What a laptop can't do: Why a notebook is essential to my storytelling life, a guest post from Ginny Kubitz Moyer

In today's essay, historical fiction author Ginny Kubitz Moyer explores the benefits and pleasures of writing down her thoughts longhand.  My thanks to Ginny for contributing her post!

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What a Laptop Can't Do: Why a Notebook is Essential to My Storytelling Life

Ginny Kubitz Moyer

More than thirty years ago, as a college student visiting London, I was thrilled to see the handwritten draft of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway on display. It was fascinating to see how Woolf had crossed out certain words and written others above them, trying out various options before settling on the right one. As I left the exhibit, it struck me that with the advent of personal computers, writing a first draft has changed dramatically. A sleek font now stands in for an author’s penmanship, and a delete button has erased the need for a handwritten strikethrough. I remember feeling a certain romantic nostalgia for the old days, when a notebook and pencil were the primary materials of an author’s toolkit.

Back then, I didn’t know that I’d end up being a novelist myself. I didn’t know that I’d depend upon a laptop to write my stories, that I’d be lost without its ease and convenience. But I also didn’t know that in addition to my trusty Mac, I would always—always!—have a notebook and pencil at the ready.

Although I don’t use it for drafting my novels, a notebook—specifically, one of those composition books with the speckled covers—is an essential part of my writing life. It’s a safe space dedicated to play, exploration, and writing without pressure. It’s the low-stakes laboratory where I can mix words and see what results.

For one thing, the notebook is where I warm up at the start of the writing day. In her famous guide The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron recommends a daily practice of three longhand “morning pages” to clear the air. I don’t always do three pages, but I do find it valuable to scribble a description of what the day is like, what I see out of my window, what’s in my thoughts. It’s a helpful transition from morning coffee into a creative frame of mind.

Notebooks are also where I figure out what will happen in my novels. This is essential, because one quirk of mine (shared by many authors) is that I cannot plot in advance. Try as I might, I can’t come up with a story idea in the abstract and draw up a scene outline before I begin. For better or worse, I have to write my way into it.

So I start with a general sense of who I think my main character will be. I’ll take a prompt from one of my writing books (usually something vague, like “write about a sunset”) and I’ll freewrite, with the character in mind. The more scenes I write, the more I get to know my protagonist and the setting. Other characters will appear in the freewrites, and conflicts too, and sometimes I’ll stumble upon insights that end up being the thematic heart of my story. It’s like being in a darkroom and watching a negative develop: from dim shadowy outlines, the details gradually emerge. Often it takes months of freewriting before I know the plot well enough to begin writing my first draft.

Sometimes I do this freewriting on my laptop for expediency’s sake, but more often I do it in my notebook. Writing by hand is liberating; the words don’t look perfect, so they don’t have to be perfect, not yet. When I’m fumbling my way into a new novel, I need to remove all expectation that it’ll be smooth and polished. Paper and pen are brilliant for that.

Pub. by She Writes Press, Dec. 2025

In the last few years, my notebooks have taken on another role as well: that of mood board or visual library. Because my genre is historical fiction, I’m constantly looking up clothing, interior design, and other images to spark my imagination. I have Pinterest boards for visuals that remind me of the time period or look like the characters, and that’s helpful, but not as helpful as having them before my eyes as I freewrite.

So a few years ago, it occurred to me that I could print out the pictures and paste them right into the notebooks. I love doing this, because it adds another layer of playfulness to my writing life. It’s fun to tap into my inner child by using scissors and glue, and once the images are there it’s like a little gift to turn the page and be greeted by a picture that I chose weeks before. (Sometimes, there’s an almost spooky connection between words and images: once I was writing about a character on a hill looking over the horizon, and turned the page to find a picture of a young girl standing on the top of a peak!)

I’ve got over twenty notebooks by now, and while they do take up a fair amount of bookshelf space, I can’t imagine my writing life without them. For something so modest and unassuming, those notebooks are precious. In that safe space between the speckled covers, anything can happen … and that’s the magic of being an author, in any generation.

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Ginny Kubitz Moyer is the author of the novels The Seeing Garden and A Golden Life (named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2024). Her upcoming novel, The World at Home, is published in December 2025. She lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can learn more at www.ginnymoyer.org.

A Different Kind of Three-Act Structure: Writing my Main Character as a Child, a Young Woman, and an Elderly Grandmother, an essay by Kristen Loesch

I'm glad to be featuring Kristen Loesch here today with an essay on a unique variation of the multi-period novel.  Her second work of historical fiction, The Hong Kong Widow, is out today from Allison & Busby (and from Berkley in the USA). As a gothic thriller featuring séances and a heroine who can see ghosts, it sounds ideal for this time of year.

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A Different Kind of Three-Act Structure:

Writing my Main Character as a Child, a Young Woman, and an Elderly Grandmother

by Kristen Loesch

In my second novel, The Hong Kong Widow, we meet one character, Mei, at three different periods of her life: As a child growing up in 1930s Shanghai; as a young refugee in 1950s Hong Kong; and as an elderly grandmother in modern-day America.

In each of these three timelines, she has one goal: Seven-year-old Mei in Shanghai wants to find her missing mother. Twenty-something Mei in Hong Kong is hell-bent on revenge, and enters a séance competition at a haunted house hosted by the wife of the man who once destroyed her life. Elderly Mei in America wants the truth about the final night of that long-ago séance competition to come to light.

Pub. by Allison & Busby (Oct. 2025)

The best feeling, when you’re reading a dual or multi-timeline historical novel, is when the narratives come together seamlessly. Not only do they make sense, presented as one story, but you get the feeling that actually, they couldn’t exist without one another. Ever since reading my first Kate Morton novel, I have been drawn to that kind of historical fiction: Usually one timeline is contemporary, in the POV of a present-day protagonist, and the other is historical, but I’ve increasingly seen multi-timeline novels in which all the timelines are historical, set at different points in the past. Either way, when this is done well, it’s breathtaking; when it’s done badly, the reader ends up more deeply invested in one timeline and one protagonist over the other. The writer, therefore, takes a risk by splitting up the narrative in this way, in the hopes of achieving that perfect plait, one timeline woven neatly into the next, all the way to the end. It is certainly what I hoped to achieve in my debut novel, The Porcelain Doll.

But in The Hong Kong Widow, all three timelines are written from the perspective of the same character. And although Mei is the same person across all three timelines, in many ways she’s also a very different person. (It’s almost like I was trying to make things harder on myself!)

When I first read Emma Donoghue’s Room, I was struck by the storytelling power of a young child’s perspective, and I knew that I would one day want to try it myself. Writing Mei as a child was an eye-opening experience for me as a writer. Although Little Mei is growing up in 1930s China, on the eve of the Japanese invasion, and her family life is no less tumultuous, I wanted her to have a wondrous innocence about her, and a quirky sense of humor. I wanted her to notice things that other people wouldn’t. I wanted her to be open and trusting and vulnerable, but also incredibly strong. I thought it was going to be so much more difficult than it was: As it turned out, Little Mei has such a distinctive voice, such a unique way of looking at the world, that whenever I wrote from her perspective, it felt effortless; it simply flowed. I never had to stop and wonder: What would this character be feeling right now? Or why does this character actually want this; why are they doing this? (I did, however, try to be careful with the vocabulary she used!)

Young Woman Mei was the greatest challenge.

In the 1950s, Mei is no longer quirky and innocent; she is lost and traumatized. As a character, she is in tremendous pain, and this pain clouds her judgement, her perspective, her every thought. She wants revenge, but she’s never considered what that revenge actually means, or what she might do afterwards. This timeline also contains the majority of the spooky, supernatural happenings in the novel; this is Mei at her most haunted, literally and figuratively. To reflect the fact that she’s largely forgotten who she is, I decided to write her in the third person. (Little Mei and elderly Mei are both written in the first person.) My aim was not only to show how far removed she is from her true self, because she is consumed by pain and hatred, but also to help the reader differentiate more easily between timelines!

Elderly Mei, who is a mother and a grandmother in 2015 Seattle, had to be both a combination of these two previous versions of Mei, but she also had to be more than that. In a way, elderly Mei is more like Little Mei; she knows who she is and she’s comfortable with who she is. She isn’t defined by her own pain, the way that 1950s Mei is. She’s moved on. But if anything, she’s moved on too far. She’s repressed her memories of the past. She refuses to believe that anything that is painful could be worth revisiting. She’s in denial of a large part of her own history, and has strived unsuccessfully to pretend that it doesn’t even exist. So while I wanted elderly Mei to come across as wise, and experienced, and self-aware, I also wanted her to need something, to be missing something, to have her own journey to embark upon.

I’m not sure I will ever write another novel the way I wrote The Hong Kong Widow. I’m not sure there will ever be another protagonist quite like Mei. The structural choices I made for this book presented a unique challenge, and a unique sense of accomplishment at the end. I would love to hear from any readers out there: Which version of Mei did you prefer? Which one spoke to you the most? And why do you think that was?

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Kristen Loesch holds a BA in History, as well as a Master’s degree in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge. Her debut historical novel, The Porcelain Doll, was shortlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award and was a finalist for the Edgar Award. She lives in Switzerland. 

Stitching Together the Novel Research, an essay by Barbara Stark-Nemon, author of Isabela's Way

I love how Barbara Stark-Nemon's essay about historical research incorporates embroidery, both thematically and literally.  Her new novel, Isabela's Way, is published tomorrow.

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Stitching Together the Novel Research

Barbara Stark-Nemon

Anyone who knows me well has learned that I love novel research, and in the course of ten years of doing author talks and interviews, one of the most frequent questions I’m asked is how and where I conduct my book research. My new novel, Isabela’s Way, takes place in early 17th-century Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany, and required extensive research involving travel, reading and experiential learning.

Isabela, my main character, is a young embroideress in Portugal, and her embroidery becomes crucial to the novel’s plot. A dear friend gifted me with a book that grabbed my attention and informed the embroidery elements in the novel. Its title alone intrigued me —Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, by Clare Hunter. 

Hunter’s book tells the story of embroidery in Europe, and traces the development of stitchery entwined over centuries with the history of the people and places where embroidery was cultivated. It also tells of the plants that found their way into fabrics, dyes, thread and decoration starting in the 10th century. Inevitably the history of embroiderers became the history of the women who embroidered, the perfect background information I needed to move forward with Isabela’s Way.

Women used needlework to claim their place in the world, “stitching down political comment or feminist complaint, documenting their experience through domestic sewing.” During the 16th and 17th centuries, “embroidery was one of the most precious forms of …communication, valued as a transmitter of intellect and emotion - when it was a conversation between people and their God, the church and its congregation, ruler and subjects. Needlework had power and embroiderers had value.”

A writer knows when she’s found a deep source of material when every page requires notes! I was particularly interested, in Threads of Life, in the story of Mary Queen of Scots, whose complicated life between Scotland and France and her sovereignty fight with Elizabeth I of England is a colorful part of history. Mary’s son James became king of England during the time my novel takes place. Hunter tells us that Mary was an expert embroideress, an art she learned in France where embroidery had moved from monasteries to castles and into home production. For all the years that Mary was kept captive because of her threat to the English crown, she embroidered coded messages in gifts of clothing, in her own ensembles and in banners displayed in royal and public settings. These beautifully stitched items subtly reflected her demands to be freed, her devout Catholic faith, her political rivalry with Elizabeth and her romantic interests. I borrowed this concept and adapted it to Isabela’s refugee story.

Another form of research I used heavily for Isabela’s Way involved trips to museums on three continents to view early 17th-century paintings and textiles. I wanted to see what clothing and other embroidered textiles were represented, and when possible, to see the textiles themselves. I also wanted a sense of rooms in 17th-century homes, furnishings, cooking and eating implements and landscapes. I haunted the old historic parts of the European cities and countryside where my story took place, imagining Isabela stitching her way with the sights and smells of the local landscapes.

