Deborah Homsher

Deborah Homsher's historical novel, The Rising Shore – Roanoke, tells the story of the Lost Colony through the voices of two women who sail from London to the Virginia wilderness in 1587. Elenor Dare is the daughter of the colony's governor. Newly married and pregnant at the start of the voyage, she hopes to explore and paint pictures of the New World, as her father has done, but is frustrated by circumstance. Her newborn daughter will be the first English child born in North America. Margaret Lawrence is Elenor's servant. Bold and happy, Margaret blazes her own path to independence.

Historically, this expedition was the first English attempt to establish a settlement in the New World. John White, the governor, left his followers to seek support in England soon after landing. He was prevented from returning to America by the advance of the Spanish Armada, which made it necessary for all English ships to be mustered in England's defence. When at last he reached Virginia three years later, he discovered an abandoned fort and the word 'Croatoan' carved in a post. There were no signs of violence, but all the colonists had disappeared, including his daughter, Elenor, and granddaughter, Virginia Dare, who had been only two weeks old when he last saw her.

The mystery of their disappearance has never been solved. The Rising Shore – Roanoke rediscovers these vanished pioneers, exploring the challenges and vast landscapes they would have faced.

Deborah is intrigued by stories of immigrant courage and by classic American tales of lone men and boys setting off to explore the back country. Her curiosity about the particular challenges that would face women who took part in similar frontier adventures sparked her research into the history of the Lost Colony.

"The women who sailed to Roanoke Island in 1587 were the first English pioneer women to set foot in the New World. They were Elizabethans. Two of them were pregnant, one was nursing a child, another had a son. So I wondered, did these Elizabethan women turn into Americans somehow, were they transformed … and if so, what do we mean by 'American'? You're far from home, you want sugar and paper, but there is no shop where you can buy sugar and paper, so you have to do without or invent. That's key to a kind of self-reliance that many of us still respect.

And the Elizabethans were brutal with their enemies. Violence is part of our history and culture, too, and frontierswomen who valued their property weren't simply its victims. They were frequently complicit. But of course most of them wouldn't be expected to act like men, to join scouting parties or raids, so their perspectives on the frontier would have been angular, different in certain ways."

Deborah's writing focuses on women who join American adventures and face American dangers. She has published two non-fiction books, Women And Guns: Politics and The Culture Of Firearms In America (M. E. Sharpe, 2001) and From Blood to Verdict: Three Women on Trial (McBooks Press, 1993).

Women and Guns is based on interviews with a wide range of American women, some of whom advocate for gun rights while others support gun control. It explores their experiences and responses to the fiercely politicized gun debates of the 1990s. From Blood to Verdict closely analyses three trials involving female defendants that took place in Upstate New York.

Deborah lives in Ithaca, NY, where she works as an editor for the Cornell Southeast Asia Program. Her husband teaches American literature at Ithaca College. Her sons have cut their own paths and chosen to become engineers. Deborah holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction Writing from Stanford University. Her newest avocation is rowing a single shell (backwards!), and she's often occupied early mornings throughout the summer trying to keep herself from tipping into Cayuga Lake.