Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
FictionInspirational FictionHistorical Fiction

Inspirational novels for spring 2025

Set during World War II, Ace, Marvel, Spy and Midnight on the Scottish Shore chronicle the stories of two women whose lives are testaments to the power of courage during times of upheaval.
Set during World War II, Ace, Marvel, Spy and Midnight on the Scottish Shore chronicle the stories of two women whose lives are testaments to the power of courage during times of upheaval.
FictionPoetry

Scorched Earth

Tiana Clark’s searching second poetry collection, Scorched Earth, embraces “too muchness” as a pure expression of the politicized body, history and art.
Tiana Clark’s searching second poetry collection, Scorched Earth, embraces “too muchness” as a pure expression of the politicized body, history and art.
Previous
Next

All Fiction Coverage

Filter by genre
Fiction

Survival City

Behind the Book by Adrienne Sharp

“Whether they ever loved her, thought about her or missed her is unknown. What is known is that she loved them, thought about them, missed them. And she still does. And there’s nothing any of us who love her can do about that.”

The Magnificent Esme Wells by Adrienne Sharp transports readers to Hollywood and Las Vegas in the 1930s and ’40s, where an irrepressible, self-reliant girl named Esme grows up surrounded by the imperfect and unfulfilled dreams of her parents. It’s a vivid and heartbreaking story inspired by the author’s own family history, and here, Sharp traces her Los Angeles roots to the late 1930s and shares the story of her own mother’s survival.

My mother was the gorgeous daughter of two gorgeous, careless people who did not want to live ordinary lives.

I have three pictures of my grandfather. In one, he has his arm slung over my grandmother’s shoulder—she looks like a flapper, with marcel waves in her hair and bows on her shoes, and he looks like a somewhat sleazy man of the world—of some world, anyway. Full of moxie. My grandfather came from a family of Jewish gamblers who played the numbers and bet on the horses at Pimlico, and when the great Los Angeles racetracks of Del Mar, Santa Anita and Hollywood Park were built in the late 1930s, he and my grandmother moved west to follow the races my grandmother called “the sport of kings.” Because my mother was by then school-age and would therefore be a problem to deal with in their new exciting, peripatetic life, they left her behind in a Baltimore orphanage, the Daughters of Hannah, without a word to anyone. I’m not sure how long it took the rest of the family to discover that my grandparents had disappeared from one coast only to reappear on another. It was probably just a couple of days. But to my mother, her time in that orphanage, where she wandered, bewildered and mute, felt like an eternity. She can still exactly recall the sight of one of her uncles walking through the door to retrieve her. In fact, when he was on his deathbed, decades and decades later, she whispered to him what she had said to him many times before, “Thank you for finding me, for saving me.”

Unnervingly for my mother, her parents did not vanish totally and completely for another 15 years. They would occasionally pop back into her life now and then—to take her from the stability of one aunt’s house or another and into chaos. One year, her father took his little family to live in the projects that were built right after World War II, where the walls dripped with moisture and my mother developed pneumonia and impetigo, and where neighbor kids would throw mud at my grandmother’s laundry hung out on the line and shout, “Christ killers,” because, of course, my grandparents were the only Jewish family in the projects, and despite all this my grandfather still thought the projects were the greatest thing because they were rent-free. He was always looking for an angle, an inside tip, a scam he could take advantage of, a bonanza of some sort.

My second photograph of my grandfather comes from the period when they lived in Los Angeles. In it, my grandfather and my uncle—for my grandparents had a second child after the war—are walking a downtown Los Angeles street. It’s probably 1946. My grandfather looks troubled now, confidence gone, hairline receding, older than his age, though he couldn’t have been more than 35, and my uncle, maybe 6 or 7, strides beside him in tall cowboy boots and suspenders, his own face clouded, uncertain. They had a difficult, unsettled, constantly uprooted life out West, a life filled with hotels (my grandmother thought hotel-living was glamorous, Hollywood-like) and movie magazines and evictions and horses and tip sheets my grandfather forced my uncle to sell outside the gates of Hollywood Park on Inglewood Boulevard, and lots of hot dogs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and I cannot imagine, given the proximity of Las Vegas and its desert postwar boom, that my grandparents would not have gone there to gamble, if not to live for a while. In all this tumult, my uncle rarely attended school, a truancy he relished as a kid and rued as an adult. He was left practically illiterate by it. He finally escaped his life with his parents and reinvented himself by joining the Army, and to this day he will not utter their names.

Eventually, my mother and her brother pieced together their histories, the mutual and the solo of it, the back and forth from Baltimore to Los Angeles, his life versus hers. She envied his life with their parents, despite their screaming rows and their constant packing of the bags. She had not had enough of them, as my uncle had, and she wanted to know where they were, what had become of them. But because he had endured his parents’ company for so long, my uncle had no interest in their lives that had gone on and on without him. In fact, he told my mother if they ever came to his door, he would shut it in their faces. He envied my mother’s life with the aunts, her relative stability, her education. My mother had been a double major in chemistry and biology, achieved through the aid of a tottering tower of scholarships that covered every last thing, including her cap, tassel and gown. And after graduation, though the pediatrician my mother worked for part-time offered to put her through medical school and then to make her a partner in his practice—people often stepped forward to offer my mother amazing things—she declined. She had met my father, she felt she could no longer live off the charity of her aunts and uncles—one of my uncles had her take her bedding out of the den that was her little ad hoc bedroom whenever he wanted to watch a movie on the television and had her sleep on the living room couch and one of my aunts, when my mother begged her for a purse, covered a Kleenex box in wrapping paper and gave that to her to use—and she wanted to create a family of her own, a stable, solid confection of a husband and three children and house in the suburbs, exactly what her parents did not want and exactly what she did. As did my uncle.

She got it. She got it all. He did not.

My mother saw her mother for what would be almost the last time in a Baltimore department store—Hutzler’s to be exact. It was the night before my mother’s wedding. Apparently, my grandparents had dropped back into town again. For a moment or two. Her parents had not been invited to the wedding, of course, had no idea about it, had no known address, but her mother had a word of advice for her: “Keep your bangs. You look like Audrey Hepburn.”

After that, no one saw or heard from my grandparents for 50 years.

All that time, my mother hoped that they thought of her, hoped that they would remember her in some way, perhaps leave her something in their wills, let her know that despite everything, they had loved her.

