Behind the Book Archives

by Jess Montgomery

Jess Montgomery takes readers into Appalachian history with her new novel, The Widows. But the characters behind this tale are more than fascinating—to Montgomery, they are healing.

A few months after our youngest child went off to college, I was at loose ends, partly from empty-nest syndrome but also because for months I’d been unmoored from any clear direction as a writer—a situation exacerbated if not triggered by a difficult situation in my family of origin on my mother’s side. With my mother’s passing, the situation was over but not resolved, at least not in my heart and not with a sense of peace.

So I was happy to distract myself by researching places to visit near Ohio University, situated in Athens County in the foothills of Appalachia, for our daughter’s birthday. We sent our children to college without automobiles, and she was, I knew, also at loose ends—in her case, for a chance to get out of town and hike. She was, after all, an Outdoor Recreation and Education major.

I started poking around on the internet with mundane search terms such as “places to visit near Athens, Ohio,” or “hiking in southeastern Ohio.” A tourism page popped up for Vinton County, which abuts Athens County to the southwest. And on that page was a celebration of a woman the county proclaimed as their most famous resident: Maude Collins, the state’s first female sheriff, in 1925. (The next female sheriff in the state, according to the website, was elected in 1976.)

I was captivated by the image of Maude: young, feminine, somber, strong, beautiful. Modestly and properly dressed in a jacket and ruffled blouse and sensible brimmed hat—clothes that don’t fit the clichéd sequined and feathered flapper image of 1920s women.

But there was something more about her expression—sorrow. A call to duty to go on, as if there’s no other choice. Maude’s sheriff husband, Fletcher, with whom she had five children and for whom she worked as jail matron, was killed in the line of duty while arresting a man for speeding. The story goes that after the funeral, Maude was packing up to head home to her parents in West Virginia when the county commissioners came to her door, asked, “Where you goin’, Maude?” and appointed her to fulfill her husband’s post.

In 1926, she was fully elected in her own right—in a landslide victory. She even gained a bit of national fame after solving a murder that was written up in Master Detective magazine.

But I was struck by more than fascination with a young woman in a law enforcement role that even today is unusual. I wondered what Maude might say to me about my own familial losses and sorrow.

I have no way to know, of course.

But inspired by Maude, my imagination offered up Lily Ross, a wholly crafted character in her own right and the protagonist of The Widows, in which her sheriff husband Daniel is murdered—in this case, by an unknown culprit.

I thought maybe, just maybe, writing about a woman working as a sheriff in a time when it was almost unheard of for women to operate outside the bounds of hearth and home, a woman dealing with complex grief and loss, would remoor me to a writing direction. A direction that might lead not only to a good story but also personal peace.

As the story emerged in my imagination, so did another character—Marvena Whitcomb, a longtime friend of Daniel’s, who has lost her common-law husband in a mining accident and who now works as a unionizer. Marvena becomes a surprising ally for Lily, and together the women work to uncover the identity and motivations of Daniel’s murderer.

Shaping both women are forces beyond their control—women’s rights, unionization, prohibition, coal mining. As well, both are formed, in part, by the hills and hollers, customs and attitudes of Appalachia.

I, too, am a child of Appalachia—both sides of my family of origin go as far back as anyone can trace in Eastern Kentucky. Though I grew up in a part of Ohio close to but geographically outside of Appalachia, the dynamics of growing up in an Appalachian family shaped me far more than actual location of birth.

And as I drew deeply from family lore, music, attitudes, recipes, music and language as threads that wove the backdrop of Lily and Marvena’s story, I found myself slowly starting to, if not fully heal, at least reach emotional resolution. More importantly, as Lily and Marvena uncover the truth of Daniel’s death, they find solace in relationships, friendships and community. Ultimately, I did, too.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of The Widows.

Jess Montgomery takes readers into Appalachian history with her new novel, The Widows. But the characters behind this tale are more than fascinating—to Montgomery, they are healing.

Retelling the myth of Medusa for YA readers

Behind the Book by Peternelle van Arsdale

by Peternelle van Arsdale

Young adult author Peternelle van Arsdale (The Beast Is an Animal) has spun an incredibly atmospheric and deeply feminist retelling of the myth of Medusa with her second novel, The Cold Is in Her Bones. In an isolated rural village, 16-year-old Milla dutifully works on her parents’ farm, prays and performs the old rituals to keep her home free of demons. But when a girl from a neighboring town moves to the farmhouse nearby, Milla learns some unsettling and harsh truths about the society they live in and must question her own identity. Packed with emotion, empathy and poetic prose, this story is a modern fairy tale that reads like an old classic.

I’ve always had a soft spot for monsters. I’m not sure why that is, but it may have something to do with my church upbringing. I was never convinced that biting the apple, as the snake convinced Eve to do, was a bad thing. And I was intrigued by Satan’s backstory, that he was a jealous and resentful angel—rebellious and questioning of God’s supreme authority. To me Satan seemed . . . curious-minded. Intriguingly skeptical. In the books and movies that most moved me as a child, I saw the monsters as the unfortunate outcasts, rejected by those lucky enough to be born acceptable. As a self-loathing, disaffected child and adolescent, I felt pretty monstrous myself. I empathized with the creatures who caused others to recoil, who behaved in unpleasant ways because in truth they were so hurt, so damaged.

Enter Medusa. It’s fascinating to me that she’s as reviled as she is, because of all the mythical monsters, she has arguably the most tragic backstory. I have a few theories as to why so few of us know how she became a monster, even though it’s right there in Ovid’s account. I think it’s because the facts of her story make us deeply uncomfortable. They make us question the goodness of our heroes and heroines. They make us question ourselves. So we look away and stick to what’s comfortable, clear and black and white.

Before her tragedy, Medusa was one of three sisters known as the Gorgons; she was the only mortal of the three and also very beautiful. They were grandchildren of Gaia, the maternal earth goddess. Gaia came long before Zeus, the uber-masculine deity whom we most often think of when we think of myth.

One day, when lovely young Medusa was worshipping in Athena’s temple, Poseidon, the sea god who was also Zeus’s brother, encountered her and he did what gods so often did when they saw a mortal they wanted: He raped her. In myth and story, such encounters were often described with euphemisms such as “ravished.” But even in Ovid’s original, this was clearly rape, entirely nonconsensual. When Athena learned what had happened, she was furious—she considered this an insult to her since it took place in her temple. Because she couldn’t punish the powerful male god Poseidon, she instead cursed Medusa to monstrosity. Irony of all ironies, the young woman whose only crime was to be desirable was doomed to turn men to stone with her eyes, her beautiful hair replaced by venomous snakes.

This would have been a horrible enough fate, but even worse things awaited Medusa. She slithered away to a lonely island and should have been left alone. But she wasn’t left alone. The demigod Perseus promised King Polydectes that he would bring him Medusa’s head. In turn, Athena pledged Perseus her assistance in his quest.

