Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Kip Wilson
A novel based on a real-life teenager who resisted the Nazis. Written in verse. How could I resist?
Kip Wilson is the author of White Rose, a YA novel-in-verse published by HMH/Versify about anti-Nazi political activist Sophie Scholl. White Rose won the 2017 PEN New England Susan P. Bloom Children’s Book Discovery Award, was a 2019 Winter/Spring Indies Introduce and Indies Next title, and received four starred reviews. Kip holds a Ph.D. in German Literature and wrote her doctoral dissertation about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She’s lived in Germany, Austria, and Spain, and currently calls Boston home.
Take it away, Kip:
What type of historical figure makes a good base for a historical novel?
As a young adult author, I look above all for figures who would be inspiring and relevant to teens. When I first learned about the White Rose resistance group back in my own high school German class, I found the mission of these young people—standing up against the Nazis in spite of the danger—to be incredibly inspiring. As the youngest member and only core female in the group, Sophie Scholl became a personal heroine for me, and I’m so thrilled to be able to share her story with American teens who might not otherwise know who she was.
One question that came to mind for me: Why did you chose to tell Sophie Scholl’s story as a novel in verse?
My inspiration to write in verse stemmed from a love of reading poetry and novels in verse. In the case of White Rose, I had been trying for *years* to find the right format for the subject. I first tried to write the book as nonfiction, but it just wasn’t working, and I set the project aside. Years later during a chat with two verse novelists, I learned that verse is often the best format for difficult, tragic subjects—that the whitespace helps the reader (and the author!) process the heaviness of the words. With that in mind, I figured out that writing the story in verse might be the very thing it needed, and I got to work on it the very next day.
What did you find most challenging about researching Sophie Scholl’s story?
There’s a temptation with historical fiction to try and fit in as many interesting facts as possible to the narrative, but that doesn’t always make for the most engaging read. So as much as I love all the research myself, one of my biggest challenges with this project was giving myself the freedom to go beyond those documents and fictionalize some of Sophie’s thoughts and emotions. I’m so glad I allowed myself to do so, however. Adding a bit of (hopefully authentic) fiction to the history definitely took the manuscript to a new level and helped bring her to life on the page.
From Kip for Pamela:
My question for you is a two-part question about inspiration from travel. First, what historical site have you visited that most inspired you to uncover more about a historical woman, and second, what woman from the past is still calling you to visit one of her historical sites?
Hmmmm. The first part of your question is hard to answer simply because there are so many possible examples! As regular readers here on the Margins know, whenever we travel I stumble across ideas/things/people that send me down the research rabbit hole to learn more. One example of that would be the Mozart sites in Salzburg, which left me eager to know more about his older sister, Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart (1751-1829).
As far as the second goes, I want to visit the Gene Stratton Porter sites in Indiana. We’ve come close, but never quite made it. Porter was a novelist and an early conservationist. I’ve loved her books since I was a child and I’d like to spend some time walking in her footsteps. In the meantime, maybe I’ll pull Girl of the Limberlost off the shelf for another read.
(Is that cover gorgeous or what??)
Want to know more about Kim Wilson? You can find her in the following places:
Website: http://www.kipwilsonwrites.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kiperoo
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kipwilsonwrites/
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Tomorrow it will be business as usual here on the Margins with a blog post from me. Then we’ll be back on Monday with an interview with the amazing Sarah Rose, author of D-Day Girls.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Sunny Stalter-Pace
Sunny Stalter-Pace says she likes to write about women making a scene!
The Hargis Associate Professor of American Literature, she received her PhD from Rutgers University and her BA from Loyola University Chicago. She specializes in the interdisciplinary study of modernist performance, literature, and urban space. Her first book, Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2013. Her current book is forthcoming in May 2020 from Northwestern University Press. Titled Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance, this critical biography considers how a vaudeville performer and producer transmitted European culture to American mass audiences.
Take it away, Sunny!
How did you get interested in Gertrude Hoffman?
I was looking for plays set on subway cars, and I found her. My first book, a revised version of my dissertation, was about modern literature related to the New York City subway. I thought my second book was going to go into more depth on that topic, specifically looking at drama with a subway setting. I was poking around on the New York Public Library digital collections site (as one does). I think my search term was “subway express.” And I found a theater program for a vaudeville revue with a tango dance at the entrance to a subway station. I was intrigued, so I googled the dancer’s name. Once I found out that she had produced a knockoff version of the Ballets Russes and toured the U.S. with it before the original dancers came over from Paris, I was hooked. Some feminist historians and performance studies scholars had written about different parts of her life. But she’s so representative of the culture of imitation in early twentieth-century American performance, and just this gutsy, self-made woman. I wanted to tell her whole story.
You straddle many disciplines in your academic work. Do you consider yourself a historian, or something else?
I’m an American literature professor, with some background in urban studies and performance studies. My intellectual home base is the Modernist Studies Association, which covers all kinds of art, writing, and culture from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. My background helped me understand Gertrude Hoffmann a little better than someone might who was firmly rooted in a particular discipline. Hoffmann’s work cut across categories of performance: she did comic imitations and serious dances in the same vaudeville act. She once wrote a letter to Lucille Ball saying she did “a bit of everything.” I feel the same way.
