Best-selling Author Talks Apples in Excelsior

“Customers just wanted an unblemished and beautiful apple,” said best-selling author Theresa Weir.

Weir spoke last week at the 318 Cafe in Excelsior for October’s Fireside Writers Series sponsored by . Weir, who also writes suspense novels under the name Anne Frasier, spoke about her newest book, The Orchard.

Released last month, The Orchard is her first nonfiction work—a memoir about her experiences on an apple orchard after marrying an apple farmer at the age of 21.

 “The farm itself, though beautiful and alive, began to reveal dark secrets,” Weir told the audience. “I was told, ‘don’t swim in the pond. Don’t wade in puddles. Don’t walk in the orchard at certain times.’ I finally figured out that it was because of the pesticide contamination.”

The use of pesticides turned out to have negative implications. Although Weir did want to expose pesticide use on farms, she did not write the book for the purpose of activism. She just felt that she had an obligation to tell her story.

It is a story that shows the “path the human spirit takes when confronted with danger and challenge,” Weir said.

This is a concept she believes everyone can identify with personally. It is gratifying, Weir said, when people from all different walks of life tell her that they can relate to her true story. But the most rewarding has been the reaction from farm wives, who have sent her e-mails thanking her for revealing what they feel unable to talk about themselves. Weir had been concerned about how farmers would react to the book.

She stressed that no one would admit to using pesticides on the apple farm, but she also cautioned against simply castigating farmers.

“The market dictates what kind of crops the famer can raise and how they’re raised,” Weir said. “I think we expect perfection in everything and no one person is really strong enough to stand up to that.”

As an outsider to farming, she was painfully aware that she was not a part of that world and never truly would be. Although there were times with her husband and two children that she described as “idyllic,” Weir also felt isolated.

That’s when she began to write.

Weir never went to college for writing, but she studied books, mailed manuscripts to publishers and revised. Eventually she was published and has now been publishing books for 25 years. Yet The Orchard was almost not published. Her agent of 20 years was convinced that her book would not sell. It then took her a year and a half after writing the book to find an agent willing to take it.

The book’s ensuing success has both stunned and thrilled Weir. She had not expected the details of her life to be more horrifying than the fiction she has written.

To further reduce pesticide use, Weir said that education is the key.

“We might have been breathing poison and eating poison,” Weir said, “but so was the rest of the country. They just didn’t know it.”