Great Gusts is a collection of tribute songs to selected winds of the world, those patterns of air that are part of the geographies, cultures, and lifeways of the lands they touch. I sent a bunch of questions to the co-authors, both members of the VCFA Writing for Children and young Adult community I cherish. Here’s the resulting conversation.

Uma: Which of you came up with the idea for this book? How did your collaboration begin?

Megan: We actually both came up with the idea for Gusts separately. We were participating in a picture book idea month, each coming up with an idea every day. At the end of the month we got back together and shared our favorites. To our surprise, a wind book was on both of our lists! Neither of us started working on it, though, because we were busy writing other things. Two years later, when the pandemic hit, Melanie forwarded me an article about all the interesting names of the wind. That gave us a structure, and we decided to write the book together.
Mel: I actually hadn’t known that “local winds” were a thing—that a foehn wind, for example, might have different names in different parts of the world. The idea was fascinating: that cities, regions, countries, etc. would claim a wind phenomenon as their own, would know it so intimately that they would give it its own name.
Uma: That is so deeply human and somehow touching.
Mel: For me, picture books (and any stories, really) are about igniting curiosity and then chasing it. We were enthralled by this idea. We could have featured dozens of winds! But that would have been a very long picture book…

Uma: Ha! Yes, we’ll get that in a bit but first, tell me how your collaboration took shape.

Meg: Because we were stuck at home, we each picked names of the wind that were interesting to us and began drafting. In total we drafted over 30 poems. (Of course, not all of them were good!) We put them all in a google doc and basically voted on our favorites. Once we had chosen our favorites, we began to revise together. The magic of this book really happened in the revision process–bouncing ideas and phrases back and forth, finding the perfect rhythm and shape to each poem.

Uma: That is so often how book magic works. Melanie?

Mel: I don’t know about you, but when I write something that’s good, but perhaps not right, I’ll get this little internal nudge when I reread the passage. Usually, I’ll pause, investigate that instinct, and begin revising. But sometimes I’ll talk myself into leaving it be.
The really cool thing about writing poetry with a trusted friend and talented writer is that you have two people with that same finely-tuned instinct for when a word or line is or isn’t working. If we both get that nudge, we know we have to get back to work. You end up feeling really solid in what you have shaped together, which is a wonderful feeling!

Uma: Poetry and the wind feel intuitively connected somehow. Can you talk about how form and content came together for you in this book?

Mel: Yes! So much of how we experience the wind is about the senses—sound, sight, touch, etc. Poetry lends itself so beautifully to sensory experience and expression. And movement! Poetry and the wind somehow occupy the same sorts of shapes. Long, steady gales. Short, intense bursts. Flitting, spinning, frolicking breezes. You’re absolutely right. They are intuitively connected.
A poem of Megan’s that illustrates this really beautifully is “Buran.” That particular wind blows relentlessly across the steppe for miles and miles and months and months. We wanted to stretch the poem across the page to show this in a visual way—a freedom that you don’t often get with prose.
Meg: When we started thinking about a wind book, we both had our own ideas. (For instance, I wanted to write a book about mythology surrounding the wind.) I think we both knew that we weren’t going to write a narrative, but we didn’t really know what form it would take until Mel found the article about wind names. If the wind had a name, we figured, then it could be personified. Given our backgrounds in poetry, it made the most sense to personify the wind in verse.

Uma: How does one begin to research the winds of the world? It seems such a vast topic. Not only that but some of the poems employ forms unique to the places where those winds blow. What research was involved on the poetry as well as the science in this book?

Meg: At first, we only researched enough to write the poems, which wasn’t much.
Mel: And we were relying on what could be found on the internet, since those were the early days of the pandemic, when many libraries were closed!
Meg: But when Great Gusts sold to MIT Kids Press, they wanted the book to be a nonfiction title, so we really had to verify everything. We decided that we needed at least two peer-reviewed academic sources for each wind, though we often used more. For each wind, we were specifically looking for geographic information, direction, air pressure systems, temperature, and more. It was a lot!
Interestingly, there were a couple of poems we loved that couldn’t be verified with academic sources, so we had to cut those. In finding winds to replace them, our editor suggested that we lean into traditional poetic forms, which adds a really fun layer when we’re in schools or at story times talking to kids about the book.

Uma: Okay, now to selection. How did you choose these winds and what others did you deliberately decide to exclude? Can you talk about the process of narrowing your choices?

Mel: The funny thing is that Megan and I each had a particular wind which launched the idea for us as individuals. For me it was the Chinook winds in Colorado, and for Megan it was the Santa Anas in southern California. Neither one made the final cut!

Uma: That’s wild. And so often how it works in writing. The spark that ignites the project is just that. When it’s served its purpose it fizzles away

Meg: Originally, we chose winds based on the strongest poems. Of course, we also had to make sure that the winds were representative of the whole globe and not just concentrated in one spot. But we also paid attention to the type and ferocity of the winds we choose—how many were downslope winds, gentle breezes, caused storms, etc. It’s easy to find information on the most intense winds, but we wanted a book that covered many different characteristics of air in motion.

Uma: Great Gusts has a circularity to it that begins and ends with humans, from “Can you ever really see…” to “…you/ and me.” In between we find all kinds of momentum, from gentle to howling. How did the book find its present shape? Can you take us through the process?

Mel: Oh, I’m delighted that you picked up on that detail! Absolutely—we wanted our child readers to be present, to feel like they could connect their own lives to this trip around the world. (We absolutely love how the illustrator, Khoa Le, made each of these winds a child-centric experience.)
The book’s shape began with and circled back to the reader in what we hope leaves readers feeling like they, and we all, are connected to and by these winds.
Meg: When deciding on the shape and order of the poems, we considered so many factors: rhyme, meter, length, location, wind type, temperature, intensity, and coastal vs. inland. But we also looked at the word choice and tone of each poem to make sure that we didn’t have clumps of poems that were too similar. We really wanted each poem to stand out!

Uma: Finally, will you each talk a little about your writing process? Are you an architect or a gardener, planner or visionary? Or pick whatever metaphors work for you.

Meg: As much as I want to be an architect or a planner (and believe me, I try!), I really am more of a visionary. I let an idea spark, and I generally know where it’s going to go in the end, but I have a hard time sticking to a plan. For example, with “Sudestada,” I immediately latched onto the fact that it’s known to cause shipwrecks. So I leaned into the idea of a myth about the wind, and wrote it to be a warning. It was only during the revision process that we took it a step further and added the layer of cultural, gaucho mythology with “spurs / unbridled waves on the ocean.” I think that imagery of waves as wild horses really makes the poem sing. I definitely didn’t plan for that level of magic.
Mel: I absolutely feel my way into stories. When it comes to writing novels, the need for some sort of intentional structure will usually assert itself after I have a very slim first draft finished. That short draft is usually full of voice, imagery, character, tone—all the things that initially call me to the story. But it’s usually also full of plot holes. My second draft is where I snip loose threads and pull others tight, creating structure and building a solid weave.
Picture books are a new form for me, so I’m finding my own process as I go. And I am having such a delightful time exploring this new form!

Uma: So much to think about here. Thank you both!

Process Talk: Melanie Crowder and Megan Benedict on Great Gusts

Process Talk With Jen: Rasha Hamid on Hello, Beech Tree

Guest Post: Jen Breach on Nonbinary Narrative Structure in Solstice