Eludia Award Long List and Winner Announced

We’re excited to name the winner of the most recent round of our Eludia Award: Elisabeth Bell Carroll of Framingham, Massachusetts, for her fascinating dual-time novel, Agnès & Oscara.

The Eludia Award is a first-book award, offered to a woman writer, age forty and above, for a work of fiction, either a novel or collection of stories. We are also pleased to announce the semi-finalists and finalists below and wish to congratulate everyone. As ever, we are in awe of the enormity of talent we receive; and we are grateful to every writer who has submitted to this award.

The next round of submissions for the Eludia Award will deadline April 1, 2024. More details about The Eludia Award, and its guidelines can be read here on our blog, and here, on the Submittable page.

The semi-finalists and finalists are as follows:

Semi finalists

Adams, Kate, Mountain View, California, Scattered Pieces

Alderton, Ellen, Washington, D.C., Changing of the Guard

Alpha, Karen, Corning, New York, ZULU And Other Stories

Bryan, Cristina, Durham, North Carolina, Henricus

Carter, Thatcher, Riverside, California, Razed

Carroll, Elisabeth Bell, Framingham, Massachusetts, Agnès & Oscara

Chilton, Lora, Memphis, Tennessee, Massacre in 1666

Clayton, Julia, Southport, Merseyside, England, Tinted Venus

Colvin, Rebecca, Gastonia, North Carolina, A Beautiful Symmetry

Crawley, Kathryn, Greensboro, North Carolina, The Fetch of the Wind

Debling, Heather, Stratford, Ontario, Canada, Count Your Blessings: Stories

De Gregorio, Karen, Sherman Oaks, California, The Carnaval Kara Never Danced

Dhavan, Lucinda, Concord, Massachusetts, A Part of It All

Feighan, Philomena, Westborough, Massachusetts, Long Sleeps the Summer in the Seeds

Gorelova, Linda, Columbus, Ohio, The Romanovs Wish You Health in the New Year

Gray, Katrine, El Sobrante, California, Crescent Lane

Gurman, Diana, Los Angeles, My Ghost and Other Stories

James, Frannie, Seattle, Washington, The Sylvan Hotel, a Seattle Story

Johnson, Lulu, Dillard, Georgia, Pandora’s Portrait

Juchniewicz, Melissa, Chester, New Hampshire, Like Dust

Kirkham, Phebe, Woodside, New York, The Last of the Winters

Lawhorn, Barbara, Macomb, Illinois, Born Again

Lownds, Joan, Naugatuck, Connecticut, What’s Wrong with Your Voice?

Marin, Robin Luce, Brooklyn, New York, Old Scores

Martinez, Suzanne, Brooklyn, New York, Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass

May, Amber, Sherwood, Arizona, Destiny Keeper

Moriarty, Marilyn, Roanoke, Virginia, Flight Is the Name of a Goddess

Neville, Sophie, Lymington, Hampshire, UK, Love Is For The Brave

O’Brien, Colleen, East Glacier, Montana, Baited

Oxnard, K.W., Savannah, Georgia, The Leg in Question

Palmer, Wendy, Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, Sphere of Her Own

