A Fine Collection That Will Leave You Touched

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books, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, farming, rural life, short stories, To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts

If you’re a fan of short stories, especially ones with a modern rural base, you’ll like this book.

Not that the characters in these stories are all farmers; in fact, few are. Instead, many are that more common species, the offspring of farmers, women and men who went off to college or who have been squeezed out economically, and are now making a living in “the city” – Minneapolis/St. Paul or elsewhere – and feeling the loss and vague guilt that comes with being severed from those roots.

To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts is full of hard feelings. Siblings hold grudges; parents cling to unreasonable expectations; neighbors misunderstand and judge. But below these hard feelings is the longing to make things right. This is a lovely book of stories, in which the drama, unforgiven wounds, and generational misunderstandings of family members are balanced by their halting attempts to heal those wounds and slights. The characters are drawn with a quiet deftness that sometimes make you forget that they are characters at all, in prose that is likewise quiet, not showy, but always well targeted.

“Fish Eyes In Moonlight” was my personal favorite of the collection, a monologue from the point of view of an old man facing mortality, counting up his losses, mistakes, and moments of redemption. But all ten of the stories have a similar yearning for the moments of harmony that occasionally — but only occasionally — counterbalance our stubbornness and failing. A fine collection that will leave you touched.

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Interview: Ed Protzel

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books, Civil War, historical fiction, Missouri, mysteries, racism, reconstruction, writers, writing

My fellow historical novelist Ed Protzel has a new book out today. It’s called Honor Among Outcasts, and it follows his very successful The Lies That Bind. Ed and I have mined similar veins in our work (Missouri during the Civil War), although Ed also has a mystery/thriller coming out this year, also. So it was a real pleasure to visit with him recently about his new release. Here’s our interview:

SW: Thanks for joining me on my blog today, Ed! To start out, I wonder if you could tell us a little about your new book, HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS, and how it connects with your previous novel, THE LIES THAT BIND.

EP: Thanks for having me, Steve. In HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS, the second book in my DarkHorse Trilogy, a Southern abolitionist and a group of runaway slaves form a Union colored cavalry regiment in western Missouri, plunging into the most brutal guerilla war in U.S. history. When the abolitionist and his fiancée are accused of spying for the Confederacy, they must face a corrupt military justice system and other obstacles.

Book 1 of the trilogy, THE LIES THAT BIND, centers on the relationship between these men and their efforts to build their own egalitarian plantation in slavery-dominated Mississippi. HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS begins two years after the end of THE LIES THAT BIND, with the group working as contraband laborers attached to the Union army in Missouri. Both books work as stand-alone novels or, even better, in tandem.

SW: What drew you to this time period in the first place?

EP: I read a lot of history, including the Civil War. Being from Missouri, it felt natural to set HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS in that time and place. However, in my research, Missouri’s terrible neighbor-against-neighbor guerrilla war really caught my attention; it said much about the depths to which hatred could debase the most noble cause. Great material for compelling storytelling. Actually, the periods depicted in the three books — antebellum Mississippi, Civil War Missouri, and Reconstruction Mississippi — form an arc through this pivotal time in American history.

Additionally, all of the DarkHorse novels decry violence, with the main characters attempting to avoid being victims of it. With HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS set during a brutal war to resolve slavery, I didn’t want to resolve the myriad conflicts in the book through violence. Instead, I chose to play out the conflicts  through a courtroom, which tied the plots together very neatly. My characters are seeking justice, and what better place for justice to prevail than a courtroom?

SW: I see that you have a third novel on its way. Did you envision this series as a trilogy, or is that something that just happened along the way?

EP: Yes, I am now happily completing SOMETHING IN MADNESS, the final book in the trilogy. Actually, I imagined the “DarkHorse” concept as a trilogy originally, but had only written the first book (THE LIES THAT BIND). Still I pitched it to my agent as a trilogy, and she pitched the trilogy to the publisher (TouchPoint Press). It’s certainly been an adventure, and I’ll miss the characters once I’m finished, they’re so real to me after all these years.

SW: On a similar note, are you someone who likes to plot your storylines out carefully in advance, or do you discover things as you’re writing? What’s your creative process like?

