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.

That's Grand!

By Kim

A couple of years ago I wrote a post called “I Don’t Need the Notoriety – My Protagonist Does.”  Even then I understood that my greatest challenge in selling The Oak Lovers may be that it revolves around a real painter, but not one named Van Gogh or Degas.  It’s tempting not to mention the book is based on a true story in queries. I can imagine an agent sitting there, perhaps intrigued by the story, but wondering how terrible it would be to suggest edits to its author, who is, after all, a descendant.

(For the record, Carl and Madonna Ahrens were both known to exaggerate or even outright lie for the sake of a compelling story. Trust me, they won’t mind!)

My great-grandfather has been rather inconveniently neglected by history, so I realize it falls to me to promote him as well as my novel. I’ve done this for years - through my website, speeches at art exhibitions, articles I’ve written, and through providing information on Carl to art historians for their own books. The effort is beginning to pay off.

Carl’s photo appeared in a recent PBS video on Elbert Hubbard and the Roycroft art colony. Ross King, a revered and widely published art historian, discussed Carl’s battle with the Group of Seven in the award winning documentary  The West Wind: The Vision of Tom Thomson. I also have two more speaking invitations.

This month Carl is being celebrated, along with one other painter, in a feature article in Grand Magazine. The author, Nancy Silcox, told me the editor gave her an unprecedented eight pages, and there are many color photographs throughout. One of Carl’s most stunning paintings (shown here) graces an entire page. Since this is a Canadian publication, and the magazine is unavailable to many of our readers, I am including a link to the article in case anyone is curious.

The Greatest Gift

By Kim

Robert Ahrens and Mildred

I am currently in that no-man’s land called Between Books. My editing is done, the synopsis and query letters are written and have been sent out. Now I wait and try to figure out what to do next. I have a solid idea for the next novel which I have not yet started, hoping I will soon receive “the call” and be thrust me back into a story that still won’t let me go.

Perhaps it is because I live with constant reminders around me—paintings, photographs, Madonna’s bracelet, my daughter’s miniature “Carl feet” and even my own reflection. Perhaps it is because people regularly contact me to add their Ahrens work to my catalog.

Occasionally I receive an e-mail that reminds me of the greatest gift that writing The Oak Lovers has given me. It’s not dreams of fame or fortune, which would be nice, but have nothing to do with why I write. It’s not simply about restoring my great-grandfather’s legacy, much as I hope to do so. No, the greatest gift is that a century-old family rift has been mended. I'm an only child and don’t have a big family, so I cherish any new relatives I can find.

Emily Ahrens

My grandmother grew up knowing her father had another wife before meeting her mother. The topic was not openly discussed, but it was certainly not a secret in her generation or my father’s. I always knew about the family scandal, but did not learn the name of Carl’s other wife and children until I read Madonna’s memoirs as an adult. Names were all she gave.

Inside one of my late grandmother’s scrapbooks I discovered a photocopied letter addressed to “Kim” from “Grandpa Ahrens.” It was about living on an Ojibwa reservation as a child and could only have been written by one of the sons from Carl’s first marriage. Where had it come from? There was no envelope. No clues. My aunts knew nothing about it.

Martha McGowan, Kitty Turgeon, Kim, and Janice McDuffie

Years later, while researching Carl’s file in the local history room of the public library in Kitchener, Ontario, I found a letter. It was written by a woman named Martha McGowan and asked for information about her ancestor, Carl Ahrens. A simple Yahoo people search led me to my half second cousin. It turned out she had found my grandmother in the early 80s and had a brief correspondence with her. She had also forwarded along the mystery letter, originally written to a cousin of hers who shares my name.

Martha and I decided that a century was quite long enough for the two halves of the family to have been kept apart, and we agreed to meet at the Roycroft campus in East Aurora, New York. The very same place where Carl met my great-grandmother and eventually left Martha’s. We laughed about the irony of the situation. About a year later we met again, along with Martha’s mother, a granddaughter of Carl and Emily, at an exhibition of Carl’s work in Ontario.

This week I've had the pleasure of corresponding with the very same Kim who received the mystery letter from “Grandpa Ahrens” when she was in 6^th grade. She has showered me with photographs of a family I never thought I would get the chance to know. It has been Christmas in October.

