Why Write Withstanding the Fiery Furnace

Welcome to my first post in the series where I take you behind the scenes of my new novel Withstanding the Fiery Furnace. I can’t believe it has been three years since I started conducting research on my ancestors to write this book. It all started when my mom read a story in my fanfiction series I was writing at the time called The Adventures with the Doctor. She persuaded me to write something I could actually publish and knowing my love for historical fiction, she mentioned there was some interesting history about my ancestors. I picked up a book about the biography of my great grandparents. There was a little blurb about Jacob Wall during his time in the Russian Revolution and I was hooked.

This led me on a journey on interviewing family members, visiting St. Jacob’s to learn more about the Mennonites and finding new relatives I never knew I had. I travelled to Georgia down in the States to visit my new relatives and met Jacob’s granddaughter who was still alive at the time. It was an enriching experience hearing stories that were passed down and seeing photos from back in the day. Hearing these stories made me realize it was a side of history that needed to be told. Not many Mennonites have told their story of their time in Russia under Lenin and Stalin’s reign due to the amount of suffering and loss they’ve experienced. Through this trilogy, I want readers to experience what the Walls went through as they struggled to survive in Russia and how they fought their way to escape to Canada.

In history, people only learn about one side. Without both sides, we don’t get to see the whole story. This was the case with the Mennonites. In one of my future blog posts, we’ll learn about Nestor Makhno, a revolultionary leader, who led the Black Army (anarchists). When I researched him, history paints him as this glorified revolutionary leader but reading the accounts from various Mennonites and from my own ancestors, they paint a different picture of him. They painted him as a terrorizing force who delighted in butchering families and burning down villages. A different view of Makhno than how history presents him to the world.

It’s like that with other history accounts where we learn how Canada or the States came to be by conquering the people who lived in this land before us and painting their own people as heroes. Whereas the truth lies behind the carnage they left buried in its wake. Where many Native Americans were murdered or lost their freedom of living in this land that was once their home. It goes back to the point where if we don’t have both sides of the story, we only have a misconstrued view of what actually happened in history. That is the reason why I wrote Withstanding the Fiery Furnace which is to tell a side of history that we don’t hear from or know about. That’s why I love writing and reading historical fiction because you can experience different viewpoints in history and feel, even just for a moment, that you are there experiencing the tribulations and triumphs of the main character.

What is your favourite genre to read and why? Comment below or send me a message.