After four-and-a-half years of sending out queries and manuscript excerpts to agents and publishers, I am thrilled to share that Line of Flight has a publisher! Köehler Books has accepted my novel, and the planned publication date is December 17, 2026.

This all came about in February. I had only recently learned about Köehler and their Emerging Authors program. I checked out their website and found out they were accepting manuscripts, so I sent mine in, thinking if I didn’t hear back in a few weeks, I’d follow up with an email to be sure they’d received it. Nothing to lose.

The next day, to my amazement, I received a very encouraging email from Joe Coccaro, who was the publisher’s executive editor for more than a dozen years and is now an editor-at-large. He had scooped my manuscript out of the submissions box because he loves historical fiction. And he wrote that both he and the acquisitions editor thought my novel has a lot of promise.

How wonderful to read those words after so many agent form-emails that said not for me, but good luck! Publishing is, indeed, a subjective business. As I’ve been reminded over and over after each rejection, it just takes one yes.

Joe and I had a wonderful call the following week, and the day after that, he sent a contract. I had a contract attorney review it for me and worked out some minor changes with John Köehler, the publisher. John and I have now had two great Zoom conversations to review their whole process. Joe will be my editor. And I have a lot of work to do.

Among the many things that impressed me when I first looked up Köehler Books is their commitment to a collaborative relationship with each author. While they will certainly have a lot of welcomed professional input on the final manuscript and design, John emphasized, “You are the expert on your book.” I am looking forward to a great partnership.

Watch this space for progress reports.

Image: Getty Images for Unsplash

More progress on the publishing front to share: The opening of Line of Flight was published in the April 2024 issue of Embark, an online literary journal that presents openings from 10 unpublished novels twice a year. This happens to be Embark’s twentieth issue, and I am in good company!

It’s rewarding to have two excerpts from my novel now available to readers in online literary journals. You’ll find the opening here and a chapter, “The Sinking,” here. I hope you enjoy them both!

Evelyn Herwitz writes about the journey of writing her first novel—a work of historical fiction set in World War I—the vagaries of the creative process, and her quest for publication, at evelynherwitz.com.

I’m thrilled to share the news that an excerpt from Line of Flight has published in the online literary journal, The Writing Disorder (such an appropriate title for this pursuit)! “The Sinking” takes place on the doomed last voyage of the Lusitania. Can’t say more, or I’d spoil it. I hope you enjoy reading it!

Evelyn Herwitz writes about the journey of writing her first novel—a work of historical fiction set in World War I—the vagaries of the creative process, and her quest for publication, at evelynherwitz.com.

Image: R.M.S. Lusitania coming into port, possibly in New York, sometime between 1907 – 1915  by George Grantham Bain – U.S. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue.

For me, writing is musical. It’s also a quest for precision. How do I channel these images and feelings in my mind and heart into words on the page?

Metaphor is, of course, one way to get there, through the back door of memory. Emotional associations with a sound, a smell, a sight or taste or touch provide the key. But what if the metaphor references experiences beyond the reader’s world? That’s where empathy and imagination come into play. And what better medium to spark both than a story?

One of the most powerful metaphors that I found while writing Line of Flight was the plight of the passenger pigeon (not to be confused with carrier pigeons, which play a different, significant role in my novel). When Simone first speaks with Colin Rockwell, a British ornithologist and fellow traveler on the Lusitania, he describes how he is returning to London from the States after studying the extinction of what had once been the most prevalent bird species on the continent:

He explained, with great passion, how these birds, which once numbered in the billions in North America, are now no more. The last known passenger pigeon died on September 1, 1914, the day he departed for the States. They would travel in huge flocks, arriving like a massive, dark cloud in fields or forests, in search of food and nesting grounds. People would run for cover, fearing a biblical plague.

“But how could they simply vanish?”

“They were hunted to extinction.”

He shook his head, overcome by his story. “Please forgive me, Mrs. Levitsky, but Homo sapiens’ capacity for destruction is unparalleled in Nature. When I left London to pursue my research in your country, I had no idea that I would return to a homeland still at war, with millions dead and wounded, and no end in sight.”

