Stepping Back in Time

By Kim

Inside the lobby of the 1886 Crescent Hotel

A few days ago my family and I returned home from a vacation in a little Ozark town called Eureka Springs, Arkansas. A more apt name, at least to this historical fiction writer, is Heaven.

Nearly every downtown building there features a plaque from the National Register of Historic Places, making the veil between past and present feel especially thin. For those sensitive souls (like me) who pick up on the energy of places, that veil was all but transparent in the lobby of the 1886 Crescent Hotel. For the benefit of those who have never had a physical reaction from walking into a building or over an old battlefield, this picture is the best visual representation I can offer for how it feels.

The Crescent has been featured on Ghost Hunters and is reportedly the most haunted hotel in the United States. Knowing this, I was neither surprised nor alarmed by the weight of the air in the room. I was taken aback, however, when my older daughter followed me out onto the back veranda and whispered, “Mama, I could barely breathe in there. Is it just me, or does this place feel heavy?”

Heavy was an apt description. Evidently she’s inherited more than my artistic bent.

She wanted to go back inside and see if the feeling came back. It did. She then said she wouldn't mind spending the night there.  (After watching some videos on You Tube later, she amended that statement to exclude room 218. She also declined my offer to take her on the ghost tour, which she was certain would scar her for life.)

My little one rides an old steam train

The longer I stayed in Eureka Springs the easier it became to look past the modern clothes, smartphones and other gadgets that ground us all in the twenty-first century. When I boarded a 1920s steam train in ninety-degree heat I could almost hear my great-grandparents laughing from their perch beyond the pearly gates.

“Where’s the air-conditioning?” my youngest asked once sweat dampened her hair.

I nodded toward the open window and inwardly grinned, chalking up the adventure to research for my novel. There was no breeze generated by a train inching along at five miles an hour, but this photo proves my child stoically endured her slow-roast in the metal oven that was our car.  I took it moments after our tour guide “conductor”, a sweet, elderly gentleman in period clothes, asked her to marry him. (She let him down gently.)

Borrowing her great-grandmother's style

While editing our vacation photos, I've lingered over those shots that could have been taken in another era, or those where my daughters adopt a pose, expression, or even a hairstyle once worn by a distant grandmother.  A few clicks in an editing program and the Technicolor world I live in fades into sepia, becomes a living past.

It makes me itch to write.

What about you? Have you ever been to a place where you felt history come alive, or that energized your writing? We’d love to hear about it.

A Review of Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

By Kim

Synopsis of Code Name Verity (from the book jacket):

On October 11^th, 1943, a British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. But just one of the girls has a chance at survival.

Arrested by the Gestapo, “Verity” is given a choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution. They’ll get the truth out of her. Only it won’t be what they expect.

About Elizabeth Wein (from the book jacket):

Elizabeth Wein was born in New York City, grew up abroad, and currently lives in Scotland with her husband and two children. She is an avid flyer of small planes. She also holds a PhD in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania.

My review:

I discovered this book while at Barnes and Noble with my twelve-year-old, waiting for her to narrow down her selections enough to not melt my credit card. As many of you know, a WWII setting is enough to get my attention.  This novel had the added bonus of having won the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature from the American Library Association. I tried to shove it into my daughter’s hands, but she had her eye on the Divergent series and so I bought it for myself.

Code Name Verity was a roller-coaster of a novel starting with that first sentence – I AM A COWARD – which made me have to know why the protagonist thought so.  “Verity” is a young Scottish girl trapped in Nazi-occupied France without her ID, a prisoner of the Gestapo after caught looking the wrong way while crossing a street. Yes, it appeared she told the Nazis anything they wished to know, but so would I if someone threatened to pour kerosene down my throat and light a match. She was not a coward, I thought, just human.

“Verity” only offers a smattering of details of what the Nazis have done to her during interrogations, leaving much to the reader’s imagination. The omissions are not merciful to those who can picture well enough what pins could do to toes.

Halfway through the book, after a page that left me howling “NO,” the psychological torture continued with a point-of-view shift that changed everything I thought I knew.