Because I like many forms of fiber art—I quilt, knit, crochet and sew—I was drawn to the study of embroidery personally, and decided to “try my hand” at it! My wonderful book cover designer incorporated embroidery-like images into the cover for Isabela’s Way and (perhaps unwisely) I determined to recreate that cover as an embroidered piece. That decision opened up a whole new world of local embroiderers, international organizations with vast stitch banks and textile history over hundreds of years.

Stitching the book cover has been a challenge, a joy, and a meditation on slow art. I newly appreciate the skill required to do embroidery well, the complexity of the design process, and the exacting patience embroiderers must embrace. I have experienced (along with occasional frustration!) the quiet thrill of bringing color and texture to an outlined design. Finally, it’s been a delightful way to deepen my understanding of my main character, Isabela!

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Barbara Stark-Nemon is the award-winning author of short stories, essays, the historical novel Even in Darkness, and the contemporary novel Hard Cider. Her historical novel Isabela’s Way is published in September 2025. Barbara lives, writes, swims, cycles, and does fiber art in Ann Arbor and Northport, MI.

When the Lights Came On: Cinema, Class, and the Stories We Cling To, a guest post by RJ Verity

Welcome to author RJ Verity, who's here today with a post about the role of the cinema in early 20th-century society: the background to her debut historical novel.

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When the Lights Came On: Cinema, Class,
and the Stories We Cling To

by RJ Verity

For many working-class families in the early 20th century, the cinema wasn’t just an escape. It was the first place they saw lives larger than their own reflected back at them—the flicker of possibility projected onto a fragile strip of celluloid.

In Britain, by the 1920s nearly every industrial city and mining town had its own picture house. A visit to the cinema was a ritual, a highlight of the week. The historian A. J. P. Taylor once described interwar cinema-going as “the essential social habit of the age,” and it’s easy to see why. The bioscope halls and “electric palaces” that sprang up across the country became not just entertainment venues, but communal spaces where hopes, fears, and identities could be rehearsed in the dark.

Across the Atlantic, Americans were making similar weekly pilgrimages. In the 1900s and 1910s, nickelodeons—five-cent picture houses packed with immigrant and working-class audiences—sprang up in cities and coal towns alike. By the 1920s, they gave way to the great “movie palaces,” which promised marble foyers, chandeliers, and velvet seats. Yet crucially, ticket prices stayed low enough for miners, millworkers, and shop assistants to keep attending. Palaces blurred class lines: for a dime or two, ordinary people could step into surroundings as sumptuous as any opera house. The geography differed, but the impulse was the same—to sit together in the dark and dream.

Writers have long recognised this dual role of cinema—as both escape and mirror. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) gave audiences the bittersweet spectacle of resilience born out of poverty. Greta Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie (1930), was advertised with the tagline “Garbo talks!”—a reminder that cinema was forever reinventing itself, just as its audiences dreamed of doing.

Literary fiction, too, has mined the emotional charge of movie-going. Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show (1966), set in a fading Texas town, captures the poignancy of a cinema on the brink of closure, its light dimming along with the community’s prospects. Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions (2002) meditates on the mystery of a vanished silent film star and the haunting power of moving images to outlive their makers. Julian Barnes, in The Noise of Time (2016), turns to music and totalitarianism rather than film, yet wrestles with the same question: how art survives when lives are precarious.

Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) and A. J. Cronin’s The Stars Look Down (1935) were later adapted for the screen, bringing industrial hardship and working-class lives directly into cinemas. These adaptations remind us that film was never only about fantasy—it was also about recognition.

Children in front of movie theatre, Alpine, Texas (public domain)

Virginia Woolf, in her 1926 essay The Cinema, caught something of this strange alchemy. “We are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves,” she wrote, marvelling at how moving pictures created visions both intimate and uncanny. Woolf sensed that cinema could show truths not easily told in words: how communities fracture and endure, how individuals imagine themselves anew.

That imaginative leap is what fascinates me as a novelist. My debut historical novel, Poole of Light (September 2025), begins in 1913 with a boy from a colliery town who comes across his first picture house. For Jem, the cinema is revelation: a doorway into stories that feel both impossibly distant and tantalisingly close. Across the decades that follow—through world wars, new technologies, and his own battles with identity—the cinema offers him not just escape, but a way of piecing together who he might become.

"Where the boys spend their money" (photo of St. Louis, Missouri; public domain)

 
I don’t think Jem’s story is unique to fiction. For countless people in Britain and America, the weekly trip to the pictures was about more than amusement. It was a way of locating oneself in a rapidly changing world. Sitting in the dark, you might imagine being someone else; you might imagine your town, your family, your class differently. The silver screen shimmered with reinvention.

That’s why early cinema continues to draw me back as both writer and reader. It’s not only nostalgia for the glamour of Chaplin or Garbo, but the recognition that behind the laughter and tears sat working people from every walk of life, grasping for meaning. Stories were sustenance. And the cinema, in its golden age, was where light itself became a form of survival.

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Short Bio

RJ Verity is the author of Poole of Light, her debut historical novel set against the rise of cinema in early 20th-century England, and the first in The Poole Legacy series. Her writing explores memory, class, and the stories that shape us.

Poole of Light launches across all Amazon marketplaces on 16 September 2025, with the eBook available now for pre-order: https://mybook.to/poole-of-light

Discover more at https://www.rjverity.com.

From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century: a guest post by Nancy Hayes Kilgore

Nancy Hayes Kilgore is here today with a short essay about shifting to a new historical era, and what happens when a potential story idea just won't let you go.

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From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

Nancy Hayes Kilgore

Four years ago I was immersed in the 17th-century world of Isobel Gowdie. The most famous of the Scottish women tried for witchcraft, Isobel lived in a world of drudgery and fantasy. Or was it fantasy? A peasant on the land of a Scottish laird, she used herbs and magic to cure diseases and to spite her enemies, and she could fly in the “Otherworld” of fairies and elves, where she had great powers and consorted with the Devil.

Milford House Press (2021)

The Scottish Reformation was a time of social change, religious wars, and changing belief systems. The reforming Presbyterians wanted to eradicate what was then a widespread belief in that “Otherworld” and in magic, which in their minds included Catholicism as well as folk religion. Heading towards a rational theology and the Age of Reason, which was of course controlled by “the rational sex,” men, they targeted the powerful women who used magic and herbal cures (and curses). They named them witches, tortured and killed them.

