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In Passages, the trilogy of Scruples on the Line continues through the terrors of 1864 and ends in May of 1865. The same five narrators, Fretz, Jacob, Esther, David, and Betsey, describe their experiences and responses of courage, adaptation, and survival in Chicago, southeastern Iowa, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and nearby West Virginia as the American Civil War finally ends. During these closing years of the war, no human experience can be ordinary: not marriage, not enterprising work, not youthful growth. Not when folks are repeatedly disrupted by the forces of military drafts, unexpected visitors, untimely deaths, and ruptured Anabaptist churches and families. Through it all the ambiguities of freedom complicate the beliefs and actions of “the people with scruples.”
Passages Audiobook Sample:
David, read by Alan Tripp
Praise for Passages
“Passages, the third and final novel in Evie Yoder Miller’s sweeping Civil War era trilogy, is a masterful insight into individual lives and consciences struggling to discover where their political, familial, and spiritual allegiances lie. The multiple perspectives of her characters reveal not only the differences inherent in families, churches, and towns, but also the uniqueness and preciousness of each individual life. Set in an era of shocking loss of life, this brings an enormous humanity and poignancy to Miller’s novels. Her characters are our kin; we know them and participate in their lives. There is no better reading experience than this.” –SUZANNE WOLFE, author of The Confessions of X
“This powerful last volume of Evie Yoder Miller’s epic trilogy draws us deeply into the heartbreaks, losses, struggles, and persistence of its characters–Anabaptists caught up in the last bitter year of the Civil War. With evocative prose and skillful use of multiple narrators, Miller creates a vivid, poignant portrait of women, children, and others often left out of conventional war stories. Whether trapped in the path of predatory armies or in the relative safety of the North, the plain people in this taut, compelling novel find their values challenged and their lives disrupted by a war where, as one puts it, “Maybe no one counts as civilians anymore.” –JEFF GUNDY, author of Without a Place and Songs from an Empty Cage
“Evie Yoder Miller explores the moral horizon of the Civil War as it is reflected on the inner spiritual and emotional landscapes of historical figures shaped by the peace-church heritage of Amish, Mennonite, and Old German Baptist communities. In Miller’s complex and convincing narrative, life and joy persist amidst disaster and death, and the ordinary routines of daily obligation and piety supply the momentum to carry both characters and readers through the unfolding national catastrophe.” –GERALD MAST, Professor of Communication, Bluffton University
“In the third and final installment of Evie Yoder Miller’s Scruples on the Line series, the characters do not flinch from the hard choices faced by Anabaptists who lived through the final years of the Civil War. Set in the thick of unfolding true-life events whose outcomes were not yet known, the Amish, Mennonites, and German Baptists in Passages stay true to their pacifist calling. Drawn from a varied cast–young and aged, loyal and questioning, staunch and humble–these voices have much to offer anyone seeking to discern the way of peace in an increasingly divisive time.” –SARA PHILLIPS, Editor, Wisconsin Magazine of History
Interview excerpts: Evie Yoder Miller with Kristen Saner of Fables Books, October 28, 2020
KS: When did you start writing and what led that writing into trying to publish your work?
EYM: Most of my life I was a dabbler. I liked to write. In 5th grade I wrote a story where I was the hero in a basketball game. It wasn’t until I was in mid-life that I started to say: ‘I am a writer.’ That was a huge step, because it pushed me to want to go back to grad school and learn more about the craft and art of writing . . . To throw myself in an environment where everybody talked about books, and everybody read books, and everyone loved how literature shapes our thinking in many ways.
KS: How long did it take you to write Shadows?
EYM: It’s hard to separate it, because the whole process [of the trilogy] has taken me twelve years from when I started doing research. To work on the first twenty chapters–maybe it took half a year to get a draft. If I could get 3-5 chapters worked on in a week, that was a really good week. I write a whole draft and then I come back and revise the whole draft, because then I know what the ending is and that’s going to affect where I want to begin because the ending is in the beginning.
KS: Does your faith or life outlook affect or inform your writing?
EYM: I’m sure that’s why I was drawn to this material. Part of what intrigued me about the Civil War, is that you really couldn’t separate the fighting from religious beliefs. Part of my struggle in writing was: am I really going to bring in all this religion? I found I could not get rid of it. Both sides, North and South, thought God was on their side. That’s partly why they kept fighting so long–‘that God must will all these deaths, so we must keep fighting till God’s will is accomplished’ . . . I found a couple of non-fiction writers understanding this link–there’s a book, America Aflame, by David Goldfield that’s excellent at bringing these two factors together and showing how religion was definitely a factor in the war, if not a motivating factor. So absolutely, I believe it’s not right for me to take the life of another person. Of course, that affected how I viewed these characters. That’s why it was important for me to always develop some scene where a character interacted with a neighbor or office worker, someone with a different perspective, to try to see from the other side also.