Though
many of the writers I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing here on Society
Nineteen are introduced to me with the book we discuss, others were already
favorites by the time we chat for the journal. Megan Chance is one of the latter. I first
encountered her work with her 2004 novel, An
Inconvenient Wife. Rightly reviewed as “gripping” and “wholly absorbing,”
that book sent me to look for Chance’s earlier Susannah
Morrow as well as to anticipate the publication of each new book since. Chance
excels at embedding issues and themes that illuminate both past and present into
compelling narratives, and The Visitant, which
appeared this September from Lake Union, exemplifies those strengths. Juxtaposing the otherworldly with
the everyday, the passionate with the paranormal, Gothic darkness with Venetian
light, and family burdens with individual possibilities, it’s a ghost story, a love
story, a psychological coming-of-age story and more. After cutting her literary teeth in
historical romance, Megan Chance has authored eight historical novels as well
as the young adult Fianna Trilogy. Find out more about the author and her books
on her website, Facebook page and Twitter feed. Honored by the Borders Original
Voices and IndieBound’s Booksense programs, she lives in the Pacific Northwest
with her husband and two daughters. Society Nineteen is delighted to talk with
Megan Chance about history, fiction, the 19th century and more. —SF
So19: Having
written about the 19th century in a great variety of books and genres,
you’re a woman after So19’s heart. What do you think makes this time period so
rich with possibilities for you? Has it always been a passion of yours?
MC: I think it’s more that
history itself has always been a passion of mine. I have always, always loved
it—some of my favorite books when I was young were The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth
Goudge, Caddie Woodlawn by Carol
Ryrie Brink, and the Little House books
by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read them over and over again. I also loved
biographies and research books. I have always been fascinated by the way people
lived in other times. When I was about thirteen, I started actively searching
for more historical fiction, and ended up reading many of the classics, which,
regardless of when they’d been written, were historical by the time I got hold
of them—The Three Musketeers, Sherlock
Holmes, Le Morte d’Arthur, Great
Expectations, Frankenstein… So
yes, clearly history has always been an obsession.
I love all periods of history, but it is true
that I keep circling back to the 19th century. There are a hundred
reasons for that: the steady inroads of science into religion, the industrial
revolution, strikes and worker discontent, the growing impatience of women with
domestic slavery and intellectual and sexual captivity, dress reform, Romanticism,
Transcendentalism, Socialism, the birth of psychology, advances in archaeology
and anthropology, Decadence, Impressionism, the birth of the modern novel … choose
your poison. Many of these things existed in some form or another before, but
they all really began to come into their own in the 19th century. It
was a time of great turmoil, when all the powers that be were struggling
mightily to keep control, and losing on a daily basis. I mean, there are a
million things to write about. Everything was changing constantly. There have
been many times like that in history, of course, but the difference between those
eras and the 19th century is that the 19th century was also
really the dawn of modernity, and it’s similar enough to the way we live today
that one can find parallels everywhere. When, as a writer, I see such parallels,
it means I also see a universality that will appeal to the modern reader, and
that’s where stories come from.
So19: Perhaps
you could talk a bit about the seeds of this particular story. From what
starting point or points did it arise? How did it change or deepen as you
worked?
MC: When I’m researching, I
also tend to read a lot of contemporaneous fiction. It gives me a feel for the
times, for the way people talked and what was important to them culturally and
socially. I also glean many small and telling details that often never make it
into nonfiction. When I was researching Inamorata,
I was reading these ghost stories set in Venice by Vernon Lee, who was a
contemporary of Henry James and Edith Wharton. I had also been reading Venetian
myth and legends. Venetians are a very superstitious lot—perhaps that comes
from living on the water, where everything is a bit hallucinatory anyway—and
there are many tales of ghosts, and devils, and spirits playing tricks on the
unwary. In reading those, it struck me that Venice would lend itself very well
to a ghost story, and that was something I’d never tried before. I decide what
to write based on how much it scares or challenges me, and the idea of plunging
so absolutely into the paranormal, and into a genre that people are very
familiar with—the ghost story—meant I had to have a full grasp of how it was supposed
to work, moment by moment, and I was really uncertain that I could pull it off.
