Welcome to Literary Ashland

Earlier this year, Literary Ashland interviewed Diane L. Goeres-Gardner. Her book
Inside Oregon State Hospital: A History of Tragedy and Triumph has recently been published by The History Press.

Diane Goeres-Gardner is a fifth-generation Oregonian, with roots in Tillamook County as early as 1852. She has a master’s degree from the University of Oregon where she studied with poet Ralph Salisbury. Her book Necktie Parties: A History of Legal Executions in Oregon, 1851-1905, was released by Caxton Press in 2005 and her Murder, Morality and Madness: Women Criminals in Early Oregon appeared in 2009, also by Caxton. Her book Images of America: Roseburg was published by Arcadia Press in 2010, part of its Images of America series, and for a history of the state hospital in images, see Goeres-Gardner’s Images of America: Oregon Asylum.

EB: How did you get interested in the Oregon State Hospital?

DG: While writing my second book, Murder, Morality and Madness: Women Criminals in Early Oregon I did some research into Oregon State Hospital (OSH) because before 1900 women prisoners were often sent to OSH in lieu of leaving them in isolation for so many years. The diagnosis female patients were assigned all seemed to revolve around the fact they were female, such as menopause, giving birth, and taking care of children, etc. I thought that was strange. My research also revealed that no one had ever written a history about the hospital. After that I was hooked.

EB: What was the research process like?

DG: The research was very sporadic and extremely difficult. The hospital itself had almost no archived information. Even the photos they had were mostly duplicates of photos held in other archives. I did find a file about the Calbreath family at the Oregon Historical Society, but they had almost nothing on the hospital either. That meant my main sources of information were the State Archives, the State Library, and the microfilm files at the University of Oregon, which stores copies of Oregon’s newspapers. When you look at the endnotes in the book, almost all are from those three sources.

EB: I want to ask about eugenics and sterilization. About 2,600 people were sterilized in Oregon between 1917 and 1983. Was Oregon typical in this? You mention some eugenics proponents like Bethenia Owens-Adair. What was her impact?

DG: Oregon’s enthusiastic adoption of Eugenics doctrine was not typical of other states. California sterilized over 20,000 victims and Oregon had the seventh highest number of victims (behind North Carolina, Virginia, Michigan, Georgia and Kansas). Many states didn’t sterilize anyone. Only Oregon targeted the gay community so harshly. Oregon’s use of sterilization was a “perfect storm” created by the kind of people elected to office during those years, a backlash against the gay community after a particularly well publicized expose in Portland, and the bias of the state’s institutional superintendents. Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair was a persistent and influential proponent. She wrote the original bills Oregon’s legislatures finally approved. She just wouldn’t let it go. She was also well acquainted with the Applegate family and their mental illness problems. I believe that knowledge biased her toward the Eugenics philosophy.

EB: It was interesting that several members of the Applegate family were patients? How did so many Applegates end up in the asylum?

DG: I wanted the book to be more than just a collection of facts and figures. I wanted readers to feel the context of how patients experienced the hospital. To accomplish that, I needed to find patients in the hospital that I could research. The Applegate family was easy to research and had an extraordinary number of family members admitted to the asylum over a rather short period of time. I discovered and reported on eight members of the family committed to the hospital. There were actually two more that I didn’t mention in the book. Today we know that some kinds of mental illness do run through families. In the late 1800s people also knew from experience that some families had more incidents of mental illness than others. However they had extremely limited ways of dealing with it. Sending the patient to the Oregon State Asylum was just about their only option. There may have been other families with just as many patients in the hospital, however their names were less identifiable and harder to research.

EB: Funding seems to have always been an issue, as well as county-state disputes over funding. What did you conclude about the impact of funding on care.

DG: It is very costly to care for thousands, or even hundreds, of sick people who have no insurance and no way to pay for their care. Over the years funding issues have tormented not only the hospital, but all state institutions. Oregon is in a particularly vulnerable situation because the state’s only income is through property taxes and those have been capped. Also other states make the patient’s home county pay a portion of the expenses. Oregon doesn’t.

EB: You mention a celebrated 1914 dispute where a wife claimed that her husband was having her committed to gain control of her assets. Was this common?

