The Magick's in the Mind: Don Bredes's New Cli-Fi Adventure

Novelist Don Bredes wants to shake you out of your complacency. 

In his new young adult novel, POLLY AND THE ONE AND ONLY WORLD, Bredes imagines the ravaged landscape and socio-political nightmare we might leave future generations, if we’re not, as he puts it, up to “the challenge of our time.”

“While I began drafting the novel, as I thought about the journey my young heroine would undertake,” Bredes says, “I envisioned Polly’s world as a stricken version of our own, a world whose dwindling goodness she might have the chance to preserve.  For me, in recent years, the carelessness, greed, hatred, and especially the willful ignorance of human beings have increasingly seemed to threaten everything we love about life on earth.”

That love of life on earth informs Bredes’s work and his life in South Wheelock, where for 35 years he’s made his home, enjoying hiking, bird watching, and cultivating impressive gardens. He includes star-gazing among his favorite pursuits. 

The author of six novels and three screenplays, Bredes is perhaps best known for his Hector Bellevance mysteries, which vividly portray small-town northern Vermont.  Author John Smolens describes the world Bredes creates in those novels as “an inviting, yet dangerous landscape where local history, long-held grudges, and intrigue lead the town folk to draw lines in the mud.”

As richly as Bredes envelops the reader in Bellevance’s Vermont scenery and milieu, in his new novel, he sets us smack into the frightening consequences of staying the course on global warming, conformity, and religious intolerance. In doing so, he calls young readers to be mindful of  “the one and only world.”

“For our purposes, this ‘pale, blue dot,’ as Carl Sagan called it, is all there is,” says Bredes.  “We have the power, if we can embrace it, to protect our fragile planet and the conditions that foster earthly life: ‘forms most beautiful and most wonderful,’ in Darwin’s famous phrase.  And we have the power to corrupt those conditions beyond any redemption if, as a species, we can’t bring ourselves to defend what we already know is good and precious.”

“The choice,” says Bredes,”is now ours to make.”

How did you find your way to Vermont?

I was born in New York City and grew up in Huntington Bay on the north shore of Long Island, where my first novel, HARD FEELINGS, is set.  In 1969, when I graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in English composition, my prospects for satisfying employment seemed limited to teaching.  One of the very few places where I could hope to find a job as an untrained, would-be teacher was the State of Vermont, where, in those days, “emergency certification” might be granted to promising candidates.  I was fortunate, late that August, to be offered a position teaching English at Lake Region Union High School in Orleans. 

In 1972 I was accepted into the MFA program at U. of California in Irvine. When I returned to Vermont two years later, I worked as a waiter at Carbur's Restaurant in Burlington while I was writing my first novel.  Carbur's, on St. Paul St., was right next door to an old gas station on the corner where I watched a couple of guys named Ben and Jerry set up their first ice cream maker in the front window.  

You’re no stranger to controversy – your award winning young adult novel HARD FEELINGS caused a local uproar.

That’s right.  My popular first novel was much reviled in some quarters when it came out in 1977.  It's still on some banned book lists.  

In fact, HARD FEELINGS provoked a blow-up in our own community in 1978, a blow-up that had no connection to the coincidence of my living here.  A freshman at LI happened upon the book in the library, took it home to East Burke, found herself shocked by all the (humorous) sex and profanity, and showed it to her parents.  They demanded that LI remove that filth from the school library.  

The story was a big one here (lots of letters to the editor)--and also in the Free Press--partly because of the coincidence.  But LI's headmaster at the time handled it well.  They would not remove the book, he said, but they would send home a notice advising all parents of its presence in the library and suggesting that parents who did not want their child to read the book should send a note with that message to the librarian.  

You’ve said that POLLY AND THE ONE AND ONLY WORLD “stands to be pretty controversial” as well. Tell us why.

The story is set in a much-diminished America called the Christian Protectorates.  The new government, formed in the wake of devastating cataclysms that are not explained, is a stifling theocracy.  The story’s villains, then, are fundamentalists afflicted by all the delusions that may sometimes be inspired by religious history and mythology.  Involuntary servitude is legal, for example, while public libraries are not. 

At the start of the novel, the Faith and Redemption Amendment has just become law, mandating that “all the heretics, apostates, and followers of false creeds anywhere in the Protectorates had 90 days to register for assignment to a ReBirthing facility or apply for bondservant status.  Anyone who failed to comply with the FRA, citizen or outlier, would face arrest and exile, consignment to a work camp, or death.”  So, Polly, a practicing witch, must try to hide, seek safety in exile, or risk imprisonment and execution. 

