Falcon in the Glass

The first bit of Fal­con in the Glass came to me on an after­noon maybe twen­ty years ago, when I was nurs­ing a cold. I turned on the TV, and there was Venice on the screen — a pho­to doc­u­men­tary. Hon­est­ly, it was just pic­tures and music, but that was enough:

Obses­sion.

Well, it wasn’t a throw-it-all-away-and-join-the-cir­cus kind of obses­sion, but ever since that doc­u­men­tary I’ve been dying to explore Venice both in per­son and through story.

What is it about Venice? I think it’s part­ly that it’s so stun­ning­ly beau­ti­ful, and when you wan­der through those old streets and canals you can almost imag­ine that the 21st cen­tu­ry has dropped away and you’re liv­ing in the Renais­sance, (but with tourists). And it’s also part­ly that Venice is, you know, sink­ing, and you know it’s not going to be around for­ev­er. And I think this sort of con­nects on a deep lev­el to the sink­ing­ness of every­thing beau­ti­ful in life.

Wait! I mean, I don’t want to be maudlin but … Every­thing beau­ti­ful is tem­po­rary, yes? And that’s part of what makes it so pre­cious. And Venice reminds me of this in a pierc­ing way that has haunt­ed me for years.

So, in between writ­ing my oth­er books, I began to read about Venice. One thing I dis­cov­ered was that dur­ing the Renais­sance the author­i­ties in Venice imposed fines, ban­ish­ment, or prison sen­tences on skilled glass arti­sans who took the secrets of their craft beyond the Venet­ian lagoon. Accord­ing to some his­to­ri­ans it was even worse than that: If a glass­mak­er left, pro­fes­sion­al assas­sins would seek him out, wher­ev­er he was, and kill him.

Yikes.

Anoth­er piece of the sto­ry drift­ed in to me years lat­er, after I found an old copy of Edith Pargeter’s The Heav­en Tree in an antique store. In the author’s note, Par­geter says that teach­ing a class on the nature of art got her to think­ing about larg­er ques­tions of what it is to be an artist, and that was the inspi­ra­tion for these novels.

The word “art” makes me skit­tish. But I, too, am a teacher, and I, too, spend the bulk of my days think­ing about, writ­ing about, and in the act of attempt­ing to cre­ate some­thing orig­i­nal and har­mo­nious. A story.

I began to muse about the nego­ti­a­tion between art-mak­ing and life. About the way that life can shoul­der aside your plans to make art … but it’s life that gives you some­thing to make art about. I imag­ined a boy—a glass­mak­er? — caught in the rock-and-a-hard-place dilem­ma between a life devot­ed to his art … and an act of com­pas­sion for some strangers who had become friends.

In the mean­time, there was the deli­cious joy of get­ting to know Venice, now in per­son as well as through books. I spent hours wan­der­ing the nar­row streets and canals; I trudged through dun­geons; I watched glass being made. As I wrote, my bird chil­dren showed up as well — the chil­dren who, in some of my oth­er books, can “ken” or com­mu­ni­cate tele­path­i­cal­ly with birds.

I’m hop­ing that Fal­con in the Glass, which lives in the bor­der­land between his­tor­i­cal fic­tion and fan­ta­sy, will evoke the mag­ic I first sensed in Venice, where the edges between land and sea blur, and you can almost for­get what cen­tu­ry you’ve been born into. And I’m hop­ing that read­ers will rec­og­nize them­selves in that place and, for a few hours, hap­pi­ly make it home.