Giveaway

This post is also a giveaway post. If you live in the United States or Canada and would like the chance to win a copy of The Winter Palace, please leave a comment to this post. This giveaway is open to entries until Wednesday, January 18. I will announce the winner the next day. Good luck!

Without further interruption, here is Eva Stachniak’s  wonderful post about the connection between historical fiction and research:

On writing historical novels and the temptations of research

I’ve long suspected that indiscriminate research is the ultimate writer’s excuse. If writing becomes hard, there are always all those wonderful books to read and places to visit, all related with the novel and thus guilt-free.

When I decided to write a novel about Catherine the Great I knew of at least eight excellent biographies of her, in addition to her own Memoirs, letters, and plays. A quick search through academic databases unearthed a seemingly unending bibliography of scholarly articles, on every aspect of her reign. If that was not enough I took a trip to St. Petersburg, for I could not imagine writing about Catherine without seeing the place where she spent most of her life.

My notebook quickly filled with descriptions: of the Winter Palace and the Hermitage, paintings Catherine collected, objects she touched: cameos, engraved stones, her china collection, her jewels. Then came the palaces where Catherine spent her summers: Oranienbaum, Tsarskoye Selo, and Peterhof. And the small Monplaisir pavilion where Alexei Orlov woke the then Grand Duchess of Russia up on June 28, 1762 to take her to the capital where she would proclaim herself Empress.

How do you contain all this?

In the end it was one sentence from Catherine’s letter to the British ambassador in Russia which saved me from despair. The ruling empress Elizabeth Petrovna’s health has just begun to fail when Catherine wrote: Three people who never leave her room, and who do not know about one another, inform me of what is going on, and will not fail to acquaint me when the crucial moment arrives.

The crucial moment was to be the death of the empress. But who were the spies who will not fail to inform her? The moment I began thinking of these spies I realized that I’ll have to write two novels, the first narrated by one of the spies who helped the young Catherine in the long and dangerous way to power, the second narrated by the older Catherine, at the end of her life, an empress and mistress of many spies. The Winter Palace is the first of the two, The Empire of the Night—which I am working on now—will be next.

On My List: A Heroic New Year

One of the benefits of having written a book about literary heroines and kick-ass authors? No excuses. One of the drawbacks of having written a book about literary heroines and kick-ass authors? No excuses. I’m hoping to have a heroic 2012…and here’s how.

I’ll channel Charlotte: Charlotte Bronte didn’t let the deaths of thee siblings in eight months derail her productivity. She mourned, she wept…she wrote. No excuses, right?

I’ll live like Louisa: I was surprised to learn that Louisa May Alcott was a proto-jogger in her day…the 1850s. If Louy could manage to work out in a bonnet and corset, I should be able to occasionally go to the gym. Right?

I’ll zing like Zora: One of my favorite Zora Neale Hurston tales is that she supposedly decked a too-fresh admirer on an elevator en route to a Harlem Renaissance shindig. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t resort to physical violence, but I could do to be a bit bolder in the coming year.

How about you?  What heroines will you channel in the new year?

Thank you so much for your thoughtful post, Erin. I think I’ll focus on channeling Scarlett O’Hara myself. Life might knock her down, but she never lost sight of the fact that tomorrow is another day. I need that resilience in my life.

Those who share their reflections on heroines and the New Year will be entered for a chance to win a paperback edition of Erin’s book, The Heroine’s Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder in paperback.

This contest is open to readers in the US and Canada. Leave a comment with your reflections about one or more heroine here before midnight EST on Thursday, January 5th. If you have a Twitter account, include your handle. I will announce the winner on Twitter on Friday, January 6th. If you do not have a Twitter account, I’ll send you an email if you are the winner. Good luck and have fun with this. New Year’s is the perfect time to learn from our literary heroines.

Today I am happy to welcome her to The Literate Housewife Review where she discusses how growing up in Michigan has affected her. Please welcome Kelly as she celebrates the release of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott in paperback. I think the paperback cover is nearly as beautiful as her writing.

I’ll let Kelly take it from here:

Place Matters

Being from Michigan has affected me as a writer because it taught me that place matters.

Maybe I would feel that way no matter where I had grown up, but I’m not sure. I’ve heard it said that you can’t really love a place until you leave it, until you see it from a distance, and that was certainly true for me. It wasn’t until I was living in New York after college, taking a sweaty two-hour bus trip out to crowded and dirty Jones Beach on Long Island, that I realized what a treasure the beaches in Michigan are. I grew up spending summer vacations near South Haven and Manistee and Torch Lake. I went to Camp Neyati nine summers in a row, on Crooked Lake, north of Clare. Summer in Michigan is sandy feet thudding on the bottom of the row boat, setting marshmallows on fire and blowing them out, raspberry bushes on sand dunes. It’s the setting for the story of my childhood.

