Author Gary Slaughter has been writing historical fiction based on his hometown of Owosso, Michigan, since 2004. The five novels in the Cottonwood series have been finalists for the Benjamin Franklin Award, the Next Generation Indie Book Award. In a behind-the-book story, Slaughter shares some of the memories from his childhood that inspired the series.

You see, I grew up right in the middle of World War II and right in the middle of America. That’s right! Back then I was positive that Owosso was right in the middle of America because we were the only Americans who didn’t speak with an accent.

This bias had something to do with the fact that I found little reason to venture far beyond the Owosso’s city limits until I was off to the University of Michigan at age 17. And, as just I suspected, many people there spoke with an accent. 

The five Cottonwood novels encompass the last five seasons of World War II, beginning with the D-Day invasion in June 1944 and ending with the surrender of Japan in September 1945.

The Cottonwood novels are set in a fictionalized version of Owosso, a small Midwestern town that I called Riverton, Michigan. Like all Americans at the time, the hard-working people of Riverton are coping with life on the home front. The shortages. The ever-present casualties of war. And fears and concerns about loved ones facing a dangerous enemy in Europe and in the Pacific.

The five Cottonwood novels encompass the last five seasons of World War II, beginning with the D-Day invasion in June 1944 and ending with the surrender of Japan in September 1945. That period impacted America—and the rest of the world, for that matter—like few others in history. And the larger-than-life events of that time provide a powerful historical background for the Cottonwood series.

Ours was a blue-collar neighborhood where you could walk down the street and hear families speaking German, Polish, French, Hungarian, Serbian—and even English on occasion. And I’ll never forget the smells that wafted out over Frazier Street as the neighborhood women prepared suppers for their families. The wide variety of simmering ethnic food from all parts of the Old World filled the air with tantalizing aromas.

The neighborhood men were either serving in the Armed Forces, or were, like my father, a tool and die maker, draft-exempt because of their critical skills. Our mothers also worked long hours in Owosso’s defense factories. So we kids were left in the care of the neighborhood bubbas, babushka-clad, Eastern European grandmothers who largely let us run free.

My bubba was Mrs. Mrva, the widowed Slovak lady who lived next door. Two Gold Stars hung in her front window to honor her sons Eddie and Cy who’d been killed in action: one in North Africa and the other on the beaches of Normandy.

She loved me and tried to fatten me with her delicious and exotic cookies and cakes. She spoke little English, so I spoke Slovak. It wasn’t until a few months into my Kindergarten year that I learned enough English to communicate with my parents. (At least, that’s how they liked to tell the story.)

Today, I suppose our bubbas would be considered irresponsible childcare providers. But not back then. Not in our town. Children were raised much differently than they are today.

If we got in trouble or misbehaved anywhere around town, we could expect a good pinch-and-twist, followed by a severe scolding delivered by some adult we might not even know. And that adult didn’t have to worry about complaints from our parents, either. In fact, if our parents ever got wind of the incident, we were in trouble all over again when we arrived home.

So we were completely free to roam our town provided we were home when the street lights came on. With War Time (Daylight Savings Time) and the Northern latitude of Owosso, we were not expected home until well after ten o’clock at night. So roam we did, even at the young ages of five or six.

This is the fertile ground onto which I sowed the seeds of wonder and imagination that grew into the award-winning series of all five Cottonwood novels. I was very fortunate indeed to have been born and raised in Owosso, Michigan.

When I first started writing Wilderness, I had no specific agenda in mind other than to try and tell a good story about an old man and his dog. I had no notion that my character, Abel Truman, was an American Civil War veteran—let alone a Northerner who had fought for the Confederacy. All I knew was that he was a physically broken, emotionally bereft recluse whose reunion with society would reveal, painfully and irresistibly, the still-vital heart within him.

Soon enough though, my interest in the Civil War—and Abel’s complicated attitudes toward that conflict—began to assert itself in the narrative. The war’s horrific violence—with death tolls exceeding anything the country, or the world, had ever seen—soon transcended its overtly political origins, much as Abel’s character and story began to change, to enlarge with its telling. The simple tale of an old man and his dog grew more complex—more personal but, at the same time, encompassing a broader view of the America that was and the America that is. As Abel says to Edward when trying to explain to the Indian boy what the country had become: “We were one thing—now we’re something else. The war mixed it all up.”

