Margaret Hutton – If You Leave

With the intrusive, catalytic forces of two wars, World War II and Vietnam, Margaret Hutton’s debut novel, If You Leave, tells of two women who mother one baby girl into her own young womanhood. Each of the three discovers the strength of herself as an individual as well as the strength of unity. Thus does this quietly vibrant story illustrate the way one life impacts others, decisions made either quickly or slowly can have similarly devastating consequences, and the need of the human heart for love competes with the need to find meaning.

Margaret Hutton’s short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The Sun, The South Carolina Review, The Chattahoochee Review, the Antioch Review, and Abundant Grace. She earned an undergraduate degree with honors from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA from George Mason University. She is a native of North Carolina and formerly was an environmental reporter. She divides her time between Washington, DC, and her art studio in Chester County, PA. If You Leave was published by Regal House Publishing and is available wherever books are sold.

Hosted by William Miller

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1. War as a Turning Point for Women
2. If You Leave examines how World War II and Vietnam temporarily expanded women’s independence and opportunity—while exposing how fragile those gains could be.
3. Art, Agency, and Interruption
4. Through Audrey’s life as a painter, the novel explores how women’s creative ambitions are often disrupted, underestimated, or constrained by social expectations.
5. The Power and Cost of Leaving
6. Every major character is shaped by acts of leaving—home, relationships, or identity—revealing how personal choices ripple across generations.
7. Interiority and Empathy in Fiction
8. Margaret highlights fiction’s ability to reveal inner lives, inviting readers to understand characters beyond surface-level judgment.

#LiteraryFiction

#HistoricalFiction

#WomenWriters

Find out more about Margaret Hutton on her website.

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© 2026 Upstart Crow Podcast – All Rights Reserved

Linda Chavez – A Novel of the Spanish Inquisition: The Silver Candlesticks

Linda Chavez began working on The Silver Candlesticks after appearing on the PBS series Finding Your Roots during which she discovered that members of her family were Converso Jews who fled Spain in 1597. Using details the PBS researchers uncovered as well as her own work on the Spanish Inquisition, she created a fictional weave of love and faith, and the perils of ardent religious faith transformed by the obdurate endurance of a persecution.

Earlier, Linda spent decades in politics and the media, having served as a White House official in the Reagan administration and been a syndicated columnist. She is the author of three previously published nonfiction books and individually published short stories. She earned her MFA from George Mason University.

“No matter how good you think your life is, it isn’t unless you are actually free.” — Linda Chavez

Hosted by William Miller

The Silver Candlesticks is published by Wicked Son, an imprint of Post Hill Press. You can purchase a copy on their website here, or anywhere that books are sold.

1. History brought to life through fiction
2. Linda Chavez discusses how The Silver Candlesticks uses meticulous historical research to humanize the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how fear, power, and persecution shaped everyday lives.
3. Hidden identity and inherited trauma
4. The novel explores the dangers faced by Jewish converts in 16th-century Spain and how secrecy, forced assimilation, and inherited identity ripple across generations.
5. Villains, morality, and belief systems
6. Chavez unpacks the challenge of writing morally complex antagonists—especially religious figures who commit atrocities while believing they are acting righteously.
7. Personal history as creative catalyst
8. The story is rooted in Chavez’s own family history, uncovered through archival research and her appearance on Finding Your Roots, demonstrating how personal discovery can inspire powerful storytelling.

This episode is also available to watch on our YouTube channel: @upstartcrowpodcast

Check out more about Linda on her Substack.

#HistoricalFictionPodcast

#SpanishInquisitionHistory

#AuthorInterview

#TheSilverCandlesticks

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Be sure to check out our website for more information about our hosts, guests, and ways you can support the show: UpstartCrow.org

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Thank you for listening to Upstart Crow, a part of Watershed Lit Radio.

© 2025 Upstart Crow Podcast – All Rights...

W. Ralph Eubanks – When It’s Darkness on the Delta

Some today would cross off the Mississippi Delta as a backwater beyond redemption or a region where bad history happened, but W. Ralph Eubanks drives the area roads and small-town streets, meets the people who live and work there, some of whom strive hard to make it more than it is, and through his evocative writing he portrays not just the economic oppression but also the area’s resilience.

In his newest work of nonfiction, Eubanks, a son of Mississippi, looks at the region with a clear, if not dispassionate eye. Seeking further knowing about this particular area, he finds insights into the soul of America. Slavery got turned into sharecropping. Civil rights were cruelly suppressed under Jim Crow. Poverty became so entrenched, it has resisted any number of efforts to eradicate it—even the spending of millions of dollars.

He finds the pervasive inequality that hinders the expansive possibilities. As he writes, “The story of the Delta is not just a Mississippi story. Nor is it just a Southern story. At its very core, the Delta’s story is an American story. The idea of American exceptionalism has rendered the Delta and other places like it invisible since the story of the Delta is exceptional in only disturbing ways. By reckoning with the story of the Delta, we as Americans, can also begin to confront the other disadvantaged places like it that dot the American landscape, from sea to shining sea.”

W. Ralph Eubanks is a faculty fellow and writer in residence at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, where his work focuses on race, identity, and the American South. He is the author previously of two other works of nonfiction, Ever Is a Long Time and The House at the End of the Road, as well as A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, as well as a recipient of the 2023 Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for excellence in literature.

“To change what we see on the landscape, we have to change what we know about it.” — W. Ralph Eubanks

Hosted by William Miller

Key Takeaways:

1. The Mississippi Delta is not an isolated regional problem but a national mirror, reflecting economic, racial, and political systems found throughout the United States.
2. Race in America operates as an economic construct, with policies after slavery preserving inequality by separating political rights from economic power.
3. Romanticized narratives of the Delta obscure the structural forces that created generational poverty, allowing poverty to be blamed on individuals rather than systems.
4. Lasting change depends on sustained local leadership and historical truth-telling, not outside saviors or short-term philanthropic fixes.

#MississippiDelta #AmericanPoverty #RaceAndEconomics

You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel here.

Find out more about Ralph Eubanks and his books, you can visit his website here.

His books for sale here.

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