Q: Fruit of the devil is based on actual events you experienced while teaching?
Mary: Yes, from the mid-eighties to 2000 I taught elementary school in the Pajaro River Valley—the agricultural center of the Monterey Bay. I taught with an exceptional cohort of dedicated, intelligent colleagues. The school community and student body were socio-economically and ethno-culturally diverse and well-integrated. We created an exemplary, standards-based articulated k-5 curriculum that integrated hands-on inquiry-based science and math, rich literature and writing, and social studies, with an incredibly strong endowed arts and environmental education program. We had an organic student garden, the salmon and trout education project, extensive field trips, and a culminating fifth grade residential Outdoor School Science program.
It was a wonderful time and place to be a teacher except for the fact that adults and children were experiencing unusually high levels of cancer, miscarriages, asthma, auto-immune disorders, and other illnesses. At first, we didn’t realize that many of our health issues were being caused by pesticide-laden strawberry fields that surrounded the school on three sides.
Q: You didn’t know the pesticides were dangerous?
Mary: Although we taught in an agricultural area, none of us teachers knew much about the agricultural practices of the strawberry growers. We were not aware of the pesticides at first. When we saw plastic tarps on the fields, if we though about it at all, I guess we figured the plastic was for weed suppression. Modern strawberry production is a fairly recent phenomenon, that has rapidly swept over the Pajaro Valley. Before planting, the soil is sterilized by injecting it with extremely poisonous colorless odorless gases which drift.
Gradually, we began to understand that poison gasses were drifting from the fields into the school and making us sick, and we started asking questions. We allied with other communities in the county and in Monterey who were coming to the same realization about pesticide drift. We learned that at least 13 different Class I Acutely Toxic chemicals were being used next to the school, with different targets: carcinogens, respiratory, immune system, endocrine system, musculoskeletal system, neurotoxins . . . and we started to connect the dots between our health issues and the pesticides.
Q: How did you respond once you understood the pesticides were harming you?
Mary: We opened dialogue with neighboring growers, one of whom had a nephew in our school. The dialogue was positive, and we started collaborating to plan a community forum about pesticides. But the school administration came down heavily on us and tried to silence us. So parents, teachers, and community members organized. We founded a group called Farm without Harm, and allied with the UFW. Then the troubles really began.
We had help from an international activist organization based in San Francisco—Pesticide Action Network—but none of us teachers were trained activists. Most of us had no idea what we were getting into. It was frightening, professionally damaging, hurtful, and discouraging for my colleagues and myself.
Q: Were you successful?
Mary: At the time it didn’t seem so. Eventually I’d had enough. I left my good tenured position in the district and taught middle school, high school, and continuation school in Salinas and “over the hill” in Silicon Valley for another ten years. Meanwhile, things were gradually changing in the Pajaro Valley. “Organic” was no longer considered a “dirty word”, and more and more growers were transitioning to organic methods pioneered by Jim Cochran of Swanton Berry Farms and the University of California Santa Cruz agroecology program. I believe that our early actions with Farm Without Harm helped kick the door open for organic agriculture in our region,
While writing about a fight over strawberries near schools that happened twenty years ago, I continued to attend meetings of the new generation pesticide teacher activist group, Safe Ag Safe Schools. History repeats itself. When I go to a meeting of SASS today, I want to say to the young teachers there, “We already did this. Read my story. Why hasn’t anything changed?” But I already know what the answer will be: “They’re going to do another study.” Positive social change take time.
Q: Why did you decide to write the novel?
When I finally retired in 2010, I was still carrying with me the story of the strawberries and pesticides. I had already realized, when I left Pajaro Valley, that I must write down the story, and that it must be commercial fiction—a murder mystery. A large body of scientific reporting had already been published on the issue, but the information wasn’t getting through to everyday people. So while I continued teaching for those additional ten years, I thought about the story, read mysteries and “how to write mysteries” books, and in the summers I attended the Foothill Writers Workshop, where I had the great privilege of studying with James D. Houston. Huston believed in my story and strongly encouraged me to write it.
Q: Talk about your writing process.
Mary: As soon as I got home from a celebratory retirement trip to Hawaii with family and friends, I cloistered myself in the little back room of my house, opened my laptop, and started writing in earnest. I kept to a disciplined scheduled, as if I were reporting to a paying job. I contacted scattered and retired colleagues and talked with them about the story, and all of them said they’d never stopped thinking about the “pesticide wars”. Many offered files, video and audio tapes, and photos they’d been keeping “for some reason”.
