10 Wednesday May 2023
Tags
Book clubs, books, bookstores, historical fiction, history, libraries, Missouri, Ozarks, St. Louis, St. Louis World's Fair, writing
Pre-order links for my next novel, Land of Joys, are now up! Check them out here:
Am I excited? Yes! I’ve got some bookstore appearances already set up and am hoping to set up more. Also intending to get some library appearances set up too, in the near future I hope. The book is set for a September 26 release.
20 Sunday Mar 2022
Posted in History, Literature, Writing
I mentioned earlier this month that the year was off to an excellent start in Ozarks writing. This book is not technically an “Ozarks” book, but its author, John Mort, grew up in southern Missouri and has written several fine novels and story collections based in the Ozarks. So, close enough.
Oklahoma Odyssey is, if you’re looking for a descriptive category, a novel of the West. It mainly takes place in southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma in the time leading up to the Oklahoma Land Run of 1893, with briefer forays to Kansas City and elsewhere. But it toys with and re-imagines the stock characters and situations of the Western genre. We have a hero, love interest, sidekick, and villain, but none of these people turn out to be what you would expect. There’s a killing and a call for revenge, but again, don’t expect it to go the way you have been conditioned by decades of Westerns.
I have a complete review of Oklahoma Odyssey coming out in the next edition of OzarksWatch magazine, so I’ll leave my discussion for there. If you’re not already a subscriber to OzarksWatch, what are you waiting for? But for now, I’ll just say that this novel is a real gem, with rich characterization, historical insight, and a compelling story.
01 Thursday Mar 2018
Tags
Aging, Black River, Current River, historical fiction, history, Icarians, logging, Ozarks, St. Francis River, utopia
I grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, a forest-rich region containing nearly ten million acres of dense timberland, and spent much of my childhood exploring the steep hills and crystalline streams around my family’s farm. To my young mind, everything had always been as it was at the current time, so I never considered the history of the region, the environmental and cultural changes it had undergone, or the effects of those changes on the people who lived there. My grandfather, who lived with us during his final years, reminisced about having chopped out a farmstead along the St. Francis River. Our neighbor, a long-time resident, remembered helping his father float enormous rafts of railroad ties down the Current and Black rivers. These tales were just isolated curiosities to me; I never connected them to any larger narrative.
Not that history didn’t interest me. I was a good student, and history a favorite subject. But the missing part was the connection between history the subject, filled with names, locations, battles, and Important Doctrines, and history the lived experience.
When I began writing historical fiction, at the age of 52, I came to it as someone who had been writing fiction in a contemporary setting for decades. The year was 2007, the United States was at the peak of its embroilment in the Iraq war, and I had been engaged in the scholarly study of 19th-century utopian communities, more from personal curiosity than as part of any systematic agenda. I had developed an interest in utopian groups after reading a rather snide reference to the Icarians in The Communist Manifesto while I was teaching a Great Books class at Centenary College of Louisiana, wondering “Who the heck were the Icarians,” and then chasing the footnote across the country, as history fanatics often do. It turned out that the Icarians were a pre-Marxian communist group who emigrated from France to the United States in 1848 and had colonies in various parts of the country as late as the 1890s. Once bitten by the footnote bug, there is no stopping. That endeavor led me to a wider interest in utopianism, especially in Missouri in the years before the Civil War. In 2007, something in the news caught my attention, and I was struck by the parallels between the war in Iraq and Missouri’s experience in the Civil War: an occupying army, a restive civilian population whose loyalties were hard to determine, a landscape in which separating enemy from ally was a constant problem, bands of freelance fighters who used the larger war as an excuse to carry out their own vendettas, and a pervasive atmosphere of uncertainty and violence, in which battle lines were never clear, neighbor betrayed neighbor, and casual encounters escalated to deadly violence in an instant.
All at once the connection between my somewhat recreational study of history and my passion for creative writing became clear. The past could give insights into the present, not simply in the “Those who cannot remember history are doomed to repeat it” sense, but in a more visceral way, engaging with the hopes, jealousies, good intentions, and broken promises of ordinary people caught up in terrible times.
That realization marked the moment when I began to think about my own history, and my home’s history, in a different way. My grandfather’s stories about life on the St. Francis River at the turn of the 20th century; my neighbor’s reminiscences of work in the lead mines and the log woods, and his tales of the great tie drives, with miles and miles of green railroad ties, freshly hacked from the forest, bound together and floated down the rivers to the railhead; these stories from my childhood took on life again.
