Between the Takes Podcast

(Henry Kieler tintype)

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January 4th, 1867

Dearest Virginia,

The cold here is a tangible thing, a weight that settles deep into the marrow. I’m certain it bites with equal ferocity atop Brushy Mountain, and I can only pray that Harrison has proven his stout hand with the axe, that you have a full cord stacked against the frost to keep the hearth fire burning.

As I sit tonight, the campfire light dancing against the trees, I find myself imagining you across from me, the glow catching the lines of your face.

My days here are a study in solitude, and the silence is so profound it feels like a physical barrier.

I was visited this morning by two red-tailed hawks as I made ready the elk meat for the journey to the Cherokee village. My friend’s wife, a woman of that nation, is guiding the mules to her kin, and in the sight of those birds, I chose to find a harbinger. I take them for a divine sign—a promise that we are held in protection until the day of our reunion. A strange, quiet relief settled over my weary spirit then, as if your own soul were hovering, tethered to me by some invisible grace.

I hunger for your voice, Virginia. I ache for the familiar music of our conversations, the sharpening of my own mind against your opinions, your solutions to the quandaries that beset us, and the way you see the world so clearly.

Nature here is a stern master; though it provides the means for our survival, it is a harsh, sequestered life in the heart of this long, long winter. There are days when my own voice feels like a stranger to me, for there is no one here to receive it.

We are, I think, much like the crops we tend. We require the warmth of human proximity to truly flourish. We need the touch of a hand, the exchange of a thought, the resonance of a voice to remind us that we even exist.

The fire wanes and the shadows grow long, so I bid you a quiet night, my dear. I love you with the whole of my spirit, and I count the hours until I might see you again.

Yours,

Henry

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January 2nd, 1867

My Dearest Virginia,

The winter moon hangs full and cold, and the chill is felt in one’s very marrow. To survive in this wilderness with only a campfire and a lean-to is, at times, a formidable trial. Yet nature provides me with moments of quiet respite, and for that, I remain profoundly grateful.

I find myself longing to be by your side, near the hearth, sheltered beneath our quilts and wool blankets. My soul yearns for your presence with a constancy that weighs heavy upon me.

The nights are frigid and long, and sleep is elusive, for I cannot seem to gather enough warmth to truly relax. Yesterday, however, we were fortunate enough to bring in a large elk while hunting near the vicinity of Turtle Town, Tennessee. It required two full days of labor to properly dress the hide and the meat. We gave nearly half of our take to my colleague’s new wife, a Cherokee woman. She transported it by buckboard to her kinfolk who yet reside within the Great Smoky Mountains. She performed a solemn ceremony over the animal, offering tobacco, corn kernels, and other tokens. She is a woman of commendable character.

Though I possess a quarter-measure of both Cherokee and Chickasaw blood, I was never instructed in the traditions of either tribe. It was a privilege, and I felt a sincere gratitude to be permitted to witness her observance.

I trust the severity of the cold has not dampened your spirits; I am well aware of how the scarcity of light can affect the constitution. I also trust that Harrison is proving himself a capable and dutiful son, assisting you with the necessary chores. Please convey my love to him, and assure him that I shall not tarry in these woods longer than duty requires.

The sunset this evening was a spectacle of such rare beauty that it would have surely taken your breath away. I only wished that I might have shared the vision with you. Know that you possess my whole heart and that it beats out the letters of your name in a rhythm I hold sacred.

Yours always,

Henry

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(Chicken With a Halo 1996 78” x 82” oil on canvas by Whitney Hamilton)

I grew up the child of a traveling salesman, moving from the exotic, diverse pulse of New Orleans to the suffocating stillness of Birmingham, Alabama. A city that, even in my youth, felt like it was still shivering in the shadow of its own history. We were outsiders in a town that hadn’t yet reconciled its past. I still feel like an outsider in the tightly knit place they now call the ‘Ham’.

In the interim, Birmingham has become a wonderful city with a huge community of creative people. I visit there regularly. I could not have made UNION without the talent, passion, and determination of the people still making movies there today. To them, I owe my undying gratitude.

