Fiction Scribe

Happy Friday, everyone!

Welcome to this week’s author interview. I had the pleasure of speaking to historical fiction novelist Celia Hayes. She’s here to talk about her life as an author and her book To Truckee’s Trail. I hope you’ll join me in welcoming her to Fiction Scribe.

Hello and thank you for stopping at Fiction Scribe, Ms. Hayes. Tell the readers a bit about yourself.

I live in Texas, after retiring from the Air Force, where I was a military broadcaster and public affairs technician. I grew up in California, but spent most of my time in the military living and travelling overseas. The movers had a bet going, the last time I moved – how many boxes of books they would pack. It topped out at 65.

What brought you into the world of writing? When did you start?

I started when I was about thirteen, actually – knowing that I wanted to be a writer, but I began to think that I ought to have something interesting to write about first – hence the military. Drastic, eh? I did a lot of writing in the military, actually: I did radio news, and spot production, training materials and video briefings.

Every time I turned around, there was a requirement for me to write something! A couple of years after I retired, I had a chance to start contributing to a military weblog, Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief (Now The Daily Brief at www.ncobrief.com) – and that is where I seriously started writing for a wider audience, and acquiring fans. I set myself a personal requirement to write an essay of 500-1,000 words for it three times a week, on anything that took my fancy and interest.

You’re here today to talk about your book To Truckee’s Trail. Would you tell us a bit about the book?

It’s one of the great unknown adventures of the frontier – the very first wagon-train party to bring wagons over the Sierra Nevada to California. In 1844 they discovered and scouted the route used by subsequent parties of emigrants, all the way from the Humboldt Sink, up along the Truckee River and over present-day Donner Pass. Like the Donner Party, they were also caught by winter snow, forced to break up into smaller groups and nearly starving while elements of their party spent the winter camping in twenty feet of snow.

Unlike the Donner Party, they managed to hang together and extricate themselves from a potentially lethal situation. The novel is an exploration of how they managed that challenge, and of what possessed fifty otherwise sensible people to even consider putting their children and everything they owned into eleven small wagons and of walking across two thousand miles of howling wilderness. There’s something magnificent about that, you know.

What inspired you to write To Truckee’s Trail? Where did the idea begin?

I kicked around the notion of writing something about an early wagon-party of emigrants when I was in college, after reading a short piece by George R. Stewart about the Stephens-Townsend-Greenwood-Murphy party in American Heritage. Here was this magnificent story, two years before the Donner Party disaster, with the same kind of people and the same circumstances that did not turn into a disaster! And yet no one ever heard of them! I also wanted to do something focusing on the women emigrants – how on earth they coped, and how keen they even were on the notion.

But it really came into focus when I did an essay lamenting the sad state of movies on offer in the spring of 2002, and I outlined the story of the Stephens-Townsend Party. It turned into a four-part essay (the basis for the Amipedia entry about them) and one of my readers emailed me that she was on her way to a class reunion and she knew a lot of people in Hollywood – I should do a movie treatment version, and she would show it around. So I did and she did, but nothing much came of it until she showed it to another friend about a year afterwards.

That friend is a writer himself and he loved the whole concept, but he advised me to do it as a book. He coached me through doing a proposal and a chapter outline and even suggested the conceit of Doctor Townsend’s diary as a hook to hang the story on. I had hardly gotten two or three chapters into writing it, when I was let go from the corporation where I worked full time; and I said to myself – Hurrah! I can stay home and work on that third chapter! It took me another two months to finish, edit and revise.

What character do you relate to the most and why?

To Isabella Patterson – she is not your usual heroine for this kind of adventure; she’s an older woman, the mother of six children – feisty, independent and very strong-minded. She is taking her family to join her husband who is already in California, and although she is travelling with her aged father, she is the wagon-owner and takes no guff from him – or anyone else. She owns her wagon and stock and because of that, she commands respect in an otherwise male organization. She has no problem exercising authority; her attitude is like mine when I was on active duty, which was, ‘I have the right and the authority; if that’s a problem for you – tough. You’re the one with the problem.’

What is your favourite part of the book?

