Alyssa Colman is the author of the middle grade fantasy The Tarnished Garden and the companion novel The Gilded Girl. Here she reflects on her research behind her forthcoming book, Where Only Storms Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug.)—which takes place during Black Sunday, one of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl, 90 years ago on April 14, 1935—and its startling parallels to our current climate catastrophes.
I never intended to write a novel about the Dust Bowl. In early 2020, I was deep in an internet rabbit hole trying to find the most effective masks. I thank whatever fates and algorithms led me to an article about the other time in history when Americans were told to wear masks: the Dust Bowl. This was news to me. The article argued that Covid-19’s best analogy was not the 1918 flu epidemic that was so widely discussed at the time. Instead, the author saw a stronger parallel to Dust Bowl residents huddling in their houses during storms and using masks to control the new, deadly disease known as dust pneumonia. I was both baffled and intrigued.
I purchased some well-rated masks and typed “Dust Bowl” into the search engine. Images of mountainous dust clouds filled my screen. I had assumed that it was simply a bad drought, but I quickly learned that the Dust Bowl was the worst man-made ecological disaster in U.S. history. Though the drought and Great Depression contributed to the crisis, the roots of the problem went back decades. During WWI through the 1920s, farmers, encouraged by the government and high wheat prices, plowed up millions of acres of prairie grasslands. When the rains stopped in 1931 and the crops died, the exposed topsoil became vulnerable to wind erosion of epic proportions.
Several months later, I was reading Dust Bowl memoirs. Again, I had no plans to write about it. I was simply fascinated by how the survivors’ lives felt drastically different and yet eerily similar to my own life. They had huddled in their houses against the storms and wore masks to prevent dust pneumonia, a deadly condition caused by inhaling fine particles of silica in the dirt. Outside my Los Angeles windows, the sky was orange while record-breaking fires wreaked havoc on the state. Every day, I had to choose whether to keep my young twins cooped up in our apartment or put aside my fears about what they might breathe in while playing outside. I thought about the residents of the Dust Bowl more and more often.
I’d been struggling with a story idea about a girl who, like me, had scoliosis. Somehow, magically, this idea merged with my research obsession. Joanna, one of the twin main characters of Where Only Storms Grow, has few options when it comes to her constant back pain—much like her family has limited choices for dealing with the dust and drought destroying their wheat farm. These real and desperate conditions forced two and a half million people to leave their farms—a group that literature tends to focus on. But when I created my twin main characters, Joanna and Howe, I was interested in the stories of people who stayed behind: what they endured and how they survived. The story became my meditation on accepting and learning to live with forces beyond my control.
While I grappled with the plot, I listened to around a hundred hours of oral histories from Dust Bowl survivors to learn the dialect and about day-to-day life on the Oklahoma panhandle. Fascinatingly, no matter what question the interviewer asked first, most of the survivors spoke about their memory of one particular storm. On April 14, 1935, a massive dust storm swept across the Great Plains, plunging the region into darkness. In a single afternoon, 300,000 tons of topsoil flew across Nebraska, Colorado, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. The locals dubbed it Black Sunday. The next day, an Associated Press article about the storm called the region “the Dust Bowl” and the name went on to define an era. The more I listened, the more I knew I had to start the story with this storm.
I wrote this book to remind us of the mistakes our ancestors made and urge a new generation to take action. Personally, I think this storm was so dramatic because it came out of a blue sky. It turned day into night, suffocating livestock, destroying crops, and infiltrating homes. Black Sunday was also a wake-up call that spurred the nation. Within a month, Congress enacted legislation that created the Soil Erosion Service, now the National Resources Conservation Service. The Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration planted thousands of trees as windbreaks through the Shelterbelt Project. The government sponsored soil conservation classes and paid farmers to take up more sustainable farming techniques. It is a consolidated blueprint that we could stand to study as modern communities contend with wildfires, hurricanes, heatwaves, and floods—all intensified by climate change. As a wise character urges in the novel, “We can’t keep fighting against the land, we’ve got to work with it.”
I hope in addition to being an exciting survival story about a major storm, Where Only Storms Grow will help young readers see the Dust Bowl not just as a historical event, but as an era alive with lessons for our future.
Where Only Storms Grow by Alyssa Colman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $17.99, Aug. 19 ISBN 978-0-374-39278-9