While this is an exquisitely researched historical novel, it throws the reader into “Verity’s” shoes with a jolt just as compelling as the opening of The Hunger Games. Even teens that would normally roll their eyes at anything involving history will likely be unable to tear themselves away.

Have you read this novel? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Research Workshop: Dig Deeper

By Kim

Half of Therese Walsh’s upcoming novel The Moon Sisters is from the point-of-view of a young woman with synesthesia. (I’d never heard of it either until reading the book.) In The Painted Girls, Cathy Marie Buchanan brought to life the underbelly of the Paris Opera Ballet during the 1870s in gritty detail. Alyson Richman took readers into a concentration camp in The Lost Wife. Jodi Picoult tackles controversial topics in all of her novels, which requires insight into the minds of characters ranging from school shooters to stigmatas to modern day witches.

If you’re writing a novel, chances are you'll have to do research in order to make your story believable and compelling.

As a writer of historical fiction, I’m neck-deep in it. Each new piece of information I dig up potentially comes with a deeper story; sometimes that story can change the whole trajectory of a scene. Today I’m going to show an example of what I mean by this, and how taking the time to scratch beneath the surface can enhance your work.

This past week I received an e-mail from David Menary, an Ontario writer penning a book called Literary Landmarks of Cambridge. He intends to include a profile on my great-grandfather, Carl Ahrens, who did write, but was better known for his painting. While researching Clara Bernhardt, another author he will feature, Menary discovered a journal entry about a visit Clara made to Carl’s home in December of 1934. Here is a shortened excerpt of what she said:

“There’s a man I shall not quickly forget. He looks more completely the artist than anyone I've ever seen. Tall, thin, emaciated from long illness, with eyes so deep-set and piercing you felt all your disguises penetrated by one glance…Pain has not only touched his face – it has carved it…As he talked I was surprised and disappointed and desperately sorry to find him cynical and bitter. Yet he is risen to the peak of his profession artistically if not financially. He said if his life were his to live over, he would not choose painting. As to his illness: “It is all very well to tell yourself it is for the best, but I feel I am not getting a square deal. I resent it.” How dreadful to live that way, and to die like that…for he looked mortally ill…No doubt he believes in [God] – any creator has to – but if I am not mistaken, God does not mean anything to him in personal relationship…He is keen, and witty, but quite unsmiling. Very weak physically, sometimes his voice would blur out, and he mentioned he had to use drugs all the time and that he rarely slept.”

If you were to write a scene illustrating this visit using only this passage as a guide. what information can you glean about Carl and Clara?

Carl: He is an artist of some acclaim who has been sick a long time, lives in great pain, and will probably die soon. He’s grumpy about this. His eyes, height, and frailty are his distinguishing physical features. He takes medication and may or may not believe in God. The line about living his life over again implies an older man, but he could just as easily be young and dying too soon.

Clara: She's insightful and has a way with words, suggesting a good education and wisdom that comes with either age or experience. While she has sympathy for the artist’s plight, she’s frustrated that he refuses to see the good with the bad in life. She believes the best way to accomplish this is through God.

There are a lot of unknowns here. Why is Carl cynical? Why does Clara make such assumptions about Carl's religious beliefs? With fictional characters, an author can invent a back story and motivations, but both of these people in question actually lived. Let’s dig a little deeper to see if we can flesh them out a bit. Bonus points if we can tell the truth.

Carl Ahrens in 1934

Let’s start with Carl. A simple Google search of his name will reveal that in late 1934 he was 73 years old and that he'd had a tubercular hip since his youth. His name is mentioned in several art history books and he has a painting in Canada’s National Gallery, but by 1934 he had already been overshadowed by a younger group of painters and his house had just been foreclosed. His wife’s memoirs (available to view at several libraries) describe a man of boundless energy and an adventurous spirit cut down by illness, destitution and bitter enemies. The “drug” in question was codeine. Side effects of large doses include sleeplessness and extreme irritability. His medical records, also available publicly due to his association with a prime minister, show Carl was admitted to the hospital a year later. They describe him as being six foot tall, eighty-five pounds, and suffering from a condition “of a most uncomfortable nature.”

