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Where did the story come from for you? Did any of your life experiences inspire you, or find their way into the novel?
I had a wonder-filled childhood, thanks to my parents, who are avid mechanical music collectors. The sounds of the past suffused our house — cylinder boxes, juke boxes, street organs, and Reuge birdcages. Fifteen years ago, when I set out to write a contemporary novel about saving and restoring the past, I became enamored with an object we didn't have at home: the serinette. Serinettes are high-pitched barrel organs that were used to train canaries to sing popular songs. I began researching who made these unusual instruments — and why anyone would want to train canaries. I soon found myself writing a historical fantasy, braiding my research about serinettes and bobbin lace into a story about the maker economy in one nineteenth-century village. Themes of parenting, gender, and childhood magic are inspired by having two children during the years I worked on this manuscript.

You're the publisher of Portland's Forest Avenue Press. How has being a publisher informed your process of writing and editing Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary?
I wrote my first two novels while guessing what publishers wanted instead of prioritizing my voice. (See the canary connection?) Through founding Forest Avenue, and then sharpening our focus to “literary fiction on a joyride,” I got clearer on the kind of stories that matter to me as a reader. I did take many long pauses in the writing process, often because of family needs and wanting to give my authors all the love I could — and occasionally because I had gotten exhausted wrangling this story that didn’t fit in neat boxes. Working with Forest Avenue authors, especially in the developmental editing phases, always re-energized me and brought me back to my pages.

Some early drafts drifted the wrong direction because of feedback I received when querying agents. I took every piece of advice, priding myself on taking direction, without considering what I wanted to say. By the time I connected with my agent, Laurie Fox, I had grown into myself as a mother, as a book publisher, and as an author. Laurie helped me untangle those years of wrong turns while keeping the layered, music-like texture of the prose. You can hear me finding myself in these pages, I think.

Did you model characters after particular people?
Not intentionally, but they all have pieces of me in them and sweet little hat-tips to loved ones. Cérine grew into being when my mother-in-law started confiding in me more. I had thought of her as a traditional housewife, but having tea in her kitchen with my little ones playing in the living room, I got to know her humor and strength and how she ran her household.

Stories about my dad's childhood influenced my protagonist Henri — a curious, not-like-his-classmates boy who is born into a family business. Those heavy expectations were very much on my dad's shoulders, and once he got out from under them, he really bloomed into himself, and I was old enough by then to witness how he adjusted his daily life around what he loved, with my mom and me at the center of his circle.

Odil, the one boy invited into The Shadow Council of Apprentice Lacemakers, is a version of me that few people see — socially awkward and unable to perform the role of normal that the community expects of him.

At one point you were a reporter; you still write essays; what is different in writing fiction and what drives you to write fiction?
As a journalist, the rules and boundaries are clear. During those reporting years, I fixated on ethics and I didn't have to invent topics — I just had to show up, observe, ask, and think. Articles came together on tight deadlines because of what a community prioritized or who called the paper to report a tip.

I've been a fiction writer since my grade-school days, luxuriating in imaginative storytelling and playing with sentences. But I didn't know the why behind my work until I started writing essays and letting some of my personal stories bubble out in 2019. With fiction, though, I can achieve a level of playfulness and inventiveness that matches what's in my heart. Real life isn't always so elastic or whimsical. I think growing up surrounded by beautiful instruments and being raised by passionate hobbyists helped me develop a deep well of joy, and making stories up lets me tap into that.
How has your book changed from your initial vision of it?
My initial story-map of this manuscript would have taken three novels to complete. I wrote large chunks of those other stories, hundreds of pages of exploration, only to cut them. I wanted this novel to feel grand and sweeping — part fairy tale, part historical — to match the sound nineteenth-century storytelling while still feeling modern. How to evoke that kind of aesthetic in a reasonable number of pages took forever to figure out.

How much research did you do for your setting and era, etc.?
I did a lot of reading while writing Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary and ended up not using a lot of my specialized, deep-dive research. But I think even the history I didn't include definitely influenced the sound of the work. There wasn't much available on serinette-making, even in my parents' extensive mechanical music library, so I wrote a fairy-tale like prologue about their invention. A few years into working on this manuscript, I met a woman whose ancestors were from the region in France where serinettes were built. She took issue with the beauty and joy in my description of this work in progress — joining my conversation without invitation. I cried when I got home that night, because how could I write about canary training without some measure of chirpy glee? After much consideration, I changed the name of the town and added a layer of magic to give myself permission to mix modern sensibilities into the story and to have fun with the prose. That's when the women in the novel really came alive, conspiring behind the backs of the men, while pretending to follow the village's social customs. But I also knew to include that this was a hard life, a life where what you make feeds your family. Terrible accidents happened. People had very little leisure time. Making beautiful objects was difficult, specialized work. It didn't necessarily translate into having a beautiful life, especially when those objects were made to be exported to wealthier communities.

