Jennifer Chiaverini is the author of the new novel The World's Fair Quilt, the latest in her Elm Creek Quilts series. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Q: What inspired you to write The World’s Fair Quilt?
A: In my previous novel, The Museum of Lost Quilts, the Elm Creek Quilters encounter unexpected financial difficulties that put the future of their beloved business in doubt. (Who could’ve foreseen that running the nation’s most renowned quilters’ retreat at a 19th-century manor in rural central Pennsylvania would be so wildly expensive?)
I knew my readers would worry about the fate of their beloved favorite characters if I didn’t resolve those issues promptly, so I decided that my next book would feature Sylvia Bergstrom Compson, octogenarian quilter and cofounder of Elm Creek Quilts, as she enlists the help of her friends to confront the calamity.
Sylvia often finds courage in lessons from history, so I began by sifting through her past, hoping to rediscover a significant event that might influence her newly uncertain present.
That’s when I remembered an incident I had included in the sixth Elm Creek Quilts novel, The Master Quilter.
When Sylvia’s friend and colleague, Gwen, a professor of American Studies, struggled to find a new research topic that would unite her twin passions of women’s history and quilting, Sylvia reminisced about a time decades before when she and her elder sister participated in the Sears National Quilt Contest for the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition.
Intrigued, Gwen plunged into historical research, and what she discovered convinced her that the extraordinary quilt contest should be the subject of her next book.
Although I shared Gwen’s fascination, the Sears National Quilt Contest appeared only briefly in The Master Quilter—but it definitely made an impression.
Wherever I traveled on book tour, curious readers would ask me whether the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair really had hosted such a magnificent quilt exhibit, or if I’d simply made it up. It was always very clear from their expressions that they hoped it was historical fact and not mere fiction.
One evening, at a library event in Wisconsin, a reader in the signing line passed me her copy of The Master Quilter and regarded me speculatively. “Gwen believes that there’s a whole book to be written about the Sears National Quilt Contest,” she remarked. “I hope you agree.”
I laughed and replied that I hoped it was true, for Gwen’s sake, and that seemed to satisfy the reader. Yet her comment lingered in my imagination ever after.
Perhaps I should write a novel focused on the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair quilt contest. Its cultural significance definitely merited a fuller depiction than the few pages I’d devoted to it in The Master Quilter.
The Bergstrom sisters had perfected the art of sibling rivalry, so it would be fun to show them overcoming their differences, or persevering in spite of them, as they collaborate on a quilt.
And since the contest had taken place during the Great Depression, an older, wiser Sylvia could draw courage and resilience from memories of that earlier time when the residents of Elm Creek Manor had come together to overcome uncertainty and financial hardship.
I’m so happy that all these years later, I’ve been able to weave the loose threads from an earlier novel into the continuing story of the Elm Creek Quilters—thanks to a timely observation from a clever reader.
Q: You’ve said that you do extensive research for your novels—can you say more about that, and about what you learned that especially surprised you?
A: I usually turn to primary sources such as memoirs, letters, newspapers, and government documents, as well as secondary sources such as biographies and historical accounts.
For The World’s Fair Quilt, newspaper articles about the Sears National Quilt Contest and the Chicago World’s Fair were absolutely essential.
As for secondary sources, the book Patchwork Souvenirs of the 1933 World’s Fair by Merikay Waldvogel and Barbara Brackman was very helpful, and I highly recommend it for readers who want to learn more about the contest.
When I’m preparing to write an Elm Creek Quilts novel, I refer to my master timeline for the series to remind myself about important, fixed events in the lives of the established characters.
Often I’ll reread entire novels to make sure I haven’t overlooked anything that didn’t seem significant enough to add to my master timeline at the time, but might be rather important for the new story I want to tell.
For a historical Elm Creek Quilts novel like The World’s Fair Quilt, I need to do all of the above!
My historical research for The World’s Fair Quilt unearthed many details that surprised and impressed me.
The first was the astonishing size and breadth of the quilt contest itself. 25,000 quilters—roughly one of every 2,000 American women given the population at the time—submitted their finest handiwork to their local Sears, Roebuck and Company stores, where the top finishers advanced to regional competitions and then onto the finals in Chicago.
The tantalizing $1,200 grand prize was an enormous sum in those days, more than the average per capita income.
In honor of Chicago’s centennial, the theme of the World’s Fair was “A Century of Progress”; many savvy participants made sure to incorporate this theme into their designs, forever capturing their understanding of “progress” during the Great Depression and reflecting the nation’s mood during an extremely challenging era.
I was also surprised to learn that the grand prize-winning quilt, “Star of the Blue Grass,” was presented to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt a few days before Christmas 1933. It was kept at the White House for a time, but at some point it was moved, lost, or stolen. Nothing in the historical record remains to explain what became of it. That’s a mystery I’d love for someone to solve.
Q: The Library Journal review of the novel says, “It’s been 25 years since Chiaverini introduced readers to the Elm Creek Quilts series, and she shows no signs of slowing down, deftly stitching two storylines together in this offering…” What do you think of that description?
A: That’s very gratifying to hear. I must be doing something right if it all seems so swift and effortless! I still love writing as much as I did when my first novel, The Quilter’s Apprentice, was published in 1999, and I hope to continue writing as long as readers still want to hear from me.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: I hope that readers will be inspired to emulate Sylvia when they face difficult times, that they’ll find strength in community and in remembering the many courageous people who overcame great challenges in the past. Find your community, take heart, and be undaunted.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My next novel, The Patchwork Players, stars a favorite character first introduced in my third novel, The Cross-Country Quilters—Julia Merchaud, an acclaimed, Emmy-winning actress and star of the enormously popular historical drama series A Patchwork Life.
When several members of the cast decide not to return for a seventh season, Julia concocts a brilliant scheme to convince them to stay.
Five years before, her visit to Elm Creek Quilt Camp had been a truly life-changing experience. Not only had she learned to quilt, but she’d also formed profound, lasting friendships with several of her fellow campers.
She’s absolutely certain that if her castmates can share a similar bonding experience, they’ll happily abandon their other plans and remain with the series indefinitely. Unfortunately, Julia’s scheme is not quite as brilliant as she thinks it is, and things go badly awry.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Since I’m so fascinated by historical events and courageous historical figures, sometimes readers ask me why I write historical fiction rather than biography or another form of nonfiction. If knowing our history is so important, shouldn’t we rely upon historic fact as recorded in memoirs, biographies, official records, and history textbooks?
Certainly these are valuable resources—I use them myself—but I believe that works of fiction, poetry, and drama are also essential for all that they offer the reader.
Historical fiction in particular engages the imagination in a way that a list of facts and dates does not. It allows us to immerse ourselves in a character’s perspective, making their experiences more immediate and real and relatable.
Historical fiction perhaps more than any other genre evokes the reader’s empathy for people quite different from themselves, developing an emotional intelligence that ideally extends beyond the printed page into the reader’s own life.
The practice of seeing the world from someone else’s perspective develops one’s empathy. In learning to understand fictional characters, their richly complex lives, their times, and the challenges they faced, we learn to understand real people better. I believe—I hope—that this can lead to a more peaceful, more just world.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jennifer Chiaverini.
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