Isobel Gowdie’s life and trial took place in this fierce, violent, and passionate milieu. And I, who had been a lackluster history student in school, became fascinated with the era, as well as with Isobel’s story. Differing beliefs, clashing and intersecting, and an amazing cast of characters, held me, a feminist, yogi, Presbyterian minister, and therapist, in thrall and provided continual fodder for the multi-layered novel that became Bitter Magic.

I finished Bitter Magic and launched it into the world. Phew! I thought. Enough novel writing.

But then I started sorting through a trove of letters from my grandmother in the 1910s. I became intrigued with the life of Florence, this grandmother I never knew. A young woman with tuberculosis, she was feisty and ambitious, a staunch feminist, a budding concert pianist, and her letters to my grandfather, her “comrade” but not yet a suitor, burgeoned with tantalizing elements for a novel – her adventures at a ranch in New Mexico, her train journeys, her music, and her paramours.

Sunbury Press (Sept. 2025)

When I began writing the story of Florence, another question, another dimension emerged: my mother’s life as a young woman in the 1940s. My mother, Flossie, never knew her own mother, Florence, who died of tuberculosis when she was born. How did the two lives interrelate?

I’d long been attracted to the idea of a dual-timeline novel, and here it was. After lots of research about those two time periods and lots of drafts, Pennsylvania Love Song emerged.

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Nancy Hayes Kilgore is the author of four novels: Pennsylvania Love Song, Bitter Magic, Wild Mountain, and Sea Level. Awards include the Vermont Writers Prize and a Foreword Reviews Book of the Year.

An ordained minister and pastoral psychotherapist, Nancy leads workshops on writing and spirituality. She lives in Vermont with her husband, dog and cat. 

A Leg to Stand On, a guest post by Nell Joslin, author of Measure of Devotion

Nell Joslin, author of the Civil War-era novel Measure of Devotion (Regal House, May 2025). contributes a short essay about how validation for one's writing choices can arrive in unexpected ways.  

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A Leg to Stand On

Nell Joslin

In the fall of 2015, I had been working on Measure of Devotion off and on for more than two years and was feeling discouraged about my ability to write anything worthwhile. It was a difficult time in general; not long before, I had lost my father and I was caring for my mother, then in the final year of her life.

Looking for inspiration, I decided to attend a Civil War reenactment of the battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. I scrounged up enough enthusiasm to buy a period costume, register as a spectator, and find a place to stay in the area near Chattanooga where the events would take place. I even paid for a ticket to the “ball” planned for the evening after the “battles.”

I soon saw that it was a mistake to think the reenactment would be helpful. The solitary nature of this jaunt, combined with my gloomy mood, piled loneliness on top of self-doubt. The war reenactors seemed even more wooden to me than the characters in my novel. And although many others were similarly attired, I felt foolish and awkward in my 1860s dress and shawl.



My characters are very loosely based on some much-revered ancestors. One of my great-grandfathers was gravely wounded at the hip in the Chattanooga area in 1863, but there most of his similarity with my book’s Civil War soldier ended. I had plucked the tiniest thread of the real story and taken it in a completely new direction. I was inventing wholly new people who did some very surprising—shocking—things. In the attempt to be creative, was I simply disrespectful? Blasphemous?

On the last evening of my visit in the reenactment area, I took a late afternoon walk along the little-traveled gravel road that ran in front of my cabin, trying to decide whether to begin the eight-hour drive back home or wait until the following morning.

I had been looking up at the darkening sky through the bare branches of trees, but suddenly something made me look down at my feet. There by the side of the road was the leg of a GI-Joe-type doll. No sign of the rest of the doll’s body, no other litter on the ground in this woodsy, tranquil setting.



I picked the leg up. The area around the hip bore a black smudge and the “ligament” which had attached it to the body was severed.

This, I decided, was a seal of affirmation. “Honey, this story is yours,” my long-ago great-grandfather was telling me. “You go ahead and write it any way you like.” And by golly, I would.

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NELL JOSLIN is a native of Raleigh, North Carolina and received her MFA from North Carolina State University. Besides a fiction writer, she has been a public school teacher, medical librarian, copy editor, freelance journalist, stay-at-home mom and attorney (although not all at the same time). She currently lives in Raleigh. For more details, please see: Nell Joslin – Measure of Devotion

Our multicultural family history, a guest post by Alix Christie, author of “The Shining Mountains”

I'm very happy to have Alix Christie here on the blog with her essay about the family history behind her latest book, a family saga set in the Rocky Mountain West. Her debut, Gutenberg's Apprentice, was one of my favorite novels of 2014, and her second, The Shining Mountains, was just released in paperback by the High Road Books of the University of New Mexico Press. For additional information, please visit her website.

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Our Multicultural Family History

Alix Christie

From an early age I was fascinated by the stories my Canadian grandmother told of her Scottish forbears in the Pacific Northwest, particularly one 19th century fur trader, Archibald McDonald, who married an alleged “princess” of the Chinook tribe. Decades later I would understand how offensive this fantasy depiction of Native wives of white men could be, and how common it unfortunately was. Yet as a child I was enraptured enough to draw a detailed family tree, showing that Archibald had indeed married Raven, a daughter of Chief Comcomly of the Chinook tribe. There the matter would have rested, if my younger brother, a historian and professor of literature, hadn’t turned up one day a decade ago with a boxful of books. He’d just written a scholarly paper on another distant relative, Duncan McDonald, and was gifting me his research. “For your next novel,” he said.

A quick count of the “Cast of Characters” of the book that eventually resulted adds up to more than fifty names. They include those Scots Highlanders, French missionaries, British bosses, American trappers, Norwegian, German and English immigrants, and Native Americans from five different tribes across the Rocky Mountain West. Though my research began with that one man — Duncan McDonald, son of our Scots great-great-great-uncle Angus and his Nez Perce wife Catherine—the story I discovered reached back several generations and across a vast expanse of the West, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. It all came together when I flew to Montana to meet my many cousins on the Flathead Reservation, all enrolled tribal members descended from Angus and Catherine.

