Author and Novelist Glynn Young
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.
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.
Related:
Grierson’s Read and “The Horse Soldiers.”
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).
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.
A publisher asks to see your full manuscript. You read it three more times, trying to eradicate all typos, missing words, unclear passages, and confusing lines. You attach it to a politely professional email, which you hope disguises what you’re experiencing in equal measure: hope, fear, and anxiety.
You hit send.
And then you wait.
Waiting may be as much or more exhausting than the writing itself, but it is a fact of life in book publishing.
To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog.
Photograph by David Taffett via Unsplash. Used with permission.
I’ve completed for reading and research for my Civil War novel, tentatively entitled Brookhaven. It’s been something of a relief to see the conclusion of this phase of the project, and I’ll have more to say about the next phase soon.
The Civil War is something of a publishing mini-industry; new books are coming out all the time. I think we keep examining the war, what left up to it, and what came afterward to try to understand our own times. I can say that much of what I thought I knew has undergone some serious revision.
I’m still following news of new articles and books on the conflict, and one was recently published that I couldn’t resist. Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign: The Eighteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation was written by Larry Peterson and published recently by the University of Tennessee Press. And I couldn’t resist it because it was precisely the operation that framed the Civil War experience of my ancestors.
They didn’t live in Vicksburg; they lived south of Jackson near the city of Brookhaven. If you travel on Interstate 55 between New Orleans and St. Louis, which I have many, many times, you travel through Brookhaven.
Vicksburg was the last impediment to Union control of the Mississippi River. New Orleans had fallen in 1862, and Baton Rouge and Memphis not long after. Vicksburg was the blockade point, and it had to be taken. The siege lasted a considerable period, and it involved a number of related operations, including the capture of the state capital at Jackson and what it known as Grierson’s Raid, a cavalry maneuver that started in Tennessee, swept down the state of Mississippi, and end in Baton Rouge. It was designed to confuse and distract the Confederate Army and allow Ulysses Grant to move his troops across the river south of Vicksburg. And it worked rather spectacularly.
Grierson’s Raid is one of the 18 critical decisions of the Vicksburg campaign.
With each decision, Peterson explains what the situation was, what the options were, what was decided, and what were the results or impact. The decisions range from the appointment of the military commanders on both sides, failures of command, Grant’s attempted advance through central Mississippi, Union Admiral David Porter’s decision to run the Vicksburg blockade, Grant’s attack on Jackson, the Confederate mismanagement of Vicksburg’s defense, and more. The discussion for each is short and succinct; the main part of the book is only 100 pages.
The appendices are also well worth reading and constitute another 84 pages, including directions for a driving tour you can take of the entire campaign; he Union and Confederate Orders of Battle; and a short discussion about reinforcing Vicksburg. The book also includes notes, a bibliography, and an index.
What I found especially interesting was that Grierson’s Raid almost didn’t happen. The Union officer takseed with the decision initially postponed it because of Confederate activity and because he thought its success was questionable at best. He was eventually overridden, and the raid was authorized, taking place between April 17 and May 2. One stop made by the Union cavalry was Brookhaven, where the rail station was burned and track torn up.
In my novel, that becomes the event that frames all of what follows.
Peterson retired from United Airlines as a Boeing 757/767 Standards Captain. He’s previously published Confederate Commander: The Remarkable Life of Brigadier General Alfred Jefferson Vaughn Jr and several volumed in the Command Decisions of the American Civil War series.
Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign covers an extensive amount of information, and it does so in a highly readable, compact way. You get a full sense of the major decisions, good and bad, that figured in the Union’s ultimate capture of the city.
Top photograph: Vicksburg during the Union siege, showing the caves where many citizens lived during the bombardment.
A Brookhaven Short Story
When he looked back on that time, he could see the first days were the easiest, if also the most frightening. And more dangerous days were to follow.
Like hundreds and thousands of others, he walked home from the war, home from defeat and surrender. Glory was long gone, erased in places with names like The Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Petersburg, and Appomattox.
The road he took began in Virginia. It ended more than 900 miles later in Mississippi, and home. The camaraderie he’d experienced with others walking home disappeared three days into the journey, when he discovered he’d been left behind. Alone, he walked the often-deserted roads, asking the occasional fellow traveler the direction and the next town.
The woods he passed through were often thick, untouched since forever, he thought, dense forests of pine, oak, and elm. When he could, he traveled through trails in the woods that followed the roads. He liked the silence of the trees and undergrowth; he also liked the safety they afforded, unlike the open road.
He also liked the shift from woods to farmers’ fields, most of which were untouched because the men were gone to war. Or gone from the war.
He’d gone about a hundred miles, he reckoned, based on what other travelers told him, when the walk changed to a ride. He’d gotten a feisty stallion and a wagon drawn by two draught horses. But there had been a tradeoff. With the wagon and the horses came a freed slave woman and her two children and a dead planter’s teenaged daughter and her young cousin. He’d probably never understand why he agreed to see them southward, but he had no regrets.
By necessity, homeward progress simultaneously quickened and slowed. The horses made for faster travel; the women and children did not. He’d quickly learned that their needs were always more complicated than his own and required frequent stops. Progress had been further slowed by rain, bandits, and measles.
He’d just turned 15, a war veteran with two years’ experience. His traveling companions made for conversation, but the responsibility for the five lives terrified him. When he felt most afraid, he’d focus on the road. The woman and the girl had no inkling of his fear; they thought him moody and melancholic.
He led them through rain and flood. He protected them from the evil roaming the roads, evil that was all too common, sometimes predators preying on people just like themselves and sometimes desperate people doing desperate things. They had all seen death and destruction, often so bad that even the children stopped talking.
But he’d seen them all safely home.
He thought he knew the reasons for their success, the reasons they’d survived. He’d trusted the good Lord to watch over them all. And he trusted his determination to do this thing, to see the journey through.
Related:
“Christmas Oranges,” a short story at Cultivating Oaks Press.
“Encounter in the Woods,” a short story.
Top photograph by Lukasz Szmigiel via Unsplash. Used with permission.
An award-winning speechwriter and communications professional, Glynn Young is the author of six novels and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.