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A Childhood Along the Levee

As a child in New Orleans, I felt free. The world was my oyster and I ate plenty of ‘em. My dad introduced me to raw oysters and hot sauce at Cajun Charlie’s on Jefferson Highway. We lived just two blocks from the levee and the mighty Mississippi River in Harahan, a neighborhood in Jefferson Parish. I spent my childhood like Huck Finn, playing amid the ever-changing landscape of the river. As it rises and falls, the land behind the levee is in constant flux. Sometimes, there are sandy shores, and other times, the shore is thick with brambles of vines and vegetation, as well as poisonous snakes like copperheads and cottonmouths, as well as an alligator or two. My dad and I would hike around the marshy backside looking for interesting pieces of driftwood from ancient and decaying cypress trees. It was a wonderland for a free-range kid like me.

History Baked into the Soil

I started second grade at Harahan Elementary School. I remember the school building vividly: stucco, ancient, and otherworldly. There was a local legend that the property had served as a field hospital during the Civil War. As a second grader, the gravity of that escaped me, but I could feel it in my gut. I knew something profound had happened on that land.

History was baked into the soil there. Long before the railroad established Harahan in 1894, the area was known as the Tchoupitoulas Coast, defined by sprawling sugarcane plantations like the Soniat and the Elmwood. By my time, the Elmwood plantation had become a fancy restaurant owned by the Marcello crime family. We celebrated many birthdays there until one day, it burned to the ground in 1978. Rumors of mob involvement swirled through the neighborhood, a dark footnote to my otherwise vibrant childhood.

Inside those old plantation houses, I felt as though I had stepped back in time. In truth, the area had been a war zone. During the Civil War, Union forces requisitioned the river road regions of Jefferson Parish, turning homes, barns, and fields into encampments and makeshift hospitals to treat soldiers suffering from battle wounds and yellow fever. The land beneath my elementary school was a graveyard of stories long before I ever picked up a camera.

(Elmwood Plantation ca. 1976 in Harahan, LA.)

The Weight of the Past

I remember wandering through the old Destrehan plantation before renovations began. In 1971, American Oil donated the house and four acres of land to the River Road Historical Society. My parents were often invited to family picnics and fundraisers there, an effort to keep Destrehan from fading into the past. I remember vividly that there was an old 1,400-pound marble bathtub in the yard, gifted by Napoleon to Mr. Destrehan himself, sitting among the giant live oak trees we played on.

The history here was heavy. After the indigo blight wiped out early crops, the planters switched to sugar. The home is most commonly associated with its second owner, Jean Noel Destrehan, who served briefly as the first United States Senator from Louisiana in 1812. He was influential in the transition of the Orleans Territory to statehood.

But there was a darker side: after the Louisiana Purchase, the plantation was involved in the 1811 German Coast uprising, a major slave revolt. Five hundred enslaved people marched down River Road towards New Orleans before being suppressed by federal troops and militia at Kenner. The subsequent tribunal—conducted by slave-owning judges—resulted in the immediate execution of 18 rebels.

(“Slave Revolt” by Haitian painter Ulrick Jean Pierre)

Folklore, Pirates, and “Old Hickory”

Folklore suggests that plantation owner Stephen Henderson associated with merchants and smugglers in New Orleans, including the infamous pirate Jean Lafitte. Lafitte is credited with helping Andrew Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. He supplied crucial gunpowder, flints, and ammunition, and brought over 1,000 Baratarian pirates—expert cannoneers who knew the local swamps perfectly. For his help, James Madison pardoned Lafitte.

(Jean Lafitte, pirate and privateer)

That victory catapulted Andrew Jackson into the White House. Upon inauguration, Jackson’s orders began the Trail of Tears—the horrific removal of indigenous peoples west of the Mississippi. I mention this because it is vital to my work in My Brother’s War, Firefly, Union, and the upcoming Heart Mountain. I want to highlight the pieces of our history that feel both “hard” and timely in today’s cultural climate.

