| As part of her research, Livesey interviewed a number of people who had dealt with household ghosts; several of them described their spirits as familiar and slightly irritating. From the stories she heard, Livesey sensed that her mother had had a similar attitude of benign exasperation toward the supernatural companions. She knew she needed to find a way for her fictional Eva to take her companions for granted but found it difficult to write about the supernatural in an everyday way. "It took me a long time to figure out what were going to be the rules for my apparitions. Were they going to be able to walk through walls, raise the dead? What were going to be their particular powers and properties and limitations?"
For answers to such questions, Livesey turned to Scottish and Celtic folk tales she had heard growing up. She also read Jewish legends and folklore, and writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Samantha Chang, and Susan Power—writers who don't, as Livesey puts it, "observe the normal boundaries." As she came to terms with her own struggle between skepticism and belief, she began to think of our resistance to belief in the supernatural "as a prejudice of our culture." "I'm skeptical of the wider idea," Livesey says. "But at the same time I do hear stories about which I feel completely credulous. There does seem to be a large part of me that does believe in this other level of reality."
Livesey grew up in the Highlands of Scotland, a place where history was buried in the landscape and tales of other realities were commonplace. "On the way to school we would pass this mound which was the remains of a Roman fort," she says. "Then there were stories about people who walked at certain times of the year. I don't mean to suggest it was a landscape of druids and soothsayers, but still those stories were very much part of everyday life." Livesey spent her childhood at the boys' school where her father taught, and where her mother had been a nurse until her parents married. Her connection to the place helped her form Eva's fictional perspective. "One of the things I could have confidence in was that I had seen the landscapes she'd seen and walked the roads she'd walked."
Even as she created a fictional Eva, Livesey found that the autobiographical element of her story posed a challenge. She had to fight the urge to sentimentalize her mother, who, in early versions, seemed "like a saint in a child's story."
More…
|
Sewanee Writers' Series Publishes Twelfth Book
 The Sewanee Writers' Series is pleased to announce the March 2004 release of its twelfth book, Greg Williams's Boomtown. Boomtown is the sharp hip tale of New York City dot-commers after the Y2K panic has passed. Internet start-ups are thriving, the stock market is climbing, and the dawn of the new century is just a little too bright for its own good. In this, his second novel, Williams cuts to the core of the optimistic post-millennial psyche by following the lives of Jonathan Scarver, CEO of Allminder.com; Steven Bluestein, a systems analyst bent on revenge against the company; Brad Smith, Allminder's hard-drinking publicity director; and Nicole, a struggling actress hoping for a life that's better than the one she has.
More ...
|
