Features
"Checking out Historical Chicago: Cynthia Pelayo's Forgotten Sisters"
Chicago Review of Books
"Although Pelayo rejects the label 'historical fiction' for what she does, she acknowledges that historical research is an essential part of her process. Her true crime poetry, for instance, reflects such a keen understanding of each case’s details that the collection seems to emit ghostly human shapes, as if each murdered girl and woman from Pelayo’s poems were hovering beside the reader. With Pelayo’s desire to find the human within the victim, her shape-shifting writing functions like a séance, whether the dead in question are historical, fictional, or somewhere in between."
"Checking out Historical Chicago: Kathleen Rooney's From Dust to Stardust"
Chicago Review of Books
"Much like the female journalist whom O’Dare confides in, Rooney sifted through numerous sources—magazines, letters, books—to responsibly imagine private, unknowable moments in the 1910s and 1920s. The result is intimately thrilling, as we, too, drink smuggled cocktails with Hollywood’s leading ladies... Considering how much Rooney’s research was shaped by pandemic shutdowns and film loss, From Dust to Stardust is a masterclass in imagining one’s way into historical gaps."
"Checking out Historical Chicago: Dawn Raffel's Boundless as the Sky"
Chicago Review of Books
"When I spoke with Raffel about her latest book, Boundless as the Sky: Fables and Tales, Some of Them True, she shared that, even on her first research trip to Chicago, she knew that she’d write about the World’s Fair in 1933. How she’d write about it was the question. Her family connection had inspired her to take up the subject, but she didn’t want to directly model any characters on her family members. She needed a more elastic narrative framework, one that accommodated how much of this history was unknown—and yet, could begin to be known through her own personal connections. 'The more I started doing research,' she said, 'the more I saw how many gaps there are in our understanding of history and how many different points of view and unrecorded voices [there are].'"
