All Behind the Book essays

NonfictionMiddle Grade

‘Their hope kept them alive.’

Behind the Book by Christina Soontornvat

Children's author Christina Soontornvat's first work of nonfiction, All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys' Soccer Team, is an extraordinary feat of research and storytelling. As BookPage reviewer Linda Castellitto observes in her starred review of the book, Soontornvat doesn't just recount the events of the rescue, she also includes "fascinating, accessible analyses—supplemented by photos, diagrams, maps and more—of the cultural, technological, scientific and spiritual considerations that affected the rescue effort, from Buddhism to climate change to political protocol." In this essay, Soontornvat shares what the members of the Wild Boars soccer team taught her.

Now that my book is almost out in the world and the early reception to it has been overwhelmingly positive, I feel comfortable admitting that I was terrified to write it. Though I had written novels and had a background in science writing for museums, All Thirteen was my first nonfiction book. It didn’t help that it dealt with perhaps the biggest news story to come out of Thailand in years, and one of the most talked about current events of my lifetime. The pressure I felt to do the story justice was overwhelming. Fortunately, I also dealt with very tight deadlines, so I didn’t have much time to dwell on self-doubt. But whenever I paused to think about how daunting my task was, I would feel huge waves of anxiety.

I never expected that researching the story of this rescue would not only help me overcome those fears but would also teach me important lessons that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

When I flew to Thailand in October 2018 to conduct interviews and research, I had a vague idea of what the overarching theme of the book would be. I had planned to tell an uplifting success story of international cooperation. Now, don’t get me wrong: That theme completely applies to the cave rescue. The way that people from all over the world were able to come together to pull off the unprecedented mission is incredibly inspiring. If only our elected leaders could tackle every problem in this way!

But my main takeaway from my research, which became the central theme of the book, is a much deeper idea, and it is one that I have come back to again and again:

Mentality is everything, and hardship makes you resilient.

This is something I understood on some theoretical level before I started working on the book, but my research showed me real-life examples of why this is true.

Resilience and the ability to calm the mind were traits possessed by many of the rescuers who labored so hard aboveground to find the boys. It was particularly apparent in the rescue divers who dove each boy safely out of the cave. Cave diving is a dangerous business. It is vital not to panic, and yet the very act of cave diving puts you in situations that would be nearly impossible not to panic in. The men who rescued the boys and their coach were veteran rescue cave divers who have been through some pretty harrowing near-death scrapes in their careers. They are the best in the world at what they do because they stay calm, they don’t let their fear overtake their mental state, and they lean on their years of experience to solve new problems.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of All Thirteen.

I learned so much from interviewing the rescuers, but the boys of the Wild Boars team ended up being my greatest teachers. When I first began this project, I could not fathom how a bunch of ordinary kids ages between the ages of 13 and 17 could have survived such a harrowing ordeal. They spent 10 days in near-total darkness, without food, suitable shelter, clean water or any communication with the outside world. But this was not the first time the Wild Boars had been tested.

They are an adventurous bunch; prior to their journey into the cave, they had gone on numerous excursions, biking up mountains and hiking to waterfalls. Together, they had already practiced pushing their bodies to their limits. And of course, on the soccer field, they had also tested themselves physically and practiced working together as a team. It’s true, none of these experiences even comes close to being trapped in a cave for 10 days in the dark. But I believe that facing challenges together made them resilient—both as individuals and also as a unit, which was key to their survival.

Their coach, Ekkapol Chantawong, was only 25 years old during the rescue, but already he had suffered many hardships. He lost most of his family to disease when he was just a child. Orphaned, he spent most of his youth living in temples, where he trained as a novice monk for years before he became a soccer coach. A fundamental principle in Buddhism is that we are our minds, and that by calming and retaining control over our mental state we can affect our physical well-being. The boys could not have had a better guide to keep their hopes alive while they waited in darkness.

Yes, these boys were ordinary. And that is what is so extraordinary about the rescue, and what I hope that readers take away from the book. We are all ordinary and extraordinary, too. No, we are not trapped in a dark cave miles below the earth. But I know that I am not alone in having experienced some dark moments in the past few months. But everything we need is inside us already. We are stronger than we think we are. We have been through difficult times, and we have made it out, and we will do so again. We are in control of our minds, which are the most important things to be in control of when everything else around us is spinning out of control.

The Wild Boars never gave up hope that they would make it out of the cave. Their hope kept them alive. Sometimes when I feel hopeless, I think about them. Why should I lose hope when they never did? It has been an honor to write this book and to share their story of hope and resilience with the world.

 

Author photo by Sam Bond

Author Christina Soontornvat shares the lesson she learned from the members of the Wild Boars soccer team, whose extraordinary rescue she chronicles in her book, All Thirteen.

RomanceContemporary Romance

A personal playlist

Behind the Book by Minnie Darke

Minnie Darke’s The Lost Love Song is a winsome and heartwarming love story that follows the brokenhearted Arie after his blazingly talented fiancée, Diana, passes away. A classical pianist, Diana composed a beautiful love song that, after her death, begins to make its way around the world and just might bring hope and light back to Arie’s life. We thought it only fitting to ask Darke which five songs she thinks are the most romantic she’s ever heard.

Can music make you fall in love? Capture the spirit of your own love story? Can it help you stay in love? These songs did the trick for me.

1. In my teens—"Raspberry Beret” by Prince
For me, this boppy tune from the purple pop star is permanently emblematic of my first love affair with a boy who had a car. I only have to hear the opening riff and all of a sudden it’s high summer. The windows are down, there are smudgy toe prints on the windscreen and sand on the red leather of the bench seats. Probably, I’m eating a rainbow Paddle Pop on the way home from the beach. I confess that at this time in my life, I even had a raspberry beret. And if it was warm, I wouldn’t wear much more.

2. In my 20s—"The Ship Song” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Oh, the sweet angst of being in one’s 20s, and in the turbid depths of a love affair with a tragic, emo art boy with big green eyes. The one I always knew wasn’t quite right for me but couldn’t resist even so. I sailed my ships around him, I burned my bridges down, and Nick Cave sang the soundtrack to the great and terrible pain of an on-again, off-again relationship.

3. In my 30s—"First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes
This song makes a cameo appearance in The Lost Love Song as the wedding song at Arie’s little sister’s nuptials. It wasn’t released at the time of my own wedding, which happened under a waterfall in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. But, if it had been, I’d definitely have chosen it as my own wedding song because it’s as simple, straightforward and beautiful as the moment in life when you commit yourself utterly to one person. I’m so glad I didn’t die before I met him.

4. In my 40s—"If I Ever Lose My Faith in You” by Sting
I came close to picking Shania Twain’s “You're Still the One” for my 40s, because—I confess—I do sing along to it super loud in the car when it comes on the radio. But the song that really pierces me to the core in this phase of my life is Sting’s “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You.” It’s a song about how true love holds steady, even when every other belief is crumbling, and despite the challenges of our complicated world (politicians who look like game show hosts, miracles of science that turn from blessings to curses). It’s a song that might sound disillusioned if you couldn’t hear the idealistic belief in love beating at its core.

5. In my future—"I Know You by Heart” by Eva Cassidy
Maybe nobody else is masochistic enough to work out in advance what song they would want to listen to if they lost the person they love. But I think I already know that if I’m ever in that situation, I’ll turn to this exquisite autumnal song by Eva Cassidy. I’ll walk with Eva’s soaring vocals down roads of orange and gold, remembering everything that I’ve come to know by heart.

