I’d like to welcome my guest Donna Fletcher Crow. Donna is the author of 35 books, mostly novels dealing with British history. The award-winning Glastonbury, The Novel of Christian England, is her best-known work, an Arthurian grail search epic covering 15 centuries of English history. A Very Private Grave, book 1 in the Monastery Murders series, is her reentry into publishing after a 10 year hiatus. The Shadow of Reality, a romantic intrigue, was also recently published.
Donna and her husband have 4 adult children and 10 grandchildren. She is an enthusiastic gardener and you can see pictures of her garden, watch the trailer for A Very Private Grave, and read her international blog at her web site.
Donna and Elizabeth having tea in a monastery garden on a research trip.
DONNA: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I’m not sure who said it, but that is certainly the perspective I have gained from writing historical novels. Thank you, Stacy, for giving me the opportunity to look back on my life 25 years ago. Could so much have happened since then? Could things really be so much the same?
Twenty-five years ago our daughter was looking forward to kindergarten and her three big brothers were in school. And I was working on the first book in a series of historical novels. Today our daughter’s daughter is looking forward to kindergarten and her big brother is in school. And I have published the first book in a series of mystery novels with strong historical backgrounds.
A whole lifetime has transpired in that time, but the research trip I took to England that summer has been foundational to so much of it. I had actually written Brandley’s Search, the first of my Cambridge Collection, but it had all been done from research here, 7000 miles away from that green and pleasant land where my historical characters lived and walked. I needed to visit their homes, read their letters collected in libraries, walk the halls of their colleges. . .
I was speaking at a writers’ conference on the shores of Puget Sound in Washington when I received notice that the publisher who had contracted to publish my book had gone out of business. I was stunned. Months— years— of work. And now I would have to start all over looking for a publisher. I blurted it all out to the editor sitting next to me.
“Send it to us,” she said.
“You don’t do fiction.” My reply has to be one of the all-time hard-sell lines.
“We’ve just started a line of historical fiction.”
All these years, and 35 published books, later I look back on that moment as the real launch of my career.
Within 3 months, I had an advance and I was on my way to England, to get the details right. I took our daughter and our youngest son with me and we even met my editor there for part of the research.
And that was the beginning of more than my career. I took Elizabeth with me on many successive research trips and she became so at home in England that she chose to study there, worked there, and married an Englishman. Whenever I would moan to friends about missing my daughter I would get a steely-eyed look and the inevitable question; “And who set her up for it?”
But it’s all circular. Felicity, the heroine of my Monastery Murders series is a young American woman who went to England to study, worked in London, and I suspect a few books down the road may marry her Englishman.
Thank you for joining us, Donna, and sharing your fascinating background. Check out A Very Private Grave on Amazon. Felicity Howard, a young American woman studying for the Anglican priesthood at the College of the Transfiguration in Yorkshire, is devastated when she finds her beloved Fr. Dominic brutally murdered and Fr. Antony, her church history lecturer, soaked in his blood. A Very Private Grave is a contemporary novel with a thoroughly modern heroine who must learn some ancient truths in order to solve the mystery and save her own life as she and Fr. Antony flee a murderer and follow clues that take them to out-of-the way sites in northern England and southern Scotland.
