Written April 20, 2009

We were robbed on Wednesday. I left the house mid-afternoon and both dogs went with me, of course. They always do. When we got home, the back door was open. The 37” flat-screen was gone, and so was an outdated laptop we kept by the TV to look actors up on IMDB. (“She looks so familiar. Wasn’t she on Dr. Who?”) You learn what you value when something like this happens.

My first thought was, “Why did you leave the door open? The heat’s on, idiot!” So even when robbed, I am concerned about global climate change. And the gas bill.

Dragging the TV off the table, the burglar knocked over a brass music box my father gave his mother when he was 14, just before she died. I was glad nobody but me cares about an item like that, but surprised that modern thieves have no interest in sterling silver. We’ve inherited three generations of the stuff and it’s all still here, waiting to be polished next time I feel like meditating on family history.

My next thought was for the computers on the second floor. Our reflexive nightly habit of emailing important files to off-site storage was vindicated by this experience, though I don’t think the thief went upstairs at all.

The police remarked that the dogs might have deterred the robbery if they’d been in the house, but what criminal would be intimidated by a retired golden retriever and a porky little dachshund? I was glad Leo and Annie come everywhere with me, for they’d have wandered out that open door and gotten lost for sure, if they’d been home. I realized then that the only things I’d begrudge a thief were the dogs, a 1930s music box that plays Popeye The Sailor, and my mother-in-law’s wedding rings, which were safe upstairs as well.

I wear Blanche’s rings now, next to my own. (If I get mugged, I’ll lose them all — that’s what you’d call ironic.) For now, my hand bears witness to a collective 93 years of marriage, which I hope will total well into triple digits by the time my daughter-in-law inherits the rings, and all that tarnished silver.

We were covered for theft. No harm done, I suppose. Except…the thief was probably a neighbor: someone who knows that when I drive away, the dogs are with me, and we’re usually gone an hour and a half. Which implies that someone also knows when I am at home, working alone, except for a retired golden retriever and a porky little dachshund.

A novelist’s mind goes straight to the most dramatic and tragic conclusion.

The neighborhood has changed, full of foreclosures and rentals and strangers these days. The kids want us to move… Maybe we’ll get a security system, and stand our ground.

Mary Doria Russell is the award-winning author of The Sparrow, Children of God, A Thread of Grace, and Dreamers of the Day. Her web site, marydoriarussell.info, includes book excerpts, dates and locations of her upcoming appearances, and advice for aspiring authors.

Mary Doria Russell has written some heartbreaking novels. The Sparrow will leave you emotionally exhausted and wondering is faith really worth all the pain? The Pulitzer-nominated A Thread of Grace forces the reader to confront the abject evils of humanity while acknowledging the good that resides in most of us.

So I popped a handful of Prozac and attacked Mary’s latest novel, Dreamers of the Day. Going in, I knew this to be a novel about the creation of the modern Middle East. Such a topic would have to be a downer knowing what we know about the world. To my surprise, Dreamers of the Day is a delightful…dare I say…fun travelogue bordering on historical romance.

Mary Doria Russell is always full of surprises.

Can you give Apex readers some background on Dreamers of the Day?

Mary Doria Russell: The book got started back in 2001, when Osama bin Laden took credit for 9/11. In his statement, he said the attacks were in part “to avenge the catastrophe of 80 years ago.” Now, not many Americans paid attention to that remark because in our culture, when we say “That’s history,” it’s code for “That’s not important anymore.”

Being an anthropologist, I try to see things from a variety of points of view, so I tried to come up with something awful that happened to Arabs in 1921 and drew a blank. World War I ended in 1918. The Versailles Peace Conference was in 1919… So I thought, Well, maybe bin Laden is rounding? The catastrophe was 81 or 82 years ago?

At the time, though, our family had three people slowly dying of terrible diseases and I was still soldiering away on A Thread of Grace, which was a bear to write. So I just filed the 80 Years Ago question away under a mental heading: stuff I’m curious about, but don’t have the time or energy to run down.

Five years, three funerals, one novel, and a couple of new wars later, I had just sent the manuscript for A Thread of Grace to Random House when I came across a reference to the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, and I did the math: that’s the catastrophe of 80 years ago. In just a few days at a fancy hotel in Cairo, Winston Churchill, Lady Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence and a handful of oil men carved up the Middle East. They invented Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Trans-Jordan – just drew lines on paper and gave these places names and made plans to install puppet governments.

We are still unwinding the damage done in that disastrous week in Cairo. Nearly all wars of the 20th century have their roots in European colonialism. Soldiers and civilians dying today in places like Iraq and Rwanda and Congo and East Timor and on and on – they are all casualties of the conflict that began in August of 1914.

One day, historians may look back call this another Hundred Years War. No end in sight, I’m afraid…

Despite such a dark topic…Dreamers of the Day is…dare I say it? Fun and mostly lighthearted.

Strangely enough, it is! Especially when you think about what a total mess the 20th century was, and how little has changed since the Great War began – but Dreamers is not a war book. It’s actually something of a Romance. The world may be going to hell, but Agnes Shanklin is doing okay for herself, thank you very much.

Speaking of your protagonist, Agnes Shanklin has a great social and intellectual awakening throughout the book.

As she says, the 1920s and her 40s were the best years of her life!

What do you think she’d say about a woman nearly winning the Democratic nomination for president?

