Diana Stevan is the author of both historical and contemporary fiction ranging from Ukrainian family sagas to psychological and literary works. A House Full of Strangers – Diana’s new book – is a collection of short stories and novellas, set in Winnipeg, about Ukrainian immigrant landladies, their families, and the people who rented rooms from them.
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Though I love historical fiction, I never considered writing a novel set in the past.
And yet, here I am, promoting my fifth historical fiction, A House Full of Strangers, and my first collection of short stories, launched in May of this year. Set in Winnipeg in the 1940s and 1950s, it’s about Ukrainian immigrant landladies, their families, and the people who rent rooms from them. Though I grew up in a rooming house run by my parents, both Ukrainian immigrants, I could not write these stories solely from my memory and my mother’s anecdotes. I had to find historical details—settings, dress, news, and events—that would take the reader back in time.
The stories in A House Full of Strangers have a common thread: that of living in a rooming house. Together, they make an upstairs-downstairs kind of story; they show the everyday struggles of the ordinary folk who rent out the rooms and those who need them.
My First Venture into Writing Historical Fiction
When I look back, I realize I had written some historical fiction in my first novel. A Cry from the Deep, a time-slip romantic mystery and adventure story. Though largely set in the present, the novel opens in 1878 in Killybegs, Ireland. The opening page shows a young woman, Margaret O’Donnell, on her wedding day. She sits on top of a craggy cliff, scouring the ocean for a sign of James Gallagher, the man who’d stolen her heart. He had left for India on the Alice O’Meary over a year ago. Since there had been no word for six months, she had given up hope and agreed to marry Barnaby Atoll, the middleman for her landlord.
Though this first section is brief, its historical references appear throughout my novel. I had to research ships of that period, as well as the Irish customs and superstitions that Margaret and her family would have held. Then, when the protagonist Catherine Fitzgerald, an underwater photographer, has nightmares of a woman in a white dress from another time, she has to look into the past to discover why this woman is haunting her.
My Second Book Turned Out to Be Historical Fiction
My second novel, The Rubber Fence, set on a psychiatric ward in 1972, was originally placed in the literary fiction category. But it turns out to be historical fiction as well because the story incorporates real historical events—like the Vietnam War and the whole hippie movement—figures, and settings. The story revolves around a young and ambitious psychiatric intern, her patients, and the arrogant psychiatrist who tries to shock them. I had worked on a psychiatric ward in the same period of history, but I was a clinical social worker, not an intern or psychiatrist, so I had to research the drugs of that period, the procedures used to shock patients, and the diagnostic manual used by psychiatrists.
A Family Saga Becomes a Historical One
With two novels under my belt, I thought I would write more literary fiction, but our granddaughter encouraged me to write about her great-great grandmother’s horrific life during WWI in Ukraine and Russia.
Though I had many anecdotes from my mother, an amazing oral storyteller, writing my baba’s family saga took years of historical research. I had to fill many holes to do justice to what my mother and grandmother had gone through.
Sunflowers Under Fire begins in 1915 during World War I. With the Germans and Austrians threatening to invade, my grandfather takes off from his farm on horseback to Lutsk to volunteer for Tsar Nicholas II’s army. While he’s enlisting, my grandmother Lukia gives birth to my mother on a dirt floor covered by clean burlap bags. Soon after, Lukia and her six children are forced to flee. Over the next fourteen years, she must rely on her wits and faith to survive life in a refugee camp, the ravages of a typhus epidemic, the Bolshevik revolution, unimaginable losses, and one daughter’s forbidden love.
I had to research wartime, refugee camps in Russia, the Romanov family, the Bolshevik revolution, farming methods, and more. I visited libraries in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, New York, and the Ukrainian Museum and Library in Stamford, Connecticut, to read history books. Afterwards, I combed various websites and consulted a professor of Eastern European history. I was thankful our family had visited my baba’s village in 1988, so I had a sense of the place’s geography.
Sunflowers Under Fire became a finalist for a 2019 Whistler Independent Book Award and a semi-finalist for a Kindle Book Award. And readers wrote to ask what had happened to Lukia Mazurets and her family after they immigrated to Manitoba in 1929.
Since there was such interest, I wrote the sequel, Lilacs in the Dust Bowl, about Lukia and her family’s arrival in Manitoba in August 1929, just before the stock market fell and the Great Depression began. It was Grapes of Wrath in Canada, and the characters were Ukrainian immigrants. The story of Lukia and her family’s hardship on the prairies ends in 1938, when Hitler is on the march in Europe. It’s also when Lukia’s daughter breaks up with a poor boy she loves.
Lukia’s daughter’s love story concludes with Paper Roses on Stony Mountain, set on a farm, in a village behind a federal penitentiary, and in Winnipeg. It covers the family’s struggles between 1938-1943. With World War II raging overseas, everyone is affected.
This book received a glowing review from Publishers Weekly.
Next Book Carries the Threads of Historical Fiction
My next novel is already in motion. It’ll be a hybrid, with the protagonist having a foot in the present and the other in the past. Though set in the current century, I’m weaving in some famous people from the past. They have a lot to say. I can’t wait to begin.
Diana … I loved reading about the evolution of your novels. It’s both strange and wonderful to read of the paths writers take into historical fiction. Congratulations on A House Full of Strangers – and please let me know when the next novel is ready!
A House Full of Strangers by Diana Stevan
Set in the 1940s and 1950s in Winnipeg, Manitoba, A House Full of Strangers is a collection of fictional short stories based ontrue tales about Ukrainian immigrant landladies, their families and those who rent rooms from them.
After surviving the Great Depression, many Ukrainian immigrants left the heartache of farming and went to Winnipeg to try their luck. To supplement their income from blue-collar jobs, some rented rooming houses, and hoped in time they would own their own. And then there were those who added to their rental income by selling homebrew.
Other authors on their historical fiction journey:
- The Writing Journey with Tracy Chevalier
- Reflections on Writing Historical Fiction with C.W. Gortner
- Jacqueline Winspear On Writing Historical Fiction
FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION FOLLOW A WRITER OF HISTORY. There’s a SUBSCRIBE function on the right hand side of the page.
M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel THAT WAS THEN is a contemporary thriller. Mary’s other novels, THE ADMIRAL’S WIFE, PARIS IN RUINS, TIME AND REGRET, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook or on her website www.mktod.com.
