Avi

word craft

blog

Rhode Island

When the nov­el Some­thing Upstairs was pub­lished, it was set in the Prov­i­dence, Rhode Island house (built 1835) I was liv­ing in. I had moved there from Los Ange­les, from a most mod­ern city to a very old one. Indeed, it felt as if I was going back in time. That sense of going back in time trav­el was what gave me the stim­u­lus for the time trav­el in the book.

The book Some­thing Upstairs led to The Man Who is Poe, which in turn led to The True Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle. All have much to do with Prov­i­dence and were writ­ten in this house.

Rhode Island books

The His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety set up a tour as a way to engage stu­dents in RI his­to­ry. The kids would come by the house, chant my name, and all kinds of folks would knock on the door. 15 Shel­don Street: You can see it on Google Maps.

Rhode Island Ocean State
Rhode Island pho­to © Andreblais | Dreamstime.com

For a small state, RI his­to­ry is quite packed. Found­ed (17th cen­tu­ry) by Roger Williams and Anne Hutchin­son, (exiled by Mass­a­chu­setts) it was always con­sid­ered polit­i­cal­ly rad­i­cal. Its true name is “The State of Rhode Island and Prov­i­dence Plan­ta­tions.” It was an ear­ly abo­li­tion­ist state even as its large sail­ing fleet was trans­port­ing slaves. It was tol­er­ant of many reli­gions (Quak­ers, Jews, and Catholics) amidst rigid New Eng­land protes­tant big­otry. The Bap­tist Church (then con­sid­ered rad­i­cal from a reli­gious point of view) began here. It was the first indus­tri­al cen­ter in the US, with the ear­li­est fac­to­ries. It has a long, long his­to­ry of polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion, and was thought to be the cen­ter of the New Eng­land Mafia. Brown Uni­ver­si­ty is there and so, too,  is the Rhode Island School of Design, from which many, many pic­ture book artists flow, includ­ing Bri­an Flo­ca. Prov­i­dence is where I first met him and where we began to work togeth­er. Prov­i­dence itself is a ver­i­ta­ble muse­um of won­der­ful old archi­tec­ture. Its state cap­i­tal is, in size, sec­ond only to the nation­al cap­i­tal in DC. Small as it is, I met peo­ple who bragged that in all their lives they had nev­er left the state. That’s a very hard, if curi­ous accomplishment.

And now, it is the set­ting for the open­ing pages of my cur­rent project, a his­tor­i­cal nov­el that begins in Prov­i­dence, and winds up in San Fran­cis­co. My research allowed me to find out that Cal­i­for­nia is about a hun­dred and fifty times the size of Rhode Island.

But hey … big things can come from tiny places.

2 thoughts on “Rhode Island”

  1. You have the man­sions there in New­port, and you have a great steam and wire­less muse­um, among oth­er things. Love your books.

    Reply
  2. My aunts worked with the Rhode Island his­tor­i­cal soci­ety for quite a while, and I remem­ber dis­cussing you and your work with them when Crispin was on my school read­ing list. As a huge Poe fan, I was so excit­ed to learn that you had writ­ten a book about him set in my home state. Rhode Island tru­ly is an odd and inter­est­ing place.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.