1. What inspired you to write this book?
Some of the seeds of this book have existed
for more than twenty-five years. Back in the 1990s, I was working on a YA book
called LoveSpeed, with a character who loved physics, a girl who was a
really good artist, and a football quarterback. One of the premises of that
story was that the speed of love is faster than the speed of light because it
is its own kind of energy, in kind of a quantum-synchronous way.
Then in January 2000, my son Brendan, who was
almost thirteen and had had a variety of health problems since birth, was
diagnosed with a very rare neurogenetic condition called Williams syndrome
(WS). I began to do a lot of research on WS, while living the experience of
being the mom of someone with WS: a teenager with unique WS personality traits,
along with medical issues, academic issues, and the social challenges that can
come with being different.
Over the years, I'd occasionally pick up LoveSpeed
and work on it. It went through more than two dozen drafts and a number of
titles. Once my son was grown, and we were far enough away from the immediate
experience, I was able to write Daniel's story. Brendan and his lived
experience very much informed the story; he was the inspiration for the book
that became See The Music Hear The Light.
2. What exactly is it about — and
who is it written for?
The book is about Daniel James Durkin, Jr., a
gifted 14-year-old saxophone player with a neurogenetic developmental
disability called Williams syndrome. He tells his own story in the first
person. Relatively strong expressive-language skills and a storytelling
conversational style are characteristics of WS. Daniel navigates his freshman
year at a public high school, beginning with August marching-band camp.
Along the way, he grapples with bullying, not
only from a rival alto sax player, but also from a rigid, nitpicky social
studies teacher. A budding friendship with artistic, new-to-town Phoebe, helps balance his days.
Throughout the year, Daniel faces both typical and atypical
issues: forming an identity within a peer group where he is seen as
"different," independence from his single, mother, a librarian, while
coping with built-in medical issues—some fixable, some not.
His father, a Marine
musician, died before Daniel was born, but Daniel carries an inherited talisman
in his pocket: his dad's Boot Camp Challenge Coin. When an incident
derails his cherished musical dream and threatens his life, he learns
that the whole world is not his friend—a hard lesson for a person with Williams
syndrome.
The book is written for
neurodiverse students and students with disabilities in grades 6 - 12, as well
as for "neurotypical" students in grades 6 - 9. It has a Lexile
Measure of HL740L, indicating an accessible book with high interest and age-appropriate
subject matter, but lower complexity in terms of reading demands.
I hope the readership will include students
with disabilities in grades 6 - 12 who may identify with some of Daniel's
struggles and challenges in middle- and high-school peer ecosystems, as well as
with the courage and spirit that he musters to meet those challenges. I also
hope to reach "neurotypical" students, particularly in grades 6 - 9,
whose perspective on fellow students with differences or disabilities may be
enlarged through reading a story told "through the eyes of" and
"in the voice of" a someone like Daniel. I am working on study guides
for that group, with a focus on social and emotional learning, and empathy
development.
3. What do you hope readers will get out
of reading your book?
I hope See The Music Hear The Light
will enhance a reader's social awareness and encourage mindfulness in social
interactions, both within their own spheres and outside them. I hope readers
will come away from the story with an expanded understanding that fellow
students with "differences" have the same feelings and emotions, the
same dreams and hopes for the future, and the same fundamental humanity.
I hope readers with "differences"
will come away feeling understood and championed. I hope they will feel that a
voice of one of their own has spoken up.
So many times, in talking with individuals
with varying disabilities, I have heard accounts of the bullying they endured,
and I have witnessed firsthand their courage in meeting all kinds of
challenges. I have witnessed many triumphs, too.
At a recent national Williams syndrome
convention, a young woman with WS who had read the book approached me, very
emotional, and said something along the lines of, "Finally there's a book
that really gets it, that shows how we feel." And my son Brendan, who's
now 39, said, after reading it, "It speaks my truth."
I hope readers will grasp that truth and
perhaps see fellow humans living with disabilities in a clearer and more
empathic light. I hope this book will foster social inclusion.
4. How did you decide on your book’s title and
cover design?
