Award-winning author Joan Thomas dug in deep when dissecting her most recent novel with the Festival of Words patrons and moderator and fellow author Angie Abdou at the Great Big Book Club.
Thomas’ historical fiction novel Five Wives was the topic of discussion during the virtual event, where Thomas spoke at length on her process when approaching the novel.
Five Wives, published in 2019, is a fictionalized account of the journey a group of evangelical Christian missionaries took into the rainforest of Ecuador in 1956 to convert the Waorani people, an indigenous group that had not had contact with the outside world at that time. The men of the families were killed during the trip, and the wives and children remained to continue pursuing the mission.
The missionaries’ trip has been widely written about, both in journals from the missionaries themselves and in other memoirs and biographies about the event, but Thomas chose to approach the narrative from the perspectives of the women involved for a particular reason.
“The men’s point of view is better represented in some ways, because we have their journals [but] I always wanted to explore the women,” said Thomas.
“I felt the families’ eyes upon me as I was writing this, and I wanted to be respectful. I didn’t want to invent anything that wasn’t congruent with the historical record [and] some of the things I write about are not in the missionaries sources but are included in different perspectives,” she said, later in the session. “I tried to explore the kinds of things they might not acknowledge themselves, in terms of their thoughts and feelings, but I didn't impose negative facts.”
For Thomas, she approached the book with a careful hand. She said she avoided writing characters who were still living, for example fictionalizing the children of the families for that reason. She also took minimal creative liberty with some of the original source material, she said, mostly to avoid some of the more problematic and racist language the missionaries used when talking about the Waorani people in their journals.
“I did not want to research living family, it felt intrusive to me, and yet I wanted to look at the resonance of this story for today [and] how they were living with that legacy and the meaning of that doctrine in present-day politics,” said Thomas.
Thomas has been pleased with the response to the book so far, especially as it was written and presented to a secular audience rather than an evangelical audience.
“I expected people to find it a little tough, going into the terms of the religious mindset, and I’m amazed and gratified, I love the responses. I’ve heard that people are not necessarily put off by entering the psyche of characters who are referring to God with every second thought,” said Thomas. “I’ve actually been thrilled with how receptive people have been to this book and how they've read it and the connections they’ve made to contemporary times.”
Five Wives won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2019 and was named Fiction of the Year by the Winnipeg Free Press. It has also been named book of the year by NOWToronto, Apple Books, CBC Books, and The Globe and Mail.
The Festival of Words continues until July 19, with a full schedule of events available here.
Stay tuned for coverage of the festival as it progresses through the week.
