"Beware of Historians": Historical Research for the Fiction Writer

I wrote for the AWP Writer’s Notebook about my experience doing historical research for REVERSING THE RIVER, my novel set in 1899 Chicago, about to be released on the Great Jones Street literary app (free to download for Apple & Android!).

The piece is called “Eight Things This Fiction Writer Learned about Historical Research,” and here’s an excerpt:

Number 1: The concept of “enough.” Perhaps the most important thing that the writer should remember is that one single word: “enough.” There is “enough” research when you’re writing fiction. You’re not going to learn everything about your time period, and, frankly, you don’t need to know everything: you only need to know “enough”—enough to tell your story in a believable way. You’re not writing an authoritative history; you’re writing a STORY. People are reading your book to see what happens next to your characters, not so they can understand trends in Elizabethan England. So, beware of historians. Historians think you should know everything. You really only need to know “enough.” I know what kind of carriage my character Lucy rides in and what the road is like, but I don’t know if there are still posts to hitch up horses in the street. I don’t know if rich people in Chicago preferred black horses or brown horses. Sure, it would be nice to know those things, and if I did, I might throw the information into the story, but it’s not relevant and it’s not necessary....

And here is the rest:

https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_notebook_view/59/eight_things_this_fiction_writer_learned_about_historical_research

Deadline to Enter Drue Heinz Literature Prize is 6/30!

My writing life changed when THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST won this contest—and no matter how many times I express how grateful I am to University of Pittsburgh Press and Mrs. Drue Heinz (benefactor), it will not be enough! The deadline for entries is June 30…please do consider entering if you have a collection of short stories.

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize Call for Submissions 2018
https://upress.submittable.com/submit



The University of Pittsburgh Press announces the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for a collection of short fiction. The prize carries a cash award of $15,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press under its standard contract. The winner will be announced in December or January. No information about the winner will be released before the official announcement. The volume of manuscripts prevents the Press from offering critiques or entering into communication or correspondence about manuscripts. Please do not call or e-mail the Press.


Eligibility



1.


The award is open to writers who have published a novel or a book-length collection of fiction with a reputable book publisher, or a minimum of three short stories or novellas in magazines or journals of national distribution. Digital-only publication and self-publication do not count toward this requirement.




2.

The award is open to writers in English, whether or not they are citizens of the United States.




3.

University of Pittsburgh employees, former employees, current students, and those who have been students within the last three years are not eligible for the award.



4.

Translations are not eligible if the translation was not done by the author.




5.

Eligible submissions include an unpublished manuscript of short stories; two or more novellas (a novella may comprise a maximum of 130 double-spaced typed pages); or a combination of one or more novellas and short stories. Novellas are only accepted as part of a larger collection. Manuscripts may be no fewer than 150 and no more than 300 pages. Prior publication of your manuscript as a whole in any format (including electronic) makes it ineligible.




6.

Stories or novellas previously published in magazines or journals or in book form as part of an anthology are eligible.



7.

Manuscripts may also be under consideration by other publishers, but if a manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere and you wish to accept this offer, please notify the Press immediately. Manuscripts under contract elsewhere are no longer eligible for the Prize.



8.

Authors may submit more than one manuscript to the competition as long as one manuscript or a portion thereof does not duplicate material submitted in another manuscript.




Dates for Submission





Manuscripts must be received during May and June 2017. That is, they must be postmarked on or after May 1 and on or before June 30.





Format for Electronic Submissions


1.

During the submission period (May 1 - June 30) simply click the link above. You'll be taken to our secure submittable.com web page where you'll find easy-to-follow instructions:



2.

Manuscripts must be double-spaced and pages must be numbered consecutively.




3.

Each submission must include a list of all of the writer's published short fiction work, with full citations. You will be given an opportunity to enter this information into a field in Submittable.



4.

