Episode 123: Shaunna J. Edwards & Alyson Richman, authors of The Thread Collectors
Debut novelist Shaunna J. Edwards & USA Today bestselling Alyson Richman talk about their historical novel, The Thread Collectors, loosely inspired by their own family histories.
With Ashley, they discuss their enduring friendship, how they came to be co-writers, and what it was like to transition from friends to colleagues.
In addition, they each share great advice for writers, the best books she’s read lately, and their research process.
Check out the book club questions and a recipe for Bourbon Milk Punch on Book Club Bites.
Books Mentioned:
The Pit by Frank Norris (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
Brave, Not Perfect by Reshma Saujani (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F. Kuang (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
The Friday Night Club: A Novel of Artist Hilma af Klint and Her Creative Circle by Sofia Lundberg Alyson Richman, M.J. Rose (Bookshop.org / Amazon.com )
Full Disclosure: We are part of the Amazon and bookshop.org affiliate programs, which means Lainey or Ashley get a tiny commission if you buy something after clicking through from link on this website.
Connect with the author:
Transcript:
** Transcript created using AI (so please forgive the typos!) **
Ashley Hasty 0:00
Shauna and Alison Welcome to the best of women's fiction podcast. I had the pleasure of interviewing you for my blog hasty bookless.com. We're here today to talk about your novel The Thread Collectors. So will you start by telling our listeners what your novel is about?
Shaunna Edwards 0:16
Absolutely. So when the thread collectors you meet two couples, there is a black couple and that's comprised of Stella Stella is enslaved and she's at home in New Orleans, secretly taking repurpose thread and cloth to create these masks to help enslaved men covertly flee to join the Union army. She's in love with Jacob. Jacob is a brilliant black musician, also enslaved and he decides he's going to run to join the Union Army as well. On the battlefields of Louisiana he meets Jacob clang. Jacob is a German Jewish soldier, and he's been encouraged to join the Union Army by his fiery abolitionist wife, Lily Clang, who is up in New York doing some sewing of her own. She's joined a quilting circle from camaraderie. And also they're creating quilts to send down to the Union soldiers for comfort, and also to help fund the Union Army cause. So these four characters who come from different races, different faiths, different backgrounds, who might not seem that they have too much in common by the end of the novel, you find out that they have much more in common than you would have thought. The threat collectors is Shana. It's your debut novel. And Alison, it's your 10th novel if I counted correctly, I love asking authors how they became authors. Their journeys to publication are so varied. Alison, I read you majored in art history and Japanese Studies. And Shana, you're a former corporate lawyer. So I want to know, how did your pans lead you to becoming authors? Allison, let's start with you. Okay, so, you know, being an art history major in college, one of the things that I absolutely loved was telling the story behind a painting, I love putting it in historical context, I love looking for, you know, the psychological artists was putting into the canvas of how he might have seen his particular subject. I love researching the cost, you know, what they were wearing in the clothing. And I think that love of investigation of research, and then trying to, you know, when I would write my art historical papers, opened up a lens into a world that, you know, it's much more complicated at first meets the eye. So when I graduated from college, I thought to myself, if I could do anything in the world, what I would love to do would be to write novels about artists and how they experience history in real time. And that's what sort of led me to write historical fiction. All of my novels have someone who is creative or artistic is one of the main protagonists. And like the threat collectors, we do have a musician or two musicians, we have a black musician and a Jewish musician who meet on the battlefield. So that kind of stays in line with what I've done since. And Shana, what about you? How did you come to co write this book with Allison? So while I am a dusty, dry corporate lawyer, I majored in literature in college. So reading has always been something that birthed me that love of language. And I don't always harbor dreams to write my own novel. I think when Allison and I first met 13 years ago, I was so thrilled to meet an author, I think I almost thought that I was meeting like a unicorn in real life. And I probably admitted to her that first day that it would be my dream to write a novel, I did not know that the opportunity would be handed to me by one of my dearest friends, but I am so grateful that it has been as for how we came to write this book. I'm happy to dive into that as well. If you want Ashley. Well, I read that the story is loosely inspired by your family histories. Absolutely. Elephant you want to go first and maybe I'll layer on? Well, yes, I'm on my family tree. I have two great, great great uncles who were sons of Jewish German immigrants that had come over to United States in the 1830s. And these two particular you know, brothers, when they came of age, one went down to Mississippi to start a mercantile depo and Natasha, Mississippi, a little town near the Yazoo County. And while his younger brother