An Interview with Rachel Devenish Ford, author of The Eve Tree

There is a gentle fragility about Rachel, or Rae as most people call her. She is vulnerable in the strongest way possible, wearing her heart on her sleeve. We've known each other since we were single, she was 18, I was 20, and we traveled the west coast of Canada and the US in a giant 16 passenger van with 4 other girls. It was a pivotal year for us both and we grew up together in the ways that really matter.

I was there the day her husband fell for her reading a poem she wrote about an orange. Words so sensual, so intimate that he says he was immediately drawn in.

Rae's blog Journey Mama is a sensory adventure into her life traveling the globe with her family, rich with photos and words that take you there. Last month she at last published her book The Eve Tree, to the delight of her devoted readers.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I was able to interview her at her current home in Pokhara, Nepal from my home in San Diego county. She confided that this is the first time she's been interviewed, which seems fitting considering our history of shared pivotal moments.

You are a mother, you live in India and change houses, not to
mention countries, every 6 months or so, and you home school 4 kids. How did you find time to write a novel? How long did it take you?

Writing The Eve Tree took me almost four years. There were many interruptions. During the span of time that I was writing it, I moved to India, had a baby, did lots of traveling, and yes, homeschooled.

Madeleine L'Engle wrote about the time when your kids are in school as prime writing time. Not the time to do housework, she said. I remember reading that and thinking, "I'm a level up from that". My kids don't go to school, so I have to work harder to find time.

I don't know why I have this drive to be a novelist, but I do, so my life has to take on quite a disciplined shape. Most of my writing I do in the mornings before the kids wake up. I'm up at 5:30, writing, which means I have to be in bed by 10:00 or 10:30. I am almost in a trance when I write. I don't have time for procrastination or futzing around, so as time has gone on, I've honed the practice of sitting down, looking at the page, and diving in.

When I'm editing, I need longer stretches of time to concentrate. I have a supportive husband (with a flexible schedule) who helps me to get a day or two a week to fully devote to writing in these times.

I can't work at night, but in the evenings I read other books, read over my manuscript, or dream about it. Everything I do with my spare time has to do with reading or writing. No TV, a rare movie. I also live in a community and have a lot of events to be part of. It's always a challenge to make room for writing time.

One of the biggest challenges in writing this book was language. Living in an international community, I hear so many different types of English everyday. British English, Indian English... I worked really hard to keep the language local to the place and not put any words like persnickety in there.

You write a blog called Journey Mama about your travels with your family. Could you tell us a bit about it?

When I started Journey Mama in 2005, mine was a figurative journey, as my family was planted in Northern California. In 2008 we moved to Goa, India, and have been traveling ever since. There are six months every year that we are in Goa, and beyond that it's always an adventure.

I see my blog as a way to tell my own story. I find that circumstances have a way of rolling us over and beating us over the head, but we can choose to become authors of our lives. Taking the events of the day and weaving them into a story gave me a lot of power when I started the blog. I was 25 and pregnant, living in a 280 sq ft cabin in the woods with my husband and two kids, and feeling mightily sorry for myself. I needed to rewrite the story

Source: http://www.blogher.com/interview-rachel-devenish-ford-author-eve-tree

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