EP: Actually, I don’t plot out my storylines in advance. Usually, I come up with a strong concept that offers lots of possibilities and powerful themes, plus good main characters that fit the situation. I also come up with an idea for what I think would be a terrific ending, one which will reveal my themes, and I try to keep that ending in mind as I create the story.

As for the rest of it, once I set the story in motion, the characters and the plot take over—that’s the fun of it for me: the reader discovers as I discover. The novel usually morphs into complex plots that gain power as they go forward, with lots of twists and surprises along the way. THE LIES THAT BIND and another novel, futuristic, that was just picked up (THE ANTIQUITIES DEALER) were written like that. Interestingly however, with HONOR I didn’t have an ending in mind when I began, just a number of conflicts and historical events, all of which I had to tie together and resolve. HONOR is quite atypical for me in that respect.

SW: So, you’ve also got a futuristic thriller coming out. I think working on two such disparate genres would make my head spin! Do you see connections between the two types of writing, or do you keep those creative endeavors in separate compartments?

EP: Good question, Steve. Writing THE ANTIQUITIES DEALER was a nice break from writing historical fiction and refreshed me, cleaned out my head. Historical fiction has so many constraints, including language and character viewpoints that can’t be used because they’re too modern, they’d be anachronistic. No such problem with futuristic and sci-fi genres. Further, I wrote THE ANTIQUITIES DEALER first person, which was also liberating, letting me get into the main character’s head in his own words. Also the contemporary setting (St. Louis) is relatively familiar to the reader, mixed with exotic portions in Israel, and partially in Paris and London. And taking place in modern times, with sci-fi-like elements, I was able to really let go and come up with imaginative plot devices that the reader won’t guess. I really enjoyed this genre and have another, EARTH EXCURSIONS, laid out and ready to jump on when I finish SOMETHING IN MADNESS.

SW: Finally, and I know it’s always a little presumptuous asking authors to comment on “themes” and the like, but what are you hoping that readers will take away from HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS?

EP: I hope readers will see a parallel to today’s world and its own set of challenges. I want them to grasp how HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS illustrates that no matter how unjust society may be, love and friendship can enable men and women, regardless of color or class, to stand together and to prevail. And that evil deeds and the lies upon which they depend can and will eventually collapse of their own weight. Think of our country’s advances in civil rights and the women’s movements, gay rights, etc.

Call me an optimist, but history does bend toward justice over time.

Find Ed Protzel at:

Website: http://www.edprotzel

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/edprotzelauthor/?ref=settings

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Honor-Among-Outcasts-DarkHorse-Trilogy/dp/1946920312/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517584302&sr=1-1&keywords=ed+protzel

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14757802.Ed_Protzel

The Pulpwood Queens, Pt. 2

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novels, publishing, Pulpwood Queens, reading, Texas, writers, writing

My author panel at the Pulpwood Queens weekend

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my upcoming trip to the Pulpwood Queens Girlfriend Weekend. That trip has been completed now, and I’m here to report that it was quite an experience!

The event was held at the Fredonia Hotel in Nacogdoches, Texas, a 1950s-era hotel that has been renovated and modernized. I understand that the hotel hasn’t been open long in its new form, but it was a terrific location! Congratulations to the owners on the job they did, and to the Pulpwoods for choosing it.

The Girlfriend Weekend is a gathering of club members, who hailed from all over the country, and the authors they read. In that respect alone it was a unique event. I’ve never attended an event that had so many avid, enthusiastic readers from such a wide location.

The authors were also a varied group, and I had a good time making new acquaintances. Here are a few photos: The one at the top of the post has Clea Simon, the author of World Enough (she’s a mystery writer), and Reavis Wortham, who writes Texas-based thrillers. At the end is the Pulpwood Queen herself, Kathy Murphy (more about her in a minute). I enjoyed meeting scads of other authors who work in a wide variety of genres: Lorna Landvik (contemporary novels with a humorous twist), Bren McClain (whose debut novel, One Good Mama Bone, was the Queens’ Book of the Year, Tamra Bolton (children’s), Rickey Pittman (children’s ABC books), Romalyn Tilghman, Man Martin, Lisa Wingate (whose latest book, Before We Were Yours, has hit the well-deserved bigtime), Alice Hoffman, and many, many more.

