Harriet Scott Chessman is the author of three acclaimed novels: Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, published in eight foreign countries and chosen as a #1 Booksense Pick in 2001; Continue Reading »
Influences
Weekly trips to the library as a child; my mother reading all of Jane Austen each summer, and at least two books a week during the year; my father "doing all the voices" as he read to us each night on the couch; fairy tales, Twain, The Bastable Children,
The Wizard of Oz series; the Brontes; The Sound and the Fury; Paradise Lost; Henry James; Jane Austen; Virginia Woolf; Ford Madox Ford; Elizabeth Bowen; and on and on and on.
Here is a play I hope you'll see: GONE, by Charles Mee, in its West Coast premiere with Crowded Fire, in San Francisco. (For a great short video about this production, go to Crowded Fire's web site at: http://www.crowdedfire.org/gonevideo.html I find it immensely heartening to see a play like this -- a moving collage, an experiment in fragments culled from blogs, Sophocles, Proust, ...
Easier said than done, of course, to listen to yourself. Here is my New Year's resolution, though: to have the courage of my innermost insights into my characters and my story. I have had to feel my way with this novel more than with any fiction I've yet written. Some days I feel like a worm, just pushing forward. I hope it's forward! This is the difficulty! How do you know?
