Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 51

What is Common Knowledge?

I’ve been thinking about the question of “common knowledge” — things that everyone is supposed to know — a little this week, partly because of the “Friends” clip above and partly because I had another crack at the Jeopardy! Online Contestant test, which is always good for revealing how much “common knowledge” I actually don’t know.

Awhile back the whole ten seasons of “Friends” appeared on Netflix, and both our teenagers watched the series, which meant a lot of blasts from the past for me and Jason if we were in the room at the time. We relived not only the highs and lows of what was (in its early years) an extremely funny sitcom, but also the years of our own lives that unrolled while we watched that show (we dated, married, bought our house and had both our kids while Friends was on air, so we kind of grew into adulthood along with the characters).

One of the things that really struck me in re-watching the show was how aggressively anti-intellectual all the characters (except Ross, who has a PhD in Paleontology) are. Four of them (Ross, Chandler, Monica and Rachel) apparently have college degrees, but the things they don’t know, and the pride they take in not knowing those things, is sometimes staggering. This is exemplified in the clip above, where the three women make fun of Joey for not knowing who “we” (i.e. the US) fought in World War One, and then realize that they don’t know either, but think maybe it was Mexico.

This is jaw-droppingly ignorant, and I’m inclined to put it down to typical sitcom exaggeration — making characters look dumber than anyone could possibly be, for the sake of getting a laugh. But then I reflected a little more and thought, maybe it only seems staggeringly stupid to me because I have a history degree, teach history, and am a history geek. Maybe the question of who fought who in WWI is not actually general knowledge for most educated people? And that (along with trying the Jeopardy quiz) made me think — what’s actually included in “common knowledge”? What can most educated people be expected to know?

I would think that “Who did we fight in WWI?” would be a general-knowledge level question that most people can answer, while, “What were the terms of the Treaty of Versailles?” is a specialized-knowledge question that I’d expect only someone with a strong background in history to be able to answer (I would hope that my World History students could answer it on the days before and after the final exam, but I know most of them will forget it within a week).

I wondered, what about my “general knowledge” in areas I’m not particularly strong in? Science, for example. I studied Biology and Chem in high school and got good grades, did first-year Biology in university, and haven’t touched a science subject since then. I know that I have forgotten a lot of things I learned in those courses.

One of the Jeopardy Online questions was “Na is the symbol for this element,” which I knew immediately (sodium). But another (from a different night when I didn’t take the test) was “Generally this metal has to be at -37.93 degrees Farenheit to become a solid” and I would not have gotten that answer (mercury) within the allotted 15 seconds. I might have figured it out given more time, by asking myself, “Aren’t all metals solid anyway? What metal do we commonly see in a liquid state?” but I definitely would not have gotten there in 15 seconds.

Is that “common knowledge”? By definition the people who get on to Jeopardy! (and trivia buffs in general) have to have a knowledge base that’s at least a bit broader and deeper than the general population. But they don’t ask expert-level questions on Jeopardy — that is, not the kind of questions you’d have to answer if you were getting a degree in a subject.

So what all this thinking has taught me is — I don’t actually know what constitutes “General Knowledge” or “Common Knowledge.” I’d hate to think that I’m looking down on people, like Monica, Rachel, Joey and Phoebe, for not knowing things that seem obvious to me, if those things really aren’t common knowledge. (I don’t actually mind looking down on sitcom characters, but I’d hate to transfer that snobbery to real people). At the same time, I’d like to think that I know enough things, outside my own area of expertise, to avoid looking stupid about things like Math and Science, but I’m not really sure I do.

So I put it out to you, blogosphere and social media friends! What do YOU consider general knowledge, or common knowledge? Do YOU know who your country fought in World War One, without being a hardcore history junkie? How much do you know about subjects outside your own area of expertise? And just how dumb ARE the characters on Friends?

Shelf Esteem: That’s YOUR Point of View!

Happy 15th Birthday Emma!

Richard III: A Reburial Message

As a regular-person history buff who has  read about the life and followed the weird afterlife of England’s King Richard III with some interest, I was disappointed to read a recent Ship of Fools Mystery Worshipper report about his re-interment service. As we all know, the ceremony was full of pomp and circumstance, people in great outfits, and a lovely poem written by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and enhanced by the mellifluous voice and eerie alien beauty of Benedict Cumberbatch.

