*Use the COMMENT BUTTON to make 5+ annotations (notes) on this autobiography.

Note especially how the author Paul Fleischmans life and experiences
relate to the novel Seedfolks and its plot. Possible notes could answer
these questions
What or who does this remind you of?
How does Fleischmans life connect to the novel
Seedfolks?
What other connections can you make?
Why did he write the novel?
What can we learn about the author from his
autobiography?
What can you infer or predict?
How can you relate? etc.

By: Paul Fleischman

I'm a word person. When I'm eating alone, I need to be reading something--anything. Mere
chewing seems idleness. So it was that I found myself, five years ago, between books, with no
ghost of an idea for the next, having lunch in a bagel shop that, astoundingly, offered no jamstained, pre-owned copy of the San Francisco Chronicle for those with my affliction. Like the
bagel, serendipity is one of my four food groups. It's usually closest at hand when farthest from
my mind. In mild disgust, I resigned myself to a copy of a New Age tabloid--no sports section, no
movie reviews--when something caught my eye: an article about a local psychotherapist who
used gardening to help her clients. The story mentioned that physicians in ancient Egypt
prescribed garden walks for mentally ill patients. Both my heart and brain began to race. The
seed for Seedfolks had been planted.
Books don't usually come from a single source. Like rivers, many tributaries flow into them,
streams that might have begun running in childhood along with others no more than a few
months old. Each book is its own braiding of waters. [...]
I brought home the newspaper, put the article in my file, and wrote a few notes in my idea
notebook. But Seedfolks actually had its start many years before. My parents were both
dedicated gardeners. In the summertime, in Santa Monica, California, I could pick plums,
grapes, oranges, berries, loquats, apricots, figs, tangerines--and never leave my yard. Little by
little, my parents had plowed under the front lawn in search of more planting space. We were-and still
are--the only house in the neighborhood with a cornfield in the front yard.
My father, Sid Fleischman, is a writer of children's books as well. For him, gardening offered a

recess break from his study, along with the pride and pleasure of growing one's own food. Often
over dinner he would tally up the number of ingredients that had come from our soil. Writers, like
gardeners, tend to be self-taught and value self-sufficiency.
I learned to write from my father, but I'm no less a product of my mother, who took her gardening
skills into the community. When I was in high school, my mother volunteered at a therapeutic
garden in a veterans' hospital, showing men who'd served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam
how to raise vegetables and flowers, helping to heal damaged psyches in the process. The
example of my mother's volunteerism was powerful. Over the years, she arranged book
giveaways in cash-poor school districts, used her Spanish-speaking skills to tutor students in
English, and, in her last years, learned Braille so as to translate books for the blind. The conflict
between my parents' spheres--the printed page and the wider world--is an ancient one for me.
I've solved it by keeping a foot in both. Following my mother's lead, I've tutored foreign-language
speakers, taught violin and string figures, delivered library books to shut-ins. In an earlier book
of mine, a character who's lost her mother vows to keep her alive by becoming her. I've found
myself doing the same. My own mother died a few years before Seedfolks. She was a large part
of the lure of the idea. A book about the healing power of plants would keep her flame lit.
I'd heard about community gardens--plots of land, usually in large cities, where anyone can
grow food and flowers. Such a setting would offer a more varied cast than a therapeutic garden:
women, children, teenagers, people from every corner of the world. I began researching. A
marvelous magnetism takes place when an idea for a book takes hold. Newspapers and
magazines suddenly seemed filled with references to community gardens. A friend of mine took
a job at a local garden for the homeless. Another friend who'd helped found a community garden
in Boston made me a tape of reminiscences. I read books. I toured gardens, taking notes.
I knew immigration would be central to the book. "Seedfolks" is an old term for ancestors. I'd
come across it many years before and written it in my notebook as a possible title. My thought at
the time was to collect actual accounts of first-generation immigrants to the United States, those
who were the founders of their families here. The book had never come to pass, but the title
remained on my list and on my mind. Suddenly, I had a book to go with it. For a writer, the few
words of a title can be harder than writing the rest of the book. To have an idea that comes
ready-made with a title is like buying a house that's already furnished.
Though my own family had immigrated generations before--one of my mother's relations had
been tried as a witch in Massachusetts--I wanted to focus on recent immigrants. This led me to
choose Cleveland as a setting, a city famous for its foreign-born population in the past and now
absorbing immigrants from new quarters of the globe. Famous as well for its harsh, white
winters, Cleveland would be a place with a short summer, where the sight of green would be
especially precious. [...]
Ideas are everywhere. As my father says, the trick is turning them into something. What would
be the book's shape and story? I decided to concentrate on the garden's first year--like the
infancy of a baby or a plant, a time of dramatic growth. I also knew I wanted to tell its history
through a variety of characters, each with a distinctive voice. I'd done this in Bull Run, my
previous book, an account of the Civil War's first battle told through 16 points of view. The
monologues in that book had been very short, each character speaking several times. I have an
aversion to repeating myself and wanted something different this time--longer speeches, closer
to short stories, with characters only speaking once, yet appearing in the background of other
speakers' accounts, presaging their entrances and following up their exits.
Those characters began taking shape. Some, like sailors awaiting a ship, had haunted my