The Ozarks that I had known as a child had not, as I should have realized even then, always been that way. The thick woods, mostly oak and hickory trees a couple of feet in diameter or less, had once been largely pine, much taller and larger. The rivers, clear but relatively shallow, had indeed carried immense volumes of cut lumber. The mound of earth on the hillside above our pasture, oddly soft underfoot, was the long-ago sawdust heap from a mill that had disappeared, along with the village that had grown up around it, leaving only the stray evidence of an overgrown lane, pieces of equipment rusted to the point of unrecognizability, and a hoard of logging tools in the barn.
History, it seemed, was all around me. It had always been, but I had simply never noticed. And it wasn’t confined to monuments and battlefields, but woven into the scenery.
It’s hard to make the claim that one must reach a certain age to appreciate history this way, but my own experience tells me that perspective is what counts in this enterprise, and perspective is a gift of aging. One becomes aware of the passing of time, and of how familiar sights – a street, a building, a landscape – shift over time to reflect changing ways of life, attitudes, and circumstances. Evidence of life-and-death struggle is concealed in plain sight. A sunken roadbed marks where a forced Indian removal passed. The incongruous name of a boat landing reveals the drowned town that once flourished where waterskiers now skim. You don’t have to get old to notice these things, but age brings an understanding of the impermanence of objects and lives, even ones that we might have imagined as children to be imperishable.
In my case, the enriched understanding of my own heritage as a fifth-generation Ozarker led to an endless fascination with the stories and conflicts of my region. As a child, my parents repeated a family tale about a great-great uncle who had been killed by a bushwhacker—a guerrilla fighter—during the Civil War. My curiosity about this tale was rewarded when I found a copy of the bushwhacker’s reminiscences, dictated to postwar interviewers, for sale in an annotated edition from the University of Arkansas Press. Like other participants in the Missouri-Kansas-Arkansas theater of the war, which was dominated by savage guerrilla fighting with no fixed lines of battle, he had sought to retell his participation in the fight by casting it in the mythical light of honor and revenge, and an eager audience of fellow reinterpreters took down his musings and published them for posterity. I discovered that my family’s story was true, although the motives for the killing remain in dispute. I picked up books like David Benac’s excellent Conflict in the Ozarks and Kenneth L. Smith’s Sawmill: The Story of Cutting the Last Great Virgin Forest East of the Rockies and discovered that my neighbor’s memories of tie drives, two-man crosscutting, and forests so tall and shady, and thus free from undergrowth, that a man could navigate them at a gallop, were not his memories alone, but shared experiences across the Ozarks and into the Ouachita Mountains as far west as Oklahoma.
This renewed sense of history as lived experience has led me to focus, in my novels, on how people’s conflicting belief systems change the way they live. “Be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming,” Emerson famously said, and the utopian idealists, determined slaveholders, love-maddened romantics, and money-loving capitalists of my novels demonstrate that truism again and again. We are living through history, making history, and becoming history ourselves. So when I turn to history in my novels, I see this simultaneous process of being and becoming repeated at the individual scale, relationship by relationship, person by person.
My earlier novels explored the Ozarks during the Civil War and Reconstruction years. My most recent book looks ahead to the later part of the century, when the Industrial Age came to the region in the form of large lumber and mining companies based in the nation’s urban centers. These companies moved into the deep Ozarks, built railroad lines into areas previously considered impossibly remote, and enlisted the local population in the extraction of the region’s natural resources. From the early 1880s through 1910, Missouri forests produced about half a billion board feet of lumber each year, a number that is as mind-bogglingly large as it sounds. The impact of this era reverberates to this day in the Ozarks, in ways that even longtime residents don’t always notice. For example, the large national forests in Missouri and Arkansas, some of the most extensive national forestland east of the Rockies, largely derive from cutover land that the big timber companies were unable to sell and didn’t want to pay taxes on. The environmentally calamitous cut-and-get-out philosophy of one era resulted in a surprising, and unintended, scenic and environmental benefit in another era.
In The Language of Trees, the quiet utopian community established in the 1850s, having survived the ravages of the war and the agonies of its aftermath, confronts a new challenge: what to do when the Modern Age arrives? The agrarian ideals that dominated the founding of America were giving way to the industrial organization of society, with time clocks, factory whistles, and all the social upheaval that accompanies it. From the contemporary perspective, we might see this transformation as a loss of innocence, and indeed it was. But for the inhabitants of Daybreak, the arrival of the American Lumber and Mining Company is a more complicated encounter. The new people who come to the valley, offering more money than Daybreak has ever seen before for land and labor, are not all the wicked capitalists of communal nightmare; in fact, some are quite charming and conflicted in their own motives. And not all the Communists want to remain Communist. Ultimately the villagers have to find a path that threads between love and self-advancement, between cherished ideals and new opportunities, between a changing present and a fraught future.
