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| Author Lenore Hart |
And what an interview! In answer to my questions, Lenore has shared a trove of great information giving novelists of every stripe and genre and student writers a primer on how to tackle writing historically based fiction. And every visitor who leaves a comment on this interview will be registered to win a signed copy of The Raven's Bride.
Before we get to the interview, here's some brief professional background on Lenore Hart:
Lenore Hart is a fifth-generation Floridian, holds a BA from the University of Central Florida, an MSLS from Florida State, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. She has been a grant recipient and writer in residence for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Florida Fine Arts Council, and a Visiting Writer at Flagler College in St. Augustine. She is also a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts at Sweetbriar College, and was writer in residence at The New College of Florida in Sarasota in 2005. She has served as the Visiting Writer at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and also at Elizabethtown College, and also teaches in the graduate writing program at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, which is where I met Lenore. She was my instructor in the killer class of all killer graduate classes, Fiction Foundations.
Welcome to Scrivengale, Lenore!
How did you decide where to start The Raven's Bride and on its frame-story structure? Well, I could’ve started almost anywhere, except usually when you’re writing an adult novel you don’t want to open chronologically starting from early childhood, as that makes it seem more like a kid’s book. I needed to cover that period though, so I opted for more of a flashback approach. My main concern was to somehow make the story of their financially impoverished, short, and in some ways tragic lives also be entertaining and funny and occasionally joyous. I wanted the finished novel to have a hopeful feel, not end on a tragic note. Quite a challenge, considering the real life facts. But there were positive facts also. They clearly loved each other very much. They did have some fun at times! I hit upon the idea of a reverse Orpheus/Eurydice tale, in which the wife, Virginia – who up till then had played more of a student/muse role – took the lead and came back to escort Poe to the “underworld,” instead of vice versa. So that comprises my opening and closing frames.
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| Hart's newest book |
Oh yes. There is of course the ghost story element – not only of the opening and closing frames mentioned above, but also throughout the novel. I portray Virginia as somewhat sensitive to the presence of the dead, from an early age. Later when the ghost of her brother Henry visits her, it is both a continuation of that theme and a foreshadowing of her own approaching mortality – but also a glimpse of the future and a nudging of hope and the existence of a world beyond the often-harsh one she is living in.
The language of the book (for one set in the early to mid-nineteenth century) was so accessible compared to other works written in a comparable time period. How did decide and then cultivate the style and cadence to your prose for this book? I used her voice, first of all, to narrate, and so had to take care not to make her sound like some 19th century scholar. She had to sound believable as a young woman and as a person of that era and of her experience and education level. Sometimes writers make a common mistake of thinking they must cram as much as possible of their historical research on a time period into a novel. They seem to forget they’re writing fiction and instead turn out something closer to a nonfiction history or an extended philosophical essay. The novelist’s job is not to lecture on the past, but rather to suggest with carefully selected details and then recreate place, people, and events in a series of vivid and well-integrated SCENES. Summary plays a part but is usually best kept to a minimum. Oddly enough, when a writer is true to the facts and also good at characterization and plot, it makes the past much more immediate and vivid and engrossing and REAL to a reader than even the most copiously detailed, date-pocked history text!
Was "Muddy," Virginia’s name for her mother, your invention or drawn from research? It was what they called her – Virginia and Poe. She was a surrogate mother to him, as well. His own died when he was two, and his father had long since abandoned the family. I also did not invent the other nicknames – “Sissy” for Virginia and “Eddy’ for Poe. Those being what family members called them; shortening names or inventing nicknames and endearments as close relatives tend to do. The amusing thing is that some biographers have seized on Poe’s use of “Sissy” as proof they had more of a brother-sister relationship, rather than the husband-wife sort . . . when actually it was simply a common family endearment.
Were some of your scenes—Virginia’s singing at the tavern, sighting the tame elk—sheer flights of fancy or were there historical underpinnings to these scenes? His sighting of the tame elk really happened, though there was no indication Virginia too was there when he saw it on the banks of Wissahickon Creek. However, It seemed a good incident to use in the novel since it was amusing, and I didn’t have many other opportunities to get them both outside, much less out in the country. The scene at the tavern was wholly my invention. I was looking for a way to give her a wider experience of public singing beyond those parlor performances for friends which we know about. And her not telling Eddy about her public debut is in keeping with restrictions of the times on women, and makes it seem logical that it escaped the biographical “record.” Other scenes I made up were the supernatural frame (of course), childhood ones with her little friends Juliette and Claudine, the ones with both music instructors, and the slightly racy scene with the Scottish proprietor in the music store. I figured for a poor aspiring singer, the proximity to so much sheet music (quite expensive back then) might easily serve as an aphrodisiac! In any case, even when I had factual events to portray, the demands of fiction necessitated that in order to convert these to full-fledged scenes I sometimes had to invent appropriate details of setting, dialogue, thoughts, actions, or of the senses, as biographies mostly do not include those.