Minnie Darke’s The Lost Love Song is a winsome and heartwarming love story that follows the brokenhearted Arie after his blazingly talented fiancée, Diana, passes away. A classical pianist, Diana composed a beautiful love song that, after her death, begins to make its way around…

Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

‘History is ever present in our lives’

Behind the Book by Nev March

In Murder in Old Bombay, debut author Nev March transports readers to 19th-century India as her sleuth, Captain Jim Agnihotri, investigates a crime inspired by a real-life mystery. In this essay, March explores how the tragic death of two Parsi women and the shadow of a mutiny loom large over her novel.

History is ever present in our lives. As a teen living in Mumbai, people sometimes asked me, “Are you Muslim?”

I’d reply, “I’m Parsi.”

“Ah!” My interlocutor’s eyes would light up with understanding.

India is a comfortable mix of religions (Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Baha'i, Zoroastrianism and more) and regional groups. Many know that Parsi Zoroastrians are descended from medieval Persian refugees who took shelter in India.

The travails of my tiny community impacted decisions both big and little. Major decisions included the expectation that girls would marry within the community. It also impacted minor decisions, like traveling alone. Among other stories, the death of the Godrej ladies in 1891 became a cautionary tale in our family.

An 1891 postcard circulated to build support for a petition to the high court shows Bacha Godrej and Pilloo Kamdin, and the Rajabai Tower where they died. Image courtesy of the author.

The well-to-do Godrej girls were sisters-in-law. The elder, Bacha Godrej, was the 20-year-old bride of 22-year-old law student Ardeshir Godrej. His 16-year-old sister, Pilloo Kamdin, was married, but had not been sent to her sasuraal (her husband’s home). That afternoon, they’d climbed 200 steps up the university clock tower. On a sunny afternoon, first Bacha, then Pilloo dropped to their deaths. An altercation was witnessed between some young men in the hour before their death, but lack of evidence led to an acquittal. With no answers, a frenzy of conjecture and outrage erupted.

For the survivors of the tragedy, life was never the same. Devastated by the loss of his bride, Ardeshir Godrej threw himself into his work and is now famous as the inventor-founder of the global conglomerate Godrej Enterprises. He did not remarry. Despite two petitions to the high court, each with tens of thousands of signatures, the mystery of Bacha's and Pilloo's deaths was never solved. While researching my novel Murder in Old Bombay, I found a letter to a newspaper editor written by that widower, Ardeshir Godrej, and resolved that this would be the inciting incident to launch my detective’s quest. As my novel opens, Captain Jim Agnihotri recuperates in a hospital bed and reads about the case in the newspapers. Inspired by Sherlock Holmes, he’s puzzled at the odd circumstances. When he reads widower Adi Framji’s fervent letter to the editor, he becomes determined to solve the mystery.

Thomas Henry Kavanaugh being disguised during the Siege of Lucknow, Indian Mutiny, 1857. National Army Museum, London.

Other aspects of the history of 19th-century India drove the events in my plot. Although the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny occurred 30 years before the events in my novel, that slaughter would be still in living memory at the time. In that first disorganized bid for India’s independence from Great Britain, Indian soldiers (sepoys) in Bengal, Cawanpore (now Kanpur) and Jhansi rebelled, killing many of their white officers. In response, Bombay regiments marched north to quell the rebellion. In the 1890s, the mutiny would have been vivid in people’s memory, from the burn of defeat to a confusion of divided loyalties. These simmering resentments form the backdrop of Murder in Old Bombay and influenced its plot twists.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Murder in Old Bombay.

Within my Parsi community, the ever-present danger to women became codified in that simple phrase, “Remember the Godrej girls!” a century after their deaths. It resonates even today, in the outrageously high number of crimes against women. Alas, we find that historical fiction isn’t historical at all, and may not be entirely fictional.

Nev March explores how the tragic death of two Parsi women and the shadow of a mutiny loom large over her debut mystery.
NonfictionHistory

8 Things You Never Knew About the Mob

Behind the Book by Russell Shorto

If you think you know about the mob just because you've seen The Godfather, think again. Russell Shorto, author of Smalltime, about the little-known history of mobs in small-town America—and in his own family—dishes on eight things about the mob that might be unbelievable if they weren't true.

1. The mob was originally Arabic (sort of).

I knew practically nothing about the Mafia when I started looking into my grandfather’s life. I was aware from childhood that he was some kind of mob honcho in our town, and I think it was precisely this awareness that kept me from wanting to explore the subject: There was a kind of blanket of silence on the subject in my family, a tacit understanding that we don’t go there. Once I broke through that and began digging into Russ’ life (I was named after my grandfather), I was amazed at my ignorance of the topic. As for the name, nobody knows for sure where the term Mafia came from, but the best guess is that it originated from an Arabic word, mu'afa. Sicily, where the Mafia originated, was invaded countless times over the centuries, including by Arabs. The Sicilian language, which is actually classified as distinct from Italian, thus has elements of Greek, French, Catalan and many other languages, including some I’d never heard of (“Old Occitan”). In Sicilian, the term Mafia originally meant "a place of refuge." It seemed to relate to peasants' need to protect themselves against the many outside threats.

2. The mob came to America thanks to Italian unification.

For most of history, “Italy” wasn’t a thing. The Italian peninsula was broken up into many independent or vassal states, such as the Duchy of Lucca and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Risorgimento, or Italian Unification, was a long series of wars and crises, the end result of which was an independent nation called Italy in 1861. Many Italians celebrated, but those in the south mostly did not. There was a bitter and long-standing divide between north and south, with northerners believing that they represented the ideals of the Roman Empire and that southerners were backward, lazy and stupid. When independence came, it was northern Italians who ran the country, and they proceeded to crack down viciously on the south, worsening the region’s already disastrous economic plight. That forced millions of southern Italians to migrate.

3. Abraham Lincoln played a role—OK, an indirect one—in the establishment of the Mafia in America.

Italian unification coincided with the American Civil War, during which Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Once the war was over and formerly enslaved people were free, plantation owners looked elsewhere for people willing to pick cotton and do other backbreaking work. They looked to Sicily, where people were facing starvation, and began advertising for workers. Coal mines, especially in Pennsylvania and New York, soon began doing the same thing. My great-grandfather was one of those who answered the call. He boarded a boat in Messina, Italy, and landed in New York, where a company rep gave him lunch and a train ticket to Pennsylvania to work in the mines.

4. The mob was a reaction to American racism.

Racism was strong and matter-of-fact in the version of America to which southern Italians immigrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. People of African origin, who had until recently been viewed as property, were essentially considered subhuman by many white Protestants. Sicilians were soon ranked at the same level. (By one reckoning, Sicilians were paid slightly less per day than Black Americans.) In my family, I heard stories of abuse and extreme poverty. Southern Italians weren’t able to open bank accounts, let alone hold good jobs.

5. The mob grew out of Prohibition.

My great-grandmother brewed moonshine in a still in her living room during Prohibition, and my grandfather, the future mobster, went out on the streets and sold Coke bottles filled with the stuff. They were both working for a neighborhood leader, a kind of proto-mob figure. This was typical around the country: Poor Italian immigrants took advantage of the opportunity that the ban on alcohol provided. Once Prohibition ended, those same Italians shifted from booze to gambling, and the mob as we know it came into being. When my grandfather was a young man, he was blocked from mainstream businesses, so he started a gambling operation, which grew into what one old-timer estimated was a $2 million-a-year enterprise.

