Hypertext Magazine asked Joan Schweighardt, author of The Rivers Trilogy, “You started your career writing contemporary fiction. Why did you switch to historical fiction to write, of all things, a trilogy based on the South American rubber boom?”
By Joan Schweighardt
History was a blur for me as a kid. In the Catholic grade school I attended, we learned much more about the lives of the saints than the world at large. We read constantly, we all had impeccable penmanship, and there were only a few of us who couldn’t diagram the hell out of even the most complex sentences. But ask us about any event that didn’t include a pope or a saint, and we were clueless. I transferred to public school for junior high, but after eight years of living in a state of fear (of devils—the nuns never tired of warning us about the ways in which they might try to trick us; of the nuns, who were mostly nice but prone to displays of anger for things like rolling your uniform skirt up to a stylish length), I was much too elated to find that with the exception of science and history, my peers were working on stuff I’d already learned. I kicked back. Who wouldn’t? I turned my attention to other pursuits: boys, cigarettes, unauthorized holidays with the girls I hung out with.
Maybe it’s different now, but back then passing history quizzes in public school required only (or at least mostly) that we memorize names, events and dates: When did WWI begin? July 1914. How many people in the U.S. died from the Spanish flu? 675,000. We studied the dots but never learned to connect them. If our text books gave any credence to the researchers who suggested that the spread of the Spanish flu was due to the war, or that the course of the war and the peace treaties that ensued were a result of the pandemic, I don’t remember. Why would I? If you knew the numbers, you could pass the test and get the grade.
Perhaps fearing more of the same, I never studied history in college. But I did study literature and philosophy, and through both windows I came to understand something the numbers I’d memorized in high school had failed to reveal: how one moment in time impacted the next, at the human level. April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land… and so forth.
My university studies whet my appetite. And when, as a young freelance writer, I was assigned jobs that required research, I found I was only too happy to dig for details—no matter the subject, and I’ve written about some strange ones (including the history of toilets) for some of my clients over the years. As for my own projects (always fiction back then), I stayed away from history at first, because I suffered from imposter syndrome. There was much too much I didn’t know.
But there was one thing that tormented me over time. In one of my undergrad classes we’d studied The Poetic Edda, a collection of poems that combine Norse mythology and Germanic heroic legends. They are the very same stories that, though coming from another source (namely an anonymously written German poem called the Nibelungenlied), inspired some of Tolkien’s work, and Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. If I had known then that Tolkien and Wagner (and a slew of others, it turns out) had already written about the material I read in the Eddas, I probably would never have ventured to do so myself. But I didn’t know, and I loved that material. And so I began to research, scrutinizing the “lays” in the Eddas as well as the history of the Germanic people during the reign of Attila the Hun to try to figure out why Attila was mentioned in legends. I found a place where the legendary and the historical seemed to intersect and went to town. The result was a novel called, in its first iteration, Gudrun’s Tapestry, and then The Last Wife of Attila the Hun when it was republished.
It took me a long time to write that book, for a number of reasons, one of which is a very nasty story having to do with a crashed computer and no backup files. But the length of time didn’t matter to me at all, because while the rest of my life was ebbing and flowing the way lives do, as long as there was more ahead to research, more ahead to write, I was in a state of bliss regarding my writing life.
I wanted to start a full-out historical novel as soon as I finished the partial one, but I needed the universe to point me toward that one historical moment that, like the material in The Poetic Edda, would have sufficient appeal. I needed, in other words, to fall in love, to be completely enthralled, spellbound, transported. While I waited for an epiphany, I wrote a memoir I’d been meaning to get to, another contemporary novel, a children’s book. I began to think it might never happen…and then…then…
I was hired by a local publisher to read some of their backlist books and write fresh descriptions of them for their website. One of the books (called White Gold) was a diary of an early 20th century rubber tapper working in the rainforests of South America, edited and annotated after the fact by an Amazon basin scholar. The book fascinated me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Around the same time I happened to watch a PBS special wherein a journalist traveled to the deep Ecuadorian rainforest to interview a tribal chief who was lamenting the fact that miners and drillers were destroying the land and waterways his people needed to survive. When the journalist asked the chief what “Northerners” could do to help protect the rainforests, the chief said we could “change the dream.” Intrigued by the phrase I turned to Google, which led me, eventually, to an organization that takes environmental/sustainability advocates into the rainforest to meet with indigenous people as a kind of cultural exchange in return for the legal support the indigenous people need to keep miners and drillers at bay. And so I went, into the deep rainforest, and the rest, as they say, is history, my history, for the next decade of my life. One novel about two Irish American brothers from Hoboken, New Jersey who go into the South American rainforest to become rubber tappers in the early 20th century became a trilogy, moving back and forth between Brazil and the New York metro area (which includes Hoboken) between the years 1908 and 1929. The trilogy required me to research all sorts of things I had gone through life without knowing much about. It required me to make a second trip to South America, to go to my first NY opera (and to listen to many others), to visit locations in NY that were previously speakeasies, to add Irish-isms into my word-bank, and—dare I say it—to become a man long enough to complete the last draft of the first book in the trilogy.
Now I’m working on projects with other writers while I wait to see if there is yet one more research-dependent historical fiction novel in my future. And I’m still mulling over the promise of that wonderful phrase: change the dream.
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Joan Schweighardt is the author of nine novels, two memoirs, two children’s books and various magazine articles, including work in Parabola Magazine. She is a regular contributor to Occhi Magazine, for which she interviews writers, artists and filmmakers. In addition to her own projects, she has worked as an editor and ghostwriter for private and corporate clients for more than 25 years. She also had her own independent publishing company from 1999 to 2005. Several of her titles won awards, including a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers,” a ForeWord Magazine “Best Fiction of the Year,” and a Borders “Top Ten Read to Me.” And she has agented books for other writers, with sales to St. Martin’s, Red Hen, Wesleyan University Press and more.
Her most recent work is The Rivers Trilogy—Before We Died, Gifts for the Dead and River Aria—which moves back and forth between the New York metro area and the South American rainforests from the years 1908 through 1929.
