The Writing Process Blog Tour

By Kim

I've been invited by Denise D. Falvo to participate in the Writing Process Blog Tour. I know Denise from Writer Unboxed and the Pitches and Plots group on Facebook. We will finally get to meet in person at the Writer Unboxed Un-Conference, which is taking place in Salem, MA, from November 3-8^th. (Sign up for that here!) Denise is currently working on a fantasy series called StarDust. You can follow her on Twitter @DDFalvo and on her blog, Drakaenwood.  She lives in the Midwest in a century-old house with her husband, two daughters, a sassy cat and the ghost of a stubborn Irish Setter. (Another believer in ghosts!)

Without further ado, here are my responses.

What am I working on?

I can’t say I’m accomplishing much at the moment beyond playing chauffeur for my kids, but summer will end on Monday and my temporary hiatus from writing will be over. When I do have a few moments to myself I plug away at a rewrite of my historical novel, tentatively titled The Oak Lovers. Consistent feedback from agents convinced me my story would be best served by changing it from two viewpoints to just the one.

As many of our regular readers know, The Oak Lovers is the story of Madonna Niles, a gifted young artist who flees her morally rigid home in the summer of 1900 to join Roycroft, an art colony in Western New York. A chance encounter with landscape painter Carl Ahrens, a striking and worldly older man, draws Madonna into an exhilarating web of creative obsession and forbidden love. When Madonna is faced not only with the devastating reality of Carl’s tuberculosis, but also that he lives at the mercy of a wife who insists prayer will cure him, she must make a choice: abandon the man she adores for the sake of her own artistic ambitions, or shoulder the burden of his survival in a world that would forever be set against them.

How does my work differ from others in my genre?

Many historical novels are written about familiar figures from the past, household names like Van Gogh or Napoleon or Frank Lloyd Wright. My novel features an artist who was considered a master in his lifetime but has been overlooked since. This prospect is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I have a story that hasn't been told before about an artist who deserves to take his rightful place in history. On the other, I have to convince an agent and publisher to take a chance on marketing a novel about a painter who, though larger-than-life, will have only a modest built-in audience.  I have to trust that in the end it is all about the story and that the book will eventually find a home.

Why do I write what I do?

Carl Ahrens - 1890 (colorized)

My answer boils down to one word. Love. Love for the idea of soul-mates. Love for a grandmother taken before I had the chance to know her. Love for the sound of native drums and the smell of sweetgrass. Love for a foreign land that has become my soul’s home. Love for the joyful cobalt blue dabs in most of my great-grandfather Carl’s paintings. Love for a story that is in my blood, a story only I can tell.

It was love that led me to attend a writers’ conference in Austin, Texas, several years ago in order to pitch a biography called Knight of the Brush. The subject was a certain Canadian painter. Agents listened kindly to my clumsily delivered spiel, some even invited me to send my proposal, but I sense most lost interest as soon as I mentioned my connection to Carl. Put Bullock at the bottom of the slush pile I imagined them saying to themselves.

An editor told me big publishers would never buy an artist’s biography unless his name was Monet or Degas—something recognizable. She suggested I approach a small university press in Canada, preferably from Carl’s hometown.

Undaunted, love led me to build a website featuring Carl’s best and brightest work, paintings that disprove his reputation as a “dark tree painter.” The president of the Waterloo Historical Society (Ontario) found the site and asked me to contribute an article about their native son for the Society’s annual volume.

Summer by Carl Ahrens

The “little something” turned into a 6,000 word cover story and an invitation to be the keynote speaker at that year’s launch, which was being dubbed Carl Ahrens Day. Two months later I did just that at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery. It was the first time in seventy years that a collection of Ahrens paintings had been exhibited to the public.

Later that same year Carl shared the spotlight with Andre Lapine, one of his closest friends, at a second gallery. I spoke at the opening day, and have two more standing invitations to speak.

A powerful thing, love.

Powerful enough for me to scrap the biography and tell Carl and Madonna’s story in a way that would bring them to life for everyone else as they have always been for me.

Powerful enough for me to start over when my attempt to do so was not quite good enough.

