Both Mistress Coffin and Allegra Fullerton are set in historical New England. What draws you to historical settings for your novels? What are the special challenges of writing an historical novel?

Personal interest in New England history draws me to the past, like a foreign country, a sort of time travel, in which I am able to completely immerse myself as I work on a book. It just seems to be one of the things I can do. I research all the details I can of daily life and material culture and social history as well as at times real people who might be of interest or fit along with the plot and my fictional characters. The particular challenge is the language, so I do an enormous amount of reading in the period for the diction, the rhythm and shape of period sentences, period voices. However long I am working on a book, I am reading and researching up until the day it is finished.

How much research did you do for Allegra Fullerton? How do you go about conducting your research? What sorts of materials do you find most useful? What are some of your favorite facts about the period that you learned in your research? Any that didn’t make it into the book?

I have two file crates full of notes and photocopies from research, and I took four years reading and researching for this book, the writing feeding the research and the research, in turn, feeding the story. I especially looked for women’s voices—journals, diaries, etc. from the era, both published and unpublished. But I read everything I could, including some secondary sources on the period. A couple of interesting facts to me were that there were about 60 utopian communities in the U.S. by 1838 and that we already went through the great American millennial madness in 1843, thanks to the Millerites. Many irrelevant facts about daily life didn’t make it into the book as did not many background facts about the history of the time, Queen Victoria coming to the throne in 1837 (the very year Allegra sets out on her journey), who was president when, and all that sort of background, or is it “deep background,” stuff, most of which I’ve already forgotten by now. Then there’s a mess of art history, literary and social history, and so on that if I were to put it all in the novel would feel merely pedantic. But it’s in my mind as I write, shaping the era for me, in this case the “fabulous forties.”

Can you tell us more about the practice of itinerant portrait painting? How common was it? Were such portraits within the financial reach of the average farmer or merchant? Did such painters ever harbor higher artistic aspirations? Were there actually any women in this field?

There were many many male itinerant painters in the period, and about ten or so women we know of (in the Northeast). The women’s names have come down to us from their journals and diaries and “autobiographical novels” but most of the record for the women is fragmentary. Deborah Goldsmith, Ruth Bascom, Susanna Paine are some of the better known women. I found that there were a number of men with ambitions to become fine artists; in fact, that was a common apprenticeship—Samuel Morse being perhaps the most famous. I did not find itinerant women with such lofty ambitions, but I did of course find women artists who were not itinerant portrait painters who had lofty ambitions to become fine artists—a student of Allston’s, a student of Fitz Hugh Lane’s, that sort of thing.

Your novel has been particularly praised for Allegra’s voice. What are the special challenges of writing in a nineteenth-century voice from a twentieth-century perspective, and of writing in a woman’s voice from a male perspective?

As I say, I immersed myself in the nineteenth-century voice by reading it constantly, but nothing was more important than women’s voices in their published and unpublished journals. All these voices get banging around in my head and then the central voice eccentric to the central character takes over and I’m off. But I did read plenty of male voices from the period too. The difficulties in writing in a woman’s voice are that you don’t know whether you’re kidding yourself until you have a few women look at the manuscript and that you are wary of opening yourself up to all sorts of blame from the political correctness police. But men and women writers have always written in each other’s voices, so we’d have to throw out tons of literary history if we were to deny any crossing of genders in novels. That’s my safety net from the police. I carry a list around with me of all the women I could think of who wrote in men’s voices from Aphra Behn on, and if I need the list, I can pull it out and unload. Would we want to throw all those women writers out of literary history for the sin of crossing gender? Writers assume we do this all the time, but certain segments of the public and the academic criticism industry may find crossing over strange or too audacious. But my list goeth with me.

Much has been made of the trend in the last few years of incorporating historical figures into works of fiction (a recent article in Harper’s, for instance, was critical of the practice). What was your motivation for including such figures as Charles Dana, Margaret Fuller, and John Ruskin in your book? Do you have any thoughts about why this has become something of a trend? Wouldn’t it be easier to imagine a completely fictional character, rather than be constrained by the actual events of an historical figure’s life?

