Fall's Final Days...

plus updates & an invitation to join me online tomorrow...

My nephew came to an event at the Patmos Library in Jamestown, MI, wearing the same t-shirt as me and carrying his own spending money to buy his very own signed copy of the book!

Enemies in the Orchard takes place over the course of one fall, one apple season. The story’s first entry is on Monday, Sept. 11, 1944 — and my book was fittingly released on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023. It happened to be that even the days of the week this fall matched up exactly with the calendar from 79 years earlier.

This week I was working alongside of some high school students who are writing their own novels in verse, and realized the date was Nov. 8, the last entry of the fall of 1944 inside my story. This felt impactful to me. The book has been in the world—and in the hands of readers—for its entire season.

As much as I love fall’s brillance, I always feel a bit melancholy as the final leaves fall and the bare trees brace themselves for the cold temperatures and long winter ahead. The days are short, the dark comes early, and the cold returns.

This past Wednesday was a chilly, rainy day here in West Michigan, one that seemed to mirror my book’s Nov. 8 poem when Claire says:

The sky spits cold today,

not quite snowflakes or rain,

but a bitter sleet that stings our faces.

As I tell students when I talk with them, though they think of fiction as “fake,” the story of Claire and Karl feels incredibly real to me. As I sent my final draft off the publisher, the writing process complete, I grew homesick for the characters and the orchard they occupied. That hollow feeling of loss is similar to what I feel when I drive past the land my grandpa’s orchard once occupied. The trees long gone, the land is a ghost of my childhood, a place that I’m happy to invite others to visit, even if only in our minds.

My grandpa’s orchard, as I remember it as a child.

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You are invited…

Tomorrow night, Monday, Nov. 13, I will join New Hampshire poet, Jimmy Pappas, as I share excerpts from Enemies in the Orchard. Jimmy leads a great discussion, and participants can expect to discuss and interact throughout the presentation. Here is the information if you’d like to join us:

A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends: Dana VanderLugt on From Seed to Story: How a Family Story became a Novel in Verse
Time: MONDAY, November 13, 2023 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Please enter with a first and last name.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84060862021?pwd=F1VSn7fX1PPD5k9n9gwmdS7EIXrnok.1
Meeting ID: 840 6086 2021
Passcode: 486159

Thank you…

for reading and sharing my book with your friends! Your reviews on Goodreads and Amazon are so helpful in getting the word out. You can direct any questions regarding future events to me at dana.vanderlugt@gmail.com.

With gratitude,

Dana