GUILFORD — Don McLean has just published his first novel, but the stories and poems in it are not his own.
They were written by his mother, Jean Stewart McLean, and have never been published until now.
McLean decided to compile her work, with the hopes of publishing some of it, after her death in 1963.
“I inherited all of her manuscripts, most of which are typewritten. And I felt bad that she'd never gotten anything published. She'd sort of given up in her later years, not actually bothering to write. But my image of her is that she would sit in her typewriter and churn out this stuff.
“So after she died, I got the idea that it would be a really great thing to do to put out a book of all of her writing. I got out her stories and made a table of contents and titles for the book. I was a college freshman at that point, so I got sidetracked by college and coming up to Guilford. It was just in the back of my mind all that time,” he said.
After years of sharing his dream, McLean's wife took matters into her own hands and published some of his mother's poems as a small collection.
“My wife got tired of hearing me say I wanted to do this, so one Christmas, as a surprise, she took some of the poems to a local printing company and had a limited number of copies made up of a short book of just the poetry. I gave one to my sister, and it was my wife who came up with the title 'Sparks' for this collection. It comes from the poem,” he explained.
Although the book of poems was a start, work and subsequent retirements kept hindering McLean's progress on publishing the rest of his mother's writing.
“Every once in a while I'd retire from something and say 'OK, now I'm really retired,' and something else would come up. I was the administrator for Friends of Music in Guilford for decades, and I gave that up. Then the Guilford 250th [anniversary] came along [in 2011] and I told everyone that it was my final event. When I got through that, I said 'OK, this is really it, because I'm getting to be an old person and I've got to do this.' By then, I'd already started typing her stories.”
McLean admits that it was extremely difficult to decide which versions of certain stories to publish, given that his mother had written several.
“I just inherited all of her stuff in file boxes. There were stories and poetry and some loose stuff, things I kept discovering as I went through family papers. It was what I had to work with, and it was frustrating not to be able to say, 'I see you have three different versions of this story and I don't know which one you'd consider the final version.'
McLean says he and his mother never really talked about her writing while he was growing up:
“I never did talk to her about her creativity. I grew up knowing that she was doing this, and thought it was kind of cool. We would talk a little about literature in general and she'd help me with English homework assignments. It was a little bit like discovering a whole bunch of work by somebody I didn't know. It's kind of a funny dialogue to have with someone who's not there anymore.”
The publication process was one that McLean wanted to do on his own, as his past as a producer had consisted of what he describes as “asking people to do things.”
“Early on, I decided I wasn't going to try to find someone to publish it. I totally felt that I'd used up all my energy for asking, and I knew it was going to be hard to get somebody to publish a book by an author who had died 50 years ago whom nobody knew about, and whose work doesn't have any kind of compelling purpose except to get it out there.
“By then I was learning about self-publishing, and started looking into that, and decided that was what I was going to do,” he said.
McLean recognizes many real-life parallels in Jean's writing, and has provided an “endless commentary” of notes at the end of “Sparks” as a reference guide.
“A lot of the book is my discussion about the works, as I figured I'm the one who could do that. I point out whenever I see any autobiographical or biographical basis. I think authors generally can't help putting in things from their own experience or their lives. All of her female characters in her short stories are described as being short and perky. That was my mom, she was five-foot-two. That comes up constantly in her fiction. There are stories that are clearly based on family stuff. There's a Christmas story that pretty clearly uses our family as the model for the family, at which point I would have been 12 or 13 years old.
Jean Stewart McLean took the adage, “Write from your own experience” to heart, according to her son, and even wrote two plays based around her experiences in Episcopal Church parishes.
“A nice thing about a lot of her stuff is that she really did [write from her own experience.] Particularly, she wrote four one-act plays which are in the book. I've been trying to convince someone to produce them, which is the next part of this project. My mother grew up in a church parish and her father was an Episcopal minister in Raleigh, N.J. Two of her four plays are about the interior politics of church parishes.
“My mom really knew this kind of stuff. I consider them kind of bookends of each other, part of the same play in a way. One is about an older minister who is being forced to retire by his board, and the other play is about a new, young minister coming to an established parish, replacing a beloved guy who has died. Those plays I think are nice because she really understood what she was writing about. A lot of her works were things she could relate to,” McLean said.
McLean and his mother had very different styles of writing. He describes his as “practical writing,” and hers as mostly fiction.
“My whole life has been doing practical writing. I've written a lot of grant applications, newspaper articles, and reviews of concerts. When I was a kid I wrote poems and funny little short plays, but I grew up not caring about being a writer. I'm surrounded by people who really are good at it, so I almost feel as if I don't need to, in some way.
