Terese Svoboda is one of my favorite writers, and her two new books are causes for celebration. Her novel Roxy and Coco marvelously brings mythological harpies into our everyday world. Her short fiction collection The Long Swim, awarded The Juniper Prize, is filled with poignant, dark stories that will also make you laugh.
“There are many mythic reimaginings out there, but I can guarantee you that Roxy and Coco is unlike anything you’ve read—Terese Svoboda’s harpies are winged avengers, a celestial task force who save kids who have been abused by their terrestrial protectors. Who but Svoboda with her talons descending from the clouds could wrest so much humor, poetry, and beauty from the abyss?”
Aimee Bender wrote of The Long Swim:
“These stories, so precise and joyful in language and movement, don’t hesitate to dive meaningfully into heaviness and honesty. What musical and beautifully-written pieces to read aloud and savor.”
I can’t write to music. Even instrumentals (Mahler!) sweep me away and I end up staring (even more) at my blinking cursor. Aside from Dies Irae from Catholic grade school, I know only a few songs by heart, mostly about Christmas. (Okay, maybe some of the Beatles’). “Silent Night” is a favorite, especially postpartum. I should’ve been reported to Child Protective Services because, in my exhaustion, I pounded the baby’s back very very slowly to my tuneless 3am singing, and so loudly even I couldn’t hear the crying. Believe me, the baby burped.
“Silent Night“ is what I titled one of the stories in my third collection, The Long Swim, which won this year’s Juniper Prize. Joseph Mohr wrote the lyrics and played the guitar with the choir director who composed the melody in 1818, then the song was taken up by itinerant folk singers and performed for the King of Prussia. By 1839, carolers sang it outside Trinity Church in NYC. Boyz II Men do it well at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK4hgTMZ9y8My. My “Silent Night” is not what happens after you toboggan down yucca-strewn gullies and beg Dad to throw the sled into the back of his 4-wheel drive, but about Dad who despairs when Mom walks out on him Christmas Eve.
In “Decorum Stinks” two sisters are summoned to the mortuary with Mom’s lipstick. I should’ve included the real life detail that the undertaker was playing “Smells like Teen Spirit” while he worked and whistled. Can you whistle along to grunge? But to mention the song was simply too weird for an already weird story, so it just skewed the title. There’s nothing like a dead body and a hot soundtrack to evoke complicated familial feelings. If you haven’t heard, this is Nirvana.
But I have back-to-back publications this year! My fifth novel, Roxy and Coco, is being published at just about the same time as The Long Swim. It’s about two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women— who attempt to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time. The book touches on the subject of extinction, human and avian, even though Roxy and Coco are near immortals.
Birdsong is the ur track for music. My half-human birds can’t resist breaking into song now and then, although they fear their singing will get them caught. Roxy sings because she’s sexually frustrated, which Coco says sounds awful, harpies having evolved so far into human that they almost can’t carry a tune. When Roxy disappears, Coco tweets a mutual signal of distress so far above human hearing that it can’t be heard, hoping that Roxy will respond. Later, after Coco is also caught and hit over the head, I’ve written a brief musical equivalent of a cartoon concussion by invoking Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux, a discordant piano solo inspired by the birds of each French province in 13 parts (Wallace Stevens!).
Harpy singing continues to be an inspiration, so much so that just the name of the creature is sometimes all that’s invoked. A particularly menacing Persian rapper, Sajad Shahi, titles his song “Harpy” but nothing visual in his video suggests the creature or even a woman – maybe the very tough-sounding Farsi lyrics? Likewise the English group Fair Brothers whose “Harpy” shows a hitchhiker murdering an elderly driver with a penknife. More illustrative is the Goth-pop singer Harpy who sings “Swallow,” a vengeful industrial metal/pop song “for those who suffer at the hands of another.” She’s wingless, raven-haired(!) wears opaque green contacts, elaborate eyeshadow, excellent long black fingernails, and is poured into black vinyl. For “Swallow” she’s posed with her tongue stuck out twice its natural length, and she whispers some of it.
Gamers have taken up harpies and their songs even more than musicians.The dreamy theme song for harpies in Baldur’s Gate 3 features vocalist Mariya Anastasova. The seductive quality of her performance is so high that more than one player out of the hundreds who have posted their appreciation wrote “It makes me want to volunteer to get slaughtered by a harpy.” It’s so popular there’s even a one hour version.
In the game Elden Ring there’s “Harpy’s Song,” in which an ancient very ugly harpy sings a beautiful song in Latin without instrumentation. D&D mashes harpy legend with the sirens’ to entrance players near watery depths with their songs, and then kill them at their leisure. These harpies can sing even while engaged in a melee. In defense, players should use “Calming Music for Birds”, a recording that sounds remarkably like the “Calming Music for Dogs,” not to mention Satie, calming music for humans. Satie: http://tinyurl.com/utejnyjh
Near the end of the novel, Coco sings a mourning song for Roxy. Humans have long witnessed the sadness of birds and their rituals. After all, we named doves after mourning. Crows gather around dead brethren, hunch their “shoulders,” and make a sad, intense cawing. When their behavior is studied, it’s called corvid thanatology. Finding out what birds are singing about – if only joy – should create more empathy for the birds and prevent their extinction. Listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears’ “Krakbegravningen (The Crow’s Funeral).”
While a third of North America’s bird population has vanished in the last fifty years, in Roxy and Coco the harpy as a species is surprisingly resilient. Optimism is key to human resilience. There is a way to save all species: allowing them to be free of human predation and habitat destruction. Easy-peasy.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Terese Svoboda’s playlist for her novel Pirate Talk or Mermalade