Wow. That is some grudge. And that’s the part of the story that I keep coming back to. Why wasn’t Athena’s curse enough to satisfy her? What was it about Medusa that made Athena so angry, so offended? Athena is the goddess of wisdom, after all. Shouldn’t she have more sympathy for a young victim of rape? But here we come to Athena’s own backstory: although a goddess, she is the most male-identified of all goddesses. She was literally born of man—from the forehead of her father, Zeus, after he swallowed her pregnant mother. And while there are many things to love about the mythical Athena (or Minerva, as she was known by Ovid and the Romans), in this story she is doing the work of the patriarchy for them. She is handling things for the men, making the messy woman with a grievance go away, and then obliterating that woman altogether. Fascinatingly, once Perseus had beheaded Medusa by using the mirrored shield that Athena had given him, Athena affixed Medusa’s head to her own shield. I’ve wondered if Athena did this as a way of further asserting her power over Medusa, further underlining that Athena would never be so in-the-wrong-place, so unwise and weak, as to be raped by a god.

As I was writing The Cold Is in Her Bones, I was both plagued and inspired by the degree to which we women are products of the patriarchal culture in which we’ve been raised. The effects of this are both subtle and gross, and I tried to portray that spectrum in my characters. So, yes, there are women who play the Athena role and others who play the Medusa, and there are those who play all parts in between—who do things out of what they believe to be love and concern. Who do things they think to be right, but turn out to be very wrong. And don’t we all do that? It’s hard to look at these things—we want to turn away from them and think of heroes and heroines as pure and unsullied by complexity as Perseus and Athena have always been viewed. But life, and in fact myth, aren’t like that. We’re all sullied. We just need to open our eyes and get honest about that. It’s okay. It’s safe. We won’t turn to stone.

Author photo by Elena Seibert.

Young adult author Peternelle van Arsdale (The Beast Is an Animal) has spun an incredibly atmospheric and deeply feminist retelling of the myth of Medusa with her second novel, The Cold Is in Her Bones. In an isolated rural village, 16-year-old Milla dutifully works on her parents’ farm, prays and performs the old rituals to keep her home free of demons. But when a girl from a neighboring town moves to the farmhouse nearby, Milla learns some unsettling and harsh truths about the society they live in and must question her own identity. Packed with emotion, empathy and poetic prose, this story is a modern fairy tale that reads like an old classic.

Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Historical Fiction

Hard work, a bad flu & one stellar debut

Behind the Book by Lauren Wilkinson

by Lauren Wilkinson

Debut novelist Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy is the best kind of spy thriller, centering on a richly drawn lead character and drawing from a complicated history. Wilkinson shares a look behind the creation of her spy, Marie Mitchell, and the true story of Marie’s real-life mark.

American Spy got its start as an assignment in graduate school—a boring origin story, I realize. My professor instructed the class to write a story that subverted common clichés about life in the American suburbs. Given that prompt, an image immediately popped into my mind: It was of a woman who seems to be a “normal” suburban mother, until an attempt on her life reveals that there is more to her story. I didn’t set out to make this woman a spy, or to write a spy novel. It’s more accurate to say that I stumbled toward that backstory because it was an interesting answer to the question of who it might be that wanted her dead.

But once I understood that I was writing a spy novel, I realized that I’d have to read as many as I could. My favorites were The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré and The Quiet American by Graham Greene because of their cynical representations of intelligence work. I felt that Marie Mitchell, my main character, who is a black woman as well as an American spy, would have a lot of good reasons to articulate similar cynicism about serving a country that isn’t particularly invested in serving her as a citizen.

My novel also revolves around a fictionalized account of a real historical figure: Thomas Sankara, who was a Marxist revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso during the 1980s. My precise reason for including him is obscure even to me—the only thing I can say for certain is that I found it surprising that so charismatic a figure, and one with such a compelling life story, is not better known outside the country of his birth. I hoped to change that.

When I went to Burkina in 2013, it was because I felt it was a moral imperative to visit the country if I was going to be writing about its most celebrated former leader. Mostly, I enjoyed my time there, scooting around the capital city on a rented moped and talking to as many people as I could in my embarrassing French. The one fly in the ointment was that I got terribly sick with a stomach flu—this, like several other experiences, eventually made its way into my novel. I did a lot of that while writing: trying to ground the elaborate inventions that overrun my book with mundane, true experiences. I did it in hope of creating the illusion of realism.

I sold a version of my novel at the end of 2014 and spent the next several years rewriting it. During that time I produced a half-dozen versions of the same story. This felt like a wildly inefficient approach—it still does—but now I think that inefficiency is an inescapable part of creating a narrative. In my experience, you have to find the story you want to tell and the only way you can do so is by writing toward it. Put another way, it felt like I’d been following a stranger around with a video camera for most of her life, and then had to go over the film to look for the moments that would let me tell the story that I wanted to about her. So I know Marie very well because I know the things that have happened to her for which there was no space in the book. Because of that she seems real to me, real enough to illicit feeling: sympathy for her, anger at her. I even find her funny. This is all very bizarre for me, because I also know better than anyone that Marie isn’t real.

After I sold my book, I wrote almost every day (or at least sat at my desk, staring at my computer) for 12 hours a day. It was a big story, and approaching my telling of it with intense discipline was the only reliable method that I knew. Now I feel like I wrote too hard for too long. These days, I tell myself that I won’t write a book that way again because if I couldn’t assure myself of that I would likely never write another novel.

The act of working on American Spy—not the finished product—defined my life for four years. And now the book is done and on the verge of being out in the world. It’s been tricky for me to recalibrate, to find a new way to define myself. But I will though, eventually. I have no other choice.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of American Spy.

Author photo by Niqui Carter

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Popular Fiction

Fiction Popular Fiction Debut Fiction

From diary to debut

Behind the Book by Yara Zgheib

by Yara Zgheib

Through the power of story, great pain can become a message of hope. First-time novelist Yara Zgheib shares the heartbreaking true story behind The Girls at 17 Swann Street.

I do not know how to eat. There was a time not long ago when I forced myself to forget. I forced myself to forget the tastes I used to love: ice cream, French fries, pizza, even bread. I pushed them off-limits, one by one. I starved and ran, starved and ran my fears and anxieties away till I, like Anna, the protagonist in The Girls at 17 Swann Street, found myself in a treatment center for eating disorders.

There I was faced with girls who were battling diseased brains that were killing them. Some became my friends. Some of those killed themselves. I admit, at times I was tempted.

I eventually left treatment and have been in recovery for a few years. But there are still girls, sometimes boys, being admitted to that center every day.

