A Visit with Jane Kirkpatrick

Winner of the Wrangler, National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Christy, Spur, Willa and Reader's Choice awards, Jane Kirkpatrick has lived the lives of her characters on a homestead at Starvation Point in rural Oregon, seven miles from her mailbox and 11 miles from the nearest paved road. During those 26 years, she wrote and published 19 books. 

Jane is giving away a copy of her new release, The Daughter's Walk, to one of our blog visitors who leaves a comment.

Jane, tell us about The Daughter’s Walk.

The Daughter's Walk is fiction based on a factual historical walk made by a mother and daughter in 1896. They accepted a wager to walk from Spokane to New York City and if they could do it, paying their way (they started out with five dollars each) they'd earn $10,000 from the fashion industry. That was all verified along with a footnote in a book called Bold Spirit:  Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America by Linda L Hunt in 2003. The footnote said when they returned, Clara changed her name and was separated from her family for more than twenty years.  So what's the book about?  An amazing journey, a relationship between mother and daughter, a daughter's walk toward independence, a family schism and reconciliation.  I researched, spoke with descendants and was soon writing about the fur industry in the early 1900s which was intriguing since I'd done a series several years ago about a woman involved in the fur industry in 1811 as part of the Astor expedition and beyond.  I love the trails writing takes us!

You actually homesteaded land in Oregon? How did that come about?

It wasn't the official "homesteading" of the land act giving 160 acres to people who would build a house and remain there for five years.  Instead it was my husband's dream to see if we could develop on and make a living from 160 remote acres that had nothing on it when we bought it but twelve foot tall sagebrush, rattlesnakes, rimrocks, the John Day River and the promise of a spring.  It was also a spiritual journey as we felt the call of this land.  I describe it as stepping out onto a cloud of faith believing we wouldn't fall through.  And we didn't.  It was the greatest risk of my life leaving my job as a mental health director and my husband left his occupation as a builder of other people's homes to go there.  I was worried that we'd kill each other down in that canyon and be dead for weeks before anyone knew we were dead!  That move changed my life and began my writing career proving one can write from anywhere, even at the end of eleven miles of dirt road.

After 26 years we left this past November.  We still have the ranch but frankly it became more and more costly to maintain it as a working ranch with cattle, irrigating alfalfa, making and selling hay -- we were far from markets. We'd tried other things like growing watermelons commercially and planting a vineyard (that got burned up in a range fire). My husband turned 81 and had been air-lifted out of the ranch twice for significant health complications and I really liked the idea of being closer than 52 miles to the nearest hospital. It's been a bitter sweet grief to leave that life behind but we have no regrets despite the challenges we had in building our lives there.  My first book, Homestead (1991) is a memoir about our experience and in 2005 it was reissued with a new fourth section. It says it all.

Tell us about your mental health work on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon.

After the first 18 months or so of building on our homestead, putting in power lines, digging our own phone line seven miles long, twice as it didn't work the first time, harnessing a spring and building a house, the money we'd set aside for living was gone.  One of us had to get a job.  This gift arrived in the mail (before we had a phone) asking if I could implement a grant the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs had received to develop services for children with disabilities.  It was supposed to be a year- long project, one day a week with a 2.25 hour commute one way from the ranch.  But my work there expanded until I was there three days a week for 17 years. I lived in a trailer and wrote early in the morning (4:00 AM). My work involved counseling families whose children had significant disabilities and helping them maneuver through the service systems and identify their strengths as families.

I also did staff training for the nearly 100 mostly Indian women working in the early childhood program there and conferred  with classroom teachers on mental health issues. I felt honored and privileged to be invited into people's lives to talk with them about their children.  I even got to help deliver a baby there!  I moved my parents there to the assisted living facility when that time came.  They were the first non-Indian people to join the facility and both died there. I maintain close connections with many people even though I officially left 9 years ago to write full time. They have a saying that once you have reservation dirt in your shoes you can never leave. They put a pound inside my shoes at my going-away party, and I'm grateful.

How many speaking engagements do you conduct each year and what topics do you touch upon?

Maybe fifty or so plus book signings and author "visits" by phone to book groups. I spoke to the NATO wives by satellite phone as their book club read A Name of Her Own.  It was cool. Topics?  A big one is the power of story in our lives and the importance of finding ways to voice those stories. I might present about Enduring Stories or Changing Stories or Wilderness Stories or Hardiness Stories, even Credit Stories (as in the Greek Credo meaning "To believe")  all of which have developed during researching and writing about actual historical men and especially women. I do a lot of inspirational speaking which to me is giving people things to "breathe in" which is what inspiration means, words to sustain people during difficult times. My international presentations have included workshops on silencing the negative voices (harpies, I call them) that keep us from listening to that inner voice, seeking our dreams, and the art of imagining women's history  since we often have so little of historical women's stories.. I draw on my mental health background but also on life experiences and fears I had and what helped me overcome them.  