DG: It may not have been common in Oregon, but it was always suspected. For many years Oregon laws protected women by prohibiting their husbands from divorcing them while they were in the hospital. The law made it very easy to have a person declared insane and a husband had greater power in front of a judge than a wife.

EB: The hospital changed its name from the Oregon Insane Asylum to the Oregon State Hospital? Did that reflect a change in its mission?

DG: Superintendent L. L. Rowland proposed changing the name as early as 1895 but it wasn’t acted upon until 1913 when a number of things changed. That year Oregon opened the Eastern Oregon State Hospital and the state discarded the old trustee system of supervision and changed to the Board of Control system. A new psychiatric and medical building was opened on campus in 1912 creating a more modern attitude toward mental illness. The mission was changed from warehousing people to trying to actively treat and cure mental illness. Certainly the term hospital had a more hopeful connotation than asylum.

EB: One long-time superintendent, Dean Brooks, allowed the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest to be filmed at the hospital, and even had a role in the film. Was the filming controversial?

DG: Dr. Brooks supported the project and wanted patients to be involved in all aspect of the movie’s filming. He believed it was beneficial for patients to be engaged in activities outside the hospital environment and that the movie would bring increased attention to the hospital’s needs. He did not think the movie attacked mental facilities as much as the authoritarian structure that so often surrounded them.

EB: I was fascinated by the various treatments: moral therapy, hydrotherapy, insulin and electroshock therapy, lobotomies. How did treatment evolve?

DG: OSH adopted various treatments as they developed across the United States. Treatments for mental illness went from basic incarceration to active remedies rather quickly. Soldiers returning from WWI and WWII with psychological problems created a need for better treatment modalities and OSH, like other hospitals, was eager to try them out. The need created the interest, and the interest created the cures.

EB: Funding, maintenance and staffing have always been issues, it seems. With the recent renovation, is the OSH turning a corner?

DG: Today the overcrowding is gone and instead of sharing a room with several other people, patients now live in private rooms. Their safety is no longer compromised by inadequate and outdated facilities. Staff can now focus on treating the patients instead of keeping buckets filling with rainwater from overflowing all over the floors. Superintendent Greg Roberts has reduced required staff overtime making the employees happier and healthier. All these improvements make it easier to focus on the important thing – helping patients get well and returning them to their communities.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

David Churchman has been an infantry lieutenant, social worker, high school teacher, research associate at University of Southern California, and program officer at the National Science Foundation. He was a professor at California State University for 27 years where he held a dual appointment as Professor in the Humanities and as Chairman of Behavioral Science. In the latter capacity, he and two colleagues initiated one of the first graduate degrees in the country in Conflict Management in 1987. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Michigan and his doctorate from UCLA.

David taught in Morocco, has been a Fulbright Scholar in Cyprus and Ukraine and a Malone Scholar in Saudi Arabia, and has conducted research on zoo visitors in Australia and Singapore. He is the author or co-author of over 150 publications, including Negotiation: Process, Tactics, Theory and Developing Graduate Theses and Projects in the Humanities.

He is also a moderately experienced wild animal trainer who worked primarily with big cats, and is the co-founder of Wildlife on Wheels or WOW, a live animal environmental education program that was reaching some 100,000 Los Angeles basin children each year. David Churchman lives in Ashland.

The second edition of his book Why We Fight: The Origins, Nature, and Management of Human Conflict has just been released by University Press of America.

EB: How did you get interested in conflict as a topic?

DC: A mildly complicated story. My main appointment at Cal State was in graduate behavioral sciences. Whenever people asked what that was, we answered “whatever we want.” I came back from a year at National Science Foundation in Fall 1979 with the idea for a single course in negotiation. It proved so popular across so many majors that my very astute colleague David Nasatir suggested that if we had more than one course we had the core for an MA. Discussion that a colleague, Marilyn Garber from History but also a lawyer, soon joined led to proposing an MA degree in Conflict Management in 1982 in which students chose family, environmental, organizational, and international conflict as a specialty. A three year approval process followed, with implementation delayed one more year by my sabbatical. When we did get going, my assignments were the negotiation course and a new one in “conflict theory” without much idea of what it meant.

EB: You describe conflict at some half-dozen “levels” from interpersonal to inter-state and draw on a very wide range of academic disciplines. What motivated that choice of exposition?

