Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation

A few months ago, an ELA teacher who works on the Turtle
Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota got in touch with me. She wrote
to tell me that she has used Flipped in the curriculum for years, with
great success in engaging her at-risk students. She sent me photos, letters
from students, and art. In return I sent her a big box of assorted books
for her and her students. It included a copy of Runaway which she
immediately took home and read.






During the next round of communication, I learned a lot more
about her and the job she does. For 25 years she has commuted 40 miles each way to teach on this
reservation, which is right up near the US/Canada border. It's a very rural, high poverty area, and a lot of her students live in housing
projects based on government funding. Drug use and abuse are
extremely high, and she deals with deaths of former students almost
monthly, trending toward weekly, from incidents related to addiction.  A lot
of her students are raised by grandparents, relatives, foster homes, or live in
the local shelter. She said that her students tend to thrive with reads that deal with the issues presented in Runaway, because they
can relate directly.








Despite this bleak reality, one thing shined through her correspondence with sharp clarity: She loves her job. She loves the kids. She’s their
cheerleader and champion, and she goes to work each day with a determination to
pave a path away from the statistics that face her at-risk students. 




You may have heard that I have a book coming out on
September 5th. The title is Wild
Bird and it’s the story of Wren Clemmens, an at-risk teen who gets sent away
against her will to a wilderness therapy camp in the Utah desert. It has a
Native American component to it because almost all wilderness therapy camps
have one, and I wanted to make Wren’s experience as authentic as possible. (And to ensure the Native representation was done correctly, I worked with a sensitivity reader from the Southern Paiute Nation, which is featured in Wild Bird.)




What you probably haven’t
heard (because I haven’t told anyone and the dates/times/places aren’t entirely
cemented) is that my publisher is sending me on a West Coast tour when Wild Bird comes out.  Mostly, I’ll be in Los Angeles, the Bay Area,
and Seattle.






The publisher’s purpose in sending an author on tour is to
help launch the book. To help sell
the book. It’s very expensive to send authors on tour. Where they send them is
tied to the return they expect/hope to get on their investment. They like to
work with stores that have a good track record of smoothly run, well attended
events, with good community outreach. It also helps if the store is in or near
a big city, where multiple tour stops can be arranged from a single flight into
that city.




Publishing is a
business. One that has had to tighten its belt over the past decade to stay competitive.
It doesn’t make financial sense for a publisher to send an author someplace
where books won’t sell, or is too remote.






So I knew there was no chance that my publisher would add a
tour stop to Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation. For one thing, being at the
tippy-top of North Dakota, it’s nowhere near the West Coast, and the tour is
specifically West Coast. For another thing, it’s, like, seventeen flights and a
three-hour drive to get to the reservation. And, of course, the ELA teacher
made clear that there's not a lot of money for discretionary things like, say, books.




So, yeah. No chance in France my publisher would even consider sending
me there.




And yet, I asked.




And to my astonishment, they said yes.




Well, actually, they said, “We think it’s a fabulous idea!”




It may be a business, but my publisher (Random House) has a
heart!




And so, added to my tour stops this fall is Turtle Mountain
Chippewa Reservation, where I will do my best to convey a message of hope, and encourage
the students to find power through both reading and writing. I am so looking forward to meeting the students and staff there, and plan to do a lot of listening to them.




Meanwhile, I’ll post my tour dates and locations when they
become official, which should be soon.






Thank you for checking in. I’ll see you in the comments!