No one alive today can recall the overwhelming arrival of a flock of millions of passenger pigeons—or the profound silence of their absence. Our concept of a flock of birds in the 21st century has no parallel. I have read extraordinary descriptions. In an earlier draft of my novel, I went into more detail, how the birds would blacken the sky like an arriving storm, with a roar louder than the Lusitania‘s engines and a choking stench of excrement.

In the May-June 2014 issue of Audubon, dedicated to the centenary of the passenger pigeon’s extinction, contributor Barry Yeoman cites the 1895 recollections of Potawatomi tribal leader Simon Pokagon, while camping at the headwaters of Michigan’s Manistee River 45 years earlier:

Throughout the 19th century, witnesses had described similar sightings of pigeon migrations: how they took hours to pass over a single spot, darkening the firmament and rendering normal conversation inaudible. Pokagon remembered how sometimes a traveling flock, arriving at a deep valley, would “pour its living mass” hundreds of feet into a downward plunge. “I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America,” he wrote, “yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven.”

The story of the passenger pigeons’ demise is gut-wrenching. With the arrival of railroads and the messaging speed of telegraphs, hunting tasty passenger pigeons became a booming commercial industry. Yeoman writes:

The professionals and amateurs together outflocked their quarry with brute force. They shot the pigeons and trapped them with nets, torched their roosts, and asphyxiated them with burning sulfur. They attacked the birds with rakes, pitchforks, and potatoes. They poisoned them with whiskey-soaked corn. Learning of some of these methods, Potawatomi leader Pokagon despaired. “These outlaws to all moral sense would touch a lighted match to the bark of the tree at the base, when with a flash—more like an explosion—the blast would reach every limb of the tree,” he wrote of an 1880 massacre, describing how the scorched adults would fell and the squabs would “burst open upon hitting the ground.”

All of this was in my mind and heart when I wrote Colin’s words. I could think of no better metaphor for the horrific death and destruction that was World War I. Will a modern reader fully grasp the metaphor without a historical point of reference? Impossible to know. I can only hope that it resonates, how the wanton destruction of billions of birds for profit wiped an entire species off the face of the Earth, how the impulse to destroy for power and glory threatens all existence.

Evelyn Herwitz writes about the journey of writing her first novel—a work of historical fiction set in World War I—the vagaries of the creative process, and her quest for publication, at evelynherwitz.com.

Image: Vizatelly

To say that World War I was gruesome is to understate the obvious. Updated weapons—like the 600-bullets-per-minute, rapid-fire machine gun, with a range of more than 1,000 yards—decimated infantries. Chlorine gas, phosgene, and mustard gas maimed more than killed, but caused devastating lung and skin damage. Hellish flame throwers terrorized troops. Deadly ordinance destroyed armies and landscapes. Even today, buried bombs from the Great War remain a threat in parts of Europe where wildfires have caused them to explode.

Millions of soldiers who survived the onslaught were wounded and maimed. Many suffered from “shell shock,” now better understood and accepted as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). And, for the first time in history, deaths from wounds surpassed deaths from disease.

In response, medicine and medical science innovated. Doctors in the field and hospitals devised new methods to save lives with improved antiseptic treatments. Surgeons learned to reconstruct shattered faces. Dentists rebuilt jaws. Orthopedists created lighter-weight prostheses to replace lost arms, hands, and legs. Blood transfusions, a technique in use prior to the War, became safer and more effective with the discovery of coating the inside of the blood storage vessel with paraffin to delay clotting and preserve supplies. By the end of the War, this enabled wounded soldiers to receive transfusions closer to the front lines, giving them better odds of surviving transport to field hospitals.

Dr. Harvey Cushing

Among the innovators was the American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, who came to the American Ambulance Hospital in Paris in 1915. In Line of Flight, Cushing inspires Camilla to follow in his footsteps, after she witnesses him removing shrapnel from a patient’s brain with a giant magnet.

