Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus
Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus
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Dusti Bowling on Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A phone call, a video, and a gap on the shelfThe idea arrived in 2008, not from a writing prompt or a market gap, but from a phone call telling Bowling that her cousin Kyle had been hit by an RPG while serving in Iraq. He lost his eye and was going to lose his arm. Bowling went looking for children’s books that featured characters with limb differences and found almost nothing. Kyle died two weeks later, and the idea went quiet for years before it finally became Aven.
The seed was first planted in my mind to write a story about a child with limb differences after my cousin was injured in Iraq back in 2008.
Years after Kyle’s death, a video of Barbie Thomas, a woman born without arms who drives, cares for a baby, and works out at the gym using only her feet, broke the project open. That footage moved the idea out of grief and into something Bowling felt she could actually write toward.
At that moment, it no longer felt painful to think about people with limb differences. It felt important.
The second character thread came from inside Bowling’s own home. Her husband and two daughters have tic disorders, and she had spent years watching the public misread those tics. When her youngest tried to explain she couldn’t control them, other kids told her they knew what it was: the cussing disease. That’s the climate that put Connor, who has Tourette’s syndrome, into the book alongside Aven.
I was inspired to write a character with Tourette syndrome because my husband and two of my daughters have tic disorders. Unfortunately, the representation of Tourette syndrome in books and movies has mostly been stereotypical and over-the-top.
nerdybookclub.wordpress.com, “Empathy and Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus: An Interview with Dusti Bowling by Donna Gephart | Nerdy Book Club”Both character decisions traced back to the same conviction about who gets to see themselves on a page. The absence of books featuring limb differences wasn’t just a gap in the market to Bowling. It carried a specific message to the kids who noticed that absence.
When you can’t find books that reflect your life experiences, it’s like saying you’re not worth writing about.
How she wrote it
Two years of research, one complete rewrite, and a breath away from neverBowling spent close to two years researching what daily life looks like without arms before she wrote a page of the book. Written accounts were sparse, so she turned to video, particularly a series called ‘Tisha Unarmed,’ which showed Tisha doing everything from grocery shopping to carving a pumpkin without arms. When the draft was finished, Bowling sent it to Tisha and to Barbie Thomas, whose video had started the whole project. Their verdict determined whether the book would exist.
I knew if they hadn’t approved, I couldn’t possibly share this story with the world.
The Children’s Book Review podcast captured Bowling describing how the research for Aven compared to everything else she had written. The stakes were not abstract: she was asking readers to inhabit a character whose physical life she had never lived.
Writing Aven was really challenging from the Cactus books because I did years of research on that, meeting people, interviewing, studying everything I could, and I really felt the pressure of making sure I represented her as well as I could. [paraphrased from audio]
The first draft, written during NaNoWriMo in 2014, had no mystery and no western theme park. It was a quiet story about two kids becoming friends. Around eighty agents read it and passed, almost all of them with the same two-part response: they loved the voice, but the story had no plot. Bowling rewrote the manuscript entirely, folding in a setting she had already been planning for a separate project: Rawhide, the western theme park she had grown up visiting in Scottsdale.
I took all the advice I received and completely rewrote the manuscript. I was already thinking about writing a story set in a western theme park, so I decided to use that setting for Aven instead of saving it for another book. I added the mystery to move the plot along better, and it ended up becoming very meaningful to me. I’m so glad I listened to the feedback I received because it improved the story massively.
Even after the full rewrite, the road to publication stretched another two years. Her eventual agent sent the manuscript to a Big Five editor who requested a rewrite, received it, and then rejected the book. Union Square, then called Sterling Publishing, finally made an offer. Bowling has since described the book’s survival in terms that capture how contingent the whole thing was.
I always tell people this book was a breath away from never being published, and that’s really true.
She had self-published three earlier novels that went largely unread. For this one, she queried traditional publishers specifically because she wanted the book in readers’ hands. The gap between that intention and the actual offer was nearly two years of near-misses.
The personal thread
Her family’s tics, and the stereotype she had to correctTourette’s syndrome is commonly represented in pop culture as the condition that makes people shout obscenities, a portrayal so dominant that it shapes how real children with tic disorders are treated by their peers. Bowling knew this from watching it happen to her own daughters. She also knew that the stereotype is statistically wrong: only about five percent of people with Tourette’s make inappropriate verbal outbursts. Connor’s tics in the book are drawn in part from her husband’s memories of his own childhood, when his tics were more severe than what their daughters currently experience.
Writing about Tourette syndrome was a little bit simpler because of my experiences with my husband and daughters. Connor’s Tourette syndrome, however, is more severe than what my daughters are currently experiencing, so I relied on my husband’s memories from his childhood, when his tics were at their worst.
nerdybookclub.wordpress.com, “Empathy and Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus: An Interview with Dusti Bowling by Donna Gephart | Nerdy Book Club”What she wants us to sit with
Fun first, then the shift from discomfort to something usefulBowling made a deliberate tonal choice before she finished the revision: Aven would not function as a lesson, and the book would not ask readers to feel sad on her behalf. She wanted readers to eventually forget, the way Aven’s old Kansas friends had forgotten, that Aven doesn’t have arms, because the story had moved on to other things. That required refusing the register that most disability narratives default to.
There are so many serious books dealing with disabilities. I wanted this story to be fun, not heart-wrenching. Well, maybe it’s a tiny bit heart-wrenching at times.
For kids with undiagnosed tic disorders, Bowling hoped the book might do something concrete: give them language, or at least recognition, that prompts them to ask for help. The existing lack of awareness about tic disorders means many of these children go undiagnosed, and a mirror in fiction can reach places a pamphlet cannot.
So if empathy and inclusiveness are what people gain from reading my story, then I don’t think I could ask for more than that.
nerdybookclub.wordpress.com, “Empathy and Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus: An Interview with Dusti Bowling by Donna Gephart | Nerdy Book Club”