Ultimately, every story is as much about the author as the characters he describes. It’s characters, no matter how laboriously presented as fiction, are inspiring creatures of his own experience and imagination. So it’s not surprising that, in writing the Mural Gazer, I am having to become a mural gazer myself, drawn into the settings and scenes on Chemainus’ walls, just like Harry Sanderson.
This morning I met Harriet Phipps in Mural #41 – The Outdoor Gathering. She was Harry’s great Aunt. He knew her in childhood, and is occasionally reminded of her by a framed portrait that sits on the mantle above their fireplace at VORLand’s End.
She plays a central role in the Mural Gazer story I’m working on at the moment. In the scene I’m describing, Harry is comparing the portrait on the Chemainus Seniors’ Centre wall, with the framed photo of his great aunt, which he’d brought with him in his jacket pocket. It will be her beckoning glance that draws him into the mural, because – though he did know her personally in his early childhood – he sees things in the portrait he’d never appreciated in real life, and he wants to meet this suddenly mysterious woman…
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She was old, in his faded photo; the woman on the wall was young, and arrestingly beautiful, Harry thought. “Not pretty,” he opined, “beautiful.” She appeared to him a woman who knew things about herself and her world that others could not possibly fathom. A woman who made up her mind about things, and said exactly what she thought at exactly the right moment.
Exactly the right moment, he repeated. Exactly the right moment…
Then he was gone.
Harry Sanderson
I didn’t know how much I wanted to meet this woman, until I wrote this passage. You can get into the evolving stories in my Direct-to-Web novel, The Mural Gazer.