Q. What do you hope that readers will take away from reading A Fall of Marigolds?
A. I really do believe that the capacity to love is what gives meaning to our lives, even though we are never more vulnerable than when we let down our guard and trust our hearts to others. The world isn’t perfect; nor are other people. It’s quite possible that loving flawed people in an equally flawed world is going to subject you to the worst kind of heartache. But I like to think that the heart is capable of surviving the costs of loving because it was meant to. The heart is made of muscle; we are meant to exercise it. This is what Taryn and Clara come to realize. It seems to me the best kind of takeaway I could hope for.
Q. Can you tell us a bit about how you first became a writer? Are there people or other writers who have particularly inspired and encouraged you?
A. I usually answer this question with: It wasn’t so much that I became a writer as that I realized I already was one. According to my mother, I was composing poems aloud when I was four, before I knew how to scribble all the letters of the alphabet. I’ve always been driven to process what I see happening around me by writing about it. I am grateful to two teachers for seeing that I was wired this way, even before I knew it myself: my second-grade teacher, Virginia Work, who gave me a little red journal to write my stories in—it was years before I realized this was something she did for me only, not for everybody in the classroom; and my ninth-grade English teacher, Frank Barone, who told me with complete confidence that I would be published someday. I can’t adequately express how much that early affirmation means to me, even all these many decades later. I salute all teachers who make the effort to water and tend the seedling talents of their young students. I don’t know that I would have had the confidence to attempt writing my first novel without that early encouragement.
Q. Would you share something about your writing process? How do you tackle such a daunting project as writing a novel?
A. I need to see that pivotal, climactic scene in my head before I can start on page one. I have many writing friends who write by the seat of their pants, and who can confidently start a novel without knowing how the story will end, or how they will get there. I must be able to visualize how the story will progress—from the scene in the beginning when the story quest becomes evident, to the middle scenes that ratchet up the tension, to the dark moment when all seems lost, to the final summit when the quest is at its zenith. I need to know why my character wants what she wants and why that matters to anyone reading her story. All that is to say that I create an outline before I start. I don’t always know what every big transitional moment will be when I’m first starting to write the outline, but I do know where those key moments need to fall. When I am outlining my plot, scene by scene, I may just write, “Something big happens here,” at a point of major escalation, just so I will be anticipating it as I write. I call this outlining by the seat of my pants.
Q. What do you most enjoy about being a writer? What do you find most onerous?
A. I heartily enjoy the creative process of imagining something out of nothing, even though that is also the very thing that makes writing fiction so hard. I started writing professionally as a reporter for a small-town newspaper and eventually became an editor, so I had ten years of nonfiction writing experience before I tried my hand at my first novel. A blank page with no parameters was what scared me most—and still does. Back in my newspaper days, when I wrote a feature story about an avid butterfly collector or a Bataan Death March survivor or a female hog farmer, I didn’t have to do anything special to make those people seem real to my readers. But with novels, I am creating—out of thin air—characters who have no biography unless I imagine one for them. If I can’t make those characters seem real to you, you won’t care about them, and if you don’t care about them, you’ll put the book down. It’s a delicious challenge that sometimes gives me heartburn.
Q. Do you belong to a book club?
A. For the last five years I have been in a book club with the most amazingly astute and insightful women. We have a long list of across-the-board favorite books, including The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Molokai by Alan Brennert, The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, and People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. We usually pair our monthly meeting with a lunch menu to match the book. As I am writing this, the last novel we read was The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, and we had at lunch, among other dishes, End of the World Chocolate Cake—which was, of course, to die for.
Q. What’s next for you? Do you have any long-term goals as a writer?
A. I am in the middle of researching the London Blitz and pulling on different story threads. As a mother, my heart has always felt a tug when I consider how hard it must have been for parents to put their children on trains and send them out of the city before the bombing began. I can’t help but think that for every child and every mother, there was a story to tell. The Londoners who lived through the Blitz were ordinary people—merchants, teachers, chefs, writers—but they found themselves on the strangest of battlefields, armed with nothing but blackout curtains. They were people just like you and me. I am plotting a story in which a London mother sends her daughters to the countryside, but something happens, and the two sisters become separated. Seventy years later, an American college student studying abroad interviews the older sister, who up to that point has never told anyone what happened the day her younger sister disappeared, the same day the Luftwaffe began to bomb London.
My long-term goal is to write something worthy of being remembered, something that breaks new ground or rises above mere entertainment. I can’t imagine ever retiring from writing. Perhaps I will have to slow down a little, but I see myself in my twilight years tapping out stories from a sunny corner in a pleasantly appointed assisted-living facility, which I hope very much has a view of the ocean.
QUESTIONS FOR
DISCUSSION
Spoiler alert: The questions that follow tell more about happens in the book than you might want to know until you read it.
1. What did you most enjoy about A Fall of Marigolds? What do you think you’ll remember about it six months from now?
2. Discuss the ways in which the contemporary and historical sections of the novel relate to each other. What story elements do they share? How do they echo and amplify each other? Did you enjoy going back and forth between the two narratives, or did you much prefer one over the other?
3. When Clara Wood finds Lily’s letter to Andrew and the certificate of annulment, she faces an ethical dilemma—should she tell Andrew the truth about the woman he loved and break his heart, or leave him in ignorance? What would be the most ethical choice? What would you have done?
4. Have you ever gone to, or wanted to go to, an “in-between place”? Would you share that experience?
5. Despite the little interaction they had, Clara is convinced that Edward would have become her lover and eventually her husband. Have you ever experienced a similar certainty about someone after just meeting them?
6. Ten years after her husband’s death, Taryn seems to be living a full life, but once her photo is published, she begins to realize that she has also been in an “in-between place.” How has she been held back? How are her circumstances similar to and different from Clara’s?
7. Discuss the role of the marigold scarf in the story. Trace its path from Lily to Taryn. How does the scarf enrich the experience of the characters? Would you react to the scarf in the same way that the characters do?
8. Andrew plays a key role in Clara’s life. Is it okay with you that she doesn’t end up in a romantic relationship with him? Does Ethan seem a better or worse choice to you? The book ends with Taryn and Mick heading toward a romantic relationship. Do you find that believable and satisfying?
9. Taryn and Clara each experience a horrific tragic
event in which someone they love dies. Have you ever been personally touched by tragedy? Would you be willing to share how your experience compares to what Taryn and Clara go through?
10. Do you believe in destiny? That God has a purpose for each of our lives? Discuss how these ideas play out in A Fall of Marigolds.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
Forgotten Ellis Island: The Extraordinary Story of America’s Immigrant Hospital, a book and film by Lorie Conway, Smithsonian, 2007. http://forgottenellisisland.com.
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Ellis Island by Barry Moreno, foreword by Lee A. Iacocca, Fall River Press, 2010.
Cultural Landscape Report for Ellis Island: Site History, Existing Conditions and Analysis, by J. Tracy Stakely, National Park Service, Olmstead Center for Landscape Preservation, 2003. (Available online at: http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/elis/clr.pdf)
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