Focus on Author Amanda West Lewis

Focus on Author Amanda West Lewis - theHumm August 2023

By John Pigeau

Focus. Click. Wind. opens with a tense, tumultuous, claustrophobic scene: a student protest of the Vietnam War at Columbia University. It’s 1968, and we see the action through the eyes — and camera lens — of seventeen-year-old Billie Taylor, an aspiring photojournalist who is there with her college boyfriend because she needs to be a part of it.

As the police, armed with pounding boots, heavy clubs and “snarling eyes,” close in on the roomful of peaceful protestors, Billie knows her “camera is her weapon, not her fists.” Armed with her Rolleiflex camera, she’s intent on capturing images of “the enemy” — in this case, the “blue fury” of uniforms and badges marching up the staircase.

The doors burst open, violence erupts, and Billie is able to capture a few images of the chaos before she’s pulled under a table to safety — but just like that, bruised and breathless and shaken, she finds herself drawn into the perilous war at home. From that moment on, she becomes obsessed with making a difference through activism. Through documenting truth.

The opening scene in Amanda West Lewis’s latest YA novel Focus. Click. Wind. is intense and exhilarating, but is the book a thriller? Well, in part, yes. It’s deftly crafted, and the prose is propulsive and quick-paced. After Billie meets some potentially dangerous activists in Toronto, it’s clear that their activities come at great risk. Every secret meeting she attends pulses with tension. Every task she agrees to take on comes with uncertainty and risk. She keeps hearing about or uncovering alarming new atrocities by the day. And it’s all hush-hush and fear-inducing, because someone is always watching.

But Billie is passionate and simmering with youthful rage. She’s feisty and stubborn, but is she willing to risk her life to stop an unjust war? At seventeen, she’s understandably confused and conflicted about a great many things: the war in Vietnam and the killing of Vietnamese people, but also the war on people back home — the poor, the Blacks, and every draft-age person in the US. Billie is clever and compassionate, but still young and at times naïve. She’s figuring things out in a time of great turmoil, which genuinely makes West Lewis’s novel part coming-of-age story as well.

Focus. Click. Wind. is captivating, shrewd and sophisticated — a difficult story masterfully told.

Stylistically, the novel is so well-written it makes for a brisk, easy read. However, the book wasn’t easy for West Lewis to write, she says, because she had to do a fair amount of soul searching.

“I had to go back into my own teenage passion and fall in love with my confused and conflicted self,” she explains.

“While the book is not autobiographical in any sense of the word,” she says, “there are many elements from my own history that I have incorporated into the story.”

For instance, like Billie, West Lewis grew up in New York City. And later “I became a teenager in a house on Lowther Avenue in Toronto, where my mother took in drafters,” as Billie’s mother does in the book. But “I certainly wasn’t involved with any violent revolutionary groups,” West Lewis hastens to add. In the novel, Billie develops relationships with some dangerous activists.

There are other similarities, too. More philosophical, perhaps.

“I think that the political, social and economic times that you grow up in shape your outlook,” West Lewis reflects. “I grew up during the vibrant turmoil of the late sixties and early seventies, so of course it had a profound effect on who I have become.”

“Over the last few years,” she adds, “I have seen a similar period of foment and questioning. Young people are struggling to make sense of horrific wars, climate catastrophe and social and sexual upheaval. The parallels to me are quite stunning. Because of this, I feel a solidarity with today’s young adults.”

In her opinion, those young adults are very smart. “I believe wholeheartedly in the moral compass of young people,” she says.

The novel is, therefore, never condescending — especially in its clear-eyed depiction of many of the appalling realities of the time: the killing of countless innocent Vietnamese people, the inhumane use of Agent Orange, police brutality, non-stop government lies, American soldiers returning home in body bags, without limbs, or severely traumatized — and so on.

“Do I think YA readers are up to this reality? Yes, definitely and more,” West Lewis says. “I think the worst thing we can do is to try and sugarcoat the truth. We owe it to them to be open and as honest as possible.”

When Billie starts spending more time with underground political protesters at Rochdale College, one of those people, Martin, says to her: “Photographs change people’s minds. They show the truth. They make a difference.” And this rings true to Billie. She’s confronted by a line from Hamlet: “When our actions do not, our fears do make us traitors.” Then she feels compelled to make a difference. And eventually, she does.

“I think the ‘need to make a difference’ is what can carry us through hard times,” says West Lewis. “It can give us purpose. It can help us to survive the chaos around us. I would love young readers to know that making a difference, whatever that means to them, isn’t just about picking a cause. It’s about what is in your heart, as a human in society. It’s about examining your heart and finding what is unique to you. It’s about the artist within. I would love anyone who reads the book to discover that person or rekindle that passion.”

I asked Amanda West Lewis what she would like readers to take away from Billie’s feelings of growing anger and impatience about the carnage of war.

“I’d like a young person who reads this book to feel that their feelings are validated,” she said. “I’d like readers, young and old, to think about their responses to the world around them. If we can change our thoughts, we can change the world. And, as we all know, it desperately needs changing right now.”

West Lewis is “pretty passionate” about Focus. Click. Wind., and thrilled to be doing a book tour where she will be going to bookstores and doing readings. On Thursday, August 10 at 7pm, her tour stops at The Book Nook in Perth.

“I’d love to have people, young and old, come and join in the discussion,” she says. “I’m hoping we’ll have Question and Answer sessions with people who lived through the sixties, and people who are trying to live through the twenty-twenties. I can’t think of anything more exciting.”

Focus. Click. Wind. is available at an independent bookstore near you, and wherever fine books are sold.

Kristi Bird — Taking Flight - theHumm August 2023

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Focus on Author Amanda West Lewis - theHumm August 2023