Ten years ago, she tracked down her parents. They had, ultimately, it seemed, remained in Los Angeles. They had been placed, somehow, in a Medi-Cal nursing home. My grandfather had died without a note, a phone call or a word to his two children, and had been buried with strangers in a California veteran’s cemetery. He had served during World War II. Whatever belongings he once had had vanished. My grandmother was alive, overtaken by dementia, with no idea who my mother was when she came to visit. She also didn’t understand that her husband was dead. She thought he had run off with another woman. The story of her life with him had to have been a difficult one. When my mother told her her name, my grandmother responded that she had a daughter with that name. But when told that my mother was in fact her daughter, my grandmother, whatever she understood of this, responded that she didn’t want to talk about what she called “family matters,” which must have been my grandparents’ defense against quarrels between the two of them over what they had done or against the questions of strangers: Where are you from? Where are your children, your sisters, your brothers?

Children, sisters, brothers were all accounted for. They weren’t the ones who had vanished.

My mother sent her mother the sweaters and movie magazines she asked for. Not long after this, on a call to the nursing home, my mother learned that her mother had died a few weeks ago and that her body had been stashed in a county freezer. At some future time in some Los Angeles location where the indigent were interred, my grandmother’s remains would be buried.

No remembrance for my mother—no ring, no bracelet, no letter.

And so ended my grandparents’ great adventure.

But not my mother’s love for them. Because she could not bear to let my grandmother endure the bleak fate the state of California had assigned her, she made the necessary arrangements for my grandmother’s remains to be sent to the Veterans Cemetery in Riverside, California, where she was buried with my grandfather. After all, my mother said, they should be together in death. They gave up so much to be together in life. Whether they ever loved her, thought about her or missed her is unknown. What is known is that she loved them, thought about them, missed them. And she still does. And there’s nothing any of us who love her can do about that.

Because I’m a writer, my mother wanted me to write her story, the story of a young girl who was abandoned by her parents, who survived that abandonment and who, at the end of the novel, stood by her parents’ graveside. My mother has actually not yet seen her own parents’ graves. She’s not well enough anymore to travel. It’s a very nice gravesite. My brother took a picture of it. My last photograph of my grandparents. I will never go the cemetery. I’m like my uncle. Shut the door in their faces. And I could not write that novel. What I did write was a novel about an absolutely magnificent woman who uses her mother’s beauty and her father’s charm and her very own exquisite intelligence and drive to make her way through the world my grandparents lived in and my mother never set foot, a world anathema to her but sweet honey to them—the racetracks and casinos and mobsters and boozers of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. And my character makes a success of herself, despite her parents’ best efforts to wreck everything around them, much as my mother did. My original title for the novel was Survival City. But I changed that, too.

My mother was the gorgeous daughter of two gorgeous, careless people who did not want to live ordinary lives. I have three pictures of my grandfather. In one, he has his arm slung over my grandmother’s shoulder—she looks like a flapper, with marcel waves in her hair and bows on her shoes, and he looks like a somewhat sleazy man of the world, of some world, anyway.

FictionComic Fiction

On ‘Limelight’: Broadway drama and family comedy

Behind the Book by Amy Poeppel

“Most mothers with teenage children would be quite well-suited to wrangling the messy lives of spoiled, young celebrities into perfect order.”

The new novel from Small Admissions author Amy Poeppel puts on a show for readers. Limelight is a hilarious melding of family drama and the world of Broadway. Here, Poeppel walks us through her love of the theater and tells us why a mom would be the best person to manage a spoiled pop star.

I was 10 years old when I saw my first West End show at the Adelphi Theatre in London. That probably sounds more glamorous than it really was; my dad was working in Copenhagen for the summer, and my parents, two sisters and I left our small apartment and took a vacation, driving a hundred hours through Bremen, Brussels and Bruges, all the way to England. On the second day of this adventure our car was broken into and our suitcases stolen, leaving us with nothing but the clothes we were wearing. Somewhere in Germany, I got stung by a wasp. I threw up a lot on that trip, a few times in the Volvo and again on the ferry (with a lovely view of the Cliffs of Dover) and one final time in the stodgy parlor of our London bed and breakfast. My family was mortified.

The trip was, for the most part, a flop, but seeing the musical Irene was a high point of my young life, and it stuck with me ever since. I remember the fun of matching the letters and numbers on our theater tickets to the tiny, brass plaques on the velvet flip seats in the balcony, and as the dark, heavy curtain went up, I clapped until my hands smarted. (My sisters shushed me when I didn’t stop.) I was enchanted by the elegant costumes and the sets depicting New York City, and—most of all—I loved being transported into the life of poor, sweet Irene, who herself was being transported into a life of glamour and riches completely unknown to her before. The entire production was a thrill.

About 10 years later, during my junior year abroad, I was invited by a handsome Brit to see Les Misérables at the Palace Theatre, not far from the Adelphi where Irene had played. To make a good impression on this young man and on ’80s British society in general, I dressed up for the occasion. We had great seats in the orchestra, and not long after the house lights dimmed and the musical began, I found myself tearing up during “I Dreamed a Dream” when Fantine was forced into a life of prostitution. I got even more distraught during “Castle on a Cloud” when poor Cosette imagined how much better her life would be if only she had a loving mother. By the time Éponine sang “On My Own” in act two, I was weeping. People turned to stare as I blew my nose in a soggy tissue and wiped my cheek on my date’s sleeve. The show was so moving and sad, and I was consumed by the injustice that was heaped on the peasants of France, awed by the selflessness of the characters and grief-stricken by the perfectly staged tragic deaths. War! Self-sacrifice! Humanity! Unrequited love!

Speaking of unrequited love, my date never called me again, and yet that in no way dampened my enthusiasm for Les Mis. Back in the States, I bought a cassette tape of the soundtrack and sang “One Day More” in my dorm room loudly, unabashedly and completely off-key (presumably to the dismay of fellow Claflin Hall residents).

