Evelyn Small: I'm Ev Small.
I'm a contributing editor at Book World at the Washington Post,
and we are so small to be one of the founding sponsors
of the National Book Festival.
Book -- tomorrow's issue of Book World, by the way,
you can pick up at our Book World table if you'd
like to read tomorrow's news today.   So, be sure and go by and say hello

to some other Book World staff who are working there.
I'm delighted to be introducing to you, Sena Jeter Naslund,
who began with short fiction collected
in the wonderfully titled Ice Skating at the North Pole.
In her historical novels, she's added flesh to such characters
as Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock in Love; Ahab's wife,
in her novel of the same title;
and Marie Antoinette in her novel, Abundance.
She is now program director
of Spalding University's brief residency MFA in writing,
and she's writer-in-residence at the University of Louisville,
and I'm going to let you listen to her talk
about where she's turning her focus now.
[applause] Sena Jeter Naslund: Thank you so much
for that wonderful introduction.
It's such a pleasure to be here with you all
at the National Book Festival.
I love simply saying that phrase, don't you, to think that as a nation
that we are promoting books together.
Often I'm asked to talk about how I got ideas for my novels,
where these novels came from,
and what sort of process I was involved in, in writing them.
I'm here today mainly to talk about my new novel, Abundance,
a novel of Marie Antoinette.   But I wanted to take a little time

because several people have stopped me and asked me to talk
about where Ahab's Wife came from, where Four Spirits came from.
So I'll tell you a bit about that briefly.
We will have some time for questions and answers, I believe,
as well, as we move along.
In the summer of '93, my daughter and I traveled a lot by car.
She was about 12 years old, 11 or 12 years old then.
And because we traveled such long distances, we knew we had
to entertain ourselves in some way.   We decided that first of all,

we would eat all the candy we wanted to, whenever we wanted to.
That was very entertaining.
But perhaps just as good, was the decision that we would listen
to abridged versions of books, famous books on tape.
And we listened to Huckleberry Finn and Little Women.
We listened to a lot of Charles Dickens.
We listened to Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
The novel my daughter liked the best was clearly Moby Dick.
And I knew this because she would puff herself up in all
of her pre-teen importance and become Captain Ahab
and recite the speeches of Captain Ahab.
As a literary mom, of course I was pleased about that,
that she had a good ear that she wanted to absorb language,
great language, and use it herself.
But also, I thought with some regret,
too bad there's no great woman character in Moby Dick
with whom she might identify
and whose speeches she might enjoy reciting.
But I didn't say anything to her about that.
I just kept that thought in my heart and pondered it.
I also thought about how Moby Dick
and Huckleberry Finn are often candidates for that elusive title
of the great American novel.
And my analytic mind asked, well what do those books have in common
that they both may be evaluated that way?
And I thought how both were quest stories over water.
Huck Finn over the mighty Mississippi River;
Moby Dick over the oceans of the world.
And I thought, good.
A great book should be a quest story.
And then I thought how in both those books,
the main characters transcended conventions
and prejudices to become friends.   Huck with Jim, the runaway slave.

And in Moby Dick, the narrator Ishmael becomes friends
with a harpooner, a pagan harpooner from the South Sea Islands.
And again, I thought, good.
Transcending prejudice, transcending divisions made
by culture is a great project, and I'm glad these great books do that.
Then I thought, what else do they have in common?
And I realized that neither of them had any important women in them.
And then I thought, bad.   Very, very bad.

To be great, to be the great American novel,
do you have to leave out all the women?
And so it was that my thoughts began to evolve
about writing on the subject.
I had already done so in the book Sherlock in Love,
when I invented a character for Sherlock Holmes to fall in love,
who had just as much courage as Sherlock Holmes;
just as much integrity as Sherlock Holmes;
and was a little bit smarter than Sherlock Holmes.
But I was in Boston celebrating the publication of that book,
Sherlock in Love, when suddenly, driving a little rented car
around Boston, I had a vision and heard a voice.
The vision was of a woman on a roof walk, or widow's walk,
platform on top of a house with a little rail
around it near the ocean.
It was night, and she was looking out to sea,
hoping to see her husband's whaling ship coming home.
But as she looked, she realized he was not coming home,
not that night, not ever.
And with that intuitive realization, her gaze shifted
from the dark ocean waves to the great starry sky.
And she began to ask, "Who am I,
in the face of all this vast glory of the heavens?
What's my place in the universe?"
No longer waiting for her husband to come home and define her as wife,
or in any other way, but asking her own spiritual questions
and trying to find her own answers.   And then the voice said to me,

Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last,
and with that, I realized I had a book.
It is in fact the first sentence of Ahab's Wife.
I had a book if I wanted to put my fanny
on the chair long enough to write it.
I knew that would be a long time
because you don't send a minnow out after Moby Dick.
You've got to create a big fish to swim in those waters.
Well Ahab's Wife is the book that changed my life,
and I did a great bit of touring with it, including going to Sydney,
Australia, where I was part of an international book festival.
And while I was there, I made a commitment to my next book.
One day, I picked up the newspaper outside my hotel room door as I was
about to have my morning coffee, and I saw there, the photographs
of four African-American girls who were very familiar to me.
And I saw there also, a photograph of a shattered church
in Birmingham, Alabama, my hometown.
Those girls had been killed in a racist church bombing September 15,
1963, and back then, when the Civil Rights movement was underway
in Birmingham, where I lived, I had promised myself
that if I ever did become a writer, that I would write about that time,
and that I would tell the truth about how bad conditions were
in Birmingham; and that I would honor and celebrate the leaders
and the followers of the civil rights movement
because they made society change through non-violent means.
And I would right about how even while the world was changing
around me and around others, that our ordinary lives were going
on at the same time, that we were still going to school,
we had our jobs; we went to the movies;
people died of natural causes; we fell in love; we fell out of love.
All of those things were going on at the same time
that the world was changing for the better.
So when I saw those photos on the front page of the Sydney Herald,
I was filled with a memory of that old promise that I had made
to myself, to write about the Civil Rights movement,
if I ever became a writer.
It was as though that promise reached halfway around the world
from Birmingham to Sydney and up through four decades
and grabbed my heart and squeezed, because the headline said that now
after all those years, finally two men were going to be tried
for the murders of those girls.
And I thought yes, this is the time to keep that promise to myself.
So that's the background of how I came to write known as Four Spirits.
The title refers to the four girls and the book is dedicated
to the four girls who were killed in the racist church bombing.
That murderous event, I feel, changed the course
of the Civil Rights movement.
It jarred the conscience, especially of white America,
of people who were sitting on the sidelines,
wondering about the Civil Rights movement, not too involved,
wondering what was the necessity.
And then suddenly, four girls who were totally innocent,
in their church, getting ready for their church service are killed.
It meant that things really did need to be changed in American society.
It was a wakeup call for many of us to become involved in that movement,
in that change towards a more just society.
Well when I was on that book tour with Ahab's Wife,
besides having the idea to write Four Spirits, I also had an idea,
another idea, which has resulted in the book called Abundance,
a novel on Marie Antoinette.
I was sent to Darien, Georgia, a small town in Georgia,
hung in Spanish moss; probably hasn't changed much
in 75 years or so.
I went there because someone in the town had written my publicist
in New York and said they were having a clambake, and they thought
that clambakes and whale hunts went together.
[laughter] And shouldn't the author of Ahab's Wife come down
and be a part of their clambake.   And my publicist thought so.

I always obey my publicist; she does know best.
And so we went there and had a delightful time at the clambake.
But, I will say, when it was over, there was not a lot
to do in Darien, Georgia.
So I went to my room, called the Women's Room, and saw a shelf
of books there about famous women,
most of them published in the '30s or so.
Included in those was a biography of Marie Antoinette,
which I plucked off the shelf.
Why did I choose to read abut Marie Antoinette?
Well, her story had interested me since I was a small child.
We've all heard that she made a terrible statement when she was told
that people in France were starving in the 18th century.
She is supposed to have said, "Well if they have no bread, then what?
Let them eat cake."   That's exactly right.

