Martha's Writing
Martha has two works in progress. Spirits at War, a [QUICK descriptor] and Parallel Lives, a [QUICK descriptor].
Inspiration for Spirits at War
Throughout the writing of Spirits at War, Mara, a minor, fictionalized character that showed up in the first paragraph of the first draft, kept bullying her way into the story. In the end, what began as a fictionalized biography of Robert Field Stockton (the man who founded Liberia for the freed slaves of America, invented the first screw propelled naval battleship, and conquered California with Fremont and Kearny), turned into a story of a wood carver's quest for freedom.
I fought against Mara for years. As a slave on the Stockton estate in Princeton, New Jersey-the last northern state to pass a law freeing slaves, Mara is black. The angst I suffered over my right as a white woman to write this story from a black point of view cannot be underplayed. Words I heard uttered first from Maya Angelou, smoothed the way for me. We are, each of us, more alike than we are different.
Inspiration for Parallel Lives
I have always been fascinated to learn how someone I know was in the exact same place at exactly the same time I was years before we ever actually met. Using that as a theme, I am working on Parallel Lives, a novel of class and the politics of the 1960s that tracks the lives of Billy Wayman Wolden and April Stewart.
Billy's storyline explores the legacy left him through his Potowatomi Indian ancestry. April, in her struggle to become her own person, must first, as in Nietzsche's parable on maturity, slay the dragon of "Thou Shalt".
When these two characters finally meet, though their lives have run on parallel tracks, it is the odd moments when they intersect that create in both of Billy and April the haunting feeling that they have met somewhere before. At the story's end, the reader is left to decide if the random intersections in all our lives are fate, or nothing more than just chance encounters.