Kathleen McDonnell's Blog

Even the best-intentioned self-imposed deadlines often go unmet. I promised myself I would write in this blog every day of my Book Week tour, but fell off after Day 3. So here's the the catch-up entry for Days 4 & 5.



Thursday morning, met a great bunch of grade 7-8's at Beurling Academy in Verdun. Once again I read from The Shining World, and was pleased to hear a few groans of frusration at the cliffhanger ending of Chapter 1. I told them they'd just have to read the book to find out what happens next. At my other two Thursday readings, the main event was definitely Emily Included.



I was pleased to discover that the kids at Beaconsfield Library had started reading the book in their class, and they were already huge Emily fans. They wanted to know all about her life now, how she communicates, and would it be okay to write to her. Duh! (Memo to self: Must email the librarian the mailing address.)

In the evening I made my way to Laval to meet with an adult literacy group at The Learning Exchange. It was a nice change of pace to talk to grown-ups about my books. They were very interested in details of Emily Eaton's legal case, and unlike kids, they know all about the great Louise Arbour.

Day 5, Friday, was a whole different bag. At Heritage, a huge high school in St Hubert, I didn't do any readings (which was fine because I was starting to get bored by my own words). Instead I did a couple of workshops where I got to talk about the craft of writing and use my current word-of-the-day, "discourse". The students chose a genre (the list I gave them included fiction, blog post, film script, op-ed article, personal essay) and wrote about some current hot topics (the smoke bomb attacks in the Montreal metro for the first group, violence in hockey for the second). I decided to write along with them, and it was interesting to take note of my own spur-of-the-moment choices.

It's been a great Book Week - exhausting and exhilarating. My partner Alec and I toasted the end of my tour at one of Montreal's great institutions of lower learning, the Dieu du Ciel brewpub in the Plateau. (I suppose I could have blogged about the fantastic food in Montreal, but hey, this is Goodreads, not Chowhound.)

Au revoir, Montreal. It's been a slice.

Forget writers' hours. The real world is full of people who drag themselves out of bed at 6 am and rush to catch commuter trains. This morning I joined this brave and noble tribe (fortunately, my membership is temporary) and headed off to various locales on Montreal's West Island. More readings from the Notherland trilogy and Emily Included. More questions - some really good ones, actually. One student at Macdonald H.S. in St. Anne-de-Bellevue posed an interesting variation on Writer's #1 FAQ "How long did it take to write all three books in your trilogy?" My answer ("about ten years") made them all groan. That's almost as long as most of them have been alive! But it gave me a chance to talk about the creative process, how it's important to give your ideas and stories and characters enough time to percolate in your imagination.



Later, a girl at Kirkland Library asked, "How did you know what Emily was feeling when you wrote her story?" I'd found out some things in talking to Emily and her family, I told the kids. But mainly I tried to put myself in Emily's place, imagine how I'd feel in the same situation, and hope that what I came up with would be close to Emily's own experience. I told them how relieved and happy I was when Emily's father told me that he'd read most of the first draft of the book to her, and that she liked what she heard. Mostly, I had guessed right.

I keep writers' hours, which tend to be pretty much the opposite of most people's waking hours. But, trouper that I am, today I managed to make it all the way to Billings High School in Chateauguay at the ungodly hour of 9 am. Read from The Shining World to two big groups (60+) of kids in grades 7, 8 & 9. A lively bunch - they applauded, they asked questions, they even laughed politely at my jokes. Of course the touring writer's #1 FAQ came up: "How long does it take to write a book?" It fascinates me that this is such a burning question for so many people - not just kids. My answer varies. Today it was "as long as it takes to get it right". Then, realizing that answer was both too vague and a bit flippant, I said that, for me, it's taken as long as 8 or 9 years (The Nordlings) and as little as one year (Emily Included). Which, come to think of it, is really just another way of saying "as long as it takes to get it right".

My own burning question of the moment is: Can I do this two mornings in a row? Get up at the crack of dawn, that is. Tomorrow's first reading is in St. Anne de Bellevue, over an hour away. With trepidation, I'm setting the alarm for 6 am right now. G'night.

