Episode 113: Lisa Williamson Rosenberg, author of Embers on the Wind
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg talks with us about her debut novel, EMBERS ON THE WIND.
Telling a tale centered around Whittaker House, a haunted stop on the Underground Railroad, past and present converge in this novel about women connected by motherhood, slavery’s legacy, and histories that span centuries.
https://bookclubbites.com/curried-sheet-pan-root-vegetables/Lisa shares how the story was inspired by a real-life house that was a stop on the underground railroad.
She shares how her background as a dancer led to writing lyrical fiction and her view that writing is choreography on the page.
She and Lainey also have a fascinating conversation about race, and identity and how it flows into Lisa’s work.
Find book club questions, food ideas, and Lisa’s recipe for curried sheet pan vegetables at Book Club Bites!
Books & Authors Mentioned:
Embers on the Wind by Lisa Williamson Rosenberg (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
How Fires End by Marco Rafalà (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Author, Christina Baker Kline
Threaded Stories:
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Contemporary novels
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Classics
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Beloved by Toni Morrison (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Currently Reading
The Thread Collectors by Shaunna J. Edwards and Alyson Richman (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Memoirs:
The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Edith Eva Eger (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor by Anna Qu (Bookshop.org / Amazon )
Connect with the author:
Transcript:
** Transcript created using AI (so please forgive the typos!) **
Lainey Cameron
Lisa, we're going to talk about Embers on the Wind. And this novel, I love the fact that it brings in so many different elements, you've got history, you've got some ghostly elements, you've got racial identity. For me, I love anytime that a book isn't bound by genres and doesn't start with like, I may only write about this and not put that in my book. And it really feels like you wrote from the heart. I'm just so excited to be talking with you today about this novel.
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
Thanks so much. Lainey. I am so excited to be here and to be talking with you too.
Lainey Cameron
Where are you today?
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
I am in Montclair, New Jersey. That's my home. This is my house. This is my study. This is not where I do my writing. This is where I do my Zoom psychotherapy sessions. Because I'm also a therapist.
Lainey Cameron
I'm going to ask you more about how that played into your writing and how you approach things being being a psychotherapist. But let's start for anyone who hasn't seen this book, Embers on the Wind. Let's just start with telling them a little bit about the novel. What would you say to someone who's not yet familiar with it?
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
This is a story of what, I should say stories, of Whitaker house and it's an underground railroad safe house turned 21st century air b&b. And it's the story about how it has touched the lives of black women over the centuries from the age of enslavement to today. And so it's multi time period. The structure the book is interlinked stories kind of all Olive Kitteridge. Each story has a thread of another story in it I extracted characters for you know, subsequent stories from each story that I told.
Lainey Cameron
I'm just gonna readquickly, quickly, a little, a little sense from Marco Rafalà , who actually was one of my my debut authors in the same year as me 2020. His books have done so well, or his book Hellfires, and has done so well.
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
I've loved his book. Loved it, my husband.
Lainey Cameron
Yeah, he says it's a gorgeously layered novel cinematic in scope, and yet hauntingly intimate, and personal in the wind crosses the barriers between the living and the dead. Eliminating how intergenerational trauma reverberates through history, an incandescent debut luminous and mesmerizing. Wow.
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
Also, he's an incredible writer. And that kind of shows shows Marcos talent,
Lainey Cameron
But also when an incredible writer like Marco says that your book is so well written incandescent, memorized, mesmerizing. And I noticed that was one of the key things that showed up in your reviews when you look at like the most common words in your reviews. Well written is one of the things that shows up again and again and again, people really appreciate it to really see the writing and the way you told the story.
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
That's so when I talk about writing, and I know that it's classified as literary fiction, which sometimes gets a stuffy you know, snooty rap, but I'm a dancer by training and a lot of my dancing life was was spent doing choreography, I view writing as choreography on the page. So I will listen to a sentence and I'll listen to the rhythm of the sentence. And when I do revisions, a use read aloud. If you hear this like deadpan monotone voice, if the rhythm sounds okay with the deadpan monotone word, read aloud voice then I think it's okay.
Lainey Cameron
Yeah, I have Scrivener read to me. And it uses like, like you say, the system voice which is horrible. It's like a robotic voice it makes you notice right when the rhythm is off, or when there's a word missing that it would just make the sentence sound better with one more word. It's so fascinating because I'm terrible at copy editing my own work, and I can only hear it when I listen to it.
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
And if you have the same word root if it repeats in one paragraph, it's kind of jarring and you can hear it.
Lainey Cameron
So inspiration, like I said, there's so many threads coming together in this almost got like almost like a ghost story element. You've got a try timeline right of history. You've got these multiple inter woven narrative narratives. Like how does something like this come together?
