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Name of fiction work? And were there other names you considered that you would like to share with us? My latest novel, coming out from Penguin in August, is Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.
The simple reasoning behind this name is that those are the novel’s two main characters: Cher Ami, a World War I messenger pigeon, and Charles Whittlesey, a World War I soldier, both of whom really existed and were famous in their day, though they’ve become largely forgotten now.
The simple reasoning behind this name is that those are the novel’s two main characters: Cher Ami, a World War I messenger pigeon, and Charles Whittlesey, a World War I soldier, both of whom really existed and were famous in their day, though they’ve become largely forgotten now.
My original title for the book was An Instinct. Thematically, I’m interested in what impulses drive living beings—both human and animal—to behave as they do, whether that behavior is noble, like sacrificing your own needs for the needs of someone you love, or whether that behavior is destructive, like waging a war. In the end, my publisher and I decided that the abstractness of An Instinct made it less memorable than would be ideal, so we went with Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey instead to shine the light on the two protagonists.
I often rotate from project to project as I wait to get distance on something in order to revise it, or as I wait on comments from friends/first readers, or as I wait on edits from my agent and so forth.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? My spouse, the writer Martin Seay (http://martinseay.com/), and I live in a small condo in a classic Chicago six-flat that’s over one hundred years old.
As is common in that style of architecture, it has a solarium in the front, facing the street, a little room that’s essentially floor-to-ceiling windows on three of its four sides. We’re on the top floor, three stories up, so the view is gorgeous, and pretty writerly—we’re up in the treetops where we can see birds galore, which felt like a good omen because this book is so focused on the lives of birds and birds-eye views of World War I.
As is common in that style of architecture, it has a solarium in the front, facing the street, a little room that’s essentially floor-to-ceiling windows on three of its four sides. We’re on the top floor, three stories up, so the view is gorgeous, and pretty writerly—we’re up in the treetops where we can see birds galore, which felt like a good omen because this book is so focused on the lives of birds and birds-eye views of World War I.
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?
Outlining is vital to me when I’m writing fiction. Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey has an alternating first-person structure, where we hear about events first from Cher Ami, then from Whit, then from Cher Ami, then from Whit and so on over the course of the successive chapters.
So I knew, each morning when I woke up, exactly what I had to work on—who would be speaking and what I had to have happen to them. Outlining helps me immensely from an organizational perspective and from a logistical one. I teach at DePaul University and also co-run Rose Metal Press, so having an outline enables me to work on a novel at least a little bit every day no matter what other stuff I have to do.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. This excerpt is from p. 83 and is the scene in which—on the massive troop transport ship crossing the Atlantic from the United States to Europe—Charles Whittlesey, a commanding officer, first lays eyes on Bill Cavanaugh, an enlisted man with whom he finds himself smitten:
Though I took it at first for a trick of the morning light, a closer look confirmed that he was blushing. This soldier who’d converse with a captain or a king as easily as with a fellow private would, I’d come to learn, turn boiled-lobster-red whenever he spoke of something he loved. And he loved many things, though none, I think, more than pigeons.
“Being in the loft with my homers,” he went on, “quiets all the troubles of life. It’s like growing roses, I imagine. Pursuing beauty, cultivating it, but never reaching it completely. Not that my family ever had space for a garden.”
It felt rare, almost unsafe, to hear a grown man speak so openly of his passions. My mind alit at once on my own comparable pursuits, in much the same way that one’s hand might reach automatically for one’s wallet while navigating a crowded street. To be clear, I’m referring not to my dalliances with men—an appetite is not a passion—but rather to my dalliances with poetry, which I had written seriously since I was a boy, and for which I had earned modest acclaim at Williams. Even at work in Manhattan I would still sometimes hit upon a promising string of iambs and cancel engagements in order to spend the weekend coaxing them into a sonnet or a villanelle. But no one in the Army or back at my law office knew that I did this, and I had never for a moment considered telling them, or sharing my verses with anyone but Marguerite. It had never occurred to me that I might do so.
I tried to steer Cavanaugh back toward practicalities. “So you breed and race them?”
“Yes sir. They really are a lot like roses. Flying flowers! All different colors, different degrees of hardiness. To appreciate them, you can’t just go by how they look, but also what they can do in the air. Their power and their smarts.”
“How did you come by this hobby? Has your family always raised pigeons?”
“Oh, no, sir, not at all. Though Ma likes that I keep the birds. They’re a better thing to spend money on than drink, which is where my father’s wages go, I’m afraid. There was an old guy in our building who kept them for years, and who taught me about them. He told me once that they gave him an intelligent and profitable pastime. They keep the harp of life in tune, he said.”
This conversation was by a wide margin the longest I had ever had with an enlisted man, and certainly among the strangest, given its topic and the many bald-faced disclosures it had included. Cavanaugh’s candor was almost insubordinate; it certainly seemed heedless of the hierarchies that defined every aspect of our lives and our mission. Without question, I should have brought our exchange to a swift end, perhaps with a reprimand.
But there on the deck with him—we two quite alone, our first morning on the open sea, the horizon visible in every direction, a clouded and violent future ahead—I could not. I reassured myself that this was a special case, that as a pigeon man Cavanaugh would likely be attached to the regiment’s command staff, he wasn’t simply another interchangeable private whom I might have to tactically sacrifice, and that therefore this intimate dialogue was appropriate and constructive.
