You guys know what an avid reader I am! I always have 4-5 books going at once, at least one of which is a fiction read (if you want to keep up with all my latest reads, I share those on my Instagram regularly!). My favorite fiction read recently was an advanced readers copy I was sent of Lori Benton’s brand new historical fiction novel, Mountain Laurel , which is set in the years 1793 and 1794. I think you all would love it as much as I did! It was so fun to hear Lori’s thoughts on her writing career in general and this new book of hers in particular.
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How did you start out writing novels? What drew you to this period in history?
Writing stories has been part of my life since the third grade. I was already an avid reader when one day my best friend said, “Guess what? I wrote a story!” She showed it to me and that was my moment of epiphany. If she could write a story, why couldn’t I? That first story was called Yellow Feather and the Wild Mustang—about a Native American girl who rescues an injured horse, nurses it back to health, and rides it in a race against the boys of her village. And wins, of course!
After trying my hand at a few different genres and historical time periods, I’ve come full circle to be writing stories set on the 18th century frontier. What drew me to this period (or back to it) was a book I read set during the 1760s, Drums Of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon, and a Revolutionary War movie, The Patriot (Mel Gibson/Heath Ledger) which I watched at about the same time. Those two together brought this era in history alive for me and I began to do my own research. The more I learned about the 18th century, the more fascinated and inspired I became.
In addition to writing, you also do a lot of nature photography. How do those two art forms relate for you?
While there are similarities between the art forms—with both I seek to create a mood, tell a story, or evoke an emotional response—there’s a fundamental difference which makes practicing the two together complimentary. Writing is the most draining creative work I’ve ever pursued. Photography tends to fill my creative well rather than drain it. In part because I get to spend time outdoors in the beautiful Pacific Northwest getting the photographs, which I then get to play with in my downtime using various editing apps. That’s pure fun. Writing has its fun moments too, but there’s a lot of left-brain work that goes into constructing, editing, then promoting a novel that photography as a hobby doesn’t employ. Also, being outside in wilderness places keeps me feeling in touch with the world my 18th century story character inhabit, living closer to the earth than most of us do today.
How is Mountain Laurel different from your previous books? What made you want to write about this specific setting and situation?
Mountain Laurel bears the strongest connection to my 2019 release, The King’s Mercy. Both tackle issues of slavery, freedom, injustice, and what it means to be family—the family we’re born to and the family we choose. The rest of my previous books have been set on the 18th century frontier and deal with the collision of world views between Native Americans and European settlers. But in all my books you’ll find characters who have, willingly or not, crossed a line between cultures and had their preconceived ideas of others challenged and changed by the experience.
How I came to be writing about Mountain Laurel’s specific setting and situation is a mixture of the profound and the playful. The profound has to do with the aforementioned Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon. A minor character in that book, an enslaved young man called Josh, spoke with a Scottish accent though his ancestry was African. Josh had grown up hearing the speech of his Scottish owners so that’s who he sounded like. With this minor character, Diana broadened my understanding of how the unique circumstances of our upbringing help create who we become. We’re born with DNA that links us to a people group or culture, but extraordinary influences can instill in us unique qualities not all in that group share. Fascinated with the idea of creating such a character, I asked myself a string of what if questions, which led to several characters in Mountain Laurel—Seona, Lily, and Malcolm. I chose North Carolina for a setting because of all the southern states I’m most familiar with that one.
But when did I want this book to be set? The Revolutionary War movie The Patriot settled that—I fancied the look of the knee breeches the male characters wore! After learning when they went out of style (and not wanting to write about a war) I narrowed the time frame to between 1784 and 1800. I picked a year in the middle, 1793.
What kind of research did you do to inform this book?
Because Mountain Laurel was the first 18th century set book I’d ever written, I came to it largely ignorant of the time period. I had a considerable amount of research to do to make the world of these characters come alive with any hope of verisimilitude. I initially researched and wrote this novel from 2004 to 2009, after which I wrote and published six other 18th century set novels, the research for each building on the knowledge I acquired writing Mountain Laurel.
That early research consisted of reading hundreds of books on topics ranging from 18th century practical life (what they wore, ate, lived in, did for work and play) the history of Colonial North America in general and more particularly of North Carolina, to more specialized topics like plantation economy, slave laws, the beginnings of the Underground Railroad, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, 18th century thoroughbred breeding, the Scottish Jacobite Rising, how to construct a dovetail joint, treat malaria, and fire a black powder rifle. I talked to an acquaintance who was stalked by a mountain lion. I watched every YouTube video and documentary on the 18th century I could get my hands on, spent thousands of hours online, and took a memorable road trip through western North Carolina with the express purpose reacquainting myself with a landscape last seen as a teenager. In other words, I immersed myself in the 18th century for five years, a process that continues.
Could you tell us a little about the main characters in your novel and the challenges they faced?
Ian Cameron’s journey has been that of a prodigal. Now he’s trying to establish a life that will make his father proud—or at least not disappointed. But in his newly adopted role as his planter uncle’s heir he finds himself at odds with the southern acceptance of slavery. It soon becomes clear he will need something stronger than those familial expectations to guide him through the web of kinship, oppression, and casual cruelty in which he finds himself entangled.
As an enslaved young woman, Seona has few avenues of self-expression. The one she’s found—drawing with scraps of paper and charcoal she manages to scrounge—has been uncovered. Instead of punishment for what is forbidden, Ian encourages the endeavor in secret. But opening herself to trust her master’s nephew in this one thing leads to complications Seona could never have foreseen. When more than one path to freedom is presented her, she must choose which she will take, and whether Ian Cameron should have anything to do with it.
