Behind the Book Archives

by Beverly Jenkins

Romance icon Beverly Jenkins concludes her Old West series with Tempest, a passionate, sweeping love story between a frontier physician and his mail-order bride. Regan Carmichael understands the dangers of traveling to the Wyoming Territory, and doesn’t hesitate to shoot a man she believes is trying to hijack her station wagon. That man turns out to be her intended, Dr. Colton Lee, who was attempting to rescue the coach from bandits. A dynamic woman who seeks equality in marriage is not what Colton had in mind when he set out to find a caretaker for his home and young daughter. But despite his initial shock at Regan’s behavior, he comes to appreciate her strength, and both explore what it would mean to forge a true partnership.

Many depictions of the Wild West have predominantly white characters, but in reality, the American frontier was extremely diverse. The Old West series tells the stories of people of color, and Jenkins has made a point of sharing the historical inspirations for her novels. In order to write a character such as Dr. Colton Lee, Jenkins researched the opportunities for African-American physicians in the 19th century and came across an incredible true story.

As a writer of historical romantic fiction, one of my pleasures is the research. Mining the works of historians such as Dr. Benjamin Quarles, Dorothy A. Sterling, James M. McPherson and others allows me to pepper my novels with documented facts and introduce readers to real life figures they may be unfamiliar with. In my newest release, Tempest, our hero is African-American physician Dr. Colton Lee. The story takes place in 19th century Wyoming, where Jim Crow and segregation were alive and well, so a writer must ask herself—where was he trained? That question took me to the medical school of Howard University, which opened its doors in 1868 with eight students and five faculty members. Among that faculty was the remarkable African-American physician, Dr. Alexander T. Augusta.

Born free in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1825, Augusta hoped to pursue his dreams of becoming a doctor by attending the University of Pennsylvania, only to be denied entrance. However, a member of the school’s faculty took the young black student under his wing and taught him privately. By 1850, Augusta and his Native American wife, Mary O. Burgoin, were living in Canada after he’d been accepted for study by the medical college at the University of Toronto. Upon receiving his M.B., he was appointed head of the Toronto City Hospital.

Back home in the states, the Civil War was raging, but black men weren’t officially allowed to fight for the Union until 1863. On April 14 of that year, Dr. Augusta became the first of eight black officers commissioned. Given the rank of major, he was appointed head surgeon of the 7th U.S. Colored Infantry, a tenure undermined by discrimination and disrespect. The average monthly pay for a major was one hundred and sixty-nine dollars. Major Augusta was initially paid seven dollars; a rate even lower than white privates, who earned thirteen. His letter to Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts solved the problem and resulted in him being compensated appropriately, but other issues remained. In Baltimore, while traveling to a meeting, Augusta was attacked by a mob who took exception to a man of his race wearing a uniform. Back on the war front, his white assistants, who were also surgeons, complained about taking orders from a black man. Rather than settling the matter in Augusta’s favor, President Lincoln transferred him to Camp Barker’s Freedman’s Hospital near Washington. But by war’s end, Augusta had been promoted to lieutenant colonel, making him the highest-ranking black officer of the time.

After his service, he led Lincoln Hospital in Savannah until 1868, and then moved to D.C. where he began private practice and taught at Howard medical school until 1877. During a number of those years, the school fell on hard times and was unable to pay its faculty. Augusta showed his dedication to his students by teaching for free. When he left Howard, he headed up D.C.’s Freedmen’s Hospital.

Despite the many lives he saved on the battlefield, his spotless military record and his stellar achievements before and after the war, the American Medical Association never recognized Dr. Augusta as a physician during his lifetime because of his race. Yet, he holds the title to many of our nation’s African-American firsts: first commissioned officer, first to teach at a U.S. medical school, first to lead a major hospital.

And there’s one more. When he died in 1890, he was the first black officer buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Beverly Jenkins shares the story of the remarkable man who served as inspiration for the hero of her latest novel, Tempest.

Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Historical Mystery

‘Downton’ writer takes on an infamous Golden-Age family

Behind the Book by Jessica Fellowes

by Jessica Fellowes

“Downton Abbey” expert Jessica Fellowes (she’s the author of five official companion books) turns an eye to a different headline-making family in her historical debut, The Mitford Murders. Based on the true story of the murder of Florence Nightingale Shore (the goddaughter of the famous war nurse), The Mitford Murders follows Louisa Cannon, the newest young employee at the Mitford’s manor, as she navigates their high-profile world. But when Louisa and 16-year-old Nancy Mitford find themselves at the crime scene of Florence’s murder, their lives begin to spiral out of control.

In a Behind the Book feature, Fellowes dishes on exactly what drew her to the drama-plagued Mitford sisters, the influence “Downton Abbey” had on her story and more.

As a young girl, seeing my uncle Julian was always a treat. He was my father’s younger brother and, until I was 16, unmarried and without a child of his own. We used to go on holidays to Majorca and the South of France together to stay with friends of his who had children, but mostly we enjoyed each other’s company. Julian was never less than a fount of amusing stories, but the ones I enjoyed the most were the anecdotes about our family that he had collected, mostly from his own elderly aunts. My grandfather was born in 1912 and though he was an only child, his father had several sisters and it was these women who told Julian of a dying Edwardian age, with all its extraordinary snobberies and customs, as well as of the challenges and tragedies of a life lived during and after World War I.

It was these stories that we later saw in “Downton Abbey,” which Julian created and wrote for six seasons. I was lucky enough to become a part of the “Downton” world when I wrote the official companion books, which told not only the story of how the series was made but also sought to explain something of the historical context that inspired so many of the characters and plots. I had grown up working for newspapers as well as the iconic Country Life magazine, which taught me a lot about life inside the great houses of Britain. And all the while, Julian and I had continued to talk and share stories, leading me to the writers of the between-the-wars period: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, W. Somerset Maugham and Nancy Mitford.

When I had finished the five “Downton Abbey” books, I knew I wanted to write a novel next and I knew I wanted it to be set in the 1920s—a time that I am both familiar with and endlessly fascinated by. By an extraordinary piece of luck, I was approached by editor Ed Wood at Little, Brown, who asked me if I would consider writing a series of Golden Age-style mysteries featuring the Mitford sisters.