This was all hogwash. I was captivated.
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? Both Whit and Cher Ami experience love and loss during their time on the front in France, and in both cases, I knew that the scenes in which they first meet their beloveds (unrequited in Whit’s case) had to be momentous. I wanted Whit to be attracted to Bill not just because Bill is, objectively, a physically attractive person, but because he, like Whit, thinks hard about things and has passionate interests.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but you can probably infer from the fact that this is a novel about World War I that not everyone winds up with a sunny, happy ending. So it was hard to write this scene between two characters for whom I felt a great deal of affection and admiration while knowing what sufferings and horrors await them when they disembark this ship and travel to the front. By the time I finished writing this scene (of which this is just a short section) I was practically crying. Like Whit, I absolutely love Bill Cavanaugh because of the way he loves pigeons, and the war was quite hard on both pigeons and soldiers.
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. Yes. This passage is from near the end of the novel when things are winding down. Because the book is based on a true story, in my earliest drafts, I had the impulse to have Cher Ami (who is speaking from her glass case in the Smithsonian where she is on display in the WWI exhibit) tell my readers everything that happened to all of the Lost Battalion men after the war.
My agent Rebecca Makkai (http://rebecca
makkai.com/) rightly argued that this kind of summing up was better for nonfiction than fiction, and so I cut it. I don’t have a picture of the marked-up draft, but there wasn’t much marking anyway because I chopped it out wholesale.
makkai.com/) rightly argued that this kind of summing up was better for nonfiction than fiction, and so I cut it. I don’t have a picture of the marked-up draft, but there wasn’t much marking anyway because I chopped it out wholesale.
Zip Cepaglia moved back to his old neighborhood of Little Italy and had eight children with his childhood sweetheart, none of whom could ever get their father to say one word about his experiences in the war.
Arthur “Mac” McKeogh—Whittlesey’s tiny adjutant during the first encirclement in the Small Pocket, the notorious scourge of German machine gun nests who’d led Jack Hershkowitz and J.J. Munson on their daring night run through enemy territory to reestablish contact with Allied Forces, earning all three soldiers Distinguished Service Crosses for valor—returned to his work in publishing and became the managing editor of Good Housekeeping magazine. He died in 1938, of natural causes.
Hershkowitz recovered from the influenza that had nearly killed him, then returned to New York to run his prosperous dried-fruit factory. He lived another fifty years, and seemed quietly and profoundly satisfied with his circumstances.
Munson, on the other hand, was already nearly dead of liquor and tuberculosis by the time it occurred to me to seek him out. Too many Lost Battalion men to name or to count turned to alcohol for comfort after the war. Prohibition made this difficult, but when the body wants something, it seeks that thing, unless and until that want is superseded by a greater want.
I remember that from when I had a body.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her most recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press 2017 / Picador 2018) and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (Spork Press, 2018). Her new novel, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, based on a true story of the Great War, will be published by Penguin in August of 2020.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her most recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press 2017 / Picador 2018) and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (Spork Press, 2018). Her new novel, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, based on a true story of the Great War, will be published by Penguin in August of 2020.
A winner of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine, she is the author of nine books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including the novel O, Democracy! (Fifth Star Press, 2014); the novel in poems Robinson Alone (Gold Wake Press, 2012), based on the life and work of Weldon Kees; the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010); and the art modeling memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (University of Arkansas Press, 2009). Her first book is Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (University of Arkansas Press, 2005), and her first poetry collection, Oneiromance (an epithalamion) won the 2007 Gatewood Prize from the feminist publisher Switchback Books.
With Elisa Gabbert, she is the co-author of the poetry collection That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008) and the chapbook The Kind of Beauty That Has Nowhere to Go (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013).. And with fellow DePaul professor Eric Plattner, she is the co-editor of Rene Magritte: Selected Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Her reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation website, The New York Times Book Review, BITCH, Allure, The Chicago Review of Books, The Chicago Tribune, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation and elsewhere.
She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay. Follow her at @KathleenMrooney or
http://kathleenrooney.com/about/
http://kathleenrooney.com/about/
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THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF SAME HELL
by Robert Dugoni
#171 06 26 2020
Women’s Divorce Fiction
QUEEN OF THE OWLS
by Barbara Linn Probst
#172 07 01 2020
Short Story “The Belindas” from the Short Story Collection LOVE WAR STORIES
By Ivelisse Rodriguez
#173 Inside the Emotion of Fiction
07 04 2020
Organized Crime Thriller
BLUES IN THE DARK
by Raymond Benson
#174 Inside the Emotion of Fiction
07 08 2020
Contemporary Literature & Fiction
THE ESCAPE OF MALCOLM POE
by Allison Burnett
#175 Inside the Emotion of Fiction
07 09 2020
Horror Novella
TERMINUS STATION
by Jeff Lyons
#176 Inside the Emotion of Fiction
07 12 2020
20th Century Historical Romance
“The Bootlegger’s Wife”
by Denise Devine
#177 Inside the Emotion of Fiction
07 24 2020
Literary Fiction Novel
“What Drives Men”
by Susan Tepper
#178 Inside the Emotion of Fiction
07 27 2020
Short story
“Tidings of Comfort and Joyce”
by Kimberly Kurth Gray
#179 Inside the Emotion of Fiction
07 28 2020
Historical Fiction
“Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey”
by Kathleen Rooney