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Nashua native, author to debut new book

By George Pelletier - Milford Bureau Chief | Aug 22, 2020

BILLERICA, MASSACHUSETTS – New York Times best-selling children’s author MarcyKate Connolly, who spent the first 27 years of her life in Nashua, will be debuting her new young adult novel, “Twin Daggers,” in a Zoom event at 7 p.m. on Aug. 25.

The event is sponsored by Toadstool Books, 375 Amherst St. in Somerset Plaza, Nashua.

Connolly attended Hampshire College in western Massachusetts, taking a “round about” way of eventually becoming an author.

“When I was growing up in Nashua, I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer,” she said. “I loved to read and loved music. I’m a classically trained soprano, however, I have crippling stage fright.”

In college, Connolly was a double major in music and literature. She wrote an opera as the equivalent of her senior thesis – a sequel to William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

“It was called ‘The Undiscovered Country,'” she said with a laugh. “Even while I was there, I wrote the plot to the story as a journey to the underworld and I wrote the music; but I didn’t write the words.”

Connolly went through all of Shakespeare’s plays and pulled different lines from passages and pieces, based on whether she could apply them to her opera.

“I kind of ‘Frankenstein-ed’ them together,” she said. “The subtitle was, ‘Quilting with Shakespeare.’ It did not occur to me that I could actually write the words yet, which was silly in hindsight, but I didn’t have confidence in that. The music and everything else was fine though.”

It wasn’t until 2008, when Connolly was 28, that she finally had an idea for her first book. She was commuting from Nashua to Boston, where she was attending Boston University, completing her master’s in art’s administration at night.

“I wasn’t sleeping at all,” she said. “That’s like a two-hour commute between train time and traffic and everything. And there was a whole bunch of construction on Route 3 at the time.”

Connolly was trying to get home, hoping not to miss her train. While the red line was stopped, she noticed a light on behind some plastic seating in an unused subway tunnel.

“I started dozing off and I got this idea for a story about fairies living in the unused subway tunnels of Boston,” she recalled. “That kind of inspired my first book idea, which never got published, rightly so.”

Working character development and storylines lit a fuse for Connolly’s creativity, and she said she never looked back.

“It took me a while to get published, but that was my first idea,” she said. “I figured if I could write a two hour opera, maybe I could give writing a whirl.”

Fantasy as always been Connolly’s niche, with a love for the classics as well.

“I always liked ‘old-timey’ language,” she shared. “When I was growing up, I really enjoyed the old, dark and grim fairy tales. My first formative books that I used to read, were the ‘Redwall’ series by Brian Jacques.”

Connolly said that was her favorite series as a child, adding that she wasn’t a very popular kid.

“Having the escapism into fantasy was really important to me when I was growing up,” she said.

Fast-forward from “The Undiscovered Country,” to present, it’s no secret that her new book, “Twin Daggers,” puts a new spin on Romeo and Juliette.

“I love Shakespeare- that’s no coincidence,” she stated. “When I was growing up, I was the bratty little sister who would go into his room and steal the books off his shelves. He was an English literature major at B.U., so he had all these Shakespeare plays. I was eight or nine.”

Getting lost in the worlds of fairies and fantasy was a passion and pastime for Connolly.

“The words I didn’t know became kind of a scavenger hunt for me,” she said. “‘What did the word mean? Could I look it up in the dictionary? What was the context?’ That was an adventure for me.”

Connolly said she might toss in a Shakespeare reference in another book at some point.

“That’s definitely a possibility,” she said.

To register for the virtual event, visit tinyurl.com/marcykateConnolly.

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