I have no choice. There’s a story in my blood, and I’m the only one who can tell it.

How does my writing process work?

I won’t lie. This book has taken a long time to write, partly because it began as narrative nonfiction and has become more fictionalized over multiple drafts. This latest version is more "based on" the lives of my great-grandparents than an attempt to write any sort of joint biography. The framework of their story remains in place, but since it is now all in her viewpoint the story arc has certainly had to change. I had to let go of a lot of things, little “darlings” that wouldn't matter to the average reader, but meant a lot to me. These changes had to come gradually.

This is a difficult question to answer because my process for this book was different from what I used with my earlier novels, or what I will use with future ones. In general I get an idea, I research, and then I write a draft in anywhere from three to nine months. Then I revise and polish. The Oak Lovers took me about five years to have a complete draft because I edited as I went along.

Any other story would not come with any outside pressure to “get it right.” I would not have family or art collectors waiting to read with any sort of expectations over what I will put in and what I will leave out. It is hard to write that way and I would have given up long ago if I didn't know I was meant to tell this story, if I didn't have faith that I’d eventually do it justice.

And now I would like to tag C.G. “Chris” Blake to participate in the tour. Blake is an author and editor with more than 30 years of experience as a journalist. A former newspaper reporter, Blake is drawn toward stories about family dynamics. His personal “Holy Trinity” of authors consists of Anne Tyler, Alice McDermott and Alice Munro, but he reads widely across many genres. Blake published his first novel, Small Change, in 2012. Family secrets are at the heart of Small Change. The Sykowskis, who live in the Chicago suburbs, and the Crandales, from rural Iowa, meet at a Wisconsin lake resort. The two families grow close over the years until a stunning secret threatens to break their bonds. He is working on a second novel, A Prayer for Maura. Blake maintains a fiction writing blog, A New Fiction Writer’s Forum (http://www.cgblake.wordpress.com). By day, Blake is an association management executive for two higher education associations.

An Evening With Ross King

By Kim

Those of you who follow our blog may have noticed that we love posting about author events. With two ballerina daughters in constant rehearsal and poor night vision that makes driving a precarious adventure, it’s rare for me to be in attendance. One event I refused to miss was author and art historian Ross King’s lecture at the Highland Park United Methodist Church on the SMU campus on March 18th. 

My correspondence with King began back in 2009 while he wrote his phenomenal book Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven. His research uncovered mention of a landscape painter named Carl Ahrens who, in 1916, verbally attacked certain members of the Group. Intrigued, King found my website on Ahrens (my great-grandfather) and contacted me, hoping I could shed light on what might have provoked his remarks.

What you can't see is how much he gallantly stoops! *

I replied with a small treatise on the subject and also provided King with primary sources and the photograph of Ahrens featured in Defiant Spirits.  Over the years we've periodically traded e-mails and he has assisted me with sections of my manuscript that involve the Group of Seven and the WWI Toronto art community. I could not ask for a more gracious and knowledgeable expert.

King is a master at bringing art history to life in vivid, novelistic detail. His prose is literary, yet accessible, and never, ever dull. I devoured Defiant Spirits (420 pages) in a weekend. Joan Mora raved about Brunelleschi’s Dome. King’s latest book, Leonardo and The Last Supper, looks equally riveting.

Joan, a fan of all things Italian, also attended the lecture, as did my mother, who happily snapped the photograph for this post. (Thanks, Mom!)

At the pre-lecture reception, King inscribed books and chatted with anyone who came over to introduce themselves. He reminded me of my favorite college professor, a brilliant yet approachable intellectual. Undaunted by the line, he rushed no one. To those waiting behind us, I offer a virtual apology. I know we took more than our fair share of time when he offered to pose for photographs then rather than risk missing the opportunity later.