DC: When I decided to write a book on conflict theory, I considered three possible organizing schemes. The first, by type of theory, seemed to be too abstract and pedantic–and besides James Schellenberg had already done it successfully. The second possibility was by traditional academic disciplines, but each one had so much to contribute to so many different types of conflict that a book so arranged would become something of a scavenger hunt for the student primarily interested in some specific type of conflict. A substantial number of conflict theory courses seem to rest almost entirely on the major discipline of the professor, with occasional brief forays into one or two other disciplines. This is much too narrow an approach for a field like conflict study. The third possibility recognized that most people are interested in a few specific types of conflict depending on their career goals—future marriage and family therapists in gender differences in communication rather than, say, geostrategic concerns that that might interest aspiring diplomats, while both might be interested in how culture affects conflict. From these ruminations, here more coherent than the actual process, arranging the book by “level” of conflict but explaining each in multidisciplinary fashion seemed to me the most useful approach. Not that I think the proposed levels or the academic disciplines that I draw on are definitive or complete.

EB: There seems to be quite a lot about critical thinking. What was your goal in the book?

DC: Educators hear a lot about the importance of teaching students to “think” rather than simply to learn facts. But, this often comes down to telling students that all opinions are equally valid. Balderdash! To take an extreme case, Hitler’s opinion on race was not as good as that of Martin Luther King. Critical thinking requires evaluating evidence, distinguishing fact from opinion, determining where cause and effect are established. We need to give everyone a comprehensive, systematic, and objective approach to judging whether theories increase understanding, help us make better decisions or develop better methods for managing conflicts, and help us identify attempts to impose social or political agendas under the guise of science. I discuss six possible criteria in the book for judging anything we are going to call a scientific theory: it should be empirical, falsifiable, generalizable, logical, parsimonious, and useful. There is nothing new here—parsimony for example goes back at least to the fourteenth century. Furthermore, the six are useful for judging all ideas, not just conflict theories.

EB: I notice that you talk about conflict management, not conflict resolution. Can you elaborate on the difference?

DC: “Resolution” implies we can completely solve all of our conflicts all of the time, and I do not believe that we can. “Management” implies a more modest and I think realistic goal without denying that resolution sometimes is possible. I prefer the more modest term and more realistic goal.

EB: This is the second edition of Why We Fight and you’ve clearly been thinking about this for a long time. How has your thinking evolved?

DC: As best I can remember, when I agreed to teach a course in “conflict theory,” I thought primarily as a historian influenced by the combination of army service and a doctorate in applied statistics and research design. The program that I chaired included the department of Marriage and Family Therapy, an obvious expansion. There had to be something in between conflict between nations and conflict within families, which led quickly to identifying all sorts of other “levels” of conflict. Serving as the campus lobbyist for our faculty union led to thinking about labor-management conflict. A short stint at Department of State helping develop the US position on the Law of the Sea while I was at NSF and the negotiations to get the Conflict Management degree itself designed and approved got me thinking of managing disputes between different parts of an organization. Starting a wildlife education program with a former graduate student led to thinking about environmental disputes rich in political and economic issues. At some point, I realized that ideas were a source of conflict and turned to the few courses I had in European intellectual history as a starting point. That and the arguments about Vietnam and the Gulf War led to recognition of the need to consider moral aspects of conflict. And so it went. In other words, the evolution has been unplanned and serendipitous. If anything, I am much less sure of anything than when I began this journey about thirty years ago.

EB: You describe peace as the absence of war. Is there something that is the absence of conflict?

DC: I doubt it, at least in the real world and probably not even in literature, which would make for a pretty dull plot. As I say in the chapter on the search for peace, the lack of war may be a necessary condition for peace, but it is not sufficient. Following up on your point about critical thinking, it is a negative definition. It says what a thing is not rather than what it is, so is inadequate. My saying that you do not speak Mongolian does not tell anyone what languages you do speak. Rather, building on the remarks of Ralph Bunche in accepting the Nobel Prize, positive peace requires well-being, cooperation, freedom, justice, respect for human rights, and non-violent means of managing disputes. That is the goal. Sometimes our methods succeed, perhaps temporarily. Sometimes they fail.

EB: Of all the approaches you consider do you have a favorite, or one that seems to work best?

