Description of Measure of Devotion by Nell Joslin:
Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the American Civil War, this novel delves into the life of Susannah Shelburne, a thirty-six-year-old woman residing in South Carolina with her older husband, Jacob. Their son, Francis, defies his parents’ wishes by enlisting in the Confederate army, sparking bitter familial discord. In October 1863, devastating news arrives: Francis has been critically wounded near Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Susannah embarks on a perilous journey to bring her son home, finding Francis delirious with fever and haunted by the horrors of battle. Their reunion is overshadowed by the conflicts at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, culminating in Francis being captured as a prisoner of war. Determined to save him, Susannah risks everything to secure Francis’s parole and bring him back to South Carolina.
As the war exacts its toll and tensions escalate between mother and son, Susannah confronts impossible choices amidst harrowing revelations from home. This gripping narrative explores themes of sacrifice, resilience, and the profound impacts of war on family bonds, painting a vivid portrait of one woman’s relentless fight for survival and reconciliation in a time of unprecedented turmoil.
Description of Dancing Woman by Elaine Neil Orr:
It’s 1963 and Isabel Hammond is an expat American who has accompanied her agriculture aid worker husband to Nigeria, where she is hoping to find inspiration for her art and for her life. Then she meets charismatic local singer Bobby Tunde, and they share a night of passion that could upend everything. She returns to her husband and their home in a rural town where, in panic over her indiscretion, she determines to plant a lemon tree. While digging, she unearths an ancient statue. Immediately she senses that the dancing female figure has come to her across time and distance.
Isabel dreams of Bobby, believing she might risk painting again, a passion she had packed away. Then she learns she is pregnant. Her desire for a realization of her deeper self competes with her sense of duty to her family.
Encircled by political unrest in Nigeria, Isabel’s personal situation becomes ever more precarious. The expat society, the ancient Nigerian culture, her beautiful family, and even the statue hidden in a back room—each trouble and beguile Isabel. Amid all of this, she is determined to seek her true destiny come what may.
About the conversation:
Nell Joslin and Elaine Neil Orr have been friends and writing partners since 2005. In addition to attending workshops and writing retreats together, they have met almost weekly to read and discuss their writing. This conversation was conducted over several weeks in December 2024 and January 2025, in person and over email, where both the questions and answers were fine-tuned and clarified. The conversation mirrors the ease that these two writers feel together, as well as their familiarity with and faith in each other’s work. Elaine Neil Orr’s third novel, Dancing Woman, was published by Blair in January 2025, a few months before Nell Joslin’s debut novel, Measure of Devotion, coming from Regal House Publishing in May 2025.
Conversation:
Elaine: I love the fact that we both wrote historical novels, set on different continents, yet exactly one hundred years apart in time. Can we talk about inspiration? What inspired you to write Measure of Devotion?
Nell Joslin
Nell: There is a story in my family of a Civil War mother who left home to find and bring home her wounded son, on which the novel is thinly based. What compelled me to write my version of this story is that the ancestral mother’s part in saving the life of her son was, if not erased, at the very least pushed into the background of family folklore. I wanted to give someone like her a voice. It’s the story of a woman who undertook a dangerous journey to find her son, a little-written about but not uncommon thing that women did during the Civil War. Yet in a larger way, my effort applies to all women of courage and fortitude whose contributions have been downplayed.
And now you. How about the origin story of Dancing Woman?
Elaine: Twenty years ago, I set my eyes on a mesmerizing terra cotta figure from northern Nigeria on display at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Dating from the Iron Age, it is called a Nok, named for the town in present-day Nigeria where hundreds (later thousands) were first unearthed in the 1940s. The figure spoke to me compellingly about the rich civilization and history of this country that I loved, where I was born. Over time, I discerned that I wanted this mysterious sculpture to act as a material text, conveying wisdom and transformation to a woman on a journey for her one true reason for being, which, as I understand it, is to know ourselves, to learn at last what we were made for.
Elaine: Did your ancestral story include deep family divisions as we find in your fictional one?
Nell: No, nothing like that as far as I know. My South Carolina relatives were all staunch Confederates. Portraying Jacob and Susannah Shelburne as against the Confederate cause was an important decision for me, not only to distinguish my characters from any of the real people, but to make them more sympathetic. I used the ancestor story as only a tiny kernel for my tale. I was decidedly uninterested in imagining the inner lives of my Confederate ancestors. One could say that my South Carolina relatives were roughly the equivalent of your Nok, only I took my seed story in another direction, whereas the Nok becomes more and more significant to Isabel’s transformation.
Elaine: For both of us, landscape, vegetation and weather are huge elements of plot and authenticity in writing. You and I both have long been students of these natural elements. What do they bring to your novel? To characterization?
Nell: The landscape around Chattanooga played a huge role in the actual wartime maneuvers: the vantage point of Lookout Mountain, the strategies necessitated by the Tennessee River, the railroads through the mountain pass that made the capture of this region so crucial to the war’s outcome.
But beyond that, I can’t think about writing fiction without including the landscape. I have always turned to nature for sustenance and inspiration. Humans are fellow travelers with trees and plants and all the wild creatures, and we cannot fully understand our lives if we are cut off from nature. In The Outermost House, Henry Beston says something about holding our hands over the Earth as though over a flame. I love that as an image of how nature warms and enlivens us.
Your character Isabel Hammond and my Susannah Shelburne came onto the page as the kind of people who notice trees and birds and the color of the sky. In both the American South and northern Nigeria, these women are uplifted by vistas, vegetation and fields; they are aware of the presence and movements of birds. Near the end of my novel, the largeness of the American landscape helps to ground Susannah as she enters a new chapter of her life.
Although there is no incident in this novel that I could call autobiographical, inspiration through nature, landscape and wildlife is something I have experienced over and over. In that way, you could call Susannah’s experience emotionally autobiographical. I’d love to hear if this rings true for you as well, in Isabel’s experience.
Elaine Orr
Elaine: My three novels are all emotionally autobiographical and most profoundly because of place. I was born and grew up in Nigeria. My deep early memories originate there: the smells, tastes, textures, vistas, sounds of home come into my fiction as naturally as breathing. One of the primary reasons I write fiction is to travel back home in my mind.
My mother said that as a girl I wanted to be outside alone while my sister wanted to be indoors among friends. That rings true with me. Every day dawned as a new outdoor exploration or journey. I climbed trees looking for ripe guavas, walked compound roads, watching for lizards and birds and the occasional goat. More than once, I was surprised by a fist of snakes thrashing in a tall palm. I swam in a brilliant, cold river. All of these gifts reside in me as psalms and I love giving them to my characters. In Dancing Woman, Isabel lives in northern Nigeria, closer to the Sahara. She experiences the harmattan, the dust storms coming down off the Sahara. Just as the storm transforms the landscape, it transforms Isabel. The weather and landscape literally remake her.
Elaine: Because your plot is precipitated by a brutal war, it was necessary for you to include scenes of violence. What challenges did those pose to your writing and what sorts of violence imposed themselves into your creative consciousness given that your main character is a woman?
Nell: Since the book is in the first person, Susannah does not witness the actual battles so much as their aftermath. But it was not difficult to make those experiences horrific; I just had to try to be original and think of things that I hadn’t read about before. An example would be when she finds a stray boot with a severed ankle and foot still inside it. Also, she sees scores of horribly wounded soldiers several times in the story, and in these cases she views the violence from the perspective of a mother.
One episode of wartime violence that she encounters directly occurs when she is wounded in the middle of a brawl between two Union soldiers. Other times she experiences both misogyny and sexual violence, traumatizing in their separate ways. These are the kinds of choices I made to authenticate her wartime experience.
Can you talk about the kinds of violence that Isabel must deal with?
Elaine: Isabel experiences trauma from shattering experiences. A child dies. Her husband is in a horrible accident. She interprets these events as resulting from her carelessness as a wife and mother and believes she has caused them. There are also incidents that unsettle her and tie her to Nigeria: her concern for Daniel, her house manager, whose clan has been attacked by outsiders. A coup takes place in Nigeria and she hears details about the northern premiere being killed with his wife in their home. Her husband reports to her about young men with rifles stopping him on the road and searching his vehicle. This political turmoil matches her inner struggle.