The biggest treasure arrived in my inbox this morning – the only known photograph that includes Carl and Emily. It was most likely taken as the basis of a painting to be done by Canadian artist George Reid, a friend of Carl’s. Reid is the man seated backwards in the chair. Emily kneels on the floor hunched with two children and seemingly crying. The boy peeking through the chair is Carl and Emily’s son, Robert. Carl is the hunched figure in the background. If you look close, you can see he leans heavily on a cane. He, too, appears to be grieving. What is especially haunting about this pose is that it is a metaphor for his first marriage. Emily, a maternal woman, sheltering their children and keeping her back to the invalid in the corner. The man who has disappointed her for years. Even more telling is that there is someone sitting between them.

Thanks to the internet, chance, curiosity, and a century of time for old wounds to smooth over, you would barely notice a scar where the family rift used to be.  A tremendous gift indeed!

Update: I have just learned that the photograph isn't a photograph, but rather an image of a completed painting by George A. Reid called "Family Prayer." It is one of his best known works and hung in the Salon in Paris in the 1890's. This explains why Carl, who was only 26 at the time, appears to have white hair. Reid could have used his frail build as the basis for an old man and changed his hair color. 

Mission Quest

Deborah Downes, Kim Bullock's mother, is filling in for Kim today with a special guest post about visiting San Juan Capistrano, one of the old Spanish missions in California. Capistrano is a setting in Kim's recently completed novel, The Oak Lovers. Her protagonist (and ancestor) Carl Ahrens, also plays a key role in this post. Deborah is a writer and photographer living in Dallas, TX, and she is currently writing a memoir about the two times she lived in China.

Carl Ahrens

In 2000, while my husband Fred and I lived on the Mediterranean island of Majorca, we went to Petra to see the birthplace of Father Junipero Serra. There we learned he was not only founder of nine of the twenty-one California missions, but considered the Father of California and its first citizen. Mission San JuanCapistrano is the seventh in the chain of missions he established. Though interested in Father Serra’s childhood home, we were most drawn to the models of the California missions within the local museum. Among them we saw those that represented a segment of our family’s history.

During 1906 popular author George Wharton James commissioned Carl Ahrens (Fred’s grandfather), a renowned Canadian artist and a Roycrofter, to paint all of the California missions. He intended to use the work as illustrations in one of his books on those Spanish sanctuaries. Carl, though periodically crippled throughout his life by a tubercular hip, set out to paint the missions, traveling by covered wagon with a woman he’d nicknamed Madonna for her timeless beauty. Madonna (Fred’s grandmother) was an artist in her own right and, though young enough to be Carl’s daughter, she was his soul-mate, source of strength and inspiration.

The San Francisco earthquake bankrupted George Wharton James, and Carl’s commission was cut short. He made it to seventeen missions, including San Juan Capistrano, Madonna’s favorite. They arrived at Mission Capistrano about eleven years following the start of basic restoration on that crumpling sanctuary and four years before Father O’Sullivan settled there and passionately began restoring it to its former glory, using original construction methods and materials.

Photo by Deborah Downes

I first visited Mission San Juan Capistrano in 2009. I entered the sanctuary with the hope of capturing through photos and written word our family’s ties associated with this historical treasure. First I framed a shot of a series of old arches and pilasters bathed in morning light. Just as I pressed the shutter release button halfway, I shivered, though it was one of those ideal California days. Despite no documented proof, I suddenly felt certain I stood where Carl, who one leading art critic of his day claimed created trees so real they exhale the very smell of the earth, had and captured a view he painted back in 1906. For a moment my mind’s eye saw a shadow of him against the old wall beside me. The darkened shape clearly reflected his tall lean frame, a profile of his chiseled features, a lock of his thick wavy hair dancing against his forehead as he vigorously applied paint to a canvas.

Photo by Deborah Downes

While I stood within the central courtyard of the mission I again pictured Carl painting. This time I imagined him dipping a brush into his signature shade of cerulean blue as I photographed a woman adding paint to a canvas depicting the corner section of the enclosure with part of The Old Stone Church peeking above the rooftops of the mission’s south wing and that of Serra Chapel.

Constructed in 1777, Mission Capistrano’s Serra Chapel is the oldest building in California and the only standing church where Father Serra said mass. Chances are when Carl and Madonna saw this beloved place of worship it was used as a storeroom, as it had been when Father O’ Sullivan arrived in 1910. The present gift shop housed the mission’s chapel between 1891 and 1920. Through Father O’Sullivan’s direction and hard work by 1922 Serra Chapel stood fully restored to its original appearance. The “crowning glory” of all the effort put into the chapel came when the over 300-year-old gilded baroque altar from Spain was installed, replacing the original one that had disappeared long ago.

