Joan of Arc... and Deborah Samson

Joan of Arc is a name that comes up often when I mention the novel I've written on Deborah Samson, and, indeed, the connection is a logical one: women dressed as men, going in to battle.  

Just as in earlier posts I took a look at the Molly Pitcher legend in comparison to Deborah Samson's battlefield experience, I'd like to compare Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, to Deborah and see what can be gleaned about women dressing as men, about women on the battlefield, about society's attitudes towards martial women and towards the "masquerade" of cross-dressing.  (Meaning that these were prolonged instances of disguise.)

To start this topic off, I'd like to justify the comparison.  Placing the two in conversation is not an invention of my own mind.  In fact, it is quite likely that this is a comparison that Deborah herself would have made.

Piece of Evidence #1:  Early in the war, when the American forces were in disarray, Thomas Paine wrote in The American Crisis that just as Joan of Arc had "driven back like men petrified with fear" "the whole English army," thus now America needed "some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow sufferers."  It is likely, though not certain, that Deborah would have seen The American Crisis.  Her hometown of Middleborough was a politically astute and involved place, a crossroads of commerce, and the pamphlets (and discussions about those pamphlets) were likely present. 

Piece of Evidence #2: Deborah was a voracious reader as a young woman.  We don't have a record of the books that she read, but we do have evidence of what was popular and readily available at the time.  These included chapbooks mostly featuring tales of adventure.  One prominent and popular such book was The Maid of Orleans, about Joan of Arc.

So, admittedly, this is tenuous evidence and supposition.  But at least it is possible -- well within the realm of the believable -- that Deborah had heard of Joan of Arc and thought of Joan of Arc in the context of the Revolutionary War.  

It would be too simple to say that Deborah might have read Paine's pamphlet and regarded it as a call to arms, as an invitation to be that Joan of Arc.  For though Paine's language, as I quoted it above, does suggest that, reading the passage in full reveals the sort of misogynistic frame that infiltrated all levels of discourse at the time.  Here's the full quote:

"In the fourteenth [fifteenth] century the whole English army, after ravaging the kingdom of France, was driven back like men petrified with fear; and this brave exploit was performed by a few broken forces collected and headed by a woman, Joan of Arc. Would that heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment!"

The tone of the first line is to suggest that the English defeat is all the more humiliating and outrageous because it was at the hands of a woman.  The line does not suggest that Joan, being a woman, is all the more heroic.  In the second sentence, notice the diction "spirit up" (like a cheerleader) and "fair fellow sufferers" -- fair might suggest a reference to other women and not to men; sufferers also makes this group passive.  This reading is strengthened by the phrase "ravage and ravishment" -- again, crimes that women, not men, are likely to suffer.  

This is not to undermine my piece of evidence: Deborah might well have heard mention of Joan in the context of the Revolutionary War.  Moreover, given that she is a product of her own time, the language and bias of Paine might not have rankled her as it rankles me.  Where I see diminishment (Spirit Up!  They were beaten by a girl!), Deborah and other women might have felt encouragement; Paine is, after all, suggesting they can do something.

Moving on from this basis, I'll take a look at more specifics of Joan's adventures and reception in comparison to Deborah's.

Understanding Your Characters...

This post is tailored specifically to those who are developing characters in historical fiction, but is, I believe, applicable to the craft of understanding your characters in general.  It also builds on some previous posts I have done about women in the revolutionary war.

You can read the earlier posts (I hope you do!) about Molly Pitcher(s) and their role not only during the war (camp followers) but after the war (loyal wives, in-the-moment-soldiers).  Given how these women are celebrated, as I noted earlier, it is not surprising that Deborah Sampson was given little attention for many decades:  she didn't fit neatly into the women-who-followed-her-husband-into-combat mold that felt "safe" to 19th century readers and writers.

When I began the research for my first novel, Revolutionary, I wanted to look at as wide a range of sources as I could on Deborah.  The earliest material is filtered through her biographer, Herman Mann and the later material is filtered through the biases and predispositions of the era in which they were written.