When he enlists, Abel Truman is already a wrecked man. Having assumed responsibility for his infant daughter’s crib death, and with his wife driven mad with grief, he finds himself wandering, numb, steeped in drink, expelled from the Garden of domestic bliss. He lets this tragedy define his life, and when he finally enlists for the Confederacy it is simply because that is where he is at the time, geographically, and because of the hope that the annealing fire of war might be the thing to either make him whole again or end his suffering. For Abel, the causes of the war—States Rights and the “peculiar institution” that drove the armies against each other—is no factor at all.

The place feels melancholy as a Sunday evening, and the moment I stepped from the car onto Saunder’s Field, I knew that this was where the cauldron of Abel Truman’s warring days would reach its boil.

But as a foot soldier directly responsible for the bloody work of those days, Abel has to participate and, when his comrades in arms are killed or wounded, he has to respond. And when he encounters the evils of slavery firsthand, he finally realizes the intensely personal dimension of the war that lies beyond politics and even bloodshed. The war is the end point of this period of Abel’s life. His life in exile afterwards—living in a place as far away as he can possibly get from the landscapes of war—is simply what Abel has to do to come to grips with and understand everything he’s seen and everything he’s done.

To make Abel’s interior journey believable, I quickly realized I needed a far more solid understanding of thewaythe war was fought. Before writing Wilderness, I knew very little of the American Civil War and so began my study where it made sense to begin: with the solid basics of James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and the lyric romanticism of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative. Afterwards, I moved on to specific battle histories and was introduced to the fields of Shiloh, Antietam, Chickamauga and Chancellorsville. I spent six months on Gettysburg alone. All the while, I was looking for the “worst” of those awful battles to serve as the cauldron that would boil off Abel’s indifference.

Somewhere along the line, I read about the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. The first clash between Lee and Grant, the Wilderness marked the last, best chance for the Confederacy to turn the war back in their favor. Over the course of the battle that took place in those tangled woods, there was little in the way of panoramas of ranked lines clashing and much in the way of soldiers using the bayonet and musket-butt against each other. The fighting was by necessity close and by inclination personal. It was the last time the oft-retreated Army of the Potomac would cross the Rapidan River and the last time the Army of Northern Virginia would mount a real offensive. So there is a sense of desperation—of endings and finalities—palpable in the descriptions of the fighting that went on in those dark woods. And when I visited the battlefield, I found the Wilderness was a dark place. The trees there are close and strange and would have been closer, stranger still in the spring of 1864. The place feels melancholy as a Sunday evening, and the moment I stepped from the car onto Saunder’s Field, I knew that this was where the cauldron of Abel Truman’s warring days would reach its boil.

The story of Abel—broken, suffering—became, in the course of its telling, the story of America at war and after. What it was and what it became. Broken, yes, but far stronger at the break.

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Read our review of Wilderness.

As a teenager I spent four, sometimes five, nights a week in the basement of an old bank, a large low-ceilinged room that had once—a yellowed sign told us—served as a bomb shelter. The ballet mistress would call out, “A little more sweat, if you please,” and at the barre, we would plié more deeply, arch our backs more fully. Sometimes we would have a moment’s rest, and I would roll stiffness from my shoulders, gazing at one of the Edgar Degas prints tacked to the walls. I felt kinship with his ballet girls, sometimes glorious on the stage but as often just simply scratching their backs or limbering at the barre. I saw their heaving ribs, their exhaustion, their thighs trained to roll outward from the hips. I saw their love of dance, too—no different from my own. No wonder, then, that decades later a documentary on Degas’ most famous sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, should introduce me to the protagonist of my second novel, The Painted Girls.

The ballet offered a chance for a daughter to escape the gutter if she had talent and ambition—or if she were able to attract the attentions of a wealthy admirer.

Marie van Goethem, I would learn, had modeled for the work and lived on the lower slopes of Montmartre a few blocks from Degas’ studio. Her father, a tailor, was dead, and her mother was a laundress. She trained at the Paris Opéra dance school and was later promoted to the corps de ballet. It was the dream of many a Parisian laundress or sewing maid. The ballet offered a chance for a daughter to escape the gutter if she had talent and ambition—or if she were able to attract the attentions of a wealthy admirer.

