From a seed to a tree

Introducing The Sun Climbs the Trees.

This novel began as supposition.

The original inspiration was my grandparents, my Nana and Papa, Emily and Willis Ray. Nana died of cancer before I turned three. I have no memories of her, but she was a constant presence in my life. I imagined what it was like for her, to know she was dying. With no future to look forward to, I imagined she looked in the only direction she could—backwards, to the past and the life she’d lived as a wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend. And I imagined my grandfather did something similar, tracing their relationship back to the year they met. I had the premise. What I lacked was a sense of what any of that truly feels like.

Some of that was answered when my father suddenly fell ill and passed from an aggressive form of lymphoma. Over the course of 90 days, I lived through much of what I had to write about. The scenes in which Emily is sick are my father. Ray, her caregiver, is my sister, who took our father into her home and took care of him while raising two young children. I had the scars to write this book, but couldn’t get started. I was dealing with a lot—grief, anxiety, fear. I started having vivid dreams of my grandmother, Anna, my father’s mother. She’d come to me and tell me he was better and that he was dancing again (the cancer had left him unable to walk on his own). She was a loving woman, but also a spitfire, and one night she came demanding to be heard. “Writers write,” she challenged me.

So I did.

I wrote a novel that was an homage to love and a tribute to my family, past and present. But I was never fully happy with it. In part, because I was still growing as a writer. So I’d put it down and go write something else in these new voices and styles I was experimenting with. Then I’d come back and rework the manuscript to reflect that growth.

Years went by.

Three other new manuscripts were started and finished. And I kept coming back, until I finally put it down to start a career and a family. In early 2026, I came back to the most recent version, believing I’d simply clean up the manuscript and publish it, just to do something with it. But when I got into it, I realized there were two separate but related books: the original romantic, Steinbeckian novel, and this new version that was a better representation of the writer I’d become and the experiences I’d had.

So I left behind the old version, with the promise that it will soon have its day. And I continued to work through the new version, reworking, rewriting, adding, changing. The premise is the same; some of the old passages are still intact, but much has changed. It feels like a truer version of life and love and the complexities that make both so challenging and rewarding.