Paul Fleischman is a Newbury Award winning writer and the author of Seedfolks. Paul Fleischman was born and raised in California and is the son of children's book author Sid Fleischman.^[5] At 19, he took a cross-country bicycle and train trip which ended with him living in a 200-year-old house in New Hampshire. The experience led to his historical fiction dealing with the Puritans' Indian wars, colonial peddlers, Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic, and the Civil War.^[7] He attended college at University of California Berkeley and the University of New Mexico.^[8] Before writing full-time, he worked as a bagel baker, library shelver, bookstore clerk, and proofreader, the last leading to his grammar watchdog groups Colonwatch and The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to English. In addition to the novel Seedfolks, he is the author of the poetry collection Joyful Noise as well as plays, and many other works of fiction and nonfiction.

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FROM SEED TO SEEDFOLKS ~ The backstory of Seedfolks in the author's own words...

I was sitting in a bagel shop, wondering if I'd ever find an idea for my next book. Flipping through a newspaper while eating, I came to an article that caused me to stop chewing. It was about a local psychologist who used gardening to help her clients. The story mentioned that physicians in ancient Egypt prescribed garden walks for mentally ill patients. My brain began to race. The seed for Seedfolks had been planted.

Books don't usually come from a single source. Like rivers, many tributaries flow into them. Some reach back to childhood; others might be only a few months old. I brought home the newspaper, put the article in my file, and wrote a few notes in my idea notebook. But Seedfolks actually had its start many years before.

My parents were both dedicated gardeners. In the summer, in Santa Monica, California, I could pick plums, grapes, oranges, berries, loquats, apricots, figs, tangerines without leaving my yard. Little by little, my parents had plowed under the lawn in search of more planting space. Our house was the only one in the neighborhood with a cornfield in the front yard.

My father, Sid Fleischman, was a writer of children's books as well. For him, gardening offered a recess break from his study, along with the pleasure of growing our own food. Often over dinner he'd tally up the number of ingredients that had come from our soil. Writers, like gardeners, tend to be self-taught and value self-sufficiency.

I learned to write from my father, but I'm no less a product of my mother, who took her gardening skills into the community. When I was in high school, she volunteered at a therapeutic garden in a veterans' hospital, showing men who'd served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam how to raise vegetables and flowers, helping to heal damaged psyches in the process. The example of my mother's volunteerism was powerful. Over the years, she arranged book giveaways in cash-poor school districts, used her Spanish-speaking skills to tutor students in English, and in her last years learned Braille so as to translate books for the blind.

The conflict between my parents' spheres--the printed page and the wider world--is an ancient one for me. I've solved it by keeping a foot in both. Following my mother's lead, I've tutored English language-learners, been a volunteer middle school violin teacher, and delivered library books to shut-ins. In an earlier book of mine, a character who's lost her mother vows to keep her alive by becoming her. I've found myself doing the same. My own mother died a few years before Seedfolks. She was a large part of the lure of the idea. A book about the healing power of plants would keep her flame lit. Those facts would be transformed into fiction in Kim's opening chapter.

I'd heard about community gardens--plots of land, usually in large cities, where anyone can grow food and flowers. Such a setting would offer a more varied cast than a therapeutic garden: people of all ages, from every corner of the world. I began researching and felt that exciting magnetism that takes place when I'm planning a book. Newspapers and magazines suddenly seemed filled with references to community gardens. A friend of mine took a job at a local garden for the homeless. Another friend who'd helped found a community garden in Boston made me a tape of reminiscences. I read books. I toured gardens, taking notes.

I knew immigration would be central to the book. "Seedfolks" is an old term for ancestors. I'd come across it many years before and written it in my notebook as a possible title. My thought at the time was to collect actual accounts of first-generation immigrants to the United States, those who were the founders of their families here. How had they traveled here? What were the first years like? The book had never come to pass, but the title remained on my list and on my mind. Suddenly, I had a book to go with it. Titles are tough. To have an idea that comes ready-made with a title is like buying a house that's already furnished.

My father's father had immigrated from Russia around 1900. My mother's family had come over centuries earlier--one of her relations had been tried as a witch in Massachusetts. But I wanted my book to be set in the present and to focus on recent immigrants. This led me to choose Cleveland as a setting, a city not as well-covered as New York or Chicago, a place famous for its foreign-born population in the past and now absorbing immigrants from new quarters of the globe. Famous as well for its harsh, white winters, Cleveland would be a place where the sight of green would be especially precious. Not to be forgotten in the decision were a number of friends of mine who lived or had lived there. Can you see Canada across Lake Erie? That's the sort of question that might take days to track down, but that a friend on the phone can answer at once.

