Eva Seyler’s and Rachel Lyon’s novels are set decades apart. In The War in Our Hearts, Eva tells a story of love conquering fear in the WWI era, and Rachel delves into the artist communities of Brooklyn in the late 1980s in Self-Portrait With Boy. In true writer fashion, however, they draw connections as they share each other’s inspirations and writerly process in their Author to Author conversation.

Eva: Hi Rachel!

Rachel: Hi Eva! So excited to be in discussion with you. I want to start by talking about where novels come from. It’s such an interesting topic to me—partly because it so often seems as if they arrive from outside ourselves, sui generis, apropos of nothing. How was your novel born?

Eva: When I set out to write what became The War in Our Hearts, I didn’t know much beyond that it would be a WWI story set at the Somme. I was thinking about what my plot and characters should be and I had this very clear mental image come into my head of a red-haired girl in a dilapidated barn, and it started me off thinking. Who was she, why was she there? And the character of Aveline Perrault started to come together.

Rachel: Where were you when you saw the red-haired girl in the barn? Do you have any sense of whether you’d seen her before, in a photograph for instance, or a dream? Where do you think she came from?

Eva: I was in my room – I’ve always liked working on my knees at the edge of my bed, I have no idea why – with my notebook open ready to scrawl out notes. My oldest daughter is a redhead, but I’m not sure if that played into it at all or not! Originally Aveline was to be the main character, and the book was supposed to be from her point of view and illustrated with her drawings (she’s mute from trauma so she writes and draws to communicate). But characters have a mind of their own, and Captain Graham, who rescues her from her difficulties, said, “Nope! My book!” and took over. Aveline is still a main character, Graham’s co-star, but it’s funny how stories evolve. I’d like to return to Aveline in a future book and give her some more love.

What inspired your book– how did it form in your mind?

Rachel: Self-Portrait With Boy began with my desire to write about the landscape and community in which I grew up: an industrial area of Brooklyn that, at the time, in the 1980s and early 1990s, was really mostly uninhabited, except by a few artists, who were technically squatting, although many of them had been there for a decade or more. The former factory where I lived with my parents was one of very few occupied buildings in the area. Most of the neighboring structures were totally abandoned. So there was this sense of complete isolation. Our neighbors called themselves “pioneers,” and they called the neighborhood “the wild West” or “the Frontier,” even though it was only a 20-minute walk to one of the wealthiest and longest-occupied neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Eventually it became too dangerous for people to live there, because the property values skyrocketed. Many of the landlords wanted to evict the artists and sell their buildings, and they went to astonishing lengths to scare them away or buy them out. So I suppose, where you started with an image, I started with a setting.

Eva: Setting is so important. Most of my other WIPs started with a setting in tandem with characters, so starting with a character alone was a little different for sure. Your setting sounds haunting and intriguing, and I love that it’s a setting that means something to you personally. I’ve never been to Brooklyn (that I know of – I was only 3 or 4 when my mom and a friend took me to NYC!) I’d like to visit sometime. I have not been able to personally visit the settings in my own book, although fortunately I have friends who were able to help out with photos and insight, and the internet is so great too.

Rachel: Yes, God, the internet has been essential for me too! So much of the writing process is navigating away from one’s document and into one’s browser, to verify or look up some essential detail. I imagine as a writer of historical fiction you must have done a lot of that—and just a lot of research for your book, overall.

What did that research consist of? What were some of the most exciting things you discovered about the time and place when The War in Our Hearts is set?

Eva: I read something like eight books (one was a slightly daunting 32-hour long audiobook) specifically relevant to the story, and I referred to at least a dozen others that I didn’t read all the way through, plus some other books that were about aspects of WWI that didn’t directly relate to TWIOH. Anyway, understanding the way society worked in the key player countries is vital to understanding why the war happened in the first place, so The Guns of August (Tuchman) and The War That Ended Peace (MacMillan) were both really helpful with that. Another book that was really helpful was not about WWI at all: A Childhood in Scotland (Miller), which greatly impacted the backstory of the character Captain Graham.

The battle of the Somme is notorious for its waste and carnage, and it figures into a lot of the existing historical fiction I’ve read – but most writers have focused on the bloody first day of the battle. TWIOH’s timeline doesn’t deal with that first day of the battle, beginning rather in August 1916. It deals with the less dramatic, later part of the campaign rather than that first day, and ends very shortly before the battle was officially called off. I think that’s the most profoundly moving thing that I learned, was how so much of the four years of the war was more or less a stalemate until the Americans came in, and even after they came in, it still took a whole year to end the war.

Rachel: It sounds like such an enormous undertaking. How did you summon the courage to contribute your own work to a crowded literary landscape—especially considering you’ve been retreading some relatively well-trod subject matter? Do you have any experience with feelings of imposter syndrome (which I’ve struggled with, myself)? Or have you found that, writing a novel that takes place in WWI, a subject that’s been returned to in literature again and again, you actually had more writerly freedom, somehow?

