Midori Snyder is the author of six magical novels for adults, one book for children, and numerous short stories published in a variety of anthologies and magazines. In 1994, after recently completing her fifth novel, The Flight of Michael McBride, Midori's interest in theater and mask-making led to a creative obsession with the Commedia dell arte tradition in Renaissance Italy . . . and this led, in turn, to ideas that she would shape into her next major work of fiction, The Innamorati.
In the Endicott circle, Midori is well known for her wonderful letters -- full of vivid imagery, poetry, musings on art, and tales drawn from daily life. In keeping with our theme of "exploring the creative process" in this month's edition of the Web site, we are posting a cycle of e-mail letters sent by Midori to me (1994-1996) which give a unique look into one writer's daily life as she creates a new work of fiction. The Innamorati letters begin and end at the author's home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which she shares with her husband Stephen, a teacher, and their children, Carl and Taiko. I received the letters in Arizona (winter/spring), England (summer/autumn), and points in between.
Please note that the following text is abridged; personal and private material has been edited out.
-- Terri Windling
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Dear Terri,
I have just finished making ten masks for a small production of Kafka's The Trial in New York (which I hope to go and see in March). They needed ten "neutral but sinister" masks . . . so I made ten masks (in different sizes so each one had to be sculpted and cast individually) and painted them a sort of gun metal. The neighborhood kids came in and we tried them all on. (Carl managed to look sinister but the rest of us exploded with giggles!) I also made a Buckram mask that is very eerie, and I am going to do more work with the fabric masks -- they have a softness but also a scary ambiguity about them. I went to a local art gallery that had a showing of Venetian masks made by a very famous mask maker in Venice. I withered at the sight of them because they were stunning . . . absolutely stunning. And the technique, so flawless. (Oh what I wouldn't give to have a teacher right now.) But it was curious. I tried two of them on, and as beautiful as they were, they were not wearable. They didn't sit well on the face and couldn't be worn in a production. They were works of art, very beautiful, but in the end, because they could not fulfill their function as masks, strangely sterile. I kept thinking of them as guilded wombs that could not support the life within. All my own mask work is directed towards the theatre and towards production. A mask has to work on stage and has to pull an actor out of himself and into the persona of the mask. Very like voodoo.
I am right now reading like a maniac on the Commedia dell arte, and falling madly in love with the theatre and the masks of Renaissance Italy. I read of a complaint by the magistrate of a town that the Commedia companies were no more than "brothels of infatuation between strumpets and scamps" . . . my kind of people! My theatre friends say things haven't changed in companies in the last five hundred years . . . so what better place to begin when writing about the relationship between sex and creativity? There is also a wonderful quote from an Italian priest who said that it was a mortal sin to go to the Commedia because the plays (which dealt with matters of love and marriage, in usually bawdy terms) were immoral. However, it would not be a sin to go if one refused to take pleasure in the obscenity but went merely as a curious bystander. No doubt that explained his season tickets!
love,
Midori
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Terri,
TOO MUCH. You are doing too much. I know the feeling . . . overwhelmed by commitments and working so hard to get out of the hole. But I worry that taking on too much work is a bit like paying groceries with a credit card . . . the bill does eventually come due. When you get through this period and reach a temporary harbor, really take another look at how you work. I have been thinking about this so much myself over the last two months. Wouldn't it be heaven to be able to work on one book at a time, and have the time to really do it right? I don't know if that's possible for you, juggling two careers as writer and editor, and then as an artist too, aiiii! But a goal to strive for, yes? I have been reading [Michael] Ondaaje's The English Patient, which is a stunning book, and I heard him in an interview talk about the three years he spent writing it. Three years! But boy does it show. It really made me want to do more within a piece by doing less. Damn it, this year I want to take control and to have my work come first, and not the demands of my check book. Okay, okay, by this time next year I'll probably be eating my shoes . . . but hey, it will have been worth it.
