All Behind the Book essays

In her new historical novel, Hour Glass, Michelle Rene draws readers into the wild town of Deadwood, South Dakota, where a boy named Jimmy Glass and his little sister, Hour, seek help for their father, who has fallen dangerously ill with smallpox. In Deadwood they encounter the notorious Calamity Jane—but this is a very different Jane from what readers might expect. Rene shares a look behind the characters that breathe life into this Wild West tale.

The rough draft of Hour Glass was written in 16 days. Yes, you read that correctly. That is not to say the research took that long, just the writing itself, but most people don’t believe you can write anything of value in that short amount of time.

The book was a desperate outpouring of emotions molded into a concise story. I had recently lost my grandmother, who is named in the dedication, and her passing filled me with a litany of emotions. Inside my journey of grief, I discovered sorrow, beauty and even humor. The loving family that surrounded me was my lifeline and a big inspiration for the book.

Why write about Calamity Jane? I’ve been fascinated with her for a long time, the buckskin-wearing woman of the West who could drink like a cowboy and swear like one, too. If you look back through history, we are drawn to stories about women like Jane. Those brave souls who bucked tradition and blazed their own path in the world. Calamity Jane did so with a pistol in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.

There are not many hard facts about the woman, which made my job both challenging and liberating. The way of the Old West was that of oral history, and the exploits of legendary characters like Calamity Jane were often exaggerated, especially by Jane herself. This is liberating in that I had more artistic license with her story, but challenging in that I desperately wanted to paint an accurate representation of the time. To write such a woman as brazen and drunk would be only part of the story. The other side, one that Jane rarely spoke of, was her kindness. She was known to be charitable, and the city of Deadwood credits her for selflessly caring for the victims of the smallpox epidemic of 1876. Who better to represent my story than a generous soul who fought mightily and could laugh in the face sorrow?

On to the subject of my title character, Hour. As far as I know, there aren’t any autistic characters written into Old West stories, and I believe they deserve representation. Of course, that is not the only reason for writing a character such as Hour. My own son is autistic. When I wrote the first draft of this book, he hadn’t been diagnosed, but we were seeing the signs, and doctors were preparing us for what was next.

Hour is not exactly like my son, but Jimmy’s love and fear for his sister represents what I was feeling at the time. He desperately wants to protect her from the world, knowing it can be a harsh place, unfeeling toward her temperament. Many of the rewrites came after my son’s diagnosis and after the shock of it wore off. Those of you who have faced a team of psychiatrists who are explaining your beautiful child is on the spectrum will understand the barrage of emotions that follow. The fear, the love and, yes, even the relief to finally know the truth. It wasn’t until I stopped reeling from the diagnosis that I was able to go back and flesh out the amazing girl that was Hour and not just focus on Jimmy’s love for her.

Though Hour Glass is about Calamity Jane, Jimmy Glass and Hour, the deeper theme is family. Even in the rough and tumble world of Deadwood in the 1870s, a loving family can grow with the most unlikely of people.

In her second novel, Susan Henderson writes about the realities and dignities of death through the story of a small town, its residents and one shy misfit, the daughter of a mortician. Henderson is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize.

In my new novel, The Flicker of Old Dreams, I wanted to explore the death of a small town in rural America. And I got it into my head that the best narrator for this story would be a mortician because she could look death in the eye without flinching.

Of course, I knew nothing about the funeral industry. I’d written plenty about death over the years, but always in the context of grief, of trying to absorb and move through the pain. Dealing with the physical body seemed almost contrary to grief. It was a practical matter of lifting and getting hands dirtied and dealing with the grim task—What do we do with this body that has been so precious to us?

And so I began my research. I studied everything I could about embalming, bathing the dead and the decay of the body. My bedside table became stacked with books about death and dying and funeral homes. I talked to morticians. I even turned on YouTube videos of surgeries and autopsies and listened with my eyes closed so I could concentrate on the sounds of the tools and the cutting.

I had to sit a long while with the shock of all I learned. The process of embalming struck me as weird and invasive—steps to make sure the body didn’t leak or foam at the mouth during visiting hours, tools to puncture and then vacuum out the contents of the organs, tiny plastic caps to place over the eyeballs before sewing them shut, so many tricks with Super Glue. The more I learned about embalming, the more I thought, How strange that we do this to people we love!

