An Interview with Ellen Notbohm

I had the pleasure of talking to Ellen Notbohm about her first novel The River by Starlight, published by She Writes Press.

from the author's website:

An internationally renowned author, Ellen Notbohm has written award-winning books on autism and her articles and columns on such diverse subjects as history, genealogy, baseball, writing and community affairs have appeared in major publications. Ellen is an avid genealogist, knitter, beachcomber, and thrift store hound who has never knowingly walked by a used bookstore without going in and dropping coin.

Set a hundred years ago and inspired by a mysterious ancestor in Ellen's family tree, The River by Starlight is the story of Annie whose postpartum psychosis ended her first marriage and separated her from her daughter. Her brother invites her to join him in Montana and Annie is eager for a new start.

She meets Adam who is drawn to her fiery strength and quick mind. They marry and settle down to farm, at first prospering but later hit by climate change. Mental health issues follow a series of losses, including miscarriages and the death of a child, resulting in Annie's institutionalization. Yet Annie rises again to cobble together a meaningful life.

The book is a wonderful read, with sympathetic, conflicted. characters, snappy dialogue, and a vivid Montana setting. Through Annie's life, the novel considers how women's health issues have been treated in a patriarchal society. (Read my full review here.)

Annie's love for Adam is represented by a marriage quilt she made for his eyes only. She creates an quilt that displays her independent mind and spirit. Because I am a quilter, I began by asking about the quilt.

Nancy:
The quilt Annie makes Adam is a symbol of their connection and shared life. Please talk about how the quilt came into the story.

Ellen:
This question goes right to the intersection between writing fiction and drawing from true story. You have lots of facts and lots of gaps. You have to listen for direction with your third ear, as I call it.

I don’t know how the quilt came into the story; it just did. Knowing so little about Annie when I decided to write her story, I read extensively about the places she lived and the times during which she lived in those places. Piecing that research together—like a quilt—with the insights and information I was gathering about her and Adam specifically, I began to construct their world.

The quilt grew out of that, and how it grew! It became a touchstone for so many things. A symbol of their intimacy, as Annie won’t let anyone other than Adam see the quilt. A stark representation of gender differences, as Annie and Adam view the quilt’s role in their lives differently, as it exerts a different kind of power over each of them. And ultimately, the quilt becomes a standard bearer for resilience and hope.

Annie’s quilt isn’t the only one in the book. We learn that as a young girl, Annie was dismayed by the traditional wedding quilt made for her sister by friends—the neutral colors and strict symmetry of the tree pattern defied what Annie already knew to be true of life’s uneven trajectory. Her own vibrant quilt would be her counterpoint to that.

Crazy quilts and other quilt patterns Annie dismissed
Quilts from Pentwater, Michigan residents

Later in the book she encounters a very old quilt which also carries a message she needs to hear but almost misses. We also learn that she made her brother a quilt, “no-nonsense patchwork of duck cloth, corduroy, and denim” heavy enough to “keep her in her place” when she uses it.

Nancy:
There are detailed descriptions of the fabrics Annie chooses which are correct to their time, and not all novelists who include quilts in their stories are aware of fabric and quilt history. Is Annie's quilt based on any historic quilts you have seen?  Did you research quilting in the early 1900s?

Ellen:
Yes. The fabrics and colors described are authentic to the day. The traditional patterns Annie rejected—Log Cabin, Bear Paw, Wedding Ring, Crazy Quilt—were also authentic to the period. Annie’s quilt, The River by Starlight, is free-form, which didn’t become popular until much later, perhaps the 1970s.

In fiction, the writer can explore beyond the confines of what is actual, to what is plausible. It felt plausible to me that Annie would have come up with her own design, depicting a moment that would define the rest of her life. In moving to Montana, she broke free of so many of the constrictive elements of her life up to that point, it made sense to me that the quilt she conceived for a wholly unexpected turn of events would be somewhat daring.

She also broke with tradition in buying all new fabric for her quilt. In her time and economic class, quilts were most often pieced from fabric scraps of previous projects—dresses, shirts, curtains, etc. In a passage that, alas, was lost to the editing process,

Annie makes a “decadent” decision:

“She remembers a blouse she made for church in Iowa, in the bottom drawer, never worn. Yellow with tiny wheat sprigs, ideal for the moon. But no, she decides, and taps a bolt of blazing chrome orange. No castoffs, no tailor samples, no dress scraps for this quilt. This will be a quilt without any ties to any past. All new fabric, it’s a decadent splurge, but for what better purpose?”

I thoroughly enjoyed the book Border to Border: Historic Quilts and Quiltmakers of Montana by Annie Hanshew.  It didn’t influence my writing about my Annie’s quilt, as I was already several years deep into the writing about it. But the cover of the book did inspire me to write a scene wherein, at the end of her life, Annie makes a quilt for her daughter as a wedding gift. That one too fell to the editor’s knife, alas. But it lives on in my heart, so who knows where it might show up?

Nancy:
I read that you are a genealogist and that the novel is based on a true story. I would love to know about the inspiration story and how you decided to write about it. Did the actual people 'come to life' in your mind's eye?

Ellen:
Genealogists are familiar with the “brick wall.” Every family has one—the person that no one will talk about. There’s usually an aura of disgrace or taboo hanging around that silence.

Annie was the person behind the brick wall in my family tree. I saw her as a woman and a mother and a person whose blood runs in the veins of my children, and I felt compelled to know her story. I had only one little crumb of information to go on, but I sent that crumb on countless goose chases until I finally broke through the brick wall.

The root of those generations of zipped lips—perinatal and postpartum mental illness in an age of extreme gender disparity and social stigma born of ignorance. It demanded that I tell Annie’s story. The actual people did come vividly to life, not so much in my mind’s eye as in my heart.

Nancy:
I also do genealogy and spent ten years researching a 1919 diary and have more pages of research than diary pages! I have wondered how to present the woman behind the diary. So I am interested in knowing more about your handling of the historical records that became your novel. How do you transform the “cold facts” found on a census or death certificate into a narrative or character?

Ellen:
The common thread in all historical records is that they were recorded by people, and in every era, people have been influenced in their thoughts and actions by the conditions of the moment and of the times in which they live.

The “cold facts” found on censuses or death certificate are frequently not as immutable as we may think—information is only as good as the person who gave it and the person who recorded it, and human fallibility is itself a cold fact. The person giving the information may not have the correct info, and the person recording it may be in a hurry, not feeling well, indifferent to accuracy, distracted by any the things that can distract us on the job.

In the case of older censuses, it wasn’t uncommon for family members or even neighbors to give information about individuals who weren’t at home when the census taker came around. That’s why you’ll find that census info on the same person over several decades of will show a variety of birthdates, birthplaces, spellings of names, immigration dates. Death certificates are also open to bias and error. The informant on a death certificate could be anyone from a close relative who either did or didn’t know the deceased well (children often didn’t know their parents’ origins), to a harried hospital or nursing home staffer who guessed at info or recorded hearsay. Records often contradict one another, so which one is the “cold fact”?

Historical documents are starting points, to which we must always search for context. It’s the context of the events of a life and how it shaped that person, not mere facts, that make a compelling story.

Of course, it’s nigh impossible to reconstruct the context of every event of an entire life. That’s where the author must decide where on the literary spectrum to take the story. I originally conceived Annie’s story as creative nonfiction. But the gaps and contradictions in the historical records shimmered with mirage-like questions of why?  and how? Unexpectedly, fiction became the format through which I could best explore those questions and tell her tale.

Nancy:
Your previous books were nonfiction. The River by Starlight has beautiful writing and delves into intense emotions. What were the challenges and joys of working in fiction?

Ellen:
My nonfiction writing wasn’t without deep emotion and engaging writing, so it was a kind of training ground, especially my history articles for Ancestry magazine, many of which sprang from my research for The River by Starlight.

An editor once groused, “I hate the fact that you hook me all the damn time with your heart-wrenching stuff.” The challenge for me in writing fiction about real people was, am I portraying the message they would have wanted? How do I reconcile that, in the name of literary license, some collateral characters based only loosely on real people may be nothing like those real people, for better or worse?

The joy came from venturing to places previously unimagined, whether in my six research trips across Montana, North Dakota and Alberta, or in the vivid places I went in flights of the mind and heart. The feelings of love, yearning, grief, fear, and hope that saturated my writing were of a different dimension than I’d ever experienced. It was scary and uplifting and staggering and wondrous—sometimes all in the same moment.