Of course, I knew their legend well—six sisters who grew up in Oxfordshire, England, who each came of age during the 1920s and 1930s. Between them, they represent everything that was compelling, glamorous, political and even appalling about that time: Nancy the satirical novelist; Pamela the countrywoman; Diana the fascist; Unity, who fell in love with Hitler; Decca the communist; and Debo, who became the Duchess of Devonshire and ran one of Britain’s grandest houses. We had the idea for a series, with each book focusing on one of the sisters at a key moment in their lives. I knew I wanted a pair of fictional protagonists who could appear in every book, taking us in and out of every room both upstairs and downstairs, so I created Louisa Cannon, a nursery maid for the Mitfords, and her (sort-of) love interest, policeman Guy Sullivan.

A few weeks after I had started planning the first novel, Ed sent me a newspaper article online about a murder in January 1920 that had never been solved. Could this, he wondered, be our first crime? This was the tragic murder of Florence Nightingale Shore. She was brave, having worked in both the Boer War and World War I, yet only two months after she was demobilized, she was attacked on a train and left for dead.

When I realized that there was a possible connection between Florence and the Mitfords, I knew this was the perfect crime. The inquest records had been destroyed but there were numerous newspaper reports of what had been, at the time, a famous and shocking murder. I was also able to trace details of her will, find photographs of her lodgings and look up the details of her family ancestry as well as those of her close relatives and friends. All of which led me closer to what, I believe, is a likely solution to her terrible death. Alongside Guy’s investigations is always the bright and irascible Nancy, whose predilection for story-telling and close observations are of invaluable help to him. Louisa, too, becomes drawn into the crime and discovers her own talent for problem-solving. For the next book, Bright Young Dead, I’m writing about Pamela Mitford and another real-life criminal. But it’s the smaller details of the world then that continue to fascinate me, and I hope that I can get that across to the readers in a way that feels real and relevant. That, for me, is the privilege of my work.

“Downton Abbey” expert Jessica Fellowes (the author of five official companion books) turns an eye to a different headline-making family in her historical debut, The Mitford Murders. In a Behind the Book feature, Fellowes dishes on exactly what drew her to the drama-plagued Mitford sisters, the influence “Downton Abbey” had on her story and more.

Paranormal Romance, Romance

Romance Paranormal Romance

How to create a world

Behind the Book by Maria Vale

by Maria Vale

Maria Vale’s The Last Wolf is a dazzling new take on paranormal romance. Many paranormal series fall under the umbrella of urban fantasy, with their supernaturally haunted cityscapes and high-octane action sequences. But The Legend of All Wolves series draws from classic epic fantasy instead, using Norse myth and medieval history to develop an entire alternate culture of werewolf packs that live isolated from the rest of humanity in the North American wilderness. To create the rich, complicated world of her Great North Pack of werewolves, Vale drew from her background as a medievalist.

I come from a family filled with people who studied Useful Things. They studied engineering, chemistry, pathology and economics. I did not study Useful Things. My major was Medieval Studies. I remember clearly one Christmas when I had to defend my decision to an uncle who made it clear that Medieval Studies was not only Not Useful, it was actively Useless. He, at the time, was involved in something like armaments design. Maybe the Merovingian dynasty wasn’t as useful as MRVs, but they weren’t as harmful as modern weapons either. Not anymore, at least.

But I wasn’t only concerned with the waging of wars and the comings and goings of kings. I was also concerned with the spread of monasticism, the formation of doctrine, the rise and fall of Rome, Pictish stones, the economic impact of the crusades in France and the politics of sports in Byzantium.

So of course, when I decided to write a romance, I chose to write one set in contemporary America. In Upstate New York. About werewolves.

Which might make you think—like my family did back then—that my studies were going to end up being a lot of course hours without much to show for them.

These are not just any werewolves, though. For three days out of every 30, the Pack must run wild in their animal form. This isn’t a burden to them or something that they try to suppress. This is a sacred time, when they all come together. For them, their human side is more of a tool, used to protect their sacred wild.

In creating the world of The Last Wolf, I imagined the Great North Pack as something between an actual wolf pack, a family and a society. Like a family, the connections are tight, and they owe each other comfort and reassurance. Like a wolf pack, it is built on hierarchy. Like a society, it has its own culture, one that weaves together law and religion and history.

The Great North Pack hails originally from the forests of Mercia, in England—until years of mining and enclosures led the great Alpha, Ælfrida, to move her Pack to the wilds of New York in 1668.

I imagined that Pack culture, like any culture under siege, would be very conservative, clinging doggedly to laws and religion and customs derived loosely (very loosely) from the world of 9th-century England. This was a time of isolation—Roman infrastructure was four centuries overdue for repair—and of insecurity. Viking raids showed up with a depressing regularity, much like dysentery or human hunters. It was also the time of Beowulf and Old English. And that language, to my ear at least, combines the roughness and musical cadence I associate with a wolf’s howl.

I adapted certain historical realities with those of life among wolves. When it came time for the entire Pack to make a decision, I borrowed from the Athenian use of ostraca, or pottery shards dropped inside into urns, and from the Thing, the Norse assembly held by freemen. I combined the challenges that real wolves use to move up and down the hierarchy with a duel used to settle disputes in Viking Britain. Called Holmgang, or “island going,” it was often fought on a spot set aside for these ritualized trials. I gave the Great North Pack just such a place:

“Fighting is a fact of life in any pack. Someone is always watching for that loss of power or respect that signals the time to make a move up the hierarchy. Or to gain cunnan-riht, the right to cover a more viable wolf. Aside from the Dæling, when an entire echelon is brawling, we hold our fights in a low palisade of logs about the shoulder height of an adult wolf, hammered in to the ground around a big square of scuffed dirt. It is near enough to the Great Hall that it’s a short run to the med station. Far enough that blood doesn’t splatter on the woodwork.”

I also adapted certain legends to the Great North’s circumstances, like that of Tiw, the god of war, and Fenrir, the giant wolf. In the Norse story, Tiw volunteers to put his right hand in Fenrir’s mouth as surety that the fine ribbon the gods want to wrap around him will do Fenrir no harm. As usual, the gods are up to no good, and the ribbon is so magical that it is able to chain even the ferocious Fenrir. Furious at this betrayal, Fenrir bites off Tiw’s hand.

The Great North has a different version. Tiw binds Fenrir inside himself instead, after feeding the wolf his right hand, so he will never make a false promise again. The Pack believes that once the wolf was bound within him, Tiw stopped being the god of war, and became instead the god of law, because he understood that law is the balance of freedom and restraint.

I suppose the point is that as scattershot as my studies were, they made me understand that politics and war and big events in isolation only tell you so much without religion and art and economics and literature and the everyday lives of the people.

In short, they gave me a richer appreciation of how the world is built. Which in turn gave me a richer appreciation of how to build a world.

