Posted on

Welcome Ilie Ruby, Author of The Language of Trees

The willows here grow to enduring heights of one hundred feet, their narrow leaves and long branches bent toward the ground, never forgetting their home. ~The Language of Trees

Trees are a life force around us. They lay claim to a land, bear the weight of change with the seasons, and, as they grow, become living evidence of the history of a place.

And sometimes, trees harbor secrets.

Ilie Ruby’s debut novel, The Language of Trees, is a story about place, as much as it’s a story about the people who live there. It is the sight of the Diamond Trees along the shore of Canandaigua Lake that draws three small children to the scene of a tragic accident. And, it is the power of that place that implores two of the main characters, Grant Shongo and Echo O’Connell, to return home to Canandaigua.

While Grant and Echo travel back to Canandaigua separately, their past, and the mysterious disappearance of a young woman named Melanie Ellis, brings them together. As they help search for Melanie, Grant and Echo find  healing, they rediscover their faith in family and in love, and they uncover the truth behind a secret that has haunted Canandaigua for years.

The Language of Trees is full of surprises and revelations — about the characters and about life. Ruby masters the craft of imagery and prose throughout her novel, hinting at answers but keeping the reader guessing. I’m honored to host Ilie Ruby here today.

At the end of the interview, leave a comment and you’ll be entered into a drawing for a copy of her novel, The Language of Trees. *Random.org will choose the winner on Tuesday, May 17th.*

***

CC: One of my favorite scenes in your book is between Lion and Melanie on their first date: Lion realizes that “memories were something you could decide to make, rather than the results of things that just happened to you.” That scene is such a sweet moment between two people and one of healing for them both. Do you have a scene that was your favorite to write?

IR: I’m so glad you like that scene. It takes place during a blizzard and it was one of my favorites to write. You know, I spent half of my life learning how to navigate a world of snow and ice. It will come as no surprise then that many of my childhood memories took place during blizzards. Blizzards are, come to find out, a good time to be inside with people you like (although when you’re a teenager you want to be out there in the midst of them). With everyone in an atmospherically-compressed space, lovers collide; intense family bonding or strife is created.

It’s hard to pick a favorite scene because all the characters came alive for me and have their own voices, magic, and sense of urgency and purpose. But Joseph’s scenes were especially meaningful because I based his character on a magnificent friend who has passed on, who had a way of enveloping those he held close in what can only be described as immense grace, perhaps the most powerful feeling of warmth, love and protection that I’ve ever felt in my life. It both startled and comforted me as I re-experienced that grace while writing Joseph’s scenes. I still feel that sense of comfort when I re-read the book and any scene that has Joseph in it. I hope others do, too.

CC: What was the inspiration behind writing a character that is a spirit? 

IR: I think one reason I write is to learn about things I’m compelled by or exceedingly interested in. Part of what fuels the desire to write about spiritual things is a wish on some level that we exist in a benevolent universe, that there is a rightness to it that can be defined in human terms. From the age of about nine onward, after learning about the loss of so many of my relatives in the Holocaust, I voraciously read everything I could find about religion and spirituality. In this novel, I wanted to show how the dynamic coexistence of light and darkness is reconciled through generations—ultimately, how a child can bring healing and triumph over a painful legacy. The character of Luke, a healing spirit, must transcend the darkness of his father, a hunter, both on this plane and from the spirit world. There is a wheel of energy at work. The character of Melanie fights addiction in order to mother her own child, becoming a person that uses art to transform pain into beauty so in my mind hers is a spiritual gift as well.

CC: What are you reading these days?

IR: I’m re-reading The Giant’s House because Elizabeth McCracken has an incredible gift for making the unfamiliar relatable. She’s a writer that takes chances and I’m awed by her creativity and her ability to render the human heart and the complexity of relationships so uniquely and beautifully.

CC: What is your advice to writers?

IR: Write truth. Write where there’s “heat”. Follow your questions and relate them to universal themes. Know that if you’re wondering about something, it’s likely other people are, too. If your book evokes questions and discovery, that’s a good thing.

Ilie Ruby grew up in Rochester, NY and spent her childhood summers on Canandaigua Lake, the setting for her debut novel, THE LANGUAGE OF TREES. She is the recipient of several awards and scholarships, including the Edwin L. Moses Award for Fiction and the Phi Kappa Phi Award for Creative Achievement in Fiction. In 1995, she graduated from the Masters of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where she was fiction editor of The Southern California Anthology. Ruby is a painter, poet and proud adoptive mom to three children from Ethiopia.

***

For more information about Ilie Ruby, her book, and her upcoming events, visit her website. Also, check out her fan page on Facebook, follow her on Twitter, or keep up with her on Goodreads.

And, don’t forget to leave a comment to be entered into the giveaway!

Posted on

Mother: More Than Just Neosporin and Band-aids.

Have you ever looked into your mother’s eyes and seen past the woman who is caregiver, chef, and chauffeur? I have. It was 1986, the year I turned sixteen.

That year, my mother threw me a huge birthday party, Fifties style. She bought hoola-hoops and poodle skirts and drove me and my best friend all over downtown Fort Worth in search of records — old 45’s.

My best friend  and I fell into each other and giggled, while my mother danced around the record bins. When she lit up over a find of Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” and Sam Cooke’s “Only Sixteen” and bubbled over with stories about when she was a teenager, we gawked. She was more alive than I’d ever seen her. It was as if I’d discovered a window to a secret room; for that moment, she was my mother, but she was so much more.

