The Inspiration Behind This Leavened Land
It began with a book.
One summer in the late 1960s, my late aunt and uncle, Marija and Karel Mauser, drove up from Cleveland, Ohio, to visit my parents, my sister, and me in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I was ten years old at the time. My aunt gave me a gift, a book titled, “Heroes in Blue and Gray,” written by Robert E. Alter, and it was that book that ignited my life-long passion for history and in particular the American Civil War.
I read Heroes in Blue and Gray so often in my pre-teen years that the covers literally fell off and several pages fell out. It came to the point that, with great reluctance, I had to throw the book into the garbage. While it was no longer part of my life, the book’s vivid descriptions of the various military battles, campaigns, and generals both Union and Confederate lingered in my mind for a long time.
Life moved on and my passion for the American Civil War faded somewhat as I spent my teenage and early adult years pursuing academic studies (high school, undergraduate, and graduate school), followed by years of holding various technical and management roles in the computer industry.
It was my fiancé (and future wife) who rekindled my passion for the American Civil War by encouraging me to collect Civil War-related books and model soldiers after telling her how much I had enjoyed reading about the Civil War when I was a boy. Soon enough, I purchased a copy of Heroes in Blue and Gray, and began building a library of Civil War books and a collection of Civil War model soldiers. My library and model soldier collection grew over the years, but it was my wife who inspired me to pursue my long-time interest in writing by writing a novel set during the Civil War.
Like most things in life, however, the novel took a lot longer than I expected. The demands of a full-time job in the computer industry, followed by my transitioning to a second career in the education field, and dealing with several serious health issues, kept me from making much headway on my novel. Truth be told, it took me nearly ten years of planning, writing, revising, and editing before my historical novel, This Leavened Land, was published.
My original ideas was to write a historical murder mystery set during the Civil War. As I began my research, however, I soon found intriguing historical records and information about the conflict between Union and Confederate bushwhackers in eastern Tennessee during the Civil War. I discovered that while Tennessee was the last state in the Union to secede and join the Confederate States in June 1861, a sizeable portion of the population in eastern Tennessee opposed secession and that region soon became engulfed in a protracted guerrilla war. I quickly abandoned my original idea and followed a different path in my story-telling. The result is my first historical novel, This Leavened Land.