In the third-floor study of her home on a sleepy New England island, far from the war-torn places she used to write about, Geraldine Brooks searched for a word Pilgrims would have used 360 years ago. She found it in a 4,000-page book that's the stuff of dreams for a historical writer.
“For the new novel, I wanted to know what word they would have called a fetus in the 17th century because I couldn't imagine them using the word fetus. And the word was shapeling. Isn't it wonderful?” Upon which Brooks, sweet of voice, lets go a riff of melodic laughter.
“It's like a treasure hunt to find the right word because I think it gives the novel authenticity,” she says. “That's my favorite part of it. I just love to find what word would they have used for that at that time. And the words are so rich and so evocative.”
Her go-to resource is the amazing Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, 44 years in the compiling: it lists a word, its ancestors, and dates of usage. “I'm not quite sure who else in the world would use it,” says Australian-born Brooks, with another ripple of mirth.
Pulitzer Prize-winner, mother of 14-year-old Nathaniel and 7-year-old Bizu adopted two years ago from Ethiopia, Brooks will speak at 7 p.m. Monday in the McMaster Center of the Main Library. She'll explain how she creates fiction based on fact, using examples from her newest novel as well as the one she's finishing.
Her appearance at the Authors! Authors! series is cosponsored by The Blade and the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library. The event is sold out.
“All of my work, the fi ction and the nonfi ction, is trying to look at how people of different beliefs and political persuasions can come together to create a more constructive environment for a just society. That's the background noise to all of my books in one way or another.”
So respected is her work that Brooks, 55, is scheduled to be in southern Ohio Sunday, receiving the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Lifetime Achievement Award, established five years ago to advance peace through literature.
“Her focus is always on how people of many nationalities have at one time lived in peace,” says Dayton's Sharon Rab, founder and cochair of the prize. “And she has firsthand knowledge of war conditions.”
Says Brooks: “It's a great honor because it recognizes the contribution of literature in furthering the peaceful resolution of conflict.”
As a Wall Street Journal reporter, she wrote about war in the former Yugoslavia before and after the Dayton peace accords.
“Even though it's an imperfect peace, I did see the effect it had on the lives of ordinary people in those countries who had been so brutalized for so long by a war that really took its toll largely on civilians.”
Memories of Toledo
For now, life on Martha's Vineyard is “pretty pokey,” she says.
“This island is really blessed with so much natural beauty, and I love to be in nature. A couple of minutes and you can be hiking on a trail through the woods or along a bluff by the ocean or through farmland. I like to take the dogs and go for very long walks.”
She converted to Judaism when she married Tony Horwitz, 53, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter turned nonfiction history writer. During their courtship in the early 1980s, she lived in Cleveland and he in Fort Wayne, and they often met for dinners and movies in Toledo.
“If you check the map, Toledo is the halfway point. We have very fond romantic memories of Toledo,” she says, except for that “pretty bloody business” of a hockey game.
The writing life
History is bread and butter for the Brooks-Horwitz household. He penned the 1998 best selling Confederates in the Attic, and is writing a nonfiction book about abolitionist John Brown in his third-floor office adjacent to hers.
“We can shout to each other ‘What's the word for such and such?' and try out phrases on each other from time to time. It's marvelous.”
She starts writing in the morning when the school bus arrives and calls it quits when it returns in the afternoon.
“But the work continues while I have my hands in the bread dough and when I'm making dinner,” she says. “Sometimes I think young kids are a wonderful asset to a novelist. ... Being in a child's imaginative world can really spark your own creative thinking, the kind of weird jumps that their imaginations make. It loosens you up.”
Son Bizu adapted quickly to his American home.
“He is the most joyous, delightful, loving child you could ever hope to have in your life. He's a pistol.”
Ethiopia, which she reported on during its war with Eritrea, has a transparent adoption process that encourages families to meet and keep in contact, she says.
“It's an intense and incredibly moving story of self-sacrifice on the part of his family.”
Sharing their home is her mother, Gloria, who has Alzheimer's.
Idealism and war
Like her previous two works of fiction, Brooks' most recent, People of the Book (2008), was inspired by a true story — that of the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the earliest Jewish volumes to be illustrated with paintings of people. In the five centuries since it was created in Muslim-ruled medieval Spain, people of varied backgrounds risked their lives to preserve it during perilous times.
The Pulitzer Prize for fiction was bestowed in 2006 for March, written in the voice of the father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Brooks paints him as an idealistic chaplain for the Union cause, but the Civil War shatters his body and mind. He realizes that his side is capable of barbarism and racism, and he tries to figure out how to reconnect with his far-away wife and daughters.
To create him, Brooks studied the journals and letters of Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
She took a leave from reporting
in the early 1990s to write Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (1994). After Nathaniel's birth she turned to her adult efforts to track down her childhood pen pals for Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over (1997).
“I didn't want to go on openended
assignments to dangerous places. I was looking for other things to do. But I wasn't getting the kind of freelance work that I felt able to do. People would still ring up and say, ‘Do you want to go to Afghanistan?' And I'd say, ‘Well, not right now, I'm breast feeding.' ”
An intriguing story
She came upon the idea for Year of Wonders (2001), when hiking with Horwitz in the craggy middle of England and spotting a sign, “Eyam, the Plague Village.” In 1665, a bundle of cloth in London, infested with fleas, carried the plague when it was shipped to a tailor in Eyam, an isolated community of shepherds and lead miners. The villagers decided that instead of fleeing and spreading infection, they would quarantine themselves.
“I'd gotten an award [for a previous book] that came with some money and I thought I'd use this time and just see if I could tell this story that always intrigued me.”
Researching it was easy, she says. “We went to England. I took my son with me. I have pictures of him at the plague graveyard. It was a fixed place and a year in time; a very, very tight narrative structure. The architecture of the plot was dictated by the facts of the situation.
“And I found a voice for the novel very easily in a half-line reference in one of the [Eyam] minister's letters where he talked about his maid having survived the plague. So I put the book in her voice. And that just meant researching voices of 17th-century Darbyshire women of her class, which was a little bit challenging because those people were illiterate and didn't leave written records.
“I found the courts were a great place to hear women speaking in their own voice. There are verbatim transcripts of testimony. Often women were being hauled in there for the great crime of being a scold, which means they told their husbands what to do, and witchcraft, and all that kind of stuff. And [the court] took down what they said in their own words, so you can hear their voices: it gives you the cadence.”
The narrator she envisioned longed for education. “I imagined the one venue for her would have been sermons on Sunday, so I give her a ‘King Jamesy Bible' kind of flourish every now and again because I know she's paying close attention in church and that's where she's getting her glimpses of a more expansive intellectual world. So it was fun to play with. She has a lot of archaic Darbyshire dialect; earthy words from things like the cowstall, but then she has this more elaborate, almost ecclesiastic cadence in her telling of her story.”
Brooks wrote a few chapters and sent them to her agent, but heard nothing.
“I thought she hated it. Unbeknownced to me, she went off and sold it and came back with a contract. I still had 90 percent of the book to write and I had to sit down and do it. And I loved it! And fortunately, it found readers.
“I'm going to do this as long as I can get away with it.”
Contact Tahree Lane at:
tlane@theblade.com
or 419-724-6075.
First Published November 7, 2010, 12:47 p.m.
