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Poet at Heart
Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution follows a passionate woman artist who struggles to be taken seriously in institutions built to exclude women, and her entanglement in the upheaval of the French Revolution. What drew you to Adélaïde specifically as a historical figure?
When I was researching the women artists of the ancient regime (pre-French Revolution), I came across this phrase – “By that time, her works had long gone up in flames.” That sentence was too hard for me to resist. I had to know all about this artist and the crime that had been perpetrated against her works. What had she done that was so bad that her works had to be burned?
Admission to elite institutions is a central conflict. How did you portray the barriers women faced in spaces like the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture?
I portrayed them in many different ways: through dialogue, letters, and actions. For example, making Adélaïde wait in the Academy offices was a sign of disrespect. Having her letters go unanswered, not allowing her to speak, and having men give speeches or telling through dialogue why they were acting to keep her out. In fact, the Comte d’Angiviller went so far as to have the rule keeping admittance to four women ordered by the king.
The prose feels immersive and tactile, especially in studio scenes. How did you develop that sensory richness?
I discovered I loved writing dialogue, and I like moving characters through their scenes using dialogue and actions to reflect their inner feelings. But I am a poet at heart, so using wealth in a treasure of evocative words is my passion as a writer.
Do you see parallels between her struggles and those faced by women in creative fields today?
Absolutely. Perhaps about three years ago, I attended my first concert with a woman conductor. It was a shock to me to think about the import of that and why I had never seen that as a place where women were missing and held back. But once you see it, you cannot unsee it. I think that it goes beyond creative fields, however. And especially today, we are seeing the removal of qualified women from public roles, the undermining of women’s work, and its value. When we see works like Judy Blume’s being censored, it’s not long before other works will follow.
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The daughter of Parisian shopkeepers, Adélaïde dreams not of marriage or titles but of earning a place among the masters of French art. With Queen Marie Antoinette on the throne and a spirit of change in the air, anything seems possible. But as revolution brews and powerful forces conspire to deny her success, Adélaïde faces an impossible choice: protect her life or fight for a legacy that will outlast her.
Inspired by the true story of one of the first women admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution is a sweeping, evocative portrait of ambition, courage, and resilience in the face of history’s fiercest storm.
Intimacy and Immediacy
The Inheritance of Light follows two families through war and migration and generations of grief and survival. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
The Inheritance of Light grew out of family stories, old letters, historical fragments, and the long memory of two families shaped by war, migration, grief, and survival. But the deeper impetus for beginning the novel was also tied to the approaching 250-year anniversary of American democracy and the question of what, exactly, gets handed down from one generation to the next.
Benjamin Franklin’s warning…“A republic, if you can keep it”…has always resonated with me. It captures the truth that freedom is fragile and that democracy requires vigilance, engagement, and moral courage to survive. In that sense, the novel is not only about family inheritance but also about civic inheritance.
I wanted to explore how people inherit more than land, names, and photographs. They inherit wounds, silences, values, resilience, and obligations. The same is true of a nation. Each generation receives both light and burden, and each must decide what it will preserve, what it will repair, and what it will risk passing on.
So, the novel came from both the intimacy of family memory and the larger American question of survival, how people endure hardship without surrendering their humanity, and how a republic endures only if its people remain awake enough to keep it. Around here, we might say freedom is a little like an old porch roof: you cannot just admire it from the yard. Every so often, you have to climb up there with a hammer before the whole thing starts leaking on everybody.
Were there particular traits or patterns you wanted to trace across the Templeton and Sewell families?
Yes, very much so. I wanted to trace the ways certain traits keep showing up in families like old songs nobody meant to teach, but everybody somehow knows.
In both the Templeton and Sewell families, I was interested in resilience, certainly, but not the shiny, sermon-on-Sunday kind. I mean the lived-in kind, the kind that gets people through war, loss, disappointment, uprooting, and the long stretches when life is more grit than glory. I wanted to follow how courage, endurance, loyalty, and a deep sense of duty can be passed down right alongside silence, stubbornness, pride, and unspoken grief.
I was also fascinated by how families develop emotional habits. Some people learn to bear pain quietly. Some learn to press forward no matter what. Some turn to humor, storytelling, or hard work as a way of keeping despair from taking over. In the South, that often means somebody is cracking a joke while the whole house is on fire, then asking who wants iced tea while they look for the hose.
Another pattern I wanted to trace was the tension between independence and belonging. Both families produce people who are strong-willed, sometimes maddeningly so, yet they are also bound by kinship, memory, and obligation. They may leave home, rebel against family expectations, or try to outrun the past, but the pull of inheritance, emotional, moral, and historical, never quite lets go.
I also wanted to show how love travels through generations in imperfect forms. It is not always spoken tenderly. Sometimes it arrives as sacrifice, protection, labor, duty, or sheer persistence. In families shaped by hardship, affection is not always dressed for church. Sometimes it comes to the table in overalls.
So yes, I was tracing patterns of resilience, sacrifice, pride, silence, humor, loyalty, and the complicated ways people carry both wound and wisdom forward. What interested me most was how those traits can save a family, burden a family, and sometimes do both at once.
The novel uses letters, linked episodes, and shifting perspectives—how did you develop this mosaic structure?
I developed the mosaic structure because it felt truest to the way families and nations actually remember. We do not inherit one seamless story. We inherit letters, fragments, silences, conflicting memories, and episodes that only reveal their meaning over time. I wanted the form of the novel to reflect that.
The letters create intimacy and immediacy. The linked episodes let me trace how choices and losses echo across generations. And the shifting perspectives allowed me to show that history looks different depending on who is carrying it. That was especially important in portraying people trying to fit into a new country or culture. Belonging is rarely simple. It involves dislocation, adaptation, misunderstanding, and the struggle to hold on to your identity while learning how to survive in a place that may not fully welcome you. The mosaic form gave me a way to honor those layered experiences without forcing them into a single, tidy narrative.
A family story is rarely one straight sermon. It is more like six cousins talking at once, one aunt crying in the kitchen, somebody reading an old letter out loud, and a newcomer on the porch wondering whether they are ever really going to belong. That felt like the right shape for this novel.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
The next book I’m working on is tentatively titled Too Much Gravy for One Enchilada, which ought to tell readers right away that I have not entirely surrendered my fondness for the odd, the heartfelt, or the slightly overstuffed.
It’s a collection of short stories, poems, plays, and essays I’ve written over the years, so in many ways it brings together the different rooms of the same house. Some pieces lean literary, some humorous, some reflective, and some carry the kinds of voices and questions that have stayed with me for a long time. What ties them together is a deep interest in memory, survival, human folly, and the strange ways people try to make meaning out of love, loss, history, and everyday life.
I like to think of it as a gathering of mischief and meditation under one roof. Around here, we’d probably say it’s the kind of book where laughter and heartbreak might sit down at the same table, pass the biscuits, and argue kindly over who gets the last word.
As for availability, it is still in progress, so I’m reluctant to give a firm publication date just yet. Let’s just say late 2026 or early 2027. But it is very much alive on the worktable, and I’m hoping it will make its way into the world once I’ve had time to shape it into the collection it deserves to be.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Charles L. Templeton | EMergeLit | Website | EMerge Magazine | Flapper Press | Amazon
In a layered portrait of American family and identity, generations of the Templetons and Sewells are carried along the currents of history, each one bearing the hopes and burdens of those who came before.
Through the earliest battles that forged a fledgling nation to the streets of midcentury Washington and the crucible of World War II, their stories are masterfully woven together to paint the resilience, devotion, faith, and bonds that define family in this historical fiction. It’s an epic, both gritty and deeply human, that traces the extraordinary paths of love, identity, and family, showing how the choices of one generation ripple across the next.
Through heartbreak and triumph, devotion and sacrifice, these intertwined lives illuminate what it truly means to honor the past while shaping the future, carrying forward a light that guides generations yet to come.
With profound insight and narrative mastery, bestselling author Charles Templeton brings history and relationships to vivid, unforgettable life in this monumental family saga fiction.
The Inheritance of Light
Charles L. Templeton’s The Inheritance of Light is a work of historical fiction that braids together the stories of two family lines, the Templetons and the Sewells, across generations of war, migration, labor, marriage, grief, and survival. It begins in the Revolutionary era and moves forward through the War of 1812, the Civil War, and into the twentieth century, using linked episodes, family memory, and a strong sense of inheritance to ask what exactly passes from one generation to the next: blood, certainly, but also courage, stubbornness, tenderness, damage, and a way of seeing the world.
Templeton is not trying to be slick, detached, or fashionably ironic; he is trying to honor people. That choice gives the novel an unusual warmth. I felt it especially in the letters, the battlefield passages, and the domestic scenes where homes are being built even as history keeps barging through the door. At its best, the prose has a weathered musicality to it. It’s full of smoke, mud, river, iron, and lamplight, and the book understands that endurance is rarely glamorous. It is usually repetitive, familial, and half-invisible until someone remembers it properly.
I also admired the ambition of the structure. This is not a narrow historical novel but a generational mosaic, and mosaics always risk becoming static. Here, though, the book keeps finding pulse through recurrence: fathers and sons, brothers and wives, duty and homecoming, violence and mercy, the old ache of leaving and the old ache of return. I respected the scale of the undertaking. I finished the book feeling that Templeton had written not just toward the past but toward obligation, toward the belief that family history, however ragged, is a kind of lantern.
I’d recommend The Inheritance of Light to readers of historical fiction, family saga, multigenerational fiction, Southern historical fiction, and genealogical fiction, especially anyone drawn to novels where lineage matters as much as plot. Readers who enjoy the rootedness of Wendell Berry, or the generational reach of books in the vein of Jeff Shaara’s war-centered historical storytelling, will likely find something to admire here. This is a book for people who like their history human-scaled and their memory hard-won. I think The Inheritance of Light argues, persuasively and with heart, that what survives a family is not just blood, but light.
Pages: 323 | ASIN : B0GGJQS3FC
Powerful Moments
Leila: The Unheard Woman is the story of a woman whose mental health struggles are both minimized and mislabeled by her family and lead to her being committed to the psychiatric ward of a hospital. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The main inspiration for me in writing this story was the life of a real person. This is not just a fictional story – it is based on real experiences, real pain and a real voice that has been lost in silence for years. Leila’s story is about one woman, but in reality it is about many women whose lives and pain are often lost in the background of the system, stereotypes or misunderstanding.
As a psychotherapist, I still often hear the voices of women who are just as unheard by family, society, or institutions as Leila’s voice was years ago. It was this experience that made me want to write this story – so that, for once, this story would be heard fully and attentively. At the same time, it was important for me not only to carefully reveal Leila’s voice, but also to express the pain associated with the fact that, despite the many years that have passed since that time, the problems of not listening to women, minimizing their experience, continue to exist in our world today. That is why this story is not just about the past – it is also about our present.
Many of the most powerful moments happen in small conversations or silences rather than dramatic confrontations. Why was restraint important to the story you wanted to tell?
When you write about real pain, you realize that the most powerful moments often happen in silence. It can be a brief conversation, a look, or a thought that a person cannot say out loud. In Leila’s story, moments like these are important. I didn’t want to cover up the real, silent pain that existed in her life with dramatic scenes.
In real life, pain often exists in silence, in small details, in unfinished sentences. Leila’s story is like that: not much is said directly, but it is still felt strongly. It was this silence that I wanted the reader to feel.
The words, phrases, and tone that accompany the story accurately reflect the voice of “order” that was characteristic of the reality of the time.
The title emphasizes that Leila is an “unheard” woman. What does it mean, in your view, for someone to be seen but not truly heard?
Leila is visible to everyone: her family, her doctors, her society. They see her beauty, her condition, her behavior. They also see her as a patient, as her roles of a daughter, a wife, a mother, as a “problem,” but they don’t see her as a person with her own story, so they don’t listen to what she says – her pain, her fears, her desires. In such a situation, a person seems to exist, but their voice loses its meaning. Leila is in exactly this situation – she is in front of everyone, but still no one understands her true story. That’s why she’s the “unheard woman” – because no one wanted to fully listen to her voice.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from Leila’s experiences?
Leila’s story shows us how dangerous it is when society and the system ignore a person’s voice. I wish readers to rethink that compassion, listening, and support can be very important for a person’s survival. Most of all, I want this story to remind us that each person is much more than their condition, diagnosis, or someone else’s assessment. And sometimes the most important thing we can do is simply listen sincerely. If after this book even one person listens more carefully to another – especially a woman who is in pain – then Leila’s story will definitely not be lost.
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The story follows Leila, a mother whose fear, pain, trauma, and postpartum suffering are dismissed, misread, and slowly transformed into diagnoses. Raised to be quiet, orderly, and obedient, she learns early that a woman’s safety depends on endurance. When she speaks, she is called unstable. When she protests, she is called dangerous. When she becomes silent, she is called “stable.”
Inside the psychiatric system of the Soviet and post-Soviet world, Leila’s voice loses its meaning. Her emotions are treated as symptoms. Her motherhood becomes a risk factor. Her longing for her child is rewritten as pathology. Each attempt to explain herself only deepens the case against her.
This is not a story about madness.
It is a story about dismissal, misdiagnosis, and mistreatment – and about how easily a woman can disappear when her suffering does not fit acceptable forms.
Written in restrained, poetic prose, the novel explores institutional power, gendered violence, forced separation from a child, and the quiet strategies of survival that leave no visible scars. It speaks to women raised in silence and order, to mothers cut off from their children, and to anyone who has learned to survive by becoming smaller.
Leila’s story does not end where her voice stops. It continues – through memory, through inheritance, and through the hope that women will never be silenced.
Leila: The Unheard Woman
Leila: The Unheard Woman drops readers into a locked psychiatric ward and asks them to sit with Leila, a mother who has been turned into a “case.” The book moves back and forth between the hospital present and the life that led her there. Readers watch her give birth, hurt, ask for help, get brushed off, and slowly disappear behind labels like “unstable” and overly emotional. They see her marriage, the quiet grind of duty, the pressure to be a good wife and a happy mother, and then the breaking point, when fear for her child and the cruelty of her in-laws collide with a system that would rather sedate her than listen. Out of this, the novel builds a tight, painful portrait of a woman who is always seen and never truly heard, and of a society that calls itself safe while pushing her out of sight.
The prose is stripped down, almost bare, and the repetition works like a slow drumbeat. Short lines. Simple images. Iron doors. Cold floors. Keys that jangle at the edge of every scene. The hospital chapters in particular have this numb, almost hypnotic rhythm that made me feel stuck there with her, counting footsteps and pills. The way the book loops phrases and images made the whole thing feel like memories. It can be heavy, yet that weight fits the subject. I also liked how the author refuses big speeches or neat explanations. The worst moments often happen in small exchanges, in tired phrases like “everyone has their own cross,” or in the silence after a question that no one bothers to answer. That restraint gives the book a peculiar power and lets the ache build.
I appreciated the way the author represents women’s bodies and voices. Leila is in real pain after childbirth, and the people around her treat it as moodiness, as nerves, as something she should push through for the sake of the baby and the family. Her “no” does not count, in the bedroom or in the doctor’s office, and that slow erasing of her choices felt almost more violent than the scenes that are clearly abusive.
