NEW VOICES
photo credit: Ryan Armstrong
photo credit: Tiffany Conner
Castles, genealogical research, medical equipment, and museums provided inspiration for debut novelists Addison Armstrong, Jai Chakrabarti, M Shelly Conner, and Courtney Ellis.
M Shelly Conner photo credit: Kelly Gleason
Addison Armstrong
Jai Chakrabarti
Courtney Ellis
For Ellis, who began writing at a young age, and had developed an interest in history from listening to her grandfather’s stories about the Second World War, “It was so rewarding to collect these seeds— the manor, the war, the masks, the art—and be able to sew them into my debut novel.” The primary inspiration for M Shelly Conner’s everyman (Blackstone, 2021), she tells me, “was a culmination of my mother’s genealogical research into our family and my desire to teach that skill to my middle grade Chicago Public School students. I watched my mother wade through obituaries and family affects and noted her patience to wait for census records. I naively thought that because my students were younger that they had greater access to information for their closest relatives. But that wasn’t the case.” As Conner points out, “Of course, the biggest obstacle to uncovering Black ancestry lies in the institution of American slavery. After that, it’s a willful amnesia to forget known relatives who caused great harm.”
The initial spark of inspiration for Courtney Ellis’s At Summer’s End (Berkley, 2021) came to her during a trip to England, when she “visited Castle Howard in North Yorkshire,” she says. “I was struck by the vast grounds and the enormity of the manor and couldn’t help but imagine what sort of people lived in such a place—and what secrets they were keeping.”
Her novel opens as Eve Mann arrives in Ideal, Georgia, in 1972. Eve is looking for answers about the mother who died giving birth to her. A mother named Mercy. “A mother who for all of Eve’s twenty-two years has been a mystery and a quest. Eve’s search for her mother, and the father she never knew, is a mission to discover her identity, her name, her people, her home.”
At Summer’s End is set on a country estate in 1920s England when Alberta “Bertie” Preston, an ambitious young artist, accepts a commission from the Earl of Wakeford to spend a summer painting at his home.
Conner explains: “Events, places and time periods commune in everyman in ways that illustrate their relationships to each other and to the people that populate them. It lives in the sprawl of the Great Migration and as much in the stories that are retold as in the ones that were buried. Those of rebellious women. Black queer folk. Southerners. Northerners. Southern-northerners and Northernsoutherners.”
When Ellis embarked on creating her storyline and characters, “I was deep in research about the First World War for other projects,” she continues. “I felt an attraction to the disillusionment of the interwar period, and the fall of the British aristocracy, and thought it would be interesting to write a story that explored the smaller, personal devastation the war had on its veterans and their families. An opulent stately home seemed the perfect setting.” As Ellis discovered, “researching a world war can be a harrowing task,” she relates. “I hadn’t expected to become so emotional over the cases of strangers who lived a hundred years before. I found myself particularly moved by stories of early facial reconstruction surgery, and the prosthetic masks that were made for wounded soldiers by sculptors such as Anna Coleman Ladd and Francis Derwent Wood.” For those who had been injured, “these wearable works of art made returning to normal life easier for a soldier who had suffered disfigurement. This perhaps lesser-known facet of the war gave me the reclusive lord of my fictional manor: the Earl of Wakeford.” 4
Because she wanted her heroine, Bertie, to earn Wakeford’s hardwon trust, “I decided to make her an artist,” Ellis says. “Rather than be unsettled by the mask, Bertie sees it with creative eyes, appreciating the skill and artistry that went into making it. For her artistic style, I turned to contemporaries such as Laura Knight, Dorothea Sharp, and Sir John Lavery, who was an official artist of WWI. Lavery’s style heavily influenced what I wanted Bertie’s work to look like. One of his war pieces in particular inspired her most important portrait, which catches Wakeford’s eye and earns her the commission that incites her story.”
COLUMNS | Issue 98, November 2021
For Conner, “everyman is also the genealogy of myself and a desire to connect with greater entities of which I am part. Families. Communities. Society. This book was written over the course of my seven-year Ph.D. program and heavily revised for an additional five years afterwards. As I evolved, so too, did the characters and the story in ways that illustrate depth more than change; everyman and I settled into ourselves like a house grounding into its foundation.” Jai Chakrabarti was born in Kolkata, India, lives in Brooklyn, and is a technologist as well as a writer. The time he spent in Jerusalem played a key role in the creation of A Play for the End of the World (Knopf, 2021). Chakrabarti asked himself: “What is the role of art in wartime? This was a central question I grappled with as I wrote A Play for the End of the World, a novel that explores how art-making and storytelling changes the life of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. This question had come to me when my partner and I were living in
