Q: How did you come to create the town of Atkinson, Vermont, and all its characters?
A: Many of the characters have been in my head for years and years. As I went along in the novel they grew in both personality and detail. Others came on board later in the novel's life.
Q: How did you keep track of all of the characters' individual stories?
A: I kept lists and charts taped to the wall over my desk, and I even used index cards which were numbered and which contained events or scenes so I would know where each person was at any given time. Then, if a scene was to be juxtaposed with another I could tell where the people were and what was happening in their lives. This of course came later in the writing of the novel.
The seeds of these stories were with me from the beginning, as were certain characters, such as the Fermoyle family and Omar Duvall, and they made up the emotional core of the novel. The more mechanical parts, where I had to keep track of all the characters, were actually more difficult to write.
Q: Which character do you consider to be the novel's moral compass?
A: So many of the characters are struggling with morality; I'm not sure there is any one character I'd consider the moral compass. Norm Fermoyle, for instance, is very socially responsible and he has a great frustration trying to save his mother and his siblings. He wants to do the right thing but that's very difficult for him. Of course, you would expect Father Gannon would be someone you could look to for moral opinion but he's having a terrible time himself. Sonny Stoner is struggling as well, and is probably more a failure in his own eyes than in the judgement of his fellow townspeople. The band leader, Jarden Greene, feels that it's his responsibility to set the moral tone for the community, to save it from the kind of decline represented by Joey Seldon's dilapidated popcorn stand on the edge of the lovely town park.
Q: What is Benjy looking for?
A: I saw many of the characters as looking for a kind of a salvation and for Benjy it would have been Omar to whom he looks. Benjy tends to refashion reality – there's his petty thievery, all the television he watches – he wants to give his mother a hero, someone who will change their world for them.
Q: You've written two previous novels. What did you learn from writing those novels that helped you with this one?
A: Obviously, brevity was not one of them. If anything, probably the ways and importance of giving characters depth no matter how minor they might be. Even if it's just a few details, that kind of attention can lend many dimensions to the main stories you want to tell.
Q: What does the novel's title mean?
A: There are many ways to interpret the title. The Songs are various stories of ordinary people in Atkinson: I wanted them to have a lyrical feeling so that each character's voice could tell their story, and as the various segments of these stories ended there would be this subtle ebb, and then another character's tale could take up the melody, and I envisioned the effect of this being a kind of chorusing, a consonance of pain and joy.
In Christian Liturgy, Ordinary Time is that period of time in which there are no major holy days. This book takes place in summer, the only complete season in Ordinary Time. Also, that year – 1960 – was still a very calm and peaceful time, which in a few short years, would change completely. It was a time of na bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan -->vet bot="HTMLMarkup" startspan -->é bot="HTMLMarkup" endspan --> that we'll never see again, and yet it was also a time when some of the more basic rules of morality were starting to be questioned. These are really the stories of ordinary lives, of people caught in the everyday struggles of everyday life.
© Copyright 2009 by Mary McGarry Morris. Reprinted with permission by Bantam Books. All rights reserved.
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