Manuscripts will be judged anonymously. Therefore, the author's name, other identifying information, and publication information must not appear within the manuscript. Only your uploaded manuscript is visible to the judges.

Happy News!

The happiest news, really: I’m thrilled to report that my next novel, SILVER GIRL, is going to be published by Unnamed Press, a fabulous small press based in L.A.  It seems entirely possible that the novel will be out in the winter of 2018!!

In a fortuitous turn of events that indicates that this pairing absolutely has to be destiny, I actually conducted an interview with Unnamed Press in 2014, so you can read how fabulous they are right here: http://www.workinprogressinprogress.com/2014/04/favorite-small-presses-unnamed-press.html

I’m working on my “elevator speech” about the book, but here’s an attempt: Set in the 80s, SILVER GIRL is about a destructive friendship between two girls from very different backgrounds who end up at a fancy college in the Chicago area…set against a backdrop of the Tylenol murders, when someone stuffed cyanide into Tylenol capsules and returned them to the drugstore shelves (which one could do because this was before product packaging was sealed; actually, this is WHY intense product packaging came about).

Here’s the opening:

            My roommate arrived first, staking her claim. Probably someone told her do it that way, her cum laude mother or Ivy League dad or an older sibling or cousin in college. I had no one telling me anything. So I didn’t know to take the overnight bus to Chicago from Iowa instead of the one arriving late in the afternoon, meaning when I unlocked the dorm room door I saw a fluffy comforter with bright poppies already arranged on the bed along the wall with the window, cracked open to grab the only breeze. Several dozen white plastic hangers holding blazers and skirts and blouses filled the closet with the door where F.U. wasn’t gouged into the wood.

            I rubbed my fingers along the grooves of those letters, imagining a deeply angry freshman girl digging a nail file from the clutter of her purse, carving those letters into the wood while at the library her roommate wrote a smart paper about Jane Austen or blew her boyfriend in a car parked by the lake or spray-painted acorns lustrous gold for table centerpieces at a sorority mother-daughter tea. I hoped my roommate wouldn’t be that angry girl.

            Also, I hoped I wouldn’t be.

 Here are two chapters that appeared online, in slightly different form:

~~~“Headache,” in WIPS/Works (of Fiction) in Progress Journal: http://www.wipsjournal.com/leslie-pietrzyk-headache-a-chapter-excerpt-from-the-novel-silver-girl/

~~~“Shadow Daughter,” in The Hudson Review: http://hudsonreview.com/2017/01/shadow-daughter/#.WUmdTWjytPY

So much to do to bring a book into the world…and please, please do let me know if there’s a reading series or bookstore or party at your house that you think I should know about! I’d love to do a reading and see YOU there!

Flash Fiction in The Collagist!

So thrilled to see one of my new pieces of flash fiction up in the June edition of The Collagist: “What We Know of the Animal” was written in my prompt writing group, and revised later, of course.

The two prompt words were “dating” and “curtain,” and here’s where to read the result (which will take you about three minutes, tops):  http://thecollagist.com/the-collagist/2017/5/19/what-we-know-of-the-animal.html

Here’s the first paragraph, in case you need more information before committing to that three minutes:

"No one says dating anymore." Thirteen-year-old Stephanie is always proud when she's able to correct an adult, especially her father, who's barely listening. To be honest, he barely listens to most conversations, so she shouldn't feel particularly special or at all dissed, though whenever she's with him, she feels both. He's gifted with the politician's ability to sustain lengthy, complicated, even heartfelt conversations while barely listening; questions, answers, words are an empty flow, like the whooshing sound spiraling through a seashell.

The Complex Machinery of Space Shuttles & Love: An Interview with the Authors of GENERATION SPACE: A LOVE STORY

By John Newlin

Generation Space: A Love Story

Stillwater Press, 2017

Anna Leahy and Doug Dechow have written a superbly crafted dual chronicle of their love affairs with space exploration and each other.  Generation Space: A Love Story is as good a history of the space program as any to be found.

