One of my favorite things is to hear from authors, artists and songwriters how they came up with the piece they created.
So I thought I’d share with you how Then Trees Said Hello was created. I’ll break it down into several emails so you don’t have to stop living for a day just to hear this story. I’m telling you the story roughly in the order that it developed in my head.
Sara’s voice floated around my head for a couple of years before I knew her story. I didn’t know what I was hearing at the time really. I wasn’t thinking of writing a novel. I was a de-technical writer for a prestigious organization and inventor and I loved my jobs. But every time I was backpacking or hiking an image of her would pop in my head. I knew the essence of her long before I knew anything about her story.
Then one day, I was sitting by a large pond, a 10 mile hike up a rugged mountainside in New Mexico. My husband and I were on the second day of a four day backpacking trip. One of the things I love about backpacking is getting away from phones and stuff. It gives me lots of time to just sit and contemplate without distractions.
I was leaning against the rough, spirited bark of an old growth oak tree that was part of a large grove on one side of the pond. The other side of the pond was a wall of granite that reached up a thousand feet above the pond. Toward the bottom the granite became a scree field, worn by centuries of snow, ice and rain. It was the ideal place for mountain goats. Everything around me was bright green, a few late blooming wildflowers held on and the air was still. We hadn’t seen people since we’d left town. (Photo)
We’d hiked around earlier that day, getting to remote mountain tops and vistas that let us see for miles. Places like this are my happy place. Where I feel the most relaxed. (Largely because I’d been getting to hike to places like this since I could walk.) Then storm clouds started rolling in so we scurried back to camp. I sat near the tent in case it started to rain, but it kept raining all around me but not on me.
Often during these contemplative times, my mind meanders all around thinking about things going on in my life, and business, then slide to the color of green on the ground at my feet, or a movement in the rocks above. And just like that, my mind started imaging an entrance to an underground world at the bottom of that pond. So much so, I really wanted to get into the frigid waters and look if I could find what I saw in my mind. (Luckily my survival instincts overpowered that idea. 🙂 Then the popped in my mind of Sara finding the entrance to another world in a pond on her property? Then I started thinking about where they’d have such ponds, and thought the Northwest would be a good place for it. Images and feelings kept floating in, like the first inklings of the farm came to mind. The next day, I had more visions of the underground world, which wouldn’t get a name for months to come.
But with that image of a place we now call Ilanaly (pronounced, eh-lan-a-lee), I started getting more snippets of Sara’s story in the next months. Though it would be months before I started writing it.
A few months after that backpack trip, the area we were in became engulfed in a wildfire, started by an unattended campfire. I felt so much pain about the death of all the trees and wildlife (we saw more bear scat than people tracks there), that I started thinking about how we could stop these devastating wildfires and how could that be integrated into Sara’s story?
That’s enough for now.
Next time I’ll tell you about how it came to me that Sara was going to start hearing trees talking and what that was going to mean for her life.
If you have anything specific you’d like to know about Then The Trees Said Hello, share your questions by replying to this email, and I can share them in upcoming newsletters.