Jess Wells

You think it's tough finding housing in San Francisco now, the Gold Rush was astounding; 1,000 SF residents in 1849 and just three years later, 36,000! Here are other jaw-dropping facts from recent reading:

"One doctor estimated that between 1851 and 1853, 20% of the people who came to California seeking gold died within six months of their arrival."[i]

And it was a deadly journey as well: "a government report estimated that each mile of the 2,000-mile journey [west] cost 17 lives – a total of 34,000 lives. Any such figure is at best a good guess; but nevertheless, the number of deaths is staggering." [ii]

"San Francisco became a United States territory in 1846 [and] had a population, not counting Indians, of less than 8,000 in 1846. Then came the gold rush, and 115,000 persons, mostly male, were added to California's population."[iii]

"This rapid growth led many people to live in cramped, unsanitary conditions, whether in tents or other dwellings, and San Francisco didn't have any real hospitals or a formalized system of health care. Several deadly diseases, including cholera, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, smallpox and scurvy, rampaged through [San Francisco's] the city's population."[iv]

By 1900, the city's population was 342,782."

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This is the third book you've written that is set in the Middle Ages. What do you find so interesting about that era?

The Medieval Period was a watershed time. The Age of Discovery was opening the Americas, trade was more global than ever before, the monarchy was giving way to mercantilism which grew into the middle class.

I personally don't care about the lives of royalty: their stories are overtold. Tradespeople and craft workers make interesting characters because we recognize the products they make, but the processes are very surprising and so, I hope, interesting to readers. The characters are enough like us for readers to identify with them but enough unlike us to surprise the reader as well.

There are also advantages as an author to writing about the Middle Ages: communication was very slow which makes it easier to work with characters who don't have access to information or each other at the speed with which we communicate. It took a long time to travel during that period; there was almost no postal system. It's a time that is less primitive than the early post-Roman era but less well trodden than the Elizabethan era.

What are some of the disadvantages of writing historical fiction?

Historical fiction based in the Middle Ages is going to be inaccurate on a number of levels. While women certainly had power and agency, the majority of them did not and it gets very boring writing about powerless women for the sake of accuracy. Having more than one comment from a man about the oddity of a powerful woman is just jarring to the story. The Medieval Period was also a violent time which is unpleasant to read about, as well as a time when people were very religious which I have no interest in. That means that you are writing about independent, non-religious women who are able to escape much of the endemic violence. You strive for accuracy in so many aspects of the work, but that core conceit is necessary.

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A ray of hope. A realistic acknowledgement of advances that have been made. In Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries that Change How We Think About Animals, Christopher J Preston, (The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2023) not only documents the animals on the rebound but offers innovative thinking on the emotional and conceptual changes we need to make to keep the recovery in full swing.

Here's the good news:

• From a low of around 1,200 when the hunting moratorium took effect, humpback whale numbers in the North Pacific have ballooned to over 20,000, a figure believed close to pre-exploitation levels.
• Humpback whales in the western Indian Ocean have surged from 600 in the middle of the last century to over 30,000 today.
• Northern elephant seals have recovered from less than 100 to nearly 200,000.
• Bald Eagles in the US have climbed from just over 400 nesting pairs in the 1960s to more than 70,000 today after a ban on DDT.
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One of the things I love most about writing historical fiction is research, and most often the question that comes up when I'm writing is "wait, did they have those back then?" "When was that invented?" Or "can this bird/bear/plant be found in England?" Some of my questions produce really oddball facts, like these:

• Did medieval kings and queens really send out diplomats to find Prester John, a man who turned out to be fictional? Answer: yes they did. Between the 12th to 17th century (500 years!), they believed him to be a powerful king of a long-lost Christian nation in the East full of riches, marvels, and strange creatures. They sent entire fleets out to find him, and I think it's a great example of how limited information was in the Middle Ages, even at the highest levels. The baker in my new novel loves to tell stories of Prester John.

