In an author’s note at the end of her new novel, “AfterMath,” Emily Barth Isler tells us how America’s ongoing massacre of its own children moved her to turn parental trembling into language and story.
“[It] came to me after the massive shooting in San Bernadino, California, in 2015,” she writes. “I had a tiny baby and a four-year-old, and I didn’t know how to process my feelings of helplessness and my fears about the world in which they are growing up. I wanted to be an advocate for change, but I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d use my voice.”
Well, she found a way.
“AfterMath” (Carolrhoda Books) is sensitive, heart-achy and sweet. It is also funny, insightful and ultimately triumphant over lingering grief. It’s about being 12 years old and moving into a new neighborhood and a new school where a horrible mass shooting has imprinted a lingering shadow across daily life.
And it’s about the parents of that 12-year-old girl, Lucy, who are still coping with a devastating loss of their own — a little boy who died of a congenital heart defect, whose loss haunts everyone.
Isner now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children, but she grew up in Columbia and went to Wilde Lake High School. She comes to writing with some pretty good genetic material.
Her mom, Toba Barth, was the guiding hand behind a children’s theater play about the life of Dr. Ben Carson. Her dad, Andy Barth, spent decades reporting for WMAR-TV’s news operation.
Isner went to Wesleyan University, where she acted in school plays with some guy named Lin-Manuel Miranda. Then she went to New York. Let her dad pick up the history from there.
“Emily dove into all the auditions, casting calls, cold readings and improv groups that might lead somewhere. Over time, she appeared as an extra on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ in a recurring supporting role on ‘One Life to Live’ and other shows.”
She married, had a few kids, lived in Brooklyn. But Emily and her husband Jim “wanted to raise their kids as they were raised,” says Andy Barth, “with grass and trees and a barbeque grill, and be able to own a car.” So they moved West.
Emily brought traces of her Wilde Lake High years with her to California, and to “AfterMath.” One of the book’s heroes is a high school math teacher. He sees in 12-year-old Lucy a youngster with great potential if he can help her past her isolation and her grieving.
The teacher’s sense of humanity is based on Eric Ebersole, one of Isler’s old teachers. When Isler taught at Wild Lake, the Maryland Council of Teachers of Mathematics named him “Math Teacher of the Year,” and Wilde Lake’s senior class named him “Teacher of the Year.”
After 35 years in classrooms, Ebersole now serves in Maryland’s House of Delegates, where he represents parts of Howard and Baltimore counties’ 12th legislative district.
As Isler writes in her author’s note at the end of “AfterMath,” the book is a response to the terrible mass school shootings of the past couple of decades.
But it’s only a starting point. What’s it like for those children living in the aftermath of bloodshed? What’s it like for a new kid in town, who’s dealing with her own grieving?
As Lucy ponders the decision to move into a small town still haunted by mass murder, she thinks, “No one prepared me for this. Shouldn’t my parents have anticipated it? Didn’t they think what it would be like for me to be surrounded by survivors who’ve been forever marked by the tragedy — where the names of ghosts come before those of the living?”
“AfterMath” tries to answer that question. It’s a book for parents to read, but it’s for young people, too. American gunplay haunts us every day and shows no signs of disappearing.
“AfterMath” tells us how people are trying to cope once we’re finished counting the dead and burying all those little bodies.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Last weekend's Flower Mart once again demonstrated that there's nothing to fear about downtown Baltimore, writes Michael Olesker.
A junior at Roland Park Country School, Katie Grossman writes about a recent experience that spurred her to take action to fight antisemitism.
At a time when many Jews fear appearing Jewish in public, seeing Judaism depicted correctly onscreen is reassuring, writes Jewish content creator Rabbi Yael Buechler.
Israeli-Americans Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin talked about the pain of losing their 23-year-old son, who was kidnapped and later murdered in the Oct. 7th tragedy.