Author Interview: Naila Moreira on The Monarchs of Winghaven
The Monarchs of Winghaven, Naila Moreira, Walker Books US, 2024, 320 pages
Reading age: 8-12
Fifth-grader Sammie is new to town and having trouble making friends in her new school. “The Field” is her private, personal refuge where she likes to be alone to study the birds, insects, and flowers, recording everything in her journal. One day she encounters Bram, a boy with a camera, and Sammie is wary. Will he make fun of her and ruin everything?
Sammie gets right to her nature explorations on page one, lifting a big board in the field to see which creatures are living underneath it. She’s also ready to record her observations with her journal and collection case. Were you kitted out in your childhood explorations of nature?
My dad and sister had always been the family birdwatchers, but when I was eight, we moved to New Hampshire and they became too busy. However, I soon began my own interest based on a stack of nature magazines for kids we’d subscribed to when we lived in England. Those magazines described the equipment a naturalist might need, and I was fascinated. Like Sammie, I bought my first pair of binoculars with my first $100 of babysitting money. Also, like her, I had a chunky waist-pack where I carried my naturalist’s materials. My first nature journals weren’t as fancy as her spiral-bound black one – they were the ordinary kind you buy at a drugstore at the beginning of the school year. But like her, I made a DIY plant-press to create a herbarium, and I brought clear collecting boxes with me into the field to store my findings. So yes, absolutely – the “kit” of the naturalist is a big part of the fun, and I created my own very early on.
Can you share an early memory of nature that inspired you or became a part of your book?
Each nature encounter of my protagonist, Sammie, comes from a real memory of mine. While Sammie and her friends and family are fictional, the great outdoors she explores most definitely is not. In the pages of Monarchs, every bird, every caterpillar and butterfly and bug, every snake and mouse and fern, and even each event of the bird count derives from a real encounter.
I will say that while heavily fictionalized, the naturalist Pete who becomes Sammie’s friend is inspired by a real person. When I was a kid, a member of the Audubon Society, Steve, used to birdwatch with me and my dad. He lived nearby, so he was our main companion during the yearly Christmas Bird Count, and I sometimes encountered him while exploring alone. He was a wizardly birdwatcher. The scene with the turkey vulture in Monarchs is based on a real memory of Steve. To learn what happened, you’ll have to read the book!
What’s the craziest thing you did while researching or writing The Monarchs of Winghaven?
The Monarchs of Winghaven is a fairly quiet book. I didn’t need to do anything truly crazy for research, like bungee jump or learn to fly a plane or voyage on an antique schooner.
But I will say that my first experience raising monarch butterflies was a crazy experience. I’d always thought of caterpillars and butterflies as just plain beautiful. Raising caterpillars taught me there’s also a good amount of the bizarre, icky, and goopy involved, too.
First, monarch caterpillars poop EVERYWHERE. You have to clean their enclosure every day, because they eat constantly and, like the title of the picture book by great children’s author Taro Gomi, Everyone Poops.
Also, I learned that caterpillars don’t gradually transform. They actually liquify completely inside their chrysalis. How terrifying is that? From that soup of molecules, a butterfly is formed whole-cloth. It’s both scary and magical. When the butterfly finally pokes its head out, the extra unused glop drips out of the chrysalis.
Finally, I discovered that raising butterflies isn’t always a picnic. One of my caterpillars managed to pupate, but had contracted one of many monarch parasites. When it emerged as a butterfly, its wings never uncrumpled, and it could not fly. I took it back to its home habitat and laid it gently on a leaf among the grasses to end its life naturally. Fortunately, my second caterpillar emerged successfully, and I was able to free it into the field to fly freely away – an exhilarating moment.
Monarch caterpillar by Naila Moreira
Of all the places or people you visited while working on Monarchs, who do you wish to visit again?
