Terrific New Story Collection

Tags

A Common Person, fiction, Missouri, R. M. Kinder, short stories, Sullivan Prize, University of Notre Dame Press

I ordered this new collection of short stories from the University of Notre Dame Press as soon as I saw the announcement, and for a couple of reasons. It was the second book in a row from a Missouri author to win the press’s Sullivan Prize, so I felt a little regional pride. And the previous year’s prizewinner, John Mort’s Down Along the Piney, was such a pleasure that I had developed some trust in the editors’ judgment.

That trust was justified. R. M. Kinder’s A Common Person and Other Stories is a rich and rewarding book. The seventeen stories in its 200 pages have a unified, guiding sensibility to them, but each is distinctive in its own way, and some challenge our notion of what counts as a “story.” It’s a satisfying collection, with stories to re-read and find multiple rewards from.

Kinder’s strength is her handling of point of view, the flowing, sometimes-random way our thoughts move from one idea to the next. The characters in her stories think in the kind of associational bursts of connection we’re all familiar with, from specific observation to vast abstraction, from hope to despair in the flick of an insight, and then back to hope again. Their feelings and responses are true and precisely portrayed.

There’s a proliferation of animals in these stories, too, mostly dogs but some others as well. I don’t know anything about Kinder’s personal habits, but certainly the stories suggest that for this author, the way a person interacts with animals is an indicator of essential character. The dogs have lives and personalities in the stories that are as carefully drawn as the humans, sometimes.

Sometimes the point of view will float from character to character within a story, the sort of thing we warn our beginning students against but a beautiful tool in the hands of a pro. The effect is that of a drifting consciousness, above but not detached from the thoughts of the individual characters, allowing us to glimpse multiple trains of thought and emotion even as the story progresses along a single line of action. This technique gives some of the stories a dreamlike quality, not that actual dreams are happening (although they sometimes do) but because we move from mind to mind with such swiftness and ease. And sometimes the collective consciousness of the community speaks through the voice of narrator.

If you’re a lover of the short story, this collection is worth tracking down and putting on your shelf.

This Writing Thing

Tags

awards, fiction, PEN, PEN/Faulkner Award, writing

I can hardly say enough about how delighted I was last night when I received word that my short story collection had been named as one of ten finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction for 2021. The happy vibe is still in full effect this morning, and I find myself reflecting on this whole writing endeavor.

Writers are a funny bunch. It’s the most solitary art form of all, and somebody can be working on a single project for years. You have to distance yourself from the rewards of immediate gratification, and in fact you’ll hear a lot of writers declare that they get sufficient reward from the work itself. I say that myself from time to time.

But at the same time, writers as a group tend to be highly insecure, often neurotically so, and every little bit of recognition is lapped up like sweet cream. So we hold contests and conferences, and we monitor sales reports, even as we announce that such things don’t really matter. But of course they do matter, even if it’s only inside our heads.

So today I celebrate, and tomorrow I get back to work.

Living with Loss

Tags

art, change, childhood, creativity, Crystal Payton, fiction, historical fiction, history, lakes, Leland Payton, literature, memory, Osage, Quincy, writing

A while back I shared a guest post from Dean Robertson about “home” – her recollections of her childhood home, leaving it, and returning years later. Since then that meditation has returned to me on occasion as I work on my next book.

The third book that I have set in the same river valley takes place about twenty years after This Old World‘s end. Some of the characters are still there, some are gone, and new ones have arrived. I’ve been thinking about the complicated emotions we experience when we see a place – our place – occupied by someone else.

Whenever I travel to Quincy, I like to drive by our old house on North 22nd Street, the house my daughter grew up in. For a while it was an unpleasant experience, as the house fell into disrepair (seeing its occupant appear in the police report was the low point). But now it has a new owner, bright shutters, newly planted flowers. So the drive-by is a cheerful one once again.

Still, it’s not my house any more. And even the most dutiful of owners is not me. So even positive change involves loss.

These thoughts were prompted today by the folks over at Damming the Osage, who posted a poem written by a gentleman not of my acquaintance, Rod Cameron of Raytown, Mo. It’s a lovely poem, followed by a reminiscence, of himself and his neighbors losing their land to the building of a reservoir. It’s a darn fine poem. Take a read.

What can we do with loss? Loss is built into our existence. Some losses are inevitable, but others (like the loss in the poem) are not, and we fight like devils to prevent them. In G.B. Shaw’s Major Barbara, a character says, “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.” Perhaps that aphorism can be reversed as well. When we lose something, we owe it to ourselves to learn from it – or at least to make it into a poem worth reading.

And so I return to the last few chapters of my novel-in-progress, thinking about my characters and their losses and their learning.

Parallel Universes

Tags

art, childhood, creativity, fiction, imagination, memory, universes

I’m not learned enough in the sciences to genuinely understand the concept of “parallel universes” as put forth in theoretical physics, but I read enough in the popular scientific media to appreciate it. It occurs to me that we all live in parallel universes.

Let me call them the “chronoverse” and the “neuroverse.” The chronoverse is the world of brute reality, of time and space as we ordinarily experience them. Time moves on. We age. We live in one place, and then another. And then we die and are gone.

But the neuroverse is the universe created by the firing of our synapses and the electrochemical processes of our brains (thus the “neuro”). The neuroverse is the world of imagination and desire, memory and possibility, the hypothetical and the fantastic. In the neuroverse, I live here in Columbia, but I also live in Quincy, and in my childhood homes. In the neuroverse, I am a child and also a great-grandfather. My parents are living, and my grandparents and great-grandparents, and all my ancestors and descendants, because as I think of them, they are created in those neurochemical sparks.

