Ohio Angels - Softcover

Sometimes books seem to fall out of the sky.
OHIO ANGELS, my first novel, rose out of many memories and emotions, from my childhood to my present-day life. How do stories come to other people? I'm not sure, but for me I felt the urge to write this story almost as something palpable, pushing on my heart.

The urge became irresistible one hot summer day, about seven years ago, as I sat on the bed of a motel room in Peoria, Illinois. I had flown to Illinois from Connecticut to see my grandmother, Dorothy Chessman, who was 92 years old and frail. She was also, as I soon discovered, losing her memory. She had acquired a new, vague look -- a hunted look -- and I could see her worry as she searched my face for clues. She tried to bluff, but I knew she had no idea who I was. Luckily, my father, her stepson, had also come to see her, from Ohio, with my mother. She recognized him, most of the time, although I'm not sure she recognized my mother, and, in any case, she seemed to have cut free from the sequence of history as most of us understand it. Often, I think she thought my father was sixteen again, and a student in her high school English class, before she had any knowledge that, by the time he was seventeen, she would be his stepmother, a transformation that would change her life.

In that motel room on the outskirts of Peoria, with my parents in a room down the hall, I felt that certain veils had abruptly vanished. To come back to this midwestern landscape of flatness and humidity -- not Ohio, but a lot like Ohio -- and to see my grandmother, at sea in the midst of all this greenness, bereft of memory and, in this sense, bereft of her life: this situation held a message for me. The message was simply, "Write." I could hear this almost as a voice rising out of the bareness of that motel room. "Write about this." What? I thought. "All of this: love, life, memory, loss."

So I began. I took notes on all that came to me. And this was the astonishing part. As I began to write a few ideas down, in my red pen, on a piece of paper, a whole world showed me, right then, how it had always been there, waiting for me to arrive. This world held two women, friends from childhood, one returning to her childhood home, a small college town in Ohio. I knew the landscape well: the back yards, the porches, the churches, the diners, the cemeteries, the shade of the trees, the hush at evening. All of this came from someplace inside me; it sprang from memory, but had its own life, a fictional life.

I think the glory of writing is the calling up of a world, a whole world, similar to the world one has known, but on its own too, independent. This part comes fairly readily to me. What has been harder has been the creation of a framework, a story-line, to which my images, my descriptions, can attach themselves. Although I had taught fiction for many years, at Yale and elsewhere, I had never written fiction, except in my stories for young children (one of which has appeared in LADYBUG), and this struggle to discover how to make a story dogged me almost all the way through the writing of this book. I guess this was the angel I had to wrestle, and I confess I often felt injured. But I like to think that, as dawn glimmered, and my publishing date loomed, the angel granted me something: an understanding of how a story could be shaped. Such a gift came late for this first work of fiction for grown-ups, but I hold on to it tightly now as I wrestle with new angels, in the writing of new books. There is always the wrestling, just as there are always the moments of such gifts, which, put together, make the larger gift of some voice saying: "Write. Keep writing. You are a writer."

HARRIET SCOTT CHESSMAN is the author of the acclaimed novels Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper and Ohio Angels, as well as The Public Is Invited to Dance, a book about Gertrude Stein. Formerly associate professor of English at Yale University, she has also taught literature and writing at Bread Loaf School of English and at Wesleyan University, and has published several essays on modern literature. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.