Goodreads asked Marianne Hering:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Marianne Hering I'm writing about a Japanese social reformer. When I was editor of Clubhouse magazine, I reached out to author Katherine Paterson and asked for a fiction story. She said she couldn't write short fiction but that she was willing to write a nonfiction piece about Toyohiko Kagawa for the magazine. That was in the early 1990s. Since then, I've wanted to write more about Kagawa, and I decided to work his story into an Imagination Station book. Kagawa lived from 1888 to 1960, and I wanted a dramatic setting to introduce him to readers, so I chose the 1923 earthquake in Tokyo. Wow. Talk about drama.

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