Embedded Files
Have students take a closer look at the types of questions the interviewer uses. Challenge students to try to identify why some questions elicit elaborate responses that can deepen comprehension of the story, while others might not.
Transcript:
Interview between Kaylie Jones Books Marketing Director, Danie Watson-Goetz and author, Deirdre Sinnott:
1. Where did the voices of Helen, Maggie, Imari come from? They feel so authentic, and I’m extremely curious about how you curated them.
There are so many different types of people who speak in this book—rich and poor, African American and of European descent, formally educated and those who were self or community-taught, those from the South and those born in the North. As I looked for the voice of each character, I turned to 19th century books, either contemporary or near contemporary.
I took special care with the African-American characters. They too were split by various formal educational levels, regions, and economic conditions. I got a lot of help from the book Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca, by John McWhorter.
I also looked at the language in several historical novels by African American writers like The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, The Chaneysville Incident, by David Bradley, The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston. Hurston’s essay on language in the book Negro: An Anthology, collected and edited by Nancy Canard (Fredrick Unger Publishing Co., Inc., 1970) helped as well. And of course, I turned to the many narratives written by the self-emancipated as well as the WPA interviews with formally-enslaved Americans.
Beyond that, I relied on my own ear for all of the characters’ speech patterns and variations. Most important to me was something that McWhorter said about historical accuracy vs. readability and sounding right to the modern audience. I hope I was able to honor the experience of each character’s history and circumstance.
This picture is me trying to make certain that each African American character had their own consistent voice. I tagged each person with a certain color tag. I then read only their character’s dialogue. I was trying to make sure that each one kept the same speech patterns. I went through methodically trying to have individuality and regionalisms in their speech.
I was a theater major in college and worked as a stage manager for a decade, so dialogue comes to me much more quickly than descriptions.
2. What writers/books influenced you in the creation of this book?
Novelist Laurie Loewenstein asked me which historical novel would I like to my book to be modeled on and my immediate answer was The Alienist, by Caleb Carr. While I was reading I saw New York City through a completely different lens. The neighborhoods that I walked through daily were suddenly transformed into places filled with Victorian era offices and chop houses. Flickering street lamps replaced today’s glaring lights. Avenues that were jammed with cars were now filled with carriages and the smell of horses. I even went to the block where Dr. Kreizler lived and tried to guess which house was the one described in the book. I was hooked.
When I was younger, I was addicted to Anne Rice and Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring trilogy. As a reader I usually want out of my world and vampires, hobbits, elves, dwarves, and wizards showed me the way.
3. What was your process for writing this book? (How did you write?/What is a typical writing day?)
I write in the mid-morning. I like to go for a walk or do a workout in the morning or it never gets done. If I can be at my desk by ten a.m. I’m happy. This was particularly challenging when my husband and I were caring for his elderly mother. But, I eventually realized that I could indeed start my work day at any time and that telling myself I MUST start at ten did not serve me. Even if I am at my computer and want to be ready to go there is the flicker of fear about it.
At the end of my writing day, usually around three p.m. I have a hot chocolate (It’s medicinal. I have a prescription somewhere).
That’s when I like to read my day’s writing and make corrections. That way the next morning I can just enter in those corrections and I’m on a roll
Because I was worried about historical accuracy, when I began writing, I had to look up almost every word in the OED to make certain I was not using any term that was not in use at the time. I also had to learn all about early kitchens and how 19th Century houses ran, what blacksmiths do and all the details about life in upstate New York in the 1830s that I could.
When I started writing, I didn’t know exactly what I didn’t know about slavery in New York State. I can’t mention the specific detail here, but there was a thing that slaveholders in NY were doing before the 1827 emancipation that made me stand up and proclaim that I had the dirty secret I needed to tie the book together.
4. The issues central to both women’s rights and the rights of enslaved people feel central to the story. How did you navigate telling this story in such an honest way? What I am trying to say is the characters are human. How do you navigate writing characters that are so far from your own beliefs? How do you make them human even though they are capable of such horrific actions and beliefs?