Theater began to play a bigger part in my life after that. I met my husband when we were both cast in a college production of The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard, playing a married couple (who got divorced during Act One, though our real marriage is still going strong 25 years later). I worked as an actress in Boston regional theater for several years after college, so I found out what it’s like to be in that spotlight, to memorize lines until they are ingrained and to keep going even when things go wrong on stage. (In Crimes of the Heart, I was playing the part of Babe, and the moment came in the second act when I was supposed to answer the phone, but it didn’t ring, marking the longest 12 seconds of my life.) I also relished the backstage camaraderie, the long, arduous rehearsals, the late-night drinks with cast mates and crew, and the jitters and exhilaration of opening night. I felt the satisfaction of glowing reviews and the mortification of terrible ones.

Although I stopped acting in my late 20s when I turned my attention to teaching drama and literature to high school students and parenting my own children, I continue to go to plays whenever I get the chance (and read them when I don’t). I live in New York, so there’s always a show I’m itching to see. And I still make a scene from my seat in the house, whether it’s laughing in The Play That Goes Wrong, crying and feeling anxious in Dear Evan Hansen, covering my eyes during American Psycho, getting goose bumps in The Band’s Visit or Come from Away or staring star-struck at Tony Award winners like Denzel Washington in Fences or Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard. Being at the theater is always an absorbing experience for me; I’m all in, every time.

One recent theatrical phenomenon I have been intrigued by is the casting of big-name celebrity singers in Broadway shows. I started to wonder how classically trained, experienced actors feel about the pop stars who sometimes take the leads in today’s musicals. Are they welcoming? Or are they wary? Do they feel that such casting adds value to a production, or do they view it as a cheapening of the institution of theater? My short career in theater taught me the importance of actors working in an ensemble, and it occurred to me that if a narcissistic star, especially someone who is disrespectful to the process or to the rest of the cast and crew, were to take a big role in a play, it could be a nightmare for the other actors and a catastrophe for the production. As a writer, I felt right away that there was a story there I wanted to tell.

I decided to write a book that combines the three passions of my life—New York City, theater and family—while entertaining an unfounded belief I’ve had for years: that most mothers with teenage children would be quite well-suited to wrangling the messy lives of spoiled, young celebrities into perfect order. I’ve often felt I could convince a child star to make good decisions and behave in a respectful manner (while I’d also remember to schedule his or her teeth-cleaning and dermatology appointments). Writing Limelight was a marvelous opportunity to imagine applying the skills I’ve acquired raising my kids to the role of managing a difficult teenage pop star. The main character, Allison Brinkley, mother and new Manhattanite, gets a front-row seat to the staging of a Broadway musical based on Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 film Limelight. Teen crooner and heartthrob Carter Reid is woefully unprepared to step into his first serious acting role, and Allison discovers she is in a unique position to help salvage his floundering career as the young star faces the biggest challenge of his privileged life. As she tries to take control of Carter’s wildly undisciplined existence, Allison tackles the school crises, break-ups and hormones in her own household, as she and her family find their place in the heart of New York City.

 

Photo credit George Baier

I was 10 years old when I saw my first West End show at the Adelphi Theatre in London. That probably sounds more glamorous than it really was; my dad was working in Copenhagen for the summer, and my parents, two sisters and I left our small apartment and took a vacation, driving a hundred hours through Bremen, Brussels and Bruges, all the way to England. On the second day of this adventure our car was broken into and our suitcases stolen, leaving us with nothing but the clothes we were wearing.

FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

D.C. drama inspired by a real campaign widow

Behind the Book by Aimee Agresti

Aimee Agresti’s first novel for adults (she’s also the author of the Gilded Wings YA series) is a scintillating escapist story centered on a fictional 2016 presidential election and five “campaign widows,” women and men whose significant others have been sucked up by the political arena. Campaign Widows is big drama in an ultra-fun package, made all the more thrilling by Agresti’s insider knowledge—as she was once a campaign widow herself.

The idea for Campaign Widows—my novel about a group of friends left behind in Washington, D.C., when their significant others are out on the campaign trail—was indeed first sparked by my own experience, even though the events in the book really are fiction. (Thank goodness none of this drama happened in real life! Well, except for one scene involving the Secret Service scooping up a child running wild at the White House on Halloween . . . which is based on my son. But otherwise, yes, all fiction here.)

I’ve been a “campaign widow” three times, all during Senate elections, and I’ll never forget that day a million years ago when my husband, Brian—who was then just my boyfriend—came home from work as a Senate staffer on Capitol Hill and proudly declared that he would be joining his first campaign—to help re-elect a Louisiana senator. He would be shipping out to New Orleans immediately and living there for several months. How fabulous! I’d never been to the Big Easy, and it sounded so exciting! I imagined weekends spent sipping Hurricanes on Bourbon Street and looked forward to, at last, truly grasping the difference between étouffée and gumbo—I was a freelance magazine writer, so I had time on my hands. Unfortunately, Brian quickly snuffed out my plans: While he appreciated the support, he would be working round the clock and would see me in November after the election. (It actually ended up being December. . . . There was a run-off!)

I didn’t know anything about campaigns at the time, and since I’m a writer, I tend to have an overly active imagination, so I had all these crazy ideas of what he was heading into. I imagined a Venn diagram where Raucous Spring Break intersected with High School Debate Team, some kind of wild camp for intellectuals. It also set my mind off running in scary, extreme directions. (For instance, what if he never came back?!)

Though I didn’t much understand the pressure cooker he was entering when I bade him a teary goodbye at the airport, I quickly came to appreciate all that goes into that kind of job. It’s grueling, relentless work. Living and dying by poll numbers. Eating, sleeping and breathing this shared goal of getting your candidate elected. It was also a great adventure and bonding experience with colleagues. I was incredibly proud of him.

But of course, back home, life goes on . . . which is how the novel began percolating. The book lived in my head—and in the Notes app of my phone, an endless file cluttered with brainstorms and character sketches and flashes of scenes and snippets of dialogue—for years before I ever truly began writing the manuscript. (I don’t start until I have everything figured out; I’m a planner like that.) I worked on other books and projects. I soaked up Washington life. I absorbed politics by osmosis. But I waited—I just had to find the story first—because luckily, the story wasn’t mine. My widowhood was wonderfully devoid of drama: The senator won; Brian came back to work on the Hill; we got married; he joined another campaign and then another.

But I kept coming back to the idea of what it might have been like if just the opposite had happened. What it might feel like to be left behind and find your relationship in complete turmoil. All the things that could go wrong, how an election could wreak havoc on partnerships in a gazillion different ways. And how, if you found yourself in the middle of that kind of emotional rug-pulled-out-from-under-you upheaval, you might reach out to anyone, a complete stranger, who also understood that same intense world that you were orbiting. I envisioned vastly different people united in this ultra-exclusive kind of sorority. It eventually hit me that what I wanted to write was really a book about unlikely friendships.

