This Journey is a Silent One – by Bettina von Kampen Available NOW!!

 A friend asked me once if I got sad when I finished a novel. An interesting question. I do, in fact, tear up every time I read to the end of one of my novels. Even if I have read it over many times, the ending always gets me.

Perhaps it’s the completion of a monumental undertaking – years, it takes me to finish a novel. Or that I have invested so much brain power and emotion in creating and getting to know the characters. I have seen them through thick and thin and with the completion of the story, I won’t see them anymore. I won’t spend all that time stressing and fussing and sorting out their lives and situations. I will be moving on to new, unformed characters that only I can coax out of their shells. It’s not easy getting to know someone, especially when you are making them up.

The idea for this book came from a story, possibly apocryphal, of a young man who had fallen onto the subway tracks and the train landed on him. The paramedics talked to him and told him as soon as they lifted the train off his chest, he would die instantly. I thought about this and wondered what would happen if a family were faced with such a situation, prepared for the death of their loved one and then the person didn’t die.

This became a short story: For Each a Space Among the Stars: Descant Magazine; 122; Fall 2003. This gives you some idea of how the germ for a novel stretches through time. In the short story it is the son who doesn’t die and the father who is dealing with this outcome. In the novel, I put the father in a wheelchair and his family have to adapt to his current, passive state, in need of total care and oblivious to their attention.

There was a program on TVO – Big Ideas that caught my attention one afternoon. Dr. Michael Persinger was discussing his research into the temporal lobe. His experiments elicited a religious experience in the subjects by stimulating the brain with magnetic waves. Dr. Persinger pointed at two sides of the brain and the interconnecting fibers – the corpus callosum. He spoke with great fervor about the presence of God that people described when they emerged from the experiment. It is essentially a sensory deprivation situation upon which magnetic fields are introduced to the temporal lobe. Subjects sit in a darkened room with a helmet on their heads. The helmet has the transmitters glued to it. It became known as the God Helmet.  

I have long been interested in neurophysiology and spent some of my university days studying this stuff. The connection between ‘God’ and the brain has always flummoxed me. For me it seems an absolute impossibility to have a god to believe in without a physiologic brain to do the believing. God is a man-made construct. Here was someone with something to say on the matter. I read through all the published papers and the idea for this story grew.

I have tried, in my own words to explain the science and its manifestation in the mind. But, this is ultimately a family story. A story of individual journeys and unavoidable intersections.

The novel is available on Kindle Direct Publishing here:

Amazon 

 

And on Rakuten Kobo here:

Kobo

 

 

 

 

Komm Lieber Mai und Mache...My First Encounter with Mozart

 When I was a child, I was gifted a picture book about the life of Mozart: Komm Lieber Mai und Mache. It referenced a popular German song about the spring and the flowers and birds. In a few colorful pages Mozart’s life was described and follows quite accurately the well-known details of his life. His father, Leopold, as teacher, his sister Nannerl, a companion and his mother, his champion.

                      

The story chronicles Mozart's talent for the piano; his early attempts at composing; the travels by horse-drawn coach across Europe, the performances for royalty.

The piano they take with them on the road;

               From the book:   

               

                         Mozart's road piano in the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest:

                                                     

                                                                                             

When he had scarlet fever:

And other well known moments: playing the piano with the keys covered, improvising variations on a theme. Professing his love for Marie Antoinette.

Then he dies. The end comes pretty fast. I remember feeling an unbearable sadness that this celebrated child, a child like I was, died at the end of the book. I was face to face with the arc that spans a life for the first time. Characters don’t usually die in children’s books.

Komm Lieber Mai und mache, die Bäume wieder Grün. Come dear May and make the trees green again.

Mozart wrote this song on January 14, 1791. His birthday would have been coming up. (January 27). The author stresses his poverty and poor health and yet he wanted to bring joy through his music. His melodies, wonderful melodies that bring us joy. He composed this piece in the winter, near the end of his life. Hear, how he longs for warmth:

Komm, lieber Mai, und mache die Bäume wieder grün, und lass mir an dem Bache die kleinen Veilchen blüh’n! Wie möcht’ ich doch so gerne ein Veilchen wieder seh’n! Ach, lieber Mai, wie gerne einmal spazieren geh’n!

Come, dear May, and make the trees green again, and by the brook, let the little violets bloom for me! How I would love to see a violet again - ah, dear May, how gladly I would take a walk!

 

For him, the spring would not come again. He, who shared his gifts with us all, died young and poor, in the ungrateful,  Emperor's City (my translation). The city was Vienna. This book was written in the DDR in 1971. Anti-western sentiments ran deep. There may well have been a rule to slip some anti-western ideas into a children’s book.

