Ilana C. Myer is the author of the fantasy novel Last Song Before Night. She is blogging here all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series on The ProsenPeople.
The cover of Last Song Before Night was always going to be a cityscape, of the city of Tamryllin where much of the book takes place. When my editor — who generously involved me in the process — asked if I had any tips for my cover artist, I enthusiastically typed, “I envision it as a combination of Paris and Jerusalem” — and it was like a light bulb went on.
Until then I hadn’t considered with any seriousness the impact of Jerusalem on this novel. The setting was inspired by research of medieval France and landscapes of Ireland and Scotland, the latter of which I’d visited in the year I began writing. That I was living in Jerusalem for the entirety of the writing period just seemed like circumstance. That is, until I found myself giving directions to the cover artist, Stephan Martiniere. So it came to be that this fantasy novel inspired by the troubadours of France and the Celtic poets has much of Jerusalem in it. It is all in the city, where much of the novel’s action takes place; outside the city has more a flavor of Ireland’s Ring of Kerry and a tiny island in the Scottish lowlands, near Loch Lomond.
And there are aspects of Provence, for there was something about the Mediterranean abundance of that place that I wanted for my capital city of Tamryllin, where arts, culture, and beauty flourish alongside brutality. So when I wrote lovingly of pale stone and jasmine scents and red wine, these seemed appropriate for the Mediterranean sort of atmosphere I wanted. But the atmosphere and aesthetic are closer to the city I was living in at the time, a place that has always been precious to me even as my relationship with it is complex. (Is there is anyone whose relationship with Jerusalem is not complex?)
One scene was consciously modeled on the Jerusalem cityscape — I knew it at the time. It was one of those writing experiences that comes rarely in a lifetime, when everything feels right. It was a hot summer night in Jerusalem, one of the hottest on record; we’d regularly had days of 105 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not normal for Jerusalem, and it didn’t cool down at night. One night I found that I couldn’t sleep. At 3: 00 AM I found myself on our third-floor porch on Emek Refaim, laptop balanced on my knees as I sat in a rickety chair left behind by a previous tenant. It was exquisitely quiet and I could see the dark treeline of the hills beyond the city. 
And it just so happened to be when I was writing a character who was wandering at exactly that time of day, the earliest hours of the morning, cutting through narrow, winding streets and scrambling across rooftops. I was imagining the Old City, where I’d taken such shortcuts at night. Into those particular pages I poured my experience of Jerusalem.
The rest was absorbed as if by osmosis, and I was not to realize until years later, when at last my book was to be published by Tor/Macmillan and we were discussing cover art. Sometimes when we write we’re not aware of the ways in which what we take in is expressed on the page. Now Last Song Before Night stands not only as a testimony to a certain time in my life, but also to a place that matters to the world and, in very real ways, matters to me.
Ilana C. Myer has written about books for The Globe and Mail, The Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Salon. Previously she was a journalist in Jerusalem.
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