Joanne Howard | Writers' Voices

In Sleeping in the Sun, award-winning poet, Joanne Howard, presents her debut novel set in Midnapore, India, in the 1930’s during the last years of the British Raj. Told from two points of view, the story follows George Hinton, a 12-year-old boy who’s lived in India all his life with his American missionary family, and his Indian servant, Arthur. When Uncle Ellis, a family friend and a high-ranking British judge, arrives unexpectedly to stay with Gene and his family, questions arise as to why this man is hiding away in their home. For Howard, the inspiration for this book came largely from her family’s history. “The story is very personal to me as it is inspired by my grandfather’s childhood growing up in colonial India. They were an American missionary family and I just thought that this dynamic of Americans in India was very unique. It’s something I had never seen before in books that I’ve come across, and I think they occupied just a very interesting third role in this historic time period which is dominated by, typically, the British viewpoint, and so I thought that their experience as Americans could bring a refreshing perspective of that time period.”

How did Howard, who’s half-Chinese, bring her own personal experiences into this novel? She explained, “…a lot of mixed people will probably relate to this idea of belonging and struggling with belonging… while it’s for very different reasons, I think Gene and his family, kind of, struggle with belonging in India and figuring out their place in this society, and then Arthur is also, he has that perspective between figuring out his true self and his pure self, not influenced by the way people think of him, and then the way that others do think of him and that, kind of, external influence over his own identity. So, I thought that was something that I could see in myself and use that to, kind of, bring my own perspective to this book because I totally could identify with that… mixed people could also be, you aren’t enough of one thing, you aren’t enough American or you aren’t enough whatever country or nationality is, and I think that there are levels of that that you can see in the book…”

Lastly, for any aspiring writers who are first starting out, Howard encourages all of you to keep writing no matter how challenging or overwhelming it may feel. “One of the sayings we would say in my MFA program was that writing a novel is like driving a car at night… you can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way, so I thought that really resonated with me in terms of, you know, this novel feels so daunting, and like I said, it took me six years and you can only look so far ahead, but I think that, just keep going and you will get to the end someday, and you will finish it…”