The first draft took me three years. When I finished, I looked up from my computer into the sky-light overhead, and expected the people of the world to be there applauding me and asking for the book. But there was only silence. That evening, I saw acclaimed mystery writer Laurie King at an art reception. I told her I’d finished writing my novel and asked her what I should do now. I was hoping she’d give me the name of her agent, but instead she said, “Well you start your next one.” That, of course was out of the question. It would have been like giving birth to a baby, leaving it on the sidewalk, and starting a new pregnancy. My baby had to be nurtured to thrive. It was then I realized that, “Writing is re-writing.”
It took another six years of revising, working with editors, critique groups and early readers, going to writing workshops, submitting query letters, and pitching my story before I finally found a publisher who said, “It’s ready. We want to publish your novel.” Fruit of the Devil is was launched through Paper Angel Press on October 15, 2019—just before my birthday.
Q: You call Fruit of the Devil an “eco-thriller” but you often refer to it as “Socially Engaged Fiction.” Explain what you mean by that.
Mary: Working on Fruit of the Devil was/is a magical experience. The story has a life of its own. I was just the agent that the story used to come through. I thought I was going to write about strawberry pesticides, the need to transition to organic agriculture, and the experience of working within a community to effect social change. But so much else wove itself in to the story. How can you write about migrant farmworkers without touching on immigration and social justice? How can you write about teachers without addressing truths that most people don’t understand about our seriously broken educational system? And if a Native American nature god appears to you and says he must be in your story, well, that brings up a lot of issues I hadn’t expected. Then I reached into the ether for a crime which, I supposed, one must have is one is writing a murder mystery, and I came up with trafficking by corrupt corporate executives. I thought I’d made that all up until I learned about Jeff Epstein, and an evil in the world that is actually all too real. Researching gangs and juvenile justice for some of the characters in Fruit of the Devil, I discovered and wrote the real story behind MS-13 long before President Trump started talking about the Mara Salvatrucha.
The setting of the story is one of the priceless watershed’s of Mother Earth: the creeks and rivers that flow to the Monterey Bay Sanctuary. This exquisite watershed is the southernmost edge of the range of the Pacific salmon, a threatened keystone species, which my protagonist and her students try to protect. We are in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction, in a new geologic era, the Anthropocene, and it is critical that we do all we can to preserve biodiversity on our planet.
At the time I was teaching among the strawberries, my husband was working at NASA on the Ozone Hole Research. I found out from him that methyl bromide—the same chemical they were using on the strawberries next to my school—was an ozone depleting chemical and was scheduled to be completely phased out under the terms of the Montreal Protocol. But I watched the strawberry growers get federal exemptions to the phase-out year after year, through the ‘90s and on into the 21st Century.
Once the Montreal Protocol was in place, my husband (the real “Cosmic John” character in my book) joined a Climate Change research group at NASA, and I was introduced to world class scientists and brought into their discussions about Global Warming. Of course, these issues found their way into my story. As I participated in discussion groups with scientist friends about the best way to talk to “Climate Deniers,” I came across the idea of “framing.” As time went on, I realized that my story about transitioning to a sustainable agricultural system would be a perfect vessel for framing the growing urgency of climate chaos. I discovered the new (and already accepted in academic circles) genres of “cli-fi” and “eco-thriller.” I found my niche.
During the years of writing and re-writing Fruit of the Devil, I’m pretty sure I would have given up if not for the incredible, unexpected affirmation I received when I submitted a draft of the manuscript to Barbara Kingsolver’s PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and they notified me that I was among a small group of finalists for the prestigious prize. A personal hand-written note from Barbara Kingsolver sitting on my desk kept me going when I wanted to quit.
Fruit of the Devil is unequivocally Socially Engaged Fiction. It’s an unapologetic Call to Action. Humans are in terrible trouble, and like the frogs in the slowly warming kettle of boiling water, most of us don’t realize what’s going on. We Must Wake Up Now!
Q: What is your wish for Fruit of the Devil?
Mary: I hope that people will find Fruit of the Devil entertaining to read—a page turner. But I also hope that by the end of the story, they’ll be moved, and inspired to action.
Following are some of the issues, the Calls to Action, addressed in Fruit of the Devil.