But Mary Crampton, the narrator who absorbed my research, was quite tender with those who came through her basement workroom. An outcast in this small town, she found it easier to connect with the dead than the living. She understood the vulnerability of the naked body—the girth, the long-raised scar, the damaged liver, the bedsores. She was not blind to the flaws of her neighbors—in fact, some had shunned her. And still she cared for them. There’s a scene between Mary and a high school peer, a former cheerleader, who arrives in her workroom beneath the white sheet. And finally they have this girl time together, with Mary styling her hair and painting her nails crimson, their school’s colors—ways she couldn’t interact with a person when they were alive.

It was Mary’s tenderness with the dead and her deep respect for her profession that helped me know how to tell the complex story of this dying town. I opened my eyes to all that was before me—to a community that was strong, proud, insular, inflexible, beautiful, punishing and grieving. I began to see the rage of the unemployed as a last struggle against an inevitable death. This was a town that had little room for difference or for people like Mary. And yet she wanted the town to die with dignity.

Photo credit Taylor Hooper Photography

Appalachian writer Robert Gipe’s first illustrated novel, Trampoline, was an award-winning coming-of-age tale set in rural Kentucky, where a teenage girl named Dawn Jewell recounts the story of her grandmother’s fight against a mountaintop removal coal mine company. Six years after the events of Trampoline, Weedeater finds 22-year-old Dawn living with her husband and 4-year-old daughter in Tennessee. But the world of Canard County, Kentucky, calls her back. Dawn’s narration forms a duet with that of Gene, a lawn-care worker in love with Dawn’s Aunt June, who is determined to rescue Dawn’s mother from herself.

With Trampoline and Weedeater, Gipe delivers some of the most vivid Appalachian characters we’ve ever read. There are no clichés or stereotypes here. Illustrations of Dawn and Gene deliver clever one-liners and elevate the narration to a face-to-face relationship with the reader.

We asked Gipe to show us around Canard County, so to speak.

I live in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. The hillside out my kitchen window is steep—69 steps up to the front door of my house from the road below, and 75 out the back door up to the road above. The mountains are everywhere where I live.

The world in my novel Weedeater is as steep as the hillside out the window. I tried to make that world as vivid as the world I live in. In the place I live, cars get wrecked. Relationships go sour. Jobs disappear. People get grouchy. People keep going. They shoot off fireworks. They go to the lake to fish in boats big and little. They go to stock car races in motor homes. They go to church in pickup trucks. They ride around on four-wheelers to be alone with their beloved or to hunt for ginseng, or just to feel their hair blow in the wind.

In the place I live, sometimes food runs low. Electricity gets cut off. People die from falling off roofs, from coal mines collapsing on them, from eating bad, from trying to save people, from taking too many drugs. They drown. They get struck by lightning. They die in their own time in their own beds surrounded by friends and family and their little dogs. Snakes bite them. Spiders bite them. Dogs bite them. They comfort one another. They pray for one another. They scheme against one another. They tattle. They keep secrets. They buy new clothes. They wear old clothes. They fix their own water heaters and roof their own houses. They change their own oil and fix their own washing machines. They make doll clothes and knitted things that fit over your toaster, and burn Bible verses into pieces of wood, and they sell these things off car hoods and in flea markets and on the Internet. They also write books and keep up with what’s going on in the world and make art, and sometimes they fix soup beans and cornbread to eat, and sometimes they fix chicken curry.

Sometimes people here organize strikes against their bad bosses, and sometimes they just go on to work. Sometimes they rise up in protest against things that aren’t fair and aren’t right, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they cry because they had to move away, and sometimes they cry because they had to stay. Most times people here know who their local politicians are. Most times they’re aggravated with them. Sometimes they say, “Well, they’re doing the best they can.” And as for national politicians, let’s just say most people I know think the electoral college and gerrymandering are highly problematic and but two examples of how the game may or may not be rigged against us and are not surprised when their neighbors have trouble taking participatory politics seriously.

This area where I live has never consistently had a good rate of employment. Things might go OK for a while, but then there are layoffs and companies going out of business, and so things have been rough here forever. The bad things that can happen to people pile up. And repeat. And wear a person down. Wear a whole place down.

