Interview With Author Anne C. (A.C.) LeMieux

 

  

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 the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He 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 first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully) and (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/10-things-my-dog-taught-me-about-marketing-books). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, three times at BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association, Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, five times at Morgan James Publishing Red Carpet, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) 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.

 

You can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum