noun: destiny; plural noun: destinies
- the events that will necessarily happen to a particular person or thing in the future.”she was unable to control her own destiny”
Paper Lantern Writers usually starts discussing themes for anthologies almost a year in advance. The members mull ideas, it’s discussed at meetings, and a topic decided. The Publication Committee takes over from there. In early 2024, when the theme of a Day of Reckoning was announced, I like to connect my short stories in our anthologies with my novels. In our first book, Unlocked, my short story “True Legacy” continues the story of my character Nina Larrowe from Innocents at Home, a novel I was still writing when Unlocked came out. In last year’s PLW anthology, Beneath a Midwinter Moon, my story “Frontier Christmas” imagined a Christmas evening with two real historical characters, Sarah Knox Taylor and Jefferson Davis, supporting characters in my novel The River Remembers.
So for this new anthology, I had to find a situation in one of my novels that I could imagine as a day of reckoning. From The Aloha Spirit, I considered Dolores’s decision to leave her husband, but I covered that pretty well in the novel. Could I write about Alberto’s decision to devote his life to a married woman and her family? Could I write about the demons that haunted Manolo and drove him to drink? Nothing inspired me.
The River Remembers had already given me a short story idea, but I searched for another idea. Could I create a scene with Lawrence Taliaferro, the Indian Agent that all three of my female characters encountered? His life was rich with possibilities, but again nothing inspired me.
My first short story had been inspired by a character in the book that became Innocents at Home, but it takes place several years after the book ends. As I thought about the characters, I kept coming back to Henry Ward Beecher. He was a powerful 19th century preacher based in Brooklyn who traveled the world speaking about God’s love. It was a well-known “secret” that he conducted many affairs with his female parishioners, but in the name of decorum everyone overlooked it. Until Theodore Tilton sued Beecher over an affair the preacher had with his wife, Elizabeth Tilton. That was it, the seed of my story. That trial had the power to affect the lives of Beecher, the Tiltons, and Chloe Beach. Chloe was the mother of a major character in my novel, and she was the mother of an illegitimate child by Henry Ward Beecher. I imagined her watching the trial and dreading its outcome and the effect on her marriage. The story is titled “And the Righteous Prevail.” It is up to the reader to decide who exactly is righteous and who exactly prevailed. The anthology Destiny Comes Due was released November 1.