Angus McDonald, 1860s, at the new international boundary between the U.S. and Canada

Catherine McDonald (Kitalah—Eagle Rising Up, Nez Perce), studio portrait, 1860s Montana

Growing up in California public schools I had not the slightest idea of the deep pre-American history of our land. The story we were taught was one of pilgrims and triumph; the mechanics of “Manifest Destiny” and westward colonial expansion were not so much glossed over as ignored. Meeting for the first time Native Americans with whom I shared some drops of Scottish blood was therefore an extraordinary introduction to their history, both painful and proud. The five years I spent learning about their lives has been one of the richest experiences of my life. The Montana McDonalds welcomed me, offering advice and support; only with their generous help and a long and careful consultation with tribal authorities, was I able to breathe life into their family story as a novel.

The Shining Mountains recounts the life and times of this mixed-race family—half Scots Highlander, half Nez Perce, Mohawk and French—who were prominent in the last years of the fur trade between 1840 and 1860 in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Angus McDonald was the last Chief Trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company in the vast chunk of territory that would become the northwestern United States. But it wasn’t his prominence that most amazed me. What struck me with even greater force was how incredibly multicultural was the mid-19th century world within which he and his family moved. We Americans have traditionally called our country a “melting pot” but on its western edge it was less melted than bubbling with many diverse peoples, all intermarrying and hunting and farming and trading together, Norwegian and Salish and Scottish and Yakama, French and Russian and yes—American. It was a Babel as well: many Native tribes communicated with one another through sign language, while the traders who bought furs from them used a pidgin they called “Chinook-wawa”.

Two of Angus and Catherine's children, Angus P. and Maggie McDonald,
in full Scottish regalia, 1870s Montana

Angus and Catherine's son Duncan McDonald, with his wife
Louise “Quil-see” Shumtah (Salish),
in Native dress with American flag, 1870s Montana

This novel is about the love between two people of radically different backgrounds, yet sharing, paradoxically, a common culture of hunting and tight-knit family clans: Highlanders, too, were considered “savages” by the English who colonized Scotland. In North America families like theirs were put under incredible stress by the waves of Anglo migration that displaced Native people and forced them onto reservations. Yet against the odds they survived, to maintain their cultures and deep connection to their homelands. The “old Scotsman,” ancestor of many tribal members on the Flathead Reservation, remains a great source of pride. I was deeply moved when his great-grandson, the late Joe McDonald, the founder of Salish Kootenai College, and a great supporter of this project, described the book I wrote about Angus’ and Catherine’s life as “brilliant and invaluable.”

The author with the late Dr. Joe McDonald, Angus & Catherine’s great-grandson,
at the family cemetery at Post Creek, Montana (2016)

When I think now of the history of this country, I think of Joe, and of his cousin Maggie, the head of McDonald Ranch, and the rest of those descendants five and six generations later, every possible blend of indigenous and immigrant. America has always been a multicultural place, a mixing and mingling of different peoples and cultures. It’s a vital thing, today, to keep in mind.

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The Shining Mountains (High Road Books/University of New Mexico Press) appeared in paperback in early March 2025. Also in e-book, audiobook and hardback wherever books are sold.

Resistant Women: Imagining Voices Inside a Nineteenth-Century Asylum, an essay by Stephanie Carpenter, author of Moral Treatment

Thanks to author Stephanie Carpenter for contributing a post about crafting characters within the setting for her debut novel.  Her essay makes for a good start to both Women's History Month as well as Small Press Month this March (and look for more small press-focused posts in the coming weeks). Moral Treatment was published by Central Michigan University Press on February 25.

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Resistant Women: Imagining Voices Inside a Nineteenth-Century Asylum

By Stephanie Carpenter

My novel Moral Treatment was inspired by the former Northern Michigan Asylum, a psychiatric hospital that operated from 1885-1988 in my hometown of Traverse City. When I was a kid, the hospital’s huge, Victorian buildings were vacant and untended. What little I knew about the place came from relatives who’d worked there—and from my own impressions, formed while roaming the grounds and peeking through dusty windows. I think it was inevitable that I would someday write fiction about this setting.

I didn’t know what stories would suggest themselves when I began researching the hospital’s history, but I quickly became fascinated by the ideologies associated with its crumbling architecture. The moral treatment of the nineteenth century aimed to provide humane care to people experiencing mental illnesses. Its chief therapeutic tools were wholesome food, sanitary surroundings, access to medical care, and exposure to positive influences. Few drugs were in use in this era, and the punitive tools employed by previous generations of doctors were abandoned. But this compassionate approach yielded few "cures," and across the U.S., hospitals like the Northern Michigan Asylum expanded steadily. I wondered about the experiences of doctors and patients inside those walls.

Moral Treatment imagines life in a fictional hospital in 1889, five years after its founding. The novel alternates between the perspectives of the hospital’s medical superintendent—referred to throughout as “the doctor,” to emphasize that his identity is inseparable from his work—and seventeen-year-old Amy Underwood, a newly-admitted patient diagnosed with “pubescent insanity.” Amy’s reckless behaviors led her parents to commit her, and I wanted to depict her experience as both deeply distressing and, in some ways, liberating: at the hospital, she’s exempt from societal expectations for young women. But how could she grow in a space where she’s constantly monitored and diagnosed? Drawing from research, I developed the women characters around Amy as points of resistance to repressive forces both inside and outside the hospital.

One of the most outspoken of these characters is Mrs. Lovelace, a deeply-devout patient known as “the Walking Skeleton of Charlevoix,” who I based on the “fasting girls” of this period. The wife of a minister, Mrs. Lovelace is disgusted by her husband’s superficial piety. She presents herself as an exemplar of true Christianity, sustained on faith alone; her emaciation and fervent preaching challenged her husband, leading to her institutionalization. The doctors see Mrs. Lovelace as a case of religious delusion and anorexia nervosa; she sees them as charlatans, leading witless sheep. Mrs. Lovelace’s righteous defiance impresses Amy deeply.