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
It came together with one house one ghost one story. Um, my father in law and step mother in law had a house owned a house in the Berkshires from kind of the 90s until I want to say, maybe 10 years ago, they sold it Oh, not that long ago. But anyway, it was an underground railroad safe house. It had been an underground railroad safe house. It went up I think around 1790 Something the freedom seekers, African Americans and slaves escaping slavery were hidden in the root cellar. The legend is and my stepmother in law told me this the legend is that one of the Freedom seekers had to come into the house for some reason related her health. I don't know what but she died in the house. And the legend is that her spirit haunted the house. I never met her. But I used to think to myself, you know, I'm the only I'm the only black woman in the family. You know, my my father died in 1995. And my mother would sometimes come with us. My mother is white and Jewish. My husband's whole family is white and Jewish. And I was the only black adult who would go there. And I would think about this ghost when we would visit the house that she was the ghost of a black woman who had been striving for what I have, which is freedom and equality, or whatever the dream at the time was, Do I have it? So I would think about this ghost and I would go downstairs late at night and kind of called her in my mind. Like, here I am. I'm your I'm your descendent and look at the life I now have and what would she think of me? But then I would think to myself, well, what would she think? You know, where are the other black people? And why is it just me? And I wondered what stories she would imagine about me. That's where the story came from. So I imagined her as an old woman, you know, in the house, like why else? Maybe she died? She couldn't join her friends to go the rest of the way to Canada. But then I thought, well, maybe it was something else like a pregnancy and maybe choose a pregnant teenager. That's how we came up with clamp with Clementine? What if there were a modern black woman who came with her white husband and baby to pass? And what if there were kind of emerging of spirits or a meeting of their minds in this house and what would then happen. And that was how I got the story of the birthing room, which is the story of Clementine in 1850 and Galen and Rob and their baby Olivia in 2019. And how gallons postpartum depression sort of makes her susceptible to the spirit of Clementine who died in this horribly traumatic way.
Lainey Cameron
So I love that people talk about in your reviews, they talk about this idea of intergenerational trauma and generations of black women and what they've been through and how you treated it with such care in this book, and I'm really interested, because you're a psychotherapist, and obviously, that you're an ex ballet dancer, you're a psychotherapist. All of this is feeding into how you write? How do you think that psychotherapy experience kind of feeds your writing or affects how you write about these things?
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
One of the things we do in psychotherapy is say a lot of what's happening right now, what are you experiencing right now, when someone is telling a story about something that happened to them in the past, and I'm seeing their face change, almost as if they're reliving the past, with what they now know, there's kind of a multi layered emotional experience that a person has. And to describe that exactly right, the particular brand of sadness that comes with remembering a pain, you know, it could be an emotional pain or physical pain, and kind of noticing where you feel it in your body and how it makes you interact with people, you know, how memory affects behavior. That's just fascinating to me, and to be able to describe it in in words that can then translate for another human being. And that's kind of the challenge and the joy of writing. And it comes from a very Ativ psychological point of view, if that makes sense.
Lainey Cameron
Yeah, it makes perfect sense, right?
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
We talked about the trauma of enslaved and how it's in the DNA of not just black women of black people how it's in the DNA, and we can say it was something that ended ended centuries ago, but its manner the fact that it happened, its way of affecting how a black person sees him or herself in the world. Is there still an awareness of being in dangers, there's still an awareness of being a threat. You know, although African Americans were enslaved and kept as chattel, they were also a threat. What if a black person get education as we did during Reconstruction? What if we become a threat is living with that? What does it mean to be present in the world and how our legacy kind of affects us?
Lainey Cameron
There's a question in your book club club questions, which I thought was very interesting, where it asks about this idea of almost freedom. So feeling like you've almost made it and then having it taken away from you. Do you think that's related, especially to race in this context? Or is it is it universal? Or I just thought it was a really interesting question.
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
Yeah, I do think I do think it's universal because I think we all strive. Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
You know, we all have a legacy of family. You know, my mother's family came over here as Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century escaping what was going on in Europe. And at the time, it wasn't Hitler yet it was pogroms and but for black people, it is so visceral, you know, the almost can kind of said an identity, get a different kind of haircuts, speak in a different kind of way and be taken for white in certain parts of this country. There's plenty of anti semitism, and yet there are ways where people will say, Oh, I didn't know she was Jewish.
If you're black and you look, you know, like I do, it's a matter of gradiation. For example, I'm going to use this story in the book of Kay. Now Kay is, you know she's got an MBA. She has the luxury to be a stay at home mom and entrepreneur. She has her own business. She owns a brownstone in Brooklyn. She is out and sprained her ankle, slips and falls in the street and becomes soiled. She sells her coat. She sees the realtor who sold her her brownstone, in Park Slope. And the realtor is then showing another couple around the area. And instead of recognizing Kay Kay, who's now in the street, rubbing her ankle, the realtor turns to the white couple who's showing around the area and says the realtor could not see beyond Kay's black skin and the fact that she was sitting in the street. So Kate lost all the strides everything she had, you know, education money. She became a representation of the black underclass. That's the almost.
