This week, The Extraordinary Times catches up with TaraShea Nesbit, Miami University Assistant Professor of English Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, and acclaimed author of two historical novels: The Wives of Los Alamos (NY: Bloomsbury, 2014) and most recently, Beheld (NY: Bloomsbury, 2020). Beheld, which dramatizes the world of Plymouth Colony, comes out in paperback format 10/19/2021. Order your copy today! * Do you see a connecting thread between your first published novel, The Wives of Los Alamos, and your second novel, Beheld?
Yes! Both projects reexamine a turning point in human history and are interested in thinking about the implications of individual actions within the scope of a larger collection of people, as well as how these past events shape and echo our present moment. The Wives of Los Alamos explores the creation and subsequent detonation of the atomic bomb through the experiences of women in the community of Los Alamos, and Beheld tells the story of the murder of a colonist through the alternating viewpoints of two very different women in the colony: the governor’s second wife, Alice Bradford, and a woman of a family recently out of indentured servitude, Eleanor Billington, on the day the murder takes place. But both books explore a group of people in a closed-off community who have it in mind to work for a greater good, but personal interest gets in the way—social striving, professional ambition—and the group loses sight, if they ever had it, of the importance to care for the whole. * What inspired you to explore Plymouth Colony in Beheld? I was in an early American literature class in graduate school, reading William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, when I learned that a woman slipped, jumped, or was pushed off the Mayflower when it was moored. People often repeat a story told by Cotton Mather, who was not on the ship, about her cause of death. Mather wrote in his biography of Bradford in 1702, roughly 80 years after the Mayflower docked and after William Bradford was dead:"...at their first landing, his [Bradford’s] dearest consort accidentally falling overboard, was drowned in the harbour" Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (Hartford: Silus Andrus & Son, 1853), vol. 1, p. 111. Was it really an accident? Should we trust this account by someone who was not present, not even alive, when the death occurred? Is a moored ship easy to slip off of? We know the story of “the pilgrims” primarily from William Bradford, who wrote his book around the time a new colony, The Massachusetts Bay Colony, was founded. Some historians have speculated that he wrote the book in part because he feared the status of Plymouth was declining, and he needed to assert the colony’s goodliness. In his account of Plymouth, we learn of the difficult struggle to establish the colony and all of the deaths that occurred that first winter, but Bradford does not mention the cause of one death that first winter: the death of his very own wife, Dorothy. I wanted to know more about the history of the northeastern woodlands and look again at the early American story about “pilgrims” that I had been told as a child with the eyes of an adult. And I started my research with that mystery of the woman who died by falling from the Mayflower. I thought: If Bradford left out the death of his first wife, was he leaving out other important stories from Plymouth, about who these people were and what they did and did not do? Of course he was. The national holiday meant to represent peaceful cohabitation, is for many a day of mourning. * What historical sources did you draw on in your research, and how did they color your fictional characterizations? So, so many! Not only historical resources, but conversations and interviews with scholars working today. I worked at the American Antiquarian Society for a summer and was fascinated by early maps of the northeastern woodlands and execution sermons. The maps helped shape my understanding of how populated and developed the area around Patuxet (which the settlers renamed Plymouth) really was. And the sermons were fascinating pamphlets to see an execution as a place for gaining parishioners. I read all the primary documents from Plymouth in the early 1600s that I could find—Bradford’s letters, the Plymouth Court Records, the pamphlets sent back to England to try to sell Plymouth to people thinking of going to the colonies, like Good News From New England, and documents I could find written by women at the time, though none existed from Plymouth, I did find letters by European women discussing their views on parenting and infant loss, two aspects I explore in the book. Some critical reads: This Land Is Their Land, David Silverman; Our Beloved Kin, Lisa Brooks; Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England, Martha Finch; The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter; White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg I began writing when I was in a literary history class, to the book was inspired by that research, and then I kept adding as I learned more and more, up until the very last moments the editor said, That’s it! The acknowledgements in the back of the book highlight many more. * Do you see any compelling parallels between 17th century Plymouth and today's United States? Yes. We are a divided nation, as we have been, from the beginning. Perhaps our division is linked to a sense of scarcity and xenophobia, inequity of economic stability and ideological line drawing related to beliefs, often religious beliefs, but if we acknowledge America as a country partially founded on xenophobia and a want for economic gain and acknowledge how the Mayflower stories have often been previously told in ways that deny unsavory aspects of the settlers, perhaps we can reckon with that violence and inequity, and develop a more equitable future. * What historical novelists, living or dead, do you most admire, and why? This might sound surprising and I hope it doesn’t sound dismissive: I don’t read historical novelists as a genre. I look to texts that pull me in at the level of language, or surprise, or humor often derived from satire and sometimes those are set in a time before the author’s life and sometimes they aren’t. I love Laird Hunt’s Neverhome, about a woman who pretends to be her husband in order to fight in the civil war—it was both a book that evoked a time period and explored timeless aspects of humanity in very distilled prose. I’ve recently loved and/or returned to Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (satire), Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (earnest book about a grandmother and grandchild relationship following grief), Leslie Jamison’s The Recoverings (explores the relationship between writers and addiction), and George Saunders’ short story “Sea Oak” (a story I have an essay forthcoming about on LitHub).
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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