Needless to say, some readers are bound to be offended by the depiction of Christians as hateful oppressors—and of witches as heroic figures. 

Your friend Howard Frank Mosher calls you a realist, and has described your depictions of the Northeast Kingdom in your novels as “strictly accurate.”  In POLLY AND THE ONE AND ONLY WORLD, you’re exploring an imagined future, ravaged by climate change and social upheaval. 

Yes, I’m more than alarmed by the gloomy trends we’ve all been seeing in the culture for the last 20 years or so:  the widespread, vehement denial of scientific consensus and the ignorant rejection of basic truths about our existence--like natural evolution--coupled with the rise in religious oppression in the public sphere.  These are ominous cultural developments.  What they may portend will probably not take shape in our actual future as Americans, but the world I have envisioned for the novel will, I hope, inspire young readers to work for positive and enlightened change in our own world today.

So would you say that your latest novel is an example of the new genre that has recently emerged in popular entertainment—cli-fi, or eco-fiction?

Yes, it fits right in, no question about that—though I had never heard of cli-fi until just a few months ago.  Clearly, the changing climate and its harsh consequences are a preoccupying concern for almost everyone today.  Our problem now, as human animals on what has been a hospitable planet for many thousands of years, is that the natural world, the world that has nourished all of us in the most elementary ways, is under grave threat.  A threat that we have produced.  So we’re the ones who must forestall its consequences, if we can.

I’m curious why you gave your heroine paranormal abilities.

Polly is a true witch, a maiden Adept in training.  Her skills are not so much paranormal as they are purely magickal.  That is, with some effort and strenuous focus, and with the aid of her grimoire, The Craeft, she can cast various complex spells.  To be effective, the magick depends on her ability to influence the space and energy that hold matter to form.  So, there’s a kind of science about it, or that’s the airy notion that underlies the narrative.

POLLY is a young adult fantasy in the mold of ALICE IN WONDERLAND, DOROTHY AND THE WIZARD OF OZ, THE GOLDEN COMPASS, THE HUNGER GAMES, HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCEROR’S STONE, and many others.   The magic(k) involved in flying, shrinking, befriending talking animals, casting spells, and so on falls squarely in that literary tradition.

In POLLY, the magic also stands in contrast to religious spell-casting, like exorcism, for example, or even prayer.  Most people do not believe that magic spells are real, and yet at the same time most people in America do believe that supernatural entities, like ghosts and angels and demons, and mythological places, like hell and heaven, are real.  In the world of the novel these two categories of supernatural belief exist on the same plane, where I think they belong.

You’re best known for your popular Hector Bellevance series. Tell us about its genesis.

One day in September, 1984, two acquaintances of mine, Roland and Maram Hanel, were slain in their isolated ski chalet near Jay.  They were each shot many times with a 9mm machine pistol.  Nothing was stolen from the house, and investigators uncovered no helpful clues. The case remains open today, the Hanels’ executioners unknown.

Ten years later, when I got around to looking into the crime myself, my plan was to use the peculiar circumstances surrounding the murders (and the frustrated investigation) in a novel about stranger-on-stranger homicides and how they’re seldom solved.  The 650-page manuscript I came up with featured a Vermont dairy farmer who finds himself the prime suspect in the killings.  Even his own wife is not sure of his innocence.  So he embarks on his own stubborn and willful investigation.  The story ends after he has managed to exonerate himself–although he never does find the killers.

My agent sent THE SUGARWOODS MURDERS to half a dozen publishers. They all passed.  In the meantime, my old friend Howard Mosher read the manuscript. “Don,” he said, “I think what you’ve got is actually a mystery. But the book you’ve written is almost an anti-mystery. What the story needs is a sleuth character who solves the crime.”

That’s how Hector Bellevance was born.  I spent two more years rewriting the book, introducing Hector, a Boston Police Dept. homicide dick who has retired under a cloud, and inventing a set of motives and villains partly inspired by the factual events. The literary mystery, COLD COMFORT, came in at 370 pages or so.  A year later I sealed a two-book deal with Harmony Books for COLD COMFORT and a sequel.  I told everyone, “The good news is I sold my novel! The bad news is I have to write another one just like it.” The truth was I wasn’t sure I could write another mystery. The form doesn’t come easy to a writer like me. My stories tend to be less plot-driven than character-driven, so they’re quirkier and more surprising than the more standard, plot-driven mysteries.  And they take a lot longer to write.

Over the next three years I wrote the second Bellevance mystery, THE FIFTH SEASON, loosely inspired by the Carl Drega shootings in New Hampshire in August, 1997.  It came out in 2005.

