Books
For most writers, there’s a small, very specific window of time each day when the work comes most easily, when there’s no struggle to find the right words for description, no tempestuous relationship with plot or characterization. In the case of local author Brenda Rickman Vantrease, that time begins mid-morning and lasts till early afternoon. Before the publication of her 2005 debut novel, The Illuminator (recently released in paperback), Vantrease’s window opened easily every day: no critic’s voice dogged her ears, no prying eyes peered over her shoulder.
Vantrease’s best time for writing is still late morning, but today it’s often interrupted by agents, editors, publishers and even curious fans. This is what happens when your first published novel becomes a national best seller.
St. Martin’s Press released The Illuminator in 2005. A novel set in 14th century England and described by The Boston Globe as “a sweeping portrayal of the distant past…ample in romance, mystery and adventure,” the book is packed with cultural and religious upheaval, a struggle for power between church and crown. It’s historical fiction with contemporary resonance, and the American public quickly latched on: over 100,000 copies are in print in the United States—a typical first novel sells 3,000 copies—and Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review, calling it “enthralling…compelling…brilliantly sketched…an absorbing, expertly told tale.” Vantrease has sold translation rights to it in more than 15 languages.
But this is more than the tale of a writer’s lucky break. When artistic morale is low, look no further than Brenda Rickman Vantrease. What makes her a hero to frustrated writers everywhere is that she is (a) living far from the tightly knit New York publishing world, (b) a career Metro schoolteacher and librarian, and (c) 60 years old.
Somewhere, a once discouraged writer is now turning on her laptop.
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
For every young publishing phenom—think wunderkind Jonathan Safran Froer publishing Everything is Illuminated at 24 or Carson McCullers penning the classic The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at 22—there has to be a Charles Frazier publishing Cold Mountain at 46 or a William Gay debuting at 56. “Has to be” because otherwise every writer/painter/musician in town would give up in despair and become respectable professionals with job titles their parents can understand and houses in non-transitional neighborhoods. All across Nashville, coffee shops and restaurants and tiny corporate cubicles would become desolate in the absence of their over-qualified, low-paid workforce.
I met with Vantrease one afternoon in mid-April at her home on a tree-lined street near Percy Warner Park. She is lively and talkative, her warm smile and gracious manner inconsistent with the stereoptype of a school librarian. Serious about learning: yes. Serious without a sense of humor: no. She showed me to a seat on her living room couch and then disarmed me by offering Girl Scout cookies. Plus, Vantrease is as amazed as anyone over the change her life has undergone.
Quick to encourage, she asked about my own writing ambitions and quoted advice from her favorite writers. I couldn’t help but hope she would offer some advice of her own, namely an answer to the one question haunting so many struggling writers: how does a person find the time to write if there are bills to pay and a household to maintain and people who need you?
To my disappointment, Vantrease never learned the answer, either: “While I was teaching, I wrote very little,” she says. But she did read constantly, subscribed to writing magazines and attended the Southern Festival of Books each fall, sitting in on every session she could. “I did those things while I was teaching. I fed the dream,” she says. “I kept it alive.”
The dream began when she was a child. Born in White County to a Baptist minister and his wife, Vantrease and her family moved often from one small Tennessee town to the next—Fayetteville, Watertown and Smyrna, among others. In each new place Vantrease would always find the library, unknowingly taking the first step of any would-be writer: read, read, read, and then read some more. If there wasn’t a library close by, she settled for her father’s books, poring over his college copy of Masterworks of World Literature and even resorting to Milton, Sophocles, Oscar Wilde.
As an undergraduate at Belmont University, she studied English and paid her way through school by working in the library. (She met her husband Don, now a self-employed businessman in real estate and construction, on the library’s front steps.) After graduation she became a teacher, first at Cumberland High School, and later at Bellevue, Hillsboro High School and finally Eakin Elementary. Teaching may not have left Vantrease with much time to write, but she was dedicated to the profession nonetheless, earning a master’s in learning resources in 1975 and a doctorate of arts in English in 1980, both from MTSU. She says teaching helped her become a better writer just through “observing the human experience, watching the children, watching their struggles. When you’re teaching school you have such close interaction with all kinds of children from all kinds of homes and all kinds of problems and personalities.” Dedicated as she was, though, teaching wasn’t her dream. “I’d always wanted to write, and teaching never left me enough time or creative energy.”
