“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
(George RR. Martin, A Dance With Dragons)
If George R.R. Martin’s quote is true, then every reader has been blessed with living thousands of lives--from the prairies of America to the ghettos of Poland to the shores of Newfoundland to the Tudor courts of England and then some!
For so many years, I was a participant in those adventures, an observer, a witness who stood on the sidelines, cheering and laughing or shouting and crying with the characters, watching events unfold on each page, with each chapter, in every book. Only when I gave myself permission to dream wildly did I ever think that I would one day be holding the pen to create them.
So, how did this all begin?
Honestly, I didn’t necessarily INTEND for this to happen.
During the summer of 2019 while on a tour of Scotland, I and my fellow travelers stopped at Urquhart Castle, the ruins of which rest on the banks of Loch Ness. Visiting the dungeon there, I read a placard that mentioned the name of its most famous prisoner, Domhnull Donn, a cattle thief who had been executed not so much because he was a reiver but because he had the audacity to fall in love with the laird’s daughter, Mary Grant. When I asked the tour guide for further information about this doomed pair, he really didn’t know a whole lot beyond what was stated there on the display.
For some reason, I just couldn’t shake the memory of the castle, the dungeon, and the two lovers themselves, so when I got home to New York, I started digging around to find whatever I could about Donal and Mary. During that time I researched the time period and all about reivers (show books), I also found a wonderful book by William Mackay called, Urquhart and Glenmoriston, Olden Times in a Highland Parish (1893) which included intriguing comments about Domhnull, calling him "the Rob Roy of his generation" who "had more poetry in his soul than the famous Macgregor had." In addition, Mackay also recounted Domhnull's capture, his final days, and even his last words before succumbing to the ax. I started to think, What kind of love could be so strong that it would be worth dying for?
I knew I had the outline of a tremendous story from history. Now, I needed to flesh it out.
How did the two meet? Why was there such resistance to their union? What other people were involved? What was happening historically at that time? What role did superstition, enchantment, mystery play in the meeting of these two souls? And, most importantly, whatever happened to Mary?
While I let my imagination run wild--creating characters, dialogue, tension, and conflict--I still had some strong authentic material to lean on. Best of all, I even had a number of Domhnull’s original poems (appearing in both Scottish Gaelic and in translation) that provided me with a glimpse into his sensitive and passionate soul.
My notebooks began to fill with factual information, but I soon started to feel the pull of something deeper, something profound, something more intuitive. Thematically, I found myself captivated by the idea of silence, specifically, the mysteries that lay undisturbed in the silence until one lifts the veil to delve into and partake of that stillness.
Silence is something we have so little of today. Think of all of the buzzing notifications we get on a minute-to-minute basis--FB updates, incoming text messages, new Instagram posts, etc. We simply can’t escape the noise and the distractions. But the truth is, we need silence. It’s a requisite for self-discovery. Only in the silence do we get to know ourselves, and when we can do that, we can then identify the part inside of us that’s made of the same stuff inside every other person--even those who lived in the Scottish Highlands back in the 1600s.
Thus, the Dedication at the opening of the novel:
“To the voices of yesterday that can be heard in the silences of today…”
Forbidden to be together in their own time, the laird’s daughter and the rebel poet cried out from beyond the grave, beckoning someone to listen. I simply heeded their call.
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