Bees, Boys and Getting By Spokane native Eileen Garvin arrives at Get Lit! with her first novel and a whole lot of buzz BY DAN NAILEN
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he Music of Bees is Spokane native Eileen Garvin’s first novel, but its initial inspiration is rooted in her adopted home in Oregon. A few years ago Garvin, a beekeeping hobbyist, bought a package of bees from a local farmer to replace her hive that died the previous year. It was around dusk, and Garvin was tooling along a small road in the small town to pick up the bees when she passed a striking image. And that picture immediately turned into the first line of the book, slated for release at the end of April. “Jacob Stevenson had the tallest mohawk in the history of Hood River Valley High School.” Garvin’s dog had just undergone ACL surgery and was stuck, inactive, in a pen for the next 12 weeks. Garvin had three months of down time ahead while she cared for the pup, time that would be spent tending her hives, too. But that short drive changed everything. “I passed this young guy in a wheelchair with a mohawk who was going the other direction,” Garvin recalls of that scene from 2016. “I’m in a small town, but I don’t know who this person is. And the first line just popped in my head. I pulled over, like we writer nerds do, and jotted it down, and then went and picked up my bees and brought them home. The next morning, I got up, installed my hive, sat down with my dog in her little pen and I started writing the story.” That forced confinement was a blessing for Garvin. It’d been years since her nonfiction first book, How To Be A Sister, made a critical and commercial splash as Garvin recounted reconnecting with her autistic older sister after returning to the Pacific Northwest after years away. Fiction was always on her mind, and 12 weeks stuck at home with an ailing dog, and that lucky encounter with a wheelchaired punk rocker, led to a situation where “the story just came” and Garvin “just let it happen.” That might make writing sound a lot easier than the reality, and Garvin worked for years to put herself in position to write a book like The Music of Bees. The 50-year-old has wanted to be a writer since she was a kid in Spokane, where she was born at Deaconess and attended Cataldo Catholic School (her Irish greatgrandfather helped build the place) and Gonzaga Prep before leaving for college and adventures around the West and beyond before landing in Hood River 15 years ago. Like so many aspiring authors, though, she was always driven to choose a “more practical” career. “I ended up doing everything you can possibly do around writing, without writing, before I fell into it,” Garvin says. “I worked in marketing for small presses. I taught English as a second language. And in between my master’s and a PhD program that I abandoned, I started working for a newspaper and I realized, ‘Oh, this is really what I want to do.’ “I don’t have an MFA. I’ve never had a writing group. I’ve always felt like sort of an outsider. But when I finally wrote How To Be A Sister, it felt so right.”
16 INLANDER APRIL 8, 2021
