The Ties That Bind

This wonderful, fascinating Blog Post has been written for us, for you, by author Jen Calonita whose new series, Isle of Ever, published in August with DK flip, following that first title Jen takes time here to explain to us more about the inspiration behind her writing and the ties of names. It's inspiring, I hope you enjoy reading it and hunt out the book too!

Naming characters is something I take very seriously.

Over the years, I’ve used countless family and friends’ names in my books. In the Fairy Tale Reform School series, Gilly's part-fairy grandmother's name is Pearl, which was my grandmother Kathleen's nickname. My niece Emma has a brief character appearance in 12 to 22 and her sister Brooke is referenced in my upcoming book, The Taylors. My friend Elpida’s daughter Zoe was the inspiration for the protagonist’s name in The Retake. And my friend Joanie has five children, all of whom have been character names in my books over the years.

But it’s my new middle grade series, Isle of Ever, that has me setting a personal family name record. That’s because the series, which is about a mysterious island that only appears every two hundred years, and a cursed pirate treasure, was inspired by my maternal and paternal grandmothers’ love of family history.

When I was a child, my grandparents built a home on the north fork of Long Island in a town called Mattituck. The house was two blocks from the Long Island Sound and located near a stretch of land that hadn't been developed. I spent a great deal of time out there in the summer, and my grandmother, Kathleen Calonita, was always up for an adventure. Since I was a reader, she liked to take me to a tiny bookshop near town often, buying me books that I picked out and ones I didn't. I can recall vividly her taking eight-year-old me to a book signing with a local author who'd written about the history of Long Island once and I complained about being bored. My grandmother, however, was undeterred. "Knowing where you come from is important," she'd remind me.

Raised by her mother and her stepfather, my grandmother spent her younger years on film sets. Her stepfather was an assistant director on films with Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe and she used to regale me with stories about being on set. (I didn’t understand how unique this was till I was much older.) A storyteller, my grandmother loved to take me to local cemeteries on the east end of Long Island to talk about who these local families once were and what their lives might have been like. When we went to the beach together, she encouraged me to dig for buried treasure, reminding me how Captain Kidd once sailed those waters and buried treasure, some of which, she was convinced, had yet to be found. “Where could it be?” she’d goad me. That’s what I wanted to find out. At night, I'd lie awake in my room, sweating under the ceiling fan, and wonder: If there was treasure buried on the beach, why had no one found it? Where could the treasure be hidden? Could it be on a magical island that no one else could see? I wondered…

While the house in Mattituck was my paternal grandparents home, they loved company and often invited my maternal grandmother, Evelyn Horn, to visit. This excited my grandmother Evelyn very much. A history buff, she too, would pack my sister and I in the car and drive us around, pointing out names on signs, and talking about how her ancestors--families like the Terrys, the Rudds, and the Hortons -- were some of the first to populate the east end of Long Island. My grandmother Evelyn prided herself on her family tree, which she liked to mention at every turn involved a Revolutionary War major-general named Nathanael Greene (the fact that he's mentioned in a Hamilton number would delight my grandmother to no end).

My grandmothers loved to connect the past with our present and the older I get, the more grateful I am that they shared our history with me. Isle of Ever may be something of a fantastical take on my family history, but by peppering in the names of my past (including a storyline involving a whole line of 'Evelyn's', that made my own mother teary when she read an early draft), coupled with the stories my grandparents told me as a child, I find myself feeling closer to my family than ever. My grandparents may be long gone, but with Isle of Ever, I can’t help but feeling this new story is as much theirs as it is mine.