Wildfire (94 page)

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
Acknowledgments
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
Rumor has it that editors don’t edit anymore, but my editor at Scribner, Alexis Gargagliano, certainly does. She read this book in several drafts, helped me pare it down, and asked the right questions. I’m grateful to Alexis and to my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, for their faith and patience.

 

  
Thanks to those who shared their experiences with me in conversation, Odella Woodson on aphasia and Valerie Windborne on speaking with the dead. Thanks to the midwives Marjorie Horton, Meg Grindrod, and Gina Haldeman, whom I consulted to write the birth scene; any improbabilities remaining are not their fault. Gina especially was midwife to that birthing, and she tried her best to ease suffering, though the sufferers were characters on paper.

 

  
When I sent family members and friends a 750-page manuscript and asked for comments, I knew I was asking a lot. For insights and encouragement, many thanks to Carolyn Micklem, Susan Micklem, Meg Kearney, Michael Fleming, Brenda Prescott, Gina Haldeman, and Sharon Kalemkiarian. Thanks to Toi Derricotte, who swapped pages with me, and Kathleen O’Donnell, who swapped stories. Thanks to Cornelius, always.

 

  
This book was informed—truly in-formed, shaped inwardly—by many other books, works by researchers, novelists, and people of the past such as Sei Shonagon, a snobbish, observant woman who speaks clearly across ten centuries and the barrier of translation. I try to borrow rather than replicate, but I could not resist one paraphrase: Mox’s drinking song is based on a real song I found in
The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian
, the oral history of a certain “SB,” as collected by anthropologist Paul Radin. SB says that when he had delirium tremens, he saw drunken ghosts on horseback singing, “I, even I, must die sometime, so of what value is anything, I think.” The song became a popular drinking song.

 

  
I want to acknowledge all my influences here, with thanks—even the ones I have forgotten, which are still at work in hidden corners of my imagination.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
About the Author
    
    
    
    

 

    
SARAH MICKLEM worked at the usual assortment of jobs before discovering that graphic design was an enjoyable way to make a living. After many years as a magazine designer, she began to write about a character called Firethorn, whom she first imagined as a woman alone in the woods. About a decade later, Micklem published her first novel,
Firethorn.
She continues to work as a designer while writing the third book of the Firethorn trilogy. She lives with her husband, poet and playwright Cornelius Eady, in New York and Indiana.