I wrote Weedeater knowing people who live where I do also read books. So I try to write something for them that deals with what is hard, but also catches how much fun we have, and how much spirit for surviving we have, and I try to write books that mess around with ideas about how things could maybe get better. But then I also write books to try and catch what it’s like when a whole bunch of things go wrong at once for readers for whom not so many things have gone wrong. I grew up with only a few things going wrong and most things going right for most people I know. It’s easier when fewer things go wrong in your life to think you’re smarter or better than the people who are always in the soup. But you’re not. You’re just luckier. And so I try to write stories that help people identify with and love people with too-complicated lives. I don’t want anybody feeling sorry for them. I want people to see what it’s like, and realize maybe hard-luck people are actually pretty smart and creative and have a lot of grit and are a lot of fun to root for, whether you are one of them or not.

Illustrations © 2018 Robert Gipe. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Ohio University Press. Author photo credit Meaghan Evans.

“Whether they ever loved her, thought about her or missed her is unknown. What is known is that she loved them, thought about them, missed them. And she still does. And there’s nothing any of us who love her can do about that.”

The Magnificent Esme Wells by Adrienne Sharp transports readers to Hollywood and Las Vegas in the 1930s and ’40s, where an irrepressible, self-reliant girl named Esme grows up surrounded by the imperfect and unfulfilled dreams of her parents. It’s a vivid and heartbreaking story inspired by the author’s own family history, and here, Sharp traces her Los Angeles roots to the late 1930s and shares the story of her own mother’s survival.

My mother was the gorgeous daughter of two gorgeous, careless people who did not want to live ordinary lives.

I have three pictures of my grandfather. In one, he has his arm slung over my grandmother’s shoulder—she looks like a flapper, with marcel waves in her hair and bows on her shoes, and he looks like a somewhat sleazy man of the world—of some world, anyway. Full of moxie. My grandfather came from a family of Jewish gamblers who played the numbers and bet on the horses at Pimlico, and when the great Los Angeles racetracks of Del Mar, Santa Anita and Hollywood Park were built in the late 1930s, he and my grandmother moved west to follow the races my grandmother called “the sport of kings.” Because my mother was by then school-age and would therefore be a problem to deal with in their new exciting, peripatetic life, they left her behind in a Baltimore orphanage, the Daughters of Hannah, without a word to anyone. I’m not sure how long it took the rest of the family to discover that my grandparents had disappeared from one coast only to reappear on another. It was probably just a couple of days. But to my mother, her time in that orphanage, where she wandered, bewildered and mute, felt like an eternity. She can still exactly recall the sight of one of her uncles walking through the door to retrieve her. In fact, when he was on his deathbed, decades and decades later, she whispered to him what she had said to him many times before, “Thank you for finding me, for saving me.”

Unnervingly for my mother, her parents did not vanish totally and completely for another 15 years. They would occasionally pop back into her life now and then—to take her from the stability of one aunt’s house or another and into chaos. One year, her father took his little family to live in the projects that were built right after World War II, where the walls dripped with moisture and my mother developed pneumonia and impetigo, and where neighbor kids would throw mud at my grandmother’s laundry hung out on the line and shout, “Christ killers,” because, of course, my grandparents were the only Jewish family in the projects, and despite all this my grandfather still thought the projects were the greatest thing because they were rent-free. He was always looking for an angle, an inside tip, a scam he could take advantage of, a bonanza of some sort.

My second photograph of my grandfather comes from the period when they lived in Los Angeles. In it, my grandfather and my uncle—for my grandparents had a second child after the war—are walking a downtown Los Angeles street. It’s probably 1946. My grandfather looks troubled now, confidence gone, hairline receding, older than his age, though he couldn’t have been more than 35, and my uncle, maybe 6 or 7, strides beside him in tall cowboy boots and suspenders, his own face clouded, uncertain. They had a difficult, unsettled, constantly uprooted life out West, a life filled with hotels (my grandmother thought hotel-living was glamorous, Hollywood-like) and movie magazines and evictions and horses and tip sheets my grandfather forced my uncle to sell outside the gates of Hollywood Park on Inglewood Boulevard, and lots of hot dogs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and I cannot imagine, given the proximity of Las Vegas and its desert postwar boom, that my grandparents would not have gone there to gamble, if not to live for a while. In all this tumult, my uncle rarely attended school, a truancy he relished as a kid and rued as an adult. He was left practically illiterate by it. He finally escaped his life with his parents and reinvented himself by joining the Army, and to this day he will not utter their names.

