I seem to have a thing for cows. Not only in Lady Killer, but in my first novel Open Country: A Civil War Novel in Stories (2015) and in my present effort, Nothing Left to Lose, a memoir of the sixties, cows play a weighty role. That is why I’m calling my newsletter Ruminations….Read more »
Ruminations
1862 Diary of Thomas Richards (Walker Price)
A page from the diary of Thomas Richards, my great-grandfather (Walker Price in “Open Country”). I found the diary a month ago after years of searching for it. It is 12 pages long and covers October 9, 1862-February 24, 1863. Below is a fragment: “Monday Morning Dec 31, 1862, in the line of battle… Read More »
40,000 Irish Confederates
In Open Country, there are many characters like in a Russian novel but I hope they are not hard to tell apart. For instance, there is only one Irish Confederate, Owen O’Grady. Robert E. Lee once said that his favorite soldier was the Scotch-Irish who came to the U.S. by way of Ireland, “because they… Read More »
My Relations in Chester, Ohio
All my Union relatives and their friends are from Chester, Ohio, a composite of the three small towns in Ohio, New Philadelphia, Urbana, and Ripley. My mom is from Urbana, Dad New Philadelphia, and nobody I know of from Ripley but I needed it because that’s where the novel takes place across the Ohio River… Read More »
L.M. Bounds House Part of the Underground Railroad
Open Country comes out in less than a month and I thought I’d build up some interest by putting it in historical context. The novel commences at the John Rankin house in Ripley, Ohio that Connie and I toured while we were taking a trip down the Ohio River on a steamboat. Rankin was an… Read More »
The Novel is Fact not Fiction
The unnamed narrator in the Preface of Open Country inherits a Quaker Wedding certificate. Here it is in our house on the wall of the living room proving the novel must be fact not fiction.