The weather is finally cheering up a bit. Carl and I went on a hike through the woods and came across the early spring blooms of red-capped lichen all over the side of a pine tree. It was like an applause. My mood has improved tremendously. I have finished one book [The Flight of Michael McBride] and am falling madly in love with the next one; I'm going penniless to New York to see my masks in a play; my kids are great; my husband is a sweetie (even if he too is overworked), and I am even staying pretty healthy. Beyond this, I am working away. The proposal for the new book is opening up in lovely ways. I am writing furiously to get characters and plot sketched out . . . and reading in the evenings, collecting all the pretties, the right word for the right piece of clothing, architecture, honing in on the Renaissance period details, the slang of the time and the food . . . having to remember when rice was introduced, red peppers (a New World crop), all those odds and ends you never think of until you begin writing. I am reading wonderful comic plays and in general collecting things.
love,
Midori
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Terri,
New York was great! Had two brilliant Alexander lessons, lunch with my agent, saw Patricia [McKillip]. (We were supposed to go shopping but never really got out of Fannelli's bar in the Village. . . .) I have decided I will definitely do the Commedia book next, and it will be called The Innamorati (which is the name of the "lovers" in the Commedia plays).
Stephen wants to go to Italy, as a family, spend a year or two over there. He’ll teach, I’ll write my Italian book, the kids will learn to negotiate life outside Milwaukee. Do you think we can actually pull this off???
Take care and I'll talk to you soon. . . .
love,
Midori
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Hey, girlfriend!
Don't tell me about the problems of twenty-year-old tenants now -- we have just rented out our house to six of them! Mio Dio. I hope there is something left of our house when this adventure has passed.
We leave for Milan on the 24th of August . . . but all our stuff, which goes by ship, leaves in the first week of July . . . and then we have to pray that it doesn't sit on the docks through the months of September and October while the "relaxed" Italian customs officers check it out. I have been on the phone almost daily to my friend in Milan . . . oh it will be wild. She lives in a sweet, old working-class neighborhood, and we are hoping to get a small apartment in their building. Her son and Carl are friends, and it is one of the cheaper neighborhoods in Milan, sort of Mott Street-ish. But in Italy an "unfurnished apartment" means nothing whatsoever -- bare walls, no kitchen, no stove, no fridge, nothing at all -- so we are hoping for at least a kitchen. I started laughing with my friend on the phone because as we talked it became ever more apparent that half of the assumptions I take for granted (things as basic as how windows open, for instance) will be useless there. I just trust that whatever new and unique problems I encounter will have a corresponding unique Italian solution. For instance, I will probably get a P.O. box in Lugano, on the other side of the Swiss border, so that mail I really want to get will actually arrive.
So now I am looking over the house . . . what to take, what to leave. I am trying to visualize a portable life: futon beds, collapsible shelving, folding chairs, crates. The computer will go by itself, probably by air. I have so much I want to do over there! I’ve met a guy who studied acting at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan for four years, a professional Commedia dell arte actor. He was wonderful to me on the phone, giving me names and contacts. He listed off all these crazy fringe Commedia groups between Milan and Venice and said I have to go to Carnevale in Venice for the Commedia that is all over the streets and the masks that are the best in the world. "Way leads to way." Wonder where I am headed???
So good to hear you are home again in England . . . and that your little house has survived the tenants. I hope there will be plenty of time for you now to work and to paint. I can't wait to see you over there. Va bene . . . I'm off now to buy futons.
ciao ragazzina,
Midori
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Terri,
I can't believe I am finally online! What a blessing and what a relief to be connected again. I have made myself famous at the American School because I was able to connect us all to the Internet through the University of Milan with a woman I found over the Internet in March!
Your card was our first letter and it made me cry. We have been more than a little homesick. Our first two weeks have been very difficult. One needs to be eaten, digested, and then shat by the Italian bureaucracy before anything gets done. Though our apartment is lovely, we were without furniture (sleeping on the floor), without electricity, without hot water, stove, fridge . . . worse than camping. But now things are getting on track and we are getting the hang of this place.
