Interview With Award-Winning Historical Fiction Author M.E. Torrey

 

 

1.       What is your book, Fox Creek, about? In 1843 Louisiana, Monette, the beloved biracial daughter of a French Creole sugar planter, is sold into slavery along with a boy named Cyrus. Together they are purchased by the Jensey family of Fox Creek Plantation. While Cyrus is sent to the fields, Monette becomes the playmate of Kate, the planter’s daughter, and catches the eye of Breck, the planter’s son. As the years pass, Monette is haunted by memories of her traumatic past, a past she had suppressed. Cyrus, still in the fields, has never forgotten Monette and loves her still. Fox Creek is a story of race, privilege, and destiny. But most of all, it is a story of love, a love that transcends all that threatens to tear it apart.

 

2.       What inspired you to write it? Decades ago, I set out to write a ghost story for young adults set in New Orleans. Instead, I found myself haunted by history. When I first visited Louisiana, I expected the plantations to be preserved as honest reckonings with the past. What I found were hoop-skirted docents and manicured gardens that told only half the story—a whitewashed version of the South that erased the lives of the enslaved people who made those estates possible. That disconnect changed me. The slave cabins I wandered through were silent witnesses, holding memories that the “official” tours refused to acknowledge. In that silence, I realized how deeply our culture has sanitized history— not only in travel brochures, but in novels, in classrooms, and in the stories we tell ourselves to escape responsibility.

 

3.       You took three decades to get this historical novel out. What type of research did you undertake and why had it taken so long to get it released? I spent years conducting research, including multiple trips to Louisiana, plus a week in the LSU archives in Baton Rouge. I read hundreds of memoirs, diaries, letters, and interviews with slaves, as well as slaveowners. I only began to write when their voices would no longer be still. Then life intervened. During that same time, I was contracted by both Random House and Penguin to write eight books for middle-grade and young adult audiences, some of them quite complex. Somewhere in there, I also graduated from seminary and cofounded an organization, Orphans Africa, which builds boarding schools for orphans in Tanzania. We’re still building schools. We’re still working hard. So, for my novel Fox Creek, it’s been a long haul.

 

4.       What do you say to anyone who criticizes a white woman for writing about Black slavery?

It is not, nor was it ever, my intention to drown out or talk over Black voices. It is my intention, however, to add to the dialogue. Yes, I’m White. Yes, I’ve never lived in the South. I can never truly know what it means to be Black in America today and to live under that hereditary trauma. By the same token, no one alive today can understand what it was like to be a slave. But by immersing myself in the writings of those times, by listening, I come close to understanding the lives of the enslaved as well as the enslavers. Certainly, writing this book opened my eyes to our shared history and how that history is still playing out.

 

5.       What lasting message do you hope readers will take away? For all readers, especially White Americans, when we name former slaveowners as “other” than ourselves, we create a distance between us and them, thereby escaping the burden of our history. It’s an easy out. But in order for us to grow as a nation, we must see ourselves reflected in their lives—not in the sense of condoning their actions or beliefs, but in the sense of understanding how the perpetration of such atrocities could have occurred in the first place by seemingly normal human beings. This is especially important as atrocities and injustices are still occurring and are even being mainstreamed in the United States today. We must ask ourselves, in what ways are we blind or numb today to the oppression of others?

 

6.       Your book has received awards recognition and critical acclaim from many major book reviews. Are you surprised at how well-received it is? I had certainly hoped that it would be well-received, but, of course, you never know. All along I felt I was creating something of profound social and literary merit—something that moved me to the center of my being. Honestly, I felt that Fox Creek was my life’s masterpiece, whether anyone else appreciated it or not. So, when I was finally ready to give it to the world, I did so with a sense of letting go—the critical response would be whatever it would be. I had done all I could, and it was enough. Now, after seeing the overwhelmingly positive, critical response to Fox Creek, I am gratified beyond belief. It affirms what I had felt all along.

 

7.       Many books and movies depicting slavery have been made. What makes your book unique or special? I think modern depictions of slavery mostly focus on the extreme. An example would be Edwin Epps, the slaveowner in the movie, “12 Years a Slave.” Epps seemed to delight in perpetrating cruelty after cruelty upon his slaves. We’ve come to expect that this was the norm, and unless a novel or a movie depicts this, we dismiss it as too kind, or “whitewashed.” But I think characters such as Edwin Epps, or another example, Simon Legree from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, can mislead us as to the reality of who slaveholders were as people in general. While psychopaths like Epps and Legree certainly existed, I felt it vital to present the slaveowners as everyday people, even as they were blind to, and helped perpetuate, the suffering around them. I find this infinitely more chilling.

 

8.       How would you describe your writing style? I love reading books that are completely immersive, in other words, books that make me feel like I’m right there along with the characters, eating, breathing, and speaking through them. My writing style is likewise immersive. I like to pull readers in and never let them go. This writing style served me well when I was writing seafaring adventures for young adults. While Fox Creek is likewise immersive, it is also expansive in that historical and sensory details are woven throughout, providing a rich, layered tapestry. I also present my characters in shades of gray—no one purely evil nor purely good. Everyone has a blind spot. By portraying my characters as regular people, I force the reader to ask uncomfortable questions.

 

9.       What impact did your research and historical discoveries have on your perspective of America’s history - -and of who we are today as a people? For the first time, I became aware of how deeply racial discrimination had infiltrated our social systems such that, if you’re not paying close attention, it’s hardly discernible because it’s the “way it’s always been.” We don’t question it unless we are, ourselves, struggling under the weight of its oppression. Usually, it’s through a brutal act, such as the slaying of George Floyd, that we see the system more clearly and demand change. Like it or not, we are, as a nation, in a blistering-hot season of reckoning—reckoning with our past, with who we are right now, and with who we want to be in the future. Hopefully, Fox Creek can be a part of the discussion during this painful time of reckoning.

 

10.   You said that you came to see the blindness of ordinary people, who considered themselves to be good folk, while perpetuating cruelty to be so shocking and unnerving. Why? During my research, I read journals of slaveowners who literally declared themselves “good,” believing they’d never harmed another soul in their life. What really shocked me, was I actually liked some of them. I didn’t expect to like them, I didn’t want to like them, but I did. So, when I wrote my slave-owning characters, I wanted to achieve this tricky balance: likeable, everyday people who nonetheless perpetuated slavery because it served them and because it was normalized. Aren’t we all products of our society? We go with the flow because that’s what’s normal. Few of us are willing to cry out against society if we see something wrong. Complacency is the decision to do nothing, which can have real-world consequences. It was true back then, just as it is today.

 

11.   What would heal the damning history of this nation’s violent race relations?  We need to listen to each other. Really listen. We need to hear one another’s stories and share the weight of them. When well-meaning White Americans responded to the Black Lives Matter movement with, “All Lives Matter,” although that is true in essence, once again, it negated the Black story, it negated Black lives. It was, again, an attempt to silence voices and erase an ugly history. There’s a lot of guilt in this country. Guilt over slavery. Over our treatment of Native Americans. And, as anyone who’s been to therapy knows, you cannot get past guilt by suppressing its root. You must break down the walls you’ve built up and instead stop and listen. Absorb. Heal. Only when we do this, with a sense of love and forgiveness for one another, can we leave behind our fear and distrust and build a nation that is truly united.

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About Brian Feinblum

This award-winning blog has generated over 5,250,000 page views. With 5,400+ posts over the past 14 years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs  by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.”  Copyright 2025.

 

For the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.

 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.

 

You can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum