Barbara O’Neal
Barbara O’Neal is the bestselling author of fourteen novels of women’s fiction, including The Lost Girls of Devon, When We Believed in Mermaids, The Art of Inheriting Secrets, and How to Bake a Perfect Life. Her award-winning books have been published in more than a dozen countries, including France, Great Britain, Poland, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Israel, Croatia, Russia, and Brazil. She lives in the beautiful city of Colorado Springs with her beloved, a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent.
Twitter: @BarbaraONeal
Instagram: @BarbaraONealAuthor
Is your comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you made yourself? Does food inspire your writing?
All of the above. Food, cooking and eating it, growing and preparing it, runs through all of my novels. Like my character Willow in Write My Name Across the Sky, I love food and cooking deeply. Willow loves a great reuben sandwich, and I admit it is one of my great favorites, too. I worked in a café as a teenager where they made great deli sandwiches like that, and I fell hard for all that pastrami and sauerkraut. The best are in New York City, of course, and I made a point to find one whenever I’m there.
What do you worry about?
So many things. How to keep my escape artist cat safe, how to keep my husband healthy when he adores junk food (luckily, he’s a runner, so that helps). Climate change, constantly, because I live in the West and it’s hard to ignore when it’s in your face constantly. My children and grandchildren. My mother, who is almost 80 and spry as can be, but still…80. I’m such a worrier that I took up meditation to try to calm it, and it honestly helps a lot. The actual, gritty truth of the matter is that we cannot control the universe.
Is there a work of art you love? Have you ever visited it in person?
So many particular paintings speak to me (and show up in my books) that it’s hard to choose just one, but for today, I choose Georgia O’Keeffe, particularly her flowers. I’m a gardener and a painter and a photographer, and her poppies and irises are so exquisitely, perfectly rendered that I can stare at them for hours. I’ve visited the O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe a number of times, and my husband knows to just come back in a few hours. I’ve also been to her home in Abiqui to see the doorways and her kitchen and studio, which was practically a religious experience. If I had to choose a #1 favorite, it would be Red Canna, but I’m also a poppy fanatic, so they’re very high on my list, too.
Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?
Several. When I fall in love with a movie, I watch it over and over until I understand what the beats are and why they made me feel so much. The Last of the Mohicans (the version with Daniel Day-Lewis) has one of the most gorgeously orchestrated endings ever. The last 10-15 minutes of that film are great in terms of emotional resonance, orchestrated resolution of the plot, and drama. It’s amazing. In recent years, I really fell for the back and forth structure of the TV show This is Us, which moves easily through time and moments to tell stories the way we tell them to ourselves, and I love playing with that structure myself. I used it heavily in When We Believed in Mermaids.
Do you have another artistic outlet other than your writing?
Several, actually. I am also an artist, a painter and collage artist, and a photographer. They all work together somehow, especially with my garden, which is also an art project and offers a lot of subject matter. Cooking, too, is an artistic pursuit—it’s color and shape and texture and beauty. I’ve just installed the most delectable stove and have been having a grand time cooking on it. For me, the thing about the alternate forms of creativity is that they allow my brain to steep in color and quiet and non-verbal expression, which then gives space for the writing to grow and emerge.