I love to read and write the kind of fiction that is deeply rooted in its setting. When I began work on The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott I had never been to Walpole, New Hampshire, and I had certainly never been to the summer of 1855. But I knew that getting the details of the setting right—the dresses and hairstyles Louisa and her sisters wore, the textiles in the rooms of the rented house, the feel of a train swaying on the track—those details were the key to creating a fictional world for my imagined version of Louisa.

At the time of my story, when Louisa was just 22 years old, she was in conflict over what she wanted her life to be. Staying in the country with her parents in Walpole, or back in Concord, Massachusetts, where they spent most of their time, provided a tranquil setting for her work. It also bored and confined her. Boston, with its noise and crowds, was overwhelming. But Boston provided the anonymity and privacy Louisa craved. Boston was full of possibility. Place mattered to Louisa because place defined who she was and who she could be.

I think that whatever I’m writing, whether it is set in the Midwest or Northeast or on the moon, Michigan will always be with me. Growing up there taught me to pay attention, not just to what was inside my own head, but to what was all around me.

Kelly O’Connor McNees is the author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott. She lives with her husband in Chicago and blogs at http://kellyoconnormcnees.com/news.

Thank you so much for stopping by, Kelly! It was such a pleasure.

When asked about how growing up in Michigan affected my writing I took a long time thinking about it. I finally decided that it was all about the cold.  I live in Los Angeles now and when I really need to get some writing done, I flee to where it’s freezing.  That made me think. Why is it that the heat gives us William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Eudora Welty? And the cold gives us Garrison Keillor, Al Franken and Erma Bombeck?  Are the southern states that much more angst ridden than the northern states? Or does the north just have a better sense of humor?  I called my mom and my brother who both still live in Muskegon Michigan to ask them what they thought.  My mom, who grew up in Texas, pondered it for a second then said, well, the cold builds character because you have to wear so many clothes.  That didn’t help much. My brother answered his cell phone while shoveling two feet  of snow from his driveway. His response was that he was busy and it was a dumbass question. So much for that. So why did I feel the need to write a comedic novel? Did growing up in Michigan form this need? No, I don’t think so. It’s the backdrop of Born Under a Lucky Moon. But the characters could have lived anywhere.  Some writers feel the need to exorcize their demons and some writers have the need to celebrate them.  Me, I just wanted to make people laugh. To help them see that their family relationships could be seen in a comedic rather than a tragic light. Right now there is too much harsh reality in our world – the economy, the wars, the unemployment. I figured maybe people could do with a good chuckle. If growing up in Michigan made me want to write that way, then all I can say is; ‘thanks to the state that’s shaped like a hand.’

Dana’s debut novel Born Under a Lucky Moon is currently available from William Morrow Paperbacks. There’s no better place to spend summer than along Lake Michigan. Reading this novel is the next best thing.

You can find out more about Dana on her website. She’s also on Twitter at @danaprecious. I follow her and she lives up to her name.

This week is definitely Dana Precious week here at The Literate Housewife Review. Come back Wednesday for my interview with Dana and then again on Friday for my review of Born Under a Lucky Moon.

Writing THE BROTHERS BOSWELL

I first read James Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763 when I was twenty-one.  I was in college, plotting to be a writer and all the while telling my father I would go to law school.  To my astonishment, Boswell was also 21 and a would-be writer, also pretending to be preparing for a career in the law.  So I felt an immediate, electric kinship, across the centuries.

We didn’t mesh on everything, of course.  Boswell trolled the brothels and associated with Dukes and Countesses, so I never reached as high or as low as he typically did.  Still, I had the immediate and lasting impression that here was a character worth a novel, and two decades later I sat down to write it.

James Boswell

My thought was that I’d sketch the famous friendship between Johnson and Boswell from the inside, from Boswell’s point of view.  In 1763, Johnson is the undisputed literary lion of England; Boswell is little more than a boy from a good Scottish family — not much in the way of a recommendation in London high society.  Yet they become fast friends almost from the moment they meet.  It seemed like a natural.  Except that when I sat down to write, nothing came.

The problem, I think, was that I knew the Boswell-Johnson story far too well:  I wrote about it for my Honors thesis as an undergraduate, and my Ph.D dissertation, and I’d published several articles on the topic for good measure.  And of course Boswell’s London Journal describes that year in painstaking detail.

But I knew the key must lie in the London Journal itself, and so I sat down to read it for the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth time, determined to search the background for what I’d previously missed.  And there, in a footnote to January 5 1763, it was:  I’d forgotten that John Boswell, James’s younger brother, visited him in London for several weeks, following a brief bout of insanity at the end of 1762.  I noticed something else as well — John appears almost not at all in Boswell’s journal entries, with the exception of a line like “Had tea with my brother John.”  In most cases, that was the extent of the reference.

