Ken Schept

My two grandchildren inspired me to write A Gift of Feathers.

After graduating from Columbia University with an MFA in fiction, in 1974, I wrote just about everything but fiction. Along writing with myriad articles and reports as a business journalist, I wrote an illustrated history of a major Jewish communal organization and America’s Table, a Thanksgiving holiday text for Americans to celebrate our diverse roots and shared values.

Eventually, I returned to fiction.

When my mother died at age 99, my younger granddaughter, Rhea, then six, asked me a remarkable question at the cemetery. It contained the kernel of a story. But when I was ready to write the story, over a year later, I couldn’t remember the question. Either could Rhea. Borrowing the astute voice of my older granddaughter, Talula, I created a fictional world based on real events.

Well into her nineties, my mother walked every day and was agile enough to pick up feathers she found and collected. Talula and Rhea actually raise chickens that they originally named after Harry Potter characters. This much is true. In A Gift of Feathers, Grandma Dot allows Talula and Rhea to toss her feathers all over the living room. That part is total fiction.

The larger truth of A Gift of Feathers concerns the power of memory as a source of comfort after loss. I hope the book comforts people experiencing loss, and also opens genuine intergenerational conversations among parents, grandparents, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

I continue to write fiction—children’s books, short stories, and literary novels. I write in a study lined with the brick walls that my wife and I exposed and cleaned forty-five ago, when we moved into the old row house in Hoboken, New Jersey, where we raised two kids and still live.