Martha Conway

author of The Underground River

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June 12, 2017 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

Writing The River: Steamboats and Slavery

PROBABLY LIKE EVERY STATE, OHIO can be very regional; the northerners stay in the north, and the southerners stay in the south. I grew up in the north, in Cleveland, which is separated from Canada only by Lake Erie; I didn’t set foot in Cincinnati (the southern tip) until I was an adult. As a child, we drove straight down to West Virginia without stopping when we went on summer vacation.

But I was writing a novel that took place in Cincinnati and along the Ohio River, and visit it I must. It was a great trip.

First of all, there were statues of pigs everywhere. What could be better than that?

In my novel, I’d been writing about the pigs in Cincinnati in the 1830s. Frances Trollope mentioned them in her book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, and I fell in love with the idea of pigs roaming around the streets, eating garbage and generally being nuisances:

“As I made my way across the street I tried to stay away
from the snuffling pigs running loose and making
every effort to bump up against me.” (from The Underground River)

In the twenty-first century the pigs no longer roam the streets of Cincinnati, but their heritage lives on. You have to respect a city who honors their porcine past.

When I went on this research trip, I lured my teenage son to go along with me with promises of visiting friends in Louisville, Kentucky (also on the Ohio River). He was a good sport. We visited Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house. (“So you’re the little lady who started this great big war,” Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said upon meeting her.) There we learned that Cincinnati, like the country as a whole, was polarized around the issue of slavery: in 1836, two years before my novel takes place, there was a an anti-abolitionist riot led by working class white men who feared that if slaves were freed they would get their jobs. But many pastors preached against the evils of slavery, and one recounted a story of a young slave woman who fled Kentucky in the winter, when the Ohio River was frozen over. She barely made it across before the ice started cracking.

Harriet Beecher Stowe heard the story, and it became the germ for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Another thing I wanted to do was ride on a steamboat. Okay, it sounds hoaky, but I really wanted to feel what it was like to be steaming down the river, like my character May did before her steamboat, the Moselle, blew up.

I’m happy to say that ours did not blow up.

On board the Belle of Cincinnati, we were treated to a running commentary by the captain over loudspeaker that combined both history and current urban planning. As we steamed west, my son and I played two-handed spades and ate sun chips and looked out at the beautifully landscaped riverbanks. When the captain invited all the children to come up and take a peek at the pilothouse, I went up, too — although John Henry felt he was really to old for that.

Unlike the other children there, I didn’t ask to try on his captain’s hat or pretend to steer the ship (although it was tempting). Instead, I asked the captain where the Moselle had blown up, (the “Fulton landing” is all I knew). He wasn’t sure, but he said he would try to find out. He became busy entertaining the real children, and so after taking in the beautiful view from the upper deck, I went back down to my seat. However, I was rewarded a few minutes later when the captain announced we were “at the spot where the steamship Moselle sank” over the loudspeaker.

Doesn’t look like much now, does it? The river is much more manicured than it was in the last century. But I got a little tingly feeling anyway. Still do.

Three hundred people were on board the Moselle, and less than half survived. It was a steamboat version of the Titanic—a captain who was too proud of his boat, and who pushed her too hard to make good time. From our seats on the Belle of Cincinnati, the shore did not seem so far away, but people had to swim nearly half a mile to get to shore. They were wearing those heavy Victorian costumes which, in a panic (and think of all those buttons), many didn’t bother to remove.

Besides walking across the iced-over Ohio River to freedom, or rowing across the water in a rowboat in the dead of night (without a light), some slaves stowed away on steamboats. They hid behind the boilers, but were routinely caught and sent back “home,” where a whipping or worse (usually much worse) awaited them. Our steamboat captain pointed out the Second Baptist Church on the northern side of the river. If the light in the steeple was lit, he said, that was a signal that it was safe for slaves to cross over.

Our steamboat turned around just past Fulton. We’d had a pleasant two hours with no mishaps. Back on shore, the boat docked, stretched out the gangplank, and all of us twenty-first century tourists walked in a neat line back to our cars.

Previous Post in Writing The River series:
A Victorian Partridge Family

Next up: The Boy Who Could Not Lie

The Underground River is available at Amazon | B&N | IndieBound | BAM | Powell’s

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: fiction, historical fiction, historical novels, Ohio River, showboats, slavery, steamboat, underground railroad

June 3, 2017 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

A Victorian Partridge Family

ALL I KNEW AT FIRST was that I wanted my next novel to have something to do with theatre — early American theatre, since I’m currently on a nineteenth-century kick.