Actually there's very little evidence
that she ever said such a thing.
But it was a horrifying and memorable statement
of total lack of social consciousness.
But I remembered her story
for another reason besides being very put-off by that callousness
of heart, or so it seemed to me.
And that was that while I knew a lot of fairytales,
basically on the Cinderella model, I put against that knowledge
of fairytales, this knowledge of history.
In the Cinderella fairytale, a beautiful but poor, hardworking,
good girl gets to marry the prince and then what?
Lives happily-ever-after.   But this story of the actual life

of Marie Antoinette was quite the reverse of that.
It was the story of a young girl who was born to be a princess
by her position in society.
She got married, and she did not live happily-ever-after.
Instead, she eventually lost her position of power, prestige,
privilege, eventually lost her life.
And I asked myself, is this the way life really is,
that we're never safe, no matter what position we may attain
for ourselves, either through our own effort or through good luck?
And it was a very scary idea for me, as a child.
And I asked myself, if this is true then, what must I do
about it, what can I do about it?   What response can I have to it?

And it seemed to me that there was only one answer,
that if we're all vulnerable as human beings,
then we'd best be kind to each other.
We can at least choose to do that, no matter what our fate is.
I saw us all as being very much in the same boat.
So that story of Marie Antoinette had moral and spiritual resonance
for me, that did affect the way that I tried to behave from that time on.
Of course, there's a big gap between being impressed as a child
and choosing as a novelist to write one subject or another.
When I read the biography that I plucked off the shelf in the bed
and breakfast in Darien, Georgia,
I found that I quickly developed an adversarial relationship
with the author.
And that I felt that he was being very unfair to Marie Antoinette,
and that I felt that she deserved a much better kind of treatment.
I also found that he admired her even though he criticized
as being an average woman.
The subtitle of the book was "Portrait of an Average Woman".
He felt average women were not very smart;
they were materialistic, selfish, egotistical.
Of course I rejected all of that.
But I was influenced and impressed by the fact that he was impressed
by the way she met her death.
I thought, rather cheerfully, after all, we're all looking
at the great guillotine in the sky, and maybe I have something to learn
from the Marie Antoinette story.
So I started writing as a sort of process of discovery,
to see how one person's life had been shaped,
such that when the end came for her, she had a kind of courage and grace
that one certainly had to admire.   So that's how I came to this book.

We have time for just a few questions.
They're microphones if you would like to-- one or two of you,
or three or four -- ask me a few questions.
Yes? Female Speaker: Thank you so much.
I enjoyed this book as much as I did Ahab's Wife.
My question for you is, regarding the relationship
that Marie Antoinette had with the female people in her life,
the Princesse de Lamballe and Comtesse de Polignac.
You portrayed their relationship as being more of a deep friendship,
a lot of kindness and love between women, where many other people
who have written, portrayed the relationship possibly
as of a sexual nature, less savory, I guess.
What I'm trying to get at is,
do you feel that your portrayal is really more accurate,
is there more evidence to this effect?
Sena Jeter Naslund: Yes, I think so.
The question has to do with Marie Antoinette's friendships
with other women.
Some people have seen those friendships really
as lesbian relationships.
Probably my most important source is Antonio Fraser's biography
which came out in 2001.   It's a very sympathetic biography,

one that very much follows the evidence.
As I mentioned, there is little evidence
that Marie Antoinette ever said "let them eat cake".
There's also very little actual evidence
that she ever had anything more than a very deep
and meaningful friendship with other women.
However, in her time, she was often depicted in highly obscene
and pornographic pamphlets as having all kinds
of sexual relationships that she didn't have.
Those pamphlets were simply lying propaganda about her,
not based on anything in fact.   Another question?

Over here, I guess?
Female Speaker: I wanted to ask you about the kind of standards
that an author has to abide by,
especially when they're writing not just historical fiction,
but biographical.
I found that many, many people seem to think the word
"fiction" means it's false.
In other words, you can write something
about even a historical character, but you're free to make
up whatever you want to, and nobody will be the wiser unless they've
actually read biographies about this person.
How can you convince your readers
that what you have written is really accurate and something
that should be taken seriously
and is not just something to be entertained by?
Sena Jeter Naslund: When I write fiction that's based on fact,
it really is based on fact.   I do a great deal of research.

