#Opal and nev how to
#Opal and nev professional

“I always feel like those two pieces of me are still coexisting as the journalist and kind of like the dreamer, like the fiction writer, the practical, the logical and fantastical, both of those things at once,” Walton said. Now, though she wants to continue exploring her new identity as an author, the journalist side of her is still there.

The events that saw the pair reach the brink of stardom before. It is the story of Opal Jewel, who explodes on to the 1970s New York scene with a howl of Afro-punk rage, and Neville Charles, a gifted but goofy young British songwriter who becomes her partner. But after The Final Revival of Opal & Nev came out, she was offered the chance to write cover stories. The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton easily takes a place on this list. In dutifully climbing the rungs of the media industry, she felt herself getting further and further away from her true passion: writing. Despite Walton taking her leap of faith and moving away from her career in journalism, the publication of her novel has afforded her opportunities in her previous career that she had never had before. It’s hard to describe, but you know when you’re onto something that feels big and feels life-changing.”Īnd life-changing it was. “I was getting something emotionally right, I was getting the characters right, I was getting the voices right. Provocative and haunting, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev introduces a bold new name in contemporary fiction and a heroine the likes of which weve not seen. “This was the first time with this novel that I felt like it was really clicking,” Walton said. Her work as an editor at magazines like Essence, Entertainment Weekly and LIFE, enabled her to explore identity, place and pop culture, which are all prevalent themes in the novel. The ’70s are a time that Walton holds dearly her parents were young and music filled her childhood home.

#Opal and nev professional

The story, a passion project that took more than eight years to complete, was influenced by both Walton’s personal and professional experiences. Walton spent Thursday talking with Newhouse School classes about The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, which follows a fictional rock ‘n’ roll duo through the trials and tribulations that came along with rapid stardom in the 1970s. After nearly two decades as editor for several national publications, Walton published her debut novel, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, this past year and can confidently say her dreams have come true. In a project her mother had saved from the ninth grade, Walton predicted that she would write three novels and work as a journalist for a magazine.

#Opal and nev how to

With the help of her stylist Virgil, who sees her unusual looks as a canvas for otherworldly drama, and Jimmy, her drummer and lover, who teaches her how to hear and adapt their music, she becomes a bolder, more authoritative presence.Dawnie Walton had a strong sense of her future from an early age.

She’s never been taught to read music and doesn’t know much about the world she’s entering, but she knows she wanted out of her old life, and that’s all the motivation she needs. Opal is skinny and dark-skinned and, because of alopecia, spent her childhood being taunted by kids who called her baldie. Opal arrives in New York facing the skepticism of the label executive who had hoped Nev would choose her buxom and more conventionally attractive sister, Pearl, as his vocal partner.

Their story is compiled, decades later, by Sunny Shelton, a magazine editor with a painful tie to. How wonderful it is to watch Walton build that complexity, starting with Opal’s fraught music industry debut. Opal & Nev (37 Ink/Simon & Schuster, 27 ), which will be published Tuesday, is a fictional oral history of a Black singer from Detroit and a white singer-songwriter from Britain who come together in the early 1970s to make groundbreaking music.