At its heart, Feathers is about hope, and what it means to face tremendous opposition, and still smile.

Frannie is a middle school-age girl living in the black section of a never-named urban city center in the winter of 1970. She has an older brother, Sean, who is deaf, and a mother who has suffered several miscarriages. One day, a new boy — a white boy — comes to her school as a transfer student. He’s quiet, has long hair and is named Jesus. No one is quite sure what to make of him, or the fact that he as a black father, or that he stands up to the class bully.

The title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem that Frannie and her class read and try to explain one day:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune — without the words,
And never stops at all …

To learn more about Feathers and author Jacqueline Woodson, CLICK HERE.

My wife is a speech pathologist, and so thanks to her, I have more exposure to the Deaf community than I think I otherwise would have. That’s Deaf with a capital D, which is different from someone who is deaf.

That capital D brings with it a world of meaning. The Deaf community can be insular, and believes that there’s nothing wrong with being deaf, and its members shouldn’t try to learn to speak or have hearing aids. They don’t want to be “fixed” by the medical and speech communities.

Sean and his family struggle with this in Feathers. How do you celebrate something that sets you apart so obviously from society and that can cause such feelings of isolation, especially as a tween? Sean was very lucky his family all learned sign language; many families elect to get hearing aids and push their deaf children to learn to speak.

Perhaps we should all try and celebrate who we are, even if it does make things harder sometimes.

— Chuck Bowen, on Feathers.

One of the best parts about writing is the ability to create entire families, cities and even worlds with the tap of a keyboard or stroke of a pen. Jacqueline Woodson (CLICK HERE) talks about getting in trouble for telling lies in school. Her teacher said if she wrote the lies down, they become fiction.

What power.

And what makes it such a powerful medium of expression is that it is so accessible. You don’t need a set of paints or brushes; you don’t need an instrument. Like Benjamin Disraeli, if you don’t have anything that you like to read, you can just write something you do.

It’s hard sometimes as a journalist to keep the fiction and the nonfiction separate. It’s not that I want to fabricate things in the articles I write, but part of my job is to meet interesting people who have had great adventures. They’re ready-made characters for a book, and sometimes I just want to rearrange their stories for more punch and drama, to add a little more detail and dialogue. But I guess that’s what they call a jumping off point; art imitates life, right?

– Chuck Bown, on Feathers