From Genealogy to Fiction

Jean Lafitte has always remained in my imagination; he is the reason I began writing The Privateers during the pandemic. Interestingly, while researching my own genealogy, I discovered a pirate in my ancestral closet: Marmaduke Mister, a Tory picaroon during the Revolutionary War.

My current project, All the Light Within Us, is a feature film based on The Privateers. It follows a 1790s privateer who, after betraying her pirate hunter husband, flees with a captive woman passing as a man. Shipwrecked on an island in Newfoundland, they must outwit a vengeful Marquesa to claim a love that transcends skin and gender.

A Departure Driven by Shadows

In the wake of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, my parents were determined that my sister and I attend public school in New Orleans. I loved it. My classmates were a tapestry of Black, Latino, Cajun, and Asian backgrounds. To me, this diversity was magic.

I had always exhibited a talent for art, filling my mother’s shopping lists with doodles. For two summers, she enrolled me in an art program at the Newcomb School of Art at Tulane University, where we created Earth art from found objects—twine, twigs, leaves. It fundamentally shifted my perception of what art could be.

(Carlos Marcello - New Orleans Godfather)

But the idyll was short-lived. My father was doing exceptionally well selling industrial laundry machinery, but in the wild New Orleans of the 1970s, he crossed paths with the wrong people—likely the Marcello crime family. My mother recalls a chilling phone call from someone who claimed they were watching us get on the bus at Harahan Elementary. Intimidation was their chosen language. We were basically run out of town. My father requested a transfer, and the options were Los Angeles or Birmingham.

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December 31st, 1866

Dear Virginia,

I was invited to be a witness to a wedding between my friend and colleague and his Cherokee woman. We are camped not far from the town of Hayesville, North Carolina. I had to hurry and gather my nicer Sunday clothes for the event—you would be proud.

I have repurposed some of my homespun clothing from the war to hunt and trap in the dense hollers. I have practiced a while with a needle and thread, and if I do say so myself, have become somewhat accomplished. Maybe someday I will become proficient enough to make you a good dress—a proper dress, a Sunday dress.

As I was preparing to dress myself, I could not find my frock coat, and it made me exceedingly anxious. The courthouse filled with veterans, farmers, and family. As I stood there, I could imagine you in your fine clothes with flowers in your hair. And I miss you so, so much that it hurt. My body ached and my spirit wept for want of you.

Then I wondered if I could make it to that mountain in time to dance with you. I pray that you are well and happy, despite this arrangement, and I do hope that Harrison is helping you and he’s well and good.

Do know that I will do anything to remain by your side as we love and labor on the farm, our farm.

As I entered the courthouse, I could feel the spirits and the ghosts long abiding there. Some of my people were forced to walk from Fort Hembree West across the Great River. The spirits pushed at me and made heavy my heart with grief. Knowing I will return to you banished all the old and the past and restless souls there. And the lightning bugs, ah, the lightning bugs have reappeared as they do every spring. To dance with you once again among them is my greatest wish.

You have my whole heart, Virginia.

Always yours,

Henry

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{Glassplate struck by Vintage Image Studios at Tunnel Hill Georgia 2003]

I had returned from the fields of Gettysburg shattered, not by glory, but by the physical toll of 19th-century gear. My feet were ravaged by new brogans, and a creeping crimson line of blood poisoning was racing up my leg. I was literally tethered to the 21st century by a miracle of modern medicine: antibiotics.

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Then, the lights went out. It was August, and the city was already living in the shadow of recent ghosts. When the power died, New York didn’t just go dark; it seemed to hold its breath. I stood in a Chelsea diner, hobbling on a cane, watching the modern world evaporate. The cell towers silenced, the subways ground to a halt, and suddenly, the gridlocked, neon-drenched metropolis I knew dissolved into a primitive, quiet landscape. In the span of a week, I had moved from the mud-caked, candlelight reality of 1863 Pennsylvania directly into the blacked-out void of 2003 Manhattan. Both worlds demanded the same thing: an ability to navigate by instinct when the infrastructure fails.