(That’s a bit off-topic, but I’m not going to miss an opportunity to post a Cumbervideo). Sadly, the actual sermon delivered by the officiating clergyperson was, according to the Mystery Worshipper at least, rambling and insipid. If true (I haven’t actually listened to the sermon myself) I think that’s a shame. I would have no trouble coming up with a homily that’s relevant to the story of Richard III, and I don’t know why nobody asked me. Other than me not being a Church of England clergyperson, I guess. Anyway, since they didn’t ask me, here’s the sermon I would have preached for the re-interment of Richard III, had I been given a shot.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to re-bury the mortal remains of Richard of York, Duke of Gloucester and King of England, remembered by most people for the last five hundred years as a hunchbacked usurper whose physical disfigurement mirrored his misshapen soul, and whose crimes culminated in the brutal murder of his two young nephews, the Princes in the Tower, the elder of whom ought to have reigned as King Edward V.

Why, then, have we laid on the pomp and circumstance to re-bury this notorious villain? Largely because of the historical significance of the discovery of his bones — it is, after all, a piece of our past, whether or not it is one we are happy to claim. And also, perhaps, because both scholarly and popular reflection in the last century has caused us to re-examine Richard’s legacy, to at least entertain the possibility that he might have been a good king maligned by history, accused of a heinous crime he never committed.

Most of the scorn heaped on Richard III after his death is due to Shakespeare’s undeniably excellent play Richard III. There is no doubt that Shakespeare’s Richard is a brilliantly evil villain. There is plenty of doubt about whether that character accurately represents the historical character whose name he shares. What’s not in doubt is that Shakespeare did very well off the royal patronage of Queen Elizabeth I, granddaughter of the man who defeated Richard in battle and took his crown. That man, Henry Tudor, had good reason to encourage the belief that Richard was a usurper and a murderer, as did his Tudor descendants. Shakespeare’s Richard III is a masterful piece of drama — but it’s also a masterful piece of political propaganda, one that has shaped our interpretation of history for centuries.

Shakespeare knew the power of words to make or break a memory. In one of his most famous sonnets he tells the object of his admiration that while the beauty of a summer’s day, and the darling buds of May, will all fade with time, his beloved’s beauty will never fade — it will last eternally. Why? Because, as the closing couplet assures us,

As long as men can breathe, or eyes can see

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

What is “this,” the magical potion that guarantees immortality? The poem. Shakespeare’s words. We know very little about the person for whom Shakespeare wrote the poem — not even, some might suggest, that person’s gender — but we know she (or he) was beautiful to Shakespeare, because Shakespeare wrote it down. When a gifted writer writes that you are beautiful, those words endure, inscribing the memory of your beauty in literary history. Likewise, if a gifted writer writes that you are hunchbacked villain, misshapen both in body and soul, that version of you becomes part of our historical memory.

Shakespeare, who probably had a larger part than anyone in destroying Richard’s historical reputation, knew the power of reputation. He knew how words can shape reality, including the way we see a person. In Othello, he has another of his great villains, Iago, say:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls.

Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;

‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him,

And makes me poor indeed.

Even Scripture appears to affirm the importance of reputation: Proverbs 22, verse 1 assures us that “A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold.”

But good name, and the esteem of others, are fickle, changeable things, as the man we are re-committing to the earth here today could surely tell us. Richard III seems, according to many contemporary accounts, to have been well-liked and trusted in his own time — certainly by many of those he ruled. A historian writing in his own time described him as “a good lord” with “a great heart.” Richard’s reputation was unmade by the words of men — mostly those who lived long after his death. Such rehabilitation of his memory as has gone on in the last century has also been done by the words of men — and of women (if you only know Shakespeare’s version of Richard, and want to explore the other side of the story, read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time and Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour). Words can make or destroy a person’s reputation — but the words others speak about us reflect imperfectly, if at all, who we really are. Reputations rise or fall like royal houses and fashion trends. What remains? What is reliable?