King spoke eloquently for the better part of an hour about Leonardo da Vinci and the stories behind how he came to paint his masterpiece, The Last Supper. As in his books, King did not shy away from pointing out his subject’s shortcomings. Leonardo’s contemporaries complained he stared at walls more than painted them and was often distracted by seemingly unrelated projects when he should have been working on his commissions. He also grossly exaggerated his expertise to win favor with Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. The Last Supper, contrary to popular belief, is not a fresco. It turns out that Leonardo’s creative process did not allow for working in such a piecemeal and rushed fashion. He experimented instead, which explains why the painting had already started to disintegrate in Leonardo’s lifetime.

If King had notes, I never saw them; he certainly never looked down. This is especially remarkable because he speaks using the same densely rich language in which he writes. At one point I glanced back to see if he used a teleprompter because I thought no one could have such an encyclopedic memory for names and dates. (I stand corrected.) King’s unusual accent, a melding of Canadian and Oxford English, combined with his height, confident tone, and gesticulating hands, make him an especially dynamic and authoritative speaker.

If you ever get the chance to see a Ross King lecture, don’t miss it. You may feel smarter simply being in the same room. I know I did.

* Photo by Deborah Downes

Research Workshop: Dig Deeper

By Kim

Half of Therese Walsh’s upcoming novel The Moon Sisters is from the point-of-view of a young woman with synesthesia. (I’d never heard of it either until reading the book.) In The Painted Girls, Cathy Marie Buchanan brought to life the underbelly of the Paris Opera Ballet during the 1870s in gritty detail. Alyson Richman took readers into a concentration camp in The Lost Wife. Jodi Picoult tackles controversial topics in all of her novels, which requires insight into the minds of characters ranging from school shooters to stigmatas to modern day witches.

If you’re writing a novel, chances are you'll have to do research in order to make your story believable and compelling.

As a writer of historical fiction, I’m neck-deep in it. Each new piece of information I dig up potentially comes with a deeper story; sometimes that story can change the whole trajectory of a scene. Today I’m going to show an example of what I mean by this, and how taking the time to scratch beneath the surface can enhance your work.

This past week I received an e-mail from David Menary, an Ontario writer penning a book called Literary Landmarks of Cambridge. He intends to include a profile on my great-grandfather, Carl Ahrens, who did write, but was better known for his painting. While researching Clara Bernhardt, another author he will feature, Menary discovered a journal entry about a visit Clara made to Carl’s home in December of 1934. Here is a shortened excerpt of what she said:

“There’s a man I shall not quickly forget. He looks more completely the artist than anyone I've ever seen. Tall, thin, emaciated from long illness, with eyes so deep-set and piercing you felt all your disguises penetrated by one glance…Pain has not only touched his face – it has carved it…As he talked I was surprised and disappointed and desperately sorry to find him cynical and bitter. Yet he is risen to the peak of his profession artistically if not financially. He said if his life were his to live over, he would not choose painting. As to his illness: “It is all very well to tell yourself it is for the best, but I feel I am not getting a square deal. I resent it.” How dreadful to live that way, and to die like that…for he looked mortally ill…No doubt he believes in [God] – any creator has to – but if I am not mistaken, God does not mean anything to him in personal relationship…He is keen, and witty, but quite unsmiling. Very weak physically, sometimes his voice would blur out, and he mentioned he had to use drugs all the time and that he rarely slept.”

If you were to write a scene illustrating this visit using only this passage as a guide. what information can you glean about Carl and Clara?

Carl: He is an artist of some acclaim who has been sick a long time, lives in great pain, and will probably die soon. He’s grumpy about this. His eyes, height, and frailty are his distinguishing physical features. He takes medication and may or may not believe in God. The line about living his life over again implies an older man, but he could just as easily be young and dying too soon.

Clara: She's insightful and has a way with words, suggesting a good education and wisdom that comes with either age or experience. While she has sympathy for the artist’s plight, she’s frustrated that he refuses to see the good with the bad in life. She believes the best way to accomplish this is through God.

There are a lot of unknowns here. Why is Carl cynical? Why does Clara make such assumptions about Carl's religious beliefs? With fictional characters, an author can invent a back story and motivations, but both of these people in question actually lived. Let’s dig a little deeper to see if we can flesh them out a bit. Bonus points if we can tell the truth.

