Fish in a Tree
Fish in a Tree
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Lynda Mullaly Hunt on Fish in a Tree
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A student who struggled, a teacher who searchedThe book began at a dining room table, not at a desk. Hunt was a child in the lowest reading group, watching her brother’s high school textbooks and running the math on her own future. That early dread of being permanently behind is the emotional seed of Ally Nickerson’s story.
By the time I was Ally Nickerson’s age, I remember sitting at our dining room table, staring at my brother’s high school textbooks and wondering how I would ever get through. Like Ally, I wondered what would become of me.
By fifth grade, Hunt’s teacher had stopped asking her to turn in assignments, a silence she read clearly enough. Then came sixth grade and a teacher who did the opposite. Hunt gave a detailed account of that first completed novel and what finishing it actually unlocked in her, not a love of reading in the abstract, but a specific bond.
That book was sort of a love letter to my sixth-grade teacher—he literally saved me. That was the first year I actually read an entire novel. I remember walking up to his desk to tell him about it. He locked eyes with me and gave me his undivided attention. Consequently, I became a reader because of the connection it gave me to him.
She left his classroom intending to become a teacher herself, and she spent nearly ten years doing exactly that before she ever wrote fiction.
When Hunt finally recognized, partway through the manuscript, what the book was really doing, the realization reframed the whole project. It was no longer just a story about a child with dyslexia navigating sixth grade. It had a dedicatee.
FISH IN A TREE is a giant thank you note to the teacher who finally helped me in the sixth grade. At the end of that year, I decided I would become a teacher and help kids just like he did me.
The classroom years that followed gave the book a second engine. Hunt spent nearly a decade in third and sixth grades actively watching for children who had learned to hide their struggles. That dual vantage, student and teacher, is what she names when she explains where the book came from.
Fish in a Tree definitely came into being because of my experiences in the classroom from both sides of the desk. I was a student who struggled, and later a teacher who looked for ways to buoy kids every day, to ensure success for each one of them.
How she wrote it
Mind movies, a reordered opening, and crawling into the basementAlly’s talent for drawing with color is the skill the book rests its central hope on, the evidence that she has something schools haven’t measured. Hunt didn’t arrive at it through a craft calculation about what ability to assign a dyslexic protagonist. The choice came from something closer to instinct, confirmed only afterward by her research.
Very early in the writing process, I began to feel who Ally is at her core. I could have made a very cerebral decision that she was going to be a metal sculptor, but I would not have been able to write that authentically because I could feel that it would not be important to her. Color, though … I knew that Ally loved to create drawings filled with color. I saw them in my head as ‘mind movies,’ just like she does.
The scene that now opens the book, in which Ally cannot produce a single page for her teacher, reads as if it had always been first. It was written last. In the GRA15 launch video, Hunt explained the sequencing decision that finally unlocked the structure.
[Chapter 1] is actually the last chapter I wrote of the entire book. [paraphrased from audio]
The sympathy card scene, now Chapter 2, had originally opened the book. Hunt added Chapter 1 only when she concluded that readers needed to witness Ally’s struggle with words before the misunderstanding that follows it could land.
Beyond structure and character, the book demanded a willingness to write from a place of genuine exposure. Hunt didn’t describe this as a stylistic preference. She framed it as a requirement of the form, and as something that cost her personally each time.
It takes courage to be honest but middle grade readers respond very well to it – in fact readers of all ages do. So, as the writer we have to crawl into our own basement sometimes in order to get it on the page. Both of the books that I have written make me feel very vulnerable in this regard. They’re honest. And they are me.
The personal thread
The neighbor behind the nameMr. Daniels, the teacher in the novel who sees Ally when no one else does, draws on Hunt’s real sixth-grade teacher for his character and method. His name, however, came from somewhere else entirely, from a person who offered a different but equally specific kind of being seen.
Mr. Daniels in Fish in a Tree was named after an elderly neighbor who often invited me into her house after school and let me tell her about my day.
Hunt has said she suspects she has some degree of dyslexia herself, though she has never been formally tested. When she describes what the teacher who changed her actually did, she isn’t summarizing a pedagogical principle. She is describing, from the inside, the mechanism of her own transformation.
By seeing the child before the student and setting high expectations — and demanding that I strove to reach them — he changed my life by changing my perception of myself.
What she wants us to sit with
Not a label, not a rescueAlly is identified as having dyslexia, a reading and language-processing difference, partway through the book, and Hunt anticipated that some readers would take that diagnosis as the book’s subject. She was direct about what it is not.
However, her dyslexia is not the focus of this book because I am a firm believer in that we should never be defined by a single label.
The empathy Hunt most hoped to build in young readers is the kind they extend to themselves, not to a character on the page but to their own history of getting things wrong. She made the argument in concrete terms: failure is not the opposite of bravery, it is evidence of it.
However, one of the things that has made me happy as an author is that my books have allowed children to develop empathy for themselves. There are a lot of kids beating themselves up over perceived faults and we need to teach kids that failure is not to be feared or avoided. Encountering failure means you’re challenging yourself. It means you’re brave.