My story is no different from theirs. Perhaps the only distinction is that I chose to write mine down. It started as a memoir. Actually, before that, as a diary of my days in treatment. I was in great pain and angry at the world for not caring or understanding. Then I read these words by Borges:

“A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

I had the clay, and I just shaped it. I wrote a memoir to tell my father that not eating did not mean that I was vain, or that I did not love him enough. I wrote to tell my husband the same thing, and sorry, and that without him, I would be dead. I wrote to my mother and sister. I wrote to my brother, my friends, to all the people who stared. I wrote to give the world a glimpse of what goes on in my head when I eat one bite, just one bite of pizza, then I rewrote the whole manuscript as fiction because it was not just my story.

Eating disorders affect millions of girls and boys around the world. Anorexia in particular is terrifying because it is quiet and sneaky and patient. It poses as your brain and tells you lies about your worth and your reflection in the mirror. Those around you cannot hear it and therefore cannot understand why on earth you will not share a few bites of their birthday cake with them.

It is about being cold and hungry all the time, even in your sleep. It is about losing your hair and energy and friends and period and personality. It is about people’s incomprehension and judgment, about scaring little children at the pool because your ribs and kneecaps are sticking out and your eyeballs are deep in your sockets.

“I am not cured. I am not ready; I am terrified of what is coming. But I lift my chin higher. Keep walking, Anna.

“[…] The car turns at the end of the street, and the house disappears. I am going home. We are going home.”

Anna had to be fictional because she is not just me. She is every person who has ever felt unworthy, insecure, scared or guilty about the way he or she acts or looks or eats. She also had to be fictional to protect the real girls of 17 Swann Street, the real Matthias and the other characters in the story. Last, she had to be fictional so she and her story could be universal. So that she and the reader could be hopeful. It can end well. It does. People do leave 17 Swann Street.

Sincerely,

Yara

Yara Zgheib is a Fulbright scholar with a Ph.D. from Centre d’Études Diplomatiques et Stratégiques in Paris. She is fluent in English, Arabic, French and Spanish. Her first novel, The Girls at 17 Swann Street, draws from her own experiences with anorexia to tell the story of a former ballerina named Anna Roux who must enter treatment. Zgheib beautifully portrays moments of both despair and hope in this raw, honest debut.

Contemporary Romance, Romance

Romance Contemporary Romance

The joys of going meta

Behind the Book by Jenn McKinlay

by Jenn McKinlay

Every romance reader’s fantasy comes to life in Jenn McKinlay’s The Good Ones, and no, we’re not talking about the very handsome cowboy on the cover. Heroine Maisy Kelly has inherited a gorgeous old Victorian home, which she intends to convert into a romance-only bookstore. Aforementioned handsome cowboy is Ryder Copeland, the architect Maisy hires to help her achieve her dream. The adorable, smart and refreshingly lighthearted romance that follows is as much a love story to the characters as it is an ode to the genre itself. Here, McKinlay shares how she crafted her clever new romance.

Have you ever held up a mirror to a mirror and seen the infinite scroll of images of yourself holding a mirror reflected within? Yeah, I love that. It totally bends my brain in a different direction, sort of like when I try to grasp quantum physics. I get it for like a nanosecond and then it’s gone, but that nanosecond is super cool. Writing The Good Ones was a bit like holding up that mirror.

The opening scene of the book finds our heroine, Maisy Kelly, reading one of her favorite romances. A knock on the door interrupts her binge read, and she is understandably disgruntled to leave Jake Sinclair, her fictional boyfriend, to go answer the door. After all, the book cover shows Jake in jeans, a white t-shirt and a cowboy hat, sitting on a picnic table in the middle of a field. What woman would want to leave that to answer her door? But Maisy does answer and standing there is a man in jeans, a white T-shirt and, you guessed it, a cowboy hat. It’s Ryder Copeland, the restoration architect she’s hired to refurbish the house she’s inherited into a romance bookstore. Maisy is undone by the coincidence. Now take a peek at the cover of The Good Ones. Yep, just like holding a mirror up to a mirror, it goes on and on and on.

Needless to say, I had great fun with all of the meta aspects of writing The Good Ones. And unexpectedly, the process of writing the book gave me the opportunity to think about the genre I love from a completely different perspective. As I began thinking about all of the authors and the books that had shaped my love of romance over the years, I found the book becoming even bigger than I had anticipated. The Good Ones became, as a reviewer from Booklist stated, “A beautifully written love letter to the romance genre from someone who understands just how important these books are to their readers.” Until I wrote about Maisy and Ryder, I don’t think I appreciated how much romance novels had shaped my life.

It also gave me the opportunity to give a nod to a lot of my favorite authors, starting with Jane Austen. The recovering librarian in me truly enjoyed that. Because my personal life does pop up in my books in one way or another, I had to include a subplot about the days-old kitten, King George, that my family rescued while I was writing the first draft of the book. And, naturally, having written the Bluff Point romance series previously, that had to be slipped in as an Easter egg, too, by having Ryder mention the hero of one of those books as his friend but also having Maisy recommend the books to a customer in her romance bookshop. Truly, there were so many elements to play with while writing The Good Ones—it was an embarrassment of riches.

Of course, when you read fiction, you’re required to suspend your disbelief. It’s on the writer to make you do so. I knew while I was writing The Good Ones that many of the meta elements I had included, such as the guy on the cover of the book Maisy is reading looking just like the cover of the actual book, would either pull my readers out or tuck them more deeply into the story. It is my hope that these references were another level of entertainment, like being taught a secret handshake, and that they acted like markers on a trail to help the reader find their way back out once the story was done. The Good Ones was a hoot to write and I’m happy to say that the fun continues at the Happily Ever After bookstore in The Christmas Keeper, coming October 2019!

Picture Book

Picture Book

Go in good health: The writing on an Ellis Island story

Behind the Book by Lesléa Newman

by Lesléa Newman

I am not a superstitious person by nature. I walk under ladders easily. I adore black cats. But I do have one ritual I adhere to religiously to ward off bad luck. Before I leave on a trip, I always call my godmother, Aunt Phyllis. I need to hear her say, “Geyn gezunt aun kumen gezunt,” which is Yiddish for “Go healthy and come back healthy,” before I can leave my home.

Did Aunt Phyllis first hear this phrase from her mother? She’s not sure. One thing I am sure of is that Aunt Phyllis’ mother, Sadie, did not hear these words from her own mother, Taube. This is because, in 1911, when Sadie was 13, Taube put her on a ship to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to America so Sadie could have a better life. She would “geyn gezunt”—go in good health—but she would not “kumen gezunt”—come back in good health. She would not come back at all. That was the point. Eastern Europe was not a safe place for Jews at the start of the 20th century. Sadie was being sent away so that she might have a better life.

