My Next Big Thing

Thanks to my friends Juliette Fay and Ania Szado, I’ve been invited to participate in an online literary blog called, My Next Big Thing.

The blog is a series of questions about my work-in-progress. Many national and international writers have participated. It gives readers a glimpse into the working life of a writer. Part of the fun is tagging someone else, and it is with great delight that I will be tagging three other writers at the end of this post.

Here we go.

What is the working title of your book?

A Catalogue of Birds.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I love playwright Tom Stoppard’s answer to this question: “If I knew, I’d go there.”

For me it was serendipity.  A friend lent me a book called “Wolves and Honey, A Hidden History of the Natural World,” by Susan Brind Morrow.  It’s one of those books where on page one you call your local store and order your own copy. It is a slim memoir about the loss of a brother, set in and around Seneca Lake, NY and it is one of the most beautiful, arresting evocations of the natural world I have ever read.

I was playing with the idea of writing about the damage that comes home from war.

I wanted to write about a boy who is so in tune with the world around him, anything that separates him creates grief.  He is a gifted bird artist.

I wanted to write about a big Irish Catholic family where the primary relationship is between a brother and sister. Morrow’s book inspired me to plant the story in the natural world, to have each main character’s relationship to the lake, the land, the birds and wildlife be as important as their relationship to each other. More than anything I’ve ever written, this book is alive with a sense of place.

What genre does your book fall under? 

Setting it in 1966 and 1970 – wow, does that mean it’s historical fiction?

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

You would think I’d be great at this given how much time I’ve spent writing for the theatre. But I actually find this almost impossible to do. No doubt we’re talking character actors here. But here’s what I came up with. There are five siblings and their parents:

Kids (range in age from 17 – 30):
Elle Fanning
Saoirse Ronan
Mia Wasakowska
Zach Gilford
Eddie Redmayne

Parents:
Frances McDormand
Jeff Daniels

Honestly, this is all a bit too Hollywood for me. The parents and older siblings should be character actors. The younger kids should be unknowns. Fresh faces you’ve never seen on the screen before.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Very funny. I’ve never written one sentence about anything.

The novel begins and ends with water.  There’s a large Irish Catholic family with five kids. It’s 1966 and the Viet Nam war changes everything

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

Two years and my deadline keeps moving out in front of me. I thought I had a solid plot; discovered I had a solid story. Finishing work on the subplot now and hoping that the merger of the two will work.

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

Why is this such a scary question? I don’t know if I can dare to compare my work to the following writers and books, but these books would be in the right territory and certainly inspired me. Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, Marilynne Robinson’s Home, Toni Morrison’s Home.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

I wanted to write about the damage that comes home from war that most of us never see. The damage that families live with, and try and fail to heal from. The damage that soldiers struggle with – some for the rest of their lives. Viet Nam is especially interesting to me because the damage played out personally, politically and in environmental degradation that is ongoing in Viet Nam today.

It has taken me a lifetime to begin to understand the fallout from WWII and Viet Nam just in my own family, and the fact that many of those issues and wounds – because they are so hidden – are still playing out today.

What else about your book might pique a reader’s interest?

Billy Flynn is a bird artist and is only fully alive in the natural world. His kid sister, Nell Flynn is a serious piano student. She learns Messiaen’s “A Catalogue of Birds” to play for her brother when he gets home from Viet Nam. Rachel Carson’s bombshell of a book, “The Silent Spring” inspires the work of Jack Flynn, their father, whose life’s work is bringing the Seneca Indian’s apples back to life at Cornell’s Agricultural Station in Geneva, NY. Nell gets a job with the man who is restoring the Observatory in Geneva that was built for the comet finder William Brooks in 1888 and subsequently went to wrack and ruin. One of the first things they have to do is remove 400 pounds of honey from the walls.

When and how will it be published?

I have to finish it first. Then we’ll talk.

Enough about my Next Big Thing. Here are three amazing writers who will now tell you all about their Next Big Thing:

David Abrams’ debut novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2012 and a Best Book of 2012 by Paste Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Barnes & Noble. It was also featured as part of B&N’s Discover Great New Writers program. His short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salon, Electric Literature, Salamander, The Literarian, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, Five Chapters, The Missouri Review, and many other places. He regularly blogs about the literary life at The Quivering Pen

Catherine Parnell is the author of the memoir The Kingdom of His Will. Her short stories and reviews have appeared in Dos Passos Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Post Road, Baltimore Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and elsewhere. Currently, Catherine serves as the senior associate editor of the literary journal CONSEQUENCE magazine and the fiction editor of Salamander Magazine. She teaches creative writing at the noted independent literary center Grub Street in Boston and runs her own manuscript consulting business.

Rebecca Wait was born in Oxford in 1988 and spent most of her childhood playing football and writing stories. She studied English at Oxford University, where she specialized in Old English poetry.  She wrote The View on the Way Down in the evenings the year after she graduated, while working as a teaching assistant. She then moved to London and worked for a year as an English teacher, during which time she secured a book deal with Picador. She now writes full time. Her debut novel, The View on the Way Down, will launch on April 11, 2013. Foreign rights have been sold in Holland and Germany.