Then, of course, I wanted to add a gothic
element to it, which complicated things even more. My personal tag-line for the
book was: Jane Eyre meets Amore Dure, which was one of the Vernon
Lee tales that I really liked.
The book, however, went through many
permutations from that point on. I tried to write it as a dual storyline
initially—the story of the ghost and how she came to be a ghost, and the story
of those in the present (19th century) being haunted by her. I struggled
with something like four or five drafts before I realized the story wasn’t
working. In complete frustration, I threw everything out but the setting and
the character names, and started over. Nerone Basilio did not enter the story
until that draft, nor did Samuel’s epilepsy, nor, for that matter, Elena’s
history. The story for the ghost was also completely new. It is not unusual for
me to do six or seven drafts of a work, but it is unusual for me to throw out every aspect of a story when I’m
that far along and start over.
So19: You write
so vividly about Venice. Have you ever lived there? If not, what drew you to
it, and how do you bring its textures to life so fully?
MC: I’m glad you think I do!
No, I have never been there. My critique partner visited there a few years ago,
and told me that it was “my city,” and that I needed to write about it. At the
time, I happened to be reading a collection of Byron’s letters from the year or
so he lived in Venice, which was a weird sort of serendipity—I try to pay
attention to those sorts of coincidences. I decided to do a little research on
Venice and see what I could find. I knew already that Venice was one of the
obligatory stops on the Grand Tour. What I didn’t know was how many people
wrote about their impressions of the city, or sketched them, or wrote poetry
about them. I found many, many memoirs, including ones by William Dean Howells,
who was the American ambassador there for a time, and Effie Ruskin. And then,
of course there were Byron’s impressions. I found myself hooked rather firmly.
There was just so much, and the best part were the travel guides I found online
that listed everything worth seeing, as well as prices and maps and
recommendations for hotels, etc. etc. It was a historical writer’s dream. Not
only that, but Venice hasn’t changed substantially in at least 200 years. The
views from the Salute are the same views you’ll see now. The palazzos are still
there, the churches, the campos … this was such a change from writing about
America, where there is almost no
city that hasn’t changed radically. America is always remaking itself; it’s
only been very recently that we’ve considered the historical value of
buildings. Venice is so old and unchanged that it was remarkable.
When I’m researching, I’m looking not just for
the usual—what people saw, what was in the shops, how transportation works,
etc.—but also for emotional cues. How did people feel about what they saw? What
did things smell like? What did they hear? I’ve done enough research on the 19th
century that I can read between the lines a bit and understand what people
aren’t really saying. Beyond that, you have to have a good imagination. When you
read that the canals were the dumping ground for waste and sewage, you try to
imagine not only what that would look like, but what it would smell like, and
when it would smell the worst. The tides cleaned out the canals to a point, but
what would it be like at low tide, with the mudflats of the shallow lagoon just
beyond? In their memoirs, people mentioned often how disorienting the sounds
were in Venice, because the city was so labyrinthine, and full of water and
stone. I try to bind these details to what’s going on in the story emotionally.
It’s those small things that help make a setting feel real. I loved writing about Venice. It did feel
like my city.
So19: I loved
the way The
Visitant reinvented classic Gothic
elements, from ghosts, secrets, suicides, repressed desire, and violence to that
beloved narrative opening in which a young woman with inner wounds arrives at a
house that is grand, crumbling and pretty darn scary. Was working within the
Gothic framework a deliberate choice on your part, or a more intuitive
development of the writing process?
MC: I cut my teeth on those
old gothic romances from the seventies—Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney, Anya
Seton, Mary Stewart, and Norah Lofts, and I have wanted to write a gothic for
years. When I decided to write a ghost story, I deliberately looked for ways to
play within the gothic framework. I also wanted to turn it on its head a bit,
because those gothics were always mysteries, and seldom about paranormal
forces. Usually, when I’m writing any kind of paranormal aspect, I like to
ground it in reality. I did that less here, because I really did want to try my
hand at something that was psychologically fraught, and I wanted it to be
something no one could really understand or necessarily fix. No one can really
fix a ghost. No one even knows if they exist. Many, many people don’t believe
in them. In the book the questions were always: How can this possibly be true?
