Today on Emily Fiegenschuh’s blog, she tells the story of how she developed the cover image for the September 2008 issue of Cricket. She was given free rein by the art director to choose any material from the story that had appeared in the magazine up to that point, and she truly nailed it. She brilliantly rendered a frozen instant that is at once beautiful and dramatic, and conveys the very heart of “The Star Shard” better than any other scene she might have selected.
I’ll try to do this without leaking any spoilers. In that picture, titled A Precarious Perch (which is available for sale as a poster — please see Emily’s blog — I have a framed print in my hallway!), Cymbril stands on a tiny ledge with no guard rail, high on the prow of the Thunder Rake, many stories above the ground. The Rake is rolling forward over rough terrain, so the perch shakes and lurches. The breeze fills Cymbril’s hair and sets her garments flapping. All the vast world is arrayed before her; the sky around is ablaze with stars. There is danger approaching behind her in the Rake’s depths, as yet unseen and unnoticed. The friendly yellow tom cat is worried about her.
It is a moment of revelation for Cymbril. She has learned something new, something staggering, and it changes her perspective. There is so much before her to see and sense, and she will not ever regard it in the same way again. Yes, that is definitely the scene to put on the magazine’s cover.
When I started out writing “The Star Shard,” I knew it would be about Cymbril trying to escape, trying to gain her freedom. What I didn’t yet know was that, on a deeper level, it wouldn’t be so much about fleeing as it would be about facing, about discovering and embracing who you are. Critics are calling it a coming-of-age story. That’s great to hear, but it’s something the story revealed about itself along the way.
I wrote “The Star Shard” during a time when I was contemplating a major life change, my relocation from Japan to America. I think it’s more or less inevitable that what we’re going through is reflected in our writing. In fact, it often shapes our writing and gives it the focus it needs. Cymbril’s ambivalence toward leaving the Rake is very much what I was also feeling during those years.
There’s a scene in the book in which Cymbril sees a caterpillar crawling across the rock she’s sitting on. She wonders if the worm is happy as a worm or if it’s eager to become a butterfly. Then she realizes that it would be pointless for the worm have regrets or to agonize over what it wanted to do; the creature is what it is. It was born to become a butterfly. I think Cymbril finds some relief from that epiphany.
That scene was borrowed from real life. I encountered a very fat, avocado-green worm on a hot day, on a dusty road near the music practice rooms at Niigata University. Probably a dozen or more students were practicing various instruments and singing in the cubicle-rooms indoors, and all their sound was pouring out of the windows, giving a soundtrack to the dry, wistful day, with the cloudless blue sky over the unoccupied sports fields at the hour of noon, as I looked toward the pine grove at the back edge of the campus, the tree trunks permanently bent by the ceaseless wind off the Sea of Japan.
It was chaotic music: pianos, strings, the voices of young girls like Cymbril singing scales, all the musicians doing something different, all doing it at once. A university is a launching-off place, the beginning of many roads. (On that very campus, Dragonfly had been born years earlier.) I stood there in a rising breeze from the future, having a little conversation with a green worm who crawled past my feet, on his way toward getting his wings.
Swordlily says: 
fsdthreshold 
jhagman 
Hagiograph 
Buurenaar