This week I interview Jessica White, fellow member of 10 Minute Novelists. Although I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting Jessica in person, I know that she is a diligent, generous, and devout woman with a passion for historical fiction. She published her debut novel, Surviving the Stillness, late last year. You can read my review here.

Surviving the Stillness is Book 1 in The Seasons of Healing Series. It takes place in rural 1920’s Montana. How did you pick the time period and the setting for this series, and what kind of research has it required?

My methodology of coming up with a time and place was at best happenstance. This story actually originated from a manuscript I wrote in the seventh grade about the renovation of an old house with an attached school. The Queen Anne Victorian style was specific to the late 1880’s-1890’s (although it was replicated among the middle class as late as the 1910’s). I spent so much time creating the story of the house and its previous owners, that I kept coming back to it over the years. Originally, I needed the house to be abandoned in the 1930’s during the Great Depression, so I came up with what became the deaths of Abigail and Samuel Morgan’s parents. When I picked up the manuscript again about ten years ago, it was Abigail’s story that I focused in on. Her mother’s death in the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 was the catalyst for her coming of age, so the 1920’s became the setting when I picked up the manuscript again in 2013.