That inspired me to dedicate Wishtree to newcomers and welcomers. I think of this country as being so welcoming, and it was hard to believe what was going on. So I already had a tree in my head, and then politically, things started getting very dark and negative. I think of trees as witnesses, and wise-which may be a cliché, but maybe clichés are there for a reason. I see it drop its leaves, and sometimes I notice that it looks tired-and it’s become quite like a person to me. I knew I wanted to write from an outsider’s rather than a human perspective-and I’d already done a gorilla! There’s a tree in my courtyard that I often watch while I’m typing on my laptop. Why did you decide to write Wishtree from a tree’s point of view? I just wanted to ventilate, and writing a book is exactly how authors ventilate. I wanted kids to read this book and ask, “Why is this happening-why do people treat others this way?” That’s obviously not an easy question to answer, and I know that I am hardly alone in feeling so angry.

It occurred to me that it was a very sad case of life imitating art imitating life. As I was making the final tweaks to the manuscript, I spotted a newspaper headline with the message “You Can All Go Home Now,” which was directed at a Muslim family in Iowa.

I came up with the premise that the word ‘LEAVE’ is carved into a beloved community tree, obviously targeting a newly arrived Muslim family. I wanted to make a small plea for civility, but I wanted to keep it simple and accessible to young readers. I wrote the novel in summer 2016, filled with frustration about the way things were going in our country. What was the spark that ignited Wishtree?

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