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The Story

Eleonora Duse spends her whole career producing, directing and acting in the great female roles of the theatrical repertoire. She claims that when she is not on stage, she does not exist. A poet publishes a novel in which an aging actress’s only role is to be a young poet’s muse. The publication of the novel is a crisis for La Duse as the fictional portrait of a pathetic, clinging female threatens to fill the void and become her personal myth in the public mind.  But her greatest fear is that the imagery of the poet’s book will alter the way she thinks of herself.

The Making of Let Me Have My Wings

This journal records the author’s reflections on the process of the crafting of the novel as it evolved through the stages of planning, writing, editing and polishing. It constitutes an effort to be as conscious as possible of the process whereby the single idea that suggested the topic of the novel was expanded into a complex work of art. Topics range from the nuts and bolts of novel-building to the nature of the novel as an art-form.

Planning Let Me Have My Wings

During the writing of the novel, the author kept a hand-written notebook which records the day-by-day development of the novel as it found its shape and style. The notebook – now in print form – reveals how a vast cluster of thoughts was sifted, selected, structured and polished into novel-form.

The Project

Together, this novel, journal and notebook comprise the twenty-seventh installment in an on-going novel-writing project in which the author is exploring the concept of form and meaning in the novel, and of the novel as a form of expression in the 21st Century. All of the published journals and notebooks are available for free download.