Sarah's Quilt
A Novel of Sarah Agnes Prine and the Arizona Territories, 1906
by Nancy E. Turner
List Price: $13.95
Pages: 432
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0312332637
Publisher: St. Martins's Griffin
Question: What is the history behind the story?
Answer: Sarah’s Quilt opens in April of 1906, a time following three years of devastating drought in the Southwestern United States. Years of over-grazing and poor land management combined with the drought finally culminated in the destruction of natural grasslands of southern Arizona. To this day, the range is covered with chaparral and cactus and supports only a small percentage of the livestock that roamed there a hundred years ago. The soil in the Basin and Range is mottled with heavy clays and caliches, steeped with alkali, and generally hard to farm. Underground caverns pit the landscape, and it is upon one of these natural wells Sarah’s main water supply depends. When that supply is exhausted, the family is desperate. I remember one hot, dismal summer day at my grandparent’s farm when my uncle came into the house with a bucket of mud to announce that he had just pulled it from the well. I remember the looks of fear on the faces of the adults. Even as a child, I knew an empty well meant disaster.
In contrast, April of 1906 marked the great San Francisco earthquake and fire chronicled first hand by Jack London in Collier’s Magazine. The irony of bone-dry, baked caliche and animal-starving drought superimposed on California’s quaking ground and torrential rains set the stage for the main element of the story, a human fight against the elements complicated by the dynamism of other characters.
The turn of the last century in Arizona Territory was an era of great changes juxtaposed against centuries-old life-styles. Ranchers’ horses were often stampeded by horseless carriages, gas lighting and sewer systems replaced candled and outhouses in town, where an ice factory provided children with respite from the summer sun. Medical care was barbaric, and more children died than lived to 10 years old. Multiple marriages were common as adults were felled by disease and childbirth. Social mores of Eastern cities had reached the West, and brought the Temperance Movement and Women’s Suffrage along with the banning of any “artificial” means of birth control. The first speed limit was imposed on a Tucson thoroughfare, Speedway Boulevard, and a hefty fine could be imposed on anyone barreling down the lane faster than 9 miles an hour. A paved road was a near miracle. The average age of the students at the University of Arizona was 14, and for over twenty years the school never finished all four quarters of a football game because by the third quarter there weren’t enough players left without broken bones to field a team. There was flowing water in the Santa Cruz and Rillito riverbeds—now dry washes unless we get a frog-choking rainstorm during the wet season—and, at the base of Sentinel Peak, a working wheat mill ground flour by means of a water powered wheel. The Presidio and Spanish Mission feel separate from Tucson until you poke further.
Much of downtown Tucson is changed and paved over, but unlike some cities, there is still much that remains of the territorial days. Adobe railroad worker’s 1880 row houses have become trendy and upscale, high-rent real estate. Convent Street and Meyers Road still serve their purposes, although the sisters of the convent have moved away as have the ladies of the evening on Meyers.
Question: What is the process of writing fiction from history?
Answer: I use meticulous research to fill in details around my characters. I rely on books, microfilm, travel, and interviews to make a story come to life in as real a setting as possible. Just as in the previous novel, where every Indian battle and most of the peripheral characters lived in the Tucson area, I spent a great effort getting the facts right, from the build of a work saddle to the cut of flannel underwear. Five days of poring through THE RIFLE IN AMERICA and GUNS OF THE OLD WEST, note taking and cross-referencing, all amounted to a single line of dialog— “See those? Krags with the rim out.” But the line felt like the thing Charlie would have said. His mother is anxious about his being dumped by his fiancé, his cousin has run off with the herd and their livelihood, land grabbers and lunatics glare from every side, and yet, the young man answers Sarah with a notice that he’s bought some new technology.
I am compelled to get it right. I sometimes draw upon my own life to broaden events as well as the scope of emotion experienced by the characters, though of course, any novel exists as just the gloss on the tip of the iceberg of a writer’s foundation of study material. It took me nearly two years of hunting and pecking for information to find out how to stop a pre-1940 Aeromotor windmill! But, the incident with the twenty-foot wide dust devil bearing animal rabbit droppings was a reality I experienced first hand. I believe there’s nothing like being there—smelling the soil, feeling the rain, the gnawing desperation and the joy, to add breath and soul to your writing.
The best writing advice I ever got? You have permission to write a book. It’s just that simple. Now go do it. The second best advice is, be prepared to throw away your first million words, and I would add, to change every last one of the next million. Only then you are ready for someone to read it. Lastly, only listen to critics when you hear the same comment three times.
Question: How did you become a writer?
Answer: I spent my formative years growing almost literally in the shadow of Disneyland’s Matterhorn in Anaheim, California. My three sisters and I were rabid readers. Days, I went to an innovative school program for gifted children, evenings were spent at libraries, doing homework. Saturdays were for piano lessons. Our family was old fashioned and tightly knit, and to this day we girls all have a literary bent.
I didn’t start out to be a writer when I began my college education at the age of 40. I thought I was headed toward teaching high school English classes. However, as one of the most terrified freshmen ever to step onto a campus, I put off the major state university in favor of a couple of years at our local community college, intending to take it slow and easy. After all, I’d waited twenty-plus years to get back to college, and I still had a family at home, so I wasn’t planning to set the corporate world on its ear. I enrolled in a Creative Non-fiction writing class, hoping it would spark my abilities for upcoming term paper requirements in my coursework. After two years at Pima Community College, I was highly dismayed when I came to registration for the fall and there were no “real” classes in writing left other than a fiction class. Besides, I loved science. I loved to write, too, but I wanted to write about science. Full of doubts, I signed up for Advanced Fiction Writing thinking at least it wouldn’t hurt anything. I’d skate through and collect an easy three semester hours. How hard could it be?
