skeletons at the feast by chris bohjalian

It's a deeply moving novel and, it seemed to me, a further indication that the world didn't need my book.Īnd so instead I embarked upon a novel that had been in the back of my mind for some time: A tale of a New England midwife and a home birth that has gone tragically wrong. Moreover, just about this time, Carol Edgarian published her poignant drama of the Armenian Genocide and the diaspora, Rise the Euphrates. Hence, the exile to the underground archives. I couldn't bring myself to do either, but neither did I ever want the pages to see the light of the day.

My wife, who has always been an objective reader of my work, and I agreed: The manuscript should either be buried or burned. I spent over two years struggling mightily to complete a draft, and I never shared it with my editor. It will never be published, neither in my lifetime nor after I'm dead.

My first attempt to write about the genocide, penned 20 years ago now, exists only as a rough draft in the underground archives of my alma mater. The novel has been gestating at the very least since 1992, when I first tried to make sense of the Armenian Genocide: a slaughter that most of the world knows next to nothing about. Perhaps in no case has the relationship between reflection and construction - between the ethereal wisps of imagination and the concrete words of creation - been more evident than in the novel I have arriving this summer, The Sandcastle Girls. But I spent a long time pondering both of these novels before ever setting a single word down on paper. Skeletons at the Feast, another book I will always be proud of, took only 10. Here's a confession: The first draft of the novel for which I may always be known best, Midwives, took a mere (and eerily appropriate) nine months to write. First, the longer I spend allowing an idea to take root inside me, the better the finished book second, the more time I spend thinking about a book, the less time I spend actually writing it. Moreover, in the quarter-century I've been writing books, I've realized two things about a lengthy gestation period. A mother elephant carries her young for not quite two years I have spent, in some cases, not quite two decades contemplating the tiniest seed of a story and wondering how it might grow into a novel. Sometimes my novels have positively elephantine gestation periods - and even that, in some cases, is an underestimate. The story behind the story: The kernel that led to the novel, The Sandcastle Girls Chris Bohjalian discusses his 2012 novel, Sandcastle Girls, which explores the Armenian Genocide - a novel which he says has been gestating since his childhood visits to the home of his Armenian grandparents.įor additional interviews with Chris Bohjalian, please see the reading guides for Midwives and Skeletons at the Feast

Skeletons at the feast by chris bohjalian