How do you pronounce your name?
tuh-MARE-uh LIN-zee. Don't worry—hardly anyone gets it right the first time.
What does the name of your blog, “writer, cogitator, recovering ranch girl,” mean?
The real reason I tagged myself “writer, cogitator, recovering ranch girl” was that I needed a tagline for my blog, something that helped me to stand out. “Writer” was obvious. I love old-timey words, and I had been finishing up Earth’s Imagined Corners at the time, and so “cogitator” popped into my mind. I have friends who are “recovering alcoholics” (and “recovering Catholics”) and I thought that that fit me well—the idea that my childhood was something I needed to recover from. As Maile Meloy wrote in her story “Ranch Girl,” you can’t have much worse luck than being born a girl on a ranch.
Earth’s Imagined Corners is based on the life of your great grandparents. Who were they?
They were just regular folks. Frank and Ellen weren’t caught up in big events like the Civil War or the Stock Market Crash or anything. But that’s what makes them so fascinating. The Ellen I heard about growing up ~ I never got to know her because she died years before I was born ~ was nicknamed Ma Strong. She was known for taking in strays and children. She was strong, as her name suggests ~ the story goes that she gave birth in the morning and then went back to cooking for the men in the afternoon. And she would have had to be, with Frank as her husband. The story goes that they met at the town pump in Anamosa, and she actually knew that he was in prison. Of course she did ~ he would have been wearing the black and white stripes. But then when he got out they married. Over the course of their marriage, he chased her with an ax while drunk, she fended off an angry mob of his employees when he couldn’t pay them, and she stuck with him. But he had had a rough life. His mother, an elusive woman I would love to know more about, was rumored to have had five husbands as she moved across the country. She started in a large family in upstate New
York, moved through Illinois where Frank was born and Iowa where he was incarcerated, and died in Red Willow County, Nebraska. Her name was Elizabeth Zenana Robinson Matteson Wood Howard Staats. She was rumored to have danced at Tom Thumb’s wedding. And so it had to have been tough for him growing up. I have a lot of empathy for them both ~ obviously, having so fully imagined their lives.
How do you know so much about your ancestors?
I’ve been a genealogy nut for a long time, and Ancestry.com has made our lives so wonderfully easy. But it all started with my mom. She also was fascinated with family stories and collected the family histories of both her side and my dad’s side. She had this huge piece of butcher paper on which she had outlined generations and generations of ancestors. And
she loved to tell family stories and embellish them. We were related to everyone from Alexander Graham Bell to Robert the Bruce to King Tut. I haven’t verified all that ~ hehe ~ but a lot of those stories turned out to be true. And then I had a cousin one generation up named Gene Hetland who did an amazing amount of research back when you had to write a letter or visit the place. And then I got into it, and I inherited my mom’s and Gene’s research and added significantly to it. The real stories are so much more than you can ever imagine.
And it’s like a huge treasure hunt that never gets fully resolved.
Could you talk about the process of converting a family story to fiction?
Earth’s Imagined Corners was inspired by Frank and Ellen, but it has since gone very far afield. Think about it. Think about what you know about your own ancestors. Very little. A fact here and there. A place they lived. A family story that may or may not be true. Those facts are like the nails along the eaves where you hang the Christmas light. The story ~ now that’s the Christmas lights. You need to imagine and embellish and change things up whole cloth. What began as an inspiration has to fit within the logic of the story and the motivations of the characters and have to seem plausible. Life itself doesn’t always seem plausible, so sometimes you have to “storify” it quite a bit. And there’s a lot of mixed bits in the making of the sausage. I did a whole bunch of historical reseach ~ not only because I needed to learn about the time period. I also over-researched because I lacked confidence in my writing, and it was much easier to research than actually face the terrifying blank page. So I take other historical facts out of newspapers and other things and mash them in there too. Above all else, creating fiction from “fact” involves taking the story into you and living it within yourself, and so I’ve inhabited these characters in a way that many descendants never get to. Granted, they bear little relation to the originals, more than likely.
