Author shares new novel with campus community

David Rocklin made an appearance at Georgia College from Nov. 7 to 8 to visit with GC’s Master’s of Fine Arts students and to discuss his new novel, “The Luminist.”

Rocklin is originally from Chicago, Ill., but now lives in California with his wife and two young daughters. He is currently traveling around the U.S. on his first book tour, talking about his passion for writing and the origins of “The Luminist.”

He met with the MFA students on Monday, Nov. 7, hosting workshops and a Q-and-A session among the students and faculty. He offered words of advice for the student writers and met with a few of them to critique and talk about their recent works.

On Tuesday, Nov. 8, Rocklin hosted a lecture in the Arts & Sciences Auditorium open to all members of the community where he read excerpts from “The Luminist” and discussed how the idea of the novel came to him.

Rocklin was visiting an exhibit at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Calif., when he came across a work of art that he described as “striking.” He examined the piece of art, filling in what he calls the “gap” of the woman in the image before him.

“The ‘gap’ is the part of something you don’t know,” Rocklin said. “Instead of learning it, you imagine your way into it.”

For example, Rocklin sees the image, and immediately recognizes the person to be a woman. This is something he knows. However, the ‘gap’ would be something he didn’t know; why she was posing for the photograph, for example.

Rocklin explains that this is a technique that all creative writers use whether consciously or unconsciously. Writers fill in the ‘gap’ and create a storyline.

“Poetry is just like that,” Miranda Jaynes, senior creative writing major, said. “The ‘gap,’ for me, is the difference between telling someone something and showing them how it came to be.”

Upon taking a closer look, Rocklin discovered that the photographs he was admiring were taken by a photographer named Julia Margaret Cameron. A female photographer was unheard of in the Victorian era, a time where women were expected to manage a house, birth babies and otherwise be seen and not heard. This fascinated Rocklin, and he was immediately struck with an idea for a story.

After hours upon hours of research and 14 rough drafts later, “The Luminist” was finally published with the main character, Catherine Colebrook, being based off of the photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, of the image Rocklin had seen at the Getty Museum.

“To me, when I look at her photos, and I think about the criticism that she took, which I think was very gender based, it’s amazing what she achieved,” Rocklin said. “She was a woman way ahead of her time.”

“The Luminist” is a work of fiction, with the suggestion of Julia Margaret Cameron being the ‘muse’ for Rocklin’s novel. The story takes place in colonial India where the main character, Catherine, has moved with her husband and two children.

After losing a child at birth, Catherine becomes obsessed with the idea of capturing a moment of beauty, never to be lost again (such as with her dead child). She befriends her house servant, a young Indian named Eligius Shourie, and makes him her apprentice in the emerging art form of photography.

Together, the two unlikely friends “defy convention, class and heartbreak to investigate what is gained, and lost, by holding life still.”

Karen Sharian, freshman accounting major, attended the author talk and says she found it very interesting how he formulated the idea for the book.

“‘The Luminist’ sounds like an interesting read,” Sharian said. “I thought it was really neat how he explained to us how he got the idea for the book, and the background for the main character. I don’t know, it just added a little extra to the story. Almost like we had an insiders look to the story.”