Gail Lerner set out to write a book about a brave 10-year-old girl who climbs trees in New Haven’s Edgerton Park — and summoned bravery of her own to complete it.
The 10-year-old girl is named Eden. In Lerner’s engaging new novel The Big Dreams of Small Creatures, Eden learns how to communicate with wasps, then stumbles into a subterranean world of insect-human communication where she helps wage a battle to save the planet. The book is written for second- to sixth-graders and parents who read aloud to them; it will change the way readers of any age look at the world around us.
Lerner, who grew up here and became an L.A.-based Peabody Award-winning writer and director of shows like Black-ish, Happy Endings, Ugly Betty, and Grace and Frankie, returned home recently to read parts of it aloud to local schoolchildren.
Big Dreams was a big dream for Lerner: her first novel, one she began considering writing 10 years ago. The pandemic pause in Hollywood filming gave her the time to focus on the last several of her nine drafts.
Another momentous event inspired a late-stage pivot in the novel’s story line: a 2019 car crash in which a drunk driver killed her teen children Ruby, 17, and Hart, 14, during a family road trip.
Lerner and her husband decamped to Joshua Tree Forest in the early stages of the pandemic, where Lerner resolved to press ahead with her work on the novel.
“After you suffer a big tragedy,” she reflected, “you need a reason to engage in the world.”
Lerner’s agent had suggested changing the relationship of two ant characters named Atom and Dot in the evolving novel. Atom and Dot were a married couple in Lerner’s original drafts. Now she made them brother and sister — like Ruby and Hart.
“Here’s my chance to be with Ruby and Hart,” Lerner recalled thinking, during a conversation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Atom finds new strength, new purpose as Big Dreams races to its conclusion. The Atom-Dot relationship change improved the story, and factored in Lerner’s grieving.
“My husband and I were there,” Lerner said of the fatal crash. “We felt we were shattered. We had to find pieces of the vase we used to be to build ourselves back. But we’re not the same people. We’re new creations, as it were.”
Click on the video to watch the full interview with Gail Lerner on “Dateline New Haven” about her new novel The Big Dreams of Small Creatures.
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