The writing of my historical novel Brookhaven took about 150 years.
I must have seen something like this before, but I can’t recall a specific example. Many novels include an acknowledgement page, cutting the people who helped or inspired the author. My historical novel Brookhaven has an author’s note explaining some of the novel’s background. But it also has something you don’t usually see in a novel – a nine-page bibliography.
I included more as a reminder to myself of where the novel come from.
A grandmother who referred to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.” A father who told slightly mangled family stories, including one that sounded like an epic journey. A research paper in high school on what the “plantation system” really looked like. A family Bible with a mystery embedded in the birth and death records. A mountain of reading old and new American history books. An aunt who spent decades researching family history, long before the invention of the internet. Discovering I liked, as in really liked, the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longellow, once the top-selling poet and author in the United States who was dropped into the dustbin of literary criticism.
Photograph: A page of family records in the Bible, pre-preservation.
Some Thursday Readings
This Just In – poem by J.S. Gilbert at Frivolous Quill.
Cameron Ballack is back. And he’s traipsing all over where I used to bike.
Ballack is the fictional wheelchair-bound detective created by St. Louis-based writer Luke H. Davis. In previous books (and there’s been a gap of some years), he and his team were based in St. Charles County, Missouri, part of metropolitan St. Louis. In his new outing, entitled The Burning Glow, Ballack is now the lead detective for the Special Investigating Department, which operates across the metro St. Louis region. (St. Louis actually does have something similar that operates across jurisdictional lines called the Major Case Squad.)
What Ballack and his team are pulled into is a car bombing in the part of the city of St. Louis known as “Little Bosnia,” home to numerous immigrants who fled the war in the 1990s.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
More than 40 years ago, I discovered the stories and novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991). I don’t remember how I came across his work, but I found myself reading stories about a culture that had largely vanished, not long before I was born.
My understanding, if I had one of the Yiddish culture, had been shaped by a play that became a movie, Fiddler on the Roof, the story of Tevye, his wife Golda, and their daughters as they navigate the forces of modernism and anti-Semitism changing their lives. It’s set in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia, around the turn of the 20th century. And then I read Singer’s stories, which not only provided a richer context than the movie but also made the culture seem more real. As much as I enjoyed the movie, it was Singer’s stories that showed the reality without the Hollywood framing.
As I started reading The Broken Heart is the Master Key: Poems by Baruch November, I was almost catapulted back to Singer’s stories. November’s poems aren’t about a culture that had almost disappeared; instead, they reflect the echoes of that culture, two generations after Nazi Germany destroyed it in Poland, eastern Europe, and western Russia.
The closer we get to July 4, the flood of articles relating to America’s 250th anniversary is becoming a tsunami. Emerging Revolutionary War Era is starting a new video series. One of America’s founders chronicled the beginning in sonnets. Benedict Arnold, whose name became synonymous with treason, was first a hero on more than one occasion. The U.S. Army Museum at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, is using “augmented reality” to bring the revolution to life. And there are more links below.
I think I was 10 or 11 when I started stamp collecting, a hobby that lasted off and on right up to now. One stamp that also seemed financially out of reach was the very first one – the “Penny Black” issued by Great Britain in 1840. It’s still financially out of reach, at least for most of us. But it transformed how letters were mailed, and it made postal management possible on a national and international scale.
Some 40 years ago, when I was in a graduate seminar on the Latin American novel, I was trying to tackle Conversations in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa for my seminar research paper and oral presentation. About 100 pages in (it’s a 600-page novel), I almost gave up in despair. I couldn’t figure out what the story was about. Instead, I started over, but this time I briefly outlined each chapter. After the first five chapters, I cracked the code. It was actually a narrative of four interrelated stories, each one told in successive chapters. So the story in chapter one picked up in chapter five, nine, and so on. Maybe it was the work I put into it, but Conversation in the Cathedral remains one of my favorite novels. Henry Oliver at The Common Reader has some observations about difficult writing and difficult novels and poems.