The chronoverse is unforgiving and linear. The neuroverse is plastic and pluripotential. In the chronoverse, I know who I am and what I’m capable of, but in the neuroverse, these questions are always open, a prospect that is both exciting and scary.

It’s tempting to say that the one is “real” and the other is not, but what is real? What I perceive through the ordinary senses comes to me through neurological filters as well, and is similarly edited before I experience it as normal. Practicality and experience keep me in the chronoverse most of the time, functioning like a regular person. The longing for other lives, for realities beyond what is currently within my grasp, draws me to the neuroverse again and again.

As a fiction writer,  I spend a lot of time in my neuroverse. I have lived in the 19th Century for many years now and feel quite at home there. But I think all of us live in our neuroverses a lot. We dream, we fear, we imagine, we remember, we project. All of these states create alternate universes for us to visit, some desirable, some not. Whenever I am creating a scene in a novel, or thinking of a loved one who is not physically present, I am there in my neuroverse just as much as if I were there in “real life.” It’s just happening in a universe that others cannot perceive.

M.M. Bennetts Finalist Review and Interview – 9

Tags

books, creativity, David Blixt, fiction, historical fiction, Italy, M.M. Bennetts Award, novels, reviews, Shakespeare, Verona, writing

My tour of the M.M. Bennetts Award finalists nears its completion with the shortlisted finalists. First up, David Blixt’s The Prince’s Doom. 

Imagine a world in which the 14th-century historical figures of Italy — the Della Scala family of Verona, the Doge of Venice, Petrarch, the family of Dante Alighieri, the Carrara family of Padua — interacted and lived alongside the characters of Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Katherine and Petruchio, the Merchant of Venice, and so forth. It’s a great premise: after all, Shakespeare did use incidents from Italian history for some of his plays, and historical characters pop up in them from time to time. So why not have them coexist in a fictional universe of their own?

That’s the premise of The Prince’s Doom, and I gather of the other books in David Blixt’s “Star-Cross’d” series, of which this novel is the fourth. The book is an enjoyable literary mash-up of characters we’ve seen before, historical figures we may have heard about but known little of, and entirely new fictional characters brought in as well.

The central character is Pietro Alaghieri (to use the novel’s spelling), the heir to Dante and a knight of Verona. He has been given the task of overseeing the upbringing of Francesco (“Cesco”) Della Scala, the heir to the ambitious and formidable Cangrande Della Scala, Verona’s ruler. Cesco is brilliant, unstable, and vastly promising, so Pietro’s task is not just the obligation of a knight to his ruler, but a personal and moral challenge. Pietro is a complex, sympathetic character, and following the turns of his mind as he tries to understand and curb Cesco’s extravagant behavior makes for great reading.

I would probably have been able to follow the complicated plot of this novel better if I had read the earlier books in the series. These novels are real doorstoppers, with The Prince’s Doom coming in at just under 700 pages, so they’re the kind of books a person can burrow into and enjoy a huge cast of characters, lots of action, and an exotic setting depicted with great care. In addition to being an author, Blixt is a theatre professional known for his skill at the staging of theatrical swordfights, so as you can imagine there are plenty of rip-roaring fight scenes here to go along with the court intrigue and intricate plotting. The Shakespearean characters add a dash of familiar unfamiliarity to the story, and it’s enjoyable to see them reinvented in the mind of another.

You can learn more about David Blixt and his work on his website or his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter.

SW: The Prince’s Doom is nearly 700 pages with an enormous cast of characters. Was it daunting for you to undertake such an ambitious project?

DB: More daunting in hindsight. This is the fourth novel in the series, and the cast and size both grew naturally from the previous books. I had a lot to accomplish in this one, and at the same time wanted the story to have room to develop naturally. That was aided by the visit I made to Verona last year – I was allowed to see places I’d never visited before, and several spots became settings for scenes I hadn’t even imagined yet. The places determined the action, which allowed the city to be as much a character in the story as the people.

SW: I’m guessing that many of us know fourteenth-century Italy mainly through its literary representations. Your novel engages with the actual historical situation of the time, as well as bringing in figures we know from literature. How did you balance the fictional and the historical in the book? Were there particular rules you set for yourself on how much liberty you could take with actual people and events?

DB: My rule of thumb is I cannot contradict the historical record. That being said, I’m lucky there’s a lot of missing data from this period. I am allowed to fill in the gaps, and do so either with literary characters or historical ones I’ve appropriated. When possible, I like to blend the historical figures with the literary ones – Cesco is an example of that, being both historical and literary at once.

As far as liberty, I’m using the historical backdrop to tell my story. I won’t contradict history (at least, not intentionally), but why people act the way they do is open to me. Motives matter a great deal. Part of my great joy in writing historical fiction is the creative detective work of figuring out why one of my characters would have done this or that in the historical record. Sometimes the actions fit perfectly with the characters I’ve crafted. Sometimes they don’t, and those are the fun times, when I have to weave new threads and hatch new plots – political, familial, martial – to explain a seeming incongruity. It has the added benefit of making all my characters more complex.

SW: I’m particularly curious about the characters from Shakespeare that come in and out of the book. Did you find it advantageous having characters with what we might call a “past history” as characters, or did their prior characterization in Shakespeare act as a limitation on what you could do with them?

