Featured Reading Guide
Ingrid Hill
In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and eyes of the entire country. A two-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft and it is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in her rescue. Little Ursula Wong is the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband. The Wongs live in a decrepit mobile home and their child is designated by one member of the TV audience as ‘half-breed trailer trash’, not worth all the attention and expense. Oh yeah? responds the story’s narrative voice. Let’s just see. And here the…
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Ingrid Hill is the author of a collection of stories, Dixie Church Interstate Blues. The mother of twelve children, she lives in Iowa City.
topAbout the Book
In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and eyes of the entire country. A two-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft and it is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in her rescue. Little Ursula Wong is the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband. The Wongs live in a decrepit mobile home and their child is designated by one member of the TV audience as ‘half-breed trailer trash’, not worth all the attention and expense. Oh yeah? responds the story’s narrative voice. Let’s just see. And here the novel explodes into a grand saga of culture, history and heredity. By its end, we’ve met, among others of Ursula Wong’s ancestors, a second-century-B. C. Chinese alchemist; an orphaned consort to a sixteenth-century Swedish queen; Professor Alabaster Wong, a Chautauqua troupe lecturer on exotic Chinese topics travelling the Midwest at the end of the nineteenth century; and Ursula’s great-great-grandfather, Jake Maki, a mine worker who died in a cave-in at age twenty-nine. Ursula’s ultimate fate echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that any given individual’s life comes to seem a miracle. Ambitious and accomplished, Ursula, Under is, most of all, wonderfully entertaining.
topIngrid Hill interview/review
From bookslut
Getting started was not easy.
Literary journals of some renown were just recognizing her talents and she was mothering 11 children (now 12) when her first husband left. Of the breakup, she says, “I knew a line was being drawn in the sand; it was not about the money (the most she made then was $375 for a story, she said); it was about who he saw me as.”
She felt she was being asked to choose between that marriage or her writing. “While I could not imagine choosing to single-parent my kids, I could not give up my writing. It was no contest. And there’s been an enormous amount of hardship — it’s been hell — but it made me a stronger person.” She believes that all her “breaking” was necessary. “Writing is such a healing thing. You simply rearrange reality. A rich interior life is a great place to go on vacation.” She took many such jaunts.
Hill had begun the writing process the only way she could: in her head…“I was writing stories in my head, and I was doing the writing and revisions in my head.” That skill — to carefully form stories before putting them to paper — has been a boon. She does little revision, and she doesn’t understand how anyone can write with a “broad brush Sometimes a connection takes you by the arm and leads you. When Hill researched her husband’s grandfather’s death in a mine, “The guy at the Iron Industry Museum in Negaunee, Michigan, said to me, ‘William Hill who died in the mine crash? Oh, you must know Emil then.’ I said, ‘Actually no.’ [Emil was her father-in-law’s brother.]’ And he said, ‘Well, you gotta talk to Emil.’” She tracked him to a veterans hospital, where…[t]he attendant pointed out Emil “who looked just like my husband 40 years older.” She and her husband got to know him well, and he told many stories, developing a strong bond with Hill’s daughter Maria before he died.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Many of the back stories show us the difficult lives women have faced throughout history – is it fair to describe Ursula, Under as a feminist novel?
- Ursula, Under contains many random catastrophes – the death of a pregnant girl in ice cold waters, the fire that kills the children in the mining camp – do you think that the book gives these acts an underlying religious or moral significance?
- Many of the characters in the book are physically ‘damaged’ in some way – Annie and Ming Tao are both crippled, Violeta contracts leprosy and loses her earlier beauty, whilst Kyllikki is left deaf after a childhood illness. How do these physical ailments affect their development and their desires for the future? Do you think Annie and Justin would have met and married if Annie hadn’t been in a hit-and-run accident as a child?
- Ursula, Under contains many bad and absent fathers and husbands. Consider Ingrid Hill’s portrayal of the men in her book – do you think that the author is too hard on the male gender?
- Joe is the first absent father in the novel to return to his wife and child – do you think that Joe’s return was necessary to achieve a satisfying end to the novel?
- Many of Ursula’s ancestors come into contact with real people and real events – does it matter to you what in the novel is fiction and what fact?
- Ingrid Hill began her career by writing short stories, how do you think this has this affected the structure and focus of Ursula, Under?
Other Books by Ingrid Hill
Ursula Under
In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and …
Suggested Further Reading
- Cloud Atlas ~ David Mitchell
- Ulverton ~ Adam Thorpe
- The Time Traveler’s Wife ~ Audrey Niffenegger
- An Instance of the Fingerpost ~ Ian Pears
- Music and Silence ~ Rose Tremain