Thank you to my editor, Harry Kirchner, for embracing The Dig and shepherding the manuscript to completion. Much appreciation to Dan Smetanka and the entire Counterpoint team for their enthusiasm and excitement about this novel, and to Margo La Pierre for early editorial feedback. Huge thanks also to my literary agent, Susan Golomb, her assistant, Madeline Ticknor, and the staff at Writers House for all their support.
Thank you to my village of brilliant, trusted readers and writers: Marina Budhos, Stephanie Carlson, Alice Elliott Dark, Susan Davis, Alex Enders, Bonnie Friedman, Gina Hyams, Pamela Redmond, Clara Baker, and S. Kirk Walsh, and to the Ragdale Foundation for the gift of time and space where the earliest version of the story was born. Special thanks to Christina Baker Kline, who has championed this novel every step of the way. Without Christina’s incisive insights and tireless partnership, there would be no Antonia King.
Vanja Pantic Oflazoglu generously shared memories of her early childhood in Sarajevo before her family fled the Bosnian genocide for the United States, helping me deepen the picture of Toni’s first years. The Post-Conflict Research Center (Centar za postkonfliktna istraživanja), in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is an incredible resource for survivor narratives and peace education; thanks to Caroline Hopper Jany for introducing me to Vanja and the Post-Conflict Research Center, and thanks to my sister singers in the Yale Slavic Chorus, circa 1987, for the gift of Bosnian folk music that sparked my imagination as a writer decades later. For additional scholarship about the Bosnian genocide, I referenced Voices from Srebrenica by Ann Petrila and Hasan Hasanovic, The Bone Woman by Clea Koff, and Bosnia in Limbo by Borja Lasheras. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali helped inform Bashiir Abdi’s journey from Mogadishu to Minnesota, as did hours of reading news stories of Somali refugees building community across the state over the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
The poem that Toni recalls Evelyn quoting on page 39 is “Shapechangers in Winter” by Margaret Atwood.
Thank you to my Becket, Massachusetts family for their cheers and consolations throughout the multiyear process of bringing The Dig into the world: Linda Burt, Jess Burt Donohue, Delayna Feuerzeig, Tessa Ury, Mark Rose, Ted Rose, Craig Feuerzeig, Jesse Donohue, Ann Birmingham, Mari Brown, Eli Donohue, Eli Rose, and Beckett Rose. Thanks to my Montclair, New Jersey friends for the same: Felicia Williams, Skye Amory, Jong Sook Nee, Darin Wacs, and members of both the Montclair Writers Group and my book group (twenty-two years and still going strong). My late father, Bo Burt, modeled living a writer’s life and inspired me to persevere. And finally, my boundless gratitude to Joshua Cohen, for all that lies ahead.