LISTENING TO THE SUN back story
Listening to the Sun
It's kind of fun explaining what inspired me to write my books, and I do hope that hearing the back story makes the reading experience more pleasurable.
LISTENING TO THE SUN is set in Northern Vermont, several miles from where I lived for seven years. The area is often wild, sometimes isolated, and always incredibly beautiful. Sometimes going around a corner that I rounded every day would reveal a new scene, an awe-inspiring sunset, a brilliant field of flame-colored maples at the height of autumn leaf-peeping season, an animal caught mid-flight: a hawk, perhaps or a sedate and stately deer. The sun might glint off a mountain of snow, creating a blue and diamond mirage, or the early morning mist might rise off the glass surface of Belvedere Pond.
It is that pond on Route 118, right before you make the final bend to the picturesque town of Montgomery Center, that intrigued me, especially after I heard the stories of what the pond had swallowed through the ages.
The pond is surrounded by the Green Mountains, majestic and maternal, the heavy growth of maples and fir trees hiding the strength of the mountain beneath. Route 118 lowers you right into the twists and turns before the pond spreads out in front of you, the mountains to your left, glass pond and mountains beyond to your right. There's a space there where people can pull over and ooh and aah. When the sun is right, you can take a photo of the pond and there's no way you can tell up from down because the pond's reflection is a mirror image of the mountains above.
I love Belvedere Pond early in the morning when the mist settles around the edges of the pond, a marshy area that locals know as home to almost every wild animal in Vermont: moose, bear, deer, herons of all shapes and sizes, fox, beaver, raccoon, etc. They are so bold that I've often had to stop my car and wait fifteen or twenty minutes for them to get out of the way.
When I lived in Vermont, I made my living as a photo journalist, so my camera was always in my car. I made special friends with a moose and her twin calves one year, often getting within three or four feet to take photos in that swampy area. I felt like the Northeast Kingdom's version of National Geographic.
The pond has a personality that is austere and cold. It's uninhabited because the mountains go straight up on all three sides (the marsh is its fourth side). Locals tell tales about the pond being bottomless. Full herds of horses pulling carriages went into the pond, cars disappeared, people committed suicide or murder. Stories abound about the pond and its history. I heard them all and dug around for more, finding that the more I heard, the more I was convinced the pond had spirits in it and around it. My imagination was stoked.
But it was one particular incident that convinced me to write LISTENING TO THE SUN.
One early summer afternoon, several friends and I loaded a canoe into the pond so that we could practice for an upcoming triathlon (running, biking, canoeing). We were a team, so we needed time together, and Belvedere Pond was close and calm. Until that day.
We were in the middle of the pond when the storm starting moving in. The rumbling started far off over the mountains, and Rich (our "teacher") said, "We probably should get out of here. Lightning will find this pond, and we don't want to be here when it does."
The three of us struggled with the canoe, hauling ass up the hill to his truck as black clouds came in from the east. Thunder echoed through the valley the pond created. Louder than I've ever heard. Lightning streaked blue in the sky. I could smell it. The hair on my arms rose straight up.
We sat in the cab of the truck, too fascinated to move, and watched the clouds from the east hover over the center of the pond. Suddenly, orange and purple fire balls shot into the pond, a wind whipped up, the truck rock.
"Holy shit." I held on to my friend Wendy, who was sitting in the middle. "What the hell?"
From the south, came another band of clouds and they collided with the ones already above us. More fireballs. Louder thunder. The truck rocked so hard, Rick threw on the emergency brake. We screamed, but I could only hear myself though I saw Rick's and Wendy's mouths open.
Then, unbelievably, a THIRD front moved in from the west. The three sets of thunderclouds jockeyed for position, sending out Thor-sized bolts of lightning, sparking balls of fire that instantly dissipated when they hit the pond, and the sky darkened completely. The only thing providing light -- the fireballs.
For fifteen minutes, the storm raged, and finally, the skies opened up and it poured quarter sized hail. We sat in place, unable to see more than an inch outside the truck windows, until the storm slowed down.
Shaking, we drove home at a snail's pace, and we've been telling the story about that Greek-god-strength storm ever since.
I remember feeling that the storm felt like a battle had been fought in the sky. Almost an alien battle. Then I wondered whether there'd been a storm like that before, and whether some of the people who'd disappeared into the lake had been swallowed up by such a storm.
LISTENING TO THE SUN was born that day, but it went through many changes before finally being published, and I'm sure there are some who might believe my story could actually happen. Especially those who make Northern Vermont their home and have seen the mist rising from the pond's edges on those early mornings when nothing else moves but the mist itself.
I'd love to take people to those places I wrote about in Vermont and talk about the process!