Caught Between Worlds

I had been having lunch with my cast mate from Union and regaling her with my fantastic tales of being a Civil War soldier on the ground, in the field, at Gettysburg, when the lights went out. The restaurant manager came over and said our lunch was on the house and that we should probably leave. Then, my friend’s husband showed up to tell us that the entire tri-state area had gone black. The power was out.

Knowing I was hobbled and walking with a cane, both of them escorted me from Chelsea down to Canal Street, where my husband worked for an advertising firm. He greeted me, and they walked back home, but we had to walk across the Manhattan Bridge to downtown Brooklyn. By the time a friend told us his brother’s cabin in the Catskills still had power, the choice was instinctual. We agreed to drive for the Catskills, but I had more than an escape on my mind. I had a vision. I needed to capture the desperate, frantic movement of a soldier evading federal scouts through dense timber. My reenacting gear was still stowed in the truck, still carrying the dust of Pennsylvania.

[Still from “My Brother’s War” feature film 2003. Catskills]

Capturing the Moment

We headed north. While the country house held a respite from the sun, it offered no modern relief. Even though it was on a different grid from Canada and had power, the house had no air conditioning. We waited for the magic hour—that low, golden tilt of the sun that stretches shadows into long, skeletal fingers. The maintenance folk had not bush-hogged the fields, and the grass was shoulder-high and perfect. In that light, we filmed B-roll for My Brother’s War. I moved through the brush and over stone fences, my heart drumming against my ribs, once again blurring the line between the soldier I was playing and the filmmaker I am. That night, with the high humidity, the house felt stifling, so we retreated to a campfire. The smoke was a familiar, grounding scent. It was there, huddled by the flames, that I brought up the next gamble.

Roger had extended an invitation to the 140th anniversary of the Battle of Tunnel Hill in Georgia. A massive event, swarming with reenactors and spectators. The battle was part of the Atlanta campaign, and most reenactments were advertising the momentous occasions and their events. “I’m going to get us in,” I told my husband. My goal was bold. I intended to sweet-talk the organizers to convince them to let us embed directly into the battle lines. I didn’t want to be a spectator; I wanted to be a phantom in the frame. I wanted my partner to have the vantage point to catch the visceral chaos of the front line—the grit, the smoke, and the true cost of the movement. I was ready to leave the darkness of a powerless city behind and plunge straight into the heart of the fire.

The Transformation

By September, we were heading south to the fields of North Georgia. I arrived at the Tunnel Hill site not as myself, but as Henry. The transformation had become ritual. There is a profound, quiet power in the act of binding, whether done to inhabit a role, to vanish into a persona, or to find a different kind of freedom. When we met my friend Roger, he looked right through me. He didn’t recognize me until I spoke. I was introduced to the ranks as a boy, a soldier among soldiers. But the reality of the front line was more demanding than any script. During the morning drill, the sergeant’s voice cut through the humidity like a whip. “Straighten your line!” he barked. Prowling the ranks, he moved with a heavy, impatient purpose, adjusting our posture by force. When he reached me, he didn’t just order; he reached out and shoved his palms square against my chest to square my shoulders. I stood frozen, every nerve ending screaming. His hands were pressing against my binding, against me, against my breasts, and he hadn’t the slightest clue. A few paces away, Roger saw the exchange and let out a sharp, incredulous laugh, but he held his tongue. My secret remained intact, held in the space between the sergeant’s ignorance and Roger’s silence.

Inside our small A-frame tent, the canvas walls acted as a veil between these worlds. By day, I was Henry, rigid and disciplined; by night, I could shed the wool and the constraints and the binding, reclaimed by my own skin. It was a strange, private liberation. But our goal for Tunnel Hill wasn’t just to play at war; it was to capture it. We needed the impossible shot—the grit of the front line. We’d scouted a wooden field hospital shack manned by reenactors playing nurses and doctors. The plan was precise. As the battle’s momentum ebbed, I would take a hit and fall precisely in front of a window where my husband was staged with his camera.

