Five Research Tips For Writing Historical Fiction In his essay, “Two Cheers for Presentism,” the historian David Bell writes, “The past, it has often been said, is a foreign country: weird, wonderful, and strange. Great historians give a visceral sense of this foreignness, showing that what looks familiar at first sight is really anything but, and revealing, with an…
What do I mean, “slavery from both sides”? In America, slavery–that “peculiar institution”–was not only a crime perpetrated against a large group of people over hundreds of years, it was also a crime committed by another group of people. In a very real way it was–and is–two sides of a single horrific coin. Both sides, whites and African-Americans, must come to a reckoning…
Yesterday, I took my granddaughter (8) and grandson (5) to see the new Disney Pixar movie Lightyear. Since I don’t have little kids and didn’t see any of the original Toy Story franchise movies, I really didn’t know what to expect. Of course, I knew that Disney had been battling with the Grand Wizard DeSantis of Florida over the “Don’t…
Few would question that we’ve entered an era of unprecedented cultural fragmentation. People can no longer agree on the most fundamental things: what is good or bad, right or wrong, true or false. Writers, too, have felt the effects of this trend. As a professor of English and a novelist, I’ve spent the better part of my life advocating for…
When I was a little boy, my father, a carpenter, would take me to work with him. He brought me along because my mother worked full-time as a cleaning lady and when I went with her I invariably broke things or was too loud and rambunctious for the old rich ladies, so my father often got me. Later, when I…
Michael C. White | Summer 2022 “As for those citizens in Camus’s world, America is not a friendly place to be sick even in good times; during a plague, it’s a disaster.” Recently I told a writer friend I was rereading Camus’s The Plague. He laughed and asked if I were crazy. He thought reading such a “downer” of a…
During research for my new novel Resting Places, I came across the term descansos, Spanish for “resting places.” In former times, particularly in the Southwest, a descanso marked the spot along a funerary route where the loved ones of someone who died stopped, laid down the coffin, and rested briefly before continuing to the cemetery. While the growing phenomena of…
Recently during an interview about Resting Places, I was asked about the phenomena of roadside memorials—those crosses that have been endemic along our roads and highways, marking the spot where a loved one died violently. In my novel the main character Elizabeth goes on a cross-country journey where she stops at many of these memorials. The question the interviewer asked,…
With this year’s presidential race, much is being said and argued and bantered about concerning another race: that is, race as cultural and ethnic distinction. As a writer who has written extensively about race (in my novel Soul Catcher), I often cringe at our candidates’ discussion (or lack thereof) of the subject of race in America. I was recently reminded…