remained up in New York, and when the civil war broke out, our family legend was that these two brothers fought on opposite sides of the Civil War, and that their relationship was never healed after the war that this, you know, decision to fight on opposite sides and take up you know, opposing views on fighting against slavery basically severed the family forever. So I always heard that from my grandmother. And then I started to do the research, we learned about what regimen each brother was in, we were able with the research also to discover the will of my southern uncle where he disowned his. We certainly incorporated that fraternal relationship in the thread collectors using that about two brothers who are children of immigrants themselves, outsiders being Jewish in a new country. How that plays out in our book is based on my own family tree. And so for me, it's not as direct a connection but when Allison was first talking to me about this idea that grew into the thread collectors that was back in
In 2017, which seems so crazy, I almost refer to it as like the before times, like before the pandemic. I then introduced this concept. Well, she had had a loose idea, I think of a Jewish soldier and a black soldier meeting on the battlefields and some map gets created. I was, as you might expect, really interested in intrigued by the idea of the black soldier and I said, Well, what if he takes the map and he gives it to his beloved and she creates a tactile map, and that was in my head because while I am not a quilt maker, I come from a line of women who have created culture. You know, my mother was born on a cotton farm and Huston Louisiana. And that idea that rich you know, history of textile in the African American community is one of the most direct lines. All of the black women in the novel are named after women in my family, including our heroine Stella who's named after my mother, and in particular, the matriarch of the black woman, Janey was inspired by a great, great, great aunt of mine, Janie Roach, who, in spite of her race, and the strictures of the time, managed to become financially independent and a landowner. And I had thought sometimes like, I wonder the choices that she had to make in order to achieve that. And as we were writing the character of Janie, as we were writing a lot of these characters Allison and I were pulling from the stories that have been passed down and the questions we've had about our ancestry. So it was lovely to be able to weave that in.
Ashley Hasty 6:26
So the story is loosely based on your family histories, but how did you decide to write this story together?
Alyson Richman 6:31
As Shana touched upon, like in 2017, I had this very rough idea to use that fraternal relationship that I expanded on within within my family and to perhaps make it into a novel. Shawna, as she mentioned, contributed to these building blocks of that story. Even though I wasn't searching for a writer partner. Back then I was literally just having a conversation with my friend who loves to read and as she mentioned, was a literature major, and our whole friendship. We've been married, married for 18 years, we've always been like, you know, talking about books. She's my litmus test when I have an idea, but I was very excited when Shauna suggested this whole other layer to the book about embroidered maps and bringing in, you know, a love story, because who was one of the black soldiers, beloved, who could create these embroidered maps, and Shawna was volunteering this information, just sort of the generosity of her heart and her interest. She wasn't, you know, trying to say like, I could be your collaborator. So I left that meeting in 2017, very much inspired and still thinking about writing this book. But I always like to say that when you embark on writing a novel, all the winds have to feel that on your back or steering into this is the book you need to be reading at this particular time in your life. And I didn't feel that in 2017, I actually went on to write another book called The Secret of clouds that I published in 2019. But fast forward to 2020, when we were in the throes of the pandemic, and the world felt so fragile and scary. And then on top of that, the brutal murder of George Floyd, which really sort of cleaved open, I think, in our consciousness, how much racial injustice there has always been in the United States, but still is prevalent today. And so the themes of the Civil War, this curiosity to sort of understand what happened back then, and how that divided our nation started pulling me back in the direction of a civil war novel again. But when I returned to the original seeds of the idea, I already knew that it wasn't wholly mine that Shawna had not just said to me. Oh, that sounds like a great idea. Allison, why don't you know, I think you should write that book that she had contributed building blocks for the story, she had already sort of pressed her fingerprint, you know, her heritage into the story. And I wanted to honor that. And I also wanted to, you know, see, because I've known her for so many years and know that she's always wanted to write a novel, I had a very strong instinct that we would be able to collaborate on something and make something really beautiful and powerful with historical integrity, because she's such a scholar, and like, you know, she's so curious about learning as much as I am. So I just thought, I think we'd make a good team. When I called Shauna, I think she was surprised that I was, you know, saying, Do you want to write this novel with me? Right?
