Charles M. Boyer

I'm a midwesterner first transplanted to New England when I studied fiction in grad school at the University of New Hampshire. In high school I deluded myself for a few months that I wanted to be a basketball coach, but I was always a reader, from The Hardy Boys as a kid to political thrillers and James Bond books in junior high, gradually finding my way to Alexander Dumas and Hemingway, Faulkner and even Melville in high school summers. I was torn between philosophy and English when I got a year to study at Harris-Manchester College, Oxford, but the analytical philosophy there was dust-dry, and Richard Ellmann was a brilliant lecturer on Joyce and Yeats, and those two influences completed my conversion to literature and writing.

After graduation, I knew that I wasn't ready to go to grad school, so I spent six years in Madison, Wisconsin, driving a cab, tending bar, and working similar jobs, before completing my circle back to grad school and to New England. I believe many experiences from these years gave me the material that I used to create the some of minor characters in History's Child.

I teach writing and humanities at Montserrat College of Art and live outside Boston with my wife and stepson. My dog's name is Oliver, a rescue terrier-Schnauzer mix, named by my step-son after Oliver Twist, another orphan. Our cat is still objecting to this act of reckless, even selfish benevolence. I played the saxophone loudly and poorly everyday that I was working on HISTORY'S CHILD, played scales, up-down-and-sidewise. For some reason this put my mind in a place that kept me focused and flexible as I worked out the story of Tadek Gradinski, based loosely on my wife's father, who is still alive in Belarus and proud of the work he did for the partisans in the late 1940s.

I neglected to mention that for the first twelve years of my life I grew up in central Illinois (Carthage) a dozen miles from the Mississippi, and so felt an immediate affinity the first time I visited my wife's family in Belarus, with the flat plain and the curving river. The landscape of childhood was where my novel really began. Also, small town life has certain advantages for a writer: instead of growing up with groups and categories of people, I grew up in a place where there was one of any number of different character types--the town drunk, the town scholar, the town bully, the town beauty. This focus on individuals making up part of a larger community didn't hurt me as a writer, though the limitations of small town life needed to be outgrown.

Also in Belarus I was inspired by the sense of the history of the place. My wife's childhood house has bullet holes in its side still from when the Nazis invaded, and when she was a child, she discovered a sabre in her backyard (under the beehives) from the Napoleonic wars. We drove by the huge stone synagogue of Grodna (now with a small renascent Jewish community), and I thought of the history that synagogue had seen. Such a sense of the depths of time immediately implied a story for me that only needed to be unfolded.