Another vocal challenger of the hospital’s authority is Bertha Chapman of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Visiting Amy’s ward, Miss Chapman is troubled to learn that not all patients—Amy included—have letter-writing “privileges.” The policy is presented as protective, but Miss Chapman recognizes it as repressive, arguing that the women all deserve voices. Mocked and maligned, temperance reformers fought to raise awareness of the impacts of rampant alcohol abuse, focusing on the suffering of women and children. The WCTU also took progressive stands on a variety of other issues, and it made sense to me that Miss Chapman would advocate for institutionalized women. Amy recognizes Miss Chapman—an unmarried woman, uncowed by the doctors, working for social reforms—as an iconoclast and ally.

author Stephanie Carpenter
(credit: Adam Johnson, brockit inc.)

Amy’s closest friend, Letitia Olsen, is a young, chronic patient who embodies women’s vulnerability and persistence. She’s been abused at other hospitals; her scars, including from a hysterectomy, illustrate gendered biases about mental health. A ward of the state, she’s now attracted the attention of the hospital’s most “modern” doctor, who sees her as a good subject for an experimental surgery. But charismatic Letitia thwarts the doctors’ attempts to quell her, constantly calling their motives into question and seeding doubts among the other women. Letitia always authors her own story, but Amy worries that her friend’s story-telling sometimes veers into self-delusion; Letitia’s unprotected situation pushes Amy to plan for both of their futures.

Finally, I crafted the doctor’s wife, Diana, as a bridge between her husband’s clinical perspective and the patients’ lived experiences. Diana met her husband as his patient at a health resort; though her “nervous complaints” make her seem like a Victorian stereotype, her arc challenges ideas about women’s frailty and docility. Having lived on-site at asylums throughout her marriage, Diana makes meaningful roles for herself: socializing with the patients, planning entertainments, and documenting the hospital through photography. Though her husband still sees her as his patient, Diana is increasingly concerned about his health; at fifty-one to his sixty-five years old, she recognizes that his commitment to the hospital is unsustainable. Her perceptiveness extends to the patients. By sharing her interest in photography, Diana expands Amy’s narrow view of the world.

Moral Treatment doesn’t attempt to tell the stories of actual people who lived, loved, and suffered at the Northern Michigan Asylum or hospitals like it. Those stories aren’t mine to tell. Instead, I hope that my fictional characters, rooted in historical research, help to animate the institutions that still linger around us—and I hope my novel illustrates that power may be complex, but it is never absolute.

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Stephanie Carpenter’s debut novel, Moral Treatment, is the inaugural winner of the Summit Series Prize from Central Michigan University Press. Her collection of stories, Missing Persons, won the 2017 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. A native of northern Michigan, Stephanie holds degrees from Williams College, Syracuse University, and the University of Missouri. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Michigan Tech University. Learn more at stephanie-carpenter.com.

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The Great Depression on the Farm, a guest post by Charlotte Whitney, author of A Tiny Piece of Blue

Today I'm welcoming author Charlotte Whitney, who has a guest essay about the historical background to her new novel, A Tiny Piece of Blue.

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The Great Depression on the Farm

Charlotte Whitney

At its best historical fiction is totally immersive. Readers become so involved in the story that they feel they are right there in the same room with the characters, mentally encouraging them to take a certain path or, conversely, discouraging flawed characters from decisions with disastrous consequences. My readers expect this from me, and I attempt to delight  as well as educate readers regarding a particular period of history.

However, I mentioned the reader being in the same “room” with the characters. Many of the settings in my books are not rooms but a variety of farm locations. A section or chapter might take place in a barn, field, silo, chicken house,  milk house, or hay loft--or a one-room country school, barn dance, or the midway of a county fair. All of these locations have been settings in one or another of my novels which are set in the rural farmland of south-central Michigan during the Great Depression. 

A Tiny Piece of Blue, February 2025

Many readers enjoy the familiarity of the dust storms of the Great Depression touchingly depicted by John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) and more recently by Kristin Hannah in The Four Winds (2021). These are amazing books, and I encourage you to read them. However, because the devastating dust storms didn’t hit southern Michigan with the same ferocity of other plains states, readers tend to be less familiar with my settings. Nevertheless, Michigan was not immune from the vagaries of weather and economics during the depression. Droughts, along with plummeting dairy, beef, pork, and egg prices caused many farm foreclosures. Farmers found themselves homeless and unless they had family willing to take them in, they joined the minions setting out for a better life, often California-bound.

My Childhood Family Farm with Red Barns

I grew up on a farm in Calhoun County, Michigan as did my parents, and both sets of grandparents. Before them were immigrants from England, Ireland, and Germany who all had dreams of a better life. Calhoun County encompasses Battle Creek, Marshall, Albion and some smaller towns and villages. But it was farmland when the immigrants settled, and all my grandparents and great-grandparents were indigent family farmers. My mother remembered the log cabin that was originally the family homestead, long since replaced not once, but subsequently by two houses on the same site. The family stories are rich with both fact and emotion. However, not all stories were passed down, particularly those of failure and heartbreak. No letters were kept, save the missives home from two great-great uncles who were Union soldiers in the Civil War. Nevertheless, when starting my research, I chose to start with those stories closest to my heart—those of my family.

My mother Mary Whitney with her sister and her pet lamb

When a child, my mother had a pet lamb that she loved. It was soft, cuddly and tagged along with her wherever she went. Ironically, my mother’s name was Mary. However, one year during the Depression my grandparents struggled to have enough to eat, and my mom’s precious lamb was slaughtered. From that day on my mother would eat anything that was on the table—some days squirrel, rabbit, or wild boar, but she NEVER ever ate lamb.

Photos of Calhoun County Fair in the 1930s
(courtesy of the Calhoun County Agricultural and Industrial Society)

A Tiny Piece of Blue contains several dramatic scenes from the 1935 Calhoun County Fair. Vernon passes by members of the Pottawatomi tribe selling quill baskets at the entrance to the fair and experiences a wave of regret he never purchased one for Edna. Similarly thirteen-year-old Silstice finds herself at the top of the Ferris Wheel and looks down to see her two younger brothers held hostage and struggling to pull free from their captors. Likewise Vernon observes families picnicking at Fair Lake, formerly named The Duck Pond. The places are authentic and make colorful, dramatic settings.

