Anne Lazurko

What’s a blog hop? Well basically it’s a way for authors to connect with one another and with readers and share info about what they’re working on, how it comes together, and why you might want to read it.

Thanks to Leona Theis, author of The Art of Salvage and Sightlines, for tagging me. Her answers to questions about her novel-in-progress can be found at
http://alwaysunderrevision.com/tag/leona-theis/

MY INTERVIEW ANSWERS:

What is your working title? 

Dollybird:

Where did the idea come from for the book? 

The novel gathered itself together around two ideas I stumbled over in research related to the early days of the Missouri/Coteau region. One was the myriad ways in which women were vulnerable, and the character and courage it took for them to navigate stereotypes and expectations to live lives beyond their circumstances. For example, the term Dollybird was used in the region to refer to a single woman who acted as live-in housekeeper for a new homesteader. But was she really just a housekeeper? And how pure were his intentions?

The second was the myriad ways in which a person could die in those days. Have a look at the headstones in an old abandoned prairie graveyard. What, beyond childbirth, killed so many women, babies and young children in those days? Men too? The maladies of the time were virulent and the diseases ugly, but in some parts of the country medical practices still included blood-letting. Imagine the potential stories.

Out of these threads a cast of characters was imagined and the novel written.

What genre does your book fall under?

Historical fiction. It’s literary, character driven, and the plot is influenced by the inevitable effects of the prairie landscape.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Okay, I thought I’d stick with Canadian actors and as I enjoy film but don’t pay too much attention to names, I’m embarrassed to say I only know those of the bigger celebrity types. With that caveat: Ellen Page could be Moira, and I know my young adult daughters would thank me if Ryan Gosling played Dillan. I’ve always thought Paul Gross would make a good Silas (he’d be a treat for us older types).  And Meg Tilly, ala Bomb Girls, could be Mrs. Miller.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Scattered through with birth, death, and the violent potential of both man and the elements, Dollybird excavates the small mercies that come to mean more than they should on a prairie landscape peopled with characters who struggle under a huge sky that waits, not so quietly, for them to fail.

 Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Neither. It will be published by Coteau Books, an independent literary press, and is to be launched Fall 2013.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Hmmm, there were so many drafts, it’s hard to remember back to the first. I still had all four of my children at home when I was writing it, so…. I’m going to say a year and a half? But two of my children are well into their university careers now, so that tells you how long it’s been, and how many drafts have been written since that first.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My sisters. I have five of them, all of whom I consider renaissance women. And I think my main character, Moira Burns, an east- coast- born- aspiring- doctor- sent- west, is one of those too. Despite the horrific odds for women of the time, she becomes more than she thought herself capable of, overcomes circumstances to find joy in a way she had never previously imagined. Many of my sisters have done the same. Many women everywhere do the same. They find grace.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

This is a tough one. I tried to think of recent historical fiction that examines the role and struggles of women, real women, “whose repertoire is seldom limited to a thin consumptive cough or a scream of rage”. (Love this quote from Lawrence Lipking in, “Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition”). The women in books like Marina Endicott’s, The Little Shadows, or Amy McKay’s, the Birth House go beyond such stereotypes and caricatures, as I hope my characters do.

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

I think readers should know this story is told from the point of view of two very distinct characters, both coming of age far from home and in what seems a very inhospitable place. The journey of young homesteader, Dillan Flaherty, is as much influenced by Moira as hers is by him. In writing the story from their two first person points of view, I hope the reader is given a broader picture and deeper insights into each character.

Also, I recently learned that Sinclair Ross’s mother was a Dollybird of sorts. She was divorced from her husband in a time when divorce didn’t happen and found work as housekeeper, taking young Sinclair with her as she moved from farm to farm. Some say this accounts for his ‘mother’ issues and his homosexuality? Any thoughts?

Dollybird is an English term and still in use. In fact, my friend heard it used recently on Coronation Street to refer to a ‘slutty’ woman. I couldn’t be more pleased!

OKAY,

so there you have my story behind the story. Please take time to view answers from the following fantastic writers about their work and their inspiration.

Anne McDonald, author of To the Edge of the Sea at  
http://totheedgeofthesea.blogspot.ca/

Maureen Ulrich, author of the YA ‘hockey books’, Power Plays, Faceoff, and Breakaway at
http://www.maureenulrich.ca/Maureen_Ulrich/Blog/Blog.html

Catherine Egan, author of the Tian Di trilogy for young adults at,
http://www.catherineegan.com/

Shelley Banks, poetry and fiction collections at
http://shelleybanks.ca/blog/

Lisa Guenther, fiction at 
http://www.brickhorse.ca/

Seven years after I started writing Dollybird, my novel has been accepted for publication by Coteau Books. There was, on receiving the news, much dancing and laughing and crying and more dancing, by myself, in my small studio at the top of a lonely arts centre. And then again when I told my husband and family.

Some people are amazed at my perseverance. Others are slightly amused at my delusion. I think I have been both, after all, I stuck with a project for five years only to spend another two selling it; and I confess to a confidence that I probably had no reason to possess outside of wilful blindness to the statistics around book publishing. In the end it doesn’t matter why I carried on, only that I did.

Mostly I’ve worked hard and had faith. Readers were positive, rejection feedback from publishers always personal and constructive (only a writer can know what a ‘good’ rejection is, but suffice it to say I never received one of the dreaded form letters), and I maintain a sense that the core of the thing works. I still like my characters, I still think a prairie setting can be made universal by good characters, and I can still get caught up in my own plot after all this time. In other words, while I spent months revisiting and revising, I never threw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater, and for that I am now so grateful.

As soon as I have details on dates and such I will post those here. I hope to enjoy every element of the publishing process and I’ll share what I can. In the meantime the validation acts as encouragement to work harder on my second novel (see literary work above), and as proof it can happen. It really can.