I don’t remember when Aunt Phyllis first told me the story of Sadie’s voyage to America—how she was given a piece of paper with the name and address of a relative and told not to lose it, and how she held the paper so tightly that by the time she arrived in America, all the ink had worn off on her hand. I also don’t remember when I first heard the story of Ruth, my maternal grandmother, who came to America in 1900 with her mother Fannie, bringing little but a pair of precious Shabbos candlesticks—which my grandmother gave me shortly before she died at age 99.

That’s something I love about being a writer; there are countless stories lodged inside my brain and heart waiting for the right moment to emerge and tap me on the shoulder. These two stories arrived in 2015 as I gazed at newspaper photos of Syrian refugees washing up on European shores. I stared at the faces of those in search of a better life, and something felt familiar to me. My family also had a history of fleeing persecution. It was time for those stories to be told.

All I had to go on were the bare bones of two family stories. I decided to combine Sadie and Ruth into one character, “Gittel.” I couldn’t bear to put her on a ship all alone (imagine how Sadie’s mother must have felt) so I gave her a traveling companion: a doll named Basha. I researched living conditions on the ships sailing for America in the early 1900s, and I read about the way new immigrants were “processed” upon arrival at Ellis Island. Just as importantly, I did what I call “emotional research,” asking myself questions such as, what would it feel like to be a young girl leaving behind everything I knew and loved? What would it feel like to arrive in a new country all alone unable to speak the language? What would I carry from my old life into my new life? What makes a home?

My hope is that Gittel’s Journey: An Ellis Island Story, a book based upon my own family history, will inspire others to tell their immigrant stories. And I hope my book will remind readers of all ages the importance of greeting new members of our society with open arms. It is our responsibility to provide them with what they are seeking: a safe place to call home. Which is something that everyone deserves.

"My hope is that Gittel’s Journey: An Ellis Island Story, a book based upon my own family history, will inspire others to tell their immigrant stories."

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Inspiration in the shelves

Behind the Book by Fran Dorricott

by Fran Dorricott

At the beginning of Fran Dorricott’s debut mystery, a little girl goes missing during a solar eclipse. Sixteen years later, her older sister, Cassie, has returned home, another eclipse is on the way, and another local girl has gone missing. After the Eclipse follows Cassie as she tries to uncover the truth and come to terms with her grief and guilt over the fate of her sister. One wouldn’t automatically assume that inspiration for a devastating crime novel could be found in that safest of places: a bookstore. But Dorricott’s experience as a bookseller provided the key to finishing her first draft, inspiration for her favorite clue and more.

I’ve been a writer for longer than I’ve been a bookseller—but I’ve wanted to be both for as long as I can remember. My local bookshop, which is the one where I now work, was my first memory of seeing a bookshop that looked exactly how I thought a bookshop should look: It’s got three floors, a spiral staircase and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. It’s stunning. And the benefits of working in such a beautiful place aren’t just the aesthetics.

I’d actually been working at Waterstones for less than a month when I wrote the bulk of After the Eclipse. I’d had the idea earlier that year, drafted a little and gotten myself stuck. Then, I had a chance conversation with a customer. She mentioned that she loved reading books that had strong echoes of the past, like those by Elly Griffiths and Kate Ellis—and I agreed. It was then that I realized: I’d been going about my drafting the wrong way, and I knew exactly how to fix it. I finished the rest of my first draft in less than a month.

The amazing benefits of working in a bookshop boil down to three main points: the books, the staff and the customers. Of course, the books must always come first. Honestly, just being around so many books every day makes me a better writer. Reading good books makes me hungry for more—and it drives me to work harder, take bigger risks, be the writer I want to see on those shelves. It’s amazing how being surrounded by thousands of books every day makes me love writing more. People always assume it would feel daunting, but actually it’s inspiring! All those people succeeded in writing a book that somebody loved, even if that somebody wasn’t me. I would find the space on the crime bookshelves in the store where my own name would sit: right between Eva Dolan and Louise Doughty. It was such a boost to realize I could one day do that, too! Plus, one of the biggest perks of being a bookseller is getting sent early review copies of upcoming releases. Checking the post is literally one of the highlights of my working days.

One of the best things about working with books is working with book lovers. It’s a prerequisite for the job! We eat, sleep and breathe books. Probably about half of my conversations on any given day are about books—and not just surface conversations either. Aside from other writers, booksellers are perhaps the best equipped to have a really fun chat with about the complexities of books we’ve loved: plot, character, pacing, etc. It’s really useful to see those things through a professional reader’s eyes, especially a reader who is selling those books on the ground, who knows what’s selling well and what isn’t, and what their regular customers love or hate. One of my colleagues accidentally helped me to come up with one of my favourite pieces of evidence in After the Eclipse—the mermaid mood ring—when we were discussing our favourite clues.

Which brings me to the customers. I love the customers! It goes without saying that booksellers talk about books a lot among themselves. But what about customers? I’ve had some of the best recommendations for books to try from my customers. A lot of my regulars are more than happy to give me wonderful new authors to try, and they often encourage me to read books I never would normally think to choose. One of my favorite recommendations last year was This Is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay. Not crime at all—not even close! But one of my regulars, who works for the NHS, said they had enjoyed it and was so enthusiastic that I couldn’t not read it. And I loved it.

Plus, customers are often an accidentally brilliant source of inspiration. From the lovely to the wacky to the downright rude, getting to talk to so many different kinds of people every day gives me insight into the world at large. I won’t say I’ve ever murdered one of my customers in one of my books, but I have drawn characteristics from more than just a few. Cassie’s mentor Henry was inspired in part by one of my favorite customers from my first months in the shop—a man in his 70s who walked a few miles into town every week to visit the bookshop and talk about what he was reading.

So beware next time you buy a book. You never know what your bookseller is thinking about. But don’t be afraid to recommend them your latest read—you might make a reading buddy for life.

One wouldn’t automatically assume that inspiration for a devastating crime novel could be found in that safest of places: a bookstore. But Fran Dorricott’s experience as a bookseller provided the key to finishing her first draft, inspiration for her favorite clue and more.

Thriller

Thriller

The king’s favorite

Behind the Book by Elizabeth Fremantle

by Elizabeth Fremantle

Elizabeth Fremantle’s historical thriller The Poison Bed fictionalizes the story of King James’s favorite, Robert Carr, and the poisoning scandal in which he became embroiled. The term “favorite” could mean anything from a close friendship to an intimate sexual relationship, and as The Poison Bed dances back and forth between Robert’s rise to power and his imprisonment in the Tower of London along with his wife, the beguiling Frances Howard, the author explores the complicated, murky ways in which homoerotic desires and relationships were expressed in early modern England. Here, Fremantle discusses the difficulty of defining a historical figure’s sexuality, and what that meant for her characterization of James and Robert.

