I had a fun experience just before Christmas. The Princeton Packet newspaper asked to interview me about the publication of Singer Lane. Being a journalist, I was kind of nervous about being on the other side of the notebook, but the writer they sent to interview me, Adam Grybowski, put me right at ease. He not only is a great interviewer, he has a delightful personality, and a great laugh!
Artist and journalist Janet Purcell’s novel is, at last, something she can’t hide behind
Ms. Purcell has recently published her first novel,
Singer Lane (AuthorHouse, $11.60). It tells the story of Matthew Callahan, an artist and recovering alcoholic who takes a job assisting a retired scholar. A parallel plot emerges when Callahan discovers an abandoned cabin that contains a 150-year-old secret revolving around a murder.
The idea for the novel began three years ago when Ms. Purcell was recovering from intestinal surgery. During a 17-day hospital stay, Ms. Purcell, who dislikes television, began telling herself a story. The words “once upon a time” have always had a magical quality for her, as a girl and as an adult. “I heard those words and everything else would go away,” she says.
After leaving the hospital, Ms. Purcell wrote the novel, which is set in Cape Cod, in one year, more or less. “I was amazed,” she says. “I sat at the typewriter and out it came. It told itself to me. Sometimes I was surprised.” Her partner, whom she has been with for 10 years, lives in Cape Cod, where she visits about once a month. Walks on the beach and drives to Wellfleet provided mental space to compose her ideas.
The book’s cover, which Ms. Purcell painted, depicts a man walking next to a sand dune along a shoreline. She has been a painter most of her life, having exhibited her work — mostly oil on canvas — in solo and juried shows throughout the region. Her experience as an artist provided a focus when she became a journalist. “I got put in that niche because I was a painter and I knew the community,” she says.
”When I’m at the easel, I can feel the computer behind me, and I feel I should be writing,” she says, adding that the reverse is also true. “I’d like to do both at once.”
While Ms. Purcell was caring for her husband, painting was “an escape, a love,” she says. “I was content doing that.” Writing fiction, more than painting, has exposed her personality. “I can hide in my paintings,” she says. “In journalism, I could hide behind the news story or the profile of the person, but you can’t do that in fiction. There’s so much of me in the characters. Incidents of my life show up. My way of thinking shows up — it must be my way of thinking for some character to think that way.”
A few years before ideas for
Singer Lane began percolating, Ms. Purcell took creative writing classes at Drew University and the University of Southern Maine that her daughter taught. For an exercise, Ms. Piggott asked her students to choose a picture she had clipped from a magazine and write about it. Ms. Purcell grabbed a picture of an old man walking with a crooked stick on the water’s edge.
”I never thought of it again for a couple of years,” Ms. Purcell says. “When I started writing, there he was.” This man became the basis for Jonas Singer, a retired Princeton physics professor. “He showed up,” she says. “I hadn’t thought of him in years.”
She has begun work on a sequel. “I miss the characters. I feel they are living somewhere.” While writing and proofing the novel, Ms. Purcell became so acquainted with them she began to know their scenes and dialogue by heart. “When I read the book for the 10th time, it was still interesting,” she says. “It was like reading someone else’s story.”
Singer Lane
by Janet Purcell is available at all major booksellers online and locally at Princeton’s Labyrinth Books, Pennington Quality Market and the gift shop at Ellarslie, the Trenton City Museum; www.janpurcellart.com The response I got from that article is amazing and I love hearing from people who have purchased the book, gave it as gifts for Christmas and birthdays, and have read it themselves. Almost everyone who read it has commented on the surprise ending.
And it is that surprise ending that opened the door for the sequel I'm now deeply involved in. It's great to be spending time with some of the main characters from Singer Lane and to be getting to know (and really resonate with) some new folks.
My work for the Trenton Times has slowed for now because of the downturn in the economy and the need for the paper to cut back and revamp. Although I'm still writing a few stories a month for them and stories for the magazines I work with, the cutback is giving me more time to work on this new book. And to paint.
So, life is good.