Ángela Fillingham Wildgoose

Edith Whitfield - Founder of "The Mercy Project"

The Mercy Project

Hummingbird

A twenty-year-old busker who can sing for a street full of strangers  - but not one person who knows her name. She goes looking for the father she’s never met — and takes three thousand miles to reach a city six hours from home.
Agent: Angela · angela.fw@wildgooseagency.com
"Experiencia multimedia única, cruda y fascinante que rompe la barrera entre la literatura y la música."
A Multimedia Experience Merging Literature and Music:

A unique, raw, and fascinating multimedia experience that breaks the barrier between literature and music
Anna Utrech and Octavio Lasheras at "Revista Media" https://www.revistavisionmedia.es/

Genre
Realistic fiction with a soundtrack
State
Upcoming work
Rights available
World English / Translation / Film & TV

Synopsis

Mercy Grace Robinson owns three things worth naming: a Gibson Hummingbird, a rust-orange Volkswagen she bought with every dollar she had saved, and a Bible that belonged to the father she has never met. His first name is Jeremiah. The last name is smudged out.

Her mother spent fourteen years in Houston waiting on a man who had told her he lived there, and died without ever finding out he didn't. Mercy was fourteen.

She read that Bible six times looking for him in the margins. She found God in it instead, which is as close as she has ever come to the inside of a church.

New Orleans is six hours east of Houston. She drives north.

What follows is three thousand miles of not arriving — church basements and truck stops, a flooded St. Louis, a festival stage she plays without missing a note for a field full of people who will never see her again. Because strangers are safe. Strangers disappear. It's the ones who learn her name she can't sing a word for.

And by the time she turns south, her father has days left.


Author's Note

I set out to write a novel about a singer, and about forty pages in I ran into the obvious problem. You can't read a song with the same impact as listening to one.

So I wrote the songs. A bunch of them, for a woman who doesn't exist. And somewhere in the middle of that the thing turned around on me—I stopped writing songs to fit the book and started finding out what was in the book by writing what she would have written. Most of what I know about Mercy Grace Robinson I learned with a guitar in my hands, not at the desk.

You can hear them, which calls for one piece of plain speech, because it would be easy to be coy here and I would rather not be. The singing voice and the instruments are generated by a machine. The words are mine. So is every decision in them, and so is everything in them that hurt to write.

She has never set foot inside a church. She has read the good book six times.

I don't believe that's as rare as it sounds, and I don't think anybody writes about it much.

— Edith Whitfield