Payne, Martha, Atlanta, Georgia, Apple Doll

Ruby, Michele, Louisville, Kentucky, Stage Presence

Smith, Jessica, Lewiston, Maine, That Kind of Trouble Isn’t This Kind of Trouble

Spasser, Connie Corzilius, Augusta, Georgia, Shimmer and Give: Stories

Taugher, Mary, San Francisco, California, What Mercy

Troisi, Gina, Eliot, Maine, After the Rush

Webb, Susan, Citrus Heights, California, Figments

Whouley, Kate, Centerville, Massachusetts, The Maestro and Her Protégé

Wood, Mary, Eugene, Oregon, The Blue Edge

Yackzan, Dawn, Davis, California, Leap Frog

Finalists

Adams, Kate, Mountain View, California, Scattered Pieces

Alderton, Ellen, Washington, D.C., Changing of the Guard

Bryan, Cristina, Durham, North Carolina, Henricus

Carroll, Elisabeth Bell, Framingham, Massachusetts, Agnès & Oscara

Chilton, Lora, Memphis, Tennessee, Massacre in 1666

Clayton, Julia, Southport, Merseyside, England, Tinted Venus

Crawley, Kathryn, Greensboro, North Carolina, The Fetch of the Wind

Debling, Heather, Stratford, Ontario, Canada, Count Your Blessings: Stories

Gorelova, Linda, Columbus, Ohio, The Romanovs Wish You Health in the New Year

Gray, Katrine, El Sobrante, California, Crescent Lane

Gurman, Diana, Los Angeles, My Ghost and Other Stories

Johnson, Lulu, Dillard, Georgia, Pandora’s Portrait

May, Amber, Sherwood, Arizona, Destiny Keeper

Moriarty, Marilyn, Roanoke, Virginia, Flight Is the Name of a Goddess

O’Brien, Colleen, East Glacier, Montana, Baited

Oxnard, K.W., Savannah, Georgia, The Leg in Question

Payne, Martha, Atlanta, Georgia, Apple Doll

Spasser, Connie Corzilius, Augusta, Georgia, Shimmer and Give: Stories

Whouley, Kate, Centerville, Massachusetts, The Maestro and Her Protégé

Winner

Carroll, Elisabeth Bell, Framingham, Massachusetts, Agnès & Oscara

Again, we would like to express our undying appreciation and respect for all who submitted to The Eludia Award. Thank you for your patience, and for entrusting your work to us. We love and honor each and every one of you!

The Secret Music at Tordesillas Wins the 2020 INDIES Award for Historical Fiction

We are thrilled to announce that THE SECRET MUSIC AT TORDESILLAS by Marjorie Sandor has been named winner of the 2020 Foreward INDIES Award for Historical (Adult) Fiction. As the editor-in-chief of Hidden River Publishing, and the proud publisher of this wonderful book, I am very happy for Marjorie, who has created a world that every lover of historical fiction should be eager to enter. It is the court of Juana the Mad, during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. It was a time when even the court musicians had to face the horrors of the Inquisition and were forced to renounce their own religions. What happens when a court musician secretly holds fast to his own spiritual traditions at risk of death? What happens to the underground religious communities during this time of great religious violence? You need to get your hands on this book and enter this world. Everyone who loves historical fiction should be rushing to add this book to their bookshelf.

https://www.forewordreviews.com/awards/books/the-secret-music-at-tordesillas/

THE SECRET MUSIC AT TORDESILLAS by Marjorie Sandor

The Secret Music at Tordesillas by Marjorie Sandor

We here at Hidden River are thrilled to announce the release of The Secret Music at Tordesillas, by Marjorie Sandor, which is the inaugural winner of our Tuscarora Award in Historical Fiction.

The novel is set in 16th Century Spain. It is April, 1555, and Juana I of Castile, the Spanish queen known as “la loca,” has died after forty-seven years in forced seclusion at Tordesillas. Her last musician, Juan de Granada, refuses to depart with the other servants, forcing two functionaries of the Holy Office of the Inquisition to interrogate him in the now-empty palace. But is it really empty? Or is there, as Holy Office suspects, a heretic hidden on the premises, a converso secretly practicing the forbidden rites of Judaism? Only Juan knows the answer, and his subversive tale is at once a ballad of lost love and a last gambit to save a life—and a rich cultural and spiritual tradition on the verge of erasure.

Sandor has created a story so alive, so filled with intrigue and passion, that the time of the Spanish Inquisition comes boldly to life. So often, the story is told from the perspective of those Christians. For them, the reclamation of territories from the Muslims, through the conquests of Ferdinand and Isabella, is understood as a triumph. But this was certainly not so for the practicing, pious Jews and Muslims who had thrived, co-existing peacefully, during the period of Islamic rule. For them, the time brought the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition. What was it like to be a Jew or a Muslim during such a time? Specifically, what was life like for a court musician, secretly faithful to his real religion, but forced to masquerade as a convert to Christianity?