6. The mob was crazy about American capitalism.

The men who founded the American mob admired the country’s titans of industry—people like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and J.P. Morgan. The fact that those robber barons were a law unto themselves, bending the government to their will, only made them more admirable. The mob saw capitalism for what it was in the days before regulation took hold—a ruthless free market enterprise—and loved it. They were barred from participating themselves because of their ethnicity, so they copied it as much as they could, including doing things like opening branches around the country. My grandfather and his brother-in-law opened a gambling franchise in my hometown, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. His brother-in-law had two aliases he occasionally used: Ford and Forbes, which I think speaks to his admiration for American capitalists.

7. The mob was everywhere.

Most people know the Chicago mob, the Philadelphia mob and of course the New York mob. But in its heyday, the mob spread to virtually every small- to medium-size city in the country. The Freedom of Information Act requests I filed with the FBI yielded accounts of mob activity in places as far-flung as Butte, Montana, and Anchorage, Alaska. In big cities the mob got into all kinds of activity—drugs, prostitution, garbage, construction—but in most smaller cities, it restricted itself to gambling. In my hometown, I found no references to drugs or prostitution, and in fact the old boys I interviewed said that my grandfather and his partner had a firm rule against getting involved in drugs. That was one of the main differences between small-town mobs and mobs operating in big cities. Another was the intimacy. Everyone above a certain age whom I interviewed in Johnstown knew what my grandfather was up to, even people who weren't involved with it themselves. That's because everyone played the numbers. People thought of the mob as a kind of public utility, providing entertainment to the masses.

8. A lot of people made their living from the mob.

You didn’t have to be in the mob to make a living from it back in the day. My grandfather and his partner ran a numbers game that virtually the whole town played, which employed about a hundred people. Some had day jobs and ran numbers on the side; others were full-time bookies. Most of them were essentially self-employed, and they paid a portion of their proceeds to “the boys.” Hundreds of others were likewise employed by the mob, directly or indirectly, in pool halls, bars and cafes. Numbers runners made the small-town mob a feature of midcentury American life. You could meet up and do business with them at your favorite hangout. Or they would even come to your door. Most people experienced it as a regular feature of the neighborhood. Or, you might say, as part of the American experience.

If you think you know about the mob just because you've seen The Godfather, think again. Russell Shorto, author of Smalltime, about the little-known history of mobs in small-town America—and in his own family—dishes on eight things about the mob that might be unbelievable if they weren't true.
RomanceHistorical Romance

Behind the curtain

Behind the Book by Suzanne Enoch

Suzanne Enoch’s Hit Me With Your Best Scot transports romance fans away from glittering ballrooms and polite country lanes and into the exciting and under-explored setting of the Regency-era theater. Enoch shares how she brought to life the backstage romance of actress Persephone Jones and Scottish aristocrat Coll MacTaggert.

In the 50ish books I’ve written, this is the first time I’ve featured an actor or actress as a main character. Having spent most of my writing time in the English Regency and doing the research that goes with that, there were names I’d heard of: Edmund Kean, Joseph Grimaldi, Fanny Abington, Sarah Siddons and, of course, the Drury Lane Theater, the one at Covent Gardens and the famous Lyceum.

For the tale of actress Persephone Jones and her romance with Coll MacTaggert, Lord Glendarril, I didn’t want to use an actual theater, so I invented the St. Genesius, a rival to the royal theater of Drury Lane. (Genesius is the patron saint of actors.) There were a couple of specific things I needed, including a small dressing room for an actress, catwalks galore, a backstage area filled with old props, backdrops and lots of places for a big Highlander to feel claustrophobic. All the backstage antics made using a fictional theater much simpler than trying to adapt the story to a real one.

I love doing research and probably have over 500 books on topics from the history of the lavatory to the scourge of gout, but for this story I needed to add a couple more to my shelves. (Yay, book shopping!) The Time Traveller’s Guide to British Theater: The First Four Hundred Years by Aleks Sierz and Lia Ghilardi gave me a good overview, while Rival Queens: Actresses, Performances, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater by Felicity Nussbaum gave me lots of specifics—and they both made me jealous of long titles. Oh, and I looked through Roaring Boys: Shakespeare’s Rat Pack by Judith Cook just because I wanted to.

In the course of writing, I’ve discovered that atmosphere is more important than specifics, but it’s also important to have a grasp of the topic so you’re just not flinging words like “blocking” and “downstage” and “stage right” around willy-nilly. That said, it was great fun to invent a close-knit acting troupe, have some theater rivalries and make some hopefully amusing use of “the Scottish play,” including one actor who refuses to say “Macbeth” even when the name appears in the text of the play.

I chose Macbeth as the play being performed during the course of the book because my hero, Coll, happens to be Scottish, and because of the supposed bad luck that frequently accompanies the performance of that particular play. That allowed me to keep the characters guessing over whether the mishaps that keep befalling Persephone Jones are simply because of the play, or if something more sinister is at work. Plus, all the male actors could be envious of how very fine Coll looked in a kilt.

There’s lots more to Hit Me With Your Best Scot than the theater, of course—including a cat named Hades, picnics in the park, fires, a masquerade ball, a lost heiress and a viscount who has 28 days to find a bride or he loses his fortune. The entire book was so fun to write, and I’m kind of wishing I’d given the MacTaggert family more than three Highlander brothers so I could keep writing in this warm, wild, witty world.

 

Author photo by Dinamariephotography.com

Suzanne Enoch shares how she brought to life a backstage Regency romance between actress Persephone Jones and Scottish aristocrat Coll MacTaggert.

Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

A stitch in time

Behind the Book by Hope Adams

Hope Adams’ historical mystery, Dangerous Women, has a particularly inspired setting: the Rajah, a British transport ship carrying almost 200 female prisoners to Australia in 1841. In this essay, Adams reveals how the quilt made by the Rajah’s occupants inspired her to write her debut novel.

In 2009, I went to see an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum. It was called “Quilts,” and the Rajah Quilt, sent all the way from Australia, was hanging there among the exhibits. It’s a very beautiful piece of work. Beside it was a card detailing its history. I learned that it was made by women convicts under the guidance of a matron, Kezia Hayter. I also discovered that by the end of the three-month-long voyage, Kezia was engaged to be married to the captain of the ship, Charles Ferguson.

I could hardly believe it. If this story were invented, instead of historically true, an editor would say, “That’s too much. That’s too easily ‘happy ever after.’” I decided to write a novel about it then, astonished that it hadn’t been done before, by someone else.

I began to research the story of this voyage. I knew that men were transported to Australia and Tasmania, but did not know that since the late 18th century women had also been sent to the other side of the world.

What must such a voyage have been like? How would it be to find yourself in the middle of the ocean, far from everything you knew and were used to, separated from all those you knew and loved? The crimes that led to transportation were mostly theft, burglary, receiving stolen goods and forgery. The women who committed them often did so at the behest of men. They had scarcely any rights. They were poor for the most part and their crimes were those associated with poverty. Alongside Elizabeth Fry, the famous prison reformer, the real Kezia Hayter had worked tirelessly to improve the lot of prisoners even before she set sail on the Rajah. Her creative oversight of the work on the Rajah Quilt undoubtedly qualifies her to be thought of as an artist.

What must the women convicts’ feelings have been? How would they deal with unfamiliar companions? Who could they trust? Would they make friends? Who would take against them? All the problems experienced by any new prisoner (see “Orange is the New Black”) were going to be much harder to bear on a ship in the middle of the ocean, far away from every single thing they’d been used to.

Conditions on board the convict ships were better by the time Kezia Hayter was appointed to be matron on board the Rajah, but they were still harsh. She was to oversee the welfare of the women and one of the things she did was organize some of the convicts to make what is now known as the Rajah Quilt.

