The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn
A Novel
by Janis Hallowell
List Price: $23.95
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0060559195
Publisher: William Morrow
Janis Hallowell has been a potter and a graphic designer. She was awarded an associateship by the Rocky Mountain Women's Institute to write this book. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, with her husband and daughter.
top of the page
Q: What originally inspired you to write this novel? How did Francesca's storyline evolve, from the time you first imagined it until the book appeared in print?
JH: Who knows what inspires us? I'm always thinking up story and book ideas. I write them down and usually don't look at them again. They're quick flashes of something that might be possible. Most of them fade away. Once in a while an idea repeats and repeats until I have to start looking at it.
I was trying to make room in my files the other day and I ran across a note that I wrote to myself sometime in 1996. It says, "A girl who has magical powers. Or maybe people want to think she has power. Maybe she's mentally ill?" As far as I know, that's the earliest record of an embryonic concept for the book.
The storyline evolved organically. Characters rose out of the plot and affected the story. At one point early on, I had six characters narrating the story. There was a journalist instead of the priest, Greg Gervais. But those things were sorted out in the first few drafts and after that the changes were relatively subtle.
Q: You created four disparate voices to convey the novel's events. What led you to keep Francesca's point of view in third person, while the other narrators (Chester, Anne, and Sid) use first person?
JH: Francesca's chapters are also in the present tense, whereas the other three speak in the past tense. The difference is that Chester, Anne and Sid encircle Francesca narratively. They speak from their personal perspectives about the recent events around Francesca. Francesca's voice had to be different because she's at the center of the things that happen. She's the one all these people project their notions of belief upon. I tried several points of view for her but I liked the close third person best because it sounded like it was her soul talking, as if she were disembodied and floating above herself, describing the events as they occurred.
Q: What have you observed about the role of religion and accounts of miracles in contemporary life?
JH: I think we live in times of deep mistrust and fear. Belief is tenuous and chaos is ascendant. There is an undercurrent of rot in our civilization and yearning in our collective soul and so we are desperate to believe in salvation. Whether by technology, art, religion, politics, philosophy or relationship, we want to assure ourselves of our imminent deliverance from whatever abyss we face both collectively and individually. Religion and accounts of miracles play the same role they always have, they reflect the willingness of the people to believe and to project yearnings for the divine onto any one they perceive of as manifesting that divinity -- all in the service of reassurance.
Q: In what ways did your experience as a mother inform the novel? Are you at all like Anne?
JH: When I started to write The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn in 1997 my daughter was only seven years old. I hadn't had the experience of being a parent to a teenager yet. But my experience of motherhood definitely guided me in writing Anne's part. It also informed my interpretation of Francesca's role as "divine mother" to some degree. And all the narrative characters saw Jonah, the little boy, through eyes influenced by my experience as a mother. In age, sex and socio-economic background, I suppose I am like Anne. But I resonate most with Chester.
Q: What writing projects are you working on currently?
JH: It's too early to say much, but the next novel is, in many ways, a continuation of thought from The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn. It's a story of the failure of the "revolution" of the sixties and subsequent guilt of my generation. Like Francesca Dunn it's a story of going too far and believing beyond reason until there are consequences. But this time it has to do with exile, actions thirty years in the past, and our simultaneous cravings for and abhorrence of conflict.
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
Excerpted from The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn © Copyright 2008 by Janis Hallowell. Reprinted with permission by William Morrow. All rights reserved.
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
top of the page
