Unfolding a novel one story at a time
Lesley Bannatyne ’75 wrote a short story that grew to become a novel.
The first seeds were planted at the tail end of the pandemic. Her first collection of short stories, Unaccustomed to Grace (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022), had not yet found a publisher, and Bannatyne had begun to think it might never be printed.
“I was just writing stories for pleasure and to keep working,” Bannatyne said. “And then the new stories started to look like they could be similar and of a piece. They are all set in upstate New York, a place that is very dear and familiar to me, so I revised the ones that I had already written and added another nine or so stories.”
The resulting new book Lake Song: A Novel in Stories, published Sept. 1 by Mad Creek Press, won the Grace Paley Prize for short fiction, awarded by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.
Set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region, the book is a multifamily epic that explores the violence, compassion and contradictions of small-town life. Bannatyne weaves in actual events that occurred in the region—Klan attacks, gold smuggling, the Albany Ketchup Murders, the 1965 Northeast blackout―to create an authentic backdrop to tell the story of a generations-long mystery.
“The characters repeat. The principal character in the first story becomes a secondary character in the second story; a secondary character in that one figures prominently in the third,” she said. “The challenge is, once you have this chain of events, you’re keeping track of three generations and plotting out how to connect the beginning and the end.”
“When I realized how it would come together, it delighted me.”
Lake Song is Bannatyne’s seventh book. In addition to Unaccustomed to Grace, she is the author of five books about Halloween that range from a “how to” for celebrating, a history of its origins and evolution and an examination for the people for whom the holiday is an obsession, a lifestyle or a business.
Beyond her books, Bannatyne has written performance pieces for the theater, penned articles for The Boston Globe and many other publications, crafted advertising copy and worked in communications for Harvard University.
She credits Wheaton with helping launch her creative career. “I wrote my first serious fiction as a junior,” she said. “The courses I took at that impressionable time—fiction and drama from medieval to the 20th century—shaped the writer I became. I was always proud to be an English major.”