Where do ideas come from?

Beaver Bourget's Lobster Boat, The Odyssey, Quaker Point, Maine - photograph by MC Rogers

I mentioned my book Rubinrotes Herz, eisblaue see in my first post.  The English title is Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea.  It hasn't been published in English (yet), but high hopes abound in that area.  Why has it been published in Germany and not here, in the U.S.A.?  Because publishing works that way, sometimes.  The short version is that my agency has international contacts, and one such contact saw the manuscript, took it to Europe, and a wonderful German publishing house, which specializes in books about the sea and seaside communities and environments picked it up.  I have been fortunate to work with the most wonderful professionals during this process.  At any rate, the book is out, and so is an audio tape, and I feel as if I've struck gold.  It's all dizzying and out-of-body and fabulous.  I love that something I made up, found a voice for, and wrote down has found its way into the world. 

But I wanted to talk about how things happen.  How things begin.  How something tiny can turn into a creative work that keeps on ticking until the story is told.  Did I sit down and conjure up a voice?  Did the voice come to me in a dream?  Did my eleven-year old narrator, Florine Gilham, come to me and say, "Write my story?"  Well, no, not really.  I didn't even know she existed until a dear friend, who was starring on stage in the one-woman show Shirley Valentine asked me to be her assistant. The show can be grueling for the actress, and I was there as prop, make-up, and general backstage calming-down buddy, kind of like the post horse that accompanies the thoroughbred to the starting gate.  Well, we all know what the thoroughbred does, but what happens to the post horse after her plod to the gate? 

In my case, I was reading a local newspaper, glancing at the letters to the editor.  One such letter was written by a woman who was distraught because someone had stolen a lawn ornament from the lawn of a friend.  In perfect Maine Coastal dialect, this friend described in great detail what the ornament had meant to her friend and to that friend's family.  The lawn ornament stolen in question was one of the seven dwarfs.  Sneezy, as a matter of fact.  Trying to explain here why this combination of elements struck me so hysterically that I dropped the newspaper and guffawed is useless.  But I got the idea to write about this family, not the woman who had written the letter.  I wanted to tell the story of this family's despair and grief regarding the unfortunate Sneezy's loss.  When I sat down to type, this woman's voice came into my head loud as thunder and twice as brash.  I immediately named her Florine.  And for over seventy-two pages, Florine unfolded her life story as an adult living with her family in a trailer by the side of the road.  The voice never wavered.  It was like sitting down to tea with a really good friend, every time I sat down to type.

Later, in a writing group, one of the members questioned Florine's relationship with one of her family members, which set me to writing the backstory, to be added to what was now obviously a novella.  The backstory became Rubinrotes herz, eisblaue see, or Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea.

Florine's voice was so strong, so a part of my imagination, that I could pick up her story at any point and she would almost say, "Now, where were we?"  Or, other times, when I didn't feel like writing, I manifested her presence standing in front of me with an exasperated look on her face that signaled to me that she didn't have all day, for chrissake, get cracking.  So I did, and her story got told, and now it's being sold and happily, pretty well accepted.  In German, at least.

Voices like Florine's just don't come around that often.  And often, they are not the voices you wish would come around.  I wanted, for instance, to finish the soft-Irish-accented trilogy that I'd started years before.  It was romantic, everyone was pretty, and rock and roll was the theme.  In comparison, Florine's adult speaking voice (yes, I hear that most definitely) is a bit crowish and a little loud.  Her childhood voice is often pugnacious and stubborn.  But here's the important thing.  ANY voice is a gift.  Any voice that strong, that insistent, has something to say, and the writer should damn well listen to it.  Let her, or him, tell their story.  Let you, as the author, shape it, mold it, and mark it with a 'P'.  It could be a wonderful collaboration and partnership. 

I don't know if Sneezy the dwarf was ever returned to his place on the lawn.  I don't even know if the lawn was in front of a trailer.  What I do know is, I got a story out of it.  And that story continues to unfold.  It's a work in progress.  It's also magic, or pretty darn close to it.  Listen.  Who wants out of your imagination and on to the page?  You might be surprised.  Let it happen.       

The Adventure Continues...

