INTERVIEW: Dolen Perkins-Valdez, novelist, WENCH

Can Mr. Media even say the title of Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s novel? (It’s Wench!)

STARTS @ 9:40 a.m.! In 1851, a lawyer named Elias P. Drake purchased a plot of land near Xenia, Ohio, with the intent to establish a summer vacation resort where the country's elite could relax and enjoy the mineral springs in the area. What made this resort unusual, however, was that it became a popular vacation destination for southern slaveholders and their enslaved mistresses. Ultimately, these flagrantly open relationships offended the northern abolitionists who also frequented the resort. After 4 years, it closed.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez took the forgotten historical fact of this pre-Civil War Ohio resort (that eventually became the first black college Wilberforce University), and sketched in a fictional account of what it would have been like to be an enslaved woman traveling to this free state each summer. The book is Wench.

During a dark period in our country’s history, Tawawa House was a resort of choice for white Southern slave owners to bring their black slave/mistress for summer vacations where they could live together, slave master and mistress, in a more relaxed social atmosphere and without the presences of their wives or southern society.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is a graduate of Harvard and teaches creative writing at the University of Puget Sound. Wench is her first novel.

Solen Perkins-Valdez website

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