Author: Deborah Homsher

ISBN: 13: 978-0-9790-51560-9

           10: 0-9790-5160-6

Today, Norm Goldman, Publisher & Editor of Bookpleasures.com is pleased to have as our guest, Deborah Homsher, author of The Rising Shore: Roanoke.

Thank you Deborah for participating in our interview.

Norm:

Why did you feel compelled to write The Rising Shore: Roanoke?

Deborah:

The novel tells the story of the Lost Colony of 1587, so it’s about America’s first English pioneers. I grew up muddy, literally, climbing catalpa and mulberry trees, taking long bicycle rides with my friends, and I’ve always admired adventurous women and loved stories about American frontierswomen. And men. But it’s clear to me that, as a mother, I’ve wanted my family to be safe, to be rooted and secure, so it’s unlikely I would have ventured out as a pioneer if given the chance. Our Western myths and literature celebrate wandering boys and men—Huck Finn, Ishmael, Deerslayer, the Lone Ranger, lots of Easy Riders—who break away from civilization, take to the road, head into the wilderness. I love these guys. But what if you try that adventure with children? What if you’re pregnant or nursing a child on the trail? Then the story becomes more complicated, and that’s the story that interests me.

The women who sailed to Roanoke Island in 1587 were the first English pioneer women to set foot in the New World. They were Elizabethans. Two of the women in the company were pregnant, one was nursing, another had a son. So I wondered, did these Elizabethan women turn into Americans somehow, were they transformed … and if so, what do we mean by “American”? You’re far from home, you want sugar and paper, but there is no shop where you can buy sugar and paper, so you have to do without or invent. That’s key to something, a kind of self-reliance that many Americans still respect. And the Elizabethans were brutal with their enemies. Before the Roanoke colonists landed, a few English exploring parties had already burned down Algonkian villages and beheaded a chief who had been bringing them corn. Violence is part of our history and culture, too, and frontierswomen who valued their property weren’t simply its victims … they were often complicit. This is colonial history.

Norm:

You very creatively used language and dialect that corresponded to the vocabulary of the era. How were you able to accomplish this feat?

Deborah:

The most important sources for this history were the documents written by the early English explorers, especially the long report by John White, who was the leader of the 1587 venture and the father of Elenor Dare, one of my main characters. Then there are other reports by Amadas and Barlowe, Sir Richard Grenville, Ralph Lane, and Thomas Hariot.

If you read those over and over, the voices do get into your head. The early drafts of the novel had a lot of prithees and mayhaps in them. That sounded artificial, so I cut them out, but maybe the rhythm stayed. My website gives links to these early documents, if anybody’s interested. All of them are posted on the web now. For the links, please visit my site: www.risingshoreroanoke.com 

Norm:

How long did it take you to write The Rising Shore: Roanoke and can you explain some of your research techniques, and how you found sources for your book?

Deborah:

I am going to say it took seven years, because if it took more than seven, I don’t want to know it. The most important sources were the reports left by the explorers. I also read books by David Beers Quinn, a scholar in North Carolina who studied the early English expeditions to North America and the history of the Lost Colony.

I borrowed natural history books so I’d know something of the seasons and animals in the Outer Banks, I read old herballs to learn about medicines, read books on the Indians in seventeenth-century Virginia, found Elizabethan cookbooks. And then I latched onto a history professor at Ithaca College, Jack Pavia, who knew all about ships and lent me wonderful books on old ships. He warned me that pilots in this era would never stand at the “wheel” … they’d steer using a whipstaff. I went down to Historic Jamestowne to look at their ship and walked around in one. I’m pretty sure it was the Susan Constant. And then I found books describing the lives of Elizabethan women … their dress, their weddings. There used to be a wedding scene in the novel. It got cut out, but it was fun while it lasted.

And I studied maps. There is a map of Elizabethan London, with the great wall around it, available through Historic Urban Plans in Ithaca, NY, and I kept staring at it, trying to SINK myself in, so I wouldn’t be looking down at the city from above but could imagine walking the streets. That was difficult.

Norm:

You write with a very vivid and descriptive style. Do you use any particular techniques to help with your writing or to help flesh out descriptive imagery? Are there any writers you admire or look to for inspiration?