My world this morning has narrowed to sitting on a small hill beside a twenty-foot long, five-foot wide pond down in a draw, in the middle of a grove of tall sturdy cottonwoods.  I am watching my dog chase frogs and jump for giant, prairie-grass fed grasshoppers.  Rua is an eight-year old Cairn terrier that looks like a Schnauzer, thanks to a surprising haircut.  To be fair, the groomer I called told me that she had never done a Cairn terrier, but I was desperate and dropped her off, anyway.  She looks downright odd, but she's happy and cool.  She trots along the mucky bottom of the shallow water from one bank to the other.  Her bushy tail slaps from side to side whenever something moves close by.  She has forgotten that I exist.  Sitting in this shade, listening to cicadas and birds battle it out in the tree crowns above makes me happy.  Rua and I have found a small, quiet place away from the big-sky sun that South Dakota foists upon all of its critters, two- and four-legged, in August.  And July.  And maybe September.  I don't know yet, but I will find out.  No one's talking about it.  They do talk about the upcoming winter.  They say, "Wait until winter."  I say, "I'm from Maine.  I know what winter is."  They shake their heads.  "No, you don't," they say.

I moved to this small town in western South Dakota in June.  I've been here about two months.  I moved here for love, at a stage in my life when I had put most thoughts of that away in a bureau drawer along with several wrinkled perfumed scarves I've acquired through the years.  (The purple one I bought in Chinatown, San Francisco, sometime in the 90s; the sky-blue scarf with the stars was given to me by three beloved friends who believe in me; the fuchsia scarf came from another friend who has become a sister of the heart; a peony-stamped navy-blue and pink scarf arrived tucked around a paper-thin china cup in an exquisite basket.)  All of my scarves have a story, as do all things worth keeping.  I tucked true love amongst them, and then I pulled it out when someone unexpected wrapped himself around my heart.

I lived in Maine, and so did Bob, for eighteen years.  He lived within ten miles of me, and we frequented Portland, Maine on a daily basis, but in separate parts of the city.  When we met, two things happened.  I thought, uh oh.  And I heard music.  I loved where I lived.  But Bob, a native South Dakotan and an artist, was headed back to Belle Fourche, a small town that can boast that it is the geographic center of the nation, if the coordinates for Alaska and Hawaii are included.  Belle has a sort of dusty, cattle-trodden, rakish past (the Sundance Kid once robbed a bank here).  Bob's gallery is located in Belle, and I visited it twice before deciding to join him here. Once, last summer during early July, and then again in February, when the winter must have been napping because it wasn't horrible.  Before I visited, Bob warned me that some people find western South Dakota's space and sky overwhelming, flat, even uninteresting.  I am not one of those people.  The landscape curves and dips and rises into the Black Hills, and takes in the surrounding buttes, gulches, and canyons.  The sky fills whatever space is left to fill.

Oh, that symphony of a prairie sky!  If I stand in one spot and turn 360 degrees, each part of the overhead has something different to offer the eye.  Thunderheads rear their cupcake clouds over the Black Hills, even as a Western sunset fades out in a blaze of glory.  a gentle blue sky sets north, while puffy, name-your-creature cotton balls dot the azure expanse to the south.  I've also seen black and boiling storms roiling at me with serious intent.  Weather here is not to be taken lightly.  Know your wind direction, and move accordingly.

August here is the kind of hot that hits your face when you open the oven door on a pan of cookies.  That's why I'm particularly grateful to have discovered this shadowy place with its little splash of water.  Sitting here watching Rua, who used to have a tree-sheltered backyard to lounge in, reminds me of childhood summers, when I had nothing to do but drink in perfumed fodder for my imagination.  That imagination is a powerful thing, and when it's working full tilt, I'm as fully me as Rua is chasing amphibians and bugs. 

I'm so homesick for my East and for my friends and family that I ache for them.  But I didn't come here bumping along a rutted dirt road like an anxious mail-order bride.  I came because I wanted to come.  Also, airplanes and rental cars can be had, if need be.  Right now, life is good.  I have a novel out in Germany that has been received well.  The title is Rubinrotes herz eisblaue see - Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea.  I'm in love with a fascinating man.  South Dakota is not a place I thought I would ever live, or even thought about that much, but I'm warming to its quirky weather and its good and Badlands.  As Bob says of us, "The adventure continues."