Maria Vale tells us how she used her medievalist background to create a rich, complicated culture for the werewolves of The Last Wolf.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Heart blindness

Behind the Book by Elizabeth J. Church

by Elizabeth J. Church

“How many of us have seen our friends stepping into a bad situation and worried over what—if anything—to say, knowing our counsel is unwanted?”

Head to Las Vegas and leave your past at the door. That is Lily Decker’s hope when she trades in her brutal childhood in Kansas for the glamour of the Vegas Strip in 1957.

Elizabeth J. Church’s new novel, All the Beautiful Girls, follows Lily through her difficult, abusive childhood, when her only trustworthy adult is the man who had caused the car accident that killed her parents. But bright lights and big dreams are always on the horizon, and at 18 years old, Lily, calling herself Ruby Wilde, discovers a showgirl life filled with parties, new friends and every luxury she ever wished for. But her heart was broken at a young age, and some pain cannot be avoided forever.

Church shares an in-depth look at the questions that drove the creation of this heartbreaking, unforgettable character.

It’s frightening to admit this, but I’ve entered my seventh decade on this earth, and not only have I often made poor choices in love, but I’ve seen many others do the same. During the years that I practiced divorce law, I saw dozens of couples who had entered into unwise allegiances, including many who were confoundingly loath to let go. They paid enormous sums of money so that they could continue to fight, sometimes over such things as who would win custody of the good brownie pan or visitation schedules for dogs (and whether the dog bowls should travel along)

It all made me think. How do we choose our lovers? Our partners for life? What factors, what previous experiences, come into play? And why do women who are talented, intelligent and strong, who possess financial security and enviable careers, enter into relationships in which they are demeaned and sometimes even endangered? How many of us have seen our friends stepping into a bad situation and worried over what—if anything—to say, knowing our counsel is unwanted? And why oh why is it only in hindsight that we see people for who they really are?

My novel’s protagonist, Lily (who adopts the stage name Ruby when, at age 18, she heads to Las Vegas and becomes a showgirl), is strikingly beautiful. She’s bright and eager to contribute to a world that, in the late 1960s, is in the process of dramatic change. She’s been pummeled in early life; her family is killed in a car accident when she’s just 8 years old, and she’s forced to live with a stoic aunt and an uncle who sexually abuses her. Despite the brutality of her childhood, Ruby works hard and rises through the ranks until she is recognized for her talent and beauty as “Showgirl of the Year.” She can have her pick of any man—or men. And yet, Ruby falls for a man who, while gloriously handsome and sexy, also has a dark side. Ruby is the friend we’ve all had (or been): She is the friend we worry about and struggle to comprehend.

Countless factors shape our wants and needs in a partner. There is that make-or-break physical attraction, that chemical pull—because without it, we simply look the other way. Perhaps a person comes along at a time when we are particularly vulnerable, or when we have a compelling need that the person seems to meet. We see what we want or need to see. And what’s particularly interesting to me is that we let those initial, needful first impressions harden into a vision we come to believe is reality.

Maya Angelou has said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” It’s a wonderfully true statement, and her wording is important. She doesn’t write, “When people tell you who they are”; she writes, instead, “show.” It’s an elegant variation on the truism, “Actions speak louder than words.” She also encourages us to avoid giving someone the benefit of the doubt dozens or hundreds of times over.

After completing All the Beautiful Girls, I came to the conclusion that what we must be careful about with love is what we tell ourselves. How often are we excusing behavior we’d never tolerate in a friend or acquaintance? What are we telling ourselves that justifies our staying in a relationship? Why are we working so very hard to justify poor behavior?

I think the most important thing I learned in writing this book is that just because I understand a behavior—why it might occur, what things might lead someone to be ferociously angry, cruel, cutting or simply careless—does not mean I have to tolerate the behavior. I wonder, though, if these are the kinds of lessons that can be learned in the abstract. Perhaps we first have to travel down the wrong road, trip and stumble, before we can find the right path to love.

Photo credit Anna Yarrow

It’s frightening to admit this, but I’ve entered my seventh decade on this earth, and not only have I often made poor choices in love, but I’ve seen many others do the same.

Fiction

Fiction

Cowgirls, family and autism: A novel of Calamity Jane

Behind the Book by Michelle Rene

by Michelle Rene

In her new historical novel, Hour Glass, Michelle Rene draws readers into the wild town of Deadwood, South Dakota, where a boy named Jimmy Glass and his little sister, Hour, seek help for their father, who has fallen dangerously ill with smallpox. In Deadwood they encounter the notorious Calamity Jane—but this is a very different Jane from what readers might expect. Rene shares a look behind the characters that breathe life into this Wild West tale.

The rough draft of Hour Glass was written in 16 days. Yes, you read that correctly. That is not to say the research took that long, just the writing itself, but most people don’t believe you can write anything of value in that short amount of time.

The book was a desperate outpouring of emotions molded into a concise story. I had recently lost my grandmother, who is named in the dedication, and her passing filled me with a litany of emotions. Inside my journey of grief, I discovered sorrow, beauty and even humor. The loving family that surrounded me was my lifeline and a big inspiration for the book.

Why write about Calamity Jane? I’ve been fascinated with her for a long time, the buckskin-wearing woman of the West who could drink like a cowboy and swear like one, too. If you look back through history, we are drawn to stories about women like Jane. Those brave souls who bucked tradition and blazed their own path in the world. Calamity Jane did so with a pistol in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.

There are not many hard facts about the woman, which made my job both challenging and liberating. The way of the Old West was that of oral history, and the exploits of legendary characters like Calamity Jane were often exaggerated, especially by Jane herself. This is liberating in that I had more artistic license with her story, but challenging in that I desperately wanted to paint an accurate representation of the time. To write such a woman as brazen and drunk would be only part of the story. The other side, one that Jane rarely spoke of, was her kindness. She was known to be charitable, and the city of Deadwood credits her for selflessly caring for the victims of the smallpox epidemic of 1876. Who better to represent my story than a generous soul who fought mightily and could laugh in the face sorrow?

On to the subject of my title character, Hour. As far as I know, there aren’t any autistic characters written into Old West stories, and I believe they deserve representation. Of course, that is not the only reason for writing a character such as Hour. My own son is autistic. When I wrote the first draft of this book, he hadn’t been diagnosed, but we were seeing the signs, and doctors were preparing us for what was next.