Lainey Cameron
Yeah, yeah. It's it's linked to this idea of affluence. Right. And does affluence class. Really fix things or are class and affluence. And like, right, it's changing, but not completely, right.
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
Sure. And it's how you are seeing and what our biases are. And also, there's this internalized racism, you know that, you know, these upper class women like K, and we'll take Galen, who is a psychologist and a brand new mom, her clothes are always perfect, her baby looks perfect. She's the most expensive kind of stroller which I had to look up, because I know what you know, I raised my kids 20 years ago, and she has all of these, you know, these accessories that pin her that peg her as an upper class woman, but her hair has to be perfect, her clothes have to be perfect if there's a slip, or if she sits with another black woman. If she's by herself in a cafe, that's fine, you know, she's just there. But if there are two black women laughing loudly, it doesn't matter. They've become a threat to the peace, they become a threat to the calm to the status quo.
I mean, remember that it was a book club, a group of a group of African American women who went on a wine tasting trip, and they were on a train in California, everybody on the train car was laughing loudly and having a good time. And when the train pulled into the station, there were police ready to do whatever, because these black women were stripping, they were a threat. They were dangerous. They were laughing loudly. They were free. They were relaxed. They should be what servient, quiet, invisible, you know something about a black woman kind of taking up a whole space.
Lainey Cameron
Fascinated in this context, where you're bringing so much of that black experience to this book, as you were editing it? Did you have in your head who your audience was like, Do you did? Were you thinking of I'm writing for this kind of a person or that kind of person? Or were you just writing your story and it didn't matter who turned up to read it.
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
I think a combination of both because I think you know what, it's 2022 or back then it was 2018 If you're a writer trying to sell your books, of course, you're a little bit about who was going to read this, you know, this is a women's story. It's a story about women. And you know, I'm biracial, I'm Jewish, I'm black, and I can't not have regardless of what I look like and how I'm seeing I can't not have kind of a dual perspective. You know, I want people to know, that blackness is so versatile. There are so many different ways of being black and so many different stories of being black. And you know, people have said to me, you know, you're so we're the whitest black person I know because you talk this way. I'm like, Well, yeah, I'm I'm not. And that's how I this is how I talk because I've always talked this way and whatever it is that I'm doing, it's a black person doing it. So I'm not a white sounding black person. I'm a Lisa sounding black person. So I'm not trying to lean one way or the other. This is this is who I am. I did have this notion that there are so many black women like me, Jewish women like me, women like me who don't fit in
A stereotype or don't fit a mold a particular mold. And if I am aiming at a black woman readership, or if I'm aiming at a Jewish woman readership or white one, I'm going to lose something. Because I'm also going to be trying too hard to be monolithic.
Lainey Cameron
No, I get why the reviews talk about how broadening the book was for them. Like, I noticed that as some people are talking about their experience or reading this novel, and they're talking about not just how it's well written, and it was suspenseful, and obviously, they enjoyed it. And the magical magical came up a ton as a word that people use to describe your work. But people were talking about how they felt like their mind was brought. And like they learned something like I talked to no way care when that when you're a black woman, and you walk into the room, you're representing all black woman, and got that across in her character. And I thought that was really interesting as a way to look at it. And so for me, every time someone takes that, and they modify it, and they expand it, the better, right, we need to show more perspectives of what exactly all these categories, you know, the point is no one author and no one book should have to represent all of anything, right? Like, we put this pressure on authors to represent like everything of whatever, wherever they come from, right the country, the class, the race, that whatever it is.
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
And you would never ask that. Also, publishing is a lot wider than it is black. And we know that. So I think there is some pressure on on black novelists to be like, Okay, this is my shot to break through for everyone. If I mess this up, no one's gonna want to publish black books again, like, you know, which is silly, but there is a sense of, okay, I'm doing this for all of us.
Lainey Cameron
So what advice do you give to other writers who are embarking on this journey? This is your debut, and it's got 1000s of great reviews, that's a phenomenal result for a debut novel. What do you advise people who are looking at you saying, like, wow, I want to be like Lisa someday.