The night before the main event, the camp transformed. The air grew thick with the sound of fiddles and the rhythmic thumping of boots on dry earth. I attended the dance as Henry, dressed in my finest period clothes, lingering on the periphery of the Virginia Reel. I kept my distance. I didn’t want to risk a dance with a stranger, nor the scrutiny that might come with it. Then I was introduced to Paul. Now, I’ve changed Paul’s name to protect privacy. Paul, the event organizer and General of the Confederate forces. He was warm, generous, and held an effortless authority. We spoke for several minutes—a soldier and a General, two men of the line. I felt the familiar thrill of the past. Then Roger chuckled, a sound that seemed to shatter the night air, and let the secret slip. Paul’s face didn’t harden with suspicion. Instead, it bloomed into a wide, disarming smile. He threw his head back, his laughter echoing against the dark canvas of the camp. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he explained, his voice thick with genuine delight, “you’re the best darn reenactor here. Your impression fooled me completely, and I respect the hell out of you for that.” The tension that had been coiled in my chest since the morning drill evaporated. I wasn’t an intruder; I was a peer.

[Tintype struck by Vintage Image Studios, 2014. Henry and company]

The Impossible Shot

Seeing the door open, Roger seized the moment. He didn’t hesitate, jumping straight into the mission. “She’s not just here for the drill, Paul. She’s a filmmaker, and she needs to capture this. We want to embed during tomorrow’s battle.” Paul looked at me, no longer seeing Henry, but seeing the filmmaker behind the wool. He considered the request, the weight of his authority as General shifting from defensive to collaborative, and then… “No cameras. The rule is absolute. No film crews, no modern tech on the field; it ruins the experience for everybody.” The disappointment felt like a lead weight, but I looked at Paul, then at Roger, then at Patrick, my husband. “What if there is no film crew?” I …

[Polaroid taken by Patrick Sullivan]

This September 11th, 2026, marks the 25 years since 9/11. Those of us who were in the dangerous ares remember that day as if it happened three years ago…not 25. Trauma etches itself into the hearts and mind and becomes indelible. Everyone of a certain age remembers where they were on that day. Just like Pearl Harbor and the Assassination of JFK. Up until that Tuesday, Union was everything. We were looking at a trajectory that felt almost inevitable: a bigger theater, the buzz of film adaptation, and the exhilarating prospect of attaching names that would finally bring the story to life. It was a project defined by its potential, a promise that felt set in stone. And then, the world went quiet. In the wake of 9/11, the industry didn’t just pause; it hardened. The promise of Union evaporated in the fallout of a city—and a nation—in mourning.

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But silence is a powerful incubator. It was in that period of profound uncertainty, while everything I thought I knew about my career was being dismantled, that I started writing Firefly. It was my first novel.

From Creative Buzz to Stagnation

In late August 2001, life felt like a series of green lights. I was in Tucson, working sound on a short film produced by my Union co-star Caroline, who played Virginia in the stage play. We were young, making art, and surrounded by a circle of new collaborators who felt like family. I had a plan: return to New York in time for Labor Day, head to Gettysburg with my partner, and breathe in the history of the ground I hoped to one day write about.

Gettysburg was everything I feared and everything I needed it to be: hallowed, sobering, and staggering in its scale. We walked those fields with film cameras in hand, capturing ghosts on 35mm long before the convenience of digital files or smartphones.

The Aftermath: A New Creative Direction

By September 10th, I was back in the city, vibrating with the kind of momentum that only artists know. I met a cast mate for dinner, and we sat in a diner in Chelsea until nearly midnight, deconstructing the play, mapping out the film, and speaking as if the big things were already ours to claim. I felt unstoppable. I called my husband to pick me up; the subways felt too sketchy that late. And then, when I got home, I went to sleep, feeling like the world was tilted in my favor.

