Beginning the End
In the final scenes of the novel, Mariah and Eliza begin a journey that will test their maturity and at the same time, interrogate their society. This journey is not a struggle with themselves alone.
Blog
Paths to Cold Mountain
In a neighborhood free library, I found a crisp hardcover copy of Cold Mountain (1997) by Charles Frazier, but I gave it away to a man for his hospital stay. I borrowed a grimy copy from the library. I dipped in. There in the epigraph is Han-shan.
Uncompromising Women: Hester Pester
If a scene in the Compromise ends with dialogue, the line probably belongs to Hester Brown, the indomitable cook and reluctant friend. Mariah and Hester bicker and chide while they work. The coworkers have nicknames for one another, Hester Pester and Mariah Milk-Thistle or Miss Prickly. They call each other out and deliver news without embellishment. Their dialogue has been a joy to write, and I’ve watched their devotion grow.
Mixed Race at the Crossroads
Revision requires a sharp delete key. Like sculpting, the act of removing is the creative act. However, I’m not ready to put my main characters on death-row for my own capital crimes. Cutting Otis’s narrative has meant cutting 20,000 words of my best writing and a Black male protagonist’s voice. Here I explore my processes of decision making involving craft, history, and my place in current discourses on race. Then I explicate a scene in which Otis is also at a crossroads.
Coming of Age: In the Mirror
Bildungsroman, the coming-of-age story, is a powerful cultural idea. How does The Compromise deliver on the cultural expectation of this genre?
Longest Night
We light candles and give gifts that this year may remind of former abundance, when time seemed endless and the planet was a horizonless platform for our whims. Gradually, the plan shifted from expanding unquestionable goodness to giving and taking less and questioning more. In the United States, some of us may have traded illusions of strength for clarifying doubt. As a writer, I’ve questioned my faith in the goodness of my creative imagination. I produced without interrogating the privledge whence it sprang. I question and begin again.
The Births of Story
Bodies have rhythms and arcs already encoded– pulse and breath, birth, growth, reproduction, and decay. Poetry performs its nonlinear subatomic behavior. We may expect the novel to work differently, to be more socially engaged, measurable in time and space, more pedistrian, in a good way. But a novel creates a larger discursive body in which the human body can speak, its pleasures and pain included.
An American Story
We may learn how to “make a difference” worth making, but we do not all agree on what differences to make. We feel and act as groups, but also as individuals, overcoming confusion and seeking truth in our existential struggles. My novel tells a story about people learning to make a difference in the United States, and I hope there is plenty of diversity and good air to breath.
The Abolitionist Library
My Gamble Library is an improvement on history. The fictional library has books to the ceiling, now-famous paintings, a globe, maps, architectural drawings, ancient manuscripts, the classics, new literary fiction, philosophical essays, unpublished work copied by hand, the New-York Daily Tribune, and contraband abolitionist newspapers. Almost exclusively, women were not allowed into university libraries and public libraries came many years later after the Civil War. Even so, a benefactor could have donated her treasures to the education of all women.
Fourth of July Declamation
The nation’s ideals continue to be questioned through acts of civil disobedience. I also respond as I write and revise my fiction, including the chapter “Awaken the Nation” about a Fourth of July declamation at the female academy. I continue to intensify my characters’ responses to injustice, one’s brave disruption and another’s equally brave mercy.