Scripture — at least, the proverb we read a moment ago — seems to suggest that reputation matters. And it does — in this life, there’s no denying that people judge you by what others say about you, and what others say about you is at least partially influenced by what you do. Those who urge us to live lives beyond reproach are giving at least partly good advice, difficult advice though it is to follow in this tell-age age of social media. But the Scriptures also reveal that there is something deeper than reputation, truer than what others can see in our Facebook feed. God Himself expresses this deeper truth to the prophet Samuel when Samuel was about to anoint David’s handsome, strapping older brother as the next king of Israel. In that case of royal succession, which was to lead to conflicts every bit as bitter as the Wars of the Roses, the prophet received a divine message:

“But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

Due to the discovery and authentication of his remains, we know a good deal more about Richard III’s appearance and the height of his stature — both issues hotly debated by scholars — than we did when we had only the words of historians to go on. But no archeological dig can reveal the state of the man’s heart. In all likelihood, Richard was a man like most of us — a mixture of good and bad, loved by his friends and hated by his enemies. He may or may not have ordered the murder of his nephews, but he certainly did, as did every medieval autocrat, deeds that would horrify a modern citizen of a democratic society. Reputation changes. Reputation, and the facts behind it, may be subject to debate. But as we commit Richard’s mortal remains to the soil in a ceremony far more grand than was granted him by his victorious enemy over 500 years ago, we recognize that his soul, like all our souls, can be committed only to God. God is the only true Judge, the only one who truly knows the secrets over which both historians and gossips love to speculate.

In the end, Richard’s eternal fate, like yours and mine, does not rest on what people say, or what scholars or novelists write. Nor does it rest even on the deeds he did, anymore than on the deeds we do. Scripture assures us that “by grace are we saved, through faith, and that not of [ourselves]; it is the gift of God.” The presence of God’s saving grace in a life is something that those around us may never see, something that may never be inscribed in the historical record. It is known only to the Judge before whom Richard III, and you, and I, will at last stand, in a light both more clear and infinitely more loving than that which falls across the pages of history.

Lost in a Good Book. Or Not.

I love this gif of Belle from Beauty and the Beast, which showed up on my Tumblr under the headline: “When I’m really into a book and oblivious to everything else.” It made me think of two things, which will be the two subjects of this blog post, and those are:

1) There’s more than one way to be an avid reader, and

2) Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it?

First things first.

There’s more than one way to be an avid reader.

People often talk about being “lost in a book” to the degree that they’re oblivious to the world around them, which to me sometimes gives the impression that if you’re not absorbed in reading to the degree that your house could be bombed and you’d fail to glance up from the page, you’re not a truly dedicated reader.

True confession: I have never been this kind of reader. I love books; I love to read, but I don’t get “lost” in books in this way. When I’m reading, I’m easily distracted by anything else that happens in the room or even in the next room. There are a lot of situations where I can’t and won’t read: I can’t read in a car or any moving vehicle; I find it hard to read outdoors unless conditions are absolutely perfect because I’m easily distracted by uncomfortable seating, wind, bugs, or sunlight striking the page at the wrong angle. Unlike Belle in this scene, I also cannot read while walking — that level of concentration on a book would be impossible for me. (In fact, it’s impossible for almost everyone who isn’t a cartoon character. In real life you very rarely see people reading while walking, which seems obvious, until you get to my point #2).

But that’s OK. It’s still pretty clear, if you look at how much I read and how much I love it, that I am a Compulsive Overreader. Just like I said in my last video that you don’t have to read the same books everyone else thinks are great if they’re not for you, you also don’t have to read in the same way that someone else reads, or someone else says you should read. Being oblivious to the world is not a prerequisite for being an avid reader.

Thinking about this reminds me of a funny story, though it’s not nearly as funny as some people think it is …

Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it?

As almost everyone knows by now, what we think we remember may not be what actually happened. Two people can have different memories of the exact same event. Memories can be conflated and changed as a story gets retold over time.

One day when I was about eleven or twelve, I was at summer camp. I was always awkward and introverted at summer camp — introverted in my special, fun way where I get to sound really loudmouthed and confident while actually not feeling comfortable with anyone. And I wasn’t a good swimmer and I couldn’t water-ski at all, so the waterfront recreation time at camp was particularly tortuous for me. On this particular day I was amusing myself, very mildly, by trying to jump from one rock to another in the shallow water near the dock. Predictably, since my athletic skills were as poor as my social skills, I soon slipped and fell, fully clothed, into the water, eliciting some unkind laughter and a little sympathy as I dragged my sodden self back up to my cabin to change.

That evening my parents came up for a visit. They were chatting with the camp director, who was a friend of my parents and had two daughters a bit older than me who were (presumably, though I don’t specifically remember them there) also at camp at the time. I told my folks about falling in the pond, and the camp director said in this jolly adult-joshing-kids sort of way, “Knowing Trudy, I would have expected she had her nose in a book and just walked right off the edge of the wharf.” And everyone had a good laugh (except me, because kids, especially painfully shy ones, almost never find it funny when adults make those kind of jokes about them, but whatever. I’ve probably done it myself to a kid without realizing it).