So here's the first part of the craft lesson for writers of historical fiction: make sure you look at your "real life" characters not just from one historical vantage point.  Get the fullest picture of them that you can by considering how they were written about by their contemporaries, by their children, by their friends, by their rivals, and by later writers.  It is poor history (and poor historical fiction) to rely only on one source or from sources all from the same era (even if it is "eye-witness").

For Deborah, two visual images will suffice to prove my point.  Here they are:

Both are early-mid 19th century depictions of Deborah Sampson that accompanied pamphlets or short writings on her. In both she is in uniform and with a weapon (or two!).  But, as those who read the earlier blogposts might note... she is also posed near a cannon.  It is not impossible that Deborah might have been near cannons in her service.  Certainly, she was at sites that would have had them.  But it is quite hard to argue that she used cannons at all.  Cannons were for pitched battle and Deborah was involved in small skirmishes only.  (Granted, she did claim to have been at Yorktown, or Mann placed her there, or both, but this is not true.)

So, when I was researching her character, I asked myself: why is she depicted this way?  What is being said about her?  I believe that both artists are making a subtle nod to the Molly Pitcher(s) legends.  By putting Deborah near a cannon, they are indicating to the viewer that this is a woman on the battlefield.  It is somewhat comforting -- suggesting that she served in the familiar and acceptable manner -- to have her depicted thus.  Much more comforting than Deborah just waving a sword or holding a gun, I'd argue.

To leave my particular case and look at craft in general, what I'd suggest is this.  Read (and look) widely as you explore your historical character.  Chip away at bias.  Consider how your character has shifted and been reinvented over the course of history.  And then...

Take good stock of how you wish to depict your character.  Realize that you are situated on this continuum that you have just explored.  Your depiction will be no less biased, no less a product of your own time and expectations (and this, I would argue is true for fictional characters that aren't historical) than any other.  It is better to be upfront and aware of your bias though.

In my own case, I knew that being transgender, I would come to Deborah's story from a particular angle.  Likewise, writing with a 21st-century understanding of gender and women's rights, I would also be biased against certain depictions of her and want to show her actions as reasonable and even virtuous -- quite the opposite of how many of her contemporaries saw her and wrote about her.

In order to fully understand, fully develop, and fully realize your characters, you need to understand your own perspective on that character!

Let me know what you think... Leave a Comment!

Character Motivation in General... and Historical Context in Particular

In any work of fiction, the main character's (or characters') desire drives the piece forward.  Don't know what your main character wants?  Or can't make that want clear, compelling, and believable to the reader?  Then your fiction will never take off.

Desire is linked to motivation: what you want, how you're going to get it, and why you want it so bad.

Because of the important of desire in driving fiction, a writer should spend lots of time understanding and deepening this aspect of the story or novel.  This is time "off the page," as I like to say, by which I mean that a lot of what you will work on in developing is for your own understanding of the character and not to be included in the finished writing.  Well, it will be included but not word by word... your understanding will inform your writing.

To give you an example of this, I'll use my forthcoming novel, Revolutionary.  Early in the story, the main character, Deborah Sampson, runs away from home.  Why? That isn't an easy decision to make in anyone's life, at any time, but particularly for a young, unmarried woman in 1782, this would have been an earth-shattering choice.  So I needed to understand her motive well.

Given that Deborah is a historical personage, I could look at material in which she discussed (or others discussed) her motive.  From these sources, I gleaned that her motive was money (the town gave a bounty for soldiers signing on), patriotism, and freedom.  Of these three, money seemed the least interesting: once she had the bounty, she still ran away, so that couldn't have been the sole motive.  Patriotism was a nice thought -- and I don't doubt that she was patriotic -- but this was a reason she offered to her later biographer (Herman Mann) and a very convenient reason it was.  It allowed her a virtuous basis for an unvirtuous act.

That left me with freedom.  She desired to break away from the constraints of society, the bounds of her (medium-sized) town, and, particularly, the limited sphere of being a woman.  I knew that's what I had to convey on the page, what I had to convince my readers of.  But in order to be convincing, I had to know my subject and context much more specifically than that.

