WILMINGTON — Although they have never collaborated on a published work, Laura Stevenson and her husband F.D. Reeve are longtime writers who “read each others' manuscripts” and work separately on their respective projects.
After writing several novels and short stories for children - she began writing stories for her own children when she first moved to Vermont - Stevenson has just published her first adult novel.
In Return in Kind, Joel Hendrickson's wife, Letty, has just died. She leaves her legacy and everything they own to Mather College - everything except an old farmstead that her husband didn't even know existed. He is one of five main characters who play a part in the intriguing events that follow.
Stevenson says her main inspiration for the story came about through real-life experience with inheriting land, and the difficulty her family had holding onto it.
“My father died and left all four of his children [his] land,” she reminisces. “He bought it for a pittance in 1959, for $9,000. My sister went bankrupt and sold hers out to our stepmother. Quite a few years later, my brother went bankrupt and sold his out. My stepmother insisted that the land be divided, and I was heartbroken. It was impossible for me to buy it out, because in 1989, the land was worth $1.5 million! When there's [that kind of] money, how do you preserve the past and justify keeping something (in the book, a character has a Chippendale desk worth $100,000) when you could sell it? That's the problem behind Return in Kind.”
Stevenson took a long time to write Return in Kind, and only finished her first draft of the novel back in 1992. The novel underwent constant revision until 2010, and the main character started out as Letty's one-time love - and Mather College founder - Nathaniel, instead of Letty's husband, Joel.
“It was peculiar because I couldn't get the beginning to start,” recalls Stevenson. “But in the last 80 pages, I changed almost nothing. For years, I had eight or nine drafts all with different beginnings. I took out a lot of the educational [college-related] stuff. In the early drafts, [the character of] Nathaniel dominated a lot of the story. Nathaniel tried to give everyone a classical education that would make intelligent and useful American citizens. It was the easiest way I could make the reader understand that by making [Mather College] an all-male school, Nathaniel refused to change with the rest of the world.”
The book also has roots in the history of Vermont's farm economy, specifically from 1945 to the “hippie generation” of the 1960s.
“The story coincides with the real death of Vermont's farms. In the post-World War II world, farms were in terrible shape and falling down. The hippie generation was into restoring and putting back the farms. I had lots of friends whose biggest dream was to buy an old farmhouse and fix it up.”
While Stevenson's work is based on the real world of Vermont, her husband F.D. Reeve (a writer for 65 years) has created a reworking of the ancient, myth-shrouded world of Greece in his theatrical poem, The Puzzle Master. He modernizes the well-known myth of Daedalus the inventor and his famously headstrong son, Icarus, in the poem.
Reeve says the “most fun thing to do” with the reworking of the myth was “trying to set up terms to suggest a setting that couldn't be done literally.”
The poem is written in the form of dialogue between the characters Delling (Daedalus), his son Ingram (Icarus), Delling's rival and nephew Thane, the scheming Queen Prue, and Prue's beautiful daughter Arabella (Ariadne).
The story interweaves the myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinth with Daedalus and Icarus' doomed escape from the clutches of King Minos. Everything from the attitudes of the characters to the scenery is described as if in a screenplay.
Reeve describes the main theme of The Puzzle Master as “a difference between corrupt and pure emotion.”
“The Ingram and Arabella relationship is a pure love story. It was intriguing to write Prue and how she gets Delling to make a contraption so she can have sex with a bull. It suggests the wideness of [her] corrupt passion, directed entirely at herself.”
When Prue's child, the “bull-boy,” is killed by Theodore (Theseus), Ingram is heartbroken when Theodore sweeps Arabella off her feet and she agrees to run away with him. Reeve used this new storyline to give Icarus' unwise flying more of a motive - to impress Arabella after she's been left by Theodore.
“The motive in the poem is [Ingram] being mocked by Dad for being left by Arabella. They're very young - Theodore is 18 or 19, and Arabella is 14. Ingram fell madly in love even though he's only 12. He has to prove to his father that he's worth something, says 'I'll do better' [during their flight] without any knowledge of how he'll undo himself.”
The third theme, according to Reeve, is about freedom. “Ingram wants to go up. Delling, when he needs to get free, flies to some other place. At the last island, he's not going to get any freer. The outside limitations are all together. [The poem is] an effort to show how social repression distorts social values, even as it pretends to support them.”
Fortunately for his audience, Reeve claims that this version will be made into a stage production in the fall, with performances planned for West Chesterfield, N.H., Ogunquit, Maine, and Cambridge, Mass.
As for the future, both Stevenson and Reeve have projects they are working on.
“I ain't telling,” Reeve says with complete honesty. “If you start talking about what you're working on, if you put it out before it's done, it'll spoil.”
Stevenson is more open about her writing projects.
“I have some short stories and pieces that I'm working on,” she shares. “There's a story I've started into, and some ideas for a novel that requires massive amounts of research.”