“History is messy and sexy and smelly,” writes novelist Lucia St. Clair Robson in the essay Predicting the Past. “It has odd angles and sharp edges. It’s not easy to wrap up in neat packages with pretty paper and ribbon. To try to imbue the past with present-day sensibilities is bone-headed…”
Robson is the author of such novels as Last Train from Cuernavaca, Ghost Warrior, and Light a Distant Fire. Her first novel, Ride the Wind, was a New York Times best-seller and won the Golden Spur Award for historical fiction given by the Western Writers of America.
“Lucia St. Clair Robson casts spells with words that pluck us from our armchairs and plop us instantly into the place and time of her choice,” blurbed Loren D. Estleman, one of the living masters of both the Western novel and the Private Eye novel. “In her hands, the characters she spun from whole cloth breathe and speak and sweat with the force of those who lived and who live once again here as never before.”
More than anything, Robson’s characters work a spell on us — characters like Cynthia Ann Parker, Sarah Bowman, and Lozen. And Robson writes landscapes — the Everglades, Maryland, more traditional Western settings such as Texas — like a shaman invoking spirits, guiding us through lives, bridging worlds.
Though I’ve never met Robson, I feel a strange kinship with her.
Robson grew up in Palm Beach, FL, about 45 minutes north of where I grew up. She graduated from University of Florida, a university I dropped out of to work on a newspaper. At one time, Robson lived in Columbia, SC, which is right down the road from where I live now.
“I have a couple tattoos and a machete scar,” Robson writes in her alternate bio (the one not found on her book jackets). “I had the second tattoo done so my eighty-two-year-old mother wouldn’t have to get her first one by herself. A nun gave me the machete scar in the jungle of the Orinoco delta. She was wearing chinos under her habit and a straw cowboy hat perched on top of her wimple.”
I have neither a tattoo nor a machete scar, but I sure do wish I’d written (or even thought of) those four sentences.
Below, Robson and I talk about authority, research, and ….
*
How does a Floridian come to write about the West? Are there any similarities between Florida and the West?
*
Lucia St. Clair Robson: They used to say of Texas that everything there sticks, stinks or stings, and the same is true of Florida. There is also the common factor of heat, which may be why I’ve been drawn to write about the southwest… Texas, Okahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. I prefer hot weather to cold. The bigger reason is that the mystique of the wide open spaces and the people who roamed freely there reached as far as my street, a couple miles from the Atlantic Ocean.
I like exploring the wildness of the western landscape. I admire the people, both native and newcomers, who learned to adapt to its hardships and thrive on its bounty.
*
And what is the biggest challenge in writing the West?
*
Lucia St. Clair Robson: I lived in Southern Arizona for a year, and have traveled all over the southwest, but growing up in Florida, I feel I’m not qualified to write with authority about the West. And being Anglo I feel presumptuous writing about people of other cultures and backgrounds.
*
What sort of Westerns do you write, and what are their key elements?
*
Lucia St. Clair Robson: Four of my books are about American Indians, a fifth is set during the War with Mexico which began in Corpus Christi. The latest one, Last Train from Cuernavaca, is about the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, and contains a couple Texans as characters. Many Americans, especially from the southwest, were involved with Mexico and participated in their Revolution on one side or the others. (And after all, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the great American Westerns.
*
How’d you come to write your first novel, Ride the Wind? Have your novels and/or your approach to writing them changed over the years?
*
Lucia St. Clair Robson: A thumbnail sketch about Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah in Time/Life’s book, The Great Chiefs, happened to catch my eye. I mentioned it to an editor I chanced to meet and he encouraged me to write about them and their people. Ballantine Books gave me a contract based on the first six chapters.
I was very naive when I started researching the Comanches 30 years ago. I didn’t realize how many errors can creep into history texts. I’ve learned to be more careful and to follow up accounts that seem exaggerated. I also use fewer adjectives and adverbs these days. (Still, that first amateurish effort, Ride the Wind, won the Golden Spur, has been in print 28 years, and has prompted more reader mail than all the others put together. Go figure.)
*
What does writing in the past let you do that writing in a contemporary setting wouldn’t?
*
Lucia St. Clair Robson: Historical fiction adds the dimension of time-tripping that’s way more interesting than writing about the familiar world I inhabit. And because conditions were far less forgiving than the sheltered existence we enjoy now, there’s a lot more drama. Writing about the past entertains me, and if I can’t entertain myself, I can’t entertain anyone else.
*
What can a writer who doesn’t usually read Westerns learn from reading within the genre?
*
Lucia St. Clair Robson: Reading about the past widens people’s world view as much as foreign travel does. And insight into the courage, resilience, and humor of Westerners puts our own lives into perspective. I believe that reading about the past, reading about the West, and reading about the past in the west make us better human beings.
*
Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor. Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.