Eventually, my mother and her brother pieced together their histories, the mutual and the solo of it, the back and forth from Baltimore to Los Angeles, his life versus hers. She envied his life with their parents, despite their screaming rows and their constant packing of the bags. She had not had enough of them, as my uncle had, and she wanted to know where they were, what had become of them. But because he had endured his parents’ company for so long, my uncle had no interest in their lives that had gone on and on without him. In fact, he told my mother if they ever came to his door, he would shut it in their faces. He envied my mother’s life with the aunts, her relative stability, her education. My mother had been a double major in chemistry and biology, achieved through the aid of a tottering tower of scholarships that covered every last thing, including her cap, tassel and gown. And after graduation, though the pediatrician my mother worked for part-time offered to put her through medical school and then to make her a partner in his practice—people often stepped forward to offer my mother amazing things—she declined. She had met my father, she felt she could no longer live off the charity of her aunts and uncles—one of my uncles had her take her bedding out of the den that was her little ad hoc bedroom whenever he wanted to watch a movie on the television and had her sleep on the living room couch and one of my aunts, when my mother begged her for a purse, covered a Kleenex box in wrapping paper and gave that to her to use—and she wanted to create a family of her own, a stable, solid confection of a husband and three children and house in the suburbs, exactly what her parents did not want and exactly what she did. As did my uncle.

She got it. She got it all. He did not.

My mother saw her mother for what would be almost the last time in a Baltimore department store—Hutzler’s to be exact. It was the night before my mother’s wedding. Apparently, my grandparents had dropped back into town again. For a moment or two. Her parents had not been invited to the wedding, of course, had no idea about it, had no known address, but her mother had a word of advice for her: “Keep your bangs. You look like Audrey Hepburn.”

After that, no one saw or heard from my grandparents for 50 years.

All that time, my mother hoped that they thought of her, hoped that they would remember her in some way, perhaps leave her something in their wills, let her know that despite everything, they had loved her.

Ten years ago, she tracked down her parents. They had, ultimately, it seemed, remained in Los Angeles. They had been placed, somehow, in a Medi-Cal nursing home. My grandfather had died without a note, a phone call or a word to his two children, and had been buried with strangers in a California veteran’s cemetery. He had served during World War II. Whatever belongings he once had had vanished. My grandmother was alive, overtaken by dementia, with no idea who my mother was when she came to visit. She also didn’t understand that her husband was dead. She thought he had run off with another woman. The story of her life with him had to have been a difficult one. When my mother told her her name, my grandmother responded that she had a daughter with that name. But when told that my mother was in fact her daughter, my grandmother, whatever she understood of this, responded that she didn’t want to talk about what she called “family matters,” which must have been my grandparents’ defense against quarrels between the two of them over what they had done or against the questions of strangers: Where are you from? Where are your children, your sisters, your brothers?

Children, sisters, brothers were all accounted for. They weren’t the ones who had vanished.

My mother sent her mother the sweaters and movie magazines she asked for. Not long after this, on a call to the nursing home, my mother learned that her mother had died a few weeks ago and that her body had been stashed in a county freezer. At some future time in some Los Angeles location where the indigent were interred, my grandmother’s remains would be buried.

No remembrance for my mother—no ring, no bracelet, no letter.

And so ended my grandparents’ great adventure.

But not my mother’s love for them. Because she could not bear to let my grandmother endure the bleak fate the state of California had assigned her, she made the necessary arrangements for my grandmother’s remains to be sent to the Veterans Cemetery in Riverside, California, where she was buried with my grandfather. After all, my mother said, they should be together in death. They gave up so much to be together in life. Whether they ever loved her, thought about her or missed her is unknown. What is known is that she loved them, thought about them, missed them. And she still does. And there’s nothing any of us who love her can do about that.

Because I’m a writer, my mother wanted me to write her story, the story of a young girl who was abandoned by her parents, who survived that abandonment and who, at the end of the novel, stood by her parents’ graveside. My mother has actually not yet seen her own parents’ graves. She’s not well enough anymore to travel. It’s a very nice gravesite. My brother took a picture of it. My last photograph of my grandparents. I will never go the cemetery. I’m like my uncle. Shut the door in their faces. And I could not write that novel. What I did write was a novel about an absolutely magnificent woman who uses her mother’s beauty and her father’s charm and her very own exquisite intelligence and drive to make her way through the world my grandparents lived in and my mother never set foot, a world anathema to her but sweet honey to them—the racetracks and casinos and mobsters and boozers of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. And my character makes a success of herself, despite her parents’ best efforts to wreck everything around them, much as my mother did. My original title for the novel was Survival City. But I changed that, too.