Writing

An Inspiration for “Brookhaven”: The Family Bible

December 18, 2024 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

In the early 1980s, the Young family Bible was passed down to me from my father. We had looked at it together much earlier, especially the family records it contained. All of the entries for births and deaths, beginning in 1802 and ending in 1890, were in the same hand, presumably my great-grandfather’s.

For years after I received it, I did the time-honored family thing: kept it wrapped in brown paper and twine and on a closet shelf. I did eventually buy an acid-free box to store it in, but it was fragile. The binding was coming apart, the ink on the family records was fading, and some of the pages were loose.

My wife read a story in St. Louis Magazine about a local book conservator who had trained at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. In early 2022, I contacted him, we made an appointment, and he offered an initial assessment of what it would cost. He also found something that had been missed for decades – tucked in among one of the Prophets was an envelope containing a lock of auburn hair, presumably that of my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young.

I had copies of the family records, and it was these that I poured over and compared to listings in Family Search. Surprisingly, the Biblical records and the online listings were surprisingly identical. But the online list omitted a name contained in the Bible, that of Jarvis Seale, with the date of death recorded as April 6, 1862. Whoever he was, and no one in the family seemed to know (my father guessed a cousin), he was considered important enough for my great-grandfather to record his death.

I stayed mystified, until I investigated the date. It was the Battle of Shiloh.

More digging found he was the husband of one of my great-grandfather’s sisters. Mystery solved.

That discovery led me to consider two other dates – the ones for my great-grandfather’s two brothers. They, too, died in the Civil War, leaving my great-grandfather, still a teenager, as the only surviving son.

He was the one who bought the Bible and started the records. My book conservator said that the Bible was sold door-to-door by the tens of thousands in the late 1860s and 1870s. Many bought the book to record family records; so many people had died in the war that surviving families on both sides of the conflict were determined to keep a record. And too many, like Jarvis Seale, had been buried in unmarked mass graves.

I looked at the dates for those deaths, and I told myself there was a story here, a story of how a family survived the Civil War.

Those deaths, and the lock of my great-grandmother’s hair, eventually became one of the inspirations for my historical novel (and historical romance) Brookhaven.

Related:

Restoring the Family Bible – and More.

The Mystery Man in the Family Bible.

Top photograph: a page from the Bible’s family records, before restoration.

The Paperback Arrived!

December 17, 2024 By Glynn Young 6 Comments

The paperback edition of Brookhaven just arrived. I downloaded the Kindle version last Thursday, but it is something else to hold the physical book in my hands. Behind it are a few of the books (but only a few) I used for research.

The Inspirations That Led to “Brookhaven”

December 16, 2024 By Glynn Young 4 Comments

Brookhaven has made its historical novel debut. Publication happened faster than I anticipated; I thought maybe by sometime in late January. It was a surprise to receive a message from the publisher last Thursday with the link to Amazon Kindle, followed by the paperback on Friday.

Like all stories, Brookhaven has its seeds, some going back more than 60 years. Some of those seeds are movies.

The children in our family are spread widely apart; my older brother is eight years older, and my younger brother is 10 years younger. For a decade, I was the little kid in the family. And because my father wasn’t a fan of movies, and my mother was a Hollywood director’s dream of a fan, I became my mother’s movie partner. We saw the Disney movies, of course, but we also saw a lot of others, including some that weren’t exactly the best viewing for a child.

The late 1950s and 1960 were a banner time for the movie forays by my mother and me. On one day, she took me to the Saenger Theatre in downtown New Orleans to see Last Voyage, starring Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. It was an early version of The Poseidon Adventure, with a doomed luxury liner. My mother had a crush on Robert Stack, which I didn’t know at the time.

I cried from the tension in the movie so much that my embarrassed mother had a novel way to make it all better – we walked across Canal Street to the Joy Theatre to see Some Like It Hot. It was funny and certainly without the tension of Last Voyage. But whether it was appropriate for an 8-year-old is another matter. (She did buy me popcorn and a soda at both movies.)

A third movie we saw that year was The Horse Soldiers, a Civil War film with John Wayne and William Holden (my mother has a crush on Holden, too). That movie was a great one for a kid – a troop of Union soldiers riding through Confederate territory and creating havoc (although having Yankees as the heroes was almost over the top in 1959 New Orleans).

Decades later, I was reading a story about Greirson’s Raid in 1863, when I realized I had seen the movie. I didn’t know in 1959 that the movie was based upon a historical event. What was more was that a bunch of Young family ancestors lived in Brookhaven, Mississippi, at the time of the raid.