She’d be quite tart, I think, about how Mrs. Clinton didn’t have much of a plan for after Super Tuesday. Having two X chromosomes is not enough. You have to be able to run a campaign well, too, and Mr. Obama demonstrated remarkable abilities in that sphere.

There’s a photo in the book supposedly of Agnes with Lawrence of Arabia, the Churchills, and Lady Gertrude Bell. Do you know who the lady in the photo really was?

No. That lady is unidentified, which is why I decided to use the photo as “documentary” evidence of Agnes’s trip.

How’s a Cleveland girl like yourself bring turn-of-the-century Egypt to life in such vivid detail? Wild imagination?

Research, honey! Research! Twenty-four linear feet of period travel memoirs, political and historical studies, biographies, natural history, etc. And I have lived in several countries, so there’s a certain sense memory of what it’s like to plunge into another culture.

Dreamers of the Day says much about the long-lasting effects of seemingly irrelevant events. Some of your characters do seem cognizant of the potential problems of creating a unified Iraq (Kurds, Shi’a, and Sunnis), but was this as big a misunderstanding as it is now?

Oh, they did it quite deliberately. Most colonial rule is based on the strategy of Divide and Conquer. That’s why you’ve got so many ethnic wars today – the “national” boundaries were drawn so that the natives would never be likely to make common cause against the British or French or Belgians.

The “natives,” however, eventually adopted the counter-strategy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” at least until they’d unloaded their colonial masters. Then they went straight back to “my enemy is still my enemy, even though we just got rid of the Brits.”

God, I hate my species…

I read in an interview posted on your website (marydoriarussell.info) that you consider your two SF works The Sparrow and Children of God as not SF but as historical fiction that happens to take place in the future. That’s an interesting way to dodge the SF label! (ed note: this was asked in a ‘joking’ manner)

Oh, I never dodge that label! Hell, in The Sparrow, they build a spaceship and go to another planet and meet aliens, for crying out loud. That’s old-fashioned, straight-up science fiction, pal! The only caveat I provide is that my stuff is very classy science fiction. It’s got, like, Latin and shit.

But the story was written with an ironic and omniscient narrative voice, as though it were all being looked back on with compassion but with an emotional distance made possible by the passage of time. So even though the story took place in the mid to late 21st century, the narrator might have been speaking from fifty years beyond that time. Which makes it a historical novel that takes place in the future!

What I did resist was being called a “science fiction writer.” I am actually pretty much a genre slut. I will stand around on the literary street corner and get into any genre that drives by and promises to show me a good time.

So far, there have been the two SF novels (The Sparrow and Children of God). And then I did two 20th century historicals, but A Thread of Grace is also a WWII thriller and Dreamers of the Day is a Romance plus Travel literature.

And now I’m writing Eight to Five, Against — a murder mystery set in Dodge City in 1878, the summer when the unlikely but enduring friendship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday began. It’s about greed, bigotry and gambling, and Doc Holliday is going to break your heart.

For me, the pleasure of the process is doing the research, learning what my characters would know, finding their voices – literally changing my own mind, so I can portray characters on their own terms.
Sometimes, that’s a lovely thing. Doc Holliday, for example, was an excellent pianist, and he’s led me to study music theory and the glorious 19th century piano repertoire.

But it’s also taken me into some pretty difficult places – writing a Nazi doctor responsible for the murder of 91,867 people, for example. The challenge is keep in mind that people aren’t villains in their own minds. Nobody gets up in the morning and says, “I’m going to be evil today!” Everybody thinks they’re doing the right thing, no matter how wrong they are about that!

You put your characters through some hellish experiences –

Yep. I write tragedies for the most part. Like the Greeks, I believe in the efficacy of catharsis.

Do you find your mood affected by the trials and tribulations of your characters?

The only time that really happened was at the end of The Sparrow. I was in Emilio Sandoz’s head, and that was a very bad place to be. In part, I wrote Children of God to bring Emilio to some kind of resolution so that I could get out from under his anger and depression!

But now… Thinking about it, I have to say that I have been noticeably affected by writing Doc Holliday. Doc is a man of ardor and conviction as regards personal dignity, and he is – let’s say, he’s in touch with his own rage. In the past year, I’ve had three truly startling encounters where someone well and truly needed to be set straight about something, and I shocked myself by providing them with the experience.

Maybe it’s just being post-menopausal and long past the stage when it was necessary to be ingratiating, but I take no crap anymore. Poor attitude and bad service are noted and defined, and a correction is expected. The interesting thing is, I get treated better! Channeling Doc Holliday is working for me!

And in Doc’s defense, I will add that he is also exquisitely courteous and kind, and I also find myself going out of my way to recognize respect and to reward excellent service. Doc and I are very complimentary — and we tip big!

We publish a lot of short fiction at Apex. You ever gotten the urge to pump out a short story?

Jason, you keep asking, and the answer is always the same: I thought The Sparrow was going to be a short story. Two 400 page novels later, I realized that “short” is not my form!

One day, Mary…one day…

You can buy all four of Mary Doria Russell’s award-winning novels from the Apex aStore(Amazon).
Dreamers of the Day
A Thread of Grace
Children of God
The Sparrow

Jason Sizemore is the publisher and editor-in-chief of all things Apex. During his free time he writes weird fiction that can be tracked down from his personal website at http://www.jbsizemore.com. .