Along with their own private boxes at the Paris Opéra, men who held season tickets had entry to the Foyer de la Danse, a space built to encourage encounters with the young ballet girls. It was a sort of gentleman's club, a place where highlife met lowlife, where mistresses were sought by industrialists and noblemen with clout enough to advance a girl’s career.

When Degas unveiled Little Dancer in 1881, at once the public linked her with a life of corruption and young girls for sale. She was called a “flower of the gutter.” Her face, they said, was “imprinted with the detestable promise of every vice.”

This seedier side of the Paris Opéra flew in the face of my teenage imaginings about the ballet girls tacked to the walls. The lives of those girls, and, more specifically, the life of Marie van Goethem, differed from my own in startling ways. Hers was a story I wanted to tell.

The documentary proceeded, touching on a second story: that of pair of teenage boys Degas had drawn in the criminal court, on trial for a sensational murder. The resultant portrait was exhibited alongside Little Dancer, and art historians contend that more than a shared exhibition links the artworks. They suggest that in each, Degas sought to imply the depravity of his subjects.

Such an intention was easy enough to swallow. “Scientific” findings of the day supported notions of innate criminality and particular facial features—low forehead, forward-thrusting jaw—that marked a person as having a tendency toward crime. Those features are incorporated into the portrait of the teenage boys, and even more telling, Degas titled the work “Criminal Physiognomies.” The criminal features are apparent in the face of the Little Dancer, too, and given the public’s reaction to the work, it would seem Degas had succeeded.

What fascinated me most of all, though, as I delved deeper into the stories of Marie and the boys, was the possibility that the link between the artworks went further. All three youths had inhabited the same underbelly of Paris, and I could not stop myself from imagining that their paths had crossed, the ways in which such a meeting might have altered destinies.

I would tell both stories, and I would intertwine their lives, too.

Cathy Marie Buchanan explores the dark side of the Belle Epoque in The Painted Girls, the story of real-life sisters Marie and Antoinette van Goethem—and their artistic careers in a time when such pursuits often made for difficult lives for women. After a childhood of dance lessons, Buchanan currently limits her artistic pursuits to writing, which she does from her home in Toronto.

More than a decade ago, I was researching ante­bellum and Civil War-era quilts for my fourth novel when I discovered a photograph of an antique masterpiece.

Arranged in the medallion style, with appliquéd eagles, embroidered flowers, meticulously pieced hexagons and deep red fringe, the quilt was the work of a gifted needleworker, its striking beauty unmarred by the shattered silk and broken threads that gave evidence to its age.

The caption noted that the quilt had been sewn from scraps of Mary Todd Lincoln’s gowns by her dressmaker and confidante, a former slave named Elizabeth Keckley. I marveled at the compelling story those brief lines suggested—a courageous woman’s rise from slavery to freedom, an improbable friendship that ignored the era’s sharp distinctions of class and race, the confidences shared between a loyal dressmaker and a controversial, divisive First Lady.

A few years later, while researching my Civil War novel, The Union Quilters, I realized that many of my secondary sources cited the same work—Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, Elizabeth Keckley’s 1868 memoir. I immediately found a reprint and plunged into her story, which told of her harrowing years as a slave, her struggle for freedom and her ascendance as the most popular dressmaker of Washington’s elite, including the new president’s wife. Sewing in the Lincoln family’s chambers within the White House, Keckley observed Abraham and Mary Lincoln in their most private, unguarded moments, and with them she witnessed some of the most glorious and tragic events in the nation’s history.

For years afterward, I longed to delve more deeply into Keckley’s story, to learn about the woman she was beyond her friendship with Mary Lincoln, to discover what had happened after the closing passages of her memoir and to uncover the details of everyday life in wartime Washington. How, I wondered, had Keckley spent that tense and fateful day in 1860 when the increasingly divided nation awaited the results of the election that would send Abraham Lincoln to the White House? What emotions had swept through her when invasion by the Confederate Army seemed imminent? What sights, sounds and smells had she encountered while all around her the capital became an armed camp?

And the most provocative question of all: How had the publication of her memoir transformed Keckley’s life?

As she awaited the publication of Behind the Scenes, Keckley worried that she might be criticized for revealing too much about the private lives of President Lincoln and the First Lady. Her fears proved all too prescient, making the last chapters of her remarkable life as compelling as any that had come before.