The more I thought about it the stranger that reticence seemed to me.  Boswell wrote and thought a great deal about madness.  It was a topic that consumed him, partially because a strain of melancholia ran through his own family, and his uncle had spent the last part of his life in a strait-waistcoat.  Boswell asked everyone about madness, friends, strangers, even Johnson, in their first conversations.  So here was a visitor fresh from the madhouse, and a brother no less — but almost complete silence from Boswell on the topic, silence from a man who happily recorded everything, from prostitutes to venereal disease.

Samuel Johnson

There was no avoiding the conclusion:  Boswell wanted desperately to hide his brother’s madness, from London society, from the friends reading the manuscript pages of his journal, and mostly from himself.  It was repression of a very high order.

From that point, the rest fell directly into place.  John, in my novel, stumbles on the Journal and discovers how systematically he has been hidden away from the great and powerful by his brother, and that knowledge reactivates his madness.  He is so jealous of James’s budding friendship with Johnson that he either begins or imagines his own deeper relationship with the author of the Dictionary.  And when he cannot reconcile his brother’s London with his own, John acquires two golden pistols, and sets out to trap Boswell and Johnson, to force them to acknowledge the relationships they’ve kept secret from one another.  A tangled web, admittedly, but one that made emotional sense.

And I could tell immediately that I’d hit on something, because suddenly the writing of the novel became great fun, something I looked forward to, rather than daily misery, which is always a good sign, of course.

**********

Thanks so much for stopping by, Philip!

Does Philip have you thinking about publishing your own book? Try Lulu as your eBook Publishers.

At the age of ten years I found my grandmother dead in her room next to mine. On that sunny summer morning I knocked on her door to ask permission to swim in a friend’s pool. I called her name, but she lay in her bed beside the window, remaining perfectly still. On her stomach sat an opened Graham Greene book and a pair of eyeglasses. I touched her face and it was stone cold. With a child’s intuition, I sensed something was seriously wrong. I ran out of the room to phone my mother at work.

Within minutes, emergency vehicles lined our once quiet residential street. All I remember is two uniformed men carrying my grandmother down the creaky wooden stairs strapped to a stretcher. I prayed they wouldn’t drop her.

There wasn’t much talk about my grandmother until about twenty years later when my parents were getting reading to move from that childhood house in Queens, New York. While packing, they stumbled across her retrospective journal which she’d written after emigrating from Vienna in the early 1930s. Only after reading that document did I really understand the deep roots of her depression, which tormented her entire life, and eventually led to her demise at the age of sixty-one.

I tucked the journal away and pulled it out ten years later after being diagnosed with breast cancer. I wondered if she’d committed suicide because of a cancer diagnosis which she’d kept to herself. I hoped her written words could provide an explanation for my own health problems, but they didn’t. However, the details of her tragic life once again drew me close to her. Her powerful words sharing her being orphaned during World War I, just pulled me in. She witnessed the Russians hack up little boys in the street and soldiers march through her town.

I realized how I’d never connected with another woman in the same way. She was an extension of me. Those ten years she’d care for me, planted the seed for my writing, because not only was she devoted to the written word by daily journaling and propensity for leaving notes on the kitchen table, but she had also taught me how to type. I remember the day as if it were yesterday.

Her black Remington typewriter was perched on the vanity in her room. Each morning, I knocked on her door for a morning kiss. She then took my hand and we’d walk down to the kitchen for breakfast. One morning when I was about six years old, instead of immediately heading downstairs, she invited me into her room.

“Have a seat,” she said,” pointing me to her vanity chair.

“I’m going to teach you how to type. This is a handy skill for a girl to have, plus you never know what kind of stories you’ll have to tell one day.”

She stood behind me with her image glowing in the mirror. She took my right hand and positioned it on the second row of keys from the bottom, carefully placing one finger on each letter, repeating the same gesture with my left hand.

“This is the position your fingers should be in. When you become a good typist, you won’t have to even look at the letters while you’re typing. Okay, dear, let’s see if we can type your name.”

With my left middle finger she had me press on the “D.” Then we moved to the right middle finger and moved up a row to type an “I.” Then my pinky pressed the “A” and then something really tricky had to happen, I had to move my right thumb down to the bottom row to type an “N.” Then my left pinky typed an “A.” After each letter I glanced up at the paper to see the impression of my efforts. After reaching the last “A” in my name, I proudly looked up at my grandmother’s face in the mirror.

“You see, you did it!” she said, squeezing my shoulders.

“Like anything in life, the more you practice, the better you’ll become. You must work hard to get results; you’ll learn that soon enough, my love.”

This seemingly innocent gesture on her part instilled my own lifelong commitment to the written word. As a young girl, I wrote stories, but as a young adult, I worked my way through college typing term papers for students.

Finding the journal was my impetus in writing write my memoir released in September 2007, Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal. The project which began as my graduate thesis made me me realize the strong connection I had with my grandmother. It also made me realize how depression is a precurrsor to suicide and the intrinsic value of writing and how important it is for one generation to pass on their stories to the next generation. As a result, I have become a journaling advocate to those in my community and beyond.