New Voices: Tammy Armstrong, Fiona Britton, Rosa Kwon Easton & Anna Rasche
WRITTEN BY MYFANWY COOK
With their debuts, Tammy Armstrong, Fiona Britton, Rosa Kwon Easton & Anna Rasche take their readers into unexplored corners of the past.
Rosa Kwon Easton’s novel White Mulberry (Lake Union, 2024) is set in Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. The original idea for the story and the central character, Miyoung, “came from some faded documents I found on my father’s desk some twenty years ago,” she says. “They were my grandmother’s, or ‘Halmeoni’s,’ old Japanese nursing and midwife certificates, dating from the late 1930s. I knew about Japan’s colonization of Korea and that my father was born in Japan, but what I didn’t know was that Halmeoni was a single mother raising a son alone in an unwelcoming country. Even though Halmeoni was reluctant to share her story at first, she eventually opened up, and White Mulberry was born.”
Easton’s research included recording interviews with her grandmother and father and taking numerous trips to Korea and Japan. “I had the opportunity to speak with my extended Korean family in Japan, and realized their struggles were similar to what I experienced growing up as a Korean immigrant in the US. I was moved by their challenges to be themselves in Japanese society, even as third-generation Koreans. Some still kept their Korean names, others passed as Japanese and intermarried with Japanese, and many continued to live as outsiders in the only country they knew and the land they called home.”
Hearing her relatives’ stories, and reflecting on her own, raised questions. “What happens to the self when you leave someplace, and what ‘self’ do you meet in the new? What ‘self’ do you sacrifice? I explored these questions in what eventually became my novel of a spirited Korean girl coming of age in Japan-occupied Korea who goes to Japan in search of a better future, only to face racial persecution, heartbreaking loss, and a choice that will change her life—and the lives of those she loves—forever.”
Easton explains: “In real life, Halmeoni learned to be herself and triumphed over poverty and a patriarchal, racist society designed to break her. I wanted to lift up Halmeoni’s story of resilience and shine a light on this little-known period of Korean and Japanese history through fiction. Given that our gender, race, and identity are still being challenged today, Halmeoni’s courage to save her family from racial injustice despite grave danger is especially timely and inspiring.”
Tammy Armstrong has “always been drawn to animal stories,” she reveals. “Animals have a way of troubling a narrative, refusing to act how we expect, while possessing inner lives we know little about. After finishing my Ph.D. in literature and critical animal studies, I wanted to write a creaturely novel that celebrated these wonderful mysteries and contradictions. In particular, I wanted to dissolve the distance between humans and animals.”
The initial inspiration for Armstrong’s Pearly Everlasting (Harper/HarperAvenue, 2024) “came while visiting my mother in Maine,” she continues, “after she gave me a magazine article she thought I’d enjoy. It was an excerpt from William Underwood’s early 19th-century memoir, Wild Brother. Underwood, a New England photographer, had heard rumours about a woman nursing an orphan black bear cub alongside her own newborn daughter in a lumber camp. With much difficulty, he traveled through Maine’s deep, wintery woods, eventually meeting this peculiar family. Before I’d finished reading the excerpt, I knew this was my story. While the yearling was sent to an animal sanctuary in Underwood’s telling, Pearly Everlasting explores what might have happened had a bear and a girl been allowed to grow up together as siblings. It is a story that looks at love in all its myriad forms, including our relationships with animals and landscape.”
For Armstrong, place is an important ingredient in her writing. “It is, in many ways, a character itself. I grew up in rural New Brunswick, so setting Pearly Everlasting down in its woods during the Depression era was a natural choice.”
Her family had “worked in lumber camps during the Dirty Thirties, and they valued storytelling, often recollecting—around my grandparents’ kitchen table—their time in the felling grounds. Funny stories, superstitious stories, old stories with new embellishments. All these experiences became touchstones for my interpretation of those years. My region’s also a very old part of Canada, rich with ghost stories, which lends itself well to the gothic elements in Pearly Everlasting.”
In the end, Armstrong “wanted Pearly Everlasting to highlight New Brunswick’s landscape and spirit, to capture a particular time—its struggles and hardscrabble years—while celebrating simple joys, love, and unconventional families.”
Anna Rasche’s inspiration for The Stone Witch of Florence (Park Row/Legend Press, 2024) “struck back in 2014, when I was conducting research for a paper entitled ‘Uses of Precious Red Coral in Renaissance Italy,’” she states. “I’d enrolled in graduate school after many years working as a gemologist and historian for estate jewelry dealers, and was intrigued by the bright red, branchy material that popped up in all sorts of art historical contexts.”