I discovered Cushing’s surgical technique in his diary, From a Surgeon’s Journal 1915-1918 (Little, Brown, and Company, 1936) where he describes the procedure. The magnetic probe was large and cumbersome, and on this particular day, April 29, 1915, Cushing tried several times, unsuccessfully, to draw out a tiny fragment of shrapnel from a wounded soldier’s brain. An assistant had the idea to enhance the probe’s reach by attaching a large wire nail, about six inches long with a rounded tip, to the probe. I’ll let Cushing describe what happened, next:

Well, there was the usual crowd in the X-ray room and approaching corridor, and much excitement when we let the nail slide by gravity into the central mechanism of smiling Lafourcode; for at no time did he have any pressure symptoms, and all of these procedures were of course without an anæsthetic. . .

[After developing the X-ray plate to see if the nail and missile were in contact] we finally traipsed into the first-floor operating room, where Cutler mightily brings up the magnet and slowly we extract the nail—and—there was nothing on it! Surpressed signs and groans. I tried again, very carefully—with the same result. More sighs, and people began to go out. A third time—nothing. By this time I began to grumble . . .

I had taken off my gloves and put the nail down; but then—let’s try just once more! So I slipped the brutal thing again down the track, 3 ½ inches to the base of the brain, and again Cutler gingerly swung the big magnet down and made contact. The current was switched on and as before we slowly drew out the nail—and there it was, the little fragment of steel hanging on to its tip! Much emotion on all sides . . .

Cushing was a gifted writer as well as a pioneer of neurosurgery, and his account of his war experiences is as vivid as this excerpt. Discovering his journal was a gift. He not only inspired one of my lead characters; he inspired me, as well.

Illustration of the magnet from Cushing’s Journal

Evelyn Herwitz writes about the journey of writing her first novel—a work of historical fiction set in World War I—the vagaries of the creative process, and her quest for publication, at evelynherwitz.com.

Top Image: “WWI: nurse and patient outside stationary hospital, Rouen” from photograph collection of Lieutenant Colonel G.J.S. Archer, RAMC. 1914. Via Wiki Commons.

When I write, I hear music. In the words, that is. Some writers play favorite music in the background while writing. I don’t. It distracts me from hearing melodies as they emerge from the page.

I can trace my awareness of word rhythms to the beginning of my professional writing career decades ago, in public radio. I was a producer/reporter, first covering the Illinois Statehouse in Springfield, later working as a news director for a new NPR affiliate in Worcester, Mass., then reporting in-depth series for a consortium of NPR stations in Massachusetts and New York. Over those five years, I learned to think and write in terms of sound. Radio scripts are, by definition, aural. You have to read your words out loud. If they trip your tongue, it’s time to revise.

After my public radio stint, I switched to print journalism. I also began teaching feature writing at Clark University. When you teach, you must decipher how you do what you do, so you can explain it to your students. Before, I had simply relied on my ear. That was no longer good enough. Teaching writing, I had to articulate what was intuitive, which had the added, unexpected benefit of learning to refine my own approach to sentences. I became more aware and intentional about varying length, using precise diction, where to place what, when to break rules.

While writing Line of Flight, I discovered Virginia Tufte’s magnificent Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, which gives thousands of examples of how different sentence structures affect meaning and sound. In the midst of final rounds of revisions, before going to sleep, I would read a few pages of Tufte and let her lessons incubate overnight. When I returned to the computer the next day, inevitably some of her wisdom would filter into my editing decisions, to the manuscript’s betterment.

Currently, while working on Novel 2, I’m reading Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. Not all his sentences are short, but they appear on the page as free verse, broken into phrases. Know what your sentences actually say is his mantra. To do so, begin with short sentences. Cut all the excess. And: “Pay attention to rhythm, first and last.”

To find that excess, to ensure that my sentences in Line of Flight meant what I intended, to revise and revise and revise the rhythms, I reworked one later draft by reading the entire manuscript aloud. Even as I always hear my sentences in my head, that process was essential to getting the music right.

Writing well is never straightforward. Squeezing a first draft out of your heart and mind, for me, is both an elating journey of discovery and a struggle that I’ll find a dozen excuses to avoid. Revision is my favorite part of the process, uncovering the story I want to tell, ensuring the sentences say exactly what I mean. The final pass, making wordsong, is pure joy.