A day or two later, the instructor, Meg Files, called and told me the registration computer had mistakenly allowed me into the class, that it was by invitation only, and that in order to receive said invitation, I was required to submit a portfolio of 30 pages of my best short stories and poetry. I’d never written a short story. My last poetry consisted of two stanzas of Haiku for a class in high school and a solitary tome of teen angst in 1969. Determined that the only thing I could do was hope she’d appreciate my best term paper, (“real” writing, I smugly mused) I submitted a 40-page thesis on plate tectonics and specific zones of subduction created by movement of the North American and Juan De Fuca plates. She let me in the fiction class. I didn’t know if that meant my scientific theory was hokey, or that wiser heads prevailed at prodding an erstwhile but misguided sophomore away from some abyss, but I was in.
That year had also been the year of my dad’s retirement, and with time on his hands, he began researching our genealogy. I’d grown up with no knowledge of our ancestry, no sense of belonging to any place or people. I’d always loved hearing stories about my great-grandparents’ from my grandparents, and imagining, with a healthy dose of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels, their day-to-day lives. When the first assignment in my fiction class was to write a short story about someone with whom each student would like to spend time, the one person I could think of was my great grandmother, Sarah Agnes Prine. My imagination had been fueled throughout childhood by breaking away from the high-tech world of California and spending weeks every summer on my grandparents’ farm in West Texas, where I learned to set irrigation pipes, shoot a .22 rifle, pull weeds, collect eggs, spoil horses with apples and annoy sheep. Along with general kid stuff, my sisters and I heard many a tale of pioneer life. My grandmother told about her mother Sarah as if she were a character in a book. When Dad came up with a little hand-written memoir we thought was by Sarah’s brother, outlining places they lived and how they worked in Arizona and New Mexico Territories, the new information threw kindling on the embers of my inspiration. That short story ended up being the first chapter of my first novel, These Is My Words.
I did finally graduate in 1999 from the University of Arizona with a BFA and three majors: Music, Studio Art, and Creative Writing. I have taught a couple of classes back at my first stop, Pima Community College, but I never got certified to teach high school, and I don’t think I’m going to pursue that. I have too many more stories to write!
Sarah's Quilt is the sequel to that very first short story, still focusing on the imagined life of my great-grandmother, a woman whose reputation was bigger than she was. Some of the family details are there, but for the most part, I have transmuted oral history and research into a fictional set of characters set against a very real background. As my third novel, I think it is a stronger, deeper story, and while it travels further from the family history, it is very close to my heart.
While I started out intending to write a story about Sarah and her sons, one day Willie came sauntering up, swaggering and ridiculous, one part scared and two parts mean, wanting to cut himself out a place in the story. I tried writing it without the rascal, but he wouldn’t go away. I had to give him his voice. I also tried my best to save the kid, but he was headstrong and dangerous, a threat to himself as much as to anyone else. A coming, hidden danger lurks beyond the knowledge of the characters in Sarah’s Quilt, which I have decided to use as the springboard for the follow-up novel. Sabers are already rattling, heralding the coming Mexican Revolution, which will greatly impact Sarah’ family and neighbors. I originally intended to carry Sarah’s Quilt along to a much later date, but the story took on a life of its own and the weight of a volume that size simply didn’t allow it.
I think a writer is an ordinary person who just happens to live on the outside of things, seeing the world as a witness, an evaluator, in a second, secret life, populated by diverse characters and places and times, a world that can be as real but less threatening than the one in which we’re forced to move. It is both a refuge and a vast domain where anything is possible, even realizing almost-forgotten dreams.
Questions: What are your influences and your favorite books?
Answer: The most powerful book I can turn back to that made me first think how wonderful it would be to own the skill of story telling was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. It’s not a novel, but told in such a looking-over-the-shoulder narrative style that it chilled me to the bone as no thriller ever has. But, common sense (or blind ignorance) had long convinced me that writers were all journalists with PhD’s and years of reporting expertise, and housewives from Arizona weren’t likely to get their names on the cover of a novel. I didn’t think about it again until I began to write for that fiction class.
Probably the second writer-ly inspirational book was a tiny novel called The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough. It’s a sweet, romantic story full of delicious details, about as far removed from Capote’s true crime drama as possible. What made me re-read it more than once was the fantastic skill McCullough used in painting memorable characters with so few deft strokes. Again, it honed my longing but not my bravado. It was to be twenty years later, before I began to study the craft of writing, and only in secret did I start to put words to paper. I still didn’t think of my work in progress as a novel, but just as a short story that got out of hand. Thinking no one would read it anyway left me free to do as I pleased!
Reading suggestions? I think in terms of authors, rather than a particular work. Every reader brings her own baggage into play, too, so it’s all so very subjective. It’s the between-the-lines style that gets to me. Mark Twain and Stephen King, Zane Grey and John Grisham, Mary Stewart and Alice Walker, Tony Hillerman and Alfred Lord Tennyson, Margaret Mitchell and Thomas Cahill have all brightened my world. The best book is one that ends with an almost audible gasp, an immediate twinge, that “oh, no, it’s really over,” combined with the hollowness of letting go, and a slightly bitter, envious voice from somewhere that murmurs, “I wish I’d written that!”
I read reams of non-fiction, particularly military history, which often gives great tidbits about terrain and other natural elements, plus has insightful maps. I find it helpful, too, to read anything I can find that was written in the era about which I want to write. Diaries, newspapers and personal journals are the most enlightening. I study photographs, maps, and love to walk through an old building and soak in the ambiance.
Excerpted from Sarah's Quilt © Copyright 2009 by Nancy E. Turner. Reprinted with permission by St. Martins's Griffin. All rights reserved.
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