John Pipkin was born in Baltimore and received his PhD in British Literature from Rice University. His first novel, Woodsburner, was named one of the best books of 2009 by the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and the San Francisco Chronicle. It won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, the Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Pipkin lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son.

12.11.2016  “Enough to provide any writer with a lifetime of material”: John Pipkin on historical fiction, historical resources — and poetry

Though the novel The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter takes places in late eighteenth-century Ireland, the current Texas connections are numerous. The author, John Pipkin, is a former executive director of the Writers League of Texas and the current writer in residence at Southwestern University in Georgetown. He did some of his research for the book at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. You may have seen the author at the Texas Book Festival last month. Despite being extremely busy grading finals last week, Pipkin took time out of his schedule to be interviewed by email for Lone Star Listens.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Congratulations on your latest well-received novel, The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter. For our readers not familiar with your book, will you describe it for them?

JOHN PIPKIN: The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter is set in late-eighteenth-century Ireland and England, and it interweaves the stories of the real-life brother and sister astronomers William and Caroline Herschel (who discovered the planet Uranus and numerous comets), as well as the fictional stories of Arthur Ainsworth, an astronomer obsessed with finding a new planet near the sun, his daughter, Caroline Ainsworth, who is determined to escape her father’s obsessions, and a talented blacksmith, Finnegan O’Siodha, inspired by the emerging pseudo-science of galvanism. The novel unfolds against the backdrop of science and astronomy, changing perspectives on the natural world, and the political upheaval of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter is your second novel. Your first, Woodsburner (Anchor, 2010), was the winner of numerous awards and was also named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Christian Science Monitor. Woodsburner revolves around the consequences of the fire accidentally set by American naturalist Henry David Thoreau to 300 acres of woods near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. What attracts you to historical fiction?

I’m drawn to those historical moments that can serve as a lens through which to view our own experience of the contemporary world and our own place in the sweep of time. In writing fiction, I am much more interested in conveying a sense of the human experience, the emotional and psychological dimension of inhabiting a specific time and place than with trying to convey a catalogue of facts about the period. When I’m researching, I’m not just looking for information but for blank spaces and gaps in the historical record; this is where fiction is able to explore the motivations and yearnings of characters. Regardless of the historical period or the narrative context, the novel is always centered on the fundamental experiences of being human.

You were born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and attended Washington & Lee University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and received your PhD in British Literature from Rice University. Since then you’ve spent a number of years in Texas. You received research and writing fellowships from the Harry Ransom Center and the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program. You are currently the writer in residence at Southwestern University in Georgetown, where you teach literature and creative writing. You also teach creative writing at the University of Texas, and you’re a former executive director of the Writers’ League of Texas. You seem to have developed something of an affinity for the Lone Star State. What surprised you about Texas when you arrived here, and what are some of the attractions for authors and writers in Texas?

I continue to be surprised by the extensiveness, diversity, and resilience of the literary and artistic community in Texas. And there are wonderful archival resources, libraries, and museums throughout the state, enough to provide any writer with a lifetime of material. The Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin in particular is a treasure-trove of documents, manuscripts, and historical objects that not only satisfy a writer’s need for factual research but also provide a rich source of inspiration.

Who are some of the Texas authors you enjoy reading?

Well, that’s a pretty long list. Let’s start in Austin with Dominic Smith, Mary Helen Specht, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, Elizabeth McCracken, Edward Carey, Sara Bird, Karan Mahajan, Stephen Harrigan, Oscar Cesares, Amanda Eyre Ward, Philip Meyer… I’ve left out an awful lot of good people; the list goes on and on.

When did you first decide to be a writer?

It’s simply what I’ve always wanted to do.

How would you describe your first “big break” as a writer? How long did it take for you to be “discovered”?

Well, I got my “big break” in a rather old-fashioned, uneventful way. When I finished writing Woodsburner in 2007, after about three years of writing, I mailed out query letters with a synopsis (actual paper letters in envelopes sent through the post office) and one of the first agents I contacted, Marly Rusoff, asked for the manuscript. She sold it six weeks later.

