"Work to Get to Those Christian Themes" - My Talk with Joseph W. Knowles
Two writers bumble through faith, fiction, history, and Dickens.
“Citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of conscience, that is, the right to profess or not profess any religion, and to conduct religious worship or atheistic propaganda.”
So begins the short story “Allegiance Owed,” by a writer named Joseph W. Knowles. These lines, quoted from Soviet policy, are a somber joke for any reader who knows even topical Soviet history. They’re also a darkly-ironic reflection of all that will befall the story’s pastor, Pyotr Simonov, as he foregoes party loyalty in favor of loyalty to the Lord.
Go ahead and read the story. But then come back here to meet Joseph himself. He’s a Virginia-based writer (and lawyer) who self-publishes novels of alternate American history, first through Amazon and now through his Substack newsletter. Oh, and he’s an enthusiastic conversationalist, effortless history buff, and has one of the best beards I’ve ever seen.
At the end of last year we talked about his work and about “Christian” fiction, though we naturally fell into talking about everything else also. It’s easy to talk to a writer who headlines his online bio with “SDG” (Soli Deo Gloria).
*The following was edited for length and clarity.*
Demands of the State, Obedience to the Faith
Me: I want to start with "Allegiance Owed," because it's fantastic. As you're thinking about that story and recalling putting it together, how did you come to write it? How did that happen?
Joseph: There's actually an anthology called the Agorist Writers' Workshop, with two themes: Faith and Freedom. They're a libertarian-ish publication. And so “freedom” is always one of the themes but then they always match it up with something else. As far as “Allegiance Owed,” the the general idea of the story came to me as soon as they announced the themes. I knew I wanted to have a pastor character who is in conflict with the government over meeting for church. This was in 2019, so it hadn't become quite as relevant as it might be now. But then, I also had in the back of my mind this this part of the old constitution of the Soviet Union that says, ‘Hey, we protect freedom of religion.’ But then you hear all these stories from the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries, and freedom of religion was obviously not what they said it was. So right away I knew that was where I wanted the conflict to be.
Me: Yeah, the conflict between what the Soviet Union says it is doing for faiths and how it actually plays out for the people of faith.
Joseph: Right. Exactly. And the title alludes to the fact that the Communist Party in the Soviet Union demanded allegiance that, rightly, people of faith would say, ‘No, that allegiance I owe to God and I owe to my faith, or I owe certain allegiances to my family. And I can't do what you, the state, are demanding that I do because I have these other allegiances.’ So I definitely wanted to pull in the theme of the allegiance that this character owes to God, the allegiances he owes to his wife, to his children, and just highlight how they run right into what the state demands.
Me: So when you when you bring up the allegiance that the priest character owes to his wife and his children, it was something that occurred to me the other night. We were watching a spy movie called The Courier, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. It’s essentially about these spies and how they very much do not tell their families what they're doing. Because there's the culpability question, that if the wife doesn't know, she won’t be punished. But I was curious: in "Allegiance Owed," compared to what this character owes to God and what He owes to his his conscience in the Holy Spirit, is there kind of conflict with what he owes his wife and children as far as of keeping them as secure as possible? Do you think about that?
Joseph: That's definitely an important theme. And if you know if I had more space to build it, I would play that up a little bit more. Actually, that was one of the things that was interesting in working with the Agorist: they did help with the editing on those submissions, and that conflict was one of their suggestions. They wanted to tie the theme together more across the whole story. So you see the character struggling with that, where I've got a couple of brief scenes where he's at their apartment, and he's struggling over it because he believes that he's commanded to lead his family in worship, and that means bringing them to church and having his children sitting in the church service. But it's a risk he's willing to take for himself and his family. But you do see him struggle with it. And like I said, if I had the chance to write a longer story, maybe there'd be more opportunity for making that a little heavier.
There’s “Slim” Christian Fiction. Then There’s Tolkien.
Me: Thinking about writing fiction based in Christian faith, how did you go about that? This is a question I've struggled with and pulled at for a long time: how do you write as a Christian? Obviously, you owe something to the story, but to your point, you owe more to God. So how did you go about that?
Joseph: Yeah, with "Allegiance Owed," it was really kind of easy. Because I was able to pick the character who in the storyline can be talking about his faith directly. And he can be a little preachy, for lack of a better word, without coming across that way, because of the situation he's put in. With other stories, it definitely can be can be harder. I'm just remembering elementary school when you would have to pick a book for a book report. I went to a Christian school, so they would say, 'Okay, this time pick fiction, or this time pick a biography.' And it was always Christian fiction, and I felt like it was kind of slim pickings sometimes, with books like The Sugar Creek Gang series. There's nothing wrong with them. But after five or six of them, you want something more, or once you get to a certain age, you kind of age out of that group if you're an avid reader, like I was.
