by anesamiller_wuhi6k | Jul 27, 2015 | Blog, Writing & Publishing
Many thanks to Dawn Brazil, an author and all-round great person, who not only provided the inspiration for this post but also shared it first on her blog, Dawn Brazil’s Brilliant Babbles about Books —
When I first visited Dawn’s website several weeks ago, I was impressed with her use of music: music video clips, playlists, and more. It made me realize what a special source of inspiration music offers for all the arts and for life, overall. We can turn to it any time to refresh our mood or energize our creativity. Songs that we love and melodies we remember from long ago yield rich imagery for many writers.
I took a look back at my novel, Our Orbit, and noticed that music plays an important part in the story.
The first instance comes in the opening scene. It’s just a small point, but I think it helps to reveal the main character. Miriam Winslow is a girl of nine, the youngest child of a close-knit working-class family. Before the plot takes off with Miriam’s forced removal from her home and placement in foster care, I wanted to give a glimpse of how her intimate family members knew her. Rather than spend a lot of space of this, I tried to choose a telling detail. Miriam’s feeling for music helped me out—
(As Miriam’s mother, Emaline, drives through a snowstorm to pick up an older daughter, they bypass the turn for their home at Friendly Village Mobile Home Park.)
Emaline suppressed a sigh. Instead of slowing for the turn, she tapped the horn and called out, “Hold the fort, Friendly!”
“Friendly, holding steady—” sang little Miriam from the back seat, quick to answer the cue in this family routine of forgotten origin, homage to the home where Emaline arrived as a bride half her life ago.
In this short passage, my aim was to show that Miriam is a happy child who enjoys melody and is not shy about sharing her voice. She expresses loyalty to her family by singing a “ditty” they invented for fun before she was born. As the story goes on, readers will learn that Miriam’s older brothers and sister have largely given up such family rituals as they began to deal with mainstream culture at school and among their peers. Miriam is the one who keeps family traditions alive, and she will bring them to her new foster family.
As a motif in our writing, music can play a wonderful role in revealing cultural differences between groups of people. Our Orbit explores these differences on a small, local scale: Miriam’s birth family and her foster family have a great deal in common, and yet they belong to separate groups with limited contact. Both families have lived in the same Ohio county for generations. They are of the same race and similar heritage from northern Europe. And both families are Protestant Christians of weekly church-going habits. Even so, the barriers between them are economic class and educational background.
When Miriam first attends church with her foster family, she is awed by the large building, bright chandeliers, and long hallways for Sunday school classes and meeting rooms. People are more dressed up than she is accustomed to, and all their clothes are new and brightly colored. But it is Miriam’s reaction to the music at this big, new church that makes clear to readers: She grew up on the other side of the tracks.
While Miriam ran up the church steps…she heard a choir strike up a song inside. Sounded like a hundred people! Across the bright lobby…you could see the flash of white-and-gold robes as the singers stepped left, right, back, front, clapping their hands on each move. A rock band with guitars and drums was playing along. Tambourines rattled…
This must be the hugest church in town, Miriam thought, All we have back at Holy Redeemer is one little piano. And even with every person singing, there were only a few dozen voices…
Miriam’s home church was a small, “backwoods” congregation without paid professionals to direct a choir or play instruments. Although she soon comes to appreciate the music at her foster family’s prosperous church, her first impression is mixed. Based on her experience, the “loud, peppy music” seems more like a performance than a call to worship. More like a “dance party” than an occasion to repent one’s sins.
(When Miriam’s foster father, Rick, takes her back to visit her home church, Holy Redeemer Tabernacle, we see the tradition through his eyes.)
[It was] a tiny white-washed church on Key Ridge, south of town… The piano’s tinny chords rang out… There was no choir director and no hymnals, but harmony swelled from two to four parts. The voices were strong for such an elderly crowd—
To Canaan’s land I’m on my way,
Where the soul of man never dies,
And my darkest nights will turn to day,
Where the soul of man never dies…
People embraced. Some laughed, others wiped away tears…
Here is a list of a few songs that played in my head as I worked on Our Orbit. I’ve hunted up those I could find on YouTube to give an impression of how they sound. Some of the hymns are quoted in the book (as in the scene above), while others served more to set a mood for my writing.