DB: Mostly advantageous, though an occasional trouble was wanting to resolve their issues, and knowing that cannot happen. At this point in the series, I’ve hit about a third of Shakespeare’s Italian plays – Shrew and Merchant are behind us, Much Ado, 2 Gents, and R&J are ahead of us. So some characters have their histories behind them, but for most their famous scenes are yet to come. So, just as I can’t contradict history, I cannot contradict Shakespeare. I very much wanted to end the Capulet/Montague feud – I love Mari and Antony, and want them to stop their nonsense. Yet as the play is still years in the future, the feud must continue to exist. But for Tybalt, Romeo, Friar Lawrence, Juliet, the Nurse, it was just pure fun to give them their early years. And of course Mercutio, whose series this is.

SW: One of the focal characters is Francesco della Scala, known as “Cesco” in the book. How much is known about the actual individual? What attracted you to him as a character?

DB: I came at him backwards. When I created the series, it started with the feud from Shakespeare. Then I delved into the history of Verona, and was astonished by Cangrande. He’s a figure deserving his own books, and so I gave them to him. Yet he reminded me of someone, too. Shakespeare’s wildest spirit, Mercutio, who is referred to in R&J as the Prince’s “kinsman” and “near ally”. So when I discovered Cangrande had a bastard son, one whose life was mostly unknown, I decided to merge them. That decision has dominated fifteen years of my life, and will continue on for some time.

As for the historical Cesco, his marriage is factual. The rest is me, a la Shakespeare.

SW: Reading The Prince’s Doom, I felt a real fascination with the city of Verona. Can you tell us a bit about Verona? What do you find interesting about that location?

DB: One of my favorite things about Verona is that it is a living city. Whereas all the ruins in Rome are only tourist attractions, the historical sites in Verona are still in use today. There are operas and concerts in the Roman arena, Cangrande’s palace is city hall, his suite of rooms the residence of the Chief of Police. Verona is not a monument to the past, but has incorporated its past into its present. And the wine in the region is marvelous.

SW: What’s next on your writing agenda?

DB: Talk about daunting. I am skimming the surface of four different novels, seeing which one takes hold. I have to edit the next volume in my series on the Roman-Jewish wars, WAIL OF THE FALLEN. I’m dabbling in an Elizabethan noir. I have a book about Hell, another about the supernatural, and I’ve just started research for the next Will & Kit book. I want all of those out of the way before I dive back into Cesco’s world. Yet I have to admit, there’s an itch, a longing, to do it now, this minute. The Star-Cross’d series is where my heart resides. These are the stories I most want to tell, and count myself lucky that I’m allowed to do so.

M.M. Bennetts Finalist Review and Interview – 8

Tags

books, Ella March Chase, England, fiction, historical fiction, M.M. Bennetts Award, novels

My next installment in the parade of M.M. Bennetts Award finalists is The Queen’s Dwarf by Ella March Chase. The Queen’s Dwarf takes place in early 17th Century England, in the court of Charles I. The intrigue of the court focuses on Charles’ marriage to Henrietta-Maria of France, and the efforts of George Villiers (the duke of Buckingham) to maintain his power at court. Buckingham employs a dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson, to spy on the queen for him, but Jeffrey quickly becomes sympathetic to the queen instead.

This book was a very enjoyable read, with a large cast of characters from the lowest to the highest ranks of society. The “queen’s dwarf” of the title is based on an actual historical figure, Jeffrey Hudson, who as “Lord Minimus” was considered one of the wonders of the age and engaged in an amazing life of intrigue and adventure. Many of the incidents of the book are likewise based on incidents from the life of the real Jeffrey Hudson.

I was happy to see Hudson portrayed with sympathy and nuance as he deals with the condescension, disregard, and prejudice of those around him and tries to find the right course of action in a world filled with double-dealing. Chase captures the sensibilities of the era well, and there’s lots of action to keep the plot moving. I’ll be the first to admit that the ins and outs of the English court are not a subject that I usually find interesting; I can never keep all those dukes, earls, and whatnot straight. But this book held my interest despite my predilections. And if you are a British royalty buff, this one will fascinate you!

Here’s Ella March Chase’s website, Goodreads page, Facebook page, and a purchase link.

Ella March Chase

SW: First, congratulations on The Queen’s Dwarf! I’m wondering how you became interested in the court intrigues of this era. Have they been an interest of yours for a long time?

EMC: I fell in love with The Three Musketeers as a teenager and my love of that era began then. I also fell in love with The Three Musketeers– in fact, I’ve had King Charles Cavalier Spaniels named Aramis and D’Artagnan.  The Stuart era has always fascinated me.  There is something so romantic about the time period.  The most amazing fact I discovered was that the incident featured in the Dumas tale, in which Queen Anne’s diamond studs are stolen from the duke of Buckingham really happened!  The woman who stole the diamonds from the duke is featured in The Queen’s Dwarf.  Lucy Hay, the Countess of Carlisle was the inspiration for Milady de Winter.

SW: I was surprised to read in your afterword about how many of the characters in the book are actual historical figures. How much is known about the real Jeffrey Hudson?

EMC: A fair amount since he was so beloved by the queen.  His performances in masques and many incidents from his life at court have been recorded.  He was immortalized in poetry, plays and diaries kept during that time.  He was even captured by pirates twice and was exiled for killing a man in a duel.  Quite an amazing life!

SW: To a modern reader, the idea of having a “menagerie” of human beings around for amusement seems quite bizarre. But I gather that this was a fairly common practice. What was the role of this sort of group in a royal household?

EMC: It was common practice to employ dwarves as royal jesters– their role was to entertain their mistresses or masters. As Henrietta Maria’s fool, Jeffrey would have served in that capacity.  He would also perform in the elaborate masques the queen adored.  He once performed as a devil’s imp, driving a chariot drawn by two spaniels.  Jeffrey, and his best friend, giant Will Evans, often played roles opposite each other.  Jeffrey also would have had “the privilege of the coat”, liberties afforded a court fool.  The fool was allowed to speak of things no one else dared to in front of the monarch.  It was a position of rare emotional intimacy, between Jeffrey and the queen.  He would see her in her most vulnerable moments and be her confidant.

