Over about exactly 12 years of running TPM, I’ve exchanged emails with and gotten to know thousands of readers. Some quite well. Many you’ve read as TPM Reader this or that as I reprint their emails in the Editor’s Blog. One of the most special has been Emily Meier, a writer who I’ve been corresponding with for I really don’t know how long, but for many years.
Emily’s been sick for a number of years. But it’s done remarkably little to slow her down until quite recently. And for much of that time she’s been at work on a Civil War novel entitled Suite Harmonic: A Civil War Novel of Rediscovery.
In a recent email she described it to me as a novel about the “literature of the Civil War, 19th century Irish-American immigration, and the history of communalism in the 19th century, especially New Harmony, IN which brought many innovations, incuding the U.S. Geological Society and Smithsonian and, really, kindergartens and various sccience and artistic endeavors.”
In the last couple months Emily’s health has taken a particularly grave turn. Since I lost my mother when I was very young and Emily is give or take something like the age my mother would be today I can confess to you what I really haven’t been able to confess to her that this has made it more challenging than I’d like to admit to maintain the correspondence in quite the same way.
What’s she’s done is post a portion of the manuscript on her site. And tonight I wanted to share it with you in this post. I hope some of you will take a moment to look at Emily’s work, enter for a few moments or maybe longer into the lives of America’s past and also learn a little more about her.
