From Flash Floods to Fire Towers: Stories of Growth and Resilience with Ann Braden and Caroline Starr Rose

Get ready for some amazing adventures as you plan your summer reading journey with not one, but TWO thrilling middle grade tales of courage, growth, and resilience featuring strong female leads. Happy Book Birthdays to Ann Braden and Caroline Starr Rose! Join us as we unravel the magic behind Into the Rapids and The Burning Season, where young heroines face the fury of nature and discover their inner strength.

Summary:

In this episode, we dive into summer adventures with authors Ann Braden and Caroline Starr Rose. Their novels, Into the Rapids and The Burning Season, feature young protagonists navigating the challenges of natural disasters—flash floods and wildfires. These stories of self-discovery and empowerment will resonate with fans of Hatchet as they explore themes of self-identity, community support, and overcoming fear. The authors share their creative processes and insights into writing about single-parent households and cultural backgrounds, proving that stories of resilience can thrive without competition. 

Chapters:

• (0:00:03) - Summer Adventure Books for Young Readers Discover the empowering stories of young heroines facing natural disasters in Ann Braden's Into the Rapids and Caroline Starr Rose's The Burning Season
• (0:03:41) - Characters' Self-Identity Journey After Natural Disasters Explore the intertwining themes of self-identity and natural disasters, and the authors' personal experiences that shaped their narratives.
• (0:15:52) - Exploring Fear and Connection Delve into how fear and mortality are portrayed in literature and how voicing fear can transform it, offering hope and connection.
• (0:21:05) - Middle Grade Authors Finding Hope Learn about upcoming books, the creative process, and the importance of hope in writing for middle-grade readers.

Links:

• Purchase Into the Rapids and The Burning Season
• Visit Ann Braden and Caroline Starr Rose online

Transcript

00:02 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
As you are preparing for your summer adventures in learning, I have not one, but two adventure books for you. They focus on different kinds of natural disasters One is a fire, one is a flood but they both feature incredibly plucky and compelling heroines that I can't wait for you to get to meet. If you liked Hatchet, you're going to love these girl power books. Welcome Ann Braden and Caroline Starr Rose to the show. I can't wait to have this conversation. Thank you, Thanks so much. So welcome to the show. I think what I want to do is I've read both books and I loved them. I'd love for you each to just give us sort of your elevator pitch about what the book is about and introduce us to your heroine. 

00:53 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
Ann, do you want? 

00:54
to start. 

00:54 - Ann Braden (Guest)
Sure, so Into the Rapids is about a girl who's she's been raised by her single mom to be very self-reliant. 

01:03
She feels like she's strong, she likes to camp and chop wood and do all these things, take care of herself, and it's just her mom and her, because her dad was killed in an accident when she was a baby. They need anyone else. They live in this tiny little remote town, um, in the middle of the mountains, and, um, they're good, um, but she doesn't actually have any friends, so she's determined to find people who are like her. When she goes to the survival camp um, it's the same survival camp where her mom and dad met when they were 12, and she's like I'm gonna carry on the legacy, it's gonna be awesome, it'll be so strong. But then this flash flood cuts through their town and it destroys the main bridge. That's the only way out of the town, and survival camp is happening next week, and she has to figure out a way to get there anyway, and so the story is about her sort of finding out what she's capable of and also finding out that you don't actually have to do everything by yourself.

02:06 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
 Great.

02:08
Caroline, the Burning Season. 

02:11 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
I'm really excited about this because it's the first book I've written set in my beloved home state of New Mexico, and it's about wildfire, which is something in the Southwest, unfortunately, we are very familiar with, which is something in the Southwest, unfortunately, we are very familiar with. 

02:25
The story takes place in a fire tower and, for readers who aren't familiar with fire towers, at one time there were thousands of fire towers across the country and there are now a couple of hundred that are still in service, mainly in the Rocky Mountain region of the country. 

