I’m so curious about your wife’s novella that could have been an opera, and in no small part because opera isn’t exactly center stage in modern popular entertainment, like next to stage musicals, etc. as far as I can tell. Do you mind my asking what made you think of encouraging your wife in the direction of an opera adaption? Is the novella about an opera singer, or is there some other aspect…?
Oh yeah, it's been ages since I talked about this so people won't remember it!
Ok, so like 15ish years ago, before I got into prose, I actually drew a webcomic, and was pretty tied in to a section of the queer local comic community in the twin cities, which at least at the time was a great but unlauded place to be a comic artist or writer. But everybody talked about how Portland was THEEE place for comics, and it made me grumpy.
And one day, on twitter, I saw that some comic artists in Portland had got to go to the final dress rehearsal of an opera, to make sketches to post online as a sort of cross-promotional thing. My grudge was activated.
With my wife out of town for the weekend I was bored and restless and lacking in distractions, so I wrote up a pitch to the MN opera asking for myself and all my comics drawing friends to come do the same- we get a little legit art cred, they get a little popular media credit. I figured they wanted to draw in a younger crowd.
And by the time my wife got home I'd organized a season-long free final dress rehearsal pass for not only myself but like 10 other comics people. The opera company even fed us fancy snacks and let us talk to people associated with the show.
This arrangement spiraled, as my schemes often do, and ended up lasting for a decade. I met some good friends there. It finally ended at an intersection of new-director-of-marketing and covid.
So as a result I got to see some spectacular old and brand new operas, and met some composers. I saw never before seen opera adaptations of The Shining, and also the Christmas Truce of WWI, and the 1919 Black Sox baseball scandal, the night before their debuts.
And my wife happened to have written a novella that would organize itself fantastically into a series of mostly arias with some interstitial bits, that could be performed cheaply because of the small cast and simple setting, and everybody could have an actually good part. The story itself had nothing to do with opera but was a meditation of suicidality, grief, and what it means to human beings to want things. Which like, classic fancy opera stuff.
It was about an old man whose husband died, leaving him with a used book shop they were going to spend their retirement life running, who notices strange things going on in the neighborhood, and goes to investigate the mystery. He finds a trail of people who all once wanted something desperately, who suddenly just...stopped wanting that, and explores the ways that unfolded in their lives. Eventually this leads him to the caretaker of the apartment complex across the street- a demon who feeds off want, and in doing so gets whatever desire he consumed. Each person who wanted is their own little story, all narrated by the old man, whose setting out what he's uncovered before he goes to confront the demon, pretty sure that in his own heart, all he's waiting for is his own death. It's a good story.