In my next blog post, I'll provide more of the historical context of Deborah, but I wanted to open with this general craft point:  start with characters' desires... and let that drive your fiction!

Curtis Sittenfeld... Thoughts on her author talk

Last night I had the pleasure of hearing Curtis Sittenfeld (best known, perhaps, for her novel Prep) read and speak at Politics and Prose.  Her new novel, Sisterland, is just out.  (I haven't read it yet, but I intend to!)

I wanted to blog about her reading for two reasons, one macro and one micro.

First, the macro: her reading was, in my opinion, just what a reading should be... she struck the right tone of being personable (not saccharine on one end or stiff on the other).  Her talk had good hooks to it as she addressed what inspired her to write the novel (a very intriguing premise) and then read a section that illustrated character and conflict without giving too much away.  After the reading, she took questions, fielding them gracefully.  And, while she certainly answered what was asked, her replies were long and digressive and interesting, taking the kernel of the question and expanding on it.  So... if you have the chance to hear her read, I highly recommend doing so.

Second, the micro level.  Sittenfeld made a number of interesting comments on writing (both her personal practice and on the business side of it).  The one that struck me was her comment (she said she was paraphrasing something that she's heard from others) that when you write nonfiction, people pick at it to show how it isn't true and when you write fiction, people comb through it to show how it is true.

I'd never thought of it that way, but immediately felt the accuracy of this statement.  Readers of fiction want their fiction to reflect reality; they want it to be possible and credible.  This is a tendency that has historical context, I believe, as for a long time novels and other works of fiction were couched as real stories.  Somehow, that's the only way that they are worthwhile.

On the other hand, when someone presents a nonfiction book as "the truth" or an interpretation thereof, the instinct is to disagree.  Oddly, it is actually the same process as with fiction though: the reader is simply asserting his or her own understanding of what is true.

And of course, where does this leave historical fiction?  With the best (or worst, as the case may be) of both worlds!

Truth, Fact, Fiction, Rightness

I have of late been thinking about that intersection of fact, fiction, true, imagined, right, real... and so on.  I can partially blame this on the fact that I taught Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried this spring, which has all those lovely metafictive sections about "how to tell a true war story."  For him, truth is feeling, getting the emotional impact accurately conveyed to the reader.

And I can partially blame my preoccupation with this topic on my taking a short break from fiction writing to compose two short nonfiction essays (one, "Multiplicity," published in The Rumpus a few weeks ago, the other as yet unpublished (waiting=sigh)).  Often, when I'm writing nonfiction, I'll be composing merrily away and then come to an abrupt stop, unwilling to write the next line, thinking to myself, but that's not what I want to have happen. Too bad it did.  Or, the flip: I'll be writing along and, after getting something down that I like, I'll think: that's not exactly how it happened.  

Since I started working on Revolutionary, I've had a great number of conversations about historical accuracy and the crossroads of history and fiction.  Strangely, it has never bothered me as much coming from the side of writing a novel (or short story).  It's fiction.  Sure, I want to be accurate (and I know readers care about that, see other blog entries) but I don't feel controlled by the facts the way that composing under the heading of nonfiction (even creative nonfiction) makes me feel.

But, as I say, I have been musing on this lately, and was delighted to find an entry by Sheryl St. Germain at Brevity Magazine's blog in which she discusses how she wrote a nonfiction piece in which her narrator interviewed Emily Dickinson (savor for a moment the oddness of that claim).  Describing the process she says: "become extremely sensitive to the fact that we sometimes must invent in order to reach (create?  interrogate?) a truth."  

I love it.  In particular, I love the notion of interrogating a truth. That's a lot of what writing -- whether fiction or nonfiction -- is for me. Wrestling.  Whether that's with an idea in my head, and trying to get it onto the page, or an idea from my life and trying to get it to fit a plot, or a topic that I've read about that I want to fictionalize.  Wrestling, interrogating... it isn't so much about "making up" or "creating" as working with what's already there: forming it, berating it, manipulating it, pestering it.

