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Keeping Track (or Not)
I rarely pay attention to how my books are selling; popularity was never the point of producing them (although both my publisher and I are pleased when they do well). That said, this past September Sowing the Seed of Truth: Orthodox Quaker Sermons of Murray Shipley (1873-1876) came out in hardcover, so I sent an…
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Now Available in Hardcover!
I’m pleased to share that Friends United Press has recently issued a hardcover edition of Sowing the Seed of Truth: Orthodox Quaker Sermons of Murray Shipley (1873-1876). This format is often preferred by libraries, making this work available to a wider audience!
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Review of Sowing the Seed of Truth
A present-day reader who imagines themself in the room where these messages were delivered may catch an echo of Shipley’s living voice and the concern under which a particular message came forth, spoken to particular people in a particular time and place. Throughout, one hears Shipley’s love for those he is speaking to and his…
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The Boundaries of Creative Non-Fiction
When I first started writing my biography of the nineteenth-century Quaker minister Murray Shipley, I wanted to review some of the historical biographies and non-fiction that we have on our bookshelves, specifically from a craft perspective. When writing about past events, how much can an author dramatize without straying too far afield? The answer to…
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Can You Trust Your Sources?
While I was researching my biography of the nineteenth-century Quaker minister Murray Shipley, I came across a newspaper article that described his wedding: Married in this city yesterday, at the Quaker Meeting House, on Fifth street; Mr. Henry Shipley of this city, to Miss Hannah D. Taylor of Neport. Well, the meetinghouse was indeed on…
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Great Expectations
When I first learned that the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library had digitized the daily account of the first superintendent of The Children’s Home, I got very excited. I just happened to be in the process of writing the chapter on The Children’s Home for Murray Shipley’s biography. (He is generally credited with being…
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What Makes the Cut?
One of the reasons that I decided to write a biography of Murray Shipley was because of the breadth of his life experiences. When you think about Levi Coffin, you associate him primarily with abolition—his work in the Underground Railroad and Western Freedmen’s Aid Society. Murray, on the other hand, took part in almost every…
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Turn Every Page…Again
The title of the documentary Turn Every Page comes from advice that the author Robert Caro received when he was an investigative journalist. The gist of it is that, as a researcher, you need to go through every piece of paper at your disposal. Caro remembers this advice as he’s leafing through thousands of documents,…
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When Facts Collide
My first sentence about an event in the life of John Carroll sounds simple enough: On an exceptionally hot day in June 1863, John Carroll’s mother told her five-year-old son that she would be back soon. However, this sentence has presented me with two conundrums. The first was his age. According to the records of…
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Sabrina Darnowsky 