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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…
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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…
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Q & A with MCP Press and author Steve Yates
A Question and Answer with Steve Yates author of Morkan’s Quarry A novel of the Civil War from Moon City Press What is Morkan’s Quarry about? It’s a father and son story set in Springfield, Missouri, during the Civil War. Michael Morkan and his young son, Leighton, own the limestone quarry downtown, somewhat modeled after…
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Cross purposes and the conflict between fiction and history
As I work through the reading list for this project, I think it’s time to pause for some working definitions of purpose, and maybe we’ll get at what the technical writers call “the problem of the report.” Here’s a first stab at it. It is the sworn duty of the professional historian to apprehend and…
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Marketing after Forty Years
What I will say today at the Oxford Conference for the Book on a panel about the University Press of Mississippi celebrating its forty years of publishing Marketing After 40 Years Every so often marketing will hear the charge that “No one knows about this book!” Even for books that we have sold 15,000 copies…
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Lukács tells us what’s wrong
The historical novel of our day, despite the great talent of its best exponents, still suffers in many respects from the remnants of the harmful and still not entirely vanquished legacy of bourgeois decadence.” I had rather hoped my first novel would be sopping with unvanquished, bourgeois decadence (see defintion of the Historical Romance novel).…
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Working definitions: Divisions among historical novels
1) The Classic Historical Novel (Defined largely by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel) A novel in which a character of middling importance caught between warring factions in a conflict serves as reader’s ambassador to a setting and time well in the past of the publication date. Large historical figures, kings, clan war lords, mighty…
Fiction and History 