Dear Terri,
We have learned this week that unless something marvelous happens (and I do mean marvelous) there is no way we can stay here for a second year, no matter that all of us love it so. The school here cannot afford us. We’re all close to tears, none of us wants to go. And I worry about the book -- it found its voice here . . . what will happen when I’m back in Milwaukee, trying to finish? Oh well . . . at least we’ve had this year, and once we’re back, we’ll just have to find new ways to dust off our suitcases and go wandering again.
Anyway, I must go . . . I need to get my ragazzi into bed. Carl is now officially taller than me, speaks way more Italian, and is bello. Taiko is riding horses (we are in the pony phase) -- she is so lovely and funny. Stephen and I continue to laugh and shake our heads at this crazy life we lead . . . his most important papers now stored in a Panettone Box (a kind of Christmas cake. We stuffed ourselves with it over the holidays.)
We will be here all summer, even if we must go home in August . . . so you know you can always come back here to Milan.
Ciao bella!
Midori
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Terri:
Well, we’re settled in. We miss the cappuccino, the food, the wine, the people-watching (all those sexy, beautifully dressed Italian women!) . . . but we’re fine. The kids and Stephen are back at school and I’m back at work on the book finally. I remember how homesick for Milwaukee we all suddenly were when we first arrived in Milano . . . now we’re homesick for Milano.
Innamorati is moving along . . . snags, but nothing terrible. The architecture of this plot is a little tricky. I have so many people and I want the reader to follow along with me and trust that everyone will get it together in the maze. I have been reflecting a lot on something a friend once said about Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. He liked the book very much but felt that the main character was not as interesting as the inside of the woods, its geography and weird people. So I want to make my maze interesting for what my characters "do" while they are there, rather than what the maze itself is physically like. I also find myself daily realizing what the hell I'm really writing about, which is always such an odd thing . . . like opening up the third eye. I write, believing I know the story and then at some point (usually near the end) I get this "eureka" moment as the pattern of my storytelling begins to tell me what was really struggling to come out. (I'll never forget the day I realized, after 1500 pages, that my Oran trilogy was really about a girl whose mother refused to grow up.) So it has been interesting. Still a challenge, still frustrating at times to keep all the threads in plain view, but always interesting.
ciao bella,
Midori
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Terri,
Lucky you going off to Bretagne. Unfortunately I have very little information handy in Breton folklore. . . . I had just started to do serious research when I got side tracked by the Italians and the Commedia. I do remember that they have a decided trickster/peasant/fool tradition . . . a sort of hapless Jack who always wins out despite his stupidity. . . . Here is one typically "French" insult for the Bretagne peasant: "With big eyes and open mouth, they look around as if they were looking for something, but the thing they are looking for is not so common in this country that you will find it in the road: it is sense we are talking about."
I think you can learn much about Breton folklore by studying Cornish lore. Bretagne as a language is closer to Cornish in any case than French, and I think that there is a real dividing line between Bretagne and the rest of France. Papa Bear (my Grandfather) straddled the fence, as it were, because he was nobility on both sides (his whole name was Pierre Emmanuel Ker de la Fountaine de la Baron) -- but I still think the best parts of him (and the parts that often warred with my Parisian father) were Bretagne.
O.K. I am off to work . . . I just discovered yesterday something that I have known for awhile but haven't tackled, and now must! I had Anna (my mask-maker) originally waking up in Florence, and Rinaldo fighting a duel in Verona. Well, given the historical times, and the fact that Italians are the personality of their city, I realized that is all wrong!!! So now I rewrite . . . Anna wakes up in Venice (free from the woes of the Italian War with France and Spain) and Rinaldo fights his duel outside the Castello in Milano (home to the armories and the site of many a battle between Swiss, French, Spanish, and German mercenaries). Simonetta (my prostitute) comes from Pavia where she survived the sacking of Pavia by the Spanish in 1525. Rinaldo has a copy of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier which came out of Urbino in 1521 . . . and my little whoring priest gets a hold of Ignatious of Loyola's "Spiritual Exercises" which is the canon for all Jesuits . . . there are books, canons, pistols and theatre . . . it's getting fun!
Ciao bella!
Midori
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Hey Terri,
I’m immersed in reading again. How I wish there was a group of us reading together and swapping ideas! It is all so very Italian and contradictory . . . Catullus (a Roman poet, wonderfully vulgar, well read as a classic in Italy), the Spiritual exercises of St. Ignatious (also published in Venice and widely read), Aristotle and his arguments about the biological inferiority of women, bleeding into St. Thomas of Aquinas, arguing about the spiritual inferiority of women (graciously saying it isn't our fault, we came second -- and wondering whether on Judgment Day, when the body is resurrected in all its perfection, women will rise up as men, the form being more perfect than the female) . . . to a Venetian nun arguing that women were superior to men because Adam was blobbed together out of the mud, while Eve came from a more dignified rib, and because Eve ate the apple for the love of Knowledge while Adam just gobbled it down either because he was simply hungry or in some sort of mindless lust which has continued to the present! I’m reading about wealthy women who walled themselves in their rooms with their books and a life of scholarly chastity . . . young women turned over to the convents because a nun's dowry, as the bride of Christ, was cheaper than the dowry required for a good marriage. (Some of these "nuns," oddly enough, lived more like lay women -- didn't cut their hair, dressed rather well and sported around town, much to the annoyances of the bishops.)
