In time for summer vacation reading, The Wide Awake Loons
was published April 16 by Silver Knight Publishing. Set in
Northern Minnesota, this middle grade novel unites the stories of lake kids and
a loon family. It is available at
Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and at the Silver Knight Publishing site. Here
is the back cover copy:
Ten-year-old Ginny and her mother are
opening up the cabin where her family stays during the summer. On an otherwise
quiet day, Ginny hears a male loon, Yudel, sparring with a younger bird over
territory.
Canoeing with her friend, Wes, Ginny
discovers a loon nest on an island. They quickly find themselves protecting the
defenseless eggs against predators. On a later visit, Ginny finds Yudel
drifting in the water, a fishing line trailing from his beak. Ginny’s
attachment to the loons brings her to find inner strength.
During the summer, the loons raise
three loonlings. Now faced with many dangers, Yudel and his mate, Owala, will
put their courage to the test. Follow the journey of Ginny and the loons as
their stories unite . . .
Since childhood, I've watched for loons summers, wondering
at their two lives – their floating like ducks on the water's surface and their
deep diving, what makes them so elusive.
My mother's family had a lake cabin and we also stayed at resorts. During college, I worked at two resorts
during summers. It was a normal summer
when I heard loons. A boyfriend could
imitate loon calls so well that loons answered.
One sultry city summer, I began planning my loon book. I lived one block from a branch YMCA where I
swam and took saunas. My vacation time north stayed with me. Researching loons,
I found it uncanny how their nesting was like the atomic family when both
parents work fulltime.
The Wide Awake Loons is the
only book I planned in my head before writing it down. From the start it had another element that
paralleled the normal world. The
behaviors of birds are so mysterious that the book became one of both
researched scenarios and of speculation.
Loons are amongst the oldest birds because waterfowl appeared earlier
than many aerial birds. Loons are thought
to be related to penguins.
Yet loons have disappeared from many Minnesota lakes as
people populated them. The year I wrote The
Wide Awake Loons, the roads near the lake I'd known since childhood had
become named instead of being backwoods dirt roads, found only with directions.
The Wide Awake Loons is
published three months before The Swan Bonnet. They are very different books yet the loon
book urged me to write another bird endangerment story. I hadn't had so much experience with the swan
or its setting. But that book took off
too. My brother was then doing law work
in Alaska and, with some ideas about moving there, I began reading about the
south coast region. Coming across the
near-extinction of swans in North America, I was again ready to research, this
time in the historical context. There
must have been heroes and villains.
The Wide Awake Loons
doesn’t have a clear-cut villain outside of the animal predatory system. Loons have become scarce without hunting or
any intentional action against them. If
they didn't call, they might not be noticed at a lake. Perhaps it is because of the remote and
solitary ways of loons that I imagined communication between them and other
animals. Anthropomorphism. I could hardly believe that such birds, and
other animals too, didn’t have a communication system.
As I wrote the loon book, I considered that animals might
use telepathy. The loon language was to
suggest their communication and, of course, it was also for entertainment. As a child, I was a great fan of
anthropomorphic animal novels.
The Swan Bonnet, due
out from GMTA Publishing July 16, was too tragic a plot for me to attempt anthropomorphism.
The books are not a series. Yet they are both based on facts about
migrating waterfowl and the settings where they nest.