02:45
In service mainly in the Rocky Mountain region of the country. But fire towers are these remote, are set up in remote places where people still stay for fire season, usually April through August, and they are looking for any change on the horizon, any wisp of smoke that might be seen, that they then report back via radio and those fires are watched and if they need to be put out, they're put out. And so this is the story of Opal, who has been raised in a fire tower. She is going to be raised to be the fourth generation woman in her family to be a fire lookout. She's really proud of this heritage, but she also is conflicted. She wants to go to school in town, and she also is afraid of fire, and so that's, of course, what she's going to need to have to face on her own. 

03:35 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
So I hope that our listeners are hearing exactly what I heard as you two are talking. This is such a gift to have not one but two heroines who are going through sort of a self-identity journey that's shaped by a natural disaster, and and I read Into the Rapids right after the floods in North Carolina, that's when I had gotten a copy to read. So it was very compelling because it felt like something that could literally have happened just the other day. And, caroline, I know we've just had the LA fires and we've had just season upon season of fires. What inspired you to put sort of the elements of weather and of finding yourself together? 

04:26 - Ann Braden (Guest)
Caroline, do you want to start?

04:30 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
Sure, my first verse novel. This is a verse novel. I didn't mention that. My first verse novel was called Maybe, and it was about a girl. It published in 2012, and it was a survival story about a girl dealing with solitude, experiencing her surroundings, nature this was the Kansas frontier and a blizzard, and so I felt like I was not finished talking about solitude, nature and survival, and I wanted to explore that in a new setting, and I've always wanted to write about my home, and this just kind of came about this way. 

05:08
This is a piece of our lives now that is not going away. Fire, unfortunately, is with us. It's here to stay. We, as people, have really complicated relationships with fire because it is both as Opal learns in the story it is terrifying and it also is something that brings healing. It's it regenerates the land and it is a it is a natural good thing that has, unfortunately, also threatens lives, and so it's just. It's a really complicated thing and I wanted to explore that. I wanted to see that what that would be like for a young person who has only grown up knowing fire, who deeply loves the mountain where she lives but also has a fear, because I think this is a really normal experience a lot of kids have had. Of course, they wouldn't be in a setting like Opal's, but I think that visceral fear of wildfires is something that a lot of us have had to deal with. 

06:19 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And I did note that you included in your author's notes at the end a note to kids not to do some of the things that Opal does. 

06:27 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
Yes, that was a good note. 

06:33 - Ann Braden (Guest)
I think for me it's interesting because I don't remember I remember trying to I remember the conversation with my agent that I had where this idea came from, but I don't actually remember how we came to it. I have always wanted to sort of explore a character who's like really into like axmanship and canoeing and all the survival skills, because that was really an important part of my childhood when I was sort of figuring out who I was as a person, and so that has always sort of been in the back of my mind. And then I think the seed of this was thinking about setting of where I don't even know if I had that part yet, but thinking about different settings for as possibilities for a story. 

07:18
There is about 10 years ago we had a flash flood in my part of Vermont, which is where the book is takes place, in the mountains of Vermont, and it was it affected my town, not my house specifically, but like huge parts of our downtown were flooded and and there's also we are, I'm sort of in one of the bigger towns and some of the remote towns they faced exactly what happens in the book, where bridges were ripped out and they were completely isolated for weeks. And so I was thinking about I wanted to sort of set it in a in a tiny town. I was thinking, okay, I could like, and then I think the flooding came from the setting, just because that's something we've been dealing with, and so bridges are thankfully rebuilt in sort of bigger ways with more creation for water runoff, but it's still very much an ongoing threat for us, and other parts of Vermont have gotten hit more recently, like last summer, for example. So yeah, I think that it was sort of a variety of different pieces coming together in one. 

08:26 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And in both cases I was struck by the fact that your characters were raised by single moms. Something tragic has happened to both fathers, related in both cases to the task that the girls have to face. I'm loving the fact you two have never met like this is blowing my mind,

08:44 - Ann Braden (Guest)
 I didn't even know this. 

08:46
These two books were coming out the same day, or that they both existed and we have the same editor. So she knew both of these very parallel worlds existed. 

08:54 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
She got well, I, I'm with Stacy to be so, so she was okay to be fair with. They weren't keeping secrets, right. But yeah, when I, when I saw that we're the same day and the same imprint, I thought, oh my gosh, this is too fun, we have to do something. 