Evelyn Herwitz writes about the journey of writing her first novel—a work of historical fiction set in World War I—the vagaries of the creative process, and her quest for publication, at evelynherwitz.com.

I’ve been sending out queries for Line of Flight since November, about 10 months, now. So much for any naive assumptions that I’d find a literary agent sooner than later. I’m up to about 40 queries, so far, and have received a variety of form letter rejections and a couple of more personal notes, as well as two requests for the manuscript—one full (declined) and one partial (waiting for an answer). As a good friend reminds me, it only takes one agent to say yes. But finding that perfect match is a long journey.

After the first dozen or so no’s, I took a step back and hired an editor to review my query letter and first 10 pages, as well as to help me write a synopsis (much harder than it sounds). I also took a Grub Street workshop on writing queries. Both investments helped me to sharpen my language. Even before sending out the first query, I had hired one of my former Grub Street instructors to review the entire manuscript twice, for the final round of revisions. I feel confident about my novel. The question is how to break through the competition.

So, what’s the best metaphor to describe this process? There’s a search for the needle in a haystack, but that quest seems next to impossible and also mind-numbingly tedious and endless. There’s running a marathon, not a sprint, but (a) I’m not a runner and (b) marathons have a defined beginning and end, usually within a day, and this is taking far longer. Then there’s slogging through the trenches. Clearly, finding a literary agent is not a life-or-death matter of warfare, but given that my novel is set in World War I, that’s the analogy that fits, for now. Especially because of the mud that made trenches so treacherous.

Mostly, I feel like I just have to push myself to keep plodding forward—slogging through the deep mud of rejections, uncertainty, market trends that don’t match what I’ve written, self-doubts, distractions of our precarious political moment—until I find that agent who loves my story as much as I do and feels it has real potential.

Meanwhile, I continue to write. I’ve been working on Draft 1 of Novel 2 since spring and making good progress. That’s actually what’s keeping me going. Telling stories is what I need to do. And trust that I’ll find that perfect agent in due time. Amen.

Evelyn Herwitz writes about the journey of writing her first novel—a work of historical fiction set in World War I—the vagaries of the creative process, and her quest for publication, at evelynherwitz.com.

Image: New York Public Library

This afternoon at 2:15, my husband and I were supposed to be on a plane taxiing from the gate on a long-planned trip abroad—our first significant excursion in three years. I had been dreaming of our destination even before the pandemic hit. Having waited patiently, venturing only as far as a day’s drive from home for long weekends, we were at last ready to take the risk on international travel, once again.

Then, two days ago, my husband started coughing. His rapid test revealed a positive purple stripe even before the control was visible. I’ve been negative so far, but am not feeling great today. Fortunately, I was able to reschedule our trip for later in August. But for reasons unknown, my airlines app decided to notify me at the very second that our original flight was leaving the gate. For a moment, sitting at our kitchen table, I imagined what it would have felt like, right then, to be on our way. Yesterday, as I cooked and washed dishes and shopped for food and tended my husband, I thought about how I would have been packing, had all remained on track.

Our thoughts are not linear. We often experience the present moment while our minds are traveling backwards and forwards in time. But words and sentences and paragraphs and pages, by their nature, follow a linear sequence. How, then, to tell a narrative that is not linear, within a linear format?

I’m certainly not the first, nor will I be the last writer to confront this conundrum—especially in historical fiction, which, by definition, is set in the past. But here is how I solved it (or attempted to, as the reader will judge) for my World War I novel, Line of Flight.

I wrote the first few drafts as a personal journal, a travel diary that my protagonist, Simone Levitsky, keeps on her journey to find her estranged daughter, Camilla, who has run off with her beau to volunteer for the French ambulance corps in 1915. That structure was based on a straight chronology of events, even as it included past memories that embellished the plot. But I realized, several years into the process, that I was stuck. The format was too rigid. I had to come up with almost daily events and observations, even as that pacing might not serve the story well.