Ideas are everywhere. The trick is turning them into something. What would be the book's shape and story? I decided to concentrate on the garden's first year--like the infancy of a baby or a plant, a time of dramatic growth. I also knew I wanted to tell its history through a variety of characters, each with a distinctive voice. I'd done this in Bull Run, my previous book, an account of the Civil War's first battle told from 16 points of view. The monologues in that book had been very short, each character speaking several times. I dislike repeating myself and wanted something different this time--longer speeches, closer to short stories, with characters only speaking once yet appearing in the background of other speakers' accounts.

Those characters began taking shape. Some, like sailors awaiting a ship, had languished in my notebook for years without finding their way into a book. Others popped up out of nowhere. Research is a wonderful push-pull proposition. You go looking for facts and return with fiction. I read of a garden that had problems with people raising produce for profit, and came up with Virgil's father, the would-be lettuce baron. I came across a mention of a support group for teen mothers taking part in a garden, and invented Maricela. Sae Young came from a newspaper article I'd seen years before about a teacher who'd been assaulted, lost all trust in people, and hadn't left his apartment for years.

Other characters were aspects of me. Sam, who greets everyone he sees, came from the year I spent in an Omaha neighborhood in which people still lived in the houses they'd been born in. Mine was the only beard on the block. Teenagers threw rocks at me on my first bicycle ride. Like Sam, I began going out of my way to make small talk with grocery store clerks and people at the bus stop, showing them that I was benign--and, by extension, others who looked different.

"Write what you know" is common advice for writers. In fact, I'm not much of a gardener. I studied up on soil and pests and fertilizers, but it soon became clear that the focus of the book was people. To experience some of what my characters were going through, I planted a long row of bush beans in my yard midway through the writing. Suddenly, I understood. I felt pulled out of bed to check on them every morning and gave them a last look every night. Every milestone felt worthy of celebration: the first cracks in the earth, the first sprouts poking through like bird beaks, the first flower, the first bean. I picked off bugs with fierce maternal vigilance and cursed the local pillaging rabbits. Truly, as Nora says, a garden is a soap opera growing out of the ground.

The Vietnam vet, who dropped thousands of tiny seeds on his soil to make up for the thousands of bombs he'd dropped, never made it out of my notebook. Nor did the alcoholic gardener who spoke to his plants. A book, like a plant, finds its own shape. I feared young adult readers wouldn't sit still for a book about a garden and for a time I lost faith. I put the book aside. When I returned to it, I felt that it had to have more young characters and be shorter so as not to bore my readers. Since life doesn't tie up all loose threads in a year, I also decided that the book would be open-ended, with the outcome of various characters' dramas left to readers' imaginations.

The book came out, with its lovely jacket and illustrations. Books are quite like seeds; the writer never knows exactly what will come up. Some are yanked out by hostile reviewers, others please passersby and spread extravagantly. Some travel far, to places the author would never know without fan mail. Seedfolks has led an exciting life: translated into other languages, produced on the stage, read by whole cities and states. A Japanese band has named itself for the book.

Like the ancient Egyptians, we recognize that contact with nature can heal. Hours after the 9/11 attacks in New York, scores of people were standing in wait for the gates of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to open. The city's public gardens waived admission fees and were thronged with those seeking solace and serenity. In the uprush of altruism, we also saw that a sense of community--the knowledge that we're known, that we care, that we will be cared for--provides an even greater solace.

I sense that we all have hidden stores of generosity that often find no outlet except in such moments of disaster. This was the marvel of the community gardens I visited. They were oases in the urban landscape, places where people could safely offer trust, helpfulness, and charity without need of an earthquake or hurricane.

Television, I'm afraid, has isolated us more than race or class. Throughout my writing life I've worked on books designed to bring readers together in performance, from plays to poetry for multiple voices. With Seedfolks I kept the monologues short so that the book could be used as classroom readers theater. Community gardens are places where people rediscover not only generosity, but the pleasure of coming together. I salute all those who give their time and talents to rebuilding that sense of belonging. It's a potent seed. "I have great faith in a seed," wrote Thoreau. "Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders."

©2014