With ‘The Meadows,’ Spokane author Stephanie Oakes walks a fine line with a difficult topic

It’s remarkable when children who struggled to read in elementary school become avid book lovers – and even more so when they grow up to be critically acclaimed, award-winning authors. But that’s what Stephanie Oakes did.

“When I was younger, prior to middle school, I had a really hard time with reading. It took me a long time to learn,” she said. “I remember struggling but liking books. I would collect them and have them near me, and look at the covers and stuff, but the actual act of reading was hard.”

“But then I found ‘Harry Potter,’ which was the first book that I’d ever read that I was like, I am into this enough that I will drag myself through this. So that kind of opened the door to lots and lots of other kinds of reading.”

By the time Oakes reached middle school, her academics had taken a turn for the better, and she came to realize that she didn’t want to just read stories – she wanted to write them.

But even though Oakes knew at a fairly young age that she wanted to write, she didn’t originally pursue a writing field in college.

After doing Running Start at West Valley High School, Oakes graduated from Eastern Washington University at 19 years old with a degree in interdisciplinary studies.

“Most writers can’t support themselves entirely from writing,” she said. “So I thought, I guess I’ll find something that I don’t hate. I thought about doing French translation for a while.”

But after graduating, she decided to return to Eastern for an MFA program in creative writing, and eventually continued her education with an additional master’s in teaching from Whitworth University.

In the final year of her MFA program, Oakes stumbled across the inspiration for her first book while working on a poetry assignment that required her to research different fairy tales and legends. She came across one of Grimm’s fairy tales, “The Armless Maiden”; three years later, Oakes’ first Young Adult novel “The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly” hit the shelves.

Her debut was met with success – after being nominated for the debut author award, also called the Morris Award, “The Secret Lies of Minnow Bly” was turned into TV miniseries by Facebook Watch, starring Academy Award nominated actress Juliette Lewis (“Cape Fear”).

Her following YA book, “The Arsonist,” went on to win the Washington State Book Award.

“I originally liked writing Young Adult because it sort of felt like there were fewer limits,” Oakes said. “You can mix up genres, which is really exciting for me. It’s sort of a place to play and come up with all of these outlandish ideas that YA editors are like, OK, great, let’s do it! I felt like there was more possibility for innovation and creativity, and just for more fun.”

Plus, she had a deep understanding of the impact different books can have on a young reader.

Her forthcoming book, “The Meadows,” has been likened to Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaids Tale,” a book Oakes remembers loving when she was younger.

The types of books you read at that age, she said, become a part of your writer DNA.

“The Meadows,” from Dial Books, will be released on Sept. 12. That same day, Oakes will join The Spokesman-Review for a Northwest Passages Book Club event at the Bing Crosby Theater.

“The Meadows” is a dystopian YA novel that follows a schoolgirl named Eleanor in two separate timelines: the before, when she first got the acceptance letter to go to a prestigious, all-girls boarding school, and the after, when she is working for the government in this futuristic, Big Brother-esque world. As the secrets of Eleanor’s past unfurl, she is forced to choose between conformity and sincerity.

By slowly pulling back the curtain of time that obscures the dark events that transpired during Eleanor’s years at school, Oakes explores heavy topics like conversion therapy and the repercussions of young trauma as she weaves between the two eras of Eleanor’s life.

But the world of “The Meadows” wasn’t fabricated out of pure fantasy and imagination – Oakes modeled it after a pre-existing framework of conversion therapy still found in the United States.

“I think a lot of people sort of believed that conversion therapy was a thing of the past,” she said. “But it’s not. The majority of conversion therapy that happens in the U.S. is done in religious institutions and churches. Like, 81%.”

Conversion therapy is banned in Washington state – but that ban only applies to licensed health care providers, which means it doesn’t restrict teachers or members of the clergy.

“It was 2018 when I first got the idea, and there was a lot of news about (President) Trump and how he was targeting migrants crossing the border and putting them in cages. So, there were these pictures of children, like migrants from Mexico and Central America, literally in cages. And I thought, if there is a group of the government that believes these people should not be here, that these beliefs should be eradicated, there’s nothing that they won’t do. And like, those pictures of kids in cages sort of demonstrate that. So, it didn’t take that much to imagine ‘The Meadows,’ because the seeds of this are already existing in our society.”

Oakes’ wife experienced conversion therapy firsthand while they were a young member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“People picture this really outlandish thing, and that’s not what it is,” Oakes said. “It’s really just a kid sitting down and being told every week in their bishop’s office or their pastor’s office, being told very slowly that the way they are is unacceptable. It kind of is just an unknotting of their self-identity. That is on par with any kind of physical violence, if not worse, because it makes you an enemy to yourself.”

She explained that she wanted to make sure her characters’ experiences came off as realistic and representational, not just exploitative.

She said, “I didn’t want to capitalize on a really horrific subject for entertainment value. I chose not to show some of the images that people get in their head when they think of conversion therapy, like shock therapy or exposure therapy or whatever. I didn’t want to use that.”

“The Meadows” has been building anticipation for a while now – five years, in fact, since it was first announced in 2018. And there are a few reasons why this novel took so much longer than Oakes, and her readers, had initially predicted.

“Part of it was the pandemic happened,” she said. “I had already sold the proposal at that time, but the publishing world kind of slowed way down. And another part was that it was a really complicated book. The back and forth in time was tricky to write and figure out, so it was a lot of going back and forth with my editor.”

“I was also diagnosed with ADHD after wondering about it for a really long time. With ADHD, sometimes your brain doesn’t cooperate, so I’ve had to learn to work with it a lot better. And in the process of writing a book, if your mental health isn’t in the best place, or if you’re kind of hounded by perfectionism, it can really affect writing. So, figuring out what I need to do to keep my mental health in a really good place has been very important in my writing, too.”

Fellow Spokane author Sharma Shields will join Stephanie Oakes on Sept. 12 to discuss the research, effort, and intention that went into creating “The Meadows.”

“Writing is a job that’s a little bit shrouded in mystery,” she said. “Like people have no idea of what it really is, or what to expect.

“I’m excited. It’s the biggest venue I’ve ever done,” she said. “I hope people come.”