Connie Hampton Connally
I am a writer who loves good music and good stories.
It’s been my privilege to combine these loves by writing fiction that honors the creation of beauty, even in the bleakest of circumstances, through the creation of music.
About
Connie
Connie and her husband live in Tacoma, Washington. They travel frequently, since they have family members living abroad. Because of her family and her characters, Connie has set her heart—and often her feet—in faraway places.
Books
Fire Music
A new novel – COMING SOON…
One August evening in 2006, Antal Varga, an old Hungarian violinist, is approached by a young American stranger. The woman, Lisa Denman, hands him music he himself wrote at age seventeen. Suddenly Varga’s darkest memories are jarred open, for he wrote this during Budapest’s terrible siege of 1945. Lisa, a distant relative, wants to know the music’s story, which her grandparents held back from her. Sensing that the time has come to face old hurts, Varga re-opens the music. The siege and its harrowing aftermath are again laid bare before him. Little by little, Varga deals with Lisa’s questions, as his grandson Kristof translates and begins asking questions of his own. In working through the music together, Varga, Lisa and Kristof each confront their shared and separate pain. They discover that though hurt may extend over generations, love extends further still, and grief can be re-composed as beauty.
The Songs We Hide
Published by Coffeetown Press
In 1951, a grim hush has settled over Hungary. After a lost war and a brutal transition to communism, the people live under constant threat of blacklisting, property confiscation, arrest, imprisonment and worse. In this milieu of dread, the best land of Peter Benedek’s peasant family is seized and his life upended. Moving to Budapest for a manual labor job, Peter meets Katalin Varga, an unwed mother whose baby’s father has vanished, most likely at the hands of the secret police. Both Péter and Katalin keep their heads down and their mouths clamped shut, because silence is the only safety they know.
But the two have something in common besides fear: they are singers. When Katalin starts giving Péter voice lessons, they take an intrepid step out of hiding by making music together. Little by little they tell each other what they cannot tell others. In their bond of trust, they find relief and unexpected happiness.
Yet the hurts and threats in their lives remain, waiting. As harsh reality assaults them again, is hope even possible? Facing their hardest trials yet, Peter and Katalin learn to carve dignity and beauty out of pain.
To order the book:
Events
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Recent Blog Posts
Spiritual Survival as a Writer
Recently a discouraged writer asked me how I cope with the depression that comes with writing. This woman, whom I'll call Mary, wasn't talking about dealing with rejection; she meant the endless self-doubt. She has spent probably four or five years writing and...
What I’m Learning From My Book Events
My novel The Songs We Hide came out May 1, and since then I've done eleven book events. I'm using the term "events" loosely, because these gatherings have come in different sizes and taken different forms. I've presented at bookstores, with one gathering consisting of...
A Review in Hungarian
When The Songs We Hide was published about two months ago, two Hungarian-American publications ran a review of it. Below is the review that appeared in Nyugati-Hirlevel, which means "Western Newsletter." This newsletter goes out to Hungarians living the U.S. and...
Contact
Whether you’d like to schedule an event, share thoughts, or ask questions, I’d love to hear from you. Please contact me using this form.