The Underground River on sale now

I got lucky. On the very first day of doing research, as I paged through a crushingly large volume called Theater in America, I came upon a reference to an Englishman named William Chapman. Chapman was a professional actor who had been trained at the Covent Garden Theatre in London. In 1831, Chapman came to America with his family, found the theatre scene there wanting, and built himself his own “floating theatre” — a flatboat with a stage and benches nailed to the deck.

The boat was a just a long, flat barge (no sail, no steam engine), but Chapman poled it down the Ohio River, landing in the little towns on either side of the water and performing shows every night but Sunday. Most fortunately, Chapman had a wife and eight children with him, all of whom acted, played musical instruments, and sang.

Basically, the Chapmans were a Victorian Partridge Family. Only on a flatbed boat instead of a school bus.

I haven’t spent a lot of time on boats, except for elementary school field trips on “The Good Time II” in Cleveland, where I grew up. That was on the Cuyohoga River, the one that caught on fire. (The Ohio River has not, to my knowledge, ever caught on fire.) So it’s not surprising that I came across a lot of boat terms I didn’t know.

Broadhorns, sweeps, and gougers—these are all kinds of poles or oars.

And there were a lot of names for ill-placed trees:

  • Snags — dead trees in the water (floating or otherwise)
  • Deadfall — a tree blown down by the wind

And some fun slang:

  • Arkansas toothpick — a large, pointed dagger used by river men
  • Grease hunger — to be hungry for meat
  • Holler calf rope — to surrender (I still don’t understand that)

Sadly, I couldn’t use all the slang I found for fear the text would begin to sound like the Song of the South ride in Disneyland. But the variety of boats—the keelboats, the passenger steamers, the packet steamers (think UPS trucks on the water), the sailboats and canoes, the rafts and barges—suddenly I had the sense of a crowded, watery highway.

And, of course, one riverboat theatre on a flatbed boat. That was where my character, May Bedloe, ended up.

If you were the Victorian version of The Partridge Family, you might have some fun, crazy antics (instigated by a boy named Danny) that almost but didn’t quite ruin your next show. In 1838, though, on the Ohio River, things were a bit more serious. To the north of the river lay Ohio and Indiana and Illinois; to the south was Virginia and Kentucky. Free states and slave states, with only one watery highway between them.

I decided that in this novel I needed to explore that conflict, too.

 

Next up: Runaway slaves and steamboats

ORDER: Amazon | B&N | IndieBound | BAM | Powell’s

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: creative writing, historical fiction, Ohio River

February 21, 2017 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

Just received my ARC!

Underground River Final CoverA big box of Advance Review copies came in the mail last week. I’m totally thrilled!

It’s 1838, and May Bedloe works as a seamstress for her cousin, the famous actress Comfort Vertue—until their steamboat sinks on the Ohio River. Though they both survive, both must find new employment. Comfort is hired to give lectures by noted abolitionist, Flora Howard, and May finds work on a small flatboat, Hugo and Helena’s Floating Theatre, as it cruises the border between the northern states and the southern slave-holding states.

May becomes indispensable to Hugo and his troupe, and all goes well until she sees her cousin again. Comfort and Mrs. Howard are also traveling down the Ohio River, speaking out against slavery at the many riverside towns. May owes Mrs. Howard a debt she cannot repay, and Mrs. Howard uses the opportunity to enlist May in her network of shadowy characters who ferry babies given up by their slave mothers across the river to freedom. Lying has never come easy to May, but now she is compelled to break the law, deceive all her new-found friends, and deflect the rising suspicions of Dr. Early who captures runaways and sells them back to their southern masters.

As May’s secrets become more tangled and harder to keep, the Floating Theatre readies for its biggest performance yet. May’s predicament could mean doom for all her friends on board, including her beloved Hugo, unless she can figure out a way to trap those who know her best.

The Underground River is now available for pre-order!

