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ON WRITING THE MONSOON WAR by Bina Shah

May 2, 2023

The Monsoon WarWhen I set out to write Before She Sleeps, I wanted to portray a futuristic society in which Middle Eastern and South Asian women were trapped by their government: given false hope that their status had been elevated to that of mothers of the nation, when in fact they were its repopulation slaves after a nuclear war.

Although the women of the Panah enacted a type of rebellion, they were limited in their circumstances of a closed system, impossible to truly escape without the help and solidarity of men who would not participate in the authoritarian system on moral grounds, or for their own interests.

In The Monsoon War, I imagined a group of women living in the mountains, their lives still harsh and constrained by circumstances beyond their control. But they choose open revolution instead of closeted subversion. Thus, the two novels would play off against each other like night and day.

The women of the Hamiyat, the armed resistance group, unlike the women of the Panah, are soldiers who live openly, in the fresh air of the mountains instead of the underground bunker of the Panah and climate-controlled towers of the affluent city-dwellers. They fight and have fun and dream of glory in battle.

Similarly, I wanted to create main characters who were strong and active, rather than controlled and passive as they were in the previous novel. So, I came up with four women who would represent the archetypes of the novel: Alia, a Wife; Katy Azadeh, a Hamiyat soldier; Raana Abdallah, a Minister in the government, and Fatima Kara, a Commander in the Hamiyat.

These women are not just characters in their own right, but representations of the different stages of a woman’s life, from youth to adulthood and into mature middle age. They each have a defining role and unique characteristics so they stand out from the crowd. We see women negotiating with and handling power in all its iterations. The women of the Panah also make an appearance in the Monsoon War, at first like a Greek chorus, and then they slowly discover their own agency.

What’s interesting is that in The Monsoon War, there are male characters, but they operate on the periphery of the action involving the women. So, you have a General as a foil to the Minister, a science expert who is subservient to the commands of his superiors, and a man who was very important in Before She Sleeps but now only appears as a ghost in this book. It was an interesting experiment to see what would happen if men were cast in passive roles and women in action/active roles.

My inspiration for the premise of The Monsoon War came from some of the resistance movements by women that I was seeing taking place between 2014 and 2022. For example, the Kurdish women fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. I researched similar resistance movements in Colombia with the women of the FARC, and the participation of women in the Arab Spring revolutions.

I didn’t want to present an idealized version of women fighters, as they face tremendous obstacles and threats to their safety, and sexual harassment even when fighting alongside male compatriots. But I wanted to create a feeling of freedom and expansion for a group of women who are following their deepest passion and purpose.

Although The Monsoon War encompasses war, repression and death, there is also space for hope, change and joy, and that’s what I wanted to come across more strongly than anything else. Of course, who wins the war is important, but the act of fighting for what you believe in is the victory that transcends the outcome.

The Monsoon War (May 16, 2023) is available for pre-buy everywhere you purchase books. To find purchasing options -including IndieBound- and to read more about The Monsoon War and author Bina Shah, see our book pages.

Filed Under: General

On the Line Between Memory and Invention Lies the Story by Kimberly Olson Fakih

December 11, 2022

From a writer’s perspective, the line between fiction and nonfiction, between memory and invention, between facts and the blurring of facts, is continuously diminished or dissolved, and most of the time I don’t think it matters. I love the documentary that has heightened the frisson to bring me closer to the screen, has recreated what “might” have happened even though no investigation has established that, because my brain, like most people’s, needs the caulk between the bricks, and will fill in the spaces regardless of what is there. Of course, I will be angry, say, if my bank similarly pads my account with pieces of paper that are not actual currency, or if a restaurant serves me a plate full of plastic food instead of the edible ingredients promised by the menu. Rationally, I understand that there must be a line between what-is and what-is-not. And I usually know where it is.

However, when things come partially from my own memory, I have stood in front of my mother and made her repeat a childhood incident over and over, and I have told her how I remember it differently. At first. If we call in my brother or my younger sister, they, too, will first latch on to versions that sound as if we were not only born in separate families but other countries. But eventually, each one will own up to the similarities, the shared threads, and we reach points in common.

It’s really a problem of polish. I admire anyone who can take the facts and give them a little Ken Burns spit ‘n shine, but my facts always needed garnish, too. I am a baker who likes frosting, and while we’re at it, let’s add sprinkles, and if there are going to be sprinkles, why not in many colors?

Aware of what I considered that failing, I started Little Miseries as a piece of literary journalism. I wanted it to be just the facts. I thought that to frost those memories, to finish out this metaphor, would be to trivialize them. I had only to tell the truth about my childhood in a way that would not harm the living or smear the dead, and still be compelling.

And that was the first draft. As it met its readers, the first being my agent, Mary Krienke, I saw the book’s flaw. There must be a hero, and it did not have one. In fact, the real Kim in my childhood was looking everywhere for the hero, and that was the point. The gnawing realization that we children were alone in the universe despite fawning adults, or because of them, was one none of us wanted to face.

In subsequent drafts, I became less of an observer, quaking behind almost closed doors, reporting on awful things, full of curiosity, and had to find someone in the book to act. My editor, my agent, the publisher, the assistants—people who loved the book and loved me—they were aching for the hero and the heroic act. The moment of salvation. The calvary. The saving of everyone. They needed it. They needed me.

So I had to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction once and for all and recall and then write out—and possibly exaggerate—all the tiny little rebellions of my childhood, the sitting in the car for hours at cemeteries, refusing to honor a grandfather I despised, and getting spanked for running away from hugs that made me nauseous. I had to embellish the moment I tripped my grandfather, who was already drunk, and might have tripped even if I hadn’t helped out, and the day when I hid his keys to the cash register at his hardware store so he couldn’t open the shop. It meant my grandmother could keep having coffee with my mother and laugh for another half-hour in our kitchen. I had pull out as if it was a daydream, but it was real, the day I whispered “Fuck you” under my breath in church, praying no one and everyone would hear. Notice the lack of Calvary’s trumpet? I know. I know.

