Highlighting True Stories Through Historical Fiction:

Interview With Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Barely South Review: The budding author often learns through reading work by other writers. She gathers pieces aptly called style, voice, plot, pace, genre, and characters to state a few. Which authors helped you discover your writerly pieces?

Dolen: I was just reading a novel by Daniel Black. It’s called Isaac’s Song and it’s coming out in January. In the novel, a budding writer is talking to his therapist and he mentions that there’s a difference between writing and storytelling. He says to her, I’m a writer, right? But as the book progresses, we learn that Isaac is both writer and storyteller. For me, some of those fictional elements that you named are the writing elements. You can learn them from any good writer. On my journey as a writer, I was more interested in writers within the great storytelling tradition. I’m a child of the 80s, so I was cutting my writing teeth on writers such as Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Tina McElroy Ansa, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Clair. I’m really interested in the oral tradition that surfaces within the novel. How do you captivate readers so that they don’t want to put the book down? Or, in the oral tradition of the South where I’m from, we’d be sitting on the porch and somebody would be telling a story and you wouldn’t want to go in the house for anything because you might miss something.

Your first novel was Wench, a story about four young, enslaved women of color who accompany their white masters from the South to a resort in the free state of Ohio. As most writers understand, breaking through isn’t easy. How did you overcome the hurdles to get Wench published?

I had some early interest, but it took ten years. I haven’t met a writer who persisted for a decade and didn’t eventually get a contract. If you are writing, reading, and giving the process time, you’ll get a book contract. Since I’ve been in the book business, I’ve met many editors and agents who are looking for good, quality material. Traditional publishing has its biases. It’s more difficult for writers of color to navigate, no question. But cream rises to the top. As my parents and grandparents used to say, you have to work twice as hard to get half as far. We have to work harder to get those contracts because we just don’t have the same number of opportunities. But if the writer is giving the process time, improving their craft, and listening to feedback, eventually they’ll get there.

In Wench, the slaves spend a lot of time in the free state of Ohio. They often aren’t chained, and their masters go fish or hunt. Free, colored folks are a prevalent and pleasant sight. With that being said, some readers might wonder why these characters don’t run away and gain their freedom. Eventually, some of these characters, like Mawu, does take a chance at freedom. How did you develop your enslaved characters’ motivations, knowing freedom is likely a must for them?

When I was in graduate school, I would always go by my professor’s office and ask a difficult question about a novel assigned in class. I was always the reader that asked really hard questions of the literature and of the history. In some ways, I was fearless in my questioning. When it comes to thinking about character motivation, I’m often looking at unpopular or uncommon reasons for it. In Wench, I looked into those grey areas of why women stayed with those men. There have been reductive answers to that question, but was more complicated than what we had given women credit for. Those women had different reasons for why they stayed. I wanted the reader to consider them. In that historical period, girls were sometimes groomed into these relationships. In Wench, there are scenes of the enslaver grooming Lizzie as a young girl. Being an unpopular or uncomfortable take never mattered to me. In those times, really dark secrets of American History happened, even if they weren’t documented.

Lizzie is a complex protagonist with clear goals. In hopes of attaining freedom for her children, she betrays Mawu, an enslaved, black woman whom she comes to admire. In your earlier drafts of Wench, did you know Lizzie would tell her master about Mawu’s plan to escape? Or did that come later in revision?

I tried to stay true to Lizzie’s character. Once I understand who my characters are as people, I can understand what actions they might take. Lizzie was groomed by Drayle. In the beginning of Wench, she is blindly loyal to him. So, she would have told him about Mawu’s plan. Over the course of the novel, she gains a new awareness of what her loyalty cost her. Some readers didn’t like the ending of Wench, but the ending fit Lizzie. As historical fiction writers, it’s easy to create characters who are too contemporary. If you really consider the thoughts and beliefs of people back then, they made decisions based on the information available at that time.

In Take My Hand, you switch between the past and present life of Civil Townsend. Though, it isn’t something you do in every chapter. In your first draft, did you use this structure or did you discover it later?

At first, I didn’t have the dual timeline. I had a reflective narrator. I did always have an older Civil, but she was just rearing her head occasionally. And then one of my friends, the writer, Sarah Braunstein, read a draft of it and said, I really like when the older Civil pops up in the narrative. You should do that more often. I checked where I was doing that, because I really wasn’t aware when the older, wiser Civil reflected on what happened in her past. One day, I pulled the older Civil out and wrote the first chapter where she’s telling the story to her daughter. I liked that frame because I dedicated the book to my daughters. And it’s a book I want young women to read. Civil’s daughter, Anne, is really a stand-in for whoever may read the book in the future. Essentially, I’m taking the Relf sisters’ story and passing it to the next generation.

It can get pretty lonely as a minority writer. What advice would you give to a young, minority writer for finding and growing a literary community? How did you create yours if you have one?

When I was a young writer, I didn’t have the internet. So, I was even lonelier. I’m originally from Memphis. I didn’t know any writers. I thought all writers were dead. I was an avid reader, but I’d never met a writer. I’d never gone to a book signing. Nowadays, young writers have been to plenty of book signings and met plenty of writers. Now, creating a literary community can happen online. You can form a book club or writing group. The internet allows anyone, anywhere to be a part of a writing community. It’s a real gift for a person who lives in a small town and doesn’t know anybody, but writing also requires going inward. Writing is a solitary activity. That’s just the truth of it. In James Baldwin’s essay, “The Creative Process”, he says the artist must cultivate, the state of being alone.

What is your favorite craft book or essay? How did it influence your development as a writer?

Oh, there are so many. The craft book I continue to keep on my desk is The Art Of Sentences by Virginia Tufte. I shared it with my students, and they said, Dolen, we don’t understand that book. It’s so difficult. That’s because it’s a book you can study for two decades. A painter has to learn their medium. If they are an oil painter, they must learn their oils. If it’s watercolors, they must learn watercolors. They have to learn blending techniques. The same goes for a fiction writer. That means studying the great master fiction writers, whether it be Edward P. Jones or Toni Morrison or Philip Roth or Colson Whitehead. They are masters of the sentence. The Art Of Sentences is based within the literary world and provides the most advanced sentence constructions I’ve seen in a craft book. I’ve been studying it for a decade, and I’m still learning something new. Unless you can write a sentence, you can’t really take your craft to the next level.

What do you struggle with the most when crafting stories?

I’m always working on my craft, aware of my strengths and weaknesses. For example, I needed to improve my scene work. I was avoiding writing scenes because at the time, I didn’t feel confident writing scenes, so I spent two years studying plays and reading craft book chapters on scenes. I was searching for answers to the question, what does a scene need in order to be successful? And now, I feel stronger about writing scenes. Then, I moved on to the next thing. Take My Hand was the first novel I wrote in first person, which I’m still working on. I’m still learning how to control it. But if you ask me the same question next year, I might be focused on something else.

What do you wish you were asked about your work?

Not a specific question. I wish people understood the difficulty of writing black historical fiction. A lot of silences are present within the archives, which is even challenging for historians to process. The emotional and imaginative demands of the genre are vast. It’s hardwork imagining yourself in these historical situations. And not everybody can do it. Sometimes, I’m not even sure I can do it for the next book.