And now for Clara. I was shocked to discover that she was only 23 in late 1934 and quite pretty, too. Had you pictured her in a wheelchair? I hadn't, though she had been in one since age 11, when she contracted  polio. Her formal education ended after 8^th grade because she couldn't take that wheelchair on the streetcar to get to the high school, though she continued to study on her own and was on her way to becoming a well-respected Ontario writer. A year before this entry was written she had spent months in a rehabilitation facility where she did extensive physical therapy and, with the help of her religious faith, came to terms with the injustice of her own childhood illness.

Clara Bernhardt by Stephen Jones

With the addition of these details, our hypothetical scene has grown much more compelling. We no longer have a simple dialogue between a grumpy artist and an insightful but slightly self-righteous woman. We have two people, both immobile, one at the end of his life and the other in the prime of hers. We understand his bitterness and why she finds it disappointing. Perhaps she perceives he sees through all of her disguises because on some level she realizes they are kindred spirits, that he was once much like her.

What are some ways you have dug deeply in your own research? Have you learned anything that shocked you and changed your story for the better? What stumbling blocks have you run into?          

Comps

by Joan

Way back when Julie’s book was still in her computer, agentless, she wrote a fun post about comps.

She said, “You don’t want to send the agent into hysterical laughter, or worse, tempt him or her to use a trigger finger to delete the query before even reading the rest of it because you came across as arrogant in the comps you chose and how you worded the comparisons. At the same time, you don’t want to use such obscure comps the agent has to look them up on Amazon.”

So yes, it’s a thorny dilemma. The goal is to find titles or authors that might share the same readers, the same shelf in the bookstore. I agree with several commenters on Julie's post; I normally don’t include comp titles in the query unless the agent specifically asks. And it’s always best to use language such as: My story will also appeal to fans of (insert author here) or my story touches on similar themes to those in (insert title here).

The comps I've used when querying for THE LOST LEGACY OF GABRIEL TUCCI are pretty diverse. In some ways my story shares similarities to Alex George’s A Good American with its fish-out-of-water immigrants and ancestral secrets, or novels by Kate Morton and Rebecca Stott with dual timelines and a focus on links to the past. Perhaps even Jennifer Donnelly's novels for themes of betrayal, murder and the seedy side of historic London.

For books with an Italian connection, I actually got a bit of help here. One suggestion came from Julie (thanks for the tip on Pamela Schoenewaldt!), and another, from an agent who passed on an earlier version (i.e. not ready!). “I think the historical Trastevere will find an audience and is very marketable. Have you read anything by Chris Castellani? I think he might be a good comp.”

I loved these books (reviewed them here!) and would be thrilled if mine shared the same shelf. If all goes well, some other writer might use my book as a comp one day.

Book review: Orphan Train

by Joan

Christina Baker Kline’s new novel, Orphan Train was published this spring to wide acclaim, quickly reaching the New York Times Bestseller list. 

I pre-ordered this novel and eagerly anticipated its arrival. The immigrant experience fascinates me, perhaps because my ancestors arrived in Ellis Island and dispersed to other states to forge a better life. Some families fared better than others; some stayed together, many did not.

Ann Packer wrote: “A lovely novel about the search for family that also happens to illuminate a fascinating and forgotten chapter of American history. Beautiful.”

Vivian Daly was once Niamh Power, a nine-year-old Irish girl whose "unfortunate" red hair puts off the Midwesterners choosing orphans arriving on the train from New York City’s Children’s Aid Society. 

A toddler Niamh’s bonded with is wrenched from her arms at the first stop and a troublemaker she’s befriended is snatched up right away for farm labor. Niamh travels on a heart-wrenching journey from one dire environment to another. When finally she is taken in by a family with an inside privy, air vents and ample food (“…and fruits, even exotic ones like oranges and bananas”), she feels safe for the first time in her short life.

“It is a pitiful kind of childhood, to know that no one loves you or is taking care of you, to always be on the outside looking in. I feel a decade older than my years. I know too much; I have seen people at their worst, at their most desperate and selfish, and this knowledge makes me wary. So I am learning to pretend, to smile and nod, to display empathy I do not feel. I am learning to pass, to look like everyone else, even though I feel broken inside.”

