Roxana Robinson's new novel is Dawson's Fall.From her interview with Scoundrel Time’s Robert Anthony Siegel:
Robert Anthony Siegel: Dawson’s Fall is based on the dramatic lives of your great-grandparents, Francis and Sarah Dawson, white Southerners who lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction. What made this feel like the right moment for their story? Did it have something to do with the ongoing national conversation on race? Or was the timing more personal?Learn more about the book and author at Roxana Robinson’s website.
Roxana Robinson: I usually know exactly when and why I start a book, but in this case, I don’t know when I began to turn my attention to this story. I had deliberately ignored the subject for a number of years. I owned some family papers, and Dawson scholars had sent me others. I knew that a large archive existed at Duke and the subject seemed too big and too burdensome to take on – until suddenly it was not. At first, I wanted just to understand my family, but as I learned more about that time and place I came to understand that I was exploring much more than my family history. I was learning about large American issues – slavery and violence – through these characters. The subject became compelling, and seemed important. These issues were also part of my own path as a writer. I had written before on the subject of moral consequences: the consequences of divorce, of our treatment of the environment, of our behavior within the family, of war, and our treatment of soldiers. So that to write about the moral consequences of slavery was part of this exploration of our national conscience. The book took me five years to write, and with each year the subject seemed...[read on]
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