To me, St. Germain's quote speaks to the process while Tim O'Brien's idea speaks to the product.  But they are two ends of the same rope.  One is how the truth feels to the writer and the other how the truth feels to the reader; one is the questions the writer asks and the other is the answers the reader feels compelled to believe.

Deborah Sampson Gannett and... George Washington?

As I was sleuthing around the internet, looking for information on Deborah's years after the war (a fascinating story, though not part of my novel), I kept coming across an image of her handing a letter to General George Washington.

Here's a link to this image: Deborah&Washington.

The image is a 19th century engraving, and in it, Deborah (on the right), stands with her arm extended, offering a letter to a seated Washington.  She is dressed in military garb, of a sort.  Certainly, her garments are men's wear.  However, she doesn't have a weapon nor does she have any sign of rank.  In one hand, she holds a tricorn hat -- the emblem of the "minute man" and revolutionary war soldier.  She is also bent, as if bowing to Washington, her eyes clearly downcast.  In all, she appears submissive, especially in comparison to how the men are depicted.

Two men are in the engraving.  One, his back to the viewer, has epaulets and a sword at his side (signifier of rank as well as of masculinity!) and stands in a posture that appears almost hostile.  He has a hand on his hip and his face, shown in profile, bears a look of disdain.  It isn't clear who this person is supposed to be -- General Paterson (Deborah's commanding officer)?  An aide to Washington?  What he represents, though, is clear: he is the military establishment, overseeing the scene before him, asserting dominance and displeasure.

The other man is George Washington.  He is seated with epaulets of rank on his shoulder, his body turned to face Deborah, suggesting openness.  Together with his seated position, his posture is much less combative than the other man's.  However, it would be too much to read acceptance into his depiction; he doesn't reach for the missive and his face is shown with a clear scowl.

Overall, it is an odd engraving.  The scene that it claims to depict is Deborah handing a letter to Washington, a letter that discloses her female nature (the letter was purported to have been written by the physician who treated an injury of hers).  Two things are strange.  First is the lack of factual basis.  It is possible that Deborah met with (in the sense that she was in the room with) Washington during her service.  She did carry messages between New Windsor (where General Paterson was stationed) and Newburgh (where Washington was stationed).  However, she doesn't mention any meeting in the biography written about her, and that biography is inclined to take notice and make use of any possible means of aggrandizement.  Indeed, she reports that she handed her letter to General Paterson and it was he who dismissed her (the apocryphal engraving account says that Washington read the letter, recognized the sensitive nature of the contents, dismissed Deborah to another room, and then went to meet her there, handing her a letter of discharge as well as a sum of money).

Why make this history up?  I interpret it as a sad statement about fame.  It is not enough to tell one's own story on one's own merit.  Rather, it must be appended to the story of another famous person.  (The old riding of coat-tails cliche.) For the 19th century, claiming a connection with Washington was a means of gaining some celebrity.  Especially for Deborah, this also legitimizes her claim -- it implies that she "passed" in front of Washington and that her service wasn't peripheral to the war but right at the heart.

But, on the level of the art itself, there are several peculiar factors.  It makes sense that Deborah wouldn't be happy about the situation (if she knows what the letter holds).  But why are the men upset?  They don't know what the letter says.  Their apparent disdain could be nothing more than a reflection of the class differentiation at the time; ranking officers had little need to be indulgent with enlisted men.  But I think that their facial expressions and body postures, together with Deborah's positioning and costuming, connote something more significant about gender relationships.  They are showing superiority; they are showing mastery; they are showing disapproval.  Deborah is lesser in every sense.  She is smaller, she is bent, she is not given a rank or a weapon.

Even though this scene is apocryphal, meaning that the artist had ever license needed to recreate it as he wished, he appears to have interpreted it through a heavy lens of 19th century bias, translating his disapproval for her service and her "masquerade."  Too bad... this moment, in my mind, was one of victory and triumph.

