Today, let’s welcome Sarah Smith to the #NoContact Book Tour – and get ready to celebrate her new book, Crimes and Survivors. While we all stay inside and stay safe, books have become even more important – and with Sarah’s latest, we can actually set sail!
Hey, Sarah! Tell us about your book!
It’s about a woman who has to find out how she can survive.
It’s 1912. She’s a young pianist, just about to make her breakthrough, when she discovers that her grandfather, the grandfather she barely knows, may be passing for white.
This is the age of Jim Crow. She has a husband and a son. She has a mother, sisters and brothers, a big family. If it comes out, all their lives will be ruined.
She follows her grandfather onto the biggest, newest ship in the world to find out the truth—the right truth, the truth that will save her family.
But after the iceberg, she survives and he is in a coma. She survives, and somebody is willing to swear she’s safely white. But she’s devastated in a new way: she lived, but children the age of her own baby boy died on Titanic.
She has to start asking herself new questions about survival.
And what surprised me, because I obviously didn’t plan it, is how similar they are to what we’re feeling now. Many of us are fairly comfortable, able to do our work from home, with a place to go to and food in the house. We’re in lifeboats. But who has to stay aboard the deck of Titanic—who nurses the sick, stocks the grocery shelves, keeps the lifeboats afloat for us? Who dies so we can survive?
My heroine has survived.
Now what is she going to do about it? How will she, not only survive, but live?
Crimes and Survivors, out April 15.
What would you have been doing now to promote it? Where would you have been speaking? What bookstores would you have visited? (Feel free to add links!)
Bookstores, libraries, festivals…but I’d got a rather nice couple of linked events. I put together a Titanic exhibit—with a tiny piece of the actual Titanic!—and there was going to be a Titanic party at the library, sponsored by the library and the Brookline Booksmith. It was going to be fun.
It’s all gone online. And it’s still going to be fun. There’s a Titanic pot luck (BYO Titanic-themed munchies and drinks), a show-and-tell from Titanic collectors, and TWO costume contests, one for kids and one for adults. Find some dress-up clothes around the house, take a picture of yourself, and submit it here; you might win a prize!
And yes, if you’re there during the show-and-tell, you’ll see a tiny piece of the actual Titanic.
Details at https://tinyurl.com/TheLifeboatsParty If you sign up for free tickets, you get a downloadable goody bag.
There would have been signed books available….sigh. Instead, if you buy a book from any independent bookstore, you’ll get a handwritten Titanic postcard from me. Claim your postcard!
Are you working on anything now? Is your process or routine different?
I’m working on a completely different project, set in a fantasticated 19C Brazil that’s a lot like a place in Brazil I’ve visited and love. There are pirates and princes and poets, there are giant eagles who speak Latin, there’s revolution and love and a lot of sex. And there’s a plague, which was planned and being written long before Covid-19 hit. Not my favorite kind of research.
Do you think your writing will be changed by this crisis?
Short answer, oh gee yes.
Long answer, it was already changing because I’ve gone from traditional to independent publishing. There’s less of some kinds of recognition, but much more chance to connect directly with readers. I love that.
During the coronavirus I find it’s even more important for me to connect, to get the story out to anyone who might want it or need it. That’s my real job, to tell a story round the campfire and do my best to invite people who might need it to sit around the campfire too.
With the security of knowing that I can publish and get it to those readers, I find myself a more fearless writer.
Campfire call: If you need to hear about survival, and my book might help you, I want you to have that book. And that’s all that counts for me.
What’s the first thing you’re going to do when we’re free to be social again?
First I’m going to enjoy seeing my extended family—my son and his family, my brother and sister and their families, nieces and nephews and their kids.
And I’m going to keep in Zoom touch with the faraway friends I’m hanging out with now.
But—what a trivial person I am–I’m going to a flea market. Flea markets are magical; wonderful little chunks of history show up there.
Want to come with?