12 Days of a Pioneer Christmas: Shannon McNear

Shannon McNear

             In her debut novella, “Defending Truth,” South Carolina writer Shannon McNear describes a surprising romance between a fugitive Tory militiaman, and a young patriot woman in charge of her siblings while her father fights during the Revolutionary War.

It’s the first story chronologically in the September 1 release of Barbour Publishing’s A Pioneer Christmas Collection.

“Defending Truth” is set in what is now eastern Tennessee, still frontier during that era. “It was a harsh, terrifying time. These people were all just struggling to live their lives, and the politics were as upsetting and confusing as today. There’s much about the loyalist plight that grabs my imagination.”

While most Americans are familiar with the “rebel” side in the war, North America during those years was split fairly evenly between those who supported the British king and those who wanted to forge a new nation. Shannon’s story portrays the confusion between would-be neighbors who really don’t want to fight about anything and who find their common enemies a unifying force despite their personal politics.

This sense is well portrayed when the spirited young woman named Truth who, while out hunting food for her siblings, comes across a frightened young man, Micah, hiding in a cave. She recognizes that he must have fought on the “other” side from her still-missing father and her uncles. But her humanity overcomes her politics as she aids him.

And of course the humanity blossoms into love.

Shannon had previously written a full-length novel about British loyalists (Tories) during the same time period. Fellow writers suggested she alter the story into a romance between a patriot and a Tory. “I didn’t follow through on that suggestion, but tucked it into the back of my mind. It sprang to life in this story.”

“It’s a great concept,” she explained. The notion of an almost Romeo and Juliet-type attraction involving “huge conflict, huge stakes. I also wanted to incorporate a battle I was already familiar with, and explore all the seeming contradictions in the behavior of the participants as they related to politics, since a study of real-life accounts doesn’t really support the whole ‘righteous patriot and heathen British’ stereotype.”

In writing the story, Shannon was surprised by “how much the characters came to life for me.” She saw aspects of her own character in the people she wrote about. “I can relate to Truth’s difficulty in accepting help, her struggle with pride. I also relate to Micah’s sense of unworthiness.”

Writing a historical novel involves a great deal of research. Shannon has been studying this period a long time, but even so was surprised at the difficulty of discovering some information. In Defending Truth, Truth offers Micah an apple, but were they cultivated before Johnny Appleseed’s march across the continent?

As a matter of fact, yes.

In terms of spiritual themes, the concepts of forgiveness and grace were deliberate. “But others popped up–the real nature of courage, humility and hospitality. If I wanted to dig really deep, I’d say the ethics of war and self-defense, and by extension, defense of family,” Shannon said.

As the home-schooling mother of eight, Shannon’s family tries to stay as non-commercial as possible during Christmas. Incorporating Christmas into her story was relatively simple. “I’d learned that Christmas celebrations tended to be more austere in certain regions for this time period. Just as our family is rather matter of fact about what we do, I could imagine that other families would be, as well.”

Her family, however, never celebrated Christmas in a cave, as is done in “Defending Truth.”

The descendant of pioneering ancestors in the general area, Shannon would like to think she would have made a good pioneer but like many has personal reservations.

“Although I always enjoyed camping and exploring when I was growing up, I’m very much a pampered modern. I’d probably have always been in trouble for dawdling and dreaming, when there was work to be done.”

For more information about Shannon, visit her website at www.shannonmcnear.com. You can also find her monthly on the Colonial Quills website  and weekly at The Borrowed Book.

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