Terry Gamble's new novel is The Eulogist.From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Eulogist, and for your character Olivia?--Marshal Zeringue
A: The genesis for this book literally came from digging up the ancestors. Their exhumations occurred in the last decade of the 19th century, but I came across the receipts for the bodies when going through my father’s desk after he died in 2004.
The receipts – along with a letter exchange between my great-great-uncle – contained names that were unfamiliar, including the name “Olivia.”
Olivia, along with her siblings, had traveled to Ohio from Ireland as children, and in 1890, their bodies were exhumed from various churchyards to be replanted in the Olmstead-designed Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati.
I had traveled to Cincinnati several times for book readings and family weddings and was intrigued with the city that was hardly a village when my ancestors arrived on a flatboat 200 years ago in 1819.
I began to ask, “Who were these people?” “Why did they leave Ireland?” “What did they make of this new country – in particular, Cincinnati, that promised so much opportunity and yet which lay little more than a stone’s throw across the river from a slave state?”
These questions led me down a rabbit hole involving slavery, evangelical Christianity, immigration, gender, race, class – many of the issues we are dealing with today.
Olivia came to me almost immediately as I started writing, although she...[read on]