Written by Teralyn Mitchell
Deepest Blue by Mindy Tarquini was an amazing and magical read! Mindy was kind enough to answer some questions about her newest release, life, and writing. Check out the interview below!
Tell us a little about you as a person!
At a picnic, everybody comments on how beautiful are the trees. I point to the tree’s interstitial spaces, “Have you noticed their canopies never touch? How do they know?”
Why do snail shells grow in a spiral? What determines the shape of a wave? Does glass shatter in along predictable lines? Yes. I was that kid. I’m still that adult. Because I’m a structure nut, a pattern-seeker. “The Fibonacci Sequence? Wait, I’ve got a browser tab open about that someplace…”
What made you want to become a writer?
I used to work in allied healthcare, pediatrics. Over time you get to know the parents of long-term patients, the very ill, the dying. There was this one mom, so kind and polite. She rarely smiled because her daughter was so sick. One day, while reading beside her comatose daughter, the mom laughed. Out loud. I peeked over the mom’s shoulder to learn what alchemy had taken this mom so far from her current grim circumstances. It was Peter Mayle’s “A Year in Provence”—a great book, by the way. I thought, “Wow. Like magic. I want to be able to do that.”
What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?
I try to start from a place of familiarity. Both of my previous novels, Hindsight, as well as The Infinite Now were set in a neighbourhood I knew well, among people as familiar as my own relatives. Both were magical-realism which allowed me plenty of room with the story, but the realism part meant myriad historical details needed to be nailed down. I wrote an article for Writer’s Digest which can be easily Googled that lists unusual and creative resources for kicking a historical up a notch. Each resource sent me down a rabbit hole of detail, the warp and weft that makes both stories’ fabric rich and real. Deepest Blue was easier. The setting is based loosely on Italian folklore and the story is a fairytale, granting me a plenty of leeway for populating the world’s particulars and deciding its underpinnings.
Do you set a plot or prefer going wherever an idea takes you?
I start with a “what if.” Then I relentlessly plot. Most of the story decisions are made during what I call, “The Thinking Stages.” That does not mean the story will not have other ideas. Once the drafting starts, the story often changes voice, or asserts attitudes other than those I’d planned. Always the tent poles, the core, the blueprint remains the same. How the story chooses to execute the blueprint sometimes goes out of my control.
What do you like to do when you are not writing?
I like to go on road trips, down less-travelled roads, visit the ‘off-places,’ the villages, not the tourist attractions, stand in quiet forests, not on city streets.
What advice would you give aspiring writers?
Learn how to structure a story. Hone your craft. Be discerning in what advice you take, and wise regarding what advice you ignore. There are a ton of resources online, most of them free or low-cost. Avail yourself. Find a writing circle, preferably people who write better than you. Read widely, in many genres, even those you don’t much care for, at least a sample or two. Become a student of humanity. Observe, question, wonder. Above all be kind whenever possible and generous when you can. Everybody has something to teach; we each have something to learn, whether we want to admit it or not.
If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
Create because it makes you happy. Everything else is a bonus.
Deepest Blue was such an intriguing and interesting read! Can you tell us a little about the novel?
Deepest Blue is set in an enchanted city seen only at twilight, where everybody’s paths are determined and steered by an unwavering star. Panduri is beautiful, her citizens connected to nature, to the earth, and to each other, and each contented to fulfill their role, their purpose to keep Panduri’s star bright and always on the rise. Enter Matteo, resentful second son of Panduri’s Duca and hot to follow his designated path to the border, and out from under his father’s domineering thumb. Matteo is star-charted to perform as Panduri’s Legendary Protector in Panduri’s continuing struggle with Careri, a connected city which is slipping away to the Outside. Then Antonio, Matteo’s brother, who is Panduri’s Heir and most beloved, usurps Matteo and heads to the border in Matteo’s stead. Matteo’s left confused, confounded, and stuck casting all the star charts. Claudio, the third and younger brother is stuck trying to keep everybody from coming to blows and sending Panduri’s course into a spiral. As can only happen in family, hilarity, hijinks, and disaster follows.