Hour is not exactly like my son, but Jimmy’s love and fear for his sister represents what I was feeling at the time. He desperately wants to protect her from the world, knowing it can be a harsh place, unfeeling toward her temperament. Many of the rewrites came after my son’s diagnosis and after the shock of it wore off. Those of you who have faced a team of psychiatrists who are explaining your beautiful child is on the spectrum will understand the barrage of emotions that follow. The fear, the love and, yes, even the relief to finally know the truth. It wasn’t until I stopped reeling from the diagnosis that I was able to go back and flesh out the amazing girl that was Hour and not just focus on Jimmy’s love for her.

Though Hour Glass is about Calamity Jane, Jimmy Glass and Hour, the deeper theme is family. Even in the rough and tumble world of Deadwood in the 1870s, a loving family can grow with the most unlikely of people.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Debut Fiction

Every day, all over the world: What is a girl worth?

Behind the Book by Shobha Rao

by Shobha Rao

As crushing as it is beautiful, Shobha Rao’s debut novel follows two Indian girls through the most hopeless of circumstances, but their enduring friendship burns brightly—endlessly—through it all. Girls Burn Brighter is a light that will not go out. Here, Rao shares a look behind her book.

In November of 1999, two young Indian girls were found unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning in an apartment building in Berkeley, California. One of the girls, who was 13 years old, died from the poisoning; the other survived. The building was owned by Lakireddy Bali Reddy. And as it turned out, so were the girls. Over the course of the investigation into the girl’s death, it was found that Reddy had trafficked the two girls, along with an alleged 99 other women and girls, into the United States over the course of a 13-year period. The girl who died, Sitha V., had served as a sexual and domestic slave to Reddy. These findings eventually led to the conviction of Reddy, one of the wealthiest and most powerful landlords in Berkeley, to eight years in prison.

Many years later, I found myself working at a South Asian domestic violence agency in nearby San Jose, whereupon I came into contact with one of the victims. She never told me her story, as all documentation related to the case was sealed, but meeting her—witnessing her warmth, her laughter—made me think more deeply about the case.

In this thinking, the first question that came to me was: How much did Reddy pay for Sitha?

The second question was: How much was she worth?

The answer to the first question was simple. I didn’t know it, but it was most certainly simple. At some point, in a small village in South India, Reddy had approached the destitute parents of a young girl. He had handed them money: a set amount of money, decided upon, bargained, negotiated by the powerless parents of a powerless girl. The exact amount he paid for her may be unknown, but it is not a mystery, it is currency: Somebody paid it, somebody accepted it, and a girl was bought.

It happens every day.

The second question though. The second question is what haunted me: How much is a girl worth?

It is this question that I set out to explore in Girls Burn Brighter. In some ways, the writing of the novel, the exploration of what a girl is worth is as straightforward as taking a knife to a frog on a dissecting table. There is a body. You can cut up the body, carve away the limbs; you can make a slit, take out the organs, put them back in. That is a body. It is, for instance, generally worth less without all the limbs intact, without all the organs in place. It is worth less if there’s a slit. Or if there’s a scar. Or if it is too fat. Too thin. Too short. Too tall. Or if the skin is too dark. It is worth less if the frog isn’t the exact shade of green that is preferred by the men of the country it is born into, and the culture and proclivities and notions of beauty that dictate its mores. The frog is worth less if it questions a single one of these mores.

In other ways though, writing the novel was nothing like looking at a frog on a dissecting table. It was instead like looking at a frog in a stream. The same frog, let’s say, but now sunning itself on a rock. The light glinting off the silk of its skin. Its eyes deepened by the memory of that first step onto land, feeling in that step the density of the waiting shore, its unending promise. But this frog on the rock is a girl frog, and so that promise is sometimes meager and offers hardly anything. It is sometimes false and feeds her with lies. It sometimes says to her, you are on a rock, dreaming, but you might as well be on a dissecting table, dead.

And so, then came the true question. What am I worth? What are you worth? Your body, your memories, the depth of your eyes, the fall of your foot, what you give to the world, what you take. What do they add up to?

It’s easy to blurt out a number: a million trillion dollars! A number that has no meaning. A number that is not a true reflection of anything but our fragile egos. A number that we hope and want to believe is maybe not even a number. But whatever it is, whether it is coins of gold or coins of light, we know, in the depth of our hearts, that our number is most certainly larger than Sitha V.’s number.

Is it cruel to admit this? Or is it cruel to not admit this?

And really, why admit anything at all? Why talk about the body of a girl? Now long dead. And why ask what she was worth? Why ask ourselves what we are worth? For surely, you and I will never be for sale. We will never be so poor as to be forced to sell our daughters. We will not lay awake, wondering if there is another way, aching to find it. We will not drop to our knees and clasp her in our arms, wordless, silenced by poverty, by inequity, by the ruthlessness of birth and chance. We will not (no, never) live in a place so horrible and unenlightened and remote as Berkeley, California. We will not let it happen in our midst, nor under our noses.

So why worry about a thing that is not our concern? That is not relevant to us. That is not worth our time.

I was talking once to a friend about overpopulation. I was having a pragmatic conversation about food distribution, water scarcity, land resources. But he was having none of it. He looked right at me, his eyes afire, and he said, “Saying there are too many people in the world is like saying there are too many stars in the sky.”

Too many stars in the sky. How romantic.

See. See how one of them is felled. A 13-year-old girl—born into poverty in India, sold by her poor parents to a rich man, trafficked to the United States, fettered into forced labor and raped repeatedly, before dying alone on a dirty floor. She was born and she was bought and then she died.

And like all stars, she hung for a time in the sky. She burned.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Girls Burn Brighter.

Photo credit Carlos Avila Gonzalez

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Merging the worlds of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley

Behind the Book by John Kessel

by John Kessel

Mary Bennet and Victor Frankenstein in love—shocking at first, but as author John Kessel reveals in Pride and Prometheus, it makes sense for these two outsiders to connect. Kessel, husband to novelist Therese Ann Fowler and the director of creative writing at North Carolina State University, shares a look behind his new book and how he combined two of our favorite classics.

I got the idea for Pride and Prometheus while sitting at the critique table of the 2005 Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference, during my comments on Benjamin Rosenbaum’s wonderfully surreal deconstruction of Jane Austen in his story “Sense and Sensibility.” It hit me that Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein were published only a few years apart. Despite big differences in content and sensibility, the two books would have sat on the same bookshelves in 1818. Yet I had seldom heard them spoken of together.