Photo of Ahrens' Capistrano oil

The Great Stone Church will never be brought back to where it once proudly stood within Mission San Juan Capistrano. On the feast day of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, December 8, 1812, an earthquake struck the sanctuary as two boys rang the church bells, calling worshipers to that day’s second mass. The churchgoers within the church from the first service screamed as the walls around them swayed and the dome at the rear of the church cracked open. Thirty-eight adult Native Americans died along with the two boys in the bell tower.

Following failed attempts in the 1860’s to restore the church, resulting in further damage, the remains were secured. Today the ruins of The Great Stone Church still stand like beautiful historical abstract sculptures. They continue to attract artists, historians, and tourists from around the world.

Photo by Deborah Downes

As I wandered within the remains of The Great Stone Church, sunlight cut across the crumbled walls in such a way it appeared as if each mass of stone gripped a scene from the tragic story of the sanctuary’s destruction. Snapping shots of those dramatic images, a scene from The Oak Lovers, the historical novel my daughter Kim wrote on Carl and Madonna, came alive. In my head I clearly saw Carl standing near me. He appeared deeply shaken by vivid mental images of what transpired there so long ago; then visualized each brushstroke of a future painting: a canvas in front of which viewers may find themselves inexplicably weeping. In order to create it, he would have to paint exactly what he saw, in all its excruciating beauty. The rubble and crumpled bodies would be painted over, but evidence of all those restless spirits would bleed through, disguised as a crumbling rock, a decaying plant, a string of rosary beads left on the stone floor. Vines of ivy would strangle a tree limb or a wild rose bush. A shadow might resemble a kneeling woman.

I thought of that passage again, along with all I’d seen and felt at Mission Capistrano, while seated on a bench in the first corridor of the mission I’d photographed. At that moment in time whether or not I succeeded in capturing through words and photos family connections to the mission didn’t matter. It was enough to be on that old bench feeling the warmth of the sun and smelling the nearby roses, while my experiences at Mission San Juan Capistrano tightened the ties that brought me there.

Madonna Ahrens with Pete at Mission San Juan Capistrano - 1906

The Forest for the Trees

By Kim

I started writing The Oak Lovers (then called Knight of the Brush) around the time of my youngest daughter’s birth. As you can see by this recent picture, that was quite some time ago. This snail’s pace is rather alarming considering that my past two novels were finished and ready to submit within a year. I can be prolific. Really.

Writers’ block isn’t the problem and the delay certainly doesn’t stem from lack of enthusiasm for the story. My biggest obstacle may be just the opposite. I know far more about Carl and Madonna Ahrens than I could fit into 100,000 or even 200,000 words. I floundered for years because I wanted to tell the whole story.

Over the last few years I’ve learned to see the forest for the trees. While still sometimes painful, I can recognize and slaughter my “little darlings” to make room for elements of the story that make my novel about more than a neglected artist and his muse. Many Canadians have never heard of Carl Ahrens, but I would be hard pressed to find one unfamiliar with William Lyon Mackenzie King or the Group of Seven. Carl was a friend of the former and an enemy of the latter. Better to play that up and leave out the time he made maple syrup with his kids, no matter how sweet the story. Most Americans know about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Carl and Madonna saw the damage from it first-hand. That’s surely more exciting than the summer Carl spent as a game warden in the Kawartha Lakes region. (No, I don’t expect you to know where that is.) Arts and Crafts aficionados are a passionate bunch, and will likely be thrilled that Carl and Madonna’s courtship takes place at Roycroft and that Elbert Hubbard makes several appearances. Even there I sacrificed Carl’s friendship with Alex Fournier and W.W. Denslow, fearing that few people would know who they are.

It’s been challenging to take a highly personal story and be objective enough to find the marketable nuggets, to take those nuggets and transform a life story into a believable and compelling plot. Forbidden love, betrayal, tragedy, adventure – these are things that keep people reading. I’m in the homestretch now and I hope by the time I finish, I’ll have delivered all that and more.

I’ve often wondered how other authors who write about real people decide what to put in and what to leave out. (If you’re one of them, please chime in!) If you know of authors who have successfully transformed a life story into a page turner, please show them some love and tell us about it.