With ‘The Good Braider,’ local author Terry Farish offers a poetic retelling of a young refugee’s struggles in Maine.

Local author Terry Farish has incorporated her love of multicultural literature and her experiences with Sudanese refugees into a compelling story of one young girl’s struggles to adjust to life in Portland, Maine. Farish’s new novel, “The Good Braider,” will be published by Marshall Cavendish this spring.

The book, written in the form of free verse poetry, tells the story of young Sudanese refugee Viola’s coming of age. As her family flees from Sudan to Cairo to Maine, Viola attempts to navigate these changes from within the local southern Sudanese community. The freedom of the United States—where short skirts, tattoos and dating are normal for young girls—puts Viola into conflict with her traditional mother, who is simultaneously attempting to navigate the same world.

Farish is an author of picture books, novels and magazine stories aimed at children and young adults. The Portsmouth resident is also coordinator of the literacy program at the N.H. Humanities Council. She said the process of writing this novel began when she was working as a non-fiction writing professor at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland. There, she befriended a Sudanese family and became immersed in the southern Sudanese community.

“Through this family, I was kind of welcomed into this larger community of south Sudanese in Portland,” Farish said. “It was very much like a documentary project in the beginning. I was hanging out with teenage girls, cooking with them, becoming part of the texture of their daily lives. This went on for a couple of months. I took notes, recorded oral histories, and followed their lives almost from the time they came to Portland up until one of the girls graduated from Portland High.”

Speaking with Sudanese parents and elders, Farish soon came to recognize the huge generational divide that exists within the refugee community. She said Sudanese elders are very important in their culture and strive to maintain their African roots and way of life within America’s borders. But teenagers are attracted to the cultural freedom they believe American young people enjoy, especially girls.

This cultural divide informs many of the conflicts in “The Good Braider,” as Viola struggles to hold on to what’s important from her life in Africa while adapting to a new way of life in America.

“There is a constant pull from home and a pull from America, and I think that the Sudanese young people grow up, really, with their feet in two cultures,” Farish said.

She believes this necessary balance gives refugees remarkable adaptation skills. Once someone learns how to live in two cultures at once, she said, they are strong and skilled enough to adapt to any situation.

Farish spent significant time researching the war in Sudan. She said she didn’t feel comfortable writing a single scene in her novel until she felt she knew enough about the war to accurately capture it on the page.

When it came time to write “The Good Braider,” Farish was committed to being a truth seeker and, by extension, a truth teller. She had amassed a collection of oral histories of people who “stunned (her) with their courage and their endurance,” and she had to figure out what to do with all the material. It was a struggle to maintain the authenticity of the story she wanted to tell.

“As a novelist, I was very drawn to recreate, to tell the story of a young woman who comes to America from Sudan,” Farish said. “I think that I was mostly drawn to it because I was so anxious to understand myself, and in the process of understanding myself, to paint a picture … I was looking for the truth of what it’s like to have been in south Sudan and to be forced to leave and to make one’s home in America (in a) completely opposite culture.”

As Farish began editing and rewriting her novel, she grew committed to turning the piece into her own creative work. Her first draft was completely chronological, which is not true of the final product. Farish said she wanted to immerse readers in the story rather than tell it from beginning to end.

The novel establishes Viola’s living situation with her mother in Portland before going back to revisit the war in Sudan and the family’s struggle to escape. From there, the story progresses to Cairo and then Portland. Farish opted to “knit” pieces of the back story into the present situation to bring more life to the novel.

Farish decided to write in the form of free verse poetry after reading several other novels in verse that she admired. The style has become popular in recent years, especially in young adult literature.

“As a fiction writer, I often experiment with scenes in poetry because poetry, to me, is a kind of writing that enables me to focus on the individuality of a person, on the heart and the specifics of a scene,” Farish said. “Poetry is a way for me to really get to the core of a truth or the core of an emotion.”

Farish said her primary goal for the novel is to get people thinking about different cultures and the connections that can be made between Americans and the refugees who come here. She is working with a group of writers to create a Web page called New Neighbors. They conduct workshops around the country to build bridges between cultures.

In the process of talking about the novel, Farish is learning that many Americans are already connected to other cultures in surprising ways.

“What interests me most is to listen and to understand how they are engaged with contemporary issues already,” she said. “It feels like Americans are attuned to other cultures. Despite the distance, we have a deep connectedness to faraway cultures.”

“The Good Braider” is set to be released nationally on May 1. For more information, visit www.terryfarish.com.