A sneak peek of our interview with Suzanne Simonetti Author of "The Sound Of Wings"

This is a small portion of our interview with Suzanne Simonetti the author of "The Sound of Wings". The full interview will be available on our new podcast The Wordy Traveler launching in mid-July. Suzanne's book is featured in our Summer Journey available now at www.thewordytraveler.com. We really appreciate Suzanne taking her time to speak with us.

Cindy- One of the things I really liked about it is it just seemed it hit the right note for this time because the book was uplifting and it was kind in a way, The characters were kind or finding kindness or they had kind hearts. But they were also coming out of some challenging times. And to me, they felt very alone and isolated, looking for that connection. To me that resonated with this past year, not only with Covid which caused many to experience different kinds of challenges, but also a kind of feeling of aloneness, that there's not really anyone out there that we can go to or who supports us. Suzanne, can you tell what inspired you to write this book?

Suzanne-I will go back to the beginning when I first purchased my home here in Cape May in 2,015, and my husband and I were walking the shoreline, and I had at the time in pitching another manuscript. But all the while The Sound of Wings was whispering to me, and I got an image of this very beautiful blonde, born and red local who was struggling to find herself. She was middle aged like I am, and married to a very supportive husband as I am. But there was something missing inside of her.

And I named her Crystal because she's beautiful at Crystal, and yet she didn't feel that way on the inside. And so I wanted to take her on a journey to self discovery, because I often find that no matter how many people in our lives tell us how great we are, whether it's our mother, our best friends or boyfriends or husbands, partners, whoever it is, we need to sort of reach that on our own. And Crystal eventually does in the story. She does, of course, have help along the way, because, of course, we're going to introduce friends.

And so that began the inspiration for The Sound of Wings.

Cindy- So you talk about the inspiration of The Sound of Wings. So was it that transformation that made you choose the title The Sound of Wings? I know you have a lot of butterfly analogies in the book as well, was that just an offshoot of Crystal's progression or how did that come about?

Suzanne- Well, Cindy, that's a fantastic question. And I'm so glad you asked me that the working title for this book was initially The Butterfly Garden, because as you know, The Butterfly Garden is almost another character in the story, isn't it? But what happened was there is a book out there on the market by Dot Hutchinson, who is doing very well. And my publisher said to me, You have to change the title. So I reached out to friends and fellow author Petty Davis, and I said I have to change the title.

And she said," Let me think about it. I'm actually pretty good at this". And the next morning she emailed me. Now, Patty had read the manuscript. He had given me a blurb. So she was familiar with the plot and the characters. And as soon as she said The Sound of Wings just knew that that was the one. And I'll talk a little bit about it, because when you see the cover of the book, you can see that the monarch is clearly represented there. So surely wings can represent butterfly wings.But it doesn't stop there because in the story, Goldie, one of our principal characters acts as a bit of an Angel, a silent Angel. So I love the fact that the wings can also refer to Angel wings.

Cindy-You have three main characters Crystal will call her the newly wed, gaining her confidence and really kind of finding herself for the first time. Then you have Goldie, the artist, haunted by her past. Lastly, you have Jocelyn, who's a writer. You show these three different women but in a way they really all have very similar backgrounds when it comes to relationships with women. I think we can all relate with that. Sometimes we've been burnt in the past by women, and it's not that easy to kind of open up again because of high school or college or really even 30’s or 40’s. You're showing these relationships and some of them have helped them and there's also some hurtful ones. What drove to explore these relationships and in the context of these three different women's life experiences?

Suzanne- And I love how you pointed that out, because that was important to me, Cindy. I wanted to make the women different ages from different walks of life, facing various like circumstances, because I wanted to show that we can bridge connections that I didn't want them to all be the same or from the same school, if you will. One of the key themes in the book is this bit of silencing old ghosts. So they all have things that are haunting them. Goldie does from the voice of her long dead husband, and then Crystal, from the mean girl culture.

Then Jocelyn, of course, is our writer who is struggling because now she thinks she's going to be facing a custody battle, and she has this agent breathing down her neck because she has a deadline. But I wanted to make sure that the women were markedly different from one another because they do find their way to each other is different as they are. And they make these startling connections and bond, these wonderful bond.

To learn more about Suzanne and her book "The Sound of Wings" please follow our podcast The Wordy Traveler launching in mid-July. "The Sound of Wings" is also available in our current journey at www.thewordytraveler.com