Genres... The Need(?) for Labels

Prompted by the excellent essay that appeared on The Rumpus satirizing the idea of writing "The Great American Woman's Novel" (Here), I got to thinking about genres of fiction.  The essay, written by Elissa Bassist (her web site here) is delightful and hilarious, poking fun at the designation of "American Woman Writers" in Wikipedia, among other things.  Following her article, come the comments (both at The Rumpus and at other sites that have reprinted the piece, like Jezebel.) and some of these are funny, too.  But many of them dropped the satire and took more serious umbrage with the idea of a "Woman's Novel" or "Women's Fiction" in general.

And these responses made me sit back and think about how to (and why to) divide literature.

Of course, there are the craft concerns: fiction as distinct from poetry as distinct from nonfiction.  And there can be reams and reams written about the fuzzy grayness and liminal areas and how even these distinctions are problematic.  But I won't go into that (at least not right now).  Just take fiction... and take it at your average bookstore.  You'd expect a division for Science Fiction, for Mystery, and for Children's and/or Young Adult fiction. These seem natural and needed, helping to funnel the right reader to the right area.  Saves time!  Of course, I can think of crossover texts -- books that I think belong just as much in the "general" literature as in the Mystery section.

But more, I can think of my surprise (and, indeed, even anger) at some of the categorization I've seen in stores.  Many bookstores have GLBT sections or African-American sections.  I've gone looking for Jeanette Winterson books in the "general" section, not found them, and been redirected to the GLBT section.  At the time, I thought, why not have copies in both?  Surely Toni Morrison (among others) belongs just as much in the "general" literature area as in an African-American section... I'd say the same for Winterson.  Those who've commented on Bassist's satire seem upset by the designation of Women's Fiction, which is stacked with romance and a certain ilk of thriller.

What's the problem here?  The problem is that what makes sense for consuming and marketing -- getting the reader to the shelf that they want to be at -- creates strange divisions in the literature.  More, it seems to imply a hierarchy.  Tacit in this is the implication that the "general" category of literature is superior, the Promised Land of the bookstore.  To belong there is to have made it.  The other sections feel lesser.

I say this more as a writer than as a reader (though, as I say above, I do feel some discomfort as a reader as well).  Many bookstores have a historical fiction section, and I know that my first novel, Revolutionary, is historical fiction -- no doubt about it.  I wouldn't mind having it in the historical fiction section.  But I'd want it in the general category, too.  Why?  Because I believe it is a book with literary merit beyond its being historical fiction; I believe its a book that would appeal to a variety of readers, not just those who like historical fiction.

So maybe that's the problem with the divisions: they feel limiting.  If it's in literature, then your book can be anything; you as a reader can be anything.  But if your book (whether a writer or a reader) is in a specific section, that seems to imply something about you -- you are "only" a ________.  Perhaps Bassist has the best solution: satire is the answer!

Selling out, or just selling?

I've added the last (for now) section in "The Road to Revolutionary" tab above.  I hope you enjoy my reflections on how the editorial process felt and how I respond the the comments I received from other writers about how to manage artistic vision while working with a publisher.

More in "The Road to Revolutionary"

I've almost finished the series of posts in the "Road to Revolutionary" section -- see the tab above.  Just posted = section 9, which is about the process of sending the manuscript out of editors at publishing houses and signing on.  From this point, I'll reflect on what the editing process has been like, so I hope you'll tune in for future posts in this area.

Now that I have an agent, what happens?

Section 8 in the Road to Revolutionary tab above is now available.  In it, I look at the steps that came after signing with an agent and before signing with a publisher.  Check it out!

Signing with an Agent...

Section 7 in the "Road to Revolutionary" tab above is all about getting an offer from an agent, in my case the excellent Alison Fargis, and accepting that offer.  For those interested in the process of taking a manuscript from concept to publication, I hope you enjoy.

And while you're at it, you can check out Alison's site (StoneSong ) for my book and the author awesome authors she represents.

The Next Step In Finding An Agent =

Sending that query letter out!
I've just posted a new entry in the "Road to Revolutionary" section (see tab above).  Section 6 tells the tale (of some woe!) about the process of sending out query letters to agents, the results of that, and what I did next.  I welcome any questions or comments!

First Step in Finding An Agent =

The Query Letter! 