Over eighty years later, Molly Ayers is a foster child in need of community service to wipe clean her record. Her crime? She’s stolen a copy of Jane Eyre, the most beat up version on the shelf because she thought no one would miss it. 

Molly finds herself agreeing to help ninety-year-old Vivian clean out her attic, which holds remnants of the old woman’s past. These two women have more in common than either imagines and neither is prepared for the journey they will take together. 

In spare prose, Christina Baker Kline created a beautifully written novel that balances the gritty realities of orphans in the Depression era to those in present-day. The reader is never told how to feel, but is shown in nuanced action and atmospheric detail. I highly recommend this novel to not only readers of historical fiction, but to anyone looking to root for two most endearing characters.

The Light Between Oceans

by Joan

There’s something otherworldly and enduring about lighthouses. From snug lookouts, weather-ravaged men communicated with ships while stirred-up oceans slapped the shore. What type of man lived and breathed the ocean this way? When I saw this cover, I knew I must read this book.

In The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Stedman draws the reader into the personal world of one such man. Tom Sherbourne is a medaled veteran of The Great War, a man of principle and character who dragged men to safety and always followed the rules. He’s grateful for a job manning the lighthouse on Janus Rock, a remote peninsula off Australia’s coast, where he can methodically work and live his days in order and sameness.

On a trip to the mainland, he meets the lovely, spirited Isabel, and returns to Janus Rock with her to carve a life. There she loves and cares for him, explores the small island, and longs for children. She miscarries twice and Tom would do anything to see her happy again. One day, mere weeks after delivering a stillborn child, a small boat washes onto shore. Inside is a dead man—and a live baby. Isabel views this as a sign from God.

Despite Tom’s insistence that they report the man and baby, Isabel protests. The mother is surely dead, the baby has no one but them. Tom loves her beyond measure and agrees to wait. The gravity of their decision weighs on him, but the problem is, he falls in love with the little Lucy, too. 

Two years later, when visiting the mainland, they learn someone has never stopped looking for the little one, whose name is not Lucy at all.

Rarely does a novel come along that is so perfectly crafted, so packed with flawed, believable characters. Every word, every scene, has a purpose. The plot twists and bends to unexpected places, thrusting the characters into situations as rough as the raging ocean. Ms. Stedman is a masterful storyteller, has a keen eye and knows how to portray raw emotion on the page.

I listened to the book on audio, read by the wonderful Noah Taylor, who truly brought the characters to life.

What a stunning debut. Highly recommend!

Going to Italy is Like Having a Love Affair – Without the Guilt

By Kim

As some of you know, I returned from a family vacation in Italy less than two days ago. If this post meanders a bit more than usual, it is because my jet-lagged body still insists it’s bedtime though it’s only mid-afternoon.

It will likely take me months to fully absorb all that I’ve seen and done since June 19^th. Being in Italy was, for me, like throwing myself into the arms of a new and particularly fervent lover. With the exception of one awful pizza in Siena, when this suitor placed a meal before me, it was meant to feed my soul not just my body. The wine, while never indulged in to the point of drunkenness, left me warm, satiated, and grinning like a Cheshire cat. Even the air was seductive – often infused with the scent of jasmine. Around every bend in the narrow winding roads was something unexpected: a Roman ruin, an Etruscan tomb, an ancient and gnarled olive tree, a castle, a village perched precariously upon a cliff, a Tuscan valley so dramatic and beautiful I could do nothing but stare and weep. I have no doubt that heaven looks like Tuscany.

As a writer of historical fiction, this sensory overload included a whole other dimension lost on the rest of my family. I would look at a medieval street and marvel at how similar it all would have looked a thousand years ago. My daughters laughed at me because I could not stop touching stone walls and dipping my hand into every fountain. I noticed by the end, though, that Sasha began picking up stones from places that obviously moved her. I’m sure her future husband will be as baffled by that habit as mine is.