So I dreamed up a cast of characters who might not otherwise travel in the same circles: the new-girl-in-town TV producer, the mommy blogger who misses her political days, the head-over-heels arts editor, the Georgetown doyenne and the First Lady Hopeful who secretly doesn’t want the job. I tossed in the villain: a zany, topsy-turvy election stocked with unexpected candidates (and bearing no resemblance to anything in the actual news at the time).

And then I set them all loose. The outcome? I like to think it’s the kind of fun, upbeat, escapist read that is perhaps even more satisfying than real-life. Sure, only one candidate may prevail in the election in this novel, but there just might be many victors in the pursuit of happiness.

 

Photo credit Abby Greenawalt

Aimee Agresti’s first novel for adults (she’s also the author of the Gilded Wings YA series) is a scintillating escapist story centered on a fictional 2016 presidential election and five “campaign widows,” women and men whose significant others have been sucked up by the political arena. Campaign Widows is big drama in an ultra-fun package, made all the more thrilling by Agresti’s insider knowledge—as she was once a campaign widow herself.

FictionPopular Fiction

Making seams: On sewing and writing

Behind the Book by Charlotte Nash

In Charlotte Nash’s The Paris Wedding, Rachael West heads to the City of Lights to attend her ex-boyfriend nuptials, intent on braving any ensuing heartbreak and enjoying an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. Like her heroine, Nash is an accomplished seamstress, and finds that her two creative outlets intersect in surprising ways. In this essay, Nash explores the power of process and how the act of ripping up a draft can lay the foundation for the work to come.

There’s a certain romanticism attached to the things we did as children. Childhood interests are windows to our truer selves, before the weight of worldly expectation fell on us and warped our sense of what we liked and valued (at least, this is the story told by many a life and career coach). The cliché of the writer often falls in this territory, too, with many claiming their interest in writing stems from childhood. I’m not really one of them (there’s times I wish I were), but it’s certainly true that interest or curiosity is at the centre of our human existence. My earliest interest was not writing, but sewing, and yet the two arts have some surprising similarities . . . and for me, one key difference.

I learned to sew before I have memories for learning things. I remember cutting patterns on our dining table (never actually used for dining), winding bobbins with a hunched ache between my shoulder blades and the smell of machine oil as I fed fabric through my mother’s Bernina (I still have it, over 40 years later).

I don’t actually remember the “learning”—the first time I threaded a needle, the first time I had to size a pattern and cut the fabric. All those firsts are lost in the far distance of my early childhood, as if I’m trying to look back on the start of the universe. Sewing is deep in my muscle memory. But there must have been something about it that captured my interest, because I kept on with it without any adult pushing, such that my first memories of sewing are when the craft of it was already established in me.

Until I entered home economics class in middle school, I assumed sewing was a universal skill. And then I learned it wasn’t. Having already completed the first garment, I watched the other girls struggling to hold a straight stitch line on the practice shapes photocopied onto white paper (sacrilege, I thought, for one should never ever blunt one’s needle by using it on paper). With the term not even half over, I had completed the second piece, which had been meant to occupy us until the holidays.

This isn’t to say that I was some kind of seamstress wunderkind; it was just that I had learned young, and so my skills looked amazing next to anyone who was just starting out.

I learned to write fiction in my late twenties, and the learning was a deliberate act. It had to be, because I was on the other side of the art in those classes. I was the one who couldn’t hold a straight stitch line with my words. I was full of enthusiasm, but not much skill. I didn’t have a long record of things I’d written back to childhood, and I remember all the learning—how to structure, how to conceive characters, how to finish a novel draft (or, most of the time, how not to do these things). Learning to sew, I imagine, was just as fraught, I just have the advantage of not remembering it. (Plus the breakage I inflicted on my memory while studying medicine had perhaps put my early writing education on the back foot).

The benefit of my early learning in the sewing department is that as an adult, I can still out-sew just about anyone I know. Again, this doesn’t make me the best; it’s just the power of deep memory. Also, it helps that sewing is a dying art (less competition), and most people didn’t learn from an unbroken chain of women who sewed because life depended on it.

I learned to sew because my mother sewed. And she learned because hers did. I assume this is a chain unbroken through generations in the stone farmhouses of the mid-east of England, where we claim our ancestry. My mother told me once how her mother would “side-to-middle” bed sheets—this is a process where sheets that have worn thin in the middle are cut down the centre and the still-thick outsides stitched together to make a new sheet. The process extends the life of a sheet that we would now, no doubt, throw away, and then drive straight out to Bed Bath & Beyond to replace without a second thought.

I’ve spent probably too long thinking about an appropriate writing analogy to this “side-to-middling”, but any direct comparisons are laboured points about recycling rejected pieces of writing (which I always tell myself I’ll do, and hence I keep all these old manuscripts and manuscript files that I never ever look at again).

It would be better, perhaps, to be less literal. The idea of recutting bedsheets speaks of great poverty, but also great resourcefulness. This is the Janus head of the writing life for most of us, too. Poverty comes to the writer in many guises; even if you are financially successful (including at your non-writing job), time itself often becomes a limited currency. Books are large commitments, regardless of vision and genre. But somehow, because we choose to act as though we write as if life depended on it (many of us haven’t tested whether that’s true or not), we can make it all work.

If it were a cartoon character, my patience would be ugly. It’s a belligerent kind of persistence, through poverty and foolishness and terrible first drafts.

Resourcefulness requires a lot of patience, mostly to put up with patch-job solutions for long periods. We have to tolerate writing in the wrangled time available to us, tolerate hearing (again and again) that the book industry/writing is dead (or at least drawing its last breath), tolerate sheer desperation at wanting to be better at this. Patience is also a virtue best deployed in sewing; even my early learning wasn’t enough to escape that requirement, which is, I think, ultimately my dressmaking undoing (all puns intended).