Me: As far as like the slim pickings, when you were reading the "Christian" fiction, what felt like it was lacking?
Joseph: A lot of them were just kind of formulaic. And there's nothing wrong with that if you're cranking them out and you want to put out content for people, but it becomes a little bit predictable. As interesting as the characters could be, you know what they're going to do. And there's a certain level of comfort in that.
But then, I chose 1984 for book report one time in high school. And my teacher told me I couldn't read it. So being a good 16-year-old, I checked it out from the public library over the summer and read it anyway. But I wanted books like that, where the plot was unique and the characters were well developed or things like that. Though, depending on who you ask, The Lord of the Rings definitely has Christian themes there. But at the same time, I wouldn't call it Christian fiction, in the same sense that we had “Christian fiction” for those book reports in school.
Me: I definitely agree. Tolkien was a practicing Catholic, and his sense of a morality that accounts for God and the natural law is all over those books. I'm curious, what's the difference between Christian fiction and Lord of the Rings in your mind?
Joseph: I think the primary difference is how much you have to work to get to those Christian themes. I mean, it's evident in Tolkien when you look back on it, and I might not have seen it, as a 14-year-old reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time. I was just reading a cool fantasy novel, like maybe the coolest fantasy novel at the time. And I was just reading it for the story and the characters and the battles and those kinds of things. Now, I can go back and reread it, and see more, take a little bit more time to see what the characters are doing, and why they're motivated to do what they do, where I feel like other books…so, if I digress, there's nothing wrong with say, the Left Behind books. I devoured them in high school.
Me: Yeah, ditto.
Joseph: There's nothing inherently wrong with putting character motivation more on the surface. And there's certainly a place for that. But I think that's where I draw the line for the difference between Tolkien and other examples: the characters in Left Behind are going to tell you the lesson to learn, more obviously than Gandalf is going to tell you.
The Articles of Confederation and Alternate Histories (and Mr. Dooby)
Me: Talk to me about Defying Conventions. How did that start? It's 1787 in Philadelphia, how'd you start there?
Joseph: Well, I wanted an idea for National Novel Writing Month, and it was all based on the reading that I had done. And there was one book in particular about one of the very first races for Congress after the Constitution was ratified. It was in here in Virginia, and it was a race between James Madison and James Monroe. I believe it was the only time in American history you had two future presidents running against each other for a seat in the House of Representatives. So that piqued my interest to learn more about about those guys, and of course that period of American history has always been one of my favorites.
Joseph: And with the libertarian ideas floating around in my brain, one hypothetical that interested me was, 'Why did the Constitution have to happen, and what would have really happened if the states had continued under the Articles of Confederation?' So I wanted to explore that idea, and I decided to make the novel about a young man who's being apprenticed to a lawyer because that's what I do—write what's familiar, you know? And I just started with just that nugget of an idea.
Me: Why historical fiction?
Joseph: History has probably always been my favorite subject in school even from elementary school, and history was my major in college, so it's always something I've loved. I was fortunate to have good history teachers. The way that I look at it, that's a big part of the reason that people say, 'Oh, I always hated history in school,' because they get stuck with the the gym teacher or the football coach, and you know, nothing against football coaches, but some of them don't love history. And that comes through when they teach, and I think that is why a lot of people have that bitter taste in their mouth over the subject. But history was always something I loved.
Me: Who was your favorite history teacher, just out of curiosity?
Joseph: Just one? I mean, in high school I had Mr. Dooby for a couple of different classes.
Me: Mr. Dooby?
Joseph: Yeah. And I had him for 7th grade history, and then for 10th grade history. And he was a really good teacher, and you could tell that he loved what he was teaching. And that really cemented my love for history from there on out. And down the road, I had other good teachers as well.
Me: Just to follow this tangent a bit, my favorite high school teacher was also my history teacher. He was my world history teacher, and his name was Adrian Viccellio. This guy had been around the world and back: he was an actor for a bit, he was a window washer for a bit. He took off one Friday to go run 100 miles straight, and he actually ran the 100 miles straight.
Joseph: Whoah.
Me: Yeah, coolest dude. He actually ended up leaving the school after I finished his class, so I didn't get to really hang out with him all four years of high school, but he was one of the more inspiring and challenging teachers I had. With the material, he was like, 'Hey, this is world history. There are a lot of things that are really hard in here, it's not always a great history, but it's always fascinating and there's always a larger picture to see.' So I appreciated that.
