Today we’d like to introduce you to Tonya Mitchell.
Hi Tonya, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’ve been a voracious reader since I was a child. I loved the imaginary world of books. It was a true escape for me, which is probably why I began writing short stories in my teens. After I graduated high school, I got a journalism degree with a business minor and decided, rather than a low-paying journalism job, I’d go into marketing. I was a brand manager for many years in the food, toy, and baby product industries. After I married and had children, I began to think of writing again. I was a stay-at-home mom with not a lot of free time on my hands, but I worked writing in whenever I could. I started with short stories because I didn’t have the mental space for a novel—not with three young boys! I wrote short stories and sent them off to journals and anthologies for publication. I won a few awards.
As the boys got older, I started thinking about writing a novel. Could I do it? Did I have the time, the talent? Ever since reading Jane Eyre in high school, I’ve been drawn to dark stories. I devoured Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I read everything written by Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Agatha Christie, Victoria Holt, Margaret Atwood, and Laura Purcell. What I was gravitating to with these authors and their stories was a love of Gothic, though I didn’t know it as such in the beginning.
As I was contemplating what to write, I stumbled on a blog about history’s ‘bad-ass’ women. One of the women profiled was a 23-year-old fledging reporter who pretended to be insane so she would be committed to an insane asylum. Her goal: to tell the story about what was happening inside the world didn’t know about. This was 1887 New York City in the dawn of yellow journalism. I had two questions: What kind of person puts herself in danger like that? Why had I never heard of her?
That woman was Elizabeth Cochrane, who would come to be known as daredevil reporter Nellie Bly. I researched for months. I read her exposé on Blackwell’s Asylum, Ten Days in a Mad-House. I read biographies written about her and most of her newspaper pieces she wrote over her career. I visited her childhood home in Apollo, Pennsylvania, and spoke with the historical society there. I read her personal letters to her mentor in the sealed archives of Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh where Nellie got her start. I traveled to New York City, to the venues I wanted to put in the book, including the location of where Blackwell’s Asylum once was – across the East River on an island of the same name, now called Roosevelt Island. After I had a clear picture of the story (and there were some exciting surprises), I started writing A Feigned Madness. It had all the Gothic elements I loved: a grim asylum, a trapped woman, dark secrets, but at its core was a story of mental illness, inequality, and one woman’s fight to see justice.
The novel was published in October 2020 after six long years of writing, editing, and finding a publisher. I’m happy to say it’s received good reviews and won two awards, the Phoenix Award in Historical Fiction from the Kops-Fetherling International Book Awards, and the Reader Views Reviewer’s Choice Award in Historical Fiction.
On May 5, in celebration of Nellie Bly’s 158th birthday, I’ll be celebrating with other authors who’ve penned non-fiction and fiction books about Bly. Brooke Kroeger, who wrote Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist, the most comprehensive of the Bly biographies, will host from New York. Other authors include Kate Braithwaite (The Girl Puzzle), David Blixt (What Girls are Good For), and Greer Macalister, whose Woman 99 is loosely based on Bly’s asylum stunt and is being adapted for a TV series.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Writing the book was not a smooth road. I like to say it was curvy with a few trap doors. By that I mean I was trying to teach myself how to write a book while I was writing the book. You can read all the how-to books on craft out there, but in the end, it’s you facing the blank screen/page. You have to really love writing to endure how hard it is and to tolerate the isolating nature of it.
I wondered, too, if the book was too grim. If I made it less so, was I still telling Bly’s story? In the end, I decided not to water down the bleakness; I wouldn’t be doing Bly or the women who suffered in the asylum any good by sugar-coating their treatment, the conditions, etc. I did make a conscience decision to break up some of the heavier chapters with some lighter ones focusing on Bly’s love interest.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’ve chosen again to write about another fascinating woman pulled from the pages of history. My second book departs from A Feigned Madness though in that it’s a mystery. The story is about the first American woman sentenced to death in England. It’s an arsenic poisoning case from 1889. In its day, the case was well-publicized, as it had all the ingredients of a cause cé·lè·bre: murder, secrets, lies, infidelity, debt, addiction. I’m having great fun with it, though once again, the story is very grim. I’m continually amazed at these gems history gives us. They’re challenging to write about, but all the elements for an intriguing story are already built-in.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
In a nutshell, I was a shy bookworm. I was horrible at sports but really good at foreign language. I became an Anglophile once I discovered Agatha Christie and I’m besotted with the Victorian Period which is probably why both my books take place during that time. As a child, I lived in Mexico, and my husband and I lived in Germany before we returned to the US to start a family. We both love to travel. On-site book research is probably me at my happiest.
Pricing:
- $21.00 paperback
- $5.99 ebook
- $24.95 audiobook
Contact Info:
- Email: tremitchell.2012@gmail.com
- Website: https://www.tonyamitchellauthor.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tmitchell.2012/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TonyaMitchellAuthor
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/tremmitchell
Image Credits
Nellie Bly