Rubens’ glorious ceiling in the Whitehall Banqueting House, one of the great artistic legacies of the Stuart era, depicts the heaven-bound figure of King James I surrounded by the flickering wings and dimpled flesh of a host of cherubs. Not long ago, I sat beneath it in the company of several towering drag queens trussed into a corsets, heels, bum-rolls and a good deal of flesh-toned hosiery, while one announced in a booming voice, “Yes, darlings—our new king is a bit of a queen!” The evening was a gender-bending performance, part of the Historic Royal Palaces LGBT events program, telling the story of James I and his male favorites.

The gay community has long claimed James I as their royal poster boy, and why not? He was, after all, well known for having had a series of beautiful male favorites, including one whose heart he kept in a box after his death. Given there was no term for homosexuality at the time (only the illegal practice of sodomy), we cannot judge James’s behavior by the standards of today. And it is important to remember that when it comes to the private behaviors of kings, much evidence is based on little more than slander and supposition.

We do know, however, that James was not thought to have had any liaisons with women prior to his marriage. Indeed, it was rumoured that his close relationship at an early age with an older male cousin, Esmé Stuart, was a physical one, and Stuart was forced to leave Scotland because his influence over the young king was becoming problematic. To add to this, once there was an heir, a spare and a daughter all in good health, James chose to live separately from his wife from 1607 onwards. While this in itself was unremarkable, it was unusual in that he didn’t subsequently take a mistress, as was expected behaviour for a king at the time. James certainly preferred the company of men and there is a good deal of anecdotal evidence suggesting he actively disliked women, although many deem his marriage to have been a happy one.

In my mind, some of the most compelling evidence to suggest James had deep and passionate feelings for the men in his life is the abundance of surviving letters between him and his favorites. These texts are strikingly intimate. Take this, for example, to George Villiers:

I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.

James R.

Two men, close friends, who call each other husband and wife, offers little ambiguity from our modern perspective. We would assume them gay on that evidence alone. But, as many historians have pointed out, the language of friendship between men in early modern England tended to be uninhibited and overblown with terms like “love” thrown about liberally. Masculinity was differently defined at the time—one only has to consider the clothes men wore at the Stuart court: festoons of pearls and lace and pom-poms on their shoes the size of cabbages, none of which would seem out of place on the main stage of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” So, the letters, though compelling, are not sufficient evidence to prove James’s sexual preference.

The recent discovery of a secret tunnel at Apethorpe House, one of James’s favorite residences, between his and George Villiers’s bedchambers caused a flurry of supposition. But this too has a plausible and mundane explanation. Corridors between bedchambers were commonplace in palaces of the period. Privacy, as we recognise it, didn’t exist in such buildings, which were designed to house a court of hundreds. The bedchamber was as much a place for political activities as for sexual. Corridors such as this would have allowed access to the king’s close circle, including the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, of which Villiers was one. All early modern kings had Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, young courtiers who had close access to the monarch and were required to sleep in his room on a rota, as a security measure.

The role of the historian is to seek evidence, making for a sticky problem when it comes to the intimate sexual practices of a monarch, when the only proof of sex was a bloody sheet or a pregnancy. The fact that James fathered children is irrefutable evidence that he had sexual relations with his wife. Beyond that we have only hearsay to go on. There was much contemporary gossip about James, whose pacifist policies with the old enemy Spain were deemed “feminine” as compared with those of his predecessor Elizabeth. Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have joked that, “King Elizabeth had been succeeded by ‘Queen James.’” This pointed more to James’s style of foreign policy, though we cannot discount the possibility that its subtext was aimed at the new King’s rumored sexual proclivities. After all, his preference for the company of beautiful men was no secret.

Three men held particularly significant roles in James’s life, both public and personal: the aforementioned Esmé Stuart, Duke of Lennox; George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; and Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. All were privileged in much the same way as a royal mistress, the latter two rising from obscurity to greatness by way of the king’s favor. It is a matter of historical record that courtiers schemed to place beautiful young men in the King’s path in the hope of creating some advantage out of it, in much the same way pretty daughters were dangled under Henry VIII’s nose. It was a weakness to exploit. Huge political capital could be gained to those in league with a royal favorite. James bestowed honours and promoted these men to the highest offices, giving them excessive political responsibilities and power, though they were not always suited for such roles.

In the case of Robert Carr, James’ goodwill was stretched almost to breaking point. Carr became mixed up in a poisoning plot, for which he and his wife were convicted, which forms the central plot of my novel The Poison Bed. There is reason to believe that James’ actions around the trial indicated his fear that Carr, were he to be condemned, might have revealed personal details about his private habits in his scaffold speech. One could suppose that James had something to hide.

I have read more than one indignant tirade directed against those who choose to accept James as homosexual, stating that to do so casts negative aspersions, or “outs” a man who is no longer able to speak for himself. This pre-supposes that to call someone homosexual is an insult and that to be homosexual, and in this I include bisexual, is degrading. This, I refuse to accept. I do however understand historians’ reluctance to take a firm stance on James’ sexuality. Stuart historian Dr. Samantha Smith is clear as to why:

“There is no denying that James I was fond of his favorites, who happened to be young men, but we cannot say for certain if this attraction resulted in sexual relations. There is no actual evidence to support such claims and the act of sodomy was in fact illegal and deemed a sin in 17th century England and James was a man who feared sin.”

The assumption that male homosexuality can be defined by penetration precludes other sexual practices between men that don’t involve sodomy. It was sodomy, specifically, that was the legal and religious infringement at the time. The law had nothing to say about most other intimate acts. It is possible to imagine, then, even considering his fear of sin, that James may have indulged in practices we might nowadays consider homosexual but not in the act of sodomy itself.

Seventeenth century historian Rebecca Rideal comes at the question from a subtly different angle, focusing on the romantic aspect of love. We know, she says, “he had romantic relationships with men which is evidenced by his correspondence. Whether this was sexual, we will never know, but it was romantic nonetheless.” It is clear she accepts the letters as proper proof of an intimacy that escaped the bounds of ordinary friendship, and I tend to agree with her.

For the purposes of telling the story of Robert Carr’s relationship to James in The Poison Bed, I have made the assumption of both men’s bisexuality. This may be audacious and certainly might put some noses out of joint. But fiction is the mode by which we can explore the liminal space between the lines of the historical record. It allows us to imagine what happened behind closed doors and weave a plausible version of the past from what we know and what we can never know.

Elizabeth Fremantle discusses the difficulty of defining a historical figure’s sexuality, and what that meant for her characterization of James I and his favorite, Robert Carr, in her historical thriller The Poison Bed.

Picture Book

Picture Book

Early wheelwomen and their relentless courage and sense of fun

Behind the Book by Larissa Theule

by Larissa Theule

I first read about “bicycle face” around the time my daughter was learning to ride a two-wheel. The term popped up on a number of online news sites and referred to a bogus medical affliction intended to scare people, especially women, away from riding during the bicycle craze of the 1890s. It was a wild story and seemed almost too regressive to be real, even for the time, so I dove into old chronicles to learn more.