Teaching did leave her time to travel, however. She and her husband have made it to every U.S. state except Hawaii. They’ve spent time in the Canadian provinces; toured England, Scotland and Ireland by car; and most recently traveled to Italy. Though her travels certainly helped her as an educator, professional reasons were not what drew her especially to the British Isles. “I love the history and I’ve always read that,” she says. “All those wicked kings and queens.” But there were also personal reasons for her interest: “Like so many white Southerners, [my heritage] can be traced directly back to England, Scotland and Ireland. My mother’s family came from the Isle of Man, which lays claim to all three.”
With each new book or trip, Vantrease picked up details of British and medieval history, storing the information away, though she didn’t know it, for a second career as a novelist. Case in point: her visit to Dublin in 1969, where Vantrease first saw The Book of Kells, one of the most famous and beautiful of the illuminated manuscripts. Created by Irish monks in the early 9th century, it contains lavishly hand-illustrated transcriptions of the four Gospels in Latin. Decades later, that visit would profoundly influence The Illuminator. “The history actually sparked the fiction,” Vantrease says.
Vantrease’s reading on everything from the European feudal system to the emergence of the English language to the role of women in the Christian Church would eventually come together in The Illuminator. Set in the 14th century, the book is part murder mystery and part romance, with a huge helping of socio-political intrigue and upheaval. During this time, the printing press had not yet been invented: books were hand-produced and elaborately illustrated, and thus expensive and scarce. The Catholic Church had forbidden the translation of scripture into English—a move that prevented the peasantry from questioning papal authority and solidified the church’s power base, even within sovereign nations. Extortion was the norm, both for the church and the crown, and the two were in a constant struggle for political supremacy.
In The Illuminator, Lady Kathryn of Blackingham understands this struggle all too well. Though she owns vast land holdings, as a widow with two teenage sons her situation as an independent woman, living as she pleases, is precarious. She walks a delicate balance between appeasing the clergy with costly tithes and rebuffing the advances of a powerful nobleman (as repugnant as her late husband) intent on possessing her lands. When she engages in a love affair with the handsome and talented master illuminator, Finn, her situation grows more complicated as she must sort out where her true alliances lie. And the mysterious death of a priest on her property doesn’t help.
Before Vantrease could write any book, however, she would actually have to sit down and put pen to paper. It was a resolution she’d made before: “I can do this. I can do this. I’ll start tomorrow,” she told herself, only to be hobbled by that twin Achilles’ heel of so many aspiring artists: fear and procrastination. “I just didn’t do the work,” she admits. “You’ve got to practice. You’ve just got to do it. I was 60 years old when I saw a book with my name on it. If I had started earlier with the doing instead of the dreaming I might not have been 60 years old.”
Things changed in 1991 when Vantrease retired from teaching. Having worked straight through for 25 years, she was a young 47 when she vowed to get serious about her writing. “I’m going to quit dreaming about it, and I’m going to do it,” she recalls saying. Using their vacation time, she and her husband attended writers’ conferences and workshops across the country, traveling everywhere from Maine to California. Vantrease also joined a writer’s group for the first time after seeing a posting on the Williamson County library bulletin board. She found a group of like-minded people determined to make it as writers, and they met in the atrium of Davis-Kidd Booksellers when it was still in Grace’s Plaza on Hillsboro Road. Membership in the group changed, with people moving out of town or dropping out, until a core group of four emerged. In Vantrease’s view, “A good writer’s group is like a marriage. You have to work at it and you have to be forgiving and you have to be thick-skinned. I would have never done it without them.”
Today, all that remains of Vantrease’s original group is Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Language of Light and the first in the group to find an agent. “We were all so envious,” Vantrease admits. Clayton now lives in California, but she and Vantrease continue to exchange manuscripts for critique and support. “What I miss most about Nashville is Brenda,” Clayton says. “Brenda’s a really special person and that was a really special group.”
Knowing she had a weekly deadline and an obligation to the group kept Vantrease writing. Before starting on The Illuminator, she wrote several novels and a children’s book, but none met with any success. Often one or more of the members of the group would “fantasize about being published,” she says, but for Vantrease, at least at first, simply being read by a trusted group of other writers was enough. Over time, though, she began to seek a wider audience. She had some luck with an interested agent who shopped one of her manuscripts around to at least 24 publishers, but the agent was young and “not very well connected,” and eventually quit the business. Vantrease was unfazed: “You’ve got to develop a callous. One novel I had 136 rejections on.”
