The Winter Sister(104)
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Find an anthology of Greek myths and as a group, acquaint yourselves with the story of Persephone, Hades, and Demeter. Discuss the connections between this myth and The Winter Sister. Make sure to bring some traditional Greek food—stuffed grape leaves, spanakopita, and baklava—to share with your fellow book club members!
2. Sylvie painted unique tattoos onto Persephone’s body to hide her bruises and continued to tattoo as an adult. Now it’s your turn! Put all of the book club members’ names into a hat and take turns picking. Then, draw a unique “tattoo” for the book club member you selected. Share your drawings with the group and discuss your design. Why did you choose this particular “tattoo” for the book club member you selected? Does it say something about their personality? Is it something significant or meaningful to them, or something completely random? Discuss the stories tattoos can tell and consider the role that a tattoo artist plays in helping someone to visibly share their story with the world.
3. Annie reads Emily Bront?’s Wuthering Heights throughout the course of the novel, but at The Winter Sister’s end, she declares that she never wants to read the story ever again. Sylvie tries to recall the plot: “Two lovers, from vastly different circumstances, spend much of their lives with other people, their obsessive love for each other still raging around inside them, turning one ill, the other withered and bitter” (pp. 322–323). Read Wuthering Heights for your next book club pick and compare and contrast Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship with Annie and Will’s. How are they similar? Different? Discuss other famous “doomed relationships” in literary works—Romeo and Juliet from Romeo and Juliet, Gatsby and Daisy from The Great Gatsby, Vronsky and Anna from Anna Karenina. Why do you think stories of doomed romances continue to draw readers? Do you think they can affect perceptions of what romance in real life should look like?
4. Sylvie has been involved with art for her entire adult life, starting at the age of four when she painted a “constellation” of Persephone on her mother’s living room wall. Look at works of famous artists who also started painting as children—Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Michelangelo are all good examples. Compare how their works evolved from childhood to adulthood. Is there anything similar between their early and late works? How do you think getting involved in art from an early age affects adult life? Is it ever too late to start a creative path? In honor of Sylvie and getting in touch with your inner child (and creative artist!), attend a local wine and paint night as a group. The person with the best painting gets to choose next month’s book!
5. Stay updated on Megan Collins’s latest projects! Follow Megan on her website, https://megancollins.com, to read some of her other published works and to hear about what she’s working on next.
A Conversation with Megan Collins
This is your debut novel—congratulations! What was the journey to getting your first novel published like? What was the most challenging part of the process? The most rewarding?
It’s surely a cliché, but my journey has been one long, emotional, exhilarating roller coaster, with more highs and lows than I ever expected. The Winter Sister is my first published novel, but it’s actually the third that I’ve written. While I did not receive a book deal on either of my two other novels, I learned so much from each one about pacing, character development, voice, etc. It was extremely difficult having to move on from those projects and accept that it wasn’t the right time for either of them, but now that I do have a debut novel, it’s been incredible to start hearing from people who connect with my characters and the story I created. Something that was once just words on a computer screen is now a tangible story that readers can hold in their hands and see play out in their minds—and that is an incredible gift for which I’m grateful every day.
You’ve written short stories, reviews, and poems before; in fact, one of your poems, “Ars Poetica” (published in the New Verse News in 2016), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize! How is writing poetry different from writing a novel? When you started writing The Winter Sister, did you have to change your creative process?
While poetry requires an attention to rhythm and form in a way that fiction usually doesn’t, I think the two processes are more linked than a lot of people realize. No matter what your poem is about, your job as the poet is to tell a story, and that demands an understanding of voice and pacing. Similarly, a book could have the most compelling premise in the world, but if the sentences don’t sing, if the phrasing doesn’t feel well-chosen and precise, then a reader might not be entranced enough to continue. To me, poetry and fiction are both about casting spells with language in order to tell a powerful and memorable story. In writing The Winter Sister, I paid attention to how the cadence of my sentences could highlight and heighten the characters’ emotions—and my inclination to do so came entirely from my training in poetry.
The Winter Sister starts with a terrible crime—the murder of a teenage girl. Did any real-life cases inspire your work? If so, what kind of research did you do in order to bring Persephone’s story to life on the page? And if not, what first gave you the idea for The Winter Sister?
Persephone’s story isn’t inspired by a particular case in real life, but I am fairly obsessed with true crime (shout-out to the My Favorite Murder podcast!). Where Persephone’s story really originated for me was in thinking about the Greek myth of Persephone, in which Demeter, Persephone’s mother, becomes so consumed by grief when Persephone goes missing that she neglects her job of making crops grow on earth. I wondered what would have happened if Persephone had had a sister, left to navigate the rest of her childhood in the wake of her mother’s neglect, as well as her own grief over her sister’s absence.