“If you write it, I can sell it.” That was the last thing the literary agent told me after a show, waiting outside the dressing room while I changed out of costume. I was still writing the adrenaline of the performance, but her words hit harder than the applause. She wasn’t asking if I could write a novel; she was telling me I should. She saw the potential for Union to transcend the stage, to become something that lived on shelves as well as in theaters. That night at the diner on September 10th, that conversation was part of the fuel. We were talking about big things, yes. We were talking about tangible things: contracts, adaptations, novels, a future that felt mapped out in ink.

I woke up on September 11th to a city that felt like it had inhaled a sudden, suffocating silence. The big things we had talked about at the diner just hours before—the agent’s promise, the film adaptation, the novel I had promised to start—didn’t just feel far away; they felt irrelevant.

As the reality of the morning took hold, the momentum behind Union didn’t just stall; it evaporated. The industry I had been navigating, one built on the luxury of imagination and ambitious creative roadmaps, suddenly faced a stark, cold reality where stories about the past felt, for a time, like they had no place in the world.

In the weeks that followed, the hustle of the city was replaced by a heavy, collective mourning. I found myself in a strange kind of professional purgatory as well as shell shock. The energy I had poured into Union—the research, the character work, the late-night diner sessions—had nowhere to land. To deal with the trauma of that day, I needed to engage my brain in something far away. I needed to move from the ghosts of the past to something that could survive the present. I started writing Firefly. It wasn’t the project I had planned, but it was the only one that could breathe in the new atmosphere of the city.

The Dream of Gettysburg

A few nights before everything changed, I had a dream. I was Henry, lost in the suffocating smoke of a Gettysburg battlefield, stumbling through the chaos until I tripped over a weathered cement marker etched with the number 110. I woke up shaking, the image of that cold, gray stone lingering like a physical weight in the room. I spent days trying to map it—the 110th Pennsylvania, the lines of the infantry, the ghosts of the regiment—but the number refused to settle.

In the weeks after the towers fell, the dream ceased to be a mystery. It became a resonance. My husband reminded me of the 110 floors of the World Trade Center. I realized then that I wasn’t just writing about the past; I was walking the perimeter of a threshold between the smoke of a war already fought and the ash of a war just beginning.

As the city fell into a state of stunned paralysis, I began to hear it everywhere—on the news, in the voices of historians, and in the quiet, desperate conversations of my neighbors. They were talking about Gettysburg. They were invoking that hallowed ground—the scale of the sacrifice, the permanence of the loss, the sheer impossibility of the carnage—as the only frame of reference capable of holding the magnitude of what we had just witnessed in downtown Manhattan.

Suddenly, my dream wasn’t just a lingering shadow; the smoke on the television screens and the smoke in my dream began to blur. For 18 months, while we all navigated the wreckage, I held that 110 marker in my mind—a weird, anchor-like symbol, the transition from one era of history to another. Union had been my life’s work up to that point, a promise of a future, but in the face of this new, shared reality, that project lost its footing. I felt untethered, drifting through a landscape of rubble and memory.

I didn’t know it then, but I was trying to find a way to navigate the smoke. I was trying to write my way out of the disaster and back to a place where I could see clearly again.

Creating My Brother’s War

While I was wrestling with the manuscript, I was also racing toward the horizon of the screen. I knew Union was a massive, studio-scale ambition, so I did what any filmmaker with a dream and a tax refund does: I wrote a prequel, stripped it to the bone, and called it My Brother’s War. My partner and I funneled everything we had into it. We were purists at heart, dreaming of 35mm, but the reality of 2001 was a Canon XL1 MiniDV camera and a dream.

[Still image from “My Brother’s War” feature film 2004]

We headed to the Catskills, my reenactment gear packed alongside costumes and a skeleton crew, to our friend’s farmland. I stripped the script of its dialogue, trusting the actors to find the intention, letting them roam the landscape as if we were capturing a documentary of a ghost war. It was my first true proof of concept.

