On the Tobacco Coast: A Chat With Author Christopher Tilghman

Sometimes, place, history, and family intersect in ways that define and magnify our sense of home.

For author Chris Tilghman, that intersection became a creative calling too hard to resist and too attractive to deny the stories that linger between the imagination and the known.

Tilghman says that childhood summers spent at the rundown family estate near Centreville infused him with a longing to know more about its history and the generations who populated it. Old family letters became corridors to the past, and dust-covered portraits became portals to the imagined lives he constructed over the last three decades. Those imagined lives, often based on his own family’s history on the Eastern Shore, would become known as the Chesapeake Quartet.

The quartet of novels about the Mason family, starting with Mason’s Retreat and ending with his current On the Tobacco Coast, is a rich and complex journey that hits every note on the scale of the human condition, from conflict and tragedy to personal triumph and the many shades in between. No themes are denied as the sprawling family engages with the changing historical backdrops of war, race, white privilege, and all the personal crises that unfold throughout the generations of the family.

In a New York Times review of Mason Retreat, Thomas Mallon wrote that “Mr. Tilghman writes with the same authoritative elegance that he displayed in his earlier stories, as when he refers to “the bay’s rivers reaching deep into the land to take whole towns into their clenched fists.”

In another NYT review of The Right Hand Shore, Fernanda Eberstadt wrote, “The Right-Hand Shore” is the dark, magisterial creation of a writer with an uncanny feel for the intersections of place and character in American history.”

This is to say, that Tilghman planted his artistic flag deeply in the soil and history of the Eastern Shore and that the accolades and readership that followed each publication proved that his conjuring of the panoramic Mason family lives were American lives writ large and continues to announce Tilghman’s firm place in America’s arts and letters.The Bookplate Bookstore continues its 2024 season of author lectures on June 12th with Christopher Tilghman for a 6 pm reservation required event at Sultana’s Lawrence Wetlands Preserve. The Lawrence Wetlands Preserve is located at 301 S. Mill Street in Chestertown, Maryland.

The Spy recently visited Chris Tilghman at his Centreville farm to talk about On the Tobacco Road, the writing life, and what lies ahead after the Chesapeake Quartet.

This video is approximately ten minutes in length.