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A reader left a review of Chouette recently that quoted this passage from Chouette:

‘I stay up a while, alone in the kitchen, drinking my twig tea and watching the spiders weave their webs. At times like these, the old voices resurrect themselves, and I grow restless for my old life in the gloaming, where my life was full of music, sweet songs that made the light hum and the trees sing. When the wind blew, the tree trunks clapped together, and they sounded like the deepest-plummet clatter of giant wood chimes. I could fly in those days. I could hear the earth’s heartbeat. Sometimes the sounds pulsed through the air like blood through living veins. Sometimes the sounds pulsed through me, and made my body sing itself to sleep and dream soft dreams. The Bird of the Wood taught me how to play songs on my hunting bow, with strings of catgut. I could pluck and bend and warble. I could make the colors come.�

And it reminded me that I've never yet written about how much The Tempest was ringing in my head as I wrote this novel, in particular, Caliban's soliloquy, here:

"Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again."

And this final heart-breaking soliloquy of Prospero's, here:

“This rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.�

Maybe just the word "plummet" is all I took from the second passage, but I loved that word when I read it first in high school, so here it is in my novel, although with a different and more abstract meaning. In fact the word "plummet" doesn't make much sense the way I wrote it but I loved the sound of the word so there it is.

There are scraps of beloved poems and plays in everything I write. Sometimes I recognize the source as I write the words. At other times I just have a vague idea that there is something I'm drawing on that I've read before, maybe decades ago. Maybe all writers do this? Hear echoes in their head, as they write, of things they loved, as readers, and these echoes make their way into the words they write on the page?

Anyway, thank you, Sister Veronica, for teaching The Tempest that year.