The plot of Mountain Laurel centers on slavery and how different characters respond to its injustices. How did you go about representing these struggles?
The struggles I chose to represent sprang organically from the characters themselves, though I was conscious of trying to create as broad a variation as I could across the spectrums of race, social position, and world view, in order to keep the story balanced, nuanced, and textured while doing my utmost to avoid stereotypes. Once I’d spent enough time getting to know the characters to understand what those individual responses to slavery would be, I made it my goal to read or watch every book (especially slave narratives), website, movie, documentary, and interview with former slaves, slave owners, and abolitionists that I could find. The rest was up to me as a storyteller—as is the case with every character I write—to work myself under the skin and into the heart and mind of a life I haven’t lived, to feel the suffering of wounds I haven’t taken, to rejoice in triumphs I haven’t known. In other words, to stretch my human empathy as far as it will go. Last, but surely not least, hours of fervent prayer bleed between the lines of this story.
In your research, did you come across any true stories like Ian and Seona’s story?
Stories like Ian and Seona’s were common in the antebellum slave South. Some were more tangled and complicated than what I’ve depicted in Mountain Laurel and most did not end with the changed heart of a man who chose to take responsibility for his ‘shadow family’ living among the community he, his father, uncle, or neighbor enslaved. Some did take responsibility for their children in the slave quarter, with varying degrees of compassion. Others were indifferent. Some sold their offspring away to lifelong enslavement elsewhere. That a heart could be so hardened to one’s own children is one of the many morally corrupting facets of chattel slavery we observe looking back on that tragic era. That’s why I chose to write about it, that the light of redemption and grace I wanted to shine through it would be the brighter.
Readers interested in learning how fraught with emotional complications the life of an enslaved woman who caught the eye of her white master could be should read Harriet Jacobs’ narrative: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
What did you learn from writing Mountain Laurel?
Besides having to learn about chattel slavery and everything else touched on in this story, I learned a great deal personally through writing Mountain Laurel. In 1999, nine years into my writing journey, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and spent that year being treated. I was pronounced in remission by year’s end, when I presumed I’d pick up where I left off with the novel I’d been writing at the time of my diagnosis, only to find I couldn’t. I was suffering an unexpected side effect of chemotherapy—Chemo fog. I could no longer meet the mental demands of novel writing. In those days, my identity was wrapped up in being a writer. That had been stripped away, leaving me unsure who I was anymore, what I should be doing. Eventually I stopped spinning my mental and emotional wheels trying to get back what I’d lost and surrendered my passion for writing and the hope of being published. “Thy will be done,” was my prayer then and, incidentally, it is a theme woven throughout Mountain Laurel.
Not until April 2004, with a vague notion of a story set during the 1700s, did I feel that old passion stirring in me again. But could I do it? Not just write a novel, but give myself what amounted to a history degree. God was asking me to take a leap of faith, trust Him for healing, and begin. I did, and along the way learned that God’s plans for me are good, but His timing is His own. I learned that writing must never again become an idol. I must hold it with an open hand. I learned how to lean into Him daily for the clarity to write. My mind will never be as sharp as it was before chemotherapy, but in my weakness He has shown His strength repeatedly.
What is your hope for readers of this novel?
Here’s a wonderful thing I’ve discovered over the years about celebrating the grace and redemptive power of Jesus Christ in the form of story. While I’ve had my conversation with the Lord about these characters and the themes I’ve explored, heard from Him and changed and grown in the writing, after the book is published it becomes the reader’s turn. It still amazes me how God can speak to each reader’s heart something unique. Whatever that turns out to be, my hope is that readers are drawn closer to the Lord through Seona and Ian’s story, that they turn that last page of Mountain Laurel more in love with our gracious Jesus than when they began.
What can we expect from future books in the Kindred series?
Shiloh is the title of Mountain Laurel’s sequel, but it also happens to be a sequel to another novel of mine, Burning Sky.
Over the years I have received requests from readers to write more of their favorite character’s story, but no character has received more such requests than the Mohawk warrior, Joseph Tames-His-Horse, introduced in Burning Sky. At last I’ve found the way to grant that request. While Shiloh is primarily the second half of Ian and Seona’s story, Joseph plays a significant role in it. If you have yet to meet Joseph Tames-His-Horse, for the sake of his obviously compelling story having the greatest impact, I recommend reading Burning Sky before Shiloh releases in 2021. Readers will also encounter other characters from Burning Sky, twelve years beyond the point that novel ended.
Such tangled webs are bound to be woven when an author lets her characters wander from book to book, as I have freely done.
About the Author:
Lori Benton was raised in Maryland, with generations-deep roots in southern Virginia and the Appalachian frontier. Her historical novels transport readers to the eighteenth century, where she expertly brings to life the colonial and early federal periods of American history. Her books have received the Christy Award and the Inspy Award and have been honored as finalists for the ECPA Book of the Year. Lori is most at home surrounded by mountains, currently those of the Pacific Northwest, where, when she isn’t writing, she’s likely to be found in wild places behind a camera. Her latest novel, Mountain Laurel, releases in September.
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Lori,
Your books are amazing! Enthralling! Holy Spirit breathed!
How can I possibly linger until fall to read the sequel to Mountain Laurel?
If a thorough, prior review of Shiloh is possible, I’d love to!!