How a Biography Became a Novel by Carolyn Niethammer
Every author knows the
thrill of ripping open a box that holds copies of your new book. Holding your
first book is akin to experiencing your first kiss. Recently the mail carrier
brought such a box to me – it was my tenth book, but The Piano Player was my first novel. It was also the first of my
books in which I had a major say on the cover.
This book did not start out
as a novel. Thirty years ago, my husband was a young journalism professor at
the University of Arizona and one of his classes was The Tombstone Epitaph. The
owner of that venerable paper, founded in 1880, had given it to the journalism
department to use as a lab paper. The students would drive down from Tucson and
do some reporting, then put it together back on campus. The professor not only
guided them, he was also the paperboy. So every other week I’d go with my
husband to Tombstone to deliver the paper, and I would wander around while he
tended to business. During those wandering afternoons, I ran across the
historic character, Nellie Cashman and was intrigued. I found a short article
about Nellie in an historical journal and I followed up on that. Soon I was
hooked.
Nellie was an Irish
immigrant who had bounced around several mining areas, including those in
Canada, before she ended up running restaurants and boarding houses first in
Tucson, then Tombstone. Nellie was very active in the new mining camp, helping
to raise money for the Catholic Church and the miners’ league. Articles
appeared about her in both the Epitaph and the Tombstone Nugget.
Nellie left Tombstone when
it ground to a halt when the mines filled with water in 1886. She wandered
around the West, starting and closing businesses, until she joined the gold
rush to the Klondike in Alaska in 1898. Her journey and her businesses in
Dawson City are well documented. After a few years, Dawson became too citified
for her and she moved even further north to the Brooks Range. I took a trip to
Alaska and Yukon Territory to follow up on research.
But I could not account for
the twelve years between when she left Tombstone and started into the Klondike.
The Sisters of St. Ann, with whom she had been close and who nursed her at the
end, had materials in their library, but they would not allow me access.
At that point, I decided to
novelize my story. Since Nellie was a bit of a goodie-goodie, I added a
character totally different. Well-born Mary Rose faces family reverses and goes
to Tombstone to be an actress. She ends up playing the piano at the Bird Cage
Theatre and must learn a completely new lifestyle as Frisco Rosie. She boards
at Nellie Cashman’s Russ House, and although the two women are very different,
they are both living outside the norms for women of the day and end up becoming
unlikely friends. Over many rewrites, the story became Rosie’s tale, although
Nellie was usually close by. Together they deal with a lover who turns out to
be a murderer, imprisonment in a Mexican jail, near death falling into the icy
Yukon River, and disappointment when their quest for gold is dashed.
The book was sold in 1983,
but while I was doing the suggested tightening, the acquiring editor was fired,
everybody remaining at the publishing company hated the book and they declined
to publish it. Every few years I would haul out the manuscript, tinker, update
it to a new computer system, then go write another of my nonfiction books. By
the new millennium, the book was much better, publishing was changing, and
small independent publishers were filling niches abandoned by the New York
houses. Through colleagues in Women Writing the West, I learned about Oak Tree
Press. It seemed to be perfect for The
Piano Player. It was, and a year later, in late June that box of books
finally arrived with the postman.
(Subsequently the librarian hoarding the
materials at the Sisters of St. Ann died, and Don Chaput, an academic historian,
got access to the information and published an excellent biography of Nellie.)
Bio: Carolyn Niethammer grew
up in the historic town of Prescott, Arizona, and now lives in Tucson. She is
the author of nine nonfiction books on southwest subjects – popular
ethnobotanies of western plants, biographies, a book on Native American women
and a travel book on southeastern Arizona. Find her work at www.cniethammer.com. The Piano Player is available at https://tinyurl.com/madl42a/
See other award-winning works at www.cniethammer.com
Comments
Mary Montague Sikes
Carolyn began writing this fiction novel in the 80s. I have a couple manuscripts that I began in the 90s! So I'd like to think there is hope for me, too, and like Carolyn, I will persevere!