Local author and UTC professor Sybil Baker wasn’t expecting to get the inspiration for her latest novel when she visited the Hunter Museum of American Art in the summer of 2010.
As part of the Tennessee Council for Teachers of English’s annual conference, she was instructing other teachers on how to incorporate art into writing when she stumbled across Hughie Lee-Smith’s painting titled “Confrontation.”
Local author Sybil Baker visits with former students during a trip to South Korea in 2010. After teaching in that country for 12 years, she moved to Chattanooga in 2007 to teach at UTC. Baker’s recent trip to South Korea was, in part, a trip to help complete research for the novel she released this spring.“It’s a picture of two girls not looking at each other,” said Baker of the painting. “There’s a real disconnect between the girls and a crumbling wall in the background. It looks almost post-war. I started writing about who these girls are, and the novel took off from there.”
Titled “Into This World,” Baker’s third book was recently released in print and in all e-book formats by Engine books, a boutique fiction press out of Indianapolis. With the plot anchored by two historic South Korean events, the Gwangju Uprising of 1980 and a naval crisis in 2010, she said “Into This World” promises to take readers halfway across the world and give them an engaging look at 30 years of South Korean history.
“People have been telling me it’s a page turner,” said Baker. “In that sense it’s not a ‘War and Peace’ type of commitment. Anyone interested in families, sisters, a new culture or looking at the [United] States in a different way might be interested in it.”