Work in Progress Meeting
Please join us via Zoom on Tuesday, November 14, at 1 p.m., when PRF member Richard T. Corbett presents “Researching the Spanish Civil War: 1936-1939.”
Richard's historical suspense novel-in-progress, All the Words Must Come Out, is set mainly in Madrid and Barcelona in the spring of 1938. His protagonist, a former bare-knuckles boxer, expatriates himself from Ireland due to some tragic events related to the Easter Rising of 1916. Traveling across Europe, he arrives in Madrid and takes a position managing the Madrid International Bookstore. His desire to lead an isolated bookish life is disrupted by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and then by the arrival of an American woman whose husband died fighting in the International Brigades to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco’s Nationalists. She recruits the reluctant Irishman to help her maneuver through the chaos and violence of war-torn Spain and find a book manuscript that her husband wrote while in Spain so that she can smuggle it back to the US and have it published.
Richard's presentation will cover the broad array of resources he consulted to weave characters and events into the historical backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, and to authentically portray the language, clothing, food, architecture, troop movements, weaponry, and cultural and political forces of that period.
His manuscript of 89,000 words is currently being edited by a freelance editor. When that process is complete, he will contact literary agents so as to have the work traditionally published.