Did you do much research to write Earth’s Imagined Corners?
See above. Yes, I did a heck of a lot of research. I had not been to either Anamosa nor Kansas City when I wrote the first draft, and so I went on the wonderful Library of Congress American Memory Site. I found so many amazing things there. Plus online research in newspapers and websites and family history sites. There’s nothing like reading newspapers of the time. They give you reality in a way nothing else can, and they were the origin of a lot of the subplots. The past is another country, as they say, and so I wanted to get the details right.
Earth’s Imagined Corners is part of a series. Tell us about the series. Where do Sara and James go from here?
Oh, they have all kinds of adventures, and these plots are loosely based on Frank’s and Ellen’s lives. In the next book, Numberless Infinities, Sara and James head out across Kansas and Nebraska. James heads up a crew who are working on railroads. Thomas, James’s friend who’s Native American, comes with them. James is so busy, Sara feels ignored and taken for granted, and Thomas is such a nice guy, well, things may or may not happen. And then Sara is pregnant. She gives birth to a boy, Jake, and they take on two Japanese sisters to help, Sharp Crane and Plum. Meanwhile, James’s men start giving him trouble, and the railroad quits paying, and so James is caught in the middle. All around them the Native community is getting swept up in the Ghost Dance religion, in which they think a man named Wovoca is the second coming of Jesus. The book ends near Wounded Knee Creek, where the 7th Cavalry come in with guns blazing. The final book in the series, This Lowly Ground, takes place in northern Wyoming. Sara and James settle down and build a town after their son Jake has his arm taken off in a gun accident. James comes together with the other men of the area and they build an irrigation system. But then a group of Mormons come straggling in in a storm and decide to settle. Tensions rise as the town goes in together on a brick and tile factory. Sara’s little sister Maisie comes to live with them, and falls in love with the leader of the Mormons, Mahonri, but then his rascally brother Levi comes to town and she chooses Levi over Mahonri. Jake idolizes Levi, who leads Jake astray. And then, when the brick and tile factory burns, people are looking for someone to blame. I’m in the beginning stages of writing these, and I can’t wait to spend more time with these great characters.
Race plays a part in Earth’s Imagined Corners. Were you nervous about this subject, which is fraught with danger for a writer?
In a word, yes. Growing up on a ranch, I knew a lot about ranch life and horses and cowboys. When I was a teenager, I read The Horse Whisperer. It’s a good book in many ways, but I couldn’t get past the idea that a cowboy would be a vegetarian. A cowboy makes his livelihood from cows ~ cows that people eat, that they make their clothing from. What cowboy in his right mind would be a vegetarian? I know now that it was the author
projecting his own values on this icon of manliness. He took it and made it his own. But as a Westerner, it made no sense to me. Writing someone from a background very different from you is challenging, but I also think it’s a challenge worth accepting. Writing and reading is
the ultimate act of empathy. It’s the only technology in which you enter another person’s consciousness. In that way, it’s about connection and love. And you should connect with everyone, not just people who are just like you. Now, the writer has a responsibility not to stereotype, to try to make everyone as fully fledged as they can. I do this not by thinking of someone as African American or as Native American or as European American. I do this by thinking of them first as a full person with all the wide ranging emotions and experiences as anyone can have, and then I overlay their life experiences and their heritage. But I overlay someone whose great grandparents are from Czechoslovakia in the same way I would if someone’s great grandparents are from Africa ~ it’s one of many factors that contribute to who they are, and it’s our common experience and humanity that actually is the overriding factor. I think long and hard about the implications of all my character choices.
Earth’s Imagined Corners is self-published. Why did you choose that route?