Elizabeth Keckley’s relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln is the focus of Jennifer Chiaverini’s new novel, Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, a compelling fictional account of Keckley’s life.

The year was 1996. I stepped off the Nantucket Ferry clutching the little flyer I’d picked up onboard: Come and see the home of the famous girl astronomer from Nantucket. I was 25 and on my own. I had no agenda. I’d never been to Nantucket. Girl astronomer? Why not.

Main Street took me past boutiques and restaurants and buildings that looked like they hadn’t changed in a century or three. Before long, I reached the little lane where Maria Mitchell had lived and worked. I was entranced by the stillness of the place; grey sky and grey shingles and grey cobblestones commingled, blurring the distance between past and future. I had to know more about this teenaged mathematician and astronomer who’d discovered a comet while in her 20s, and I set about learning everything I could about her life and times. 

Born into a tight-knit Quaker community in 1818, “Miss Mitchell” learned navigation and basic astronomy from her father, whom she assisted with rooftop observations used to “rate”—or, adjust—the chronometers of the island’s legendary whaling fleet. She excelled in math but couldn’t go to college—there were barely a handful of options open to women then—so she studied on her own, while family friends who ran the Harvard Observatory kept her apprised of news and innovations in the field. Rather than marry and begin a family, she spent her youth on a little platform attached to her roof, in every kind of weather, scouring the night skies for the appearance of a comet. If she found one before anyone else in the world, she could win a monetary prize from the King of Denmark, and—more importantly—recognition for her accomplishments. 

I had to know more about this teenaged mathematician and astronomer who’d discovered a comet while in her 20s.

On October 1, 1847, she found what she sought—though her hesitation in reporting it almost cost her the award. Luckily, after an exchange of letters among important men (!) from Cambridge to Washington to Europe, her “priority” was established and Comet Mitchell was recorded for posterity. With that finding, she became famous, was hired as a “computer” for the National Almanac, and, 13 years after the discovery, was the first person hired by Matthew Vassar for his women’s college in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Great story, right? But I knew nothing about Quakers, astronomy, whaling or 19th-century New England. Determined to get the facts right and adhere closely to the life of this inspiring woman, I spent year after year doing research and rewriting the same chapters over and over. No matter how much I learned, though, something felt like it was missing. A reconstructed version of Maria Mitchell’s life wasn’t the story I wanted to tell, after all. To get to the heart of that girl, on the roof, searching the night sky for something that would change her life, I was going to have to invent her, and the people around her as well: friends and foes, her loved ones and her beloved. 

Thus began the long, slow work of puzzling together the setting and endeavors of a real person’s life with an invented character and plot. I kept some details and made up others; re-created scenes that had occurred, but changed the time or place in which they happened. By the time I was done I’d forgotten, in some cases, what was “real” and what I’d made up. Thankfully, I kept good notes. And I had a lot of help along the way, from research fellowships and stints at libraries and historical associations up and down the New England seaboard.

I hope that the novel and its protagonist, Hannah Gardner Price, bring much-deserved attention to the life and work of Maria Mitchell. But I hope she stands on her own, too. In truth, Hannah is a hybrid of every young woman I read about who longed to go to college, to accomplish something beyond the domestic sphere, to make a contribution to society commensurate with her intellect and her passions. Without trailblazers like Miss Mitchell and her contemporaries, I certainly wouldn’t be writing this today. For this, I am eternally grateful.

Amy Brill is a writer and producer who has worked for PBS and MTV. A Movement of Stars is her first novel and was inspired by the remarkable life of Maria Mitchell. Brill lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters. Find out more on her website.

Linda Spalding—who has lived in Canada for 30 years—has written fiction and nonfiction over her long and varied career. With her third novel, The Purchase, which won Canada's 2012 Governor General's Award for Fiction, she draws from her own family history for the very first time. It's the story of a Quaker man who moves to Virginia in 1798 and finds his abolitionist principles tested by the reality of the slave economy. In an exclusive behind-the-book story, Spalding writes about her discovery of this story and how it inspired this poignant historical novel.

My grandfather’s grandfather left an established life in Pennsylvania with a wagon full of children bound for the far western edge of Virginia. The year was 1798. When he finally stopped at the edge of what was then the United States, just a few miles from the Cumberland Gap, he erected a small cabin, the pieces of which still lie scattered on the ground of Jonesville, Virginia. 

