It’s almost October and my book is still scheduled to be available in December. The last thing I did with the actual manuscript was proof the index. That was a weird experience, seeing the big story carved up into key words and names. This week I saw the mock-up of the whole book jacket, and I made some requests about changing the wording of the synopsis. Then there was a little thing about the author photo, which I’ll address in a different post.

Now all of that work is done and the only thing left is promotion–talking to people about my book, hoping they will be interested enough to buy it.

At a small social function this past weekend, I had my first chance to talk to strangers about my book. I brought along some photocopies of the cover art to hand out in case the conversation turned to what I do for a living. It’s a pretty nifty, eye-catching cover.

The first person who looked at it, did a double take, and said to me that no such women existed. I’m pretty sure the look I gave him in return was very much like this:

I emphasized that I am a historian, that I spent years researching the topic–including a trip to the National Archives–so I know these women did, in fact, exist. He gave a small shrug, folded up the piece of paper, put it in his pocket, and walked away to talk to someone else.

Later in the evening, a woman and her husband picked up one of the photocopies, admired the artwork, and asked if this was a real book. I knew exactly what they meant. Still, my covert reaction was:

They wanted to know, by using the word “real,” if the book was self-published or commercially published. I bragged on Oxford for a bit, and we all had a wonderful conversation about good nonfiction history books and about the need for more unconventional war stories. They kept one of the photocopies, too, and made sure to note my e-mail address so we could stay in touch.

I hope to have lots more conversations with many more people about the book. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before I stop being startled all the time.

A title like this irritates me to no end:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/07/novels-about-historical-women-saint-mazie-circling-the-sun

This is not a criticism of the authors (well, maybe a bit) and novels that are discussed in the article. I’m a huge fan of historical fiction. Huge. Seems that not a week goes by without me reading some, and I’m very likely to read one or more of these.

What irritates me is the notion that without novelists, women’s history would be solely relegated to that month of March that’s designated Women’s History Month. I have a hard time believing that people at Vanity Fair are unfamiliar with the fact that historians write lots of women’s history, have done so in great volumes since at least the 1970s. And that this history is taught in high school as well as college classrooms.

For instance, I have been introducing college students to the Grimke (I know an accent mark belongs over the e. I don’t know how to insert it.) sisters for over 20 years. Their story is a staple of my U.S. History survey course and my Women in American History course. I discuss their importance to the Civil War in a Women in War course and to the women’s rights movement in a class on Women’s Rights and Feminism. Yet a lot of articles and reviews that (justifiably–I thought the book was wonderful) praised Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Invention of Wings made it sound like no one had heard of Sarah and Angelina until Kidd brought them to life.

I wasn’t the only person to notice the title of this Vanity Fair article and take exception to it. On her blog (one of my favorites), literary scholar Rohan Maitzen observed: “Women’s history is actually a pretty venerable field now, so I think the real (if inadvertent) point is not that it is forgotten so much as that the writer, and apparently the authors she interviewed, took their own relative ignorance of women’s history as definitive. The wheel they’re busy reinventing wasn’t brand new….” Here’s the whole article:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/novelreadings/coloring-books-for-adults-sure-why-not/

And honestly, historical novelists usually give a nod to the historians who laid the foundation for their fiction. In the Acknowledgments of her wonderful book Balm, Dolen Perkins-Valdez wrote, “I have always said fiction writers have a lot of ground to cover if we want to catch up with the scholars.”

I don’t think it’s a matter of catching up, though, as much as a matter of respectfully acknowledging the work of historians, which Perkins-Valdez then went on to do. Historical fiction isn’t a substitute for history, but it can be a way of drawing readers into history, igniting interest and passion.

This line is the title of a creative digital history project launched by Michelle Moravec focusing on the Alma A. Clarke papers in the Bryn Mawr College Special Collections.

Alma, pictured here with her brother Jack, was an American woman who volunteered for nursing duty in France, just after the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. You can explore the project here:

http://clarke.rdigitalh.org/

Alma Clarke’s experiences illustrate what is true of a lot of American women: their contributions to war efforts have largely been forgotten. Yet the comment that headlines this project, “Till I’ve done all that I can” is representative of the attitude of many women who figured out ways to support the wartime goals of the United States. In the last book I published, I recounted how the young Ethel Thomas, living in southwestern Wisconsin, did all she could during the First World War by volunteering for Red Cross work and for Food Administration projects.

The stakes were higher for the four women featured in my forthcoming book, Angels of the Underground. Trapped in enemy-occupied territory thousands of miles away from the United States, the actions they took put them in danger every day. “Till I’ve done all that I can” had dire consequences for them.

In Part III of her Crossing Over series, historian Ann Little discussed the literary models for her forthcoming book, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, to be published by Yale University Press in 2016. Since much of the story takes place while Esther was a child in the 1700s, Ann turned to her favorite writer of childhood, Laura Ingalls Wilder. This is the link to Ann’s full article:

Crossing over, part III: The uses and limits of literary models

This really resonated with me, not because of the childhood issue, but because of how both the Little House books and Ann’s forthcoming biography are grounded in a sense of place. I loved how Ann described the first three chapters of her book, in which Esther wakes up in three very different places.

Place looms large in my books, all of which focus on the Philippine Islands, a place I have never been. So I have to work extra hard to convey that sense of place. The most thrilling document I found while researching my second book, Citizen of Empire, was a detailed map of the town of Baguio, where Ethel Thomas Herold lived with her husband and children, which marked the locations of the homes of the prominent American families. Great for geographically grounding the story, great evidence of the nature of U.S. imperialism.

I’m also fascinated by the feeling that is associated with a certain place, especially if that place is considered home. Ethel Herold was an American woman, but for most of her adult life she considered the Philippines home. Then, on a tumultuous day in December 1941, Japanese troops marched into Ethel’s home town of Baguio, occupied it, and took the Americans living there–some 500 men, women, and children–prisoners. I kept trying to imagine what it was like for this middle-aged woman from Wisconsin to watch enemy soldiers march into her town, how frightened she must have been when a small contingent of them burst into her home one evening.

Ethel kept a diary and she wrote her autobiography late in life, so I had solid primary sources to build the book around. But I drew a lot of inspiration from Anne Frank’s diary, which I first read in 8th grade English class. These two women were a world apart in terms of geography and age. Anne was confined first to a hiding place, then was hauled off to a concentration camp where she died, a victim of the Holocaust. How she reacted to these changing circumstances was never far from my mind when I wrote about Ethel.

All of these feelings came back into play as I researched and wrote Angels of the Underground. The four American women featured in this book also embraced the Philippines as their home. But unlike Ethel Herold, they did not spend the war years imprisoned. Rather, they risked their lives to undermine the Japanese occupation. The women’s actions were rooted in how they viewed their place in the Philippines (much colored by U.S. imperialism); they wanted their home back.