Talking with Mary Sheeran

 Mary Sheeran and I have known each other since the mid-1990s, and over the years have sung in several different choirs and ensembles together.  Since I've gotten more serious about my writing, we've also been meeting regularly for moral support and cheerleading.  So it only made sense to celebrate her Prairie Rose debut, A Dangerous Liberty, by interviewing her.

Although you’ve also lived in the Midwest, you’ve been a Northeasterner for a long while.  And yet you describe the far West with such passion and immediacy. Can you tell us about how that came about?

Until I got out of college, I hadn't made it past Indiana.

I was interested in Virginia City because of the TV show Bonanza. I loved those stock shots of pine trees, desert, and Lake Tahoe. (I also loved Pernell Roberts!) I did considerable reading about the history of that area in college, and after I graduated, I went there. I got a cab from the Reno airport up to Virginia City.  Live and in person, that country just took me over. The desert amazed me with its colors, just as it amazed Elisabeth. I didn't know it was so alive. I didn't know then that the Paiute tribe had been finding food in that desert for centuries. The immensity of the sky, the desert, the mountains beyond were both spectacular and terrifying.

One of the nights I was in Virginia City (I went back several times), I woke myself up at four in the morning to watch the sunrise over the desert, a kaleidoscope of deep purples and blues fading to bright red and then to white, the stars vanishing over the mountains. It was like a miracle, the best show on earth. We are so fortunate to have this land, and we should work to protect it. 

When I went to San Francisco, I took trip to Yosemite.  When the bus climbed up the Sierras to the Yosemite entrance, there it was, brilliant sunlight on the granite formations, the pine trees soaring above us all. My jaw literally, and I mean that literally, dropped wide open. The Japanese tourists around me were snapping pictures, but I don't think you can capture the beauty of that sight. Two days was not enough. So every spring, for the next ten years, I spent a week in Yosemite, in a cabin - just four walls - and walked in the meadows and into the forests and hiked up to Vernal Falls and sat by the rushing Merced River where a coyote sat next to me, watching along, too, and the roaring of Yosemite Falls drowned out everything. The expanse of that country, the power of it, the scent of pine constantly in the air was enthralling. My life was incredibly busy then - work, school, church - and going to Yosemite was a great joy, a gift, a place to learn how to breathe again.

The West always seems like home to me when I write about it, when I visit it, when I'm thinking about it. It's my special place, and yet it's still a stranger. I have so much to learn about it. It’s a strange romance we have, the West and me. I could probably never live out in the wild. I love New York and all it offers. But I have these images in my mind and heart.

By the way, if you look at Livia's cover for the book, the open window looks out on the desert with the Sierra Nevada range just beyond. I love how that cover turned out. 

You’ve been singing and performing most of your life.  Are there aspects of your own experiences as a musician that you used in writing about Elisabeth?

I've sung all sorts of music, a ton of classical, opera, church music, and the American Songbook. If I'd made Elisabeth a singer, it would have been about my point of view, and this way, I had to imagine it for Elisabeth. I used my singing but through a piano, if that makes sense. I imagined a pianist's frame of mind. I imagined and read about pianos and pianists in that time. I listened to a lot of the piano literature of the time. Concerts were different then; the kind of concerts and recitals we have now were still being figured out in the mid-nineteenth century.  

Women as pianists were considered a bit of an anomaly in Elisabeth’s time. Women played the piano at home, but performing on stage was a different matter. Clara Schumann was admired, playing her concerts, composing, wearing black, all her music memorized. There was this emotional response to Schumann, the assumption she was playing in memory of her dead husband, so people could think of her as the widow, even if she was a brilliant musician - It was still about a man. Elisabeth has the same problem as Schumann, as her own music is perceived as an expression of her father's oratory, especially when it’s powerful and dramatic.

Women were not allowed to study composition at the Paris Conservatory until 1870. In this country, Clara Bauer founded the Cincinnati Conservatory in 1867. Elisabeth is right on the cusp of a time when women were starting to make their presence known in the concert world. And conducting! Good grief, no woman did that. Stand with her back to the audience and conduct an orchestra of men? Women do conduct orchestras now, but even the other day, it was a big deal that a woman conducted the orchestra at the Oscars. 

Elisabeth finds herself in the midst of a great deal of political change:  abolitionism, voting rights, and the rights of women more generally. How do you think these issues affect her?

