Buffalo Flats, Ep. 14: Martine Leavitt Interview, Part 2
In this second part of our interview with Martine Leavitt, the author of Buffalo Flats, she tells us about the mountains that inspire her, how to put emotion on the page, what the heck an objective correlative is, and much more, including what she’s working on now.
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Martine: Sometimes you can call it organ recitals. You know, if it’s, if there’s an organ involved.
[Music intro]
[00:00:09] Anne-Marie: Welcome to the special episode of the Kid Lit Craft Podcast. This season we're taking a deep dive into the YA novel Buffalo Flats by Martine Leavitt. Today we're so excited to share the second part of our interview with Martine. We'll take a deep dive into her thoughts about the writing of Buffalo Flats. I'm Anne-Marie Strohman and I write for children and young adults as well as short stories for adults.
[00:00:33] Erin: Hi, I am Erin Nuttall, and I write for children and young adults and mostly young adults.
[00:00:39] Anne-Marie: At Kid Lit Craft, we look at mentor texts to discover the mechanics of how writers do what they do, so we can apply it to our own writing.
[00:00:47] Erin: A writer who does it really well is Martine Leavitt, and we looked at her book Buffalo Flats, as Anne-Marie mentioned, and Buffalo Flats is all about Rebecca Leavitt, who is a teenager in the Northwest Territories in the late 1800s. And she wants more than anything, a piece of that beautiful land for just herself. We hope you enjoyed the first part of our interview with Martine. If you haven't listened to it yet, just be sure to go back and listen to it sometime.
[00:01:17] Anne-Marie: As we mentioned last time, a wild Canadian snowstorm caused some recording difficulties and we're relying on a backup copy of our conversation. So apologies for any sound glitches.
[00:01:27] Erin: This part of our interview is longer than most of our episodes, but we learned so much from Martine and we wanted to make sure you could hear it too.
[00:01:35] Anne-Marie: So here's the second part of our interview with Martine Leavitt. Let's dive right in.
[00:01:39] Erin: So one of the things that really stands out in Buffalo Flats is the Canadian Wilderness. Rebecca loves that wilderness so much, and it seems like you might love the Canadian wilderness as much as Rebecca. So how does the natural world affect you as a person and as a writer?
[00:02:01] Martine: You know, I thought about, is this even a Canadian book? I don't know. Canada, as we know, it didn't exist. But of course, I've obviously so inspired by the mountains and I think every book I've written has mountains in it except for My Book of Life by Angel. And that is a very sad book.
I can see the Kananaskis mountains from my town. I don't think I could be happy living anywhere else. But how it affects me as a person and a writer? It might be so much a part of me that it's hard for me to parse that out.
[00:02:42] Erin: That is probably why when you write about it, it makes me wanna go and see those specific mountains. If you have a specific answer for this, but it was one I was thinking about is, how could we use the natural world to expand our characters and who they are and how they, come through on the page? If you have any ideas about that?
[00:03:04] Martine: Well, I might have a, a short answer to that. Setting or landscape or place never does only one thing if it's doing its job, right? It is never just a place for your characters to stand on. Setting reveals character because of course we know that the place where we grew up, the culture, the landscape, everything about it, the, the politics, all of this has a huge influence on us and naturally on our characters.
So. I would say never think of setting as just a pretty face. It's got brains too. And it has to do something essential to the story. And it can serve as a way to show your character's emotional world as well. It works really nice. As an objective correlative.
[00:04:05] Anne-Marie: Tell us more. It's a term that people use in very rare corners of literary criticism and at VCFA and I have not heard it outside that setting. So can you, for our listeners, explain what you mean by objective correlative.
[00:04:18] Martine: I think it's because TS Elliot popularized it and he made the definition of it sound really confusing 'cause that's just what TS Elliot likes to do.
And I just dumbed it down. By saying that an objective correlative is simply an object that correlates to the emotion of your character. And you do it Anne-Marie and you do it Erin.. In your writing, you just don't know you're doing it maybe sometimes, or maybe you do, but some writers don't realize.