I brought my laptop with me but never opened it. In fact, I didn’t give my WIP a single passing thought. Despite having a torn ligament in my foot, I climbed the bell tower in Siena, explored the ruins of Hadrian’s villa and the catacombs, ate wild boar, navigated Rome by train, subway, car, streetcar and city bus, indulged in a daily gelato, toured the castle where Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes got married, had an audience with the Pope, swam in the Mediterranean, and watched as my children made friends with a little girl who spoke no English. Watching Sasha and Ashlyn thrive on the freedom of being in a country where children are adored and fretted over was the most rewarding part of the whole adventure. They didn’t particularly want to come home.

Now that I am back in Dallas, refreshed, and will soon have both children in summer activities, I’m ready to dive back into my WIP. I have the feeling that my progress will be greatly enhanced by having left both my comfort zone and my muses behind for a little while. What about you? Have any of you had a big boost of creativity after going on a grand adventure?

All but one photo in this post were taken by Sasha Bullock, my nine-year-old, who was presented with her first digital camera upon arrival in Rome and quickly developed a love of photography.

I Want to Know

by Joan

As writers, we receive conflicting advice on how to write the best book we can. Write what you know. Write what you want to know. Write what you read. Write what you’d like to read. I think the best course is to combine all of this advice.

I keep a file of ideas, little notes about occurrences that have happened to me or my family, situations I find amusing, odd incidents from the news, character traits I’ve observed. I pore over these when looking for ideas, for ways to make my writing more realistic.

Writing what I want to know requires immersion into different worlds. Tracy Chevalier, originally from Washington, D.C., has lived in London for twenty years and completes vast research for each of her novels. Texan Deborah Crombie writes British mysteries and spends several weeks each year immersed in the English neighborhoods and cities about which she writes. Even though I’d love to visit every place I write about (numerous times!), I must rely on the Internet, books or interviews as resources for unfamiliar subjects or settings.

Since I discovered a love for adding a dash of historical fiction to my plots, I’ve had to travel to the past.

My current manuscript features many parts of London: posh Hampstead, crumbling Highgate Cemetery, eclectic Clerkenwell, and fashionable Bloomsbury. I’ve spent some time in London, but long before I ever dreamed of writing a story placed there. Rather than rely on my memory, I must do my research.
















The story features two sets of rival architects, one hundred fifty years apart. I know very little about architecture, other than what I’ve read in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, a multi-time-period mystery set in the grittier parts of London. He's a master of historical fiction and biography. My story is set both in present day and the Victorian era. With that in mind, over the next week I’m taking a step back from writing while I refuel my history tank, exploring books on nineteenth-century London, Roman-inspired architecture, church monuments, and convents.

Not only do I need to get the setting, architectural scene and period details right, but the story features an Italian immigrant and his Irish nemesis for whom I must capture their respective nineteenth-century accented dialogue. I want it to be authentic, yet not cliché.

Anyone have ideas on how to accomplish this? Movies or books to recommend? I want to know!

A Conversation with Melanie Benjamin

By Kim

Those of you who read my last post already know that I’m a huge fan of Melanie Benjamin’s new novel, Alice I Have Been. Just days before that post went public Melanie agreed to be interviewed for What Women Write and I did a little happy dance before combing the internet to make sure I wasn't asking the same questions she has already answered a million times. For the record, no, she is not a lifelong fan of Alice in Wonderland, and no, she does not feel she has a muse of her own (other than her own curiosity).

My fellow blogger, Julie, alerted me about the book several months before the release date. I admit it, I have actually never read Alice in Wonderland, but I was immediately intrigued by the cover and premise of the novel. It never occurred to me before that Alice was anything beyond a figment of Lewis Carroll’s imagination. When I saw the haunting (and mildly disturbing) photograph he took of the very real Alice Liddell, I had to know her story.

From Publisher's Weekly - starred review: Born into a Victorian family of privilege, free-spirited Alice catches the attention of family friend Dodgson [a.k.a. Lewis Carroll] and serves as the muse for both his photography and writing. Their bond, however, is misunderstood by Alice's family, and though she is forced to sever their friendship, she is forever haunted by their connection as her life becomes something of a chain of heartbreaks. As an adult, Alice tries to escape her past, but it is only when she finally embraces it that she truly finds the happiness that eluded her. Focusing on three eras in Alice's life, Benjamin offers a finely wrought portrait of Alice that seamlessly blends fact with fiction. This is book club gold.

