Claudia Mills' THE LAST APPLE TREE

One of my brilliant friends, Claudia Mills, has another wonderful book coming out on June 18th that deserves some love! I asked her to drop by to talk about it. Take it away, Claudia!      A lot of newsletters come my way, and I mean to read them but somehow never get around to it, and months later they end up in the recycling bin. But a few years ago, I browsed through a newsletter from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I taught in the philosophy department for twenty years, and one article caught my eye. Ecology professor Katharine Suding had created the Boulder Apple Tree Project, to preserve the county’s aging heirloom apple trees as well as memories of those who loved them.
      Hmm.
      I clipped the article and taped it in a notebook where I mean to keep ideas for possible books but somehow never get around to it, and if I do save them, never remember to do anything with them.
      But this article, clipped by happenstance, years later became the seed of The Last Apple Tree. The book stars an heirloom apple tree, lone survivor of a vanished orchard, and two seventh graders, a boy and a girl, who uncover its secrets while interviewing her grandfather for a school oral history project.
      Of course, in the process of groping toward the actual story, I had to come up with secrets for the tree, and tensions between the boy and the girl, and between the boy and his environmental activist father. I had to come up with a character arc for the girl, who wants to protect her widowed grandfather from losing himself in the griefs no one in her family is willing to talk about.
      There would be poems, I decided, from the point of view of the apple tree, scattered throughout the book. My previous book for young readers, The Lost Language, was my first novel in verse, and I found I adored that literary form. But I didn’t want to write two verse novels in a row. No, this book would have standard prose book chapters, alternating between the viewpoints of the boy and the girl. But poems from the tree would give me a chance to indulge my love of writing poetry and contribute a third viewpoint, the most important of all.      Maybe I should read these newsletters more faithfully! Or at least occasionally. For who knows what tiny tidbit of an idea may emerge, that planted, and watered, and fertilized, and given slow time to grow, may find itself someday bearing the fruit of a published book.

Here's a photo of Claudia and her favorite writing spot, where she writes for at least an hour a day!