“The Soul of Man Never Dies” performed by Tony Rice and Ricky Skaggs. From the DVD “Legends of Flatpicking Guitar.”
“There is a Balm in Gilead” performed by Mahalia Jackson.
“The Stable Song” performed by Gregory Alan Isakov.
And to close on a happy note, here is “Dreams” performed by the Cranberries. This is the favorite song of Miriam’s teenage sister Rachelle. It becomes embarrassing to Rachelle when her friends make fun of the band because they are Irish and “talk funny.” So we see that Rachelle’s musical taste is a bit more open-minded than some of the people around her!
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Visit Dawn Brazil at her blog, Brilliant Babbles About Books.
Connect with Dawn on Facebook, on Twitter, on Goodreads, Pinterest, and on Amazon.
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by anesamiller_wuhi6k | Jun 8, 2015 | Blog, Series: Drawer no more!
The fiction bug bit hard, back when I was employed as a foreign-language teacher and should have been working on my dissertation on Tolstoy. Call it procrastination, but nothing brought me so much delight as a couple of stolen hours with a legal pad and row of needle-sharp pencils.
The short stories and novellas I produced in those early years were mostly unreadable. Surely, the way to prove that one is a writer is to use lots of long and difficult words! Or so I opined at the time. Steeped in academic language, I struggled to keep my sentences down to half a dozen dependent clauses, max.
Ah, the days when every word was precious!
Once I finally climbed down from the ivory tower, it was time to improve my style. I read Alice Munro and began to grasp how to shape a sentence, read Carolyn Chute and sensed the chemistry between characters, read Marquez and grappled with the dream that is an enthralling narrative. Small vignettes and short-shorts proved a good place to hone my craft. Several of those found homes in literary magazines—a thrill for the starry-eyed novice.
The short story form remained my nemesis. To this day, I consider it a lofty pinnacle of prose artistry, and have often said I hope to never write another.
But while ideas continued to swarm, and before I worked up the nerve to tackle a larger project, I labored in the fields of short fiction. I longed make readers pause and see fellow humans in a new way. Don’t people drive us crazy with anger, love, hysteria, amazement, and every possible emotion! I struggled to present characters that would help readers recognize their fellows—our fellows—with a bit more compassion than before.
One of my short stories at this time went by the cumbersome name “Gravitation of the Spheres.” Please be kind and consider it a throwback to my academic career. Other titles came and went, all equally bad. Despite the abstractly philosophical name, the tale was a simple one: a nine-year-old girl loses her parents and is thrust into foster care. A kind family takes her into their home. Connection ensues along with various conflicts. Crisis, resolution, THE END.
But this story gave me no rest. In one draft, I expanded the plot with new episodes. Then cut every expendable word to tighten things up. “Leaner and meaner” was supposed to be better and better, or so minimalists would have us believe. I revised that story so many times, my head began to spin. I had no idea which version might be better than another.
Realizing I needed professional help, I applied to The Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop for my first class in creative writing.
Kenyon College had the advantage of being within a 3-hour drive of my town. More importantly, this is the home of the prestigious literary magazine that launched work by such luminaries as Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, and many others. If Ohio has a literary Mecca, I reasoned, this must be it!
All a-tremble with excitement, I joined a group of 12 acolytes studying with Nancy Zafris, a winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction and a formidable presence. She forced us to realize the power of each word while becoming attached to none (Kill those darlin’s). Awed by Nancy’s skill with tone and structure, I felt no one could better advise me how to transform my troublesome story into the brilliant narrative it was meant to be.
But are they “Gravitating”?
Nancy graciously agreed to read “Gravitation of the Spheres.” She convinced me to reconsider the title and gave some pointers on focusing the plot. But it was her parting remark that helped me keep faith with the story for years to come: “Brush it up and send it out.”
So my strange little tale was in the ballpark of publishable material!