Eva: Comparatively speaking, there’s not nearly as much about WWI as WWII, so even if I’m touching on a battle that’s been addressed before, I don’t feel like I have a lot of competition at this point. The Great War’s arguably most well-known classic, All Quiet on the Western Front, is from 1928! In recent years, there have been some great contributions (I have an ongoing series of posts on my blog about every WWI book I read, so I won’t go into detail – you can check out the most recent of these here.

Even so, I wasn’t really satisfied with most of the WWI historical fiction I’ve found, so I wrote what I wanted to read. I have at least two more WWI ideas that I’d like to work with in the future that haven’t been written about yet!

I would feel more imposter syndrome if I tackled WWII, I think, but I definitely often feel like I’m just playing at being an author and surely I’m not REALLY any good!

Your protagonist is a photographer; is photography something that’s a hobby of yours?

Rachel: No, no. I mean, I use Instagram, like anyone these days, but I do not have the confidence, patience, or enthusiasm to attempt to make anything like art from my photography. I took one photography class in college with the wonderful photographer Emmet Gowin, and learned pretty quickly that when it came to the techy side of the art form—light levels, exposure, chemical development processes, etc.—I was no natural. So I was really surprised and delighted when I got a Google Alert just this week, notifying me that a real, live photographer had posted about my book on a photography forum. He said, “Self Portrait is a great book, by the way, written by someone who actually understands photography.” That I had effectively convinced this expert was incredibly validating. The truth is, I actually do not really understand photography. I just researched it for the book.

I read somewhere, some time ago, something to the effect that the novel should always be wiser, and more knowledgeable than its writer. Although clearly I have forgotten the source of that idea, I’ve hung onto it. How does that idea resonate for you?

Eva: It’s pretty easy to fool readers, for lack of a better term. I think because we as writers can familiarise ourselves with tech or historical facts and drop them in casually because they’re core to a character. My main character, Jamie Graham, is a classically trained musician who would have preferred to go to the Paris Conservatory but his father made him go to military academy. I know a bit about music, but I’m definitely not as skilled as my character is! Researching his options and the kinds of music he would have sung was a lot of fun.

I’m also curious, seeing you’ve written short stories, if you have any recurring themes in your work.

Rachel: That’s a hard question. Seeing one’s own work from the outside, and identifying themes, seems like it requires a different part of the brain than creating it from the inside out. I do think I return to certain ideas again and again, however. Self-Portrait With Boy is about a photographer whose photographic “masterpiece” will change the course of her career and destroy her closest relationship, if she shows it to the world. My new novel is about writers, not visual artists, but it too involves questions about art and ethics.

My short stories tend, necessarily, to be narrower in scope. I feel like the short story form is a kind of literary Petri dish, where we can experiment with the most ultraspecific of human encounters. Looking over my recent publications, they’re all essentially about people encountering one another with some preëxisting set of expectations, and then being surprised or failed by each other in some way. Gender and sexuality also come up, persistently. My story “Utopia Falls” is about a gay divinity student who thinks she can help a misogynist, only to realize she is not excluded from his misogyny. “Jennie, Jake” is told from the point of view of a woman whose husband is struggling with the trans identity of their youngest son. “Chicken” is about a belligerent woman who eventually realizes she’s been bullying the people around her—especially her husband—because she herself wants to be bullied; she wants to be erased.

What are some recurring themes in your own work?

Eva: I’d say the main theme in TWIOH is love being the opposite of fear; love driving out fear; love conquering adversity. I’ve got several other WIPs in varying states of doneness, and I’d say I also have a tendency to have strange and dysfunctional family dynamics, which probably stems from my own background and my parents’ backgrounds. There’s one scene in TWIOH where the father is berating Jamie Graham and his mother just sits there as if nothing is happening, which is directly taken from my mom’s story about how her mom responded when her stepfather went on a rampage.

Rachel: Ah, there’s really nothing like family to inspire our juiciest fictional material! Reminds me of this gem from Flannery O’Connor: “The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.”

Eva: I love that!

Thanks for chatting with me, it’s been fun! And best of luck with your book!

---

Eva Seyler has been writing stories since she was about nine years old. She graduated from Perry Technical Institute’s graphic arts program in 2007, and currently lives in Oregon with her husband and children. She loves history, music, and cats. She’s most active on Twitter @the_eva_seyler and you can also find her on her website, http://evaseyler.com.

 

 

 

Rachel Lyon is the author of the debut novel Self-Portrait With Boy (Scribner 2018), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her shorter work has appeared in Joyland, Iowa Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, McSweeney’s, and other publications. A co-founder of the reading series Ditmas Lit in her native Brooklyn NY, Rachel has taught creative writing for the Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Catapult, the Fine Arts Work Center, Slice Literary, and elsewhere. Subscribe to Rachel’s Writing/Thinking Prompts newsletter at tinyletter.com/rachellyon, and visit her at www.rachellyon.work.

Headshot Photo Credit: Christopher Stella