Nancy:
Because I am not familiar with your nonfiction books, or know much about the topics you cover, would you like to elucidate? Perhaps how, like River, you deal with misunderstood “differences”?

Ellen:
When you write a book, much of the reading world wants to deem you an expert on your subject matter. I’m no expert on postpartum mental illness, and I was no expert on autism when I wrote my four books based on what I’d learned in raising my son, books that struck a chord and have remained popular through the years.

I believe that connection comes from my having been able to write about a complex and emotionally charged human condition in a timeless and accessible manner, removes the fear and champions hope.

For that, I’m constantly fending off the label of “expert” in a subject for which I have no formal training. So I’ve redefined the label, just as I did for the labels society tried to apply to Annie and my son. They do share the experience of being misunderstood, and often judged, for their neurological differences.

What I do well—my true “expertise”—is to tell a story from perspectives not commonly considered and tell it in a way moves people to shift old, ingrained perspectives, sometimes incrementally, sometimes seismically. It starts conversations. It builds healthier relationships and leads to constructive actions. It can be expansive and thrilling. It’s a privilege that never fails to humble me.

Nancy:
Annie finds great comfort in Emily Dickinson's poems. And of course, Thoreau is quoted. Are they some of Ellen's favorite writers? Dickinson touches on so many things in her poems, from the beauty of nature, to passion, to despair. What poems do you think were Annie's favorites?

Ellen:
I have always loved Thoreau, so that was a piece of myself that I injected into the book.

Dickinson, on the other hand, was not one of my favorite poets, quite the opposite, in fact. I have no idea why she became such an important thread in the story, or why the particular poems excerpted in the book, presumably Annie’s favorites, came to me. It was another one of those things that I heard with my third ear. I didn’t question it or let my own opinion intrude on it. I’ll never know, but perhaps it was a gift to me from Annie, because I certainly came to a far better understanding and appreciation of Dickinson and her work than I had before. Reading Aife Murray’s Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language was both eye-opening and soul-opening.

*****

Quiltmaking In the Early 20th c. and Pictorial Quilts

At the time when Annie made her wedding quilt most quilters used traditional quilt block patterns. Crazy quilts had dominated the late 19th c but were on the wan by WWI.

Typical quilts of the early 19th c were pieced, formal, repetitive blocks placed side by side or separating by sashing. Below is a family heirloom quilt made by my husband's great-great-grandmother, typical of an early 20th c quilt.

Single Wedding Ring quilt, circa 1915, made by Harriet Scoville Nelson
Turkey red and white, machine sewn, tied.

Below is the popular Log Cabin block in a quilt top circa 1890-1915. The fabrics include mourning prints, indigo and cadet blues, a maroon diaper print, and madder brown. The light prints are shirtings in stripe and plaids.

circa 1900 Log Cabin quilt top

But there were a few 'mavericks' who, using applique or inventive use of piecing, created something of their own. These were typically Pictorial Quilts, some of which have become quite famous in the quilt history world.I'd like to share some of these extraordinary quilts.

This 1853 Farm Scene quilt in the Museum of American Folk Art was made by Sarah Ann Garvis of Pennsylvania. Family history told that Sarah made it at the time of her engagement. The background is chrome orange. Photo from American Quilts, A Sample of Quilts and Their Story by Jennifer Regan, Gallery Books, 1989.

1853 Farm Scene

The Iowa Farm Quilt by Marianna Hoffmeister, made in 1880, blends her life with the Rev. Hoffmeister with memories of New Orleans where they met. Note the palm trees and the night sky. Photo from American Quilts, Regan. Quilt from the Hennepin County Historical Society.

The Iowa Farm Quilt 

Bill Volkening has an amazing collection of American quilts. One he acquired is the pieced Pictorial Quilt with American Flag, unknown maker, Ohio, cottons, c. 1930, dimensions: 64" x 75". Collection of Bill Volckening, Portland, Oregon.

Pictorial Quilt with American Flag

See Bill's other quilts at his website The Vockening Collection.

In the 1970s, a revival of traditional quiltmaking was accompanied with artists discovering fiber as a new medium. Pictorial and original quilts became common.

My friend bought a contemporary pictorial quilt made in Caohagan in the Philippines. Read more about it here.