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 may lie with my mother — a classical pianist and Southerner whose stories and roots always gave the South a strange and highly ambivalent pull on me. I never completely felt 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.

And perhaps Hazel and Erie were waiting there.

My way of beginning a novel is unusual. I do not construct characters from a distance or assign them qualities and backgrounds like filling out forms. I open myself like a huge window in my imagination and consciousness and invite character candidates 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.

Why eight years? 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 heart attack, a coast-to-coast move, our political upheavals, and through the ordinary joys, devastations, and surprises that accompany parenting, grandparenting, and getting older. Writers understand this strange intimacy. Imagined people can become deeply real companions.

As an exclusively first-person novelist, method-acting two Appalachian bluegrass lesbians could have been the greatest challenge of my writing life. It wasn’t. It was a privilege and a joy from word one.

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.

I hope you enjoy meeting them too. 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. I think.

My very best to you,

JTM