Carl Ahrens in 1934

Let’s start with Carl. A simple Google search of his name will reveal that in late 1934 he was 73 years old and that he'd had a tubercular hip since his youth. His name is mentioned in several art history books and he has a painting in Canada’s National Gallery, but by 1934 he had already been overshadowed by a younger group of painters and his house had just been foreclosed. His wife’s memoirs (available to view at several libraries) describe a man of boundless energy and an adventurous spirit cut down by illness, destitution and bitter enemies. The “drug” in question was codeine. Side effects of large doses include sleeplessness and extreme irritability. His medical records, also available publicly due to his association with a prime minister, show Carl was admitted to the hospital a year later. They describe him as being six foot tall, eighty-five pounds, and suffering from a condition “of a most uncomfortable nature.”

And now for Clara. I was shocked to discover that she was only 23 in late 1934 and quite pretty, too. Had you pictured her in a wheelchair? I hadn't, though she had been in one since age 11, when she contracted  polio. Her formal education ended after 8^th grade because she couldn't take that wheelchair on the streetcar to get to the high school, though she continued to study on her own and was on her way to becoming a well-respected Ontario writer. A year before this entry was written she had spent months in a rehabilitation facility where she did extensive physical therapy and, with the help of her religious faith, came to terms with the injustice of her own childhood illness.

Clara Bernhardt by Stephen Jones

With the addition of these details, our hypothetical scene has grown much more compelling. We no longer have a simple dialogue between a grumpy artist and an insightful but slightly self-righteous woman. We have two people, both immobile, one at the end of his life and the other in the prime of hers. We understand his bitterness and why she finds it disappointing. Perhaps she perceives he sees through all of her disguises because on some level she realizes they are kindred spirits, that he was once much like her.

What are some ways you have dug deeply in your own research? Have you learned anything that shocked you and changed your story for the better? What stumbling blocks have you run into?          

What's Your Favorite Sentence?

By Kim

A friend of mine recently alerted me to a potential agent to query. After some research, I clicked over to the agency website for submission instructions. This particular agent uses an online form rather than a traditional query letter, something I’ve encountered before, but the questions she asks…well…there are a few doozies mixed into the usual fare. Two are especially challenging, but they are useful exercises for writers and, I imagine, helpful to her in evaluating queries.

Adventures in Queryland

One thing she requests is a log-line, or a (hopefully compelling) one sentence description of your story. Thanks to Twitter contests like Pitch Madness and PitMad, I’ve got that handy. If you currently reside in Queryland and have not yet gone through the agonizing torture process of writing a log-line, it’s an enlightening experience. Agents have differing opinions about using log-lines in queries – some love it, some hate it – but if you can’t compose one, your manuscript may lack focus.

Here’s the request that had me stumped for a while: “Please share a favorite sentence from the manuscript you are submitting.” 

This agent mentioned in an interview that leaving this space blank is the biggest mistake writers make. It’s the first thing she sees – above the query letter – and it is a good place to hook her.

What she essentially wants is a tag line, that sentence often seen on the cover of a book. Yes, this is a tough one but, again, it could be a useful exercise for any writer.

Don’t know where to start? Here are some ideas. 

A) Most writers can compose pretty sentences, but pretty does not necessarily equal compelling. The chosen sentence must have tension or at least intrigue. A potential problem: conflict-filled scenes are often filled with short sentences. Staccato. Difficult to stand on their own.

B) If the agent does not rep romance, for example, it may be risky to have a sentence involving sensuality, declarations of love, or any hint of melodrama.

C) The sentence should reveal something about your specific characters or story. If it doesn’t, it may be too generic.


I’ll play guinea pig here, and offer up my original list of potential sentences as an example. Some clearly fall into the pitfalls I mention above.

1) The varnish, like my smile, is but a protective skin painted over a wound that will take a lifetime to heal.

2) I lie awake most nights and imagine sorrow seeps from the cracks in our bedroom ceiling.

3) Under the right circumstances, any sin might be forgivable.

4)  I must let her leave, but I refuse to ever let her go.

5) Leaving her would be both my life’s greatest regret and an act of kindness.