I discovered that bicycle face was just one of many alleged bicycle-related maladies. There were countless others, like “bicycle hump” and “bicycle leg.” Bicycle face, it was said, came from the strain of riding and resulted in bulging eyes and a clenched jaw. It was a threat to both men and women but purported to afflict those of a delicate nature (read: women) with greater frequency and to a more serious degree.

This quote nicely sums up the fictitious condition as it pertained to women: “No woman on a wheel has yet solved the problem of self-consciousness; and of all the sad sights that greet the eye that of the woman in baggy breeches plowing her way along the boulevard with a stern, fixed, anxious face betraying apprehension of some unseen danger, combined with the consciousness of the popular scrutiny and comment and sometimes a lurking suspicion that not all may be right with her, is the saddest. In such cases as these, the strain upon the special brain center must be not only incessant but tremendous, and it must of necessity sooner or later produce the bicycle face which the victim must carry to the grave . . .” (From the Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1895.)

The threat of bicycle face was only a sliver of the serious pushback early wheelwomen encountered. Critics also said riding a bicycle threatened to “unsex” women, damaging not only their reproductive organs but their inherent femininity as well, turning them into loose young ladies, disobedient wives and negligent mothers.

Fortunately, what I read wasn’t all misogynistic headlines. Researching bicycle face led me to learn about the many ways spirited wheelwomen flat out ignored religious, medical and patriarchal calls for them to cease riding.

Early wheelwomen loved riding and were good at it. They taught each other to fix their own bikes, established their own magazine called The Wheelwoman, and otherwise had loads of fun socializing, racing and using bikes to make their work easier. They also adjusted their fashion so they could ride unencumbered and look good doing so—hello, short skirts and bloomers!

In writing Born to Ride, I wanted to reclaim bicycle face. I wanted to retroactively turn that silly threat on its head and transform it into something celebratory, as befits bold young readers and riders.

I watched my own young rider as she learned to pedal and coast without a steadying hand on the seat behind her and saw in her face a thousand shades of joy. Riding a bike makes her feel strong and free. That joy and strength is what I hope to have captured in Born to Ride, and in doing so, pay homage to early wheelwomen and their relentless courage and sense of fun.

“To men, the bicycle in the beginning was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world.”—Munsey’s Magazine, 1896.

For more about the remarkable history of wheelwomen, read Sue Macy’s seminal book Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way).

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Born to Ride.

Author Larissa Theule talks about the bogus medical affliction known as "bicycle face" and how it inspired her new picture book,

Born to Ride

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

The world we left behind

Behind the Book by Sarah Blake

by Sarah Blake

Debut novelist Sarah Blake offers a new heroine of biblical proportions: Naamah, wife of Noah, who finds hope amid an interminable sea.

I have been writing poetry since I was 10 years old, and I never thought I would write anything else. Poems are perfect. They’re stimulating little machines of power and grace. They can take different forms, registers and presences. They can be read aloud or in your head, and that changes how you experience them. You can ask anything of a poem—to be short or epically long, to have one voice or multiple, to be quiet and subtle or brash and bold, to quote sources or to forget the real world, or to be a mix of it all. If someone makes you think poetry is a small wedge of the written word, they’re wrong.

After my son was born, my relationship to poetry changed. For a year, I could hardly read or write. And as I began to read again, after that year, reading felt strange. I felt removed from it. An observer. And what I observed was that every poem, whether it was lyric, narrative, language or experimental, was engaging my brain in the same way, hitting it in the same spot. I had never noticed it before, and in trying to figure it out, I started writing very long narrative poems that were attempting to develop a different kind of relationship between reader and character. I’d never written anything longer than five pages, and suddenly 60-page epics were pouring out of me while my son was in childcare at the YMCA.

Soon I wasn’t writing poems anymore. I was writing screenplays. I was flooded by dialogue. It was the only way I wanted to tell stories. My brain was working something out, and I wasn’t sure what it was. And then my friend, who’s a director, asked me to write her a screenplay for a short film, about anything I wanted. And I immediately thought of Naamah, the wife of Noah, stuck on the ark. I imagined her taking up swimming, swimming in floodwaters filled with the dead. I sent the screenplay to my friend, and we chatted about it, envisioning it set on a stage with strange props and big fans and everyone naked. I loved it in that moment, and when the moment passed, I didn’t think about it again.

But after the 2016 election, I experienced a kind of hopelessness I didn’t know how to confront. Art seemed dwarfed. I didn’t want it to feel that way, but it did. When I wrote poems, they came out didactic, and I couldn’t stand them. And the dialogue stopped coming to me. Everything stopped. I started planning ways to volunteer in my community and ways to flee the country, all in the same few days. It felt like living a dual life: one of determination, to help stop the erosion of rights in our country, and one to prepare myself to get out.

And all of this led me back to Naamah. I thought of her stuck on that ark for over a year, with no communication with God, with everyone she knew dead, with all those animals needing her. That was hopeless. That was miserable. It was clear that she was someone I needed to spend time with: the woman who’d faced it all and held it together.

The setting of the ark unlocked something in me. All the senses at work there. All the animals to learn about. The large family in their faith. The real and surreal already blurring at the story’s outset. There was the scale of the ark itself to try to understand. I drew pictures of it, what it might look like on the water. I returned to the book of Genesis, reading the passages over and over again. Next to my document window, I kept open a timeline of the ark, from the coming of the rains to the release of the birds. One part of me always rooted in the story as it has been told for millennia.

As I wrote Naamah’s story, I worried that I wasn’t writing a novel. I thought, Maybe I’m just figuring out more ways that narrative works. I will look up, and the story will have ended, but it will have been for me alone, not for Naamah. It was a difficult feeling to navigate: Was the story mine or Naamah’s? If it were solely mine, it would sit happily in a drawer. If it were Naamah’s, the world might yearn to know it as I had yearned to know it.

When Naamah became entwined with an underwater village of dead children and the angel who’d created the village, I had to know what she would do, who she would choose to stay with—the angel or Noah. Every day I sat in my house and wrote about the animals, the family, the dangers and isolation, the ways to escape. Everything needed to be considered; the choices had to be made. Mine or not, the story could not continue without me returning to the page. I owed it to Naamah to continue. And the book became hers, through and through.

Sarah Blake has previously authored two poetry collections, Mr. West and Let’s Not Live on Earth. In Blake’s debut novel, Naamah provides guidance and stability to both humans and animals aboard Noah’s ark, but she also seeks solace in the mysteries underwater, where a seductive angel watches over a flooded world.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Naamah.