My mother always tells me that she is not as good a seamstress as her own mother, because she has no patience to press correctly (pressing is the dreadfully laborious process of ironing/steaming garments during their making). This flaw, I’m afraid, has manifested in me in worse ways, for I have no patience to press or indeed for many other slow steps that might make me a more skilful dressmaker (most notably for everyday clothes—I will take more time if I’ve paid a month’s grocery money for some lovely silk). It’s not that I’m bad. It’s just that I am always racing to finish the end product, even though I know that the process—the careful fitting, pattern adjusting, precise cutting, and stitching and finishing—is where the garment is really made.

This idea of the process being what makes the artwork is also true of writing.

Sewing is a more unforgiving mistress than writing, just by nature of form. Words can be cut and trimmed and re-seamed without leaving needle marks (at least, they can now, in the post-typewriter age . . . pause for nostalgia if longhand is your thing), and without having to waste ruined fabric. I’ve done a heap of this kind of unpicking with my words. Despite hopes that I would find writing easier the more I did, each book has been more trouble than the last. With some books, I think there is not a stitch of the first draft left.

A garment doesn’t usually allow such alteration—you are aiming for perfection on the first try. Or at least, I am, because I am impatient. Unpicking is going backwards, and I might not get away with such corrections. You might leave needle marks in the fabrics. Or there may simply be no fabric left to let out or adjust. You might just have to start again. The thing is, as with books, these mistakes, these re-makings, are where you truly learn the craft.

And this is the key difference between sewing and writing for me. With writing, unpicking is always going forwards. I have rescued many books with re-making, learned many a lesson. I enjoy the process itself. When a new box of my books arrives hot from the press (prepare yourself for the sacrilege to follow) I don’t feel
. . . really . . . anything. It’s great, don’t get me wrong. But still, writing is the doing, not the end product. (This is helped perhaps that I don’t want to wear a book . . . and I certainly don’t want to read it once it’s set in print!).

Simply, I think, sewing is not my art—if I could enjoy the actual process of it more, perhaps that could change. In the meantime, I’d prefer to watch Project Runway rather than be sitting at my own machine. (My crueller inner critic also tells me that I have little eye for personal style with fashion, which really is a problem. At least I always know what books I’ll feel great reading.)

Writing is hard work, but I have the patience for it. Not patience with any grace, to be sure. If it were a cartoon character, my patience would be ugly. It’s a belligerent kind of persistence, through poverty and foolishness and terrible first drafts. I figure that’s the big difference between how I sew and how I write. I’m always impatient to be finished, but only with writing am I prepared to unpick. That’s why my childhood dedication to sewing has been overtaken by an adult life of books.

 

Left: Golden taupe embroidered silk bodice and black silk skirt (material from Hyena Productions), made for wedding and in typical fashion, not quite properly pressed.

Right: getting value out of the outfit at a romance writers event many years later . . .

 

Author photo © Jen Dainer, Industrial Arc Photography.

In Charlotte Nash’s The Paris Wedding, Rachael West heads to the City of Lights to attend her ex-boyfriend nuptials, intent on braving any ensuing heartbreak and enjoying an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. Like her heroine, Nash is an accomplished seamstress, and finds that her two creative outlets intersect in surprising ways. In this essay, Nash explores the power of process and how the act of ripping up a draft can lay the foundation for the work to come.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Digging in deep for a first novel

Behind the Book by James A. McLaughlin

Like a 17-year cicada, my novel, Bearskin, spent a long time underground before emerging. I was in my early 30s and just starting at a graduate writing program when I heard about people finding mutilated bear carcasses in the Virginia mountains where I grew up. Poachers were killing black bears out of season and cutting off their paws and gallbladders for sale on the black market. The big money was in exporting the bear parts to East and Southeast Asia, where the native bear species had been hunted to rarity. Back then, the profit margins approached those in the narcotics trade, and organized crime outfits were moving into the bear parts market. All of this struck me as a compelling backdrop for a story, and I decided I would write about a guy who has to confront bear poachers on his property.

Most of the original story depended only on my own memory of the forest where I’d spent a lot of my childhood, but there was still a bit of interesting legwork to be done. I interviewed an undercover game warden who was infiltrating a bear poaching ring. I researched the worldwide black market in wildlife (at the time, it was just behind trafficking of drugs and weapons in terms of total annual dollar value). I learned bear paws are a delicacy in certain cultures, a prized and prestigious dish—the front paws are supposedly more tender than the back paws, but all four get eaten. And bear bile, used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine, contains ursodeoxycholic acid, which helps bears avoid losing muscle when they’re dormant during the winter. The acid has real therapeutic effects in humans—so much so that it was synthesized from cow bile in the 1950s, and you can buy FDA-approved, bear-free medicine with brand names like Actigall, Ursodiol and Urso Forte (“strong bear”).

Read our review of Bearskin.

I finished Bearskin 1.0 while I was in the writing program, but it wasn’t what I’d hoped, and after another year or so of revisions I set it aside. Most of a decade passed while I worked on another novel, stories, essays. My wife and I moved west; I helped start a small business. When a good friend who’d read the first Bearskin suggested I go back to the book and try again, I spent a few weeks stripping it to the essentials, inventing new characters and rewriting the first few chapters. This exercise led to a published novella, agent inquiries and . . . several more years of work extending the novella into a novel.

Writing the second version of Bearskin involved far more research than the first (note: as a cicada nymph nears maturity, it burrows deeper into the soil, searching for larger tree roots to feed on). My new main character was a completely different person, much more interesting and dangerous than the original protagonist. He has a violent history in the cross-border drug trade in southern Arizona, so I spent a lot of time looking into the Mexican cartels and the ways drugs are smuggled north—and how cash and other easy-to-carry valuables are smuggled south. I had an excuse to visit Tucson and explore the Arizona-Mexico border. I learned about local law enforcement, gunfighting and how to disappear and start a new life with a new identity. I had nearly finished the book when it occurred to me that I should update my research on bear poaching.

What I found out was complicated, and it required some tweaks to my plot. While bears in Asia are still under tremendous pressure from poachers, bear poaching for gallbladders and paws has fallen off in the U.S., and the American black bear population in most areas has increased dramatically. The law enforcement efforts I’d witnessed in the late ’90s presumably had an effect, and responsible bear hunters have pushed for more sophisticated management of the species by state agencies. Wildlife and animal rights groups reported some success, at least in the U.S., with convincing traditional medicine practitioners to substitute herbal ingredients for bear bile. And a more troubling development was the growth of “bear farms” in parts of Asia, horribly inhumane institutions that have become a significant source of bear bile in Asian markets.