DC: I am not sure “favorite” is the right word but there are three theories that I think have the greatest potential for coalescing into a single coherent one. The first focuses on how important satisfactory resolution and how important the relationship with the opponent is to each party on each issue. Together, they predict which of five strategies each party will follow: collaborate, compete, compromise, surrender, or withdraw. The second analyzes a conflict in terms of what may be lost or gained at what level of risk to identify the most rational course of action for a particular party. The third requires preferentially ranking every possible course of action from the perspective of each party to the conflict, and analyzes these “preference vectors” to identify the one that is most likely to remain stable once agreed to. They are much too elaborate to explain here. Readers will have to buy the book.

EB: Who should read your book? Do you have a particular audience in mind?

DC: The main audiences that I have in mind are professors and students in the proliferating degree programs in conflict management and peace studies. I hope to provoke debate among them as to which theories and methods are good and even whether conflict theory is tenable at all given human ability to adapt and manipulate. I hope that parts of the book at least will be of some use to individuals involved in the particular types of conflicts—as evidenced by the endorsement of it by one US Congressman and one senior businessman.

Author Hester Kaplan’s latest book is THE TELL (HarperCollins 2013), a story of marriage, relationships, compulsion and culture. It’s the story of Mira and Owen, a couple whose marriage begins to founder after a charming former TV star named Wilton Deere buys the house next door to be near his estranged daughter Anya. Mira begins to accompany Wilton to a nearby casino and is increasingly drawn to the slot machines, as Owen struggles with his own career and past.

Hester Kaplan’s previous books are THE EDGE OF MARRIAGE (1999) which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and KINSHIP THEORY (2001). Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories series (1998, 1999), Ploughshares, Agni Review, Southwest Review, Story, Glimmer Train, and other journals.

Kaplan teaches in Lesley University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and her work has been recognized with the Salamander Fiction Prize, the McGinness-Ritchie Award for Non-Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

EB: The title of your book seems to involve some wordplay. What did you have in mind?

HK: I think we all have a “tell,” that little tic or gesture we make that gives us away when we’re evading or not telling the truth. We read each other’s tells, even if we’re not aware of doing it.

“Tell” is a term I first heard used at a poker table, so I thought it was appropriate. (A tell, interestingly enough, is also a ancient garbage heap.)

EB: Water plays a big role in the story—Owen’s a swimmer and his father lives on a lake. It seems like the characters are drowning?

HK: I’m most content when I’m in the water, and while I’m a strong swimmer, I’m also a little afraid of the water. Owen and his father share a love of the water—ocean, pond, pool—as well as the knowledge that it can be dangerous. Owen particularly may feel like he’s drowning at times, but he has the power to swim to shore.

EB: I was pondering the idea that middle school was a type of casino. This is a novel about compulsion. Mira’s addiction to the casino, Wilton’s home shopping. Is Owen addicted to teaching?

HK: Owen is a dedicated teacher, but deeply ambivalent about his role and value in the classroom. If an addiction is about compulsive and self-destructive behaviors, then Owen is no addict. He might be hampered by fear and his ability to not see the truth in front of him, but these failings are within his control. Ultimately, his understanding this allows him to see his wife clearly.

EB: Wilton and Mira both have their tells. What was Owen’s, do you think?

HK: This is a great question. Owen is so hard to decipher, even for me. He’s a million little tells rolled up into one very tall and very enigmatic guy. He doesn’t want to be known by anyone.

EB: Did you have a favorite among the characters in the book?

HK: I love Edward. He’s straightforward, able to express what he’s feeling, and so hopeful about life. He’s careful, yet open to everything new. And he loves cats.

EB: You studied anthropology in college, not creative writing. Has that perspective helped you as a novelist? Your work seems to especially catch small details of place and culture and language, like the description of the Rhode Island accent as “bright melted plastic.”

HK: I did study anthropology in college, but I think I was really just a snoop—and still am. And I always feel a little bit on the outside of things, looking in. My nosiness about how other people live—what you kindly call my attention to details of place and culture—is what fuels my fiction. I want to see what someone else sees when she wakes up in the morning. I want to hear how she talks to her dog, her children, the woman who serves her coffee. I want to know if she stops and smells the lilacs.

EB: You also seem fascinated by architecture. What do houses tell us about ourselves? Or are they part of our compulsion? Mira seems attached to her house.

