THE WRITER’S GARDEN by Heather Mateus Sappenfield

THE WRITER’S GARDEN

by

Heather Mateus Sappenfield

What are the seeds of your narratives? Are they concepts? Problems? Themes?

With three novels and one short story collection under my belt, I’ve learned that my narratives usually arise from things I witness. Things about our humanity that leave a deep impression. After that initial impression, they settle into my unconscious, where they germinate. Months, sometimes years, later, they flourish to life, usually as fully-formed characters, loudly insistent on telling their tales. Nutty, right? My latest novel, THE RIVER BETWEEN HEARTS, is a perfect example of this intuitive madness.

This excerpt is from the Author’s Note:

In the mid-nineties I taught high school language arts. Each year students who were new to America turned up in my classes. Some of them were undocumented, yet I’d become a teacher to help anyone with a desire to learn. These students were a marvel to me because, despite knowing little, if any, English, and despite knowing few of the basics of daily life within the school, they managed to get by. Often admirably. Often while also working one or even two jobs after school. 

Some mornings I’d walk through the school’s front doors to discover a group of them gathered in the lobby, crying and comforting each other because a family member, or maybe a few, had been rounded up for deportation the day or night before. I tried to imagine how that must have felt: being left behind in a foreign country with no documentation and no family. Later, these students would be in my class, trying to concentrate, learn, and continue on. Their courage amazed me. 

That was the seed. Years later, the book’s protagonist Rill sprouted into my mind, stomping her way along a riverbank, angry at life, yet a big-hearted, mistake-making hoot. She was almost eleven, heading into fifth grade the next fall, and when I realized she wanted to tell the story of those students I’d witnessed in high school, I resisted. No, I told her, you’re too young. I write young adult and adult books. Yet she was so insistent that I eventually had no choice but to listen. 

I began reluctantly to see that she was right—that the story of a child left in the US with no documentation told from the perspective of two naïve young girls was perfect. Their lack of social conditioning would omit politics from the story. Rill’s narrator’s perspective would be that of two kids coping with repercussions of the adult world. Yet she demanded to tell the story in the here and now, and this was a problem because in today’s book marketing forum, this would make it a middle grade novel. I didn’t know how to write a middle grade novel. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.

But Rill kept nudging me.

I started studying middle grade books. I began observing—really seeing—kids Rill’s age, noting not only what I saw, but what I did not. I realized that I had my work cut out for me because I discovered that good contemporary middle grade novels are as full of content and meaning as any adult novel, yet these messages are written cleanly and directly so that developing minds can interpret them. Middle grade books have economy of language. Profuse descriptions of setting or character quickly bore active young minds. Any metaphor or symbolism or artful strokes happen through the action. In other words, the writing had to be extremely clean and well crafted. 

And then there was Perla. Again, here’s an excerpt from the Author’s Note (warning—spoilers!):

This is very much Rill’s story of accepting her father’s death and forgiving him for it. A story about understanding her own grief and loss. It’s Rill’s own grueling, internal adventure. Yet she has help. As in life, through her interactions with Perla—someone of a different background—Rill gains a new and broader perspective that fosters compassion, helping her to heal and grow. Moments when we meet people who are different from us—in nationality, in ethnicity, in spiritual belief, in social strata—define us. They have the potential to be among the most beautiful experiences available to us as human beings. And because Perla faces a similar grief and loss, this is also her story. Yet I didn’t dare tell it from her perspective because I am not of that heritage. 

So my former immigrant students helped me. 

Perla’s story, though she’s younger, is a blend of their experiences, especially those of one student in particular. The nighttime crawl through the hole under the fence follows that student’s journey almost word for word. The account of the farm, her parents’ advice, her older sister not attending but wanting to go to school, her brothers left behind—all of it is rooted in that student’s reality. And as I listened to this former student insist that Perla’s parents would tell her to stay in America, my heart nearly broke. The River Between Hearts would not have been possible without this help, and because of that, half of this book’s royalties will go to this person. 

The specifics of this student’s life, so kindly loaned to me, needed to be written with the utmost care and respect. Once that was finally done, I encountered the hardest element: rooting out the weeds of my adult sensibilities so that Rill and Perla could ring true. 

During the writing, I often doubted my path into middle grade fiction. Especially when my agent at the time said, “Nobody is going to want to read this.” But the things that stick with us, that become planted and grow deep in our psyches, do so for a reason, and I’ve learned that when they arrive into my mind, I need to listen because they blossom into tremendously compelling books. Writing Rill and Perla’s story grew from love for my mountain community, for my state, for my region, and for our divided world. It was the risky business of writing from the heart. And that’s scary stuff.

That said, here’s the main thing this book has taught me: When you write authentically from the seeds of things that affect you, when you dig deep and bare the essence of what about it you struggled with, the courage of that act resonates implicitly through the text, drawing in readers. This novel won publication with Fitzroy Books. Post release, it garnered two Moonbeam Awards, a Reader’s Choice Award, a Nautilus Award, and a Reading the West Award. It even received a letter of recognition from the Colorado General Assembly. 

So nurture those seeds. Dig and tend fearlessly your writer’s garden.

—

THE RIVER BETWEEN HEARTS

On an ordinary Monday, Rill Kruse left for third grade with a dad, but when she came home, he’d been stolen. By a river. One year and thirteen days later—on the first morning of summer vacation—Rill still insists he’s trudging home. Her mom has become a practical woman. Her older brother, Eddy, now calls her baby and dork. Gus, second-in-command at Kruse Whitewater Adventures, Rill’s family’s rafting company, has gone from being her dad’s “risk bro” to her mom’s guardian angel. Joyce, company secretary, arm-wrestler, and mechanic, still calls Rill a fingerling, but, after learning what a cheater water is, Rill wishes she’d stop. When Rill’s cat, Clifford, leads her to the family tree fort on the mountainside behind home, she discovers a stowaway, Perla. To help Perla, Rill embarks on an adventure that tests her understanding of the world, of loss, and of what it means to be a friend. In the end, what Rill discovers will nudge her—and all those she loves—toward healing.

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Heather Mateus Sappenfield writes across genres for all ages. Of her two contemporary YA novels, THE VIEW FROM WHO I WAS and LIFE AT THE SPEED OF US, the latter was a Colorado Book Awards finalist. Her literary story collection, LYRICS FOR ROCK STARS, was featured on Colorado Public Radio, earned a Ben Franklin Awards Silver Medal, an Earphones Award from AudioFile magazine, and was a finalist for the Audies. The stories also won the Danahy Fiction Prize and the Arthur Edelstein Prize, garnered six Pushcart Prize nominations, and were a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award. Her most recent MG novel, THE RIVER BETWEEN HEARTS, is a Moonbeam Awards Double Silver Medalist, a Nautilus Awards Silver Medalist, and 2023 winner of the 2023 Reading the West Award.

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