Sometimes you have to chase the story. And sometimes the story chases you. The tension between the two often drives writers mad, but it can also inspire some of their greatest work. John Pipkin is no stranger to this enterprise.
“One of the great challenges of writing fiction is not so much coming up with ideas for topics to write about,” says Pipkin, “but rather how to get access to those topics. Astronomy is something I've always been interested in and wanted to write about, but I didn't yet have the narrative structure for what a story would be that in some way incorporated astronomy.”
Pipkin continued to ruminate on the astronomy idea, but it wasn’t until he started studying Romantic poetry that the loose framework for his latest novel emerged. While reading the John Keats poem "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer," Pipkin realized that astronomy afforded him the opportunity to explore a universal theme that was central to the human experience.
“What always has especially fascinated me about astronomy is this sense of wonder associated with it,” says Pipkin. “And I think we've lost [that] to a certain extent. We've almost become numb to the astounding discoveries that are reported almost on a daily basis in the news. Even the recent discovery of a planet that was labeled ‘the greatest discovery of the century’ hardly made a blip. I’d long wanted to try to write something about astronomy that captured that sense of wonder, that was less about the technical and scientific achievements of astronomers and more about the personal experience of being an explorer who remains static while exploring great distances.”
This epiphany inspired Pipkin’s new novel, The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter, but the journey from concept to completion was anything but linear. He says he was struggling through the manuscript when he “stumbled upon the idea of Henry David Thoreau and his forest fire.” Pipkin set the astronomy novel aside while he completed Woodsburner, his critically acclaimed, Kirkus-starred novel about the aftermath of Thoreau’s incendiary episode. Then in 2009 he went back to his astronomy manuscript because “the idea just wouldn’t leave me alone.”
And that’s when the story intensified its pursuit of the writer. Pipkin went to see an Edgar Allan Poe exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center, a museum, library and archive at the University of Texas at Austin (which happens to be one of the universities where he teaches creative writing). Quite by accident he wandered into a small room of astronomical artifacts that was located just off the main exhibit.
“They had some old telescopes and globes and atlases,” says Pipkin, “and there was also an enormous painting of the phases of the moon that was signed by Caroline Herschel. The card read, ‘This is from the Harry Ransom collection of the Herschel family papers.’ ”
Caroline Herschel is the sister of William Herschel, a man many consider the father of modern astronomy. Pipkin applied for a grant and spent the summer
of 2010 sifting through the Herschels’ journals, charts, index cards, and random scraps of paper upon which they’d scribbled various constellations. It was at that point he realized that the Herschels would be two anchoring characters in his novel.
Pipkin did an enormous amount of astronomical research while writing the book and admittedly often delved much further than the story required. Still, he’s adamant that his newest novel isn’t intended as an astronomy textbook or even a broad overview of what was happening at that point in history. Rather, he says, it’s a historically driven, creatively imagined contemplation about what it might’ve been like to live in that rapidly changing era, the end of the 18th century.
“Part of the human experience is trying to figure out where you've come from, who you are, and what the arc of your life is,” says Pipkin. “And that's something that's very much at the center of astronomy.”
Laura Jenkins is a writer living in Austin.
