Editorial offerings, and paperback revisions

Dear friends,

I’m an editor as well as a writer by trade, and occasionally fellow writers express interest in working with me, one-on-one, on their ancestor projects. I’ve done this with friends pretty often, and now, just for the summer, I’m making a couple of editorial offerings available more broadly. One is more oriented toward the early stages (or stuck stages) of ancestor projects, and the other is a deeper dive for writers who have more experience and are further along. The details are over at my website: Editorial Offerings. If you have questions, reach out through my website or as an emailed reply to this newsletter. Otherwise, you can just book the spot—it’s first-come, first-served.

In other news, Ancestor Trouble is out today in paperback! This is a good time to thank you all for your astonishing support for and interest in the book over the past year. I am immensely, intensely, continuously grateful.

I always say—including in this newsletter—that the work around my ancestors will continue, and here’s an example of what I mean. In the paperback I revised one chapter to include a new-to-me (and to most?) awful but not too surprising discovery that my ancestor, Mary Bliss Parsons, who was accused of being a witch in Northampton, Massachusetts, very probably enslaved a Black man named Tobee at the end of her life. I say “very probably” because—well, I’ll just post a screenshot of the revised text from the ebook here:

For the detailed discussion in the accompanying end notes—including insight from the archivist at the Springfield Museum on the common use of the euphemism “servant” for an enslaved Black person in that place in that era—you can see the paperback or the ebook, or give me a holler and I’ll be glad to share those as well. Next time someone tries to paint slavery as a peculiarly southern problem, here’s just one example you can offer to illustrate that it’s not. Slavery permeated the Massachusetts Bay Colony and was not banned in New York City until 1827.

(Updated to add: I had more to say about this, so I wrote My Accused Witch Ancestor Was Also an Enslaver.)

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In closing, please allow me to commend to your attention:

• my friend Carrie Frye’s editorial services at Black Cardigan Edit;

• Greg Marshall’s amazing new memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew Through It, which I’m reading and which is about among other things growing up without knowing he had cerebral palsy (the link is to an NPR interview in which Scott Simon accurately describes the book as intimate, insightful, and often laugh-out-loud funny—which also describes Greg himself);

• and the forthcoming Holler Rat, a memoir by Anya Liftig, which I’ve preordered and recommend you preorder too!

Thanks for reading, and almost happy summer solstice!

Maud