Author visits area for book research
by Christina Verderosa

   Claire Belle is not your every day middle school student. She keeps a lot of secrets; one of the biggest is her seemingly mystical ability to attract birds. In the first book of her story, “The Legend Awakes,” Claire has the chance to save a red-tailed hawk, who saved her when she was a toddler.
   For Claire’s second adventure, author Georgia Anne Butler came to southeast Arkansas, particularly the White River Refuge last week, for research.
   Butler, whose first book is set in Central Pennsylvania, where she lives, wouldn’t say much about how Claire and her friends will end up in Arkansas. They will spend about three or four chapters in Arkansas and at the White River Refuge, “but the themes will run through the book,” Butler said.
   Butler got together with refuge ranger Matt Connor, who took her around and explained the hydrology, bird life and trees on the refuge. She was most impressed with her first sight of a bald cypress.
   “This was another revelation for me,” Butler said. “I had read about the knees” of cypresses, but had never seen them. Then she visited Burnt lake and saw a grove of very old cypress with dozens of “nubs” sticking out of the water. It looked like, “something from an alien movie,” she said.
   After several days of cramming in all the places she could visit, Butler said her plans for her last days in Arkansas were to “sit someplace and take it all in.”
   Another goal Butler had in coming to Arkansas was to add more birds to her life list. Although her character Claire Belle is an avid birder, Butler said this wasn’t always the case for her personally.
   Her late husband, David, was an avid birder and frequently took Butler out birding with him. She admits, “I was slow to pick it up,” but after David died in 2005, she started again on her own.
   It was also after David died, that she seriously got to work on finishing her first book.  She began “The Legend Awakes,” in 2002, “inspired by the local red-tailed hawks.” Butler had started a short story years before about a boy who was “super-sensitive.”
   But she needed a way to connect the character to the red-tailed hawk. “I wanted them to have a spiritual connection.”
   So Butler decided that the hawk would have saved this child, who is now a girl, as a toddler.  But the project moved slowly at first. “I was only up to about chapter eight in 2005,” she explained. “When my husband died, I threw myself into it and finished in a year.”
   Another inspiration was the Harry Potter books, but unlike the boy wizard’s actual magic, she wanted to, “highlight the magic of the natural world.” Claire is very much attuned to nature and her surroundings, but she also has a mysterious ability.
   If Claire wears a shirt with a picture of a bird on it, she will see that bird that day. An explanation is offered late in the book, which may or may not answer all the reader’s questions. “You don’t know whether she’s gifted in a fantastic way or whether it’s just natural,”
   Butler said she would like to awaken that same sense of wonder in her readers, “that inspires [Claire] every day.”
Claire and her friends and family are creations of the author’s imagination, but one character who is very real is Sammy the sheepdog. “Sammy is my dog!” Butler exclaimed. In fact, the color illustration on the cover depicts the actual Sammy, taken from a photograph.
   Sammy is now 9, but many of his antics in the book come from real life. “All of what you see portrayed in the book is his personality.”
   Butler reported that book two, which is due out next year, is moving along a lot quicker. There will be a third book, which Butler expects to set in Ireland but other details are still to be worked out.
   Before publishing her book, Butler got a lot of input from nieces and various other people. “I took everyone’s input seriously,” she said. “Readers always get it right.”

From the DeWitt Era-Enterprise
April 9, 2009