Incident overwith and mostly forgotten. Fast-forward nearly ten years. I am a young adult in my first teaching job, and my principal is the very same guy who was camp director when I was 12. He and his wife invite me to a meal at their house along with a bunch of other new staff members, a sort of getting-to-know-you thing. And in the process of getting to know all these new people, the principal of course mentions that he knows my family and knew me when I was a kid, and tells everyone this funny story about how when I was a kid, I was such a bookworm that one day at camp I was walking along by the pond, nose in a book, and was so absorbed in what I was reading that I didn’t notice and walked right off the end of the wharf!

Under cover of the uproarious laughter that followed, I said quietly to the one person there I considered a friend, “Isn’t that a great story? So great, I almost wish it had really happened.”

It was sort of amazing — his off-the-cuff joke about how it could have happened had somehow morphed into a memory that it actually had happened that way. He was so sure of his story I’d almost have doubted my own memory of the event, if I hadn’t known myself well enough to know that I had never, and would never, be able to attempt to (or even want to) read and walk at the same time.

I never corrected him though — and I have actually had other members of his family repeat the same story to and about me in the years since, and I never say anything (well, I guess I’m saying it now, but correcting those specific people is not really the point here). He loved the story — they all did — and to them it said something essential about their understanding of me: that I was such an avid reader that I could be engrossed in a book to the point of not noticing I was walking off a wharf. I didn’t want to get into an argument about my memory of an event that had happened to me versus their memory of an event they hadn’t even witnessed (though in later years they were sure they had).

I knew it hadn’t happened like that; furthermore, I knew it couldn’t  have happened like that, because I’ve never been that absorbed in a book in my life, and (as noted above) I have never tried to walk while reading, much less on a wharf leading into a pond. (Full disclosure: I did once run straight into a concrete telephone pole, but I wasn’t reading then either; I had turned my head to talk to the person I was running with).

I am an avid (though not deeply absorbed) reader; I am also clumsy and accident-prone. It’s kind of natural that a person who knows me a little bit, but not very well, would combine those two qualities into a funny story and eventually come to believe they saw it happen, even though it never did.

But it does make me very suspicious of memory. It’s a bit like all those old folks in England who swear they heard Churchill giving his “We shall fight them on the beaches…” speech on the radio during World War Two, when in fact the speech was given in Parliament and never recorded or broadcast during the war years. Things like this remind me that just because I think I remember hearing or seeing something, I can’t always trust my own memory of events, nor anyone else’s. Memories are just as much created as recorded and recalled — which is a bit scary, actually.

Shelf Esteem: No Book for You!

I’d love to hear some comments on this one when people have watched the video. Are there books you just WON’T read? Why or why not?

Shelf Esteem: “When I was your age, TV was called books!”

Bonus points if you recognize where the title of this video comes from. One of the rare instances where a screen adaptation was better than the book.

I have no idea what you’re going to do with those bonus points though.

Fifty: My Manifesto

In case you missed the declaration of what really ought to be a national observance, I’m turning fifty this year.

This still seems a little incredible to me, despite the fact that I’ve accumulated several years of doing things (been married 20 years, started teaching 29 years ago, have a 17-year-old and an almost-fifteen-year-old, lived in my house for 20 years). These things should add up to me being 50, but I can’t quite wrap my mind around the fact that I’m not still a teenager myself. I look at Chris and think, “That’s my son? How can he be seventeen? I was just seventeen, like, two weeks ago!”

Despite this, I’m not traumatized by turning 50. On the one hand it feels incredible and on the other hand it feels perfectly natural, like it’s exactly the thing you should be doing after having been alive for 49 years. Why would people try to resist such a natural process?

While turning 50 is not something to be fought or resisted, it does seem like a natural occasion for thought and reflection. I could have posted this in January at the turn of the year, or I could wait till September and post it when my actual birthday rolls around … but instead, I’m posting it on this cold February day, because it’s what’s on my mind today.

Two events, more than any others, have led to the attitude I have today as enter the year of my fiftieth birthday. Those are the deaths of my friend Jamie in 2011 and my friend Linda in 2013.

Jamie was in his early 40s when he died; Linda had just turned 50. Neither of them ever had the luxury of getting to whine and moan about middle age and getting older. Both of them left partners they loved, young children they had hoped to raise to maturity, and dreams they still wanted to fulfill. Neither of them got to experience their 50s, not to mention their 60s, 70s, or 80s. They both died of cancer: one of a type that we knew from the start had a bad prognosis, the other from a type that was supposed to be easily treatable. Because life is just so brutally unpredictable and bloody unfair.