But it is a way to connect your readers with the emotion that your character is without using cliche, without using the standard, you know. Beating heart and widening eyes, and you can find fresh ways of, of describing this.
[00:05:14] Erin: I do prefer your definition to TS Elliot’s. You're, I think we all needed it dumbed down a little bit.
But, but speaking of beating hearts in our romance episode we talk a little bit how you are against body part description to convey emotion, especially strong emotions. So can you expand on that a little bit? Why you feel that way, what you think works better, as we are trying to describe emotions of our characters?
[00:05:45] Martine: I think that many emerging writers resort to cliche because the writers they read are resorting to cliche. And by cliche, I mean overused ways of expressing a character's emotion, like beating heart or her, his heart thudded or his heart stopped or stomachs, his stomach twisted, they have been used so often they don't mean anything anymore. They're code and they're just placeholders and they tell us nothing about how this character uniquely feels this emotion that they're having right now. It's just what you've seen done a hundred times before. And maybe at some point back in the 1800s someone wrote, oh, her heart thudded, and it was fresh and it was original, and it described it really well.
Awesome. But it just, sorry, it's all used up and drained of meaning now. Sometimes you can call it organ recitals. You know, it’s, if there’s an organ involved.
And and all manner of breathings, you know, his breath caught. He breathed hard. He gasped, he and I'm not saying never, of course, I'm just saying to be aware of that. And like I said, it is ubiquitous out there, but using those sorts of go-tos, they don't elevate your writing. They, they'll never be fine art, let's put it that way. Maybe some people don't wanna write fine art. That's okay. But…
[00:07:37] Erin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so what do you suggest that people do instead?
[00:07:43] Martine: I had a student once who was in this really terrifying situation, and I would've been terrified in that situation. And this character kept, you know, his heart was pounding and he, fainted and he threw up and throwing up is like the new fainting actually.
And I was not connecting with his emotions because they were all overdone. And my student was saying, well, if I can't use these, what do I do? And I, I found it really hard to explain what it was, and she kept reminding me that I was the teacher and I was expected to teach her.
And so I finally said, just in a moment of kind of desperation, I said, use your metaphor. Any kind of metaphorical way of expressing your character's emotion is going to be better. Personifications, simile, objective correlative, multiple metaphorical ways to approach. If you deny yourself using a cliche, you will naturally reach for something fresh and original and it is going to make a difference in your writing.
[00:09:07] Anne-Marie: Yeah. It feels like when you're using cliches, it, as you said, it's code, right? Like someone's brain is like, oh, butterflies in the stomach equals nervous. Right? So they do this kind of brain thing. But when there's a novel metaphor, it's engaging imagination. Right? You have to get that, that sense feeling from imagining it.
[00:09:28] Martine: Yes, your reader has to be a co-creator. They have to, they have to invest imaginatively in the text when you do something fresh like that. I read a book not long ago. Eyes, eyes are, there's so many eye cliches. And one of them is widening eyes. Her eyes widened and, but this writer wrote, her eyes widened so much, they almost fell out of her face. And I thought that was kind of a fresh way to do it, with something a bit tried and true. And you can do something a little different with it.
[00:10:06] Erin: Well, that is, it is a good reminder to me. I actually have a sticky note on my screen that reminds me not to use body parts. So in Buffalo Flats you explore a lot of different themes, and I was especially intrigued by your portrayal of strong female characters. You might not be surprised listeners, Martine helped me write my, my Master's thesis about strong female characters. And so…
[00:10:36] Martine: Which won the critical thesis prize.
[00:10:39] Erin: It, it did, thanks to, thanks to a lot of crying and, and a lot of help from actually both of you.
So there's a tradition in our media, in writing and in movies and TV of creating or portraying strong women and girls as being out of the norm or exceptional. And then if they are strong, they're shown strong because they do things in a traditionally male way. And Anne-Marie and I were talking about this and I, I thought of Lady Macbeth who asked to be unsexed because she couldn't wield political power as a woman. And then we have like Wonder Woman who is a female warrior, which is a very popular, you know, Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, Hunger Games, like there's just a lot of female warriors. But those are women being met manly, in, if you look at traditional roles.
