THE HOUNDS OF SPRING a novel by Lucy Andrews Cummin

UPCOMING READINGS:

No scheduled readings at the moment. 

DONATIONS

So far (March 2019) I have donated $120 to the Humane Society of Chittenden County.  This represents 2018.  Thank you everyone who gave a little extra!  

The Hounds of Spring is available!   Published by Leapfolio,  a joint venture partner of Tupelo Press, North Adams, Massachusetts.  E-edition pending.

Purchasing my book from Tupelo Press (TupeloPress.org) will directly  benefit both the author and the press, so please consider taking this route!  Visit Tupelo/Leapfolio and see what else is on offer!    It is available on Amazon and should soon be available for bookstores to purchase to sell on the major book distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor.  Please contact me here or at Tupelopress if you are having problems. 

If you live in New England or the mid-Atlantic region and would like to host a book party or a salon with your book club or would like to recommend your library to me as a reading venue, please contact me at Lucyavery@aol.com.  

ABOUT THE STORY

On a crisp April day in Philadelphia, Poppy Starkweather, in her mid-twenties begins the rounds of her clients--Penelope, Fauna, Horatio, Bliss, and Chutney, accompanied by her own hound, Spock--assuming that this will be another ordinary day.  Since abandoning a Ph.D. program in literature, Poppy has stumbled into walking dogs as a stopgap while she figures out what to do with her life.

Although happy in a steady relationship, Poppy is leery of further commitment while in career limbo, fearing she might commit the age-old error of hiding from herself inside marriage. Shouldn't she get it all figured out first?

By noon her day will be careening off course, diverted by an unexpected visit from her brother, a scary medical appointment with her boyfriend, and an urgent request from a client.  By the small hours of the night Poppy will be questioning her assumptions about what it means to be truly adult.

ABOUT WRITING THE NOVEL:

A while ago I conceived the idea of writing a novel using the blog format, in the hope that a weekly posting schedule might provide structure and incentive.  Once a week I would post something; a single sentence would fulfill the requirement to keep the story moving forward.  While I would allow myself to go back to correct egregious errors, there would be no obsessive rewriting.  If, for example, I decided to change the name of a character, I would note the change at the start of a new entry and move forward from there. Time enough for rewriting after the story was finished.

The story, I thought, would benefit from having boundaries if I could identify and start out with some key ingredients.  The project couldn’t be so ambitious that I would lose heart, but the ideas would have to grab me strongly enough to sustain my interest.  I turned to E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, a book that is not so much about writing but about the ingredients that go into making a novel.  Forster wrote of seven elements or aspects that he observed are usually present in some form or another in almost (but not) every novel:  story, characters, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm.

Before beginning to write I pondered which of these elements I would work with from the start and which could be left for later consideration.  Story, characters and plot were the most obvious.  Pattern and rhythm, struck me as aspects that would emerge as the story progressed and could not be planned for ahead of time, but could be amplified and made use of when rewriting.  The most difficult aspects, fantasy and prophecy, required more thought as I wasn’t sure what Forster meant by either one.  Eventually I decided that by fantasy Forster was talking about not  binding yourself up in knots over perfect realism, about taking imaginative leaps into the unknown.  Prophecy was not as difficult; Forster was writing about extant novels, not potential ones, and prophecy is present only in a few works of prescient genius.  That was not going to be a factor for me!

Two concerns that Forster addresses in a limited way are the physical settings and time,  both very earthly realities, so integral to story that   their importance can be overlooked. Stories unfold somewhere, even if it is a space station, and setting, (Thomas Hardy comes to mind) can become a character of itself.  I would set the story in a city I know and love, Philadelphia.  Stories also unfold in time. A writer can delve backwards into someone’s past, but there is always a present which the past serves to enrich and inform.   For my purpose, a compressed time frame would force me to keep things moving.  The story would therefore take place within a twenty-four hour period.

One way to use fantasy is to identify a road not taken in your own life.  To ask “what if”?  The “what if” in this case was to start with the premise that my main character’s mother would make a different choice from the one which my own mother made. The idea of exploring that alternate past was deeply compelling and I intuited it would be enough to see me through.  Henry James’s amazing story “The Jolly Corner” in which the character realizes he is being followed about by the ghost of who he would have been had he made different choices was also an inspiration. 

The main character, Poppy, would begin as a me/not me (even her name, Hepzibah, has resonances from my childhood).  As for everyone else–family and friends–their names, characteristics, and genders would be jumbled up in various ways and combinations and I was confident they would quickly take on lives of their own which they did. 

As I have a tendency to complexify, I chose the friendliest plot of all, the romantic “Will they or won’t they?”  Life itself is kind of a romance, almost every day has several “Will I  or won’t I?” moments, not about human to human romance, to be sure, but about engaging fully with whatever the day offers.

I did finish, that is, I got to the end of the story arc.  First I let the story sit and simmer, then I asked many friends to help by reading and commenting.  Finally, I began to rewrite and this is where the process took me.  Enjoy.

The title is taken from a poem by Charles Swinburne:

The Hounds of Spring

When the  hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.
Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers.

Maiden most perfect, lady of light,
With a noise of winds and many rivers,
With a clamour of waters, and with might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendour and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.