The Secret Music at Tordesillas has received much well-deserved praise:

“Radiant, passionate, deeply intelligent and intensely moving, this brilliant novel brings alive a place and time surprisingly resonant with our own. Love and music burn like a laser through these glorious pages.”
–Andrea Barrett

“In The Secret Music of Tordesillas, the fabulously gifted Marjorie Sandor tells the absorbing story of a Jewish musician and his queen, both living precarious lives in the tumultuous world of the Spanish Inquisition. Sandor’s lustrous prose resonates like the music she so eloquently describes and her characters are exquisitely complicated. Reading these gorgeous pages, I felt that I too had taken up residence in some castle full of dark corners.”
–Margot Livesey

“An historical novel of striking imagination and lyricism, this sly tale of sixteenth-century Spain, with its secrets and masks involving the interrelationships of Catholics, Muslims and Jews, has an uncanny bearing on our own country’s diversity tensions. It is a pleasure to have another of Marjorie Sandor’s delicious fictions: she is writing at the top of her form.”
–Phillip Lopate

“I found Marjorie Sandor’s The Secret Music at Tordesillas irresistible, as appealing for its grand romantic adventure as it is for its clear-eyed exploration of culture, tradition, and identity. Its narrative–replete with hidden Jews, palace intrigue, a captive queen, a hopeless love–is rendered in a prose as intoxicating as the ancient music that informs it. This is history in the form of a haunting song.”
–Steve Stern

The novel is available at:
Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Powell’s

BookShop.org

Marjorie Sandor is the author of four books of fiction and non-fiction, including the memoir, The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction, (2011) and the 2004 Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction, Portrait of my Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime: Stories. Her earlier book of personal essays, The Night Gardener: A Search for Home, won the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. In February 2015, St. Martins Press published her anthology, The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows. She teaches creative writing at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Her debut novel, The Secret Music at Tordesillas, is the inaugural winner of the Tuscarora Award for Historical Fiction, and is forthcoming from Hidden River Press in 2020.
Marjorie’s work has appeared in such magazines as The Georgia Review, AGNI, and TriQuarterly, as well as in Best American Short Stories 1985 and 1988, The Pushcart Prize XIII, Twenty Under Thirty, and The Best American Spiritual Writing 2000. Sandor’s characters—real and imagined–inhabit urban gardens and old houses. They linger on the ever-shifting threshold between home and wilderness, between youth and old age, and most of all between the human quest for adventure, and the desire for refuge. In her stories and essays, she explores family, community life, and the pull of art to expose our darkest and best-kept secrets, our restlessness and comical mistakes and deep regrets; our desire to create a domestic paradise against all odds.

Praise for Marjorie:

“Whether she is writing essays, as in the splendid The Night Gardener (1999), or fiction, Sandor’s prose is as tangy and luscious as just-plucked fruit.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist

“Marjorie Sandor has all the skills of a masterful writer of stories, but her compassion and beguiling tone are all her own. Her distinctive style and rich understanding of people raise our hopes.”
—Guy Davenport

Marjorie is available for interviews, readings and other events. Please contact us for further information.

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Slouching Towards Publication

A guest blog by David Hallock Sanders, author of Busara Road

© 2018 David H. Wells

This is not a feel-good story. It’s too full of disaster, disease, and failure.
It’s not a sob story, either, even though it does include some sobbing.
It’s also not a how-to story, although it does have bullet points.
But then again, it ends on a happy note, so maybe it is feel-good after all.
And maybe that’s where I should start, with the ending:
This year my novel, Busara Road, got published.

That may sound like solidly feel-good news, except that it took me 20 years to get the book into print – years filled with grave setbacks, personal traumas, and drawers of failed drafts.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In 1999 I wrote my first draft of something that was not yet a novel, but was more like a short-story attempt that got way, way out of hand.

It was titled Return to Kwetu, and contained many of the same characters, settings, and themes that would one day become Busara Road. The core story, which has remained remarkably intact over the years, involved an American Quaker boy who gets transplanted to Kenya in the early sixties, just after Kenya’s long and bloody struggle for independence. The story followed this kid, Mark, as he comes of age in a nation that is coming of age itself.

That first story was a long, royal mess. Rambling, leaden, and confusing, it just kept growing longer and longer, until it was so unwieldy that I finally abandoned it.

Two years later, though, I excavated the original story and took another look. That’s when it occurred to me that maybe I was dealing with a novel here. I renamed it Kijiji Road, and began again.

I fleshed out some of the more compelling characters. I wrote new scenes that became new chapters. I ended up with several hundred pages of new text – some of it interesting, most of it not.

That attempt failed as well.

I started over. This time I reconceived the work as a magnum opus in three parts. The first section would be the boy’s childhood in Kenya. The second would be the span of his adulthood back in the United States. And the third section would be his return, in his aging years, to the village where he’d lived as a child.

By 2007 the manuscript, now titled Busara Road, had grown to over 800 pages, yet I was still stuck fumbling around in the character’s early life. I was finding the whole thing completely unmanageable. Another failed attempt.