But you portray Mother and Rebecca as normal women and they show their strength through more traditional female roles. Caring for the family, midwifery. I found the way that mother deferred to her husband and yet stood her ground and changed his mind just astounding and awesome. So why did you decide to write these characters this way?
Like, especially historical characters? I think people really struggle writing historical women and that was a very long lead up to the question. But, but I am curious because I felt like you had these really, a whole raft of really strong women doing normal women things, and I just really loved that.
[00:12:27] Martine: Well, one reason that I did it that way was because women did have these traditional roles in, you know, settling these sort of wilderness areas, but those roles were perceived then as being every bit as necessary and essential to survival as men's work. And I think that it came later, much later, into the 20th century when these roles became perceived as demeaning in some way.
But at the time they were respected and they were very distinct roles, but women were respected. I'll say also that this was a turning point. It wouldn't be many more years I think. I'm, I'm gonna guess maybe eight or ten years later when women received the franchise and were able to vote. So women's political power was beginning to emerge at this time. But you know, the family histories that I read, they have these family structures of mutual dependence and just the deepest respect and love. Now, these histories would take them from their childhood right up until they, they die. Their, their kids would write sort of the postscript and say, this is when they died.
And they would talk about how lost they were when their husband or wife died. There was just so much closeness and love and respect in these personal histories. I had a cousin who had a memory of her parents. She grew up on a ranch, you know, very agrarian, almost exactly like Rebecca's time.
And one of her strong memories is of falling asleep every night to the sound of her parents talking. She said sometimes they would talk for hours. And I think, oh, does, you know, not everybody gets that. And especially nowadays, you know, we watch Jeopardy and then we go collapse into bed kind of thing, they had each other and they depended on each other.
Of course, the problem was that women were not protected or recognized as being persons under British law. And so Rebecca bumps up against that when she wants to get her own homestead, and she's told that she's not a person and she can't own her own homestead like her brothers can.
And of course, if you were unlucky enough to be married to a man who wanted to exercise his you know, right over you, you had no protection, you had no power. He had legal superiority. And so there was that other dark side to it to the fact that women did have these traditional rules and they were loved, but not in every situation.
There were some situations that were very bad and they had no recourse. So I dealt with that in my story as well.
[00:15:38] Anne-Marie: We see so much of that with the Sempel story and especially the climactic scenes where Mother does her thing and has to go into the legal system and all of that comes to the fore. And you use that so well in service of the story, right? It feels like something that could just be interesting moments of historical women, and you really make it serve the story. So I appreciated that.
[00:16:06] Martine: There was no domestic abuse. There is no children out of wedlock in the personal histories. That does not mean I don't think it happened. I think that, you know, you have a community of, some hundreds of people. There's going to be, you know, domestic abuse and children out of wedlock.
So I just, I invented it. I think that it wasn't a deliberate effort to deceive anyone to thinking that their, their life was perfect in any way. But it was just their uncomplaining way of saying that was then this is now we move on.
[00:16:45] Anne-Marie: Mm-hmm.
[00:16:45] Martine: And not going to trouble you all with the sad bits.
[00:16:49] Anne-Marie: You mentioned the idea of perfect, and that's actually something we have talked about a lot is Rebecca's desire to be who God wants her to be and believing at the beginning that she has to be perfect in order to do that, that that's what that means. And it, we talked about it in terms of it being a misbelief for Rebecca. She starts out with the wrong belief that she has to be perfect and she realizes by the end that what she thought was perfect was not in fact perfect. And that she doesn't need to be perfect either.
And I'm curious how you thought about that as you were working on this story and how you use that tool in coming up with your stories or developing them.
[00:17:33] Martine: So I have to say that I'm very impressed that you drew that out of the story. I, I think this is one of those times when you're just so grateful to your readers because they see a depth to things that you didn't necessarily see exactly that way.