Given those findings, I had to make some quick revisions to plausibly account for a resurgence of bear poaching in the Virginia mountains circa 2011. And those plot changes in turn opened up an entirely new criminal dimension for my book, and another series of interesting rabbit holes for me to dive into. But the process was dragging on by then, and I finally managed to quit the research and finish the book so it could crawl up out of the earth like one of those cicadas, molt and start making noise.

Photo credit Nancy Assaf McLaughlin

James A. McLaughlin explores the brutal and beautiful Appalachian terrain with his debut novel, Bearskin, a tale of bear poaching and one man on the run.

FictionPopular Fiction

The best and worst decision: to write a novel

Behind the Book by Elizabeth Leiknes

In The Lost Queen of Crocker County, Jane Willow, the former Corn Queen of Crocker County, returns to Iowa after a family tragedy—and finds a second chance in her Midwestern home. Author Elizabeth Leiknes imbues this tale with a breezy sense of humor and an abiding love of movies, and though her new novel proves that she knows how to tell a great story, she also has a serious bit of advice: Don’t become a novelist.

For those of you readers who are considering it, don’t become a novelist. Just don’t. I beg you. Because before you know it, years will evaporate. Your lofty dreams and Oprah-inspired vision boards will come and go. Your various muses will turn fickle. Then one day you’ll be sitting on the couch, balancing a hot-mess-of-a-manuscript on one knee and your own personal key lime pie on the other—and I mean the whole pie, not just a slice. That would be way too civilized. You will also have a can of whipped cream, so that each bite can act as a mere vehicle for the creamy clouds piled high, meant to sweeten the tartness of the often-sour, pride-swallowing work that is creating a novel.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Sure, there are ups and downs to writing, but the process . . . the PROCESS! It’s so magical. What must it feel like to give birth to a full-length story complete with an engaging plot, riveting themes and satisfying narrative arcs? It feels like giving birth. That’s what it feels like. It is a great deal of work, at first terrifying and painful and then joyous beyond belief. What happens after the book-birth? Pretty much, you’ll worry yourself to death about it. You’ll imagine what could go sideways. You’ll invent ways it will fail. You’ll make deals with the universe in exchange for its triumph.

All of what I’ve said is true, which is why I consider the birth of The Lost Queen of Crocker County to be a bit of a miracle. Sometimes the right thing happens at just the right time in life, and it makes so much sense that you must consider it divine. Five years ago, I’d silently decided to give up writing. I’d published three novels that I was proud of, but my writing career hadn’t become what I’d hoped it would. I am an English teacher by day, so I decided I’d continue the privilege of teaching writing rather than doing it myself.

But then one day, shortly after my I’m-not-going-to-write-anymore realization, something strange happened on my way home from school. I heard a slight thump while driving. In retrospect, it was probably something inconsequential like a rock on the highway or maybe even just the way the car reacted to a bump in the road, but at the time, my initial reaction was a series of emotions alternating between panic and denial. Did I hit something? You’re just tired, it was nothing. Oh, my God, what if it was a kitten? Why would a kitten be on the highway? I even pulled the car over to peruse the area and make sure I didn’t see anything. Then, as I resumed my drive home, I was struck with this: Is it normal to have those kinds of thoughts (zero to prison) in reaction to a small incident like that? Do other people see headlines in their heads—LOCAL TEACHER CHARGED WITH HIT AND RUN INVOLVING SMALL ANIMAL IN FRONT OF DAIRY QUEEN—or is this, perhaps, strictly a Midwesterner’s reaction? Does where we come from shape who we are? Are Midwesterners somehow programmed for guilt? By the time I got home, a story had formed about a woman, transplanted in the West, who returns to her Midwestern home to face her sins, and after being involved in a crime, has to make things right.

So I wrote the book. I had to. This is how it is for writers, or for me at least. If you don’t feel compelled to write stories, go enjoy your life. Work out. Ride a unicycle. Learn to make fancy cakes. Walk into a bookstore and get lost. Worry about normal things, like your beautiful family or gluten or plagues, rather than if your novel accomplished all that you wanted it to. For me, I really, really hope that The Lost Queen of Crocker County does justice to Iowa, to movies, to love. I hope that it reminds readers of the beauty of home, family and second chances.

If I still haven’t convinced you not to write novels, you’ve passed the test. You are doomed to the roller-coaster ride that is being a writer. But you are also blessed with leaving a legacy of stories for your children long after you’ve gone. And you are able to hand your husband a novel that is dedicated to him, dedicated to the fact that his exceptional dad-and-husband skills have afforded you the luxury of time so that you can put your dreams on paper. Last but not least, you are able to create a piece of work that proposes an alternate storyline, a kind of better you’d like the world to be.

In The Lost Queen of Crocker County, Jane Willow, the former Corn Queen of Crocker County, returns to Iowa after a family tragedy—and finds a second chance in her Midwestern home. Author Elizabeth Leiknes imbues this tale with a breezy sense of humor and an abiding love of movies, and though her new novel proves that she knows how to tell a great story, she also has a serious bit of advice: Don’t become a novelist.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Going to work while the world ends

Behind the Book by Ling Ma

I first started writing Severance around the time I realized I was going to lose my job, although I did not know that I was working on a novel. The company I worked for was downsizing and consolidating their West Coast and Midwest offices. As a result, many employees in the Midwest office would be let go, some who had been there their entire careers, spanning several decades.

Most colleagues felt like they had been screwed over by management. As we came to the office day in and day out, the low morale in the work environment was palpable.

I needed to figure out what I was going to do, but instead of applying to other jobs and taking interviews, all it seemed that I could do was write stories. In those final weeks of my job, I wrote more fiction than I had in years. Since some of our tasks were drying up, I would write those stories at the office. Taking a break during lunch hour, I would walk around through downtown, drinking iced coffee and eating pastries. Buoyed by sugar and caffeine, plot ideas and character details would come to me. All around me, people went about their days, using their lunch breaks to window shop, to take dentist appointments, to go to the gym.

One of the pieces I worked on was an apocalyptic short story. Writing anything apocalyptic just seemed fun—the destructive glee of toppling office buildings, of disrupting everyone’s routines, of crushing clamshell containers of sad desk salads. My target was all of these things and none of these things. My target was the larger system, the capitalist power structures that enabled all of this. The authorial power that a writer gets to wield is irresistible, especially to someone (like me) who does not have a lot of power.

