 |
- Author interview - |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Interview with Susan Vreeland, author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999). Her short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and journals. Her first novel What Love Sees (1996) was made into a CBS television movie. One of the stories in Girl in Hyacinth Blue, A Night Different Than All Other Nights, was nominated for a Pushcart Award in 1998. Girl in Hyacinth Blue is one of five nominations in the Fiction Category for the ABA's BookSense Award. Winners will be announced in June 2000. Girl in Hyacinth Blue is also one of three nominations for the Western States Art Federation's Book of the Year Award. Author's email: svree@funtv.com - Web SiteFeature by Nancy Mehl. Read our review of Girl in Hyacinth Blue NANCY MEHL - The reviews of Girl in Hyacinth Blue have been very positive. To what do you attribute the success of this novel? SUSAN VREELAND - The positive response to Girl in Hyacinth Blue has been a surprise, and a delight, to me. Perhaps many people have, in their own families, a painting or a hand-made item that means something to them. If so, they can imagine, like I did, the provenance of how that precious thing came to them, and how it has passed through many lives. Perhaps also, Vermeer represents calm and tranquility in our fast-paced lives. His work reminds me of Wordsworth's line: "With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and by the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things." Each chapter contains a different story that revolves around a painting. Was it easier or harder to write your novel this way? I started by writing a pair of stories, which became the first and last. It wasn't until I was writing the fifth story that I began to conceive this as a little novel. Perhaps playing that game with myself kept me from feeling the formidableness of having a whole novel ahead of one. I think everyone who reads GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE will identify with one or more of the characters portrayed in the novel. Do you identify with one more than the others? Saskia, I would have to say, is the one female character I identify with most. Her line, "There's got to be some beauty too," came right from my soul. That is not to say I didn't enjoy creating Magdalena, whose sensibilities of yearning have been mine too. And of course, Claudine was pure fun to create. Where did you get the idea for your novel? That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains. In the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I was once drawn to a small Phoenician glass medicine pitcher, luminous pale yellow-green with a rounded belly and a long, curved snout of a spout. It was made in the second century. People rose in my imagination--the mother of a sick child who let a few drops fall from the spout onto her child's tongue; the glassblower who might have seen a similarly shaped animal the morning he made it. Did it rain that day, or was the sun scorching his back while he worked? Was his community at peace or war? In want or plenty? Did he see the thing he made valued by others? Certainly he could not have imagined its longevity or the world it now inhabits. Glass! Countless hands had held it. For it to have survived undamaged for eighteen hundred years moved me with awe and tenderness. Likewise, paintings, especially those with people, move me the same way, and feed my imagination. Who sat as model for the artist? What was their relationship? Was the painter sick with dread over how he would feed his family? What did his children want from him that day? Was his wife happy? Was he? Was he contented with his work? I remember my step great-grandfather who came from England to paint America as a young man. When I was nine he taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared on a page of real, textured watercolor paper. How many girls throughout history would have longed to be taught that, but had to do washing and mending instead? I've always envied writers whose novels gushed out from their own growing up, rich in ethnicity or place or history. Countering my complaints about my ethnic blandness, the lack of a ready-made family story, one of my writer friends said, "Go back further." All I had was a love for art, a Dutch name, and a trip twenty years earlier when, to my surprise, I passed through a village in North Holland named Vreeland. I had nothing more than that--except a library card, and uninterrupted days of solitude, two years of cancer treatment and recovery, during which I could imagine my way out of my uncertain circumstances, and imagine my way into Dutch paintings. They showed me a heritage alive with vitality and history and the endurance of beauty. They survived--and so would I. Poring over the National Gallery catalog of the Johannes Vermeer exhibition in Washington D.C., I felt a growing love for a people and a place I could call mine. All those brave Dutchmen fending off flood on their fragile, sunken land were my kinsmen. But those complaisant matrons admiring their jewels, married to ship captains trading in African souls were my kinswomen too. A girl crouching on a swept Delft street with her orange skirt ballooning out behind her like a pumpkin could have been me in another age. I felt Dutch! It was Vermeer who gave me my heritage. In him I saw my same reverence for items made by hand--by someone unknown to him. Vermeer, too, was a lover of the connotations and qualities of things in his own domestic life: the luminous variations of pale colors in a hand-dipped window pane, a woman's silk jacket with fur trim, the rough nap of a red Turkish carpet, the strong lines of a golden pitcher, a hand-drawn wall map showing where that ship captain sailed. Now the cords of connection tightened, and I felt free to add objects of my own imagination--a glass of milk left by a sickly child, a sewing basket, a young girl's new black shoes with square gold buckles. I had a painting--and with news reports of so much art stolen from Holocaust victims by members of the Third Reich, I had a start. How did you research your novel? I made extensive use of the UCSD (University of California, San Diego) library, including their wonderful collection of historic maps. I had to be careful not to set a story in a village that was under water at the time. Describe a typical writing day for our readers. A typical writing day is impossible to describe. I teach high school English in the San Diego Unified School District, and many weekday evenings I stay up late, or rush home from school to get into my creative life. Much of Girl in Hyacinth Blue was written while I was undergoing chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant and surgery for lymphoma. I guess that's why I had the painting survive all those centuries. Survival was on my mind. The book was a wonderful gift during those days of solitude and quiet. To it, I owe the power of healing. The vibrancy of what I was imagining lifted me out of self-absorption. What advice would you give to an aspiring writer in today’s marketplace? Several challenges face the beginning writer, not the least of which is the urge to send one's work out before it is as fine as it can be. We so dearly want the validation that comes with publication that often we cut short our chances by having big dreams too fast. I would also speak in favor of years of apprenticeship interacting with editors of literary magazines, listening to their comments, revising, reading widely and slowly and attentively, being open to the helpful criticisms of fellow writers. I must speak as well of the benefits of the small to medium sized publishing houses for whom a submission by a writer early in his or her career might receive more loving attention than from a big house. What are you working on now? I am working on a short novel for Viking/Penguin currently called Artemisia. Artemisia Gentileschi was the first female painter to earn a place in art history. She lived in the Italian Baroque period and was known for her individual and sometimes radical treatment of female heroes from classical and Biblical sources. The novel deals with her rape by her painting teacher, the trial and its public and private aftermath, betrayals by her father, obstacles to her achievement as a painter, and her hopes and losses in the matter of love. It will appear in hardback in spring 2001 and paper a year later. When I finish that, I need to add several more short stories to a collection of stories on the arts. Called Uncommon Clay and Other Tales of the Arts, it includes stories of VanGogh, Cezanne, Monet, Matisse or their work. In one, the characters of VanGogh's "Potato Eaters" come to life. It will come out from Viking/Penguin in spring 2002 in hardback, with paper to follow a year later. Read Susan Vreeland's full bio Author's email: svree@funtv.com |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||