Kim: The artist/muse relationship holds great fascination for many people. Was the special connection between Charles Dodgson and Alice the main draw for you, or were you more interested in the story of Alice’s later years?

Melanie: I have to cheat and say both. Obviously we would never know about Alice were it not for Dodgson, and their intriguing relationship really is the heart of Wonderland; it’s hard to separate the two. But the idea of following Alice throughout her long, fascinating life is what induced me to write the book, for that’s the story that hasn’t been told before.

Kim: I have to admit that I opened your book with a slight bit of trepidation, fearing I may have difficulty reading about a close bond between seven-year-old Alice and a grown man. I was surprised to see in one of your interviews that the early part of the book was the easiest for you to compose. How did you handle writing about the creepier elements of their relationship?

Melanie: It was easiest to write because there’s so much known/not known about it; it’s the intrigue that fascinates me as a writer and fuels my imagination. I never once saw the relationship, through the eyes of either character, as creepy; I saw it as tragic. I suppose that’s what made it palatable for me to write it. I realize – and understood, always – that modern eyes, reading it, might be uncomfortable. But I could never allow my own modern sensibility to impart any kind of judgment on either of their actions; that would not have been true to their characters.

Kim: This could explain why I found myself hoping that they would actually end up together when she was grown. I personally saw her as a very old soul and him as oddly childlike, but I could see how people today may be quick to label Alice a victim or Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) a pedophile. I take it you do not see them that way?

Melanie: No, the truth, I firmly believe, was much more complex than that. I really have come to see their relationship as tragic; two very lonely people who wanted to comfort each other, meeting at the wrong time in both of their lives.

Kim: I’ve never been to Oxford, but I have spent some time in England. I was amazed at how well you captured the feel of both the time and the place. How did you prepare to write about a place you’ve never been?

Melanie: I gave my imagination free rein. Based on research, of course, and there was a lovely site called Virtual Oxford that allows you to see the town, the college, through web cameras. But of course, then I had to go back and determine what would not have been there one hundred and fifty years ago! But once I established some sense of the place in my mind, I then allowed myself, somehow, to “go” there, and see it through Alice’s eyes at the different times in her life, imagine what she would have felt, touched, sensed, etc. It’s strange and almost mystical, in a way, and I can’t really explain it better than that.

Kim: Alice I Have Been is your first attempt at historical fiction. How did you approach writing it?

Melanie: By concentrating on the characters and the story first. I didn’t write it because I was intrigued by the period (although I am drawn to the Victorian era; my shelves are full of books about it). I wrote it because I was drawn to the characters and the story, so the setting, while vital, is not the most important element. Perhaps other historical fiction writers approach their novels differently, but for me it’s story and characters first, setting later.

Kim: Did you do all your research before starting the book or was the research ongoing?

Melanie: I thought – and I suspect most historical novelists think this – I had done the bulk of it before writing, but with historical fiction, you never know. You can be chugging along, writing, and all of a sudden you need to know something; was there a railroad station in this town in 1862? Were gaslights installed yet? That sort of detail you might not know you need until you get into the body of the manuscript. So it’s always a balancing act; you can’t get down on yourself if you do, unexpectedly, spend a day researching instead of writing, as long as it’s necessary. It’s still work. The challenge is not getting too swept up in unnecessary research and using that as an excuse not to write. As I said, it’s a balancing act!

Kim: As a fellow historical fiction writer, I relate. I've read that Alice I Have Been is not actually your first book, that you (as Melanie Hauser) previously wrote contemporary fiction. Do you see yourself ever going back to that, or will you continue with historical from now on?

Melanie: I have no plans to revisit the type of book I’d published before. I think I finally found my true calling, as I’ve long been a history nut, and my shelves are just packed with histories, biographies, etc. It’s as if I really have been training to do this my entire life; I just had a minor detour along the way!

Kim: What do you think may be the appeal of historical fiction to readers today?

