ART IMITATING LIFE II…
As I noted in the previous post, I wanted to ground the novel’s setting and characters in an everyday world, but ensure that one family mirrors for a number of young readers a way of experiencing reality that is actually – if too often, still secretly – their own. For the rest, my hope has been to open a window to a different perspective on practices like communication with the deceased, or the “D”s, as Mona’s family calls them. Not to convert readers to that particular way of seeing or believing (and, as importantly, not to deplore or dismiss those who believe), but to promote understanding of another’s reality.
I crafted the opening line – Mona says if you want to talk to the dead, don’t expect long sentences – to elicit laughter, but by story’s end when it reappears, if I’ve succeeded the sentence produces a very different response because the reader comes to it with more insight and sensitivity. That is, ideally the reader not only has more facts about the phenomenon, but awareness of another’s perspective: I am not alone. I am supported by spirit. I am still loved by those who have passed. Such exposure invites comparisons to other beliefs about life and death.
When a bright teen reader asked me on the day we met – and she’d finished reading the manuscript — if I believe in such communication, it was cause for celebration. Clearly, she had not come away from the story with a sense that I’d been selling anything. I had presented a realistic account of such experience… and she was freed to wonder and question and add to her body of knowledge about the nature of reality.
Of course, I had to be sure to present this version of “reality” in a way that conforms to real-world experience of professional intuitives. I couldn’t have the dead confined to a graveyard, for example, since virtually all mediums will tell you that, in their view, it’s one of the last places that the “D”s hang out. They are free to show up there, they’ll concede, but if and when they chill anywhere on the earth plane, it’s in proximity to loved ones, wherever they may be. Hence, my search for consensus about their practices and perspectives via a boatload of titles by and about them. Helpful, too, were books about ongoing research (over a thousand controlled studies of the paranormal to date).
The After-Life Experiments by Gary Schwartz, for example, reports on his extended controlled studies of a group of highly talented mediums. Their rates of accuracy were so stunning that Schwartz, a respected scientist, initially resisted accepting the evidence. His “dream team” may be in a class by itself, but many other gifted mediums have built impressive track records in their practices, too. I decided to base the behavior and traits of my character Mrs. Arguedes, on one of them — Suzanne Krupp.
Professional Intuitive, Suzanne Krupp
Fiction writers are always taking the stuff of their own lives to create characters with an amalgam of other real people’s personal traits. In this respect, the character Mrs. Arguedas is not a clone of Suzanne. I portray her as a mother of two, the wife of a physics professor at the university, a kick-ass gardener, and a vegetarian. Suzanne Krupp fits none of these descriptors. Both she and Mrs. A., however, are generous, loving, wise women.
And, more importantly, I have both women share a professional history: Suzanne was a successful corporate headhunter and owner of her own company prior to changing careers, so, in the story, Mrs. A.’s been one, too. Suzanne reports that“early arrivals” have been known to show up during the night before a scheduled reading – over the exercise bike in a corner of the bedroom, to be specific — so this occurrence in Mrs. A.’s life becomes a source of humor in the book. Intuitive Suzanne inspired the character of intuitive Mrs. Arguedas because she herself is such a wonderful character. Moreover, in the interest of accuracy, her real professional experiences validate Mrs. A.’s fictional ones… and vice versa, since Mrs. Arguedas provides, for readers, an engaging model of a real-life medium’s bead on reality. In other words, biographical facts support what some would otherwise call improbable or even fantastical storytelling.
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