The Writing of Souls on Fire & Lonesome Dreams

I still cannot fully explain why I spent eight years writing a novel about two gay bluegrass women.

I am a straight, native Bostonian, now Californian, whose musical tastes lean toward jazz and classical music. On paper, Hazel and Erie, gay bluegrass Appalachians, and I should never have found one another.

Yet we did.

Part of the answer lies with my mother — a classical pianist and Southerner whose stories and roots always gave the South a strangely enticing yet highly ambivalent pull on me. I have never felt fully at home there myself. But my spirit does. I have spent much of my life returning there in my fiction — to its beauty, contradictions, wounds, music, magic, passions, and mysteries. The South contains a richness I have never been able to resist as a novelist: superb natural beauty along with ugliness and grace, eccentricity and cliché existing side by side.

This allows me to create extraordinary worlds my characters already inhabit rather than worlds they seek. The locations themselves are almost always characters in their own right — places that push people forward or hold them back, support them or slowly try to dissolve them. What my characters usually seek within those worlds is definition, clarity, escape, and redemption.

Another part of the answer lies in my comfort with women. The only boy with four sisters and a supportive, enlightening mother, female consciousness enveloped me from my first breath. I have been extremely fortunate to have had remarkable women in my life, both friends and lovers. Across seven first-person novels, including two dual narratives, I have written three male protagonists and six female.

And why two remarkable gay women? Why not? I got to explore their psyches, minds, talents, and gender in ways I never could with people in ordinary life. I know these women on levels beyond my human relationships. I honor their sexuality, individuality, and progressive minds, as I do all LGBTQ+ people with good hearts and open minds.

My main characters often arrive almost fully formed. They come to me — or I find them — as three-dimensional people. I do not construct characters from a distance or assign them qualities and backgrounds like filling out forms. I rarely use outlines or notes. Everything is in my head. When I’m ready to begin a new novel, I open myself like a huge window in my imagination and consciousness and invite potential protagonists to introduce themselves — anyone, any age, any background, any identity. 

Over a few days, after several candidates who never quite felt right, Hazel floated into view, then Erie. They smiled at me, and I smiled back. That was it. Eight years for me. From twelve years old through their lifetimes for them.

Hazel — steady, loyal, wise, enormously gifted, carrying more hurt and longing than she often allowed anyone to see. Erie — by her own admission, a lesbian Huck Finn; equally gifted, restless, wild, difficult, damaged, and impossible not to love.

Souls is about music, partnership in both love and career, the courage to live openly, and the cost of self-expression. It traces a long journey from Appalachian back porches to artistic prominence and self-definition. At its heart, it is a novel about identity, truth, deep wounds, freedom, addiction, love, healing, and redemption.

As an exclusively first-person novelist, I method act my characters, often with the character guiding me on how best to enter their consciousness and understand who they need to be. Creating their world and storyline is my job. Once I can slip into a character and know their mind, emotions, and personality — know them as a person — I build a world around them and open the novel to them.

Writing Souls as dual autobiographies gave me incredible freedom to explore the inner and outer lives of each character and bring them more fully to life than I could have in a traditional novel.

It’s a 50-50 split between where they want the novel to go and where I want it to go. I see it as two co-songwriters collaborating equally on words and music, writing live in the studio.

Why eight years? One reason is the architecture. Souls on Fire and Lonesome Dreams is a 425-page dual first-person narrative written as two separate autobiographies unfolding side by side, chapter by chapter. The timelines intentionally do not align. Hazel and Erie are often moving through the same life together while experiencing entirely different emotional and everyday realities. Structurally, it became a 129,000-word balancing act.

And, of course, life got in the way. Over time, they stopped feeling like characters and began feeling more like companions. They lived beside me through COVID, a series of serious illnesses, a coast-to-coast move, our political upheavals — even a heart attack — and through the ordinary joys, devastations, and surprises that accompany everyday life, parenting, grandparenting, and getting older. Writers understand this strange intimacy. Imagined people can become deeply real companions.

Even now, after eight years, I still feel less like I invented Hazel and Erie and more like I had the privilege of meeting them. They certainly took their time getting here. I hope you take the time to get to know them.

Hazel and Erie are really something else.

And now it is on to completing novel #7, Angel Blood, only a two-year project, arriving later this year.

My very best to you,

JTM