SW: Although many of your characters are actual figures, many others are not. How did you balance the need to stick to history with the need to create an original story?

EMC: While I try to stick close to history, and be as true to characters that actually lived as possible, my books are fiction. Creating characters to flesh the story out and move the story forward was great fun. What I found remarkable about The Queen’s Dwarf was that the most fantastical characters in the book were real.  Giant Will Evans, tiny Jeffrey, the duke of Buckingham and Lucy Hay– they seemed far more fictional than the characters I added.  I do try to blend my creations into the story so carefully that they’re hard to detect.

SW: George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, figures prominently in this novel. What do you find interesting about this character?

EMC: What fascinated me most about Buckingham was his rise from a nobody, on the fringes of court, to the most powerful man in England, save the king. Buckingham fascinates me.  He bewitched two kings.  Rose to unimaginable heights.  Despite some despicable behavior, and acts of incompetence, he inspired great loyalty and love in his wife and King Charles.  History is populated by women who rose to great power because of their physical beauty.  Buckingham is their mirror image.  He was groomed to become King James’s favorite, but those behind his rise expected him to remain their puppet.  Instead, he seized power for himself– all because he had a beautiful face and a well-turned leg.

SW: Like many American readers, I suspect, my knowledge of British royal history is pretty thin. Do you keep an idea of your envisioned audience’s knowledge level in your mind as you write? And is there a need to “educate” your readers as you go, or do you have to trust them to figure out the history as they read?

EMC: I try to set the stage, build the framework so that people without a wide knowledge of the time period are able to follow the history. I hope to make it intriguing enough that they will want to learn more about the Stuart world. I also want to include tidbits fans of the Stuart-era will find new and exciting.

SW: What’s next for you?

EMC: I’m currently working on getting my backlist titles up as e-books.  I’m also in the middle of a novel set in Paris during World War II.

Thank you so much for this chance to talk about Jeffrey and congratulations on your own work!

Best Review Ever

Tags

art, Blank Slate Press, blogs, books, Civil War, creativity, Faulkner, fiction, historical fiction, history, human nature, Jim Bencivenga, novels, reviews, This Old World, utopia, war, Yeats

I try to keep my posts on this blog focused on things other than book promotion — that’s really not the point of the blog, which is more focused on offering thoughts and commentary. But once in a while I have to celebrate something about one of my books! And today is one of those days.

Jim Bencivenga, retired book critic for the Christian Science Monitor, recently wrote a review of This Old World that has me simultaneously blushing and making a resolution to work harder on the next book so that it lives up to the expectations it generates. I am grateful beyond words for this review and will do everything in my power to make the next book worthy of this praise.

Here’s the review:

“Since I did not read its predecessor, I came to This Old World, by Steve Wiegenstein, only on the terms inside its covers.

“It is a heart rendering tale in a time of personal and national trauma. Such lasting wounds. Such healed wounds. For Wiegenstein, the war that divided a nation is but background. The hopes and anguish of common people, and more pointedly aspiring women, dominate this book. Utopian hopes, racial hopes, and especially gender hopes play out. The cadenced voice, the agricultural pace of the characters’ colloquial, regional dialog, is the blood flowing through the veins of the narrative.

“The Civil War and the Ozark mountains hold near mythic status in the American experience. Wiegenstein populates these myths with flesh and blood characters literally or psychologically bathed in the blood of battle. Home, family, children – identity – are overwhelmed. He is true to the hymnal inspiration used in the title and which echoes on every page: ‘This old world is full of sorrow, full of sickness, weak and sore —If you love your neighbor truly, love will come to you the more.’

“I couldn’t help but connect the psychological and emotional moods of this narrative work with poems by William Butler Yeats. Both Yeats and Wiegenstein embed the worn and known facets of their nation’s pivotal rebellion/war as spiritual heft for the human hearts animating their writing.

“Yeats’s sentiment about humanity’s connection with God in ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’: ‘Now that my ladder’s gone, 
I must lie down where all the ladders start. 
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart,’ is where ‘This Old World’ begins. Things indeed fall apart in the widening gyre of the Civil War. And, much more than in Yeats, the women of ‘This Old World’ (one advantage of a novel over a poem or hymn) are given full voice to speak.

“I am convinced Charlotte Turner would more than hold her own should she sit down with Crazy Jane to lecture the Bishop. By voice, example, and especially sincere doubt, Charlotte lectures us throughout. Want to know how common folk from a proto-typical American locale not only ‘survive, but prevail,’ as Faulkner would have it? Read ‘This Old World’.”

M. M. Bennetts Finalist Review and Interview – 6

Tags

books, farming, fiction, historical fiction, human nature, novels, reviews, writing, Yorkshire

Next stop on my trip through the M.M. Bennetts Award finalists is P.D.R. Lindsay’s Tizzie. Although Lindsay lives in New Zealand, her family roots are in Yorkshire, the setting of this novel.

I mention that only by way of partial explanation of one of the most striking features of this book – its utter and complete mastery of the rural Yorkshire dialect. From the first paragraph onward, Tizzie captures the speaking rhythms and vocabulary of 19th-century Yorkshire farmers with amazing fidelity and precision. I was immediately immersed in the concerns and thought patterns of the main character, Tizzie Cawthra, simply by virtue of her poetic and quaint rural dialect.