This 4800-word opus acquired the name “Our Orbit.” Not sure why I was determined to stick with cosmic imagery when this theme is not essential to the plot. I’ve gotten a bit of criticism despite the great improvement over previous titles. One widely published author told me that first person (“Our…”) was inappropriate, given that the story is written in third. And a couple of readers said they were misled to expect a sci-fi tale.
I hoped my eventual readers would accept the metaphorical sense of an “orbit.” Then I stumbled upon this same small phrase in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. There it’s used to describe Scout and Jem’s daily routine of play and exploration. This is not a major passage in the classic book, but it seemed so resonant with my story, I wasn’t about to give up the title from then on.
As for sending it out—first, I tried journals at the top of my wish list: Pleiades, Five Points, Prairie Schooner, Agni. Guess what happened! Soon moved on to a slightly humbler tier: Ascent, Spindrift, The Green Hills Literary Lantern. Eventually, I was scraping the bottom of the litmag barrel: Dodohebdo, DoTell Motel, Tales from the Hip, and FicLines. (Not their real names!) As discouragement set in, it was back to the legal pad many times over. For the next eight years, I sent the story to at least 50 different magazines, several of them more than once.
“No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” —a favorite saying from Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men and professor in the University of Idaho creative writing program
Luckily for my flagging spirits, I succeeded in publishing other stories during this time—even one at The Kenyon Review. So what was the problem with “Our Orbit”?
No other story of mine garnered so many comments from editors scribbled at the bottom of rejection slips. One apologized for keeping “Our Orbit” on his desk for 8 months. He felt it wasn’t “ripe for acceptance” but couldn’t quite bear to reject it either. He found his mind “cycling back to it.”
At least half a dozen editors wrote that the story needed further development. Independently, several agreed that it could—even should—be expanded.
It had the makings of a fine novel.
This was not something I wanted to hear. Already at work on a novel, I had gained insight on the time and effort required for such a project. “Our Orbit,” by contrast, was just a practice piece. Not bad, but no major opus. Something to get off my desk and onto my publication list—not a sinkhole for endless tinkering, a baby bird demanding food to grow.
But art is like a higher power. Not unlike God, it “disposes,” regardless of what we humans propose.
Soon enough, I had finished two other novels. With no agent or publisher in sight, discouragement set in hard this time. Fiction was a cruel master. I tried writing essays and poetry: anything to keep up my skill with words. Then, my husband was invited to apply for a job in the Pacific Northwest, 2000 miles from our home. This opened an opportunity for me to enter an MFA program in creative writing.
One more way to keep working, to stop myself from giving up.
So in August 2005, we were preparing to relocate across country. In our Ohio backyard one warm night, I wondered how I would get along without my garden. I looked up at the sky, but didn’t focus on the stars until I realized that they were falling. It was the Perseiad meteor shower that comes every year in late summer.
What are they, really?
Beautiful lines of light streaked the sky. And with them, a thought popped into my head. A perfect scene for “Our Orbit”: My fictional family hurries outside to see the meteors. The children ask questions…parents try to explain so the little ones can understand.
So many falling stars—is it an omen, or a mere fact of nature?
This unfolded into a scene for Our Orbit the novel. Same plot as the story, but with more people, more fully fleshed characters interacting in more complex ways. It became my thesis in the MFA program at the University of Idaho. It took 5 years to create a complete draft. I was convinced it would become my first mainstream, publishable novel. For 2 more years, I would search for an agent—would give up, try again, and give up again.
“Now, Our Orbit will be re-issued by Sibylline Press in 2025.”
Now, Our Orbit will be re-issued by Booktrope Publishing on June 23, 2015.
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Thank you so much for visiting my blog today! Feel free to nose about the website and let me know if you like what you see, or if you have suggestions. You can reach me by leaving a comment in the box below or by clicking the Contact link at upper right (or just click here). Consider subscribing to my blog or newsletter. Stop by again soon!
(When Miriam’s foster father, Rick, takes her back to visit her home church, Holy Redeemer Tabernacle, we see the tradition through his eyes.)
