Dear Reader,
Please welcome today's guest author, Lisa Wingate.
Lisa is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Before We Were Yours, which has sold more than three million copies and been translated into over forty languages worldwide. The co-author, with Judy Christie, of the nonfiction book Before and After, Wingate is an Oklahoma Book Award finalist and a Southern Book Prize winner. She was named a 2023 Distinguished Alumni of Oklahoma State University. Lisa lives with her husband in Texas and Colorado.
Her brand new book is Shelterwood...a sweeping novel inspired by the untold history of women pioneers who fought to protect children, caught in the storm of land barons hungry for power and oil wealth.
Please say "Hello" and welcome Lisa to the book club: [email protected]
Be sure to enter-to-win the Shelterwood Book Club Gift Box which includes a letter from the author, printed book club kit, bookmark, and custom sticker inspired by the novel. To enter, go to: https://www.emailbookclub.com/firstlook/shelterwood.htmlg
Years ago, I interviewed a woman who couldn't read for first two-thirds of her life. I met her as the result of a college class that had been mundane for the first seven weeks. On week eight, the instructor whisked in carrying a newspaper article about an elderly World War II veteran who'd been found in a house with no electricity, no running water, no air conditioning, and no heat other than a gas stove. Criminals had broken into the home intending a robbery, but there was nothing to steal.
The instructor told us to write a newspaper piece about someone living on the margins. Then he walked out, leaving fifty college sophomores floundering like fish in a dry lakebed.
Through a few connections, I ended up at a mission shelter interviewing a small, thin woman with sun-pleated skin and silver dreadlocks bound in a multicolored bandana. To me, she looked at least eighty, but she reckoned that she was around sixty-nine. She'd traveled to Florida on a small boat as a child. The adult who was with her--a relative she thought--had not survived the trip. When the boat came ashore, it was met by traffickers who hustled cheap labor for sugar cane farms, where the workers would remain in an endless state of indenture, always in debt for their meals and housing.
This was the childhood of the smiling woman on the stool across from me. She'd escaped the farm as a young adult by sneaking away amid the chaos and smoke when stubble was burned off the fields. Years on the run followed, as she feared being arrested for her unpaid debt.
Eventually, she ended up in a shelter program, where she did odd jobs and through their literacy initiative, learned to read.
She'd been there for several years, working and living at the shelter, by the time I met her. Every day after washing loads of dishes and mopping floors, she'd walk to the subsidized daycare next
door and read to the kids. Her eyes held the most vibrant light as she talked about the importance of those sessions. "When you can't read, all around you there are line pictures," she said. "On street signs. In restaurants. In stores. In books. Everybody else looks at the line pictures, and sees a tree, or a cat, or a sky. You can't understand how that looks like a cat or a tree. The lines make other people hear thunder, or wind, or a voice saying something. But you look at the lines, and you see nothing, hear nothing. The lines don't speak. Then you learn to read, and the lines tell you everything."
To this day, those words remain with me, not only an inspiration but an indelible testament to the power of lines that form words, and words that fill pages, and pages that create stories, and stories that build worlds.
-- Lisa Wingate
Be sure to enter-to-win the Shelterwood Book Club Gift Box which includes a letter from the author, printed book club kit, bookmark, and custom sticker inspired by the novel. To enter, go to: https://www.emailbookclub.com/firstlook/shelterwood.html
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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