And that's what my most recent post is on... section five in the "Road to Revolutionary" tab above. In this post, I write about how to put together that all-important missive!

1937 New Yorker Article On Deborah

Having had much fun gallivanting about The New Yorker's online archives for a series of posts I did last week, I couldn't resist typing in Deborah Sampson and seeing what I turned up.

Imagine my delight to find a 1937 article written on her!  (I did then go back to Alfred Young's excellent volume on Deborah (Masquerade) and confirmed that he had mentioned the New Yorker article briefly.)  Written by Morris Bishop on July 3, 1937, the article runs over three pages (scantily so, for there are columns of ads on the pages; the advertisements are delightful.).

There is no pressing reason that I can discover for writing an article at this time on Deborah -- no recent discovery of letters, no new release of a book, no resurgence of interest in women in combat.  I can only think that, given a press date of July 3, they were looking for some good Americana.

The article is delightful, if snide, quoting large chunks of her biography as told by Herman Mann, whose florid style is pilloried by the article's author.  I turned to the article interested in how her "adventure" would be portrayed at that time: as a positive, daring adventure; as a negative act of deceit?  I was surprised to find that she is presented almost as a laughing stock.  In part this is owing to Mann's overly-flowery language, but in part this is, I think, owing to the inability -- or, rather, unwillingness -- of society to accept that women are capable and that gender is complex.  It is far easier to brush aside her "escapades" as lighthearted whimsy bordering on craziness or criminality than it is to consider exactly how difficult women's lives were back then and why they might want to escape.

Have no doubt: the article is worth reading (archives are free to subscribers of the magazine).  For those most interested in the presentation of gender, one line is particularly remarkable.  In describing how Deborah bound herself given the shape/style of the Revolutionary War uniform, Morris writes that: "the female of those days was used to enduring severe pressures; it was merely a question of altering the point of incidence of the stress."

What a wonderful caricature.  I thoroughly enjoy the double meaning of women being accustomed to "enduring severe pressures."  This is true sartorially -- of corsets and such -- and it is true domestically and psychologically.

Famous Letter For Deborah Sampson Gannett

Since my lovely wife, also known as the Missive Maven, has been gracious enough to mention my forthcoming novel on her blog (http://www.missivemaven.com/), I thought I would expand a bit on the connection between Deborah Sampson Gannet and letters.  In the novel, as my wife's blog notes, there is an epistolary element.  This is entirely a fictional imagination and -- as far as I know -- no historical record remains of letters Deborah wrote while in the service.

After her discharge, however, there is one famous letter written on her behalf.  

In 1804, (over 20 years after her service in the army ended) Deborah was living in Sharon, Massachusetts. Married and with three children, she and her husband struggled financially, frequently falling into debt.  Deborah had earned some money on a lecture tour and had, in 1792, received the sum of 34 pounds from the Massachusetts Legislature as compensation for her year and half of service in the army.  She felt she was owed more.

And so she reached out to Paul Revere, who ended up writing a letter on her behalf to Congressman William Eustis.  An image of the original letter, as well as a readable typescript below, can be found at The Paul Revere House Website, here.

As a writer, if not a missive expert, I appreciate this letter for its wonderful display of the spelling and grammar conventions (or lack thereof) at the time, but especially for its sense of rhetoric.  My favorite line is when Revere explains that he heard Deborah's story and fully expected to meet an uneducated, small-minded woman, "one of the meanest of her sex," but found instead a "small, effeminate, and converseable" woman.  This strikes me in particular because the core of this stereotype still holds true today, and Revere is delightfully honest in admitting his expectations when hearing that a woman had passed as a man.  

The end of the story is a happy one: Deborah got her pension of four dollars a month, thanks in large part to Revere's intercession.

Added A Section on Revising...

I just posted Section 4 in my "Road to Revolutionary" section... on the topic of revising.  Not every writer's favorite stage, but a very important one!  Now that I've gone over this, my next entry will be about getting manuscript ready to send off to agents.

The Cover of Revolutionary....

There's the old saying, I know: you can't judge a book by...

BUT.