As I thought about writing this post, I searched through a stack of old pictures and found this photo of her:

Betty Jo

My mother was a model. I forget that sometimes. Some days, it takes me a minute to remember that she was also an actress. And, an artist. That she painted a self portrait in secret when I was ten, and my sister and I weren’t supposed to see it. She was a mystery;  sometimes when she laughed too hard, she sounded as if she were crying.

At almost forty-one, I am neither young nor old but am almost the same age as my mother when I turned sixteen. When I look in the mirror, I see her neck, her freckled shoulders, her brown eyes. And, in those eyes, I see pieces of myself that amount to my whole.

My favorite sculpture of my mother's.

I am a mother. But, besides that, I am a knitter. A writer. Sometimes, I am an artist. Once in a while, I am a baker. I can bake a killer loaf of bread (and by that I mean a loaf dense and heavy enough to kill).

On the outside, I am crow’s feet and a soft, post-childbirth belly; but on the inside, I am 1986 and 1992 (another good year), spirited and mysterious in my own right. And, when I wrap my arms around my children and breathe in the scent of their freshly-shampooed hair or the essence of their good and hard play outside, I think my God, on top of everything, I am a mother!

Yesterday, I picked up Natalie Merchant’s CD, Leave Your Sleep, and her song “Bleezers Ice Cream,” reminded me of the many facets behind every mother. There was so  much more to mine than I knew; I wish I’d stood longer at the window and studied her more.

Posted on

Lessons from an Old Panasonic: Read out loud.

Back in the old days, when cassette tapes were still in circulation, I read books out loud, into a recorder. I wasn’t writing at the time, but I was working in a department that turned printed textbooks into audio books for people with impaired vision.

Once a week, I would scurry down a flight of marble steps into the basement of my office building and seal myself in a sound proof room. I’d crack open the book at hand — sometimes social work, occasionally a classic, once in a while (the dreaded) Chemistry. I’d pop in the cassette tape, clear my throat, and press record.

I spoke the words of welfare policy and research using my best authoritative tone. I invoked the spirit of my days on stage in High School Theater when I came across a monologue in literature. I did my best to breathe life into the periodic table.

“Who is the owner of that voice?” I imagined the students would say. “I’ve never heard Chemistry sound so sweet.” Of course, once my ego died down, I realized that saying “the atomic mass of hydrochloric acid” probably evoked the same level of excitement if spoken with passion versus a subtle, scholastic drone. In fact, most of the students were likely fast-forwarding to chapter summaries and skipping over my thrilling read.

These days, transferring books to audio happens inside the inner workings of computers and in a fraction of the time. But, I still love to read out loud. It serves a different purpose, though, one that applies to my life as a writer. There are three reasons – at least – why reading stories and essays aloud should be a part of  every writer’s process:

1. You see the work through the eyes of an editor. Anne, in her post, “Read It Out Loud” (on About Freelance Writing), says this:

Awkward sentence structure and poor word choice…show up. Consistency, or the lack of it become apparent….

Nowadays, one area I pay close attention to in my work is dialogue; I listen for unrealistic speech or the strength in a character’s voice. Once, I wrote dialogue for a character from Mexico. I tried to incorporate a strong Spanish accent, and, in doing so, managed to make the character sound like an idiot. Or, at least that’s how I felt reading the words out loud. I decided reported speech might be a better choice.

2. Reading your work out loud helps you capture your voice. This didn’t matter so much when I was reading someone else’s research into a cassette recorder, but it’s especially helpful when I write blog posts today. Andrew Rosen, in “4 Reasons to Read Your Blog Aloud,” explains how blog posts play out differently, as compared to stories or essays, in the reader-writer relationship:

A BLOG IS A CONVERSATION. If you write the way you talk you have a better shot of connecting with your audience – and keep them coming back for more.

Subheadings, white space, and hard returns play an important role in blogging. Reading posts out loud helps me decipher when those techniques enhance the post or inhibit the flow of it.

3. Reading out loud prepares you for that book tour you’ve been dreaming about. I got a little dramatic during my “books on tape” days, but there’s truth behind the fact that, as authors, we have to practice reading aloud. As James Chartrand says, in a post on Men with Pens:

…[S]ub-vocalization…is a natural brain process we use while we read. As we read, we imagine the sounds of words and ‘hear’ them in our minds. That’s pretty important, because sub-vocalization helps us understand more of what we’ve read and remember it longer…That means [readers will] grasp your razor-sharp message perfectly….

Chartrand is talking about how a reader processes the words on the page, but his point can be taken from the perspective of a listener as well. There’s a distinct difference in how I hear a story that’s read with feeling and with appropriate pausing, versus a story that’s poured-out-in-one-long-breath-with-barely-a-break-between-paragraphs-and-what-did-that-character-just-say? I miss big chunks when a story blows past my ears too fast; I also get distracted when a story is read too slow. I have to practice my pacing, so that when I am standing in front of an audience, I can trust they will hear the story the way I intend — as if the characters were standing in the room and the scene was playing out in front of them.

One final note, Mem Fox (author of Harriet, You’ll Drive Me Wild, one of my favorite children’s books) offers ten commandments for reading out loud, one of which says, “Read aloud with animation. Listen to your own voice and don’t be dull, or flat, or boring. Hang loose and be loud, have fun and laugh a lot.”

I think she’d be all for reading through the alkaline metals with pizzazz.

Do you read your stories out loud? How does it improve your writing?