On November 24, the Friends of the Orange County Public Library will host its first ever Hillsborough Local Author Book Fair! You can read more about the event here. Leading up, we’ll be posting short interviews with some of our author guests. Today we feature Frances M. Wood!
Tell us about yourself as an author:
I think we all wonder how we affect other people’s lives. I’m beginning to believe we don’t give ourselves sufficient credit for all the positive that we do.
I stopped participating in GoodReads when it was bought up by Amazon. (I studied 1984 in high school.) But a few years earlier, a reader named Jennifer had selected a paragraph from my Daughter of Madrugada as her signature quote:
Beneath and around the dead and ruined chaparral rise the most amazingly beautiful flowers. Tulips and wind poppies and flame poppies, whispering bells and suncups. These are flowers that grow only after a burn. Only in a land once dead. You never see them otherwise. With my eyes closed I can see those flowers now. They are a promise: that the land will regrow, that even after a disaster life continues, that wonders abound.
I read this stranger’s selected quote and wondered, “Did I really write that?”, because I was at a low point in my life. I, Frances M. Wood, certainly possessed neither such wisdom nor such optimism.
I had written not only that quote, but a whole book written around the quote. I was that kind of person. At least sometimes.
What Jennifer may have thought was a gift to her, she had turned around and given back. She returned to me a part of myself.
In case you are wondering which signature quotes I selected all those years ago…
He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can.
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
and
She was transparent, like a watercolor. As if she were about to dissolve in sound, in tones not yet created.
― Peter Høeg, The Quiet Girl