You're a publisher and you're involved in the writing and publishing community. You also have a family with children. What is your writing space like? Do you have distractions? Do you have to set aside private time for writing?
I work wherever I can — the kitchen table, my art desk, the living room couch, a hammock in the back yard. Everywhere except my desk in the basement, which is my Forest Avenue work station. Pre-pandemic, I waited for my family to be out of the house before digging into a creative writing project, but then in March 2020, school moved online for the foreseeable future. My husband and children were home all the time. I didn't have the luxury of quiet. I could either quit writing or adapt to writing within chaos. So I adapted. In addition to revising Singing Lessons during the pandemic, I finished a complete draft of a novel I started at a residency in 2018, hired an editor, and then revised — all while my kids interrupted me with school updates and questions and arguments. Any preciousness I felt about my writing time evaporated. And I kept doing the work anyway. It kept me moving forward when the world felt scary and out of control.

Your use of French words in the text feels effortless and your language overall is so effervescent. Did the voice just trip off your writer tongue like it does on the page, or was there much effort that went into it?
I used to joke that I spent a year writing chapter three of this novel, but as members of my writing group can attest, I actually did that. Of course that material turned into multiple chapters eventually. But I used that slice of plot to figure out how to write this novel. I wanted it to sound historical, but not plodding or inaccessible. I wanted to sprinkle some French words in to get that sound on the page without having to stop and define words—and without coming across as pretentious or overstepping my boundaries as a US-born author. And I wanted some whimsy to shine through. Chapter three was like a cake I baked from scratch, and so many early attempts didn't rise properly. Thanks to writing group feedback — and patience! — I found my stride and from there the language poured out.

How did the magical elements in Singing Lessons come about? Were they in your head all along or did they arrive after the human story came to be? These elements advance your narrative in very different ways than magic usually does in other books. How did you decide to use magic in such a different and complex way?
The absurdly sunny weather showed up as a way to differentiate Mireville, my fictional village, from the real village of Mirecourt. But the other bits and pieces of magic came together because I wanted to replicate childhood wonder. I used to spot fantastical happenings everywhere in my youth — shadows that looked like animals, the ghost-like waves emitted by my town's historic gas lamps, how sometimes I thought of a song and it'd start playing on the radio. As our lives get fuller, as busy seems to be synonymous with good in our adult lives, we often stop noticing those sparks of everyday magic. All this to say, the human story came first; the magic sneaked in as a way to look at self-belief versus what your community thinks of you. Which one is more powerful? Which vision matters more? I think for Henri, by the start of the final section of the novel, the village's view of him has taken precedence over his self-belief, and then he has to figure out what's next. What can he do? Where can he go with this information, now that he's no longer harnessed to the cylinder of industry? Now that he's free to be himself?
Did the story/plot elements come first when you started creating Singing Lessons? Or did it all begin with voice? With time/setting? With the notion of a serinette?
The manuscript came together like the lacemakers work in the novel: piecemeal. The serinette inspired my decision to write about the past and a community of makers. The recurring themes of gender expression and societal expectation — not to mention all the babies! — grew out of my motherhood journey. The voice — well, it's hard to look back and not credit all that work on chapter three and my very patient writer-friends who helped me figure out how I wanted to have this story sound. The historical time period gave me something to push against with modern sensibilities — the strictness of roles, especially.

You've written about being neuroatypical. What effect might that have had on your creation of this book and of its characters?
In my unpublished, given-up-on novels, my characters were called not normal enough or too immature. That really hurt. Such criticism made me wonder how different my views on life are from everyone else's — what was I missing? Didn't other people feel like me? What was normal anyway? Over the years of writing Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, I came to terms with my neurodivergence and began appreciating my brain for its amazingness instead of wanting it to be more like other people's. Henri isn't diagnosed as neuroatypical, as they wouldn't have had that language back then, but his way of viewing the world is his, alone. And his self-belief is specific to his lived experience as an outsider. This novel, as with everything I write, is a celebration of brains that are different. Change happens when people think beyond of traditions and societal expectations, and that's exciting to me.
Once upon a time, Laura Stanfill lived in a New Jersey house filled with music boxes, street organs, and books. She grew up to become the publisher of Forest Avenue Press. Her work has appeared in Shondaland, The Rumpus, The Vincent Brothers Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, and several print anthologies. She believes in indie bookstores and wishes on them like stars from her home in Portland, Oregon, where she resides with her family and a dog named Waffles. Learn more at laurastanfill.com.