Shaunna Edwards 9:09
I was very surprised. I think I hung up the phone and turn to my husband, who I'm actually married to, although you might. And I think I said to him, she's crazy. I will say actually, that it wasn't for me and an immediate Yes, not because I wasn't blown away by the offer. But it was because in 2020, particularly as a black woman, I was feeling pretty wrung out emotionally exhausted. My day to day job was leading a global organization in their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Live, you know, in that time, in terms of like, looking at all the source documentation, I sometimes phrase it as I didn't know if I could live through what I hope is the most racially divisive time of my lifetime, and then revisit the most racially divisive time in our country's history. So it took a little bit of, frankly, a little bit of nudging for my husband to really put it in context. Have What this ultimately turned out to be a legacy project a place for me to put some of those difficult emotions in place to work through these questions of race with a dear and treasured friend and a place to maybe do something that's educational in a way that people walk away knowing more than they ever could have, in a manner though that is maybe not as scary and confrontational as it sometimes feels. So I'm glad that I took the leap. But it wasn't right away. Yes, for me.
Ashley Hasty 10:26
That is a great segue into my next question, Allison, like you, I'm a historian. First I focus was in fashion history. So the textile connection of this book really spoke to me when I was first reading about it. Research, therefore, is my favorite part of the writing process. And I love asking authors about their research. Actually, Shawn, I want to start with you, because I imagine that research was quite difficult, quite heavy and many instances. So I'm curious what researching that time period was like for you?
Shaunna Edwards 10:59
That's a great question. We're fortunate to at least have some institutions in the nation that focus on the lives of ordinary African Americans because it was important for us to showcase what ordinary people were going through, I relied a lot on the homicide Research Center, which is down in New Orleans. And because it was the pandemic and I was working fully remotely, I got to go and stay with my mama after being like hosed off with Lysol. The Schomburg Center up here in New York, I live in Harlem in New York. And so that's only a few blocks away, and they were wonderful. And also the historic New Orleans collection. Part of the research was focused on free black people of color, because we do have free black people of color who are in are not free people of color, sorry, who are in our novel, and the research that is pretty readily available. If you can imagine like I'm holding letters from the 19th century in my hands, where we have archival deficiency, and I think it says a lot about our country is when you think about the day to day lives of people who are enslaved, you know, you couldn't teach an enslaved person how to read or write if you were caught, even a white person could face dire consequences. People that were enslaved are either written by, you know, they're in slavery, or it's been passed down from oral history. And so that's not always easy to piece together. I know we often get asked, Well, are there any records of people haven't created like these covert embroidered maps for enslaved people to run we didn't find that exactly as we found in certain other circumstances like civil war saboteur is embroidering things on, like the hem of their petticoat. And many of us have heard, for instance, about using quilts, you know, in different directions and with different symbology to lead people to different Underground Railroad houses. But what I say about that time is I don't rule anything out, because the very people that were doing it often didn't have a way to write down and preserve for history, what they were doing. I also had the ability to go to Port Hudson, the battle for Hudson plays a really central role in our novel, it was a battle where black men were finally given the opportunity to fight for freedom, similar to the battle scenes that are depicted in that wonderful movie glory, although Port Hudson happened a few weeks prior. And they were frankly, they were massacred. And it was a really dark time, their bodies weren't collected for weeks, it was not it was not the Union armies shining moment when it comes to how they treated black soldiers. And I spent a day there with the park ranger. And when I say you can feel the spirits when you're walking across that land, I certainly could. And even though it's only 90 minutes away from where I grew up, I had never been which reiterated to me how important it is for Allison and I to work on this project and frankly, for historical novels, historical fiction to be out in the world to teach people things that they're never going to get taught in the classroom.
Ashley Hasty 13:53
Now listen, I'm curious if your process differed how you would write a solo novel versus how you co wrote with Shana.
