By Chloe Cramutola
While 28-year-old Ciera Burch writes books for middle school students professionally, she has dozens of fantasy-filled notebooks from her own years in middle school.
She would share these notebooks with her friends at the lunch table, and they would read her work in class. They left little notes to talk about when they all met up again.
Born in South Jersey, Burch used the Pine Barrens as an inspiration for many of her novels.
“It wasn’t until later in college when I was like, ‘Oh, I can actually do this as a job and not just a hobby,’” she said. “And I really started working towards that, but I’ve always been a big reader and writer. It’s my favorite thing to do.”
Her new novel, “Camp Twisted Pine,” on sale Sept. 17, is inspired by a week-long middle school trip to the Pine Barrens. Burch and her classmates stayed at a campground called Mount Misery, where she decided the name was the scariest thing about the place.
“I’m a big suburb-city girl, and I wasn’t really into the woods because it just wasn’t a place that I explored often,” she said.
“Camp Twisted Pine” follows Naomi, an 11-year-old girl who can relate to Burch. The protagonist avoids the woods and prefers the bird and beetle facts written in her books. But with her parents preparing for a divorce, Naomi and her younger twin brothers are sent to summer camp to piece things together.
In addition to real-life bugs and animals, another creature—the Jersey Devil—roams the campgrounds, abducting kids and forcing Naomi to venture forth and save everyone.
Burch said many of the younger characters are inspired from girls she knew when she was younger, and she imagines what her current friends would have been like when they were kids. She thinks about how children figure things out on their own, and sometimes, her characters come to her “fully formed.”
“They just sort of walk into my head and won’t leave me alone until I write them down,” Burch said. “Just seeing how they interact with one another and play off of each other is one of my favorite parts of writing, because it forms so much of the plot that I wasn’t expecting.”
When Naomi meets nine girls at camp, she is drawn to her cabin mate, Jackie, in particular. Jackie is blunt and rebellious, and hard of hearing, so the girls build a bond through sign language lessons. Burch said this helps Naomi come out of her shell in a way she is not expecting.
“Their [relationship] is a very sweet, innocent crush like any other, and it was important for me to write, especially with middle grade,” she said. “I think having that representation, like ‘Oh, some girls get crushes on other girls’ is normal, and you get to see it normalized now in something you’re reading and hopefully enjoying.”
Burch described characters as a reader’s lens into the fictional world. It is how the audience forms opinions about other characters and events in the world, whether it’s more fantasy or more realistic.
She also believes characters allow people to see themselves in a book or to see an opposite point of view. That is why it was important for Burch to craft kids with diverse backgrounds in her books, and to push them into nature especially. It was also important for her to have Naomi realize that being outside can be both freeing and beautiful.
“It can be really disheartening to not see someone that looks like you or thinks like you, or has a family like you, and so I really wanted to give the reading experience that I wanted as a kid to other kids,” she said. “I think it’s just a pivotal age where so much happens, and there are so many adults and people in your life that talk down to you or don’t respect that age because, well, you’re kids. But there’s so much to explore, and you’re grappling with so many things.”
In addition to “Camp Twisted Pine,” Burch has also written “Finch House” and “Something Kindred,” novels that delve more into generational trauma.
“Finch House” is also set in New Jersey, and it is about a girl who has to find her missing grandfather in a haunted house. Burch said it was inspired by the Victorian houses in Haddonfield and Cape May. “Something Kindred” is about another girl who moves to rural Maryland to care for her dying, estranged grandmother. This started out as Burch’s school thesis, and it morphed into something more complex—a dive into familial relationships and grief.
Burch has always liked horror and fantastical stories, so with her new novel, she wanted to focus on the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil, explaining how quintessential they are to New Jersey and its lore.
“With ‘Camp Twisted Pine,’ whether you like the outdoors, whether you went to summer camp or not, at its core you’ve got friendship and making choices that seem hard but are necessary,” she said. “And it’s a little bit spooky and that’s fun especially since fall is coming… I had a lot of fun writing it.”