So I changed course, reconceptualizing the novel as a long letter written by Simone to Camilla’s daughter, Zoé, about her journey to bring Camilla home. This enabled me to more freely explore Simone’s memories as well as her insights gained years after the events, deepening her character. In earlier drafts, I had created a story-within-a-story of found letters from Camilla to her lover. Working them into the journal format was a bit forced. Here, I was able to integrate them more seamlessly.

But I needed another layer. What was Simone’s relationship to Zoé, and how did that inform her reflections about Camilla, as well as memories of her own mother? This evolved into a series of vignettes interspersed throughout the novel that capture what’s happening in the present moment between grandmother and granddaughter. Juxtaposed with Simone’s recollections, the vignettes serve to reveal her immediate emotional state as well as how she has evolved.

In so doing, I have tried to create a more immediate sense of how Simone’s mind works, how she jumps from present to past to future and back again, not necessarily in that order. I have tried to build her understanding of her life in layers that reveal themselves when, and only when, she is ready to acknowledge her own truths. To the extent that any of us can do so.

We are all time travelers, whether or not we acknowledge it—or an app reminds us where we might have been. Capturing the essence of that lived experience is the novelist’s eternal challenge.

Evelyn Herwitz writes about the journey of writing her first novel—a work of historical fiction set in World War I—the vagaries of the creative process, and her quest for publication, at evelynherwitz.com.

Image: Alex Guillaume

In October 1914, two-and-a-half months after Germany launched WWI in Europe, Dr. Mary M. Crawford, a graduate of Cornell University (’04) and Cornell Medical College (’07), set sail for France—one of six American surgeons journeying to Paris to assist in medical treatment of combatants at the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine.

In Line of Flight, Dr. Crawford becomes a mentor to Camilla, who expands her goals beyond nursing to become a physician after the War. Dr. Crawford’s vivid descriptions of her experiences at the American Ambulance were published in 1915 and 1916 as “Letters from a French Hospital” in the Cornell Women’s Review (Vol 1, No. 2–5). Her words helped me to envision and recreate the world inside the hospital, and inspired some of the events and characters in my novel.

She was a woman of her times, and her sense of noblesse oblige is on full display in her letters; and yet, I found her to be a fascinating trailblazer who deeply cared for her patients and believed in her mission. Here are a few excerpts—about devastating injuries, medical innovations, a Zeppelin attack, fear of the War’s escalation, and the courage and grinding stress of life at the American Ambulance:

12 November 1914

“The days are so full, the nights seem so short, that letters can’t be written. Tonight I’m sad. I have a dear young French boy who is wounded in the arm, he had a terrific hemorrhage before he came to me, and tonight he has just had another fearful hemorrhage. Luckily I was in the next ward and rushed in in time to get a tourniquet on his arm. Now he is quiet, the bleeding has stopped, and I’ve begun giving him saline and stimulants. We shall probably transfuse him if he lives. I do hate to lose these poor fellows.”

1 December 1914

“To-day the electro-magnet covered itself with glory. We drew a huge piece of shrapnel right out of the middle of a man’s lung with it. Dr. Blake was so skillful. The way in was curved, so he took the steel end, put it in a vise, and bent it correctly, and then managed to get it in the right way. It was like some super-thrilling fishing!”

16 December 1914

“I am tired to-night. I’ve taken a bath and washed my hair, which is an undertaking, for this water is very hard and you have to use ammonia and borax to get results. Two days ago Dr. B. gave me charge of nine dental cases. They are the men who have fractures of the upper or lower jaws besides other wounds. The American dentists here are doing wonderful work—some of the most brilliant that is done in any department. I have a camera now and am going to photograph all of these poor fellows together. Such deformities you never saw. The whole front of one man’s face is gone; how we are ever going to build him a new one I don’t see, but as soon as he is ready we’ll begin grafting and plastic work generally.”

