I Found My Muse in a Video: Here Are Four Things She Taught Me About Inspiration

One night during the early days of research for my novel, That You Remember, I stumbled upon a documentary video on YouTube. It was a raw, emotional chronicle of the aftermath of the Buffalo Creek disaster of 1972 in which three coal waste impoundments failed. Four thousand people lost their homes and 125 people lost their lives.

A young woman — a survivor — was interviewed. After sharing her experience, she read a poem – her poem. With the haunting lines of her poetry describing her tormented memories, this woman crawled inside my head. Particularly the refrain, I can’t remember, I can’t remember, and then I can’t forget.

“Remembering—that’s the sanity,” she said. This phrase resonated so deeply within me that it became my mission for the next ten years of writing my novel. The young woman from the video, the survivor, the poet, had unknowingly become my muse.

She had to be about my age, this young woman reading her poem, this survivor of the preventable catastrophe that didn’t take healthy miners, as you’d expect in mining disasters. The deaths were mostly women and children. I could see myself in her. But could I have done what she did? Write a poem and read it in front of a camera about pulling dead people, people she knew personally from her community, out of the mud? Could I have had the strength to synthesize that horror into a lesson? I’m not sure. That’s why I felt so deeply that I wanted to pick up what she’d started. She lived inside me. She was my Sara, my lead protagonist.

This unexpected encounter and the impact it had on my work taught me four vital lessons.

Inspiration Comes in Unexpected Places.

You never know when and where inspiration will strike. It was in the resilience of this young woman, her painful experience and her courage, that I found a purpose. Her call to remember became my mission.

Your muse might be a neighbor, a first employer, a summer camp counselor, or the love that got away. Or perhaps a person you’ve never met. A muse may live inside you as fresh as when you first encountered them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.” My eyes had fallen on that video, on that young woman, on her poem. I was moved, haunted, inspired. For me it was a moment, I saw something that others might not have seen and I wanted to tell them.

Your Muse Will Guide Your Narrative

This woman became my Sara. Thanks to her I knew my heroine was real and I knew what she would say at the end of the novel. “Don’t forget this.” Your muse may speak to you in other ways. But you have to listen.

Think of the inspiration your muse triggers as a starting point for the work that lies ahead.

Over that decade of writing, I was unable to find the interview where she said that sanity is remembering.  And I’d forgotten the exact name of the video, and didn’t know her name, so it was hard to search for it. But this was good. I had to go with what was in my head, who she was to me and what those words meant to me when I’d first heard them.

I did lots of on-the-ground research in Appalachia, and spoke with many people about their views. Many people shared her views that the story of the Buffalo Creek disaster, which took the lives of innocent people on a Saturday morning while making breakfast, needs to be told. But her words almost held a threat. If remembering is sanity, forgetting is insanity. This drove me to continue doing the day to day work of researching, writing, revising and editing over the years.

I chose to see the fact that I couldn’t find the video not as a hindrance, but as a call to action to keep up with that work.  What seemed initially like a loss became a reminder that in the end, the job of writing the story was mine to do.

Your muse can help you to overcome doubts

It takes courage to write. Questions can swirl around the writer’s head. What to write? What will sell? What’s popular now?

For me those questions didn’t enter my brain. I had this young survivor, I remembered her words, and I did have the poem that she wrote. She was always there, the compass I followed, throughout my writing, throughout the zillions of revisions.

I believe that if you let her, your muse will do the same for you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isabel Reddy began her career in clinical research as a science writer. She has been a guest columnist for several newspapers, and is currently working on her MFA in Writing at Goddard College. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and German shepherd, Mac. THAT YOU REMEMBER is her first novel.

THAT YOU REMEMBER

In 2019, Aleena Rowan, adrift in the wake of a failed marriage, receives a box of her father’s desk diaries from the years he worked as a coal executive. She expects to find nothing more than the cost of business lunches and meeting notes. Instead, she finds a mysterious name, Sara, scrawled on a slip of paper in her father’s handwriting.

Frank Rowan meets Sara Stone while fishing on a frigid January day, and sees her again waiting tables at Otter Creek’s only restaurant. It is 1970, and Frank and Sara’s relationship grows despite the impossible distance between a New York corner office and a Kentucky coal hollow. Initially, Sara sees Frank as her ticket to a better life, but other forces compete with her dreams – like protecting her town from the increasingly perilous coal slurry dam.

In her debut novel, told from both sides of the coal industry, Isabel Reddy brings to life the conflicts and undercurrents of an Appalachian mining town on the eve of disaster.

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