HK: Mira is attached to her house because it is attached to her. It follows her everywhere she goes and often drags her down. But it’s a magnificent place—in my mind, at least—full of rooms that still hold life in memories for her. It’s how we choose to live in our house, apartment, shack, or mansion that reveals how we want to live in the world and how we want the world to see us. Providence is full of amazing architecture, so taking a walk in my city is like listening to a thousand stories.

EB: Marriage and relationships are an ongoing theme in your books. In this book it seems that things are getting in the way of relationships? Is that what you had in mind?

HK: I’ve been married for a long time, but marriage is still a mystery to me, as it seems to be for Wilton. Each marriage is different, with its own private dynamic and rules. How is it that some marriages last and others don’t? The husband and wife in my novel hide their wounds from each other, which means they’re easy to hurt, but hard to heal.

EB: You are teacher as well as a writer. What’s your life like?

HK: I have a couple of teaching jobs, as so many of the writers I know do. I love teaching, love my students, and am enormously proud of them and their discoveries. I try to write every day, to keep my head in the story or novel I’m working on. I talk to the cats, but they don’t have any writing advice for me. I am married to a writer, so we edit each other’s work and talk about what we’re reading. Then we watch movies.

EB: Can you tell us about any upcoming writing projects? What are you working on?

HK: I’m working on a long piece of non-fiction about houses—and about the house I grew up in with two parents who were writers.

EB: You’ve established a reputation as both a short story writer and a novelist? How are those different? Which do you prefer?

HK: I like short stories better when I’m working on a novel, and novels better when I’m writing a short story. But the difference between them isn’t only about length, but about the moments that make a difference to the characters. In a novel, the moments accumulate to become change and understanding and consequence. A short story involves the recognition of that moment. It’s almost the difference between a sigh and a gasp.

Writer Ann Parker’s award-winning Silver Rush series of historical mystery is set primarily in the 1880s silver boomtown of Leadville, Colorado. It features Silver Queen Saloon owner Inez Stannert—a woman with a mysterious past, a complicated present, and an uncertain future. The series was chosen a “Booksellers Favorite” by the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association. Her first book, Silver Lies, won the Willa Literary Award and the Colorado Gold Award, and was a finalist for the Bruce Alexander Historical Mystery Award as well as for a Western Writers Association Spur Award. It was chosen a best mystery of the year by Publishers Weekly and The Chicago Tribune. Iron Ties won the Colorado Book Award for Popular Fiction and Leaden Skies was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award for Genre Fiction. Her latest book, Mercury’s Rise, won the Alexander Bruce Historical Mystery Award and was a finalist the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel, the Colorado Book Award, the Macavity–Sue Feder Historical Mystery Award and the Willa Literary Award.

As for Parker herself, she has degrees in Physics and English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and balances writing novels with a career as a science and corporate writer. Her ancestors include a great-grandfather who was a Leadville blacksmith, a grandmother who worked at the bindery of Leadville’s Herald Democrat newspaper, a grandfather who was a Colorado School of Mines professor, and another grandfather who was a gandy dancer on the Colorado railroads.

Ann Parker reside in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can visit her website here.

EB: Your Silver Rush series is set in the real town of Leadville, Colorado. How did you decide to write about Leadville in the late 1800s?

AP: The genesis of my historical mystery series has its roots in my own family history…. and I can thank my Uncle Walt, in particular, for setting my feet on the road to Leadville. Both my mother and my father were born and raised in Denver, Colorado, but ended up meeting in New York and relocating to California, where I and my siblings were born. When I was young, our family would trek out to Colorado to visit grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins for the holidays and during the summer, and I have very fond memories of those times. But it wasn’t until a family reunion in the mid-1990s that my Uncle Walt told me that my paternal grandmother—aka Inez Stannert Parker or “Granny”—had been raised in Leadville. This was a big surprise to me: When Granny was alive, she’d often told us stories of her life as a young woman in Denver, but she’d never mentioned Leadville nor anything about her life as a child.

I asked my Uncle Walt, “Where the heck is Leadville? I’ve never heard of it.” My uncle became very excited and said, “Why, Leadville is just the most amazing mining town anywhere, with an incredible history!” He told me a bit about Leadville’s beginnings and the Silver Rush, which started in the late 1870s. He ended by saying, “Ann, I know you’ve been thinking about writing a novel. I think you should research Leadville and set your novel there!”