Daniel’s migration brought wealth to the family but it cost us everything we valued.

As a child, this story struck me as wildly adventurous, but also troubling. What father would take such risks? How long was the trip? Was it cold? What did they eat? And why had they left? What was wrong with life in Pennsylvania? “He was disowned by his community,” my father admitted once over his nightly highball. “He was sent off into exile!” I learned that Daniel Dickinson, this migratory ancestor, was a Quaker, one of those good people of strong moral purpose and fervent belief who began abolitionism. Therefore, my father’s next admission horrified me. “We didn’t stay long in the south,” he said. “And we freed all our slaves before we left.”

My father was a civil rights lawyer and I had always maintained absolute faith in our familial virtue. Old Daniel a slave owner! What eclipse of honor could have brought him to such a choice? What must he have felt when he first raised his hand at an auction in order to buy a human being? How did he live with his very well-developed conscience after making that unconscionable choice? I think the puzzle of this must have nagged at me for many years as I became more and more interested in Quakerism, participated in meetings of worship and made a pilgrimage to early Quaker sites with a group of international students. Never were there people of sturdier ethical fabric than the early Quakers.

Then I was given the genealogy a paternal aunt had carefully prepared and found part of an answer. Daniel Dickinson had lost his first wife in childbirth and quickly married a Methodist. That was all there was to the exile. Needing a mother for his many children, he must have felt desperate. Then, shunned for marrying outside the faith, he had packed his family into a wagon and driven them to the edge of the world. And there, in that wilderness, he had found dilemmas insurmountable.

I made a journey by car along the route Daniel took when he left Pennsylvania, and by the time I reached the little spot in Virginia where he finally pulled to a halt and unloaded his family, I began to understand. In 1798, there was no town in that wild place. There was a bit of land he could have in exchange for one of the warrants he’d brought from Pennsylvania. Land warrants, these were, given to veterans of the war with King George. How did Daniel come by them? He had certainly never fought. He was a pacifist, and anyway too young for that war. The warrant he exchanged for his first six acres was worth $50. I was able to find the deed and other documents in the courthouse. With children too young to help him farm, he needed a worker. And there was no paid labor to be had.

I stepped over the stones of his fallen chimney and saw, adrift in the grass, three graves. I saw the pretty creek and the mansion his son had built in 1830, every red brick of which had been molded by slaves. What must have been the reaction of those children who had been brought up so diligently, torn from their home, and brought to a place where their father lost his way? Daniel’s migration brought wealth to the family but it cost us everything we valued.

For a novelist, all of it had to be imagined and felt right down to the bones, remembering that class and race and religion determined everything in 1798. The smallest differences caused distrust, hostility and violence. And when you migrated from one place to another, social signals were often impossible to navigate. Quakers. Methodists. Africans. Confederates. There was all of that to understand. But grief and shame and envy have felt much the same to everyone in every time. My characters were waiting in the yellowed pages of that genealogy with their passions and their frailties, their crimes, their secrets and their sorrows. Each of them had a story to tell.

When Coll Coyle, a struggling tenant farmer in 1832 Ireland, accidentally kills the landowner he works for, retribution is fierce. Forced to flee the country for America, Coyle exchanges one bleak existence for another when he finds work digging the rail beds for the Pennsylvania railroad. And he’s still being pursued by the relentless overseer, Faller, who is determined to see Coyle punished. That’s the premise of Paul Lynch’s powerful Red Sky in Morning. Here, Lynch shares the inspiration for this carefully crafted and highly praised first novel.      

I spent years trying not to be a writer. I gave it my best shot. I gorged on the literary greats and believed it would be folly to try and emulate. Better to quit while you are ahead, I thought, and avoid any embarrassment. I took the dream I had carried all my life and quietly buried it.

I wrote music and played in a band. I became a sub-editor on a national newspaper and learned the technique of writing and editing. I became that newspaper’s film critic and honed consciously my grasp of narrative. I began to notice that though I loved deeply what I was doing, my soul was not singing. Something deep in my spirit was not being addressed. My weekly film essays were developing a decidedly literary bent. I was starting to sound like a frustrated novelist.

