Leah Angstman

Leah Angstman is the author of the debut novel of King William’s War in 17th-century New England, OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA (Regal House, January 2022), and the editor-in-chief of Alternating Current Press and The Coil magazine.

Twitter: @leahangstman

Instagram: @leahangstman

What period of history do you wish you knew more about?

The answer to this one changes from day to day and comes with lots of asterisks. One thing I generally find myself asking, as a historian, is why don’t I want to know more about X, Y, Z time periods? There’s a great deal from the past that I have no desire to dive into, and I always find it interesting what historians will skip and what they’ll dig into a stranger’s great-grandma’s moldy cobwebbed attic to discover. I always wish I had more interest in Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, and Viking eras, but I never want to put in the legwork. It’s outside of my purview and would be years of my life just to crack the surface.

I’m currently kicking myself that I don’t know more about the military sides of the War of 1812 and the European Napoleonic theater. I know a great deal about the social and economic atmospheres, the clothing, foods, way of life, different classes, individual battles, and biographies of many of the major players; but I’m now working on a years-long, highly ambitious (as in: What have I gotten myself into?) alternative-history trilogy that requires me to know far more than I already know about naval warfare, the Royal and U.S. Navies, and the specific hierarchies and roles of land and amphibious troops and officers. It took a long time for me to become familiar with the American Revolution and the American War of Independence in the realm of military knowledge, but by 1812, we already have a whole new military structure, so I feel like I’m completely starting over from scratch. It’s rather daunting. I’d give an arm to be able to do the research by osmosis.

What’s your favorite comic strip or graphic novel?

I’ve been a huge collector of Spider-Man comics and old-school paraphernalia since late junior high, so of course I am here for this question! My favorite all-time graphic novel is still Marvels, the absolutely iconic reimagining of the Marvel universe origins through the incomparable watercolor artwork of Alex Ross and the human, awe-filled writing of Kurt Busiek. It is beautifully done and written from the viewpoint of a photojournalist who questions everything and documents the fear of the unknown from everyone around him. This book changed the way I viewed comics and my expectations of the medium. I still remember how slowly I turned each page in anticipation of the beauty of it, and how loudly I gasped at the full-page spread with the bird’s eye view of all the superheroes parachuting down from the sky … the moving liquid lines of the Silver Surfer … the Gwen Stacy-thrown-off-the-bridge saga with that tiny little *snap* … guh, I can still hear it.

Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long?

I am a great collector of things. All the things. I have magnets, which border my mammoth wall-sized office dry-erase boards, that are souvenirs from every battlefield and historical site I’ve ever visited. I’m a battlefields preserver and a member of the American Battlefield Trust, and I write travelogues about the sites I visit. The rest of my office is divided into sections of my collections: One corner is a collection of Rorschach, my favorite character from one of my favorite comics, Watchmen. Posters, figurines, even a bizarre hand-drawn trading card with Rorschach’s splotchy face.

The adjoining wall and long sideboard buffet hold my Marquis de Lafayette antiques collection, of which the prize pieces are an uncirculated coin from Lafayette’s 1824 U.S. tour and a hand-painted statue from his death in 1834. Those reside among countless china plates, antique postcards, figurines, wall art, and even a brass key to the Bastille (a replica of the gift that Lafayette gave to George Washington). Lafayette has been my hero, and maybe the only person I can truly say that about, since I was a kid (I mean, besides Bruce Springsteen, of course). I was a total fangirl long before the musical Hamilton made it cool to be a fan of “America’s favorite fighting Frenchman.”

At the next corner is my Broadway collection. Though it’s not nearly as complete as the amount of Broadway material I still have stored in a storage space, my favorite Playbill posters are on the wall, and the best of the best is represented: Hamilton, Assassins, Stephen Sondheim, Raúl Esparza, my favorites. I went to school for musical theater and spent many years trying my hand at it. Being hard-of-hearing ended up making the cues too difficult, so I switched to my other love: Wikipedia rabbit holes, dusty library stacks, and all-access archive passes. But I still have over 300 Broadway CDs (yes, yes, compact discs; I’m old) in my music collection, and I still know every word to every single one.

Next on the wall is what’s left of my visible aforementioned Spider-Man collection, some posters and sculptures that I can’t bear to put in boxes alongside all the rest. And next to that is a very fledgling Ethan Allen collection—he’s my twelfth-great uncle, and I’m currently writing a biography-in-verse about him, thus I’ve started a collection, of course! The bling that started it all is a Revolutionary-era coin depicting Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold stealing the British cannon from Fort Ticonderoga. I’ve been obsessed with the mythology of Ethan Allen ever since I was a child, so I guess it’s only fitting that I eventually write about him.

Then there’s the Wade Whimsies figurines, which you can read all about in my essay of tragedy and collecting at Nashville Review. Then a whole hutch full of antique Victorian figurines, most of which are pretty hideous, but I unfortunately love them, to my partner’s detriment. I’ve collected those throughout the entirety of my life.

And thus we come to my final collection, my Mounties. Anyone who knows me knows I have an irrational obsession with old-school Red-Serged Mounties, and I can pin it on two culprits. Nelson Eddy as the charming Mountie in Rose Marie, one of my mother’s and grandmother’s favorite movies from 1936 (specifically this scene); and Benton Fraser, my teenage crush from the long-forgotten 1990s TV show Due South. Played by Canada’s national treasure Paul Gross, Benton is the most perfect specimen of a man and role model that any weirdo teenager could ask for, and he *has a dog that’s supposed to be a wolf but is clearly a dog* and that’s all there is to it. Later in life, I became fascinated with the 1930s Hollywood attempt to make Mounties into the “cowboys of the North” and feature them in movies akin to the Wild West genre.

If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?

I would definitely make a Lafayette museum, hands down. I have so much quirky Lafayette stuff, especially weird old advertisements from 1800s newspapers and various whiskey decanters, things that take up a good deal of wall and shelf space. I could easily fill a little ballroom with it all. Then, I would dress up in 1790s French fashion at the exhibit opening gala, drink French wine, and have someone play the hurdy-gurdy in the corner.

Do you speak a second language? Do you think differently in that language? Does it influence your writing?

If it counts, I can speak in ASL (American Sign Language). It’s not really another language because it’s American English, but it feels like a second language because I can’t just walk up to any random person on the street and have him understand what my hands are saying. I tend to think a lot in ASL—The precision of it helps me keep my words, thoughts, and writing clearer, simpler, when I get bogged down in my Hawthornian and Melvillian purple prose. I’m poetic to a fault, and my brain thinks in long strings of unnecessary words; but in ASL, you must get to the point, and your facial expression does most of the heavy-lifting. I don’t get much chance to use ASL (I’m only hard-of-hearing), and I definitely get rusty sometimes, but I do write a lot of characters with missing or differently-abled senses—deafness, blindness, mutism—and I’m sure it stems from having a connection with my own experiences since childhood.

I can also read French—I cannot speak it or hear it to save my life, but I can read it pretty decently. This comes from mining primary and secondary sources for research. With my specific areas of study, a great deal of it is written in French.