Writing From the Heart

Arts and Review

SANTA CRUZ (May 2009) --  Jill Wolfson used to sit in the bleachers and imagine all the things that could go wrong as her gymnast daughter spun and flipped on the uneven parallel bars.  She imagined her daughter’s hands letting go, the crashing fall to the ground. She imagined broken bones and concussions and even death.

It was those horrible parental imaginings that Santa Cruz writer Wolfson turned to as she sat down to write her third young-adult novel, “Cold Hands, Warm Heart,” which takes on the subject of illness, loss and connection through the story of a young girl’s heart transplant – a book one reader called “the ‘Juno’ of organ transplants.”

“I realized I had to write about someone dying in order to get the story moving,” said Wolfson, sitting in a downtown Santa Cruz coffee shop on a drizzly morning. “I tried to have (the organ donor) be a sweet grandpa who had lived a good life, or a weird uncle who lived miles away.”  As a parent, she wanted to write anything except about a child’s death.

“But I kept coming back to having it be a teen-age girl,” Wolfson said.   And so, it was those nausea-inducing, knee-weakening parental fantasies she’d had during her daughter’s gymnastics meets that she used to write the book’s emotional opening chapter – a scene that resonates against a backdrop of life.

Wolfson,  a former San Jose Mercury News reporter and now editor of Bay Area Parent Magazine, said she’d had the idea of doing a magazine story on the dynamics of organ transplantation for years. But it wasn’t until she was searching for a topic for a novel, that she decided to revisit the idea. Still, she approached the topic with a journalist’s mind and skills.   Wolfson spent months doing research for the book so it would be both emotionally and medically accurate, she said 

She interviewed transplant patients, donor families and the surgeons who gave new life to those facing certain death.  She went to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital where she joined a young transplant patient as he held his own damaged heart in his hands.  She met a teen-age girl who held the hand of her donor’s mother during the trial of the men who had mistakenly killed him during a gang-related shooting.  She heard the story of a woman who had asked to listen to her son’s heart beating in another child’s chest.

“I really immersed myself in that emotional world,” said Wolfson, a slender woman with dark, curling hair.

What surprised her most during her research, was not the drama of organ transplantation, but the resiliency of the young people who received the organs and how, despite facing a terminal illness, the ordinary was still very much a part of their lives. How they had crushes, got angry at their moms and worried about the physical side effects of the anti-rejection drugs which included hair growth and facial swelling.

“They were: ‘Oh great, on top of all this now I’m like hairy too,’” Wolfson said with a laugh.

It was that spirit and humor that Wolfson tried to capture in her book, which is told from several points of view, including a teen-age girl’s first-person voice.

“I was very comfortable writing as a teen-ager,” said Wolfson, whose two children are both off to college now.  “I was living in a house with teenagers at the time and my teen-age years are still pretty there.”

It wasn’t hard for her, she said, to remember those crazy, chaotic times or to recall the feelings he had when she learned a friend’s father had died suddenly. She even called to mind the times as a youngster when she had imagined her own funeral or that of her parents.

“I can recall all those feelings pretty easily; just the chaos of that age,” Wolfson said.

Wolfson’s book centers on the connections that happen between people and of living life to the fullest.  It is those two ideas that Wolfson said she hoped young readers would carry with them when they had finished her book.

She also hoped it might spark a conversation that one young blogger had suggested: that the book offered an opportunity for parents and children to sit down and talk about organ donation and their own wishes on the topic.

 “It’s not a bad way to bring up a difficult topic,” Wolfson said.

Last year, 72 children between the ages of 11 and 17 got organ transplants, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

“Cold Hands, Warm Heart,” by Jill Wolfson, Henry Holt and Company, 245 pages.  Visit Wolfson’s Web site at www.jillwolfson.com.

Wolfson will join Newberry Award winner Paul Fleischman and illustrator Jim Lamarche for a panel discussion on writing children’s and young-adult books at 7 p.m. Sunday, May 17 at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz.  The free event will include information on the publishing world, writing tips and creativity.