I wish I could go back to my own Field, the place where I used to birdwatch in my childhood. That Field was the original inspiration for Monarchs, but unlike Sammie’s special place in nature, it has since been torn down for development in my rapidly growing hometown. I miss the sense of escape, separateness, and freedom it gave me as I stood at the top of the slope and gazed down into the swaying grasses.
A staff member at the Nature Center at Buck Place told Sammie, “It’s important to have a home base in nature, a place to understand deeply.” Did you have a home base in nature when you were Sammie’s age?
My Field, mentioned above, was truly a haven for me, just like Sammie and Bram’s Winghaven. It’s also the most autobiographical part of the book. I tried to recreate every detail of that landscape for monarchs. It’s a way of keeping its memory alive.
Now I have another field, a place I went while researching the book to wander and explore. In my town, the Audubon Society maintains an area of grassland and wetland called The Meadows. It’s much like the Field of my childhood and has almost identical ecology, though it’s larger and attracts even more wildlife. I’ve observed countless monarchs, garter snakes, wood duck, harriers, and kestrels there. Great blue herons and great horned owls nest on snags in the wetland. My next goal is to spot a bobcat, which others have spotted there but I’ve never seen for myself.
Monarch caterpillar sketch by Naila Moreira
I love the concept of map-making as a part of nature journaling -- did you create a map of your childhood nature place?
Yes! See above! The map of Winghaven at the beginning of Monarchs is based on my childhood Field.
Are there books for adult readers or for much younger kids that you would recommend as companions to Monarchs?
For much younger readers, I’d recommend two books by celebrated author Jane Yolen. Her late husband was an ornithologist, and his birdwatching and knowledge inspired several of her books. Owl Moon is a famous picture-book depiction of a child looking for owls at night with her dad. And You Nest Here With Me is a personal favorite. Written with Yolen’s daughter, Heidi Stemple, it walks young kids through the real-world nesting habits of a dozen birds, with the heart-warming refrain that a human child’s nest is at home with loved ones.
For middle-grade readers, there are lots of companion books, too. I wrote a blog post for shepherd.com on great kids’ books about nature. Some of those formed part of the inspiration behind Monarchs. My novel also concludes with a section where I recommend nonfiction field guides, nature-journaling guides, and nature observation books for budding naturalists.
For grown-ups, Clare Walker Leslie’s nature journaling guides are a great complement to Monarchs and were an inspiration to me. A Year of the Turtle by David Carroll, a childhood mentor of mine, is a moving contemplation of the interconnections inherent to nature, seen through the eyes of a spotted turtle over a year of its life. For parents who want to work alongside their kids, I also recommend Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes. It contains fantastic advice and guidance to set your kids’ imaginations free to fly.
Finally, any field guide will offer inspiration for young through old, especially those tailored to your local environment and ecology.
Were there fits and starts between the conception of Monarchs and the publication date?
Loads! The biggest one was between original idea and first draft. I came up with Sammie as a character when I was a kid myself. I imagined her into the same Field where I birdwatched, almost as if she was a friend of mine or someone I was admiring from a distance. Her bright yellow hair seemed like an embodiment of the shining blond grasses of the Field in late summer. I wrote a few notes about her, because my mother always encouraged me to write down my creative ideas. Then, many years later as an adult, I finally decided to write her story.
How has your poetry or your sensibilities as a visual artist impacted your nature observations?
I’m a very visual writer, both in poetry and prose. The root of inspiration for me is often an image or images I don’t want to lose. Those images are usually coupled with a powerful sense of atmosphere - the gestalt or energy or inner personality of a place or scene, which form such a part of its beauty and impact. I aim for my writing to offer a series of vivid, intense snapshots, bringing the reader as fully as I can the same sense of immersion and gloriousness I felt in a given place and moment.
I try to do the same with my drawings. Even an inexpert or incomplete sketch can “inhabit a private universe all its own,” as I read on a wonderful museum placard once, and likewise bring the viewer a sense of connection and involvement in that space.
A copy of this interview is available as a downloadable .pdf via our Downloads page. An edited version appears in the Autumn 2024 issue of Nature Book Guide.