Catherine Con Morse

Catherine Con Morse’s debut novel, The Notes, was shortlisted for the CRAFT first chapters contest. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA from Boston University, where she taught undergraduate creative writing for several years. Her work appears in Joyland, Letters, HOOT, Bostonia, and elsewhere, and has been a finalist for the Beacon Street Prize and the Baltimore Review fiction prize. While writing The Notes, she was one of the inaugural Writers in Residence at Porter Square Books, where she enjoyed writing in the back office and eating croissants with her cafe discount.

Con Morse attended college on a music scholarship at the University of South Carolina, where she received a B.M. in piano performance. She also holds an Ed.M. in Arts in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education. In high school, Con Morse attended the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, a public arts boarding school. While there, she was as intrigued with her piano teacher as Claire is with Dr. Li. Con Morse continues to play and occasionally teach piano today. Most recently, she taught English at Choate Rosemary Hall, and lives in the Connecticut River Valley with her husband and daughter.

Her second novel, The Summer I Remembered Everything, is out in April.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title of The Notes do to take readers into the story?

The Notes is simple but evocative. It makes you wonder, What notes? Are these music notes or is someone writing a note? Maybe both?

The book takes place in the lively, high-stakes world of a prestigious performing arts boarding school, where Claire Wu is a pianist. When Dr. Li, a glamorous new piano teacher, shows up, Claire can’t help but want to become just like her. But when Claire starts receiving mysterious, handwritten notes about her teacher, she is forced to decide who she really is, and who she wants to become.

What's in a name?

My sister was in college when she offhandedly told me, “All the Asian kids hang out together, like Rocky Wong and Natalie Lam, but I don’t hang out with them.” Years later, it still bugged me. My sister is Asian American, so why wasn’t she hanging out with the other Asian kids? And who was this Rocky Wong? Rocky sounded like it had to be the name of a cool guy. What was his deal?

In The Notes, Rocky and other Asian students are part of an elusive secret society that Claire longs to join. Later in the novel, Rocky’s Chinese name is revealed at a crucial moment as Claire begins to see what he’s hiding beneath his bravado.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

Teenage me would be delighted to know I actually finished writing a damn novel! I loved creative writing and had lots of ideas for projects that I never finished.

The Notes was inspired by my own high school experience at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. It was a magical place. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the only Asian kid in my class, and I had friends who loved the arts. My senior year, we got a new piano teacher. Dr. Chen was glamorous and demanding, her teaching methods unconventional. She was the only Asian teacher at the school. All these things made her a celebrity on our small campus. Years later, I still wondered about her—so much so that I ended up writing a whole novel inspired by her.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I saw the opening scene in the dining hall very early on, because, as a teen, it struck me how fish-out-of-water the real Dr. Li was in our cafeteria.

This is embarrassing to admit, but it took me a while to know who was writing the notes in the novel. Once I knew who they were and their motives, the ending came more easily.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

While writing, I listened to a lot of musicians and bands that deal with coming of age, first love, loneliness, longing, and belonging—things that characters grapple with in The Notes. Some of my favorites include Mitski, Sufjan Stevens, and Belle & Sebastian. The novel is also a love letter to classical music, so make sure to listen to the playlist in the back of the book as you read!

Visit Catherine Con Morse's website.

--Marshal Zeringue