6. What is your understanding of a “utopian” community? What ones do you know about? What have been their successes and failures?
7. What’s your sense of the Civil War in Missouri and how it differed from the war in the Eastern states?
8. How do you feel about Turner’s attempt to maintain Daybreak’s neutrality as the conflict escalated in the rest of the nation?
9. What future do you imagine for these people after the close of the book?
10. Did you like the title of the book? Why or why not? Can you think of passages in the book where the theme of seeing things in a certain “slant of light” was used?
About the Author
Steve Wiegenstein grew up in the eastern Missouri Ozarks and roams its back roads every chance he gets. The Black River and the Annapolis Branch Library were his two main haunts as a kid, and they remain his Mecca and Medina to this day. He is a longtime scholar of the 19th century Icarian movement in America, which provided the inspiration for Slant of Light. He particularly enjoyed weaving the real-life story of Sam Hildebrand—the notorious Confederate bushwhacker who murdered one of Steve’s ancestors—into the novel. Steve and his wife, Sharon Buzzard, both academics, live in Columbia, Missouri. Slant of Light, the first book in his Daybreak series, is his first novel.
About Blank Slate Press
Blank Slate Press, formed in 2010, seeks to discover, nurture, publish and promote new literary voices from the greater Saint Louis region. To learn more, please visit www.blankslatepress.com. Our previous novels include:
The Samaritan by Fred Venturini (2011)
Dancing with Gravity by Anene Tressler (2011)
Slant of Light Page 37