Terrible things happen to lovely people, and I don’t pretend to know why. I do know that I will not turn 50 without thinking of Jamie and of Linda, and of the things they never got to do, see and experience.

I know that in my 50s I will probably lose more friends of my own generation, and I will be angry all over again at the unfairness of it.

I know there’s a chance I could be one of the people who dies in my 50s, because, see above about life being unfair and unpredictable.

I can’t promise that I will never complain about gray hair, aching joints, wrinkles, menopause or any of the other inconveniences I’m sure I will encounter in my 50s. But I can promise you that every time I do complain, I will stop myself short and be grateful I am getting the chance to experience those things.

I can’t promise that I will live every moment of my 50s “to the fullest.” I will certainly try; I try to live my life that way anyway, but I’m keenly aware that there will be days when the home/work/home routine is a boring slog, and I’m frustrated, and I may fall into bed without expressing deep gratitude for the wonder of life. But I do promise that at least once a week I will say to God and the Universe — “This is amazing! Thank you for the fact that I’m still here to experience it all!”

I can’t promise to always be fearless, because there are things worth being afraid of. But I promise to try to let fear hold me back less, to take more risks and try more things, even if they involve terrifying activities like picking up the phone to talk to people. There are things I want to get done in the year I turn 50, and in the years that follow, that will require moderate doses of courage. I don’t want to leave those things undone, because I am so thankful I am still here to do them. So I will try to be brave, when I need to be brave.

I can’t promise that I will always eat right, exercise enough, and make all the healthy choices. But I do want to honour the memory of my friends whose lives were too short by taking the best care I can of this body that, amazingly, still works really really well. I won’t succumb to the illusion that if I do all the right things, I can guarantee my own safety, because I know how wrong that is. But I also won’t throw my hands up in despair and say, “Oh well, I’m getting old, might as well slide downhill.” Unless I am on a toboggan or at the top of a waterslide, in which case I will certainly surrender to the urge to slide downhill.

I will continue going on toboggans and waterslides.

To be honest: I am excited that (if all goes well for the next seven months) I will get to turn 50. I recognize that a lot of the reason I’m so sanguine about this milestone is that I have a lot of the things in my life that I wanted to have when I turned 50: good health, a husband who is my best friend and makes me laugh; two great kids who haven’t gotten into any major trouble so far; a job I thoroughly enjoy. I recognize that a lot of people’s sadness and frustration over reaching midlife stems from the fact that they didn’t get things they desperately wanted. I promise to try to remember that, to be compassionate and less judgemental, when I hear people express fear or regret about turning 50.

Because I lost two dear friends far too soon, I don’t want to take for granted the many friends I still have. I want to show them how grateful I am for their presence in my life.

Mostly, for my fiftieth year and beyond, I want to do what I always try to do anyway: to be present. To be here now.

Because I’m so, so grateful that I am here now.

Getting it Wrong … or Right

I’m on record as loving Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall and the sequel Bring up the Bodies, and from what I’ve managed to see of the BBC miniseries based on the novels (it’s not been aired on this side of the Atlantic yet, so don’t ask, don’t tell), I’m loving that as well. The series has a brilliant script that echoes a lot of Mantel’s text, and inspired acting and directing that manages to bring to life a novel where so much happens inside the head of the main character, Thomas Cromwell. On screen, you can’t hear what Cromwell is thinking as you can in Mantel’s book, but you can certainly read a lot of it in Mark Rylance’s eyes and every tilt of his head.

What made the original novel great, and the reason I loved it, is the same reason some people hate it — it took a character who has generally been perceived as one of the villains of the Tudor piece, Henry VIII’s sometime right-hand-man Cromwell, and made him the hero. Not the “hero” in the sense that the book ever tried to deny or whitewash the less-than-savoury things Cromwell did in his king’s service. Rather, because the story is told from Cromwell’s point of view, with access to his thoughts and his private life, we see his own reasons and justification for the things he does (including his sincerely held Protestant faith). It’s a pretty certain bet that if Cromwell had written an account of his own life, he would have come across as heroic and worthy of sympathy: we are all, after all, the heroes of our own stories. I love it when a writer of historical fiction is able to get us into the head of a character we think we “know” through history and tell the story in a different way.

