Mary Volmer

Crown of Dust had made the Historical Novel Society's Editor's Choice list.  Very exciting!

From the website:

For each quarterly issue of the Historical Novels Review, the editors will select a small number of titles they feel exemplify the best in historical fiction.  These novels, which come highly recommended from our reviewers, have been designated as Editors' Choice titles.

CROWN OF DUST
Mary Volmer, Soho, 2011, $24.00/C$29.50, hb, 274pp, 9781569478615 / Harper, 2006, £6.99, pb, 448pp, 9780007205776
   
The tiny mining town of Motherlode isn’t just another place to try one’s luck in Gold Rush California. It’s also a place to escape. Emaline, proprietress of the town’s only inn, knows most of the secrets.  The only woman in Motherlode, she’s lover, mother, and confidante to the miners who drift through.  The newest, Alex, is different from the other rough-and-ready miners.  Emaline takes Alex under her wing, not knowing that the quiet, reclusive “boy” is really a young girl fleeing from her past.  Alex carries her secrets tucked beneath her shapeless clothes, alongside the gold nugget she accidentally found one day.  A gold nugget that brings unwanted attention to both Alex and Motherlode. As Emaline struggles to hold tight to the town she’s built, Alex struggles to hold tight to her new identity, that of a person strong enough to stop running and stand on her own two feet.
  
This is beautifully and unabashedly a character-driven novel.  Through Alex and Emaline, we feel what it is to be a woman in the rough-and-ready man’s world of the Gold Rush.  So alive are the miners that they threaten to swagger right off the page, knees caked with red dust, picks over their shoulders.  In such a leisurely novel, details are savored and back stories are trickled in teasingly.  But it never drags.  Despite the simplicity of the prose and the starkness of the setting, the author has crafted a gorgeous debut, and I look forward to future novels. -- Jessica Brockmole

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify.  That, indeed, is nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.  Millet had done a hundred sketches of peasants sewing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, “The Sower,” the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable.  All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying and sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves, for one that was better and more universal.”

Willa Cather
 

Pretty Cool! -- MV

Once upon a time Noah asked God to create a website and facebook page in order to market GOD. And God was like, “Market myself?  Forget it, man.  I AM.” 

Here I am, human, infinitely more limited than an omnipotent being, and still paralyzed by the thought of trying to define myself for an on-line audience.  Instead of getting to work, I do what I always do when faced with tasks that are foreign or mildly distasteful to me: I begin over-thinking. (Can you hear the existential crisis speeding round the corner?)

But who am I?  Am I just one me?  And if I am, as I have always suspected, a crazy collection of manifestations, no one of which fits comfortablyfor more than an hour at time, then which “I” do I put forth as the definitive edition?   Which I do I want the world to think I am?  And am I then stuck with the I that I create?  Is the I that I create, and the I that I am, really the same person after all?  And who is that?

But then I think to myself, hold on, self!  Wait just a minute!  Who I am isn’t really the question, is it?  The real question is, am I cool, smart, attractive, experienced, witty enough to represent the book I’ve written.  I’d buy and read my book.  But would I buy my book from me?   Or not from me, me, but from the me I find on my blog, twitter account, facebook page, website?  Because let me tell you that that confident, mildly attractive, carefully benign individual is not me.  No really.

Yes, I know.  Just write.  Of course I know because that’s what I tell my students to do.  Don’t worry about it!  Just write and rewrite and the universe will unfold as it should.  Hypocrite!  I know.  But that too is a part of who I am. 

I’m not a violent person, but given the chance I’d hang the men who invented the Internet and the leaf blower.  Subtract these two things from my life and my days would be a marvel of efficient, peaceful productivity. 

Instead the World Wide Web sounds its siren call the moment my mind butts up against a sticking point.  One little click and I’m caressed by endlessly seductive distractions.  No need to toil Odysseus.  Join us.  Stay a while.  Stay longer. 

By the time I stop clicking through Yahoo’s top ten destinations for a mid-winter get-away, ten years have passed and I’m still staring at the same paragraph I clicked away from, staring so hard and so long that after another ten years the words might order themselves like hard working ants back into whole thoughts.

But wouldn’t you know it.  The moment thoughts start to form the leaf blower man flicks his switch.  Goodbye ants.  Goodbye thought. 

Seriously, how is the leaf blower an improvement over the rake?  I get the Internet.  It has its uses.  But even the leaf blower man must prefer a rake to that roaring contraption strapped to his back.  There aren’t leaves enough to justify that sound.  What harm are those leaves doing anyway?  If they are such a nuisance, then, (forgive me mom….you know I don’t really mean it!), but cut down the tree: a crash, bang, one-shot-job with a chainsaw.  Imagine how much fuel we’d save in the long run, and any depletion in ozone would be surely be balanced by considerable loss of noise pollution. 

Then, you see, then I could get back to work.   Then I would be able finish this paragraph, line, scene, story...

*Cartoon Above: Copyright © 2009 BECK*Cartoons | All rights reserved
http://newtoonsontheblog.info/?tag=man&page=12

I was lucky enough to interview with Helga Sitkin of KCLA FM radio in LA a few weeks ago.  We talked about my novel, Crown of Dust, but Helga alone is reason enough to listen in.  She is 90 years old, has a fantastic radio voice and a mind that has sharpened with each passing decade.  In her 20's, during WWII, she was a pioneer in broadcast radio.  I'll post a longer profile about Helga soon.  For now, here's the podcast of the interview.

 Check out this article about one of my writing mentors, Rosemary Graham, and I.  Rosemary you rock!  I'm so lucky to have found you.  If I had one wish for that genie in the magic lamp, it would be that teachers everywhere would be honored for the work they do for students, rather than blamed for failures that are too often the result of difficult social and financial circumstances. 

The Craft of Mentorship-By Ben Peterson

Washington Nugget: Huge piece of gold up for bid--SF Gate


Yes, there’s still gold in them hills, still speculators and miners, still a few who get rich quick on the strength of luck, or divine intervention.  One hundred and sixty-three years ago, another gold strike created a migratory frenzy that opened the west and laid bare a wagon and then a railroad track across the continent.  It was the hope of instant riches that first drove the mostly young men and a few women to California.  They would come, find their fortunes, return to New York, to France, to China with new futures defined by their effort instead of by the social standing of their fathers.  A great many never returned.  Some died in route; others, only momentarily disillusioned by their failure to find that lucky strike, that motherlode, settled into the satisfying work of cultivation, and up grew the farms and ranches of the San Joaquin valley.  Long after alluvial, or river gold, had been snatched, people kept coming to California, lured by the audacious optimism that still, even in these horrid economic circumstances seems to rise from the very earth. 

Join me at Book Passage in Corte Madera on Saturday, January 29th at 5:00pm for a reading and lively discussion of my novel Crown of Dust. 

And bring an extra buck to enter the raffle to win a "free" autographed copy of Crown of Dust.  All raffle proceeds will benefit the Lamont Madden Book Fund.