In this year before publication, of the truths and half-truths stitched together from memory and wishful thinking, I had hoped my family and I would find a way back to one other, but we are actually more estranged than ever. They think I’ve said too much, and I think I haven’t said enough. From a writer’s perspective, the line between fiction and nonfiction is only as thick as the facts that support it. I owe my sister, my family, more than paper and ink. But the fog has not lifted for them, and I’m afraid to be swallowed up by their pain, and so, instead, with the only perspective I have, I write.

Filed Under: General

Six Thoughts on Historical Fiction by Don Zancanella, author of A Storm in the Stars

August 8, 2022

I’ve now written two books set in the past:  Concord, which takes place in Massachusetts in the early 1840s, and my new novel from Delphinium, A Storm in the Stars, which takes place in England, France, Switzerland, and Italy between 1800 and 1825. While I don’t have a comprehensive theory of historical fiction, I’ve collected several observations and questions about fiction set in the past.

  1. For the most part, literary categories exist to help bookstores and libraries organize their books, publishers describe their books, and readers find the kind of books they like. Some categories seem to have rather firm identities and boundaries. Science fiction has communities of fans, awards, and a separate section in bookstores. Historical fiction has fuzzier boundaries and a less clear identity. Many stores don’t have a separate section for historical fiction. I tend to think of myself as the author of some novels that are set in the past rather than as a writer of something called “historical fiction.” From a writer’s perspective, fuzzy boundaries and imprecise identities are best.
  2.  There seems to be little agreement about how distant from the present the action in a novel has to be before it’s considered “historical.” A bookstore I frequent has recently added a Historical Fiction section. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, set in the 1500s, is shelved there but Jennifer Egan’s novel, Manhattan Beach, set in the 1940s, is not. Perhaps—and I say this only partly in jest—historical fiction is fiction in which the characters wear peculiar clothes.
  3. As a novel ages, the question of whether it will be identified as a work of historical fiction becomes more complicated. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is set in the 1640s and was published in 1850. Despite the 200-year differential, I don’t believe many readers think of Hawthorne’s novel as an example of historical fiction. Maybe that’s because looked at from 2022, both 1640 and 1850 seem merely to be “a long time ago.” Consider also Tolstoy’s War and Peace (set 60 years before its publication), Scott’s Ivanhoe (set 600 years before its publication), and Mary Shelley’s Valperga (set 500 years before its publication). In ways I can’t fully explain, thinking of a book as historical fiction seems to involve a calculation based on three points in time: the reader’s, the author’s, and the setting of the action in the book.

4. Nearly all works of fiction are set in a particular place and time. Is fiction set in the distant past—a work set during the American Civil War, for example—different in some fundamental way from fiction set in the present? One response would be to say that since readers know the present better than they know the past, the writer of historical fiction has a responsibility to explain the setting more completely. But a writer who sets a contemporary story in a place that most readers won’t have firsthand knowledge of bears a similar burden of explanation. Maybe a more useful term would be “novels with unfamiliar settings.” In a way, that’s what the term “science fiction” denotes—a reader who opens a work of science fiction expects to be dislocated in time and place.

5. We’re living in what could be considered a golden era of fiction about notable historical figures. Maybe the most highly praised has been Hillary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy, about Thomas Cromwell, but there are also Colm Toibin’s The Master and The Magician, about Henry James and Thomas Mann respectively, Amy Bloom’s White Houses, about Eleanor Roosevelt and the journalist Lorena Hickock, and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. What is it that’s causing writers to write about notable people from the past and readers to want to read such books? One theory I’ve heard is that as the writing of history has become more analytic and less narrative, fiction has stepped in the fill the gap. In my own case, I was so intrigued by Toibin’s The Master, that I found myself wondering if I could do something similar—not (I hope) because I lack imagination but because writers often find themselves conversing with or extending previous works of art. In my own mind, A Storm in the Stars is in conversation with Toibin’s The Master, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein¸ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry, and even Richard Holmes’ magnificent biography, Shelley: The Pursuit.

6. People tend to think that one of the distinguishing features of historical fiction is the amount of research required. This is true, but only to a point. If I decided to write a novel about campaign workers during the 2020 elections, I would have to do plenty of research because I’m not a campaign worker and know little of that world. By the same token, I could write a novel about the 1960s in Wyoming, the time and place in which I grew up, without doing much research at all. I do believe some writers of historical fiction rely on research a bit too much. While it’s important to avoid obvious gaffs, most readers care about character, plot, and language more than they do about historical details. As a reader, I’m unlikely to care if a character ties his shoe in a scene that takes place at a time before shoes with laces were common; yet, sometimes, while reading a novel set in the past, I feel that the writer’s pride in having gotten all the minuscule details right exceeds their pride in how convincingly they’ve portrayed a character’s inner life.

Some writers of historical fiction seem to be true history buffs. They find learning about and recreating people and events from the past endlessly fascinating. I don’t consider myself part of that group. Instead, I think I’m drawn to writing in his form because to find my voice, it helps me to have a good deal of distance from what I’m writing about. For me, writing in the first person about the present results in wooden sentences and lifeless paragraphs. Writing in the third person about people from two hundred years ago helps bring my words to life.

Filed Under: Delphinium Authors, General, New Books Tagged With: fiction, Frankenstein, Historical Fiction, Mary Shelley, on writing

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  • ON WRITING THE MONSOON WAR by Bina Shah May 2, 2023
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