New Voices

Castles, genealogical research, medical equipment, and museums provided inspiration for debut novelists Addison Armstrong, Jai Chakrabarti, M Shelly Conner, and Courtney Ellis.

p hoto credit: Ryan Armstrong

Addison Armstrong M Shelly Conner

photo credit: Tiffany Conner

photo credit: Kelly Gleason

Jai Chakrabarti Courtney Ellis

The initial spark of inspiration for Courtney Ellis’s At Summer’s End (Berkley, 2021) came to her during a trip to England, when she “visited Castle Howard in North Yorkshire,” she says. “I was struck by the vast grounds and the enormity of the manor and couldn’t help but imagine what sort of people lived in such a place—and what secrets they were keeping.”

At Summer’s End is set on a country estate in 1920s England when Alberta “Bertie” Preston, an ambitious young artist, accepts a commission from the Earl of Wakeford to spend a summer painting at his home.

When Ellis embarked on creating her storyline and characters, “I was deep in research about the First World War for other projects,” she continues. “I felt an attraction to the disillusionment of the interwar period, and the fall of the British aristocracy, and thought it would be interesting to write a story that explored the smaller, personal devastation the war had on its veterans and their families. An opulent stately home seemed the perfect setting.”

As Ellis discovered, “researching a world war can be a harrowing task,” she relates. “I hadn’t expected to become so emotional over the cases of strangers who lived a hundred years before. I found myself particularly moved by stories of early facial reconstruction surgery, and the prosthetic masks that were made for wounded soldiers by sculptors such as Anna Coleman Ladd and Francis Derwent Wood.”

For those who had been injured, “these wearable works of art made returning to normal life easier for a soldier who had suffered disfigurement. This perhaps lesser-known facet of the war gave me the reclusive lord of my fictional manor: the Earl of Wakeford.” Because she wanted her heroine, Bertie, to earn Wakeford’s hardwon trust, “I decided to make her an artist,” Ellis says. “Rather than be unsettled by the mask, Bertie sees it with creative eyes, appreciating the skill and artistry that went into making it. For her artistic style, I turned to contemporaries such as Laura Knight, Dorothea Sharp, and Sir John Lavery, who was an official artist of WWI. Lavery’s style heavily influenced what I wanted Bertie’s work to look like. One of his war pieces in particular inspired her most important portrait, which catches Wakeford’s eye and earns her the commission that incites her story.”

For Ellis, who began writing at a young age, and had developed an interest in history from listening to her grandfather’s stories about the Second World War, “It was so rewarding to collect these seeds— the manor, the war, the masks, the art—and be able to sew them into my debut novel.”

The primary inspiration for M Shelly Conner’s everyman (Blackstone, 2021), she tells me, “was a culmination of my mother’s genealogical research into our family and my desire to teach that skill to my middle grade Chicago Public School students. I watched my mother wade through obituaries and family affects and noted her patience to wait for census records. I naively thought that because my students were younger that they had greater access to information for their closest relatives. But that wasn’t the case.”

As Conner points out, “Of course, the biggest obstacle to uncovering Black ancestry lies in the institution of American slavery. After that, it’s a willful amnesia to forget known relatives who caused great harm.”

Her novel opens as Eve Mann arrives in Ideal, Georgia, in 1972. Eve is looking for answers about the mother who died giving birth to her. A mother named Mercy. “A mother who for all of Eve’s twenty-two years has been a mystery and a quest. Eve’s search for her mother, and the father she never knew, is a mission to discover her identity, her name, her people, her home.”

Conner explains: “Events, places and time periods commune in everyman in ways that illustrate their relationships to each other and to the people that populate them. It lives in the sprawl of the Great Migration and as much in the stories that are retold as in the ones that were buried. Those of rebellious women. Black queer folk. Southerners. Northerners. Southern-northerners and Northernsoutherners.”

For Conner, “everyman is also the genealogy of myself and a desire to connect with greater entities of which I am part. Families. Communities. Society. This book was written over the course of my seven-year Ph.D. program and heavily revised for an additional five years afterwards. As I evolved, so too, did the characters and the story in ways that illustrate depth more than change; everyman and I settled into ourselves like a house grounding into its foundation.”