From the very first seeds sown in the LoveSpeed
book, various drafts went through different titles. For several years, I
called it simply, Daniel's Heroic Journey Book. Some of the other titles
were: See Me, See You, See True; Hearts & Eyes, & Dragonflies;
and If Music Be The Food Of Love... Some of those versions were
structured very differently. In one, I experimented with four alternating
narrators. Then I pared it down to two, Daniel and Phoebe.
Finally, when the manuscript was over 130,000
words, I realized it was too long. I took the book apart and began writing
entirely from Daniel's point of view, in the first person. That is when
everything really came into focus.
The character of Dalton 1.6 came more fully to
life, along with his interest in energy waves. Waves became one of the book's
motifs, tying back to the early LoveSpeed idea. As I researched various
physics topics, I came across material on the acoustic waves, the sound waves,
inside the sun.
Another aspect that came to the foreground was
the synesthetic, cross-modal sensory processing experienced by some people with
WS. My son, as a musician with WS, was invited to participate in a research
study when he was in his twenties. It involved fMRI brain imaging while
participants listened to various kinds
of music. Afterward, I was told that when Brendan listened to music in the
study, "his visual cortex lit up like a Christmas tree."
Paired with a quote on the wall in Daniel's
saxophone teacher's music studio, attributed to the great alto sax player
Charlie Parker—"See with your ears. Hear with your eyes."—the title See
The Music Hear The Light percolated up to the front of my brain. It felt
right to me.
For
this book, I had some ideas, for the cover design, such as wanting to include
the origami wind horse which Phoebe made for Daniel, and the actual diagram
from a scientific article I'd read about the sound waves inside the sun. I took
a picture of my 14-year-old grandson playing his alto sax and put it through a
few Photoshop filters, to come up with the abstract, geometric saxophone, with
the white-gloved jazz hands. I printed elements out and use acrylic and
watercolor paints to make colors pop. I cut and pasted with scissors and glue.
For the intense blue of the background, I took two pieces of blue tissue paper
and wrapped them around a piece of cardboard, then scanned that, and fiddled
with it in Photoshop, stretching the "waves" to suggest my idea of
deep space, boosting the color saturation.
The font I chose, Amatic SC, a wavery,
handwritten-looking font, is also used for the chapter titles in the paperback
edition. Because of formatting issues, I had to change it for the ebook. I
originally chose it to echo with Daniel's difficulty with handwriting, a common
WS characteristic due not only to visuospatial deficits but also to fine motor
difficulties. This becomes an element in the conflict between Daniel and his
social studies teacher.
I wanted the first-person chapter titles to
function as a lens focused through Daniel's eyes and perception, as well as a
road map for readers. Each title has three-parts, like many Victorian
literature novels: "In which this, that, & the
other thing happens."
5. What advice or words of wisdom do you have
for fellow writers – other than run!?
1)
Write.
2)
Don't be afraid to write badly. Just be prepared to rewrite and rewrite until
you think it's good.
3)
Be careful who you share your work with, especially in the early stages. The
wrong feedback can be wrong in itself, and it can also squelch your creative
spark, the thing you need to guard and nourish. (And let rest, when rest is
called for.) It's your pilot light.
4)
Read. Books. Articles. Good ones. Don't hesitate to discard reading material
that you've already spent some time on, if you've come to a point that it
doesn't seem good to you anymore.
5)
Whatever little rituals or talismans seem to help you get going, or overcome
inertia, make use of them. Then write.
6. What trends in the book world do you see --
and where do you think the book publishing industry is heading?
That is a difficult question for me to answer.
I was very active in the children's book publishing world in the late 1980s and
1990s, then basically took twenty-five years "off" because the path
of my life required a major pivot. Today's obvious technology-driven trends,
ebooks and audiobooks, for example, were not even a thing back then. Nor was
self-publishing available on anything like the affordable) scale that exists
now. And then there is the AI factor... A topic for another day.
That said, I have read some recently written
books that I found exquisitely good—wonderfully written from the standpoint
of wordsmithing and craft, deeply
important from a human perspective, and original and though-provoking.
I chose to self-publish See The Music Hear
The Light primarily because, without blatantly giving away my exact age,
time is of the essence to me at this stage of life. I know how long the
timeline can be from acceptance to publication and distribution. My former
agent is no longer with my former agency, and that adds another layer of time.
