“Hot Coffee and Cold Truth: Living and Writing the West,” edited by W.C. Jameson (University of New Mexico Press, 256 pages, $25.95)
Anybody interested in writing should take a look at “Hot Coffee and Cold Truth.” And since almost everybody wants to write, this book should have good sales.
Thirteen Western fiction and nonfiction authors put down their thoughts on their craft, why they started and how they write, along with tips for beginners and professionals alike.
While a few of the chapters are little more than ego trips, most explain what a writer’s life is like and offer helpful suggestions. One tip is don’t expect overnight success. Another: Don’t quit the day job. The writers don’t agree on everything. Some of them outline their books before starting, but not all. Outlining “discourages spontaneity,” claims Elmer Kelton, author of 52 books.
Among the most articulate of the contributors is Margaret Coel, whose mystery series revolves around a priest and an attorney on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Already a successful Western history author, Coel decided to write a mystery after hearing Tony Hillerman speak. In searching for a topic for her first mystery, Coel remembered an incident she’d mentioned in her nonfiction book on Indian chief Left Hand, and that became the basis of her first mystery, “The Eagle Catcher.”
Richard Wheeler, who has published more than four dozen Westerns, tells how his background as a journalist contributed to his success as a writer – the ability to hustle a story along, to write openings that caught and held a reader. “And especially … a sense that I had to convey my material lucidly, logically, transparently, in language that eliminated ambiguity. ”
With all those books to their credit, most of the authors spend their time at the computer. “There is some mysterious quality that is at work when we are writing,” says Robert J. Conley, a Cherokee author. “Personally, I do not understand it … I just accept the mystery.”
“Burning Fence: A Western Memoir of Fatherhood,” by Craig Lesley (Picador, 357 pages, $14)
Craig Lesley has drawn on the people and events in his family for his prize-winning novels. In “Burning Fence,” he tells a startling story of his own life and the men in it – his absent father, his abusive stepfather and Lesley’s own adopted son, born with fetal alcohol syndrome.
Lesley’s father, Rudell, a handsome but distant man and veteran of World War II, deserted his family when his son was too young to remember him.
Lesley’s stepfather, Vern, was even worse. He belittled the boy and sexually abused him, referring to his acts as their “cowboy secret.” The mother left Vern days after the birth of her second child, a daughter, and struggled to raise the two children alone. While this is a story of fatherhood, the real hero is the mother, who put her own life on hold to raise her two children.
The author didn’t meet Rudell again until he was 15 and the boy was lying near death in a hospital following an agricultural accident. Rudell showed up with his child-bride and four children. After that Rudell became an intermittent presence in Lesley’s life, as the son struggled for acceptance. Lesley couldn’t bring himself to ask his father why he’d left or whether he’d ever wondered about his first-born. In an odd turn of events, Lesley and his half-brother Ormond were the only two of Rudell’s five children who remained in contact with the old man.
In an attempt to prove he could be a better father than his own had been, Lesley adopted Wade, an Indian boy who had been in 22 different foster homes. At the time, fetal alcohol syndrome was an unknown diagnosis, and Lesley tried to cope not just with the child’s limited mental capacity but his irrational acts.
Lesley does not go easy on his family, but he is just as hard on himself, writing about his unsuccessful attempts to hook up with his father, a brawling, insensitive bum of sorts, who lived in a shack in rural Oregon and survived by trapping and doing odd jobs. Nor does he shirk telling of his own frustrations and failures as Wade’s father. “Burning Fence” is a deeply moving book, an emotional search for love and acceptance among flawed members of one family.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes a monthly column on new regional nonfiction.