Peace,
Dawn
Listening to the Sun
It's kind of fun explaining what inspired me to write my books, and I do hope that hearing the back story makes the reading experience more pleasurable.
LISTENING TO THE SUN is set in Northern Vermont, several miles from where I lived for seven years. The area is often wild, sometimes isolated, and always incredibly beautiful. Sometimes going around a corner that I rounded every day would reveal a new scene, an awe-inspiring sunset, a brilliant field of flame-colored maples at the height of autumn leaf-peeping season, an animal caught mid-flight: a hawk, perhaps or a sedate and stately deer. The sun might glint off a mountain of snow, creating a blue and diamond mirage, or the early morning mist might rise off the glass surface of Belvedere Pond.
It is that pond on Route 118, right before you make the final bend to the picturesque town of Montgomery Center, that intrigued me, especially after I heard the stories of what the pond had swallowed through the ages.
The pond is surrounded by the Green Mountains, majestic and maternal, the heavy growth of maples and fir trees hiding the strength of the mountain beneath. Route 118 lowers you right into the twists and turns before the pond spreads out in front of you, the mountains to your left, glass pond and mountains beyond to your right. There's a space there where people can pull over and ooh and aah. When the sun is right, you can take a photo of the pond and there's no way you can tell up from down because the pond's reflection is a mirror image of the mountains above.
I love Belvedere Pond early in the morning when the mist settles around the edges of the pond, a marshy area that locals know as home to almost every wild animal in Vermont: moose, bear, deer, herons of all shapes and sizes, fox, beaver, raccoon, etc. They are so bold that I've often had to stop my car and wait fifteen or twenty minutes for them to get out of the way.
When I lived in Vermont, I made my living as a photo journalist, so my camera was always in my car. I made special friends with a moose and her twin calves one year, often getting within three or four feet to take photos in that swampy area. I felt like the Northeast Kingdom's version of National Geographic.
The pond has a personality that is austere and cold. It's uninhabited because the mountains go straight up on all three sides (the marsh is its fourth side). Locals tell tales about the pond being bottomless. Full herds of horses pulling carriages went into the pond, cars disappeared, people committed suicide or murder. Stories abound about the pond and its history. I heard them all and dug around for more, finding that the more I heard, the more I was convinced the pond had spirits in it and around it. My imagination was stoked.
But it was one particular incident that convinced me to write LISTENING TO THE SUN.
One early summer afternoon, several friends and I loaded a canoe into the pond so that we could practice for an upcoming triathlon (running, biking, canoeing). We were a team, so we needed time together, and Belvedere Pond was close and calm. Until that day.
We were in the middle of the pond when the storm starting moving in. The rumbling started far off over the mountains, and Rich (our "teacher") said, "We probably should get out of here. Lightning will find this pond, and we don't want to be here when it does."
The three of us struggled with the canoe, hauling ass up the hill to his truck as black clouds came in from the east. Thunder echoed through the valley the pond created. Louder than I've ever heard. Lightning streaked blue in the sky. I could smell it. The hair on my arms rose straight up.
We sat in the cab of the truck, too fascinated to move, and watched the clouds from the east hover over the center of the pond. Suddenly, orange and purple fire balls shot into the pond, a wind whipped up, the truck rock.
"Holy shit." I held on to my friend Wendy, who was sitting in the middle. "What the hell?"
From the south, came another band of clouds and they collided with the ones already above us. More fireballs. Louder thunder. The truck rocked so hard, Rick threw on the emergency brake. We screamed, but I could only hear myself though I saw Rick's and Wendy's mouths open.
Then, unbelievably, a THIRD front moved in from the west. The three sets of thunderclouds jockeyed for position, sending out Thor-sized bolts of lightning, sparking balls of fire that instantly dissipated when they hit the pond, and the sky darkened completely. The only thing providing light -- the fireballs.
For fifteen minutes, the storm raged, and finally, the skies opened up and it poured quarter sized hail. We sat in place, unable to see more than an inch outside the truck windows, until the storm slowed down.
Shaking, we drove home at a snail's pace, and we've been telling the story about that Greek-god-strength storm ever since.
I remember feeling that the storm felt like a battle had been fought in the sky. Almost an alien battle. Then I wondered whether there'd been a storm like that before, and whether some of the people who'd disappeared into the lake had been swallowed up by such a storm.
LISTENING TO THE SUN was born that day, but it went through many changes before finally being published, and I'm sure there are some who might believe my story could actually happen. Especially those who make Northern Vermont their home and have seen the mist rising from the pond's edges on those early mornings when nothing else moves but the mist itself.
I'd love to take people to those places I wrote about in Vermont and talk about the process!
Peace,
Dawn
Listening to the Sun
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