My research was helped enormously by an old school friend of mine, Carolyn Ferguson. She is an expert on the Rajah Quilt and has written extensively about it. She also showed me pictures of every single piece of fabric used in the making of the patchwork, and I’ve used word pictures of these at the top of some chapters.

This voyage of the Rajah is very well-documented. We have the captain’s log and the surgeon superintendent’s log. Kezia Hayter kept a diary. We have a list of the convict women with their names and crimes written down carefully. I have not used those names, because the descendants of these women are still living in Australia and Tasmania. The 1841 voyage of the Rajah was a very peaceful one, without much illness and only one death, from natural causes. I added a thriller element to the story to make it more suspenseful. This is a novel and not a history, so I have also changed somewhat the timeline of the romance between Kezia Hayter and Charles Ferguson.

The idea that more people will learn about Kezia and the others who made the Rajah Quilt by reading Dangerous Women gives me enormous satisfaction. I really hope everyone enjoys it.

 

Author photo © Hope Adams.

Hope Adams reveals how a quilt made by the occupants of a British prison ship inspired her to write her debut historical mystery, Dangerous Women.

True Crime

On being conned (just a little)

Behind the Book by Tori Telfer

Tori Telfer reflects on the fine line between herself and the dazzling con artists she profiles in her raucous romp, Confident Women.

I spent most of 2019 perched on a stool in a coffee shop, “writing.” I was supposed to be writing a book about con women—con women in the court of Marie Antoinette and con women in Olympic-mad Beijing and con women who came down from Canada to wreak havoc on the tender hearts of Cleveland’s finest businessmen. But there were times when I clutched my almond croissant like a woman possessed and just sat there, staring into space, consumed by one burning question:

Have I ever been conned?

I had a mercenary reason for asking myself this question. I had been struggling with the introduction to my book, trying to cram every single thing there was to say about cons and women into a few punchy pages, and the resulting introduction read like a Google Drive document that was being edited by 10 people at once. I needed a better way in. I needed an anecdote—something to start the book off with a bang. And wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if the anecdote involved me being conned?

If I could just dredge up some suppressed memory about being cheated by a crook or swindled by a spiritualist, the introduction would practically write itself. Sure, I knew on an intellectual level that being conned was not something to wish for. The victims in my book were seriously damaged by their run-ins with con women. They were broke, despairing, ashamed, traumatized. Some of them were even dead. But I couldn’t help trawling through my memories anyway, searching for con artists at every turn, asking myself, Wait, was she a con artist? Was he?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Tori Telfer’s Confident Women.

There was the roommate who lied to me about . . . well, everything. She told me, for example, that she’d been given the phone number of the lead singer from Dashboard Confessional while sunbathing on an abandoned beach.

There was the man who convinced me that he needed money for a tow truck to come and get his broken-down truck. He sat with me on the curb, chatting about his tattoos, as my boyfriend took $40 out of an ATM behind us. We were entirely convinced that he was going to come back in the morning and repay us. He was even in costume as a construction worker. It was as though we had attended a piece of interactive theater, not a petty fleecing.

And then there was the time I chatted with a known con artist on Facebook Messenger. I had been researching her cons but ultimately decided not to include her in my book after our interaction. She told me that Roman Polanski wanted to make a movie about her life. I decided to leave her story up to him.

But none of these interactions felt compelling enough to make it into my book. Instead of the stuff of great introductions, they felt like the stuff of . . . life. Who among us hasn’t been lied to on Facebook Messenger, or had trouble with a roommate, or given money to someone who may have been pulling the wool over our eyes? Instead, I found a fantastic article from the 1970s about a con artist named Barbara St. James who changed her hair color a lot and used her as my opening anecdote. But afterward I was left with all those small stories from my past—those microswindles, if you will—wondering what to do with them.

“The world of the microswindle is not as clear-cut as one might hope.”

As much as the microswindles irritated me, I had to admit that I was a bit of a microswindler myself. I have lied more times than I care to admit. (Ask me about the time I made up the story of my first kiss.) In living rooms and on Facebook Messenger and while sitting on plenty of curbs, I have pretended to be a little bit different than the person I truly am. It didn’t seem fair, then, to interpret the interactions I’d had with microswindlers as examples of Me Being Good (or at least naive) and Other People Being Bad. I started thinking of them less as moral and more as transactional. They were a sort of payment, I thought—payment for the privilege of trusting other people.

If I am going to trust most of the people I interact with, then yes, every now and then I will have to fork over $40 for something shady or listen to an anecdote about Dashboard Confessional or Roman Polanski that probably isn’t true. And the payment isn’t entirely one-sided, either. I only chatted with the con artist on Facebook Messenger because I was thinking about writing about her—thinking about absorbing her life story into my book, like some sort of soul-sucking spirit. And as far as my old roommate and my friend on the curb? I have used them as anecdotes in conversation again and again. I am using them now. The world of the microswindle is not as clear-cut as one might hope.

The macroswindles that made it into my book were more clear-cut. After opening my book with Barbara St. James, I lined up the rest of my chapters—the woman from Beijing, the woman from Versailles, the woman from Canada and all the rest—and the resulting cast of characters was big, fascinating, compelling. Their tales were twisted and bizarre and sometimes confusing, but there was often some clarifying moment: a trial, say, or a prison sentence. Their stories were special, for lack of a better word—special enough to be worthy of a book. But their stories were just bigger, not other. They were still on the same spectrum as the woman on Facebook, as the guy on the curb, as my old roommate, as me.

 

Author headshot © Charlie Kirchen

Tori Telfer reflects on the fine line between herself and the dazzling con artists she profiles in her raucous romp, Confident Women.
RomanceHistorical Romance

Five underrated costume dramas for romance lovers

Behind the Book by Emily Sullivan

A dashing spy! A spinster determined to cause a scandal! Estranged childhood friends-to-lovers! Emily Sullivan’s debut historical romance, A Rogue to Remember, practically begs for a screen adaptation. So who better to give happily ever after fans a list of criminally underrated costume dramas?

My lifelong love of the costume drama began during childhood sleepovers at my grandma’s house where we would watch episodes of Masterpiece on PBS or movies she had either rented from the library or taped off the TV. These were usually British adaptations of various 19th century novels and I couldn’t get enough of the lavish settings, the period clothing, the crisp accents and the melodramatic storylines. I wanted my life to be filled with intrigue, forbidden romance and lots of longing glances. Instead, I’ve grown into a happily married and, perhaps, slightly boring adult who prefers their drama to be on the page or screen. And in times such as these, I’ve also come to value the comfort provided by a good Happily Ever After. However, there is a limit to the number of times one can watch Mr. Darcy’s terrible proposal or submit to yet another adaptation of Jane Eyre. So in that vein, here are a few underrated gems that combine some of my favorite elements of a good costume drama along with the promise of a HEA.

Gentleman Jack (2019)
Suranne Jones is absolutely mesmerizing in this HBO show based on the diaries of 19th century British landowner and LGBTQ+ trailblazer Anne Lister that everyone should be screaming about. Lister is a commanding presence as she stalks around Yorkshire in her top hat and tailcoat, refusing to conform to social norms and ruffling feathers wherever she goes, which makes the tender romance that develops between her and shy neighbor Ann Walker a particularly compelling example of opposites attract.

Vanity Fair (2018)
If you enjoyed the modern musical cues and eye-catching costumes of "Bridgerton," check out the most recent adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s classic novel which features songs from Kate Bush and The Cure to score the story of the social climbing but oh-so-entertaining Becky Sharp. While Miss Sharp is far too cynical to ever truly fall in love, the slow burn secondary romance between Amelia Sedley (played by “Bridgerton” actor Claudia Jessie) and William Dobbin (Johnny Flynn, the star of 2020's Emma) that unfurls over years will please romance lovers seeking a more traditional HEA.

