Ask the Author: Emily Midorikawa
Answered Questions (3)
Emily Midorikawa
With two small children about the house, at the moment it's more of a case of carving out enough time to write rather than struggling with writer's block. However, I've had lots of past experiences of getting stuck and really struggling to move forward. Over the years, I've developed a few strategies for getting past this feeling. In less serious cases of getting stuck (when, for instance, it's just a short section of the book I'm working on that's causing me problems) I might simply try to push through it. I'll keep turning up at my desk at my usual writing time, keep my fingers close to the keys and keep thinking about the work. Often, if I stick to my routine I'll find that the feeling of being blocked starts to solve itself. When things are more serious than that, and if circumstances allow, I will switch to a different writing project for a while or work on research related to the book I am writing, which might well lead to me getting inspired in new ways. Other tactics include walking and making soup. Moving one foot forward then the other, or continuously stirring the pot, can be very effective for freeing the imagination. They work for me, anyway.
Emily Midorikawa
Having written two group biographies - A Secret Sisterhood (2017), co-written with Emma Claire Sweeney and Out of the Shadows (2021) - I am now working on a novel. It's set in the same period, the Victorian era, as my most recent non-fiction book and has already involved a great deal of historical research. Although I could have taken a different approach, I felt that my subject, which is based on real events, was better suited to fiction this time round. I'm enjoying the challenge of writing in a different way and am looking forward to discovering where this story takes me.
Emily Midorikawa
Out of the Shadows is a group biography about six remarkable nineteenth-century women whose supposed ability to contact the dead brought them fame, fortune and astonishing levels of social and political influence. Funnily enough, though, the first spark of the idea came when I was researching my previous book, A Secret Sisterhood - another group biography, this time about female literary friendship. It was while I was poring over a collection of letters from Harriet Beecher Stowe to her pen-friend George Eliot that I came upon a reference to Kate Fox, a famous Victorian spirit medium. Stowe was a great believer in the power of spirit mediums while Eliot was much more sceptical. Although my way of thinking was closer to Eliot's than Stowe's, I was intrigued by Stowe's description of Fox and so I decided to find out more about this young woman. Researching Fox led me to other women of the period with apparently similar talents. I was fascinated to learn where these 'gifts' could take them: among the women that I'd eventually write about in Out of the Shadows are a hugely popular orator, a much celebrated legal campaigner and America's first female presidential candidate. Once I realised how rich their stories were, and the extent to which they had often been forgotten, I knew I had to write a book about these women.
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