NEWFANE — Author Susan Mills was recently named a finalist for the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Awards (NGIBA) in the First Novel (Over 90K Words) category for On the Wings of a Hummingbird.
Published by Apprentice House Press of Loyola University Maryland in 2022, Mills's book starts in Guatemala and ends up in Providence, Rhode Island.
Having studied Spanish as an undergraduate at Brown University, Mills began to learn about Central America when she worked for several years as an accredited representative in immigration law for Catholic Social Services/Providence before moving on to Northeastern University School of Law in Boston.
She became immersed in Central American culture with the El Salvadoran father of her now-33-year-old son, spending time with his family, both in El Salvador and in the U.S. As described in her biography on the book's cover, some of her family members “journeyed from the war-torn countryside of El Salvador to the U.S.”
And so Mills learned firsthand the history, challenges, and assets of Central American cultures - knowledge that served her well when she began her practice as a bilingual Spanish-speaking immigration lawyer in South Providence.
Along with these firsthand experiences, Mills's material is gleaned from her more than 20 years in practice as a partner in her own firm, Mills & Born.
“[I] represented thousands of people from around the world, but especially Central Americans, applying for asylum, citizenship, family petitions, etc. I also helped many unaccompanied children gain legal status,” she writes on her website.
A lifelong activist, Mills's father was a university professor and her mother an ardent civil and prisoners' rights activist whose guiding aphorism was “social change is the purpose of life,” Mills recalls.
On the Wings of a Hummingbird tells the story of a Guatemalan teenager who suffers the relentless scourge of violent gangs, poverty, limitations, and abandonment by her parents - both real and perceived.
Mills weaves a gritty reality of today with lore, ideology, and mythology of ancient Mayan culture, lacing the text with Spanish phrases, poems, and invocations that nuance the novel's tone.
Petra, the central character, is solid as a rock; nonetheless, she's a typical teen who tends to believe she's less vincible than she really is and who Mills describes as “isolated.”
“She's not been exposed to a lot; she doesn't know a lot of things,” the author adds.
While interacting with villagers who've lost her once-firm trust and those she can still count on, Petra discovers her unique character, her loyalties and priorities, and her own sexuality. Petra finds herself kissing her best friend, who is soon murdered, adding another layer of complexity to the narrative.
Petra's life has been upended by violence in her small Guatemalan village, as have to a great degree the lives of her brother and grandparents. There, predatory gang members exercise full sway over aware and wary villagers, but police are nowhere to be seen.
Since corruption is rife and gangs rule in such locales, it could be more dangerous, Mills explains, to report a rape, a theft, or even a murder to the police: There's no guarantee that law enforcement there wouldn't tip the gang off.
Due to weakness and corruption in Central American governments and their respective judicial systems, efforts toward amelioration have proven fruitless, she says.
For instance, Mills explains, “El Salvador has tried to impose a tough-on-crime policy, La Mano Dura - a heavy-handed approach to crime. But they just put everybody in jail.”
Thus, the prisons are full of very active gangs, she adds.
“They're hotbeds of recruitment,” Mills says. “It's a mess.”
Inspiration from life
An ardent feminist, Mills introduces us to several women in Wings, each with varying stores of strength and tenacity.
The initial inspiration for the fictitious composite of Petra, clearly a hero, was a client, Mills explains. “But I never got to know my clients the way I got to know Petra.”
That client had short hair, which, Mills said, is “very unusual for Guatemalan girls. She'd left Guatemala by herself - didn't tell anyone she was leaving.”
Petra is not fully Mayan, yet she's influenced deeply by the culture's mythology. In the vein of magical realism, Petra escapes through lore and an imaginary friend since there's no safe space in her reality, “where she can actually think about things and figure things out [...] because it's too scary,” Mills says.
“With the help of her grandfather,” the book summary states, “Petra searches her suppressed Mayan heritage for wisdom about forgiveness, redemption, claiming one's future, and healing. The Mayans believed that the hummingbird was in charge of carrying the thoughts of humans between the earth and the gods. That hummingbird flutters inside Petra, sometimes appearing as an imaginary friend, carrying messages from her daily life to her determined spirit.”
Petra ultimately flees to the U.S. The transition is rattled with challenges and growing pains, but she shows that one can heal and rebuild, even after trauma threatens to destroy both body and spirit.
A long road
About being selected as a NGIBA finalist, Mills describes herself as “pretty amazed.”
“It's been a long road to haul to introduce people to a debut novel put out by a small independent publisher,” she said. “So it's wonderful to have the work recognized by a major awards program. It's really fueled my hopes for my own writing, and for writers generally who take on social justice issues like this.”
On Friday, June 23, Mills will be in Chicago for the NGIBA recognition celebration at the Newberry Library there, coinciding with the American Library Association's Annual Conference. Livestreaming of the ceremony begins at approximately 5 p.m. CDT at facebook.com/NextGenerationIndieBookAwards.
On return, she'll get back to her next book, tentatively titled Asylum, a second immigration story in which a gender-fluid paralegal meets a complicated asylum case involving a gay immigrant couple.
Mills says she's thrown Don Quixote into the story - the paralegal uses imagination and idealism to cope with reality. She adds that many of Asylum's characters loosely correspond to Cervantes'.
When not writing, Mills gardens avidly, works with her chain saw, climbs mountains, cycles, and engages with the area's Spanish-speaking/learning community.
And, she adds that she enjoys “the slower pace of life in Vermont, the closeness to nature.”
“I have a modicum of hope that I can help build understanding and empathy for immigrants (and fiercely independent women, and victims and perpetrators of crime, and various others) through fiction,” Mills says.