When I was a boy, much like Lyman, the narrator of Skunktown, I used to accompany my father to whatever jobsite he was working at. When I was very little, he took me as a form of babysitting, but as I grew up I began to function as a carpenter’s helper—sawing boards, toeing nails, mixing concrete, holding sheetrock, acting as a go-for. It was hard and dirty work, but it taught me two things: the pride of working with my hands, and the fact that I didn’t want to do that for a living. But the really important lesson that my father taught me, which would become both my vocation and my avocation, was the art of telling stories.
After work, like Walt Polly in the novel, my father would take me to some bar—or in his vernacular, a ginmill. My father was known in every ginmill within a twenty-mile radius of home. As soon as he entered, someone would call to him, “What are you drinking?” And then someone else would plead, “Tell us a story.” He’d tell stories as long as the drinks kept coming, and the more he drank the more wild and outrageous the stories became. In fact, he was renowned for his story-telling. Tall tales of the big woods of northern New England, where he grew up on the family farm. They were Bunyanesque, or should I say, Homeresque, filled with drama and heroics, of derring-do and near deaths, of O Henry endings and backwoods ribald humor. As I sat nearby in a booth, I listened captivated, but even more so, I noted how the rough, working-class men seated at the bar around him were similarly captivated by his stories. Though my childhood wasn’t filled with books or poetry—the usual prerequisites for an author–what I felt when watching my father do his schtick was that one day I, too, wanted to be a storyteller.
Of all my novels, Skunktown is the most autobiographical. Not so much in the narrative as in the characters that populate it. Similar to Lyman and the old man, I spent a great deal of time in my father’s company, working with him, riding in his run-down truck, listening to his stories. Besides carpentry, I learned early on that he was a man of contradictions. Uneducated but well-read, someone who could be kind and generous, but also a man angry and bitter at a world he felt had cheated him somehow. He was a racist, too. But his racism gave way to a larger guiding principle that said if a man, any man, worked hard, kept his nose clean, and treated him fairly, then he was all right in his book. For example, he used to take me with him to a small hamlet where African-Americans lived (much like Skunktown), a place set apart from our otherwise all-white New England town. There he would buy used car parts from the black owner of the junkyard. They would talk and laugh together as friends, and many times my father would share his bottle of booze with the man in a kind of blue-collar camaraderie. My father showed respect and admiration for the man, which belied his otherwise bigoted feelings. And one of his closest friends was a black man named Scottie. I’d accompany my father to Scottie’s house where the two men behaved as equals. When I look back on those days, it was this contradiction at the very heart of racism that I wanted to capture in the novel. I had in mind To Kill a Mockingbird, but unlike Atticus and Scout, who were paragons of virtue and strength, I wanted to start with a very flawed character in Lyman’s father and have the young boy be forced to struggle with his own morality.
I’m delighted to have my second novel Handmaiden of the Reich accepted for RHP’s Fall 2028 frontline list. Set in southeastern Germany, the novel’s research was pure joy for me. My wife and I traveled from the town of Steinhöring (southeast of Munich), the site of the first Nazi Lebensborn home. We then traveled southwest within sight of the Alps across southern Germany and into Bavaria and through the Black Forest, following the escape route of my main character Renate.
Handmaiden of the Reich opens during the summer of 1944, after the Allies have landed at Nor-mandy and as German civilians are beginning to contemplate defeat and a post-war world. The sto-ry focuses on a little-known but infamous Nazi eugenics program called Lebensborn (“fount of life”). Brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, Lebensborn homes were established throughout Germany as places where young, pregnant, unmarried women could go while awaiting the birth of their child. As well, these homes received “stolen children” from the Eastern Front, blond, blue-eyed infants who were then “Germanized.” Combined, the intent was to increase, by whatever means possible, Germany’s falling birthrate. To quote Hitler: “The woman has her own battlefield. With every child that she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation.” Pregnant women, along with the men who impregnated them, had only to prove their pure Aryan bloodlines. At the homes, women were given room and board and free medical care, as well as being taught the Nazi ideals of motherhood. After the birth, the child was usually given up for adoption, sometimes by force or coercion, to families of German officers.
My novel tells the story of 19-year-old Renate Dressler, who lives with her widowed father and works in a small Bavarian cafe. Intelligent but afflicted with a disability that would make her vulnerable to Nazi laws on eugenics and sterilization, she meets and falls in love with an SS captain. When she finds herself pregnant and subsequently learns that her captain-lover is actually married, he suggests she go to stay at a Lebensborn home until he can secure a divorce. At the home, a former Jewish estate called Hochweise, Renate has to negotiate not only the brutality and Nazi politics of the place, but also the loneliness she finds herself surrounded by. She becomes friends with Ilse, an older pregnant woman who teaches her to stand up for herself. Finally, seven months pregnant, one night she’s called upon to help Ilse. Forced to make a tragic decision she and her friend must flee at night. They, along with a male friend of Ilse, begin a dangerous journey across Germany in the waning months of the war, a journey that will test them mentally and physically, and push them to their limits, all to save their babies.
Though historical, the novel has a great deal of relevance to our own times. A coming of age story, The Handmaiden of the Reich also covers current issues such as motherhood, a women’s autonomy over her own body, conflicts over racial and ethnic identity, sexual assault, and toxic masculinity within an authoritarian context. Some who have read it consider it a female take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest while others have compared it to the sexual repression and abuse presented in The Handmaid’s Tale.
In addition to Skunktown and The Handmaiden of the Reich, I am the author of seven previous novels: Soul Catcher (Harper Collins), a Booksense and Historical Novels Review selection; A Brother’s Blood (Harper), a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and an Edgar Award Finalist; The Blind Side of the Heart (Harper), A Dream of Wolves (Harper), Beautiful Assassin, a Connecticut Book Award winner; and The Garden of Martyrs (St. Martins), which was made into an opera of the same name. Resting Places was runner-up for 2024 Best General Fiction award from the Indie Authors Project. I’ve also published a collection of stories called Marked Men (University of Missouri Press). I was the founding editor of the yearly fiction anthology American Fiction as well as the journal Dogwood. I also founded and was the director of Fairfield University’s MFA for many years. I received my Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Denver, and taught college for nearly forty years.
I currently live on an old horse farm on the Connecticut shoreline with my wife Reni, a breast cancer radiologist, and our two Labrador Retrievers, Lincoln and Falstaff (I used to teach Shakespeare). Next to the horse barn, I renovated a former chicken coop into a tiny cabin, where I love to hide away and write. The dogs and I hike through the woods surrounding the horse farm daily, rain or shine, and marvel at the gifts from nature – the fiddlehead ferns popping up in springtime, the bard owl hooting late into the evenings, the red-tailed hawk nesting in a big beech tree, or a fox running through the woods. When I’m not writing, I enjoy working in my vegetable garden, reading contemporary fiction, and listening to classical music. My wife and I also love to travel and explore global cultures and cuisines from all over Europe, South Africa, Argentina and, most recently, India. We usually squeeze in some hiking wherever we go, with some favorite trails in Newfoundland (try the Skerwink trail on the Bonavista Peninsula if you go), the Isle of Skye, the Andes, the Rockies, and Maine (great trails all around Moosehead Lake where my first book, A Brother’s Blood, is set). Finally, I am inveterate watcher of BritBox crime mysteries and devoted fan of UCONN Women’s Basketball.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Michael C. White’s Skunktown in 2027.
