Reading Group Guide
Questions for
Discussion
You may download this book club guide for your group
discussion. (PDF)
1. Author Sheri Holman described Searching for
Virginia Dare in this way: “Marjorie Hudson has
beautifully united the personal and the poetic in her
quest for the elusive Virginia Dare. By making this as
much an autobiographical odyssey as a historical
narrative, she challenges us to plumb our own dark
interiors and seek out new shores of self.”
| o Find
passages of Hudson’s poetic narrative.
What makes these sections “poetic”? How do
these sections add to the narrative?
Find a few personal passages. How do they
work with the themes in Virginia Dare’s
historic story? |
2. Many people in the
mid-Atlantic and Southern states grew up hearing the
story of Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony. Some people
have grown up knowing very little or nothing about it.
| o What
did you learn as a child? Did you know there
was a colony before Jamestown and Plymouth?
Were you fascinated by the story? Why or why
not? |
3. Native Americans
feature prominently in the story of Virginia Dare. The
author was intrigued by the history of the Lumbee
people.
| o Do
you know the history of a tribal people near
where you live? Does your family or anyone
you know claim Native heritage? Had you
heard of the Lumbee before? |
4. There are three
solar eclipses described in the book. Did you catch them
all? Look for the “darkened sun” mentioned in the Thomas
Hariot/John White scene in Chapter 2. Then in a memoir
section, at grandmother’s house (Chapter 6), there is a
brief image of tree leaves’ shadows during an eclipse in
the author’s childhood. The third eclipse takes place in
Chapter 10, in a brief section in which the author
attempts to view the sun’s shape using a pin hole in a
piece of tin foil.
| o Read
those three sections aloud. How does the
idea of an eclipse relate to the themes in
the book? How does the idea of an eclipse
relate to the story of Virginia Dare? |
5. Prayer figures
occasionally in the themes and musings of the book.
John White reads from the Book of Common Prayer for the
baptism ritual. Hudson makes a prayer of thanksgiving
for finding her way in Greenville. An Iroquoian prayer
for the souls of dead children is invoked.
| o How
would prayer have been important to the
colonists? How did Christian conversion
affect the Lumbee Indians’ fate and
identity? |
Hudson speculates that
the images in Sallie Southall Cotten’s epic poem were
meant to be Christian symbols.
| o Do
you see Christian themes in Cotten’s life
and poetry? |
6. “One of the best
things about writing this book,” Hudson says, “is
sharing it with people and hearing the stories they tell
back to me— about Virginia Dare, about grandmothers,
gardens, growing up, hitchhiking, just about anything.”
| o Did
Hudson’s experiences strike a chord in your
life? |
The book explores
universal themes of missing people, losses, and times
of upheaval.
| o Can
you point to a time in your life of upheaval
and change? |
7. Hudson explores the
relationship between facts and myth in the book.
o Did
you learn any new facts that surprised you?
Which Virginia Dare
myth is your favorite? Do you think the
Eleanor Dare Stones were a hoax?
Why or why not? |
8. The author
describes Virginia Dare’s story as a family story, and
as an American story. Families move, separate, and
forget to pass information along. Children are lost,
parents are lost. Those who remain, make things up. As a
nation made up of people who come from somewhere else—or
who as Natives found their families and cultures
devastated by European invasions—our collective memory
is rooted in a pattern of loss and memory.
| o How
does American history figure in to your
family story? Are there any stories in the
book—about Indians, for example, or
immigration, that remind you of your own
life or family? |
9. Hudson also claims
that in America family stories are often lost or
missing, yet they seem to remain alive inside the
descendants.
| o Do
you agree? If so, how might this be true in
your own life? |
Author Comments
I WAS BORN IN 1953, in a small town in northern
Illinois, the part with rolling hills and trees near the
Wisconsin border. Our parsonage was next to the church
on one side, the barber shop on the other, across from
the courthouse and catty corner from the Piggly Wiggly.
My life took a hard right turn when my family moved east
to Washington, D.C., so my father, a minister, could
study International Relations and peace. Eight years
old, I missed my old life terribly. I remember tracing
the highway on the map over my bed each night, following
the route west with my finger, touching the places I
once knew, lost and far from home. In Washington we grew
up face to face with Cuban missile crisis scares,
Kennedy assassinations, riots and anti-war
demonstrations. My father took me to meet Martin Luther
King in 1968; two days later he was assassinated. A
sense of yearning for home, a sense of violent
disconnection, a sense of the very personal pace of
history—all these things had a great effect on me.
Some of this personal history is reflected in Searching
for Virginia Dare, a mosaic of history, fiction and
memoir that turns on the story of first English child
born in North America, who disappeared with her family
shortly after birth. The book tracks Virginia’s imagined
steps through the coastal swamps and bays, following
legends, tracking down weather studies and scholars,
finding “lost tribes”
and fanatics, and taking side trips and tangents into
the 19th and 20th centuries. The book is my love letter
to North Carolina—my adopted home for more than 20
years. I live on a farm in the rolling hills of the
center of the state, not far from a small town with a
courthouse and a church and a Piggly Wiggly (now
defunct). I have worked most of my adult life as an
editor and freelance writer, writing for nature
magazines and editing everything from Southern fiction
to law books. Now I’m working on a collection of short
stories and a novel, both set in a mythical rural county
in North Carolina.
o
You may download this book club guide for your group
discussion. (PDF)
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