Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Joseph Fasano writes about The Swallows of Lunetto from Maudlin House.
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For every page of a writer’s work that makes its way into the light, there must be hundreds that remain hidden, mythic, gnarled roots in the darkness.
When I’d finished my first novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, I picked up one of my many fragmented manuscripts and began working on it in earnest. I told myself it was a novel. I shifted it, turned it, stoked its embers. Still, it would not ignite. At some point I had a manuscript of over 200,000 words, and though I felt there was certainly something at the heart of it, I knew it wasn’t the raging flame it had hoped to be. Mark Strand used to tell me, in his inimitably placid voice, that the best thing we can do for our writing is get out of its way. Why, then, had I tried to bank that flame into something it had not wished to be?
So I set out to make something else. And I did. There were months of research, plotting, scribbling, pulling the car to the side of the road on the way to the grocery to jot down a sentence, a line, an idea. And yet, once again, something was missing. I had a completed manuscript of what might otherwise have been a third novel, but I knew, in the end, I had nothing.
And yet we never have nothing. We always have what we have tried to do. Always. Somewhere in us, our lives and our works ripen in secret.
My life was moving on. I began a new relationship, moved, cut down on drinking (and then, later, stopped altogether). I gave myself the time and space to change. And all the while, those roots I’d put down into the darkness were doing their work.
And then they blossomed. It’s difficult to explain just how this happened—it’s mysterious even, or perhaps especially, to me—but somehow, after years of laboring on two abandoned manuscripts (still I’m not sure if I abandoned them or they abandoned me), the path was clear before me. I knew what I had to do.
What had been missing in those previous manuscripts, I now see, was the voice, the inevitable music and thrust of the narrative. Suddenly—and as often happens in life, inexplicably—that voice announced itself to me, and I began writing. The difference, of course, was that now I was listening; I was letting the story have its way with me.
And what kind of story was it? On its surface, it had absolutely nothing to do with the plots of those two abandoned manuscripts, but I sensed, and later knew for certain, that what I was doing was alchemizing the abandoned material into the form, the story, the voice it had meant to be all along.
But that, of course, was the beginning. I was writing about a young artist searching for her truth, a young man searching for forgiveness, a society trying to heal. Suddenly I was in Calabria at the end of the Second World War, and I knew I was there because I was going back to my own family’s roots, going into shadows I had avoided looking into for nearly forty years. Now I would have to look deeply, steadily, and with the wild precision that all writing demands.
This, of course, meant research. Though sometimes in this life of mine I have failed to live voraciously, I have always read voraciously—it is a drug for me, a necessity, a love—and very often I am reading of history. The history of war, in particular, fascinates me, telling as it does the terrible story of what we can do to one another, and thereby teaching us, if we can listen, the ways to avoid catastrophe when next it holds out its hand.
The Swallows of Lunetto is not a story of war, exactly. It is a story, in part, of war’s aftermath, of what happens when a young man looks up from his youth and realizes, with horror, what he has done. And it is a story of the love and forgiveness that just might be possible not only in spite of but because of the ways in which we have erred.
But writing a novel is like—how should I say this?—installing one continuous carpet in a deep, shadowy castle with endless corners: you move something in one place, and you have to account for how it moves everything else, in every other place. Did your character say she likes vanilla gelato on page seventeen? Orange gelato on page twenty-four? Just as importantly—but no more or less—if your novel draws profoundly on history, does it have the details right? The spirit? The words?
This research, for me, was and is deeply enjoyable. I wanted to know more, then more, then more. How did Mussolini’s fascists attempt to “educate” the youth in the years prior to the Second World War? With what kind of wood might a young Calabrese artist make her own charcoal with which to draw her images? What would she see in the waves outside her window? At exactly what depth do fishing crews net their catch in a particular season, off a particular port, in the Tyrrhenian Sea?
I drew, of course, on personal experience, on my time in Italy, on family legends, on reading, on breathing, on life. And all the while, as those gnarled roots were stirring in the darkness, I felt the terror and the splendor of the inevitable blossoming.
I hope I have created, with this book, a world of the past into which you can escape, and I hope in that escape you are drawn even closer to the world as it now needs us, as it now beckons, as it now is. Which is to say I hope that fiction—its questions, its joys, its necessities—is no escape at all.
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Joseph Fasano is an American poet, novelist, and songwriter. His novels include The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the “20 Best Small Press Books of 2020.” His books of poetry include The Crossing (2018), Vincent (2015), Inheritance (2014), and Fugue for Other Hands (2013). His debut album of original songs, The Wind that Knows the Way, is available wherever music is streamed or sold. Fasano’s honors include the Rattle Poetry Prize, the Cider Press Review Book Award, eight Pushcart Prize nominations, and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year.” His work has been widely translated and anthologized, most recently in The Forward Book of Poetry 2022 (Faber and Faber, 2022). He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College.