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“I’m happy to report that my son is doing well.

I had to discover that again as I went through my own trial. “Em learns to do more than survive - she learns to really live despite hard times. … As I dove back in, I found Em’s experiences of grief and tragedy more relatable than they had been before. In the wake of the family’s trauma, she felt called back to Em and Caleb’s story. It felt trivial, she said, compared with what Titus was facing.įive months later, feeling like a different woman, Fordham reopened the Word document. Fordham put her almost-finished manuscript aside. She drove him to the hospital one night while he was unresponsive and stiff.Īfter a long stay and weeks of tests, he was diagnosed with adrenoleukodystrophy, a hereditary disease that attacks the nervous system and adrenal glands. In 2015, Fordham’s son Titus, then just 4, got sick suddenly. She didn’t have an easy time with the project. “Azure Springs” is set in a fictional town in Iowa, but Fordham bases the story on her research into what is now called the orphan train movement. Along the way, Em becomes friends with Caleb Reynolds, an unusual man also struggling with loss. She is adopted by a man who leaves her to sleep in his barn, while Lucy goes to live with a family in a town far off years pass before Em gathers the resources to search for her. “I read through enough personal accounts of train riders to know that there were beautiful stories of orphans finding homes,” Fordham said, “and that there were tragic stories of children being placed in homes where they were neglected and abused.”Įm, a 19-year-old orphan at the start of the story, is separated from her younger sister, Lucy. When she learned about the orphan trains of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she got on board to find out more.īetween 18, the so-called “mercy trains” relocated some 250,000 orphaned or abandoned children from the cities of the East and took them to foster families mostly in the Midwest, according to the National Orphan Train Complex website,.

She grew up in Shelton, and has moved all over the country, living in Idaho and in Buffalo, N.Y. The audience, enchanted, would beg for more.Īt the same time Fordham has a fierce interest in history. She’d tell her kids bedtime stories: complex ones that continued night after night. Fordham was a storyteller long before she became a novelist.