The Berry Pickers
The Berry Pickers
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Amanda Peters on The Berry Pickers
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The road trip that changed her answerFor years Peters turned down her father’s request to write about the Mi’kmaq blueberry pickers of Maine, insisting fiction was her territory. He eventually stopped arguing and simply drove her there. Standing in the fields in August 2017, walking the cabin where his family had stayed and the store where they’d bought supplies, the first line of the opening chapter arrived. The scattered notes she’d accumulated across her phone, her computer, and scraps of paper suddenly cohered.
I actually wrote the first chapter kind of as a short story. I thought it would be a short story. I worked on it for two years thinking it was going to be a short story, so the first chapter took me two years.
The road trip didn’t just give her a first line. It committed her to a scale she hadn’t planned for.
Before she could write the Mi’kmaq experience at all, Peters had to reckon with earlier fiction she’d tried to set in Indigenous worlds. Those stories failed in a way she could feel but struggled to name, and the failure kept her away from the material she knew best.
They lacked heart. They lacked soul, they lacked rhythm, they lacked everything. So then I wrote my first Indigenous short story, it was a piece of flash fiction, and I loved it. It had my voice, the voice I wanted to bring.
A Mi’kmaq friend gave Peters a frame she now returns to when asked where her stories originate: they come from the ancestors, and she is responsible for getting them onto the page. That sense of obligation quietly shaped the deeper stakes of writing this book.
I have always struggled with my identity as a mixed-race woman and writing this book and telling these stories have led me to accept and love who I am as a Mi’kmaq.
How she wrote it
A puzzle built in two separate piecesThe novel’s dual-narrator structure, alternating between Joe (a Mi’kmaq man carrying a decades-old guilt) and Norma (the woman taken from his family as a four-year-old child), came with a practical problem Peters hadn’t anticipated: she couldn’t write them at the same time without losing what made each voice distinct.
I found that I couldn’t write them both together because I had this fear that they would just melt into one voice and they wouldn’t be distinct when they’re two completely different people. So I wrote most of Joe’s first and then I wrote most of Norma’s. And then I put them together like a puzzle.
When she assembled the pieces, a seam didn’t close. She wrote an extra chapter to fill the gap, and that chapter ended up doing structural work the original outline had not accounted for.
Early readers kept pushing Peters to reframe the book as a mystery. The disappearance of a child, the decades-long silence, the slow accumulation of clues: the genre reading was available. She rejected it consistently, and her reason goes to the heart of what she was building.
I don’t want it to be a mystery. I’m not a mystery writer. I want people to become invested in the characters and their journey through all this grief and trauma and joy. [paraphrased from audio]
Research for the blueberry-picking scenes required one phone call. Peters couldn’t picture how workers tracked their rows in fields that large, so she asked her father. He told her about her grandfather cutting twine to mark where he’d already been, and that detail went straight into the novel. Boston, where Norma’s adult life unfolds, was harder: Peters had planned a visit to walk the neighborhoods before writing those sections, but COVID cancelled the trip. A friend in the city guided her through it on Messenger using Google Street View, block by block.
I also took breaks from the most difficult material — sometimes for days, sometimes for months — to let the hurt be real on the page, but not impact me as a person.
The pregnancy loss scenes required a different kind of preparation: Peters had not experienced it herself, and she spent days reading first-hand accounts before writing those passages.
The personal thread
Putting her own craziness on poor NormaNorma, who grows up knowing she is adopted but not that she was taken from a Mi’kmaq family, spends the novel negotiating two identities that won’t fully reconcile. Peters hadn’t originally planned to write her at all: the first outline was Joe’s story alone. But once Norma demanded a place in the narrative, Peters found herself drawing on something she’d carried her whole life.
I think writing her was somewhat therapeutic because I’ve kind of struggled being mixed race my whole life. Like, when can I be Mi’kmaq? When can I be White? When can I be both, and in what situation? I’ve always kind of struggled with my identity that way. So I think I took all of my craziness and put it on poor Norma.
Peters grew up off the reserve and does not speak the Mi’kmaw language, positions that made her hesitant for years to claim Mi’kmaq stories as her subject. That hesitation didn’t disappear when she began writing the novel, but it shifted into something more useful.
My mixed identity always makes its way into all my writing. I think when something is so essential to who you are as a person, it will find its way into your art.
On what’s at stake
One act and fifty years of consequenceThe novel does not hide what happened to Ruthie, the four-year-old taken by a white family at the end of a blueberry-picking season. The question Peters puts to the reader is not whodunit but what that act made of every person it touched over the following five decades. She named this the book’s governing logic.
I wanted people to think about these things because all of them are a result of one action—everything trickles down. It’s like the ripple effect of one action, and it has so much impact on both people.
Joe, the Mi’kmaq narrator who was a child when his sister disappeared and who carries the guilt of the moment she vanished, spends most of the novel choosing distance over confrontation. Peters described his arc in terms that apply equally to what the book is arguing about silence and its costs.
He thinks he is doing what is best for the people he loves by staying away. He stays away so long that the thought of returning is incomprehensible, but he justifies it as love. He realizes too late that being with the people you love, acknowledging the wrong you’ve done, and accepting their love is true healing.
Peters spent eight years working in Indigenous governance, attended Truth and Reconciliation witness sessions, and listened to residential school survivors before she wrote a word of this novel. The missing girl at the novel’s center connects to that history in a way Peters says she didn’t consciously plan.
People need to understand that you can’t just take a child from their home, family and culture and think it’s going to be okay. There are always repercussions.
What she wants us to sit with
Joy as insistence, fiction as truthAt a Barnes & Noble event in New York, Peters pushed back against how readers sometimes approach Indigenous literature, collapsing it into a single register of suffering. Her grandmother’s funeral, she noted, ended with everyone gathered and laughing over stories. The karaoke scene in the novel, the siblings in a car laughing until they can’t breathe: these were not relief valves from the serious material. They were the point.
Too many times people like to put the trauma label on Indigenous populations. We have joy, we have family, we have love. [paraphrased from audio]
Peters says simply that she wants a reader to close the book thinking it was a good story. The more specific version of that hope concerns what fiction, as a form, can do that documentary accounts cannot. She made this argument most plainly in the Poured Over interview, where she was talking about why she chose to write the Mi’kmaq experience as a novel rather than the nonfiction her father had originally requested.
There’s nothing truer than fiction, because you can always find yourself in the work.