Summer 2003

Reprinted with permission from The Voice - The Official Linda Eder Newsletter

Part One of Five.

I was thrilled when Frank started writing with Nan. She beat out all the guys on the script for THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL for a reason. She's really good. She has breathed life into Camille, and it's wonderful to know that a woman is telling a woman's story. Also, I am surrounded by men all the time in my work so it's great to hang out with a broad, and Nan is a broad. She's tiny, but she's a broad and I love that. Linda

Nan Knighton is best known for THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL book and lyrics, the stage adaptation of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and the eagerly anticipated CAMILLE CLAUDEL book and lyrics. The staff of THE VOICE visited with Nan as she was preparing to take CAMILLE to the stage, in order to learn more about the journey of her creative spirit. Her words spin beautiful dreams in the minds of theatre lovers everywhere. How does she weave this magic spell that captures our hearts?

VOICE: Let's start at the beginning. Would you tell us where you were born and grew up?

NAN: Baltimore. I lived there until I was 18. We lived on a little country road called Hollins Lane, which was actually inside a bird sanctuary. Very isolated and pretty.

Nan's Parents

VOICE: Can you tell us about your parents?

NAN: My mother was an art teacher and painter. She taught art for over 50 years to every age group from children to retirees. She was a great teacher. She always stressed the importance of imagination. Like she'd say to a child, "What other color might the sky be instead of blue? Could it be pink? Or lavender? And the grass doesn't have to be green. It can be whatever color you want."

VOICE: Did you inherit any of your mother's artistic talent?

NAN: No. I can't draw a damned thing! Strictly stick figures. That particular talent skipped a generation. My oldest daughter, Eliza, can draw beautifully and also sculpt, and my younger daughter, Nola, also draws really well, though she insists she can't.

VOICE: Does your mother continue to paint today?

NAN: Yeah. She's now 88, and basically blind. She has macular degeneration, which means she has just a tiny little bit of peripheral vision left in one eye, but she's still painting. Recently she gave me a painting of a winter storm, because she knows how much I love snow. She's an amazing inspiration to me, kind of indomitable.

Nan & Dad

VOICE: How about your father?

NAN: My father's 90. He's the cat with 9 lives. He's a doctor and spent most of his career affiliated with Johns Hopkins. He has three full professorships and he's also written a lot of medical textbooks and so forth. Actually he was going to be an opera singer. He studied at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore- he had a wonderful voice! But he also loved medicine. So what it came down to was deciding that he could be a doctor and sing on the side, but he couldn't be a singer and practice medicine on the side!

VOICE: Do you think your interest in the arts is a result of your parents' influence?

NAN: Sure. Mine was the ultimate artistic household, always brewing with an almost pressured creativity. We were just surrounded by music, painting, books, woodcarving.

VOICE: Woodcarving? That sounds interesting.

NAN: Well, my father also loved to wood-carve. He's just one of these multi-faceted, Renaissance men. And he could never keep still. Like me. All his spare time was spent reading, singing, woodcarving, doing double-crostics or jigsaw puzzles. That's one of his woodcarvings over there in the corner, although that one's an abstract. He usually does nude female torsos, all these beautiful naked women with no heads or legs.

VOICE: That is so great to be able to have your father's art displayed in your house.

NAN: Yeah. I'm very proud of them both. Lots of Mother's paintings are around the house, too.

VOICE: Do you have any siblings?

NAN: I have one brother, three years older. He works in Baltimore for the city government. Environmental Control.

VOICE: Do your parents still live in Baltimore?

NAN: Yes. They live in a retirement community now. In fact, I just recently visited them to celebrate my father's 90th birthday.

VOICE: How wonderful to celebrate such an occasion! What are your favorite memories of growing up in Baltimore?

Nan at Age 5

NAN: God. Let's see. Horse races in the spring in the Maryland countryside- it's so amazingly green. Tulips and flowering dogwoods everywhere. In the fall, horse chestnuts that fell on the hill behind our house- I used to save them like little magic talismans, polish them and keep them under my pillow. In summer, cracking open hard-shell crabs spread out on newspaper-covered tables. As a child, I remember my mother playing the piano and I'd dance around the living room- once during a hurricane- Hurricane Hazel. The wind and rain were raging outside, and we only had candlelight inside, and mom played this Swedish waltz and I kept dancing. We always had tons of animals- primarily cats, but a few dogs, a guinea pig, hamsters, white mice, once a little chick. And outside the house were tons of box turtles who would wander into the garden, and rabbits, that the cats would unfortunately drag in, and I'd cry. So Daddy would open a penicillin capsule and sprinkle it on the wound, put a bandage on, and then we'd go set the baby rabbit loose in the forest again, and I had to hope he'd make it. Some of my earliest memories are of teaching myself to read. I remember very vividly how jealous I was of my older brother when he started school. He'd bring home these tantalizing papers and worksheets, and I was just so hungry to get into it all. So my parents bought me this little picture dictionary, which I still have. I can remember endlessly sitting there at the kitchen table, copying the words until I taught myself to read and write. I loved that.

(At this point, Gracie, Nan's 3 year-old border-collie mix, came bounding into the living room. Nan had warned us that Gracie was a "party animal" and would want to be part of the interview also. You'll see that she interjected a thought or two during the course of our conversation. T.J., her 14 year-old cocker spaniel, was much quieter. Since the time of this interview, T.J. has died, but Nan assures us that it was a "good death." He was surrounded by her, her husband, both daughters and their boyfriends, and stroked with much love right up to the end.)

VOICE: Do you remember the first thing you wrote?

NAN: Absolutely. I wrote my first short story when I was 5 ½. I still have it, and all my early writings. In the beginning it was just short stories, though always with lots of dialogue. Usually there'd be an evil creature in the stories- witch, goblin, whatever- and then the good guys would win out in the end. Some of them are pretty phantasmagoric. Then I started writing poems when I was about 7 or 8 years old. All rhyming poems, and I wrote them constantly. Living in that forest- it was very isolated, no other kids around my age- so I'd lie out on the grass and write poems. In fact, the only prize I've ever won was the Fourth Grade Poetry Contest.

VOICE: Where did you go to school?

NAN: I went to Roland Park Public School through first grade, and then the Bryn Mawr School for Girls from second through twelfth grades. Back then it was a relatively conventional school. I always felt like I was bucking the tide. I remember once, when I was in eighth grade, our English teacher told us to go to the library and choose an extracurricular reading book. I adored going into the library, looking through all those books. So I found The Catcher in the Rye and was entranced. The next day we had to announce to the class what book we'd chosen. So I said The Catcher in the Rye, and the teacher stiffened up and asked me for the book, from which she then read aloud the first paragraph to the class- you know, it's like "I'm not going to tell you all that David Copperfield crap about my life" and so forth. She closed the book, handed it back to me, and said, "I think a good Dickens would be a much better choice." I mean, I had nothing against Dickens. In fact, he and John Irving are my favorite writers- but that's what the atmosphere was like. I mean, Bryn Mawr was pretty conservative back then, but I did receive a wonderful education. Read all the classics, learned Ancient Greek, you name it. The school existed in sort of an ivory tower when I was there, but it's an amazingly innovative place today.

On to Part Two...