This resulted in my bringing a story titled “Austenstein” (later Pride and Prometheus) to next summer’s conference. After my critique, fellow workshopper Karen Joy Fowler suggested to me that it should be a novel. I resisted. I did not think I could find a novel’s worth of story in Mary Bennet’s brief encounter with Victor Frankenstein and his Creature.

But 10 years later I returned to the idea, realizing that the novelette was only the middle of the story, and by starting earlier and carrying past the end, and adding the perspectives of Victor and his Creature, it would make a book.

Fusing the worlds of Austen and Shelley presented problems if I was not simply going to write some superficial parody. Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein are antithetical books. Austen maintains a cool distance from her characters; she treats them with irony and leavens even the most extreme situations with wry humor. There’s plenty of psychological distress, but for the most part, the most violent thing that happens in an Austen novel is an overheard conversation or someone getting caught out in the rain.

Frankenstein is full of histrionic excess, chases and murders: An artificial human is created from dead tissue, a child is strangled, a home is burned down in vengeance, a woman is hanged for a crime she did not commit, and a man chases a monster to the north pole. There are no jokes.

Frankenstein’s monster does not belong in a Regency drawing room. Mary Bennet does not belong in a 19th-century laboratory.

But the very challenge of mating these disparate tales made it a fascinating project, and the more I got into Shelley’s and Austen’s characters, the more interesting the project became. For one thing, making Mary Bennet the heroine meant I had to evolve her from the sententious, clueless girl she is in Pride and Prejudice. I set my story 13 years after the end of Austen’s novel, placing Mary on the verge of spinsterhood and allowing time for her to mature, to gain a little self-knowledge and sympathy.

It pleased me to tell what’s become of various characters from Austen in the decade after her novel ended. Of course writing sequels to Pride and Prejudice has become something of a cottage industry in recent years, but I hope I have provided as true a vision as they. So here are Kitty Bennet and Mr. Collins, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Darcy and Elizabeth, Uncle and Aunt Gardiner, and even a servant or two, a little older and perhaps even, in some cases, a little wiser.

Moreover, since my novel occurs during the course of Frankenstein rather than after it is finished, I had to work my story into the gaps in Shelley’s. Pride and Prometheus grew into a secret history of Frankenstein, elaborating on events that occur in that book, adding new ones. What would the Creature think upon observing a ball in London society? How might Frankenstein converse with the Bennets at Darcy’s dinner table? My job with Victor and his Creature was to extend what we know of them from the novel, to go deeper into their characters, to explain some things that are left out and imagine why and how they do the things they do.

In the process I got to contrast the worlds of realism and the fantastic, the novel of manners and speculative fiction, the two kinds of stories to which I have devoted my career as a teacher and writer. It turns out that these distinct visions of the world have things to say to each another.

I hope the result is as thought provoking to read as it was to write.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Pride and Prometheus.

Photo credit John Pagliuca

Historical Romance, Romance

Romance Historical Romance

A new wave of romance heroines

Behind the Book by Julia London

by Julia London

Julia London’s latest highland romance, Devil in Tartan, upends the typical power dynamic of the genre —the bold hero is taken captive by heroine Lottie Livingstone, who has commandeered his ship for her own purposes. London tells us how Lottie is part of a new wave of historical leading ladies who recognize the patriarchal injustices of their world and insist on their own agency and happiness anyway.

There is a misconception about historical romance that persists in the book world at large. They are pejoratively called “bodice rippers,” a term that is a throwback to the 1970s, when the heroines were innocent, powerless creatures and the heroes were worldly, experienced alpha males who knew best. The heroines were charming, delightful confections, and the heroes were drawn to their innocence and felt a strong urge to protect them. The heroes were afforded all the meaningful choices—when to have sex, who to marry. The heroine wanted all those things, but rarely got to lead the way of her fate.

Well, good news. The historical heroine has come a long way in the last several decades.

Throughout history, across the globe, women were little more than chattel. They had very few personal rights and lived by the rules of men. Their personal worth was the sum of their chastity and their ability to provide heirs—preferably sons.

Historical romance novels have always captured that lack of power and personal agency, but in the last few years, the heroines have begun to push back. Authors were introducing women who demanded consent long before the current feminist movement took to the streets. Historical heroines have been inspiring readers to make their desires known and their consent necessary. They’ve been in situations where they needed to be strong, to be clever and, most importantly, to create choices for themselves. Of course the historical heroine is still physically vulnerable in a patriarchal world, and she still lives in a world ruled by men, for men. But she has shed her resignations. She is no longer merely a good girl in an impossible situation—she is not going to sit back and wait for life to come at her.

Gone are the days of bodice ripping, and in their place, we have smart, savvy women in a historical setting who learn how to navigate a male-dominated society. To the extent that she can, she pursues what is best for her both personally and, in some cases, even professionally. She doesn’t need a man. She wants one. She is exploring her sexuality instead of being chased around a desk.

In my opinion, the evolution of the historical romance heroine makes the central romance all the more compelling. It becomes something that’s hard-fought and won. This doesn’t mean the historical heroes have lost their alpha or don’t pursue a woman with the same vigor as they always have. He’s still strong, still protective, still possessive, but alongside that is a current of respect and devotion that our heroines have earned. The hero doesn’t just want her—he needs her now. He needs what she fulfills in him, he needs what he was missing before she came along.

In Devil in Tartan, my hero, Aulay Mackenzie, discovers that Lottie Livingstone, the woman who brazenly steals his ship and holds him captive, fulfills him in a way he never imagined he needed. He wants to see her hang for the crime—he definitely wants to see her hang—but he also recognizes what she might have added to his life had she not committed this crime. It’s quite a conundrum for a captain, a man who has always been in charge of his own destiny. It’s just as much a challenge for Lottie, who has never been in charge of her destiny and, now that she is, wants so badly to lean on someone as strong and capable as Aulay. But her conviction is stronger—she will not give in until she has done all that she can for a clan that depends on her, and to live up to her expectations for herself.

It was a delight to pen this novel, to watch these two characters come to realize so much about themselves and what they need in a partner. I was inspired by the way Lottie grasped for the brass ring even when she didn’t want to do it and didn’t know how to do it. But what she did was always her choice. I hope you enjoy the adventure Lottie embarks on and enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed writing it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Devil in Tartan.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

The melody of a first novel

Behind the Book by Leesa Cross-Smith

by Leesa Cross-Smith

Love and music, grief and guilt swirl in Leesa Cross-Smith’s debut novel. Whiskey & Ribbons dances around the death of a police officer, unfolding through the voices of three of its characters: the officer’s wife, Evi, months after his death, when she’s snowed in with her late husband’s adopted brother; the officer, Eamon, before he’s killed, as he anticipates the birth of his son; and Dalton, the brother, who’s trying to track down his own father. In gorgeous writing, Cross-Smith renders the relationships between these three characters sacred. We asked Cross-Smith why she wrote her novel, and her answer is simple: because she is a novelist.