Alyson Richman 14:01
So my process didn't change. And and it's interesting, because when Shawn and I decided that we were going to collaborate, we didn't so much talk about process. I mean, we definitely knew that we were going to work on a Google Doc and I've always worked on word and the Google doc was unable to enable us to really jointly create the voice that we wrote the Fred collectors, you know, a lot of people a lot of readers initially thought, you know, when we would come to book clubs, or we do talks, and they people would raise their hand and say, did Shana write the black characters are going to die, right, the white characters and that's not at all how we wrote this book. Right from the beginning. We did want to create one seamless narrative voice that blended our hearts or minds and our histories together, so you couldn't tell who was writing what and we did that by creating a Google Doc and usually every Sunday night, we would brainstorm 20 pages at a time we didn't have a big outline of what was we didn't have an outline at all what was going to happen. We generally knew the intent and what kind of story we wanted to create one that showed history. being pulled from our ancestry and was
Alyson Richman 0:00
You know, at the end of the book, a book about hope the bridges that connect us rather than divide us. So we had like a feeling about this book. But we didn't have an outline for that book. And I never worked for, you know, on an outline. And it's funny because she never said, like, do we need an outline, she was very much like me, let's create something beautiful and powerful. Going back to that methodology, we would brainstorm 20 pages at a time, I would go in and do almost like a wire armature of the structure of what we had discussed with a thin layer of clay, and then she would put on her layer of clay and build out the story, then I would do another layer, and then she would and then four or five times back and forth on those 20 pages until we felt it really envisioned how we saw those particular chapters, let's say that we're, you know, we write short chapters or three chapters, and then we would slowly move on. And that's how I've written all of my stories very much like a painter where one brushstroke building against the next brushstroke, and being very conscious of, of saturation of color, and description, and then face, you know, negative space where you pull away and there's time for the reader to breathe in and process what's going on. There's a collaboration, they outline everything and they say, in this chapter, it's going to be from this point of view, and it's going to have this character coming in, we didn't do any of that. And that would have really thrown me to trial if Shauna said I feel I need an outline, or, you know, we need to plot your pace out everything that's going to happen, because I love the beauty of what sort of unfolds in a story when you're writing. And I've always done it that way. And I not to speak for Shauna, but we write, we never discussed this, it's just became, you know, you and I just had a natural instant synchronicity, creating together, thank God.
Ashley Hasty 1:39
I imagined that what 13 years of marriage friendship, in handy to be on the same level as far as how you're going to absolutely. And Sonic didn't come as naturally to you, as Allison is making it out that you just kind of met her in her process. And that's what was your process to,
Shaunna Edwards 1:56
I guess, for me, and you know, approaching it as not my day job, but a dream, I think it would have been less fun. If it it felt is rigid, you know, I have a ton of rigidity. In my day to day life. If you saw my Outlook, you might think, you know, it's like 15 minute increments. So for me, this idea of just telling story is very much even if you were with me at a dinner party, I would just start and it would just go and then it might go and like a little tributary there, that is the way my mind thinks. And I think that allowed it to not only be more creative, more beautiful, but frankly, more fun. I you know, I've never written a book by myself, although I have aspirations to of course. But that's the beauty of being able to do something with a friend because you want it to be fun, not only purposeful. And so if we had had an outline, I don't know, I think.
Alyson Richman 2:47
But I will say going back to your initial question, one thing that's different is that when you're running a book by yourself, everything is so solitary, right? So if you're in like a conundrum with a character, does the character go here or a character go there, it could take me three days to be like to make a decision, I'm in the shower, I'm thinking about that. I'm not really sure, I might try it out one way and then fix it and go another way, having a wonderful co author, you can call her, you know, up and say, and knowing that she's confident that that's the direction it took a real burden off my back and made things much more, I think, efficient for us to be able to always have each other as a sounding board.
Ashley Hasty 3:21
Well, I'm excited to hear your answers to this next question, given where you each are in your writing careers. What one piece of advice would you share with writers who haven't yet landed an agent or who aren't yet published?
Alyson Richman 3:33
I think my advice to aspiring authors is that you should really try and write every day if possible to be consistent and so that you can build out a story because any agent is going to want to see a full manuscript from you, they're not going to take a representation and run a few pages, they really need to see what you you can create. Um, so having that full manuscript is, is everything right? But for me, when I was first starting out, in wanting to finish my manuscript, I made my expectations on myself very easy and manageable. So I would say I'm going to write for four hours every day, but I only I'm a slow writer. So this might horrify people, you know, I'm not going to be upset if I don't write more than 500 words, you know, so I knew that I had to force myself to do 500 words, which is like two pages, but I did it every day, and I treated it like a job, you know that that was going to be my output. And even to this day, when I write and sometimes I do only write 500 page 500 words a day, and I have to rewrite them the next day because they're not good enough. And I'm always rewriting. It keeps me consistent. It keeps me moving towards that focal point, which is to have a finished manuscript and so maybe it's 250 words for you. Maybe it's 100 but if you stick at it and you keep on doing it, you will have a finished manuscript. I'd love to
Ashley Hasty 4:51
hear about the books you're reading and loving right now. Can you tell us a bit about your reading world What books should we not miss?
