Michelle Theall and her wife were in the process of taking in a foster child when they got a call that a boy and a girl had just been removed from their home.
The older brother was holding his sister’s hand in the backseat of the car on their way to what seemed to be a new life. “Just think of this as the next adventure,” Theall recalls him telling his sibling. “As long as we’re together, we’re going to be fine.”
The kids ended up going back to their mom, but that moment stuck in Theall’s mind. And those two kids became Sky and Ben, the main characters in her new novel, The Wind Will Catch You, out now on Alcove Press.
As the story begins, Sky is growing more entangled with her caseworker when she gets a call that a comatose man in the hospital may be her brother. That can’t be, because Ben died when they were kids.
The narrative travels back and forth in time, weaving several threads along the way, but Theall doesn’t use flashbacks in the common sense. For one, Ben’s journals play a large part in the way the story is told. Ben had always wanted to be a writer, so the diary entries are evocative and detailed. It would be a disservice to the reader and spoil the plot by talking about the storyline much further.
“I had to be really careful tying together the mystery of whether or not Ben is alive, if he’s the man in the hospital or whether he really did die, and keeping that alive without revealing too much,” Theall says.
Theall lives in Boulder and works as editor and photographer for Alaska Magazine. Prior to The Wind Will Catch You, Theall wrote Teaching the Cat to Sit, a memoir about her experience as a gay Catholic woman balancing being a daughter and a mother raising her son with her partner. The book started as an essay, which was eventually nominated for a GLAAD Media Award, in the Denver-based 5280 Magazine.
As emotionally raw as this book is, with heavy themes including child abuse, patricide and forced adoption, Theall was less fearful about it being out in the world than when she published the memoir. “It was much less emotional,” she says. “It’s not my story.”
Shine a light
The Wind Will Catch You may not be based on Theall’s life, but she and her wife were foster parents and adopted their son from Boulder County foster care. She knows firsthand the problems in the system.
“There are outcries and movements for so many things that are important, but the U.S. foster system we’ve just left in shambles,” she says. “There’s no protests or outcries and these kids have no one to stand up for them. It breaks my heart.”
After her book was published, Theall asked her friends: On a scale of one to 10, how much do you know about the foster care system in the United States? “People are saying ‘zero,’” Theall recalls.
Theall’s book is fiction, but she says the gut-wrenching parts about America’s broken foster care system could “absolutely be true.”
She hopes that if anything comes from publishing the novel, it spurs discussion about its different themes, which also include incarceration, teen pregnancy and LGBTQ identity. Even if that wasn’t Theall’s intent when she set out to write it.
“I didn’t really want to change the world with the book or preach,” she says. “I wanted it to be a page-turner. I wanted people to sit down and have something they needed to talk about afterward.”
Writing the landscape
According to Theall, her new book will appeal to fans of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone in the way those writers incorporate a sense of place.
Theall grew up in Texas before she “escaped,” and the landscape of the Lone Star State almost serves as a character of its own in The Wind Will Catch You.
“That’s definitely something a Colorado audience can relate to,” Theall says. “The way that we’re part of [the landscape], that it plays a part in our survival and understanding of the world.”
And not unlike the dedication required to scale some of the Centennial State’s most daunting 14ers, the 320-page novel took Theall nine years to write. She knew the beginning and the end — it was the part in the middle that she tweaked and obsessed over for years.
She’s part of the same Boulder writing group as Buzzy Jackson, who recently published the historical novel To Die Beautiful; and like Jackson, Theall credits the group with keeping her going and finding the story.
“It was just me spending the time, layer after layer after layer,” Theall says. “Taking layers off, putting them back on, until the story really made sense.”
ON THE PAGE: Colorado Local Authors Open House feat. Michelle Theall. 3-6 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 8th, Nederland Community Library, 200 CO-72. Free