What was the most surprising thing you’ve found doing historical research for your work?
That letter to Lucille Ball was definitely one of the most surprising artifacts. She was trying to convince Lucy to play her in a bio-pic. It’s a draft letter in the Wake Forest papers; the second page is written in pencil on a paper napkin. It’s fragile and poignant. I don’t know if she ever sent a version of the letter, but it told me so much about how Hoffmann was thinking about her career later in her life. Another surprising things had to do with child care. Gertrude and Max Hoffmann had a son, Max Jr., very early in Gertrude’s career as a performer. Once, when her mother was babysitting over the summer, Max Jr. stole a buggy and tried to get to the beach to “give the horse a chance to get his feet wet”! The horse and kid were recovered without further incident.
A question from Sunny for Pamela: What’s the best place to visit in Chicago in order to better understand women’s history in that city?
The Women and Leadership Archives at your alma mater, Loyola University. They have excellent on-line exhibits and are becoming an important repository for the papers of women who played a role in the city’s history, with a special emphasis on women and activism.
Want to know more about Sunny Stalter-Pace and her work?
Check out her website at https://www.sunnystalterpace.com/ and the website for Imitation Artist https://nupress.northwestern.edu/content/imitation-artist
Her Twitter handle is @slstalter.
Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with novelist Kip Wilson, author of a novel in verse about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose resistance movement in World War II.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Theresa Kaminski
Theresa Kaminski and I are co-administrators (and occasionally, co-conspirators) for a Facebook reading called Non-Fiction Fans, where readers and writers of narrative nonfiction meet up to talk about great non-fiction and how it gets written. She is also a wonderful writer of women’s history and a generous member of the on-line literary and historical community.
Theresa holds a PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For more than twenty-five years she worked as a history professor at a state university in Wisconsin. She is the author of a trilogy of nonfiction histories on American women in the Philippine Islands during World War II. Her book on Dr. Mary Walker is due out from Lyons Press in June 2020.* She is currently completing the first full-length biography of America’s favorite cowgirl, Dale Evans. Theresa lives with her husband in a small town outside of Madison, Wisconsin.
Take it away, Theresa:
You have been working on biographies of two women whose names many of my readers will recognize, Dr. Mary Walker, of the American Civil War, and Dale Evans, pop-culture cowgirl extraordinaire. Are there particular challenges in writing about women people think they know something about?
The Mary Walker book was probably easier in this regard. Even for people who have heard of her (the only woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor), few know many of the details of her life. It was fascinating to delve into those. The biggest challenge stemmed from the fact that while Walker left behind a lot of public writing, there’s not much of the personal kind.
The same is pretty much true of Dale Evans. As a celebrity, she was really good at all the public stuff, especially giving interviews and writing books about her life. But in researching beyond what she wrote about herself, I’ve uncovered things she rarely talked about publicly. Not that these things were negative or scandalous, but I could see why she wanted to control if and how they were discussed in public. Most people probably don’t know about them because Dale was so adept at highlighting what she wanted to emphasize. I’ve just been fascinated with how she constructed her own celebrity. So I think a lot of people who know the public Dale will be fascinated by the behind-the-scenes stories.
You’ve successfully made the jump that many academics dream of, from writing purely academic work to writing rock-solid scholarship with a popular audience in mind. Do you have any advice for writers who dream of doing the same?
It’s funny, but I think of that “jump” more of as a slow (sometimes painfully so) learning process. My first two books on American women in the Philippines were scholarly, but what drew me to the topic was the drama of their stories. Academic writers interested in making the move to trade presses should definitely read a lot of popular history to get a sense of how narrative is used. I recommend Jill Lepore since I turn to her books for inspiration on how to focus on story. Lepore’s output is also a reminder that good history can be written rather quickly. Trade press editors won’t wait ten years for the delivery of a manuscript!
What have you read lately that you loved?
I always have to push myself to read something on non-American topics, and I was so happy I picked up Hallie Rubenhold’s wonderful history, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. It’s a first-rate social history of late 19th century London and the lives of the poorer women who lived there.
A question from Theresa for Pamela: You have worked on topics that tend to be global in nature and feature war and politics. How have you come to focus more on women’s history?
It’s hard to get more global or war-centric than a global history of women warriors!
That said, I would argue that in focusing more on women’s history I have returned to my historical roots. The first biography I ever read was about Clara Barton. My guess is the second was a book about Joan of Arc. Ten-year-old me would have been very excited to get her hands on a book on Civil War nurses, or on on women warriors for that matter.
Want to know more about Theresa Kaminski and her work?
She blogs about women’s history and the writing life at https://theresakaminski.com/.
Her Twitter handle is @KaminskiTheresa
*I had the privilege of reading an advance copy of this. I’ll post a review here on the Margins when it comes out, but the short version is it’s really good.
Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Sunny Stalter-Pace, who writes about modernist art and literature. Her biography of innovative vaudeville performer and producer Gertrude Hoffman is due out in May. Mark your calendars.)