And yeah, I think that Rebecca does, well. She has her mother, and her mother is this paragon of virtue and she sort of has her as a model. And then you have LaRue and I, I think, I personally identify with Rebecca so much because I do have friends who are just like, they're just angels and everything they say, they never say a mean word, and they're, I really, truly have friends like that, and I will never be that way.
So I think some of it was my own struggle, you know, with, well, what is goodness? I think that is, you know, what does God want from me and what is goodness? That was a big question that I went into the story with.
And she does figure out by the end that she doesn't have to love the whole world. She has to love the person that she's with at that time. One of the lines is man by woman by child. That's what we all can do, is take the person that's before us and love them.
And she does come to that conclusion, but I did not see it as elegantly as you saw it. So thank you for, for seeing that.
[00:19:15] Anne-Marie: But I love that idea of coming in with a question and kind of an abstract question. What does it mean to be good? What does goodness mean? Is that something that you do in all of your novels? Do you approach with questions like that?
[00:19:30] Martine: Yes, I do. To me that is where theme lives is in asking the big questions, the questions that you don't know the answer to. The questions to which there may not be one answer or even any answer. Sometimes I come to the end of the book and think, well, I, I don't think I really answered the question.
I, I went in wanting to know, but sort of ended up being humbled by the question to realize who am I to be able to solve this huge question? What is goodness? You know, how do we know if we're good? But I believe that my readers by reading the book and considering the question will either come up with their own answer or they'll just be a little bit changed by the question. They may continue on with that question and come up with different answers in the future, or, or at least recognize that it's a question.
[00:20:35] Erin: I like that idea. I think I've said that for every one of your answers, by the way. I like that idea. I do that of, the author, exploring your own thoughts about a question and maybe coming up with the answer or maybe not. When Rebecca is working out her feelings about uh, LaRue being pregnant. I think you do that really well. Because she talks about how she sees this conflict.
She knows that what LaRue and Ammon did breaks the commandments, but she also can't see LaRue as anything other than the really good person that she is. And she just kind of leaves it like that with both of those hanging there. And you as the reader, are then invited to continue thinking about that idea. And just let it, percolate in your brain, see where you come up with.
[00:21:35] Martine: And also when Mother shoots.
[00:21:40] Erin: Yes, yes.
[00:21:45] Martine: You know, she's this angel of mercy, this woman who nurses and heals and midwives and yet she goes ahead and takes the law into her own hands. And I think that the question is a really good question. You know, what is it, was it good for her to, you know, defend Sister Sempel and defend her daughter? Was that good or, or was it bad? Like I, to this day, I don't know. I just, that was actually one of my parts of the book, to be honest, was this moment when I had painted Mother into this corner.
[00:22:25] Erin: You did.
[00:22:26] Martine: This case in the law, and I thought, well, at first in my first draft, I just let her get away with it. It's just like, there's no consequences. That is just not realistic. I'm gonna have, she's going to have to go before a judge. She's going to have to answer to this in some way.
And I had no idea. I had her before the judge, and I literally did not know what was gonna happen. And then Mother says, it's just one of these gifts from your characters. She says, well, I didn't take the law into my own hands because there is no law against beating your wife. And I thought well done, Mother. I looked up because she was right. I had no idea where that came from. It was just there when I needed it. That's, I mean, that's one of the lovely things we love about writing. We sort of slog along and think, wow, do I have to do everything? You know, is this not gonna take over and just, you know, be this magical thing and then all of a sudden you just get one of those wonderful magical moments.
[00:23:34] Erin: I enjoyed that as well. And I did not see either of those things coming. I did not see Mother shooting Brother Sempel and then you made her go to court and I was like, oh, no. I didn't expect that to come. And certainly her, solution that she came up with herself, I did not. Yeah. So that was, yeah, it was a really fun part of the book.
[00:23:55] Martine: And then Father lies.
[00:23:58] Erin: Yes! You do really put Rebecca through the ringer.