I’ve always wanted to be a novelist. I love the word. Novelist. It’s pretty and it’s something I wanted to be. Something I am. Something I love being. I wrote a novel that wasn’t really a novel. I wrote a short story collection. I wrote a young adult novel. I wrote another novel. I wrote my debut novel Whiskey & Ribbons. Whiskey & Ribbons began as a short story and turned into a longer story. For a moment it was a play. I’ve always wanted to be a novelist. I talked myself out of it. I was semi-content only writing short stories. I love writing flash fiction. I’ve written a story that is only 26 words long. I decided to expand on “Whiskey & Ribbons” the short story because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I decided to write Whiskey & Ribbons because I wanted to be a novelist.

I read everything. I listened. I kept writing. I read books re: time in fiction. I read books about plot. I spent a lot of time considering intimacy, a lot of time considering grief, a lot of time considering family—the ones we’re born into, the ones we (sometimes accidentally) find ourselves in. I spent a lot of time considering secrets and complicated relationships and comfort. I started and stopped writing Whiskey & Ribbons because I couldn’t figure out how to structure it. I would walk and wander around, two miles, three miles, listening to Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet. I listened to Chopin and Bach. Mozart. I am not a composer, I am a novelist.

I decided to structure Whiskey & Ribbons the way a composer would structure a fugue. A piece of music consisting of three voices, three different points of view. But they come together. They blend. And later, one voice drops out. I kill a character. I kill him in the first line of the first page. This is no surprise. But I can still barely read his obituary without crying. He is very alive to me, and I am in love with him. I am in love with all of these characters because they are real to me because I am a novelist.

I’ve written about three people who love one another deeply. I’ve written about two of those people attempting to find their way . . . together . . . after losing someone they both love so deeply. I’ve written about how they hold and honor that space, that piece of them that is now forever missing. I’ve written about a mother, simultaneously grieving her husband and celebrating the birth of the son she was pregnant with when her husband was killed in a random act of violence. I’ve written about a woman who is falling in love with her husband’s adopted brother—her brother-in-law—and the complications that brings. I’ve written about a police officer who loves his job, who loves his wife. I’ve written about a black family in Kentucky. I’ve written about a ballerina and a man who is an exquisite pianist—who was a piano prodigy—a man who owns a bike shop. I’ve written about a blizzard, trapping them inside, a kiss at the piano—sparking a weekend of confession and storytelling and sexual tension.

I’ve written a novel about grief and hope and desire and brotherhood and the slick ribbons that hold families together, even when one of them slips away. I almost talked myself out of writing it, but it wouldn’t let me go. I am so glad it wouldn’t let me go. Whiskey & Ribbons is my debut novel and I am a novelist.

Middle Grade

Middle Grade

Finding the real hero: Dismantling gender roles in the middle grade adventure

Behind the Book by Diane Magras

by Diane Magras

My childhood had a dramatic setting: a bridged island in Maine with mountains, thick woods, a thundering sea and granite boulders strewn over the coastline. It was just the place to come up with stories. It was also just the place to feel the crushing isolation of rural life. And so as a child, I read.

Books were my earliest link to a world beyond my own. I read widely—whatever was in the house, whatever sparked my interest on the library’s shelves. But what I loved most were fantasy adventures: stories of a bold character who sought to gain a treasure, win a contest or defeat evil, all while mastering new skills and exquisite weaponry and learning what it meant to be a hero.

The hero of these stories was nearly always a young man. During my formative years, I read no story in which a young woman played this role.

The heroine was quite different. Often strong-willed, she was also often in need of a boy or man to protect her or give her purpose. Some stories starring girls lacked a “hero,” but they usually didn’t include a lot of action and ended with the protagonist’s marriage or the promise of marriage.

Those were my fictional worlds.

In the difficult years of middle school, I found an additional world that helped me both persist and thrive: writing. I wrote my first novel at age 14. It was a wild tale of adventure with swordplay and rescues, danger and escapes. I remember a scene in which my young protagonist (a girl) held a sword for the first time.

But the weapon wasn’t hers: It belonged to the young male hero.

Even then, in a world I controlled, the stories I had read dictated the roles I could imagine. Of course, the girl was there to be rescued, to be aided in her escapes. Of course, the young man had the sword and was both brave and strong. Those were their roles.

And those are the roles that still exist today in hard-core adventure novels for the middle grade crowd. There are some exceptions, but not many. And when we have them, it’s often a transposition of genders—a girl takes the traditional boy’s role. But what about girls who are strong on their own?

I needed to write a novel to confront the gender roles in the novels I had grown up with and to offer new concepts of what a girl could be to readers today. And so in my fantasy adventure, The Mad Wolf’s Daughter, my protagonist Drest is more than a girl with a sword masquerading as a boy. She embodies the person I wanted to be when I was 12: strong, brave, determined and focused on doing the right thing. She lives in medieval Scotland when tales of men’s strength and bravery dominated all discourse. This was a world where no one expects her to play the boy’s role.

I gave Drest the support of her father (the villain of the story, by the way, another of my tweaks to the genre) and five vicious but loving brothers, who never see her for her gender but for who she is beyond it, and include her in their infamous war-band. She also learns from them how to care about other people. In her own way, she’s nurturing. She loves deeply and fiercely.

But Drest also begins with a kind of masculine arrogance, commonly seen in the adventure genre, where brash heroes need to learn humility. Like her brothers, she adopts a seemingly noble but ultimately unsettling part of her family’s war-band code: to honor and protect all women and girls. The code exists because women are weak and vulnerable, her father says, while he’s told Drest that she “was as tough as any of her brothers.”

And yet when she first meets girls and women, she realizes that they’re powerful in ways she’s never known. They are each as tough and strong as her brothers and make significant differences in their worlds—including one she only hears about: a girl long dead whose story motivates much of the action. Drest slowly learns that the gender roles she once understood don’t exist and that there is no one kind of woman. And in that process, she also learns about her own potential to be a true hero.

I hope that Drest, the women and girls, and the sensitive and physically weak boys in The Mad Wolf’s Daughter will help to dismantle the traditional gender roles of heroes and heroines in the fast-paced adventure genre. I hope my young readers take to heart these examples and understand that there are different ways of being a girl—and different kinds of strength and power.