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| Lenore Hart presenting with Roy Blount, Jr. at the Savannah Book Festival last week |
How much did you feel beholden to being accurate to the events of Poe’s life—was it constraining to know where your narrative needed to go or freeing? Initially I think I felt very beholden. Too much so, in fact. I was worried about insulting her, I think. My first draft was too focused on Poe still, since almost all the information I had was about him anyhow – very little about her – and also I did not agree with the ways many biographers portrayed her as silent, childish, nearly simple-minded. Children – no matter how young and unformed – eventually grow up. “Folks often mistake a quiet nature for lack of wits,” I have Virginia comment to herself, in the narrative. And yet it is of course often the opposite case. Anyway, I have a very good editor at St. Martin’s Press, and she told me flat-out: “There’s not enough about Virginia and too much about Poe. You have to get creative with events to give her a fuller life.” And so, given that challenge and (it seemed to me) the official permission, I set out to add more events, in a logical, “could have happened “context.” These were the interrupted music shop “seduction,” the tavern singing scene, and some more childhood scenes that featured her great desire to learn as much about music and voice as she could. I think these came off pretty well. And anyhow, it IS fiction, after all!
Did you murder any darlings in the writing of this book? Not nearly so many as I had to do in my previous novel, BECKY. I actually took out very little this time.
What was particularly challenging for you about writing this book? Aside from the initial hesitance to make up too much, as mentioned above, time was a real problem. I was teaching both graduate and undergraduate students at two different colleges at the same time, in Pennsylvania, while I actually live in Virginia. So I had to compartmentalize teaching and writing more so than usual, and had a very regimented schedule in which I would write for about five or six hours starting early on Wednesday mornings every week. In this way I turned out a complete first draft in two semesters – about eight months of work.
Do you write the story and then heavily research it to ground it, or did you start with lots of research? I start out with research, and read quite a bit. I read all of Poe’s biographies and many of his letters and other documents available thanks to the good work of the various Poe museums. I already had a three-page outline and three chapters (about thirty pages). The book was sold to St. Martin’s in advance, before I actually wrote it. However, I know better than to get carried away with research by now. I don’t try to pin down minute details till later. Things change as you write a novel, and allowances have to be made for unexpected plot twists or ideas that, in execution, turn out not to be so great after all. As I write I might look for a detail or date or missing name or event, but I never let that stop my progress on the first draft. That way lies madness! You can always add more details later, so it’s best to press on and not get bogged down in minutiae. The fact is, I dread the first draft process, and I LOVE revision – it’s so very satisfying, like cleaning a long-dirty window. Gradually you begin to see, more and more clearly and in startling detail, the fantastic view outside!
There are two pages of reading group questions at the end of the book? Who saw this as a reading group book first, you or your editor? My novels are known to attract the notice of reading groups (should I call them reading groupies?) perhaps because I like to tackle themes that have a history but still resonate with readers today, and also because my latter ones have focused on some well-known fictional or real people. We are still essentially curious monkeys, and I think secretly or not so secretly want to know the “real” story behind famous people and events.
Though you were named for Lenore in the poem "The Raven," what things about Poe did you discover (or relearn) in writing this book? After I began, initially I was a bit worried about the age difference. I know what the knee-jerk reaction to such a relationship would be now, of course! There was Jerry Lee Lewis and his young cousin, a few decades ago . . . we are immediately suspicious now of anything to do with an older guy and a very young woman. So I was worried briefly that I might’ve signed up for something I’d later kind of regret. Though women sometimes married quite young in the nineteenth century, Virginia was a bit too young even by their standards. But there was their dreadful financial straits, and then the family situation (the early-orphaned Poe had no other real family by then and badly wanted to keep this one). So it seemed clear to me the original (unused) marriage license had been for formality’s sake, so Virginia and her mother could decently move to Richmond and live with Poe in the same boarding house and be supported by him and not raise too many eyebrows. And I felt that they finally married almost a year later because an eternal engagement would also look odd. But I believed by then they probably did not consummate the marriage until much later, and that was an intriguing plot element to deal with, also! This hunch felt confirmed when I came across a mention of Poe making a comment to a contemporary that they had not lived as husband and wife until Virginia was several years older. As a Victorian and a Southern gentleman, he could have hardly said much more than that about it!
What’s next? Now I’m working on a new Young Adult novel which is set in the present in Florida. It’s a bit complicated to coherently explain at this point, but the first person narrator is a sixteen-year-old girl who was driving when her father was killed in a car accident, and the plot involves love, death, cult religion, and string theory. It will be a nice change from copious historical research! After that I’ll either write another historical novel, most likely, or a contemporary murder mystery set on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. I have the beginnings of each already in hand.
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See, I told you she gave a killer interview. Lenore even includes references to one of my favorite operas La Cenerentola by Rossini (based on the Cinderella story) in The Raven's Bride, and it is fascinating to hear it discussed as a popular work in the context of the book. Given the pace at which Lenore Hart writes her books, perhaps this time next year we'll be discussing her next release. And don't forget--anyone who leaves a comment on this post will be registered in a drawing to win a signed copy of The Raven's Bride.
