Something Wild #4: A Star and an Origin Story

This full moon is called the snow moon, and soft, wet snow blanketed the city where I live last night as if the world still remembers how to be good.

There were mounds of powder in the morning light when I went downstairs, and I watched one of our backyard visitors, a young squirrel born in the trees overlooking our house, try to find a place in the marshmallow fluff to bury a nut. He kept plunging his little nose in and pulling the nut back out to find a better hiding spot. Finally he bounded off to eat his breakfast pecan on the arm of a chair. It was a calm moment, as I stood in the kitchen and toasted a bagel and listened to the community of sparrows that lives in our ivy sing, gazing out the window at what had befallen us while I slept. Then I remembered the waking nightmare. I remembered. And the panic set in and all the calm left my body.

It's difficult to celebrate or even fully acknowledge personal good news right now (I am not okay; we are not okay; were we ever?). It's a surreal and agonizing moment to be publishing a book, especially one like mine. Even so, I wanted to start this post off with something beautiful. And then I wanted to tell you how this book began, including its first burst of words on a mountaintop retreat at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, in a period from my past that feels far, far away from me right now.

My great news is this: Wake the Wild Creatures got a starred review in Publishers Weekly!

⭐️ Publishers Weekly said: "A teen recovered from an off-grid Catskills commune of female fugitives struggles to adapt to society in this evocative and empowering novel . . . Suma’s fiercely feminist offering unfolds from Talia’s somewhat alien-feeling perspective, her first-person narrative snaking along a nonlinear timeline to add context and resonance. Intersectionally diverse, insightfully rendered characters and their complex, continuously evolving relationships ground the tale, while a surreal setting and sensate prose impart an otherworldly air."

You can read the full PW review here.

As I've confessed before, I don't tend to read reviews of my own books—I'm too prickly, too thin-skinned, and it's best to keep my heart intact so I can be practical and am able to keep writing more books. But the star at the top of this one told me it would be positive, and so I did read it. A review like this, one that deeply understands my intentions, that sees elements I'd hoped would be seen, is so meaningful. Especially when the struggle to write the book felt as overpowering as it did.

Before I share where and how this book began, I want to thank you once again for subscribing to this newsletter and being at my side in these anxious and exhilarating months as the pub date approaches. Wake the Wild Creatures comes out from Little, Brown on May 6, so I'm less than three months away. There will be some live in-person events for this book (please come!). And you can preorder the book in hardcover, ebook, or audio. I'm often asked where is the best place to preorder, and for now I'll say that I'd be especially delighted if you preordered from your local independent bookstore or bought from Bookshop.org, which is a wonderful way to support a local indie online. And if you're holding out for a signed copy, please wait a little longer for when I announce the bookstore events... which should be soon.

For as long as I'm devoting time to writing this author newsletter, there will be free subscriptions and free book-related posts like this once a month on the full moon. I'll be mindful to not clog your inbox otherwise.

But I also especially want to thank those who are signed up for the special Writer Membership with this newsletter, a number of whom joined me for a generative prompt-writing session at the end of last month. (Did you all see that one of the writers there with us that evening got THE PHONE CALL in the midst of our workshop?! Such amazing thrilling news for such a talented author!) Premium subscriptions make it possible for me to host this newsletter on Ghost, which is a small non-profit organization and network I'm happy to support and be a part of. I also love connecting to writers this way, and I'm grateful.

Now let me share the Origin Story for my book, one that began with a gift of a piece of art and a series of visits to a mountaintop retreat in California...

As a reader, and as a fellow writer, I enjoy peeling back the curtain and learning how a story came to be written. I especially adore hearing about the first glimmers of an idea: What was the first spark? What set off that spiral of obsession that led you to spend literal years out of your life torturing yourself by writing a book that—let's face facts—might never get published? Or, more kindly, and in a more positive light, what ignited the passion for this story that has now come alive in your pages?

I have to go back almost ten years to find that spark. So much is fuzzy, but I do know it was near the end of 2016. It was right after the presidential election, and I was feeling pretty despondent. Sometimes the way out of an emotional spiral is a creative project, and when we find one that feels worthy, and precious enough to immerse ourselves in, it truly can be life-saving and perspective-changing. But I didn't set out to write myself out of a hole. I wasn't so conscious of what I was doing just yet. All I knew was that a tiny shard of a story got embedded in my mind's eye—the way the thinnest sliver of mirror does in my favorite fairy tale from childhood, "The Snow Queen."

Something had pierced me with possibility. It was a drawing that awakened an idea in me and wouldn't let go.

The print of this drawing was gifted to me from a dear friend named Libba Bray, as a birthday present. I'll use this moment to offer an aside and say that I hope you all know about Libba's incredible new novel, Under the Same Stars, which just came out last week! Here is a video post where she talks about the spark of inspiration.

