Imagining the Untold Stories of an Early African American Preacher

I started writing a novel for National Novel Writing Month (an online challenge posed annually) in the hopes that it would be a means to an end, to allow me to read more closely into the autobiographies of Jarena Lee, an early African Methodist Episcopal preacher, while trying to creatively fill in the gaps in her narratives. Lee's self-published narratives from the early nineteenth century, though rich in the details of her spiritual life, left a lot to the imagination in terms of her flesh-and-blood existence. This talk will summarize some of the  challenges inherent to writing about a historical figure, whose details are ill-defined, and writing fictionally when one is trained to write in the citation-driven world of historical writing. As well, this presentation will explore the idea that writing fictionally has unexpected benefits for one's academic writing. I will talk about working within the silences of historical sources to provide coherent narratives and how connecting these dots in a fictional manner might reveal some new directions for academic writing.