What was the inspiration for the story?
Deepest Blue was born out of an older story, an overwrought tale of nobles behaving badly. That original version had no real setting and was untethered from a driving theme. Rightly, I shoved the mess under a bed and near forgot about it. Then my family suffered a loss as devastating as Matteo’s and Antonio’s and Claudio’s. I picked up the story again and I looked at it with new eyes, saw that beneath all the bad behaviour was the tale of a family in grief, a love letter among siblings, an Inside story detailing the architecture of their emotion. I discarded everything I’d written, structured a new outline and Deepest Blue, an inner narrative desperate to define its place, finally settled into its course.
What is the significance of the title?
Deepest Blue applies on many levels. It’s the favourite colour of Italian fairy folk, the folletti. It’s the favoured colour of Matteo’s mother, guardian of the twilight, the time of day most dear to the folletti, as well as the people of Panduri and most significant to Panduri’s course. It’s also the colour of a dress worn by a woman who near brings disaster on Panduri. Most importantly, deepest blue it is the colour of grief, the engine which drives this story and her characters.
Your story is set in Panduri. Why did you choose that as the setting for your book?
Grief is personal, an internal journey that travels the in-between places when we’re expected to be doing everything else. It’s Inside, as opposed to Outside. I wanted to find a real place in Italy where my story could hang its hat. I searched specifically in Calabria, an homage to my great-grandparents, who’d also known overwhelming grief. I was searching out ghost towns in that region and stumbled upon an article written in Italian recounting the tragic tale of Panduri, a town levelled by an earthquake in the sixteenth century. Only one-third of her citizens were left alive, her dead were never buried. The survivors packed up what remained and moved to another hilltop within view of Panduri, but magical and unexplainable occurrences persisted at the old site.
I was fascinated by this legend and went in search of Panduri, using Google Earth and Careri, the new town, as the center, but my quest came up empty. One day, I shifted my view. Instead of looking for what was, I looked for what wasn’t. Panduri appeared through its absence—the fields that were no longer planted, the stones that outlined walls and houses. It had been there the whole time, I’d stared at it, sometimes for a quarter-hour or more, but I couldn’t see it. And so the idea of a city seen only at twilight, emerging from the mists, separated, yet connected to its sister-city was born.
What do you hope your readers take away from this book?
That so many of our heartaches and hurts could be healed if we’d only open our hearts, let go our mistrust, and talk with each other. That grief’s burden weighs heavy, that it’s okay to choose not to carry it, to choose to lay it down, that you can best honor those who’ve gone by going on with the rest of your life.
Are you working on anything presently that you would like to share with us?
I’m hard at work on my fourth novel, a magically-realistic contemporary women’s fiction involving a protagonist who creates crystal worlds, a time-bending antagonist determined to steal her story, and a hot Swedish yoga instructor named Sven.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for us?
I tend to like quirky kinds of stories. Right now, I’m reading Virgil Wander by Leif Enger and enjoying it very much. It’s about an amateur photographer who owns a cinema in a no-name town outside of Duluth. Virgil goes out to photograph Lake Superior. There’s a snowstorm; his car flies off a cliff. When Virgil wakes up, he’s lost his memory. Part of his memory loss is the use of adjectives which I found so fascinating as an amnesia item. Out walking one day, Virgil meets a man named Rune whose talent for making and flying kites helps him to connect with people. Rune has come to town to look for his long-lost son, a baseball player who was a local legend and who also happens to be a friend of Virgil’s. The tale’s small-town details are excellent, the various characters well-drawn, and the story poignant—about love and loss and the town’s fading prospects. For example, Rune kind of takes on Virgil as a replacement son, and it feels like Virgil’s rehab and the town’s resurgence are tied. No idea yet how the story will end. It has a pleasant pace that’s holding my interest. I appreciate my friend for making the recommendation, so I pass it on to you.
Deepest Blue is available on Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
