Q&A with Sarah Blake

A few weeks ago I posted a review of The Postmistress by Sarah Blake. Now it's my honor to introduce Sarah Blake to our What Women Write friends.


From Publisher's Weekly: Weaving together the stories of three very different women loosely tied to each other, debut novelist Blake takes readers back and forth between small town America and war-torn Europe in 1940. Single, 40-year-old postmistress Iris James and young newlywed Emma Trask are both new arrivals to Franklin, Mass., on Cape Cod. While Iris and Emma go about their daily lives, they follow American reporter Frankie Bard on the radio as she delivers powerful and personal accounts from the London Blitz and elsewhere in Europe. While Trask waits for the return of her husband—a volunteer doctor stationed in England—James comes across a letter with valuable information that she chooses to hide. Blake captures two different worlds—a naïve nation in denial and, across the ocean, a continent wracked with terror—with a deft sense of character and plot, and a perfect willingness to take on big, complex questions, such as the merits of truth and truth-telling in wartime.

Joan: You mentioned it took ten years to craft the story of The Postmistress. As writers looking to be published, we often hear that we should not spend years rewriting a story, but to move on to something new. Thank goodness you didn’t leave this one behind! What do you think of this advice? Does the answer lie in the difference between crafting a literary vs. commercial novel (even though your novel is both)?

Sarah: Well, it’s a great question and one that I think probably has as many answers as there are stories! Honestly, I tried to move on to something new--especially as one year folded into the next. And the next. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t keep from returning to Franklin and to these three women, and to trying to get at how their three lives intertwined. It was a puzzle I was too enmeshed in to leave. So I stayed, often to my despair. I think that’s the thing always to pay attention to when it comes to the question of when to move on: if the story is still urgent for you, even inchoately, then it’s probably worth staying with.

Joan: Good advice, thank you! Readers who are also writers can learn so much about character development from reading The Postmistress. Without giving anything away, I was struck by the choices Iris and Frankie had to make, how those choices challenged their belief systems. At the climax of their plot lines, it became apparent what it means for a character to grow and change and, most of all, learn what they are capable of. How did you pull that off?

Sarah: Oh, thank you! That means a great deal since character movement is so difficult, I think. The novel’s interest really began for me with Iris’s completely uncharacteristic gesture. I had the picture of her doing what she does on page 230 as the very first thing in my head. It started the novel for me. Everything lodged in the question, why would this woman who believes so firmly in doing things by the book do what she does? And it was that question that led me deeper into thinking about war and its effects on ordinary life--war, that is, off the battlefield. Frankie’s gesture is an extension of that same question. So, in some ways these characters develop, to the extent that they do, as I was drawn deeper into the question of responsibility in a time of war.

Joan: You did a tremendous amount of research for this book, yet it never feels dumped into the narrative. As readers, we are next to your characters—in shelters hiding from bombs, on the train with Frankie as she records the voices of the war, on top of the lighthouse as Harry searches for U-boats. What’s the secret of weaving research into narrative?

Sarah: The novelist, Susannah Moore, passed on this gem of advice that Joan Didion had given her: when you look up from your computer, or your desk, stay in the eyes of your character and what does she/he see? This is deceptively simple, but it asks the writer to be inside the world that she is trying to create in a very fundamental way. For me, all research has to work that way, too. It has to disappear. The time I spent researching was time I spent trying to get at the world in which Frankie and Iris and Emma were living from the inside out so that when I lifted my eyes up, I saw the color and tint of the 1940s, and heard the sounds they would (I hoped). And then this way, I could imagine what they felt, or what they might say.

Joan: What a great explanation--thank you. The cover is stunning! What did you think when you first saw it?

Sarah: I wanted to take a bite out of it! It really is so incredibly luscious.

Joan: It certainly is! Now that I’ve found you, I want to read more of your work! I just noticed Grange House: A Novel, and can’t wait to read it. Victorian era, coast of Maine, ghosts—a perfect combination! When can we expect your next novel? Selfishly, I hope it’s not ten years from now!

Sarah: My next novel returns to Maine, but centers in a summer house owned by an old money family whose money, but not whose sense of itself, has run out. It goes back and forth between the summer of 1959 and the summer of 2009, between the stories of two sisters and then their daughters, and the ways in which their lives repeat and echo each other’s without their knowing. And there’s a big secret at the center of the house, of course, since I am always drawn to the stories about characters who don’t see, or don’t know, how their lives intertwine. This is where I’ll always be a Victorian.

Joan: Me too! I am struck by how generous authors are with their time—just look at our list of interviewees (yourself included!). Who were your mentors along the way and did anyone in particular inspire you?

Sarah: I never went through an MFA program, and I’m old enough so that there weren’t creative writing courses in my undergraduate curriculum, so I have to say that my mentors were mostly those on the page: the writers I would turn to to generate ideas or sentences, the writers I wanted to imitate. As a growing writer, it was Virginia Woolf, first and foremost, and then the Brontes--all of them, and George Eliot. But then, too--I learned so much from going to readings, lots and lots of readings by poets and fiction writers and listening to them talk about how they wrote. How they thought of what they had written was tremendously inspiring. I love hearing artists--painters, sculptors and photographers--give artist’s talks for this reason as well. Often, listening to someone else describe their process is pivotal as I try and work out some knot in my own work.

Joan: Your book trailer incorporates some very moving pictures from the WWII era. How far things have changed since letter writing days! Do you still send hand-written letters?

Sarah: I do. And I love getting them, for just the reason that Emma loves Will’s letters. The personality of the letter-writer is captured twice: both in their words and in their hand-writing. I love that.


Thank you, Sarah, for sharing your time with us today. And thank you, readers, so much for stopping by! If you’ve read this one, let me know if you loved it as much as I did. If you haven’t, head to the bookstore!

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.