Shaunna Edwards 4:57
Okay, so I will say that I My high low leader just like I am a high low fashion girl, Allison has a very a relatively, I don't want to say no but very literary bid, I will literally read anything. So if someone leaves something in the subway, I will pick it up. I am currently reading quite an old novel, I think it's maybe published in the beginning of the 1900s called the pit by fluke, Frank Morris. And it's kind of like this tale of industrialist in Chicago. And I cannot tell you why I just suddenly started reading this book. But that is what I'm reading. Oh, and I have two, two more chapters left. It's not a it's not a novel in Brave, not perfect by Reshma Saujani, who found it like Girls Who Code because I do think that I sometimes struggle with bravery by the fact that I took this leap into being a novelist. And so I wanted to read that book to inspire me on my next feat of bravery. So that one was really good, but obviously, not as novel nonfiction.
Alyson Richman 5:56
And I am a third way through our of Kuang babble. I don't know if you've read that, Ashley. But it's really wonderful. It's beautifully written, it has an element of magic in it, which is, you know, really fun to read. And I think what I really love about that book is her taking sort of a micro lens on the nuances of language and words and how we each you know, in each culture, a word has a different layer to it that might not be translatable. And I think was Shawn and I, when we were creating this book, one of the things that we noticed is that sometimes we heard a word differently, whether it was from our backgrounds or Heritage's. And that nuance of how language hits your ear in a different way is really fascinating to me, especially coming from having always written by myself. And so you know, when I am writing by myself, I pick out a word very often because as I'm painting a picture, it's the word that I associate with that visual, not necessarily the history of that word, or how another person might hear it. And now I have a whole other sensitivity to it, and I love that but I also love what in this Book Babble of how she brings that into, you know, just how people do translation work. You know how when you're trying to interpret an author's words, what words you bring to it, and how you heard your those words are different, perhaps than the author's original intent. So it's interesting.
Ashley Hasty 7:14
Finally, I want to share how people can find you where you eat, share your website, and where you like to hang out on social media,
Alyson Richman 7:20
and has all of our speaking engagements, Book Club questions and all those things that make our book interesting. Behind the scenes and you can find me on Instagram at Allison Richmond just like my name and on Facebook, Allison Richmond dash author,
Shaunna Edwards 7:35
and on Instagram, I am at Shauna J. Edwards, just like my name. And on Facebook at Shauna J. Edwards. They did it pretty easy.
Ashley Hasty 7:43
And before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to talk about that we haven't yet covered? Perhaps what's next for each of you whether you're writing another book together or Shana, if you're working on a solo book,
Alyson Richman 7:55
you have a book coming out another collaboration called the Friday night club that comes out on May 16, which is about the artist Hilma AF Klint. She was a Swedish AP she's actually considered now the first abstract painter preceding even Kandinsky although her her accomplishments were sort of buried by mail history prior to the explosion of in Renaissance and recognized recognized recognition of her work in the past couple of years. I have a novel coming out fall 2020 for a solo book called the Timekeepers and Shona talk about what we have plans for, you know, as a collaboration.
Shaunna Edwards 8:30
Absolutely. So our novel does not end in a neat little bow. So we have aspirations of taking our characters into reconstruction, and perhaps even into the 20s, the Harlem Renaissance, and even into the 60s where we know there were so many connections between black and Jewish communities. And each generation, you know, seeing this spark of musical talent and how the music industry changes against the backdrop of all of these huge historical movements. But as Alison teaches me, because she is my writing Sherpa, we first need people to fall in love with the thread collectors first. And as Alison well knows, I've been noodling around with two ideas, one of which is loosely inspired by my father's side of the family because our families are more interesting than we know. I think.
Ashley Hasty 9:15
Well Shawna, Allison, I cannot thank you enough for joining me today on the best of women's fiction podcast. It was really a pleasure to learn more about the thread collectors what inspired it and your paths that led you to sharing this book with us thank you