FM: You two decided to write the novel as a birthday present for a friend?

JL: He was actually our graduate student mentor at Yale, John Demos. When an academic retires, his graduate students usually hold a conference to celebrate his work. Jane and I decided that for our piece of the conference we were going to write character sketches that were a send-up of 18th-century genre fiction. It took us a week to write these character sketches, and it was fun. So we kept going, and before we knew it we’d batted back and forth 100 pages….

Part of the conceit of the novel is that it was supposed to be written as if it were written in 1764, and so there’s a lens through which the characters see the world that’s not entirely bearable for a contemporary reader. Most modern readers aren’t out there reading “Clarissa.”

I love the idea of two historians getting carried away with writing a novel, as if such things had a life of their own. And as a side note to Lepore: I’m a huge fan of Samuel Richardson and epistolary novels, so I suppose I’m a rarity among contemporary readers. Go figure.
(H/T Cliopatria for the interview link)

The Promise and Pitfalls of Writing for Readers beyond the Academy
Friday, January 2, 2009: 3:30 PM-5:30 PM
Nassau Suite B (Hilton New York)

Chair:
Martha Hodes, New York University
Commentators:
Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham’s Quarterly and Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times
Deborah E. Harkness (The Jewel House), University of Southern California
Saidiya Hartman (Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route), Columbia University
Stephen A. Mihm (A Nation of Counterfeiters), University of Georgia

The Pleasures of the Imagination
Friday, January 2, 2009: 8:30 PM-10:30 PM
Trianon Ballroom (Hilton New York)

Chair:
Gabrielle Spiegel, Johns Hopkins University
Panelists:
Linda Colley, Princeton University
Natalie Zemon Davis, University of Toronto
John Demos, Yale University
Jane Kamensky, Brandeis University
Jill Lepore, Harvard University
Robert A. Rosenstone, California Institute of Technology
Jonathan D. Spence, Yale University

Oh….and grad students might want to check out the panel session where I’m speaking, too.

At the end of this year, John Demos will retire from his position as Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University. For the past decade, Professor Demos has offered a course on “Narrative and Other Histories” for graduate students, and encouraged innovative writing and the conversation between history and fiction in the classroom, in academic journals, and after hours, through support for the Writing History colloquium at Yale.

Too modest by half, in this interview, Demos doesn’t describe his role in fostering the careers of Jill Lepore, Jane Kamensky, Jennifer Price, Aaron Sachs, Wendy Warren, and others who have trail-blazed innovative historical writing in recent years, nor does he mention the namesake John Demos Prize in American Studies, at Barnard College. But he does offer insights into how his career has embraced numerous historical styles, including the Bancroft Prize-winning Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England(1982) and The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994), winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Ray Allen Billington Prize and finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. And he discusses the openness and curiosity he considers essential to finding the best historical methods for a project and how to have confidence in one’s voice as a writer.

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