13 January 1915

“I must write you just one more story that came to me at the Ambulance just a little while before Xmas. We had a French soldier brought in frightfully wounded. One leg had to be amputated, and besides that he had a half dozen other wounds. His dog came with him, a hunting dog of some kind. This dog had saved his master’s life. They were in the trenches together when a shell burst in such a way as to collapse the whole trench. Every man in it was killed or buried in the collapse and this dog dug until he got his master’s face free so that he could breathe, and then he sat by him until some reinforcements came and dug them all out. Every one was dead but this man.”

22 February 1915

“Somehow I’ve not been able to write a word these last few days. We’ve had plenty to do and I’ve been tired at night. We all discuss the chances of the United States being dragged into the War. Every day we rush for the papers to see how many more ships have been torpedoed. It is a ghastly business all around. I’m glad I’m not planning to come home yet, for I’d hate to be blown up. How awful it would be if an American ship were destroyed and war declared.” [Note: Britain’s R.M.S. Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-Boat a few months later on May 7.]

16 March 1915

“I’m startled to find that I’ve let more than a week go by without telling you all about the Zeppelin raid. Except in my postals to Father, I mentioned that we had thrills. It was a most wonderful occasion. Every one felt that it was worth crossing the Atlantic for just that one night. The bugles blew the alarm about one o’clock. Immediately all the electricity in the A. A. was turned off while in the street men were running around turning off the old gas lamps by hand. Neuilly has not progressed to street electricity. Almost immediately the search lights were flashing everywhere and the guns of the forts began to boom. Suddenly right over the Ambulance appeared a Zeppelin, lighted by the searchlights. The Eiffel Tower guns began shooting too, and in the dark the trail of the shells could be seen. So the ambulance was shot over in two directions. It was a curious sensation. No fear but tremendous excitement. Lots of us on the Terrasse watching and groaning as we’d see the shots pass too low. Zeppelin No. 1 passed out of sight and then No. 2 appeared, even lower down than the first. I assure you that guns booming in earnest sound very different from practice or salutes. Last sight of all was a flock of biplanes with searchlights on their front, patrolling the sky. We tumbled into bed at last, tired but exhilarated. A bomb had been dropped only three streets away from the Ambulance, so we really were in a little danger. Paris is full of tales about How and Why the Zeppelins managed to get here at all. And some sort of military investigation is going on. . . .

“Here we are in the midst of a rush of work that is awful. Not that we aren’t glad and able to do all that comes to us, but awful in what it signifies. The fighting in Belgium at present is the most frightful since the beginning of the war. The English, the Canadians, the Zouaves, and at the back, the French territorials are in a death grapple with the maximum force of the German army. For the last five days, the freshly wounded men, right off the battlefield, have been pouring into Paris alone about 500 a day! This is only a small percentage of the whole. We have been taking them in at the rate of 15 or 20 a day, as fast as we can empty our beds, or get extra ones. We are full up now, but each day we send out older cases to make room. We are getting the Zouaves, the best soldiers France has, and generally a pretty nasty proposition to go up against. These men say it is a massacre on both sides. . . .

“With all this we keep getting rumors from high official sources that on the French front things are going wonderfully. They look for a sudden and complete crumpling up of the German line. The wounded say the same thing as they come in from Arras in a different way. The French are fighting magnificently and are, I believe, a better machine today than the Germans. The waiting and working blindly seem more than we can stand sometimes. I would to Heaven the end were in sight!”

After a year at the American Ambulance, Dr. Crawford returned to Brooklyn, N.Y., where she had been Chief Surgeon at Williamsburg Hospital and had established a private practice before embarking to France. She helped to raise funds for French hospitals, as well as founded the medical department at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which she led as medical director from 1919 until she retired in 1949. She married Edward Schuster, an attorney who specialized in Latin America. Dr. Crawford also served as an alumna trustee of Cornell, vice president of the American Women’s Association, president of the Cornell Medical College Alumni Association, and co-founder of the American Women’s Hospital Service. She died in New York on November 17, 1972, at 88 years old.

Image Credits:
American Ambulance Hospital, Wikki Commons
Dr. Mary M. Crawford, Wikki Commons

Evelyn Herwitz writes about the journey of writing her first novel—a work of historical fiction set in World War I—the vagaries of the creative process, and her quest for publication, at evelynherwitz.com.

