We asked the authors of the three novellas coming in February about their stories, each of which had some inspiration from the art world. Madame Sorel’s Lodger by Tracy Wise is a Van-Gogh inspired story about an artist and the effect his perspective has on a small French village and its inhabitants. Peter J. Dellolio, author of The Vigil, is a writer but also a visual artist and lover of painting and film. And the novella, Night Hawks, borrowed from a famous painting for its initial spark, according to author Michael Loyd Gray.

“The Intersection of Art and Writing” by Tracy Wise

I grew up with two parents who were artists. My father specialized in pen and ink and photography; my mother was a painter and had an eye for how objects, colors, and textures could come together to create something special in a space. Added to that, I had the opportunity to live in a number of countries around the world and travel because of my father’s aid work. This exposed me to a wide variety of art not only in galleries but as part of everyday life. My parents further grew that access by purchasing original work by local artists and artisans, including paintings and furniture, along with statues, carvings, and brass- and copperware.

It was an incredibly rich visual and tactual environment.  This training in sensitivity and awareness led me to continue to seek out diverse, global art from childhood onwards.

Another artistic influence were the illustrations in the children’s books my parents purchased. My mother would look for books with an interesting use of words and/or poetry; my father would look for original artwork that caught his eye. As I grew older and began reading on my own, I had access to the British edition of the C.S. Lewis Narnia series.  Pauline Baynes’ illustrations awoke in me a love of medieval art, which I think was a strong influence on her pen and ink portraits. When I finally was able to visit museums specializing in this period, especially in Cologne, Germany, I felt immediately at home. For that, I thank Ms. Baynes.

Also, from my earliest memories (and from stories my mother shared with me from before I can remember), music has served as a basic thread in my life. To me, all language is music. That includes sound, rhythm, structure, and cadence.  An acting teacher once chided me during a scene, “Tracy, stop singing!” I was not literally singing, but I was obviously searching for the music in the lines I was delivering. Unfortunately, in that instance, it definitely did not work!

Visual art and music are the structural supports for my writing. In Madame Sorel’s Lodger in particular, they are key. For example, the central character who I simply name “the Artist” is trying to pull all of life down onto a painted canvas, so that the canvas comes fully alive. I am striving to create a vivid experience for my reader using letters on a flat, white page or screen, so that this world and its characters come fully alive. My hope is that I have been at least partially successful towards that goal with this novel.

Much of my writing, in fiction and poetry, has been deeply influenced by the imagery of painting and cinema. I have always been very much attracted to the ways in which language can create visualizations of things, people, and events. In my surreal poetry, I use words to create effects found in painters such as Dali, de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, and Magritte. In my fiction, especially my novella, The Vigil, I have created “cinematic” images in the vein of directors such as Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. My prose is very visually oriented. For me, narrative fiction often adopts the role of a motion picture camera that enables me to give my writing a vivid, baroque, image-oriented texture. —Peter J. Dellolio

 

On Night Hawks:

Hemingway allegedly told Gertrude Stein, “I’m trying to do the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit.” Now, I can’t claim that my ability to write was influenced by a particular artist. But the idea for my new novella Night Hawks was indeed inspired by Edward Hopper’s famous 1942 painting Nighthawks, which resides at The Art Institute of Chicago, where I first saw it years ago. Nighthawks always resonated for me: I’ve felt the late- night solitariness depicted in the painting.

I’ve been a night hawk.

I ran across the Hopper painting again on Facebook in late 2023 or perhaps early 2024. It still resonated for me. My love of the painting had not diminished over time. But my ability to create authentic settings for telling stories had flourished. I looked again deep into Nighthawks and was able to imagine my own version of it, a small-town diner where four people’s intertwined lives kept crossing paths. I wrote a first chapter, thinking it might only be a short story, and titled it “The Last Train to Chicago.” Two of the four main characters were set in motion, and soon I thought of the other two characters and the novella was off and running–thanks to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and my vivid imagination.

“The Last Train to Chicago” went on to win third place in a 2024 anthology of stories about work published by The Vincent Brothers Review. Baltimore writer Rafael Alvarez was the judge. Here are his comments on the story:

“Some 90 years after Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) published “The Thin Man,” the noir tale remains a vibrant piece of the American landscape. No setting outside of a gumshoe’s office is better suited for such stories than the vanishing roadside diner—not the fancy pants wanna be places with slick posters of Elvis and Marilyn on the wall, where the bill comes to $58 for two plates of eggs with turkey sausage and a side of fresh fruit but the 24-hour greasy spoons like the one I patronized a week ago in Boston, the South Street Diner. Because the genre is known so well from books and movies, it is very easy to write a cliche-ridden caricature instead of one that approaches literature. The author of “The Last Train to Chicago” handled the challenge well—booze, a desperate waitress, her cynical boss at the grill and even the blue plate special at closing time—in telling the tale.

“The Windy City,” says the waitress before running off with the joint’s resident alcoholic. “I’ve never seen it.”

“Now you will,” answered her boss. “You’ll see it all.”

And I bet she did. A deftly handled line in a nicely done story.”

I’m thankful Alvarez liked the story, and that Type Eighteen Books is publishing Night Hawks. Maybe I should look at some other Hopper paintings. There might be a new book in one of them for me.—Michael Loyd Gray