notebook for years but had never found their way into a book. Others popped up out of
nowhere. Research is a wonderful push-pull proposition. You go looking for facts and return with
fiction. I read that a few gardens had problems with people raising produce for profit, and came
up with Virgil's father, the would-be lettuce baron. I came across a mention of a support group
for teen mothers taking part in a garden, and invented Maricela. Sae Young came from a
newspaper article I'd seen years before about a teacher who'd been assaulted, lost all trust in
people, and hadn't left his apartment for years.
Other characters were aspects of me. Sam, who greets everyone he sees, came from the year I
spent in an ingrown Omaha neighborhood. Mine was the only beard on the block. Rocks were
thrown at me on my first bicycle ride. Like Sam, I began going out of my way to make small talk
with grocery store clerks and people at the bus stop, showing them they had no reason to fear
me--or, by extension, others who looked different.
"Write what you know" is common advice for writers. In fact, I'm not much of a gardener myself.
I read up on soil and pests and propagation, but it soon became clear to me that the focus of the
book was people, not plants. To experience some of what my characters were going through,
however, I planted a long row of bush beans in my yard midway through the writing. Suddenly, I
understood. I felt pulled out of bed to check on them every morning and gave them a last look
every night. Every milestone felt worthy of celebration: the first cracks in the earth, the first
sprouts poking through like bird beaks, the first flower, the first bean. I picked off bugs with fierce
maternal vigilance and laid an aria of invective on pillaging rabbits. Truly, as Nora says, a
garden is a soap opera growing out of the ground. [...]
The book came out, with its lovely jacket and illustrations. Books are quite like seeds; the writer
never knows exactly what will come up. Some are yanked out by hostile reviewers, others
please passersby and spread extravagantly. Like teenagers, successful books move out of the
house and take on a life all their own, received in distant homes, traveling far, being translated
into other tongues. Writers know nothing of these journeys except through fan mail--the
postcards sent home by the book. I've followed Seedfolks's progress through these.
Like the ancient Egyptians, we recognize that contact with nature can heal. Hours after the 9/11
attacks in New York, scores of people were standing in wait for the gates of the Brooklyn
Botanic Garden to open. The city's public gardens waived admission fees and were thronged
with those seeking solace and serenity. In the uprush of altruism, we also saw that a sense of
community--that we are known, that we care, that we will be cared for--provides an even greater
solace.
I sense that we all have hidden stores of generosity that find no outlet except in such moments
of disaster. This was the marvel of the community gardens I visited. They were oases in the
urban landscape of fear, places where people could safely offer trust, helpfulness, charity,
without need of an earthquake or hurricane. Television, I'm afraid, has isolated us more than
race, class, or ethnicity. Community gardens are places where people rediscover not only
generosity, but the pleasure of coming together. I salute all those who give their time and talents
to rebuilding that sense of belonging. It's a potent seed. "I have great faith in a seed," wrote
Thoreau. "Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders."

After reading/annotating the autobiography, write an ACE

paragraph below. COMPARE (similarities) and CONTRAST
(differences) the author Paul Fleischmans life and experiences
to the novel Seedfolks and its plot. How does his life relate or
connect to the novel? Be sure to cite evidence from the
autobiography and/or Seedfolks.

Write your paragraph here:

In the autobiography titled From Seed to Seedfolks the author,
Paul Fleischman, explains how he invented his novel Seedfolks and what
personal experiences he used to develop the plot. One example of how
the novel relates to his own life is his family had planted a garden. For
example, in the text he states, My parents were both dedicated
gardeners (3 ). Similarly, in his novel Seedfolks, he includes that Kims
dad was a farmer. In the novel it states, All his life in Vietnam my
father had been a farmer (3 ). This shows that the author and Kim

both have at least a family member who farm/gardened. In conclusion,

he used his past experiences to write his novel Seedfolks.