Vantrease began The Illuminator in 2000, though she wasn’t committed to the new book at first. “In my writer’s group I would bring them a rewrite of a chapter in the one I was still trying to sell, and then the next week I would say, ‘Well I’ve got this new idea and I want you to take a look at this.’ ”
The Illuminator was three years in the writing—time well-spent, according to Hope Dellon, Vantrease’s editor at St. Martin’s. Dellon specializes in historical fiction; other writers in her stable include Jewell Parke Rhodes and Paula Morantz Cohen. Though she is, she says, “extremely picky,” Dellon was immediately impressed with The Illuminator. “I think it’s rare for any first novel—regardless of the age of the author—to be as accomplished as Brenda’s or to do as well. …[H]er storytelling and characterizations were among the strongest I’d seen in any historical fiction, and were particularly impressive for a first novel.” Then she adds. “Of course, when I got to know Brenda, I discovered this was far from her first draft; she’d worked hard at mastering her craft, which is part of what makes her so good.”
Persistence still counts in the world of publishing and can be what separates the would-be writer from the accomplished novelist. But Vantrease understands how much luck is involved too. Media conglomerates dominate the publishing scene. Editors prefer the safe bet, signing proven writers over unknowns and possible financial loss, and a debut novelist needs an editor willing to take a risk. As Vantrease puts it, “You’ve got to get the right pair of eyes.”
But first you have to find an agent. By the time Vantrease finally heard from the agent who ultimately signed her, it had been so long since she’d sent the letter of introduction that she had nearly forgotten his name. She was on the West Coast at a family wedding when she received his email asking to see a section of the book. “So I sent him a hundred pages, and by the time I got back [to Nashville], he was saying he wanted me to overnight it to him at his home in Maine—the whole thing. I said to my husband, ‘I’m not doing this. I’m not spending 40 dollars to send this in because I’ve been there before.’ You do that and then they say ‘Well it’s not for us’ with a form. My husband said, ‘Give it to me. I’ll pay the 40 dollars.’ ” Within a week the agent called back, saying he thought he could sell the book. “When it happens, it happens like that,” Vantrease says, snapping her fingers. “It was really pretty frightening.”
What distinguishes The Illuminator from other historical novels are its characterization and themes. Lady Kathryn is not part of the medieval swooning set; she is even, perhaps, an early-modern feminist. If she could have it her way, she would ignore both the church and the state: for her, piety is not something to be paraded about, and the protection of a man is more trouble than it’s worth. Lady Kathryn runs a large estate, cares for her children, finesses her way through the sensitive politics of her day and engages in a passionate love affair. Some critics have found such a character unbelievable in the context of the Middle Ages, but Vantrease argues that the roots of modern feminism go deep: “We didn’t just emerge in the 20th century carrying suffragette signs. Those ideas have been deeply rooted in strong women throughout history.”
Then there’s The Illuminator’s attempt to address the connection between women and the church. Vantrease was inspired to tackle 14th century political and religious upheaval when she first read the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich. Author of the Divine Revelations, Norwich was the first woman to write in English, and Vantrease was drawn to her idea of a “mother God.” Making her the central figure in a book proved challenging, though: a religious recluse provides little action plot-wise. In working out Norwich’s story though, other characters began to emerge. Some were other figures from history—like the heretic John Wycliffe (first to translate the Bible into English) and the warring Bishop Despenser—while others Vantrease imagined, including the book’s protagonist, Lady Kathryn, and her love interest, the master illuminator Finn. In the finished novel, Julian of Norwich plays a secondary role, yet her inspiration lives on in Lady Kathryn’s strength and Vantrease’s subtle nod toward 14th century feminism.
Despite her new best-seller status—and having recently completed the sequel to The Illuminator, The Mercy Seller, due out in early 2007—Vantrease is not exactly starry-eyed about the publishing world. “The hardest thing for me is to realize there’s a big difference between the dream and the getting of the dream. It’s a business, and it’s a job to manage the business part of it.” Now there are interviews to do, book clubs to meet with, emails and phone calls to return plus even teaching and speaking on writing at seminars. “It all takes time,” Vantrease says, though it’s also given her “a chance to meet some wonderful people.”
There are the other perks, too. Writers she admires now praise her writing. Veterans of historical fiction—such as Margaret George, author of The Autobiography of Henry VIII, and Frances Sherwood, author of The Book of Splendor—call the book “masterfully written,” and one that “absolutely glows.” And a large ad promoting The Illuminator appeared in The New York Times on Vantrease’s 60th birthday, prompting sales and proving that late-in-life writers can compete with the wunderkinds for space on bookshelves. “I figure I’m on the edge of the baby boomers so I’ve got a little time,” says Vantrease. “I’ve got a couple books left in me, probably.” If anything, Vantrease sees her late start as a kind of advantage over many younger writers: “An awful lot of would-be writers have nothing to say. I think you’ve got to have something you want to say. You have to live a little to do that.”