On the blog today, Nancy shares about her latest book called Wandering Swallow, A Young Girl’s Quest for Freedom. I hope you enjoy her story and the book.
How Nancy Began Writing
My writing for children began because my oldest granddaughter had to “write a book” for school when she was in third grade. I babysat Mila and her younger brother, Marco, after school while their parents worked.
Mila had already written her story, which needed to be 150 words. “It has to be typed, Grandma. And my mom’s been so busy.”
“Let’s go type it then,” I replied.
She dictated the story to me of a girl who collected buttons. She had a favorite button that she’d lost. The story recounted how she looked on top of furniture and under the couch and beds until she found it.
Mila went home that evening to glue her own collection of buttons on the front of the binder holding her book.
When summer came, I decided to turn Mila’s book into a learning opportunity. I suggested we expand the story, change the perspective from third person to first, and add some peripheral characters. We discussed symbols, motifs, and motives.
Then we drew her brother and cousins into the discussion as they came to visit me over the next couple of summers. Cousin Lily helped us name characters and determine what they would be like. One character carries Lily’s name. The Mathers cousins added details. Brother Marco insisted we not end the story without first redeeming the bully.
In the meantime, I attended writing conferences for tips and critiques.
That book saw its share of rejection. Too episodic. Not a big enough story arc. The criticisms were not undeserved. Many a book becomes a learning tool rather than a publication success.
Even as I worked on that book (and still plan to revise it), the seed of a new idea arose in my brain.
The Story Behind Wandering Swallow
A couple of years ago, I engaged in what I thought was unrelated reading preparing for my Advanced Placement rhetoric class. I picked through pieces of Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and another book about North Korea. Oppression and our response to it is a recurring theme in the course. Solzhenitsyn usually comes up in conversation during the course of the year.
Then I stumbled across a video of Yeonmi Park discussing her escape from North Korea. I bought and consumed her book. And my mind was off to the laptop and to conferences for more critiques.
It occurred to me that our character from the first kids’ book, Lily, was Korean. I began to imagine and research the historical possibility that a girl could escape from North Korea during the time of the famine there (1995), after the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989), and before Hong Kong reverted to control of Mainland China (1997) and later give birth to our character Lily, a 12-year-old of the early twenty-first century.
The numbers fit into the possibility of another 12-year-old, Hana, who would later become Lily’s mother. So a new story came to life—Wandering Swallow, A Young Girl’s Quest for Freedom.
Researching for Wandering Swallow
My grandchildren, most of them beyond needing supervision, visited less often. I wrote on my own, including my understanding of Chinese culture from two stints as a foreign language teacher in southern China, my memories of news accounts in 1989, and some experiences during my time as a news reporter.
When President Clinton went to China in the 1990s, I interviewed the owners of a Chinese restaurant there. Such small-town newspapers focus on local news, so the editor wasn’t excited when I interviewed and wrote about a man I’d seen on CSPAN, Shengde Lian, a Tiananmen Square survivor and the head of an umbrella organization for Chinese dissidents in the US.
Lian’s information about the massacre proved invaluable to the book as one character explains to another what happened on the square in those days.
A book I’d read by David Aikman also stirred my passion for the story. Aikman’s Jesus in Beijing discusses the explosion of Christianity in China after the massacre.
My fictional character-massacre survivor became a type of Christ for the story. He conveys his Christian faith to our fictional Hana, who has difficulty overcoming her atheistic indoctrination and reconciling her life’s hard reality with the existence of a compassionate, merciful God.
Another important element in the book is the presence of a couple of characters with Down syndrome. The fictional Lily from the first book is a Down child. In both books, I wanted to present special needs characters who make important contributions.
The underlying messages in the book are that we can trust Christ “no matter what” and that every human life has value and deserves freedom. People are sacred beings formed in the image of God.
As publishing time neared, I recruited our Lily to create the cover image and do some illustrations for the book.
Mila, Lily, and I unanimously approved the book’s font, which I imagine looks like something Tolkien might want for his stories.
The Future of Wandering Swallow
I’m currently working on curriculum to go with Wandering Swallow for homeschoolers and classroom learning.
Writing this book, I hoped to teach literature, geography, culture, history, vocabulary, and, most importantly, faith in Christ. I hoped the reading would be an adventurous ride while students learn without realizing they’re learning.
I hoped they’d arrive at the truth by the end.
Check out Nancy online:
Website: https://www.nancyehead.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nancyehead/
Twitter: @nancyehead
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancy-e-head-99437112/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/nancye3277/
Nancy’s Good, Clean Books for Kids and Teens: https://www.milicomathersreads.com
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Yvonne M. Morgan is a Christian #author, #blogger, and #speaker. #BibleGatewayPartner
Matthew 28:19 “Therefore, GO and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
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