Foreword
Candace Nadon
It is easy to forget how complicated childhood is, just how challenging it is to forge an identity and chart a course towards adulthood, especially in opposition to societal, cultural, and familial forces. The difficulties inherent in the maturation of the self are not confined to adolescence, as is often thought. Rather, they are present throughout childhood and are particularly evident in the liminal space where the ten-year-old exists. No longer a little kid, but not yet a teenager or even a tween, a ten-year-old is caught in a space between, where the competing desires for closeness with the family and independence from it are tangled in an ever-shifting continuum and where a young person acutely feels the injustice of not being believed and understood for who they are.
Ten-year-old Noah finds himself in just this space when Being Noah begins. Noah is in 4th grade at a Denver-area Montessori School. He loves video games and baseball. He’s a good student and loves visiting his grandmother in Paonia, on the Western Slope of Colorado, where he gets to spend all day outdoors and play with his grandmother’s horses. Noah’s twelve-year-old brother, Sean, is on the Autism Spectrum. He’s easily agitated by unfamiliar settings and any situation where there is, as Noah tells us, “noise and chaos.” Sean has a service dog, a chocolate lab named Ozzie, who goes everywhere with him and helps to calm him.
Noah loves his brother, and like any little brother, helps him and teases him in equal measure. But Sean’s developmental disability is also tough for Noah. Because Sean needs special care, Noah often feels Sean gets more attention from their parents, teachers, and friends, and because the manifestations of Sean’s disability sometimes lead to outbursts, Noah is often disappointed by the disruption of their family’s routine. And Noah wishes he could have a puppy all his own, too. But he knows his parents don’t have the bandwidth for another animal in the household.
Noah has another struggle, though, one more profound than the heartbreak of feeling neglected by his overworked and stressed parents. Noah has an ability beyond his brother’s brilliant mathematical mind and understanding of complex technological systems.
Noah can see things before they happen, leaving his body to watch events unfold in front of him.
He’s also able to communicate with animals, like Ozzie, who help him act on his prescience.
The problem isn’t Noah’s gift, which over and over Noah uses to help people—rather, the problem is that no one, not Sean, not his mother, not even his beloved grandmother, believes him, even when Noah’s sight keeps the people he loves from harm. They think Noah’s actions to help them are coincidental, and worse, sometimes meddlesome, which makes Noah feel all the more misunderstood.
Being Noah is the story of Noah’s journey towards believing in his gift, even when others don’t. It is the story of Noah wrestling with loving and resenting his brother. And above all, it is the story of Noah learning that he is exactly who he is supposed to be.
I met Margaret Hardy, or Cheryl, as she preferred to be called, in the summer of 2016, her first semester in Western Colorado University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. I team-taught the introductory fiction craft class that July with Russell Davis, the then Fiction Concentration Director, and when Cheryl walked into the classroom with her service dog, a sweet Border Collie named Jetta, her presence calmed the first-day anxiety swirling around the room.
Cheryl was quiet, but observant. She was considerably older than the other students in her cohort and had less writing experience, but she persevered, ever-attentive and willing to challenge herself, Jetta always by her side, her talisman and protector. At the end of the two-week residency, Cheryl had already grown as a writer, and the rest of us, learning from her example, had learned about the quiet compassion that makes space for creative risk taking.
I was given the opportunity to advise Cheryl on her thesis, the project that became the novel Being Noah. Cheryl wanted to write a story about a boy who was misunderstood, a boy whose path towards growing up included teaching others as much as it included his own journey towards self-knowledge. She wanted to write a story that acknowledged the spiritual world as valid as the visceral one, and I’ll admit I was as skeptical as Noah’s parents at first, not sure such a book would appeal to young readers, thinking they would find the story difficult to relate to.
How wrong I was.
As Cheryl’s book took shape, I found myself captivated by Noah and his world, and as Cheryl continued to send me chapters, I became more and more convinced by Noah’s gift—and more and more convinced that this was a story that young readers would not only love, but would understand with the kind of knowing Wordsworth writes of in “Intimations of Immortality”—the “glory and the freshness of a dream” of the world just beyond our own that we ignore to our own detriment.
When I read the final chapters, I turned from my computer screen and cried, feeling as though I’d been privy to Noah and Cheryl’s journey towards believing in themselves, believing in their gifts, and believing in the stories they had to offer us.
Cheryl Hardy lost her battle with cancer and passed away on June 17, 2019 in hospice care in Grand Junction, CO, not long after she finished the final edits for Being Noah. She was awarded her degree posthumously in July of 2019, with her daughter and granddaughter in attendance at the graduation ceremony. Her granddaughter, who is named after her grandmother, read a portion of Being Noah earlier that day during the graduating student thesis readings. As her granddaughter read the final chapter of Being Noah to a rapt audience of Western faculty, students, and the students’ family and friends, I felt the power in Cheryl’s words yet again.
It was Cheryl’s hope to have Being Noah published, and I am sorry she is not able to hold a copy in her own hands. I hope that she knows that her book will reach young people and adults alike. I hope she knows that Being Noah is a book for all of us who find ourselves between knowing and not knowing and between doubting ourselves and believing in ourselves. Being Noah is a book about understanding that we are already who we need to be, the message Cheryl shared with all who knew her, the same message she lived every day.