• What was the Statute of Laborers? Answer: The plague, called the Great Mortality, first came to England in 1348 and killed nearly half of the population. This caused a tremendous labor shortage and threatened to end feudalism because the gentry relied on profits from agricultural labor for their wealth. After the plague, workers demanded higher wages and the rich pushed back: King Edward III issued the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 which threatened imprisonment for any peasant who left the property on which they originally worked, and then in 1351, issued the Statute of Labourers which made it illegal to ask for wages that were higher than their pre-plague levels. Enforcement of these laws is a central tension in the new novel. Read More 

Women's History Month! I consider it my life's work to write about the world of women, especially women of great accomplishment who are overlooked by standard history books. Here are the fascinating stories of some unsung women:

Eleanor Roosevelt, A Tale of Two Firebrands: Discover the fascinating friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Pauli Murray, a civil rights advocate and brilliant writer. 

The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Rumrunners and Hitler: The modern science of cryptology was largely invented by a husband and wife team who battled rumrunners and Nazis. Here's their fascinating story, and other tales of unsung women.

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I'm diving into another draft of my novel set in 1351 and I thought I would share with you the building that I'm using as a model. This is a schematic entitled Michaelhouse circuit 1348[i] , "a college for scholars in Holy Orders" that existed between 1323 and 1546 and has now been incorporated into the College at Cambridge. Despite it being a college, it has features that can be found in many medieval manors.

• First, note that this manor is nearly self-sufficient. It has a fruit orchard, kitchen gardens, and a fishpond for food, with a brewery and bakery for bread and ale. Read More 

Three things thrill me when I stumble across them: theories on why the world is so varied and beautiful; how the females of all species exercise more agency than traditional culture understands; and that animals have far more cognition than we realize.

It turns out that Charles Dawin championed all three concepts, but his work on these specific topics has been undervalued for 140 years.

Yale ornithologist Richard O. Prum's 2018 book, The Evolution of Beauty: How Dawin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World, uses his extensive understanding of birds to set the record straight.

"Darwin hypothesized that mate choice had resulted in the evolution of many of those traits in nature that are so pleasingly beautiful… from the songs, colorful plumages, and displays of birds to the brilliant blue face and hind quarters of the mandrel," Plum writes.

Darwin understood that mate choice is mostly driven by the females of the species. Read More 

So thrilled to be part of the podcast series run by Anita Kelly. Here we chat about historical fiction, my own love of research, feminist fiction and the writer's life. 

Check it out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGdJHeHmJt8

I'm very pleased to say that A Slender Tether, a novel in linked stories, is now available as an audio book in a number of places, including the free library site Hoopla. In celebration, I thought I would outline the ways that the tethers in our lives, ties that bind us or secure us and the threads between us, appear in the book and what they say about the human condition.

In "Raptor Among Bluebirds"

A connection about to break: In "Raptor Among Bluebirds" the father of Christine de Pizan is confronted with his own pending death and remarks that "unable to heal her husband on his deathbed, a wife will sew a leather tie, a slender tether, on his doublet" as a futile attempt to reinforce a connection that is about to break.

A tether to prosperity or the strings of puppets: Christine's mother her mother sends granddaughter away to a convent with the princess. "I've done us a great service!" Tessa insisted. She strode around the room, gesturing with expansive arms, and Christine heard snatches of logic that it would tie them to the court and position them well, but to Christine her mother was engaged in her profession, bartering with the lives of others." Pg. 63

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I get raised eyebrows and harumphs of disagreement when I mention this book, but Steven Pinker, Harvard professor and author, makes compelling arguments that violence is declining worldwide, and he backs them up with a trove of statistics and analysis in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.

Granted, his timeframe starts in the Paleolithic, and the book was published in 2011 before the hate-filled debacle of the Trump years, but he has a point: "for most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life."

Pinker not only proves that these conditions are declining but explains why and when.

Why: Pinke identifies several historical forces.

1.     The changing role of government: "Instead of thinking of government as the local franchise of God's rule over his kingdom, people began to think of a government as a gadget invented by humans for the purpose of enhancing their collective welfare." This reduced tolerance for governmental violence against its citizens. The state and judiciary having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force" reduces intrastate violence, he says. And finally, he says, "Democracy… would turn out to be one of the greatest violence-reduction technologies since the appearance of government itself."  Read More