What inspired you to write Singing Bones and explore life during the Neolithic era?
Singing Bones is a prequel to my first published novel, The Téuta’s Child. Several people who read that first book wanted to hear more about the characters they met there—and when I thought about it, I was curious about them too. I decided to write about their early lives, about the childhood and younger adult experiences of characters who were old when we first saw them. And since Téuta’s Child was set in the Neolithic, Singing Bones had to be set there too.
Why was Téuta’s Child set in the Neolithic?
The time of the 8.2k climate crisis was perfect for the story I ended up telling, but the truth is that I don’t really know how to answer that. I rambled into the Neolithic without a plan. Years ago I stumbled groggy down the stairs one morning, sat on the couch with my laptop, and wrote a scene, probably from a dream although I don’t generally remember my dreams. In the scene there was a young girl, a child really, walking alone up a forested hill on a barely visible path, and at the top of the hill was an old, old man, kind but puzzled. He was concerned that a strange child would be wandering alone in the forest. Neither could see the other, and they seemed not to know each other, but the child knew she was climbing the hill to meet the man at the top, and the man at the top was watching her without being able to see her. How? That was part of the mystery. But the real mysteries were: what were they doing there? Why were either of them there, so isolated, so far from anyone else? Why was the girl looking for this specific old man, and what would happen after they met? After a few moments of writing it was clear that this scene was ancient—very ancient. After more minutes, I knew it was neolithic. Those who have read The Téuta’s Child may recognize the scene, since it is a major event that appears in the middle of that book.
But at the time I knew very little about the Neolithic. I’m not an archaeologist. I’d read a few things here and there, I was distantly aware of Gobekli Tepe and Catal Hoyuk, two archeological digs in Turkey that have shown up in general interest stories. I was always curious about the beauty of cave paintings. I’d watched an occasional TV show about archaeological topics—Josh Gates, Time Team—but I was familiar with these things in a small way, just from curiosity about the world, not from any special interest in that time period. But once that scene began to expand into a book, I had to get serious about exploring where humanity was and how we lived that long ago.
The novel is set during a dramatic climate collapse—what drew you to this period of environmental upheaval?
As I explored the Neolithic, trying to learn enough to provide some realism to the settings in the book and the actions of the people, I happened to run across something that mentioned the 8.2k event. Once I knew what it was, and when, I knew I had to use it for the setting of my story. It seemed perfect. It was dramatic, long lasting, in places truly disastrous in scope—for example, it finally drowned a huge area that we now call Doggerland, which at the time was dry land and well occupied, but which, as a result of that event, is now under the English Channel and much of the North Sea. The people alive then had no way of knowing what was happening to them. They could not know what caused the floods and the long global cooling. And, of course, it’s reasonable to guess that it created enduring stress and tension in their lives. I began to wonder what they would have thought about it, and how they would have responded to it. And, in my exploration of the Neolithic I read a good deal about Catal Hoyuk, which was a neolithic town with a population of between 3,000 and 8,000—enormous for the time—that had been thriving where it was for a thousand year, but which was abandoned at about this same time, at about the lowest point of the 8.2 global cooling. It’s possible that the climate change contributed to the end of Catal Hoyuk.
And of course I was writing a novel, where stress and tension can be useful, the more the better. What better time could there be for a Neolithic story?
Eini is a compelling central figure, especially with her visions of disaster—how did you develop her character and role within the story?
Eini arrived late in the long process of writing the book. This was always meant to be a prequel to The Téuta’s Child, because several people who read that book wanted to know more about the characters in that story, particularly Prsedi and Welo. So I meant to explore the early lives of several of them. Those two were old in Téuta’s Child, so I wanted to see them as children, and as young adults. But from the very start of writing Singing Bones I knew something was missing; this book did have what I thought was a great setting, and the Téuta village had a dramatic story. The village itself seemed to be the protagonist, though, since the book is about the troubles the village had, and about what had to happen to save them. But treating the village as a character simply wasn’t working. I had to have a real human character that carried the troubles with her, and who found the way out. I created Eini to do that, to play that role. In a way she is an avatar for the whole village, for its experience through the years from the beginning of the climate event until it became a real crisis for the Téuta people. And once Eini came to help me write the book, the story began to really take shape for me.
The story spans generations and focuses strongly on women’s voices—what made you choose this multi-generational, female-centered narrative?
The first part of that question is easy: it’s multi-generational because the slowly unfolding climate change took time. Lots of it, at least compared to an average Neolithic lifespan.