Desperate Romantics (2009)
This BBC series follows the burgeoning careers and tumultuous love lives of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of radical painters who sought to challenge the stodgy Victorian art world. It also focuses on the real-life—and often scandalous—romances between Dante Gabriel Rosetti and model Elizabeth Siddons, and John Stuart Mills and the unhappily married Effie Gray. Rosetti is played to rakish perfection by a young Aidan Turner, perhaps best known for his shirtless scythe-wieding in “Poldark.”

Death Comes to Pemberley (2011)
Ok, so you’ve watched both major adaptions of Pride and Prejudice dozens of times and have strong opinions on the Firth vs. McFadden debate. But have you seen Mr. Darcy played by a super grumpy Matthew Rhys trying to solve a murder? If not, let me introduce you to this enjoyable miniseries based on the book by beloved British mystery writer P.D. James. It takes place several years after the events of Austen’s novel and gives viewers a window into the lives of Darcy and Elizabeth, who are happily married until Lydia and Wickham show up and cause trouble.

Read our interview with P.D. James about Death Comes to Pemberley.

North and South (2004)
Some may quibble with this entry being labeled as “underrated” given its cult-like status. But until Richard Armitage growling “Look back at me” is as well-known as the Darcy hand-flex, I contend that this miniseries based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel about a young woman moving to northern England and learning the importance of workers’ rights deserves more attention. It also features a borderline torturous slow burn romance that is entirely worth enduring for one of the best onscreen kisses I’ve ever seen.

There is a limit to the number of times one can watch Mr. Darcy’s terrible proposal or submit to yet another adaptation of Jane Eyre.

Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

Cholera in the time of COVID-19

Behind the Book by Anna Lee Huber

Anna Lee Huber always knew that her Lady Darby mysteries, which are set in the 1830s, would eventually reach the cholera epidemic of 1832. What she couldn’t have known was that she’d be writing A Wicked Conceit, in which sleuth Kiera Darby must solve a series of crimes in a disease-stricken Edinburgh, while the COVID-19 pandemic was affecting Huber’s own life.

Illness is nothing new, and neither are epidemics, for that matter. Yet very few of us living in the developed world have experienced a pandemic. We’ve read about them in history books, but we haven’t experienced the strain and uncertainty and immediacy of dealing with one—until now. 

When I first began writing the Lady Darby mysteries and decided to set the first book in August of 1830, I always hoped the series would last long enough for the characters to reach the year 1832. But while I was aware that my characters would eventually have to wrangle with the cholera epidemic that struck Britain beginning in late 1831, I had no idea I would be writing about it while enduring a new pandemic in our time—nor could I have predicted how my own personal experience with a pandemic would inform not only my understanding of the past but also our present predicament.

First I had to confront the methods used for controlling a pandemic and treating disease in 1832 and how they differ from those we utilize today. Our scientific and medical knowledge has progressed immensely in 188 years. For one, we now understand that viruses and infections like cholera are caused by germs and not by miasmas.

In 1832, miasma theory was the predominant medical theory held by the brightest minds of the age to explain how diseases spread. The belief was that bad, noxious air emanating from things like rotting corpses, marshy land areas and other putrid matter actually released vapors that caused people to fall ill. This “influence in the atmosphere” was also believed to afflict those who had weakened themselves by exposure to certain behaviors, places or “exciting causes.” These theories promoted the idea that only people of “irregular habits” should fear diseases like cholera. So in addition to avoiding noxious air, doctors prescribed preventatives that were supposed to keep you from contracting dreaded diseases.

One of the most useful measures was the establishment of the first Central Board of Health, which was based in London with branches in other cities throughout Britain. The World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control are the modern equivalents of these Boards of Health. Also, much like the regular televised coronavirus briefings held in 2020, the 1832 Central Board of Health published the Cholera Gazette to disseminate information to the public in an organized manner. Broadsides were posted that advised people of what foods to eat, how to clean themselves and their homes, and how to be mindful of the weather and the suitability of their clothing. Buildings in infected areas were even cleaned and whitewashed.

Quarantine measures were rarely recommended because cholera didn’t seem to spread by contagion but by personal contact. Contagionism was a precursor to germ theory, so it conflicted with the accepted concept of miasmatism. Quarantine was unlikely to have been effective anyway because the bacteria that causes cholera is not airborne like the virus that causes COVID-19. We now know that the reason cholera outbreaks kept recurring despite all the Central Board of Health’s efforts was that they failed to address the true source of the disease: open cesspools throughout communities.

It wasn’t until 1854, when Dr. John Snow was able to trace the source of a single cholera outbreak in London to a specific water pump, followed by a decadelong fight for germ theory to overtake miasma theory, that the real cause of cholera was pinpointed and accepted. Once significant sanitation improvements were made and uncontaminated water supplies were created, cholera became largely eradicated from many parts of the world, though areas without these two crucial elements still struggle with the disease.

While writing for an audience now familiar with the masking and social distancing protocols of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was important to communicate the differences in methodology between the medical community of 1832 and today. However, the feelings of dread, fear and misgiving that people experience during such times of crisis were as present in the past as they are today. The desire to make sense of such a calamity, to understand its cause and to draw some sort of meaning from it, was just as strong. 

Some people in 1832 found healthy ways to grapple with these issues and emotions, while others responded with anger and vitriol. Pamphlets from the time railed against people’s sinful natures and called on the government to change laws to save people from their own iniquities, correlating the concept of contagion with the idea that cholera was divine punishment for intemperance and immorality. Others even blamed doctors for allowing or causing people to die of cholera so their bodies would be available for dissection in anatomy schools. This fear ultimately resulted in violent cholera riots throughout Britain and Europe. 

But not everything that can be gleaned from our study of past pandemics is dire or disheartening. In fact, there is great comfort to be found in realizing we have been through difficult times like this before, and we’ll get through them again. Chaos and uncertainty may reign for a time, but humanity will eventually prevail. Science and social understanding will be advanced. We’ll emerge with a better understanding of the past, and hopefully of ourselves and others. As an author, I now have a greater empathy for the characters who inhabit my pages and the misfortunes I inflict on them.

Anna Lee Huber shares what it was like to write about the cholera epidemic of 1832 while the COVID-19 pandemic was affecting her own life.

Desire is supposed to burn

Behind the Book by Laekan Zea Kemp

Debut YA novelist Laekan Zea Kemp’s Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet, the story of two teens who must save a beloved family-owned restaurant when it’s threatened by a dangerous loan shark, is a moving story of first love, family and the power of resilience. Kemp reflects on the role that hunger has played in her own life as well as in her first book.

I’m peering over the edge of the counter, flour dusting the tips of my fingers, as I watch my grandmother roll out balls of dough into the shape of tortillas. She clicks on the burner beneath the comal, and I watch her pinch and flip each tortilla until it puffs up like a balloon.

Most of them go into a brown tortilla warmer, tucked in tight like they’re sleeping.

Except for the one she’s slathering with the rounded end of a stick of butter, which comes apart on the face of the tortilla, gold and glittering. She folds the tortilla once, then twice. A pocket to keep the butter from running out. It gets on my hands anyway, and on my face. It tastes like home.

“Can I have another one?” I ask.

She smiles. She always lets me have seconds.

*

My grandfather and I are idling in the Sonic parking lot, drinking coconut cream pie shakes through straws that aren’t big enough. Coconut is his favorite flavor. His sweet tooth is bigger than mine. He’s the reason I order dessert first, if I order it at all. Because life’s too short to wait.

