At my regional SCBWI conference earlier this month, novelist and presenter Leah Henderson kinda—maybe—fingers crossed—gave me hope that a novel I’ve worked on for a long time might not be entirely dead. Her presentation was Their Voices, Their Perspective: Writing Cross-Cultural Stories We All Deserve. Henderson handed out a page full of resources, with an outline of a head on the other side. Wait, what? You mean I am allowed to try to create characters from other cultures? And here the message I’ve been getting was Just. Don’t.
My novel, Mourning Light, takes place at a Minnesota boarding school in both 1862 and the present. Louisa, in 1862, is the half-Dakota daughter of Minnesota’s first governor. She reaches out to Mia through rare, night-after-night appearances of Northern Lights, and Mia searches for physical documentation of the story she’s hearing.