During the course of her research, Rasche says, “I found myself engrossed by sources that fell way outside the parameters of my school paper. The thirteenth-century lapidary of Albertus Magnus. A collection of magical rings donated to the British Museum. A Victorian tome on the ‘ancient and widespread’ belief in the evil eye. I learned that for a very, very, long time, coral has been ascribed with all sorts of magical and medicinal powers, including the ability to protect its wearer from disease and misfortune.”
Rasche could imagine “a woman who wore just such a coral amulet. My mind connected her to the Black Death and Florence—a setting that would provide the ultimate test of the coral’s magic… I imagined empty streets, my heroine the only one brave enough to venture through infected districts. The concept excited me. I would definitely read that book! But nobody had written it yet…”
It was about the same time that Rasche received a critique from a professor. “He said my writing was ‘delightfully breezy, but most prefer a more sober approach.’ Maybe this was a sign I ought to try my hand at fiction? I took the subway up to The Cloisters, thinking that immersing myself in a medieval setting (or at least, the closest thing you can get to one in New York City) would bring clarity. Walking through the stone passageways, past the gilded reliquaries, I got that allover tingly feeling I’m sure HNS members are familiar with. It happens when you visit an old place, or view an object, or read an antique text and you know that somehow you are connected to it, maybe just a little bit more than everyone else. I decided to write the book.”
Violet Kelly and the Jade Owl (Allen & Unwin, 2024) by Fiona Britton has been described as a “funny, playful, out-of-the-box debut historical crime caper”. The novel has already been shortlisted for the Best Debut Fiction, Danger Awards for Crime Writing in 2024 in Australia and Best Debut Crime Fiction, Ned Kelly Awards. Her own rich working experience—including toy shop assistant, chip fryer, clown doctor, aerialist, hula hooper, stilt walker, and editor—have all provided her with more than just research into the past and have undoubtedly helped to shape her fear-free female characters. However, as Britton points out, “Violet Kelly and the Jade Owl is, above all, a story in which loyalty, friendship and courage wins the day… with a few laws broken, and a few rules of decorum bent along the way. And it draws on the rich, raucous history of its setting.”
Regarding the backdrop for the novel, she says, “Sydney in the 1930s is a well-documented time of marvellous sleaze, drama and lawlessness. Local historians refer to it as the ‘Razor Gangs’ era. Colourful low-life characters carried blades to settle fights rather than risk penalties for carrying guns.”
The result was, Britton says: “Blood-soaked alley-way clashes. infamous slashings, as rival gangs sought to dominate the local ‘sly grog’ and prostitution trade. Glorious debauchery followed by bitter endings… What crime writer wouldn’t be drawn to this wild moment of mayhem?
“To make matters better (well, in this writer’s view), the crime scene in Sydney at this time was dominated by two very fearsome women, Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh. As these two tussled for street glory, they left behind a trail littered with the bodies of scorned lovers, rival upstarts and unlucky go-betweens. Never before, or since, has inner-city Sydney’s fate been decide by two such infamous, terrifying and cunning women.”
The upshot for Britton was that “it made sense to create a very feminist story of luck, pluck and survival against this backdrop. Violet Kelly herself is a creature of the inner-city Sydney slums, and she succeeds in this world thanks to a dazzling brain, legs up to her ears and the determined patronage of another survivor of the streets, her beloved Madame (rhymes-with-alarm). The world they create is an antidote to the reality they might otherwise face.”
However, “At La Maison des Fleurs, located just a suburb away from the dark streets of Darlinghurst, the working girls refuse the future they might otherwise have been destined. They are cared for, educated, cultivated and given agency. From the comfort of her champagne-soaked boudoir, Violet Kelly connives to save another young woman, Shen, from being trafficked as a ‘blood prize’. This is a story in which young women triumph over the limitations of a world that wishes to send them, post haste, back to the gutter.”
Finding intriguing, sometimes humorous and often poignant and unusual connections with history has enabled Armstrong, Britton, Easton, and Rasche to provide glimpses into aspects of the past which could easily have remained hidden and unexplored, and to share them with their readers.
About the contributor: Myfanwy Cook is an Associate University Fellow. She is constantly inspired and filled with admiration for those who take part in the writing workshops on historical fiction that she designs and facilitates and by the creativity and dedication of debut novelists to their craft.
Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 110 (November 2024)
