With the release of “The War Began in Paris” in November 2023, Wheeler embarked on a nationwide book tour, an opportunity that both humbled and delighted him. Reflecting on this experience, Wheeler acknowledges the tour as one of the highlights of his writing career.
To catch a glimpse of Theodore Wheeler, keep an eye out for him at Dundee Book Company, where he occasionally graces the bookstore with his presence, sharing his passion for literature with eager readers.
In case you missed it a couple weeks ago, I made an appearance on my favorite radio show: All About Books with Pat Leach.
Mostly we talked about my new novel–The War Begins in Paris–and the process of writing the book, but there’s so much more. I love talking about Nebraska with Pat, who was director of Lincoln City Libraries for many years and earned the title of “Lincoln’s Most Passionate Reader.” How cool is that?
The segment originally aired state-wide on Nebraska Public Media and many fine NPR stations. But you can give it a listen here!
I was recently lucky to be interviewed by one of my favorite writers, and favorite people, in the world: Amina Gautier. Today, on Necessary Fiction, the interview went live!
We go deep on all three of my novels, the craft of writing about real things, and the challenges of being a journalist/novelist/professor. I really like these kinds of conversations that get more into the craft and experience of writing rather than focusing solely on the story of a specific book. I like them all, to be clear, but this kind comes my way less often. There’s still plenty about The War Begins in Paris too.
Thanks so much to Amina for her great questions and finding a platform. Amina has a new book out this month too, btw, The Best That You Can Do. You should go get it!
“Wheeler’s latest novel The War Begins in Paris follows Mielle aka Marthe Hess, a quiet, unobtrusive journalist living abroad in Paris. Having left her Iowa home and her Mennonite community she finds herself struggling to fit in with the gaggle of journalists, reporters, and correspondents in Paris. While others are there to cover the disturbing rise of Nazism and Fascism, she writes uncredited fashion and style columns for midwestern housewives. Raised to be meek, to dress plainly, to never raise her voice, Mielle goes unnoticed, invisible among her cadre of reporters, never quite fitting in until she strikes an unlikely friendship with the notorious Jane, whose influence drags Mielle into the war’s dark center.”
I’ll be headed down to Georgia in February for the Savannah Book Festival. SBF is one of the best book fests in the country, and it’s known for taking great care of it’s authors. I can’t wait!
What’s the strangest thing you had to do to create this story?
In order to better understand what it was like to be Mielle, I ended up buying a pair of brogan shoes and a long canvas jacket like one that she wears in the novel. Wearing her shoes and clothes helped a lot to feel what she would have felt, even though I was walking around Omaha and she was walking around Paris. Thinking about writing this novel during the Covid pandemic feels strange too, when put in comparison with what foreign correspondents experienced in 1938, on the edge of the war starting. That sense of looming catastrophe; the uncertainty and chaos; even having been personally rushed out of Paris. The details don’t match up, of course, but there was a lot of experiential overlap that helped get me in character.
Q: What is your advice to anyone on writing great historical fiction?
A: The thing I love about writing historical fiction is seeing how the real-life elements come together with the fictional characters. It’s more than just plot points—characters should come out of the story as well—otherwise the project will feel shallow, like it’s only set in a period for fashion. Figuring out how all the elements can fit together as something new is really exciting.
The hardest thing for me to learn, however, was about voice. Don’t forget that your audience is contemporary and modern, no matter when your story is set. With this in mind, your narrator should be engaging and dynamic in a way that meets the expectations of modern readers.
Check out this interview of me that’s new on Midwestern Gothic today! Thanks so much to Sydney Cohen for her great questions about writing novels, the geo-political landscape of race relations in the Midwest, and some other themes from Kings of Broken Things that I feel like are often overlooked, like how the female condition and the ideal of youth are addressed in the novel.
SC: What interests you specifically about the geographical-political intersection of race relations in the Midwest? How does Omaha in 1919 contradict or reinforce your personal relationship with and ideas about the city?
TW: It surprises a lot of people to learn that Omaha has a long history of race troubles, including efforts to drive out Irish and Greek populations that go back to the city’s founding, through several riots in the 1960s and continuing issues with police and lack of economic opportunity today in the traditional African-American neighborhoods on the north side. It’s no secret that Omaha has been the most dangerous city to be black over the last decade, but it’s not something to be talked about in polite company here, and Omaha doesn’t have enough national prominence to matter on a bigger scale. These pervasive, macro issues don’t get a lot of play unless a riot breaks out.
As far as personal relationship with the city and these issues, it goes back to the idea of being complicit in the system. Though I’m not a bad person, you can trust me, I do enjoy my privilege and the spoils that go along with that. A lot of my interest while writing the book—beyond learning the history itself in a deep, meaningful way—was the idea that many people who live in Omaha now have a family connection to the race riot in 1919, whether they’re aware of it or not. This suspicion has borne out in these two months since Kings of Broken Things was released, as there’s usually somebody who steps forward at the end of an event to tell me about their uncle or great-grandparent who participated in the riot in some capacity. Not that I’m walking around the city staring at people and wondering what their ancestors were up to in 1919. Well, I guess that’s kind of what I have been doing after all.
Check out this interview about my new book and a range of other topics that Creighton MFA alumna Meredith Allison Lea was kind enough to post on her blog this evening!
3) What challenges did you face writing not only historical fiction, but also about this topic in particular?
Depicting the riot was the biggest challenge, on craft and personal levels. In a practical sense, it was difficult to write a series of scenes that depicts an over 10,000-person riot that took place over twelve hours and nearly destroyed downtown Omaha, with the struggle being to let the riot be as big as it was without swallowing up the book’s characters in the process. I like to think about telling a story as building a house, and the ending should be contained within the structure without blowing the roof off. Just by its nature, the riot kept blowing the roof off the house I was trying to build in the rest of the book.
With pub day for Kings of Broken Things rapidly approaching (tomorrow!) a few more interviews and reviews should be coming out this week–including this Q&A I did with the Omaha Public Library for their blog.
Thanks to librarian Erin Duerr for the great questions and for helping to promote my book!
OPL: Kings of Broken Things is set during the Omaha Race Riot of 1919. What drew you to this time in Omaha’s history?
TW: For the last 10 years, I’ve worked as a reporter for a news service and covered a beat at the Douglas County courthouse, which, of course, was the site of the race riot and lynching. I’d first heard of the riot when I was in fourth grade, growing up in Lincoln, and it has stuck in my mind ever since. Spending so much time at the courthouse, it was something I thought about almost every day while walking the halls, stairs, and surrounding neighborhood. Beyond that, it was such a chaotic and inventive age, notably in art, technology, and transportation. The grief over World War I was experienced over this backdrop in such an expansive way–this notion of the “war to end all wars,” that it was so abominable that it couldn’t be repeated. This feeling was echoed in Omaha after the lynching of Will Brown, by the way, that the tragedy would spur society to improve and never repeat its mistakes. Given that context, it’s troubling to think that the U.S. has been at war my entire adult life. Following World War I, you see a lot of intense examination of the psychic damage war causes. These similarities in the art and culture of the era are attractive to me and my art, and the time is still recognizably Modern in other ways too. Like most historical fiction, it’s a convenient way to think about our own times.
Check out this 
With pub day for Kings of Broken Things rapidly approaching (tomorrow!) a few more interviews and reviews should be coming out this week–including 
Theodore Wheeler 