By Ignatius Valentine Aloysius
To most of us, Hollywood’s flapper era of the 1920s evokes the black and white images of silent films, dialogue in quoted text, dramatic soundtracks, scratched-up celluloid, and movie stars communicating via gesture and hyperbolic expressions. These were the formative but crucial days of the Roaring Twenties, marked by the Charleston and jazz. Until I read Kathleen M. Rooney’s latest novel, From Dust to Stardust (Lake Union Publishing), I knew little about this time in movie-making history. The novel educated me about that defining period and its transition from silence to sound and highlights the resilience and courage of young female actresses, including the fictional Doreen O’Dare (inspired by the real-life Colleen Moore), women eager to break the industry’s patriarchal mold and find their independence. This interview with Kathleen follows our in-conversation at the American Writers Museum in early September to mark the Chicago launch of her novel.
Ignatius Valentine Aloysius: I really enjoyed this novel and appreciate the chance to read an early copy of it. Your title From Dust to Stardust is a perfect line and points to far-reaching consequences in the lives of its characters, especially that of your first-person POV protagonist, Doreen O’Dare (inspired by the famed silent-film actress Colleen Moore). Before we delve deeper into both their fictional and real lives, can you talk about your interest in taking this direction as a writer, your inspiration for giving us this story now, and if you share any parallels to its narrative and Hollywood?
Kathleen Rooney: Thank you, and I have to give credit where it’s due on the title. I have many strengths as a writer, but titling is not among them; I always need help. My last three novels, including this one, got accepted under titles that were then changed before publication. In this case, the help came from my friend, DePaul colleague, and Poems While You Wait co-founder Eric Plattner. Thanks, Eric!
Personally, I haven’t got any connection to Hollywood except that I adore movies. I don’t really care for television, but movies are my jam. I think it’s because movies have to have an ending and tv shows can, in theory—especially if they’re making money—go on indefinitely. (The obvious exception, of course, is big franchises like the Marvel movies, but those bore me in the same way most tv ends up boring me.) Maybe, like life, narrative art has more meaning because it ends. I’m in a movie club, which is like a book club except we get together and eat food and discuss films, and I appreciate how—like a book—a feature-length motion picture is a self-contained unit that can be satisfyingly discussed in its entirety.
Aside from that, I was drawn to this subject matter because ever since I was a kid and saw her Fairy Castle at the Museum of Science and Industry, I was a Colleen Moore fan. Before I laid eyes on any of her films, I was captivated by her bobbed hair, her flapper style, her joie de vivre, and the fact that not only did she use a massive chunk of her personal fortune to build this sumptuous dollhouse, but she also toured it to raise money for children during the Great Depression. In the process, she raised people’s spirits, which is just as important as money, if not more so.
Who would do something like that? I asked myself back then. In 2016, when I was ready to write a new book, I decided I’d like to find the answer.
Ignatius: Doreen O’Dare’s character evokes admiration in the reader for her bravado and also her position as a willing subject for “divine intervention” — voices and signs were always guiding and keeping her from imminent harm. This counsel of the fairies, so to speak, is central to the story and begins in her early years. Can you elaborate further on this, as you talk about her searching, her reliance on her grandmother, and her distinct ambition. They seem like ineffaceable themes, relevant even today.
Kathleen: Her bravado, yes! As I began answering my own “who was Colleen Moore, anyway?” question, one of the most salient features of her personality was her drive. She was determined from childhood to be an actor. Not just any kind of actor but an actor in the movies. She was born at exactly the right time for her life and the life of the early cinema to coincide. Had she been born a little earlier, she would have been too old to be the flapper nonpareil; if she had been born later, she would potentially have had a career in talking pictures, but who knows? As it happened, she became the embodiment of the zeitgeist—a smart, daring, provocative-yet-wholesome comedienne who did a ton to change the way young women were expected to behave.
Second to her bravado was her belief in supposedly impossible or fantastical things, specifically fairies. Like Moore—and like Doreen—I was raised Catholic. I don’t adhere to the religion today, but trappings of it linger, many of them beautiful and hard to shed completely. Among those is my belief that there is more to the world than what we can see. That there are such things as miracles. That there’s a metaphysical aspect that lies beyond the physical realm, and that we can sometimes access this aspect, maybe when we make art or say a prayer or make a wish, or send our thoughts or vibes to somebody who we think needs them. Every day contains mystical happenings that reason can’t explain. So both as a kid and now, I gravitate toward the idea that Doreen’s grandmother, Granny Shaughnessy, holds from Irish folklore of thin places. These are places where the membrane between our visible, rational world and some other realm (be it of ghosts, the dead, fairies, the past, whatever) become permeable and magic can slip through in either direction.
Movies, books, and art of all kinds—anything that helps us become more curious, full of wonder, and aware of the beauty of existence can operate as a thin place. The Fairy Castle is a great example of one.
Ignatius: For readers who are not familiar with the actress’s 1920’s life and career, as I wasn’t, I’ll admit it helped that you framed the novel in a more recent time (1968). Was this intentional, and, if so, why? The novel opens in Chicago with an interview at the Museum of Science and Industry and sets the stage for the unfolding of Doreen’s life. Was it a strategic move on your part to employ alternating chapters that show her life in the past and also in later years (with the ongoing 1968 interview)? How did you arrive at this decision?