For anything I’ve ever written, be it fiction or non-fiction, my favorite research is always sifting through primary sources. There is something about reading materials that are unfiltered by someone else’s editorial judgment, in their original form, that gives me chills, as if I’m connecting across time and space to another person’s soul.

My research for Line of Flight led me to just such a close encounter in the New York Public Library’s lion-guarded main branch, which houses the 1915-1919 records of the American Fund for French Wounded. Founded by American women living abroad to aid small French hospitals serving wounded troops during WWI, the AFFW maintained its U.S. office in New York City—hence, the location of the archive (although other records are housed at Yale).

My protagonist, Simone Levitsky, ends up volunteering for the AFFW as a way to search for her daughter, Camilla, along the Western Front. I wanted to know what those volunteers saw and felt on their delivery routes, providing medical assistance to wounded soldiers and civilians.

So, back in August 2016, I spent hours in a book-lined research room at the NYPL, pouring through boxes of correspondence, written on well-worn typewriters, corrected by hand. It was quite the treasure trove. Back then, people wrote wonderful, detailed, eye-witness accounts of their travels, dinners, conversations, and general observations of life in France.

To give you a taste, here are excerpts from a letter by A. Schuyler van Rensselaer, president of the New York branch, to volunteers at the AFFW’s Paris Depot, about her experience as nurse in charge of the Motor-Van Canteen at the Chalons-sur-Marne Railroad Station, July 1, 1916. (The original is 3½ single-spaced, typed pages):

Our task consists in serving the soldiers. We aid those who cannot help themselves to food or drink—so many of them are wounded in both hands or both arms or, their heads envelopped [sic] in bandages, are unable to see! We guide their movements, lift them up, support them, and under their heads, which lie too low and which rest, for want of something better on their caps stuffed with hard objects, slip little pillows until they say with a sigh of relief: “Ah, that is much better, thank you!” These little pillows, of which you have been good enough to send us great numbers, are the manna of the sanitary trains. . . .

After serving the men with their food we give them cigarettes. We put socks on their bare feet, and slippers of felt or lamb’s wool. Everything of the sort that you have so generously given us is disposed of to the very last article. Many of the men have had their feet frozen, and we often relieve them by replacing their heavy marching shoes with these soft warm slippers. We also examine the bandages and dressings and call the attention of the surgeon of the train to those that have become blood-stained or are too tightly bound, and also to such patients as are in delirium or seem to us to be growing worse. And we try to calm the insane, for the bursting of a shell sometimes produces a total or partial impairment of the brain.

The deep voice of the guns almost always accompanies us on our journeys. The chasing of aeroplanes is a daily distraction; by preference they fly over the railroad stations in order to attack provision trains or troop trains. The Zeppelin of Revigny fell quite close to one of our vans; some of our lines are bombarded every day, and sometimes, by accident, an ammunition wagon blows up near our own, which we never leave.

Day and night we live in the tumult of the railroad stations, but one soon grows accustomed to these noises, unknown in the ordinary course of life; we even love them because they secure for us the joy and the honor of aiding our soldiers in their sufferings. . . .

There were many more letters that I read and photographed, to record appearance and mood of wounded soldiers, the state of medical care, inventories of items that the AFFW distributed, how small and mid-sized hospitals looked and smelled, as well as the voices of the authors and how they filtered what they saw through their own values and prejudices. As essential as these details were to building the world of my novel, however, the cadence of correspondents’ words influenced me most of all, and found its way into how Simone tells her story.

Historical fiction novelists in the future will undoubtedly scour Facebook posts, Twitter feeds, and Tik-Tok videos to create their own characters and stories about our fraught times. But give me an old-fashioned letter, any day, to delve into past lives.

Evelyn Herwitz writes about the journey of writing her first novel—a work of historical fiction set in World War I—the vagaries of the creative process, and her quest for publication, at evelynherwitz.com.

Image: “American Fund for French Wounded” poster, (Paris: Herbert Clarke, ca.1917), Library of Congress.