6) Her touch is light, gentle, and it lulls me into such a drowsy state that I pay no attention to what she does until I feel the cold blade of the scissors pressed against my scalp.

7) I promised to love, honor and argue with him until death us do part.

8) My greatest fear is that God will punish me for this crime with a long and miserable separation before He allows me to join Carl in heaven.

9) I can’t be both a good mother and the wife Carl needs.

10) No matter what method I choose, creation’s process is physical, messy, and exhilarating—a sensual act filled with intoxicating smells and infinite variety.

11) I touch her back, a silent apology while the gentle brown rain falls onto the casket.

12) I’d rather suffocate together than languish apart.

The "Sound" I refer to in # 13 - Owen Sound, Ontario

13) When Carl paints well, his soul is like the Sound’s channel, where viridian and Prussian blue waves dance, collide, and merge into a turquoise vibrant enough to make my eyes ache.

14) Without me, he’d probably be ten years in his grave, but history would remember him as a Master.

15) He must be first; before the children, before music, before anything at all, and not just first, but second and third, too.

16) Barili dangles a golden carrot in front of her and my illness will forever shackle her just out of its reach.
 

When you have your list, send it to a bunch of people for their opinions. My What Women Write colleagues helped narrow my list ten. Here it is again, with strikeouts.


1) The varnish, like my smile, is but a protective skin painted over a wound that will take a lifetime to heal.

2) I lie awake most nights and imagine sorrow seeps from the cracks in our bedroom ceiling.

3) Under the right circumstances, any sin might be forgivable.

4) I must let her leave, but I refuse to ever let her go. 

5) Leaving her would be both my life’s greatest regret and an act of kindness.

6) Her touch is light, gentle, and it lulls me into such a drowsy state that I pay no attention to what she does until I feel the cold blade of the scissors pressed against my scalp.

7) I promised to love, honor and argue with him until death us do part.

8) My greatest fear is that God will punish me for this crime with a long and miserable separation before He allows me to join Carl in heaven. 

9) I can’t be both a good mother and the wife Carl needs. 

10) No matter what method I choose, creation’s process is physical, messy, and exhilarating—a sensual act filled with intoxicating smells and infinite variety. 

11) I touch her back, a silent apology while the gentle brown rain falls onto the casket.

12) I’d rather suffocate together than languish apart. 

Woodland Pool by Carl Ahrens - the "Master" in # 14

13) When Carl paints well, his soul is like the Sound’s channel, where viridian and Prussian blue waves dance, collide, and merge into a turquoise vibrant enough to make my eyes ache.

14) Without me, he’d probably be ten years in his grave, but history would remember him as a Master.

15) He must be first; before the children, before music, before anything at all, and not just first, but second and third, too.

16) Barili dangles a golden carrot in front of her and my illness will forever shackle her just out of its reach. 


We have a diverse group and all had strong opinions. No one agreed. I sent my shortened list to an editor friend and the one she chose (with plural exclamation points) confirmed my instinctual choice. I do not offer it here because I’m curious to see what you think. 

What sentence grabs you the most and why? Are there any you would cross off the list?

In Praise of Pack Rats (Reprised)

By Kim

Now for the secret. Well, here it comes, but put on your sober face. Does thee recollect when it happen[ed]? It was on the day of Uncle B’s funeral. I had a letter on that day, just after tea I went in the nursery to read it. I had not set there long before I heard someone come to the door, looked up, and who should I see but J. Spencer. I said walk in, little thinking he would mind me so good. He came in, got a chair, came set down beside me and went to talking. I was almost scared to death, sat there trembling. He sat as composed as you please, so we staid there and jabbered for about an hour when I ask him to excuse me for a moment. I cut myself upstairs and you may well think I did not trust myself within the confines of the nursery very soon again. That day he sent me an orange. But dear Martha, you see I could not help it. I trembled and was so afraid that Miriam or some one else would come in.