I love doing readings and meeting groups of kids. Writers tend to work alone and spend a lot of time spinning stores in our heads. So it's really energizing to get out and actually talk to people, to meet your readers and potential readers face to face.

This week I'm one of a couple of dozen touring authors for Canadian Children's Book Week. My "territory" is greater Montreal - lucky moi! If only I had the time to linger in all the fantastic cafes and bistros. I'm too busy consulting Google maps figuring out how to get where I needed to go next.

Day One, first stop: Octogone Library in Lasalle. (The building really is octagonal!) A great bunch of kids grades 4-6. First off I showed them some of my early drafts of The Nordlings to demonstrate the bitter truth of the writer's life: Writing is Rewriting. Ideas are easy to come by, compared to the hard slog of actually finding the words, getting them down on paper or a computer screen, finishing a draft, editing,cutting, adding, reworking, finishing another draft and the process starts all over again until it's "finished" (which it seems like it never will be). When kids see my marked-up, messy pages, they get what I'm talking about.

Then I read a short section from Emily Included. They told me about their own school, which is very inclusive, and had tons of questions about Emily Eaton and her court battle to go to a regular school.



Later I went to the library on the Mohawk reserve in Kahnawake, and met with the after-school book club there. I read from The Shining World and told them the story was partly inspired by pictographs I'd seen on canoe trips up north. I was going to read a bit from Emily Included too, but was interrupted by snacktime. Another bitter lesson for a writer: Literature will always come second to cookies.

Once I decided that I would write a sequel to The Nordlings, I began thinking about ways that I could carry the theme of music into the new book. I came across a news story about a major archeological find, a primitive flute made of animal bone that was unearthed in a cave in Germany. The flute had two holes and could produce three tones corresponding to the Do-Re-Mi scale. It was estimated to be around 35,000 years old, at that time the oldest known musical instrument. Since then more bone flutes have been discovered, some with more holes and even older, possibly as old as 40,000 years. You can see a picture of one of these ancient flutes at this link:

http://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/j/msnbc/54...

I realized a bone flute would be an intriguing way to continue the thematic thread about Peggy's flute from Book I. Around the same time there was a news story about another remarkable find. A ancient rock carving near Canmore, Alberta depicted a flute-playing "kokopelli" figure typical of the Hopi of the U.S. southwest. Why a picture of this mythical creature would be found so far north was a mystery, one that I decided to weave into the storyline of The Shining World.



I'll be taking a break from Origin stories for a little while, though not from this blog. I'll be posting about my readings and workshops in and around Montreal for Canadian Children's Book Week. Tune in.

I knew from the start that I wanted my imaginary world to revolve around music. But I soon discovered that I'd taken on a tricky task. Music demands to be heard, but all I had to work with was words on a page. I honesty can't remember how I came up with the notion that the Nordlings, the spirits who inhabit the Northern Lights, would be singers, and be named after the notes of the musical scale.



But the do-re-mi scale has only seven notes, and I wanted to express the idea that there were a vast number of Nordlings, and that music itself is infinite. So I decided that beyond the basic scale I would number them - e.g. "Re9". But it felt like kind of an odd idea to me, and it still does. (Warning to writers: Your words will outlive you, but so will your lame ideas!) Then again, there are a lot of odd things in the Notherland books, which is part of their appeal.

The flute plays a big part in the overall narrative arc of the series. In book 1, Peggy tries to sell her flute at a second-hand shop, an act that triggers the events that send her back to Notherland and sets the stage for the next two books. In The Shining World it's a rock painting called The Flute Player that sends Peggy on her journey. There's lots more to say about flutes in the books - more next time!

"From her place in the blazing RoryBory, Mi looked down from the sky over the vast sweep of Notherland. Maybe tonight, she thought as she drifted off to sleep, I will dream a new universe into existence." Those are the closing lines of The Nordlings and I was pretty pleased with them - the cadence of the phrases, the suggestion that the story goes on even after the book ends.



