Fiction and History

Category: Fiction and history

  • Connecting family to fiction: Inspiration for characters can come from Yellville or Yamhill

    McMINNVILLE—Leading up to tonight’s signing at my brother-in-law’s Edward Jones office in McMinnville, Oregon, some editors and journalists have naturally asked, What is the connection of this story in your novel Morkan’s Quarry to anything in Yamhill County? When I was working with editors and agents on the book, my wife, Tammy Gebhart Yates, and…

  • Reviews of Morkan’s Quarry

    from Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozarks Studies I swear, Yates introduces characters so genuinely and fully, you’re stunned to discover they weren’t figures borrowed from history…. Yates can set a scene with the best of them, and capture the broad vistas of battle as ably as he evokes the most tender exchanges between family and…

  • History is Lunch: Who let the novelists out???

    Lecture given August 11, 2010 at History as Lunch lecture series, William Winter Archives Building, Jackson, MS I want to thank Chrissy Wilson for inviting me to speak at History as Lunch. I’m not certain how many other novelists, fiction writers have spoken here, so I am humbled by this privilege and I am very…

  • Introduction to a reading at St. Paul’s Catholic Church

    Prayer of St. Francis de Sales May the Lord guide me and all those who write for a living. Through your prayers, St. Francis de Sales, I ask for your intercession as I attempt to bring the written word to the world. Let us pray that God takes me in the palm of His hand…

  • Father’s Day history

    originally at Lemuria Books blog I was born on Father’s Day, 1968, in Springfield, Missouri. When I hear someone nowadays cry, “Oh, who would want to bring a child into this world?,” I marvel at what my then 28-year-old Dad, Carl Yates, faced bringing a son into 1968. Vietnam was raging. The Tet offensive had…

  • What I almost said before recalling: It’s all about the characters!

    Here’s what I almost said. Preparing to give Morkan’s Quarry its first launch in Mississippi at my hometown bookstore, Lemuria in Jackson, I thought tons about Ozarks history needed explaining. So I was going to light in with all this stuff that follows. “If you will indulge me, let me tell you a little about…

  • Tips and rules to use in writing historical fiction

    These are the lecture notes I used at Missouri State in W. D. Blackmon’s class and at the Creamery Arts Center. Have any of you written fiction set at a time before you had the ability to remember, set at a time before your first memory? Are you comfortable with it being called historical fiction?…

  • Why fiction? Why history? And a call to historians to write Civil War Springfield

    What I will say this morning at Ozarks Technical Community College Thursday, April 15 10:00 a.m.–11:15 a.m. Lecture/Signing, Springfield, MO: Ozarks Technical Community College, 1001 E. Chestnut Expressway, Linclon Hall 211 I want to thank Kay Murnan, Social Science Chair, for inviting me, and thank my long time writing friend Michael Pulley for bringing us…

  • The contract: You have two paragraphs to define your universe

    In preparing to return home and talk about Morkan’s Quarry to people in Springfield, Missouri, the toughest set of lectures to prepare for oddly ought to be the easiest set. I’m having difficulty conceiving what to say in two workshop settings slated to be “On the writing of historical fiction.” By the definitions of most…

  • Development + history = fiction we live with

    The quarry my novel is loosely based on has a renaming survey out now. So the Morkans’ Quarry will be transformed and re-used. And this is not at all a bad thing. Razor-wire and mystery surrounded the Morkans’ Quarry when I knew it firsthand. I drove by it every afternoon and again late at night…