In fact, the critics never fault me
for misrepresenting the facts of the case.
But how to convince readers of that, in this case, I write a forward
and tell the readers that I learned what Marie Antoinette's voice was
like, the kinds of things she said from the historical record.
The letters that she wrote to her mother,
the Empress of Austria, still exist for example.
People did record in their journals and diaries many things
that she actually said from various sources.
So that's the sort of source material I use,
that I find convincing.
But I do want to tell the truth through fiction,
even though that may sound paradoxical.
Imagination takes us inside the characters, it's true,
in a way that an objective view doesn't.
But that doesn't make it any the less true.
It's a truth that includes subjectivity I think.
Yes? Female Speaker: First off, I really wanted
to thank you for what you've written.
I find it ironic that you said Ahab's Wife changed your life
when I found that Ahab's Wife transformed my reading life --
Sena Jeter Naslund: Thank you.
Female Speaker: -- and it really propelled me into reading
and analyzing much more in depth in good literature.
My-- I teach A.P. Literature at a high school right by Richmond.
And my students always want to know, do writers intend what they say?
I read to them some samples from Ahab's Wife,
specifically about the giant lighthouse.
And they wanted to know, did you mean everything that you write
in there, did you deliberately put in the alliteration?
Sena Jeter Naslund: Well yes,
sometimes I do deliberately put in alliteration.
I try to be sensitive to the music of the prose.
I see the novel as an art form.
I don't see it mainly as communication or even entertainment,
but I see it as an artistic product.
And that means, an art, that you take every part into account and try
to bring all the parts into a harmony, so I try to write
as self-consciously as I can.
At the same time, ideas occur spontaneously
that have not been thought out in advance.
Female Speaker: Thank you.   Sena Jeter Naslund: Yes?

Male Speaker: Hello.
I'm intrigued by the way a lot of creativity in this day
and age is more from looking at novels in the past,
like Michael Cunningham's The Hours, and Virginia Woolf
and like your Ahab's Wife looking at Herman Melville's Moby Dick,
and I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit toward whether one
creative process of writing a novel--
if writers sort of unconsciously or consciously always look
to historical precedence in fiction, or if one process is superior
to the other or not-- or they're all born of the same desire to create,
and whether you did it consciously or unconsciously, being inspired
by Herman Melville; that kind of thing, if you can speak to that.
Sena Jeter Naslund: The question is: what relationship does a writer have
to the tradition, either the tradition that you're looking
at very self-consciously or that you've simply absorbed.
I think that books begat books, and there's a great train of them.
Even such an original writer, and great writer,
as Shakespeare depended very much on hearing stories, in history,
and in other plays, and reworking that material.
So it seems like a natural
and perfectly legitimate kind of thing to do.
The challenge for me when I first wrote the Sherlock Holmes spin-off
from Conan Doyle's Holmes, was to be true to his character,
but to emphasize an aspect of the character
that had been mentioned but not fully developed.
For example, Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock in Love, plays --
and in Conan Doyle -- plays the violin, but we don't know anything
about how he got into playing the violin.
The violin represents his emotional side.
The rational side of Sherlock Holmes is certainly facing front
when he's presented in the original.
But I turned the figure a bit so that we see the emotional side
as represented through music.
I did the same thing with Ahab in Ahab's Wife.
I think that you can create a wonderful new product even
with your roots and your conscious reference to other writers.
There's a kind of dialogue going in -- between the current writer
and all of the past, it seems to me.
I think that our time is -- we have a few more minutes,
five more minutes for our time.   So we can take some more questions.