The Truth of the Story

But as I sat in the dark of my editing suite, the world outside was still shifting, and my professional life was hitting its own wall. My literary agent had passed my manuscript up the ladder to her supervisor. I remember the phone call. She was disappointed—not in me, but in the notes that had come back. They were hollow, disconnected from the heart of the story. We both knew the truth. The agency wanted a different path. To get published, I would have to abandon the core of what I had written—a story rooted in the play—and build something entirely new, yet still anchored in that same Civil War soil.

It was the start of a cycle I would brush against for years. That question, “Why is Henry a woman?” was…

[Glassplate struck by Vintage Image Studios. Whit Hamilton at Gettysburg]

From the Stage to the Shadows

The first time I put on a suit of armor, it wasn’t on a battlefield. It was on a dimly lit stage in a black box Manhattan theater, Ensemble Studio Theater to be exact.

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I was playing Joan of Arc, in a play I wrote called The Secret Language of Circumstance.

The transformation wasn’t just about the lines I had written and memorized. It was about the physical displacement of wearing steel. That moment of becoming, where the weight of the metal dictated how I walked, how I breathed, and how I saw the world, stayed with me long after the curtain fell.

It was also how people reacted to me in traditionally male armor. On and off the stage, the shift in perception of who I was and am, was palpable.

It was the spark that led me from the stage to the historical record, and eventually to the mud and heat of Gettysburg, searching for that same impossible clarity of what it meant to be a woman who held a line when the world told her not to.

The theater was my entry point, but it quickly became an obsession with a question: How much of this struggle was performance, and how much was raw, grit-to-the-bone reality?

I wanted to write a uniquely American story with that same Joan of Arc intensity—a woman standing between herself and an encroaching abyss. But I hesitated.

Was it actually realistic? Would historians and theater folk laugh at me for such an outlandish idea?

The 400 Women

Then I dove into the archives. I expected to find a few outliers, a handful of myths.

Instead, I found a pattern. Over 400 documented cases of women who fought disguised as men during the Civil War alone. Most had not been discovered until after they were dead and buried.

And as the records deepened, I realized that 400 was almost certainly a low ball estimate.

Women haven’t just been present in war; they’ve been fighting in the shadows of every conflict, doing what they had to do when the world demanded they stay in the light of strict gender roles.

So, I wrote a play, called Union.

The Line in the Sand

The bridge from the page to the field happened in Cape May, New Jersey. I was visiting a friend’s childhood home, a place anchored in history. When her mother mentioned the Civil War living history event at Cold Springs, I didn’t hesitate. I had to go.

But as I walked the grounds, speaking with the reenactors and breathing in the atmosphere, I hit a wall.

I wanted to immerse myself in that world, to understand the tactile reality of the soldier’s life, but I was met with the reality of the community: women weren’t allowed on the field.

The boundaries were set in stone.

I was relegated to the roles of the era: the nurse, the civilian wife, the observer, maybe the prostitute.

None of which allowed me to truly test what I had been researching.

It was a frustrating yet clarifying moment. I realized that to understand the women who broke those boundaries, I had to understand exactly what they were breaking, and why the line in the sand was drawn so firmly in the first place.

I will note that almost all reenactment units forbade women in the ranks on both sides. The Federal army seemed to have a vehement revulsion to women in uniform. So much so that one woman disguised in a blue uniform at Antietam battlefield was discovered going to the ladies room in the historic park where the event took place. She was promptly thrown out of the park.

Lauren Cook Wike, formerly Lauren Cook Burgess.

She was expelled from the North-South Skirmish Association at Antietam in 1989 for being a woman, filed a federal tax discrimination lawsuit against the organization, and documented her fight in the book, “An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers.” The legal outcome was a decisive victory for Lauren Cook Burgess.

Crossing the Boundary

Back home in Alabama, a casual mention from my father about a local reenactment at Tannehill State Park sparked the next phase of the journey.

I was still carrying the physical remnants of my role as Joan.

My hair was short, my frame slender, and I carried the research in my head like a secret.

I showed up at the event, a self-identified “researcher” in the making.

I was surprised by how quickly the walls of the community opened up. I met a captain of a Boy Scout unit portraying the Company A 62nd Alabama Volunteer Infantry. And when I told him about my screenplay and my drive to understand the experience...

