The Fire Concerto
by Sarah Landenwich
Interview by Ellen Birkett Morris
We’ve all heard the adage ‘write what you know’ and Sarah Landenwich’s debut novel The Fire Concerto shows the power of a novel hewn from both imagination and a deep knowledge of the subject matter. Landenwich, a former pianist, crafted the story of Clara, a gifted pianist who is injured in a fire and years later inherits a metronome from her mentor, the stern and unyielding Madame. The metronome leads her on a quest to understand its origins that sheds new light on her mentor and helps her better understand herself. Landenwich shares her writing journey here.
AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?
LANDENWICH: I started my writing life as a poet. When I was younger, my life was very much about music. When I was a senior in high school, I was prepared to go to music school, and at the very last minute, decided that wasn’t the life I wanted anymore. I ended up going to Bellarmine University as an English major, and my sophomore year, the poet-in-residence, Fred Smock, became my mentor. He was the person for me who was like, “You’re good at this. You should be a writer.”
I wrote poetry through undergrad and then went to grad school and got an MA in English with an emphasis in writing poetry. A few years after I graduated, I was driving home from teaching at the community college one night, and I thought, “I don’t go to bed at night with a volume of poems on my nightstand. I go to bed with a novel sitting there. Maybe that’s what I should be writing instead.”
When I started trying to write novels, I didn’t have any background in fiction, so it took me a really long time to learn how to do it. But my poetry professor Fred Smock had taught me how to pay attention to details and to always look for the right detail. That background as a poet heavily informs the prose that I write. I’m grateful that I had that focus early on, on the detail and the sound of language, because that’s something that takes a lot of time to learn and to craft and to hone.
AUTHORLINK: James Dickey said the idea for Deliverance came to him as a vision of a man standing alone on top of a mountain. His job was to get the man off the mountain. Where did the idea for The Fire Concerto come from?
LANDENWICH: It came to me in one of those kinds of flash moments when I was driving home from work one night. This is back when I lived in Colorado, a long time ago, and I thought, oh, wouldn’t it be interesting to write a braided narrative about three women across time who are connected by what in music is called your “pedagogical lineage,” a term that essentially refers to how you as a musician come down a line of teachers. That was it. There was no metronome, there was no murder. It was just a general concept. At that point, I was working on another book that never got published, and it took me two years, or maybe even three before I started working on that idea of the women connected across time.
AUTHORLINK: You did extensive research to so vividly depict this time and create this authentic world.
What was the most interesting fact you uncovered?
LANDENWICH: This book required so much research in so many directions: the history of Poland, valuable violins, and the physics of the way metronomes work, to name a few. But what really captured me the most and has propelled me forward into the book I’m writing now is the way that in the 19th century, women were pathologized for behavior outside of the norm. I’m talking particularly about the incarceration of women in asylums. I read all these research papers and narrative accounts of female murderers in the 19th century and how they were put on trial, and how their trials became these very sensational events that were tabloid fodder. This idea of the madwoman really caught hold in popular consciousness.
AUTHORLINK: What advice do you have for historical novelists when it comes to research?
LANDENWICH: My advice runs contrary to itself. Part of my advice is not to get lost in the research, because that’s very easy to do. You go down a rabbit hole to look for one answer, and then you get really interested and can’t stop. On the other hand, you want to go deep enough where you feel the world come alive for you. All the best historical finds are buried in a book no one’s checked out of a library since 1967. That is the stuff that makes you really feel a tether to the past. Don’t let yourself forget what you’re trying to accomplish, which is to write a new work, but go deep enough where you feel that you are connected to the past.
AUTHORLINK: You talked about your background in music. I’m curious about the ways in which that informed the writing of The Fire Concerto.
LANDENWICH: I started playing piano when I was six. We had a piano because my mom had inherited one from her dad. I have three sisters, and we all took piano lessons. I really loved it. I liked to practice. I liked to push myself. Looking back as an adult, I can also see that it was a container for emotional expression. As a kid you can feel emotion, but you don’t really know how to express it. I think kids are so drawn to the arts because they provide that outlet. That sense of music as being a vehicle for expression never left me. I just pivoted to putting that emotional outlet into writing. When it came to writing this book, it was easy to recall or to feel all those feelings that I used to have when I would sit at the piano.
AUTHORLINK: What was your greatest challenge in developing The Fire Concerto?
LANDENWICH: The structure, for sure. It took me a long time to figure out how to tell a big story across a lot of time with a lot of complicated details while staying within the acceptable word limit of a literary novel. One day, I was in front of my bookshelf looking at every novel that I love, asking, How is this story told? I found my model in the novel Possession by A. S. Byatt, one of my favorite books. Whenever anybody thinks about that novel, they think it’s a dual timeline novel, but it’s not. There’s one chapter that takes place in the past. The rest of the historical story is given to the reader through textual artifacts. I thought, well, that’s how I’m going to do it, too.
AUTHORLINK: In your historical note you talk about the struggle for women to become artists and the many things that can stand in our way. What advice do you offer writers facing financial, emotional, or physical hardship?
LANDENWICH: My advice is to just keep going. I’ve known so many writers in my life, and I meet people all the time who say, “Oh, I want to write a book.” , What I have seen, in my experience, is that the people who end up publishing or achieving “success,” whatever they deem that to be, are the people who don’t quit. I think that when people face impediments to their art, it’s all the more reason to make that art. One of the themes of this novel is to follow the impulse to do what you love to do despite the obstacles. Clara faces many challenges in the book, but I never wanted the novel to be a story of overcoming, which feels a little bit trite. The truth is, in life, we don’t overcome; we learn to adapt. That was the story I wanted to tell. That’s the story that I find really interesting.
AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.
LANDENWICH: I’m working on another past/present narrative. The past setting is a similar time period, the 1880s, but this book has nothing to do with music, and it is set in the United States, so it’s much easier to research. It continues with the theme of women who have been wrongly forgotten.
Sarah Landenwich is a writer and writing educator. Also, a classically trained pianist, her debut novel The Fire Concerto was inspired by her love of music of the Romantic period. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her husband and daughter.
