Stephany Cavalier Houghton

Classical music since infancy! My mother played piano, my brother oboe, close family friends were concertizing dual pianists – Weekley and Arganbright. Talentless enough on piano to prefer listening, but took up folk guitar, dreamed of a cello, never stopped playing easier piano pieces. Doing my homework to Bach, Prokofiev, Shostakovich. Falling even more in love with the violin as a youth at a concert, by an also young Itzhak Perlman in solo recital, learning that a handicap isn’t necessarily a handicap, beginning a life-long interest in the rights of individuals with disabilities, all human rights. Enthralled by my family’s friendship with, artist, musician, writer, and visionary Harlan Hubbard and his wife Anna. Discovering the horrors of the Holocaust, of our nation’s tragic history of annihilation of native populations, of slavery, of continued segregation and racial hatred, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Horrified again by the cruel reaction to Black Americans seeking equality and social justice that was theirs by right, admiring a one-armed local religious leader, father of a close friend, who went south to march with them.

Reading, reading, reading. The great works of literature, especially 19^th Century French and Russian. Devouring Dickens and Dostoevsky before junior high, profoundly affected by The Idiot, which I continue to reread. The seed of my character Sasha Borodin germinated with my first reading. Sasha’s character has grown and mutated over the succeeding decades, through my experience of the Vietnam War era, through political and environmental crises. I reference The Idiot in each of my novels. I imagined a genius instead of an “idiot,” an inventor and man of action, a superb musician and surgeon, highly contradictory, conflicted, socially handicapped by a psychologically scarring childhood and resultant severe touch phobia – rather than a caricature of Dostoevsky’s passive “positively good and beautiful man,” although Sasha vehemently denies any similarity to the saintly, also socially awkward Myshkin. Only his enemies call him Saint Sasha. He’s not quite a saint – he is by his own admission sometimes insufferable, and he kills when he must in protecting the vulnerable and exploited. His partner Katya, my alter ego, kills to protect him when she must––both regret every death. I was always daydreaming, imagining solutions to the world’s problems, imagining a character who could create such solutions. Devouring news stories on innovative scientific developments. Writing detailed stories in my head but not committing them to paper for decades.

Wanting to be an oceanographer in junior high – in Indiana, far from a sea; a fascination with the ocean and with boats remains. As an adult, learning to scuba, traveling to snorkel, dive, and sail whenever I can. Aviation is my latest obsession – reinventing the jet becomes an obsession with Sasha. Following in the footsteps of my father and grandfather, becoming a third-generation newsperson – working for high school and college newspapers in Wisconsin. Dreaming of life as a journalist, an international reporter, anything but a teacher like my hard-working mother.

Taking private oil painting classes, constantly drawing. My first horse in high school – borrowed from a neighboring farm, then one of my own. Preferring Nature to any organized religion. College – studying languages and history. Exploring a new world – Europe, living in Germany and France for over a year. Experiencing radicalism, riots, and tear gas while studying in Bonn, Germany in the early 1970s. Tanks in the streets! Moved to tears visiting Dachau, cementing my ties to Judaism and the Jewish people. Marrying a medical student who was also a fabulous classical pianist. On to California, getting close to horses again with riding lessons. Volunteering, then teaching a horse therapy class for handicapped children, camping with them. Reveling in what they could do, not what they couldn’t.

Finding my way to classroom teaching after all, teaching German for two years in graduate school in Minnesota, then teaching my own children in California, teaching preschool, then getting degree to teach Kindergarten, teaching nature and science classes for young children. Creating a unique Kindergarten program in a Jewish Community Center, based on music and movement, art and science. Balancing teaching, horses, and raising two children, my son excelling in kung fu, art and piano, and second child in the dramatic arts and singing. My son has become a professional musician, on an ancient Swedish instrument, the nyckelharpa, my nonbinary offspring works for a Jewish nonprofit.

Music, music, music. Taking up cello as an adult, and guitar, classical this time. Still persevering at the piano – Bartok, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Scarlatti, mastering Bach’s Prelude in C Major and a version of my favorite Schubert impromptu, practicing my three instruments every day, finding time to swim and ride. Am business director of the Sierra Chamber Society, now in our 38th year, featuring the finest local musicians, including San Francisco Symphony members, commissioning new works. Experiencing live music of all sorts, from jazz to bluegrass to World.

Finding strong women to emulate – Harriet Tubman. Marie Curie. Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman, pioneering aviators. Musical geniuses Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn. Artists Artemisia Gentileschi, Georgia O’Keefe, getting back to art, painting watercolors, entering shows. Actress Michelle Yeoh. Ocean explorer Sylvia Earle – “Her Deepness,” Jane Goodall, Nobel Peace Prize winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai, to name a few. In my novels I‘ve created a ferociously strong multi-talented woman in Katya Kaplan Zhang, who becomes a role model to other women – “never picture failure, only success.” Admiring the young environmental crusader Grete Thunberg. Starting in my third novel, Sasha looks to the young to lead a “Rational Revolution” based on community and science working together – he knows he can’t save the world by himself. A few of the many men in history I admired growing up – Leonardo da Vinci, Sequoyah, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela. Plus men and women heroes I learned about while researching my books, like Ho Feng-Shan, a Chinese official who rescued hundreds of Jews and Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft, the angel of Bergen-Belsen. I admire Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Ray Chen, and Yo Yo Ma for their exquisite playing and for bringing people together through music. Yuja Wang and Hilary Hahn for their breathtaking artistry – along with so many others.

Traveling the world alone or with my husband or a child or two, and with KidsCareEverywhere, a nonprofit helping bring free advanced medical software to doctors and staff, seeing firsthand how most of the world lives, the effects of climate change. Viewing crushing poverty, barely habitable houses, lepers knocking on my taxi windows with their fingerless hands, visiting hospitals that bear no resemblance to what we know here, experiencing how great is the need. Breathing the thick smog of Kathmandu, the mountains invisible except by plane – viewing awesome Mt. Everest and the entire Annapurna Range by Buddha Air. Sweeping flies off children in a hospital in Tanzania, the ceiling tiles and plaster above them collapsed halfway to the floor – burn patients, suffering silently, the doctors having nothing but aspirin for them. Their mothers just as silent, living in the hospital room, sharing their beds – up to four mothers and four children for each bed. Good medical care should be a human right, not a privilege.

Visiting simple Masai villages. Falling in love with the warmth of the African people, the glory of their game parks. Trying in vain by kayak to collect the sea of trash floating in the fuel-stained back waters of beautiful Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. Snorkeling and diving in breathtaking coral reefs off Australia, and in those laid waste by climate change and warming seas. Gagging on the fumes of boat motors on the Amazon, dreaming up pollution-free ones. Supporting Greenpeace – thrilling to see the Rainbow Warrior docked in Sydney. I’m awed by the work of Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, Smile Train, Mercy Ships, Oxfam, the Nature Conservancy, local charities and food banks, the many agencies that help refugees, and support them best I can. My concern over women’s and LBGTQ+ rights has grown stronger and I face the issues in my novels. The reality that more people live under conditions of slavery today than in any time in history – including women and children trapped in forced marriages, that not since WWII have so many refugees fled war, persecution, and poverty, that human rights are under attack even here in the U.S., deeply influences my writing.

In today’s turbulent world, my concerns are with ways to save our environment, with finding alternatives to fossil fuels and nuclear energy. With our need to end warfare, to help the millions of refugees created by conflict and environmental disasters. In my novels, I share what I have learned of history and our current situation and hope to share the dream that men and women of courage, geniuses or not, can change the world.