Official Website of Author
ABOUT JAMES
James Lovejoy is an author with an interesting past. He’s driven a cab, washed dishes, worked on a fishing boat, and taught in an alternative high school, where he learned more from his diverse students than they did from him.
Prior to his teaching career, James earned an M.A. at the University of British Columbia in a program called “Indigenous Arts of the Americans.” He wrote his thesis on the shaman’s toolkit of an Alaskan tribe, which sparked a lifelong interest in consciousness.
Growing up in Seattle in a family that settled in the area long before Washington became a state, James has been interested in queer history ever since realizing he was queer. He’s also interested in the survival of indigenous peoples and the cultural coping mechanisms of marginal groups, queers in particular.
James set his first novel, Joseph Chapman: My Molly Life, in Georgian London specifically because London’s rich literary scene of the time featured very few homosexual characters, due to the era’s severe repression. In fact, while there’s been some excellent queer history on the location and era, very little queer fiction is set in that era. James desired to fill in that blank.
In recent years, James has fallen in love with several genres of pop music from west and central Africa that receive very little attention in North America. He’s a cat person and a dedicated organic gardener.
He lives and writes in Tacoma, Washington.
Matilda
THE BOOK
Joseph Chapman, My Molly Life, is a Dickensian tale told by Joe, who must contend not only with being orphaned and consigned to an execrable charity school but also with a sense that he is different in some very important ways from other boys.
At the Little Eastcheap Free School for Unfortunate Boys, Joe encounters the predatory headmaster, Mr. Peevers, and a boy, Chowder, who becomes the one person he can trust. When the boys are sent to their separate apprenticeships, they must find each other and negotiate their troubling mutual attraction.
Joe, apprenticed to a prominent progressive bookseller and publisher, does well, but Chowder must contend with the frequently drunken greengrocer Tobias Cudworth and his wife, Dulcibella, who considers herself a good Christian woman, and yet puts on airs and likes to peep through keyholes. Before long, Joe and Chowder find themselves in Newgate Prison, facing trial for the capital offense of sodomy.
REVIEWS
"Joseph Chapman will enchant readers of British historical fiction and romance in the traditions of E.M. Forster and Sarah Waters."
Andrew J. Peters
