Karen Hugg: On Writing

When I was a child in the 1970s, I felt like an outsider. While other kids had the usual set of two parents, I only had a mother. And among kids I knew whose parents had divorced, oftentimes the father was involved in their child’s life, albeit distantly. But for me, my father was permanently gone, dead. He’d died of lung cancer when I was four and a half, leaving my mother, brother, sister, and me devastated and unsure how to go on without him.

In my child’s logic, I’d decided my dad’s death was my fault. Children, with their limited orbits of experience and lack of reasoning skills, often do. I used to think if I’d been born better my father wouldn’t have contracted cancer and died. Never mind he smoked constantly and ate little and never exercised. I reasoned there must have been something innately wrong with me that caused this fate of being fatherless and unlike other kids. Not too surprisingly, I lived with that nonsensical explanation until I was in my early twenties.

The good news is I’ve gone on to heal enough to be a functional adult. I even have what many folks consider to be a good life. I’m married, have three children, pets, and a nice home. I worked for almost two decades as a self-employed gardener and have published books, an astronomical feat in itself. But still, like a quiet demon I can’t shake, I feel from time to time, mostly during stretches of weak mental wellness, that I’m different from other people. Flawed in an intrinsic way. Stained. Less than. A misfit. Alone.

Not only has this feeling of being an outsider dogged me my entire adult life, it’s appeared in various ways in my writing. My first novel was about a young Polish woman struggling to feel like she deserved to have a good life in Paris. My forthcoming nonfiction book devotes a chapter to our evolutionary need to belong to groups of people. How being social with others is hard-wired into our brains. Needless to say, I’ve struggled with my feelings of being a misfit and alone.

Nowhere was this feeling more pronounced than in my new novel. The Dark Petals of Provence. It follows a thirty-something photographer on assignment in France, charged with finding the more unusual “secret” places of the Provençal countryside by her employer, a travel magazine. But April Pearce feels like an outsider, never quite having fit in at school or in social situations or at work. Her mother died when she was a teenager and this was a sad mark she believes made her not as worthy as other people. 

In adulthood, April has turned to photographs as a way to cope, seeing the plain simplicity of a captured moment as better than the complex, messy interactions of personal and professional relationships. She feels she’s never been very good at those, cases in point, her recent divorce and inability to get onto her company’s full-time docket as a staff photographer.

And so, the challenge for April is to travel to France and capture the unusual “hidden” shots of Provence that her capricious boss desires. It’s a difficult task made even more difficult by a village containing several small-minded residents who are determined to keep the town’s secret, which is a dirty one, and the spoils of which many enjoy.

As April seeks to highlight those lesser known corners, the entire town seeks to protect them. Serious conflict ensues. It begins when she, while taking shots of lavender in a sunset field, accidentally photographs a teenage boy running by covered in blood. It ends with her shunned, threatened and her work vandalized, intimidated so that her curious and righteous spirit will break. At the climax where she’s confronted by the village, she, in a browbeaten fog, must choose between standing up for the truth or giving up and allowing the nefarious status quo to continue.

I won’t spoil her choice but suffice to say, this deep angst-ridden feeling of being surrounded by aggressive people where your one ally isn’t present is a feeling I’ve had more than once. My father was my ally before his death and he wasn’t there to guide me through the cruelty of school playgrounds and emotionally charged adolescence. In Dark Petals, April’s loving father is in America and the one wonderful French ally she’s made is unfortunately away on business through most of the story. And so, she must struggle on her own.

Though I’d give almost anything for my father to be alive to this day, it’s sometimes these wounds that give us the compassion and empathy we need to make the world a better place. If through my experience I can give the reader a sense of April’s pain on the page, that reader’s own pain may be soothed a bit. They may relate to April’s personality in some way or to a story plot point as it reflects their own lived experience. At the worst, they may just understand the world a bit more clearly. And if that change makes them feel less alone, less like an outsider and more like part of a group of compassionate human beings, then I imagine I’ve done my job as a writer.

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Karen Hugg writes fiction and nonfiction books inspired by plants. Born and raised in Chicago, she moved to Seattle and worked as a content editor in tech before becoming a certified ornamental horticulturalist and master pruner. She earned her MFA from Goddard College and is the author of Song of the Tree Hollow, The Forgetting Flower, Harvesting the Sky, and The Dark Petals of Provence (Woodhall Press). Her first nonfiction book, Leaf Your Troubles Behind: How to Destress and Grow Happiness through Plants (Prometheus Books) arrives in July, 2022. Her short work has appeared in Crime Reads, Thrive Global, The Big Thrill, and other publications. To get more info, visit www.karenhugg.com.

THE DARK PETALS OF PROVENCE, Karen Hugg

Fresh off a divorce, April Pearce arrives in Provence to photograph its hidden places for a travel magazine. But on her first night in a lavender field, she accidentally snaps a teenager running in the distance covered in blood. When she enquires about him in the local village, no one wants to talk. They don’t like April and she can’t figure out why. As she witnesses other disturbing events, her concern for the teen grows, but the more she investigates, the more she’s threatened and her work vandalized.

Then she meets some wealthy celebrities who may or may not help her. As April struggles to stand up for what’s right, she in turn reveals the shameful secret the village has kept hidden for years. The Dark Petals of Provence is a thrilling mainstream novel rich with atmosphere and dark questions. It brings the beauty and culture of rural France to life while enticing readers with the magic and allure of plants. In the tradition of Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, The Dark Petals will not only entertain readers with its compelling plot but move people with its memorable characters and emotionally profound theme.

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Category: On Writing