The world was not necessarily a small place for me as a child, but it was consistent. Big Sunday lunches with cousins playing in the nearby creek together, a small elementary school that had two grades per room, and a swing on Granny’s front porch where I fell in love with stories. The stories she told were passed down through seven or eight generations, all woven with an Appalachian culture of victories and hardships and, as Granny would often remind me, a thread of hope. I suppose those moments were what first sparked my imagination for bigger and vaster places beyond my hemmed-in mountain world. I was a spark waiting for the right flicker to set my imagination alight with even more stories. That is ultimately what *The Secret Garden* is about—the stubborn, almost unreasonable insistence of living things to grow toward the light. And in my sixth-grade year of school, it happened. Now, I’d been a reader for years.…