He tells me, “I know I’m not supposed to have favorites. But you’re mine.”

We cheers with our Styrofoam cups.

*

I’m holding my hands over my ears while fireworks pop in kaleidoscope shapes above my head. I stare at the sky ablaze, wishing it were the kind of beauty that didn’t make a sound. My cousin and I are on the roof of their trailer house—a Fourth of July tradition.

Our parents are down below, buzzed and laughing as they set up the next line of fire. My uncle’s frying tripas next to the patio in a gas wok, the popping grease almost as loud as the fireworks.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Click here to read our review of Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet.

We crawl down when they’re ready, resting the tripas in warm corn tortillas before covering them in homemade salsa.

I eat too many tacos and groan.

“I told you you were going to give yourself a stomachache.”

My aunt pulls out a chilled strawberry shortcake from the fridge and I feel better.

*

The car’s headlights finally pool over the Sky-Vue entrance sign. There’s a double feature at the drive-in tonight—Mulan and The Truman Show. But we’re not here to see a movie.

We park in front of the snack bar, our shoes kicking up dust as we get out of the car. It smells like popcorn and pimiento cheese, and I picture spreading it across two warm tostadas before layering in a handful of cabbage, fresh white onions and seasoned ground beef, before finishing off the sandwich with a giant pickled jalapeno wedged between the two tostadas.

“Why are they called Chihuahuas?” I ask.

“Don’t know,” Mom says.

And I wonder for a second if that’s the reason so many white people think we eat dogs. But it doesn’t bother me enough to eat something else. We drove an hour and a half to get here. I’m eating a damn Chihuahua.

My dad orders 10 of them, and we eat them in the car with both hands, the paper wrappers torn in half and laid across every surface to catch the grease running down our chins. It takes practice to hold the tostadas just right so they don’t crack in half with that first bite. But the mess is part of the experience. You don’t eat a Chihuahua sandwich. You devour it.

This is why food matters. It’s a part of life that is safe to devour. A place where our passions can be unhinged. A moment of want that isn’t regulated by what someone else is willing to let us have.

Almost eight years after beginning work on my debut novel, Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet, I see how timidly I used to dream, and how the process of writing this book is what gave me permission to want with a fervor, to devour life for the delicious existence that it is.

My protagonists, Pen and Xander, take that journey, too. When another character asks Pen why she doesn’t try to follow her dream of baking, she thinks, “People from my neighborhood don’t take risks. We have dreams, sure. But the numerous threats involved in their pursuit keeps us from pining for things beyond our reach. We don’t shoot for the stars or even the moon. Instead, we pray for roots. Something to tie us down, to ensure that the places and the people we love are never taken away from us.”

My praying-for-roots moment came when I was 18 years old and bargaining with God to let my father live. He had cancer, and I hoped that I could entice God with a trade.

“I’ll never ask for anything else. Never expect another miracle. No shooting for the moon. No wishing on stars. If you just keep him here, rooted to this spot,” I prayed.

It turns out, God doesn’t bargain. Which means that shrinking myself and my dreams is not actually payment for anything. But there is a cost.

If I hadn’t finished this book, I wouldn’t have learned this lesson. I wouldn’t now be on the verge of a career helping to shape the Latinx literary canon for the next generation of young people. I wouldn’t be dreaming among the stars and wondering what lies beyond them.

Because there is so much.

So much I want to say and do and be. For me. For my community.

And this is just the beginning.

So no more praying for roots on stolen land. No more second-guessing the reason I was planted here in the first place. No more thinking that if my story only matters to some, it doesn’t matter at all.

It’s time to look up. To accept that desire is supposed to burn. To devour the joys of this world that has tried and failed so many times to devour us.

Photo of Laekan Zea Kemp courtesy of Diana Ascarrunz.

Debut YA novelist Laekan Zea Kemp’s Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet, the story of two teens who must save a beloved family-owned restaurant when it’s threatened by a dangerous loan shark, is a moving story of first love, family and the power of resilience. Kemp reflects on the role that hunger has played in her own life as well as in her first book.

NonfictionParentingMemoir

11 Things I Wish I’d Known About Writing 11 Years Ago

Behind the Book by Sarah Sentilles

In Sarah Sentilles’ memoir Stranger Care, she writes beautifully about risking love, vulnerability and loss by becoming a foster parent. With the same care and attention, she shares how to tend your creativity and help it feel safe enough to flourish.

1. Set an intention

Before I begin a new writing project, I set an intention. My intention for Stranger Care was to write a love letter to our foster daughter, Coco, that would mother her when I’m no longer allowed to. I wanted to write a book that would help create a world where she’ll be safe and loved, no matter where she lands. Whenever I got scared while writing, whenever I wondered, What am I doing? What difference does it make?, I returned to my intention. And it grounded me, kept me going.

I learned this practice from my friend and teacher Juliana Jones-Munson. The intention should be personal and healing, she told me, not external or dependent on other people. Your intention should remind you why you write, and it should be powerful enough that everything else—what critics say, whether you sell it—pales in comparison.

2. Welcome first thoughts

During a writing workshop I took with Nick Flynn through Tin House, Nick had us do timed, constraint-based writing exercises by hand. This helped me learn to welcome first thoughts, my initial ideas, and helped me practice trusting myself. I took another workshop with Carolyn Forché, who was Nick’s teacher, too, and in that workshop at the Hedgebrook writing retreat center, she taught me to embrace generative writing.

Before that, I was an incessant reviser. I’d get stuck on the first paragraph or the first few pages of my manuscript, and every day I sat down to write, I would rework those. But Carolyn said, “Don’t revise. Don’t go back. Go forward.” She told me to write for three hours a day, to write whatever came to my mind. It didn’t matter. Just keep writing. And her directions unleashed a torrent of words.

Now when I start a new project, I write for three hours every day, for weeks and weeks and weeks. Only after that kind of generative writing do I begin to understand what I might be working on. And only then do my ideas begin to trust me to write them. Only then do they show themselves. I picture my ideas huddled in a cave in the back of my mind, and they send out scouts to see what will happen. “Let’s see how she treats this idea,” they whisper to one another, and then they push one forward. “Will she bludgeon it? Call it stupid? Think it’s garbage? Or will she write it down, put it on the page, tend it?” Your creativity is watching how you treat your ideas. It will only send more when it seems safe.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Stranger Care.

3. Be a magpie

When you’re working on something, whether it’s a memoir or a novel or a painting, act like a magpie and collect everything that shines. Or, to use another bird metaphor, be a bowerbird. Collect whatever helps you build a structure that will draw some future reader to you. In The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp calls this “scratching.” She writes, “I’m digging through everything to find something. It’s like clawing at the side of the mountain to get a toehold, a grip, some sort of traction to keep moving upward and onward.”

Write down the lyric you can’t get out of your head. Take notes about the story you heard on the radio that you can’t stop thinking about. Collect the poems that make you cry. Everything is connected to what you’re working on, even if it seems unconnected. If you find yourself drawn to an article about whale song, write about it. If you keep thinking about the fact that birds are dinosaurs, write about it. One writer I work with told me her story was getting cramped, as if her writing room were shrinking, but when she gave herself permission to invite other ideas into her writing—how clouds form, the history of rice, how a bud knows when to bloom—she felt like she’d opened a window and let the world in.  