Milan is both very beautiful and very ugly. It is a lot like Dublin, I think. The old prewar buildings are lovely, beautiful shades of pale cantaloupe that capture the sunlight . . . all the ornate art nouveau details . . . vining balconies, gargoyles, stone maidens, and birds beneath the windows. But the postwar city is "brutta!" -- very ugly and alienating. The food here is sublime . . . except for bread, which tastes like pizza dough. This is rice country and the school is surrounded by rice paddies. The wine is fabulous and so ridiculously cheap. The coffee in the little coffee bars is like a bolt of black lightning. The kids like the school. The teachers and students are from everywhere. Carl is a bit apprehensive about the academic challenge and the need, at twelve, to "fit in." He is taking French and Italian and a good art class as well. Taiko loves her teacher and is thrilled that in her class being unusual is the norm, so she feels right at home. Stephen very much likes his fellow teachers and the students . . . and the school lunches which are heavenly.
I'm doing all right. My Italian is coming along, though slowly. Every day I must shop for the family, negotiate the street, etc., and so I hear a lot of it and am constantly forced to speak it. I am hoping next week to actually start writing again.
Sorry for this rushed message . . . I am trying to catch up to everyone today. But I'll keep posting you during the week to let you know how things are going here.
Love,
Midori
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Dear Terri,
Okay, I think I have the hang of this Italian system. I am so happy to be online, I can't tell you -- at the end of the day I am ravenous for English. I am just sending a cursed short note for now, letting everyone know that e-mail is now coming and going with uncustomary Italian efficiency. I will log on tomorrow with something more substantial.
Can't wait to tell you about the music scene I am finding . . . or the Irish pub . . . or the film festival . . . or the gelati. . . .
When are you heading to Arizona? I want at least three days in London with you first.
ciao ragazza,
Midori
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Terri,
Well, let's see . . . sometimes there is so much going on here I don't know where to start. Life here is so challenging, learning to accept the cultural differences and to slide ourselves into Italian life without losing who we are at the core, and yet also giving up something to allow this place to settle comfortably. It's quite the trick, but I think we are managing. Yesterday I went to the mercato, the street market, and finally got up the courage to use my Italian and buy things there. You should see this market. There isn't anything you can't buy, from the most beautiful and wild looking porcini mushrooms (big, brown, foresty things) to truffles, to lingerie, to pins, to shoes, to pots and pans, to flowers, to watchbands, to gleaming vegetables, to cosmetics . . . it’s fabulous. And some of the really old country farmers still "sing" their wares. I saw a man yesterday with bags of lemons singing about how good they were. The light was perfect, Milano at is golden best, and I couldn't believe how lucky I was just to be here.
I don't want to go home again . . . except maybe to vacation in the summer when life here is unbearably hot, even for the Italians! I hope we can stay beyond the year we have arranged. But it is expensive, and we are as broke as church mice during a reformation. I am finishing up the kids’ book [The Hatchling] for Random House, and am anxious to jump into Innamorati . . . I can already feel how this place has changed the look and smell of the book. I am also teaching a creative writing class to the adults and another one to teenagers at the American School. Actually not much teaching really. Mostly I just encourage them to write, to bring in their stuff to read, and I talk to them about the process of getting published. It's not bad work for the money and leaves my mornings free. Say . . . I just thought of something. It might be possible for me to get the school to invite you to come over from England and talk to the writing classes (the kids especially), and maybe even the art classes as well. Would you be interested? Would you have the time to come over here before you head back to Arizona? I know your life is crazed with work, but it could be a way to get together while you’re still in Europe. Besides I would love to walk around this city with you. (Oh the coffee! the cappuccino!)
I saw Luigi Bernabo, my Italian agent . . . he was very troppo gentile (polite and well bred). He also has probably the second most expensive street address in Milan. (I'll take you to the most expensive -- it has a fenced-in garden with flamingoes and peacocks. As my neighbor says, it isn't enough to be merely rich to live here! But oh, the building, the facade . . . an artist's dream!) Anyway, Luigi was very nice. So we'll see. It would be fabulous to be published in Italian.
Take care my dear and keep in touch. I know you are working like mad right now . . . how I hate that awful fear of the deadline. It makes the clicking of the clock so tortuous.
Ciao ragazza!
Midori
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Copyright © 2000 by Midori Snyder
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