What do you foresee for the future of Western historical novels? Have you noticed a decrease in sales? 

I'll talk about the sales thing first:  Yes.  A decrease of about 30%. My editor tries to assure me that it isn't just my titles but all print titles are off while ebooks and audio are increasing. I'm grateful most of my books have an audio version and are ebooks.  My editor says where once a book distributor might order 4000 copies of a first print run, now they'll order 1500 so that's a huge drop.  As for the future of Western historical novels, I continue to see a future for them.  Because a good western has components in character development and story structure that can appeal to mystery readers, history buffs, action adventure readers and romance too.  Books with strong, intriguing characters regardless of gender, sell.  And stories like Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss transcend purely Western readers and find homes in the hearts of people who love quality writing and a well-told story. If we write those kinds of stories, I think there'll continue to be a market.

You’ve received a number of awards. Which means the most to you?

No one has ever asked me that before :)  I'd have to say the Wrangler Award from the then National Cowboy Hall of Fame.  Now it's called the Western Heritage and National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City.  It was for my first novel, A Sweetness to the Soul.  That story was of a ranching couple in Oregon in the mid 1800s  and their life with the Wasco, Warm Springs and Paiute people.  I worked with those same tribes and their side of the story had never been told. It was a story of living with integrity with one's neighbors. In addition to winning the Wrangler it's been on Oregon's 100 Best Books published in the past 200 years and Oregon's 150, one of the best books chosen to celebrate the state's 150th birthday. The award was unknown to me when the book was selected and I've felt honored and humbled to be on a list with Barbara Kingsolver and Larry McMurtry among others.  Most of all, it was an award that told me to simply listen to my heart and tell the story I'd been given to tell.  It also said someone beside my mom loved it!

What piques your interest most when deciding on a new writing project? 

I find something strange and thoroughly explore it. I'm always looking for the unfinished story or the "how did that happen?" part of a story.  I love the research, uncovering mysteries and letting those tidbits lead me down new paths in ways I might not have expected.  Just as I want a reader to be kept interested and surprised, as I writer, I like being surprised, too. 

Advice to fledgling historical writers.  Pay attention to the story. Let the history be the spine and your characters the flesh and blood and the story be the heart.  Don't listen to the harpies saying no one reads westerns any more or to those who might say, "You're a writer?  Really?  What have you published?"  You don't have to be published to be a writer, you just have to write.

Thank you, Jane, for a pleasurable visit.

You can visit Jane at the following sites:

 http:// www.jkbooks.com.

http://janeswordsofencouragement.blogspot.com/  (Jane says her dog also has a blog and he has more followers than she does:  http://www.bodaciousbothedog.blogspot.com)  http://www.facebook.com/theauthorjanekirkpatrick and

http://twitter.com/JaneKirkpatrick

You can also sign up for her monthly newsletter called "Story Sparks" at her website.  It's published monthly and includes a book review, her writing update, and inspiration.

A Visit with Dale L. Walker

Dale L. Walker has been called a great bookman by his friend, Richard S. Wheeler. I agree. Among his Macmillian/Forge titles are The Lost Revolutionary, Eldorado, Legends and Lies: Great Mysteries of the American West; The Boys of ‘98: Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders; Bear Flag Rising: The Conquest of California, 1846; Pacific Destiny: The Four-Century Journey to the Oregon Country, and The Calamity Papers: Western Myths and Cold Cases.

Dale, why did a boy from Decatur, Illinois, become interested in writing about the West?

In 1959, after four-years in the Navy, I came to El Paso to visit my dad, a career army sergeant stationed at Fort Bliss. I loved the town from the start. It had two daily newspapers and newspaper work is what I aspired to. So, I stayed, ended up in the news business, got married, earned a journalism degree at the university here and wrote a lot of freelance magazine stuff in my spare time.

Western stuff? Yes, from the get-go. El Paso is an old, classic Western border town and living here makes everybody a sort of historian. I soaked it up.

How did you make the leap from television news reporter and university press director to writing biographies and a diverse array of nonfiction books?

