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Writing the Past Responsibly: Tamara J. Walker and Leah Redmond Chang on the Ethics of Historical Storytelling
by Writing Workshops Staff
4 hours ago
Every historian encounters a moment when the archive reveals something they didn't want to see. For Leah Redmond Chang, it was a letter from Catherine de' Medici to her daughter—a document that challenged Chang's carefully constructed portrait of the Renaissance queen. For Tamara J. Walker, it was uncovering the complicated personal life of Richard Wright during his time in Argentina, details that explained a mysterious silence in the author's own writings. These moments of discovery and ethical reckoning sit at the heart of their new workshop, The Art and Ethics of Historical Storytelling.
Chang, whose Young Queens was named one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023, and Walker, whose New York Times Editor's Choice Beyond the Shores charts the global journeys of African Americans abroad, bring complementary expertise to this three-week intensive. Together, they tackle the questions every writer working with the past must face: What do we owe historical subjects? When does artistic license cross into irresponsibility? How do we craft compelling narratives while maintaining ethical rigor?
In this workshop, students will develop the vocabulary to discuss their methodological choices with confidence, learn to weigh the merits of sources, and practice building characters and scenes grounded in responsible history. The result is writing that is both artistically bold and ethically defensible.
Below, you'll find our interview on The Art & Ethics of Historical Storytelling.
Writing Workshops: Tamara, you're working on a biography of a "mysterious Black pirate," and Leah, your Renaissance queens left behind thousands of letters, yet both of you face the challenge of gaps in the historical record. Can you each share a moment when you had to make a choice between what you wanted to be true and what the evidence would actually support? What did that feel like?
Leah Redmond Chang: When I first conceived of Young Queens, I really wanted to release Catherine de' Medici from the centuries-old reputation she had as the evil queen par excellence. History has painted her as a conniving, ambitious, and controlling woman interested only in her own power. She's known as a poisoner and a murderer. She tends to land somewhere between "perfidious" and "sinister."
I saw in Catherine something quite different: a woman who had to navigate power structures that were hostile to her; a loving mother who wanted to protect her children; a woman committed to tolerance who sought to guide the kingdom of France through a dark time of religious and political polarization. I had thought misogyny was to blame for much of the negative portrayals of Catherine and I wanted to breathe new life into the woman behind the almost caricaturesque portrait of the nefarious queen.
But as I was researching, I found a letter from Catherine to her daughter that showed Catherine's capacity for manipulation and cruelty. I read it over and over—I really didn't want to see what the letter was clearly showing me. Here was the evil Queen Catherine that everyone despised.
I think I was actually saddened by that moment. I had grown to appreciate and admire Catherine, but I couldn't admire how she was treating her daughter. What to do with that letter? As much as I might have been tempted to leave it out, that letter had to go into the book. It captured a dimension about Catherine that was vital to who she was. If I had left out the letter, or ignored its implications, I would have been guilty of creating a flattened, one-dimensional portrait. And, in some ways, isn't that just as unjust, perhaps just as sexist, as the portraits of Catherine as an evil queen?
Writing Workshops: There's a provocative question in your workshop description: "What is our obligation to people of the past?" Have either of you ever written something, looked at it, and thought, This person would hate how I've portrayed them? What did you do?
Leah Redmond Chang: I'm not sure that "this person would hate how I've portrayed them" is really the issue. I don't think we owe it to a historical person to portray them the way they would want to be portrayed. We owe it to history and to our readers to portray something true about who that person really was, how they operated in the world. Historical people were, like people today, seriously flawed. Shouldn't we capture that? In that case, we might have to portray them in ways that they would hate if we want to be historically responsible.
In some ways, to convey the flaws—the bad alongside the good—is necessary to capture the messiness of human experience. We don't write only to portray heroes or villains, but to explore the experience of real people, how they navigated their difficult and compromising worlds. We have to remember that these were actual human beings, not just characters in our own narratives, and find ways through our craft and research to do justice to that reality. I actually think this approach makes historical people more relatable. Tamara, what do you think?
Tamara J. Walker: I totally agree. I actually had this come up when I was writing Beyond the Shores. I have a chapter about Richard Wright's time in Argentina during the filming of the movie version of Native Son, and one of the things that came up for me in the research was how little he actually wrote about that period in his life. He lived there for nearly a year, but said so little about it compared to, say, the few months he spent in Spain and wrote about in his book Pagan Spain. And the more I dug into things, the more I realized what a difficult financial, creative, and personal phase Argentina represented: he had poured money into making this film happen and it was proving to be a bit of a disaster, he had moved away from his wife and children to be on location, he was being surveilled by the FBI and knew it, and he seemed also to have had a relationship with another woman. I didn't want to be talking about any of this in a gossipy way; it just helped solve a puzzle for me, and to Leah's point about relatability, it actually helped me understand as a fellow writer why this would have been a tremendously difficult thing for him to be writing about as he was going through it or to revisit once it was over. I then started to wonder (and I still wonder as I talk about it now): do I need to be saying all this, especially the part about his marriage? So I don't think we ever fully resolve these issues for ourselves, and we ought to have lines so we are not digging into prurient details for the sake of it, but because my goal in the book was to lean into the difficulties Black people faced when they traveled to avoid romanticizing the experience, it felt right. So I think it always comes back to why, exactly, we are revisiting these histories in the first place.
