Birthing Freya: Art & the Divine as Writing Process

by Meg Richman

One of my earliest memories is being cast as a fairy by the neighborhood big kids for a backyard play. I got to wear a tutu and carry a wand made of a weed whose seeds glimmered at the top of its stem. I was in heaven.

I have always been a beauty stan, and have always had a mystical belief that image, song, sweet animal, the sky, a lyrical string of words, a string of pearls, the composition and colors of a painting, the smell of a lilac, the taste of dinner—all these are licks of the Divine flame. If I have a mission in writing and sharing Freya the Deer, it is to spread that fire.

I majored in painting in college, probably to escape the horrors of young adulthood by immersing myself in art. Mind you, to me beauty is not necessarily pretty. Once I had a show of my paintings at a bank, and the tellers insisted they be taken down; they were too dark and grim. Beauty can be filled with grief. It need not ignore the pain of the Universe. It is definitely present in Freya the Deer.

In grad school my interest shifted to film. I wanted to make movies so I could combine words and imagery. Eventually, after years of reading scripts and writing them (etching Aristotelian narrative rules into my unconscious), I got to direct Under Heaven from a script I wrote. After that, circumstances conspired against my Hollywood career, and I left for home in Seattle. I taught literature and composition in an inner-city high school. I raised a child. And I started to write fiction. Here I could combine the music of language with story and pictures, all created out of words, and I didn’t need a film crew to produce them.

Coming up with the idea for a screenplay or narrative has always been the hardest part of writing for me. I am not bursting with great plots. I eke them out of memories and current concerns and I don’t really know what. The idea for Freya the Deer came from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot whose main character is as bewildered by the state of things as I am. I started the book in the middle of the Covid pandemic and the upheaval after George Floyd’s murder, and so I was writing what I knew. I let Freya grapple with some of my own existential and spiritual questions: What is the soul? What is actually moral in the face of oppression? However, because she isn’t me (she took on her own character organically) she didn’t necessarily come to the same conclusions or behave as I would. 

I am only really happy writing when I feel an inspirational flow, coming from some sort of muse. When the plot twists and turns in ways I might not have expected, following the logic of the characters and situation that I’ve set up: that’s when it’s fun for me, and when I actually believe in it. Some people are surprised by the climax and ending of Freya the Deer, and all I can say is, don’t blame me. I didn’t think it up, I just wrote it down.

FREYA THE DEER

Raised by absent-minded professors in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Freya is a young neurodivergent woman occupied since childhood by a series of obsessions. She is artistic, vegan, unsocial, and utterly honest. She attends college in the Pacific Northwest, planning to create her own major so she can explore exactly what the soul is. There she falls in love with handsome Caleb, who becomes her new obsession. When Caleb becomes increasingly radicalized after the hideous murder of George Floyd, she must choose between her intense loyalty to him and her moral doubts about violent protest.

From screenwriter Meg Richman comes a quirky, lyrical debut coming-of-age tale about a complex character curious about the numinous yet tied to a physical world that’s steeped in political upheaval.

BUY HERE

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A native of Seattle, Meg Richman studied painting in college but transitioned to film in graduate school. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for ten years where she wrote the original treatment for Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride, a draft of Up at the Villa for Sydney Pollack’s company, and the pilot for Aaron Spelling’s series Malibu Shores. The film she wrote and directed, Under Heaven, was a jury selection at the Sundance Film Festival and a nominee for an Independent Spirit Award for Joely Richardson’s performance. 

She currently writes fiction and has stories published in Louisiana Literature, Isele Magazine, and Judith Magazine. Freya the Deer is her debut novel. 

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing