Leslie Budewitz--Dreaming of the Past

DEBORAH CROMBIE: A big welcome to one of our Jungle Red regulars and favorite people, the lovely and talented Leslie Budewitz! I'm not going to tell you anything about Leslie's book because it would be anticlimactic compared to the wonderful story she shares below. It gave me goosebumps.

Welcome, Leslie!

LESLIE BUDEWITZ: Thank you, Reds and Readers, for welcoming me back to the Jungle.

Just before sitting down to write this piece, I read Laura Jensen Walker’s piece on her new historical novel, Death of a Flying Nightingale, about the volunteer flight nurses in England during WWII. and how she discovered the stories of these forgotten women. So many fascinating stories.

Discovering the forgotten stories of the past is, of course, one reason many of us love reading historical fiction. And though I mostly write cozy mysteries and suspense, I’ve also written historical short stories, with a mystery slant, featuring some of those overlooked women.

I don’t remember how I first learned about Mary Fields (1832-1914), who was born into slavery and spent her last 30 years in Montana, including a decade working for the Ursuline sisters at St. Peter’s Mission to the Blackfeet Indians, but I was instantly fascinated. All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection brings together three previously published stories featuring Mary and a new novella.

When it came time to write the novella, to anchor the collection, I was lost. I didn’t have a clear story idea. I wanted to continue delving into the themes and motifs of the stories, which focus on how women created lives for themselves in the American West, and how the social strictures of the era influenced the choices they made. I had a vague idea that it would involve two women, a teacher and a mail order bride, whose lives overlapped and somehow connected to Mary.

I got busy researching the era. Updating what I knew about Mary and the Ursulines. Plunging into books and articles about the Black experience in the American West, particularly for women. Thinking about possible crimes, and what Mary’s role might be.

And then my subconscious took over, in the form of a dream.

In the dream, I saw a book cover. An image of a late 19^th century woman. A photo I’d taken years ago of a rime-covered rose, grown from a cutting I’d been given by a woman whose grandmother carried a cutting in a coffee can when she came to Montana by train to marry a man she had never met. The dream was in the collage style of a Montana artist, Amy Brakeman Livezey; I’d never met her, but I’d seen and admired her work in a local gallery.

A week later, I stopped in the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell, Montana, about 30 miles away, to see an exhibit of work by Livezey and another artist who tell stories of women of the past.

Imagine my shock when I walked in and saw the woman from my dream.

(I suspect I’d seen an image of the painting in an ad for the exhibit. I hadn’t focused on it, but my subconscious did.)

I wish I could tell you I immediately knew the rest of the plot for “A Bitter Wind,” but I didn’t. It took me a couple of weeks to realize that the dream was telling me to merge the two women I’d been thinking of into one. Amelia Morgan, who came West by train to marry a man she’d met once. A woman who wore a blue traveling suit and carried a carpet bag full of books—and a cutting of a rose, in a can. It took a while longer to figure out who she was marrying, start writing, and discover the crime and mystery.

 A few years ago, I read an article on Writer Unboxed, one of my favorite blogs for writers, about using collage to develop or clarify the elements of a story. I loved the idea. It totally daunted me.

But clearly, the dream was telling me to do it.

I found the image of the woman in blue on Livezey’s website. (And yes, I’ve told her this story and she loves it.) On a narrow road near Helena, Montana is an old homestead I’ve driven by many times, always thinking I should take a picture and never stopping. The house I envisioned in the story was vaguely like that one. My friend Tabby Ivy had painted it, and I found the image on her website. I found a suitable photo of a sparrow. I printed out the picture of Mary that ultimately went on the cover. Photocopied a map of the area. Dug out my childhood stamp collection, still in a box in the closet. After all, Amelia and George courted by mail, and Mary is believed to have been the first Black woman in the country to drive a U.S. Postal Star Route. I watched videos on making a collage.

And Readers, I did it.

Ultimately, what the dream did was give me images for my subconscious to work on, spurring my conscious mind to ask the questions that fleshed out the story. The dream and collage gave me permission to plow ahead despite not knowing where I was going, through a mountain of fear. They gave me trust in the creative process, even though it was unlike anything I’d ever done before.

It’s nothing like the courage of Mary, Amelia, or the Flying Nightingales, but it feels pretty good.

 

Readers, have your dreams given you ideas you’ve been able to use in waking life? Have they prompted you to do or make something unexpected?

 

All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection, out September 17, 2024 in paperback and ebook (Beyond the Page Publishing)

 

From the cover: Born into slavery in Tennessee, the remarkable “Stagecoach Mary” Fields was a larger-than-life figure who cherished her independence, yet formed a deep bond with the Ursuline Sisters, traveling to their Montana mission in 1885 and spending the last thirty years of her life living there or in nearby Cascade. Mary is believed to have been the first Black woman in the country to drive a U.S. Postal Star Route, the source of her nickname.

In All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories, Agatha Award-winning author Leslie Budewitz brings together three short stories, each originally published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, imagining the life of Stagecoach Mary in her first year in Montana, and a novella exploring her later life, including: “All God’s Sparrows,” winner of the 2018 Agatha Award for Best Short Story; “Miss Starr’s Good-bye,” a nominee for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award; “Coming Clean,” a finalist for the Western Writers of America’s 2021 Spur Award for Best Short Story; and “A Bitter Wind,” a brand-new novella in which Mary helps a young woman newly arrived in the valley solve the mystery of her fiancé's death and his homesteading neighbors’ bitterness toward him.

Includes an abbreviated bibliography and historical notes from the author.

 

About Leslie:

Leslie Budewitz tells stories about women’s lives, seasoned with friendship, food, a love of history and the land, and a heaping measure of mystery. In addition to her historical short fiction, she writes the Spice Shop mysteries set in Seattle's Pike Place Market and the Food Lovers' Village mysteries, set in NW Montana. As Alicia Beckman, she writes moody suspense. A past president of Sisters in Crime, she lives in NW Montana with her husband and a big gray tuxedo cat. Find out more about her, find buy links for her books, read excerpts, and join her newsletter community at her website.  

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