Q&A with Joy Jordan-Lake

 

 

 

Joy Jordan-Lake is the author of the new novel Echoes of Us. Her other novels include A Bend of Light. She lives south of Nashville, Tennessee.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Echoes of Us, and how did you create your cast of characters?

 

A: I often fall in love with a place first and then start reading and researching for a story based in actual historical events and people. That’s been true for my past novels set in Charleston, South Carolina; at the Biltmore Estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains; the coast of Maine….

 

With this novel, though, I was already quite familiar with St. Simons Island, Georgia, the novel’s setting, since my family has been connected with it in various ways for five generations.

 

So in this case, I don’t think I was searching for a future novel so much as stumbling onto visiting the brand new World War II Home Front Museum there in the old Coast Guard station right next to what had been a musty old motel where my family stayed when my brother and I were small.

 

The museum startled me, highlighting how a German U-boat lurked off the St. Simons Island coast hunting for kills, then sank two ships in one night, killing 22 men.

 

From that came a hundred different ways the island was suddenly thrown directly into the war, including the conversion of a posh hotel, the King & Prince, into a training school for the new technology radar.

 

The characters grew out of things in my research I found most surprising and enthralling—like imagining how on earth it worked for German POWs stationed nearby to serve food to the Allied officers billeted at the radar training school, and how farm boys from rural America were living alongside, for example, a brilliant British officer who was Jewish brought in as an instructor, and the role of the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

 

Then, once the three very different men forged a bond, against all the odds, what if they were all connected somehow to an extraordinary female aviator? What if there were sacrifices they’d each made, and secrets they’d all kept…until now?

 

Q: Can you say more about how you researched the novel and what you learned that especially surprised you?

 

A: I’ve touched on the research through the WWII Home Front Museum, and I made a number of trips there.

 

One early surprise was that more Americans were killed on the East Coast of the U.S. by German subs during the war than at Pearl Harbor.

 

I was blown away to learn how many hundreds of thousands of German POWs were kept on American soil during the war, the enlisted men working and the officers not forced to—and how many privileges, for example, the German POW officers had compared to American citizens who were people of color. Mind-blowing, truly.

 

Other surprises and important reminders included all the various ways ordinary people were doing such extraordinary things to help the cause, and how little credit many groups, like the Merchant Marines and the WASP, received compared to the credit they deserved for sacrifice and courage.

 

Once you move as a writer from reading about all these different people and roles to wondering what happened in the lives and hearts of actual people when their paths crossed and they had to interact as fellow soldiers or as a woman trying to use her aviation gifts and brains, but being just patted on the head by too many men in charge, or two people attracted to one another across lines they shouldn’t cross for any number of reasons….

 

Once all the statistics starting turning into real people who love and despise and betray and sacrifice for one another, then you’ve got the makings of a story.

Q: You tell the story along two timelines--did you focus more on one before turning to the other, or did you write the novel in the order in which it appears?

 

A: Dual timelines can be tricky, which I’m sure you know and have heard before, but also incredibly fun to read and create. I always hate myself a little about a third of the way through for choosing a complicated format. If it works, though, I think it can heighten the suspense and mystery.

 

My earlier novel A Tangled Mercy was originally just a historical novel and I added the modern-day timeline later, but for Echoes of Us, the two timelines really grew together.

 

I was intrigued by the idea that these three very different men, one of them originally part of the German navy and one of them Jewish, might have become friends, and how that friendship might have been impacted by their separate connections with a female aviator.

 

But just as interesting to me was how the bonds they’d forged so many decades ago in wartime might have become contentious among their descendants, fighting for control of what the three men had built—and might become even more volatile as old secrets emerge.

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: I read a good bit about the development of radar, and how it became really THE pivotal technology that would mean either the Axis or the Allied powers would win.

 

It’s easy in hindsight not to feel the absolute terror the people living through these years experienced day by day as they watched, for example, Allied ships be sunk by German U-boats faster than the ships could be built.

 

So in studying radar, about which I am still no expert, just a novice who is fascinated, I learned about the echoes at play. And with a dual timeline, in which secrets in the past are now impacting the present, this seemed like a perfect title.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: This next novel is set in present day in Northern Italy at a villa on Lake Como, but mafia-related violence and a devastating theft in the late 1960s in Sicily become crucial to untangling the present, and key for the main character, an up-and-coming painter, to make some life-altering choices that could also impact hundreds if not thousands of other people.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’m always delighted to connect with readers through my newsletter and website, where there are lots more behind-the-scenes stories, book and swag giveaways, interviews with fellow writers, affordable travel tips, and book club kit items such as recipes that go with the various books. Here’s the link: https://www.joyjordanlake.com/subscribe.

 

And thank you so much for the invitation to chat on this page!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Joy Jordan-Lake.