Me with Lorna Landvik, who was the high bidder on my gift basket to raise money for the Pat Conroy Literary Center.

The orchestrator of this event is Kathy Murphy, who is a tireless advocate for books, reading, and literacy. She put the whole event together, co-hosted with author Jamie Ford, and somehow managed to keep this enormous herd of cats pointed in the same direction! It was a delight to meet her. We ended up having dinner together on the night before the event got started, and I was immensely impressed with her verve and zest for the literary experience. There’s a movie in the works about her story, and she’s an author herself!

The Texas Ornithological Society was holding its winter meeting that same weekend, and the hotel staff helpfully directed us. As if the tiaras weren’t enough of a clue!

It was a long drive, but an unforgettable event! I am hugely grateful to have been invited and excited about a return trip!

 

The Pulpwood Queens

Tags

Kathy Murphy, Pulpwood Queens, reading, Texas, writing

Earlier this fall, I was delighted to receive an invitation to participate in the annual get-together of The Pulpwood Queens, an event they call Girlfriend Weekend. I’ve been aware of the Queens for years, after reading an article about them in Newsweek. So when I got the invitation, I said yes without a moment’s hesitation.

For those who haven’t heard of them before, the Pulpwood Queens are an organization of book clubs, founded in 2000 by Kathy Murphy. You can read about her inspiring story here. At the Girlfriend Weekend, the Queens dress outrageously, wear tiaras, and dance the night away. But more important, they share their love of books! They talk books, chat with authors, and celebrate the writer-reader partnership. These folks love books. They are a Reading Nation, as Kathy Murphy calls them.

I’m excited to head for the Girlfriend Weekend next month. And despite the name, the Queens also welcome men — “Timber Guys” is the designated term. It’s not too late to join the fun, so if you’re looking for a mid-January getaway, head to Nacogdoches, Texas, in the heart of pulpwood country.

 

 

 

 

The Historical and the Utopian

Tags

books, historical fiction, T. C. Boyle, Terra Ziporyn, utopia

The visionary plan of the Koreshan settlement near Fort Myers, Florida.

The Historical Novels Review recently published a piece I wrote about historical novelists who write about utopian communities or similar subjects. I’m working on a longer article, but for HNR, I had a tight word limit, so I confined myself mainly to an interview with fellow novelist T. C. Boyle.

Here’s the article as it appeared in HNR. By the way, they also have a review of The Language of Trees, which you can read here.

The list of historical novels grows ever longer, as does the list of utopian (nowadays, more likely dystopian) novels. Yet few novels occupy places on both; the historical and the utopian seem to be antithetical impulses. Although utopias fascinate historians and sociologists, they pose narrative challenges that may help explain why few historical novelists have entered this territory.

The classic utopian/dystopian novel is set either in the future or in a geographically indeterminate present. For this reason alone, historical novelists would find this genre inhospitable. A few novels give fictional treatment of actual communities; Terra Ziporyn’s Time’s Fool (2001) portrays a child of the Oneida colony of New York who becomes a zealot for sexual hygiene, highlighting the oppressive potential of utopian idealism. My novels explore similar themes using a community based on the 19th-century Icarians.

Similarly, T. C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville (1993) finds the dark and ridiculous sides of another utopian project, John Harvey Kellogg’s sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, where the health-obsessed sought relief through Kellogg’s regimen of vegetarianism, abstinence, and “colonic irrigation.” The novel also sees the authoritarian shadow behind the utopian impulse, especially with a charismatic leader in charge.

I recently posed a few questions to Boyle about his work:

Wiegenstein: American history and literature seem populated by obsessives, cranks, and con-men. Does the American sensibility lend itself to this tendency?

Boyle: Because we are essentially an anti-authoritarian nation founded by and harboring utopian cultists, we are uniquely susceptible to the leader (con man?) who says, “Give yourselves over to me and my regime and I will purify and sanctify you.”  Examples in my work include The Women (about Frank Lloyd Wright), The Inner Circle (Alfred Kinsey) and The Terranauts (John Allen and the Biosphere II project), and that is only a partial list.