4. Writing is the remedy

My saboteur, the voice that tries to stop me from writing, is a wily shape-shifter. My saboteur will say anything to keep me away from the page—that I’m a fraud, that people will hate me if I write this book or that essay, that I’m wasting my time, that my ideas are boring and derivative. I’m writing fiction now, so my saboteur sounds different than she does when I’m writing nonfiction. She’s taking a new approach, insisting the plot idea I have is too dramatic, over the top, dumb. You don’t know what you’re doing, she says to me every morning when I sit down to write. Who do you think you are? But as soon as I recognize that voice for what it is, her power evaporates. As soon as I start to write, she’s gone. And the more regular my writing practice is, the quieter that sabotaging voice is. Not writing gives my saboteur an opening, but all I need to do to close that door is touch the page. 

“Your creativity is watching how you treat your ideas. It will only send more when it seems safe.”

5. You don’t know what you’re writing until you have a draft

You can’t know what’s garbage and what’s gold until you’ve written your way through a draft. You can’t know what belongs in a project and what doesn’t in the beginning either, because you don’t know what you’re writing yet. Be patient. Hold your story loosely. Wait for it to show you what it wants to be. Listen. Write down all your ideas. Save everything, all your strange little fragments and scenes. Editing won’t happen until later.

So many of my writing clients say they aren’t sure what they’re writing yet, but can I help them find an agent? This, too, is putting the cart before the horse. How can you find the right agent for your book if it isn’t written yet? For me, the goal is to write the best possible book you can write and then assemble the team that understands what you’re trying to do and can help you do it better. I’ve worked with so many people who sold a book proposal for one kind of book only to realize they were actually writing a very different book. They weren’t writing a commercial self-help book at all; they were writing an intimate memoir about their childhood. They weren’t writing a memoir; they were writing a page turner of a thriller. But they’re stuck with a team who wants the book they proposed, not this other thing that their art has become. Let your art lead the way. Wait for it. The timing will be right and perfect.

6. Keep your writing to yourself

When I first started writing, I wanted to show everyone every new thing I wrote, like right away. I’d write a paragraph and show it to someone, anyone, to see what they liked and what they hated. But now I don’t show anyone what I’m writing until I’ve taken it as far as I can on my own, which sometimes means I don’t show anyone my writing for years. And then, when I think it might be ready, I show my agent, Molly Friedrich. And that’s pretty much it until we think the book is ready to be sold.

At its heart, writing means learning to listen for your voice—or for the voice that wants to come through you. That voice is hard to hear when you’re letting other readers and critics chime in all the time. Be monogamous with your writing. Keep it to yourself.

 “Our ideas come from deep within, and they come from the stars. Treat these visitors with love.”

7. Your story chose you

It occurred to me recently that when we worry our story idea isn’t good enough, it’s disrespectful to the idea. Thinking we’re not good enough to write it is also impolite. Our ideas come from deep within, and they come from the stars. Treat these visitors with love. Tend them.

Draw Your Weapons took me 10 years to write, and during one of those years, I complained to a friend, the writer Alice Dark, about how sick I was of working on that project, how ready I was to be done with it. “Sometimes we have to become the person our book needs us to be before we can finish it,” she said. Sometimes that becoming happens fast. Sometimes it takes a long time. But your story idea chose you. (Elizabeth Gilbert writes powerfully about this in Big Magic.) That idea knows you have everything you need to become the writer it needs.

8. Write first thing

I do my best writing in the morning, first thing. I don’t check my email or social media, and I don’t look at the news until I’ve done my writing. Sometimes I “forget” and check my phone when I’m still in bed, and on those days, I might as well put my brain in a barrel and light it on fire.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport makes a compelling argument about the need for undistracted, focused time for thinking and writing and problem-solving. It doesn’t happen when we multitask, or check email, or look at Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or whatever social media platform sucks up your time. I’m addicted to this stuff, and I know it impedes my creativity. When I step away from this never-ending stream of distraction, I can feel my mind reset. I can feel my internal emotional life settle. My thoughts and my time belong to me again.

Writing first thing is also connected to boundary-setting. We tend to think of boundaries as selfish, but really they’re generous. When you close your studio door or say no to an obligation or block out time for your art, you give other people permission to protect their time and space to follow their creative dreams. And if you’re a parent, your boundaries give your children the freedom to set boundaries, too. It shows them they can protect what’s important to them.

9. To turn toward your writing is to turn toward the world—and change it

I’ve spent a lot of time and energy believing that if I pay attention to what’s happening in the world, my attention can somehow make terrible things not happen. But it turns out I don’t have much control over what politicians do. Or corporations. Or governments. Or viruses. Or courts. But I do have control over what I write and dream and imagine. I have control over what kinds of activism and resistance I engage in. And I have control over where I put my energy. I can choose to put my creativity toward the kind of world I want to help bring into being.

So, experiment. Stay away from the news and see what happens when you don’t absorb all that panic and fear. I’m not saying don’t pay attention at all—but I am saying choose a different kind of attention. In A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders writes that the aim of art is to ask big questions: 

How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel at peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?

“It turns out I don’t have much control over what politicians do. . . . But I do have control over what I write and dream and imagine.”

To write well is to care for the world and the beings we share it with. To write well is to learn to live in the world in more just and life-giving ways. Matthew Salesses puts it another way in Craft in the Real World. “Craft is never neutral,” he writes. “Craft is the cure or injury that can be done in our shared world when it isn’t acknowledged that there are different ways that world is felt.” He continues, “Craft is support for a certain worldview. . . . Revision must also be the revision of craft. To be a writer is to wield and be wielded by culture.” Writing is political work.

10. Write through the hard stuff, even while it’s happening

When it became clear that our foster daughter Coco would be reunified with her biological mother, and when we’d have hard days in court or with the social worker or just walking around with our broken hearts, my husband, Eric, would look at me and my puffy eyes and say, “Go write.”

“I can’t,” I’d say.

“Go write,” he’d say again and point to my desk. I’m grateful to him. I’m grateful for those raw pages. I wrote Stranger Care in real time, and working on it brought Coco close, even when she wasn’t. I felt so helpless—I feel helpless still—but I find some agency in arranging words on a page, even when those words are, “She is gone.”

11. Your project is well supported

We don’t write alone. We write for the generations who came before us, and we write for the generations who will follow. One of the women who participated in the WORD CAVE, a four-day virtual writing retreat I offer, told me, “I write because my grandmother couldn’t.” What more powerful reason could there be?

Read our starred review of Stranger Care here.

With care and attention, Sarah Sentilles shares how to tend your creativity and help it feel safe enough to flourish.
RomanceHistorical Romance

Dancing our way into a colorful Regency

Behind the Book by Vanessa Riley

Regency romances with diverse casts such as Netflix’s “Bridgerton” may be perceived as merely a laudable fantasy, but the reality is that the time period was far less lily-white than many historical romances acknowledge. Daniel Thackery, the titular nobleman in Vanessa Riley’s An Earl, the Girl, and a Toddler, is Black, and was inspired by real people of color who were elevated to similar positions by the prince regent, George IV. In this essay, Riley explores the many fascinating layers of Daniel’s experience as a Black aristocrat.

In 1982, cartoonist Bob Thaves wrote a memorable line in his “Frank and Ernst” syndicated strip: “Sure he [Fred Astaire] was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, backwards . . . and in high heels.”

It’s a sexist quote humorously offered to disclose what we don’t often talk about, the fact that two wonderfully attired peers whirl about a ballroom floor, spinning with that look of falling in love—shimmering eyes, bated breath—but the world doesn’t see them as equals.

The melanated set did exist in this world of finery built on exquisite manners and wealth from colonization, where gossip could spread from an impertinent look.

