As a young child, I enjoyed fairy tales, and poetry. "Winkem, Blinkem and Nod" was a favorite, as were all the selections in Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. What I remember clearly are the drawings and watercolors accompanying these poems, and the sounds, rhymes, and rhythms. From this developed my inclination to relate literature (words) with images (art).
Later, I adored Heidi by Johanna Spyri. My hardback copy of this first full-length text included watercolors. Looking back, I see as significant that it is a European story. Little Women by Louise May Alcott followed.
I was given One Hundred and One Poems, and even though I was too young to understand the nuances, I loved reading them aloud to feel the rhythms and sounds of words. I now read my fiction aloud to test its rhythms and sounds
As a young teen, I loved the Perry Mason mysteries, and Edgar Allen Poe, both his poetry, notably "Annabelle Lee" and "The Bells," which brought me the pleasure of natural sounds and the sounds of words. His short stories introduced me to settings with a foreign feel, particularly 19th century settings. From this it was natural for me to set three of my historical novels in Europe--Holland, Italy, and France--as well as the stories in Life Studies.
As an older teen, I read A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Catch 22. As a result, anti-war sensibilities surfaced in chapter one of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Alphonsine's confession of saving the life of an enemy solder in Luncheon of the Boating Party, and are surfacing even more prominently in my current work-in-progress, Lisette's List.
Amy Lowell's poem "Patterns," which is a cry against the rigid limitations of prescribed women's roles had a deep effect on me, buried for years, but surfacing in the character of Emily Carr in The Forest Lover, and the plot element of a woman receiving notice that her lover died in a war will echo in Lisette's List.
I discovered Shakespeare as a teen, too.
What kinds of fiction did you read as a child and teenager, and did you have some favourites?
See answer to previous question.
What did you do before you became a published novelist, and how did you come to write your first novel and get it published?
I was a teacher in a public high school for thirty years, teaching American Literature (A Separate Peace, Huckleberry Finn, Of Mine and Men, The Pearl, The Scarlet Letter--the old standards), and later English literature (Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, As You Like It, the romantic poets, the war poetry British servicemen Wilfred Owen and Seigfried Sassoon.
Through a friend, the daughter of a blind couple, I witnessed their natural interactions in a large room full of people and was impressed with how they managed--a wealthy, cultured, New Englander and a poor, rough-shot California rancher. As I came to know their determination to live a fulfilling life, I was convinced it would make an inspiring novel. When I told my friend that she ought to write a book about her family, she turned it right back on me, saying, "You're the writer," even though at that time I had only published articles. I proceeded, worked on it for four years, and sent out query letters to agents when I finished. That novel, What Love Sees, eventually became a CBS television movie.
How would you describe your style of fiction or your approach to writing fiction during your first few novels?
What Love Sees developed from many hours of interviews with the family members, and was faithful to the events in their lives.
There was a sharp step forward in my second novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue which was conceived as a series of discreet stories tracing the influence of a Dutch painting, an invented Vermeer, on the people who owned it, loved it, stole it, valued or didn't value it. Seven of the eight chapters were pure invention, with imagined characters, but one was based on the researched events of Vermeer's life.
Using the principles of historical fiction that I developed in that chapter, I proceeded to write three novels based on important periods in three painters' lives, personally and artistically. Because they were firmly based on extensive research, I was able to show the development of their painting styles and skills, as well as their interaction with friends, and their interior struggles and joys.
Between novels, I experimented with short stories told from the points of view of persons--mostly historic, a few invented--who knew the artists; as well as stories of common people encountering art in subtle or life-changing ways. Written over a period of a dozen years, those stories became the collection, Life Studies.
Feeling that I didn't want to return to the subject matter of a portion of a painter's life, I switched mediums from painting to stained glass when I discovered the unknown woman who conceived of and designed the famous Tiffany lamps.
In each of these novels, the settings in time and place contributed to the realism and power of the narratives. This became a stylistic trademark:
-- World War II Amsterdam, Dutch high society, rural life, and the artist's life in 17th century Delft
-- the male-dominated art world of 18th century Rome, torture practices, limited roles for women.
-- the deeply forested wilderness of British Columbia and the five native tribal communities which inhabited it, in contrast to the largely English settlers, colonialists whose rigid Christian values conflicted with the animism and spirit worlds of the native population.
-- the joie de vivre of a vibrant time in late 29th century Paris in which Impressionism developed along with a new social order.
-- Gilded Age New York at the turn of the century when uptown wealth rubbed elbows with the poverty of immigrants pouring into the Lower East Side, the protagonist's rarefied life in Tiffany Studios as well as her lively boardinghouse.
How would you describe your style of fiction or your approach to writing fiction now?