How can the characters come to terms with something so unreal? How is it
possible for them to explain and rationalize this? I wanted the story to be an
experience that brought the characters closer together, while at the same time
being one that was impossible to explain to anyone who wasn’t there. I also
wanted it to force them to change.
So19: As its
cover affirms, The
Visitant is a ghost story—and, I might
add, a compelling one. But it’s also a love story, one that is powerfully rooted
in forces such as sexuality.
MC: I’ve always loved
stories that were deeply romantic (in the broadest sense of the term), and I
tend to gravitate toward them—unapologetically. I don’t understand why so many
writers seem to shy away from it, or why reviewers dismiss it. Love and sex are
a big part of life for everyone, and if, as a writer, you sweep them under the
carpet or pretend they don’t exist, it means you’re sweeping aside some
powerful motivational forces, ones that have dominated and ruled society from
the very beginning. Most of us are seeking love, forged by it, burned by it,
recovering from it … the list goes on and on. But in America, in particular, we
don’t seem to have much respect for it.
More importantly, sex has always been used to
control people—particularly women, but men too—and I think it’s important to
address it honestly. Sex was as important in the 19th century as it
is today, and in many of the same ways. At that time, women were thought to
exist on a lower rung of the evolutionary ladder. All their blood was going to
their uterus, and not their brains, so if a woman looked to any pursuit other
than domestic, she was actively endangering her unborn children. Every
component of a woman’s life—creativity, intellectualism, athleticism, sex—was
rigorously controlled, thanks to that nasty little bit of social science. I wrote
about this in greater detail in my novel, An
Inconvenient Wife, but more broadly, it seems to me that society is still
in the business of controlling women. This has to do with fear, of course, because
the truth is that women have a great deal of power, and much of that power
comes from their sexuality. It frightens everyone. It frightens young girls
because no one teaches them what to do with it. It frightens men because
they’re in thrall to it. It frightens women because the world has shamed them
into compliance. We’re only allowed to use our sexuality in socially acceptable
ways, such as gyrating in a Robin Thicke video or posing nude with a boa
constrictor. We’re allowed to be titillating, as long as we’re titillating in a
way that doesn’t actually threaten anyone. Women cannot possibly know their
whole selves, and what they’re capable of, until they embrace what is, at its
very least, a crucial part of who they are.
The way society controls women is just so
insidious. It creeps into almost every aspect of our culture. As long as men
and women keep confusing sex and love with guilt and repression, I’ll keep
writing about it.
So19: Going
from the pleasures of the flesh to the pains thereof: Elena’s attempts to heal
but also restrain her patient, Samuel Farber, really speak to the limitations
of even the most enlightened and well-intentioned health and mental health
treatments of the 19th century. The tools she has at her disposal
are so limited, and so problematic in different ways.
MC: What’s so interesting to
me about this period are the huge gains in science and medicine. It was believed
that we would understand the brain by the end of the 19th century—that
we would have it completely mapped out—and we are still so far away from that. Medical
science was growing by leaps and bounds, and refuting all these long-held ideas
that were primarily based on Biblical time charts. But at the same time there were
also these deeply precious moralistic beliefs about various ills and
diseases—epilepsy was considered by many to be caused by licentiousness, and
there were still those who labeled it madness or demon possession.
It strikes me that nothing much has changed. We
understand a great deal more about the brain than they did, but we are still
caught up in this moralistic thinking about so much—alcoholism still, drug and sexual addiction, obesity
… We still believe on some deep-in level that living a good, moral life will
affect your physiology. It’s incredible really.
We also still—as they did—put far too much
credence in social science: today’s biological determinism, for example, is not
much different than believing that women and minorities were on the lower rungs
of the evolutionary ladder, or believing in Lombroso’s theory of anthropological
criminality, where it was thought that criminal tendencies were inherited, and one
could tell whether someone was born a criminal based on his/her physical
defects. These beliefs still linger in weird ways today.