And oh, Tizzie has troubles. As an unmarried woman thought to be past marrying age (29), she has been “taken in” by one of her brothers, whose family treats her as little more than a slave, or worse. Her immense store of knowledge about dairying and cheesemaking, handed down through the female side of the family over the generations, serves as the family’s financial bulwark, but Tizzie never sees a penny of it. Scorned as a failure by the family because of her lack of a husband, Tizzie can only find comfort in her beloved niece Agnes, who is similarly abused as a “useless girl.”

Tizzie’s brother’s family surely enters my list as one of the most appallingly vile sets of people I’ve read about in a long time, counterbalanced precariously by the kindly schoolmaster and fair-minded squire of the village, who appreciate Tizzie’s talents and share her aspirations for young Agnes. Tizzie’s struggles to find a sliver of freedom for herself, and a glimmer of hope for Agnes, are depicted with heart-aching care.

Fans of the gauzy PBS version of Yorkshire rural life will find parts of Tizzie hard to take. Farm work during that era was backbreaking and mind-numbing, set against an omnipresent worry that the year’s earnings might not make the rent and the family would be put off. The economic and social pressures that weigh on Tizzie make her battles against them all the more heroic. And I use the term “heroic” most intentionally here; Tizzie is indeed a hero as she labors to carve out a space of freedom for herself and her niece.

Learn more about P.D.R. Lindsay at her website, her publisher’s website, her Twitter feed, or her Goodreads page.

– PDR Lindsay

SW: Tizzie struck me immediately with its evocative use of Yorkshire dialect. Can you tell us about that dialect, and how you came to have such a mastery of it? Did the use of that dialect pose particular challenges for you as a writer?

I grew up in Yorkshire listening to several of the Yorkshire dialects. My father was strict and my siblings and I were not allowed to speak like that ourselves, but we heard it daily from the men on the farms around us, the women in the street and shops, a sort of general broad accent was used by most Yorkshire people. Being kids we picked up and could use some of the more colourful expressions. I used to love listening to the oldest grannies and grandads who spoke the purer dialects where I could only understand one word in twenty. There was a special rhythm to that speech. Even now I love the sound of the Dales dialects. Many of the words are pure Old English, or Norse-based and have fascinating histories. Sneck and thwaite, yat and mither, thole and crowdie, nipper and laiking, they sound grand. And it is not only the words but the way they are used which is a delight to my ear. I tried to convey some of that musical quality to the readers without losing them but any real dialect expert would not approve of the way I’ve used some of the words. My American Beta readers hated the dialect and asked me to take out as much as possible. It became a delicate balancing act, but Tizzie had to sound on the page as she did in my head.

Dialect is always a difficult choice for a writer as many readers are put off by having to deal with the unknown. As a writer I have to make things clear for my readers so I did try to put every word in context or use it in such a way that a reader could substitute a word they would know and so understand what Tizzie was thinking or saying. I know I did not succeed, but some readers have told me they loved the way she spoke, or they loved it because she sounded just like their old Nan, so perhaps a little of the music of the dialect made it off the page.

SW: A little further on that topic — I noticed that some characters are distinguished by their ability to shift in and out of the local dialect, while others are not. And then there are characters for whom the local dialect is practically a foreign language. Do you see the characters’ language use as a marker of social distinction?

Oh yes, speech marked your social class and from the Regency onwards people were clearly ranked by their speech. The old Squire, Sir Charles’s father, would have been a jolly, broad Yorkshire speaker and not give tuppence for London and London society and their pernickety ways, but his wife had had a London season and did mind about being thought a country bumpkin. Their son and heir, Sir Charles, was brought up to remember that and went away to an expensive public school where any dialect would be beaten out or mocked out of him. It was the language of the peasant not the gentleman. Even servants who wished to be more than gardeners, stable men or kitchen maids had to try and mend their speech. Readers of The Secret Garden will remember that the serving girl, Martha, tells Mary that she is only allowed to help in the house as a favour because her speech is ‘too broad.’ People learned to manage this dual system in order to get better jobs or positions. Dialect at home and standard at work.

The Schoolmaster is an interesting character in this way of dual speech in that he had joined the army and been made sergeant then was invalided out. But his friendship with his captain, Sir Charles, (he’d saved him from a couple of disasters) and their mutual interests meant that he could train as a teacher, with Sir Charles’s support, and so he had to move up the social ranks. As a senior teacher and Sir Charles’s school inspector he needed to speak ‘standard’ English but as a Yorkshire lad he knew his dialect and used it occasionally to good effect.

SW: Tizzie herself is such a great character — so rich and well-rounded. Had you been thinking about this character for a long time? What got you started with Tizzie?

I like cooking, especially old recipes. Dorothy Hartley’s book Food in England had a bibliography which set me chasing up books. I found the wonderful Elizabeth David’s book on bread which had a reference to an old Scottish cook book. I was hunting up oatcake recipes and this book was recommended for its scone and oatcake recipes. The writer aimed to preserve traditional recipes and mentioned their history and why they were made. One of these traditional oatcakes was the St Columba’s cake, an oatcake made on June 9th, St Columba’s eve. Into this cake went a silver coin. The cake was toasted over a fire made of sacred rowan, yew and oak wood and the child who found the coin in their piece of cake got to keep the year’s crop of lambs.

What an idea for a story!

