All in historical fiction

Susanna the Foundling

Sara Stratton
book review, being an author, love story, historical fiction

SUSANNA’S BALLAD, Volume 8 in my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, tells the story of an abandoned child: Susanna. She was a “foundling,” an infant left on a porch by a destitute single mother, who hoped that whosoever found the tiny and sickly baby girl would have mercy, accept her as a gift, love her and raise her as their own. Susanna’s story is a “ballad,” because, as Webster’s says, it is “a slow or romantic dance song,” with a happy ending.

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Judging a Statue: What Do We Do About Confederate Statues?

Sara Stratton
being an author, historical fiction

My novel, Colleen and the Statue, is a love story. However, it also answers the question, “What do we do about this Confederate statue?” That is, for this particular statue standing in Central Park of Mackenzie, Texas, my story gives a unique solution. Read the novel to know what it is. Personally, I think that each statue has its own story and we should judge it accordingly, asking: “Who put it up? Where was it put? What did it symbolize when it was erected? What does it symbolize now? Should we distinguish between the historical person and what that person’s statue stands for today?” I think this last question is the most important one.

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What If the Statue Could Talk?

Sara Stratton
historical fiction

Colleen and the Statue is Volume 5 in my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle. It’s apropos for the times we’re in. May-June 2020 will be remembered as times of protests, marches, and questioning of the fundamental values of American culture and society—brought on by the senseless murder of yet another black man at the hands of heartless white police officers. Usually, opinions on the matter are divided into two distinct camps: white and black, with each side giving an opposing, contradictory version of what happened and its meaning. But what if there were a third opinion? What if what took place in Baltimore to George Floyd had taken place under a statue of Robert E. Lee, and the statue could talk?

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What Would Happen If Your Culture Was Disappeared and Erased?

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

Once upon a time, the Comanche people ruled the Texas Panhandle. Then they were disappeared and erased—saw both genocide and “cultural genocide.” Tammie’s Destiny, Volume 6 of my historical romance series, tells the coming-of-age story and forbidden love between an adolescent Comanche girl from a reservation in New Mexico and a young man from a Texas millionaire ranching family. The tale’s background is the generational hatred between Texans and Native Americans, seemingly making such a relationship impossible.

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Colleen and the Statue - The Movie

Sara Stratton
being an author, historical fiction

If I had to pick one of my novels to submit as a movie script, it would be Colleen and the Statue. The movie’s opening scene would be the novel’s Chapter 20, when Sgt. Nicholas Ruff, U.S.A. comes for his family in August 1865, after witnessing Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In war movies, the most emotional scene is when the soldier everyone thought had died, returns. Usually, this happens at the end. I would put it at the beginning, to set my story’s emotional tone. I would show Sgt. Ruff first slowly riding through his hometown in Nacogdoches County, Texas, accompanied by a platoon of Yankee cavalry, then going past the Ruff plantation’s Big House, and finally going out to the cabins where he had grown up as a slave. Along the way, I would zoom in on the faces of the spectators, to show their varied reactions to the totally unexpected return.

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Jim Crow is Always Watching!

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

As I said, Jim Crow was not real for me. I grew up in Amarillo’s white ghetto, totally unaware of how “coloreds” lived their lives in N-town on the other side of the tracks. I had no idea of the unofficial brutal system that completely controlled their lives, and of the horrific consequences for even the slightest violation of Jim Crow’s unwritten laws: disappearance, lynching, indefinite imprisonment, beatings, castration, gang-rape, black-listing from employment, burning down of houses, and more—much more. Even today, I find it hard to believe that this was happening in the city and the region where I grew up. … But I’m not a black, so “they didn’t come for me.”

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Valley of the Fallen

Sara Stratton
being an author, historical fiction

The background of my latest romance novel, Colleen and the Statue, is the on-going controversy over what to do with Confederate statues scattered ubiquitously across the states of the Old South, including Texas. For example, is the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in a park a symbol of States’ Rights and the Southern Way of Life, or rather is it a symbol of slavery and white supremacy? If the former, it should stay; if the latter, it has to go somewhere else—perhaps to a museum.

It is instructive to compare this American controversy with a similar, recent controversy in Spain over what to do with the to-be-exhumed body of Gen. Francisco Franco. Was he a hero, who saved Spain from Communism and restored the Catholic Church to its proper place or rather was he a brutal dictator, who fought only to acquire power and money? How you answer that question about Franco will determine what you do with his body.

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“YOU CAN’T REWRITE HISTORY!”

Sara Stratton
being an author, historical fiction

I recently had a phone conversation with a good friend—a lady in her mid-70s—who lives in Fairfax County, Virginia. She’s perhaps typical of older white Southerners, whose grandfathers served under Gen. Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia. My friend said that although she deplored the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted from the “Unite the Right” rally of August 11-12, 2017, she agreed with the rally organizers that the City Council’s order to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s Lee Park was a mistake. “You can’t rewrite history!” my friend emphatically insisted over and over again, during our long discussion about removal of this and other Confederate statues—including that of a Confederate soldier in Ellwood Park, Amarillo, Texas, where I grew up.

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"Build That Wall!" - What Do You Think When You Hear That Phrase?

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

I think about that border over there, first of all, because I’m Irish on my mother’s side and Scotch-Irish on my father’s side. That is, my mother’s Catholic McDade family came from what is now the Irish Republic; and my father’s Protestant Nicholl family came from what is now Northern Ireland. And secondly, I think about it because Volume 5 of my Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle series—a romance novel entitled, Colleen and the Statue—has as its main female character an Irish teenager who has immigrated to Texas, in great part, as a political refugee, leaving her homeland to get away from “ethno-nationalist” violence.

