ABOUT THE AUTHORS - MARSHALL HIGHET & BIRD JONES
As authors, we often ask, What is it about this historical moment in particular that captures the imagination and makes it worthy of reading? As a team, we try to find little-known stories or snippets of history that are worth telling to serve as the spine of our plot. We then fill in the empty interstices with our imaginations tempered by historical accuracy.
We like to write stories about people or events that often go unnoticed. For example, our first book began with two paragraphs in an old family journal and our latest book appeared as a footnote of an academic article. The signature of our collaboration is a balance of research, writing, characterization, and development of dialogue.
A great historian once asked, Why write historical fiction when history is good enough? Our response is that sometimes history doesn’t give us all the answers and, by adding fictional elements, we flesh out a story and open up conversations that might not otherwise occur. We like to think that history gives us the bones and fiction brings them back to life.
For the most part, the partnership works like this: Bird frontloads by finding the historical nugget from which the story will unfold. The research is extensive and detailed. She creates a series of truth pins—real life historically bonafide events or people—that the story hangs on. For example, in Hold Fast, when the boys were at the Battle of Havana, research for authentic and accurate details was relentless.
Marshall imagines almost everything else. What conversations might the characters actually have? What are they feeling? She builds in spots of humor in what otherwise can be a grim tale, and invents villains that could’ve existed, but are certainly necessary for the dramatic tension that we want to create.
As a duo, we try not to stray too far afield and are meticulous on accurate details. What’s in their pockets? is our way of saying to each other: how real is this? Throughout the writing process, Marshall hands off chapters to Bird, who then is a harridan for accuracy.
For both of our books, we assembled a loose board of advisors to vet our work outside of one another. Hold Fast is a maritime story, so we consulted two celebrated marine historians and sailors. For Blue-Eyed Slave, our advisory board included a Rabbi, scholars, writers, and an expert on education in colonial Charleston. Not only does the team read for accuracy, but they also offer suggestions and edits.
Our partnership is a great marriage because we both think we have the easier job. Our goals align in that we want to create compelling, historical narratives with a strong basis in research and a firm hand guiding the fiction. Finally, we work really well together because we absolutely agree that no dogs will ever die in any of our books unless it is necessary and historically accurate. And even then, we will try to avoid it.
MEET MARSHALL
Reading a good book is like having an escape hatch in the back of your mind. I’ve always thought books are magical, ever since I came across my first Oz book. Even though I don’t still think that my super powers will finally blossom into fruition someday or if I stare hard enough I will see the fairy in the firefly, I do still believe in the magic in-between the pages.
Despite all that adult rationality and responsibility, I believe that books are enchanted objects—printed pages that become transparent windows into other worlds, words that give us wings. I first found books when I most needed them, and they’ve never let me down. Those are the kind of books that I love to write, and the best ones I’ve written, I’ve written with Bird.
MY BIO
MARSHALL HIGHET is a professor and writer. Spare Parts—her YA sci-fi novel—was published in 2014 and has an educational bent, with science as its foundation. Hold Fast, written with Bird Jones, is a swashbuckling adventure with historical facts holding it up. Blue-Eyed Slave came out in 2022. Currently living in Baltimore, Marshall’s newest venture is brewing her own kombucha.
MEET BIRD
Stories are the great river of memory that winds its way across time, language, generations, civilizations, and cultures. There is no place or people on Earth unoccupied by stories. Sometimes they bind us together despite our differences, the saint to the sinner the billionaire to the pauper, the revolutionary to the pacifist. Stories can highlight how our universal beliefs are larger than our tribe. Sometimes they drive us apart despite our similarities. We can see that in the war-torn places in the world where one group is pitted against another based on a deeply held narrative. Stories are powerful often invisible entities with a life of their own.
For me as a writer and ethnographer, the beauty of stories, particularly the ones that have historical roots, is the fun of disappearing into another time and place and wandering about to see what’s going on and snooping into the lives and times of folks long since gone. Or, as a great professor of mine once said, “Our job is to wake the dead and get the living to listen.” However, some folks are more dead than others, and that is our challenge. That’s why I like working with Marshall to create historical fiction—it is story-telling at its most magical: just enough fact to be instructive and to pique curiosity, and just enough fiction to fashion a world where those facts can come to life.
MY BIO
BIRD STASZ JONES holds a doctorate from Syracuse University and is a professor Emerita of Elon University. An ethnographer by training, her love of stories and story collecting has taken her from Appalachia to Central Asia. There she worked in collaboration with ministries of education, global donors and village teachers to support innovation in the literacy classroom. Awarded a Fulbright, she was able to visit and work in the farthest most school on the Afghan/Tajik border—literally the roof of the world. Bird has published in academic journals and spoken at conferences.
OUR BOOKS
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