Writing Workshops: What's the most common mistake you see skilled writers make when they venture into historical territory? And what's the mistake you yourself made early on that you now help others avoid?
Tamara J. Walker: I'll start with the mistake I often make, although I find it a fruitful place to work from so I hesitate to call it that.
As a trained historian, I often find myself starting with the source rather than the story. Let me explain what I mean. To pull from my current project, any time I find an historical account of a privateering journey I immediately get bogged down by certain details: Who wrote it? Why does it exist? How does that shape our understanding of the account itself? In the case of these privateering accounts, they were often published by captains who were embroiled in lawsuits upon their return to Europe, or whose crews had mutinied (or by crewmembers who were themselves mutineers). Which is to say that the authors were very concerned with their reputations. And often they were directly contradicting accounts published by their crew members. So already, in thinking that, I'm positioned to be skeptical of everything they have to say before I've read a single word.
But that's not a very enjoyable or productive position as a storyteller, or a reader for that matter. These accounts contain really dramatic stories, and part of my job is to present my readers with something they can sink their teeth into, like a story, while also making them approach the story with a sense of the different ways it can be told.
Again, the reason I don't think it's a mistake is because it's important not to overly fetishize historical sources or be too credulous of them, since they were produced by human beings who are fallible just like we are. So with that I can do some interesting characterization work, to give readers the dose of skepticism I want them to have. I can present the privateering captain as a man who wants to get his side of the story out, who is concerned about his reputation and legacy, and is deeply aware of what his critics are thinking and as a result is going to overstate his own heroism while turning other people into villains. That's a much more interesting place to meet a reader, I think, than speaking more generally about the interpretive challenges of travel accounts. What about you, Leah?
Leah Redmond Chang: I completely agree with you. However, at the same time, I think the skills that trained historians cultivate are important and useful too. You can write a great story, one that the reader can sink their teeth into, and still guide the reader toward a healthy skepticism of the sources—a skepticism that actually enriches the reading. We want readers to engage with the story we are telling them, not just to accept a text at face value. If you think about it, being skeptical is a different way of building suspense. Unpacking a historical life or an event is a kind of investigation, a forensic look. When we write about the past, we are acting as both guides and detectives and encouraging our readers to be active participants in that process. Showing our skepticism about the sources, and encouraging readers to be skeptical too, gives readers more to chew on as they work their way through the book. So a healthy skepticism generates payoffs for both writers and readers.
Writing Workshops: Here's the big one: In an age of historical revisionism and "alternative facts," what would you say to writers who argue that strict accuracy doesn't matter, that imagination and emotional truth are more important than getting the details right? When does artistic license become artistic irresponsibility?
Tamara J. Walker: It depends on what we are talking about. As an historian of slavery, I believe there are certain details that absolutely do matter, such as whether it was possible for a person in a given slaveholding society to attain freedom, either through escape, self-purchase, or manumission. There are some parts of the world where that was impossible, and others where it was more likely but still tremendously difficult (and varied according to gender, whether they lived in an urban versus rural setting, and the nature of the work they performed under slavery). If we create enslaved characters in historical fiction and creative nonfiction and present them as easily attaining freedom, in order to fulfill a modern fantasy about fighting oppression, we do a disservice to the people who actually lived through the experience and understood the impossibility or overwhelming difficulty of doing so. It actually makes us less compassionate towards them and their descendants (including those of us alive today). Instead, we owe it to the people we write about to understand the constraints they were working within, and use those constraints to get at the emotional truths that emerged therein. That is both a storytelling challenge and an ethical one, but we often need constraints to grow as writers anyway.
Writing historically demands that we hold two truths at once: the creative freedom to tell a compelling story and the ethical responsibility to honor the people whose lives we're reimagining. In The Art and Ethics of Historical Storytelling, Tamara J. Walker and Leah Redmond Chang offer writers the tools to navigate that tension with confidence. Over three weeks, you'll develop your own ethical framework for historical writing while producing work that is both artistically bold and historically grounded. Enroll now to join these award-winning historians for a transformative exploration of what it means to write responsibly about the past.