My current novel-in-progress, Lisette’s List, marks another big change, a move to a largely invented plot with the fictional main characters not artists, but encountering the art and personalities of three painters. Although many aspects are researched (art and life of Pissarro, Cézanne, and Chagall; World War II, Provençal culture), the plot is entirely of my own devising, allowing me much more freedom.
Was your first published novel standalone or part of a series, and what advantages or disadvantages did this present for you?
All my novels are standalones., requiring different research and the creation of different milieus. Although this is more work, the advantage is that I learn a wealth of things new to me with each book.
Did you find writing your second novel easier or more challenging than writing your first novel and why?
My first novel was naturally more difficult because I had so much to learn: how to develop the arc of the narrative; how to move forward and backward in time; how to show the interiority of the characters. In this last aspect, I had a breakthrough with my fourth novel in learning through trial and error how to manage both close and distant narrative voice through particular sentence structures and the lexicon of the point of view character. Other than that, no single books was more difficult than the others. In each, I have to research new material, create a world unique to that time and place, develop individual, complex characters and issues. For each new novel, I write ten to twelve drafts, each of which refines the pacing, deepens the characters, sharpens the conflicts and issues, adds or subtracts details, develops secondary characters, makes the language more precise, and adds new dimensions to the themes.
Who is another novelist whose fiction writing you admire and why?
I admire Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway) for her fluid movement in the characters' minds; Michael Cunningham (The Hours) for his interlacing of three plots and time periods; Sena Jeter Naslund for her gorgeous sentences in Ahab’s Wife that effortlessly drop a deep philosophical thought in the reader's lap; and Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) for the way ethical principles are expressed and learned by the characters which illustrate the redemptive grace of which we are all capable.
Pick a series of novels you have written. How would you describe what makes that a cohesive series with strong appeal for readers? If you have not written a series of novels, how would you describe what makes one of your favourite series by another novelist a cohesive series with strong appeal for readers?
I neither write nor read series novels. However, the stories in Life Studies about painters and common people encountering art can be seen as a series, loosely defined, because they pick up the same character at another period in his life; and develop different angles of a theme in more than one story. Reading groups enjoy seeing a minor character in one story reappear as a major character in another. They like the challenge of discovering a theme treated in the 19th century stories surfacing in the contemporary stories.
How would you summarise one of your novels in one paragraph?
Luncheon of the Boating Party, the novel and the painting, depicts the summer of 1880, an exuberant postwar time when social constraints were loosening, Paris was healing, and Parisians were bursting with a desire for pleasure. The fourteen people on the terrace overlooking the Seine enjoying this moment of la vie moderne are Renoir's very real friends from all social classes whose lives, narrated by themselves, reveal the issues of the time. Boat races, a duel, a tragedy backstage at the Folies Bergère, an elopement, a confession, the end of an affair, the beginning of another, a romantic triangle give color to life. Yearning to create something extraordinary out of the life he sees, Renoir takes on this most challenging project at a time of personal crises in art and love and while facing issues of loyalty and diverging styles tearing apart the Impressionist group.
How would you describe the appeal of this novel to readers?
The novel appeals to readers because of the insight into Renoir, one of the most beloved of the Impressionists, and reveals his personality, wry humor, love affairs, struggles and artistic techniques. It has a wealth of vibrant characters--the fourteen friends who model for his paintings, their repartee, flirtations, conflicts, and moving confessions, as well as the events of their private lives which illuminate vividly the time and place while moving the plot forward. Most of them have yearnings with which readers can identify. Well-beloved among them is the adorable Alphonsine with whom Renoir interacts most revealingly and whose concerns about him deepen into love in such a way that her yearning becomes the reader's yearning. In addition, the novel takes place in a universally loved city, enticing Paris, in the explosive 19th century.
How would you summarise a chapter from this novel in one paragraph?
After the first day of painting, Alphonsine creeps from her room onto the terrace to see the painting. It makes her feel that as one of the models, she is part of something important and exciting, a feeling she calls "nous," us, we. Renoir discovers her there and she senses a growing rapprochement, a coming together as he reveals his ideas for the painting. They go for a row during which he confesses that he feels undirected, like a cork being carried away in the stream without his control. She encourages him to think more positively. She reveals her sorrow at losing her husband in the war. They nearly kiss, but she backs away, firm in her conviction that they shouldn't kiss until he knows who she really is. She is apparently hiding something. However, she reveals how important it is to her to be one of the models, nous, one of Us.
How would you describe the contribution this chapter makes to the novel?
It reveals how Renoir came to be a painter, and how insecure he is in his art. It develops the understanding between Alphonsine and Renoir not shared by any of his other models. It hints at some secret of hers, the revealing of which must come later, and upon which there rests deep, private stakes, as imortant to her as the success of this painting is to him.
Author website: www.susanvreeland.com
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