Anna is an English Professor at Chapman University.  Her collections of poetry include Aperture and Constituents of Matter, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize.  Doug, a librarian at Chapman University, is the co-author of SQUEAK: A Quick Trip to Objectland, Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson, and The Craft of Librarian Instruction.  They have written the Lofty Ambitions blog together since 2010.

JN:  When I began reading the book, I thought, this is going to be overwhelmingly technical, a slog through mind-boggling scientific and mechanical terminology and detail.  One of your great accomplishments is that you produced a book ABOUT a highly technical subject without overpowering your reader with scientific minutiae.  How did you do that?

Anna and Doug:  That’s terrific to hear because we wanted to strike a balance in which we acknowledge that a complex machine like the space shuttle is a collection of interrelated scientific and engineering facts without the reader being distracted from the story by jargon. We thought about this book as a story—our story and the story of the Space Age. And we thought about people—characters—as an important way for this story to come alive for readers.

In Generation Space, we talk about why particular shuttle launches were scrubbed, for instance, and try to convey how caught up we were in learning about mechanical parts like a GUPC or a thermostat because they were an integral part of our story of seeing—and not seeing—launches. We want readers to feel a sense of learning NASA lingo right along with us and to understand how quickly some of the basic jargon became natural to us as we immersed ourselves in the newsroom culture at Kennedy Space Center. We kept in mind, too, that there are a lot of space nerds out there who already know RTLS means return to launch site and we hope they are reminded that, at some point, they had learned to talk and think in such terms, that they carry this terminology in their minds. Of course, we didn’t talk about all of the 2.5 million parts in the shuttle configuration sitting on the launch pad, but we wanted to give a sense of how intricate the shuttle was because that had everything to do with how amazing it was to see one actually rise from the ground into orbit.

JN:  Collaboration in writing a book or poem has to be tricky.  Would the two of you comment on the process as well as some of the challenges you faced (and overcame) in writing Generation Space?

Anna and Doug:  It is tricky for any two writers to collaborate, and we don’t recommend anyone begin with a big project. For us, collaborating as writers was very much wrapped up in being a couple romantically as well, so that probably doubles the risks as well as the benefits. We joke that we haven’t figured out how to share the task of doing laundry—we each do our own—and that may be because we don’t care much about laundry. When the stakes are low, why increase the risk of discord?

That said, we started with a small writing project and a big reward years before we tackled Generation Space together. On a lark, we sent an abstract to a call for conference papers about World War II. It was accepted, so we drew from our dates at aviation museums to write about the theory and practice of how museums display WWII aircraft. Figuring out how to write together allowed us to travel to Amsterdam. And then, we spun that writing into a book chapter and an article in Curator. That early validation made us think we were onto something.

JN:  It struck me as I read Generation Space that both of you were able to maintain your own voice while at the same time crafting a piece without a jarring difference of style while shifting from one point of view to the other.  Are your writing styles naturally similar?  Was this something of a happy accident, or was it a conscious effort on your parts to create this stylistic consistency?

Anna and Doug:  In a way, this issue of voice has been thorny for us. We had developed what we call a together voice—the one we’re using now in this interview—for Lofty Ambitions blog. When we started that project in 2010, we would have weekly date nights at a local watering hole and write our posts together sentence by sentence. In the process, we got to know each other’s voices and negotiating ways to represent both of us authentically. Figuring out who “we” are meant more than just writing together. And with that ongoing reference point of the other, we each honed own individual voices too and understood that we each notice and value sometimes very different things.

An early partial draft of Generation Space was in our together voice. We liked it, but readers didn’t trust it. No one believes we can agree on a single way to look at something. Ultimately, we admitted that we needed the two perspectives, we remembered things differently, and we find meaning in different ways. So, the lack of a jarring difference probably stems from years of writing together and, as couples do, hashing through topics over time so that we became more similar generally. Over time, we end up agreeing a lot but definitely maintain our distinct opinions and turns of phrase, too.