The Wilds of Ohio and a President We All Forgot
Me: Anyway, so you finished up Defying Conventions, and you moved on to Fit for Freedom.
Joseph: Yeah, I did.
Me: What was the transition, from finishing that first novel to moving into the second?
Joseph: Originally I just self-published the first one on Amazon, and family members and a couple friends read it. So that was kind of neat. And I had no concrete plans to necessarily keep writing that line of stories, but a couple people enjoyed it enough that they just flat-out asked me, 'When are you writing the next one?' And so I thought, 'Well, I guess now I have to.' And I did have some ideas for what would happen next in this alternate timeline, if there were to be another story.
So I thought about how far ahead I would want to jump in the story. Defying Conventions is a little bit unusual for an alternate history, because of where you have your point of departure, the point that lays out what happened in real life versus how where the novel ends up differently. Most alternate history novels take place 50 or 100 years after the point of departure. But mine takes place at the point of departure, and that's not typical. So I thought, 'Well, do I want to jump ahead in time like 25 years, maybe around the War of 1812?' I didn't know. But ultimately I decided to go a couple of years ahead, so the second novel one starts in 1791, about four years later. One of its big events was the Northwest Indian War. So if you're unfamiliar with this historical period, then you know there was the Northwest Territory, which is now Ohio and Indiana—
Me: That was considered northwest at the time?
Joseph: Yeah, today we think of it as highly populated, we've got these population centers and a lot of farm country there, but at the time it was much more rugged, and it was inhabited by these tribes of Native Americans. And when the War of Independence was over and the British said, ‘Alright, Americans, you have this land now,' it wasn't as if nobody lived there. So these Native Americans found themselves in a different country and under a different ruling order than the one they'd had for the past 100 years. So that was a big source of conflict. And I started thinking, how would how would the American states deal with that conflict, if they were a Confederation rather than a country united under a Constitution with more centralized power? So I started to think through that, do some reading, and figure out how the characters would fit into that.
Me: This is going to sound like a strange question, since you're writing alternate history, but as far as writing historical fiction, what are you doing by way of research? How do you kind of go about collecting the nuts and bolts of this world that you're going to shift about two inches?
Joseph: That's one of the more difficult parts, I've found, is to actually write historical fiction without making it a history textbook. Because you could describe all these things in great detail and really just show off how much you know about the time period. But what I've tried to do is some general, high-level reading on the topics I want to talk about.
So there was a book called President Washington’s Indian War, which goes into the politics and also some of the Indian wars that they were fighting at the time. So that allowed me to pick up on questions like, ‘What are the tribes that were there? Where were they located?’ A couple times I looked into some online sources about what people wore and those kinds of things. I do want to be able to have those details to give it the right flavor. And then the other part is trying to write away from how I speak and write in my everyday life. So historical letters of the time period are very helpful for that work, because you find out how people sounded when they wrote. And then also, what were the things that they wrote to each other about? What do they care about? I use letters in both of the books.
Me: It makes me happy but also sad to read a historical letter because I feel like there was such eloquence that was just normal.
Joseph: Yeah, definitely.
Me: To be verbose, to be witty in the everyday context of a letter between a husband and a wife. It's incredible that that was commonplace. Anyway. Is the point of departure that the Articles of Confederation remain, instead of the constitutional ratification?
Joseph: Exactly, right.
Me: So without spoiling too much, how would you describe how that plays out for these characters? I'll give you a little bit of a caveat from my own public-school education: we were taught the flaws of the Articles of Confederation. Now I think, maybe that was skewed, but I'm not sure, I haven’t returned to the Articles since I was about 16. So how do you work with those?
Joseph: I mean, I didn't get a public school education but we probably learned a lot of the same stuff, because that definitely is the accepted view of history, that things were terrible and then the Constitution came along and everything was great again. Which is not to say that either of them is a flawless document. But then, one of the things that’s seen as the primary disadvantage of the Articles is the lack of a central government. For instance, John Hancock, with the big signature on the Declaration of Independence, was also the president of the Confederation Congress on at least one occasion, maybe a couple times. He had that title of "President," but you don't really hear it mentioned with his name, because it was so administrative that it didn't really carry any prestige at the time. It's a function that they had to have, but we don't remember his name like we remember George Washington because there wasn't an executive branch. And there was no federal court system, so there were only state courts.