Originally, the story was written in the first-person plural—one collective voice that embodied all of these disgruntled employees. But one voice kept breaking out from the rest of the pack, and that was the voice of Candace Chen, who eventually became the protagonist of Severance. I knew her job right away. She worked in New York, as a production coordinator for the manufacturing of Bibles, which was all taking place in China and other Asian countries. It became clear that the apocalyptic story was really a meditation on work, of its routines and its conciliatory satisfactions in the age of globalism.

When I first interviewed at the company, a VP had perceptively mentioned to me, “I think you’re qualified for this position, but you’re going to get bored in two years.” He said he would recommend me for the job, but that I might reconsider my options after two years. Around the time of the corporate downsizing, I had been working at the same job going on three years. I wondered, what kept me working there? This is a question that many of my friends also asked of themselves, about why they still stuck at their jobs. I think writing the novel was also a way of trying to answer that question.

“The feeling was one of liberation, and maybe that feeling comes during apocalyptic, chaotic times.”

As I wrote, I found inspiration by reading the works of Kafka, everything from his short stories to his journals, in which he complained about how a job disrupted his writing. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, about an English butler, always seemed like the ultimate office novel to me. The TV shows I watched were at heart narratives about work: “The Sopranos,” “The X-Files” and “Mad Men.” I’ve always maintained that I learned how to plot by watching eight seasons of “Mad Men,” the way that the storylines were organized more by thematic layering than a string of causal events. I didn’t write the novel in any particular order, simply jumping to whichever scene felt the most urgent at the time, and organizing the novel around those guideposts.

Severance
Read our starred review of Severance.

As for my job, the closer the end date neared, the emptier the office became. Some employees found new positions at other companies and left, while others made the move to another branch office. All the rules flew out the window. Going to work was a surreal experience. I have this memory, set during those final days, of coming into the office at nine in the morning and being handed a plastic flute of champagne and a donut. There was no one watching us. The feeling was despair, but also one of giddiness. The feeling was one of liberation, and maybe that feeling comes during apocalyptic, chaotic times.

After my last day at the company, I took my severance and got on unemployment. I called it my arts fellowship. I continued working on the novel. However, in order to secure more funding, I ended up applying to MFA programs and was accepted by Cornell University. I moved to the remote town of Ithaca, New York, and spent the next four years steadily working on Severance. During the summers, I established a writing routine that was very similar to my office routine: I would begin writing at nine in the morning, take a long lunch break and then resume writing until six in the evening. It serves me still.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ling Ma shares a closer look at the creation of her debut novel, an end-of-the-world tale that transforms the mundane into a creeping horror. It’s the story of a millennial daughter of Chinese immigrants who watches as nearly everyone around her falls prey to a spreading fever that leaves its victims in a zombielike state, repeating the day-to-day tasks of their former lives.
FictionComic Fiction

Dashed presumptuous: On writing a new Jeeves and Wooster novel

Behind the Book by Ben Schott

Bestselling author Ben Schott has revived Jeeves and Wooster for a new novel starring literature’s most beloved master and servant. In sparkling, comic prose worthy of P.G. Wodehouse, Schott sends Jeeves and Wooster off on a new (mis)adventure as spies for the English Crown. But how does a contemporary author enter into a well-loved series? Schott explains—in a way.

‘I say, old bean, do you think this is wise?’

‘Wise?’

‘Prudent, sensible—sane even?’

‘You mean, to dog the patent-leather footsteps of P.G. Wodehouse? The greatest craftsman of comic fiction the English language has known? The genius who created Jeeves and Wooster? The man who spun unforgettable prose, and wove a thread of Englishness on which the sun will never set?’

‘Yup. That’s the chap. And I ask again: Is this wise?’

‘Possibly not.’

‘I’d call it loopy.’

‘You may have a point.’

‘Dashed presumptuous, too. What in heaven inspired you?’

‘Adoration. Admiration. Awe. Many of the words beginning with ‘A.’ And it occurred to me that the universe, being in such a darkly parlous state, might enjoy a tad more Bertie to gladden the heart and lighten the soul.’

‘And so you wrote a new Jeeves and Wooster novel?’

‘I did indeed. It is called Jeeves and the King of Clubs—and it is fully authorized by the Wodehouse Estate.’

‘They must be mad!’

‘The premise is that Jeeves’ club of butlers and valets, the Junior Ganymede, is actually a branch of the British Secret Service. It remains a genuine social club for those in the upper echelons of service, of course, but it is also a conduit of unique intelligence to His Majesty’s Government.’

‘You mean to say, there’s a gang of butlers roaming the halls, sniffing out secrets like the Baker Street Irregulars?’

‘They prefer to think of themselves as the Curzon Street Perfectionists. And for reasons explained in the book, Bertie is inveigled into joining the Junior Ganymede to help thwart the fascist upstart Roderick Spode.’

‘That fat-headed oaf!’

‘Quite. Bertie, naturally, takes to spying like a d. to water, and we are led on an uproarious adventure of espionage through the secret corridors of Whitehall, the sunlit lawns of Brinkley Court and the private Clubland of St James’.’

‘Does Aunt Dahlia appear? I adore Aunt Dahlia.’

‘She does indeed, along with a cast of characters old and new: outraged chefs and exasperated uncles, disreputable politicians and gambling bankers, slushy debs and Cockney cabbies, sphinxlike tailors and sylphlike spies.’

‘Is there action? A spy caper rather demands action, y’know.’

‘Fear not, old crumpet—there’s Action-a-Plenty. In addition to foiling treasonous fascists there are horses to be backed, auctions to be fixed, engagements to be escaped, madmen to be blackballed and a new variety of condiment to be cooked up.’

‘I say, it sounds quite the thing!’

‘Far be it for me to tootle my own trombone, but if Jeeves and the King of Clubs is one hundredth as much fun to read as it was to write, well . . . ’

‘I shall send my man out for a copy immediately.’

‘I say, you are a brick!’

 

Author photo by Harry MacAuslan

‘I say, old bean, do you think this is wise?’

‘Wise?’

‘Prudent, sensible—sane even?’