I started poking around, researching Leadville and the Silver Rush that first made it famous. (You can find a general overview of the “Colorado Silver Boom” in Wikipedia). I was doing all this preliminary digging around in about 1998, at the height of the dot-com boom craziness, when everyone came to California, thinking they would make millions easy as pie by joining an e-company. (For those too young to remember, Wikipedia again has a short history here.) The parallels between the two periods of time—past and present—were fascinating to me. It seemed as if the desire to “get rich quick” just abolished all common sense. I realized that the psychology of “boom times” has remained a constant. It was this resonance between the past and the times I was living through that encouraged me to begin writing Silver Lies, the first in the series.

I gave my protagonist my granny’s maiden name—Inez Stannert—in recognition of the part she played in bringing me to Leadville’s history in the first place. I’ve yet to name a character after my Uncle Walt, but that time is coming.

EB: Your protagonist Inez Stannert is part owner of the Silver Queen Saloon? How typical was she as an independent women in the West?

AP: It’s interesting how reviewers and readers interpret Inez. Some call her a “woman of her time.” Others say she is “a woman ahead of her time.” She is, perhaps, atypical in some ways in her profession, but financially independent women, and women who worked in a variety of fields that we might not ascribe to women of those times, did exist.

The census records are a wealth of information in this regard. For instance, in the 1880 census for Leadville, 228 men and only 3 women claimed occupations as saloon keepers/bartenders. The same Leadville census also includes 4 women physicians/surgeons (compared to 69 men), 1 female journalist (sharing the field with 30 of the male persuasion), 4 women who were miners (compared to 3204 men), and so on.

I haven’t checked, but I’d bet if you looked at the census records of various Western boomtowns in the 1800s, there would be any number of women popping up in other male-dominated occupations… in small numbers, of course.

Independent” women were also found in the more traditionally female-dominated fields of the time, running all sorts of businesses, such as boarding houses, laundries, millineries, and restaurants.

EB: Your books contain a lot of historical detail—and have won a number of awards—what’s your research process?

AP: Usually, I begin by reading the newspapers of the time I’m interested in (right now, I’m working my way slowly through the year 1880… the current book takes place in the autumn). I look for events that catch my attention, that can become historical “pegs on which to hang my hat.” For Leaden Skies, for instance, the historical “peg” was Ulysses S. Grant’s five-day visit to Leadville in July 1880. For Iron Ties, it was the coming of the first railroad to Leadville.

I’m a bit of a magpie in research, always on the lookout for shiny objects (i.e., facts) that catch my eye. It can be a newspaper advertisement for Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral (“…not to be confounded with any ‘cough syrup,’ ‘lung balsam’ or ‘elixir’…”), or a passing mention of the escalating feud between a couple of posh hotel/resorts in Colorado’s Manitou Springs in a history of the area. I meander through websites, photographs, books, and talk to experts when I get stuck on the details of certain subjects (such as the laws and ramifications of divorce in Colorado in 1880).

One particular treasure in my home library is a copy of transcribed letters from George Elder, a young lawyer who came to Leadville from Philadelphia in 1878. George’s detailed and fascinating letters to his mother and father and sister date from 1878 to 1880. I also have a book of etiquette, copyright 1880, titled Our Deportment or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society, by John H. Young, A.M., which helps my characters keep their manners straight.

Once I start a writing session, I try not to break the flow for research unless absolutely necessary. If I come to a place where, for instance, I find myself wondering what shoes a character would be wearing in the rain, I put [TK] (which stands for “to come”) in my manuscript and keep going. If I stopped every time I was uncertain of a detail, I’d never finish!

EB: In Iron Ties Ulysses S. Grant and the railroad come to Leadville. What was the impact of the Civil War on boomtowns like Leadville?

AP: Well, since my series takes place in 1880, the Civil War is 5 years in the past. However, the effects of the war for those who lived through it didn’t just disappear at war’s end. A good book that explores the long-term effects upon the veterans and those close to them is Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War by Eric T. Dean, Jr.

Too, at this time, the veterans of both sides had dispersed across the country, and many came West to start new lives, explore the territory, look for work, and all the other reasons that people leave homes.

