A dark family mystery unravels as one woman searches for the truth in Amanda Peters' novel The Berry Pickers
The Berry Pickers is a finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
The mystery of a young girl's disappearance reverberates through the decades in Amanda Peters' debut novel, The Berry Pickers.
It's July of 1962, and a Mi'kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. A few weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie is last seen by her six-year-old brother Joe, and he is forever altered by her mysterious disappearance. In Maine, a young girl named Norma is troubled by recurring dreams that seem too real to be her imagination. As she grows older, she senses there is something her family isn't telling her, and this eventually sets her off on a years-long search for the truth.
Peters is a writer of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry based in Annapolis Valley, N.S. Her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review and The Dalhousie Review. She is the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose and was named a Writers' Trust 2021 Rising Star.
The Berry Pickers is on the shortlist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. The annual $60,000 award recognizes the best novel or short story collection by a Canadian author. The winner will be announced on Nov. 21 at the annual Writers' Trust Awards ceremony at CBC's Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto.
Peters discussed The Berry Pickers on The Next Chapter.
Inspired by a father-daughter trip
"My dad and his family, the Peters family, used to go to the berry fields of Maine to pick berries in the summer. When my dad found out that I loved writing and that I was taking it seriously, he said that I should write about the berry pickers. And I said, 'I don't write nonfiction, I write fiction – I make things up.'
"But he was determined. So we went on a father-daughter road trip to the berry fields and he showed me where they lived, stayed and picked berries, and the story just started coming to my head.
"I have a friend who says that stories are given to you from ancestors, so I'm assuming they put it there for a reason. I just started writing and it started unfolding. The landscape is quite different from Nova Scotia, but it's still rural and it's still agricultural. There's so many Mi'kmaq people that still go down there to this day to pick berries, so I think it's some important stories for other people."
Proud to be Nova Scotian
"As Nova Scotians, we're pretty proud of the fact that we're Nova Scotians. This is where I'm from, this is who I am. It is part of my life. My worldview is shaped by this land, so it was very important that [the setting] be there. Especially the Annapolis Valley, which is a gorgeous and lovely place, and I really wanted a really positive view of the valley."
As Nova Scotians, we're pretty proud of the fact that we're Nova Scotians. This is where I'm from, this is who I am. It is part of my life.- Amanda Peters
The importance of family
"At the beginning of the novel, Ruthie, who is the youngest child of five, in the berry fields, goes missing. Joe is the last one to see her, and he's the closest one to her. They're very close. They're four and six when she goes missing, and he lives with the grief of that, and with the guilt of being the last person to see her for the rest of his life. And it impacts how he lives his life.
Indigenous families are the same as other families. They grieve the same as other families, they feel the same way as other families.- Amanda Peters
"I think I say in the book, hope is a lovely thing until it isn't – which essentially captures the essence of their family. They hope that she'll come back one day, but they don't know what happened to her. So it really does impact all of them on different levels, Joe particularly.
"Mi'kmaq families, Indigenous families are the same as other families. They grieve the same as other families, they feel the same way as other families. Family is, in the end, what you have."
Finding Ruthie's voice
"When I first started writing the novel, I thought it was just going to be about Joe and his life. I was writing everything from Joe's perspective. And there was just this nagging voice in my head that said, 'Wait, I have a voice too.' Little Ruthie. She just came to me fully formed and she's like, "I want to tell my story."
This segment has been edited for length and clarity.
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