Going back to The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter, it is really a richly woven tapestry of eighteenth-century technology and scientific discovery, how long did it take you to write the book? And what was your creative and research process like in writing the book?

It took about four years to write the current version of the novel. When I first began Thinking through the earliest draft of The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter—about fifteen years ago—the main story was only tangentially about astronomy, and William and Caroline Herschel were not yet characters in the narrative. I knew that I wanted to try to capture the sense of awe during the scientific revolution of the late eighteenth century, set against the backdrop of the political and social upheaval of the period. Ireland and the Rebellion of 1798 were always central to the story, as was the fictional story of Caroline Ainsworth, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to incorporate the discovery of Uranus and the birth of modern astronomy. Looking back now, it sort of seems obvious that William and Caroline Herschel would be central to the novel, but at first I only thought of their story as an unwritten backstory to the main plot. I was drafting the early manuscript in 2003 when I came upon the report of a little-known forest fire accidentally started by Henry David Thoreau in 1844, and so I decided to put aside the draft of The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter to begin working on a new manuscript that would eventually become my first novel, Woodsburner.

After Woodsburner was published, I returned to that early manuscript, but I still hadn’t found the narrative core. And then one day I was visiting the Harry Ransom Center to view an exhibit on Edgar Allan Poe, and I noticed a small display in an adjacent area, featuring selected astronomical items from the HRC’s archives. One of the items was a large painting of the moon by Caroline Herschel, and the tag indicated that it was from the HRC’s collection of the Herschel Family Papers.

The collection proved to be a treasure trove of items: notebooks, diaries, letters, charts, drawings, and the journals of Caroline Herschel herself, in her own shaky handwriting, documenting her day-to-day activities. There were also folders and boxes full of random bits of paper—calling cards, envelopes, pages torn from notebooks, and even an old menu from a tea merchant—and all of these scraps were covered with hasty sketches of constellations and planetary orbits and scribbled mathematical calculations. These seemingly unimportant fragments hinted at the kind of frenetic activity surrounding the early days of astronomical observation, as well as the compulsion to write down thoughts and observations and calculations on whatever scraps of paper were readily at hand. (And, of course, it was also an amazing experience to hold physical objects that were actually used by William and Caroline Herschel over two hundred years ago!)

This was a wealth of factual information, but more importantly, from the perspective of writing fiction, the collection made it possible to reimagine the personal, interior lives of these astronomers and to explore a dimension of their lives beyond astronomy. After spending time among the materials that had actually passed through their hands, it was clear that William and Caroline Herschel would have to become characters in the novel, and I realized that I would need to scrap the old manuscript and begin writing again from the beginning. That was when everything finally began to fall into place.

You are the writer in residence at Southwestern University, teaching aspiring writers. I am going to ask you the question I ask every writing instructor. How much of writing is inherent and how much can be taught? Are there writers with a natural gift, or is it all a craft to be taught?

Everything can be taught but desire. Every form and model can be taught, and breaking those forms and models can be taught too. Plotting, structure, dialogue, setting, characterization, building tension and suspense and pacing—all these things can be taught. Even methods for finding ideas and inspiration can be taught. But writing is difficult, and it is frustrating, and it takes a long time, and in order to develop a voice and grow as a writer, you really need to have the desire to do it. You have to want to make all the necessary mistakes and wrong turns. You have to want to keep developing your own skills and talents, even when you might not think you have any. In the end, it’s a stubborn and irrational desire that carries a writer forward. I can’t teach anyone that.

If you could give aspiring authors one piece of advice, what would it be?

Read poetry. Every novel, no matter how long, is built sentence by sentence. Pay attention to your sentences. Make each sentence earn its place. And choose your words carefully. Reading poetry is the best way to learn the strength and importance a single word can hold. Start from there.

What’s next for John Pipkin?

I’m currently working on a novel about bicycle racing and the Tour de France during World War II.

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