I have to admit that I crave the legitimization that comes from traditional publishing, and that’s why I resisted self-publishing for so long. It took me 11 years and almost 200 queries to get an agent. (Read more about m y journe y to get an agent he re. ) I’ve written and rewritten two novels that have gone out to publishers ~ one of which is Earth’s Imagined Corners. Though I’ve gotten some very nice notes from editors, neither was picked up. Some might call me a slow study ~ I call myself pig-headed, and that’s a good thing. I don’t know if you’ve been reading much about this, but the squeeze that is being put on traditional publishing by disintermediation has brought about the rise of a new type of author: the hybrid author. (The great Chuck Wendig has be en talking a lot about this .) There’s no longer just two tracks ~ traditional publishing and self-publishing. The tracks are becoming melded and diversified, and much more of the power is back in the hands of the author. Also much more of the responsibility for getting a book out and connecting with readers. That’s where the hybrid author comes in. She or he is someone who, with the help of her agent, chooses the best route for the work at hand and then has to make it so. This is wonderful and terrifying ~ for everyone involved. Also, traditional publishers now consider the success of a self- published title in their decision to take book on. In other words, they will take on a book that’s doing well under self-publishing (and I suspect that this will become the norm, rather than the exception). I’m also made for it. It’s like all my various backgrounds come together in this one endeavor. Of course the writing part ~ I’ve been writing and improving my craft my whole life. But then also editing ~ I’ve been an editor in all different capacities. I’ve also been an artist and taken art classes for years, not to mention jobs as a document designer. I took classes in electrical engineering and computers for a number of years, and all that experience goes into making a website and working with digital publishing. And I’m in marketing and have done freelance marketing for years, which prepares me to be a promo- sapiens. And I love social media and tend to be a bit of an early adopter. Not to mention I’m a bit obsessive.
Who did you read as a child?
I loved all things British—Pooh and The Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden. I also loved Joan Aiken and Frank L. Baum. I was glad to go from grade school to middle school because I’d exhausted the library. In middle school, I discovered the Newberry Award books. Later, I read a lot of westerns and loved them, particularly Louis L’Amour. He doesn’t stand the test of time well, though. I went through a scifi/specfic phase as a teenager and still have a fondness for it. I haven’t read much romance or mystery, and I’m not quite sure why. Literary fiction is and always has been my greatest love.
Who are your favorite writers?
My favorite writers. Well, it often feels like the writer of the last book I read because I fall in love almost every time. I fall in love with minds. But I’ll take a run at it.
• My all-time favorites are Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.
• For novels, Douglas Adams, Julian Barnes, Michael Cunningham, E. L. Doctorow, William Faulkner, Charles Frasier, James Galvin, Kent Haruf, John Irving, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Ann Patchett, Jodi Picoult, Terry Pratchett, Anne Rice, J. K. Rowling, Anita Shreve, and Alexander McCall Smith.
• For short stories, Sherman Alexie, T. C. Boyle, Raymond Carver, Charles D’Ambrosio, Anthony Doerr, Aryn Kyle, Dennis Lehane, Maile Meloy, Alice Munro, Antonia Nelson, Tim O’Brien, Benjamin Percy, Donald Ray Pollock, Annie Proulx, Karen Russell, Jim Shepard, and Tobias Wolff.
• For nonfiction, Steve Almond, Judy Blunt, Augusten Burroughs, John D’Agata, James Herriot, and Mary Roach.
• There are lots of writers that I really want to like and I have their books but I haven’t gotten around to reading them.
See what I mean? And this isn’t all of them by a long stretch.
What’s the earliest memory you have of writing a story? When did you first call yourself a writer?
I’ve always written. The first story I wrote a beginning, middle, and end to was called “The Silver Locket” and was the story of a girl who goes back in time to become her own great grandmother. It was inspired by a friend named Cami who was into a British YA mystery writer named Joan Aiken. Together we read everything of hers. Cami wrote a story that ended with a head rolling in a gutter. Prior to that, I had read all the time, but I hadn’t realized that a person could actually BE a writer. When I actually called myself a writer is a different story.
