Most of my books have been written in libraries, both public and school. Why? I really can’t say. I used to think it was because when I’m sitting in the library, there’s always a wealth of research material only a few steps away, but the Internet and laptop computers have made that a moot point. Now an author can write from anywhere and have all the knowledge of the web literally at his or her fingertips. The library, however, was my spot from day one and remains my go-to place.

When I was writing my first book, The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963, I learned that if I reached a point where the story started to slow down, instead of stopping writing altogether, I needed to get up, go over to the stacks of nearby magazines, and read one of the writing periodicals. That way I gave myself a break and still remained involved in the writing process. It was during one of these slow periods that I read an article where an author described how she felt emotionally devastated every time she finished writing one of her novels. She wrote that there was such a feeling of loss it was as though someone close to her had died. I remember my eyes rolled like a slot machine at a casino and I thought, “Oh, please, get a grip.” What a load of hoity-toity, artsy-fartsy nonsense that is.

Then I finished writing my book. When I woke up the next morning, I thought the rumbly, jumpity feeling in my stomach, the dizzy sense of unease, and the strong desire I had to bawl were due to my celebratory dinner the night before. I’d eaten the La Azteca special, a baker’s-dozen of cheese, lettuce, and tomato tacos drenched in hot sauce, all for the suspiciously low price of $3.99. When the queasiness hadn’t left by early that evening and I actually started crying, I knew I owed two people apologies: the owner of La Azteca and the woman who said she mourned when she finished her books.

I felt so bad when I realized I wouldn’t be going back to the library to “talk” to the characters in The Watsons again, I did feel as though they had died. There really was a period of mourning that I went through. And much as in real life, when you lose someone close to you, one of the components of grief is that you will be overwhelmed by questions. You’ll find yourself asking, “I wonder what my departed dear one would say to this?” or “How would they react to that?” or even “What would they be doing now?”

Some novelists try to answer these questions with a sequel, bringing old characters back to life and letting readers, and themselves, know what did happen next. That is risky. If a character’s story is done, I believe it’s best to let them rest in peace. But that doesn’t mean I’m not curious as to what happened.

When I finished Elijah of Buxton, I was overcome with an even stronger-than-normal sense of loss. I’d always wanted to write a book about slavery but knew it would be difficult for me. I didn’t think I could honestly put myself into the mind of a slave, a person whose existence depended on denying their own humanity. When the character young Elijah Freeman came to “visit” me at the library (remember, this is all going on in my head), I knew I had a way into the story of slavery. Instead of having the novel’s point of view be that of a slave, a traumatized person who had spent his or her entire life brutalized and dehumanized, I could tell the story from the perspective of a slave’s freeborn child; someone who was far enough away from the horrors of slavery to have not been absolutely poisoned by it, but close enough to hear the echoes of the screams in his parent’s nightmarish memories.

I began the process of getting to know who Elijah was, listening to his off-kilter reasoning, laughing with him, worrying about him, and eventually falling in love with him. Then I finished writing the novel and he was gone. I’d lost him. I always wondered what happened next in his story, and what he’d say about this or think about that.

I knew I couldn’t answer those questions in a sequel, but I couldn’t let go of them, either, which is how I came to write The Madman of Piney Woods. With this book, I hoped to kill two birds with one stone: I was able to revisit Buxton and meet more of its extra-ordinary citizens, and I was also able to sneak a peek at what has happened in my dear friend Elijah’s life forty years later.

And what a delight it is to come back to Buxton! I’ve always thought there was something magical in the place, a land where so many dreams came to life, where the very soil is infused with the hopes and unimaginable exultation of people shedding the cloak of slavery and being free for the first time in their lives. I imagined the newly freed parents’ joy at knowing their children would not have to go through the life-scarring trauma that they had.

As I dove back into researching Buxton and learned more about its relationship with the nearby city of Chatham, I somehow stumbled across the story of Irish immigration in Canada. And much as my research taught me facts about Buxton that surprised me, I was surprised to learn about the horrors so many Irish people went through in their quest for freedom in North America. While reading descriptions of the coffin ships of the early 1800s, I was struck by how much like slave ships those boats were. I imagined the life-scarring trauma a young girl would go through after surviving being imprisoned on one of these ships. The more I read, the more I began to see other parallels. It was at that point I understood what my next book would be about. I also saw I could incorporate lessons my parents had taught me into the story.

My mother used to tell me and my siblings not to rush to judgment when first encountering people. “Life can be rough, and everyone you meet has been through hardships you’re far too young to be able to imagine,” she’d say. “Give folks a chance.” My father would tell us about how extreme adversity could cut both ways, how it could either build or destroy character. He also said the way we react to the adverse situations in our lives will define who we are. Some of the time, the victims of horrific acts become angry, resentful, and hateful, even turning into ramped-up, blinded, carbon copies of the thing that hurt them so much. Some of the time, the victim’s eyes are opened, and they realize the poisonous folly of behaving in the same way as whoever it was that caused them pain, and they are lifted through forgiveness. Think Nelson Mandela. At other times, the victims of unimaginable adversity are stunned into a state of nothingness, a state of complete withdrawal.

Taking my mother’s lesson into account, I saw there’s no point in judging one reaction as more honorable or better than the other. Who’s to say why the burden that one person carries so easily absolutely crushes someone else? It’s all a part of what makes us human, and it’s another of the parallels that shows, no matter what our superficial differences, there is, as a redheaded lad from Chatham and an African-Canadian boy from Buxton discover, much more that binds us together.