How Linda Donn Discovered Her Balloonist

After writing two nonfiction books (which she’ll tell you more about below), Linda Donn has come out with her first novel, The Littlest Balloonist. The story of how she found the subject and setting for this foray into fiction is a happy accident which I hope you’ll find as interesting as I have.

When I began to write about my heroine, Sophie Blanchard, I was surprised to find the little French balloonist as familiar to me as if I had known her for a long, long time.

I would like to explain how this came about.

Years ago, I was writing my first book, a nonfiction story about the friendship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and I did a lot of research in the Rare Book and Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Even on a blistering hot day in Washington, D.C., it is very cold in the archives. It helps preserve the old papers. And so, to warm up—and because you can’t help but get stuck in research sometimes—I would get up and wander around the room and pull out the drawers of files that describe the different collections in the Manuscript Division. There are large lives in there—Kennedys and Roosevelts and Fords and the like. But there is also a little archive, all in French, about the adventures of the early balloonists. I can read French, and so it amused me to read about their escapades—they once sent an elephant up in a balloon, and described as him as ‘superb’ and ‘modest’!

Then, too, I read descriptions of the young Sophie Blanchard, how generous and daring she was, and how she became Napoleon Bonaparte’s official balloonist.

When I finished writing the book on Freud and Jung, I thought of doing a book about that brave little band, but I couldn’t figure out how to structure the story. I mentioned the problem to a friend—who happened to be a Roosevelt—she said, “Oh, you like stories about relationships. You should write about a group of Roosevelt cousins.” Well, I went back to the Rare Book and Manuscript Division and pulled out the drawers of Roosevelts—and found a fascinating story. But on my research visits, inevitably, I would get cold and stuck, and so I’d wander over to the drawer of my French balloonists.

And this time, when I finished my book on the Roosevelt cousins, I pulled out the folders about hydrogen balloons in 19th-century France and went to work.

(more…)

23 January 2006 | guest authors |

Queens Writers Represent!

This Sunday, January 22st, at 3 p.m., I’ll be hosting a literary event at the L.I.C. bar in Long Island City (45-58 Vernon Blvd., at the corner of 46th Avenue). Two writers from Astoria decided to have a reading together, and then they invited me to introduce them because I’m a local, too!

Marcy Dermansky is a MacDowell Fellow who has won the Smallmouth Press Andre Dubus Novella Award and the Story Magazine Carson McCullers short story prize. Her stories have been published in numerous literary journals, including McSweeneys, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Indiana Review. She is a film critic for About.com. Twins is her debut novel, but she’s not an identical twin.

Tara McCarthy wrote the memoir Been There, Haven’t Done That back in the ’90s; her recently published novel, Love Will Tear Us Apart, is about conjoined twins who are also pop stars. Tara’s work has appeared in magazines including Seventeen and Good Housekeeping, and on websites including Killing the Buddha and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. Her novel for teens, The Pursuit of Happiness, is due out in March from MTV Books.

19 January 2006 | events |