Two writing traits they share: strict attention to grammar and the ability to include comic elements in a story.
“I think the influence of my mom is that she was very particular about grammar, and this is the result of her having hammered that into me. She was quite a competent writer, so she put a lot of value on the technique of writing. That part has rubbed off on me. I tend to revise and revise.
“My mom was well-known for being a literary wit in her college circle, and some of her best moments [in her stories] are when she does cute, funny little things. Most of the stories are serious, but there's always this comic turn. I think I've inherited a bit of that,” McLean said.
McLean started typing up his mother's stories in 2007, but soon ran into problems when he tried to digitize her handwritten pages:
“I started typing in 2007. Every once in a while I'd do a story. I wasn't sure how to do it, hoping I could stand them, but I discovered after scanning a page of her typescript that the program was reading so many things as errors. I decided it would be better if I just took every single thing and typed it. One thing is, doing that, you become very familiar with the material. I really got inside this material, but it was years and years. At first it was a bit here and a bit there, but as I got further along I started devoting major amounts of time [to the project.]”
McLean had to spend a long time on formatting the stories, poems and plays, learning a lot about formats in the process.
“I spent months and months getting all this [formatted.] The plays were really tortuous. I really wanted someone to be able to perform them from this, so I puzzled over formats. I had all this stuff on my wall saying, 'This is how a play goes.' A friend of mine in Vernon designed my cover, and she really did a nice job on it. She gave me all kinds of advice. Books are really complicated.
“Finally, this summer, I had the whole thing done. I printed it out, which pretty much took forever because I had to do front and backs of the pages. I took the copy with me on vacation and proofread, got it pretty close to OK. A couple of weeks ago we started to print, finished the cover design, and started uploading it, and got versions which we're still tinkering with.”
Rather than make more copies than he could sell by himself, McLean chose an online print-on-demand publisher for his book.
“Having spent my life with print shops, I knew it would be really foolish to go to the local printer and get 500 copies of this [book] because I could envision getting rid of about 40, and having the rest in a box. I'm using this online on-demand publisher called Lulu, which is very popular. They put out gazillions of self-published books, so anyone can publish a book. You send all the stuff electronically and they accept anything, whatever you want to call your book.
“Once the book is uploaded to the company site, it exists digitally. When anybody wants a copy, they can order one and the company sends a message to a print shop, and this print shop will churn out a copy of the book. It's working pretty well,” McLean said.
McLean has been composing music since the sixties, and enjoys setting poems to music.
“I grew up with music, and it's something I've done forever. While she was still alive, I set one of her poems to music - a very simple setting. And when I was in college, I was an English major, but when I moved up here I became very involved with the musical stuff. Since I don't have formal training as a composer, I've never felt very confident writing music that doesn't have words in it.
“I hang out with so many poets, it's one of my ways of dealing with poems I like - set them to music. That's sort of how I honor a poem. My sister [Verandah Porsche] is a wonderful poet and she and I have done a whole bunch of wonderful pieces together. Early on, I wrote a song from one of my mom's poems, and after she died in 1970, I set another one for a friend's music concert. When my sister got married, she wanted me to do a musical setting for her wedding. It's from 'The Plan.'”
True to his musical roots, McLean made settings for 11 of his mother's poems and scored them for an orchestra.
“I did a version where they're all scored for the same combination of instruments. Setting poems to music is my way of saying to people, 'You should pay attention to this poem.' Sort of my way of commenting and highlighting things and bringing out what I think is the feeling of the poem, and music can do all that.”
McLean plans to host an event sponsored by the Friends of Music in Guilford on Nov. 2 at the Guilford Community Church. The event will feature a short lecture by McLean on Jean Stewart's work and life, a musical poem setting of his own composition, and a short skit based on one of Jean's own plays.
“It all started to come together as the idea of doing this even where we're going to highlight her work. I was able to convince Friends of Music to sponsor it.”
When asked what he believed his mother's reaction would be to her son's mission to publish all the writing she had done in her life, McLean says she would probably be “pretty astonished.”
“I imagine that even though you expect your kid to be devoted to you, she'd be pretty amazed that I put this much time and work into it. It's really become kind of a consuming thing, [with] all the different versions and revisions. Of course, I hope she'd like it. She put these all in finished form and sent them out to people so, quite clearly, she was ready for people to see them.
“I feel like it's really fulfilling the mission she had to get the word out and have people see it. It's kind of a funny partnership, the two of us doing this together, but she's not available to talk to about it, so I have to do everything from what I have,” he said.