Gobsmacking beauty & fairy blessings

Bittersweet endings, an almost cover reveal, and why this letter is late

Tuesday night I sat in the audience at an outdoor amphitheatre as the final scenes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream played out on the stage and a huge orange supermoon hung low over the St. Lawrence River. 

It was—there's no other word for it—magical. My daughter, sitting beside me, said she'd never seen my jaw drop quite so dramatically as it did when I realized that glowing orb above the water was the moon.

Watching the play, watching the moon, I also felt a profound sense of “something is WRONG!” Because for the first time since I began this cyclical full-and-new-moon newsletter, the full moon was out (gloriously) and I had not sent my letter.

But I was waiting! Deliberately. Waiting till the moment when I could share with you the culmination of many years’ work, the full and brilliant face of the novel that is at last emerging into the world.

I.e. my cover reveal for The Mother Act.

This cover, I’d decided, was gorgeous enough to justify altering my newsletter publication schedule. When my editor first sent me the cover back in the spring, after a few rounds with several different concepts that weren’t quite right, my reaction was not unlike my response to the supermoon—gobsmacked and hardly believing something could be this breathtaking. 

But the cover reveal, alas, is not what I’m sending you in today’s belated email, because due to unmagical technical difficulties, we’re having to sit on it a little while longer.

So instead I’m sending you this photo of the moon pretty close to how I saw it Tuesday night—I was sitting closer to the stage, the moon hadn’t risen this high yet—taken by Rebecca Beith from the stage manager’s booth near the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

That’s Oberon (Philip Pace) and Titania (Joy Tanner) bestowing fairy blessings. Behind them is the black nighttime St. Lawrence and the lights of Ogdensburg, New York on the other side.

My family and I have been seeing plays in this space since 2015, when my husband was first cast as an actor in the summer season. In 2017 Richard became artistic director, in 2019 we moved to this little town on the river full-time, and this year we made the decision that our time with the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival is complete.

So we are ending this season bittersweetly, and this night was bittersweet, too. We’ve put a lot of ourselves into this Festival—and, incidentally, I’ve put some of this Festival into The Mother Act too, or at least my own imaginative rendering of something not unlike it. 

It is a rare and beautiful thing to immerse yourself in an enchanting work of art in an exquisite natural setting. I guess what I’m doing by sending out this photo, by reflecting on this night, is acknowledging the beauty where I find it, being present with it in its fleetingness while it is here.

That moon has already begun to wane. Closing night of our final season is on Saturday. My cover reveal will not happen this week.  

But it will happen next week! A new beautiful thing that I’m excited to send your way very soon.

Fairy blessings to you all.

Warmly,

Heidi