Deborah:

My technique involves a lot of rewriting, cutting here, adding there, and focusing on what I know about how the world tastes, smells, behaves. I belong to two book groups and read a lot of fiction, and I majored in American and English literature as an undergraduate, so my head is full of sentences … but my favorite authors tend to be from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Weird mix: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Thoreau, and, of contemporary authors, Alice Munro. She’s miraculous. If I’m in a bind, I always try to think, “What would Alice Munro do?” but generally she’s too subtle and smart for me to imitate.

Norm:

How did you celebrate the novel’s completion?

Deborah:

I haven’t yet convinced myself that it is completed, since now I’m trying to promote the book, to coax people to read it. It turns out this stage is hard work, and challenging, and really interesting. It’s like starting out in a new marriage after months of planning a grand wedding.

Norm:

It seems that historical fiction is of late becoming very popular to the degree that publishers are now promoting not only individual historical novels but entire series of historical fiction. Would you please comment as to why this is happening?

Deborah:

I would have to guess, but I assume that it has to do with the creation of a stable imaginary world, a vanished time and place that an author manages to resurrect, to bring back to life. Readers of a series must be eager to step back into that imaginary world, especially if it includes a spunky character they’ve come to love. It’s like being able to dive back into a good dream.

Norm:

How would you define “historical fiction?”  What is the difference between historicizing fiction and fictionalizing history?

Deborah:

From one point of view, almost all fiction is historical—the stories take place in the past (near past or far past), not the future. But I would say that authors who feel compelled to write “historical fiction” usually reach back to a era that’s difficult to reconstruct because much of the evidence is gone, has disappeared, so that preparation for the novel involves research that’s archaeological, in a way.

Fiction is, by nature, historical, much more than poetry is, because a convincing novel needs a sturdy landscape to support its characters. It relies on roads, paths, maps. And the impulse to draw a map, so that you capture the lay of the land and never forget it, is a historical impulse.  So I’d say that it’s not necessary to historicize fiction … it’s done. It’s part of the nature of the beast. And you can’t really study history without fictionalizing, without calling on your imagination to fill in the gaps.

Norm:

Do you believe that historical fiction should be more frequently used in primary and secondary school classrooms in order to teach history? If so, why and what are some of the problems?

Deborah:

Oh yes, I’m a convinced fan of Johnny Tremain. Fiction brings the past to life. That sounds simplistic, but it’s just true. Swimming down into the world of a novel is a good exercise for anyone learning to think, learning to realize that there are other cultures, other countries, other languages and landscapes and foods and even whole vanished worlds all around her, or half buried under her feet. The problems? I would think the main problem would be making sure that a particular novel was appropriate for the class. Teachers can do that.

Norm:

Can you tell us how you found representation for your book. Did you pitch it to an agent, or query publishers who would most likely publish this type of book? Any rejections? Did you self-publish?

Deborah:

I had an agent who submitted an earlier draft of the book to four publishers and got four rejections. At that point, she gave up on the novel. So I decided to publish it myself, since I was convinced it would have strong local appeal in North Carolina and Virginia and that new technologies—the Internet for promotion, POD technology for production—gave me the freedom to try.

Norm:

What is next for Deborah Homsher and is there anything else you wish to add that we have not covered?

Deborah:

Norm, thank you. I’m in the midst of writing a contemporary novel about a librarian who’s so shaken by the return of her ex-husband, the absence of her grown son, and her own fifty-first birthday that she rents out her house, moves up into the attic, and gets into some interesting trouble. But someday, when I catch my breath again, I would love to write a historical novel centered on Anne Hutchinson, of Boston. Move from Chesapeake Bay colonial history to New England’s colonial history.

Anything else? One note: I have written two nonfiction books grounded in interviews with American women: Women and Guns: Politics and the Culture of Firearms in America (M. E. Sharpe), and From Blood to Verdict: Three Women on Trial (McBooks Press). Anyone interested, please see my website: www.risingshoreroanoke.com. That’s my last pitch.

Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors.

Thank you. Thanks for reading the novel.

To read more about Deborah Homsher CLICK ON HER WEB SITE

The above interview was conducted by: NORM GOLDMAN:  Retired Title Attorney: Editor & Publisher of Bookpleasures. Here are  Norm Goldman's Reviews       

 To read Norm's Review of The Rising Shore: Roanoke CLICK HERE