The Rebel Wife Blog Tour/Guest Post

Good morning blog visitors, I am thrilled to welcome author Taylor M. Polites as he stops by my blog today for a guest post. I'm the first blog on this book tour and I am so happy to be the one to 'kick it off', so to speak.

Mr. Polites is the author of the historical novel The Rebel Wife. Isn't this cover gorgeous? The book sounds fantastic and reminds me a bit of Gone With the Wind.

Set in Reconstruction Alabama, Augusta “Gus” Branson's is a young widow whose quest for freedom turns into a race for her life when her husband Eli dies of a swift and horrifying fever and a large package of money – her only inheritance and means of survival – goes missing. Gus begins to wake to the realities that surround her: the social stigma her marriage has stained her with, what her husband did to earn his fortune, the shifting and very dangerous political and social landscape that is being destroyed by violence between the Klan and the Freeman's Bureau, and the deadly fever that is spreading like wildfire. Nothing is as she believed, everyone she trusts is hiding something from her.

Read on for Mr. Polites guest post, as he discusses his writing inspiration....

People often think inspiration comes from a single source or in a flash like lightning, but the inspiration for The Rebel Wife came to me over a long period of time and from different places. I grew up in North Alabama, but my parents relocated there from Southern Illinois, which in some ways can be as Southern as Mississippi. I was born in Huntsville, though, and educated there. In kindergarten, we were walked as a group to a nearby cotton field and allowed to pick a boll or two to keep. Talk about learning what’s important! I remember tours of the historic district, which has an incredible number of beautiful and beautifully preserved antebellum homes. I learned the smell of boxwood and what a carriage block was for and how very old glass windowpanes begin to run and warp like they are melting. And all the unremembered things that must have added up with the remembered things to create assumptions about Alabama and the past and the Civil War that seemed in-born.

When I read Gone With the Wind, that was like a thunderbolt. I was thirteen and had already harbored ambitions of writing. In fifth grade, I had written (and directed) a series of short plays that my English class had acted. In seventh grade, when I read GWTW, I can almost say it changed my life. I read it again and again. It seemed to flesh out into real life (the way novels can seem so much more real than real life) all those latent things that I still carried from Huntsville. When I was fifteen, I volunteered at the Weeden House museum (http://weedenhousemuseum.com/), a beautiful 1819 Federal style home on Gates Street. I pulled weeds and cleaned up the garden, but more importantly, I got to spend time in that house, inside those thick brick walls with the pictures and furnishings, the reeded wood paneling and the leaded glass fanlight and the wide pine floors.
I did more reading, too. Not just fiction, but of women who lived during the period. Sarah Morgan’s diary of Baton Rouge during the Civil War. Susan Dabney Smedes’ heavily sentimental recollections of her father and antebellum life. Mary Chesnut’s sharp, acerbic diary. Fanny Kemble’s recollections of her life on a Georgia plantation long before the war. These women made an impression, strong-minded but hemmed in by society and convention. They were my inspiration, too.

I went to college and studied American history and began a more detailed and academic investigation of the South. My senior thesis, of course, was on Huntsville. The fascination just won’t let up. I continued reading and researching since then, working on understanding a world, recreating it in my mind. In my teens, I had developed an obsession with towns. River towns and railroad towns. I would map them out, street by street, business by business and home by home. All of them contained something of Huntsville at their core. I drew the houses, filled them with people and began writing stories about those people.
Albion is the result of all these things. Augusta is made up of all those women. I was definitely inspired—by places and stories and people, by history and myth and how the two get bound up in each other. It has been a dream come true to have this novel published, something unbelievable and yet inevitable, too. I am so grateful to all those voices and experiences that have led me here. I hope people who read The Rebel Wife get a sense of that inspiration, too.

Thank you so much for letting me guest blog on your site! And happy reading!!

About the author:
Taylor M. Polites is a novelist living in Providence, Rhode Island with his small Chihuahua, Clovis. Polites’ first novel, The Rebel Wife, is due out in February 2012 from Simon & Schuster. He graduated in June 2010 with his MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. He has lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, New York City, St. Louis and the Deep South. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a BA in History and French and spent a year studying in Caen, France. He has covered arts and news for a variety of local newspapers and magazines, including the Cape Codder, InNewsWeekly, Bird’s Eye View (the in-flight magazine of CapeAir), artscope Magazine and Provincetown Arts Magazine.
Where you can find the author: his website, his blog, on facebook and on twitter.

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Thank you so much for stopping by Mr. Polites and sharing what inspires you to write. How wonderful that you have put so much into learning about American history, in particular the South where you are from. The Rebel Wife really does sound interesting and it sounds like it truly came from your heart and soul. Best of luck!
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You can purchase the book at the following:
amazon
barnes and nobles
powells
kindle
nook
iBookstore

Visit the rest of the tour stops during the month of February:

Official Blog Tour site

February 2
Let Them Read Books

February 3
Colorimetry

February 6
Five Alarm Book Reviews

February 7
Historical Boys

February 8
Ladybug Storytime

February 10
The Maiden's Court

February 14
Reading the Past

February 16
Ex Libris

February 17
The True Book Addict

February 20
The Elliott Review

February 21
Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer

February 24
A Bookish Libraria

February 29
Reading for Sanity

Special thanks to Tribute Books for making this possible.