It’s clearly an auspicious date. This Writer Unboxed post falls on the launch of my new novel, Marilla of Green Gables. It’s true, Jupiter and Mars are in alignment, the harvest moon has risen full, and the air is sparkling with autumn’s magic. Not that I believe in any of that and, of course, I believe in all of it. Whatever your conviction, no one can deny the charm of October. It’s ingrained from our childhoods to feel the magnet pull of change—new yet old, strange but familiar, comforting in its promise that the miraculous is real and evident season upon season.
On days like this one, there seems to me a palpable connection between the lives we live and the stories we share. The narrative osmosis begins in our youngest days and carries through to our last breath. It’s why I’ve come round to believing that the books we read during our imaginative development are the ones that make the biggest impact on our adulthood—the majority of our life.
Looking at my own literary upbringing, my favorite novel and one of the first that I read without pictures was Anne of Green Gables. I distinctly remember the pages of that old, borrowed library copy in my mother’s hands, ink type on sepia pages, dimly lit under night lamps. Nothing exotic, whimsical, or particularly fairy tale in it, but it didn’t need embellishment. The word pictures in my imagination exceeded any illustrator’s paints.
During that first reading, I had never met a person with red hair and had never been to Prince Edward Island. I had, however, visited my grandparent’s farm in Puerto Rico. I imagined Green Gables in tropical jungle motif. The landscape Lucy Maud Montgomery described sure fit the bill— vivid and swirling with motion. We had farm animals on my grandparent’s finca, just like Green Gables. I had a tribe of titis (aunties) flittering back and forth between kitchens. Marilla and Rachel could’ve been two. We had church gatherings weekly, bedtime prayers, and my mother made all my favorite dresses. So Anne in her Avonlea world felt like an extension of my own. A bosom friend in a make-believe world that was as real to me as any of the stories my family told about bygone days and people.
Such a poignant a part of my childhood, the book took root and my devotion only grew. For those who know me well, it’s not surprising that a middle-aged Sarah would be compelled to write the story of the middle-aged heroine Marilla Cuthbert. In Chapter 27 of AOGG, Lucy Maud Montgomery writes: “The spring was abroad in the land and Marilla’s sober, middle-aged step was lighter and swifter because of its deep, primal gladness.”
There’s a story heart beating passionately in that single sentence. I remember knowing it as a child and wanting to know it as an adult. It’s the reason Marilla of Green Gables exists. [Read more…]
