Weird Titles

I've been asked about why my stories have such strange titles.

Short answer: I'm pretentious.
Longer answer: I spent like, eighty thousand dollars getting two English degrees, and I need to use that knowledge at least a little if I am to justify the fact that I'm still paying off student debt.

Poetry aficionados will likely recognize the phrase "glory in the flower" as coming from one of Romantic poet William Wordsworth's more famous works, "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (and I get told my titles are weird). There are those famous lines:
"Though nothing can bring back the hour
of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower,
we will grieve not, rather find
strength in what remains behind."

If you've read the book, the hint should be obvious enough... I open and close it with fragments of the poem. Even though I'm pretentious and spent a lot of money on my degrees, poetry was never my strong suit. I just like some of the phrases. Wordsworth I always liked because he was so bloody complicated there didn't seem to be a way to completely encompass what he was saying. So I could make stuff up. And that made it easier to pass the classes.

The idea is that we cannot go back to our younger, more innocent days. We might long for them, but we have to move forward. So we do that, and hopefully take the lessons we learned from that innocence into our newer, more difficult lives. Kate in particular struggles with this in the novel, as she figuratively, and eventually literally, returns to her childhood home instead of facing the realities of her situation and her marriage.

Impulses of Deeper Birth runs a bit more complex. It's from a less-known work by Wordsworth, entitled "A Poet's Epitaph." In this poem, Wordsworth basically philosophizes about what a poet actually is, and how a poet is different from most others. One of the big ways a poet is set apart, Wordsworth claims, is by how they relate to nature. They see it differently, experience it differently, and can therefore express it in ways that most people cannot. That struck me with the character of Peter, who doesn't like being in cities and needs the fresh air and the mountains to be who he is meant to be. He has that quality about him, that ingrained way, the 'impulses of deeper birth' that indicate he was always mean to be a man of the outdoors. I will explore Peter's character in more depth as the series continues, including his deep connection to nature.

I intend all of the Sonatas of Grace books, both the full-length novels and the shorts, to be titled with Wordsworth phrases, linked into poems that express some of the themes I want to examine within each story.