The Title May Be Important

     Since I spoke of the title of one of my books in the last blog post, I wanted to follow up regarding titles of books and poems. For a long time, I’ve been fascinated by titles. When I started writing novels, I realized again how important a title can be. 

    In my next few blog posts, I would like to share with you my reasons for selecting the titles of my novels. Let’s just begin with my first novel, The Welsh Harp. Now you may be thinking, “Well, now there’s nothing complicated (or even important) about that title.” And you may be right, but I chose that name for a reason. As I’ve told many of my readers, this story is based on a history my husband Bill’s aunt wrote about their family’s journey from Wales to the U.S. in the early 1900’s. I didn’t meet his aunt until the 1960’s, when I started dating Bill. I went to her house often, and there was a harp (a photograph of it is on the cover of the novel) sitting in the corner of her living room. I don’t remember her ever talking about it, and as far as I know, she never played it, but she was an accomplished musician and taught piano to many children in the little town where she lived. 

    According to her history, she was a young girl, maybe eleven or twelve when the family came to live in Southeastern Kentucky and the dad and sons worked in the coal mines for several years. They had been coal miners in Wales and thought the mines in the U. S. were safer. Anyway, when I decided to write the novel, I decided to make the young girl the main character in the story. The harp was the perfect item to stand as a symbol for what the girl wanted to do. She wanted to learn to play the harp.