#378 Inside the Emotion of Fiction THE FLICKER OF OLD DREAMS by Susan Henderson; published by Harper Perennial; Unabridged edition (March 13, 2018)
What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I started researching in 2012 and the book was published in 2018. (LEFT: Susan in November 2018)
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? I did my initial research in Winnett, Montana, where my father grew up, thinking it might lead me to the itch I couldn’t scratch. I wanted to understand the growing division in our country, the idea that we’d split into two different Americas. With deep relationships in both, I didn’t have the luxury of picking sides. I wanted to open up a dialogue, and I had zero interest in writing about politics. So I set out to write a story that could reveal what these two Americas needed to say to each other. (BELOW: Susan’s father in his teen years)
I went to Winnett, a town of 180 people, with little more than a pair of hiking boots, a stack of empty notebooks, and my brother’s truck on loan. I stayed in a motel mostly used by hunters. Since it was off-season, I was the only guest. My room had no internet, no TV, no cell service. And the town had no doctor, no firehouse, and just one restaurant, which has since closed.
I usually begin this way—drawn to a place before I have a clear sense of the story I want to tell. My idea of research is to wander around the setting of my story, photographing whatever catches my interest, and talking to anyone who’s got a stake in that place. I took so many pictures—an empty grain elevator, train tracks covered in grass, homes and business I assumed were deserted. You only have to learn the lesson once, not to peer through the window of a run-down house! Some of the businesses, like this white and pink laundromat, looked abandoned but were fully functional.
I needed my brother’s help getting to our family cemetery, a long, rough drive from Winnett, through “the breaks,” better known to most as the Badlands. For much of the way, it doesn’t feel like you’re driving on roads at all; it feels like being lost in the middle of nowhere. Whenever a family member dies, our relatives caravan out there, often piling into other vehicles if the roads are flooded and one truck has a better chance of getting through. We dig the graves ourselves. Many of the markers are homemade—repurposed scrap metal, car bumpers. I used our family cemetery in the book but moved it a lot closer to town. (RIGHT: Susan and her family at her father’s gravesite in Winnett, Montana)
I hoped to come back from that trip with a sloppy first draft. It didn’t go like that. When I returned to New York, I salvaged only one sentence from my notes—something about the wind. What struck me more was the dissonance between my notes and photos. My notes, largely from interviews, reflected pride—knowledge they had of this land, the animals, weather, and every kind of fix-it project. Some cherished the town’s traditions; others quietly spoke of feeling shut out or unable to introduce new ones. Both spoke about the beauty of this place and shared a suspicion, even defensiveness, toward a world they felt looked down on them.
But the pictures I’d taken told a different story. They showed something in the process of dying. The town. A way of life. I couldn’t match the words to the photos. I was reminded of a line from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: “Every nowhere is somewhere.” That, I realized, was the heart of the story—how a place can be both dying and alive, both forgotten and fiercely held. But who could narrate such a story? Who could look at death without flinching? Who could treat the dead and the dying with respect and compassion?
And that’s how Mary Crampton came to life. And, I hope, a book that speaks to our universal cry for dignity.
https://davidmitchellbooks.com/
Atlas%22&qid=1745367354&s=books&sprefix=david+mitchell+cloud
+atlas+%2Cstripbooks%2C112&sr=1-1
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? In general, I do the bulk of my writing while walking. I’m not a “keep your butt in the chair” kind of person. My brain doesn’t really work at full-speed unless I’m moving. So, what I’ll do is leave the house with a specific question about the book. Here are two examples:
How can I get these two characters to be at the same place, at the same time, and in the most contentious and memorable way?
Does this character belong in the book? If I cut her, how will that improve the plot and pace? Without her, what possibilities open up? If I keep her, how can I attach her more urgently and centrally to the spine of the book?
Then I just walk and let the question bounce around in my head. The question is always harder than the answer. Once I have the question, the answer will come. And when it does—often in fits and starts—I pull my phone out of my pocket and talk it into a voice memo app.
Little Miss Funeral review on THE FLICKER OF OLD DREAMS
&s_it=searchtabs#id=1&vid=ef5b94451bf3502743b485c7f783104e&action=view
The great thing about this method is that it keeps my editor-brain from barging in too soon. When I write at the computer or in a notebook, I tend to judge every word as I go. But I’ve never-once stopped a recording because I started a sentence with the word, um, or because I used the word suddenly three times in a scene. A clunky idea gets the creativity flowing. And good ideas often hide behind the bad ones.
I store up months of voice memos before I give them a listen. I wait for a day I feel stuck and the weather’s no good for a walk. Transcribing them, though it’s tedious, catapults me right back into the book.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. The excerpt begins on page 18 with “I remember every name I’ve been called.” And ends on page 21 with “We are simply here, together in this quiet.” 