The third Bellevance mystery, THE ERRAND BOY, came out in September, 2009.  This one was also partly inspired by an unresolved (but not unsolved) crime, the Orville Gibson murder in Newbury in 1957.  In some rural communities, like Newbury, there may live a person everyone knows to be a killer but who cannot be held to account because enough evidence to support a conviction is lacking. Gibson’s killers were known to the townspeople and the state police, but at their trial no one would testify against them. They died unpunished.

You’ve also written the screenplays for the film adaptions of two of Mosher’s novels.

Yes, thanks to filmmaker and producer, Jay Craven.  Howard and I first met when I came to Vermont in 1969 to teach high school English at Lake Region.  Howard lived a mile down the road from me in Barton.  He had just ended his stint there as a teacher.  By coincidence, he, his wife, Phillis, and I were Syracuse University grads.  And Howard and I were both trying to write short fiction. 

In 1970, Howard was accepted into the MFA Program in Writing at the U. of California, Irvine.  When they arrived in southern California, however, he and Phillis soon decided that that part of the country did not suit them.  At all.  So they came home to Vermont.  Two years later, as I mentioned earlier, I was accepted into the same program.  I liked it out there—the ocean, the newness, the time to write. 

I was at Irvine when I wrote the beginning of my first novel, HARD FEELINGS.  My work attracted the interest of a well-established literary agent, Don Congdon.  After graduation, once I was back in Vermont, I suggested to Congdon that he have a look at what my friend Howard Mosher was writing.  He was impressed and offered to take on Howard, too.  In time, Congdon found excellent publishers for our first novels.  When Jay Craven decided to make a short film of Howard’s short story, “High Water,” he chose me to write the script.  Jay and I worked well together.  Later, when he decided to make a feature based on Howard’s first novel, WHERE THE RIVERS FLOW NORTH, he hired me to do the adaptation. 

What’s your writing routine? Do you write every day?

I write every day, yes, with regular breaks to read, play tennis, or hoe the beans.  It’s a luxury, an obsession, and a sacrifice.  I haven’t had a fulltime job since I stopped teaching at Lake Region, though I have worked part-time, teaching college courses in writing and literature and working as an advisor to adult college students for Johnson State College’s External Degree Program.

What are you reading now?  Who are your favorite authors?

When I’m working on a novel, I tend not to read much, except in periodical literature, because longer, immersive fiction, especially when it’s well done, can influence what I’m trying to do myself.  That said, I have enjoyed reading James Howard Kunster’s futuristic novels and, most recently (off the top of my head), the work of Cormac McCarthy, Tom McNeal,  Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Erdrich, William Trevor, and others.

What’s next?

The ending of POLLY AND THE ONE AND ONLY WORLD leaves the door wide open for a sequel, and I have a file of notes and ideas for that project. And I’m midway through the fourth Hector Bellevance novel.  For no special reason, when I began the Bellevance series, I had imagined a quartet of novels, each inspired by an actual crime and each unfolding over a week’s time during a defining season of the year.  The first three are set in foliage season, mud season, and high summer.  Next up, set in the depths of winter, is THE BIGFOOT HUNTER, which I hope to finish in 2015.

Upcoming Events for Don Bredes's

Polly and the One and Only World

Vermont-based Green Writers Press will publish Don Bredes’s new young adult novel this month. The author will appear and sign copies at these upcoming events:

October 4, Brattleboro Literary Festival, Brattleboro, 2:30 pm

October TBA, Galaxy Books, Hardwick  

October 10, Green Mt. Books, Lyndonville, October 10, 4-6 pm 

October 30, St. Johnsbury Academy library, 3 pm

November 14--Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, 7 pm 

November 15--Northshire Bookstore, Saratoga Springs, 7 pm 

This interview appears in the October issue of The North Star Monthly.  Check out their site:

The North Star Monthly

Taking Flight with Tanya Sousa

The animals talk in Tanya Sousa’s new novel, THE STARLING GOD.  They offer comfort to one another, hold conversations on the activities of the powerful bipeds they regard with awe, and reflect on their place and purpose in the grand scheme of things. “There is greatness,” one communicates to another, “in sharing what we were born to tell.”

Sharing what she was born to tell is exactly what Tanya Sousa is all about.

An award-winning author with a BFA in writing from Johnson State College, Sousa has held positions in human services and community development while steadily building her writing resumé.  She’s written three books for children; her articles and essays, most relating to animals and the environment, have appeared in numerous magazines and been widely anthologized. With her first novel, though, Sousa has passionately stepped up her game.