09:09 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Well, and I love them because they don't compete with each other. They tell very different aspects of an ongoing story. It's a different way of looking at it, different cultural backgrounds and perspectives. But I guess what I'm kind of wondering is how did you come to decide that that was sort of the world to put her in and how important was the family structure and sort of? In both cases there are external layers of friends or people that become friends that you discover when you realize you can't do everything on your own. So how did you decide how to place your character in terms of their friends and family structures? 

09:49 - Ann Braden (Guest)
I this is actually the third manuscript I wrote since my previous book, and so the other two were nixed by my editor and in a lot of ways she's like you're not getting into the character enough, like, like for you, like it needs to be this deep character dive. 

10:07
And one of the things I was trying to do was to not write a single mom and a daughter, because that's how I grew up and I've already written that a lot.  And so I was trying to do something different and I was like, well, is it okay if I like do a single mom and a daughter? And she's like yes, and I was like, okay, so I, you know, I grew up so my dad died in a plane crash not a flash flood accident when I was a baby. But I thought, you know, I've always sort of shied away from using that in a story, not because it's so vulnerable, but just because it's so it's such a trope in middle grade that the dad has died. 

10:42 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
It's that Disney trope of how do you, how do you get rid of the parents in the first five minutes.

10:47 - Ann Braden (Guest)
 Exactly. 

10:48
So my husband and I always joke about like how did the dad die in this book, Like, and so anyway. So I was trying actively to not write that book. But then, you know, I tried other things that were not so personal. So I was like, well, it's my personal experience, Maybe I'll take one for the team. 

11:11 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Another dad dead book. 

11:13 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
I like that. I seem to have somebody who has died in almost every book too and I always say, like this one is not going to be that book and it just it keeps happening. 

11:24 - Ann Braden (Guest)
Yeah, sometimes you don't have that much control. 

11:26 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
Yeah, it's something I guess we're exploring again and again For me. I was really fascinated with the fact that there were female lookouts very early on, in fact, I think 1912, I don't have my research in front of me but the first woman to work as a lookout for the US Forest Service, hallie Daggett was her name. She worked in California and she served from 1912, gosh, at least a decade, if not more. So I thought that was really interesting and I wanted to kind of have a character that would have been inspired by Hallie. And so I love this idea of this great aunt, that we have the great aunt, a grandmother, a grandmother, a mother, and then we have opal and you know, the great aunt goes and lives with the or the, the grandmother lives with the great aunt, and the summers and and trains and, um, I also. This doesn't exactly tie into your question, but I'm gonna throw it in there anyway. Anyway, one of the first threads of this story, and every time I talk about a new book I wonder if you experienced this, Ann I can't always pinpoint its beginning because there are these layers it's like sedimentary layers and you realize, oh wait, there was this too and there was that, and one of these layers was I was fascinated with writing a girl in a tower story. 

12:51
Like you know, just I love isolation. That goes back to my book. Maybe that takes place in a Kansas, saudi. Most of the book is in one setting, which is challenging. I love kind of limitations. I find I can write from limitations somehow, instead of like everything being out there for me to tackle. That's terrifying. But limitations somehow helped me find my story, and so this idea of a girl in a tower was really interesting to me and at first I thought is this a fairy tale? I don't know, you know Rapunzel, I don't think so. Then I thought about a lighthouse and then I thought you know, I've seen several lighthouse books, but a fire tower, that's really interesting. I could set it in again, I could set it in my home, and then I could address this ever present aspect of nature that we we are contending with. So that's how. That's how this came about in bits and pieces. 

13:49 - Ann Braden (Guest)
I love that. That's like. It's like Rapunzel turned on its head in terms of girl in tower  

13:56 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
That's right. That's right, exactly Well. And she comes down from the tower and makes such an impact when she finds who she is, and that's huge. I mean, in both cases, you know they have to go from that home setting to go out into the world to figure out who they are and what they need, and it's not necessarily what they thought they needed at the beginning and I'm not offering spoilers, but that's kind of the path we're taking.  