            Credit where credit is due:

Mozart died on December 5, that same year. Age 35. That would make this song, one of the last pieces of music he wrote. He would have been working on his Requiem Mass. Wrestling with all those themes of death and torment. January – we all know how that feels. It is a plea founded in a dark winter’s night in Austria. Sitting at his writing table and staring down the Requiem Mass. Everything will be better in the spring.

          The house where Mozart died:                             The view from his window:

               

I read this book over and over. I identified with this boy, born in the middle of winter in Salzburg, Austria. We were both German and winter babies. And I had recently started piano lessons. (I still despair at how difficult Mozart is to play. I thought my early connection with him would make playing his music a breeze.)

In 1971 I was seven years old. I practiced on a cardboard keyboard from the back of the Leila Fletcher Book 1 for piano. I took piano lessons at school, at lunch hour, in a group. We each had a short lesson with the teacher while the rest of the group scratched out key signatures and intervals in those tiny, multi-colored Rudiments of Music books.

The arrival in our home of the Heinzman Upright Grand piano was met with great excitement. We all took turns tapping and pecking at the keys. My father could play some melodies, his fingers rippling up and down the keyboard. No music in front of him, everything in his head.

My musical journey began at home, listening to my Uncle Peter and my father play Russian and Ukrainian folk songs on the piano and mandolin. My father did not read music, but he played both the piano and the mandolin without effort. Uncle Peter was accomplished on the piano. Uncle Peter loved a grand flourish, and my dad would strum the mandolin in equal measure. The impact of watching and listening to them play music together for the sheer joy of it was not immediately apparent to me, but it proved to be most profound.

I continued with piano and then the violin. I learned some Mozart. I’m still at it! Stay tuned...

If you want to hear German pop sensation Nena sing this song, it is here:

 

bvk writes

 I’ve been reading for a very long time. Trips to the library with the book bag sewn by my mother filled with the maximum number allowed, I walked to and from the Brock Corydon Library buzzing with anticipation. On the way there, scanning shelves in my mind and on the way back, deciding what to read first. My reading at an early age was mostly the monthly Highlights Magazine and Enid Blyton mysteries. Any mystery, really – there was Trixi Beldon, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys. These books pulled me into worlds much different from my own. I never stumbled upon a mystery to be solved, though how I longed for it.

    

The gap between my reality and those thrilling reads was bridged when I discovered Harriet the Spy. Here was a character that resonated with me so soundly, that I reread that book at least six times and      still flip through it to this day. I started playing Town and writing things in a scribbler. This book taught me that my imagination would always keep me company.

When my interests veered towards the lives of writers, reading their biographies, I found an unexpected connection there. Maybe, I could write. My first attempts were terrible. I read through my stories and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them. I went back to reading, studied for a career and became a working adult.

But the seed had been sown. I wanted to write. At the first opportunity, I took a class. I took two classes. I started submitting short fiction to literary magazines and have an envelope filled with rejection letters to prove it. One day, the unimaginable happened. Descant Magazine (sadly no more) accepted a story of mine. Define euphoria!

I kept at it. Descant accepted two more of my submissions. I started a novel. Finished it. Rewrote it about ten times. Sent it out. Filled another envelope with rejection letters. Until one day, a publisher asked to see the whole manuscript. I zoomed through it once more, not wanting to take too long to send it. Their response was humbling but encouraging. It was not ready. The manuscript needed a lot of revision. If I was willing to work on it, they would consider publishing. I had spent so long on it already and thought I was done. However, what else would I be doing? There was no point in not working on it, so I buckled down and rewrote. Blue Becomes You went on to be nominated for a Best First Novel Award sponsored by Amazon Canada. More chills and thrills!

I wrote two more novels with Great Plains Publishing:

 

Then I wrote two more that I have been unable to place with a publisher. One of these, I made available on Kindle Direct Publishing. I pulled it and have reworked it and am about the relaunch under a new title. The other I am still waiting to hear. Those first three novels landed in bookstores and had their turn of a few weeks in the spotlight and then faded away. This happens. It is not unexpected. 

Readers’ appetites have changed, publishers bottom lines have moved. Risk is no longer worth it. Self-publishing is exploding. I am sitting on two homeless novels. No more letters to stuff into my envelope. Just unanswered queries. After a year or so, I can safely guess it’s a no.

                                                    Holding a finished draft brings great joy!

I’ll probably place the fifth novel with Kindle Direct as well. The sixth novel is underway and the seventh is percolating in my brain. Writers write. bvk writes.

 bvk reads                                                                  bvk writes