Book Title: Liberty Landing by Gail Vida Hamburg
Category: Adut Fiction, 344 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Mirare Press
Release date: March 2018

​Synopsis

Liberty Landing — a 2016 Finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction — narrates the American Experience of the 21st century through the lives of a polycultural cast of natives, immigrants, and refugees in Azyl Park–a town in the Midwest.

After Angeline Lalande, a journalist and historian, unearths the real meaning of the name, “Azyl,” conferred on the town in the 1800s by immigrant-hating politicians, the town elders begin the act of renaming it. During the course of the renaming, we meet the intriguing denizens of the town–survivors, strugglers, and strivers of every race and nationality, see the intersection of their lives, and the ways they find home, heaven, and haven in each other. We learn about the singular journeys that brought them to Azyl Park–a place that both transforms them and is transformed by them.

The larger story of the American Experiment is told through the personal story of Alexander Hamilton, the essential immigrant among the Founding Fathers, as Angeline writes a book about him. By the end of the novel, after Azyl Park is renamed, each of the characters has lost or found something essential.

Liberty Landing is about the personal and the political, family and loss, memory and migration, finding new love and a new home, and about history and the American Experiment. Seminal moments of the American Experience figure in this literary and historical fiction. Inspired by John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy about early 20th century Americans, Liberty Landing is a sweeping, lush, layered saga, set in a vibrant community, with a cast of Americans marked by neuroses, flaws, secrets, unspeakable pasts, humor, warmth, vulnerability, and humanity.

Liberty Landing is Gail Vida Hamburg’s love letter to the American Experiment–the first in a trilogy. ​

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Interview

Where did you get the inspiration for the novel?

I knew I wanted to write a novel about the American Experiment and Experience, but the plot and characters eluded me for a long time. Steven King said that stories are found objects. JK Rowling said the inspiration for Harry Potter was a flash of an image of a train leaving a station. While I was mulling over my novel, I’d take daily walks on the beach where I live. One scene I kept seeing everyday was an image of the neighborhood with the iconic image of the Chicago skyline in the distance. The title, Liberty Landing, came to me as I stared at this scene, both as the name of the place and as an idea of America as a place of freedom.

The book has characters of different nationalities. Was it hard to write so many diverse characters?

I’ve lived in multiple cities on three continents, and my family and community are cross-cultural, bi-racial, polycultural, and multiracial. I am comfortable writing characters who are from backgrounds other than my own.

If you could put yourself as a character in your book, who would you be?


I believe most characters in a novel are aspects and fragments of a writer and her psyche. In Liberty Landing, I recognize myself in the workaholism, ambition, and white-knuckled ferocity and striving of Gabriel Khoury, the protagonist; in the anxiety and historical memory  of Angeline LaLande, the writer; and in the traumatic past of Bruce Halliday.

What genre do you write and why?

I write literary fiction shot through with politics. Liberty Landing was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. I guess it’s fiction about real life, straight up with no chaser. I’m concerned about many political issues at home and abroad and I view fiction as a way to talk about these issues. It’s easier to understand a serious issue like torture through the life of a fictional character and her story, than through a white paper or a news report.

What’s the most important thing you learned about writing a novel from this book?

While writing my first novel, The Edge of the World, I was like an explorer in the Amazon rainforest, hacking away at tree branches until I got to the center of my story. It was a wonderful creative journey but it took forever because I’d go off on false leads and tangents. With this book, once I knew what the story was going to be, I drew a chart with all the characters and a little about their roles in the story. It changed over time of course, but not very much. Having that blueprint allowed me to enter the story without going off into the unknown—it was controlled creativity.

Do you edit a lot?

Yes, like a maniac. Backspace/delete is the most overused key on my keyboard. I was a journalist earlier in my career and knew that to avoid writer’s block, I had to dump everything on the page. Once I was able to do that, I knew I could go back in and chisel and sculpt the copy. Writer’s block only happens when you expect perfection in the first draft. Hemingway said, the first draft of anything is shit, and he was right. Everything happens in revision.

If there is one thing you want readers to remember about you, what would it be?

I’d like people to think of me as a writer who demythologizes the mysterious other and serious political issues through graceful storytelling, and spins a good yarn.

About the Author

Gail Vida Hamburg is an award-winning American journalist, author, and museum storyist. She is the author of The Edge of the World (Mirare Press, 2007), a novel about the impact of American foreign policy on individual lives. A nominee for the 2008 James Fenimore Cooper Prize, it is a frequent text in undergraduate post- colonial studies, war studies, and creative writing programs. Born in Malaysia, she spent her teens and twenties in England before migrating to the United States. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Literature and Creative Writing from Bennington Writers Seminars at Bennington College, Vermont. Liberty Landing, the first volume in her trilogy about the American Experience, is her love letter to the great American Experiment.

She lives in Chicago—the setting for Liberty Landing, a finalist for the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

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