I really enjoy presenting these kinds of
juxtapositions in fiction, and drawing parallels to the same kind of thinking
in the 21st century. We think we are so enlightened and wise, but we
are really not very removed from the past.
So19: I was
struck by the way the three main characters struggle not just with their own private
“ghosts” but also a sense of obligation to their families. You’ve framed those (real
or perceived) debts in very 19th century terms, but for me the core
issues—what we owe our families, how their wounds and needs shapes our lives, and
what happens when we forge identities that violate family expectations—still feel
so much a part of our lives today. Is that a fair reading? Was it a theme you
were conscious of tackling from the start?
MC: I think that’s a fair
reading. I’m not sure I was conscious of tackling it from the start, except that
I love writing about how people find themselves, and the decision and
consequences that get in the way.
Your family, of course, is crucial to this whole
growing-up thing, because it shapes who you are, for good or for ill. It is
very, very difficult to escape from those expectations to become the person you
want to be, and the person you want to be is also limited by your self-concept,
which is formed very early, and primarily by the family. I have three sisters,
and we were all labeled early in our lives: the pretty one, the smart one, the
athletic one, the space cadet. We have all gone on to forge our own identities,
but those early labels were extremely hard to unlearn, and still, when we are
together, we all fall back into those ways of behaving. I think no one ever
manages to break free of their family, and while loving someone means that you
have obligations and responsibilities to them, at the same time you have to
find a way to discover your own identity and build your own life. That is one
thing that has not changed at all through history, though the opportunities for
self-realization/actualization have obviously become greater, especially for
women.
In The
Visitant, all the characters are struggling with the reality of their
obligations to their families, and I liked playing with the idea what it took
something otherworldly to force them to accept the consequences of their
decisions and to remake themselves.
So19: You
currently publish novels for young adults as well as fiction for actual adults.
(Old adults, I nearly said.) How do you divide your working time between very
different kinds of projects? How much “crossover” do you perceive between your
work in the two genres—does a story in one inspire thoughts about the other,
for example?
MC: I had this strange
experience lately where I was editing The
Visitant and the last book of my young adult trilogy (The Veil, Book 3 of the Fianna trilogy) back to back, and it was a
bit disconcerting to see how much I work with the same kinds of themes over and
over again. So yes, I think there’s crossover there; I very definitely have a
vision about the world that infuses everything I do. There have been times when
one kind of project inspires ideas for the other, and vice versa. Certainly a
bit of research can inform both a young adult plot and an adult one. The Fianna
books are concerned with the Irish immigrants in America, and I can see one day
writing an adult story about immigrants. My adult historical, Bone River, informed a young adult book I
just finished.
But generally the young adult books are
something I approach quite differently. I love the melodrama and big emotions,
and the everything-at-stake aspect of young adult fiction. It’s actually very
fun to write, and while they deal with serious themes, I’m allowed a lot more
leeway with them than I think I get in adult fiction. The young adult audience is more willing to
suspend disbelief and throw themselves in for a pell-mell ride. Adults you have
to convince, but young adult readers get bored when there’s too much thinking
and rationalizing in the narrative. The writing in the young adult books has to
be simpler and cleaner and more direct. It also has to be faster paced. You’re
allowed the cliff-hangers and angst that sometimes you can’t get away with in
adult fiction. I usually work on a young adult project when I’m researching the
next adult book, writing in the morning and then researching in the afternoon.
I never write adult fiction and young adult fiction at the same time. I want to
focus on each one solely and completely, because it’s important to me that I
don’t sacrifice one for the other.
So19: I can’t
end without asking what you’re working on now…and hoping it’s another book set
in the 19th century.
MC: Yes indeed! Another one
set in the 19th century, at Lake Geneva, Switzerland. It is
currently scheduled for a January 2017 release. But I won’t tell you anything
else about it, because I’m only on the second draft. Several more to go, and no
doubt everything will change.
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| Watercolor of Venice by John Singer Sargent, courtesy of www.johnsingersargent.org |