Rebecca Turkewitz discusses queerness, nontraditional communities, life in 1850s textile mills and boarding houses, and her first foray into historical fiction featured in the Spring 2025 issue of Colorado Review with editorial assistant Trent Kay Maverick.
Rebecca Turkewitz is the author of the story collection Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press), which was a finalist for the Maine Literary Award. Her fiction and humor have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, Best Microfiction 2023 & 2024, Alaska Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. She teaches high school English in Portland, Maine.
Trent Kay Maverick: Let’s introduce your fantastic piece, “The Mill Girls,” featured in the upcoming Spring 2025 issue of Colorado Review. I’m curious what you typically write and where this story falls in your body of work.
Rebecca Turkewitz: I think it’s stylistically similar to some of my other stories, which are in this kind of literary horror, spooky-but-not-quite-gruesome realm. Not to say there are not some gruesome parts of the story! And it’s also similar in terms of theme: exploring the constraints of womanhood as well as celebrating elements of that identity and of queerness. But it was my first attempt at historical fiction.
TKM: Your story is set in the Biddeford/Saco textile mills in the 1850s. What can you tell me about the mills, and that area of Maine?
RT: I love Biddeford. It’s just one of the places that I really—like, in a way that I cannot fully explain—feel so interested in and intrigued by. And part of that fascination comes from the mills. They are still such a stalwart part of the downtown. They’re enormous and they span multiple blocks. They’re all brick, with lots of windows. They’ve mostly been repurposed—they’re condos or businesses—and there’s a mill museum that gives tours. I was interested in this place where the past—and such a distinct past—is still so visible. I had thought about Biddeford and Saco for years and years before I actually decided to set a story there.
TKM: Beyond this story, do you think you’ll write a larger work or novel about the mills?
RT: I love the short story form. My first book is short stories and I was like, okay, after this book, I’m just gonna write a novel. And then I wrote a bunch of stories about these mills! So I just can’t get away from the short story form. I have wondered whether if I keep writing these stories, whether there’s a book that’s just stories about the mills.
TKM: What is it that keeps drawing you back to the mills and wanting to tell stories about them?
RT: I’m always interested in unusual communities, especially ones that are less traditional. In the mid-1800s a lot of the workers in the textile mills were young women and girls from New England farms. It would have been the first time these girls were living or working outside of their homes, and the idea of them living together in a boarding house sparked my curiosity.
I was wondering about what it would be like for them to have their lives change so drastically. Not just the economic independence—they also had very vibrant social lives in a way that I was surprised by. They went to lectures and played piano in the boarding houses and they had their own newspaper. For people who were working insane hours, it was interesting to me that there was still this kind of evening social life.
And also, I wondered about the temporariness of their new lives. The whole point was that you were there, you got a little money and then you married or went back to your parents. But for the narrator in this story, she loves this new life, even though it’s meant to be temporary. And that’s very stressful for her!
TKM: Was there any particular event or fact about the history of the mills that inspired this story?
RT: I wouldn’t say any particular fact inspired this story, except maybe that the girls lived in boarding houses with a curfew and a housemother to watch over them. But there were a lot of small details that ignited my imagination. For example, there were a lot of injury stories. People’s clothing would get stuck in the machine and then it would just tear up their arm. I have another story set in the mills that explores that more. And then in this story, someone’s hair gets stuck. The mills were a very dangerous place to work, as you might imagine. I also was, for some reason, fascinated by the fact that there were young boys who were paid to clear eels away from the canal grates so that the river water could get through to the waterwheels.
TKM: You mentioned this story was your first piece of historical fiction. What was your research process like?
RT: I did a lot of Internet research, like digging into historical archives and studying old photos of the city, and I toured the mills and took copious notes at the mill museum. And I reread Elizabeth DeWolfe’s wonderful nonfiction book about the Biddeford/Saco mills, The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories. It took me a long time to start writing because I was getting obsessive about getting every detail right, which I eventually had to let go of a little. I spent so much time looking up when certain words came into popular usage! And I felt like my narrator had too much of a contemporary mindset. But then I reread Little Women, which was the weirdest part of this research process. It was published in the 1860s, so pretty soon after this story is set. And that book has such a modern sensibility! It gave me permission to think, you know, maybe there was a wider range of perspectives back then than we think about.
TKM: I do love your modern narrator! The fact that she’s queer and in this historical environment is really intriguing to me. Did that come out of your research?
RT: I always find it kind of hard to talk about character. Because I’m very intentional about a lot of things in my writing, like voice and setting and plot. But character, I often feel, is a bit more organic. Like I don’t really know how I constructed this character!
But her queerness was definitely part of the story’s premise when I originally conceived of it. As a queer person, I’m always looking to find queer folks at different moments in history, because queerness has always been around, but there often isn’t evidence of it. Probably these things were happening, and people were aware of them, but they didn’t get recorded.
I found it interesting that there was a big emphasis during this historical moment on the potential scandal of young women being unprotected away from their families. There was, specifically, a fear of corruption from men (and unwanted pregnancy). And lesbianism would have been such an unforeseen… like no one was talking about corruption from these girls being together with each other and then choosing a different type of life.
TKM: I don’t want to give too much away about the story, but your narrator—who is pretty no-nonsense—has an unexpected brush with the supernatural. I wonder what this story is trying to say about this character coming into contact with another realm?
RT: A lot of my stories explore questions of the supernatural and life after death. And the truth is, I’m also a very no-nonsense, logical, firm nonbeliever in the supernatural. And so more than making a statement, I’m really interested in the question of belief and then, what happens when something challenges your belief system? Like, how do you cope with that? And how do you rearrange your own worldview to make space for that?
TKM: In closing, what are you hoping that people come away from this piece thinking about or feeling? What do you want the lasting image to be?
RT: I want people to think about the way that we make decisions about our lives. And how community can shape us. And I really wanted to have queer characters who defy expectations around the stories that are typically told about them, especially in historical narratives. I don’t want to give too much away, but even two hundred years ago, you know, there were queer people who were defining their own lives.
Trent Kay Maverick is a first-year MFA candidate in fiction and Gill-Ronda Fellow at Colorado State University. Trent’s essays and audio narratives appear in/on/with the Washington Post, Ideastream, Kast Media, KCRW, the Missouri Review’s Miller Aud-Cast, and the Belt anthology Red State Blues: Stories from Midwestern Life on the Left.