This month, I’m chatting with author, Nancy Taylor Robson, whose most recent release is A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, a Modern Love Story. Welcome, Nancy!

Thanks so much for having me.

Nancy, what inspired you to become a writer?

I think I always wanted to write. My mother read to me from the time I was in the crib and I adored it. It was the stories, imagining myself into other lives, feeling what the person who was actually living the experience was feeling. You do that when you read and you do that when you write.  Life is so big and broad and there is so much to see and do and learn and share with other people.

Also, I’ve always loved words. My father and his family used to recite poetry at meals, and quote poetry in general conversation. One great aunt could do tons of Edward Lear from memory.  I can remember before I could read or write sitting down with a piece of paper and scribbling across it and handing it to my mother – I thought I was writing letters to her. When I was in elementary school – and COULD read and write -- I started writing little books that I’d illustrate and then share with my mother. Making her laugh with my writing and seeing her face as she read them, made me think about connecting with other people who weren’t there at the time.  When I went to work as a freelancer – I did maritime reporting and analysis for WorkBoat Magazine for a number of years and also wrote for House Beautiful and Yachting – I loved it because it gives you the excuse to meet new people and learn new things. I used to teach a nonfiction writing seminar at a high school once a year called: Living Other Lives Through Writing.

In researching you and your work for this interview, I found you to be very well-rounded in interests, experiences, and works. I read about your book, Woman in the Wheelhouse, that tells the true story of your six years working as a cook, deckhand and licensed mate on coastal tugs. Will you share what made you decide on this as an early career, and what it was like?

Well, I didn’t so much decide to get a license to run a tug as submit to it. I fell in love with a man who had just become the mate on a tug. We married the month after he became captain and he began talking about our buying and running our own coastal tugboat.  When a job on the boat he was then captain on opened up, he sort of volunteered me for it. It turned out, that I loved the work. I became one of the first women in the country to earn a license to run coastal tugboats – 200 tons, 200 miles offshore. (Woman in The Wheelhouse is available as both an ebook and in paperback now). It was exciting, hugely challenging, and scary.  There was one time in particular that I thought we were going to die. We were in a 70-knot storm and the tug was icing up (when the waves splash over a vessel in below-freezing weather, the ice builds and builds and weighs the vessel down). And then when the engine overheated off Bermuda and we were without power. Scary. But being out there let me see things in nature that I probably wouldn’t have been able to experience any other way.

You seem to have a great love for nature and the outdoors. Was this something inherent from childhood, or did you grow into it in later years?

I’ve always loved the outdoors. My family spent a lot of time outdoors. We sailed with my dad, and my brother and I played outside year round. My mom was a great gardener and she introduced us to that part of nature, so it came from all angles. I still love to be outside in all weather. I have a big vegetable, fruit, herb and flower garden. We sail, bicycle, and walk the dogs every day on a friend’s farm. Being outside at least part of every day keeps me sane.

Your love of historical novels has led you to write one of your own. Please tell us about A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, A Modern Love Story.

Abigail was in many ways a modern woman. From her earliest years she wanted a marriage of equals, a man who would appreciate her brain as well as her character and her sexuality. She wanted a true partnership and a long and interesting life with a man she could love, respect, and build a rich life with. By rich I mean rich in experiences, friends, love, children and success. Most people know the ‘Remember the ladies’ quote from Abigail’s letters to John when he was part of the all-male Constitutional Convention. She was prodding him to let women to have the vote.  Of course, it didn’t happen until about 150 years later. She was very ahead of her time.

John may not have advocated giving women, most of whom at the time were not educated, the vote. But even when he and Abigail disagreed, he had enormous respect for her. They were really each other’s best friends. They had a long, happy, though challenging marriage. They spent literally years apart while John was earning their living, building his reputation, helping to separate our country from England and then building the new nation. Abigail longed for him all that time apart – I think, reading between the lines of their letters, that they had a very passionate love life together. But she almost never complained. She knew she was a critical partner in their lives and it gave her a sense of her own worth. She ran the farm, had babies (she had a stillborn baby while he was away), nursed her children and a servant through an epidemic that killed a lot of people in Boston and then nearly died of it herself.  She took in a whole family who were fleeing Boston during the fighting in the Revolution. She taught the children at home and then traded sheep for her sons’ school fees when they needed to go to school. She sent two of her sons at ages 12 and 9 years old overseas with John and didn’t know for months whether or not one of them had survived a shipwreck until he arrived home months later. Finally, when John was a minister in France and England after the Revolution, she and their daughter, Nabby, went across the ocean to meet him in England finally, after being separated for six long years. An incredible journey -- the two of them on a sailing ship for weeks, seasick, never having even been on a boat before. I can draw from my own experiences at sea to understand something of what they went through during that long trip. And then, can you imagine the heady joy of wrapping her arms around her beloved husband after all that time?

Why did you choose Abigail and John Adams as the subjects of your book?

The children’s novel, Johnny Tremain, affected me hugely. It made me realize what a complex, HUMAN time that was and how the Revolution could so easily have ended differently and how hard everyone worked to make it happen the way it did. So I was already incredibly interested in the time.

But John and Abigail specifically interested me partly because of the separations my husband and I have been through in our marriage. He’s a mariner and so has been away and out of communication for big chunks of our lives together, which meant that everything was in my hands, when the kids were sick, when the pipes burst, when my dad died. He was also away for some of the joys that you want so much to share with the ones you love. I was looking for role models and found one – an amazing one -- in Abigail Adams. I was also fascinated by her and John’s combination of altruism – wanting to be sure they sacrificed for the sake of the whole, whether it was their children or their country – and their wanting to be recognized and appreciated for that sacrifice, a very human feeling. They were both flawed and admirable.

What can we expect from you next? Are you working on a book now, or some other type of work?

I’m working on the sequel to Course of the Waterman (my first novel, published by River City Publishing) and finishing a book on caregiving at the end of life that I’m writing with a hospice nurse. It’s called: OK, Now What? A Caregiver’s Guide to What Matters. It should be coming out this year.

Where can readers find you on the internet?

They can find my work at Amazon either by searching: Nancy Taylor Robson or at this link.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=nancy+taylor+robson
They can also read some of my blog posts – I blog for the University of Maryland Master Gardeners Grow It Eat It blog, at the link below:
http://groweat.blogspot.com/#axzz2VXAdqjs3
 and occasionally at my blog
http://nancytaylorrobson.wordpress.com/

Have you read any books recently that you would recommend?

I loved Mat Bai’s The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics,
Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, which I enjoyed for both the details of the environmental questions it brought to light and for the people it depicted, and read straight through Year of Wonders, a novel of the plague in 17th century Europe by Geraldine Brooks.

Nancy, thank you so much for visiting with us this month. We wish you all the best with your novel, and any future works.
Thank you so much Deborah. I appreciate your interest, and the really great questions you’ve asked.

If you would like to win a copy of A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, A Modern Love Story, just use my Contact page, and type “drawing” in the comments box. The deadline to enter is July 24th.