Joel H. Morris used historical fiction to unravel “Macbeth” mystery

Joel H. Morris is the author of the USA Today bestseller, ”All Our Yesterdays,” his debut novel. He teaches English at Cherry Creek High School. Prior to that, he taught college and worked as an officer aboard small maritime expedition ships. His essays, translations, and stories have appeared in Literary Hub, CrimeReads, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He lives near Denver, Colorado.

This book won the 2025 Colorado Book Award for Historical Fiction.

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SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory – what’s it about and what inspired you to write it? 

Joel H. Morris: This is the story of Lady Macbeth’s early marriage to Macbeth and her experience as a mother. I’d been thinking about Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” for years — it’s one of my favorite plays both to watch and to teach. With its witches and ghosts and plotting, it’s spellbinding! 

I found myself always getting stuck on Lady Macbeth’s mention of knowing “what it is to love the babe” that she once nursed. What happened to that baby? A little digging into the history and legend gives an answer to the question of what happened to her son, but not the answer to Shakespeare’s erasure of him. The kernel of this novel was in trying to answer that question.

SunLit: Place the excerpt you selected in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole and why did you select it?

Morris: This excerpt focuses on Lady Macbeth’s girlhood, a fictionalized version of some of the historical facts of her life, including her first marriage. I wanted to capture the spooky atmosphere of an imagined medieval Scotland, and so she is chasing ghosts through the forest near her father’s castle. 

It’s a sample that shows conflict between her royal position (she is a princess, granddaughter to a fallen king) and the imprisonment she feels in a male-dominated world. She begins her life as an outcast and grows to become one of the most powerful (maybe the most powerful) women in the kingdom.

SunLit: What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write? 

Morris: I immersed myself in the play and in Scottish history. The story began out of my own questions about the Macbeths, and I wanted answers about Lady Macbeth especially. If there is a gothic feel to some of the novel, it could be because I also went back and read some of my old favorites: “Jane Eyre,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Rebecca.” They probably had an influence.

SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?

Morris: It’s a historical novel, and initially I was focused on getting the facts of that history right. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth really existed. She married Macbeth after he killed her husband. She already had a son, and Macbeth adopted that son. That was the core of the story. 

But I learned that the story needed to take precedence over the history. The characters had to be imagined in ways that would certainly separate them from the facts to make the story work — I wanted more ghosts and witches anyway! Soon the challenges became fun puzzles to solve.

SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?

Morris: The biggest challenge was gaining the confidence to write from Lady Macbeth’s perspective. I love her as a character. I always assumed there was much more to her than the villain she is in Shakespeare’s play. I wanted to do her justice.  

I also didn’t want readers to have to know the play to be able to enjoy my novel, so I tried to make her a character who could be understood as her own person, one whose motivations might even be sympathetic. 

SunLit: What do you want readers to take from this book? 

Morris: I hope they’ll be swept up in a story about a strong woman in a dark and superstitious time, a woman who is trying to be a mother, a wife, and a leader when so many forces — including fate — seem to be working against her.

SunLit: The title of your novel is taken from a famous speech in “Macbeth,” the one that begins, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…” Without giving anything away, how does the meaning of “All our yesterdays” inform the events of your novel?

Morris: Macbeth delivers that speech right after his servant informs him of Lady Macbeth’s death. It is Macbeth’s last comment about his wife in the play, and it sparks his consideration on the brevity of life, how ephemeral human existence is. 

In my imagining of Lady Macbeth, she is tormented by the past and how it has shaped her and led her to such fateful outcomes. All her decisions, her “yesterdays,” have affected her in what she has endured, what she has lost. I like to think that is true of all of us. All our yesterdays — the time that has accumulated and brought us to the present — are where we can find illumination into how we became who we are. 

SunLit: Tell us about your next project. 

Morris: Another novel of historical fiction, but not so distant in terms of time and place. It’s set in the Ozarks in the 1920s and focuses on a lawyer defending a woman who has killed her husband — only that might not be the whole story…

A few more quick items

Currently on your nightstand for recreational reading: “Milkman,” by the Belfast writer Anna Burns

First book you remember really making an impression on you as a kid: “Encyclopedia Brown.” I’ve always loved mysteries.

Best writing advice you’ve ever received: Just write. Put one word in front of another, no matter how good or bad you think that next word is.

Favorite fictional literary character: Jane Eyre

Literary guilty pleasure (title or genre): I mentioned mysteries, but I refuse to feel guilty about it!

Digital, print or audio – favorite medium to consume literature: Print, but there’s nothing like a good audiobook for long car rides or long walks

One book you’ve read multiple times: “The Great Gatsby”

Other than writing utensils, one thing you must have within reach when you write: The family cat

Best antidote for writer’s block: Reading a good book

Most valuable beta reader: Anne Morris — former English teacher and tremendously supportive partner

Type of Story: Q&A

An interview to provide a relevant perspective, edited for clarity and not fully fact-checked.