As for me and my own spark, I don't know what called Libba to get this drawing for me as a gift, but somehow she knew I'd connect with it.

It's called “Daughters of the Forest” by the artist Megan Eckman, and it felt like a writing prompt to me.

Look closely.

The pen-and-ink drawing features two nearly identical girls (sisters?) huddled together with a deer visible through the window behind them. All is straightforward until you take a closer look at their feet. It was this detail—the surprise of it, the possibility—that sent me staggering forward into a story. Of course, story ideas wriggle and transform and grow whole new heads and feet as you write them, and so what began as a book about two daughters of the forest became something other, with one girl instead of the original two. Still, the glimmer of maybe-magic within the story remained. And the forest—barely seen in this drawing, as-yet-unspoken—began to emerge in my imagination and take on a life of its own. The forests of my childhood in the Catskills filled in every available corner, that feeling of safety, that sense of being hidden from all that was hurtful and frightening and bad. And something inside me blazed awake.

In my notebook years ago I wrote the first snippets of what would one day become Wake the Wild Creatures. (By the way, the original title was The Pines. Then I had the working title The Great Unknown. One narrator stayed intact—her name was and has always been Talia. The sister I cut from the story had been named Chaya, which happens to be the name of one of my sister's best friends from our hometown. There was always the woods of the Catskills in this story idea, but there wasn't a hotel at first. Then there was.)

This gift of art was the first spark. But novels must be built from many ideas, and one nudge is never enough.

That brings me to the mountain.

Soon after, I was away teaching a workshop at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, on a mountaintop in Northern California. Before the pandemic ended my workshop series, I used to lead a yearly (sometimes twice-yearly) YA novel retreat at the Djerassi Program, an isolated week in a gorgeous hidden-away place with ten or eleven talented writers at work on their own novels. While there, I'd carry my own novel-in-progress and ideas with me and let them gestate during that week away on the remote mountain. The Pines (now Wake the Wild Creatures) emerged consciously at the retreat in 2017 while I was sitting in the Artists Barn, gazing out the wall of windows at the expanse of land, the distant hills, and the peek of Pacific Ocean.

I saved this note I wrote to myself:

And I remember this view:

But going back even before that, the second time I ever led a workshop at the Djerassi Program, in 2014, we were hit with a overhanging summer haze of soft, deep fog. It looked like a hovering mist and at certain angles seemed almost magical. The mist would surround us, tender and pale gray, in the daylight, hiding the mountains and the peek of the Pacific Ocean from view. But in the night there was something absolute about the way the mist held us close on the top of the mountain, as if we were existing in a world outside time.

One night, some of the writers went out into the mist that blanketed the whole large expanse behind the Artists Barn. In daylight it's a slope of grass and a view of hills and, if you're lucky and the skies are clear, a sliver of ocean. But at night, it's something else entirely. And with the mist, all the more so.

The writers were barely visible through the glass, and as I watched they became hints of figures and shadows moving through the deep fog. Sometimes they seemed inhuman, like fantastical creatures, slipping through the foggy night. From far away I heard their hushed voices and then their shrieks of laughter, their delighted shouts.

I have only this one fuzzy picture:

(If you're reading this and you were at that workshop, do you recognize yourselves?)

That, too, was a clear spark for me. Watching them from afar, seeing how enveloped they'd become by the mist and the dimmed moonlight, and how it looked to transform them, to turn them into something other, imprinted on me. Years later, when I was writing what became Wake the Wild Creatures, I channeled some details of this witnessed experience into a ritual on my own fictional mountaintop, a scene of women and girls enveloped by the magical mist that comes alive in my novel.

(If you read the book, keep an eye out for this howling scene!)

All of this shows that the Origin Story for my new book was unplanned and came from sources beyond my control. I have many people to thank for this—especially those who made my workshops at the Djerassi Program possible and all of the writers who attended them over the years between 2014 and 2019 (far too many to name!)—and the acknowledgments at the back of the book speak to that. But maybe this also shows that any experience we writers might have, any random encounter or surprise gift, might be the seed that leads to the next story. You may already have one right now and not even know it until the first fierce words emerge.

Wake the Wild Creatures is coming out on May 6!

• Bookstore events are being planned for May, including a launch event to be announced! I'll share soon. I hope I'll see some of you there.
• I'll be at the Texas Library Association conference in Dallas on April 2 and 3, and there will be an ARC signing. If you're planning to attend, please come see me!
• I'm sorry to say that I can no longer attend the AWP Conference in Los Angeles in March—some unfortunate personal circumstances make it so I can't go. I'm so sorry to miss seeing my writer friends there.