Creativity is Quirky: My Meandering Way to A History of Silence
Creativity is Quirky: My Meandering Way to A History of Silence
You never know what experience you have, what story you hear, what observation you make will end up in your first novel.
In 1982, I took a job in Kuwait on a lark. I worked as a developmental editor helping Middle Eastern research scientists get their manuscripts in shape for publication in English-language science journals. Our office was filled with expatriates. One day, my officemate Sylvia told me a story. Before moving to Kuwait with her Egyptian petrochemist husband, Sylvia had been an English professor in the U.S. One of her male colleagues had been murdered. At the funeral, Sylvia saw something that disturbed her so much that it had stayed with her even years later. After she told me what she had seen at the funeral, I also could not get her observation out of my mind. The plot of A History of Silence is my explanation for what she saw. The novel begins with her fictionalized colleague’s funeral.
Didn’t like Kuwait much but did like the expat life, so my next stop was Athens, Greece. While living and working there I wrote the first draft. It wasn’t great. In retrospect, I can see that I lacked both the life experience and the writing experience to do the story justice. I put it in a box and didn’t look at it again for 35 years! I became a professor and had a career teaching sociology and women’s studies. Then COVID struck and I decided to retire a year before I had planned. During lockdown, I got out my old manuscript, originally typed on a tiny lime-green portable typewriter, and started revising as I transferred my old draft to my computer.
Viewing television news during the pandemic completely changed the plot of A History of Silence. One story I followed closely and supported was the Black Lives Matter movement. People who braved the pandemic to protest together I thought exceptionally courageous. I found it sad that in the 21st century, we still had to have a movement in this country with the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” We obviously haven’t moved on from our unsavory history of enslavement, even now. I had an epiphany. I saw how I could make my novel a critique not only of patriarchy (as it was originally written to be when I drafted it in the 1980s). I could make it a critique of the particular type of patriarchy our nation was founded on, and one that haunts us still — our “peculiar institution” — the racialized enslavement of some by others. I decided to make the main male character a descendent of an enslaving family. With the adoption of that deep and troubling backstory, the narrative’s potential opened up and the novel was transformed.
Another experiential element profoundly influenced my novel; the stories told to me by women. Friends of mine from long-ago college days became loosely translated into three of my characters. I have also interviewed many homeless and impoverished women during my career as a social scientist. The grief, trauma, and sorrow some of them shared with me has also helped give my characters a three-dimensionality they were lacking in the first draft.
Reflecting on my life as a woman embedded in these times, and what I’ve learned from my own mistakes and triumphs has been woven into the fabric of this novel, too. That’s unavoidable. In some sense, all novel writing is gleaned from one’s biography.
A History of Silence is a much better novel than it might have been if not for the stories I’ve encountered, the experiences I’ve had, the attention I’ve paid to the larger world. Most importantly, contemplating what life has thrown my way has helped me construct the world in my novel. Taking up novel writing in my 60s has been a gift. I simply was not ready to write fiction until this point in my life.
Some writers can undertake persuasive character construction, plot formation, and world building in their 20s. I wasn’t one of those lucky authors. All of us, however, are better off for paying close attention to what life is trying to teach us. These lessons came my way in the trauma and pleasure of growing up, or in savoring or fearing a new place or adventure. But it’s the people I’ve gotten to know, close family, friends, and random strangers, that have most influenced my writer’s perspective.
My best tips for maturing (at any age) as a writer are: keep yourself open to the new and novel, think hard about what you’ve experienced, and don’t be afraid to meld seemingly disparate elements into the world and actors of your creation. For me, a troubling funeral story, a wealth of women’s woes, and a social movement trying to find justice came together to create A History of Silence.
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Cynthia J. Bogard has reinvented herself as a novelist after a successful career as a Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Hofstra University in New York. Born and raised in rural Wisconsin she’s lived in Kuwait, Greece, Mexico, New York, Texas, Vermont, and in Madison, Wisconsin.
World traveler, longtime feminist and environmentalist, Greece, mid-century jazz, and Mother Nature are all close to her heart. These days, Cynthia lives with her spouse and two rescue dogs in Montpelier, Vermont. Visit www.CynthiaJBogard.com for news and other writings by Cynthia.
A History of Silence is out now (Atmosphere Press)
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A HISTORY OF SILENCE
Four women, unknowingly bound together by one man’s violent past.
Johnny Wharton is a history professor and descendant of a Texas “planter family” — a legacy that’s followed him all the way to 1985. Tough-girl Jenny (Johnny’s daughter), runs away to Madison, blotting out her past with distance, drugs, and sex. Her loner lifestyle is upended by her new roommate’s scary insistence on friendship. Emotionally damaged Jane (Johnny’s new graduate student) gives Johnny’s offer of an affair a try, thinking she might manage if it’s furtive and part-time. Maddie (his lesbian colleague) is grief-stricken; her longtime Black lady love Roz left her — inexplicably. Conservatively raised Liz (Johnny’s wife) is desperate to reconnect with her estranged daughter. She’s beginning to realize that Johnny’s past has left unspeakable scars on her family’s present.
As the lives of these four women intertwine in unexpected ways, each learns the past can’t be conquered until it’s confronted, and its secrets revealed — and shared.
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