Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Lauren Stanfill writes about Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, published by Lanternfish Press.

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Fifteen years ago, while in the early stages of drafting a novel, I came upon a peculiar term I hadn’t heard before.

bird organ: A small hand-cranked organ with a small number of pewter or wooden pipes. It was developed in the 18th century to teach canaries to sing. The music is pinned on a wooden barrel. — Musical Box Society International

This odd little glossary entry then pointed me to a synonym: serinette. Alas, when I clicked on S for more information, serinette led straight back to bird organ.

A bird organ. For teaching canaries. How? I wondered. And why?

Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, my debut novel coming out this April from Lanternfish Press, spun itself out of those initial wonderings.

My parents are avid mechanical music fans, so I grew up attending conventions, sitting through innumerable slideshows and workshops, and visiting family friends to admire their collections. We had a nickelodeon in the den, cylinder boxes in the living room, and mechanized songbirds in the dining room.

My new novel, like the two unpublished manuscripts before it, was supposed to be set in modern times. I had always written literary fiction, not historical, and the idea of replicating an earlier time — an era I didn’t live through — seemed daunting. I had an idea for this story: two families could come together over the decades, at different hinge points in their lives around this particular old-fashioned passion. Surely I could find a plot in there someplace. After all, write what you know is advice-gold.

When I found the bird organ definition, I had been scrolling through the Musical Box Society glossary trying to figure out what my music-box collecting characters might have in their collection. I decided I could drop this old object into my modern-day novel. Maybe the instrument belonged to one family, and then the other somehow acquired it.

With this idea in mind, I listened to a few serinette recordings, appreciating the quick-paced, chirping brightness of each song. The high-pitched tunes had an emphatically cheerful quality to them.

And yet, how could I fully appreciate such an instrument when it existed to train birds away from their natural voices? Isn’t training a canary to sing a human-composed song just another way to cage it?

I couldn’t shake my fascination with the serinette. It pulled and tugged at my imagination way more fervently than my underdeveloped, modern-day characters. Over one of our writing lunches, I asked my friend Jackie Shannon Hollis if I should follow the instrument back in time; I wanted permission from someone who knew my writing style. Jackie suggested my ebullient voice and this historical material might be a great match. And she told me to trust myself. To explore this time and place in the past — and to let go of the front story, just for now, just to see what happens.

I had earned an agent with my first novel, which didn’t sell, and lost her when I turned in the next manuscript. Nobody was waiting for this new book besides me.

So with Jackie’s encouragement, I let myself be lured deep into the past. I learned about Mirecourt, a small village in the Alsace-Lorraine area, by reading French websites and studying online maps. Mirecourt was known as the center of serinette making, but it was also famous for lutherie and a recognizable style of bobbin lace. Men built instruments; women created lace for curtains and tablecloths. The whole economy centered on art that actually sold. Moreover, the beautiful objects made in Mirecourt were exported elsewhere. I loved the tension inherent in those dynamics — not to mention the idea of a maker economy so robust that it supported multiple generations.

Knowing serinettes were invented in the eighteenth century, I pushed my novel into the nineteenth century, when its popularity had begun to wane. This added stakes; not only was my protagonist Henri Blanchard a firstborn son, but his father ran the last serinette workshop in the village. I added magical realism and changed Mirecourt to a fictional village, Mireville; these changes gave me leeway to play with whimsy and humor, as befitting a book about canary training.

To understand the Blanchards’ daily work, I studied diagrams of barrel organs and what I could find on tonotechnie — knowing where to place a pin on a cylinder to get it to play a particular note. My parents have a house full of Musical Box Society magazines and books written by their friends, so the technical aspects were accessible to me. But I didn’t find more than a mention or two of serinettes in those resources.

In 2010, I emailed the Varzy Musée Auguste Grasset in Nevers, France, seeking to purchase a CD of a serinette recording made at the museum. Much to my delight, Jean-Michel Roudier responded. He was the Varzy’s conservateur, and the person who cranked the serinette on the recording. Not only did he send me a copy of the CD, his emails helped give me a physical sense of the object. What it felt like to turn the crank.

Also in 2010, at my request, my friend Sarah Cypher toured the now-defunct Musical Wonder House in Wiscasset, Maine. She sent me typed notes and a recording of the serinette in the museum’s collection. From her, I learned that wealthy women on the East Coast of the United States purchased serinettes:

“Given the lack of other entertainment available to women at that time,” Sarah reported to me, “their canaries were their pride; and many homes had a large, soaring aviary to let their birds fly ‘free.’ As with any status symbol, some canaries were boasted to be better or smarter or prettier than others, so women would enter their canary or collections of canaries into contests, and would seek to buy the best canaries for their contests and for showing off to their friends.”

Only then did my story start to take shape. I had begun envisioning a family of makers; now I could invent a wealthy woman on the other side of the ocean who liked buying instruments from the Blanchard family. I decided this woman, Delia Dumphries Stanton, would have a sweeping aviary with glass panes and hand-crocheted greenery. And I wanted her to love canary breeding and training so much that she sold her canaries to the other ladies in town, who all looked down on her for trifling with a pastime better left to servants. Delia was both elegant and of her time and also an outsider to fashionable society because she had a strong understanding of supply and demand.

Surely the canary trainer and the serinette makers would have to come together, much like I wanted my two 1970s families to come together. But this was a much more interesting story. I just needed to figure out how and why. Again, I felt a strong wave of story this way. So I plunged in. Committed to the themes and ideas this one odd, mostly-forgotten object conjured for me.

It took more than a decade for the research and the writing and the plot to come together in a way that worked, with a lot of helpful editorial feedback from friends and professionals. I taught myself to write in this genre-bending style: historical, but with modern sensibilities and a focus on upsetting constructs of gender and power. A little bit magical, but not fully. Publishers Weekly called Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary a “charming, lite-fantasy debut, set in the mid-1800s,” which is a succinct way of explaining the genre blend.

When I sold Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary to Lanternfish Press in the spring of 2021, I was already tunneled happily into a new magical-historical project, set in the early twentieth century and featuring a Tin Pan Alley subplot. It’s my jam: this blend. I feel so lucky, after so many years of trying to fit my style and voice into contemporary settings, to have found a way back in time.

It turns out that the history of music, accessibility of music to the masses, and the gap between the makers and the consumers continue to fuel my imagination. In growing up with wondrous and outdated instruments, they have become part of my life story and the work I do on the page.

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