Melanie: I’ve heard from a lot of readers that they enjoy feeling as if they’re learning something as well as being entertained. It’s almost as if there’s a certain guilt attached to relaxing and reading a novel, and the guilt is lessened if the reader feels as if he’s learning something new. I don’t think most readers confuse fiction with non-fiction; they’re smart enough to know that novels aren’t history books. But a lot of readers use that historical novel as a jumping off point to do a little bit of research on their own about a certain subject or person. And I think people enjoy being intrigued enough to do that.

Kim: What time periods most fascinate you and why?

Melanie: Pretty much everything from the early Victorian era (1830’s) to the 1950’s. Those are the eras that fascinate me, and again – my bookshelves are stocked with novels and histories written in and of those time periods. I’m not sure I can articulate the “why;” I think people are just naturally drawn to certain eras.

Kim: What can you tell us about your next project?

Melanie: It’s another historical novel, a “story behind the story” but this time it’s a uniquely American story. It’s set roughly in the same time period as ALICE I HAVE BEEN, but that’s the only similarity. Other than the protagonist is an amazing female you’ve heard too little about!

Kim: Many of our readers are aspiring writers seeking publication. Do you have any words of wisdom you can share with us?

Melanie: It’s a never ending journey. There is rejection at every step; there’s really never one moment where you can say, “At last, I have arrived!” We all have to learn to juggle many different roles; we have to be an artist and love the creative process but then we have to learn to let our work go, and understand that everyone else will look at it as a product that needs to be bought and sold. But in the end, there’s no more rewarding job than being a writer; I’m my own boss, and I have the privilege of living in different worlds, becoming different people, every day. I suppose the most important thing I’ve learned is that the successful author is the author who learns to move forward, always; to reinvent herself, if necessary. But who never loses her love of language and storytelling.

Kim: Thank you so much for joining us today, Melanie. Alice I Have Been can be purchased in bookstores everywhere and here.

In Praise of Pack-Rats

By Kim

Now for the secret. Well, here it comes, but put on your sober face. Does thee recollect when it happen[ed]? It was on the day of Uncle B’s funeral. I had a letter on that day, just after tea I went in the nursery to read it. I had not set there long before I heard someone come to the door, looked up, and who should I see but J. Spencer. I said walk in, little thinking he would mind me so good. He came in, got a chair, came set down beside me and went to talking. I was almost scared to death, sat there trembling. He sat as composed as you please, so we staid there and jabbered for about an hour when I ask him to excuse me for a moment. I cut myself upstairs and you may well think I did not trust myself within the confines of the nursery very soon again. That day he sent me an orange. But dear Martha, you see I could not help it. I trembled and was so afraid that Miriam or some one else would come in.

Now Martha, if you show this to anyone I shall never forgive you…

Amanda Akin to Martha Angell – April 22, 1842

To 21^st century eyes this may not look like much of a secret, but in 1842 Amanda, then fifteen, could have had her reputation ruined if “Miriam” or anyone else happened to find her alone with a gentleman. She would only have made such a risqué confession to a trusted friend. Martha likely kept her confidence, but she also saved the letter, as she saved many other letters from friends and relatives. I imagine she tucked them all away in a special box, perhaps re-reading them when the long winters prevented visitors from coming to call. She became Martha Niles in 1850 and the relics of her girlhood travelled with her, perhaps consigned to the bottom of a truck, unmolested through the births of four children and the death of her husband. Years later her belongings moved to a larger, grander home a few miles away in North Chatham, NY, until her second husband, too, died. By then Martha was elderly, her health failing, and she retired to her daughter Katie’s home in Stratford, Ontario until her death in 1910 at the age of eighty-three.

The letters survived. They may have remained with Katie for some time, or perhaps Katie sent them immediately to her niece, Madonna, then living in Toronto with her husband, landscape painter Carl Ahrens. (They are my great-grandparents as well as the subjects of my work-in-progress.) Madonna both adored her grandmother and shared her trait of saving everything. Not only did she guard Martha’s treasures, but she clearly told her children about them. When Carl and Madonna moved to England they let the mortgage lapse on their house. They told their grown children to go and collect any sentimental items in the home and leave the rest. Many things were overlooked, but the letters were rescued.

