Returning to that adage, “Write about what you know,” I realize how some work experience from my past gave me a unique edge in drafting Quaker Dover.

For instance:

1. My journalism career included an early gig of pure research for a daily Action Line column. (We had an editor/writer, a secretary, and two researchers – big time!) Writing and editing, of course, were the staples of the rest of those years.
2. From writing and then revising the novels, of course, I had explored the dynamics of building a large book and then the distinguishing qualities of fiction in contrast to journalism. I even learned to excise a hundred or more pages from a manuscript and not weep.
3. My long service in Quaker meetings, as presiding clerk in addition to committee work and visitation, steeped me in the decision-making process and culture of the Society of Friends, past and present. Along the way, I gained familiarity with our peculiar customs and historic language, ranging from liberal “unprogrammed” worship at one end and old-order conservatives at another to pastor-led evangelical at the other extreme.
4. Genealogy research accompanied much of those discoveries, especially as I gleaned the old minute books and journals. (Many of my findings appear on my blog, Orphan George.)
5. Triangulation of three or more differing versions of an event, as I encountered especially in material and correspondence regarding my grandparents, became helpful in considering Colonial history in New England. I could live with the ambiguity while letting the conflicting accounts still add to the bigger picture.
6. My long interest in geography – maps, especially – came to play in placing Dover in perspective with the rest of New England as well as Devonshire in England itself.
7. My training as an artist in high school and my work with photojournalists in the years after came in handy in examining portraits of Quakers (once those were permitted) as well as related locations. Sometimes I could see where an individual was in regard to changes affecting Quaker practice and the world around them.
8. Online sleuthing, rather than archives (which I had explored in the genealogy), came to the fore during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Somehow, I think my experience in formatting my novels as ebooks, fed into this, but I had already devoured many digital texts by the time I became amazed at the number of rare old, arcane books I could download for free.
9. Despite the fact that Quaking Dover is a history involving political conflict, I was surprised to find that my political science degree didn’t add that much, though the way Vincent Ostrom had taught us to closely read an argument came in handy, especially in looking at a system from the ground up rather than top-down.
10. Moving to Maine before the final revision and publication also added to my perspective as I settled in. Dover, like much of New Hampshire, gravitates toward Boston, as did much of the Dover Quaker history. Little did I suspect just how much Dover Friends and the broader community influenced the growth of Maine to the east and northeast once the territory reopened to English settlement once the conflicts with the French and their Native allies wound down – earlier than I had presumed, in fact.