As an expatriate, Elisabeth felt the United States had lost the dream. It was over, finished. She'd seen her father killed, she'd seen Lincoln killed. Reconstruction was crumbling.  When she finally returns, she wants to skip right over the country and get to St. Petersburg. And yet, her love of country, affection I think she calls it in chapter one, tugs at her. To her surprise, she dives into politics. It was in her blood, to her surprise, and it was a way she could keep her father alive. You're not going to kill him off. I'm still here. The country wasn't abandoning the dream. People were fighting for it. But in joining the fight, Elisabeth increased the risk to her own life.

That part of the book gave me a chance to include what some women felt about not getting voting rights. "I have all the rights I need" is the big one, or "My husband will protect my rights." It shows how frightened some women were to declare that they were human beings, equal to men. It was a big deal when the California legislature passed, with some lobbying by Elisabeth and her friends, an act that entitled women to their property if they were divorced. 

Elisabeth made friends with interesting women, a reporter, a poet - whom she hired as a lyricist. Some wealthy women were politically active. Being back in her home country affected Elisabeth strongly. Perhaps she thought she was keeping her father's voice alive, but she was finding hers.

One of the great joys of writing historical fiction is delving into the past.  Do you have one or two favorite pieces of research that you’ve found over the years, whether or not it’s fit into a story?

My thesis in college, now lost, was about the theater on the Comstock Lode. "From Bear Fights to Shakespeare" is, I think, what I called it. It’s so indicative of the time and place. The opera house (that’s what they called the theater) really did have a bear fight one day and Hamlet the next. Some evenings were specially advertised as appropriate for ladies and children. It was also an arena where several women were heralded as artists.

There is more research being done about women in mining communities now, simply because there are more women studying and writing about that history. I keep discovering things. Women of all nationalities ran boarding houses, restaurants, shops. One woman, Mary Mathews was a contemporary woman in Virginia City, in the 1870s, and she wrote a book called Ten Years in Nevada. I would love to explore a character like her. Alas, she reveals herself as a bigot; she is quite outspoken about the prejudices of her time. She was not rich, she was struggling to get along and would take any job that she could grab, she was politically active, belonged to a lodge, and did charity work. She was one stubborn, tough woman, no delicate flower. History doesn’t seem to stop.

Who are some of your favorite fiction writers?

The trouble with spending a lot of time writing historical fiction is that I don't get to read much in the way of fiction, although I push myself. I've probably read more plays than fiction, too. 

I broke into Edith Wharton's house many years ago, so I'd better read her books. I love House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. Ethan Frome is on my bookshelf but I haven't read that since senior year in high school. 

Every so often I pick up Willa Cather's A Lost Lady. The story haunts me.

Sam Clemens became Mark Twain on the Comstock; Roughing It is amusing, but Huckleberry Finn gets better every time I read it. I don’t know how he does it.

Philip Roth! I loved American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. 

But the biggie was the Angelique series by Sergeanne Golon. I found them at Hess’s Department Store in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I was in high school, and I wanted to read something with sex in it! I picked one up because the back of book copy called her “the most ravished and ravishing heroine in fiction.” She’s much more than that (and the sex was fairly discreet).  The first five books are incredible, the first one, Angelique, is not only entertaining and my God romantic, it is packed with history, yet everything is in character and the tone is marvelous. The series set in Louis XIV's time, one book is entirely in his court, with amazing detail, and a great love flames through the whole series. Sergeanne Golon was a husband/wife team;. Serge Golon died sometime after the sixth book, and the series does a downward spiral after that. I try to read them every couple of years.

And the dread final question:  What’s your next project?

I'm jealous of you, already at work on your next one. I put out two books right in a row. Banished From Memory took six years of reading, watching movies, and writing. And then there's the whole page proof business and so forth. I wrote A Dangerous Liberty years ago, but Prairie Rose took it this past year, and it was just published at the end of last month, when I'd barely gotten over Banished. So there were those page proofs and thinking about it, getting back into that world.

Elisabeth and Will are still hanging around, and I don't know if that is going to last; there's so many things I didn't touch on. I'm curious about the people around Elisabeth, especially wonderful Mai Lan. Virginia City and the Comstock are always on my imaginative doorstep. When I was on a writer’s retreat, I started a book about an actress there, but I haven’t worked on it in a while. I think I should do something closer to home and me, but “should” is a deadly word.

 This is a long way of saying I don't know yet. But stuff is spinning around in my head. 

Very out of focus selfie of us at a favorite cafe.

You can buy A Dangerous Liberty here:

https://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Liberty-Women-Destiny-ebook/dp/B083N2MMFB

And if you want to read more love stories featuring independent women, there's my Courting Anna:

https://tinyurl.com/y4k6rwvd