Now Martha, if you show this to anyone I shall never forgive you…

Amanda Akin to Martha Angell  – April 22, 1842

Martha Angell

To 21^st century eyes this may not look like much of a secret, but in 1842 Amanda, then fifteen, could have had her reputation ruined if “Miriam” or anyone else happened to find her alone with a gentleman. She would only have made such a risque confession to a trusted friend. Martha likely kept her confidence, but she also saved the letter, as she saved many other letters from friends and relatives. I imagine she tucked them all away in a special box, perhaps re-reading them when the long winters prevented visitors from coming to call. She became Martha Niles in 1850 and the relics of her girlhood traveled with her, perhaps consigned to the bottom of a truck, unmolested through the births of four children and the death of her husband. Years later her belongings moved to a larger, grander home a few miles away in North Chatham, NY, until her second husband, too, died. By then Martha was elderly, her health failing, and she retired to her daughter Katie’s home in Stratford, Ontario until her death in 1910 at the age of eighty-three.

Madonna Ahrens

The letters survived. They may have remained with Katie for some time, or perhaps Katie sent them immediately to her niece, Madonna, then living in Toronto with her husband, landscape painter Carl Ahrens. (They are my great-grandparents as well as the subjects of my work-in-progress.) Madonna both adored her grandmother and shared her trait of saving everything. Not only did she guard Martha’s treasures, but she clearly told her children about them. When Carl and Madonna moved to England they let the mortgage lapse on their house. They told their grown children to come and collect any sentimental items in the home and leave the rest. Many things were overlooked, but the letters were rescued.

They were in Madonna’s possession when she died in San Clemente, CA in 1976. She willed them to her daughter, Chloris, my grandmother, who was perhaps the most fanatical pack-rat in the history of the human race. Everything Chloris kept, her daughters Nonna and Siegie also saved because “Momma must have had her reasons for keeping it.” Boxes containing everything from old manuscripts to the registration papers for a long-dead poodle remained in Aunt Nonna’s attic for twenty years after her mother’s death. When the time came to remodel the house, Siegie suggested they send everything to me because, as family historian, I would “know what was important.”

Chloris with Nonna

Imagine my shock when I opened one of the boxes, pulled out an ordinary file folder and a letter from 1836 dropped onto my lap. There were about fifty letters total, all written before 1850. Despite having been passed around for a century and a half, the ink is clear, the paper barely yellowed, and they are infused with the mildly musty scent of an antique bookstore. I skimmed a couple of them, but the mid-nineteenth-century handwriting made for slow reading. With a new baby to care for, I was short on time. As I did with so many other documents that did not directly relate to my book on Carl and Madonna, I sorted the letters by author, placed them in acid free sleeves, and returned them to my aunts.

After I began writing The Oak Lovers I realized historical fiction is my calling and regretted my haste. It’s true that the letters all date to well before the book I’m working on and only one was written by someone in my own family, but someday I’ll finish this book and need new characters, new stories. I asked for the letters back, explaining that they really should be scanned, transcribed, and footnoted rather than just preserved. The family agreed, relieved to hand that task, along with the letters, back over to me. All are curious about what they contain, but none has taken the time to decipher them. I suspect I’m the first person in generations to read them.

Over the last couple of months I’ve transcribed over half of them in my spare (HA!) time. Most are written by teenaged girls and are full of school-girl crushes and gossip. What makes this remarkable, other than for the idea that a teenager is a teenager no matter the century, is that most girls had little or no schooling in the 1840s. Yet here were a circle of girls, all Quakers, most from rural farm families, who were clearly well educated and widely read. Their handwriting was a work of art and their prose more refined than most college educated people today.

Charles Scholefield's letter

There are two friends of Martha’s I find particularly interesting. The first was a young gentleman named Charles Scholefield. As he was neither a relation nor a suitor, it is odd that a correspondence was allowed between them, yet sixteen of his letters were saved. After a little digging I discovered that the same Charles Scholefield who filled pages with romantic descriptions of sunsets or treatises on why the white men were wrong to treat the Mohawk so poorly, became one of the first legislators from Oneida County, NY. He was a celebrated lawyer, very handsome, married a seventeen-year-old at the age of forty, and was a Major in the Civil War.