People are driven to extremes. There are times in my life that I acted in ways that are no longer acceptable to me. Most of my unkindness was directed at myself, but not always. I had to be taught and those lessons came from friends, strangers, people who didn’t like me and people who did. While I’ve never committed most of the negative actions that appear in the book, it’s my job to look at the system of slavery and how in order for it to survive, it had to be carried out by a huge percentage of the people in the society. Yes, there are different levels of culpability as well as financial gain. But even the guy who simply laid out the newspaper type so that runaway slave advertisements could be printed was participating on some level. I have to wonder about the moment we live in– what each action that seems unrelated to oppression, like driving a car, is really supporting? War, pollution, global warming, oppressive governments, and a host of woes that don’t seem to affect me. It’s easier to close my mind and think of something else rather than the result of actions so many of us take all the time. The character Pryce says it when he is asked about the slave-labor origins of his cotton shirt: “How can I help doing what everyone else does?”
5. Who is your favorite character in the book and why? Which character do you empathize most with and why?
My dear friend Pricilla Tucker asked me if I had modeled Maggie after her. Deep down I knew I had, but I was in denial on some level and wasn’t ready to admit it. Maggie is a character who just made her own room on the page. I found that slipping into her point of view was compelling. She may be one of the most practical characters in the book. There is some of me in her of course, but I came to realize there is a whole lot of Pricilla in her. Eventually I admitted that I had been thinking of her as I wrote. I think that’s one of the reasons I could hear her voice so clearly. When I came clean with Pricilla she said, “I knew it!” I had been worried about it, but she was happy. I said I wanted to make sure that Maggie wasn’t a stereotypical character, Pricilla said, “Oh, she’s no Mammy.” That made me happy because I knew I was getting something right with the character.
6. Societal expectations and norms and the secrets we hide when we don’t live up to those norms plays an important role in this book. Why is it important to shed light on the difficulty people have when they keep secrets from each other and from the larger society? Should all family secrets be exposed/investigated? Why or why not?
I used to think I was keeping my secrets, but really they were keeping me. Exposing or suppressing them is my prerogative. But I feel like investigating them freed me to do what I had always wanted to do. I did that in therapy and in group settings. I STILL don’t know everything that went on in my family, and I doubt many people ever really do. All I know is that the human condition is a tangle of emotions and actions and novels would be very dull if that were not true!
7. History and the idea of reparations and acknowledging our history are in the forefront of the news these days. What can students learn from The Third Mrs. Galway about the early history of the United States? How do you think we created a society that could justify enslaving human beings?
Slavery is an inhuman system set up by humans. In this hemisphere, slavery didn’t become a vast system all at once. Various things were tried, for example enslaving indigenous peoples. At an early point with the advent of importation of people stolen from Africa, it was almost like an indenture system, not the perpetual, generational enslavement that quickly dominated the system. Laws written by whites came to define the system of total generational control including the treatment of human beings as property who could be sold. The U.S. Constitution outlawed the importation of people from Africa as of 1804. That prohibition brought with it an increase in the internal marketing of people and their children. At the end of British colonial rule, there were states in the north where the system was not particularly profitable. Besides all of the acts of resistance by the enslaved and free people of color, a small segment of people of European descent expressed moral outrage over the question. This led to an emancipation movement. Running parallel to that, was an effort to send the free African American population to the colony of Liberia in Africa rather than simply let them live free and get on with their lives.
The system of slavery evolved over time. White people who were born during that period mostly accepted it as the way things were, the natural order, and probably didn’t think much about it or justified it with thoughts of their own supremacy. Some, no doubt were troubled by slavery’s continued existence, but felt powerless. A system as vast as slavery or say today’s justice/incarceration system seems too big and entrenched to fight. But there are always some people who do fight, primarily the people who suffer the most from oppression.
8. Where did the inspiration for Maggie come from? (See question five.)
9. You have some really interesting parallels between Maggie, Helen, and Imari.
Because of the narrow roles that women had in that era, the three find common ground. Each finds herself pressed against the rules and conventions of the day, seeing a freer world just out of reach. The question is what sacrifices will each one try? And what are the possible reverberations of her decisions? Each learns for herself how to both live within the confines of her assigned role and how much she is willing to risk to break out and seek freedom.