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
So this is my debut novel, meaning that this is the first novel I've gotten published. This is like my fifth novel. So I would so what I would say to people is, is really learn how to write a novel, before you start submitting, really learn, you know, this is a novel that doesn't have one arc, it's got eight different arcs. It's got in certainly stories. I, you know, I had to learn what plotting meant, what pacing meant, because I think when I started out, I just wrote a whole bunch of words and came up with a gigantic, sprawling novel that really didn't need to be 711 pages, but somehow it was, and I went from there. And I got that same novel down to 350 pages. And someday I will revise it then again, and tried to publish it, or tried to get it published. But I went through all the steps. I did writing workshops, I was humbled by a lot of criticism, I worked with one of the most brilliant authors there is walking the earth right now. And that's Christina Baker Kline. And I really, she actually had to suffer through that I hired her as a developmental editor, because someone said, Yeah, I think you need a developmental edit and sent me in somehow. And she did a developmental edit of 711 page novel. And I always feel I feel so guilty that she had to deal with that. She basically taught me so I worked with Christina on what it kind of meant to write a story. And you don't have to write everything. The first thing she said to me was, well, you can write and not everybody can do that. It's starting with that.
Sort of she told me - You're really good at writing about ballet. So you can write about ballet so it was like solo write more about Bella and I wrote a YA fiction about ballet dancers. It started out being called second company and it was about the second company either the young young performing troupe of a major ballet company and I got my agent through that one. And T and I've worked really hard. My agent is a wonderful guy named of us who have a stander. I hope I'm pronouncing it right. He, he and I worked to get that sold, and we couldn't. So I did a nonfiction book proposal. I also worked a little bit with Christina on that one. And then I wrote another two novels that I just decided weren't really ready to submit and I never showed them to anyone. And then my son had this ridiculous soccer program where it was two hours a day four times a week and I was driving these boys in my minivan to this disgusting like little location in a dome in New Jersey that was hot and full of flies, and I found a little room with my laptop and ice sat there in a row. And when it got too buggy, I would sit in my minivan. And I just wrote stories about the ghost, and my father in law's house. And I started writing story after story that had to do with this underground railroad seat house. And I said to my agent, and I published one, I have one of the second prize in the Piltdown review, winter spring, short story contest. And I said to my agent, like, hey, guess what, I sort of won almost, what if this becomes a novel, and he's, he's so great. He just, you can finish your email and send it to him, and he'll have a response, by the time the minutes up. And he was like, great, I love it. Let's do it. I didn't have the attention span sitting in that minivan, or in that hot soccer dome. So they it became stories. And I wrote nine stories about the house. And each story came from a character from the first story, you know, there was Galen, and Rob and Clementine. And then who was Maxine, the Airbnb owner. And Maxine is this white woman who becomes obsessed with the ghosts in her house and wants to get closer to them by by meeting real live black people. And she doesn't know how to do it. So she goes to a live drawing class where there's a black model. So what's this blog model doing in the Berkshire's in 2018? young black woman? What is she doing there? Oh, that's Michelle. Michelle is up there on the advice of her therapist to heal from this trauma she suffered in the Berkshires when she was 12.
Lainey Cameron
I love how your mind works, right? One thing leads to the next and the next in the next to the next. And I hope everybody listening is gonna read this novel, because it's fascinating. So you were able to build build it that way. We're almost at the end of our time there. There's one last question I want to ask you, which is reading and books. Is there anything that you would particularly recommend?
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
The pulling of characters and creating stories, I really, I swiped that idea when I was reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth by Elizabeth Strout and my favorite books that are linked stories are actually Elizabeth Strout's Anything is Possible. And also, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, which is even takes us back to Africa and the slave trade and brings us to the present day. So those two are really important books to me contemporary books, I would recommend The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Dr. Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett . Old influences were Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and I wrote my senior thesis on Virginia Woolf. So Mrs. Dalloway actually, Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon is my favorite and beloved, which of course, there's a quote from beloved at the beginning of the book.
One I just read and I have to recommend, right is Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese and that is just an incredible historical fiction book. It takes Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter and it sort of imagines her story and how Daniel Hawthorne met her. Right now I'm reading The Thread Collectors by Shaunna J. Edwards and Alyson Richman. And that's kind of set when around the same time as Clementine in my book, and like if we're going to talk about memoirs, my plug for memoirs is two opposite ends of the spectrum, the choice by by Edith Eva Agere. And she is a psychologist, Holocaust survivor. And it's probably it's one of the most incredible Holocaust and psychology books that I've ever read and made in China by Anna Q, which is also it's a different kind of immigrant story, but but wonderful.
Lainey Cameron
I'll get them all on the page. So if you go to the website, www.bestofwomensfiction.com, you can see this episode and you'll be able to see the full list of books and find them all. Lisa, this has been an absolute pleasure talking with you. If people want to follow you if they want to see what you're up to know about your next books. What's the best way?
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
I would say right now Instagram, but I have my website.
Lainey Cameron
We'l put all of those on the on the episode page and also, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for joining me today, Lisa.
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
And Lainey, thank you so much. It's been such an honor.