Here I was, eight years in, and I still didn’t have a legitimate draft.

So I decided, once again, to start over. I set parts two and three aside to concentrate on the first section. I decided to focus on the plot, a sensible approach that I should have taken eight years earlier. I bought new software to help me create a master plotline, filled poster boards with scene-by-scene index cards, and charted each chapter in detail to track my through-lines, thematic developments, character motivations, etc., etc. I lugged boxes of notes and source materials with me to more than half a dozen writing residencies.

It was slow going. But by 2011, I finally had what felt like an actual, presentable draft.

And then disaster struck.

My computer suffered a catastrophic hard-drive crash. Even worse, I had not been backing up for years.

I lost everything.

A long road back

The wonderful writer Pico Ayer has written movingly about losing his home and all of its contents – including 15 years of notes and manuscripts – to a devastating fire. He ultimately described the experience as liberating, one that left him with a strange sense of freedom.

I don’t have Mr. Ayer’s Zen Buddhist composure.

When I lost my novel I nearly lost my mind. I literally curled in a ball on the floor, sobbing and moaning, “I fucked up! I fucked up!” My wife, grasping the seriousness of the situation, fed me shot after shot of whiskey.

From there I began a painful, lengthy period of reconstructive surgery. I dug through cardboard boxes for old printouts of early chapters. I thumbed through file cabinets for old notes and searched through old thumb drives for discarded text. I reassembled all of this material the best I could, and assessed what I had.

The whole thing was a mess. The novel’s narrative voice was all over the place. Scenes meandered. Characters behaved in inconsistent, unconvincing ways. Story arcs conflicted. Tenses battled – present in some sections, past in others.

And this wasn’t only the fault of the disjointed drafts. The entire novel suffered from these shortcomings. It just wasn’t working.

That stark realization, I now believe, was a gift. My version of Mr. Ayer’s liberation.
So I started over, once again, from the beginning. I re-plotted the book in detail, chapter by chapter. I re-defined character bios and thematic threads. I dispensed with the wandering prose that had diluted early drafts and focused on simply telling the story. I even re-wrote the whole novel as a screenplay, which taught me a lot about plotting and pacing and efficiency.

I signed up for a one-on-one novel intensive with Nancy Zafris, a marvelous writer and teacher who literally tore the manuscript into pieces and helped me reassemble it with a better, stronger structure.

It took me two years to complete a new draft. I submitted an excerpt to the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Prize for a novel-in-progress, and was shortlisted as a finalist.
I pitched the novel to agents at conferences – AWP in Seattle, PWO in Philadelphia, Grub Street in Boston. I got requests to see more of the manuscript, and sent it off with high hopes.

I sent the new manuscript to more editors and publishers. I pitched it to the agents of writers I knew. I pitched it to the agents of writers I didn’t know. I got more requests to see the complete manuscript.

I was certain that acceptance was near at hand.

But no.

“The writing is beautiful,” said one agent, “but I don’t know how to sell it.”

“I love it,” said another, “but just not enough.”

I continued to collect rejections. I felt lost.

And then I got cancer. Nodular lymphocyte-predominant Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Over the next half-year, throughout chemotherapy so debilitating that many days I couldn’t sit upright for more than an hour at a time, I started re-writing the novel again. I cut scenes, added scenes, moved scenes. I changed the entire narrative voice from past to present tense. Decided I didn’t like it, and changed it all back. I continued to send the manuscript out, and the rejections continued to arrive in return.

But as the Buddha said, “Each day we are born again.” And one of those days finally brought acceptance.

This spring Busara Road was published by New Door Books. Hardcover. Paperback. E-book. Big release party. The works.

So there’s my happy ending.

And what did this whole saga teach me? Here is my promised set of bullet points, my three-p finale of lessons learned:

• Patience. Things simply take the time they take to get to where they need to be. Had any earlier draft of the novel appeared in print, I would have been disappointed in both myself and the work.

• Persistence. I was determined not to give up. I was stubborn about seeing each stage through to its completion, and when it didn’t lead me where I’d hoped it would, I’d find another way forward. And finally:

• Pain management: Sometimes, when anguish overwhelms, a shot of whiskey works wonders.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

For more information about David Hallock Sanders, check out his website. For more information about his novel, Busara Road, check out information here.