Wiegenstein: In The Road to Wellville, the characters’ preoccupation with diet seems to have contemporary resonance. Do you see a connection to the utopian impulse?

Boyle: Yes, even in the early 1990s when I was writing The Road to Wellville, I was inspired by the parallels between the early health-food advocates and the ones we see now, as well as their food and exercise fads.  Kellogg had splendid ideas–vegetarian diet, no alcohol or tobacco, regular exercise–but what made him ludicrous (and suspicious) in my eyes was his messianic and puritanical bent.  (Incidentally, I loved Alan Parker’s film version, with Anthony Hopkins in the ever-so-slightly menacing role of Dr. Kellogg.)  Further, I do see our obsession with purity of food as part of the utopian impulse, as you put it, and, as The Road to Wellville suggests, what does this have to with but the very saving of our souls (and corporeal beings too) through staving off death?

Wiegenstein: In writing The Road to Wellville, did you feel compelled to stay close to facts, or relatively free to invent?  How did you decide where to draw the line?

Boyle: Fiction has no compulsion to do anything but exist as art.  That said, in all my historical novels, I have been motivated by the oddness of actual events and their correspondence with today (how did we get here?), and so have given the history to you as I have received it.  All the facts of Kellogg’s life are accurate (so too with my portrayal of Frank Lloyd Wright in The Women and Alfred C. Kinsey in The Inner Circle)—I suppose I’d be a historian if I weren’t a novelist.  But the novelist can dig into the brains and p.o.v. of historical figures in the way historians can’t, and that is a great joy for me.  As for your final question regarding the line between invention and fact, my conscience is clear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book Club Reading Guide

Tags

Book clubs, reading, Reading guide, The Language of Trees

The Language of Trees reading guide

For those of you who are leading book club discussions, here’s a downloadable version of my book club reading guide. Would you like to have me visit with your group in person or by online linkup? Contact me and let me know!

Myths and Mythmakers

Tags

ghost stories, legends, monsters, Springfield, Steve Yates, storytelling, The Legend of the Albino Farm

The Legend of the Albino Farm, by Steve Yates

I finished Steve Yates’ intriguing and inventive The Legend of the Albino Farm yesterday and have been pondering it since. Like all of Steve’s books, it brims with sentences that surprise and descriptions that engage. Its central character, Hettienne Sheehy, compels our attention with her multi-edged personality and lapses into premonitory trance. But at its heart, I think it’s a book about our propensity for mythmaking.

I’ve heard Steve describe this book as a horror story turned inside out, and that’s an apt description. Imagine a horror story in which the focus is on the presumed monster, and in which the “monster” turns out to be nothing of the sort. That’s the situation of the “Albino Farm,” which I am told is a long-standing Springfield ghost story/urban legend about a farm on the northern outskirts of the city. The only monsters in The Legend of the Albino Farm are the townsfolk and rowdies, snoopers and idle curious, who trespass on the farm to get a look at its inhabitants, deface its buildings, and terrorize the old folks.

We make up stories to entertain ourselves, and as a storyteller I honor that impulse. But there’s a dark side to this tendency, which we see in people’s stunning willingness to believe all sorts of wild nonsense without evidence (my Facebook news feed testifies to this) and to construct the worst possible explanation for something we don’t understand. Our love for story is also a love for gossip and ugliness sometimes, unfortunately, and we warp toward the tawdry all too often.

The King Sits in Dumfermline Town

Tags

art, music, narration, Sir Patrick Spens, writing

Stained glass window from the Abbot House at Dumfermline

I’ve had the opening lines of “Sir Patrick Spens” running through my head for the last few days, probably because I’ve been thinking about narrative economy. And rarely will you find a more economical opening than this:

The king sits in Dumfermline town, drinking the blood-red wine.

“Where can I find a good captain to sail this ship of mine?”

Then up and spoke a sailor boy sitting at the king’s right knee:

“Sir Patrick Spens is the best captain that ever sailed the sea.”

