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. 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of this book.

Priya Parmar is a former freelance editor whose first novel, Exit the Actress, was based on the 17th-century actress (and royal mistress) Ellen "Nell" Gwyn. Her second novel, Vanessa and Her Sister, is based on the life of the artist Vanessa Bell. In this behind-the-book essay, Parmar explains how important—and how personal—choosing a historical fiction subject can be.

For me, choosing a subject for a historical novel is a tricky thing. Historical fiction is a guess, a hat tossed into the ring. But it is a guess that is based upon a real life. Choosing the historical figure is a bit like choosing a roommate for my brain. I have to want to see this person first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I have to not mind if she does things that might irritate me. Things like leaving dishes in the sink or singing in the shower. I have to feel an immediate kinship, a recognition that this is a person I could spend an enormous amount of time with. Because it can take years to write the novel.

"Choosing the historical figure is a bit like choosing a roommate for my brain."

First comes the research. After the initial honeymoon period, the wrong historical figure could start to grate. If her choices feel illogical or her decisions poor, or her laughter shrill, she can quickly fall off her pedestal. But the right person from history will only grow more dear, more beloved and more real.

After the honeymoon, comes the immersion, the falling down a rabbit hole period. It is the part where I become completely absorbed in a character’s life and time. This is the fun part. This is when I am committed, devoted and off and running. This is also the time when the history blurs and fiction gallops in. The facts are cemented in truth, but the moral, emotional reasoning is an educated guess. The figure becomes a character and the engine of the novel turns over.

My research for Vanessa and Her Sister began with a letter. In the summer of 1906, Clive Bell proposed to Vanessa Stephen. No. She would not marry him. But she strayed from the usual, demure sort of letter a young woman of her social class was expected to write. She told the truth. She told the whole truth. She sort of liked him but was not truly mad about him and had no idea if this would change in the future. She began this letter at home but finished the postscript in pencil at the dentist’s office. She apologized and explained that she was in a hurry and was off on holiday the next day. The letter reads like an email written circa last week.

Reading this letter roughly a century later, I was astonished by her frank, self-deprecating tone and her modern, uncompromising words. She was absolutely the person I wanted to write about. The character stepped off the page fully formed, like a woman alighting from a railway carriage. But Vanessa Bell came as a package deal with her better-known sister, the writer who would eventually become Virginia Woolf. And their collection of eccentric, intellectual, artistic friends would also tag along into the story: the bohemian crowd who would be remembered as The Bloomsbury Group. They are quirky and brilliant and difficult and gifted and daunting but I loved them all, and so I fell down the rabbit hole.

I began to read their letters. I started with their volumes of collected and selected published letters: Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Roger Fry. After the published works, I moved on to the unpublished. I got to know Vanessa’s sloping uphill handwriting and Virginia’s outsized Vs in her signature. I read about Roger Fry’s exhibitions and Leonard Woolf’s cattle problems. Then the circle widened. Like a complicated spider web, the correspondence took me round and round in larger and larger circles. Vanessa’s art world, E.M. Forster’s publishers, Virginia’s teeth and Roger Fry’s building projects. I spent time in archives and museums. I moved back to London and lived in Bloomsbury. I walked their bus routes and photographed train stations. And at each turn along the way, Vanessa Bell did not disappoint. She was exactly the person I hoped she was and more. It was wonderful to have her in my brain. She was such a lovely roommate and I miss her dreadfully now that she has gone. 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Vanessa and Her Sister.

For me, the first act of writing historical fiction is resistance. There are tropes within the American imagination that pop up readily; it takes a slapping of your own hand to not reach for these tropes and recycle them. 

When I began working on Jam on the Vine, I did not want to write about a dysfunctional black family. Nor would I put a black woman protagonist into a role I have seen too often—maid, prostitute, junkie . . . unloved, uneducated, uninspired. Luckily, mining black history, which I have done scholastically and creatively for 20 years, brings you face-to-face with so many wonderful characters that it is easy to resist the tropes.

I wanted to attempt what I believe the best historical writing—both scholarly and fictive—can do: shed light on the seed of a social problem that cripples its current society. I had no idea what the “problem” might be when I set out to write; however, I knew that any articulation of said problem would be found in the newspaper.

More than any institution in black America, including the black church, African-American newspapers have held the government accountable: demanding rights for its black citizenry and disseminating life-sustaining information. I knew my protagonist was an editor and journalist who, realistically, would not find employment at a white newspaper and therefore would have to launch her own.

Two trailblazing black women journalists inspired Ivoe Williams, the heroine of Jam on the Vine: Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) and Charlotta Bass (1874-1969). Driven by the murder by lynching of black male friends, Wells, who wrote for the New York Age newspaper, began to document lynchings and their causes, most notably in her monographs Southern Horrors (1892) and The Red Record (1895). Bass was a suffragist and the first black woman to own and operate a newspaper, the California Eagle.

