Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers brings L’nu stories to the forefront

If you haven’t heard Amanda Peters’ name in your book club circles, consider this a friendly heads up: There’s never been a better moment. Last night, the Falmouth, NS author’s debut novel, The Berry Pickers, took home the 2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize—an award voted by booksellers to identify “new talent in the literary landscape”—and $10,000 in cash, to boot. For an author who makes her home in a village of 1,500 people, she’s seemingly everywhere at the moment: The New York Times just gave her props for “writing characters for whom we can’t help rooting.” Six months after The Berry Pickers’ Canadian release, the book premieres in the US today. On Thursday, Nov. 2, it will make its UK hardcover debut.

To top it off, Peters is one of the star attractions of this year’s AfterWords Literary Festival in Halifax. On Wednesday evening, she’ll be reading from her novel at Cafe Lara (2347 Agricola Street) as part of the festival’s kick-off party. It’s the first of three events she’ll take part in between Halifax and Millbrook in the next week.

Quite a run for a first-time author.

“I think I’m still in the ‘pinch me’ phase,” Peters says, speaking by phone with The Coast. “I’m glad people are connecting to this book—that they’re finding something that they can relate to.”

The Berry Pickers is Amanda Peters’ debut novel. Credit: HarperCollins Canada

The Berry Pickers is not always an easy book to read. Set in Maine and Nova Scotia, beginning in 1962, it tells the story of a Mi’kmaw brother and sister who are separated when their family makes their annual summer trip to work at a berry farm. Four-year-old Ruthie, the youngest of the family, goes missing. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, is the last person to see her. It eats at him. What unfolds is a story of family trauma, grief, remembrance, the search for identity and hope for reconnection.

Peters—who is of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry—sees it all as part of “the human condition.”

“I’m a real fan of the idea that reading fiction increases empathy,” she tells The Coast. “Regardless of the story, regardless of how you relate to it, it’s always about the human condition—whether it’s joy or sadness or grief, or trauma or happiness or family.”

While The Berry Pickers is a work of fiction, it’s rooted in Peters’ history: Her family used to pick berries. The seeds of the story took root on a father-daughter trip to Maine.

“He showed me the berry fields where he and my family used to pick berries in the ’60s and ’70s,” Peters says. “And he told me all about how it worked… and told me all these crazy stories about his time in the berry fields. And when I was down there, the first line of the first chapter just came to me. And I think the story just started to unfurl from there.”

In The Berry Pickers, Peters soon introduces readers to Norma, a girl who grows up as an only child with a head full of questions about her dark skin and white parents. She has dreams that she can’t quite place.

“She doesn’t know who she is,” Peters tells The Coast. “And sometimes, being of Mi’kmaw and settler descent, I have struggled with my identity a little bit. So I think that kind of resonated with me.”

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A lifelong reader, Peters came to writing at the midpoint of her career. She’d dabbled in her twenties—“I have a short story I wrote when I was 21 that I’m still tweaking,” Peters says—but she went to university at Mount Allison and Dalhousie for political science and public administration. She lived in Japan and Korea. Spent a decade and a half working in health policy and in various administrative roles for Health Canada, the province of Nova Scotia, the Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nation Chiefs and her home community, Glooscap First Nation.

It was another book, Christy Ann Conlin’s Heave, that helped light a spark in Peters to try her hand at a novel. Set in the Annapolis Valley, its portrayal of early-twenties angst and life in rural Nova Scotia became a hit; it was a Globe and Mail top 100 book.

“This was set in a place that I knew. And they were characters I could relate to,” Peters tells The Coast. “And I was like, ‘Well, if she can write a best-selling book set in the valley, maybe there’s hope.’”

She took an online creative writing course at the University of Toronto. She loved it so much, she completed a certificate in the program—then, in 2020, Peters enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was a formative experience: It was there that she met author Pam Houston, who became a mentor. She also befriended a host of other up-and-coming Indigenous writers.

“I still talk to those folks all the time,” Peters tells The Coast. “There’s something about being around other people who understand you and the issues you’re thinking about all the time—[whether it’s] struggles with identity, or wanting to reconnect with the culture, and doing that through writing.”

With The Berry Pickers, Peters follows in a long line of Indigenous women at the vanguard of writing. Authors like Lee Maracle. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Katherena Vermette. Eden Robinson. Alicia Elliott. Louise Erdrich. Tanya Talaga.

“I love Indigenous literature right now,” Peters says. “I’m loving that we’ve taken back our stories… it’s just so brilliant to see all these amazing [writers], especially Indigenous women, telling stories—and telling them in their own way.

“And for me to be considered among all those amazing people, and to think some of them are now my friends, I literally feel like I’m living in a dream world.”