That was one inspiration for Brookhaven. A second had been my paternal grandmother, whom I dearly loved and with whom I spent a week every summer in Shreveport from the time I was 8 to when I turned 14. The visits stopped for reasons of her health, but she would live for another 16 years.

She was a storyteller. My grandfather had died when I was nine months old, so she filled my information gaps about him. She kept his workshop intact and let me explore it each time I camp; what I remember most is lots of dust, old carpentry equipment, and a considerable number of empty bottles that my teetotaling grandmother refused to answer questions about.

One thing one grandmother would talk about was the Civil War, except she referred to it by its proper name, she would say, “the War of Northern Aggression.” She bought into the Lost Cause completely. She was proud of her father-in-law, Samuel Young, who was a Civil War veteran. She said very little about her own family, so I suspect they didn’t fight in the war.

Samuel had died in 1920 when he was 74. His wife Octavia had died at 44 in 1888 (when Samuel was 43), and Samuel had never remarried, unusual for the time.

For decades, those stories and the memories of those stories lay dormant, until an article about Grierson’s Raid began to bring them to the surface, fusing them with other stories. Little did I know that hearing my grandmother talk about “those Yankees” would help inspire a novel so many years later.

When Research for Your Historical Novel Changes Your Understanding.

“The Real Horse Soldiers” by Timothy Smith.

A note from T.S. Poetry Press on the release of Brookhaven (including the author’s note).

“Brookhaven” is Published!

December 13, 2024 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

It’s always a milestone in a life when a new book is published. Brookhaven, a historical novel about the Civil War and what happened after, has made its appearance in the world.

It’s not a novel about battles and military strategy. Instead, it’s about the people who were involved, some directly and some indirectly (and virtually every American alive at the time was affected).

This is the summary:

“In 1915, young reporter Elizabeth Putnam of the New York World is assigned a story on the Gray Wisp. New information has come to light about this Confederate spy in the Civil War, a figure of legend, myth, and wildly competing claims. What no knows is the man’s identity. The reporter follows leads which eventually bring her to the small Mississippi town of Brookhaven. He agrees to tell his story, a tale of North and South, loss in wartime, narrow escapes from death in battles, family survival, the poetry of Longfellow, and love. And Elizabeth soon finds her own story has forever become part of the Gray Wisp’s.”

Brookhaven is essentially two stories – that of Sam McClure, who enlisted young and finds himself enrolled as a spy, and that of Elizabeth Putnam, a young reporter trying to make her way and her name in what was a very male world of journalism.

The book includes a character list (my wife insisted I include one) and a bibliography (I read more books and did more research than I can remember).

I’ll write more about the inspiration for the book (a movie I saw in 1959 and a family story that turned out to be more legend than fact. For now, it’s feelings of relief, satisfaction, and no-small amount of joy I’m experiencing. And if you want more information, just ask.

Brookhaven is available here on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

Related:

A note from T.S. Poetry Press on the release of Brookhaven (including the author’s note).

“Christmas Oranges,” a short story – Cultivating Oaks Press.

“The Last Days of the War” by Dr. Henry T. Bahnson

November 27, 2024 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The half-century after the end of the Civil War saw an outpouring of memoirs by veterans on both sides. Some were written by war heroes, like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman (and were bestsellers as well). For time, it must have seemed like every general and officer in the war was writing an account. A joke made the rounds that so many people had witnessed Robert E. Lee’s signing of the surrender to Grant at Appomattox that both armies had crowded into the room.

For a time, those who had been privates – enlisted and drafted – penned their remembrances as well. These accounts, and I’ve read a considerable number number for my soon-to-be-published historical novel Brookhaven, are not so much concerned with strategy and battle outcomes as they are with day-to-day survival, getting enough food, mud (lots of mud, especially when you have to walk through it), in short, what everyman experienced. You find none of the romance of war in these accounts; what you do find is gritty commentary about the war and the hope to make it home one day.

Henry Bahnson was a private in a North Carolina company. He was a much older man, and a physician, when he wrote his account of the last days of the war. He narrowed his story to the period from April 2 to April 9, 1865 – the final week for Robert E. Lee’s army. He was there, and he very nearly died several times that week.

His story, “The Last Days of the War,” was published as an article in The North Caorlina Booklet, a periodical of “great events in North Carolina history” akin to what we know as historical or academic history journals today. It’s been digitized and made available through North Carolina Digital Collections. The article was originally published in 1903.

His account begins with the final siege of Petersburg, some 20 miles south of Richmond and a critical rail junction for keeping the Confederate capital and Lee’s army supplied. He describes the fighting – how it began (interrupting a planned holiday), the intensity of the battle, the deaths of friends, one literally shot between the eyes right next to him. He evaded death several times, gradually making his way to the body of Lee’s army, which was in full flight westward.