He didn’t see a nurse or an observer. He saw a recruit.

“You can borrow the gear,” he told me, gesturing to a musket and the accoutrements. “Fall in.”

We couldn’t source a full uniform in time for that first day, and I spent it as an observer, watching them drill from the sidelines. The captain mentioned they were headed to the 140th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg over the 4th of July, 2003.

I was living in New York City at the time; the battlefield was practically in my backyard. I bought an A-frame tent before I even got home.

The weather had other plans though, heavy rains and flooding in Pennsylvania forced a rescheduling of the 140th Anniversary from July to August.

My initial connection, Roger, the captain, called with the bad news. His unit couldn’t make the new dates. I felt that familiar sinking sensation, but then he offered a lifeline: “I know a guy.”

By the time August arrived, I had fully committed.

I had sourced my own uniform, musket, brogans, and the heavy leather of the accoutrements. I was no longer a curious observer; I was geared up.

My co-star, Dana, who had been cast as Virginia in my brother’s war film, was rightfully worried.

I was about to drive solo into an enormous, sprawling event of thousands of men, effectively in drag, to meet people I had never spoken to in my life.

The fear was visceral. I spent a little over an hour walking through the labyrinth of canvas asking for a name no one seemed to know.

The temptation to just turn around, drive the hours back to the safety of Brooklyn, and call it a failed experiment grew louder and louder.

I was walking back to my truck, defeated, when a voice cut through the noise of the camp. They had found him. The captain of the Arkansas unit was standing there. And just like that, the barrier collapsed. Roger had let this captain in on my secret. So I had a pass.

[Me at Gettysburg]

The Reality of the Field

For the next three and a half days, I would drill, and march, and fight five battles including Pickett’s Charge, as Henry.

My unit for the long weekend, the Northwest 15th Arkansas Infantry, camped campaigner style. No luxuries, no comforts. They slept on the ground or under lean-to’s.

I was the only one with a small tent, a choice that seemed like a soft indulgence until the skies opened up.

As the rains turned the battlefield into a mire, I was the only one with a dry square of earth.

It was a strange, silent moment of irony when the father of the unit’s drummer boy—a man who had been visibly hostile after discovering my secret—sheepishly approached my tent. He asked if he could store his son’s expensive drum inside to keep it safe from the deluge.

I agreed, and in that moment, the hostility vanished. I was no longer an intruder; I was a protector of the unit’s tools.

The rest of the regiment remained none the wiser. But the field was brutal. Marching thirty miles through heat and humidity in stiff, new brogans turned my heels into raw, weeping wounds.

During the chaos of a battle, I found myself marching shoulder-to-shoulder with a doctor.

He didn’t see a woman. He saw a struggling recruit.

He walked me through the field medicine of the 1860s—how to dress the blisters, how to ration my canteen, and the vital necessity of sipping water every ten minutes, thirsty or not.

That advice was likely the only thing that kept me out of the EMS trucks that were constantly ferrying men away, overcome by the brutal d…

December 27th, 1866…

History isn’t just written in dry textbooks—it’s lived thread by thread, frame by frame, and choice by difficult choice.

Welcome to Between the Takes.

This publication is an ongoing multimedia journey into the grit, shadows, and tactile reality of the 19th century. Through fictional historical letters, reenactor notes, and filmmaking memoirs, we are pulling back the curtain on the research, the handcrafted sets and locations, and the cinematic storytelling that brings a world like Henry Kieler’s Diary to life. It is being developed into a feature film called “Heart Mountain”, the third in a trilogy of features chronicling the meeting and deep abiding relationship between Henry and Virginia.

During the Civil war Grace took on her dead brother Henry’s identity in order to survive in the ranks of the rebel army. Wounded, she deserts to find peace living as a man until s/he crosses paths with Virginia, a widow. They keep each other’s secrets and form an unbreakable bond.

Watch the promo above for a glimpse behind the scenes, and subscribe to follow the journey as we build this project from the ground up.