And thus history makes its way, neither the steady march of progress our forbears liked to imagine nor the decline from innocence it sometimes seems now, but instead a swift and twisting river that loops back on itself, disappears and reappears, and carries us along with it as we try to steer a clear route while being borne by the current. Come to think of it, history is a lot like an Ozark float stream itself. We think we understand it, we even think we can control it, but in the end it surprises us with destruction, or beauty, or both.
This essay first appear in BLOOM.
02 Friday Feb 2018
Posted in History, Literature, Missouri, People, Writing
Tags
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
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14757802.Ed_Protzel
04 Saturday Nov 2017
Posted in History, Literature, Utopias, Writing
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.
24 Tuesday May 2016
Posted in Daybreak, History, Illinois, Literature, Missouri, Ozarks, Personal, This Old World, Writing
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.
03 Tuesday May 2016
Tags
Civil War, Fredericktown, historical fiction, history, human nature, Missouri, nostalgia, Ozarks, slavery
I belong to a Facebook group that shares thoughts about local history in and around Fredericktown, Missouri, the small town that figures in the setting of my novels. Most of the posts to this group are of the “who remembers that quaint cafe on the corner?” or “does anyone recognize the man in this photo?” variety, but yesterday, one of the members posted this sobering reminder that the little town we bathe in nostalgia also participated, like the rest of the slaveholding part of the country, in the great evil that tore the country apart. It’s disquieting to remember, yet with only the slightest effort, such reminders are all around. A recent moment’s idle curiosity into the origins of some old-time songs led to some intense discomfort at the astonishingly racist lyrics of turn-of-the-century popular songs. And I recall a time, some years ago, when I was editing a manuscript of the journals of an early citizen of the Arcadia Valley, reading with horror his childhood account of a lynching on the railroad bridge over Stouts Creek. The horror was particularized because this was a bridge I had idly viewed from my car window hundreds of times.
The task for anyone interested in history is to see it whole, not just the parts that reflect well upon our forbears. I’m reminded of that whenever I give a talk about Missouri during the Civil War, because just about nobody of that era comes out well in the moral light of the present day. People will tell me with an element of pride, “My family never owned slaves” or “My family owned slaves, but treated them well” as though those conditions made them exemplary. Let’s face it, owning a human being pretty much rules out the “treated well” claim, and the overwhelming majority of Missourians didn’t object to the practice of slavery, whether they owned slaves or not. Apart from a handful of abolitionists, and the slave families themselves, most Missourians accepted the practice either explicitly or implicitly, with even those who were against slavery holding only the vague hope that it would wither away somehow in the future.
What does this tell us? Not that our ancestors were evil, necessarily. But that they were flawed, and that they countenanced evil things…..just like us.
30 Sunday Aug 2015
Posted in Literature, Personal, Writing
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.
14 Friday Aug 2015
Posted in Literature, Personal, Writing
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!
08 Wednesday Jul 2015
Posted in Literature, Writing
Tags
Andalusia, books, creativity, England, Granada, historical fiction, history, M.M. Bennetts, mysteries, novels, reviews, Spain
I was unable to complete the interview for the next book by a finalist for the M.M. Bennetts Award, but here’s the review. The book is The Red Hill, by David Penny. This book was a revelation to me for several reasons.
The setting is fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, in the final years before the fall of the last parcels of Islamic Spain. Thomas Berrington, an Englishman serving as physician to the Sultan of Granada (or Gharnatah as Penny spells it, following the Moorish pronunciations that would have been in use at the time), finds himself with an unexpected task – finding out who has been committing a series of gruesome murders within the walls of the Alhambra itself.
I rarely read mysteries these days, so it was a treat for me to get back into the pleasures of mystery reading – watching for clues, trying to outthink the protagonist, all the while enjoying the benefits of characterization and setting. In this book, the main character is richly characterized, with a range of secondary characters who provide good balance to his strengths and weaknesses. There’s a host of potential suspects, and the setting is rich in detail.
Several things set this book apart for me. One was the variety of characters. I have read that Moorish Spain was a remarkably diverse location, and Penny takes full advantage of that diversity, populating the novel with a wide range of characters. Of particular interest is Thomas’s partner in detection, a palace eunuch named Jorge. Penny avoids the cliché of medieval historical fiction and makes Jorge an interesting, complicated character, rather than a creature defined by his difference. The book also effectively conveys the reality of life in an absolute monarchy, where the whim of the Sultan carries the power of life and death.
The Red Hill takes a few liberties with the actual history of the era, which Penny carefully points out in his afterword. But in terms of capturing the feel of a time and place, the book does a marvelous job of conjuring up the last days of Islamic Spain, with a dandy murder mystery as the driving force of the plot.
You can learn more about David Penny on his website and order the book here.
David Penny
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