I think I was 30. I wrote all of my life, but no one I knew was a writer, and I thought of writers as someone who published a novel, and so when I began to imagine I might just be published is when I tentatively played around with the idea of calling myself one.
Why do you write?
That’s a complicated question. Because it’s my passion. Because as a child I felt I had no voice. Because I love to read, and writing is like reading only better. Because I have to to stay sane—just ask my husband. Because I’m fascinated by people, and writing and reading is the closest you can get to another person’s consciousness. But a deeper reason is that writing is
all about desire. All people everywhere live in a constant state of desire. It is truly a human condition. Whether it’s something as small as a snack or something materialistic or something as large as a mate for life, people want. People need. One reason that we are such good consumers and why advertising works so well is because we by our very nature have this endless hole within us that needs to be filled. Every religion is built on this. So, this is my deeper answer to why I write: Because I’m human. Because I desire. It’s a way to take the world into myself and to make it part of me. It’s a way to place myself into the world. It’s a way to connect with the world and with other people and to imagine for one small moment that we are not alone and that we have the capacity to be full and content and meaningful.
Where do you get your ideas?
That’s the wrong question. It should be: How do you recognize an idea when you see one? Ideas are all around you. Everything and anything can spark a story. Say, someone told you to write about walls. Thomas King, who’s Native American, was given 24 hours' notice to write about walls, and he came up with a humdinger. (Sorry—I don’t remember the name of it!) It’s about a man wanting his walls painted white but the history of walls bleeds through, and then finally, when he has them torn out and new walls put in, the stark white walls makes him look brown. Virginia Woolf wrote a story about a blob on her bedroom wall, which turns out to be a snail or a slug, I think, but it’s a great story. I’m sure there are more stories about walls. It’s about what you put into the idea, what lights you up and interests you, and it can be as specific as something that happened to you as a child or as general as wanting to write about the color green. I also find that when my head is in my writing—in other words, I’m not blocked and avoiding—ideas come so fast and thick I can’t keep up. Everything sparks an idea for a story. Then it’s a problem of way too many ideas and feeling guilty about lost opportunity.
What is your writing process? What is your least favorite part? Your most favorite part?
I avoid. I feel awful. I inevitably read things and feel inspired, but still I avoid. Then I make myself sit at the computer and start. It’s hard, really really hard. But then something magical happens. The real world goes away and the world I’m creating becomes more real than the real world. It’s like the real world is in black and white, and the world I’m creating is in technicolor. Sure, sometimes it still comes slowly and painfully, but sometimes it comes like lightning from my brain. And then I’m in love. When I finish a story, revised and all, I’m in love with it. I can’t see its flaws. I want to take it to dinner and then make out with it in the back seat. Then, like all affairs, after a while I start to see the story’s strengths and weaknesses. Then I either revise some more or I write a new story or both. My least favorite part is the avoiding stage, and my most favorite part is when the writing is going well and the world I’m writing is more real than the real world.
What are you reading?
Boy, you ask difficult questions. The thing is, I could honestly say that I’m reading hundreds of books at one time. That’s because I tend to “taste” books before I read them from beginning to end. I’ll buy a new book and then read it for a half hour or hour before bed.
Then I’ll put the book aside and not pick it up again for years. Lately, I’ve been reading the books of my fellow Wyoming writers who are also great friends ~ Pembroke Sinclair, Nina McConigley, and Mary Beth Baptiste. I’ve also been reading a great biography called The Brontes by Juliet Barker. It’s been very inspirational for me.
Do you have an MFA?
