wilderness
This from a sleepy reader:
Midnight and I can’t get to sleep until I ask this question: what’s wrong with Callie? I understand that she’s been abandoned by everyone she’s ever loved, but I just can’t get at the core of her, and it’s keeping me up at night!… Read more.
The most common question I get about The Endless Forest has to do with Jennet’s death and the aftermath. After Jennet died, Luke returned to Manhattan alone, leaving the children behind to be raised in Paradise. Many readers have trouble with this.… Read more.
People seem to feel strongly about the epilogue at the end of The Endless Forest: they love it, or they really, really do not love it.
I wrote it because I personally needed to have some closure, and to say goodbye to my characters.… Read more.
This question always takes me by surprise. I am reminded of myself at about age eleven, when I figured out about the relationship between sex and pregnancy. I was watching Johnny Belinda — a movie about a deaf woman who is raped and has a baby, a story set maybe in the forties or so — and I realized with huge surprise, disquiet and even disbelief that those people knew that sex led to having babies!… Read more.
There’s a very detailed family tree you can consult, here.
The truth is, sometimes details are not available no matter how hard you search, and you have to make logical jumps. I could find out a great deal about Mohawk village life, but not everything. When I couldn’t avoid the murky areas, I tried to extrapolate as cleanly as I could.… Read more.
James Fenimore Cooper wrote a series of books called the Leatherstocking Tales. His main character was Natty [Nathaniel] Bumppo (also called Hawkeye, and several other names), and seemed to be based on the legends that grew up around the real life character Daniel Boone.… Read more.
Into the Wilderness came into being because I wanted to read stories of the women on the New York frontier in the post-revolutionary period. Since no one else seemed inclined to write those stories, I began to consider writing one after re-reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers.… Read more.