In one scene of A Tiny Piece of Blue Vernon surprises Silstice and her sister Alberta with a Saturday night barn dance. He mentions that barn dances only happen in June when haylofts are cleared out and before they are filled up again at hay-baling time, usually around the 4th of July. This, of course, is true for Calhoun County, Michigan. The hay season farther south would be earlier and farther north would be later.

I’ve heard from a great number of older Midwestern readers who comment on the “authentic” nature of my historical novels. I strive for that plus a superb story which keeps the reader turning pages, desperate to reach the end, yet never wanting the book to ever end. That paradox remains my goal.

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Charlotte Whitney’s next book, A Tiny Piece of Blue, will be released February 18, 2025. It can be pre-ordered here: https://charlottewhitney.com/pre-order

The View from Behind the Camera: My Family and Old Hollywood, an essay by Ginny Kubitz Moyer

Longtime readers of this blog will know I'm drawn to historical novels inspired by family history, and along these lines, Ginny Kubitz Moyer has a really interesting story to tell.  Please read on!  Moyer's novel A Golden Life is out from She Writes Press today.

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The View from Behind the Camera: My Family and
Old Hollywood

By Ginny Kubitz Moyer

Ask a roomful of authors where they get their story ideas, and you’ll likely hear some surprising answers. In my case, the inspiration for the Hollywood setting of my novel A Golden Life came from two unexpected sources: my younger son and my great-grandfather.

In late 2018, when my son Luke was in fourth grade, he was assigned a report highlighting an aspect of California history. He chose the history of Hollywood, so we headed to the library to do research. There, we found that the movie industry was not a popular subject for middle grade authors; children’s books on the topic were as scarce as SoCal rain in July. I told Luke I’d find some adult sources to use, and we’d go over them together.

To be honest, I embraced the task, because I’ve always loved old Hollywood. In high school, I decorated my bedroom with a poster of Casablanca and black and white photos of 1940s movie icons. I loved actors from the Golden Age of movies more than actors my own age; there was something about their class, elegance, and talent that captivated me.

On an even deeper level, I’ve always felt a personal identification with old Hollywood because of my family history. My great-grandfather, William S. Adams, was a cinematographer in the silent movie era. His career began in his native Brooklyn, but in the mid-1920s, when the movie industry started shifting from the East Coast to California, William followed it west. He later sent for his wife and two young daughters (the elder, Ruth, was my grandmother) to join him. The family put down roots in Southern California, where my great-grandmother herself later found work in the movie industry as a film cutter for Warner Brothers.

The Adams family, on location in southern California, approx. 1926.
Left to right: Ruth (my grandmother); William S. Adams;
Ruth Lillian Owen Adams; Jessamyn Adams.

William’s films were mostly adventure stories, including several “flying ace” movies with exciting aerial stunts. Some of the equipment he used can be seen in a photograph from the February 1927 issue of The Motion Picture Director of Hollywood, which features William and two fellow cinematographers posing proudly with their cameras. Overall, from 1913 to 1930 William worked on at least 34 films for directors such as Ralph Ince and James Stuart Blackton (William’s half-brother and the founder of Vitagraph Studios). One of these films apparently featured a very special bit player: my grandmother, who as an infant was pressed into service when the director needed a baby for a particular scene. Like many actors of the era, alas, her starring turn has been lost to time.

One hundred years later, it’s astonishing to me that my great-grandfather’s cinematography took him quite literally around the world, including to China and Fiji. He always brought back souvenirs, usually dolls, for my grandmother. Tragically, William’s travels led to his early death; he contracted malarial fever while on location in Borneo, and he died in Hollywood in December 1930. My grandmother, only eleven at the time, kept the dolls he gave her for the rest of her life. The history they represented was always a source of fascination to me.

During that winter of 2018-2019, as I helped Luke with his research (and told him his great-great-grandfather’s story), I gained a new feel for those heady early days of Hollywood. I gained a stronger sense of the historical arc of the motion picture industry. And the more I read, the more I wanted to explore old Hollywood, and the experiences of those who lived and worked there.

Simply put: I wanted to write a novel about it.

As a writer, I often have vague ideas for characters before any other details take shape. Prior to Luke’s project, I’d been captivated by the idea of a secretary and her boss on a road trip. I didn’t know much about either character, or why they were traveling together—but with the Hollywood history so fresh in my mind, it occurred to me that my protagonist could be a secretary in a movie studio, and her boss could be a producer. That idea had energy behind it. I was excited to explore it further.

William S. Adams, far right, with Conrad Luperti and J. Marvin Spoor.
(Wikimedia Commons)

So after Luke’s report was finished, I kept on researching. I decided to set my story in 1938, the Golden Age of Hollywood, and my deep dive into the period was utterly absorbing. I read about the powerful studio system of the time, which helped me design my fictional VistaGlen Studios from producer Lawrence Merrill’s corner office down to the backlots. I perused old movie magazines, getting a feel for the breathless publicity campaigns that propelled new actors to stardom (and which inspired the rise of my fictional ingenue Belinda Vail). And watching movies from the late 1930s immersed me in the fashion, slang, and manners of the time, a delightful kind of research that helped me bring my secretary protagonist, Frances Healey, to life.

I wish — how I wish— I could have sat down with my great-grandfather and heard his stories of the movie industry. It pains me that those experiences are not recorded for posterity. But although A Golden Life is pure fiction, I’ve tried my best to make it an accurate portrait of this unique slice of American history. I hope it faithfully captures the flavor of 1938 Hollywood, a place that was equal parts glamour and grind for secretaries and stars alike.

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Ginny Kubitz Moyer is a California native with a love of local history. Her novel A Golden Life, which earned a starred Kirkus review, moves from 1938 Hollywood to the Napa Valley. Her novel The Seeing Garden, which won Silver in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Historical Fiction, brings to life the vanished world of the San Francisco Bay Area's great estates. An avid weekend gardener, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, two sons, and one rescue dog. Learn more at ginnymoyer.org.

