On writing the wrong direction

An idea for a novel does not arrive all at once. It gathers slowly, over months, out of the things you cannot stop thinking about. Sanctuary began that way, while I was working with immigrants arriving in Chicago.

Through my church we ran services for people who had just crossed into the country. One winter a group was dropped at a police station not far from my home. It was the middle of a Chicago winter, and many of them had no coats, no shoes, no way to wash, nowhere to rest. We did what we could. It was nothing political, only human. People in the congregation gave their time and their money, and we bought coats and shoes and socks, sanitary supplies, food for the children, diapers, a hundred small things that add up to dignity.

In those weeks I talked with many of them, and I began to understand the journey behind them: how hard it is to move a family, small children and women among them, the length of Central America to reach the border and ask for asylum.

I wanted the novel to give them a voice, and I chose to tell it through an American teenager. As adults, our view of the world is already set, shaped by years of news and propaganda, by family and friends and income. A young narrator has less of that between himself and what he sees. I wanted to look through those eyes and find out what would come of it.

The story opens in a world where every basic comfort has been stripped away, and I did that on purpose. We tend to learn who we really are only when we suffer, when we are made to compete for food, for status, for a place to stand. Our integrity, our image of ourselves, the way we treat the people around us, all of it can falter at the edge, when we feel we are losing our footing in the world. It may be part of why so many countries are sliding toward populism, choosing leaders who promise to return us to some former glory, who describe the world as a ruin only they can save us from.

So the book pushes its protagonist into that desolation and makes him choose things you would swear he never could, and do things that are hard to forgive. Underneath, it asks the reader a quiet question: in his place, are you certain you would choose differently? Then it shows you the parallels.

You could argue that all of this is engineered, that the suffering is invented for effect. I will not grant that escape. Researching the gangs and cartels of Latin America made one thing clear: none of it is a story. It is ordinary daily life for millions of people, not misery staged for a reader. When we ask why they come, we owe them more than our assumptions. This novel is the byproduct of trying to actually find out. I spent a long time with documentaries and footage about the countries of Central America, their people and their cultures, and researched the gangs, the cartels, their symbols, and the texture of ordinary lives.

I hope you enjoy reading it. And if you turn the last page and find yourself still thinking about it a few days later, then I will have done what I set out to do.