Chapter 14, I think – “Snowfall�- where they must make the hardest choice of all. They have made it over the Sierra Nevada but the first winter storms is dropping several feet of snow on them, they are lost in the mountains still; they have split the party twice already – once to send a small group ahead for help, and once to leave behind half their wagons and extraneous gear with three young men to guard them over the winter.

Their remaining oxen are spent and hardly have strength to move, they are nearly out of food, the men are exhausted… and one of the wives is in labour. They cannot move the wagons any further but they can’t carry the children and the remaining supplies on their backs… so they make camp and sort out what they will do next. Their leader, Elisha Stephens – who is a rough and inarticulate frontiersman-, makes this speech outlining the situation and the only means they have of assuring everyone’s survival.

He tells them they need to make one more gamble, the kind that men don’t like to make – but that they were gamblers from the moment they crossed the river from Council Bluffs. They have just a little way more to go… it’s a lovely plain but eloquent speech from a man who doesn’t say much. I made up every word of it!

What kind of research did you do for the book? Did you enjoy the research?

Oh, the usual stack of books about the emigrant trail and pioneer diaries and reminiscences – a stack nearly as tall as myself, plus a number of websites with pictures of some of the places along the trail, and my own memories of travelling across parts of the country – the Great Basin, the desert and the Sierra Nevada. In one way it was easy enough to get a sense of what the early emigrants experienced and of the conditions along the trail in general since there are just tons of resources out there. But it was very hard finding specifics about the Stephens-Townsend party; most of the first-hand stuff is drawn from what one of the participants – who was about seventeen years old at the time – told his daughter thirty years later. I had a bare outline of events, a time-line and some sketchy details of personalities involved. It took me months just to find a little pamphlet about the Murphy family listing everyone’s name and birth-dates!

There is an expression used in intelligence circles; “walk back the cat� which in one sense means you start from the conclusion and work backwards trying to figure out how you got there. Researching to “To Truckee’s Trail� meant working backwards from a few little scraps of the known and making guesses about the unknown elements of the story. I enjoyed it tremendously; there is something very satisfactory about fitting together the pieces and creating the devices that fit it all together to make a whole picture

What draws you about writing historical fiction?

I love history, and reading about challenging times, and what ordinary people did to cope in extraordinary times. Really, every time is interesting and every person has the capacity in them to be extraordinary.

Are there any authors who have inspired you in your writing?

I like writers who write so beautifully about a place – Rosemary Sutcliffe writing about the north of England in “Rider on a White Horse� and Mary Stewart writing about Greece in “My Brother Michael� or “The Moonspinners� comes to mind – that you can close your eyes and see it. That does date me, doesn’t it?

And the other writer – just as a counterweight – is George McDonald Fraser; the Flashman series. Rollickingly funny, but totally accurate; he even has footnotes!

What are you working on now?

Another relatively unknown frontier epic - “Adelsverein� - the story of the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country. Hardly anyone has heard about that, either! In the mid 1840ies a group of well-intentioned German noblemen had the bright idea to take up a land grant in central Texas and fill it up with German farmers and craftsmen. They got as far as to bring over more than 7,000 settlers and families… and essentially just dumped them onto the Texas frontier. It started as a single volume but it got so interesting and there was just so much that happened to them that it’s three volumes now. One of the fans nicknamed it “Barsetshire With Cypress Trees and a Lot of Side-arms!�

What are your dreams for your writing?

To have enough new readers for my books that I can stay at home and write full-time! Staying at home writing full time, every day – that would be perfect!

When you’re not writing novels, what do you do? How do you find time to write?

I work part time at Texas Public Radio’s classical station one day a week, and during the week I work half-days for various small businesses doing marketing and office administration. I also write for Blogger News Network (www.bloggernews.net ) doing book and DVD reviews, and manage the website for the Independent Authors Guild, which is a sort of writers cooperative. On a good productive week I have five afternoons to chain myself to a computer and write! The pension helps with living expenses, but not as much as people would think!

Do you have any advice for writers?

Write, and read; we need our stories and we need people to tell them.

Thank you very much for your time.

**
For a free sample chapter of To Truckee’s Trail, visit Celia Hayes’ website.

**
If you liked this interview, check out my interview with Wendy J. Dunn