BRATTLEBORO — Author Ann Braden shares her experiences and steps leading up to writing The Flight of the Puffin.
Braden, who wrote The Benefits of Being an Octopus, said that with the new young adult novel, she set out to use her 11 years of writing to promote kindness, lessons, and hard topics for an audience of a younger age group.
This book tells the journey of the protagonist, Libby, and how her past with bullies and hardships evolves into her spreading kindness through a postcard.
The puffin is used to symbolize many meanings in the book.
“I always start with 'weird' animals, because deep down we're all weird on the inside, and I want to honor that,” said Braden, who “thought about the power of birds to fly across distances.”
“The puffin is there, because I feel like it works at multiple levels for the story,” she said - and the presence of a bird offers connections “like the flight of a postcard.”
Braden wants to return people's attention to humanity.
“I really wanted to explore the connections that we have, just at the heart level from one to another and that was getting lost in all the news reports,” Braden explained.
Lessons from in and out of the classroom
Braden said The Flight of the Puffin is directed towards middle schoolers and around that general age group - a group she knows well because she has taught them.
“They were always my people,” Braden said. “I never got elementary school. I never got high school.”
The book focuses on four perspectives of children with different lives and personalities.
Braden follows Libby, T, Jack, and Vincent, who live far apart from one another but are are all facing their own obstacles. Despite their distance, the seventh graders find a bond in the form of a simple message on a postcard.
In writing the book, Braden said she ended up having an impact on children around the world in one giant classroom of sorts.
“I just started writing when I left the classroom, and so it's just sort of a continuation of my relationships with those students,” Braden said.
Spreading kindness and postcards
A real-life experience inspired the book: The Local Love Brigade, a group that Braden created with other local women after a hateful anonymous letter was sent in December 2016 to the Islamic Society of Vermont in Burlington.
The Local Love Brigade sent out what one member called “an avalanche of supportive postcards” to the shaken Muslim community, and the group similarly created handwritten notes and cards of affirmation to other individuals and groups in response to bomb threats, racial slurs, and other hateful acts that surged in the aftermath of that year's presidential election.
“The Islamic Society got hate mail, and we [asked], what can we do? And I [thought]: we can send postcards covered with hearts,” Braden said.
The Islamic Society ended up receiving approximately 500 postcards from this act of kindness.
“It was just to show up: We are here. We've got your back,” she said.
Braden realized that “we don't realize the ripples of the actions that we have” until such efforts come full circle.
“Love is a powerful force, and this is a reminder that we're able to push back against the hate and divisiveness, one step at a time,” Braden told The Commons in 2017.
Flipping the page
Braden said that The Flight of the Puffin recently has been a part of a read-aloud with the help of some 700 educators, which translates to approximately 33,000 readers from all different parts of the world.
“They loved the first chapter and were bummed to have to wait over the weekend for Chapter Two,” Braden reported. “They were so engaged and had so much to share after only one chapter.”
Braden said one educator called the book reading “the perfect end to the most difficult year.”
“Distance learning has been so challenging, and they've been on the struggle bus this final trimester,” Kristin Hanna, from Wisconsin, told her. “They came alive on Friday. Thank you so much for this opportunity to share your book and yourself with kids around the world.”
After six years - and more than 200 rejections for five different manuscripts - Braden takes some satisfaction at seeing her words enjoyed worldwide. And her experience provides a good lesson in itself.
Whatever you're doing, “you need to be doing it because you love it,” she said. “Because you're going to get rejected for years before you get something accepted. And so you need to find ways that you want to keep going, despite the rejections.”
“The only thing that makes an author as opposed to someone who's not an author, is just that they kept going,” she said.