Joseph: And there wasn't an easy mechanism for Congress to get money to do anything. So when it comes to internal improvements like building canals or a big federal road like the Cumberland road, that came later because there was no money to do it. And really, Congress didn't have the power to do it. So what you really saw were two conflicting visions for what United States of America were destined to be. On the one hand you have a Thomas Jefferson type, who envisions a nation of yeoman farmers living on their farms, carrying out normal life and not really having much to do with the other states or even with the people one county over. And then on the other side, you have the Alexander Hamilton type, who sees big things for the United States with heavy industry and manufacturing. And if that was what you wanted, you did have to go the way of the Constitution with more centralized authority. But if you were content to have people living on their farms and teaching in one-room schollhouses, then the Articles of Confederation made a lot more sense. So I think that's what it came down to.
Me: So then in Defying Conventions, I'm just curious about the logistical things. Like, Congress doesn't raise taxes because the Constitution was not ratified. So what does that mean for like traveling between states, or like state-to-state borders? I understand there was one conflict where states were pulling up on each other. How does that work if you're a character just trying to live your life?
Joseph: It's an interesting thing to try to think through, because in history, you actually did have states that for a while attempted to charge each tariffs on each others' imports, just between states. And they pretty quickly decided it didn't make a lot of sense at all, because there were easy ways to get around it. Not even including smuggling, it was like, ‘We can just pick up from one port and go to the other and not have to pay your tariffs, or we'll take our goods across the Atlantic or down to the West Indies.’ So as a practical matter, for at least my characters, you don't see them bump into a ton of those kinds of things. Only a few of them, like the coach roads and things like that. That was another one of the things that I tried to research: how long would it actually take someone to travel from Richmond to Philadelphia, using the means of transportation then available? And what would they encounter? It was kind of difficult, because there wasn't a lot of information easily available on on those kinds of things.
Me: Yeah, you could just take the speed of a carriage, probably add some terrible roads, and just match the difference and work backwards, do a little on-the-fly math, right?
Joseph: Yeah, that's basically what I ended up doing.
Me: Oh, that worked?
How to Write: Invite Far Too Much Accountability
Me: Talk to me about the scheduling logistics of Fit for Freedom. There's an instalment every week, right?
Joseph: Yes. And part of that was, I write with an outline, where I plan out all the scenes I want to write, ahead of time.
Me: Yeah?
Joseph: That helps me. I'd made a couple attempts before, where I'd have an idea for a story and I would just start writing and not finish it, or even get very far. So I outlined the whole thing, started writing, and got 75% to 80% done. But then I got to the end of National Novel Writing Month in 2017, and I read my 50,000 words, and I was tired of working on it, so I just set it aside and said, 'Well, I'll come back to it.' And then it probably sat there for a year, but I did come back to it because people were bugging me about it. I started working on it again, and then in the spring I discovered Substack.
Me: Yeah, same.
Joseph: Yeah? Well, I thought, Hey, I have this material, and I want to finish this novel. If I announce that I'm going to do it, that will force me to do it, so that I'll have to actually sit down and make the time and write those last handful of scenes that need to be written. So that might not be the best way to incentivize yourself to finish your novel, but it's been working so far, I think.
Me: I agree, definitely. The best way to do something that you don't want to do is tell other people you're going to do it, just give yourself way too much accountability. And what about the second novel?
Joseph: In 2019 I went back, built the story idea for Fit for Freedom and started working on that in November 2019. I wrote most of it that month, actually. And then that's when I got tired of looking at it and set it aside. I came back to it every now and then in the meantime, and then I've been working on it since then.
Me: And then you started publishing them on Substack this past spring?
Joseph: Yes, in March 2021.
The (Inevitable) Dickens Tangent
Me: So I've got to ask: why did you choose the newsletter title, "The Tidewater Papers?"
Joseph: Two reasons. One is, Tidewater is the area where I live. But I chose that over the more recently-given name of "Hampton Roads." Tidewater is a name with a little more pedigree, even though it's it's used a lot less around here than it used to be. And then for "Papers," I was thinking of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, who was kind of doing what I do. He was a lot better at it, obviously, but many of his books were originally published as serial publications in English newspapers. So, I wanted to latch on to that because serialized novels are a tradition that's fallen out of practice, but a tradition with good history behind it. So "The Tidewater Papers" is an homage to the area where I am and also to Charles Dickens.
Me: What’s your favorite novel by Dickens? I have Great Expectations on my shelf, which I got from my birthday a minute ago. It's been staring at me for a while.