15:28
That seems to be the middle grade market and I know there's some stretching on either end for that. What are you hoping that they take away from your book? Is there sort of a gift you're sending into the world, or does it just go out and you hope that it finds the right reader and you move on to the next thing? 

15:47 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
 say there are a couple of things for me. There are a couple things for me. Opal's fear, I feel, is really relevant in most of our lives, especially young people. Though I can say as an adult, I still deal with fear, and it doesn't necessarily have to be fear of fire. A lot of times, fear is something that's kind of shameful or secretive, and that's the case for Opal, for a good portion of this book, and learning to be able to vocalize fear somehow helps to remove some of the. You know, shining the light in the darkness, I guess, is one way to put it, makes the darkness less terrifying at times, and so I hope, I hope kids can feel a camaraderie with Opal and, as she's experiencing that, I'll leave it there. 

16:41 - Ann Braden (Guest)
Hey, I'm really glad I let you go first because that you like it's the same, it's one of my. I feel like it's that's such a thing. I feel like it's that's such a thing, the idea of shining the light into the dark. You know that, um, so the boy that um Addie the main character becomes friends with reluctantly at first, um is he has he started to have panic attacks, and specifically around death, the fact that we all die and the fact that life is going to end and his life is going to end. And um and Addie feels like of course we're going to die, like that's always been clear. 

17:21
But each of them needs each other to help them figure out like, but how do you fully live If, like, you have to sort of have that balance of recognizing like life is not forever and it means that, like, this is our chance to like live it up while we can. And so that's a hard thing to do when you're the only one. It's really much easier to do if you like find at least one other person or the nature or whatever it is where you feel like you have this bond with something else. And so I feel like I know so many kids have that fear, but it's not spoken about that much. It's especially in our culture. It's not part of you know. It's like you go to a funeral and then it's over, like it's not part of daily life in the same way. And so I sort of wanted to give them a place to see two kids who are coming from different places sort of exploring that topic together and finding a way through. 

18:23 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
I'm so glad you brought him up because I thought he was one of the most charming characters I've read in forever. I loved his phobias and at the same time he was kind of the mayor of the town. He knew everybody, like his fear of death took him to, uh, new heights and knowing everybody's business yes, yes, yeah, mayor of the town, exactly so I think he's charming and he gave you know, and that adds sort of another layer of character that if you can't connect to Addie because your experiences are different, you might find your way in in a different way and then be compelled by her story, and I thought that that was really cool. 

19:01 - Ann Braden (Guest)
Yeah, I do love him as a character. He may or may not be based on someone I love in real life. Him as a, as a character, he may or may not be based on someone I love in real life. 

19:12 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
We won't ask you to name names. I know how dangerous that can be. So I'm going to switch gears now and I want to ask are you going to be going out on the road to promote your books? Can people expect to see you on a book tour? And then, second part is what are you working on now? Sort of what's the next thing you're in process on? 

19:32 - Ann Braden (Guest)
um, I have a very short book tour, um, that is, I'm going to be at Anderson's um uh bookstore in uh Illinois, in Downers, the Downers Grove um ranch. Uh, on Wednesday, the 14th of May Um, and I'll be in conversation with Jasmine Warga, which is exciting, excited about Um, and then the next day I'll be at uh Skylar books in um West Bloomfield and then later on I'll be at uh flying pig in Vermont. Um, I think I don't remember the date, maybe it's a Friday. 

20:10 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
I will make sure that into. 

20:11 - Ann Braden (Guest)
But yes, I'm. I'm excited to have some time to see readers and but it is. It's hard to figure out how to. Yeah, it's. This is a tricky time in publishing yeah, it's. this is a tricky time in publishing.

20:34 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
 Yes, how about you, caroline?

20:35 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
I'm doing a book event in Albuquerque Bookworks on Saturday, may 24th. That's really the only thing I have Ann, but I am also getting to teach a class this summer at Chautauqua, in Chautauqua, new York, about middle grade, and that will be the end of July and beginning of August. So exciting, yeah, hoping to meet some new readers and writers there as well. Wonderful. 

20:58 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And what are you all working on now? Because there's always something else we're working on. 