That progression was more of a 50-year stroll than a leap. I took a TV news writing job because it paid more than newspapering and I had a family to support. The university job, as director of the News Bureau, fell in my lap as did the work I did as director of Texas Western Press. The books were an outgrowth of magazine writing — always my first love.

How did your work evolve between your first New York Times book review for your first book, The Lost Revolutionary and Eldorado, your gold rush book in 2003?

Thirty-six years separated those two reviews. I rode the coattails of my mentor, Richard O’Connor, in writing The Lost Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed. The book was published in 1967 and got a lot of critical attention — New York Times, New Yorker, the Atlantic, Saturday Review, Nation — but sold so poorly O’Connor and I never earned a dime outside the advance Harcourt, Brace, paid.

And Eldorado?

Thanks to my agent Nat Sobel, I began writing books for the Macmillan imprint, Forge Books, in 1991. The CEO of Forge, Tom Doherty, is a brilliant, history-minded publisher and I think liked the books I was writing for him despite the fact that he publishes mostly fiction. Eldorado: The California Gold Rush came from a proposal I wrote which Nat Sobel sold to Tom Doherty. Not very romantic, but the book business rarely is.

Which book do you consider your best and which was the most difficult to research and write?

My best book was the most difficult. In the late 60s my collaborator on Lost Revolutionary, Richard O’Connor put me onto the story of the Ohio-born war correspondent with the lilting Irish name of Januarius MacGahan. "He needs a biographer," O’Connor said, adding that a book on MacGahan would be tough to research and tough to sell once written. But he said. "You will love his story." In fact, I loved his story so much I invested 18 years of on-and-off work to do the research, write the book, and find a publisher.

Who was Januarius MacGahan?

That was the question I started with. Nobody, including me, had ever heard of him. In his lifetime of but 34 years, MacGahan rose from Ohio farmboy to become among the greatest war correspondents America ever produced. For the New York Herald and London Daily News he covered wars in France, Spain, Central Asia and the Balkans, and took part in an arctic expedition. For his writings on the "Turkish atrocities" in Bulgaria in 1876 and the Russo-Turkish War that followed, his grave marker in New Lexington, Ohio, reads "MacGahan: Liberator of Bulgaria." He died of typhus in Constantinople in 1878.

I'm intrigued by your Mary Edwards Walker book. Tell us about it.

Mary Edwards Walker (no relation) was among the first women to earn a medical degree and the only woman ever awarded the Congressional  Medal of Honor, America's highest award for wartime valor. She was a Civil War battlefield surgeon, in the thick of the war: the aftermath of the Bull Run battles, at Chancellorsville, Chickamauga, and other engagements, and spent six months in a Confederate prison, during which time she ministered to wounded soldiers, both Union and Rebel. She was also a social reformer, a foe of tobacco, hard liquor, and corsets and a campaigner for women's rights.

You served as president of Western Writers of America. How important are such organizations to a writer’s career?

Very important. They give a writer the opportunity to make contacts with editors, publishers, and agents, and to make friends with other writers. I owe a great debt to WWA in the life-long friends I have collected along the way.

Who most influenced your own work?

As to a literary influence Jack London’s life and works affected me deeply. Every writer should read his Martin Eden, a brutally truthful novel about a writer’s journey from abject failure to bitter success. It is as fresh and meaningful today as it was in 1909 when it was first published.

What did your position as director of Texas Western Press encompass?

The press, a division of the University of Texas at El Paso, was a small, old, and respected academic publisher of books on Southwestern U.S. history. We published up to ten books a year with a staff of no more than four people. I served as editor of all manuscripts our editorial board accepted, dealt with budgets, publicity, and all aspects of publishing from raw manuscript to finished book.

Who are some of the well-known authors you’ve edited?

I worked for over 20 years as a freelance fiction editor for my own publisher, Forge Books of New York. Among the writers assigned to me were Richard Wheeler, Win Blevins, Norman Zollinger, Michelle Black, Lana Harrigan, Max Evans, and Elmer Kelton.

What are some of the worst mistakes that writers make?

Not reading enough — there is no such thing as a good writer who does not read; and failing to research — to recognize that even fiction writers need to get their facts right.

Advice to fledgling writers of the West?

Beyond that obvious one about keeping your day job, I’d advice fledgling writers of the West to branch out, write romance, mystery, science fiction, all genres, including non-fiction. Western fiction is a cyclical thing, an undependable source of income to say the least.

Your website, blog, Facebook, Twitter urls?

I am your friendly representative of the Jurassic Age: I have no website, do not blog, face or twitter, and do not know what a url is.

© 2011 Jean Henry Mead