"I wanted to strip Irish history of its clichés and find in it something meaningful for a new generation."

I had an epiphany on a hillside on Lipari when I was 30. I knew in that moment I had failed in my bid not to be a writer. That my psyche was starting to buckle. I knew in that moment that I would write for the rest of my life. I rushed back to my hotel and began to write my first short story.

Bubbling deep was the wellspring of a novel. I had watched on Irish television a documentary called The Ghosts of Duffy’s Cut. What happened at the railway dig near Malvern, Pennsylvania is a mystery. In 1832, 57 Irishmen arrived in America and went to work on the Pennsylvania Railroad. A few months later, every one of them was dead. Cholera had struck the camp, but it is believed that what took place was mass murder. A good many of these men came from the area of Donegal where I grew up.

Something powerful struck. It was 2009. Ireland was sliding into economic depression. People were beginning to emigrate again. I saw in Duffy’s Cut a moment in history that could speak with the power of myth. I wanted to strip Irish history of its clichés and find in it something meaningful for a new generation that found itself angry and powerless.

I had to learn to carve writing time out of my hectic week. I wrote on my day off and at evenings. I used up all my holiday time to write. I wrote through numbing tiredness in the hope that what I put down would later make sense. I learned that once you commit your consciousness to the page, it can always be rewritten. That the real work of writing is rewriting. So I rewrote and rewrote until I could hear the book hum.

It took me just under three years to write Red Sky in Morning. When I started writing the book, I had a full-time job and neighbours each side that were long-settled in the area. By the time the book was finished, I had lost my job, the newspaper I worked for had collapsed, and both of my neighbours had emigrated to America. While the past had become the present, I was writing the present through the past.

There were many things I liked about my Grandmother Puffer’s home: cartoons on television (We didn’t have a TV at home: hippie parents.), Cheerios for breakfast (ditto), and all manner of ancestral relics. There was a genuine family tree—branches wider than my arms—and artifacts like a chair that Myles Standish had sat in (and in which we were not to sit) and a bugle that had been played at President Wilson’s inauguration. More than all this stuff, there were the tales my grandmother could tell.

Every April, on Patriot’s Day, we’d go with my grandmother to see the re-enactment of the battles of Lexington and Concord, and, once back at her house, I could count on her to tell Deborah’s story. “Can you imagine?” she’d say. “She so wanted to join the army that she ran away and put on men’s clothes. I guess she had watched boys her age go off to be soldiers and wanted a chance to serve. But can you imagine?”

I was certain that, if the Revolutionary War started up again, it wouldn’t take me half a minute to pull on some britches and join the army.

I could. I was 6 or 7 or 8, a little girl. But even then I knew that wasn’t exactly who or what I was. And I could imagine Deborah quite well. I could picture how her skirts and apron and lace cap must have felt: just like the tights and dress and pinafore my mother made me wear to birthday parties. I absolutely knew that Deborah, from her spinning wheel, had looked at boys in her town marching off with the militia the same way that I looked at my brother when he went racing out the door to play with BB guns, while my friends brought over Barbies. And I was certain that, if the Revolutionary War started up again and someone rode on a horse through my town ringing a bell and proclaiming that the British were coming, it wouldn’t take me half a minute to pull on some britches and join the army.

That said, it wasn’t until I was 17 years old that I figured out I was transgender—to finally say that I was a man and would live the rest of my life as one. I remember that it felt hard: difficult to explain to people, tough to imagine exactly how I would manage all the legal and personal details. It was unspeakably nice to have Deborah’s story there, waiting for me. What a comfort to know that someone had done this before, had crossed this line—done it in 1782, well before gender identity was a concept—and had family that was still proud of her to this day.

When I sat down to write Revolutionary, I read my grandmother’s volume of family genealogy and then Alfred Young’s history of Deborah. And I counselled myself: this is Deborah’s story, not your story. I wanted to let her character emerge fully, without bearing the imprint of my own. Yet, so often as I wrote, I thought—she would have worried about using the bathroom . . . she would have glowed when someone called her “young man”. . . just like me. There were many times when I felt that point of contact through the page.