There are books I pick up, and books I let sit, and sometimes that is based on the cover.  (That said, there are books that have terrible covers that I love nonetheless.  And sometimes covers I once didn't like will grow on me in a thoroughly irrational way.  Perhaps there's a future blog post out there about covers I love, covers I loathe, and covers I've been converted to.)

I am THRILLED with the cover of my first novel, Revolutionary.  So many thanks and so much admiration to the design folks at Simon & Schuster.

Check it out... when the cover is closed:

And when the cover is open:

Okay.  This is going to be a gush.  So bear with me.  The things I love about this cover...

• The use of vertical lines on the front.  I love the suggestion this gives of division, of a split, of a defining line.  I like how it divides my name (and the words "A Novel") as well as the title itself.  This plays so well with the theme of two-ness.
• To pair with this, the use of color in the name and title.  Again, things both run together and are separate.  So essential to the notion of self and identity that Deborah feels.
• The colors/stripes.  I like it for the flag motif, of course.  There is an immediate American theme.  But also for the way the horizontal meets the vertical.  The two intersect inevitably, but it is a merging we expect, given the flag.
• The stitching.  Deborah was a weaver. In the first version of the novel (and a few of the subsequent ones), the construction of her first male garments played a huge role.  In the final version, she stitches much of her uniform while at West Point (a point that is historically accurate, I believe) and so the sewing is part of the plot.  But this also relates to her story, how it is stitched and woven together, and in the novel, she often compares her life to fabric.  Alfred Young notes that Deborah was proud of her weaving: she was good at it.  In later life, when she no longer worked as a weaver, she still kept samples of her fabric at hand to show how tight her "lawn" (linen) was.  Not only is there stitching by the stripes have a fabric look.
• The rough edge on the left.  It looks almost unfinished, and I like that for the suggestion that things aren't neatly concluded.
• The division/unity of the figure on the cover.  She is clearly a woman with the jacket open.  She is clearly whole and in action. But with the cover closed, there is some ambiguity.  Not too much, but enough.  I think Deborah would have had to look more male than this, but the closed image is still very suggestive of how masculinizing a uniform and equipment can be.  Plus, with the cover closed, the idea of division is extended.  She is half there, half not.

Alright.  Clearly I'm a fan.  I just hope it's something that makes you want to pick it up and give it a try.

Pre-Order Revolutionary!!

Grant me a little patience and let me just say... I am so excited that folks can pre-order my novel, Revolutionary!  

Here's the link to Amazon

I know...you'll have to wait a while (1/14/14) until it arrives, but, to be early is to be on time.

At least follow the link to check out the cover design.  Pretty fabulous.  I'll be blogging on it soon!

Cool Smithsonian Piece on Revolutionary War Soldiers

I happened upon this article on the Smithsonian Museum of American History Blog, which answers the question: what did soldiers in the American Revolutionary War carry in their pockets? (And did they even have pockets?)

A short and informative piece, it was also pleasant to learn that others are curious in such minutiae and to confirm that I'd gotten it right in my novel!  When I began writing, I remember having the same question: did they have pockets?  I kept thinking of Mary Rowlandson (whose captivity narrative I have taught in American Literature classes).  She refers to her pocket (in which she keeps food), but it means a sort of exterior pouch, one that would have from her belt. 

My own research was helped by the excellent museums I visited along the Hudson (see the road trips and research section of this blog).  They had excellent displays on the uniforms and articles of daily life.  Though they didn't detail the pocket contents (that I recall), the museum at New Windsor did show what a typical soldier carried in his haversack.  

Here's to obscure knowledge and those who enjoy it!

Final Entry in "Researching Revolutionary"

(for now)

I just added some last thoughts on the research process... waxing more philosophical than practical, I admit, and reflecting a bit on the genre of historical fiction in general.  These topics were on my mind because I recently received some wonderful notes from a historian who had read through the manuscript.  So... once I'm through this stage, perhaps I'll post some more on this part of the process.  It has been enlightening!

Check out Section 6 under the "Researching Revolutionary" tab above.  As always, leave comments and tell me what you think!