Throwback Thursday

As I have confessed elsewhere, I haven’t always been an historical fiction fanatic. As a middle-schooler, my daughter got me hooked on reading this genre by introducing me to a lovely duo of books by Jennifer Armstrong: The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan, and Mary Mehan, Awake.

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My sweet Quinn. . .who is a tiny bit older than this now.

 

Even though I enjoyed reading historical fiction, I certainly never imagined writing it. Then three things happened that changed all that. First, I read an incredible novel, Catherine Called Birdy, byCatherine_Called_Birdy_cover Karen Cushman. With every page, I would pause and wonder: can a writer really do that? Have so darned much fun with the language and the characters and the situations in an historical novel? (Why, yes, dear reader; she can. But I did not know that then.)

Then my beloved grandmother told me a family story I’d never  heard. It turns out that my diminutive great-grandmother proved up on a homestead claim in eastern Montana about the time of WWI — all by herself. My sweet grandma was suffering from that wretched disease we call Alzheimer’s so I wasn’t certain that the story she’d told me was true. But she captured my imagination and I was shortly able to find both the truth of the story and my great-grandmother’s homestead claim documents. Hers seemed like a story that needed telling but, at that point in my career, the only novels I’d written were horrible and hidden away in a drawer; an historical novel was a whole nother kettle of fish.

The third event that transpired is that Karen Cushman — author of that book I’d so admired — was keynoting at the annual Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Conference in  Los Angeles. I registered for the conference, booked a flight and a hotel room and before I knew it, was sitting in a ballroom with a thousand of Karen Cushman’s other best friends. If you haven’t met Karen, she is tall and elegant and supremely confident (also warm and funny, but I didn’t know that at the time). She stood behind the podium and spoke directly to me — or at least it seemed like it. Find your passion, she said, and follow it. Don’t worry about writing the next Harry Potter. Write the stories that matter to you.

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Now,  when Karen Cushman tells you to do something, you do it. I came straight home and began writing the novel that would become Hattie Big Sky. It was terrifying. Exhilarating. Terrifying. Incredibly terrifying. Four years later, I had a finished manuscript. Six years later, I had a real book.

So this post is a belated thank you note: to my daughter, Quinn, who shared her love of historical fiction; to Jennifer Armstrong, for writing the books that got me hooked, and to Karen Cushman for inspiring me to take the risk to write from my heart.

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