10. If you could choose a role model during that time period, who would it be (living our dead), and why?
For the period, it has to be the Grimké sisters. Sarah and Angelina grew up in South Carolina. Their father owned hundreds of enslaved people. They saw the brutality of the system first hand. Sarah was prevented from becoming a lawyer because of her gender. She was influenced by the Quakers in Philadelphia and their opposition to slavery and when she returned to her home, she in turn won over her sister Angelina to her view. They left the south, their relations, and all of the comforts that daughters of privilege might enjoy. They became outspoken abolitionists at a time when it was rare for a woman to speak in public. They faced threats and became important as women from the south who opposed to slavery, witnesses of the brutality of the system, and advocates for women’s rights! How could I NOT love them?
11. How has writing this book influenced how you see the world and where you think we need to go as a society?
This act of creation is the fulfillment of a life-long dream. The fact that it exists outside of me and is a thing unto itself just amazes me. The book is something that I hope will be a contribution to the task of understanding human behavior. I had early drafts where almost every character was good or bad. First of all, that’s not true to human experience. Secondly, it’s kind of boring and predictable. I’m lucky that I had a great mentor and some very astute readers who pushed me for more. My many thanks go to Kaylie Jones and Johnny Temple for their demand that I do better.
13. Why did you decide to write this book?
It’s taken so long! I started doing research on the anti-abolition struggle in my hometown, Utica, New York, in 2007. Each time my husband Charles and I were in a bookstore, I was grabbing books on the Underground Railroad and flipping to the index looking for Utica. Finally in the book Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement, by Fergus M. Bordewich I found two references to Utica and found out for the FIRST time that there was an active movement there. Not only that, there had been an anti-abolition riot against the founding meeting of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society. I was hooked. I wanted to know all about it. And once I knew a lot, I wanted everyone else to know. So I began speaking publicly on the subject.
At this time I was writing a memoir and I met my wonderful mentor Kaylie Jones. Eventually I put that book aside and on May 19th, 2014 started a book I was calling The Society. I was immediately thrilled to find the narrator’s voice just flowing through my fingertips. The next exciting thing to happen was finding in a period almanac that Halley’s Comet was going though at just the same time that novel was set. That led to the second title The Comet on the theory that Comets bring disruption and change and finding a freedom seeker in your shed would certainly mean that change had arrived.
But that title didn’t quite match what I was creating. I settled on the title The Third Mrs. Galway and people found it intriguing.
I’ve made all of this sound too easy.
14. If you could give any advice to someone writing a historical novel, what would it be?
Learn, learn, learn about the period, about the politics, dress, technology, the everyday problems of living, and what was happening in art and culture of all of the people in that period, not just the dominant class or race. Find the moral center or question of the book. Try as much as possible to imagine the justifications that anyone might give for actions they take, good or bad. Then, when you’ve done all that, have some fun. Write everything and toss out anything that doesn’t move the main story along, no matter how great it was.
SHAKOURE CHAR INTERVIEW SERIES
Writing a Historical Novel: https://youtu.be/Hk1wMjyIxmo
Helen's Dilemma: https://youtu.be/FXq9m5WQ0lE
Maggie's Character: https://youtu.be/kjRQ7VqQRGQ
Utica & Abolition: https://youtu.be/hqfXI2pCEm4
Types of Work Available to Black Uticans: https://youtu.be/3J5IrgbD_Wg
Abolitionism & Links to the Present: https://youtu.be/QHo8tc_tI8U
Activism: https://youtu.be/XQe4aPNLB7U
The Race Card: https://youtu.be/T_SBOK32g5U
What to do: https://youtu.be/kC378ExLgk4
PODCASTS
Rebellion Dogs Radio Podcast. Conversation with Joe C. 1:03:25 minutes
The Historians Podcast, by Bob Cudmore. 29:01 minutes.
The Writers Lounge With Tom Riddell.
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