The Motel of the Stars by Karen Salyer McElmurray
I received this novel in the mail from its publisher – Sarabande Books – right after the AWP Conference in Chicago. I began reading it then, got about 1/3 of the way in, and had to put it down to face the onslaught of teaching. It’s a testament to the novel that it remained on my bedside table and the characters continued to beckon to me. Almost two months later I took it up to finish it and thoroughly enjoyed it. The writing is powerful, lovely, the characters fully developed, and the suspense seduces.
The Motel of the Stars has two POV characters, an unlikely coupling, a repo man in later mid-life and a young woman who works in a motel as a refuge from the past. She was abandoned by her mother and spent years traveling with Sam Sanderson, seeking enlightenment and love on the backpackers trail in Nepal and other countries. Sam joined the military and Lory went home to hide out in the Motel of the Stars. Sam dies in a freak military accident. The repo man is Sam Sanderson’s father. What the two characters have in common is love of Sam and unresolved grief. They are both headed to the Anniversary of The Harmonic Convergence, a mystical alignment of planets portending universal peace. It is 1997. As they travel, we are privy to their histories, their troubles, and the impossibility of healing for either character. It may seem like a fragile thread to embroider tension upon – what will happen when these two meet at the New Age celebration – but I found myself driven to finish the story and find out. The ending is satisfying.
Karen agreed to answer a few questions for us.
Did you travel for the book or did the story claim those travels and experiences years later?
Over twenty years ago now I did travel a great deal. A former lover and I traveled around the world with just what we could carry on our backs. We worked as we went--grape harvests in France; avocado and kiwi orchards and a sporting towel factory in Australia. We spent about eight months in Nepal and India. Particularly that time in India passed like a dream of heat and color and crowds of people. My memories of being on a shikara in the lakes of Srinigar are a slow-moving film I summon and release. I have wanted to write those times as memoir, but have not yet been able to do so--partly because of the painful end of that love affair and my own inability to love again for a long while. The travels I have done, ones expanded, contracted and reimagined, belong in this book to Lory and to Sam.
Did you conceive of this as a novel from the start? And what attracted you to the story at the start? I ask this because I see beginning novelists struggling with this issue: how do I know when I’ve got a novel that wants to be written?
When this novel first began, it was a short story also called "The Motel of the Stars." As that story began in my imagination, it was about a man driving and looking back to see a white feather rising and falling in the wind in the back seat. Later, the story expanded to be about a man who is an ex-soldier from World War II, and he has become a drifter, unable to live with and love his wife for more than a matter of weeks. When the story was complete, I took it with me to a writer's conference in Northern Kentucky, where my mentor was the novelist Mary Lee Settle. When we had our independent conference, she looked at me with her hands at her sides and said, "Honey, this story is too full of everything. You need to be a novelist." And so, all these years later, the story became just that.
What were some of the writing challenges and difficulties you experienced as you worked on this novel? From conception to holding the book in your hands – how long did that take?
The book took a long while, way too long. It followed me through a couple of years as a writer-in-residence at a small Southern college, then to a full time job teaching in an MFA Program. It followed me like a lover I only gradually came to understand, with many changes in its communications of shape, beginning, point of view. When I first began it, it was in the point of view of a young woman who has lost the man she loves but cannot "possess." Later, the story of a man who has lost his son began to speak to me. Finally, the man who is a drifter entered the story as the lost son. The parts of the book, with sections belonging to the individual "speakers" evolved. All of this happened while I was living my life and experiencing so many changes--I found my own lost son (surrendered to adoption many years ago); I married a man who had lost his own son in a Marine Corps helicopter accident years before. Our mutual losses translated into the experiences of my characters, enriching them, informing them about the true nature of loss. All in all, the novel took almost six years.
Do you have any suggestions for first-time novelists?
I have the advice I am currently trying to give myself as I begin a new, long work. Write a core of a long work. Write it all, even if it is 100 pages. Then begin to weave the story from that shape. There will, I hope, be less starts and stops and digressions from many directions. Capture the sketch of the whole quickly, then fashion and refashion from the heart.