I wrote one, not a great one because it was all sweetness and light and a good story needs friction. But the idea grew because I know families. Imagine what happened if the same child found the coin? Would a mother cheat to see all the children had the coin and so those valuable lambs? Would children fight and fall out for ever because one had the lambs and the other did not? The ideas buzzed inside my head quietly for a while and I tried to write a story, but the idea grew too big for a short story. It might be a novel though and I wondered about who and what and where, which is when I first began to hear Tizzie’s voice, this Yorkshire voice, in my head. Other writers will know what I mean, but it does sound a little crazy, this voices in the head business. It comes about, for me, after a lot of thinking and musing and wondering about a story idea. I will find that a character is coming to life, first as a voice I hear, then as a face I see. Thus Tizzie appeared. Tizzie, the aunt who wanted her niece to get the coin and the lambs. Tizzie who had to stop wearing rose tinted glasses and see her life as it really was. Tizzie, who was a simple, kindly soul, trying to cope with a great deal of devious evil. She was, for me, real and alive.

SW: The farther I got in the book, the more I felt that a dominant and growing theme in it is the amount of casual violence that occurs, and the disregard some of the characters have for the harm they cause. Nowadays we would call it “domestic violence,” but in that time seemed to be part of the fabric of existence. Do you see this as a theme in the book?

I have the greatest problem with themes because I always start off thinking I am writing on one theme but the story ends up about others. Any first draft is a confused mess as I try to force it my way and it goes off on its own path. In Tizzie what I wanted readers to understand was that we all wear rose tinted glasses and we need to see truly and honestly to live our lives well, which is not easy. We can choose to see or not to see. I always write about people having choices. But there was also this underlying theme of man’s inhumanity to man, and the casual unthinking unkindness which people with power often show to those who are powerless. It can be seen in families, in groups who have to work together. There is nothing ‘old’ about Tizzie’s treatment. It still happens today. I have seen in schools and in businesses the Killing by Kindness method of putting people down, pushing them out, or rendering them powerless. I have also seen the outright, devious and cruel methods which people use to gain power or get rid of people. Tizzie faces both sorts of ‘violence’ and yes, it became a theme, one I hope readers will think about and may be more aware of it happening around them.

SW: Another element of book that resonated with me is the sense of old folkways and folk wisdom being slowly lost, with Tizzie as an example of someone who possesses an enormous store of folk wisdom. Do you see this time period as a shift in our ways of knowing and doing things?

It seems to me that every generation discards the old, the things the parents did, and takes up the new. Traditions which parents valued are often derided as old fashioned or useless. Sometime traditions had to change for simple economic reasons. With luck the following generation might seize on some of their grandparents’ traditions as quaint or an excuse for a celebration, drinking or stopping work, and there might be a few people around who remembered how the traditional activity went.

In Tizzie’s era, the 1880s in Victorian Britain, economics played a large part in losing traditions. It was a period of economic depression and there was a world-wide slump in agricultural prices because New Zealand had just learned how to send chilled meat to Smithfield market in London and their cheese and butter soon followed. Exports of cheese and butter from America also added to the English farmers’ problems. Prices fell. Farmers had a hard time paying their rents. The pressure was on for change in order to survive.

Maggie was always chasing Tizzie up to make more cheese, butter, and clotted cream. Tizzie used the old, careful, slow methods traditionally successful, but you can see how the pressure would build to become more efficient, cut out some of the traditional ways in order to speed things up and produce more. The blessing of the Hall dairy is one example of a traditional way of introducing the correct bacteria to a new dairy, but it was slow and there were other ways of doing it.

SW: What’s your next project?

Right now I’m fighting my way through the first draft of a novel set in 1872 in the India of the British Raj. I anticipate that the characters end up in New Zealand, however I am not sure where the novel will now end as the characters have done their take over and might go back to Britain. I am at that dreadful writing stage where I have to make the middle of the novel fit onto the end and it is tough going as my carefully planned ending has vanished and I don’t know where I am going. Writing becomes an act of faith until that glorious moment when it all makes sense.

Tizzie had to be written in the 3rd person POV because it was too painful to write in 1st person. This is a 1st person novel simply because my male main character insists on having his story told this way. He is a merchant banker, son of bankers, an observer, thinker, and excellent seeker of new opportunities for banks and business. His family is one of the new Victorian families whose wealth and education made them independent of the mainstream upper middle class Victorian mores. He has a Quaker mother and a Jewish father. He’s been tipped out of his comfortable life in the bank to extract justice and revenge on behalf of a group of families, and himself, and he has to travel to India to deliver it. It’s another difficult story to write because of what the poor MC has to go through.

M. M. Bennetts Finalist Review and Interview – 5

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archaeology, art, books, creativity, fiction, historical fiction, history, Jersey, Mark Patton, reviews, writing

I’ve been traveling on vacation for the last couple of weeks, so haven’t had the opportunity to post my most recent reviews and interviews. I’ll be trying to catch up this week and next.

Omphalos is the third novel of Mark Patton, who in addition to writing novels is an academic, an archaeologist by profession. It’s unlike the other historical novels I’ve reviewed so far, because it’s not about a particular era in history. Instead, Omphalos tells six different stories set in different eras, all of which involve in some way a stone tower built above an ancient underground stone structure on the island of Jersey, known today as La Hougue Bie. The stories range from prehistory to contemporary times and include revolutionary France, medieval travelers, and the Second World War.

I applaud Omphalos for its ambition — it’s a novel that is unafraid of taking risks and stretching the genre. It also uses a mix of narrative methods; the French Revolution story takes the form of diary entries, while the Second World War story is epistolary. You have to be ready for lots of changing times, situations, languages, and characters. But the pervading sense of how themes and characters recur over time makes this book compelling.

I’ll confess that not all the stories held my interest to the same degree, but that’s to be expected in a novel this wide-ranging. This isn’t so much a “historical novel” as it is a novel about history itself, about the way history is made and the stories that come to be accepted as history. The omphalos of the title, a tower that reaches deep into the heart of the earth and stretches toward heaven, is the novel’s connecting point and central symbol, a sign of how our stories connect over time even when we’re not aware of it. It’s a lovely, meditative work, and one that well deserved its M.M. Bennetts nomination.

