The Compromise: An American Novel
Author's log of writing The Compromise
In my little world, The Compromise looms large and requires greater responsibility. Through the month of June 2020, I revised “Moral Freedom.” It describes a protest in front of the courthouse, Columbia, Missouri, 1845. The potential for collaboration interests me more than violence, so I listened to various sources and found my path.
If we write and teach well, echoes return.
“Sometimes things that have only the barest of associative connections will pay off in the end.” Robert Boswell, The Half-Known World This approach recently payed off. Tentatively, I began The Compromise with an assessment of Otis’s injuries. He was attacked the day he started working as an overseer, a role he was too immature to…
How solemn is The Compromise? I don’t expect it to be a tome or a tomb, but there are stories that involve death. Often elderly people, like my mother, keep their sense of humor to the end, and so does this novel. Love and humor might help me find the secular balance I need. Let’s…
A huntress knows the heart has four chambers. They open and close as long as there is life. There are sections of The Compromise about love and family that are quiet but tense. Aware of their fragility, I work long and hard to breathe life into them. Image: The hart. Lithograph of Kashmir stag by…
She lives to become a wife and mother, a pioneer woman in the flesh of my history. In the first storm of January 1847, a rider came up the road, bundled against the wind and hunched in the saddle. It was not George, who always sat tall with his hat pulled low, so I stood…
According to the website Examined Existence, Americans as readers do not rank well on the World Culture Score Index. Yet 2 million books are published every year. Even I can follow the logic of these numbers. Is it possible to be lost in a crowd of writers with unread books to sell? Women’s authorship, despite…
How is The Compromise teachable? A recent article in Edutopia gives advice on how to teach novels like The Hunger Games, Divergent, and 1984. Dystopian novels are very common in the high school curriculum. Historical fiction, on the other hand, is grounded as much in actual history as in speculation. Why isn’t historical fiction in…
I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything–other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned…. Mary Oliver, Upstream, 2019 New Yorker article The Compromise begins in fragile equilibrium. Many American families have step-children and half-siblings. In my half-brother’s big family, all but one child was adopted. Now they are far-flung. In…
If we write and teach well, there are echoes. The useful phrase is used again. The fertile image is reimagined. The play of light on rings and the echo of sound on stone are rarely spoken of, so they find their places in art. Few things in writing The Compromise give me as much pleasure…