Where the Wildflowers Grow
Where the Wildflowers Grow
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Terah Shelton Harris on Where the Wildflowers Grow
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Circling grief until she had to landHarris starts every book with a theme, and for this one the theme surfaced as a pattern she hadn’t consciously planned. After two novels where grief appeared in the background without ever being examined directly, she recognized she had been avoiding the harder version of the subject.
Grief was the seed that grew Where the Wildflowers Grow. In both of my previous books, grief has been quietly present. I realized I’d been circling the topic without fully confronting it because I wasn’t ready to sit with its messiest truths.
Two real-world news stories gave the abstract question a human shape. The first was about a seventeen-year-old in Colorado who had been born off the grid with no birth certificate and no Social Security number, a person the government did not recognize as existing. The second was about Bobby Love, an escaped convicted felon who walked away from prison, kept a private promise never to break the law again for thirty years, married, became a church deacon, had children, and then one day had a knock at the door. That second story produced the question Harris built Leigh’s interior life around.
How do you live thirty years of your life knowing that at any moment someone could come and it can end?
Nearly two decades as a librarian sharpened her sense of which stories were missing. She could see the gap before she could fill it.
I noticed gaps on the shelves. There were stories I wanted to hand to readers that didn’t exist yet — stories about complex grief, about survival versus living, about Black characters navigating trauma and finding healing in unexpected places. Eventually, I realized I needed to write those stories myself.
That professional frustration became a personal mandate. The book she couldn’t find for a reader became the book she wrote.
How she wrote it
Flowers, pencils, and a character who refusedThe flower farm setting was not planned; it arrived at a library conference dinner. Harris found herself seated next to a flower farmer who spent the entire evening talking about the work, and she realized she had never read a novel set on one. That gap became the world of the book. Two specific flowers then became structurally load-bearing. Dahlias require their tubers to be dug up and carefully tended through winter before they can bloom, which Harris read as a working image for the slow, underground labor of healing. The Cahaba lily, which exists only in Alabama’s Cahaba River, proved even more pointed: an expert told her that every attempt to transplant the flower kills it.
They’ve tried to dig that flower up and bury it, and it dies every time. It has to grow in running water.
Harris writes every draft longhand with a Black Wing pencil, sitting outside in the Alabama woods with no phone nearby. But she picks up the pencil only after exhaustive preparation. Character, theme, and setting are all settled before a word of fiction goes down, and she has a precise internal signal for when that preparation is finished.
Once I start asking myself how much of this is actually going to make it into the book, I realize none of this is going to make it in. So that’s when I stop.
By the time she reaches that stopping point, the characters are already distinct presences rather than outlines. She described the state she needs to reach before she can write.
By the time I’m ready to write, I know what my story is, I know who my character is. The characters have arrived. They’ve introduced themselves to me.
Leigh, the novel’s protagonist, was the hardest character Harris had ever written. For a long time she could not hear Leigh’s voice at all, and she kept treating that silence as a problem to solve. The shift came when she stopped fighting it. According to Harris, speaking about the writing process in the Friends & Fiction conversation recorded February 25, 2026, once she accepted the silence as the character rather than as a failure of craft, Leigh began to open.
[paraphrased from audio] Leigh “is a survivor. She is an escaped convicted felon. She is not going to be trusting to people. And that includes me as the author.” Harris said once she stopped fighting that resistance and recognized it as the character’s actual nature, Leigh started to speak.
The novel’s opening was a deliberate structural gamble that Harris had to defend to her editor and agent. Her original plan was to begin with the bus in motion before the crash. She cut everything earlier in the sequence until the first scene places Leigh already underwater, and she explained the logic of that choice.
The best entry for this story is this is a book about a very complicated character who I need the reader to immediately begin to bond with and immediately try to understand who she is. So how about I just started in the water?
By showing Leigh stay with Officer Madison rather than swim immediately to safety, Harris handed readers their first evidence that Leigh’s prison record does not define her instincts. The structural argument she won became the novel’s first emotional signal.
The personal thread
Love as the hardest act of courageHarris had written romance into her earlier novels, but as a texture rather than a structural engine. For this book she made a deliberate change, assigning love a different function entirely. The shift required her to think about intimacy not as warmth added to a story but as a form of risk that her most guarded character would have to take.
I’ve written a little romance into my books, but romance wasn’t the center of the emotional arc. This time, love is the healing. I wanted to show how intimacy can be both terrifying and transformative, how choosing to trust someone with your heart can be an act of courage.
What she wants us to sit with
Permission to stop surviving and start livingThe recognition Harris most wants is the one that breaks isolation. Leigh’s wounds are specific, but the experience of carrying unresolved grief is not, and Harris wrote toward that overlap.
My hope is that readers who carry similar wounds will see themselves in Leigh’s journey and feel less alone. Trauma doesn’t resolve neatly, and I wanted to honor that truth.
Leigh has spent her entire life in survival mode, which means she has never had space to rest or to want anything for herself. The book’s argument, the one Harris named most directly, is about what that costs and what it is possible to reclaim.
You are more than what you have survived. Your worth isn’t defined by your trauma or the battles you’ve fought. And it’s never too late to stop merely existing and start actually living.