The Inspiration Behind MYSTIC
A year after the accident that left my daughter paralyzed I travelled to Ohio to attend a reading conference where Patricia Polacco and Patti Gauch were speaking. I had fallen in love with Patricia Polacco’s picture books, knew Patti Gauch was her editor and I wanted to hear them speak about writing for children. I suppose I knew there was a story I wanted to tell but had no idea how to take the first step.
Then in the summer of 2006 I went to another writing conference, The Highlights Foundation, in Chautauqua, New York. Again Patti Gauch was teaching. This time her class was on writing fantasy. As I sat listening, I knew. My story was going to be a fantasy novel. That night I began creating the characters of Mystic. What I didn’t realize was how long it was going to take me to write and publish Mystic.
I had watched my daughter adjust to her new life using a wheelchair for three years. At that time we were struggling with the questions of whether to have her in therapy full-time in place of school hoping she would improve or to let her go to school with her peers and have a “typical” childhood without hours of physical therapy. We certainly didn’t want her to grow up and feel as though we hadn’t done everything for her but we also worried about putting so much hope and, work on her part, towards an outcome that may not happen. Walking. What lesson would we be sending? Would she feel as though she wasn’t whole if we placed so much emphasis on being healed? I wanted Arielle to know that walking or wheeling she was absolutely perfect. And that’s the lesson that Amelia learns in Mystic.
It took me over a year to write the first draft because I was teaching. I wrote only on the weekends. When I finally finished my little story for children it was three hundred and fifty pages! I found another writing conference with Patti Gauch. Yes, I guess I was a bit of a stalker. Thinking my story was brilliant and ready for publication I handed it over to Patti. Thus began my lesson in accepting an editor’s input and learning the craft of writing. Patti gently took me through two more rewrites of Mystic and then recommended a woman named Emma Dryden.
Emma gently guided me through three more edits. I began Mystic the summer of 2006 and it was published on January 5, 2013.
The winter of 2014 I received a letter from a woman who had given Mystic to two young girls who used wheelchairs. They were the age of Arielle when I first started writing my story. Both girls lived in towns where they were one of the only ones using wheelchairs much like Arielle’s experience. Both girls were very excited to have a book with a character “just like them.”