When writing people of color in the aristocracy, I think of Thaves’ quote. The melanated set did exist in this world of finery built on exquisite manners and wealth from colonization, where gossip could spread from an impertinent look. One could be vilified for being on the wrong balcony with the wrong person or getting caught falling in love with the wrong peer at the wrong time.

Imagine a couple dancing to a reel composed by a famous violinist. The couple is touching, lovingly in each other's arms, spinning around a leased, luxurious ballroom. Thousands of scenes from books may have entered your head, but did any include the renowned Black musician George Bridgetower or the rich rooms of the well-connected Black proprietor Jack Beef?

Now make the couple interracial, or Black, or Asian, or LGBTQ+ or with a visible disability. Whether we want to admit it or not, the story changes. Different sensibilities come into our well-conditioned, biased minds. We can’t help it. We’re born that way.

In An Earl, the Girl, and a Toddler, Daniel Thackery is one of the prince regent's favorites. It is a fact that Prinny elevated exceptional people of color, investing in their careers and allowing them access to his social world. It is also a fact that wealthy people of color attended balls, held balls and were outfitted in all the trappings money could buy.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of An Earl, the Girl, and a Toddler.

We originally met Daniel, now Lord Ashbrook, as a reserved barrister and nephew to the Widow’s Grace mastermind Lady Shrewsbury in A Duke, the Lady, and a Baby. In An Earl, the Girl, and a Toddler the second book of the Rogues and Remarkable Women series, we see him moving in all his responsibilities. He’s a widowed single dad. He’s trying to keep his aunt and her women out of jail. He works in the prince regent's courts. His hands are full, but he deals with the imperfect world as it is.

Daniel must contend with those who don’t like his ascension. He must ignore the glares of some who don’t want him at the balls daring to dance with a member of the ton. He must share the chalked floor with those who refuse to acknowledge his humanity and hope his ratafia is watery.

Things as simple as making sure his cuffs are pressed and his cravat is perfectly tied feed into his anxiety. He understands that are people waiting for the slightest appearance of wrong to allow that niggling feeling, that suspicious notion of his character and motives, to convict him in their minds.

Guilty.

They will cheer if he’s scandalized. For some of his peers, it’s wrong for Daniel to be here, to be anywhere, to breathe.

And our hero knows this. He’s trying to build a better world for his little girl. He has hope. Breathe.

Did I mention the ones who love him? He’s an earl, right? Daniel is not a victim. He is a man who is a party to a system built for men. He has money and power within a patriarchy that rewards power.

Daniel is smart. He’ll not do life alone. He refuses to be one speck of color on a snowy canvas. He has good friends who share his ethnicity, his interests or both. They help him laugh and remember that he’s bright and loved. They’ll help him pick out his dancing slippers with an inch of Regency heel.

I’ve given you a glimpse of some of the things I think about when I write about people of color intersecting with the aristocracy. By acknowledging the knee-jerk discomfort that may arise from seeing Black characters in these roles while still surrounding the characters in the joy of being who they are and loving the skin they bring to the ballrooms, the world expands.

In this context, we learn about people and enjoy differing perspectives without the othering or painful narratives long associated with history and Black people and people of color. That’s a ballroom all can visit for a celebration of dance, dexterity and killer shoes.

Author Vanessa Riley explores the many fascinating layers of her latest hero’s experience as a Black aristocrat, which is more rooted in historical truth than many readers would expect.

Nonfiction

How Elizabeth Letts discovered the freedom of the open road—in the midst of lockdown

Behind the Book by Elizabeth Letts

The Ride of Her Life tells the story of Annie Wilkins’ epic horseback road trip from Maine to the West Coast in 1954. As author Elizabeth Letts finished writing her book in 2020, she learned from Annie how to find contentment and freedom even during quarantine.

Annie Wilkins inspired me. In 1954, 62 years old, penniless and unwell, she set off from Maine on the cusp of winter believing she could ride her horse all the way to California. When I decided to write about her, I thought I’d found a path to escape just like she had. I imagined myself gliding down endless highways as I did research for my book, freed from the concerns of daily life. I’d be Annie, unfettered, alone, no cell phone in my pocket relentlessly calling me to the things of this world. Or at least, that’s how I pictured it would go.

And no wonder escape was my fantasy. I’m a member of the “sandwich generation,” juggling the demands of a frail, aging parent and a growing teenage son. My life is punctuated by ordinary things—grocery shopping and doctors’ appointments, kids’ sports practices and calling the plumber. Most of the time, I find it hard to leave town even for a few days. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Ride of Her Life.

Despite all this, I geared up to investigate Annie’s epic adventure, a journey that I had already planned to retrace inch by inch—if I could just find the time. In 2017, I started to follow Annie’s route in chunks. Using vintage maps for guidance, I sought out a landscape that no longer existed but whose traces nonetheless remained in plain sight if you knew where to look—filling stations with a couple of pumps out front, roadside diners and motor courts, Main Streets of small towns. America as it was, just on the cusp of being transformed by the massive interstate highway system. Each time I ventured out, I was caught up in the romance of the vast American landscape. Each time, I hurried home before I was quite finished, wishing I had more time to stay on the road.

I confess I envied Annie’s freedoms—a woman on her own, with her horse and dog for company, doing precisely and only what she pleased. I often wished I, too, could leave everything behind—the instant messages, the emails, the work and home responsibilities that modern technology allows us to bring along so that we never truly get away. 

“As I spun the results of my research into a story, my own vista grew smaller. But Annie’s world got bigger and bigger as she traveled to the wide-open spaces of the West.”

The Ride of Her Life was mostly complete when, in late February 2020, I decided to squeeze in another trip. I didn’t know it would be the last one—but as every reader now knows, the world was about to change. Within a month, my son was sent home for online schooling; my older daughters both moved home. The quiet sanctuary where I did my writing was filled with people jostling for desk space, fridge space and bandwidth. I moved my laptop from my home office into my bedroom and immersed myself in what solitude I could find.

Throughout the next months, as I spun the results of my research into a story, my own vista grew smaller. But Annie’s world got bigger and bigger as she traveled from the wooded confines of New England to the wide-open spaces of the West. And it seemed that the longer I stayed in my own home, the better I understood Annie. She was a single woman, short and square, working class and proud of it, divorced and with no children at a time when women were judged mostly by their relation to others—mother, wife, widow. Annie Wilkins never went anywhere or did much of anything except work in the kinds of jobs available to a woman with a sixth grade education. She was trapped in a life that was pretty much inevitable for her. She had no means of escape.

“The binds I had chafed at were less like boundaries and more like the yellow lines on the highway—not walls to keep me confined but guidelines to keep me straight on the road.”

And how did she respond to that? Unfailingly, for the first 62 years of her life, she just kept going. Not a word of complaint. She adopted her father’s motto—“Keep going and you’ll get there”—which is helpful for a journey, even if it’s the ordinary journey of life.

As I wrote about Annie’s life and travels, I began to perceive that I hadn’t really been stuck before. The binds I had chafed at were less like boundaries and more like the yellow lines on the highway—not walls to keep me confined but guidelines to keep me straight on the road.

Yes, Annie’s journey was epic, but the things she carried—her pluck and determination, her faith in the essential goodness of the world and her love for her animal companions—were all things she possessed before she started. And so, as I sat at home with my laptop, slowly growing used to the restricted world we’ve been living in, I learned that the truest journeys of our lives take place in our hearts. That’s the lesson Annie taught me. And it was a lesson I needed to learn.

 

Author photo credit © Ted Saunders

Writing about an epic horseback road trip from 1954 helped author Elizabeth Letts find contentment in the pandemic world of 2020.

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