‘You mean, to dog the patent-leather footsteps of P.G. Wodehouse? The greatest craftsman of comic fiction the English language has known? The genius who created Jeeves and Wooster? The man who spun unforgettable prose, and wove a thread of Englishness on which the sun will never set?’

YA FictionYALGBTQ Fiction

The unsung 1950s genre that changed literature

Behind the Book by Robin Talley

Robin Talley, author of the new YA novel Pulp, shares a glimpse into the underground world of 1950s lesbian pulp fiction that changed her life.

My first glimpse of a lesbian pulp novel came from a refrigerator magnet.

I was a college student browsing in an LGBT bookstore when an image leaped out at me from across the aisle: “I PREFER GIRLS,” it proclaimed in all-caps, alongside a painting of two women clutching at each other while dressed in skimpy vintage clothes.

I was mystified by where the image could’ve come from, but in that moment, I didn’t care. I bought the magnet, took it home and proudly slapped it on my dorm room minifridge.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned I Prefer Girls was a novel published in 1963—and that it was part of an enormously successful midcentury genre now called “lesbian pulp fiction.” During World War II, paperback books finally took off, and by the 1950s publishers were rushing to put out original paperback novels. They were printed on ultra-cheap paper, with the idea that a man would buy one of them in a bus station, read it during the trip and toss it into a trash can once he reached his destination.

(And yes, the books were very much intended for men. It didn’t seem to have occurred to most of these publishers that women were an audience worth targeting—let alone queer women.)

Most of the lesbian pulp authors were men, too, often writing under female pen names, but a handful of the authors were lesbians themselves. In many cases, it was the first opportunity these women had to write about their own experiences and communities.

The stories often had tragic endings, thanks to publishers’ fears of controversy and censorship. Pioneering author Marijane Meaker was instructed to put one of the protagonists in her 1952 novel Spring Fire into an asylum following a nervous breakdown at the end of the book and to have the character’s former girlfriend promptly forget she’d ever been anything but straight. And Tereska Torrès’ Women’s Barracks was the subject of much outrage at a public hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials. (Incidentally, news reports of that hearing led to millions of additional sales for Women’s Barracks, so it wasn’t all bad news.)

Despite everything they were up against, some of the books written during that era are incredible. The collection Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950-1965, compiled by powerhouse lesbian author and editor Katherine V. Forrest, is full of gripping midcentury writing as well as fascinating glimpses into the lives of the LGBT community in the pre-Stonewall era. Nearly all of the characters are closeted, and many of them face discrimination that threatens to destroy them, but the worlds the characters inhabit and the lives they live are still incredibly rich.

But even though lesbian pulp fiction was selling in numbers that most modern romance authors can only dream of, actual lesbians, along with other gay, bisexual and transgender people, were facing impossible odds. Same-sex marriage and other legal protections were unheard of, discrimination was a matter of course, and outright persecution was common.

The same era when lesbian novels were thriving was also the height of the lavender scare in the United States. From the late 1940s and all the way into the 1970s, the federal government went to great lengths to identify any potential gay, lesbian or bisexual employees and summarily fire them. Gossip spread by a disgruntled coworker or a belief that someone’s voice was too low or hair too short might be all it took to get an employee kicked out of the job and officially banned from any future government employment. The rumor mill also made certain they could never get a job anywhere else either.

Thousands of people lost their jobs. Along the way, many were outed to their parents in an era when outing often meant the severing of all family ties. Suicide was common.

I never came across anything in my research about whether the same men who conducted the interrogations and ordered the firings (because it was pretty much all men there, too) also read lesbian pulp fiction in their spare time. But odds are, most government officials in that era would’ve seen absolutely no contradiction between being titillated by fictional lesbians and ruining the lives of actual queer people.

That contradiction wound up being the most interesting part of writing Pulp. From the beginning, I envisioned it as a dialogue between two queer teenage girls, both writers like me, living in very different circumstances and battling hypocrisy.

Pulp starts with Abby, an out-and-proud lesbian high school senior in 2017. Abby lives in Washington, D.C., and she regularly goes to protests with her friends to speak out against the injustices happening in the world around them. One afternoon she stumbles across an eBook of a lesbian pulp novel and becomes fascinated by the dramatically different world it represents. She decides to track down the author, who wrote under a pseudonym and vanished after publishing only one book. The 1950s have always seemed like a million years ago to Abby, but as she searches for the mysterious author, she starts to understand exactly how much the world still hasn’t changed.

Interspersed with Abby’s story, alternate chapters introduce Janet, an 18-year-old closeted lesbian living in 1955 who also happens across a lesbian pulp novel and decides to try writing one of her own. While she’s writing, Janet also falls in love for the first time, but her best-friend-turned-more, Marie, has just been hired as a secretary at the U.S. State Department. Her job would be in major jeopardy if anyone found out about Janet or discovered Janet’s book.

While I was researching Pulp, I naturally read a lot of lesbian pulp fiction (my personal favorites are Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker series), and it gave me a whole new appreciation for the women who wrote these novels right in the middle of the horrific landscape that was the United States in the 1950s. These authors helped to lay the groundwork for the modern publishing industry. I’m a queer woman writing fiction about LGBT teenagers, and if it hadn’t been for the queer authors who first paved the way, I might never have been able to see any of my books in print.

We take for granted now that the world is ready to read stories like these, but that’s only true because activists worked for decades to make change. Reflecting on their work is a great reminder of how far we still have to go to ensure representation of marginalized characters—and of how lucky we are, even with all the challenges we’re still confronting, to be living in today’s world instead of the era just a few generations back.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Pulp.

Robin Talley, author of the new YA novel Pulp, shares a glimpse into the underground world of 1950s lesbian pulp fiction that changed her life.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Finding solace and guidance in Ohio’s first female sheriff

Behind the Book 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.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Hard work, a bad flu & one stellar debut

Behind the Book 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 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.

FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

From diary to debut

Behind the Book 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.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The world we left behind

Behind the Book 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.

Trending Fiction

FictionDebut Fiction

Two turtledoves

Francesca Hornak, Samantha Silva

more info

Holiday preparations flood our hearts with the warmth of Christmases past—or the echoes of family dinners best forgotten. Wherever your memories lie, two debut works of Christmas fiction are sure to lighten your spirits.

read more
FictionSpeculative Fiction

Megan Angelo

Cursive, privacy and other things worth saving

more info

Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.

read more
All Fiction

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features