Debut novelist Sarah Blake offers a new heroine of biblical proportions: Naamah, wife of Noah, who finds hope amid an interminable sea.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Six cookbooks that changed my life

Behind the Book by Leslie Karst

by Leslie Karst

In Leslie Karst’s fourth Sally Solari mystery, Murder from Scratch, the restaurateur stumbles onto her latest case after taking in her blind cousin, Evelyn, who is convinced that her mother was murdered. Sally and Evelyn’s investigation takes them into the fast-paced, high-stakes world of pop-up restaurants and celebrity chefs, giving Karst the opportunity to feature even more delicious recipes. Here, she shares six cookbooks she finds herself returning to over and over again.

Okay, that title may sound a tad dramatic, especially since—being more of a seat-of-the-pants style cook—I don’t even use recipes all that much. I do, however, love to read cookbooks and to study the techniques described by the experts who’ve come up with or compiled the recipes therein. Moreover, several cookbooks have had a huge impact on me from a young age, opening my eyes to a world of food and cooking far beyond the TV dinners and Jello salads so prevalent during my 1960s childhood.

So here are some of the cookbooks that have most influenced me over the years, listed in the order in which they came into my life.

The New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne
I remember first noticing this big blue tome on our kitchen bookshelf when I was about eight or nine years old. The book was all the rage in the early ’60s, with its recipes for hip, “new” dishes such as rumaki and curried chicken and Eggs à la Russe. It harkens back to the days when the New York Times was the king of newspapers and people enjoyed their food with no qualms about butter or salt or excess calories.

But what was different about the book for me was that both my parents cooked from it. This was a big deal because my dad rarely ventured into the kitchen save to spread butter on saltines, slice a few stalks of celery and mix up a glass of chocolate milk for a light lunch watching the Saturday afternoon Dodgers game on TV. Dad only made two recipes from the book, however: Steak Diane and potato pancakes, which he would make on the same night, to be accompanied by a salad prepared by my mom. I thought it was heaven.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck
This selection is somewhat disingenuous, as I actually first came to the book by way of Julia Child’s television show, “The French Chef,” during which this big, charismatic gal with a funny voice would demonstrate how to make many of the recipes from her newly published cookbook.

My mother adored the show, and she and I would sit on my parents’ bed in the afternoon and watch it together, Mom with a pen and notepad in hand to take down any recipes that struck her fancy. Later, she would try them out for the grand dinner parties my folks used to throw back in the day when that was a thing. (I miss those fabulous “days of the dinner party” but do my best to keep the tradition alive in my own home.)

Years later, I finally bought my own copy of the cookbook and have tried many of its wonderful recipes, including the to-die-for coq au vin and the labor-intensive-but-well-worth-the-effort cassoulet (which Ms. Child poetically translates into English as “baked beans”).

The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer
My mother presented me with a copy of this book when I went away to college. For some years it was the only cookbook I owned, as it contains pretty much everything you need to know to be a quite passable cook—from how to stuff, truss and carve a chicken, to coring artichokes, to whisking up the perfect white sauce.

I once cited The Joy of Cooking as a “learned culinary treatise” in a brief I penned during my years as a research and appellate attorney. I needed to show how much was in the “three glasses of wine” our defendant client had testified that he consumed, and Mrs. Rombauer’s declaration that “an average serving of wine” was the genteel amount of three and a half ounces was highly beneficial to our case.

Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making by James Peterson
This was one of my textbooks during culinary arts school, and through it, I discovered the wonders of the five “mother sauces” (béchamel, hollandaise, velouté, espagnole, tomato), from which all the secondary, or “small,” sauces are derived in classical French cooking. In addition, the book instructs about stocks, liasons, butter sauces, vinaigrettes, Asian sauces and even dessert sauces.

If you’re as much of a sauce junkie as I am, then you need to get this book now.

The Classic Pasta Cookbook by Giuliano Hazan
After I’d completed the first book in my Sally Solari culinary mystery series, Dying for a Taste, I realized I should really learn how to make my own fresh pasta if I was going to write books about a restaurant-owning Italian-American family.

This was the cookbook that taught me how. Giuliano is the son of the renowned Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan, so he should know his pasta—and boy does he ever.

What’s especially wonderful about this book is all its terrific photographs, which not only give step-by-step tutorials on how to mix, roll and cut your pasta but also provide mouth-watering illustrations of what you have to look forward to once you add the luscious sauces and toppings (recipes for which are also included) to your handmade noodles.

Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey
Several years ago, I resolved to teach myself to cook Indian food, since it’s one of my favorite cuisines. The first book I bought in my journey toward unwrapping the secrets of curries, dal, raita and chutney was this one, by the food writer I consider to be the queen of Indian cookery. This book was an offshoot of a TV show Madhur Jaffrey did for the BBC and makes for a perfect primer for learning about the cuisine.

A couple of years later, I was brainstorming ideas for Murder from Scratch and hit upon the idea of featuring a pop-up restaurant serving the kind of Southeast Asian dishes you’d buy on the street from a food vendor—which of course gave me reason to further my culinary education regarding Indian food. Many of the dishes featured in Murder from Scratch were inspired by Jaffrey’s book, including the butter chicken, lamb curry, dal, samosas and naan.

Murder from Scratch author Leslie Karst shares six cookbooks she finds herself returning to over and over again.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Empowered by librarians

Behind the Book by Kim Michele Richardson

by Kim Michele Richardson

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek was inspired by the true, historical blue-skinned people of Kentucky and the brave and dedicated Kentucky Pack Horse Library Service, which spanned the 1930s and early ’40s during eastern Kentucky’s most violent era.

Years ago, I stumbled across these heroic librarians of the Great Depression and the rare blue-skinned Kentuckians, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I wanted to embrace their strengths and uniqueness in story. There was such rich, magnificent history in the two, and I was surprised that I hadn’t seen them in novels—that neither had been given a large footprint in literary history. I knew it was time for the wider world to experience them fully, to learn about and see the glorious Kentucky female packhorse librarians and the precious blue-skinned mountain folk.

There was a small, isolated clan that suffered from a rare genetic condition called congenital methemoglobinemia. To learn more, I visited with doctors and spoke with a hematologist. I was saddened to find how the Blues were treated—how people shunned and shamed them instead of embracing them for their very uniqueness. It became important for me to humanize these Appalachian folk, to shed light and dispel old stereotypes, to help inform others by bringing these unique people into a novel. I have much empathy for marginalized people, for anyone who has faced or faces prejudices and hardships. It’s easy to feel the Blues’ pain deeply, particularly if you’ve gone through hardships in your own life.

Librarians have always been dear to me. I grew up under the grinding heels of poverty, spending my first decade in a rural Kentucky orphanage, and then on to foster care and beyond, to finding myself homeless at age 14. As a foster child in 1970, I remember going to my first library one lonely summer and checking out a book with the help of a librarian who wisely informed me that I could take home more than one. I was moved by her compassion and wisdom and have not forgotten her to this day. Librarians are lifelines for so many, giving us powerful resources to help us become empowered.