One of the fields where you would find veterans from both sides was in the railroad business. In the 1870s and 1880s, railroads were being built at a frantic pace as the owners tried to be “first” into those areas where money was to be made. Leadville was a prime example: All the ore taken out of the mining district had to be refined in smelters—the silver didn’t come out in nuggets, as in the Gold Rush, it required chemical processing to separate the silver from the other minerals. Leadville was at the 10,000-foot mark in the Rocky Mountains: material and people flowed in, and ore flowed out. The railroads could carry all this much more efficiently than wagons and stagecoaches.

EB: In Mercury’s Rise you explore the spa tourism? Was it really that shady?

AP: I did take some fictional license in spinning my tale. But from my reading and talking with historians in the area, it appears that there was a great deal of competition between the resorts to capture the tourist trade and to cater to those who came to the area “chasing the cure” (i.e., looking for a cure for tuberculosis). The mineral springs in Manitou in particular were a big draw. At the time (1880), the cause of tuberculosis was as yet unknown (Dr. Robert Koch’s discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacillus responsible for TB, was still a couple years away). So, some of the things TB sufferers believed would “cure” them were palliative (fresh air, healthy food, rest and exercise), while other prescriptions were downright dangerous (mercury in various forms) or noneffective (one prominent doctor firmly believed that, for men, growing a beard would prevent TB).

When people are desperate and dying, they will grasp at straws, no matter how slim. You see that same behavior today. There are standard, medically-proven treatments for cancer, for instance, but, sadly, they don’t always work. Sometimes patients turn to “cures” that have no scientific validity, out of hope, out of desperation.

EB: Which aspect takes longer? The historical research or the fiction writing?

AP: That’s hard for me to say. I don’t write or research steadily; everything progresses in fits and starts for me. Since I also have a “day job” as a contract editor/writer for several clients, that work must come first, and fiction writing must fit in here and there as I can squeeze it in. It takes me usually three years from book to book, but I’m not researching or writing full time or even half or quarter time during that period.

EB: How has your background as a science writer been a help in crafting the fiction?

AP: As a science writer, one of the skills I’ve developed is the ability to come rapidly “up to speed” on any topic that I’m assigned to write. I can research and write quickly and effectively, once I’ve zeroed in on what I need to know. And, writing to deadline is a very useful skill as well. I often say that, in writing, I’m propelled by panic and deadlines. When a deadline is looming, I can gear up and crank out a credible first draft in a short timeframe. After all, a first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to “be” (i.e., exist).

EB: I rather enjoy the author’s notes on the historical research. What prompted you to add those?

AP: I’m glad you like them! They are fun for me to write. The author’s notes are a way for me to share some of the lovely bits and pieces of research that I’ve found along the way. Also, historical fiction readers as I’ve discovered often want to know “what’s real and what’s not.” My notes provide that information, for those so inclined. And, if someone gets interested in the railroad wars in Colorado, for instance (the fight between the Denver& Rio Grande and the Atchison Topeka Santa Fe is one of the famous events of that war), they can find a source or two in my notes to get them started.

EB: What’s coming next in the Silver Rush series?

AP: I’m rolling up my sleeves to seriously attack Book #5 (the titles always come late to me, so right now it is the-book-with-no-name). This is the autumn 1880 book I mentioned earlier. It will take place in Leadville, and I’m intrigued/interested in a number of things that were going on at that time, so we shall see.

EB: I know that collecting artifacts is part of your research process. What have you collected that has appeared in your books?

AP: You are so right… I love objects! A few that have made an appearance here and there: a boot hook, a mourning fan, a cupel (used in the silver assaying process), and a small blue bottle with gold cross-hatching that once held poison. One of my prized possessions is a cabinet card featuring a photo of Williams Canyon in Manitou Springs, taken by a woman photographer, Mrs. Anna Galbreaith. I became fascinated by this card and its creator, and as a result, Mrs. Galbreaith (a fictional interpretation of her, in any case) and Williams Canyon play important roles in my fourth book, Mercury’s Rise. I spent a lot of time—probably more than I should have—trying to track Mrs. Galbreaith: who she was and what happened to her. Alas, as often happens when trying to track down women from the past, I caught a few tantalizing glimpses of Mrs. Galbreaith before she disappeared into the mists of time. You can read a blog post I wrote about the cabinet card and my search for more information about Anna Galbreaith right here.