I do both—use actual people as the basis for characters and use totally imagined characters, and then let them interact. But I do a lot of research on my real people so I can use their voices respectfully and accurately, and if I have a real character doing something at some time and some place, I try to make sure he or she was there then and did those kinds of things. For example, Richard Henry Dana, upon returning from two years before the mast in the California fur trade, and while a Harvard trained lawyer with a business of his own, did in fact frequent brothels out of an obsessive curiosity and at times a desire to “help.” We know this from his published journals and his biographers. I didn’t make that up. But that he met and helped my Allegra in such a place is of course the fictional adaptation of the impulse. It fit my plot and character at that moment. I don’t have only the famous that I base “real” characters on; in fact, I find the famous the most difficult to do. Could come out like a stiff Masterpiece Theater production with famous people walking on like pasteboard history lessons and intoning famous words woodenly. So folks like itinerant painter J. W. Stock show up and nobody would know who he is except scholars of the period and itinerancy. I think a few real folks lend a kind of historical validity to the tale, so long as you get them right, like getting the facts right. That’s something I also try to do. I don’t alter facts, or very few let’s say, to fit my plot. I think if readers catch you playing fast and loose with the facts you “destabilize the text” for them, you break their good-faith willing suspension of disbelief, and then they tend not to trust a lot of other things about the book. I’m not sure that “it’s only fiction” is a good excuse for getting the facts wrong, or manipulating them for your own convenience.

Your novel combines elements of at least two traditions, the picaresque and the Kuntslerroman. How conscious were you of these traditions while you were writing it and how did they shape the final novel?

Yes I was conscious of literary traditions, but there is a certain historical reality to the picaresque elements of itinerants. They were after all on the road living by their wits and talents and a bit of scam when necessary, so it seemed to me a bit inevitable that an itinerant artist would be something of a picaresque type and in my case bit of a female Quixote, another related tradition from the 18th and 19th century.

Allegra spends some time in the utopian community of Newspirit. To what extent did you have Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, or the actual Brook Farm, in mind here?

Actually it’s an amalgam of those 60 or so communities and more closely related to Fruitlands than any other, I guess. But I did in fact re-read also The Blithedale Romance as one of the many books I read or re-read all the while I was slogging away at my book.

Can you tell us something of your own writing practice? Do you write every day?

I write just about every day in the summers and on sabbaticals, but I can’t write every day or much at all during the teaching year. I can read a bit then, I can take a few notes then, I can edit a bit then, I can doodle and noodle, but the real work has to wait for summers mostly. Throughout the summer I start the day with my writing stint. Everything else comes in second once summer arrives. If I can get 3-5 good hours a day in, I feel okay. If I don’t, I feel lost.

You are also a critic and a professor of English. What made you decide to take up fiction? How are your novels influenced by your critical ideas?

Well, the ghastly turn of post-structuralism turned me off to academic criticism. I didn’t want to spend my mental life debunking great authors for a tight little political agenda. I love literature too much. It’s too much the center of my life. So I stopped playing in the criticism game once I had tenure and a full professorship. But I had been writing poetry for years and did some literary journalism and then moved over to fiction again, which I used to write in college. I was in fact editor of my college literary magazine, but I had to put off writing for many years while I was in grad school, the army, and earning my spurs (and security) as a college level teacher. I had made some bad starts at novels, did some apprenticeship work as everybody does, but finally at about 40 was able to turn full bore to writing fiction in the off times from teaching.

Do you expect to continue writing novels with historical settings? Any ideas about what your next book will be, or when it will be set?

I think for some reason I work best in the historical mode. I get excited about learning so much as I write and research. I take energy from that. I recently spent a couple of years trying to make a 20th century novel work, but failed. I have another 20th century novel in an early stage of the process and don’t know if I can make that work. I have an idea to go to the 18th century next and write a book that would fill in a sort of New England historical trilogy—Mistress Coffin, Allegra Fullerton, and the new one. I’d cover the 17th-the 19th century that way too. But I haven’t lifted a finger yet beyond the idea, so who knows what I’ll end up doing next. I go on sabbatical from January to September this coming year, so I hope to find out then what I am in fact writing next. Part of the fun of being a writer of fiction is the mystery of what will come next, what it will be, where it will take you. But writing a book, and especially a novel, is also always a huge risk. Maybe I enjoy that risk too. Maybe I need all the above because, as Flaubert advised, I do live my life in a quiet middle class way otherwise. I save the good stuff and the wild stuff for the novels.

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