Long ago, I began collecting everything I could on the packhorse librarians and blue-skinned people, poring over archives, old newspapers, pictures, documentaries and more. My research stretched into coal-mining towns and their history, and then into thick-treed forests to explore fire-tower lookouts and interview an old mountaineer who was a former fire-tower watcher. The mountain man had many intriguing stories about living in a fire tower and generously shared them over a modest Christmas meal. Other research included more hours studying Roosevelt’s New Deal and WPA programs. And last, there was the fun and interesting research on mules. I had every intention of riding one until I fell off the mountain.

Sadly, there isn’t a cool or exciting wolf or bear-that-chased-me story to be had here. Instead, this story involves me awkwardly toting a tall stack of heavy Pyrex casserole dishes down dangerous concrete steps for an elderly mountain lady. After an embarrassingly painful fall, my arm suffered seven breaks, but the Pyrex survived with nary a scratch.

In 2016, I had the honor of meeting the talented Georgia playwright and writer Amina S. McIntyre, who was staying nearby at a Kentucky nature conservancy for an artist-in-residency program that I’d supported. Since Amina was new to the area and alone on the 300-acre preserve, I wanted to welcome her and drop off books and pie. Important and conducive to good writing and creating, so I thought! Amina kindly showed me around the pastoral grounds and inside the old antebellum farmhouse that she occupied. She paused to point out an antique courting candle, which ended up becoming an important theme in my novel and inspired the first pages of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

The legend behind the candle says it was used by patriarchs to set a time limit for the suitor who came courting his daughter. I was utterly captivated by the concept—although the unique spiral design of the 100-year-old wrought iron courting candle was likely created as a mere practicality to keep the melting candle in place and from slipping. More folklore than fact. Still, I found the candle a commanding and curious induction of courtship. And I couldn’t stop imagining how the candle could have been the source of someone’s lifelong misery or joy and how it had been passed on to different generations. How wonderful the conversations must have been that took place around and over it.

That visit with Amina led me to look for a courting candle. Eventually I found one: a small curiosity to be admired, more decor than practical. But when my novel went on submission to publishers and I was given the wonderful opportunity to talk to several editors, that changed. As I picked up the phone to chat, I immediately lit the old courter, hoping for the perfect “intended” for my novel. It worked.

Additionally, I spent thousands of hours exploring everything from fauna to flora to folklore to food and longtime traditions indigenous to Appalachia. I was fortunate to have a shoebox apartment atop a mountain in Appalachia and to be able to live in that landscape and spend time with native Appalachians who taught me the lyrics and language of their people and ancestors.

Kentucky has always inspired and influenced my books, as it is both a beautiful and brutal place full of fascinating history, varied landscapes, complex people and culture, and I’m fortunate to live in a region that my heart can draw on.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

From a childhood in foster care to a lifelong love for librarians, author Kim Michele Richardson shares the deep personal connection to her new novel, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Out of the past

Behind the Book by Thomas Lockley

by Thomas Lockley

When the black solider Yasuke arrived in Japan, he became a sensation and later a respected samurai. Thomas Lockley shares how he first encountered the incredible man at the center of African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan.

It was sometime in 2009 when, while reading a Wikipedia article about William Adams, the English navigator who became a samurai, I happened to notice a link to a page on Yasuke, an African samurai. My interest piqued, I clicked to find out more, and his story drew me in immediately. Like Adams, Yasuke rose from a humble background abroad to greatness in Japan, but unlike Adams, he actually fought in battles at the side of Oda Nobunaga, one of Japan’s greatest warriors who helped unify the country in the 16th century.

I started to write a novel about his life in 2010, but other things got in the way, and the project dropped by the wayside. Nevertheless, I kept on researching, and Yasuke’s world and time started to reveal themselves to me. It was an era when humanity was on the move, the first global age of navigation when people from all over the world were traversing the seas. That surprised me, as I didn’t remember learning about the globe-trotting exploits of Turkish, Indian, Chinese, Arab, Jewish, African or Japanese people! Most books made it seem as if only Europeans were “discovering” the globe at this time.

I found out that people of African descent around the globe formed royal houses in India, were present at the Chinese court, held noble ranks in Europe and were employed virtually everywhere as skilled professionals such as interpreters, divers, musicians, navigators, merchants and warriors. Yasuke was not unique for being an African success story far from home. Another stereotype, the one that claims all Africans outside their home continent were slaves, flew out the window.

When I wanted to contribute a paper to a special issue of my university’s journal, my aborted Yasuke project sprung to mind. I turned the rough beginning of the novel into an academic paper and eventually published it online in 2015. It was an instant hit, and I was contacted by people all around the world for more information.

I asked many of the Yasuke fans why they felt drawn to him. The answers were varied and compelling: his rags-to-riches story, his success in another culture, his physical strength, his potential as a positive role model, his ethnicity. Yasuke gave them hope for a better world. All of the respondents connected Yasuke’s story to modern-day issues such as the refugee crisis, social mobility, immigration, social alienation and racism. The African samurai is a man for today, a fact reflected by his portrayal in Japanese books, manga and computer games over the last two decades.

As the swell of interest increased, I made an interesting discovery about Japan—one that, as an immigrant to that country, came as a surprise. The country of Japan is often thought of as racially homogeneous, but in the decades before and after Yasuke’s time, there were at least 300 to 500 Africans living in western Japan and several thousand more if you include temporary visitors. Of other foreigners, there were tens of thousands. Japan was far more diverse historically than people believe, and as Japanese cities move speedily toward multiculturalism, and as mixed-heritage sports stars such as Naomi Osaka and Asuka Cambridge find global success, Yasuke’s story again bears relevance to the present day.

I urge readers to look for more Yasukes, for there are millions of them. History is not only about kings and queens. “Normal” people in history can inspire us today. We can connect with them and emulate them to lead our own meaningful lives. In many ways they were just like us.

But in many ways, of course, they were not like us. Most readers of this book will not face early death from horrible diseases and childbirth, nor will they have the need to bear arms and kill at close quarters. And that aspect of historical change can help us see that our world is not so bad. The barbarians are not at the gateway, and human health is better than it has ever been before. The vast majority of humanity is very lucky, and we owe it to our ancestors to realize that and do positive things with the world they have left us.

Thomas Lockley is an associate professor at Nihon University College of Law in Tokyo, where he teaches courses concerning the international and multicultural history of Japan and East Asia. He authored the first academic paper on the life of Yasuke, which led to the release of a Japanese-language book on the historical figure and now to African Samurai, a narrative history co-written with thriller and speculative fiction author Geoffrey Girard that relays Yasuke’s story in a cinematic, endlessly fascinating fashion.

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