And there you have it. We know that king. He’s idling away his time, he’s contracted for a new bride from Norway, and he’s eager to get to the business of siring heirs. With the wine in his blood, he’s growing impatient. But why won’t anybody sail over to fetch her? We know the reason. It’s a crazy mission this time of year to cross the North Sea. But he will not be brooked; he’s the king, and his word is law.

And we know that sailor boy, too. Eager to please, the little underling. Eager to show off his knowledge. So he “up and speaks,” and from that foolish remark the tragedy unfolds. Sir Patrick, his frightened crew, and “all the lords and noblemen” sail off to their doom. The blood-red wine foreshadows their fate.

A chance exchange of words sets off a chain of events, unforeseen by those who speak the words but inevitable as death itself. Now that’s narrative economy.

A Great Year for Reading

Tags

C.D. Albin, criticism, Daniel Green, literature, short stories

Hard Toward Home

Beyond the Blurb

Looking back over the past year, I realize what a great year I had for reading. (I know, it’s already the end of February, but I’m still digesting work from 2016.) Two books that I read toward the end of the year were C.D. Albin’s excellent collection of short stories Hard Toward Home and Daniel Green’s literary critical essays in Beyond the Blurb.

The stories in Hard Toward Home are brief and rather jaggedly structured, with characters we often find mid-crisis and for whom the crisis remains unresolved at the end of the story. They’re mainly set in the Arkansas Ozarks, in the contemporary era, with a few excursions out. The stories are beautifully written, but what I like best about them is that they take characters often overlooked or stereotyped in rural fiction–the angry middle-aged male, the frustrated professional man’s wife, for example–and find depth and humanity in those people.

Many of the characters in Hard Toward Home are poor, or nearly so. Even those who are not poor are pushed by economic necessity. I appreciate this element of the stories; the contemporary short story has so often been taken over by characters whose concerns are more ethereal, and (in my view) thus often less interesting. Albin’s stories explore and humanize overlooked people, and to me that’s a great thing.

Daniel Green’s book does a wonderful job of surveying the current landscape in literary criticism and evaluating those who practice it. It’s not a book for the general reader (I confess, I don’t consider myself qualified to evaluate the book entirely, as I’m not familiar with some of the critics he discusses), but for the literary scholar it’s a valuable addition. Green writes with great precision, and in a  time when much literary analysis seems more interested in advancing a theoretical perspective than actually engaging with the work, it’s refreshing to read a book that returns the focus squarely onto the workings of the literary work. I read it in little bits, as it consists largely of a sequence of essays, and I tend to take my literary criticism in small doses.

Both are well worth reading!

 

It’s Official Now

Tags

Amphorae Publishing Group, Blank Slate Press, forests, Industrial Revolution, novels, The Language of Trees

My publisher, Blank Slate Press, an imprint of the Amphorae Publishing Group, has set the release date for my next novel–September 26! This is an exciting moment for me, as I’ve been working on this book since 2014.

We went around and around for several weeks about the title. I like titles with a lot of literary flair, while the publishers like titles that will catch the eye and sell well from a bookshelf—not that these two concepts are necessarily opposed to each other. But we definitely come from different vantage points; as my editor regularly reminds me, “Writing is an art. Publishing is a business.” But it all worked out in the end, and we have a title that suits us both.

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away quite yet. It’s fun to do a little buildup as the months go by, and launch events have not yet been planned. But I can give you a taste: when This Old World ended, it was 1866, and the people of Daybreak had wrestled with the aftermath of the Civil War with varying degrees of success. Some of them carried the wounds of war with them till their end, while others sought to heal by whatever means they could find—revenge, forgiveness, the remaking of self. But now, it’s 1887, the war is a fading memory for most although still fresh in the minds of some, and new challenges face Daybreak. Their agrarian way of life seems outdated as the Industrial Revolution transforms the country. And new people have moved into the valley. Some are sympathetic to the ideals of Daybreak, some seek to profit from them, and some keep their motives to themselves. The children of Slant of Light and This Old World are now in their twenties, creating lives of their own, and not everyone wants to hang on to the prewar utopian ideals that led to the creation of Daybreak. So the stage is set for change in the lives of Charlotte, Charley, and all the inhabitants of Daybreak old and new, change that will be profound, tumultuous, and potentially tragic.

The new book is The Language of Trees.