sarahdunant
City of Anywhere
Planet Earth
TABLE TALK
No one has posted to this glutton's wall. Sad Glutton. You can be first by typing something above.PUBLIC NOTES
Will She Settle?: So – will she settle? Will she open her mouth to sing? Will ‘he’ come for her and help her escape? And if not, can Zuana help this fierce, passionate young woman to find a life for herself, or will her fury engulf the whole convent? The novel took me the best part of three years to research and write. It won’t take you any time at all to read – though I hope you get lost in it – but I’d love to know what you think when you have…
Sacred Hearts: A Novel
Monday, June 29, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Serafina: At first Serafina didn’t have a voice in the book. But the more I wrote, the more I realised that the energy and passion pumping out through her rebellion and fury was colouring the whole novel and we needed somehow to get inside her head. Fifteen is a fabulously volatile age, when courage and foolishness go hand in hand and you think you can take on the world. I love that about her. I vaguely remember that level of arrogance in myself and more recently have watched it raging like a forest fire in my two teenage daughters. Serafina is not them, but they certainly helped me find her voice.
Sacred Hearts: A Novel
Monday, June 29, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
My Stay in a Convent South of Milan: While researching this book I spent about a week in a convent south of Milan, where the nuns were still enclosed. I stayed in a small room and attended all the offices along with them. That involved getting up at 4.30am in time for Matins (later now than in the Renaissance), so I had some first-hand experience of the strange, potentially visionary effects of being so tired and disorientated, forced to wake in the middle of the night to pray in a dark, cold, empty chapel. Without any form of electric light or heat, the past would have been a much more powerful place in terms of all our senses, and it was in this scene that for the first time I started to be able to imagine what life inside the constraints of a convent might have been like and how reality in all kinds of ways might seemed blurred.
Sacred Hearts: A Novel
Monday, June 29, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Who Is the Abbess?: When she first arrived in the story the abbess was unformed in my head. This is the point at which a character started to develop, as I watched her handle the other nuns and then talk more intimately to Zuana. By the end of this chapter I was really interested in who she was: clearly an intelligent, well-educated woman for whom the convent was not only a life sentence (she came in as a young boarder when she was six years old) but also a real career, for it offered her a chance to wield power, controlling as she did a community of over a hundred women. She would have needed to be kind and stern by degrees, as interested in physical as spiritual welfare, a businesswoman and a diplomat. The more I wrote her, the more I grew to like and respect her – even when (for the sake of the convent) she starts to behave very badly indeed.
Sacred Hearts: A Novel
Monday, June 29, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Zuana: Zuana, this sister with a talent to heal and a mind committed to study, was the second great revelation of my research. She showed how within convents it was possible for women to pursue almost a kind of career, which would have been impossible outside because it would not have been deemed ‘fitting’ for a woman. And the idea of a woman taught by her father to culture herbs and then use them as medicine, a woman curious and intelligent enough to do her own research, was very attractive to me. Once I had her and the novice Serafina I knew I had a relationship that could grow through the book. Though of course I still did not know what was going to happen between them…
Sacred Hearts: A Novel
Monday, June 29, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Snapshots of Different Women: I wanted to start with snapshots of different women in the convent at night to show the range of characters and responses you might find behind these walls. Though it may seem strange to us now, there were many women at this time, often young ones, who were so desperate to find God that they used self-mortification to try to do so, to show how wiling they were to share Christ’s pain and thus subdue their own bodies in search of the spirit. It was one of the great challenges of writing this book – to try to get into their minds and hearts, as well as all the others…
Sacred Hearts: A Novel
Monday, June 29, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
This Image: The novel began with this image in my head. And in my ears! The idea of a cell door closing at night onto silent cloisters and then the sound of screaming, from someone newly incarcerated, who did not want to be there. Her howling stayed with me through almost a year of research. I didn’t know who she was, or quite what was behind her fury and terror, but it was enough to start a story going in my head – the spark to the dry tinder of all that fabulous research I was doing…
Sacred Hearts: A Novel
Monday, June 29, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
UPLOADS SHARED WITH YOU
I have not uploaded anything.