[00:24:02] Anne-Marie: And I feel like you keep us so closely in Rebecca's perspective that it's easy for us or easier for us as readers to understand that like, oh, Father probably lied on occasion anyway. Rebecca just didn't see it. Like Mother had these characteristics, Rebecca just didn't see it. Right? So it's not, yes, it's surprising, but it's within the fabric of the story and within the fabric of the characters. Especially because we're so tight with Rebecca's point of view.
[00:24:31] Martine: And I think that her brothers also sort of bring up a question about goodness, because when they start out, the brothers are just not very nice. You know, they're not, they're not kind to her, but gradually over the story, she sees them as being much more loving and kind than she had initially thought.
[00:24:53] Anne-Marie: So I wanted to ask you about the middle of the book, because your book is so, as everyone said, so tightly written. And I know it went through a lot of revision and editing, but I'm hoping there's some magic trick about moving this story through the middle. I kinda wanna ask that in terms of what are you thinking about as you're working through the middle, either in a first draft or in revising?
[00:25:17] Martine: One way to make your book tight is to cut it in half, which is what I ended up having to do. Um, I've listened to some of the podcasts that you've done on Buffalo Flats, and I love the analysis that you did about character desire driving the story, the emotional and external or physical or concrete desires, what I call it, and the obstacles to that desire and the stakes involved.
Stakes meaning what the character stands to lose if she doesn't get that desire. And I, I literally examine every chapter and scene, and I ask, is this revealing character or is it something about the character pursuing her desire or the obstacles to that desire or the stakes? If it doesn't fall under any of those categories, it has to go.
And that can be really, really hard to let go because, you know that phrase killing your darlings? I really don't like that phrase 'cause sometimes your darlings are darling for a reason and you should keep them. But there's times when it just really does not serve the story.
It's, indulgent and it was fun for you. And I think especially when you're writing for, for young people, you are up against the TV, the video games, the computers, social media. You better get in there and tell a good story real quick, and you better keep it moving along and keep the interest of your young reader.
And so if you really love those wandering scenes that you know are just there to be beautiful, you should probably write for adults.
Don't write for adults. Because writing for young people is the best. Writing for young people, they have so little volition in their lives. They are at the mercy of their parents. Their parents tell them, you know, where they're gonna live and what school they're gonna go to. And they, they, you know, buy their clothes for them and they manage their lives.
Adults have all this agency. So you give an adult a problem and I always feel like that adult should figure it out. I have no patience with these adult characters but young people, they don't have as much agency. And so how do they overcome their problems? How do they work out their struggles, which are so much more intense? They have no coping mechanisms. They're so young, and how do they work it out? That's where story gets interesting for me. So anyone trying to figure out, should I write for young people? Yes, you definitely should write for young people.
[00:28:16] Anne-Marie: When you started writing, were you intending to write for young people or did you start writing for adults first?
[00:28:21] Martine: Well, no, I started writing for adults, but it turned out that it was for young people and then I, for, for teenagers, young adults.
And then I tried to write middle grade and everyone called it a young adult book. And then I tried to write a picture book and my editor said to me, I think you've got a novel in there. And it's just, I don't know. Everything I, I turn out turns out to be for young adults for some reason. So it wasn't a real decision, it was just sort of where I ended up, where I landed.
[00:28:52] Anne-Marie: So we talk a lot on the podcast, I think in every episode, Erin mentions something funny that you wrote and that humor is just infused throughout this book. And we also talk about, we go on and on actually about your beautiful sentences. We end the podcast with one beautiful sentence, but very often in the middle, Erin will read something and we will go, oh, how does she do that?
And now we have you here to ask, how do you do that? Our humor and language, you can take them one at a time. Are those things you are really intentional about? Do they just flow out of you naturally?
[00:29:26] Martine: Oh, heavens no. I am so not funny. But Rebecca is funny and she cusses too, and I, I don't she just had this worldview that was so entertaining for me. But no, I'm, I'm too shy and awkward to be funny. I, I wish I could be.