A village survives long periods by producing new generations again and again, and that was true here too. But also, two of the characters from The Téuta’s Child whose early lives I wanted to tell were of very different ages: Welo was more than twenty years older than Prsedi. That made it natural to tell Welo’s story, and then later tell Prsedi’s.
The other part of the question is a bit murkier to me. Why are so many of my strong characters women? I have wondered that myself. It’s not something that I planned when I sat down to write. But it’s certainly true that the women are strong, that they have to be strong, both in Singing Bones and also in The Téuta’s Child. There are strong male characters too, but the women seem to have taken possession of center stage. Few people anywhere have the sheer grit that Kaikos had to have in The Téuta’s Child—and she was a 12 year old girl. In Singing Bones, not only Eini but Akesh and Prsedi, all women, had to give the village the strength and hope it needed to survive. So I have to admit that strong women seem to be a founding notion in these books. And that must come from some inner place, right? When you write something as big as a novel you are exposing your inner life, whether you mean to or not. You can’t really write something that is not inside you. So (unexpectedly!) somewhere in my inner brain I must think of women, or some women, as heroes.
Community and connection to the land are central to the Téuta people—what did you want to explore about humanity’s relationship with nature?
I should probably leave at least part of that question to readers to answer. I’ll make a few observations, though.
Early farmers and pastoralists, and wandering hunter-gatherers too, did live very close to nature, close to the land and all the other inhabitants of the land. The relationship of the people to nature was compelled by setting them in such an ancient time. There were none of the modern conveniences to distract them from the natural world. When they travelled, they walked: horses were not domesticated for thousands of years after the time of these stories.
In spite of the differences in technologies, and the differences in their proximity to nature, I did want to show these people as actual people, not strange or mysterious ancients but people just like us. Just as smart as us—and just as dumb as us. Their close relationship with nature was a requirement of the time, but I didn’t want to neglect their relationships with each other, and with their society. They had all the human emotions and human entanglements that we have. Parents and children and siblings, people they liked and people they didn’t. Friends and lovers, fights and parties. They were generous and selfish, magnanimous and petty. They told stories, to remember the past, and to instruct their younger members, and also for amusement. Humans are social animals. I wanted my characters to show that.
The novel blends archaeological realism with spiritual and mystical elements—how did you balance research with imagination?
The archaeological realism was simply a discipline I imposed on myself: to learn something about this setting before I wrote characters walking around in it. As I point out in the author’s notes at the end of Singing Bones, I am not an archaeologist. But now I have a bookshelf that is bending under the weight of books about this time period, or at least have some section devoted to how neolithic people lived or thought. Of course, one of the things I needed to look at was their beliefs, their gods. In the end I used a few of the gods from the Proto-Indo-Europeans for the gods believed in by the Téuta village. To write about that I had to ask myself what it would be like to believe in those gods, to believe deeply in a god that brings storms, a goddess of dawn that brings each new day, a goddess that gives us the ground from which our grain grows. Reverence might not be a good word for how they felt about them. They would have been simply other parts of a natural world. But there would have been respect for them, certainly, and fear, and hope. Gods are powerful. It’s worth some effort to keep them on your side.
But you may also be asking about the special senses that I gave to Eini and to Welo—to Eini the unwelcome gift of seeing the future, and to Welo a gift of sensing things at a distance without seeing them. This last gift was implied by that first scene from The Téuta’s Child that I wrote while I was groggy from sleep: two people, a child and a very old man, who were hidden from each other’s sight but still could ‘watch’ each other. That sense became important to the characters in that first book. But I didn’t think of it as necessarily mystical or supernatural: it might be entirely natural, simply a sense of something in the world that most of us don’t need to sense. And I think many people, maybe most of us, have had an experience, or know someone who has had an experience, where they are aware of something they can’t sense with their usual senses. They might have a sudden awareness that there is danger around a corner, or know who is on the other side of a closed door, or what is in a package that arrives unexpectedly, or something like that. Maybe when that happens it really is something magic, or mystical. Or maybe it’s just a real-world sense that is so weak that we barely notice it. And maybe there are—or were—people for whom those senses are stronger.
Still, even if these are natural senses, remember the wisdom of Terry Pratchett: it doesn’t stop being magic just because you know how it works.
Much of the tension comes from change and displacement—what themes of survival and identity were most important for you to convey?