La Hougue Bie, on the island of Jersey

You can learn more about Mark Patton from his website, his blog, his Facebook author page, his Twitter feed, or his Pinterest page. And here’s a purchase link.

SW: Omphalos takes a very distinctive narrative approach, involving not one story line, but six. What inspired you to take this approach? 

It all started with Italo Calvino’s If, On A Winter’s Night, A Traveller…, which influenced David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which in turn influenced me. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was also there in the background. I didn’t know this until a late stage, but, as I was writing Omphalos, Kate Atkinson was writing Life After Life; Sebastian Faulks was writing A Possible Life; and Ali Smith was writing How to be Both; all of which have comparable structures, so it seems to have become something of a contemporary trope, a wave I was more than happy to ride.

SW: The stories connect through a location on the island of Jersey that is used for various human purposes, both sacred and secular, through the centuries. I understand that this site is one you are personally very closely connected with. Could you give us a little background?

I was born and grew up on Jersey, and was later Director of the Archaeological Museum there. La Hougue Bie is one of the most important archaeological sites there, which I excavated in the 1990s. There is a megalithic tomb covered by a cairn, built around 6000 years ago. On its summit is a 12^th Century chapel, to which a 16^th Century cleric added a crypt styled on the Holy Sepulchre, on top of which an 18^th Century prince built a pavilion. During World War II, the occupying German forces built an observation post over one end of the chapel. It is now a museum complex, and I had my office there for three years.

SW: As an archaeologist, I suspect you have a different relationship with objects and artifacts than most of us. Omphalos uses certain objects (a bead, a model of a chapel, etc.) as connectors between the stories. What has the practice of archaeology brought to your fiction writing in that respect, i.e., seeing stories in objects?

An archaeologist studies the human past backwards. The 20^th Century layer is always on top of the 18^th Century layer, which is always above the 16^th Century layer, and so on. Thus we always experience it in reverse order as we excavate, and then try to tell the story in the other direction. That gave me the structure for the book: I take the readers back in time to 4000 BC, and then bring them home again, revealing aspects of the story along the way. Archaeologists are telling stories with objects all the time (I even teach my students how to write “object biographies”), so it seemed to me that this was something distinctive which I could bring to fiction, something that might make my novels a little different from those written by others. Objects feature as “characters” in all of my novels, and some figure as connecting devices between them.

SW: I find one of the challenges of historical fiction is the immersion into an era, getting a feel for what characters of that time would have been thinking, what their world-view would have been, and so forth. Were there any of the eras you write about in Omphalos that were particularly difficult for you to immerse yourself into?

My writing practice is something close to method acting. I surround myself with the literature, art and popular culture of the time as I “become” the character. The most emotionally draining story to write was that set in the 1940s, because my two protagonists are (at least at the outset) members of the Nazi Party. Inhabiting their world, as the events of the war and its aftermath unfolded, took me into some of the darkest corners of the human psyche. The most technically difficult to write was that set in 4000 BC because, like Tolkien, I had to invent an entire world view, social system, code of ethics, religion and so on, based on very meagre archaeological evidence: places and objects are real, but everything else is necessarily pure fiction.

SW: Because it uses intertwined story lines, each with its own pace and sets of characters, Omphalos doesn’t follow the classic rising action/climax/falling action structure of many novels. Were you concerned about deviating from this familiar pattern? 

Not at all. My first novel, Undreamed Shores, follows quite a conventional story arc, but my second, An Accidental King, has flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, in a structure that owes as much to the films of the French Nouvelle Vague as it does to anything in literature. By the time I came to write my third novel, Omphalos, I was actively looking for a new means of expression, one that would allow my readers to travel through time, even though my characters don’t.

SW: When I hear the word “omphalos,” one of the literary antecedents that comes to my mind immediately is James Joyce, who gives the term a kind of free-floating symbolic importance. Does the concept of an omphalos have similar symbolic resonance for you? 

It has had a resonance for me since I visited Delphi, the omphalos of the ancient Greek world, and it occurred to me that other cultures might be thought to have their own omphalos, and that for Jersey, it would have to be La Hougue Bie. James Joyce, however, is certainly an influence on my writing. When I was working on my third or fourth draft, I came up with the idea that each of the stories should have one or two “presiding geniuses” – past or present writers that I would not try to imitate, but whose influence I would specifically invite. These were: James Joyce; Johann von Goethe; Jane Austen (with M.M. Bennetts sitting alongside); Francois Rabelais & Miguel de Cervantes; Hilary Mantel; and Sally Pomme Clayton, a performance storyteller whose work I have long admired.

SW: In addition to its unusual narrative approach, Omphalos also uses a variety of devices such as letters and diaries to tell some of its stories. What drew you to these methods instead of more conventional narration?

In part, it was about distancing the characters’ voices from my own. My first two novels each have a single male viewpoint and, in a sense, the protagonists, Amzai in Undreamed Shores, and Cogidubnus in An Accidental King, might be thought to be projections of my own personality back into the past. Omphalos has ten protagonists, some male, others female, and if all of them spoke with a variation of my own voice, the book would probably seem very stilted. Writing in entirely different styles made it easier for me to avoid this, but it was also an opportunity to experiment with new modes of writing: I am still learning my craft (and will be until the day I die).

SW: What’s next?

The Cheapside Tales – again made up of several stories set in different periods, but set in London. The linking device is a hoard of jewellery, discovered in 1912, buried in the 17^th Century, but including individual pieces that go back to the 1^st Century BC.