 

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: American theatre, civil war, fiction, historical fiction, historical novels, Ohio River, showboats, theatre, underground railroad, writing

October 23, 2016 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

The Cold Open – Start at the Last Possible Moment

THERE IS A MOMENT WHEN, in your story world, everything has changed. The stranger has come to town, the father has died, the mother has left, the best friend has announced that she’s moving to Pakistan. And that moment is a great place to start your novel. Forget backstory, forget building up to it—just lay out the stakes right away.

Like In Media Res, in which you begin in the middle of the action, this technique relies on triggering a reader’s curiosity. The world has suddenly changed. What will happen now? That’s the question you want in the back of your readers’ minds at all times, but especially at the beginning.

Some examples: In The Lovely Bones, it is the moment when Susie, a teenage girl, gets lured into a neighbor’s secret bunker. In The Hobbit, it is the moment when the wizard Gandalf appears and talks to Bilbo, then leaves a mysterious mark on Bilbo’s front door. In The Light Between Oceans, this is when the childless couple manning a lighthouse finds a baby in a lifeboat.

This technique answers the question of why a reader should care by creating drama immediately that will result in—what? We want to know what. If you start big, you can afford to fall back a bit afterwards, a least for a bit. Layer in some characteristics; maybe even give a bit of back story. You have won the first battle: getting the reader’s attention.

Starting at the last moment possible allows for a dramatic chapter one, which is great, but it raises the stakes. Your reader will probably want more of the same. Of course, it would be difficult for the writer and tiring for the reader to have constant, building drama. There is an ebb and flow to everything, even our attention. Down time is important—but not too much. The writer needs to create enough sparks in chapters two, three, and so on to prepare for the next dramatic moment without losing readers.

And a dramatic moment doesn’t have to be a natural disaster or a gunfight; it can be as small as one character’s timely decision. Drama in the Greek means “Action.” Think of how many kinds of action there are in life! So don’t worry if your novel begins not with a death, but with a simple decision to write an anonymous letter. That’s an action. That’s drama. That’s starting at the last possible moment.

 

Other posts in “The Cold Open” series:

  • In Media Res
  • Begin with a Question
  • Get Scary

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chapter one, craft, creative writing, creativity, drama, fiction, good fiction, historical fiction, historical novels, how to write well, in media res, inspiration, Ohio River, publishing, reading, Thieving Forest, underground railroad, writers, writing craft, writing rules

October 8, 2016 By Martha Conway 4 Comments

The Cold Open – In Media Res

STARTING A NOVEL, writing that very first sentence, is as exhilarating and intimidating as riding a bicycle for the first time without training wheels. Many writers think they need to explain a good deal more than they need to explain. They think that the first chapter is about laying a foundation so that the story — the real story— can begin in chapter two.

They could not be more wrong.

In this and in the coming weeks, I’ll be writing a blog series about those hooks—different techniques writers have successfully to capture their reader’s attention.

In media res, or “in the middle of things,” drops your reader into the middle of the action with no warning. In other words, the action of the story began off stage, before the very first sentence, and the reader must play catch up. A great example of this is from “A Room with a View” by E.M. Forster. Here are the very first lines from Chapter One:

“The Signora had no business to do it,” said Miss Bartlett, “no business at all. She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are north rooms, looking into a courtyard, and a long way apart. Oh, Lucy!”

“And a Cockney, besides!” said Lucy. . . “It might be London.”

Yes, the reader will be confused at first, and in fact that’s what you want. Whenever you put a question in a reader’s mind, the reader is more likely to keep reading so she can find out the answer. Of course, too much confusion results in a book thrown across the room in disgust, but usually this doesn’t happen on the very first page. When you open using the “In Media Res” technique, there is an implicit promise that wyou-must-start-well-and-you-must-end-well-2hatever you are throwing your reader into will be explained. But not quite yet.

This logic also addresses the worry that readers won’t know (and care) enough about the characters to be sufficiently interested. Readers are generally patient for a few paragraphs or a page or maybe even a whole chapter, if you’re lucky. We want the writer to make us interested; that’s why we opened the book!

I’ll talk about another technique in the next blog post, which can be used in conjunction with “In Media Res”: starting at the last possible moment. And don’t worry, it’s not a pitch for procrastination (most writers don’t need that pitch, anyway).

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artist, chapter one, creative writing, creativity, drama, fiction, fiction writing, good books, historical fiction, historical novels, how to write the first chapter, in media res, Ohio River, reading, underground railroad, writing craft, writing rules

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