work and play

No more museums for awhile. The sun has found Maine! In order to work and keep from morning kayaking, I drive to Miller Library at Colby College. Funny how that provides a work atmosphere for me. I can’t make potato salad, wander down to the dock or do a hand laundry. I write for three hours, return to camp for lunch where my husband is glad to see me and we enjoy the lake in the afternoon.

I’m crafting a new chapter in Hildegard’s story. When I get stuck, I re-read other chapters. Sometimes I discover that I need more detail to flesh out the scene. I needed to see what Hildegard saw when she moved her nuns to start a new monastery. She had been enclosed in an anchorage for some years, then moved out to start a convent with her teacher within the walls of St. Disibod’s monastery. For forty years she had not been outside the walls. Everything must have seemed new.

The details are coming from the Luttrell Psalter, a 14th century illuminated English prayer book. I’m making the leap that English medieval country scenes were much like those in Germany in the 12th century. Hildegard may have seen women harvesting barley and a gooseherd waving his club to scare a hawk away from his geese.

However, Hildegard will be on vacation for a few days. The grandkids have arrived!

character

At our Maine lake, the only thing keeping me from inhabiting this painting is the rainy weather! So on a visit to the Colby College Museum of Art, I enjoyed this Winslow Homer painting and another by William Merritt Chase.

I had seen Chase’s painting “Boy Eating Apple (The Apprentice)” before. This time I was surprised to notice other details. The freckled boy seems caught in the act, as if he shouldn’t be behind the fence enjoying a green apple. His mouth is stopped in surprise before he chomps the apple. In addition, the bulge in his apron bib is not caused by only his hand. A tell-tail leaf and the end of a twig tell us that the boy has stashed away a whole branch of apples for future eating!

These details seem to illustrate something about character. When we first meet a character, we don’t know all there is to know right away. An action tells us something (boy likes apples, Charlotte’s “Salutations!” evidences an intelligent spider). More detail gives us more insight (boy is sneaking apple, Charlotte can write words). Looking, or reading, further, we discover intentions not known at first (boy is really hungry, Charlotte will save Wilbur).

I’m trying to remember this simple analysis and comparison as I draw out Hildegard’s character – growing her from a fourteen-year-old nun who doesn’t understand her visions to an eighty-one year old abbess who learned to listen to God’s voice. It’s all in the details.

revision

Community college libraries are wonderful to escape to, especially in the summer. But it's hard when the sky finally looks like this one in Slovakia a few weeks ago! I've been writing at our tech this week. Hardly anyone has been there, though today groups seem to be conferring with professors in the library. It is warmish, but not bad with this cool NE summer!

I feel like I'm working with a scalpel and a trowel! I'm re-visioning the structure of my Hildegard story. Cut, add and lay in mortar to hold it all together! With this new version of Hildegard, flashbacks are needed to fill in back story, and I have to relearn how to do them effectively.

The draft I'm working with is so polished that the new writing seems strained. I have to get over that and just lay down the words. The polishing will come later after I have the new structure.

It's off to Maine now. When the lake gets too distracting, I head for the Colby College library.

Windows are being replaced at home, so I took refuge at the community college library today. I intended to continue work on Hildegard. However, I revised a picture book manuscript instead.

I received good peer feedback from the annual NESCBWI conference this spring. Now I've incorporated it. Where to submit? This is a tough one. I've already tried the two houses I targeted as open to stories with a religious theme, Eerdsmans and Ideals. Now I must find others.

I ended the day by hearing Donald Hall and Peter Campion read at New England College. Hall read one of my favorites, "Names of Horses." I got up the nerve to introduce myself. At over eighty and frailer looking every time, he still is rather a rather formidable wild haired, bushy person with a literary giant's reputation!

Hildegard of Bingen

This is the summer of Hildegard. I’m fresh back from my second visit to the Abbey of Saint Hildegard in Eibingen, Germany. What better time to tackle another revision of the story of this abbess who captured my attention ten years ago?

So today I began. With the singing of Vespers echoing in my mind, I re-read my manuscript. I put myself back in the abbey church at dusk. One nun approached from the choir. She turned a key to lock the wrought iron gate that separates the altar from the pews. Then she lit the floor candle, turned up the lights and exited. Very soon the sound of many footsteps signaled that the nuns were entering the choir. They were hidden from view as their voices blended together in the Vespers Psalm. One voice led and fifty-something voices responded. It did not matter that I couldn’t see the nuns. Their crystalline voices were enough.

This was Hildegard’s life, too. Though her cloistered beginning was secret, her life blossomed. She dared to write her visions, though punishment for heresy was death.
My task is to make the 12th century life of this Benedictine nun come alive for today’s young teens. How can they believe in her and understand her spiritual yearning?