About Illyria:
When I was seventeen and a senior at a Catholic high school in New York State, a number of my friends at the nearby public school in Katonah were cast in a magical production of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night." My boyfriend Steve played Malvolio, my friend Anne (now an actor in London) was Stage Manager, and another friend, Russell, was Feste, the clown. For months I'd hitchhike to Katonah and hang out for the day at school and in the village, taking notes for the novel I was planning to write about my friends and Shakespeare's play. Russ pretty much stole the show — he was and is an amazing performer, with a beautiful voice, and you can hear one of his songs, "Imaginary Girl," on this site. I'd seen Shakespeare done before, but never like this: I became obsessed with the play, the actors, the little town, all of which seemed like a brighter mirror image of my own dull life just a few miles down the road in Pound Ridge. For years — decades — I tried to capture that magic on the page, in my first novel, Winterlong, as well as subsequent novels and stories. With Illyria I finally felt like I succeeded. About a month ago I found a large storage bin in my attic here in Maine. It hadn't been opened since 1975, and when I looked inside, I found all the stuff I'd written back in high school — literally hundreds of typed pages of notes and letters, many related to what became Illyria. I've put a few of those pages here, along with a few photos and the playbill for that production of "Twelfth Night," part of the archeological record of the one story I always wanted to write.
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