In THE STARLING GOD, which several reviewers have called reminiscent of the best-seller WATERSHIP DOWN, Sousa displays not only a lifetime of keen and reverent observation of the natural world, but a philosophy that stresses the interconnectedness of all living things and a love for the beautiful Earth we share.  “I like the idea of blending into nature more and standing out like a sore thumb less,” the author says of her goals of downsizing, and of incorporating solar and wind power into her lifestyle. “I want my impact on the planet to be less than it is now.”

But the decidedly independent Sousa, with her bright smile and signature waist-length blonde hair, is unlikely to blend into any background.  With THE STARLING GOD, she’s proved herself to be not only an articulate champion of the animals she so clearly loves, but a compassionate commentator on the most invasive species on the globe: humankind.  Readers will find her message, as told through a young starling’s search for answers, affecting and profound.

Tell us about growing up in the Kingdom and how it shaped your work.

I've lived in the NEK since I was 4, the youngest of two girls. My parents bought a defunct farm with a small pond, endless mysteries inside the old barn, and fields and wooded trails galore. My German-born mother was an avid animal lover and valued my independent spirit. My quiet, thoughtful father was happy to let me be whatever I wanted to be as long as I let him read his books and watch his sci-fi movies in peace!

This setting and these parents were vital in creating my drive to write and to specifically write as a champion of other living things. I played outside and explored the fields, woods, barn and pond for hours on end, watching the creatures I found there and sometimes catching them and learning more about them before setting them free again. The family dog and these wild things were my family and my playmates. I didn't feel separate from them or above them, but part of the whole continuum.

When I was old enough to read, I devoured books about animals. My imagination placed all these living things in vivid scenarios with me - and when I began to write, my poetry or stories were often about none other than animals. I didn't play with dolls unless they were a prop for the animal figurines I played with most!

I've had people ask me why I ended up writing about nature instead of pursuing a scientific career for instance. Part of it is genetic, I believe. My father was always a philosopher and thinker and had the quiet, observational bent of a potential writer. He's also very imaginative and "in his own head" quite a bit, which is where stories evolve. My mother actually wanted to be a journalist in her youth and encouraged my writing and reading, so I grew up thinking of "writer" as a noble career. When you put those parts together I'm sure it's obvious how I came to be a nature-oriented author.

You’re a licensed guidance counselor and have written several picture books for children.  How did those books come into being?

I didn't intend to write children's books, but I've always loved picture books. The artwork captivated me at any age, and I loved how stories could be so effective with so few words. After working with school-aged children as a guidance counselor for about a decade, I realized how few books there were, or that I liked, that taught empathy or about the environment in more than a dry, didactic fashion.

There's a big push right now not to anthropomorphize animals in children's stories, and there are studies that claim kids don't do as well in science if they read mainly tales that use anthropomorphism. I say that's garbage, and have always been very suspicious of "studies" and "statistics."

I abhorred "realistic" nature books as a child, and my experience with children tells me imagination is the place where their learning begins best - that knowledge delivered through the playful is more effective than facts alone. With that in mind, I began writing the kind of children's picture books I longed to see more of and could use in my classes.

I have three children's books out now. FAIRY FEAST introduces the idea of growing your own food and eating a rainbow of foods (through a fanciful and rhyming tale that shows every food having a companion fairy as mythology has tree spirits for each kind of tree).  The book also shows the fairy and human characters interacting kindly with other living things throughout the beautiful paintings by Monique Bonneau.

Another of my picture books is LIFE IS A BOWL OF CHERRY PITS. This one is illustrated by the whimsical and child-at-heart artist Katie Flindall and won a Moonbeam Children's Book Award. It's about a disgruntled boy who learns—thanks to his eccentric, fun-loving and farming grandmother, that the glass is indeed half full.

The last one is NINNY NU’S ORGANIC FARM. I wanted to introduce children to the concept of "organic" food, and did so through a story of an organic-farming cat (Ninny Nu) and a “traditional” farming rabbit (Farmer Jack) entering a contest to produce the most delicious food in the valley. I was lucky enough to have that one endorsed by actor Paul Newman's daughter and CEO of Newman's Own Organics, Nell Newman.

The books are now on sale through (Vermont based publisher) Radiant Hen and are part of a program called "MyBooks," where they are given out to NEK school children thanks to the generosity of donors. The classroom teachers have access to resources that go along with the books, and I love that. My purpose in writing has always been to make a difference, and I think this does the job!

Your new book, THE STARLING GOD, features an intriguing premise and point of view.

Because this novel is told from the point of view of birds, people often assume it's a Young Adult story, but it absolutely is not. It's a book that is very much about adult themes and for adult readers. I think it would be good for high school or college-aged students, but certainly not younger unless the readers are very interested in birds or in social and environmental issues.