Elaine: Your novel includes significant Black characters. Several of these characters enable your white main character who is, within the limits of war and gender, a free agent granted special privileges while most of the Black people around her are not. How did you negotiate this reality of history and not fall prey to the tropes of “the white savior” or “the magical Negro”?
Nell: From the beginning, I was aware of the danger of appropriating the Black characters’ experience for the purpose of developing the white protagonist’s story, so my intent was to give them agency and personal lives that had nothing to do with Susannah. It had to be evident that the Black characters’ purposes are not—or at least not always—her purposes, or otherwise the story shrivels down to something I wouldn’t want to sign my name to. These Black characters make their own choices within the limited range afforded to them in those times. They are the subjects of their own lives. At least that was what I wanted for them, what I tried to give them. I give you credit, Elaine, for helping me find my way when I stumbled in the attempt.
And I’d love to hear anything you can add on this subject.
Elaine: My novel is full of Nigerian characters who are significant in their own fully-developed lives. We see them as Isabel’s path intersects with theirs. One of these characters is Amina, a Nigerian mother and market woman, who stops regularly to visit with Isabel in her home and yard. Isabel also regularly seeks out advice and instruction from the town chief, called the Sarki, who presides over Kufana, where they live. Isabel must abide by his counsel. For example, he won’t allow her to let her female students paint a mural on the outer walls of his compound. None of these characters is fearful of Isabel. They speak to her frankly and see her as flawed, though they also appreciate how she struggles to learn Hausa and to become a member of the community. They aren’t “Black” characters as we think of them in the U.S. They are Nigerians. Still, I make a point in the novel of having Daniel correct Isabel when she tries to exercise “white saviorism.” Because of the history of white appropriation of African-American arts, white American writers must, to my mind, be critically aware of their own flawed thinking. You and I worked to remind each other of this many a time.
Elaine: What led you to make the Union doctor, Matthias Andreas (who is so pivotal to Susannah’s story), a German?
Nell: A feeling of otherness is part of Susannah’s way of being in the world. Her mother and grandmother were outsiders in their community, and this feeling of not belonging became part of the daughter’s identity as well. Susannah is attracted to the German doctor partly because his culture and experience distinguish him as different. While her outsider-ness has made her more guarded, he wears his differences easily, and with a warmth that she is immediately drawn to.
But Andreas is also German because it helped the plot! Germany was where significant medical advances in hygiene were made in the mid-1800, and he is there to share these advances with American surgeons. In the end, though—and most importantly—the friendship between Dr. Andreas and Susannah is about the transcendence of love amid misunderstanding and loss.
But now you’ve got me realizing that there’s perhaps another parallel here—a parallel between Matthias Andreas and your novel’s Bobby Tunde. Would you agree?
Elaine: Yes. Bobby is essential to Isabel’s journey, though he has his own journey and is not present in the novel primarily for her. Rather, his understanding of music as an underground spirituality offers Isabel a route for thinking of her own art—not as a past-time or a hobby but as her calling. The two of them come together because they understand life as artists do: the means by which we know ourselves and even create ourselves. The difference in our plots as far as these men go is that Bobby comes in right away with his transporting music that leads to a warm and joyful sex scene. His presence continues to be a source of conflict and inspiration for Isabel all the way through though they do not continue to have a physical affair.
Elaine: One last question: You’ve been a writer all your life, yet this is your first novel. Can you talk about the other kinds of writing you’ve done?
Nell: As I think is true for you as well, writing has always been a form of escape for me. There’s a land a writer enters where everything else falls away, even the sense of self. Ever since I was a child, I knew how to access this land, although sometimes it takes some real discipline to overcome the obstacles that arise to dissuade you from entering it.
I’m a journal and letter writer, and both have always offered great solace and companionship. I have also always written short stories, some few of which have been published. This novel, written over a ten-year period, is a quiet triumph for me. I am saying, “OK, let me talk now.” I have given a voice, not only to Susannah, but to myself. She and I are saying different things, but we’re both speaking, at last.
Can you tell the story of how you found your own craft, your own voice?
Elaine: I’ll keep it short. About the time I became a full professor, I was diagnosed with end stage renal disease and started dialysis. I decided to write my memoir because I might die. I wrote it doing dialysis. It was published and was successful enough that I could keep writing creatively. Three novels later, I have found my art form.
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