During the time Creech was in graduate school, she worked at the Federal Theatre Project Archives and later at the Congressional Quarterly as an editorial assistant. She didn't particularly enjoy being an editorial assistant, because the work involved facts and politics, subjects that do not appeal to Creech. For the next several years, Creech remained in Washington, D.C. She was married, had two children, Rob and Karin, and was divorced. In 1979, Creech got a job teaching literature at an American school located in a Surrey village in England. She and her children packed up and moved. In 1981, Creech married Lyle D. Rigg, the assistant headmaster (assistant principal) at the school in England where Creech was teaching. Like Creech, Rigg was originally from Ohio. Soon after getting married, Rigg was transferred to The American School in Switzerland (TASIS) in Lugano, Switzerland. Rigg, Creech, and Creech's two children lived in Lugano for two years. In 1984, the family returned to the TASIS in England where Creech teaches American and British literature and her husband is headmaster.
Creech concentrated on her family and her teaching for many years. It wasn't until her father had a stroke and was unable to speak that Creech began writing her first novel. She was fearful that her words would be locked inside her forever, as they had been for her father during the six long years before his death. Creech's first two books, The Recital (1990) and Nickel Malley (1991), were published in England for adults under the name Sharon Rigg. Her first novel for young adults, Absolutely Normal Chaos, published in 1991 also in England, is a book about a large, rowdy family like her own. Walk Two Moons was published in the United States in 1994, earning Creech the Newbery Medal Award in 1995, the School Library Journal Best Books Award (1994), the Notable Children's Books Award (1995), and the Young Reader's Award (1997).
