Visiting with Margaret Nevinski

by Claire Guyton

What inspired “The Eve of St. Agnes?”

I grew up Catholic, so I’ve always been interested in saints. There are so many odd, wonderful details in their stories. When I came across the poem “The Eve of St. Agnes” by John Keats, based on the myth surrounding St. Agnes, I was intrigued.  I wanted to give the story a contemporary setting. What if a high school girl dreams of her future husband on January 20^th, the Eve of St. Agnes? And what if the future husband is the geeky guy who wears plaid shirts with striped pants?

I read everything I could about St. Agnes and her symbols. I also read about Keats. Interestingly, I learned that he wrote “The Eve of St. Agnes” soon after meeting Fanny Brawne, which has a nice tie-in with the recent movie by Jane Campion, “Bright Star.”

Tell us about your writing process—either generally or specifically with regard to the birth and development of this piece.

I can best describe my writing process by talking about my middle-grade novel manuscripts.

Film director Anthony Minghella, on the DVD for his film “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” speaks about the seemingly chaotic elements that came together as he created the movie’s storyline. Minghella called this chaos, “a bewildering series of collisions.” I love that phrase, which perfectly describes my writing process. When I’m open to these “collisions,” some of them may become part of the work, and some may not. Chaos can either terrify or thrill me at the start of the writing process (usually terrify) but I like to consider the “collisions” to see which pull at me the most.

For my middle-grade novel Sandhill Spring, the following elements were colliding in my head: a bus trip I took years ago in Nebraska, a nearly abandoned town called Gilead, a boy and his archeologist dad who were ready for a novel but had no story, a Polish girl I met while teaching English in Poland, and my love of sandhill cranes.

I created a contemporary story about an eleven-year-old girl from Warsaw, Alina, whose family, struggling financially, moves to Gilead to live with relatives. The story takes place during the spring sandhill crane migration, so migration becomes a theme connecting the family and the birds. The archeologist dad morphed into a documentary filmmaker studying the cranes. Luke, his thirteen-year-old son who’s forced to accompany him to Gilead, now had a way to “collide” with Alina’s story.

I teach a class for adults called “Creativity for Writers,” and in that class we use collage as a way to explore ideas. I created a collage for my current work-in-progress (see photo below), a contemporary middle-grade novel set on an island much like Bainbridge Island, where I live.  For this novel, my “bewildering series of collisions” include a twelve-year-old girl named Jordi, her divorced parents who both remarry and leave on honeymoons, a tunnel that is both threatening and comforting, a would-be boyfriend who barely talks, a strange girl who moves to the island, and an artist grandmother who gathers beach material for her “Convergences” art pieces. I’ve since abandoned some elements in the collage (such as Jordi loving animals). In the case of this novel, an interesting collision came about recently when Jordi started to make collages herself. Art imitating life?

Luther T. Farrell, the main character in Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bucking the Sarge says, “Things aren’t ever what they seem to be when you first look at them. What’s important is that you keep your mind wide open and try to understand what’s going on from a lot of different angles.”

That describes my writing process with “the bewildering series of collisions”—keeping my mind open and looking at the angles. What works? What can I build on? What has to go?

If you painted this story, what colors would you use?

Because of the winter setting in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” I see the story in gradations of white—snowflakes falling on Mom’s topiary, Courtney’s dress with lacy sleeves, and the snowstorm at the end when Courtney flings open the doors to “a sea of white.” In contrast, the medieval dream with its tapestries, armor, and candlelight is colorful—I see lots of red, silver, and gold. I can only imagine the “kickin’ ” colors Courtney and Florian will use for the medieval banquet in their “Kickin’ Chickin” ad!

What books have had the most impact on your writing?

Richard Peck said, “We write by the light of every book we ever read.” I couldn’t agree more.

When I think about books I’ve read, from The Bobbsey Twins to Anna Karenina, the writer who has had the most impact on me is Willa Cather. I love the sense of space in her stories, which was certainly influenced by the Nebraska prairie where Cather moved when she was nine. You can feel the wide, open spaces on the page, allowing the reader to breathe. In her essay “The Novel Démeublé,” Cather wrote, “It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named [italics mine]…that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.” I remind myself of “the thing not named” whenever I’m over-explaining, especially to young readers.

Two novellas by Cather are, to my mind, masterpieces: “Neighbor Rosicky” and “Old Mrs. Harris,” both found in Obscure Destinies. Both deal with death, but in an unsentimental way. The events in “Old Mrs. Harris” revolve around her teenaged granddaughter, Vickie, who desperately wants to escape her family and her small town, but who can’t yet understand the ways Mrs. Harris has helped her. The story ends with, “Vickie had still to go on, to follow the long road that leads through things unguessed at and unforeseeable.” I can’t think of a better description of growing up. Which brings me back to Courtney and Florian. I can’t foresee their future, but I hope it’s happy!

The collage I created for my current work-in-progress.

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mima tipper September 24, 2010 at 1:24 pm

Hi Margaret,

I loved this story! Great, spare prose, and such fun the way you wove in the poetry and the dream. Really satisfying:)

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