The first work of historical fiction I ever read and loved as an adult was Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour, an epic, sprawling re-imagining of the story of Richard III, another character who is usually cast as one of the villains of English history. With Richard in Sunne, as with Cromwell in Wolf Hall, we see the story from the point of view of the character so frequently maligned, and a different interpretation is placed on events as we see them through his eyes.

Since then, I’ve read other novels set during the Wars of the Roses which took the more traditional view of Richard as the ruthless, ambitious villain, and been intrigued to see how the exact same historical event, well-documented in the sources, can be interpreted in a different light depending on how you view the motives of those involved. Another great example of this: I don’t always love Philippa Gregory’s novels, but what she did with Margaret Beaufort in The Red Queen worked brilliantly for me, humanizing a character who nearly always comes across as despicable.

Villain or hero is, after all, all in the interpretation. Historians can argue, and do argue, for generations about the motives behind a particular act (who really killed the Princes in the Tower? Why did Cromwell rise and then fall so swiftly in Henry’s favour?) but only a novelist can help us re-image the story as it might have looked to the people living through it.

This is why, as both a reader and writer of historical fiction, I roll my eyes — vigorously — at articles like this one, which asserts that Wolf Hall’s depiction of the (literally) sainted Thomas More is “wrong.” Is it wrong, or is it just a different perspective, to show a generally-admired historical character in an unpleasant light? The message that comes across clearly in Wolf Hall (even more clearly in the book, where there’s more time to develop it than in the miniseries) is not some kind of universal statement about what kind of man More was — it’s that Thomas Cromwell really, really disliked More, a dislike that was religious, political and also personal. So if Cromwell is telling the story, then of course More is going to come off as kind of a prick.

We see this all the time in our present-day lives: do you know a single person, famous or obscure, who is either universally loved or hated? Probably not. That jerk in your office who spouts obnoxious comments may have a wife and kids who love him and friends who think he’s hilarious, while that saintly old lady at church may have been driving her daughter-in-law to drink for years. We are all complex and multilayered, and different people see us differently. Guaranteed there’s at least one person in my life who thinks I’m a saint and a few who think I’m a jerk — and lots in between. And nobody, except for me, ever knows what I’m thinking or what my motive is behind anything I do.

Now, compound that complexity with the fact that hundreds of years have passed, all these people are long dead, and all we have left are (sometimes sketchy and contradictory) records of things they did, and in some cases things they said or wrote. Of course there are different possible interpretations of every historical character. The job of the historical fiction writer, when writing about well-known historical characters, is to find a fresh and interesting way to tell the story, not to unthinkingly rehash the prejudices of the last five hundred years. This is what Mantel did, and did brilliantly, in Wolf Hall. You may not, of course, agree with an author’s assessment of a historical character, but saying “I don’t agree with the conclusions she drew from the historical record” is a much more nuanced statement than “She got that wrong!”

This is not, by the way, the same thing as a historical fiction writer changing or misrepresenting known facts. I’m on record as saying (though not all writers would agree) that a writer should not include anything in a story that contradicts well-documented fact. But this is different from re-interpreting the facts in light of the way the writer has imagined the historical character’s personality and motives. To use an example much closer to home than anything Tudor, it doesn’t bother me in the least that in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Wayne Johnson images motives, private thoughts and even a fictional lifelong frenemy for Joey Smallwood that plays around with the way many of us in Newfoundland have traditionally imagined our Father of Confederation. But it drives me insane that he sets an important scene on Harbour Drive in St. John’s in 1916 — when the street that is now Harbour Drive would have been well under water for another fifty years after that.

My personal creed for historical fiction, whether I’m reading it or writing it is: you work with the facts as given. Richard III had his nephews declared illegitimate and took the throne for himself. Nobody can deny that. But did he do that because of naked ambition or a genuine conviction that his kingship would be better for England — or a messy combination of both? Nobody knows, but the writer of historical fiction can imagine, and her imagined version cannot be “wrong.” Thomas Cromwell engineered both the rise of Anne Boleyn to the throne, and her fall from grace a few short years later. Again, those are the facts. But what Cromwell may have thought of Anne herself, or of Henry on whose orders he made her rise and fall — no historical record can tell us that. Only a novelist can. And she has. And, like it or dislike it — you’re free to do either — I don’t think you can say it’s wrong.

Unless, of course, I’m wrong.

Happy Seventeenth!

Apparently, someone in my house is now in their LATE TEENS. Love you Chris — it’s been a great journey together so far. If anyone wants to read the story of how it all started back in late years of last century (1998), click here.