Every Story Is A Survival Story

For as long as I can recall I’ve been trying to save things.

I remember clearly the baby robin that fell out of its nest. My mother and I fed him and kept him in a birdcage, so a cat couldn’t get him, right under the cherry tree he fell from in our backyard. Every day his agitated mother flew around the cage. We would set him carefully on the top of the cage and over the course of a week or so, she taught him how to fly, and they were gone.

Things didn’t go so well for the robin’s eggs I found when I was three. Three blue eggs with babies inside. I knew just what to do to keep them warm so they would hatch. Bird mothers sat on their eggs … I was inconsolable.
I made up adventures for my collection of dolls that involved putting them in spaceships to other planets or taking them through portals to fantastic worlds where they lived out survival stories that I imagined.

And there were bigger things I was trying to save.

My mother from my father

My father from himself

My family from the world

Childhood isn’t always easy. The fairy tales tell us survival is not guaranteed. They’re right.

I’m still trying to save things. Stray animals and stray kids. If my grown kids would just let me tell them how to run their lives. Mothers know that if you worry enough you just might keep the world from falling apart.

Along the way I realized that you can’t save anyone else, really. You can give them a hot meal and a place to sleep. You can listen. And you can help make them resilient. So I write books about surviving difficult things, about finding wonder and your way through the woods, about finding hope on the journey.

My latest book features two teenage girls in different time periods trying to survive and triumph over difficult family situations. It includes a retelling of Hansel & Gretel between the chapters. They were resilient. They used breadcrumbs and when the birds ate them, small white stones that shone like pieces of the moon. They stood by each other, faced down the witch, and eventually found home.

Over the last fifty years researchers have been studying resiliency. Here are four truths researchers have discovered about making it through the woods of the world with your humanity more or less intact.

Every child needs one stable relationship with a caring committed adult who is emotionally healthy. It doesn’t have to be a parent.

They need to learn a mindset of agency—that means that they are not at the mercy of the difficult things in their lives.

They can make choices. They are not victims. Change can happen.

They need to develop a competency—one thing, one special talent they are good at.

They need a sense of purpose that is larger than themselves. For many, spirituality fills that role.

At its heart, every story is a survival story. We turn the pages to see how others navigate their way through the woods.

—

Maureen McQuerry is an award winning poet, novelist and teacher. Her YA novel, The Peculiars (Abrams/Amulet) is an ALA Best Book for YA 2013, winner of the Westchester Award. Her MG fantasy duo Time Out of Time, includes Beyond the Door, a Booklist top Ten Fantasy/SciFi for Youth, and The Telling Stone, a finalist for the WA State Book awards. Between Before & After(HarperCollins/Blink) will be released in Feb 2019.

She taught middle school through college for almost twenty years.  She currently supervises student teachers for WSU. When she’s not writing she hiking, playing with her grandson and looking for the next real life mystery to solve.

Find out more: www.maureenmcquerry.com
https://www.instagram.com/maureenmcquerry/
https://twitter.com/maureenmcquerry

About BETWEEN BEFORE AND AFTER

“The carnage began with the roses. She hacked at their ruffled blooms until they dropped into monstrous drifts of red on the parched yellow lawn … Only two things kept my mother grounded to us: my uncle Stephen and stories.”

Fourteen-year-old Molly worries about school, friends, and her parents’ failed marriage, but mostly about her mother’s growing depression. Molly knows her mother is nursing a carefully-kept secret. A writer with an obsession for other people’s life stories, Elaine Donnelly is the poster child of repressed emotions.

Molly spends her California summer alternately watching out for her little brother Angus and tip-toeing around her mother’s raw feelings. Molly needs her mother more than ever, but Elaine shuts herself off from real human connections and buries herself in the lives and deaths of the strangers she writes about. When Uncle Stephen is pressed into the limelight because of his miracle cure of a young man, Elaine can no longer hide behind other people’s stories. And as Molly digs into her mother’s past, she finds a secret hidden in her mother’s dresser that may be the key to unlocking a family mystery dating to 1918 New York—a secret that could destroy or save their future.

Told in dual narratives between 1918 New York City and 1955 San Jose, California, Between Before and After, by award-winning author Maureen McQuerry, explores the nature of family secrets, resiliency, and redemption. This is an historical coming-of-age Young Adult story about the complex bonds between mothers and daughters.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing