Corrections to a Review I Didn’t Write (and Why They Matter)
On January 16, 2022, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a half-page article that both reviewed Twentymile and interviewed me about the book. This was the culmination of efforts that went back several months, when I cold-emailed the editor of book reviews for the paper and asked if they’d be interested in reviewing this small-press book. In all honesty, I never thought anything would come of it. You can imagine my surprise when I learned that, not only would the novel get a review, but the freelance reviewer wanted to interview me as well. I was over the moon.
The reviewer and I had a good talk. He asked pertinent questions. I was immensely grateful for the attention he paid and the respect he gave my little story. Plus, how many small-press offerings get this kind of publicity? On January 11, the reviewer sent me a link to the online version of the article. (He had told me the online content would likely be available first.)
Let me say up front: The review is a generous and in-depth reading of the novel. It’s gratifying to see that someone not only read it, but got what I was shooting for, saw the themes I was working with. I couldn’t be happier with or more grateful for that aspect of the article.
But.
Before I get to the “but,” a brief digression about the novel is in order. At surface level, Twentymile is a procedural/thriller involving the suspicious death of a wildlife biologist inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the special agent who investigates it. I won’t spoil the whys and whos of the story here, but suffice to say, the novel’s primary thematic preoccupation is with the history of the 500,000 acres that comprise the park and how said history might give rise to resentment and long-held grudges. Western North Carolina was part of the Cherokee homeland for millennia until the disgraceful act of removal in the 1830s. Following removal, European settlers and timber companies occupied the land, establishing farms and clear-cutting forests. That lasted another century, until the land was forcibly purchased from thousands of property owners by the states of Tennessee and North Carolina and handed over to the Park Service.
I knew early on in writing the novel that, if it was to consider the history of the land at its center, then the characters should be reflective of that history as well. That meant characters who were not only of European descent, but enrolled members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. (Today, the Qualla Boundary–the land owned by the Eastern Band and held in trust for it by the federal government–borders the park.) This also meant that I–a white male with no indigenous, much less Cherokee, heritage–needed to do my homework. It was on me to be fair and diligent in my representations, to avoid tropes that are harmful and lazy, and to stay away from what was not my story to tell. I interviewed enrolled EBCI members, including some involved in the workings of the Tribal Council, and others of Cherokee heritage. I asked (probably) dumb but honest questions. I took many notes. As I wrote, I avoided any suggestion that I was penning an account of “the Cherokee experience” or “what life is like as an enrolled member of the Eastern Band.” (If you want that story, I highly recommend the writings of Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, including her fantastic novel Even As We Breathe.) I asked fellow writers for gut-checks and had extensive discussions with my editor. And I lost sleep worrying about getting any of it wrong.
Which brings me back to the subject article and the “but.” The article contains two fundamental errors, the origins of which are a puzzle to me. Namely:
In more than one place, what should be identified as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is instead called the “Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation” or, more simply, “the Cherokee Nation.” The Cherokee Nation is, in fact, its own sovereign tribe in Oklahoma, separate and distinct from the Eastern Band in North Carolina. Tsula Walker, the protagonist of the novel, is a member of the Eastern Band, not the Cherokee Nation, and my research did not include speaking with members of the latter. Nor is there ever such a mis-identification in the novel. I know the difference.
The article states that Tsula’s name is Cherokee for “crow.” Based on my research, I understand that it is, in fact, translated as “fox” or “red fox.”
The way it is worded, one could intuit from the article that these errors are mine. They are not. More than sparing myself unearned embarrassment, though, I was concerned that this article would be seen by enrolled Eastern Band members living just two to three hours north of Atlanta, who understandably would feel hurt at the thought that yet another white author hadn’t cared enough to get his facts right.
The same Tuesday that I received the link to the article, I emailed the reviewer to point out these errors and ask that they be corrected. I followed up with a second email the next day. The reviewer apologized for the errors, stating that he would do what he could, but that the copy may already have gone to the printers for the Sunday paper. I take at face value that he wanted to get the errors corrected, and that he tried. But when Sunday’s paper came out, it read exactly the same.
We live in a human world, and mistakes will be made. I understand, too, that people could read Twentymile and take issue with my writing on its own terms. If I get something wrong, it’s on me to listen and take my lumps. With respect to the mistakes in this article, however, I can only say that I tried to get the paper to correct them, and I am so very sorry if they caused any reader distress.