I want to take a moment to thank you for reading The Wishing Trees. Countless wonderful and deserving novels exist, and I’m grateful that you set the time aside to read my book. I hope you enjoyed it.
The Wishing Trees follows in the footsteps of my third novel, Dragon House, and I’d like to update you on the street children that Dragon House is helping. The success of that novel, along with direct donations from readers, has allowed us to buy sets of schoolbooks for about eight hundred Vietnamese street children over the past year. I’m so grateful for this outcome and am indebted to readers, librarians, and booksellers for their encouragement and generosity.
I also want some good to come out of The Wishing Trees and plan to donate some of the funds generated by my book to support the Arbor Day Foundation. So, if you’ve purchased The Wishing Trees, or told a friend about it, know that you’ve helped plant a little tree—a wishing tree, as I like to think.
As always, feel free to contact me with questions or comments. I can be reached through my Web site at www.johnshors.com.
Be well.
John
Acknowledgments
The Wishing Trees would not have been possible without the support of my wife, Allison, and our children, Sophie and Jack. Thank you for letting me live my dream. I love you all.
I’d like to express my gratitude toward Ellen Edwards, my wonderful editor, as well as Laura Dail, my agent extraordinaire. Thanks also to my parents, John and Patsy Shors; my brothers, Tom, Matt, and Luke; as well as Mary and Doug Barakat, Bruce McPherson, Dustin O’Regan, Amy Tan, Wally Lamb, Mahbod Seraji, Kara Cesare, Michael Brosowski, Pennie Ianniciello, Clover Apelian, Shawna Sharp, Sarah Streett, Bliss Darragh, Diane Saarinen, Amy Cherry, Kara Welsh, Craig Burke, Kaitlyn Kennedy, and Davina Witts at BookBrowse.com.
John Shors is the bestselling author of Beneath a Marble Sky, Beside a Burning Sea, Dragon House, and The Wishing Trees. He has won numerous awards for his writing, and his novels have been translated into twenty-five languages.
John lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and two children. For more information, please visit www.johnshors.com.
READERS GUIDE
A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN SHORS
Q. At the heart of The Wishing Trees is a touching father-daughter relationship. How much did you draw upon your relationship with your own daughter in creating the interactions between Ian and Mattie?
A. I try in all my novels not to base characters on the people in my life. I prefer to create characters from scratch, to watch them grow, draft by draft. Having said that, certainly my experience as the father of a young girl and boy was crucial for this novel. I could put myself in Ian’s shoes, and make him believable, because of this experience. Also, having young children made it easier for me to write from Mattie’s perspective.
Q. What particular challenges did you encounter in writing about two people grieving for the wife and mother whom they loved?
A. Obviously, two such people are going to have a great deal of sadness in their lives, and I needed to honor that sadness. But I didn’t want to dwell on it too deeply. I wanted to also give my characters hope and humor, compassion and joy. Finding a balance between sorrow and celebration was a difficult process.
Q. Describe your experience with “wish trees.”
A. After graduating from college, I moved to Kyoto, Japan, where I taught English for several years. I have vivid memories of wish trees, which were often located in popular parks. The trees tended to be old—propped up with bamboo poles and rope. During holidays and busy weekends, the trees were covered with thousands of small white pieces of paper that contained people’s wishes. I loved the sight of these trees, and the thought of wishes being fulfilled.
Q. Did many of the scenes in The Wishing Trees come from your own personal experience?
A. While teaching in Japan I managed to save enough money to backpack throughout Asia. I was fortunate to spend a significant amount of time in all of the countries depicted in The Wishing Trees, and many of the scenes in the novel are based on my own experiences. For instance, I swam with the sharks at Ko Phi Phi, I helped a Nepalese girl carry her firewood up an endless series of stone steps, and I went on a self-propelled roller coaster in India. I am the type of writer who needs to live in a place to bring that place to