Within a paragraph of my first letter by Amanda Akin, I knew I had found a friend. I should die of despair if I was obliged to write a formal, sentimental letter, she writes. What I wish for in a letter is the picture of my friend’s mind. I want to know what she is doing and saying, to have her show me the inside of her heart without disguise. I have this feeling when I write letters. If I seek wisdom and lofty sentiments, I can find them in books.

Amanda Akin's letter

Here was a girl who was both of her time and somehow beyond it. She doesn’t hide behind formality in her letters. She’s frank, teasing, feisty and, most importantly, relatable. She has a distinct voice – every writer’s dream. Within the last few days I’ve discovered snippets about her remarkable life. I won’t go into great detail, as she may very well end up a character in a future book, but I will say that the Civil War, Walt Whitman, and Abraham Lincoln come into play.

Amanda would little have imagined when she penned her “epistles” that Martha’s 3x great-grandchild would wish that she had followed through on her threat to write the name of Martha’s crush on the top of each page to prevent her from showing the letters to anyone.

Each letter offers a glimpse of the past that, at most, only a handful of people have ever seen. For a historian, there’s no greater pleasure than such a discovery. For a writer there’s nothing more inspiring than hearing a voice so clearly in your mind that you simply must know the speaker. I would never have heard this one if it weren’t for the five generations of pack-rats that came before me, each one of them finding the letters and making a conscious decision to save them. I carry on the family tradition with pride

Calling My Characters Home

By Kim

All of us here at What Women Write have been thinking a lot about “home” lately, thanks to the release of our own Julie Kibler’s debut novel, Calling Me Home. We’ve weighed in on what we consider home to be and what it is about that place that calls us.

I wrote my post about a place I’ve never actually lived, but with which I feel a primal connection. I was in the midst of a major revision of The Oak Lovers at the time, and it struck me that my great-grandfather and I both had spiritual homes far away from where we lived. (He pined for the far north of Ontario and I long for Georgian Bay.) We’ve also both had many physical homes.

While I fictionalized portions of Carl and Madonna’s lives in order to make a compelling narrative, their various “homes” in the novel are real places, many of which still stand today. I thought it might be fun to share a few of these.

One of Carl and Madonna’s first homes was this Eli farm wagon. Carl had been commissioned to paint the old California missions in the summer of 1906. Motor cars weren’t allowed on mountain roads, and so this served both as their mode of travel and their residence. This photo was taken near the mission at San Diego. Madonna, then about four months pregnant, is doing the laundry. Carl almost certainly held the camera.

 

This photo was taken at Carl and Madonna’s Toronto residence (1909-1911), likely by Carl, in the summer of 1910. All people in the photograph are characters in The Oak Lovers. The adults, from left to right are, Sarah Wainwright (Madonna’s mother), Madonna Ahrens, Isabella Hynds (Carl’s mother) and Richard Hynds (Carl’s step-father). The children are Dickadee Wainwright (Madonna’s half-sister), Penelope Ahrens and Laird Ahrens. This house still stands.

 

This is Carl and Madonna’s house in Lambton Mills (1911-1919). That’s Carl on the porch along with one of his daughters, probably my grandmother Chloris, who was born in the house. Lambton Mills is now part of Etobicoke, just west of Toronto. The house still stands today, though the porch is gone, as is the building Carl used as his studio.

During the summers of 1913 and 1914, Carl and Madonna called this cottage home. It was located on the beach at Leith, a small village near Owen Sound on Georgian Bay. The baby is my grandmother, Chloris, and judging by her age, this photo was taken in 1913. Also in the photo are Madonna Ahrens and Sigrid Ahrens. The house has been torn down, but there are still summer cottages along this beach today.

This photo features the house closest to Carl and Madonna’s heart, their Galt, Ontario, residence called Big Trees. They lived here from 1923-1935. That’s Carl and Madonna in rockers out front. Carl’s studio was in the small wing on the right. At the time, the house was a half mile from their nearest neighbors, but now the neighborhood is completely developed. Miraculously, the house still stands and has been beautifully taken care of. I visited the first time when I was eight and have been back three times since.

Have any of you used real houses as inspiration for your settings, even if your characters are fictional?