They were in Madonna’s possession when she died in San Clemente, CA in 1976. She willed them to her daughter, Chloris, my grandmother, who was perhaps the most fanatical pack-rat in the history of the human race. Everything Chloris kept, her daughters Nonna and Siegie also saved because “Momma must have had her reasons for keeping it.” Boxes containing everything from old manuscripts to the registration papers for a long-dead poodle remained in Aunt Nonna’s attic for twenty years after her mother’s death. When the time came to remodel the house, Siegie suggested they send everything to me because, as family historian, I would “know what was important.”

Imagine my shock when I opened one of the boxes, pulled out an ordinary file folder and a letter from 1836 dropped onto my lap. There were about fifty letters total, all written before 1850. Despite having been passed around for a century and a half, the ink is clear, the paper barely yellowed, and they are infused with the mildly musty scent of an antique bookstore. I skimmed a couple of them, but the mid-nineteenth-century handwriting made for slow reading. With a new baby to care for, I was short on time. As I did with so many other documents that did not directly relate to my book on Carl and Madonna, I sorted the letters by author, placed them in acid free sleeves, and returned them to my aunts.

After I began writing The Oak Lovers I realized historical fiction is my calling and regretted my haste. It’s true that the letters all date to well before the book I’m working on and only one was written by someone in my own family, but someday I’ll finish this book and need new characters, new stories. I asked for the letters back, explaining that they really should be scanned, transcribed, and footnoted rather than just preserved. The family agreed, relieved to hand that task, along with the letters, back over to me. All are curious about what they contain, but none has taken the time to decipher them. I suspect I’m the first person in generations to read them.

Over the last couple of months I’ve transcribed over half of them in my spare (HA!) time. Most are written by teenaged girls and are full of school-girl crushes and gossip. What makes this remarkable, other than for the idea that a teenager is a teenager no matter the century, is that most girls had little or no schooling in the 1840s. Yet here were a circle of girls, all Quakers, most from rural farm families, who were clearly well educated and widely read. Their handwriting was a work of art and their prose more refined than most college educated people today.

There are two friends of Martha’s I find particularly interesting. The first was a young gentleman named Charles Scholefield. As he was neither a relation nor a suitor, it is odd that a correspondence was allowed between them, yet sixteen of his letters were saved. After a little digging I discovered that the same Charles Scholefield who filled pages with romantic descriptions of sunsets or treatises on why the white men were wrong to treat the Mohawk so poorly, became one of the first legislators from Oneida County, NY. He was a celebrated lawyer, very handsome, married a seventeen-year-old at the age of forty, and was a Major in the Civil War.

Within a paragraph of my first letter by Amanda Akin, I knew I had found a friend. I should die of despair if I was obliged to write a formal, sentimental letter, she writes. What I wish for in a letter is the picture of my friend’s mind. I want to know what she is doing and saying, to have her show me the inside of her heart without disguise. I have this feeling when I write letters. If I seek wisdom and lofty sentiments, I can find them in books.

Here was a girl who was both of her time and somehow beyond it. She doesn’t hide behind formality in her letters. She’s frank, teasing, feisty and, most importantly, relatable. She has a distinct voice – every writer’s dream. Within the last few days I’ve discovered snippets about her remarkable life. I won’t go into great detail, as she may very well end up a character in a future book, but I will say that the Civil War, Walt Whitman, and Abraham Lincoln come into play.

Amanda would little have imagined when she penned her “epistles” that Martha’s 3x great-grandchild would wish that she had followed through on her threat to write the name of Martha’s crush on the top of each page to prevent her from showing the letters to anyone.

Each letter offers a glimpse of the past that, at most, only a handful of people have ever seen. For a historian, there’s no greater pleasure than such a discovery. For a writer there’s nothing more inspiring than hearing a voice so clearly in your mind that you simply must know the speaker. I would never have heard this one if it weren’t for the five generations of pack-rats that came before me, each one of them finding the letters and making a conscious decision to save them. I carry on the family tradition with pride.