It was an odd stocking stuffer—a five-inch Wonder Woman, with Gumby-esque limbs malleable enough to achieve super-human, joint-defying positions. I tossed my husband a baffled look. No fan of the superhero, superpower stuff, I’ve always found my power in the ordinary, the everyday, the quiet people and deeds.

“But you have been a Wonder Woman,” he said, referring to my decade-long work on my novel The River by Starlight. “Your tenacity, your curiosity, your patience. Your tirelessness.”

Wonder Woman.

When our son was young and communication-delayed, our speech therapist taught me to help him develop social-emotional thinking by reading books together and pausing before turning the pages to say “I wonder?” I wonder what’s going to happen next? I wonder what she’s going to say? I wonder what he’s feeling? I wonder why they did that? The therapist called this approach “a picture walk” through books. Instead of reading the words, my son and I tried to figure out what was going on and what was going to happen only by “I wonder”-ing about the pictures.

I found myself doing the same thing with period photos from the settings of my novel. I wonder how he got that scar? I wonder why she looks so worried? I wonder how much that thresher cost and what they had to scrimp on get it? I wonder how her feet feel after walking two miles in those shoes? I wonder how much—how little—of that moonshine it took to render him knee-walking drunk?

And where I could find no pictures, I wondered about that too. My lead, Annie, endured perinatal and postpartum psychosis at a time when stigma and injustice about maternal mental health prevailed. I haven’t yet found photos, other than one from an institution, which I don’t wonder isn’t a fair representation. I wonder what happened to family photos from her childhood, from three marriages, from a lifetime? I wonder who might have had them, might have destroyed them? I wonder if someone several generations removed may still have one. My wondering about this shaped the way I drew Annie’s character as she navigated the challenges of her life in the face of her illness. . . .

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