How did you come up with the story for Deciduous?

We’ve all heard people say you should write about what you know. I completely disagree with that concept. That’s why we have imaginations. I let my imagination run wild when I write. I spend countless hours in ideation mode where I think of nothing other than the characters and what’s happening to them…and what’s about to happen to them.

With that said, of course, what we see every day and what we experience influence perspective and the writing. I finished my first book, Hear, in 2017 and already had my main character in mind at that time. I could visualize her and the opening scene of Deciduous. “With her arms crossed and hands cupping her elbows, she took a seat in the first pew. A jolting pain of grief stabbed her gut, reminding her she was awake and in agony, lost inside the thirty-seven-year-old body that resembled her former self. She smoothed the skirt of her black dress—her funeral dress—the one she also wore to Kira’s services ten months earlier. Leaning into the shoulder-rest of the unforgiving wooden bench, she struggled to admit or comprehend that first her daughter, and now Kai, was gone too.”

On a seventeen-hour road trip, free to focus my thoughts more on Sienna than the empty road ahead, I imagined her sitting in that pew, then started to wonder why she was there. A year later, I finished the story in Deciduous. But it was time in the forest and at the lake that helped drive the story forward. The Japanese have a phrase that loosely translates to “forest bathing.”

In 2018 and into late 2019, I spent months hiking in the forest. The sensation of towering trees going through their annual cycle of sprouting new foliage and months of walking beneath a shimmering green sky of leaves never ceased to stir. And in fall, when those leaves change color and treat us with a few shorts weeks of a vibrant display, it’s like being lost in a fairytale. But then the fairytale ends, and the leaves dry up and die. The cold creeps. That’s what “deciduous” means...Letting go of something you no longer need. Letting go of something no longer useful. Oh, when I coupled that word with my vision of Sienna, I had my story. It took a full year of writing to get the full story on paper. It took a full year of thinking of little other than my characters. And dreaming about them.