How I Came to Write the Novel: Lemon Blossoms
by Nina Romano
I found the Authors’ Lounge on Twitter and immediately knew I wanted to submit an article about the “story behind the story” of writing my novel, Lemon Blossoms. This novel, set in Sicily, is the story of Angelica’s struggle in pursuit of feminine identity and heritage while coping with the intricacies of loss, love, and yearning.
While in Grad School at Florida International University earning an MFA in Creative Writing, my advisor and mentor John Dufresne taught a novel course. The object was to write and complete a novel in a semester. I fictionalized many family stories and finished a first draft.
I’m a history buff so I set the book back in time. Curiosity about the many types of love and the fact I was a poet inclined my writing toward the lyrical. Love is the basis of all romance novels and in Lemon Blossoms, I wanted to write about romantic love, but also wanted to investigate familial and platonic love to broaden and expand the work. I intended the narrative to express tenderness between human beings in a family—the kind that I grew up in.
I am second generation American of Italian descent. My grandparents on both sides were Sicilian. As a young girl, I listened to our family’s stories about our past. There was nothing better than sitting around my maternal Grandma’s table listening to her, my mother, and aunts telling stories. The lives of my grandparents and the world they lived in fascinated me. Inquisitive, I wanted to understand how we arrived at our current lives. If I couldn’t visualize it for myself, I could research and create it with real elements: family vignettes, outdated articles, photographs, and even old-fashioned kitchen utensils. I loved stories and wanted to tell them because in Sicily, we come from a line of cantastorie, bards, who travelled from town to town singing and communicating through storytelling.
Later on, but still many years before ever dreaming of writing an historical romance, my Dad visited me while I lived in Rome. I interviewed him about his youth in Sicily, which also became part of the novel.
Interested in antiques and old ways to do things. I treasured vintage rocking chairs, spinning wheels, hand coffee grinders, old copper kettles, mandolins, books, diaries and ephemera with tattered covers and bent-eared corners. There was never a doubt that my novel would be historical.
Basically, for this writing, I stole my womenfolk’s narratives and legends, snippets of how things were done in the “olden” days, recipes and cooking lessons. I eavesdropped on secrets as they’d switch to Sicilian or Italian so I couldn’t understand. Somehow, I managed to get the gist of what they were conveying by hand gestures and actions. I learned Italian words and meanings—I wasn’t fluent in Italian—that would come years later when I lived in Rome. I imbibed in a drink called customs, religion, mores, superstitions, ethnicities, social behavior, and scruples, which reinforced my ideas for future writing.
As a girl, there was nothing better than spending a Saturday morning rooting around in Grandma’s attic. The bathroom had a tub on lion claws feet and in the closet, I found a long hank of beautiful chestnut hair, a mercury thermometer, a ring with a red stone, an old meat grinder, and many sepia-toned photographs that spoke parables because “Every picture tells a story.”
I also played sleuth and investigated the huge basement that housed Grandpa’s workroom, or the immense closet/deposit/ storeroom on the first landing of the main staircase of the century old Brooklyn home.
When I looked at the photos and those old items, I asked myself: What are they saying? Look closely. Listen. Rob and steal with your eyes, pickpocket rumors, gossip, speculations. Make a heist of little things noted in the pictures: observe, imagine, dream and conjure magically. The items of yesteryear would then transform themselves so I could partake and envision them as reality. It pays to be curious. Many of these childhood experiences enriched my desire to write the novel.
I told stories to classmates and friends ever since I was young because my mother, grandmother, and aunts told me about how they spent their youth. When they finished speaking, I’d never let them off the hook always wanting just a bit more. I was a little inquiring reporter, seeking another spark to ignite my thinking, constantly asking, “And then what happened?”
And so it was that my childhood questions and inquisitiveness came into play when I started to draft Lemon Blossoms. My Aunt Jay told me her grandmother, my great-grandmother, was a mattress-maker and that my grandfather made wine. I also learned that my grandmother had had a miscarriage, lost another baby at birth and another a few months old in-between birthing her and my mother. These anecdotes fed my storyline.
They tell beginning writers to write about “what you know”—that’s exactly what I did.
Catholicism is an important theme in the book. I knew a great deal about the religion because I went to private Catholic schools with cloistered nuns. With this background I was confident and prepared to touch upon a religious theme and be able to construct a tale that would render a finished manuscript.
There’s a line from a 1986 Clint Eastwood Movie, Heartbreak Ridge, when Eastwood says: “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome.” I had not yet seen that movie when I was young, that would come years later, but I was already thinking along similar terms: Invent, Change, Astound
when telling a story.
After I earned my MFA and many revisions later, this transmuted manuscript would surprisingly become the second book of the Wayfarer Trilogy. But to write that first version—I had at my fingertips: family unity, religion, love, characters I knew, and the perfect setting: Sicily, mysterious island perfumed of le zagare—lemon blossoms—as exotic as the Arabic word laced into Sicilian.
Author’s bio:
Nina Romano earned a B.S. from Ithaca College, an M.A. from Adelphi University and a B.A. and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from FIU. A world traveler and lover of history, she lived in Rome, Italy, for twenty years, and is fluent in Italian and Spanish. She has taught English and Literature as an Adjunct Professor at St. Thomas University, Miami, and has facilitated numerous Creative Writing and Poetry Workshops at Writing Conferences throughout the States.
Romano has authored a short story collection, The Other Side of the Gates, and has had five poetry collections and two poetry chapbooks published traditionally with independent publishers.
She co-authored a nonfiction book: Writing in a Changing World, and she has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry.
Nina Romano’s historical Wayfarer Trilogy has been published from Turner Publishing. The Secret Language of Women, Book #1, was a Foreword Reviews Book Award Finalist and Gold Medal winner of the Independent Publisher’s 2016 IPPY Book Award. Lemon Blossoms, Book # 2, was a Foreword Reviews Book Award Finalist, and In America, Book #3, was a finalist in Chanticleer Media’s Chatelaine Book Awards.
Her Western Historical Romance, The Girl Who Loved Cayo Bradley, was a semifinalist in the Laramie Book Awards, has been published by Speaking Volumes, LLC. Her historical Russian thriller, Dark Eyes, is also forthcoming in 2023 from the same publisher.
Author Links
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ninsthewriter @ninsthewriter
Goodreads:
Amazon link:
Lemon Blossoms https://amzn.to/2TWqzYt