[00:29:46] Anne-Marie: When you are approaching a scene or writing from Rebecca's perspective, is it as you're writing in her voice, humor that you don't naturally have comes out? Or do you go back and say like, oh, there could be a funny moment here. Let me see what I can come up with.
[00:30:02] Martine: Oh, definitely the former. Rebecca, just, she took over and her, her humor…
[00:30:08] Erin: That is totally not fair. Because, I would look at it and I'll think, oh, I see how Martine put this funny moment, took 11, the seriousness, and I just love it. You do that consistently throughout the book, and now you're telling me Rebecca did it on her own. And I have to say that's not fair.
[00:30:31] Martine: I totally see, I totally see that. That is, that is, that, no, that can't be my answer. I, I edit that answer out.
But yeah, no, I can't bear it when, when writers say, well, it just happened, you know, and no, no.
[00:30:52] Anne-Marie: When you know your characters really well, when you hear that character voice, like I often will kind of do a little meditation and imagine myself in the scene and then just try to move through the scene as my character as I'm typing and like there is something intuitive that comes out that's not my voice, but that's my character's voice and will sometimes include things like humor, not as funny as Rebecca is.
But I think that there's, so, I think that is an answer that there's an intuitive thing that can happen that can bring out humor or beautiful language too. It doesn't mean it's has to be that way for every person or all the time, but I think it does happen for some people.
[00:31:31] Martine: I mean, yes, but to be honest, I think that I was, I, I thought about your protest to my answer and I think you're absolutely right and it's super annoying when people say things like that, but, okay, so I've had a chance to consider now, and I will say that I was always aware on some, some little part of my brain was aware that some of this could be ploying.
Like if you saw God and you did not have any humor involved in that experience, it could be too much. Do you know what I mean? Does that make any sense? And I think…
[00:32:15] Erin: Oh, for sure.
[00:32:16] Martine: I probably used the humor to sort of dial down that a little bit and, and ground us. Make sure we're not all floating off into a place where we go sit on a mountain and God's always there and to, to just ground it in reality
So I will say that I was aware of that and that might have, and probably did. In fact, I will say it must have informed her humor. So you were right. You were absolutely right.
[00:32:51] Erin: Oh, those are my favorite words.
[00:32:55] Anne-Marie: So what about language? Is that too, is that kind of, you find the voice of the character and that takes over or is that something, you know, we've taken apart sentences, looked at the parallelism in them and look at how you place the clauses and everything. So is that just you on the page you've been writing for many, many years?
Or is it something that you think intentionally about?
[00:33:17] Martine: I do think I, I mean, I write my first draft by hand because I feel like, well, I'll say that I think good writing is simply one really good sentence after another. And so I try to write really good sentences, and this might be a holdover from when I was raising seven babies and struggling to find even 20 minutes to write.
And I said, well, I can't write to a certain number of words. I can't write to a certain amount of time. So I will just write until I'm happy. And I found that writing one perfect sentence could make me happy for a full 24 hours.
[00:34:00] Anne-Marie: Mm-Hmm.
[00:34:01] Martine: So I developed that love of a good sentence back in the very beginnings of my writing journey. And I find, if I write by hand that I have enough time while I'm writing one word to be thinking forward to what the next perfect word would be.
[00:34:23] Anne-Marie: When you're revising do you revisit your beautiful sentences or do they pretty much stay the same?
[00:34:31] Martine: I mean, some do, some do, thankfully, but there are others where I think it, it felt so perfect at the time and then you realize it's not perfect. So yeah, I fiddle with my sentences for sure. But for Buffalo Flats, it was more about structure that really caused me difficulty. Not so much the nitty gritty of getting words down on the, on papers.
[00:35:04] Anne-Marie: You mentioned really enjoying writing the court scene and discovering what Mother would say. Did in rereading, as you were looking at pass pages, kind of late in the process, was there a scene that stuck out to you as like, oh, this is, this is one I love?