Jai Chakrabarti was born in Kolkata, India, lives in Brooklyn, and is a technologist as well as a writer. The time he spent in Jerusalem played a key role in the creation of A Play for the End of the World (Knopf, 2021). Chakrabarti asked himself: “What is the role of art in wartime? This was a central question I grappled with as I wrote A Play for the End of the World, a novel that explores how art-making and storytelling changes the life of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. This question had come to me when my partner and I were living in

Jerusalem. It was our last day in the city, and we decided to visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum.”

They had been intending to go to the museum but kept putting it off. “The day was grey and rainy, but we knew it was our last opportunity. The visit was important especially to my wife because her maternal grandparents were survivors of the Lodz Ghetto and ultimately liberated from Auschwitz. At Yad Vashem’s Art in the Ghettos exhibit, I first learned that Rabindranath Tagore’s play The Post Office had been performed in Janusz Korczak’s orphanage in Warsaw.

“This felt like a striking coincidence—that I, as an Indian man from Bengal, married to a Jewish woman with Polish heritage, would find a work of Indian literature referenced in a Holocaust museum. It was transformative also because I knew the play from my childhood. Tagore remains one of my literary heroes, and I was deeply moved to learn that The Post Office had been performed during WWII with child actors.”

So began Chakrabarti’s “decade of research into the lives of Janusz Korczak and Rabindranath Tagore,” he says. “I wanted to understand how a play written in a village in Bengal would become interweaved with the story of an orphanage in Warsaw. Why did Korczak choose to stage this play during the Great Deportations, weeks before he and his children would be sent to Treblinka and their deaths? Seeking answers to this question, I would travel to Poland and to India. What I’d learn would inform the journeys of the characters of my novel, the arc of their love story, and their search for redemption.”

Trawling or even skimming through the internet and reading snippets of articles that catch one’s eyes can lead us on an adventure of discovery. Addison Armstrong, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and has an academic interest in literacy and reading skills, is the author of The Light of Luna Park (Putnam, 2021). “I discovered Dr. Couney’s incubator wards online and could barely believe that something so bizarre was real. But it was. Dr. Martin Couney, who was born Michael Cohen and was never a doctor at all, spent nearly forty years exhibiting premature babies in incubators at Coney Island’s Luna Park. He charged visitors to come in and see the babies as if they were a freak show, but he never charged the infants’ parents a cent. And over the decades, he saved approximately 6,500 babies that hospitals never even tried to keep alive.”

Armstrong found that “the juxtaposition was almost garish. On the one hand, there were attractions ranging from five-cent hot dogs to roller coasters, from microcephalic brothers presented as ‘the missing link’ to the four-legged Myrtle Corbin. But on the other hand was a quiet, orderly ward of high-tech incubators and doll-like babies, of competent nurses in starched white uniforms and stringent rules and standards.

“The contrast was so compelling that I knew I had to write about it. But beyond the sensationalism was a deeply human question: If Dr. Couney was a liar, a conman, and a fraud, was he doing the right thing? I decided to have my protagonist grapple with the same debate. The fictional nurse Althea Anderson smuggles a baby girl out of Bellevue Hospital so that Couney can save her life despite the parents’ wishes. Does Althea overstep? Who has the right to decide whether a baby should be saved? When does a lie become a morally justified means to an end?”

Armstrong’s “second timeline,” she relates, “transports readers twenty years into the 1950s, during which special education teacher Stella Wright must grapple with her late mother’s secrets, her husband’s WWII trauma, and her principal’s inhumane treatment of her students. Though Stella’s work is not directly related to the medicine Dr. Couney practiced, she too believes in children that the medical field, the pseudoscience of eugenics, and the world at large is willing to abandon.”

The cornerstone on which the firm foundations of Armstrong, Chakrabarti, M Shelly Conner and Courtney Ellis’s novels are constructed bears witness to their detailed research and a passion for individuals, communities, the places they once inhabited and the moral dilemmas that faced them.

WRITTEN BY MYFANWY COOK

Myfanwy Cook is an Associate University Fellow and ‘a creative enabler’. She is a prize-winning short story writer who facilitates creative writing workshops. Contact myfanwyc@btinternet. com if you have been captivated by the writing of a debut novelist you'd like to see featured.