I hope that The Mad Wolf’s Daughter will help to dismantle the traditional gender roles of heroes and heroines in the fast-paced adventure genre. I hope my young readers take to heart these examples and understand that there are different ways of being a girl—and different kinds of strength and power.

Fiction

Fiction

Looking death in the eye

Behind the Book by Susan Henderson

by Susan Henderson

In her second novel, Susan Henderson writes about the realities and dignities of death through the story of a small town, its residents and one shy misfit, the daughter of a mortician. Henderson is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize.

In my new novel, The Flicker of Old Dreams, I wanted to explore the death of a small town in rural America. And I got it into my head that the best narrator for this story would be a mortician because she could look death in the eye without flinching.

Of course, I knew nothing about the funeral industry. I’d written plenty about death over the years, but always in the context of grief, of trying to absorb and move through the pain. Dealing with the physical body seemed almost contrary to grief. It was a practical matter of lifting and getting hands dirtied and dealing with the grim task—What do we do with this body that has been so precious to us?

And so I began my research. I studied everything I could about embalming, bathing the dead and the decay of the body. My bedside table became stacked with books about death and dying and funeral homes. I talked to morticians. I even turned on YouTube videos of surgeries and autopsies and listened with my eyes closed so I could concentrate on the sounds of the tools and the cutting.

I had to sit a long while with the shock of all I learned. The process of embalming struck me as weird and invasive—steps to make sure the body didn’t leak or foam at the mouth during visiting hours, tools to puncture and then vacuum out the contents of the organs, tiny plastic caps to place over the eyeballs before sewing them shut, so many tricks with Super Glue. The more I learned about embalming, the more I thought, How strange that we do this to people we love!

But Mary Crampton, the narrator who absorbed my research, was quite tender with those who came through her basement workroom. An outcast in this small town, she found it easier to connect with the dead than the living. She understood the vulnerability of the naked body—the girth, the long-raised scar, the damaged liver, the bedsores. She was not blind to the flaws of her neighbors—in fact, some had shunned her. And still she cared for them. There’s a scene between Mary and a high school peer, a former cheerleader, who arrives in her workroom beneath the white sheet. And finally they have this girl time together, with Mary styling her hair and painting her nails crimson, their school’s colors—ways she couldn’t interact with a person when they were alive.

It was Mary’s tenderness with the dead and her deep respect for her profession that helped me know how to tell the complex story of this dying town. I opened my eyes to all that was before me—to a community that was strong, proud, insular, inflexible, beautiful, punishing and grieving. I began to see the rage of the unemployed as a last struggle against an inevitable death. This was a town that had little room for difference or for people like Mary. And yet she wanted the town to die with dignity.

Photo credit Taylor Hooper Photography

Fiction

Fiction

In the place I live: Welcome to rural Kentucky and ‘Weedeater’

Behind the Book by Robert Gipe

by Robert Gipe

Appalachian writer Robert Gipe’s first illustrated novel, Trampoline, was an award-winning coming-of-age tale set in rural Kentucky, where a teenage girl named Dawn Jewell recounts the story of her grandmother’s fight against a mountaintop removal coal mine company. Six years after the events of Trampoline, Weedeater finds 22-year-old Dawn living with her husband and 4-year-old daughter in Tennessee. But the world of Canard County, Kentucky, calls her back. Dawn’s narration forms a duet with that of Gene, a lawn-care worker in love with Dawn’s Aunt June, who is determined to rescue Dawn’s mother from herself.

With Trampoline and Weedeater, Gipe delivers some of the most vivid Appalachian characters we’ve ever read. There are no clichés or stereotypes here. Illustrations of Dawn and Gene deliver clever one-liners and elevate the narration to a face-to-face relationship with the reader.

We asked Gipe to show us around Canard County, so to speak.

I live in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. The hillside out my kitchen window is steep—69 steps up to the front door of my house from the road below, and 75 out the back door up to the road above. The mountains are everywhere where I live.

The world in my novel Weedeater is as steep as the hillside out the window. I tried to make that world as vivid as the world I live in. In the place I live, cars get wrecked. Relationships go sour. Jobs disappear. People get grouchy. People keep going. They shoot off fireworks. They go to the lake to fish in boats big and little. They go to stock car races in motor homes. They go to church in pickup trucks. They ride around on four-wheelers to be alone with their beloved or to hunt for ginseng, or just to feel their hair blow in the wind.

In the place I live, sometimes food runs low. Electricity gets cut off. People die from falling off roofs, from coal mines collapsing on them, from eating bad, from trying to save people, from taking too many drugs. They drown. They get struck by lightning. They die in their own time in their own beds surrounded by friends and family and their little dogs. Snakes bite them. Spiders bite them. Dogs bite them. They comfort one another. They pray for one another. They scheme against one another. They tattle. They keep secrets. They buy new clothes. They wear old clothes. They fix their own water heaters and roof their own houses. They change their own oil and fix their own washing machines. They make doll clothes and knitted things that fit over your toaster, and burn Bible verses into pieces of wood, and they sell these things off car hoods and in flea markets and on the Internet. They also write books and keep up with what’s going on in the world and make art, and sometimes they fix soup beans and cornbread to eat, and sometimes they fix chicken curry.

Sometimes people here organize strikes against their bad bosses, and sometimes they just go on to work. Sometimes they rise up in protest against things that aren’t fair and aren’t right, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they cry because they had to move away, and sometimes they cry because they had to stay. Most times people here know who their local politicians are. Most times they’re aggravated with them. Sometimes they say, “Well, they’re doing the best they can.” And as for national politicians, let’s just say most people I know think the electoral college and gerrymandering are highly problematic and but two examples of how the game may or may not be rigged against us and are not surprised when their neighbors have trouble taking participatory politics seriously.

This area where I live has never consistently had a good rate of employment. Things might go OK for a while, but then there are layoffs and companies going out of business, and so things have been rough here forever. The bad things that can happen to people pile up. And repeat. And wear a person down. Wear a whole place down.

