Fiction

I was a Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellow in June 2014, working primarily on research for a novel. Holystone takes up the story of early eighteenth century pirate Captain Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy, as told through my own imaginings of Maria Hallett (the Cape Cod woman whose love, legend has it, spurred Bellamy to his pirate career) and an invented member of Bellamy’s crew, Boyd Garrick, a London barrister who has fled his old life. The book, ten years in the making, is nearing completion.

Set in New York and Québec during the French and Indian War (1754–1763), The Counterfeiter centers on Andrew Whitlaw, a Manhattan physician who—after an ongoing struggle with syphilis—must relocate to his wealthy brother’s estate in the Hudson Valley to recover. From this starting point, the novel follows the narrator as he grows embroiled in his brother’s obsessive pursuit of a counterfeiter costing the Whitlaw family trading business dearly with his false bills, a man they later discover to be a fugitive from slavery operating on Native American land.

When I arrived at AAS in 1996 to immerse myself in research for Nightbirds in the Age of Light, a novel based on the Salem witchcraft trials, I had only recently begun writing it, but my interest in this period and place as the occasion for a novel dated back to my time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center.

As a 2020 Hearst Foundation Creative Artist Fellow, I completed research for the book The Making, an illustrated novel set in New England during the 1940s-1950s. In the book, two sisters, Bea and Millie Cogswell, must live by the rigid traditions of their aging grandmother - always performing as true ladies of the 1800s should.

My AAS fellowship supported research toward Many and Wide Separations: Two Novellas. The two works in this diptych both center on fictional female artists in mid-nineteenth-century New England. In summer 2020, I finished a full draft of the manuscript—now grown to two short novels—and I plan to begin shopping the manuscript soon.

I received an Artist Fellowship from AAS in 2006, to research Moby Dick as well as other works by Herman Melville. I’m a cartoonist who adapts classic literature and other texts into comics and graphic novels, in the styles of famous cartoons. Many of my short stories were collected in the book Masterpiece Comics, and I’m working on a sequel that will contain more Melville adaptations, including an extended Moby Dick retelling.

I arrived on August 1, 2005 at the American Antiquarian Society on a Creative Artists and Writers Fellowship excited to learn more about the life of Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1815), the first female historian of the American Revolution. At that time very few books were devoted to Mrs. Warren but the month I spent at the AAS greatly enhanced my understanding of the historical background, social tensions and personalities that led her to become an influential playwright, poet and social critic of the Revolution and the early Federal period.

My residency at AAS was a productive time for writing and research on my historical novel Sister Séance (previously titled The Dumb Supper).

Jarretsville tells the true story of Martha Jane Carines, a Maryland woman who killed her fiancé in 1869 and was acquitted.