I don’t think in terms of themes while I’m writing. I mean, I don’t write to expose some universal truth. How would I know a supposedly universal truth that isn’t already known by all the people who read the book? So when people ask what the theme of my book is I’m perplexed about how to answer. Like plot I can’t deny that it’s there, and I must have felt it as I wrote, but I didn’t think about it, or even know what it was, while I was writing. Anyone who has read the book can answer that question as well as I can. Probably better than I can. The readers can often see things in a book that the writer doesn’t. Your description of the themes seems to me to be pretty good: what helps us in our struggles for survival and identity? Determination, and a belief that there is a future worth having, maybe. Eini would be perfect to offer that. What would help a village survive? Maybe identity is part of that. A belief within a group that being who you are matters, to you and maybe also to the world. That was what Prsedi had to show to the Téuta people at the end of Singing Bones: even if it has to change, we can’t let the Téuta die. To all the people around us the Téuta was always stability in an uncertain world. It matters to everyone that it survives, and only we can save it. She had to make them strong, and she had to do that when they were badly hurt, when they felt bereft and powerless, when they saw, in every direction, compelling evidence that they were not strong.
The story feels both epic and intimate at the same time—how did you approach structuring a narrative that works on both levels?
By feeling what was intimate and just recognizing what was epic, I think.
Robert Frost once said “no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”. What he meant was that writers have to feel the emotions they want their readers, and their characters, to feel. If they try to fake those emotions, the writing will sound fake, and readers will see it as fake. If you think readers should cry when they read a scene in your book, you need to be struggling to see the keyboard through your sobbing when you write it. So I try to put myself in the place of my characters, to be them in my mind or heart. What do they feel? I need to feel that.
The epic scope of the story, I think, was just a natural result of the times and the setting. The story does run through generations, and the climate event that these people were living through took a long time. The central part of the 8.2k event took 140 years, 70 years of cooling followed by 70 years of warming back up. I didn’t have to try to make these events epic: they just truly were epic in scale.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing a story set so far back in human history?
Just completing a novel is already an enormous challenge. That really was the challenge that I felt while writing: to keep going, every day.
Learning (and sometimes inventing) the setting was challenging, but it was not hard. Trying to understand the people and the time was absorbing, and interesting. I enjoyed doing that.
I thought, when I started, that the hardest thing would be imagining an alien mind, the mind of a person in a culture very, very different from the one I live in. In one of the books I read, Inside the Neolithic Mind by David Lewis Williams and David Pearce, the authors asked whether we would be able to converse with neolithic people even if we spoke their language, if we knew every word, or if we all had Babel fish from Hitchhiker’s Guide in our ears to translate for us? They asked whether we could understand what such people said, or whether instead would the words be tumbled together in sentences that made no sense to us? Would Neolithic people make such odd leaps of reasoning that we would be simply unable to follow them? But when I read that passage in their book, I realized that I thought I knew the answer, and that I was even surprised at the question. It seemed obvious to me. We would be able to follow them and understand them, even if there were topics where we did not believe the same things they did. I’m capable of understanding people who disagree with me. Neolithic people were people. They had all their most important, most formative experiences in common with us. I said much of that in answer to question 5: they had parents, children, friends and neighbors and rivals and lovers, they went through adolescence, the responsibilities of adulthood, and old age, they had happy times and sad times, parties and fights, all of the ordinary human things happened to them. They wanted the same basic things that we want—not a new car, but survival, security, intimacy, for themselves and their families and their village. They made art that we can still look at, and that we still admire.
The other part that might be considered challenging and difficult is research. But I found the research fascinating. I was exploring a whole world I had never seen before.
What do you hope modern readers take away from Singing Bones, especially in light of today’s conversations around climate and resilience?
As I said earlier, I wasn’t thinking about lessons to teach the world as I wrote. I just hoped people would enjoy reading the books.
It is true, though, that the people in that time had to adjust their lives and their expectations to new conditions, new and very, very difficult conditions. And since I believe that climate change is real, I think that we—all of humanity, and much of the rest of life on earth—may have a long and difficult adjustment ahead of us too. We may need the strength and determination that Eini and Prsedi gave to the Téuta. And we may need the lessons about grief and joy that Akesh taught them.
In the modern case, we might also try to learn how to mitigate problems that (I believe) we are complicit in causing. We are creating a future that may not be easy. But that debate is not part of this book; the Téuta did not create the 8.2k event, or any of the crises that resulted from it.
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S. G. Ullman
Stuart Ullman retired from working after 38 years as an economist and engineering project manager at a US Navy lab. He has been an avid recreational sailor for decades, and was, for a time, the Commodore of the Sailing Club of Washington; he once sailed to Bermuda on one of the U.S. Naval Academy’s 44-foot sailboats. Since his retirement he has pursued a life-long interest in writing. He has been active in the Maryland Writers Association and for several years was president of the Montgomery County chapter. He and his wife raised two children, have a grandson, and are currently living in Kensington, Maryland.
