Proposed Topic: The underscore of the novel is relating directly to the life choices each individual makes as we grow-up, and yet, not always an easy topic to write about as sometimes people have to make a harder choice which leads them back to family, their childhood home, or a place they weren’t expecting to find themselves. How did you originate the idea behind Liddie Treadway!? Was it partly inspired by a real person, either known in your own family’s history or one you came across whilst conducting research? What drew you into Liddie’s story to impart her onto readers?
One of the blessings I have always appreciated as a book blogger is having the opportunity to host authors as Special Guests on my blog! They give me such keen insight into their novels, a bit of their writer’s process, and the light of joy in their inspiring paths they take towards having their stories in printed form, that I am always fascinated and thrilled to feature a new author I have been enjoying the pleasure of knowing a bit better. In this particular case, what happily surprised me about having learnt the back-story on “Go Away Home” is that the author herself, quite literally ‘went back home” and found the inspiration of her story! I have oft mentioned my delight and joy in researching my own ancestral past, and like Ms. Bodensteiner I am generally left a bit bereft in having lost the true details of how my grandfathers and grandmothers stories truly knit together and occupied their living days.
Let me now present Ms. Bodensteiner and
give you the lovely insight into this historical novel
I was so happy to read about myself:
Book Synopsis:
Liddie Treadway grew up on a family farm where options for her future were marriage or teaching. Encouraged by suffragette rhetoric and her maiden aunt, Liddie is determined to avoid both and pursue a career. Her goal is within her grasp when her older sister’s abrupt departure threatens to keep her on the farm forever.
Once she is able to experience the world she’s dreamed of, Liddie is enthralled with her independence, a new-found passion for photography, and the man who teaches her. Yet, the family, friends, and life of her youth tug at her heart, and she must face the reality that life is not as simple, or the choices as clear-cut, as she once imagined.
GO AWAY HOME is a coming-of-age novel that explores the enduring themes of family, friendship, and love, as well as death and grief. This novel will resonate with anyone who’s confronted the conflict between dreams and reality and come to recognize that getting what you want can be a two-edged sword.
}: The story behind her novel,
& how her grandfather inspired her to create it :{
Is that a good choice?
“What if you choose wrong?” Liddie looked to her father.
“Then you make a new decision.” G.W. tapped the pipe bowl against the ashtray. “Every choice we make becomes part of who we are. That’s why you must take care.”
This conversation between Liddie Treadway and her father happens early in my historical novel Go Away Home and establishes one of the core themes of the book – the difficulty of making decisions with certainty. Like many young people today, Liddie is eager to embrace the future. But the future she hopes to have is different than what her parents and society consider right for her.
In the years leading up to and encompassing World War One, life options for farm girls like Liddie Treadway were limited. Society and family pointed toward teaching and then marriage as the respectable paths. A woman needed a man to provide for her – home, family, financial security, respectability.
But the times were changing and women were challenging the prevailing wisdom, even before the war. Inspired by her maiden aunt and the suffragettes, Liddie hoped for a different future, a future that included a job and travel, so her struggle to leave the farm and set her own path begins.
When Liddie finally makes it away from the farm, she discovers what most of us do – that the choices are not so clear-cut as we like to think they will be. Every decision involves tradeoffs. To get one thing, we often must give up something equally important.
Go Away Home was inspired by my maternal grandparents. My grandfather died of the Spanish Flu in 1918. Throughout my life, I’ve been intrigued by my connection to this major world event.
I was also intrigued by the fact that my grandmother never remarried even though she had two small children and no reliable means of supporting herself. Re-marriage would have been the obvious choice.
So there we are again. Choices, choices, choices. Every choice sends us down a different path.
Of course I never knew my grandfather and even though my grandmother lived until I was well into my 20s, I never asked her a single question about him or their lives together. And she was not the type to share.
So, Go Away Home is fiction based on a few facts. It’s the product of my on-going musing about what causes us to make the decisions we make. In a way, it also creates a life for the grandfather I never knew and for the grandmother I only knew as a stern old woman.
Throughout the book, Liddie makes choices every day, as we all do. Whether her choices are wise or not, only time will tell. As her father said, all of her choices collectively become part of the fabric of who Liddie is.
Thanks for hosting me today, Jorie.
I appreciate the opportunity to share my new novel with your readers.
Author Biography:
Carol Bodensteiner grew up in the heartland of the United States, and she continues to draw writing inspiration from the people, places, culture, and history of the area. She is a member of the Historical Novel Society. She is the author of Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl, a memoir. Her essays have been published in several anthologies. Go Away Home is her first novel.
Author Connections: Site | @CABodensteiner| Facebook | GoodReads | LinkedIn
Converse on Twitter: #GoAwayHome, #GoAwayHomeBlogTour, & #HFVBTBlogTour
To read how she took a kernel of inspiration out of her own grandfather’s life and turnt it on its toes into a properly fleshed out narrative, I believe gives us all the inspiration to dream and ponder about our own relatives; seeing where those thoughts can lead us, and the hidden realities that they will expose. This is a bit like reading a biographical fiction story but with the added pleasure of having the ‘biography’ of the living person being such a closely known relative of the writer! I am always drawn to stories that go inside the human condition as much as the emotional heart of the human soul. Some stories take us on an internal journey towards discovering something that we either did not realise previously or help us unearth the courage to embrace something we perhaps did not want to understand. I love how the synopsis of this story encourages us all to take the journey towards seeing where Liddie Treadway decides to lay her hat once her dreams and her living reality take such a stronghold grasp on her living hours!
Go Away Home gives us all a renewed sense of awe about our own relatives and therein a renewed curiosity of what it was like to live amongst them during the years of their life. As a writer, I was encouraged that another writer found such a happenstance of pure inspiration out of her own past as to carve out a story from it. This has been an idea that has germinated inside my own heart for quite a bit of time, as Mum was the one who planted the seed of ancestral research into my heart! Each of us gets as giddy as school girls when we are a step closer to uncovering new information on our ancestral tree, and the unknown bits that we do not yet know are what give us a lot of fodder to chew, as it is quite difficult not to beg the questions of “What if?” and “I wonder if?”.
I am curious then, as you are reading this Guest Post, what are your own thoughts on the subject!? Have you needled out little clues about your own relatives that you’d like to explore further in fiction OR were you blessed with fuller stories that neither the author nor I have had for ourselves? I am always curious if others like to take up the hunt for finding out about their heritage and if they like digging through historical records and going on Family Search to see what is new and how many lovely new databases are being added around the close-knit world of family historians and archivists of family records world-wide. Mum & I equally share the dream to travel to key locations in the states which would yield the ability to print off tangible records rather than simply recording what we find online. I wonder, has anyone travelled and uncovered hidden secrets? It goes without saying that I adore and miss “Who Do You Think You Are?”!
Blog Book Tour Stop, courtesy of Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours
Virtual Road Map of “Go Away Home” Blog Tour found here:
Return on Friday when I review “Go Away Home”!
see what I will be hosting next for
and mark your calendars!
Similar to blog tours, when I feature a showcase for an author via a Guest Post, Q&A, Interview, etc., I do not receive compensation for featuring supplemental content on my blog.
{SOURCES: “Go Away Home” Book Cover, synopsis, tour badge, author photograph and HFVBT badge were provided by Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours and were used by permission. Guest Post badge provided by Parajunkee to give book bloggers definition on their blogs. Post dividers by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2014.
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