Dear Reader,
There is a surreal quality to the idea of your first novel being sent out into the world. I feel both honoured and comforted by the fact that its first steps will be taken directly into your hands.
Dirtpickers is a story about two adults and three children who flee a small and corrupt mining community in rural Idaho and cross the border into Canada, where they must pretend to be a family when they hardly understand the meaning of the word. There, they meet an elderly woman by the name of Mrs. Schweers and move into her late husband’s hunting cabin. She does not question their lack of possessions, their dissimilar appearances. She opens her home and lets them use it as they see fit; to lick their wounds or perhaps create new ones.
Life ought to be simple, but it’s difficult for the characters to reconcile their disparate pasts with their shared future. To build a home, when none of them know what a home looks like. To look into the heart of something that has never quite healed. But there is beauty in trying and failing, and trying again. There is even more in asking for help.
Dirtpickers isn’t about mining so much as it’s about digging senselessly, and what we unearth in doing so. It’s about making a childhood that was better than your own for children who are not your own, because love is not earned, and it should never be buried.
There is pain, and there is what comes after. It turns out that this story is mostly about the after. I hope you enjoy it.
Yours,
Edie May Hand