The story follows a newly fledged starling who has been raised by a new wildlife rehabilitator from such a young age he only recognizes her as “mother.” Once released into the world of birds –who, in an attempt to make sense of humanity’s often devastating behaviors, have formed a religion deifying human beings -- he sets out to learn the truth about this connection after being told he is "The Starling God," a bird destined to help other starlings be more like the humans they revere. Is he what they say he is? The truth he discovers is important to the survival of his kind and all kinds of living beings - including humans.

THE STARLING GOD is a reminder that we share this planet with other species and that we are all connected. Forgetting that, which is what humans have done (and other species are beginning to do in the tale), is dangerous to all living things.

Why did you write THE STARLING GOD?

I wrote this novel because it had to be written. It wouldn’t stop pushing me until I did. It’s a “life’s work,” I suppose you could say.

I have a stack of journals that I've kept over the last 30 years. I write about observations in nature, my deepest thoughts, dreams - literally - anything that pulls at me to document. Sometimes there are seeds to stories or articles within those entries, and one such entry was about starlings singing on a sloping roof outside my bedroom window.

During a trip to Germany, I discovered they are actually "European starlings" and are an invasive species that have been reviled here in the states. This inspired many questions - aren't WE the most invasive species alive now? Why don't we recognize that and how can we judge what deserves to live or flourish or spread and what doesn't?

The thought led to noticing we even decide what a "weed" is versus a "flower" and we tear out what doesn't meet our "flower" criteria. We do the same with all living things - one tree is "bad.” One tree is desirable. One bird is "bad" and we shoot it or poison it or shoo it away. Others are welcomed, fed, loved, photographed, etc. It seems like such egotistical and god-like behavior, I thought, "What must the other creatures think of us?"

That long thought process lead to an essay called "Mirror.” It was first published as a runner-up in an essay contest and then later in "Thrive in Life" magazine. It discussed starlings being reviled when in actuality they are strikingly like us, and poses the suggestion that we focus more on our own invasiveness. It finally coalesced into the idea for a novel, and in 2014 the work came to fruition and was published by Forestry Press (based in Tennessee but with strong Vermont roots).

Readers have liked my work, my other books and articles, but this novel is touching something deeply in people, and I am honored beyond words. When readers write reviews that say the story is life-changing, or discuss how the effect it had continued to haunt their thoughts for months after reading it even though they've read many other books since, you know something has worked.

It took five years to complete this novel and I'm incredibly proud of the result. If anyone ever wondered, "Who is Tanya Sousa?" all they would have to do is read this and they'd see into what I see, what I wonder, what I think. The fact that others have found it profoundly moving is more than I could have hoped for.

And so, what’s next for Tanya Sousa?   

I've been writing a number of very varied children's picture books and sending them out - five are looking for a home right now. I haven't sold those yet, but I've had some lovely personal replies from publishers saying they like my writing style and asking me to keep submitting. It's important not to give up!

The picture books range from a very simple and non-fiction work about my growing up and spending time with wildlife (called "Frogs in the Baby Carriage”) to a fantasy of another culture in another world where the people make life-long bonds with giant, intelligent insects (think dragonfly riders and carpenters who work side by side with ants and mud daubers). That one is called "Dryft Wing" after the main character. I have more ideas than I can get out.

I also have three ideas for novels and am actively involved in research on the subject matter of all three. My next step is to figure out which one to actually write first. These novel ideas are also very different from each other, and I'm afraid I can't share details about the storylines at this point. Let's just say one calls me to travel to Montana to meet a very special beef cow, one would take speaking with academics who know the most about the seeming human population bottleneck that took place about 75-80,000 years ago, and the other is a more New Age novel completely different from anything I've written before.

Beyond writing, my goal is to be happy.  To me, that means having control of my own schedule as much as possible and living in a more flexible way than many jobs allow. It must be "the artist" in me that calls for that. My first words (that's right, not first word but first words!) were uttered when I was toddling about and my mother called for me to come to her. I was exploring my environment, and busy, so I balanced precariously against a living room chair and replied, "Wai a mini (wait a minute)!" My mother couldn't believe it, so she gasped, "What did you say?" She said I looked at her, quite serious, stuck out my arm and put my pointer finger up and said, "Wai a mini!"  So to go with that flow that's always been a part of me – that would be ideal.

You'll find THE STARLING GOD at Amazon and also Forestry Press:  Forestry Press  To purchase Tanya's children's books, visit Radiant Hen:  Radiant Hen Press

This interview appears in the September 2014 issue of The North Star Monthly.  Check out their site:

The North Star Monthly