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Best-selling author Linda Spalding is a keeper. A keeper of her family history, a keeper of words, a keeper of truth. In this episode of The Kitchen Sisters Present, Spalding reads from her new book and talks about how discovering her family’s dark history as slave holders inspired her novels A Reckoning and The Purchase.
“Writing historical fiction is a mug’s game,” says Spalding. “Are we recreating the past, or creating it? While writing, I am imagining things that never happened, trying to make it seem like they did, like they were part of the actual pageant of history, like they make as much sense as the history we all learned in school, some of which was also a fiction. While writing, I am leaning backward from my 21st century chair and hoping to smell things that no longer even exist, to create medicines and foods and conversations I have never heard or seen or tasted.”
Other books by award winning author Linda Spalding include Who Named the Knife, The Paper Wife, Daughters of Captain Cook, A Dark Place in the Jungle, Mere and Brick a literary magazine she and a group of Canadian writers have been publishing for years.
Born in Topeka, Kansas she lived in Mexico and Hawaii before moving to Toronto in 1982. She has two daughters, Esta and Kristin Spalding, from her first marriage to photographer Philip Spalding. She is currently married to Canadian novelist Michael Ondaajte. A professor of English and writing, Spadling has taught at several universities including University of Hawaii, New York University, University of Toronto. She was writer in residence at Brown University and has taught creative writing at Humber College’s School for Writers.
FLING OUT THE BANNER
“The reason I went [to church] every Sunday was because I really loved the music…. The hymn that I loved so much was called Fling Out the Banner. I think I probably only got to hear it about six times in my entire childhood, but every one of them was worth it.”
Fling out the banner! let it float
Skyward and seaward, high and wide;
The sun that lights its shining folds,
The cross, on which the Savior died.
Fling out the banner! heathen lands
Shall see from far the glorious sight,
And nations crowding to be born
Baptize their spirits in its light.
Fling out the banner! angels bend
In anxious silence o’er the sight,
And vainly seek to comprehend
The wonder of the love divine.
Fling out the banner! sin sick souls
That sink and perish in the strife,
Shall touch in faith its radiant hem,
And spring immortal into life.
Fling out the banner! let it float
Skyward and seaward, high and wide,
Our glory, only in the cross;
Our only hope, the Crucified!
Fling out the banner! wide and high,
Seaward and skyward, let it shine;
Nor skill, nor might, nor merit ours;
We conquer only in that sign.
Learn more about Linda Spalding at lindaspalding.com
And order A Reckoning and more of Linda’s books at penguinrandomhouse.com
This story was produced by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo and The Kitchen Sisters. Mixed by Jim McKee.