by Kitsy Clare
I’m a factory geek. Yup. I’ve been obsessed with spooky,
spidery warehouses ever since I lived in a defunct shoe factory in Boston while
I was in my twenties in art school. It was a mecca for creative souls, and we
formed a funky-utopian tribe with a dance bar in the basement and a veggie
garden on the roof. The place still had barrels of shoe soles in the halls and
mildewed promo flyers in the basement from 1920, announcing they’d utilized the
latest trend in production line speed: workers flying around on roller-skates!
My very first novel was set there.
The Boston shoe plant was awesome (Until it burned down.
Thankfully, no one got hurt). But my favorite old warehouse ever is the Domino
Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I moved around the corner from it,
before Williamsburg grew into the mega-hipster paradise it is today. In the
sketchy days, when my car battery would get stolen and I’d buy it back from the
local gas station for $25, I recall strolling by the place, ever eager to see
which magnificent vessel was docked on its East River port. Sometimes they
sailed in from Cuba, sometimes from Brazil or Thailand. I thrilled to the
colorful flags flapping on the rigs, and the idea that the boats came from such
exotic, faraway places.
One afternoon, I took my camera and notebook over and
interviewed the night watchman. My senses infused with its distinct burnt sugar
scent, its walls covered in a skim of blackened sugar. He told me stories of
workers falling into vats and boiling alive, tales of hearing their subsequent
ghostly sounds as their spirits floated around at odd hours. Oh, man, was I
hooked! I wrote a story outline with the intention of penning a freaky urban
fantasy. Then, in a stroke of bad luck, my bundle of notes and photos were lost
when I went out drinking with friends and left them in a bar. No doubt, some
fool thief got a handful of strange scratchings. Yet, the setting stayed firmly
embedded in my mind after I moved to Manhattan where I began to write novels in
earnest.
In 2013, I finally thought up the perfect plotline for
the fictional sugar factory setting. PRIVATE INTERNSHIP is my forthcoming new
adult romance, out this Fall with Inkspell. In it, artist Sienna Karr lands an
interview for a high-level internship with bad-boy sculptor Casper Mason, or
Caz. Guess where he lives and works? In the Domino Sugar Factory, which I
renamed the Schneitryn Sugar Factory (You have to read the novel to learn why.
There’s a specific reason) “Sugar, no shit!” as the newly hired Sienna remarks.
Rich, famous Caz has bought the entire factory, and uses the hundreds of
existing sugar bags for his sculptures.
A summary: Sienna’s bestie, Harper warned her not to
intern for famous bad boy artist, Casper Mason. After all, he just fired Harper
who helped Sienna get the interview. But the moment Sienna sees Casper—or
Caz—sweaty and practically shirtless and swinging from chains while he works on
his sculpture, she’s hooked. He’s the richest, hottest artist in New York, and
he lives in the fabulous Williamsburg Sugar Factory. But he’s also an
incorrigible gameplayer, who seems to relish testing Sienna’s loyalty with a
string of unsettling tests. She knows she should get away fast. But by the time
Sienna sneaks into his locked storage room and begins to unearth his dark and
terrifying secret, she’s fallen way too hard for the handsome, charismatic Caz.
Little did I know that in 2014 the Domino Sugar Factory
would be a fixture in the news; that the neighborhood landmarks committee would
be in an uproar about its demise and redevelopment, and that well-known
sculptress Kara Walker would set up her sugar sphinx mama in that doomed place.
Yes, reality is as strange as fiction. Kara explains through her little sugar slave
boys who are literally melting—an arm dropping off here, a nose there, that the
sugar trade was a very nasty business, fueled by oppressed slaves hauled in
from Africa to the Caribbean and elsewhere.
Ditto the mood from the Landmarks Preservation Commission
in a September, 2007 statement: “Raw sugar was supplied from America’s deep south,
mainly Louisiana, and the Caribbean, where it was primarily harvested by
slaves. Though slavery ended in the United States in 1865, it continued in
Cuba, the world’s largest exporter of raw sugar, until 1886.”
Coincidentally, in PRIVATE INTERNSHIP, the sculptor Caz
quotes from Voltaire’s CANDIDE. A horrified Candide comes across a slave boy
in what is now Guyana who has lost an arm and leg. The boy explains: “When we work
in the sugar mills and get a finger caught in the machinery, they cut off the
hand; but if we try to run away, they cut off a leg … it is the price we pay
for the sugar you eat in Europe.”
Caz is no fool; he’s aware of the dark side of his
spun-sugar art medium. Ironically, as he tears three sugar packets and pours
one after the other into his gourmet blend coffee, he says to Sienna in all
seriousness, “Sugar, it’s delicious yet deadly, sweet yet bitter to the
arteries. It’s no good for anyone.”
What kinds of unique settings inspire you to write?♥
Kitsy Clare hails from Philly
and lives in New York. A romantic at heart, she loves to write about the sexy intrigue
of the city, particularly in the art world. She knows it well, having shown her
paintings here before turning to writing. MODEL POSITION, her new adult novella
is about artist Sienna and her friends. The next in her series, PRIVATE INTERSHIP just launched with Inkspell.
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