[00:35:22] Martine: Oh, the kissing scene. Of course, when she first kisses…
[00:35:28] Anne-Marie: Her spine blooming! It's lovely. I do have to say I just finished reading Middle March and there is a kiss in Middle March that I was like, this is a Martine kiss. And it reminded me so much of Buffalo Flats and I just, I loved it. So you and George Elliot write my favorite kiss scenes, and that's high praise. I do not like smoochy scenes that much usually.
[00:35:55] Martine: I almost can't read a book anymore unless I know there's gonna be a kiss in it somewhere.
[Laughter]
[00:36:02] Erin: Martine, I just wanted to tell you that I felt so seen by this book and it just hit me so deep inside of my soul and who I am, especially that opening where Rebecca visits with God. I read that over and over and just found it so beautiful and so moving and so honest and true and it just made, helped me feel like I felt seen in a way I had never felt in reading a book before. I just wanted you to know.
[00:36:37] Martine: Erin, thank you so much for saying that. And you know, I have to say that I've received so many emails that say it almost in the exact words that they felt seen.
And I think that's why it's so important that we tell the stories that are close to our heart to tell our stories. Because there's someone out there who needs that book, who needs that story that only you can tell. And maybe more than one someone. Thank you.
[00:37:09] Erin: Thank you for giving me that experience. So anyway, we can, we can move on back to the podcast.
[00:37:18] Anne-Marie: It's all good. It's all good. So I'm curious, what you're working on next.
[00:37:25] Martine: So I am working on a book called ad-seg. Short for administrative segregation, which is a euphemism for solitary confinement in juvenile detention. And yeah, I've been working on that for a long time because I've initially thought this was gonna be a time travel book and there is time travel in it, but, but I became more concerned as I did more research, more concerned with what goes on in some of these institutions.
And so it really started to change the book seriously. So that's what I'm working on.
[00:38:10] Anne-Marie: So Martine, we so appreciate you talking with us today. And we usually have one beautiful sentence at the end. Erin usually chooses it. I got to choose one, I was very excited. And we wondered if there is a beautiful sentence you would like to share with us today.
[00:38:25] Martine: I would, and you told me that I might get to, so I had one prepared.
This is on page 161 and LaRue has just confessed to being pregnant. And actually this might be an example of an objective correlative. Well, it's certainly metaphorical anyway, and this is how Rebecca takes that moment. At first, she doesn't absorb it, it goes into her head, but she doesn't actually hear it. And eventually it settles down.
She said “the word swirled around in her head, looking for a place to land. But there was no place in her mind where those words could sit down and make sense.” That's not my sentence, but when she finally makes sense of it, this is what I wrote.
“Rebecca saw the world, a painting then, a stretch of undefined prairie, a dust steady spinning up and gone, a prairie mirage of water, a flock of unnamed birds. LaRue was the subject of the painting, her hair blowing, her ribbons, her skirt, her face, looking away.” And I love that because in that, I'm so grateful for that, a little moment in the book that, that came also as a gift, because I think in that moment she is seeing that what she had thought of LaRue was not the actual reality.
And it's this painting, but she can't put her finger on any one thing. It's a flock of unnamed birds and undefined prairie. So she can't really put her finger on what she's feeling about LaRue in that moment. And then LaRue is the subject of the painting. And she sees her beauty, her hair blowing, her ribbons, her skirt, her face looking away. And so there's that moment of not really knowing LaRue. And then in the very next moment, recognizing how truly beautiful she is. So…
[00:40:31] Anne-Marie: That's great.
[00:40:32] Martine: That's the one I picked.
[Music outro]
[00:40:34] Anne-Marie: That's it for today. If you're enjoying this podcast, you can find more content like this at kidlitcraft.com. Find us on social media at @KidLitCraft, and you can support this podcast on Patreon. We've also got T-shirts and a tote bag and drinkware that you can find at Cotton Bureau, and we'll put a link in the show notes.
[00:40:54] Erin: Please download episodes; like, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen; and let your writer friends know about the podcast and your other friends, and your grandma and your spouse and whoever else you think might be interested, because we can't wait to nerd out with you.
[00:41:08] Anne-Marie: Thanks for joining us. See you next season.