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? This is the scene where I found the heart of my narrator. Until then, Mary was kind of dotted in. I’d over-researched the how-tos of embalming and running a funeral parlor, and the writing had a generic “stage direction” feel to it. The words sounded like a director, off-screen, had called out, “Okay, Mary, now walk across the room and pick up an embalming tool.” But I had yet to see how Mary was going to interpret the director’s words.
I’d just come back from a writer’s event, where a person I’d met many times, shook my hand and said, “Nice to meet you.” I felt invisible and unimportant. On the train home, I pulled out the pages I’d brought to work on and edited that scene. That’s when I realized this shy, awkward woman doesn’t really get to know people in her town until they’re dead. My story started to have a heartbeat.
On a later edit, I decided to slow down before Mary lifted the white sheet. The scene felt like it rushed too quickly to her work, and I wanted to honor the person under that sheet before we met him naked.
BOOK TRAILER (Scroll to bottom)
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. I don’t save drafts of my work but I did find these two photos. The first one shows how I mark up a page (this is a draft from chapter 35).
The second picture (the whole book up on my bulletin board) is one of my favorite parts of the editing process. I pin each chapter, side-by side, and look for physical signs of the book being unbalanced. Are some of the stacks too fat? Are the skinny chapters bunched in one part of the book? What about that section am I rushing? For me, this is the best way to spot large-scale problems with pacing and balance.
Next comes the fun part! I pick two chapters from completely different parts of the book and edit them together. This is what I call “cross-pollinating” the chapters. So maybe I’ve grabbed chapter 4 and chapter 14.
In The Flicker of Old Dreams, chapter 4 gives the reader a detailed tour of the town, while chapter 14 focuses on an affair Mary’s father is trying to hide from her. As I’m line-editing chapter 14, I notice an off-hand reference to a tea bag her father won’t use. And so I ask myself: Is there more to that tea bag? And could I introduce it back in chapter 4? Here is how that tea bag makes its debut in chapter 4:
Pop takes off his jacket, loosens his tie, lets his posture wilt. He can use his regular voice and stop sounding so happy now. He removes two muffins from the pan but stays there at the counter.
My mother has followed us into the house. My mother is the name I’ve given his grief. She was gone long before I knew what death was so, for me, she is an abstract loss, a game of guessing at the life I might have lived.
My mother is a collection of stories and inanimate objects. She is a wedding ring in my father’s bedside drawer, a rosehips-flavored tea bag in the back of our kitchen cupboard that we both refuse to use or throw out. She is a picture of someone standing on the rims too far away to see. She is a book underlined only to page seven. She is a pair of burnt rosebushes in the yard that Pop won’t dig up. She is the line between his eyebrows, the groove where his smile would be. She is a feeling in the gut I can’t name or move.
It is my father’s grief that we both suffer. I think of my parents in Doctor Fischer’s two-room clinic in what even people from Petroleum would call the tiny town of Kestrel. I’m certain Pop never imagined that he would come home with only me. That he would suddenly have to figure out every single thing without a partner. He’d never even held a baby before, not a living one. You can see it in our first photo together, taken weeks after he had buried my mother; still his elbows poked out awkwardly and I did not nestle into the crook of his arm.
“Are you all right, Pop?”
“I’m fine.”
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062686704/keywords=women%2Bgifts?tag=harpercollinsus-20
So, that addition of the tea bag not only gets chapters 4 and 14 in conversation, but it also keeps chapter 4 from being overly focused on the walk-through of the town. See the fun and surprise cross-pollinating can bring? Sometimes I have a sense of chapters I want to edit together. But, usually, I just shut my eyes and eeny-meeny-miny-moe it. This, for me, is how I find hidden magic in a story.
Susan Henderson’s Interview with Sara Nelson about THE FLICKER OF OLD DREAMS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tS6MHJqehk
Susan Henderson is a seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award, and the author of two novels, Up from the Blue and The Flicker of Old Dreams, both published by HarperCollins. Her latest is a Montana Book Award Honor Book and winner of the High Plains Book Award for Fiction, the WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction, the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Western Contemporary Novel, and included by This House of Books on its list of Top 100 Books of the 21st Century. Susan is a lifetime member of the National Book Critics Circle and the NAACP. She lives in New York and blogs at the writer support group, LitPark.com
Her favorite authors include Toni Morrison, Shirley Jackson, James Baldwin, William Gass, Kent Haruf, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ellen Gilchrist, John Steinbeck, Nikki Giovanni, Max Porter, Nicole Krauss, Ocean Vuong, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tim O’Brien, Zora Neale Hurston, Edward Hirsch, Jill Bialosky, William Maxwell, Claudia Rankine, and the Brothers Grimm.
Susan Henderson’s Website
Susan Henderson’s Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/susan.henderson.520