I am in the maze at the moment . . . working well, but slowly. Trying to make all these disparate pieces fit easily. It is pretty awesome at times, and I wonder what the hell have I got myself into. . . . Still, I am bravely forging ahead. Do you want to see the first 250 pages or so? Or wait until it's all done, sometime next month?? I am betwixt and between about sending it, only because I keep wanting to have it finished first . . . and at the same time want to share it with someone! I know you are massively busy, so not to worry if it doesn't fit into your reading schedule now. . . .
Right, I am off to the library, computer under my arm . . . and as usual bizarre scenes rattling in my head.
ciao ragazza!
love Midori
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Dear Terri,
I have been wanting to write you back . . . mostly to thank you so much for that vote of confidence in me as a writer! Especially now when I am both in love and hate with my novel. One day deliriously happy that it is all going to work out after all . . . and the next day ready to pitch it into the lake . . . not because it’s bad, but because I am exhausted with its demands. (We are getting to the "I want a divorce" stage of the novel, the "I love you, but I can't live with you anymore" drama.) I walk around in a total haze . . . filling up my gas tank and then driving off forgetting to pay . . . putting clothes in the washing machine and forgetting to turn it on . . . staring blankly into coffee cups as though the answer to the next scene was swirling in the cream. . . .
But it is getting there. And it does amaze me that the story will find a way through a plethora of ideas. I think of the story as a self-determining spirit, stubborn and insistent. I have been at impasses where the story refused my attempts because it knew better than I that I was going astray. I often do what Keith Johnson talks about in his book Impro (you read it in my house in Milan, remember?), walking backward through the story to find the first threads that my subconscious laid down. I am always amazed at how the answer for where to go next is usually in the past, not in the foretold future of the plot.
We are buried under a low ledge of grey clouds that has not shifted for two weeks. It is cold for this time of the year, rainy and foggy and absolutely grey. Dreadful stuff. One can never tell what time of the day it is. We are all struggling not to get crabby and depressed (and not always very successful either). I know it will pass with the first truly warm, sunny day . . . but for now it feels as though the world were a very soggy underwater place. I envy you your dry, warm desert.
I am dashing to pick up Taiko from school, hoping that my mind doesn't wander on the way and I wind up in Chicago (though if I do, you can bet I will have sorted out at least three good, future chapters!).
Ciao bella,
Midori
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Terri,
The interesting thing about writing is that it has an almost oxymoronic life -- when we write we are locked in the "present" moment of the book, yet the whole thing is a process that takes place over time. Our current experiences keep threading in emotional details to the work and the novel keeps ordering them out of their chaos into the form of the work. By the time the novel is done, there is, for me anyway, the strange sense of having "packaged" my emotional experiences (or maybe "synthesized" is a better word) in the body of the novel. It becomes like one's own snakeskin, shed in the process of growing . . . and yet it is not nearly so fragile, but a solid thing taken up by others. I never totally dislike my older books, but I do feel always detached from them, alienated by the distance from the experience of writing them. Ideally, we should grow with each book. And for whatever "faults" our early work may contain, we should feel compassion for the limitations we once had, and a certain victory at having breached them once again. . . .
Innamorati is a fun and sometimes hugely frustrating book. I do like it and I do feel it leading me into some strange places. I can't help but take my time. It is Italian in that too – it closes at 1:30 sometimes, reopens in the afternoon, is never open on Monday or the odd Friday and goes on strike frequently. . . . Yet during those times of do-nothing, all the ideas fill up again, the masks start arguing with me, and my lovers get very pouty, demanding to know when are they going to be back on stage! (It's funny, I've just realized that the masks -- or Anna's masks anyway -- do talk quite a bit in this book. They have turned into a funny Greek chorus, yacking and arguing, often at tense moments.) Sigh. I just have to keep working on it. Piano, piano. Slowly, slowly.
I have learned two funny Italian proverbs which sum up so much of the book: "What doesn't kill you makes you fat," and "If we don't die first, we'll meet again." Only a nation so in love with food and family and friends could toss death around so easily!
I’m off now . . . Arleccino has pulling my ear all morning . . . Simonetta is standing at the entrance to the cave of the Minotaur, with a ball of glowing thread given to her by Cheiron the centaur, who is about to rescue Rinaldo with his own sword, which he got from a servant of death, who wants it back, who is disguised behind the mask of the centaur and is preparing to cut off Rinaldo's head, who has been rekilling the animated corpses of all the men he killed in duels that have been jumping out at him in the Minotaur’s part of the maze . . . whew. . . .
Ciao raggazza!
Midori
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Dear Terri,
I am sending the finished manuscript of The Innamorati to you. I’m exhausted and I’m elated. Let me know what you think.
Ciao,
Midori
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The Innamorati was published in a hardcover edition by Tor Books in 1998.
The subsequent trade paperback edition won the Mythopoeic Award in August 2001.
"The plot is as intricate as an old Gozzi scenario or one of Plautus's
domestic farces, full of scoundrels, fools, lovers ("innamorati") and braggarts getting in one another's way as they converge on the Maze to lift their various curses. . . . It's fairly miraculous how Snyder pulls all this off; she does though. The hybrid of street theater and fantasy seem to spin itself into existence before the reader's eyes."
— Publishers Weekly (June 1998)
"Snyder's Renaissance Italy is a supremely entertaining setting, teeming with hustlers, poets and lovers, and her shimmering Maze will work its magic on readers as well."
— Booklist (May 1998) |
Copyright © 2000 by Midori Snyder
Copyright © by The Endicott Studio.
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