IU alumna Claire Arbogast and former IU staff member Shana Ritter read at a double book release party for their novels, “If Not the Whole Truth” and “In the Time of Leaving,” on Sunday at the Backspace Gallery in Bonne Fete.
Arbogast graduated from IU in 1980 with a degree in journalism despite being a single parent while in school. Before attending university, she had been a line cook.
“My whole life changed because of my journalism degree,” Arbogast said. “I had a work-study job [at IU]... my daughter came to work with me all the time. She roller skated up and down the hallways of Ernie Pyle Hall.”
She later worked in marketing and advertising, but said her degree gave her the “ability to hunt and find the story and to seek out the truth behind things,” which influenced her later writing career.
“It stayed with me all of those years,” she said.
Her new novel, released Sept. 10, is set in the late 1960s and features Connie Borders, a strong-willed woman who leaves her hometown to protest the Vietnam War and is taken on whirlwind adventures as she tries to find her place while pushing for societal change. The book has been eight years in the making and blossomed when she realized today's social unrest mirrored that of the ’60s.
“It was like the ‘60s, in some ways, was the Pandora’s box that opened unvetted information and the obligation that people feel to call out other people,” Arbogast said. “I started researching all of that… this isn’t something that just happened in the ‘60s. It’s something that’s happened over and over and over again.”
She said it was a repeating cycle, stating that today’s protests and those in her novel retained similarities to the movements for women’s suffrage and birth control.
Ritter, whose novel reflected on the plight of a Jewish mother and daughter forced to either leave or convert to Catholicism during Spain’s 1492 Edict of Expulsion, added that the past had to be understood for society to be able to move forward.
“Until you explore as an individual, as a movement, as a nation, until you explore from many angles, not just those written down, what the past is, and how that past has influenced the way we think now,” Ritter said. “We can’t free ourselves from repeating, again and again, the same places where we trip.”
Arbogast and Ritter knew each other from sharing writing groups over the years, and Arbogast invited Ritter to read at her book release to celebrate Ritter’s new edition of “In the Time of Leaving,” which was originally published in 2019. Arbogast’s next reading of “If Not the Whole Truth” will be at Morgenstern’s Bookstore on Sept. 30. They will both attend the first-ever Writer’s Guild Local Authors Book Fair, along with several other Bloomington writers, at the Monroe County History Center on Nov. 2.