No—my master’s is in literary studies and my thesis was on 1852–54 pioneer diaries. I’ve
taken a lot of workshops, however, in the classroom and online and at writers conferences. I highly recommend them. Be it an MFA or a local writers group, any time you can get others to look at your work and give you solid feedback is helpful. Solid feedback does not mean only “oh, you are so wonderful”—but you do need some of this for your ego or you won’t have the strength to go on. Neither does it mean brutal comments like “This isn’t working”
with no further explanation or direction. It means detailed criticism of one reader’s reaction to what’s working and what’s not working—the more detailed and specific and articulate, the better. Still more important, volunteer to read your writer friends’ work. You’ll learn more from commenting on theirs than you will reading comments on your own. I am thinking
about getting a low residency MFA, however, as I’m always trying to improve my writing.
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
Read a lot. Write a lot. Give yourself permission, which is another way of saying don’t undermine your own success. Write in the style of what you like to read. The best writing often comes from what obsesses you and makes you uncomfortable. Be brave. Persevere. Make a lot of writer friends.
What’s next for you?
To keep writing, always writing! I’m working on a young adult series called the Wyoming Chronicles, which are re-imaginings of classics set in contemporary Wyoming. The first, called Pride, is Austen’s Pride and Prejudice set in present-day Jackson Hole, and I’m having a lot of fun with that. That’s on the girls’ side. On the boys’ side, my first part of that series will be Moreau, based on The Island of Dr. Moreau, which will be about genetic manipulation. And of course I have the two Round Earth Series books to finish too! I even have a children’s book or two in the works. I’ll be busy.
Earth’s Imagined Corners
The Round Earth Series
Book 1
Tamara Linse
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Willow Words
Date of Publication: January 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9909533-1-9
ASIN: B00T18RRNK
Number of pages: 472
Word Count: 130,000
Book Description:
In 1885 Iowa, Sara Moore is a dutiful daughter, but when her father tries to force her to marry his younger partner, she must choose between the partner—a man who treats her like property—and James Youngblood—a kind man she hardly knows who has a troubled past.
When she confronts her father, he beats her and turns her out of the house, breaking all ties, so she decides to elope with James to Kansas City with hardly a penny to their names.
In the tradition of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Earth’s Imagined Corners is a novel that comprehends the great kindnesses and violences we do to each other.
Excerpt:
Anamosa,
Iowa, 1885
Sara Moore
should have nothing to fear this week. She had been meticulous in her entering
into the ledger the amounts that Minnie the cook requested she spend on
groceries. She had remembered, just, to include her brother Ed’s purchase of
materials to mend sister Maisie’s doll house and to subtract the pickling salt
that she had purchased for sister Esther but for which Esther’s husband Gerald
had reimbursed her. She stood at her father’s shoulder as he went over the
weekly household accounts, and even though her father owned Moore Grocer &
Sundries from which she ordered the family’s groceries, he still insisted she
account for the full price in the ledger. “No daughter of mine,” he often said,
though sometimes he would finish the thought and sometimes his neatly trimmed
eyebrows would merely bristle.
Despite the
buttressing of her corset, Sara hunched forward, somewhat reducing her tall
frame. She intertwined her fingers so that she would not fiddle with the
gathers of soft navy wool in her overskirt, and she tried not to breathe too
loudly, so as not to bother him, nor to breathe too deeply, in order to take in
little of the cigar smoke curling up from his elephant-ivory ashtray on the
hulking plantation desk.
As always, the
heavy brocade curtains armored Colonel Moore’s study against the Iowa day, so
the coal oil lamps flickered in their brackets. Per instructions, Sipsy the
maid lit them early every morning, snuffed them when he left for the grocery,
lit them again in anticipation of his return at seven, and then snuffed them
again after he retired. It was an expense, surely, but one that Sara knew
better than to question. The walls of the study were lined with volumes of
military history and maps of Virginia and Georgia covered in lines, symbols,
and labels carefully inked in Colonel Moore’s hand. In its glass case on the
bureau rested Colonel Moore’s 1851, an intricately engraved pistol awarded to
him during the War of Northern Aggression. Sipsy dusted daily, under stern
directive that not a speck should gather upon any surface in the room.