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Then vs. Now

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

In recent times, starting in the mid-1920s and the 1930s, white supremacist groups, such as the modern KKK, have claimed the statues as their own—as heroic defenders of the white race. The original meaning has been co-opted, so that now—today—in the first decades of the Twenty-First Century, long after the last Confederate veteran has died, and after almost all the children of Confederate soldiers have passed away, the racists, the white supremacists, Aryan Nation members, neo-Nazis, neo-KKK members, and the like, have made the statues of the Confederate soldier into symbols of the so-called “movement” to defend and preserve the white race.

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Accounted For (Lost, then Found, then Forgotten)

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

Seventy-five years ago—on January 25, 1944—Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Toney W. Gochnauer of Amarillo, Texas, disappeared. At the time twenty-four-years-old, he was co-pilot of a B24J Liberator bomber, which had departed from Kunming, China on a supply mission over the Himalayas to Chabau, India. The aircraft, with its crew of eight and four passengers, failed to arrive. On January 26, 1946, the lieutenant was declared, “Dead while Missing.” On May 13, 2019, his remains, which were found in wreckage near a rural village in eastern India, were identified, and he was declared, “Accounted For.”

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Apologize & Recognizing the Wrong

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

It is inconceivable to me that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott would do what California Gov. Gavin Newsom just did: issue by executive order an official apology on behalf of the citizens of California for a history of “violence, maltreatment and neglect” against Native Americans. (Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2019.) It is also inconceivable to me that the Amarillo Globe-News would do what the Los Angeles Times just did: publish an editorial challenging the City Council to likewise issue an apology for its complicity in the genocide to which Gov. Newsom refers in the text of his apology. (Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2019.)

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A Pilot of the Flying Tigers - Character Development for Nadya

Sara Stratton
being an author, historical fiction

The first chapter of my latest novel, Nadya: The Restoration of a Flying Tiger, is autobiographical. The little boy, “Jimmy Dade,” is me. The man, “Howie Hill,” is one of the Smyer brothers—embarrassingly I don’t remember his first name … maybe “Paul.” I remember so well the day I met him. It was the first time I realized what war does to a warrior. Like Chennault, he was a hero, but no book has been written about him, and he hasn’t even merited a footnote. As far as I know, no one in Amarillo remembers him or knows anything about him. His mother, his father and his brothers are long deceased. The Air Force undoubtedly didn’t know that he had died and so it furnished no marker for his grave, wherever it might be. Again embarrassingly, I forgot to put “Flying Tiger Smyer” in my novel’s Acknowledgements, even though he was the reason I wrote the book.

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A good love story is timeless and “place-less”

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

I was surprised when the public librarian in a small town in Virginia rejected the idea of placing my novels in her library, saying, “They’re too regional—they’re all set in the Texas Panhandle. I don’t think my patrons here in Northern Virginia are interested in stories that take place out West. They want stories set in their part of the country.”

I can’t say that she was wrong about her patrons. Maybe they really are that limited in what they will read. But she certainly was wrong in saying that a story can be “too regional,” and for that reason would not be of interest to anyone who is not from wherever the story takes place.

Good stories are timeless and “place-less.”

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"Who Am I?"

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

It seems that most people don’t ask themselves, “Who am I?” Most people know who their parents are—and their grandparents and even their eight great-grandparents. So it seems that they’re sure of their ethnicity, religion and nationality. So it seems if you ask most people whether they know who they are, they’ll suppose it’s a trick question, and they’ll answer you unabashedly, “Sure, yes—of course I know who I am!”  But some people are not so sure.

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"Duty" Above "Ethics"

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

“[Good-bye] to officers who put ‘duty’ above ‘ethics,’ and to the troops who regularly complained that the Army’s Rules of Engagement were too strict—as if more brutality, bombing and firepower (with less concern for civilians) would have brought victory instead of stalemate.”

Words of Major Danny Sjursen, West Point graduate, who retired in 2018, after 18 years in the Army and 11 deployments, often to war zones. Words very unusual for a multi-medalist soldier who was teaching history at West Point. He had become a disillusioned pacifist after what he saw in his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan—and he gave up his once-promising career, in order to speak out.

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Silent Sam vs. Tommy Trojan

Sara Stratton
historical fiction

I have determined that one of my coming novels in the series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, will deal with the issue of whether to remove the Confederate statue from the central park of my fictitious city of Mackenzie, which is modeled after Amarillo. At present, there is an absolutely incredible number of such monuments, which are scattered throughout the former Confederate states. The central theme of my novel will be: Is it right to honor a soldier who served in the wrong army? That is, even if the soldiers of the Confederate States of America were heroes and valiant soldiers, were they mistaken in fighting for what became known as the “Lost Cause”?

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The Hardest Topic to Write About (Racism)

Sara Stratton
historical fiction, being an author

My novels all necessarily involve racism as an underlying theme. They take place in Texas—which is part of the South—during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when white folks like me were being forced by the Civil Rights Movement to confront racism head-on, instead of pretending that segregation, discrimination and racial animus either did not exist, or were no big deal.

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My Mother and The Great Depression

Sara Stratton
being an author, historical fiction

            My mother’s stories about the Depression and Dust Bowl era were endless. They struggled to have enough to eat, never bought new clothes, never went anywhere, taped around windows and doors to keep out the dust from the dust storms that turned day into night. She said good-bye to many of her friends and their families, when they gave up and joined the endless procession of Okies going out West. Somehow, her family managed to survive and stay. But there was always fear: the dreaded thought that their time might too come, when they would have to leave and go to California.

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