Joseph: I've read a few, and the one I've read most recently may be my favorite novel: it's Bleak House, which delves into the Chancery court system of 19th century England, which interests me since that's my profession. But then it was also a book where "I laughed, I cried, it moved me, Bob," like they say in VeggieTales. But it really was moving, and you wouldn't think, picking up an 800-page book by this 19th-century English guy, that it'd be a book where I laughed out loud multiple times and was literally moved to tears multiple times. It's just fantastic. And I know Dickens is not everybody's cup of tea, but I love him, and Bleak House is my favorite novel of his so far.
Me: What was it that moved you exactly? I haven't read Bleak House, so don't necessarily go into spoiler territory.
Joseph: There's always a love story in Dickens, with two young lovers, right? But in Bleak House there are lots of those interactions where you see the love story develop, and you start rooting for this young couple. You’ve got to go through their ups and downs, and you feel it all for them.
Joseph: But then there's also the narrator character, who has a really compelling story too. She goes through a lot of hard stuff, and you're rooting for her to get the happy ending. And Dickens plays all this off the Chancery court system, which, if you think our court system now is crazy, that court system was a whole other thing. And some of the characters are going to the judge to try to get what they think is justice, to try to get relief for their situation. In some cases, they can and in some cases, they can't. And you really just see how it would feel futile to these people, like, 'This is where I'm supposed to go, and you're the one who's supposed to help me, but you're telling me there's nothing you can do?'
Me: That already sounds moving. And I can definitely agree with you on the breadth of Dickens. One of the perks of having 800 pages to work with is that you can put any kind of novel in there, probably several novels at once. I'm thinking of A Tale of Two Cities, where you have high drama, political intrigue, and terror, and you also have these hilarious cockney-accented guys stumbling around a graveyard.
Joseph: Yeah, exactly.
Me: I appreciate that, I was not planning a Dickens tangent, but I'll take a Dickens tangent any day.
Psalm Poetry for Your Thoughts
Me: And your Substack does feature poetry, also. You had a burst of poetry in November 2021, how did that happen?
Joseph: I'd written several of those poems previously, and they'd been stored in various places: some in my journal, some on my mostly-dead Wordpress site. And my goal was to have all of my creative writing, the short stories, the poetry, and the two novels, in a central location. I just figured it made the most sense to place them all where people can find them, if they wanted. But I actually put those poems on the site and didn’t send them out as newsletters. I left them separate, for people to stumble across them.
Me: What's it feel like to using poetry to meditate on scripture?
Joseph: Many of the poems I've done are from the Psalms, which are poetry to begin with. So they definitely lend themselves to that, because the writers of the Psalms were using poetic language themselves. And I stick to the more technical verse as opposed to the styles on the other end of the spectrum. I like that structure, and in terms of meditation I find it helpful because I really have to think, ‘What is this? What are the other meanings? What's the full meaning of this phrase? ‘And how can I make the meaning fit with the rhythm or rhyme scheme?’ And all the while you're turning it over and over in your mind, which is the point of scriptural meditation. So I've found this poetry very helpful.
Me: I've been reading Puritan prayers for a while, and one stylistic thing they keep coming back to is the rhythmic repetition, where they have a verb, for instance, and it says, 'May I,' and then there's a verb phrase, and then there's another verb phrase, and they stack verb phrases onto one another. Sometimes these prayers have five or six different verb phrases, and they stack onto one another and they're just a little bit different from one another. But the spirit of their action before God is roughly the same, and so the prayer feels like you're working your way around something, seeing it from different vantage points but seeing the same thing every time.
Again, please make sure you read The Tidewater Papers for yourselves—not only Fit for Freedom and Defying Conventions, but also the short stories and Psalm-inspired poetry that we discussed. All this faith and history Joseph accesses so easily in off-the-cuff conversation give sturdy roots to his fiction. And did we mention that he’s now writing a science-fiction novella?
There are no shortage of fiction writers at work today on Substack, and they are very intentionally building a digital community. One of my plans for this newsletter is to interview more writers, for your reading pleasure but also for my own place among people doing work like mine. I hope you enjoyed this interview, and that you’ll enjoy the interviews that come later this year.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch again on St. Patrick’s Day.
I love what Joseph said about 1984. It was banned, so being 16-year-old, he promptly went out and read it. There's been so much politically-motivated talk about banning books. I have been thinking for a while now, the best way to get kids to read some of these classics is to tell them the books are too bawdy and risque. Tell the kids they're not allowed to read the books and they'll read them. Tell the kids they have to read the books, and they won't.
Really enjoyed this read as a fellow Christian writer serialising fiction on Substack. I will be subscribing to the Tidewater Papers. I don’t know much about American history but the alternative history described sounds interesting enough for me to want to read more!