But at the time I wrote those lines, I was completely unaware of just how open-ended they were. Writing The Nordlings had been a long, hard slog. With no template to work from, I had to make everything up from scratch, and it was difficult to have faith that anyone would be interested in this strange little story of mine. I was relieved to be done with it, and I certainly didn't consider it anything but a stand-alone book. The one day, some months after The Nordlings was published, I opened it to the last page and was dumbstruck to realize that those final lines contained the seed of... yes, a sequel. Of course Mi should create a new universe! At that point I had no clue what it would be, or how the story would unfold. All I knew for sure was that I was going to write it. After a gap of nearly four years, the second installment of what I was calling The Notherland Journeys trilogy (because now I could foresee the possibility of a third book) saw the light of day.



Compared to its predecessor, The Shining World was a lot easier to write - chiefly because I didn't have to start from scratch. The characters already existed, and they had a pretty good idea of where they wanted the story to go.

"Writing is rewriting". A bit of a cliche, but for most writers, it's all too true. For me, much of the re-writing process is about discovering what it is I'm trying to say, and going for it. In early drafts of The Nordlings I imagined my northern travellers finding the wreck of the Terror, the ship of lost Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin.



But I had trouble figuring out where the story should go from there. Then it came to me: Why not have Franklin himself make an appearance? Or more accurately, the ghost of Franklin. As I've often found before, that decision really got the story rolling, opening up all kinds of other possibilities. It lead me to create one of the key characters in the trilogy, the Eternal, who in Book I takes the form of Franklin's wife, Lady Jane Franklin. She's the subject of one of my longtime favorite folk songs, variously called "Lord Franklin" and "Lady Franklin's lament".

I was homeward bound one night on the deep
Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep
I dreamed a dream and I thought it true
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew
With a hundred seamen he sailed away
To the frozen ocean in the month of May
To seek a passage around the pole
Where we poor seamen do sometimes go.
Through cruel hardships they vainly strove
Their ships on mountains of ice was drove
Only the Eskimo with his skin canoe
Was the only one that ever came through
In Baffin Bay where the whale fish blow
The fate of Franklin no man may know
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Lord Franklin with his sailors do dwell
And now my burden it gives me pain
For my long-lost Franklin I would cross the main
Ten thousand pounds I would freely give
To say on earth, that my Franklin lives.

In closing, an anecdote: In the late nineties (when I was working on The Nordlings) I was invited to speak at a children's television conference in London, England. My younger daughter, Ivy, then age nine, went along with me. Walking back to our hotel one day, we got a bit lost, and stopped to take a look at our handy tourist map. We were standing in front of one of those Great Man statues so ubiquitous in London. I looked at the plaque. It was a statue of Sir John Franklin! I was so excited I made a bit of a scene, embarrassing Ivy (who has since forgiven me).

I've been away from this blog for a couple of weeks, finishing a draft of a new play. When I'm writing a first draft, it's on my mind for most of my waking hours, and I find it near-impossible to think or write about anything else. But now I'm back - at least until I have to get started on draft #2!

In my very first post on this blog, I mentioned the poet William Blake as an inspiration for the imaginary world of Notherland. Over the years I've gone through periods of being obsessed with Blake, especially his ideas on "contraries" and the notion that the realm of the imagination is just as "real" as the physical world. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a kind of manifesto of Blakean concepts, written in evocative (and in some cases familiar) "proverbs" (e.g. "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom")



This idea of "the reality of imagination" is the core of the Notherland trilogy, and in the first book, I even named a minor character "Wilma Blake" as a sort of homage. By the time I started writing the second book, The Shining World, I decided I wanted to go further. I borrowed Blake whole-cloth and made him a character in the story.



I didn't go about it in a casual or (I hope) disrespectful way. I'd read a lot about Blake and his times, and "my" Blake is very rooted in the facts of his life, while placing him in a story and characters arising out of my imagination. A blurring of the border between real and imaginary... I like to think Blake would have approved.

More than any other writer, Blake straddles the worlds of childhood and adulthood,and writing this has brought back the memory of a charming book I used to read to my kids when they were little:



I've only scratched the surface of Blake's influence on the trilogy. More to come...

I haven't been keeping up my usual rate of posting here lately, but I do have an excuse: I'm hard at work on the script of a theatrical adaptation of Emily Included.

But to get back to the subject of the Notherland trilogy, the current focus of this blog, I'm excited that Book I, The Nordlings is going to be serialized in the Hamilton Spectator (link below), introducing the series to a whole new generation of readers.


http://www.thespec.com/community/educ...