Sara’s father
let out a sound between an outlet of breath and a groan. This was not good. He
was not pleased. Sara straightened her shoulders and took a breath and held it
but let her shoulders slump forward once more.
“My dear,” he
said, his drawl at a minimum, “your figures, once again, are disproportionate
top to bottom. And there is too much slant, as always, in their curvatures. I
urge you to practice your penmanship.” His tone was one of indulgence.
Inaudibly, Sara
let out her breath. If he was criticizing her chirography, then he had found
nothing amiss in the numbers. The accounts were sound for another week. Later,
when he checked the numbers against the accounts at the grocery, there was less
of a chance that she had missed something.
He closed the
ledger, turned his chair, and with both hands held the ledger out to her. She
received it palms up and said, “I will do better, Father.”
“You would not
want to disappoint to your mother.” His drawl was more pronounced.
So he had
regretted his indulgence and was not satisfied to let her go unchecked. His
wife, Sara’s mother, had been dead these five years, and since then Sara had
grown to take her place, running the household, directing the servants, and
caring for six year-old Maisie. Ed needed little looking after, as he was older
than Sara, though unmarried, and Esther, the oldest, was married with two daughters
and farm of her own.
Sara
straightened her shoulders again and hugged the ledger to her chest. “Yes,
Father,” she said and turned and left the room, trying to keep her pace
tranquil and unhurried. She went to the kitchen, where Minnie had a cup of
coffee doused with cream and sugar awaiting her. Minnie gave her an encouraging
smile, and though Sara did not acknowledge what went unsaid between them—one
must shun familiarity with the servants—she lifted her shoulders slightly and
said, “Thank you, Minnie.” Minnie, with the round figure and dark eyes of a
Bohemian, understood English well, though she still talked with a pronounced
accent, and Sara had only heard her speak the round vowels and chipped
consonants of her native tongue once, when a delivery man indigenous to her
country of origin walked into the kitchen with mud on his boots. Sara tucked
the ledger in its place on a high shelf and then allowed herself five minutes
of sipping coffee amid the wonderful smells of Minnie’s pompion tart. Then she
rose, rinsed her cup, and applied herself to her day.
The driver had
Father’s horse and gig waiting, as always, at twenty minutes to nine. As Father
stretched his fingers into his gloves, pulling them tight by the wrist leather,
he told Sara, “When you come at noon, I have something unusual to show you.”
“Yes, Father,”
she said.
It seemed odd
that he would concern her with anything to do with business. He left her to the
household. He had long tried to coerce Ed into the business, but Ed’s abilities
trended more toward the physical. He was a skilled carpenter, though Father
kept a close rein on where he took jobs and whom he worked for. All talk of
renaming the business Moore & Son had been dropped when Father had recently
promoted the young man who was his assistant, Chester O’Hanlin, to partner. Mr.
O’Hanlin had droopy red muttonchops and a body so long and thin he looked a
hand-span taller than he really was, which was actually a bit shorter than
Sara. Mr. O’Hanlin didn’t talk much, either, and he seemed always to be
listening. He held himself oddly, cocking his head to one side, first one way
and then the other, his small dark eyes focusing off to the left or right of
the speaker. His nose, long and wedge-shaped, seemed to take up half his face.
“Chester, the Chinaman,” Maisie called him outside of his presence because of
the way he stooped and bobbed whenever their father entered the room.
About the Author:
Tamara Linse jokes that she was raised in the 1880s, and so it was natural for her to set a book there. She is the author of the short story collection How to Be a Man and the novel Deep Down Things and earned her master’s in English from the University of Wyoming, where she taught writing. Her work appears in the Georgetown Review, South Dakota Review, and Talking River, among others, and she was a finalist for an Arts & Letters and Glimmer Train contests, as well as the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize for a book of short stories. She works as an editor for a foundation and a freelancer.
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