Yes? Female Speaker: I enjoyed very much Sherlock in Love.
I've tried to recommend it to people who enjoy the story
of Sherlock Holmes, but I understand that some people absolutely hate it,
and I wonder if you've gotten any hate mail
from Sherlock Holmes' fans.
Sena Jeter Naslund: No, I have not gotten any hate male
from Sherlock Holmes' fans.
The book has been translated into German and also into Japanese.
You may not know that the largest Sherlock Homes fan club
in the world is in Tokyo, with 5,000 members.
There's a large bust of Sherlock Holmes in Tokyo Square.
And I've received only the good news in response
to my novel, Sherlock in Love.
In that novel, I was playing, with myself, in a way.
I wanted to write novels, but I didn't know how to manage plots,
and I thought if I wrote a novel that was a little on the light side,
that I would learn how to manage plot because I wouldn't be quite
so self-conscious and under so much pressure.
I also got into the habit with that novel,
of interfacing fiction with fact.
There is a character, Ludwig the Second, the king of Bavaria,
who's a historical figure, who comes into that novel;
so does the child Albert Einstein, and the child Virginia Woolf.
And I loved bringing those characters in, being very careful
to have them at times and places,
I mean Einstein did take violin lessons in Munich
when he was eight years old.
And I used all of those facts, and of course I did
that too, with later novels.
In Ahab's Wife, there's Hawthorne and Emerson, Frederick Douglass,
Mariah Mitchell, the great woman of letters, Margaret Fuller.
But with this last novel, Abundance, the historical character moves
to the center, so that was a different kind of challenge,
I had much less latitude with that.
Yes. Female Speaker: I have a question
about the writing process per se, that sort of follows
up on a lot of these questions.
You mentioned with Abundance, that you started writing
about Marie Antoinette and used it as an exploration, as a search.
You've talked a lot about using facts in your fiction.
What comes first?
You do a lot of research first, and then that sort
of compels you forward, or do you find yourself writing
and then wanting to fill in gaps?
That's the first part of the question.
The second part: the switch from the occasional historical figure
to making one center or the switch from writing
about a fictional character like Ahab's wife, where the facts
and history have to be a little bit more exact: which one's harder?
Sena Jeter Naslund: Well, it's all hard,
and at the same time, it's all fun to do.
In terms of my process, vis a vi research,
I start the project probably with a hypothesis or with an idea,
and then the research helps me to test that idea and to refine it.
And I do have to do, especially with Abundance, or with Four Spirits,
quite a bit of research because I want to be accurate.
You know, you can research forever.
There is a danger for a novelist who wants to use research
because you feel always, that you never quite know enough.
But I do feel that a certain point, that my ideas have come together,
and I begin the actual writing, not deferring it too long.
But I continue to do the research while I'm writing,
especially as I approach a point where I need to be very clear,
then I go back to the research, so they weave back
and forth, those two things do.
Sometimes I'm simply interested in the subject matter.
I still read about whaling even though Ahab's Wife came out in '99.
And I can't turn off the curiosity that goes along with research.
Is it harder to write a novel around a factual person
like Marie Antoinette, or is it harder to write Ahab's Wife,
which has only incidental historical characters in it?
There's a certain constraint in dealing
with this novel of Marie Antoinette.
I can't change history, she's got to -- you know what happens in the end.
And everybody says by the way, that even though they know what's going
to happen, that they're really glued to the text,
hoping that it won't happen.
But I really can't do anything about that.
But I feel constrained in the same way with Ahab's Wife.
I can't have Captain Ahab washed up on shore in the end,
and they're living happily-ever-after.
He wasn't even a real person,
but the fictive context has its own facts, so to speak,
within its own world, and I have to have allegiance to them.
The challenge is to the imagination, in any circumstance,
I like writing books that are very different from one another.
So, Ahab's Wife was a first person story
but not told in the present tense.
Abundance is a first person story that is told in the present tense,
and it was a different thing --
difference between having a retrospective narrator as a kind
of lens over the action, or making the action happen
as it seems to happen.
This seemed particularly appropriate for me, with Marie Antoinette,
because history has given us the retrospective view
of seeing her as an object.
I wanted to recreate her story as she lived it, moment by moment,
not in the shadow of the guillotine.
She didn't know that was going to happen to her.
So it's really just a different range of challenges.
I'll just say in closing, that I'm in the process of signing a contract
for my next novel, which probably won't be out for two or three years.
But it too is going to be quite a new challenge in that it deals
with the deep past and also deals with the future.
It's set in the future, in the year 2020, so I don't have forever
to write it, if it's going to be the future.
But, the name of the novel is Adam and Eve.
So you can already see a certain tension
between the past and the future.
And I want to look at sacred texts; I want to look at sacred texts
that are images, such as the cave paintings in the south of France.
At the same time, I want to consider the future of science;
the probability
that extra-terrestrial life will be discovered and how
that will affect our sense of who we are as human beings
and our place in the universe.
So thank you so very much for coming out today.