Kathleen: A question I often teach my students to answer in their writing is the occasion of the telling: why tell this story? Why tell it in this way? Why tell it now, as in the now of where either you or your character are standing and looking back. The twin achievements of Moore’s, and therefore of Doreen’s, life are stardom in Hollywood in the 1910s and 20s and the one-ton Fairy Castle. Therefore, I wanted to create a structure that could emphasize both of those settings. Giving her this really assertive occasion of the telling—it’s 1968 and she’s in a museum making an audio guide—seemed, like you say, a good way to give people a door to walk through in order to get inside the bigger architecture of the story.
Ignatius: The novel provides a complete and startling insight into the early film industry. The narrative opens windows to so many delicate subjects relevant today, such as gender, race, equality, and a young woman’s perseverance against incredible industry odds. Can you elaborate further on this and whether your early motivations to write the novel changed priorities and focus as you worked on it? What were those circumstances, if any?
Kathleen: History can show us so much about who and where we are today—how far we have or have not come. The gender piece was huge for me in getting interested in Hollywood in its early days because even though they were rarely allowed to become directors or producers, women had a considerable amount of agency over their images, scripts, and careers. This agency quickly eroded, especially as the studios regrouped in the face of the coming of sound. But it was a brief, brilliant period when women were ascendant, and this ascendancy had an impact on liberating women outside of Hollywood.
The silent film historian Jeannine Basinger calls Moore’s portrayal of the flapper type as “the evolution of the old-fashioned girl into the modern woman.” This new archetype, she says, “wasn’t a siren or a vamp or a femme fatale. She wasn’t innocent, and she wasn’t maternal. She was a naughty grown-up girl who wanted to play with boys, to cause trouble, to be mischievous.”
That said, Hollywood then as now was full of inequality on and off-screen and full of problematic people in front of and behind the cameras. In addition to being intrigued by the flapper as a feminist figure, and by how many women used comedy to push social boundaries, I was fascinated by how race, class, and sexuality were or were not depicted in the industry. For example, D.W. Griffith gives Doreen her big break when she’s 14. As she gets older and more sophisticated, she starts to realize this man everyone hails as arguably the biggest genius of the new art form made arguably the most racist movie of all time. I am touched that Griffith supposedly defined cinema as “the wind in the trees”–meaning that before film, you couldn’t capture so many gorgeous subtleties of life; a photo can’t do it, a book can’t do it, a painting can’t do it. But then oh my god, Birth of a Nation.
Ignatius: You are known as a publisher of hybrid writing forms. Tell us about your application of hybridity in this novel. Were there any notable fictional freedoms you took in the narrative of Doreen O’Dare’s experience that departed from the real Colleen Moore’s life?
Kathleen: Great question! The most obvious hybridity is that I’m taking an entire lived life and putting it into a novel. I’m fascinated by the shape of people’s lives. Lives have beginnings, middles, and ends. They don’t always have plots, per se, especially plots as defined by contrived twists and reveals like you’d get in a thriller. But they have a form, a pattern that is usually perceivable only after that person is dead. I like the dead. I don’t like them being forgotten. So maybe in a way the hybrid is not just life and fiction, but life and after-life. A séance. A reanimation. An effort to not let these people and things I love so much completely vanish from our collective memory.
Because Doreen goes through so many ups and downs, particularly in her exhausting and abusive first marriage, and because fairies were so important to her, I wanted to give her a fairy tale ending. I want people to be so happy on the final page that they cry. You can’t always, if ever, do that with a real life—get any kind of happily ever after—but in fiction, you can.
Ignatius: How long did the first draft take you, and how many significant edits were necessary? Talk a bit about your creative writing process for the novel and how you were able to balance all the research and reading needed for accurate storytelling.
Kathleen: Oh man. After doing a ton of research, I started writing in earnest in the summer of 2017 or so and went through approximately a bajillion drafts with the help of lots of feedback from my friends and critiquers. I had what I thought was a finished draft in November of 2021, my agent and I were not quite satisfied, and kept thinking about how to tighten it and make it really done. In March of 2022, during DePaul’s Spring break, I did one more colossal revision and it felt euphoric, a total high. Revising when you know you’re on the right track is better than drugs. It feels so good that I feel bad for people who never get to experience this feeling. So the real final draft was done in April of 2022 and we sold it in late May of 2022. Obviously, it got some more editing after that, but all that is to say that the whole thing took about five years. I feel lucky to get to spend my life hanging out in these thin places.
Kathleen M. Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press 2017) and the novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (Penguin 2020). Where Are the Snows, her latest poetry collection, was chosen by Kazim Ali for the X.J. Kennedy Prize and published by Texas Review Press in Fall 2022. In September of 2023, her novel, From Dust to Stardust, based on the life and work of the silent movie star Colleen Moore, was published by Lake Union.
Twice Pushcart nominated, Ignatius Valentine Aloysius earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University, where he won the Distinguished Thesis Award for fiction and is a lecturer in writing and experimentation there. A 2020-21 Creative Writing Fellow for the Ludington Writers Board and the Ludington Area Center for the Arts in Michigan, Ignatius is the author of the literary novel Fishhead. Republic of Want (Tortoise Books, 2020), and his prose and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review, Olney Magazine, Thanatos Review, Roi Fainéant Press, Trampset, Tofu Ink Arts Press, the Coalition for Digital Narratives, and Porter Gulch Review among others. He is a host and curator of the long-running reading series Sunday Salon Chicago, and he serves on the curatorial and diversity boards at Ragdale Foundation, an arts residency in Lake Forest, Illinois. Ignatius lives in Evanston and is a mayor-appointed board member of the Evanston Arts Council.
