Mobile writer Emily Blejwas publishes her debut novel

First-time author Emily Blejwas lives in Mobile with her husband and four children. (Courtesy Emily Blejwas)

When Emily Blejwas speaks to kid-filled audiences about her new book, "Once You Know This," she usually invites each child to write his or her dream on a butterfly that goes on a "dream board." Her own dream since childhood, when she picked and bagged apples on her family's orchard in Minnesota, was to write a book.

With the recent publication of her first novel, that dream has come true.

Blejwas (pronounced "blay-voss"), who lives in Mobile with her husband and four children, ages 11, 8, 6 and 3, started writing the book in August of 2014. Between jobs at the time, she would write in "short bursts" during the little ones' nap times. Fortunately, they were good sleepers, so she would have a solid hour and a half most afternoons to devote to writing.

Forcing herself to have "tunnel vision" while writing intensely and quickly was a habit she'd gotten into when her first child was born while she was in working on her thesis in graduate school at Auburn.

Writing the book "helped me as a parent," she says. "I felt like I was a better mom if I had that time."

By October, she had finished her novel. In "Once You Know This," 11-year-old Brittany Kowalski lives on Chicago's West Side with her mother, baby brother and great-grandmother, who has Alzheimer's, in her mom's abusive boyfriend's house. Brittany's fifth-grade teacher, Mr. McInnis, tells the students to imagine their future, but that's a difficult task for a girl who's almost always cold and hungry and worried about her mom.

Despite the somewhat bleak setting, the book is filled with hope, and it's often funny. Blejwas manages to capture the essence of being 11.

Though she didn't write it with a middle-grade audience in mind, the book ended up being marketed toward 9- to 13-year-olds, which makes her happy. "I love that it turned out that way," she says. "I was a huge bookworm, and I remember reading all the time at that age."

Blejwas grew up in Excelsior, Minn., and went to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where she majored in religious studies with a minor in anthropology. She earned a master's in rural sociology at Auburn and has lived in Alabama, with the exception of a year spent in Boston, since 2004.

"We really loved it, so we stayed," she says.

Blejwas has some Southern roots on both sides of her family. Her maternal grandmother grew up outside Lucedale. Her grandparents met in Mobile in the 1940s.

Since January of 2015, she has directed the Gulf States Health Policy Center, which was established by Dr. Regina Benjamin, the former U.S. surgeon general. Benjamin has been extremely supportive of Blejwas as she promotes her new book, which came out Sept. 19, and has been listening to the audio version in her travels.

"She's amazing. I love working for her," Blejwas says. "She's just a great person to be around, a great mentor. She expects a lot because she believes in her staff. There's something about her that makes you want to do well."

The center primarily does research to inform health policy, she says. "Dr. Benjamin's focus is on prevention to avoid poor health outcomes."

Scrabble box

Blejwas drew on her extensive experience working with people in impoverished conditions to create the characters in her novel. After she graduated from college, she worked as an advocate for victims of domestic violence in on the West Side of Chicago, "a pretty tough area," where the book is set.

She started writing the book after reading a note from the author at the end of a book her oldest son, an avid reader like his mom, had finished. The book, Katherine Applegate's "The One and Only Ivan," was inspired by an image of a gorilla who lives in a shopping mall.

Blejwas had her own image that prompted her to get started on "Once You Know This." She remembered, when she'd worked as a victim's advocate at a Chicago hospital, screening women for domestic violence, a woman who had come through the emergency room carrying a large Scrabble box, with four kids in tow.

"She was not in a good place and seemed defeated," she says.

Blejwas helped arrange for the woman to go to a shelter. The woman didn't even go home first. She walked out into the sunshine and boarded a bus, Scrabble box in hand and children following her. "She was transformed in that moment," Blejwas says - because she had hope for a better life.

"It takes a lot of guts to get on a bus with your kids and go somewhere you've never been," she says.

The image inspired her to write the ending of her novel, which includes a similiar scene, first. She wrote the beginning next, and then filled in the middle.

"When I write, in a weird way it doesn't feel like I'm in control," she says. "It just comes. I can't take too much credit for how it turned out."

The book includes "some heavy issues," such as domestic violence, the loss of a loved one and hunger, among others. "It's kind of intense," she says.

But she had to tell the truth. For children living in poverty, everything about life is more difficult, from transportation to eating to facing indifference from others, she says.

"It's hard work just to live," she says. "It's important for kids who comes from tough circumstances to see themselves on the page." And it develops empathy in readers who don't know what it's like to be poor.

Unconventional route

After she finished writing the book, Blejwas did what so many other first-time writers do: She mailed query letters to publishers all over the country. She also did something writers are advised not to do when she sent copies of the full manuscript to the major publishing houses.

Then, like many authors, she was disappointed when no one seemed interested. She soon landed the full-time job with Benjamin and started writing another book.

A year and two months later, she received a call from an executive editor at Penguin Random House's Delacorte Press who had been looking through a dozen submissions culled from the "slush pile" of unsolicited manuscripts - something editors seldom do - and "Once You Know This" was at the bottom.

"She said she hadn't published anything from the slush pile in 14 years," Blejwas says - but the editor said she knows what she likes, and she sent a contract.

"It was an unconventional way for it to happen," Blejwas says.

Her advice for aspiring writers is to "collect experiences, pay attention, be a good observer" as you live your life. "You need input to have output," she says.

Her husband is Polish, and the couple lived in Poland for a year before they moved to Alabama. In the book, Brittany's father is Polish, and she also has roots on her mom's side in Alabama.

Encouraged by the publication of "Once You Know This," Blejwas is now about three-quarters of the way through writing her second novel, which will be for adults and is set in Alabama's Black Belt region.

For now, in addition to her full-time job and family life, she's busy promoting her newly published book. She will be at the Southern Festival of Book in Nashville from Oct. 13-15. Locally, she will read from and sign her book at Page and Palette bookstore in Fairhope on Nov. 9.

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