I wrote Weedeater knowing people who live where I do also read books. So I try to write something for them that deals with what is hard, but also catches how much fun we have, and how much spirit for surviving we have, and I try to write books that mess around with ideas about how things could maybe get better. But then I also write books to try and catch what it’s like when a whole bunch of things go wrong at once for readers for whom not so many things have gone wrong. I grew up with only a few things going wrong and most things going right for most people I know. It’s easier when fewer things go wrong in your life to think you’re smarter or better than the people who are always in the soup. But you’re not. You’re just luckier. And so I try to write stories that help people identify with and love people with too-complicated lives. I don’t want anybody feeling sorry for them. I want people to see what it’s like, and realize maybe hard-luck people are actually pretty smart and creative and have a lot of grit and are a lot of fun to root for, whether you are one of them or not.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

How to write a memoir in a forest office

Behind the Book by Liz Clark

by Liz Clark

Surfer and environmentalist Liz Clark has been sailing—mostly solo—from Santa Barbara to the South Pacific on her 40-foot sailboat, Swell, since 2006. In her wild, challenging and nomadic life filled with sea and surf, she has traveled 20,000 miles, living in harmony with nature and becoming an outspoken environmental activist. She is perhaps best known for her cat, Amelia the Tropicat, who was her first mate for five years. (Tropicat died in January of this year; in her memory, Clark has raised over $12,000 to bring a team of veterinarians to French Polynesia to do an island-wide spay and neuter program.)

Clark shares all the adventures and surprises of her voyage in her new memoir, Swell: A Sailing Surfer’s Voyage of Awakening. Authors often speak of the discipline required to write a book—but Clark takes it to a whole new level, proving that writing can be done anytime, anywhere.

I always hoped to write a book, but I never imagined that I would write that book while on my sailboat anchored at a small island in the South Pacific.

After nearly a decade of nomadic sea life—sailing from place to place in search of waves to surf, new inspiration, new friends and the next paycheck, I was presented with the opportunity to write my story. The timing felt right; it was time to drop anchor for a while.

My life suddenly shifted from an ever-changing canvas full of adventures, freedom, movement and fluidity to one gargantuan task of fitting the prior decade into a meaningful piece of literature. I was stuck searching for words instead of waves, and seeking a mental horizon clear enough to figure out where to begin. Procrastination set in. First I had to catch up on all the other things I had to do when I finally stopped moving—like software updates on my electronic devices, backing up photos, writing blog entries and replying to starred emails, along with scrubbing the hull, hauling water, cooking and surfing. I decided that the two-foot-by-three-foot nav station, which also functioned as my dinner table, counter space and computer desk, wasn’t going to cut it for book writing. So my next task was to create a groovy new place where I could really dig into this project.

I removed the wooden door to the head (ship-speak for bathroom) and cut it to fit perpendicularly across the bunk in the forward cabin. I found a three-legged chair at the dump and lashed on a fourth leg. The orange-backed, metal-legged, fourth-grade classroom chair fit into the tiny space, but with only about an inch clearance in any direction. I’d make it work. I stacked my journals and logbook and a few of my favorite reads next to a heart-shaped rock paperweight and a penholder, ran an extension cord and voila—I had a writing space.

But approach-avoidance continued, and a week went by before I actually tried to sit in the chair. In the meantime, I noticed that if I forgot to shut the hatch above when it rained, the desk got drenched. When I actually squeezed my sixth grader-sized body behind the desk into the fourth grader-sized chair, my legs jammed into the bulkhead of the bunk and my elbow hit my underwear drawer. The desk was wretchedly uncomfortable. As I tried various ways to make it work, the hatch above started leaking again when it rained. When it was nice out, the tropical mid-day sun came blazing down on my head. I soon retreated to the nav station.

On a good day, I spent three hours at the computer, answering emails and posting on Instagram before writing. Around 3 p.m. the local kids came by to jump off Swell, and then by 4:30 my cat master started stirring. If Tropicat wasn’t brought ashore daily, I was ambushed and shredded by dinnertime. So afternoons were for cat adventures. We hiked and went to parties, visited friends and did yoga on the beach. On one of our hikes we found an overgrown plateau in the forest with low sturdy branches, so I started bringing my hammock and computer to work in the shade of the forest. Depending on the life cycle of the mosquitoes and the chance of rain, it extended my workday, and Tropicat was pleased.

One morning, I accepted an invitation for a morning surf session on the other side of the island, which turned into Tropicat going AWOL on the small islet. It had been raining constantly and we hadn’t been able to get out much. So I spent the next 42 days not writing, but trying to find my beloved first mate.

Tropicat finally reappeared, and a new friend I’d made while searching for her offered to help build a table in the forest where I could write and Tropicat could run around and climb trees. We lashed together a wide, tall desk made from purou branches and stripped bark. He made a bench seat high enough for my legs to dangle so the ants wouldn’t crawl up my feet. It was shaded by an old mango tree and broad-leafed purou bush. This was a serious upgrade, and I finally got some momentum going on the book in my forest office.

Both Tropicat and I loved spending time in the forest, but some days were steamy hot, made worse because I wore full-length clothing to protect myself from the mosquitoes. When it rained, we ended up under the desk. One day, after a highly productive streak, it started pouring, and even with my yoga mat wrapped around my semi-waterproof bag, the computer’s hard drive got wet. I wasn’t doing regular backups and lost everything I’d written in the past month. Lucky for me, my boss at Patagonia chalked it up to “product testing” and paid to recover the lost work.

Seasons came and went; occasionally the table needed to be lashed together again. Although I was mostly just hurling events and feelings onto the screen, I made progress. The sweet guy who had helped find Tropicat had become my sweet companion, and by the time the original desk finally collapsed into a wad of rotting sticks, I’d made it through a first draft of what would soon be Swell.

Clark in her forest office, with Tropicat.

Surfer and environmentalist Liz Clark has been sailing—mostly solo—from Santa Barbara to the South Pacific on her 40-foot sailboat, Swell, since 2006. In her wild, challenging and nomadic life filled with sea and surf, she has traveled 20,000 miles, living in harmony with nature and becoming an outspoken environmental activist. Clark shares all the adventures and surprises of her voyage in her new memoir, Swell: A Sailing Surfer’s Voyage of Awakening. Authors often speak of the discipline required to write a book—but Clark takes it to a whole new level, proving that writing can be done anytime, anywhere.

All Behind the Book essays

The trailblazing black doctor behind ‘Tempest’

‘Downton’ writer takes on an infamous Golden-Age family

How to create a world

Heart blindness

Cowgirls, family and autism: A novel of Calamity Jane

Every day, all over the world: What is a girl worth?

Merging the worlds of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley

A new wave of romance heroines

The melody of a first novel

Finding the real hero: Dismantling gender roles in the middle grade adventure

Looking death in the eye

In the place I live: Welcome to rural Kentucky and ‘Weedeater’

How to write a memoir in a forest office

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