When I read The Lilac Hour, I wanted to slow down, pull up an Adirondack chair on a front porch overlooking some sleepy New England harbor and drink in every word slowly, deliberately. I find the writing of these stories to be lyrical and alluring. I think you will, too. I asked author Ute Carbone to share with us the story behind the stories of The Lilac Hour and take us all to that front porch in that early evening sunset to introduce us to three ordinary, yet amazing women.
(Photograph provided by author. Please enjoy but do not copy.)
It
all began with a sunset. I was in the tiny town of New Harbor, on the Pemaquid
peninsula, one of the many rocky fingers that reach into the Atlantic in
mid-coast Maine, running a writing retreat.
To
say Pemaquid is pretty is a lot like saying the Duomo is a nice building. The
small town of New
(Photograph provided by author. Please enjoy but do not copy.)
The
sun set on the quiet cove right in front of the rickety antique house we’d
rented (a story for another day). The
sky put on quite a show, pastels smeared into the horizon—soft blues, lilacs,
salmon, rose, apricot—softening everything around it in ethereal light. My
friend and fellow writer, Kathy Pyle, mentioned she’d always thought of the
wondrous time between daylight and dark as ‘the lilac hour’.
A
few months later I got the idea for a story about an elderly woman and her
undying love for the husband she’d lost when they were both young. I knew New Harbor
I
wrote the story, a short piece with a slight magical realism flavor, and looked
for a place to publish it. Turquoise Morning Press was open to short story
submissions and they had a line call ‘After Happily Ever’, which seemed the
perfect home for the story. I sent it to them and Lola DelSol, the editor of
the After Happily Ever line, wrote me to
say she loved the story and wanted to publish it. Only one problem, it was too
short to publish as a stand-alone. She suggested several options, one of which
was to write another story to compliment it.
In
the original story, Sarah, the main character, mentions her daughter and her
granddaughter. They must, I thought, each have a story of their own. I pitched
the idea to Lola who told me to go for it.
An
interesting thing happened when I sat down to write about Sarah’s daughter
Maggie and her granddaughter JoAnne. It was as though they had been there all
along, waiting for me to ask them for their own stories of true love. Maggie,
in her fifties, had a wish to reconnect with her husband, Jake. JoAnne needed to
examine her past in order to understand how much she loved her present—and her
husband, David. The stories came quickly and, miracle of miracles, they all fit
together, one complimenting the next. And it all started with a sunset.
The Lilac
Hour
Three
Stories.
Three generations of women.
Three
loves meant to last forever.
The
Lilac Hour: Sara has been widowed longer than she was married. Now in
her eighties, she
discovers
that anything is possible in the lilac hour.
Love
Letters: Maggie rediscovers the letters that her husband Jake
wrote long ago. Can she rekindle the passion that was once theirs?
The
Road Not Taken: JoAnne meets an old love at Target. Has she made
the right choice in choosing her husband David?
About the author:
Ute
(who pronounces her name Oooh-tah) Carbone is an award winning author of
women’s fiction, comedy, and romance. She and her husband live in New Hampshire
Books
and Stories by Ute Carbone:
For more
about Ute and her books, Please Visit:
Web page: http://www.utecarbone.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Wildwords2
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/utecarbone/
Love Stories (available daily via
Paper Li): http://paper.li/Wildwords2/1355247882?utm_source=subscription&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=paper_sub#
1 comment:
Thanks so much for having me as a guest today, Linda. Writing this post brought me back to New Harbor, which is a lovely place to be!
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