Assignment 1: Story Statement
In the shadow of a waking volcano, Thea must trust her own wisdom and embrace her found family—or risk vanishing into the inherited grief of silence, shame, and regret.
Assignment 2: Antagonistic Forces
The primary antagonist is Thea’s mother. Imogene does not want a child, and her detachment keeps Thea longing for connection. Thea believes that uncovering the truth about her father will heal Imogene and win her love, so she silences her intuition and defends her mother’s erratic behavior while rejecting the unconditional love offered by her stepfather. Imogene’s secrecy, shame, and eventual suicide leave Thea burdened. Even after death, Imogene lingers as a haunting antagonistic force and a mirror of what Thea fears becoming. Through this complex, charged dynamic, Imogene catalyzes Thea’s arc: the need to break free of generational wounds and claim her own path.
A secondary antagonist is the volcano itself, a constant physical presence and a psychic weight. Imogene constructs a mythology around it, withdrawing from Thea and turning to the mountain for meaning, eventually giving herself over to it by triggering an avalanche. Thea’s stepfather pours himself into scientific monitoring, convinced the volcano will erupt. Thea is caught in the space between faith and science, mysticism and logic, silence and alarm. Thea is also under pressure to heal her fractured family. She represses her unease, dismisses her instincts, and absorbs blame. As tremors rise beneath the earth, so does the turmoil within Thea, who must navigate not only the literal threat of eruption, but the inherited instability, denial, and dread that have defined her life.
Thea’s biological father, Elan, casts his own shadow, an absent parent consumed by grief and silence, whose choices echo through Thea’s search for truth and belonging.
Assignment 3: Working Titles
On a Wink from the Sun
The Fault She Carried
Lady of Fire, Daughter of Ash
Assignment 4: Comparables
The lyrical prose and landscape-rooted storytelling of ON A WINK FROM THE SUN echoes the work of Richard Powers, and like Bewilderment, it explores the emotional resilience of a young protagonist shaped by alienation and a mythic landscape that mirrors inner life. This coming-of-age novel blends the emotional interiority and found-family arc of Allison Larkin’s The People We Keep with the generational trauma, haunting silence, and cycle-breaking choices of The Mountains Sing (Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai)—a novel that also traces the lingering impact of the Vietnam War on a fractured family. ON A WINK FROM THE SUN follows a narrator wise beyond her years who must learn to trust her own voice and decide whether to inherit the grief that made her—or become the one who ends it.
Assignment 5: Hook line/Logline
Caught between a mythic mountain that threatens to erupt and a mother who already broke, a girl whose story begins in the womb struggles to trust her own wisdom and build a life defined not by inherited grief—but by the love and family she chooses.
Assignment 6: Conflicts
Protagonist Inner Conflict:
Thea feels torn between her intuition and what she believes she must do to earn her mother’s fragile love. Her internal conflict is rooted in the core wound that she’s a burden and therefore must earn love through self-erasure, loyalty, and silence. She wants to survive, be loved, and know the truth, but she’s deeply afraid that expressing her inner knowing will rupture the conditional connection she has with Imogene.
Scenario:
When Imogene reads a book on herbal abortion, Thea’s internal world fractures. She pleads for her existence but also internalizes that her existence is unwanted. This moment creates a deep psychological split: she desperately wants to survive and be lovable, while absorbing the shame of being a burden.
Secondary Conflict:
Thea is caught between Imogene’s mystical, impulsive spirituality and John’s rational, scientific worldview. As Imogene spirals into myth, John focuses on data, risk, and monitoring. Both parents look outward—to gods or graphs—while neither fully sees Thea nor do they agree on how to raise her. Thea becomes the bridge, trying to maintain the family’s emotional balance, even as doing so erodes her sense of self.
Scenario:
Against John’s wishes, Thea attends a protest with Imogene to preserve her mother’s fragile affection. The destruction of the forest she witnesses echoes her fear of being inherently unlovable and irreparably broken. When they return, John’s quiet disappointment devastates her. She is caught between loyalty and discomfort, between pleasing and belonging. In trying to hold her family together, Thea feels increasingly alienated, and no one truly sees what it costs her.
Assignment 7: Setting
In the Pacific Northwest, the natural world doesn’t just surround Thea; it seeps into her. Before birth, she senses the pulse of birdsong and shifting plates. The forest beyond her cabin feels both enchanted and indifferent. Old-growth trees tower like elders who’ve seen too much, their roots snaking through soft moss and hidden grief. This is where Thea first feels herself vanish into something older and quieter than language. It’s where she and her mother protest with signs and fury, where the sound of a chainsaw feels like betrayal. Even the birds feel charged: sentinels, messengers, omens. Their calls pierce moments of quiet with longing, or dread, or strange comfort. When Imogene disappears, it is the birds who return first, circling the silence, bearing witness.
Thea grows up on the edge of something sacred and unstable. Lawetlat’la (Mount St. Helens) is a looming, mythic presence that’s as much a character as any human in the book. Thea’s emotional world is mirrored in this landscape: dormant, restrained, poised to blow. Lawetlat’la is not just scenery. To Imogene, she is sacred, a divine force that stores grief beneath the crust and speaks in signs only Imogene can interpret. To John, she’s a threat to be measured, plotted, contained. To Thea, she is unknowable yet intimately felt. Thea’s own emotional world mirrors the volcano’s quiet tension: contained, pressurized, waiting. When she finally erupts, the volcano doesn’t destroy Thea—it clarifies her.