JN:  At one point Doug says, “…and I wouldn’t be sure about Anna without these last few years together” (260),  and Anna says, “I’d reshaped myself, and Doug and I had become closer than ever before” (229).  This is an extremely personal question, but can you compare briefly the difference in your relationship before and after your immersion into the exploration and experience of the shuttle launches and landings?  I guess I’m thinking about how two very independent people with somewhat parallel but very different careers can forge a lasting and loving relationship with each other.  What’s your secret?

Anna and Doug:  In 2008, we moved to California. That Thanksgiving, we drove into the desert to see a space shuttle land. The following Thanksgiving, we eloped. In our minds, these events are all of a piece. We’d fallen in love twenty years before we married, and there are all sorts of ways it’s difficult to grow into adults as a couple. Moving to California was a conscious choice to start a new stage together. Looking out at the tarmac at Edwards Air Force Base to see the shuttle moments after it had been up in space gave us a sense of being situated between the past and the future.

In the book, we open with the line, “Ours has never been a conventional love story.” Even before we knew we wanted to be academics or had much sense of career paths, we discovered early on that we both enjoyed research, travel, and writing. Over the years, these interests—the next trip or move, the next question or blog post—have underpinned our relationship. As a writer or as a couple, you never master it once and for all. The next place or the next writing project presents different challenges and different opportunities. In order to stick with it, a person has to get a kick out of the process itself. And each experience reshapes you a bit. Our secret may be that we’ve been willing to reshape ourselves.

JN:  Have the two of you developed any ongoing relationships with any of the astronauts you met on your journey?

Anna and Doug:  The first time we met astronauts together was an unexpected accident that we recount in the book. We mostly talked with astronauts in our role as journalists. We talked with a few astronauts—Charlie Duke and Mike Barratt, for instance—more than once, and we’ve talked with Garrett Reisman informally as well as in our official roles. Over the last several years, we’ve found astronauts to be amazingly engaging, intelligent, quirky folks. In other words, they are just the sort of people we’d like to hang out with. But we run in different circles, and astronauts are relatively rare among us. Only twelve men walked on the Moon, and fewer than 550 people have been to space.

JN:  Doug, have you heard anything in response to the application you sent in to NASA?

Doug:  As I expected, I was not among those applicants brought to Houston for in-person interviews last fall. I knew when I applied that, if I made the final cut, I would have to be the oldest astronaut candidate ever selected. Don’t get me wrong, that would have been amazing.

The new class of astronauts should be announced very soon. I won’t be among them. The average age for an astronaut candidate is thirty-four. I talk about the magic astronaut age and timing in Generation Space. I actively pursued becoming an astronaut early on, then missed the most obvious window. What a different life I’d have lived if I’d been able to clear my ears during a physical when I was eighteen. But I can’t imagine a better mission for my life than the one I’m on right now—and I wouldn’t have met Anna. I’ll be cheering the new group on—on to Mars.

JN:  Do the two of you plan to collaborate on another book?

Anna and Doug:  Long before we started writing Generation Space, we had talked about writing a book about particularly intriguing aircraft. Last fall, we were fellows at the American Library in Paris so we could get back to that project. As we answer these questions, we are getting ready to head back to France for more research in the amazing history of French aviation and for the International Paris Air Show. We’re not sure how this research will pan out—isn’t that why any couple sticks with it? Isn’t love a long-term research project in which we create something that didn’t exist in the world before?

JN:  So true!  We look forward to learning of your new adventures.

***

MORE INFORMATION:

About the book: http://www.stillhousepress.org/generation-space

Lofty Ambitions blog: https://loftyambitions.wordpress.com/

INTERVIEWER BIO

John Newlin’s work has been published in Short Story America, Independent School Magazine, South85 Journal, and Night Owl Journal.  He is the Review Editor for South85.