The psychiatry on display is chilling because it is so ordinary. The doctors use polite words. They note down facts. They talk about stability and safety. Yet no one asks what she feels, or what she wants, or what would actually help her live with her son. The system treats her like a problem to be managed, not a person to be met. That hit me hard, especially in the scenes where she tries to hold on to Gega’s name in her mind, almost like a last thread tying her to the world. The book turned abstract ideas like patriarchy and medical power into something intimate and raw, and I found myself thinking deeply.
By the end, I felt moved and more awake to a certain kind of quiet cruelty that can hide inside “care.” I would recommend Leila to fans of literary fiction who are willing to sit with hard topics, to people interested in women’s mental health, postpartum experiences, and the history of psychiatric institutions, and to book clubs that like to debate and dig into ethics and power. Readers who prefer narratives that hit like a punch and want a story that lingers beyond the last page will want to delve into Leila’s world.
Pages: 81 | ASIN : B0GHPWHJWX
Sugarcane Saint: The First Book of Ruth
Sugarcane Saint: The First Book of Ruth is a hard-hitting family story set in early twentieth-century Georgia. It follows young Ruth Shurlington as she grows up under the shadow of Stone Mountain, in a house full of siblings, chores, church talk, war news, and quiet fear. In another county, we also see Leonidas Brantley, a machinist with pride, shame, and a cruel streak that spills into his small home. The book lays out how war, poverty, religion, and everyday racism shape these families and tighten around the girls in them. By the time the author’s opening note and the prologue click together, it is clear this is the “seduction” phase of a bigger cycle of abuse, and the first part of a planned trilogy about hurt that runs through three generations.
I felt the writing was vivid and sensory. The author has a knack for small details. The sagging porch, the smell of lamp oil, the ash that looks like strange white snow, the way chickens move when a child scatters feed. The dialogue is thick with Southern rhythm and slang, but it is easy to follow, and it gives each person a clear voice. I liked how scenes jump from quiet domestic work to sharp danger in just a line or two. One moment Ruth is playing in the hen run. The next she is walking through a burned town that used to feel safe. The Bible verses at the start of each section set the mood without feeling like a lecture, and they fit the way these families actually talk and think. The prose is controlled, but it still feels authentic.
The opening scenes of violence and the picture of a mother holding her own daughter down are sickening. They are also written with a cool, steady eye that refuses to look away. I could feel the author wrestling with the question she states up front. How can a woman be gentle and loving and still help terrible things happen in her home. The pacing leans into that slow dread. We see the fire in the town, the boys treated like little men, the girls pushed back to the edge of the room, the casual racism in everyday talk, the constant reach for God as if He is the only safety net around. That build-up made the heavy scenes hit even harder, because by then I cared about Ruth, her brothers, her cousins, even the flawed adults who are already bent by their own history.
What stayed with me most was the book’s idea of how harm grows inside a family and inside a culture. The story keeps tying the private wounds in the house to bigger forces outside. Old men still raging about the Civil War. Lost land. New wars that pull sons away. A system that tells white men they should rule everything and everyone. A church world that talks about mercy while kids hide from belts and fists. The book does not excuse any of the abuse. It also does not flatten people into simple monsters or saints. A father can work himself to the bone for his farm and still break his children. A mother can pray and bake birthday cakes and still turn her face away when her daughter begs for help. I appreciated that the author is open about building this from family stories and from research, and about her own need to understand rather than just to punish. That gives the whole thing a searching, haunted feel instead of a neat, moralizing tone.
I would recommend Sugarcane Saint to readers who want historical fiction that looks straight at family violence, racism, and faith without soft focus. It is a good fit if you like long family stories, rich settings, and morally messy people, and if you can handle graphic scenes of abuse and emotional distress. This first book feels like the start of a brave and painful journey, and it left me wanting to follow Ruth’s story through the rest of the trilogy and see what kind of healing, if any, can come after so much harm.
Pages: 410 | ASIN : B0F94MTK18