I felt the need to get this book out into the
world, to complete the study guides for teachers and students done, and to
begin work on the companion YA books, of which three are half-written, having
been excised from earlier long drafts Daniel's story.
7. Were there experiences in your
personal life or career that came in handy when writing this book?
Yes, very much so. The discovery that Brendan
had Williams syndrome really thrust our family into a different world, one in
which Brendan found his "tribe" and we became members of it. Being
part of that community has deepened my understanding of WS and of my son's
identity, and it has propelled me along a fascinating research journey, as
well.
All the growing-up experiences—my own, as a
mother watching, participating, and supporting, and Brendan's, as the person
living them—have influenced this story, and the way it is told.
I also have a musical background. In my
twenties, at the University of Bridgeport, I studied music history, music
theory, and classical, acoustic fingerstyle, and jazz guitar. I also taught
guitar at a local music store. That certainly came in handy, both in raising
musical children and in writing a book in which music is so fundamental that it
is almost a character in its own right.
8. How would you describe your writing style?
Which writers or books is your writing similar to?
For the writing style of See The Music Hear
The Light, I'd like to quote from the BookLife Review:
"Daniel's voice is the book's greatest
strength. He narrates in short, staccato bursts that move like jazz riffs,
funny and observant in equal measure." —Publishers
Weekly/BookLife May 18, 2026
This writing style is actually very different
from that of my earlier YA books, which were influenced by writers like Chris
Crutcher, Robert Cormier, M.E. Kerr, and Laurie Halse Anderson, and from my
middle grade books, which were influenced by the styles of writers like Lois
Lowry, Jerry Spinelli, Margaret Mahy, and Madeline L'Engle.
My earlier books were primarily contemporary
realistic novels: slice-of-life for middle grade readers, and "problem
novels" for YA readers.
There are subject-matter commonalities—there's
almost always a bully to deal with, as well as "growing-up stuff"—but
this book's writing style arose organically from Daniel, its main character.
9. What challenges did you overcome in the
writing of this book?
At the beginning of COVID, I was on draft 26
or so, and working with one of my former editors from HarperCollins. One of her
comments was, "If you are going to write the story from Daniel's
first-person point of view, the voice has to be pitch-perfect."
That was the biggest challenge.
The second biggest challenge was probably
carving away so much writing I has produced over the years, some of which I
loved and thought was very good, in order to get to this story, simply and
cleanly.
A quotation that has been a guiding light for
me since I first found the poem "Little Gidding" in T.S. Eliot's Four
Quartets is probably almost impossible to achieve, but it's still my
aspiration:
"...Every phrase and sentence that is
right... every word is at home, taking its place to support the others... the
complete consort dancing together..."
10. If people can buy or read one book this
week or month, why should it be yours?
It
invites readers into the uncommon world of an uncommon young person, full of
music, unusual heroism, and very particular joy. As BookLife wrote:
"Daniel's unique way of relating to the
world around him draws readers in on every page... The question of what it
means to be brave when your body and mind work differently from those around
you runs through every chapter, arriving at an honest, heartfelt
resolution..."
— Publishers Weekly/BookLife May 18, 2026
About
The Author:
A.
C. (Anne) LeMieux is the award-winning author of eleven books for young
readers, including fiction for young adults, middle-grade readers, and early
readers. Her first novel, The TV Guidance Counselor, was named an ALA
Best Book for Young Adults; her second, Do Angels Sing The Blues?,
received a Parents' Choice Silver Honor Award; and her poetry has been included
in anthologies edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins and Michael J. Rosen. A former
journalist, LeMieux graduated from Simmons College with a degree in writing and
illustration. A lifelong reader, researcher, musician, and writer, LeMieux
believes that stories create parallel universes which readers may continue to
inhabit long after the final page. LeMieux lives in Branford, Connecticut, with
her husband and son, Brendan, who was born with Williams syndrome. She is also
at work on a research-based collection of personal essays about her family's
path to a Williams syndrome diagnosis, as well as companion novels to See
The Music Hear The Light. For more information: https://www.seethemusichearthelight.com
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For
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formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the
head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the
director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many
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times at Morgan James Publishing Red Carpet, and Connecticut Authors and
Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.
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letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal,
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and The Washington Post. His first published book was The
Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook. It
was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.
Born
and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids,
and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.
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