Mark Patton

M.M. Bennetts Finalist Review and Interview – 4

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blogs, books, creativity, Crispin Guest, fiction, historical fiction, history, Jeri Westerson, London, medieval era, noir, novels, reviews, writing

My next fellow M.M. Bennetts Award finalist is Jeri Westerson’s Cup of Blood. This novel’s subtitle describes it as “medieval noir,” and that description gives you a pretty clear idea of what genre expectations are ahead.

Like the protagonists of the noir movies of the ’30s and ’40s, Cup of Blood’s main character, Crispin Guest, is a man with a past, wounded in love, tough on the outside but carrying a history he can’t quite get rid of. And like those noir heroes, he has a dicey relationship with the official representatives of the law, in this case the Sheriff of London and his minions. In classic noir fashion, the book opens with the discovery of a corpse, a discovery which quickly opens out into a web of intrigue that goes far beyond a simple murder, involving the royal court, popes and anti-popes, and a host of characters that vie for the title of “most disreputable.”

Westerson’s characters are creatures of the streets and taverns, and she does an excellent job of conveying the seedy warmth of these locations. The plot takes some twists that I can almost guarantee you won’t see coming – at least I didn’t! This was a very enjoyable read that kept me guessing as to the next turn in the story, with rich description of setting that makes medieval London come to life.

You can learn more about Jeri Westerson from her website, her blog, her Facebook page, her Twitter feed, or her Goodreads page. Here’s a purchase link.

Jeri Westerson

SW: Cup of Blood was my first introduction to your work, but I see that there’s a whole series of Crispin Guest mysteries. Which book would you recommend for someone as their first introduction to Crispin?

Since Cup of Blood is a prequel I would absolutely recommend it as the first. In fact, the only reason it’s a “prequel” now is that it was the very first I wrote in the series but couldn’t get it sold to a publisher. When we were looking for a new publisher to continue the series after six published volumes, I didn’t want a year to go by without a Crispin book on the shelves, so I dusted off this manuscript (that I always liked) gave it a bit of a rewrite, and called it a “prequel.” So it truly is the first book in the series. It explains where Crispin gets his adolescent servant/thief Jack Tucker.

SW: I gather that at least some of the characters in Cup of Blood are actual historical figures. What can you tell us about the “real” people who inhabit the novel?
The whole series includes real people of the time period, from King Richard II to poet Geoffrey Chaucer to famed alchemist Nicholas Flamel. The sheriffs of London existed, though since we don’t know much about them I was free to cut loose on my characterization of them. King Richard is the young king and despises Crispin for the part he played in committing treason against him, which threw Crispin into his current state as a poverty-stricken “Tracker,” a medieval detective. In later volumes, Crispin’s old friend Geoffrey Chaucer shows up to help and sometimes hinder him in his investigations, and there is also a cross-dressing prostitute by the name of John Rykener–a real person in Crispin’s London–who had helped Crispin learn the ropes of survival when he was first set adrift on the streets with nothing but the clothes on his back. It’s an interesting collection of people cast against a wide variety of events. Never a dull moment!

SW: What drew you to this particular era to set your novels?

I was raised in a household where English medieval history was king, with the numerous works of fiction and nonfiction on our bookshelves to choose from. Even discussions at the dinner table sometimes centered on English history. You paid attention and learned by osmosis. I can definitely name more monarchs of England–in order–than I ever can presidents.

SW: Your website features a quotation from Raymond Chandler, and certainly there’s a noir feeling to this book. Is it difficult to translate the noir sensibility to the medieval era?

It wasn’t difficult at all and I’m certainly glad I thought of it. The dark streets and alleys in London, the people waiting in the shadows with daggers at the ready, corruption from the highest of authorities, the secrets of the Church, and everyday ordinary greed, lust, and jealousy makes it prime for noir and hardboiled crimes.

SW: Your characters have, among other things, a remarkable vocabulary of oaths. What can you tell us about their swearing, and how on earth did you come up with all of them?

As much as we like using our own Anglo-Saxon swearwords, they weren’t really used as such then. True, humor tended toward the scatological, but swearing, oaths, were strongest when they had the tinge of blasphemy about them. Hence, swearing on the body and blood of Christ and his saints was usually where one went. So Crispin’s favorite oath, “God’s blood!” is entirely appropriate for the era.

SW: Crispin Guest seems to me to have both a medieval sense of the world and a modern one. Does that make sense to you? How do you envision Crispin?

He is definitely a man of his time, but there were men of that era that didn’t hold with all that the Church taught or that the majority of the lower classes and upper classed believed. His own mentor, John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, had Lollard sympathies, that is, he was interested in reformation of religion and religious practices, not quite as common in that era as in the later Tudor period but it was still there. Naturally, Crispin emulates his mentor’s ideals. And since he is a man of intelligence (he is an Aristotle groupie) he can weigh the facts and make an intelligent decision based on the information at hand. And that means sometimes changing his mind about long held beliefs. Which is perfectly legitimate for the time period.

SW: What’s next for Crispin, and for you?

Crispin’s eighth outing, The Silence of Stones, will be released in the UK this November, and in the US next March. And I’m finishing up my steampunk novel, The Daemon Device, to hand in to my agent for shopping around. It involves a Jewish/Gypsy Magician who eschews his heritage but can really perform magic with the help of Jewish daemons..for a price, and that price may be getting too high. Then it’s on to the ninth Crispin, A Maiden Weeping. And hopefully by then, my urban fantasy series, Book of the Hidden, will have found a publishing home. So there’s a LOT to do.