Like both women, Ivoe is a bookish girl who goes to college. (Ninety-four black colleges and universities thrived in the first decade of the 20th century, yet we don’t encounter their stories in Progressive-era narratives. Ever.) Like Bass, I wanted Ivoe to launch her own newspaper. Like Wells, I wanted Ivoe’s journalism to have purpose, but felt I could not write about lynching for my own mental health.

Drawing on the early 20th-century history of Texas, one cannot help but notice the birth and proliferation of prison farms—the roots of the incarceration crisis we now face. The moment I stumbled across this fact, I knew that Ivoe’s newspaper would call attention to shady police procedures involving the racist arrest and (often erroneous) imprisonment of black men. This crisis continues to plague America.

The last value I brought to Jam on the Vine hinged on sexual orientation. Much damage has been done to disconnect the social and political—not just artistic—contributions of homosexuals from the American narrative. Placing a black lesbian activist at the center of an early 20th-century story was a natural choice and also a political one.

In writing Jam on the Vine, my valentine to the black press, I’ve exercised my strong belief that historical fiction can go a long way in restoring marginalized groups  to their rightful places within a society’s past, present and future. Today, black newspapers continue to trumpet the age-old call for justice.

Missouri-born author LaShonda Katrice Barnett is also a playwright and editor. She now lives in Manhattan.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Having grown up in Wisconsin, I was surprised to learn that German prisoners captured during World War II were shipped across the Atlantic to my home state. They were housed in rural areas—vacated schools, fairgrounds, migrant worker camps—and were put to work in canneries and on local farms. Between 1942 and 1946, Wisconsin housed POWs in 39 camps across the state.

Thinking on this, a story began forming in my mind—a frightened family on one side of the gate, the enemy on the other. But as I looked into it, I learned that in many rural areas, the prisoners were needed more than feared. One such area was Door County, Wisconsin.

In 1944, when The Cherry Harvest opens, my fictional cherry orchard is threatened because there are no workers to pick the cherries. Nearly all the able-bodied men have left for war, and migrant workers have taken better jobs in the Army or at the shipyards. This would be the second year without a harvest and my family is about to lose their business.

In writing fiction, I typically write from a sense of place. I need to know the feel of it to better appreciate my characters’ relationship with their environment. With that in mind, in May 2011, I traveled to Door County with my daughter. To get a sense of the WWII era, I made numerous trips to the Door County Library and also interviewed people who remembered that time in Door County.

Door County is a lush peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan, a tourist destination dotted with summer cottages, cherry orchards, lighthouses, beaches, and state parks. It’s known as the Cape Cod of the Midwest.

But it wasn’t always so. The name comes from the many ships that crashed along the rocky coast of what was known as Death’s Door. Today you can hire a plane to glide along the coast and view the shipwrecks still resting on the rocks below.

Because The Cherry Harvest is a dramatic story, I wanted it to take place on the stormy side of the peninsula—the Lake Michigan side—and so we booked a stay at a home right on the beach. I later learned that very home was the site of a former orchard. That spot became the location of my family’s homestead, and there, my protagonist, Charlotte, a farmwife, began to come to life.

I woke early each morning and listened to the birds, monitored the weather, walked barefoot in the grass and along the shore as my characters might have done. My daughter and I visited blooming orchards, tasted cherry pies, and learned of the old harvesting processes. I interviewed people who had lived on cherry orchards back when they worked alongside German POWs.

Charlotte came to me strong and brave, insisting on bringing POWs to pick the summer’s harvest. But she has a son, Ben, fighting in Europe against the Nazis. How would bringing prisoners onto the land play into her relationship with her son? Would he come home to find POWs on the land?

Just north of the spot where my daughter and I stayed was a lighthouse. This became the lighthouse where my character Kate would visit her friend Josie. My daughter and I walked across the isthmus to the island and climbed to the top of the lighthouse, which became the perspective of many of my scenes.

Continuing north along the shore is an expansive summer home owned by a politician; this became the home of Kate’s Cinderella boyfriend, Clay.

Thomas was the last character to come clear to me. He flowed out of Kate’s intellectual desires to leave the farm and pursue a writing career. While Charlotte and Ben share a pragmatic, physical sense of purpose, Kate and her father have an intellectual connection through poems and stories. Once the Thomas character developed, I could give him a backstory as well.

By the time I left Door County, I had my story. All I had to do was write it.

Lucy Sanna is the author of two previous relationship books, but The Cherry Harvest is her first novel. She and her husband divide their time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Madison, Wisconsin. Find out more about Sanna and her debut novel on her website.

Author photo by Hope Maxwell Synder.