Instagram: @moyerginny
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Circumnavigating Svalbard: My Love Affair with the Arctic, an essay by Cynthia Reeves

Thanks to Cynthia Reeves, author of The Last Whaler (Regal House, Sept. 3), for contributing the following essay about her research. I hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I did.

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Circumnavigating Svalbard: My Love Affair with the Arctic

by Cynthia Reeves

Imagine this: You land by Zodiac at a remote beach on the southern shore of Van Keulenfjorden in the Svalbard archipelago, the site of an old beluga whaling station called Bamsebu, unprepared for what’s preserved there. Stretching to the horizon are whale bones, piles and piles of bleached beluga bones bearing silent testimony to the slaughter that occurred there in the 1930s. How is it, you wonder, that no one has been moved to incorporate this tableau into a story?

Piles of Beluga bones (photo by author)

I was inspired to write The Last Whaler when I came upon this sight during my 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice residency aboard the barquentine Antigua. Prior to this encounter, my love affair with the Arctic was satisfied only through books, starting in childhood reading tragic tales of doomed Arctic explorers. This early interest later merged with concern for the impact of climate change on the Arctic’s fragile eco-system. Flying over the vast, undulating white terrain leading into Svalbard’s airport at Longyearbyen feels like entering another world—a frozen landscape riven with fissured glaciers spilling down into the ice-pocked waters of the archipelago. That this magnificent spectacle might one day vanish spurred me to commit Svalbard’s beauty to my writings in hopes of helping raising awareness of what could be lost.

The Last Whaler is the most ambitious of these works. The story centers around Astrid Handeland, a botanist who travels to Svalbard in 1937 with her whaler husband, Tor, hoping the sojourn will enable her to move on from the devastating death of their son Birk and to reconnect with her passion for Arctic flora. Instead, she discovers the reality of the challenges imposed by the unforgiving environment and her growing unease with her husband’s industry harvesting belugas. Ten years on, in the devastating aftermath of World War II, Tor returns to Svalbard to come to terms both with his wife’s death and his role in damaging the abandoned station’s once-pristine shores.

Research shaped The Last Whaler, above all because I had little familiarity with Svalbard and Norwegian history prior to my Arctic Circle expedition. In the two years following the expedition, I spent several months living in Longyearbyen and exploring the surrounding area to gain a sense of the unusual environment, from the days of perpetual sunlight to the nights of utter polar darkness. Aside from allowing me to absorb the physical landscape, these residencies also provided unique historical insights into Svalbard and Norway of the 1930s and 40s. For example, the former art gallery, Galleri Svalbard, housed a library of rare documents—including an original copy of the Norwegian botanist and environmental activist Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen’s Svalbards flora. Also contained in the library were journals, newspaper articles, memoirs, and other documents—often in Norwegian and unavailable elsewhere—that offered background into the lives of those who lived on Svalbard and in Norway during that time. I was especially captivated by the women who survived and even flourished in the Arctic. In addition to Resvoll-Holmsen, the novel features such real-life heroines as Christiane Ritter, whose memoir A Woman in the Polar Night details her year in 1935-36 on Svalbard with her hunter husband, Hermann; and Helfrid Nøis, who spent years carving a life as the “Arctic housewife” of the famous hunter Hilmar Nøis.

Moreover, the history of Norway in World War II required substantial research in order to assess its impact on Tor’s changing views on war, whaling, and women’s roles. Of particular interest were the heroism, and cowardice, exhibited by Norwegians during the war. Remarkable acts of bravery include the almost-mythical journey of Jan Baalsrud, who together with eleven other Resistance fighters sailed from Scotland to Bardufoss in northern Norway to sabotage a German airfield control tower. Baalsrud alone escaped capture and endured a harrowing trek across Norway to freedom in Sweden with the help of sympathetic Norwegians. Conversely, Lebensborn, the Nazi program of using Norwegian women to give birth to “perfect” Aryan children, plays a role in Tor’s life as he tries to protect his teenaged daughter from the predations of Nazi soldiers.

Pages from Charlier scrapbook, v.2t

The Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England, was also an invaluable source of Arctic history. There, I scoured rare documents, focusing on the biographies of polar explorers as well as ordinary people whose lives intersected with those more famous. One such story involved Anna Charlier, the fiancée of Nils Strindberg, one of the three occupants of S. A. Andrée’s hot-air balloon during its ill-fated attempt to sail over the North Pole. Quite by chance, I discovered among the artifacts five enormous, leather-bound volumes of newspaper clippings and other mementoes preserved by Charlier from the time of the balloon’s disappearance in 1897 through and after the discovery of the men’s bodies on Kvitøya in 1930. Her obsession culminated in asking her husband to bury her heart next to Strindberg’s grave in Stockholm, a request her husband honored after her death in 1949.

Charlier’s story is not only embedded in The Last Whaler but also the centerpiece of my next project. Again I will travel to Svalbard to circumnavigate the archipelago aboard the 2024 Arctic Circle Summer Alumni Expedition. On this trip—ice conditions permitting—I hope to explore the eastern side of the islands and get a glimpse of Kvitøya, an inhospitable spit of land that does not lend itself to landings. I’m curious about the kinds of obsessions that would drive Andrée and his companions to undertake their courageous (or foolish, depending on whose history you read) journey and that would illuminate Charlier’s eternal passion for Strindberg.

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author Cynthia Reeves (credit: 5L Photography)

Cynthia Reeves is the author of three books of fiction: the novel The Last Whaler (Regal House Publishing, 2024); the novel in stories Falling through the New World (Gold Wake Press, 2024), which was awarded Gold Wake’s Spring 2023 Fiction Prize; and the novella Badlands (Miami University Press, 2007), which won Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. Cynthia’s short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared widely. She has been awarded residencies to the Arctic Circle’s 2017 Summer Solstice and 2024 Alumni Expeditions, Hawthornden Castle, Galleri Svalbard, Art & Science in the Field, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program, she taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Creative Writing Program and Rosemont College’s MFA program as well as at conferences nationwide. She lives with her husband in Camden, Maine. Find out more at her website cynthiareeveswriter.com.