There were, however, just as many spots where our stories diverged. I wish I could have had Deborah turn west at the end of the novel; I would have liked nothing better than for her to continue living as a man and to find a little farm out in the new Ohio territory, even if that meant living the rest of her life alone. That’s what I would have wanted to do. But that isn’t what she did. She went home, to an aunt and uncle and to a place that she’d missed. She went home and married and had children and became Deborah again—something I could never imagine doing. Yet, if she had not . . . I wouldn’t be able to write her story. 

Born and raised in Paris, Maine, Alex Myers was raised as a girl (Alice). He came out as transgender at 17 and earned degrees from Harvard and Brown before attending the Vermont College of Fine Arts to study fiction writing—where he began his debut novel. Revolutionary is the story of his ancestor Deborah Samson Gannett, who disguised herself as a man in order to join the Continental Army and fight the British. Myers currently teaches English at St. George’s School, where he lives with his wife and two cats.

A chance discovery of an old biography at The Strand inspired journalist Alix Christie's debut novel, Gutenberg's Apprentice, which tells the story of the invention of moveable type and the printing of the Gutenberg Bible. In this essay, Christie explains how her lifelong love of letterpress printing left her uniquely suited to fictionalize this remarkable true story.

I set my first line of metal type in the mid-1970s, under the watchful eye of my grandfather, who had just retired from running America's foremost hot type foundry in San Francisco. For the next 20 years or so we printed books by hand together. There's something incredibly satisfying about making something from nothing, forming letters into words, inking them and stamping them into paper. I was mainly a hobbyist, though: my interest seemed to lie more with the words themselves. My life led away from letterpress toward writing, first as a journalist and then as a writer of fiction. Still, I never really thought that this early love of printing would lead me to tackle the immense subject of its invention in medieval Germany 560 years ago.

Alix Christie and her 1910 Chandler & Price printing press

Like so many stories, Gutenberg's Apprentice began with a chance item I read in the paper: Scholars at Princeton suspected that the world's first printing types were not as sophisticated as they had thought. As an occasional practitioner of the "darkest art", I was intrigued, and squirreled this tidbit away.

A few years later, in New York's venerable used bookstore, The Strand, I stumbled across a forgotten biography of a printer named Peter Schoeffer, who had worked with Johann Gutenberg, and started looking more deeply into the history of the Gutenberg Bible. Very quickly I discovered that there was vastly more to this story than met the eye.

Printing with moveable type, the most important invention since the wheel, had not been the work of just one lone genius. It was a huge undertaking, a collaboration between the inventor, his financial backer and that little-known scribe-turned-printer, Schoeffer. Even more dramatically, this historic partnership had blown up spectacularly, ending in an acrimonious lawsuit in which Gutenberg lost his workshop.

Printing with moveable type, the most important invention since the wheel, had not been the work of just one lone genius. 

This invention was an event of such importance, and what happened to those partners so compelling, that I felt it simply had to be told—not as biography or nonfiction, but as a narrative of human ingenuity and passion. I felt incredibly lucky to have the background to understand this technology, which ended the Middle Ages and ushered in the Renaissance, transforming society through mass literacy and ultimately enabling free thought and democracy.

Nobody really knows what went on in that workshop in Mainz, nor exactly how the first metal letters were forged. But I tried very hard to respect the few known facts, and the evidence of the surviving printed books, while imagining the kind of drives and motivations that might explain the tragic ending to this partnership that changed the world. Fiction grants us access to people who, though living in a different age, nonetheless felt much the same emotions as we do; it allows us to subtly investigate the reasons why people do the things they do.

From the start I felt a great affinity for Peter Schoeffer, Gutenberg's apprentice, through whom we hear the tale. I saw his story as deeply moving, torn as he was between two father figures: a brilliant master and the financier who had placed him in that Bible workshop. The deeper layers of the novel came with time, as I began imagining the feelings of that young and gifted scribe as he watched his way of life destroyed by new technology. For Peter Schoeffer lived at a time much like our own: he stood on the unsettling edge beween the old ways and the radically new. Five hundred and sixty years later, we are experiencing similarly rapid and profound change. Digital technology is transforming everything we once held sacred, bringing new rhythms, relationships and ways of communicating into our lives. It's both exciting and terrifying, and leads, for me at least, to feelings of ambivalence toward these new magical devices. I hoped that Peter's story would help us to think our own way forward, balanced as he was between the wonder of the truly new and rejection of those "crude words crudely wrought" of metal type. 

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