I burst into tears when I first held my fingers over the keys to write fiction. I paced around, knowing I needed help. Lots of help. I stemmed the tears by turning the names of five friends into a mantra I repeated, sure that if they were in my living room, they’d cheer me on. Then I taped paper up on my camp wall, and on it I scrawled “CRAFT. BE CRAFT-Y.”  

Did you ever have a moment when dream-destroying words sledgehammer you flat? I’m guessing most of us do.

Three years ago, I stumbled toward a New York City subway, reeling from a publisher’s verdict that “environmentally themed fiction is the kiss of death.”

You just never know when the light bulb will go off. Or the loud click in the ear. Or the moment you slap yourself up the side of the head.

The click and head slap for “Deadly Trespass” came after I asked my daughter to kneel in a deer-yard. (A deer-yard is an area where deer gather under tall trees that shelter them from wind and deep snow—where they can move about to find food.)

I wrote “Deadly Trespass” to entice readers onto a field trip, a journey into a rich and threatened world. I want to be a writer-guide who’s also firmly in a story-teller tradition. Someone who has folks lean too close to the fire on a dark night and say, “Don’t stop. What happens next?”

In “Deadly Trespass,” the narrator, Patton, thinks some city folks see natural vastness as the “Great Nothing.” Not so.