What:
I imagine my novels balancing on a tightrope stretched between the issues that are important to me (racial and social justice, the climate emergency, feminism) and the characters who live inside the stories that grow from those themes, characters who try to figure out how to make a difference in the world. My manuscripts never start with theme or issue—they begin with characters in some kind of trouble—but they usually end up there. I consider myself a member of the Kurt Vonnegut school of fiction. He said that to write a novel, the writer is “continually jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” I love that image because it’s what writing fiction feels like to me. I jump off the cliff of a “what if” and discover the story on the way down. The ride is sometimes terrifying, often exhilarating, and always a process of discovery.
My fifth novel, The Lost Women of Azalea Court, centers around two characters, an elderly couple who live in a bungalow on the grounds of a former state mental hospital. The man was the head psychiatrist of the hospital for the last forty years of its operation. When his wife Iris goes missing, her daughter, a policewoman, and the neighbors search for her and discover, among the historical ruins of the hospital, the secrets her husband hid for decades.
Why:
The spark for this novel was a 2002 email from a friend, who described the goings-on on her street when an elderly man barricaded himself in his home and SWAT officers responded. I stuck the email in my “ideas” folder until 2016, and then started writing about the guy. But the story didn’t get interesting until a year later, when I moved to a condo in a new community built on the ruins of a state mental hospital. I wrote at my computer, looking out the window at one of the few remaining hospital buildings, and the ghosts of the hospital residents convinced me to tell their story. So, the elderly man became a psychiatrist, and the novel took off, sailing over that cliff.
How:
Normally, I write the first draft of a novel from my imagination, noting places where I need research to flesh out the bones and for verisimilitude. This novel was different. The more I wrote, the more I understand how little I knew about mental illness and the history of its treatment. I imagined those ghosts of hospital residents shaking their fingers at me, instructing me to learn. So, I started researching the state hospital, mental illness and its treatment, and the politics of that history. Luckily, the local historical society and the public library have fantastic archives, and I dove deeply into them. I interviewed people who had worked at the hospital as social workers, psychiatrists and attendants, people who were patients there, and lawyers who worked on behalf of those patients. I also excavated my own buried experiences as a nursing student on the locked wards of the hospital and tried to make sense of them. Once I understood more about mental illness and the treatment of “inconvenient people,” I could write the story with more depth and compassion.
Bio:
Ellen Meeropol is the author of the novels The Lost Women of Azalea Court, Her Sister’s Tattoo, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest, the play Gridlock, and is guest editor for the new anthology Dreams for a Broken World. Essay publications include Ms. Magazine, Lilith, The Writer Magazine, Guernica, Lit Hub, The Boston Globe, and Mom Egg Review. Her work has been a finalist for the Sarton Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and selected by the Women’s National Book Association. Ellen holds an MFA in fiction from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine and is a founding mother of Straw Dog Writers Guild.
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Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist.
Learn more about her multi-award winning novel, In the Context of Love.
Learn more about her picture book, Gordy and the Ghost Crab.
Learn more about her poetry chapbook, Security