21:03 - Ann Braden (Guest)
I have. My next book is currently titled Hijacked by Goats um, and it's we both love the title it's um. 

21:15
It's about a girl who is, uh, who um has to. It's she. Basically, it starts with her being admitted to a psychiatric hospital and, um, she's dealing with a lot of stuff going on in her brain that are telling her that she needs to be punished and she, if she's not perfect, and that she needs to be a better friend, or a perfect friend specifically, and that, um, she doesn't deserve to get better, like all these things that um are sort of piling in on her, and so she ends up getting diagnosed with OCD, um, and it's about her sort of story through, you know, getting discharged and still finding the. You know there's a lot of work after discharge, and so that's, I think, coming out in two years, I think it's 2027. So I'm waiting for edits from my editor for that one. So I'm waiting for edits from my editor. 

22:12 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
I have a picture book next year called Books Up the Mountain, which is about the Packhorse Librarian Project in Eastern Kentucky, the Great Depression, so I'm really excited about that. And then, two years from now, also waiting on edits. So we seem to have a similar schedule. I have another verse novel called Song of the Raven. This is the first time I've ever written from an animal's perspective and it's about a raven and her siblings as they leave the nest. It's a coming of age story as they visit different roosts and as they learn to be in the brutal and beautiful Raven world. 

22:49 - Ann Braden (Guest)
You know, I just have to say so. One of those manuscripts that got nixed by my editor was from a bird's perspective. I'm not doing the deep character dive that I needed to. It was crow. It was a crow, not a Raven. That is wild, but it was also like apocalyptic fiction where humans had gone extinct and like there's not so much hope for middle grade. In that I'm intrigued. I want to read that. I want to read that. It was also in verse. There was a lot of things that I was trying to do. 

23:17 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
I am truly feeling you all need to get together for coffee. 

23:22 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
Oh my gosh, that's wild Wow. 

23:33 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
 So you kind of alluded to darkness and lack of hope and not beating around the bush. We're clearly living in times that feel dark and apocalyptic. How do you continue to write in ways that you do shine light in the darkness for kids? 

23:51 - Caroline  Starr Rose (Guest)
That's, that's the heart of middle grade, that's the beating heart of middle grade. You know, we we show characters in hard situations. We don't make it easy for them, but we always end with hope, because I mean that we have to hold to that as as the adults in the world that we're offering this world to our children. 

24:09
That's what we have to hold to and and that's what we have to look for in the midst of challenging times. We it's there. There are beautiful things. It's a little bit like when I was talking about fire. It's complicated. It can be two things at once. You know the heartache and the beauty. The both of those things can be happening at once. You know the heartache and the beauty. Both of those things can be happening at once, and I I love getting to explore that. But ending on a note of hope, that's so beautiful. 

24:37 - Ann Braden (Guest)
Yeah, I feel like. I think sometimes, if we have the whole world in our lens, it does not feel hopeful, but like we just have to keep shrinking the lens until you're at the however small it needs to be, to be like, okay, I find hope in this one person or in this one place, whatever it is. Um, and so I think, in some ways, that's what stories allow us to do is to sort of shrink our lens. Um, that said, I have struggled to write recently, to be very honest. So I'm hoping to connect, find other ways to sort of fill my well so that I can find that next story. 

25:16 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Well and I think you just said that beautifully, Ann that when we don't have our cup filled, when we're not able to write from that place where we can shrink the lens and look at hope, we're not able to write from that place where we can shrink the lens and look at hope, then we have to do the things that help us to find that. Whether it's walking in nature or having a conversation like this, you know, spending time watching kids interact with each other, whatever it is, it's there. We just have to be willing to take ourselves out and give ourselves the grace to find it. I think, yes, exactly. Well, thank you so much. 

25:50
I cannot wait for our listeners to read Into the Rapids and the Burning Season. You all are in for such a treat. I'm going to drop information and contact information for both authors in the show notes. If you happen to be in Vermont or New Mexico, you need to go to their author visits,  or Illinois, if you happen to be out there, and I can't wait to welcome you all back to talk about more of your books. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much. Thank you.