The situation was more complex than “Lee’s army fleeing westward from Grant” might imply. Skirmishes and small battles erupted along the way. At one point, Bahnson and the bare handful of men with him captured 102 Union troops and their officers. Not long after, he himself was taken prisoner. He spent his final days in the way in a prisoner camp, with no food; Grant’s supply trains had been destroyed or left behind as the army raced after Lee. The Union soldiers got what food was left; Confederate prisoners were reduced to chewing roots, tree bark, and buds, sucking the inside of their haversacks, and drinking water “by the gallon to lessen the aching void of hunger.”

He was eventually paroled and freed, making his way home to North Carolina. He’d lost 38 pounds in three weeks, and his father didn’t recognize him. The comforts of home and family, including a warm bath, forever dispelled “the glamour and illusions of the pomp and pride, and circumstances of glorious war.”

Bahnson’s experiences run counter to the myths of romance and “the Lost Cause” that came to be so connected to the South for generations. This was war at ground level, focused on what soldiers constantly contended with – hunger, mud, cold, and the regular threat of injury or death.

When Fiction Seems to Predict Fact

November 18, 2024 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

The Dancing Priest novels seem to be back in the fiction-becomes-fact business.

Last week, after saying he would not resign, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby did, in fact, resign. This followed the release of the Makin Report, which documented the failings of the Church of England (COE) in a cover-up of an abuse scandal. The scandal went back to the 1980s when a barrister named John Smyth abused young teens at COE church camps, slipped out of England when it appeared the law was onto him, and went on to victimize more boys in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Welby’s sin: he learned about the abuse in 2013 but failed to report it to authorities. Smyth could have been brought to justice at that time; he died in 2018.

One as-of-yet-unanswered question is if Welby was the only COE official to know. It’s unlikely that others, including people high in the hierarchy, also didn’t know. The scandal may not be over. And lest we think this type of scandal only happens to the big established denominations like the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church, there are lessons here for all of us. A church I’ve attended had a member of the staff get involved in an inappropriate and illegal relationship; the difference was that the head pastor, as soon as he was told, called the police. That’s how it’s supposed to work, no matter how damaging it might be to an organization’s reputation. Righteousness trumps reputation, as Bernard Howard wrote for the Gospel Coalition.

In Dancing Prophet (2018), the fourth of the Dancing Priest novels, Michael Kent-Hughes has an abuse scandal thrust upon him. He’s a former COE priest and now the king, and he’s simultaneously dealing with a developing church scandal and a collapse of the government of Great London. His church nemesis is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sebastian Rowland, who has spent considerable time covering up an abuse scandal that threatens to blow the church apart.

During the research for the book, I learned that the Archbishop of Canterbury, along with the rest of the hierarchy and the church itself, is subject to the monarch. That’s how Henry VIII set it up in the 1530s during the English Reformation. And the archbishop functions at the pleasure of the monarch. That the current prime minister, Keir Starmer, refused to back Justin Welby publicly was of less importance than the silence that was coming from King Charles. Welby’s announcement noted that King Charles has graciously accepted his resignation. That’s how it works. The Catholic pope tells God and the church; the Archbishop of Canterbury tells the king (or the king asks for it).

In Dancing Prophet, Michael tells Sebastian Rowland he must resign. Rowland at first refuses, until Michael, in the presence of the police, explains the evidence against the archbishop, all of which will be made public. It’s worth noting, too, that Michael went to the police as soon as he became aware of the activities of one priest, which would soon explode into a global crime. And Michael, when he speaks to the British people, will tell them that the Church of England may not survive. Righteousness trumps reputation.

Dancing Prophet was written long before the John Smyth scandal was known publicly. What I did know concerned a COE abuse scandal involving some priests; it had first surfaced in the news in 2012. For the novel, I adapted the abuse scandal that has rocked (and continues to rock) the Roman Catholic Church to the COE.

I’m not a prophet; I can’t and don’t predict the future. But I’ve learned that, when you’re doing research for a book like any of the Dancing Priest novels (“future history,” one reader called them), you pick up on issues, concerns, trends, and ideas that are being discussed. You read about past events and troubles. You learn how people, especially people in authority, respond to what they see as threats. And you know what humans naturally tend to do: wish it would all go away, ignore it, make it worse, try to contain it, or cover it up. It might work for a time, but it usually doesn’t work forever.

We forget that lesson: righteousness trumps reputation.

Related:

Can Fiction Predict the Future?

Did Dancing Prophet Become Prophetic?

Top photograph by Ruth Gledhill via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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