FARMINGTON – About 60 people packed into Devaney, Doak & Garrett Booksellers early Saturday evening, so tightly there was no room for some people to maneuver, for a chance to hear author, poet and political activist Marge Piercy introduce her newest work.
Members of the audience chuckled then laughed outright, made whispered comments then blinked tears away as Piercy read, first from a selection of political poems, later from the first chapter of her new book, “Sex Wars: A Novel of the Post-Civil War Period,” about the many social, political, and intellectual transformations that took place during the late 19th century.
Some audience members gasped in surprise at the many parallels Piercy drew between that period 150 years ago and today. Political and social issues between the Civil War and the turn of the century centered on things like abortion and contraception rights, censorship, the rights of women and minorities, company – and election-campaign finance irregularities, and “election fraud” then as now, Piercy said. Her commentary drew gasps and chuckles from the crowd.
While she spoke and read from “Sex Wars,” Piercy showed slides of drawings and photographs of the characters in her novel, which, while fictional, fleshes out the lives of a number of historical figures, including feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Victoria Woodhull. When asked “how hard it was to fictionalize real people,” Piercy said the “craft is the same, the ways you must handle dialogue are the same.” But she added that a great deal of historical research also goes into the process. When researching “Sex Wars” time period and learning about her characters’ lives, Piercy said, she read more than 300 books.
Farmington-based author Ann Arbor was at the tail end of the line of more than 30-people waiting for Piercy to sign copies of “Sex Wars” or her books of poetry after the reading. Approaching the signing table, Arbor began to thank Piercy for continuing to write at a time when many of the other woman writers that shaped Arbor’s work had either given up writing, or committed suicide. The power of Piercy’s voice, and her persistence, was one of the things that gave Arbor the strength to finish her first novel, she said.
“I’ve been reading her work for 20-plus years,” Arbor said. “The feistiness of her voice, her ability to communicate how people process their worlds” directly affected her own relationship with writing. Arbor said she has always admired the way Piercy approaches history in her novels. The books “took me away from this time and place, even though they told me about this time and place,” Arbor said.
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