Byron Graves believes in writing what you know. Their 2023 debut novel Rez Ball focused on high school basketball, drawing from Graves’ experience playing while growing up on the Red Lake Nation in Northern Minnesota.
They knew their next book would focus on skateboarding, something Graves was a fan of but had never tried on their own.
So, Graves bought a skateboard and learned how to do it.
In a recent What We’re Reading interview, Graves recounted, “I would wait until it was midnight and I would go skate in empty 7-Eleven parking lots because I was embarrassed if I fell. So, I spent time just getting comfortable on the board. And then the next thing I knew, I was at a skate park, and I had my headphones on, and it was a beautiful sunny day, and I was figuring out how to groove around in a bowl.”
Graves’ new novel is Medicine Wheels--the story of Bryce Fairbanks, an Ojibwe teen whose mother struggles to come to terms with the death of Bryce’s father and her place in the world. Meanwhile, his grandpa is dying of cancer, and Bryce has just spent the last few years at a school where he doesn’t feel he belongs.
Things take a turn for the worse as Bryce and his mother return to Wolf Creek Reservation where his mother breaks her probation and is sent to jail. Luckily, Bryce is taken in by his grandma and is reunited with his cherished childhood friends.
Bryce visits the local skate park and remembers that his father was talented skateboarder. He is inspired to learn how to skate and his friends Robbie and Mikayla teach and support him and just maybe Bryce can become good enough to compete in the skateboarding competition at the end of the summer.
Graves summed up Medicine Wheels, “It's really a lot about this character trying to find himself in this summer and finding friends and family and skateboarding and how can he go from this dark, sad, lonely place to feeling accepted and like he has somewhere that he belongs.”
With Bryce having to navigate so many painful events in his life, Graves used this to help give their younger readers a model for their own lives, something they wished they could have had as a teenager.
They explained, “So I'm always trying to plant these seeds for my young readers in their real life that they can take from the book and be like, ‘I was reading that book, and this character had this similar thing happen that happened to me. And this is what they took from it. This is how that tragedy wasn't in vain.’ So I'm always trying to hope that my young readers not only are entertained and have a good time with the book but walk away maybe with some lessons.”
For more information on Byron Graves and their work, visit their website.
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