What made you decide to write this non-fiction work? I was approached by Allison Gilbert, a former CNN producer who’d been researching Elsie’s life for years but needed help turning Elsie’s story into a book.
After writing two “sad” books – one on the Jonestown tragedy (“A Thousand Lives”, and a memoir, “Jesus Land”) I leapt at the chance to dive into a project that felt a bit more hopeful. Allison and I made a great team; she researched, I wrote, and together we hammered out a book that encapsulates Elsie’s dramatic life.
Click on the link below to purchase “A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown” from Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Lives-Deception-Survival-Jonestown/dp/1416596399/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Click on the link below to purchase JESUS LAND from Amazon
Can you talk about your experience of researching this non-fiction work? And the dates of when you began researching and when your research was complete? As mentioned, Allison began researching Elsie years before she contacted me. Her introduction to Elsie Robinson came after her mother died – she was cleaning out her mother’s home when she came across Elsie’s poem, “Pain.” It’s a poem about death and loss that’s been widely anthologized.
Click on the below link to view an EXTRA’s interview of Allison Gilbert about Elsie Robinson.
When we began working together, we first spent a lot of time doing original research in archives and fashioning a detailed outline. After we had that, I wrote a chapter a month, until the book was done. We took a fun field trip to Hornitos, the town in the California foothills where Elsie hit rock bottom and worked as a mucker in a gold mine while trying to hone her writing craft. It’s now a ghost town, but still has one saloon in business.
Where did you do most of your writing for this non-fiction work? I write from my home in Albany, California (mostly my backyard) and I also have a desk at my writers’ collective in San Francisco (the San Francisco Writers Grotto).
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? Oh, I love process questions.
Music: I listen to classical music in the morning and jazz in the afternoon. No words – just calming vibes. Spotify has lovely playlists for writing.
I work on laptop, sometimes connected to a large display so I can throw several windows up at the same time. I am calmest in the morning, so try to roll out of bed and get to writing asap. I don’t look at social media/news/internet beforehand or I’m too distracted to get good work done. You really need to seal out the world and focus on the story. I put my phone/computer in focus mode. Even my kids can’t get through!
Drinks: caffeinated. But that’s tricky bc too much caffeine and you can’t focus.
Please include an excerpt of one FACT or one set of FACTS that you were most impacted by in this non-fiction work. The excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. Pages 139-141.
The Ruth Pierce Mine consisted of a central six-hundred foot-deep shaft that had six drifts, or tunnels, branching out from it as it followed a four-foot-wide quartz vein deep into the earth. Elsie became a “roust-about,” taking a series of menial jobs, sometimes laboring in the cool tunnels, other times above ground.26
I sat on the dump—often with sonny helping—under a
114-degree sun and picked over the ore after it had emptied from the skip . . . looking for the tell-tale streak, feeling for the tell-tale jag that might lead to a pocket.
Mucking, panning, timbering—during the first summer it was all one blurred delirium. Of one thing only was I constantly and acutely conscious—that heat.
Heat—God, what heat!
Days that ate like acid. Days when the flesh shriveled and shrank from the scorched bone . . . when the brain withered to a dry kernel within the skull . . . when, on a mashed finger, the blood powdered to dust before the vein could empty.
I took any job that came along—glad to get it. I was still a lanky outfit. But I couldn’t let that matter—any more than a man could let it matter. It’s amazing what you can do, if you can’t do anything else.
I mucked—which means shoveling mud and broken stone into a wheelbarrow . . . carting it off . . . clearing the tunnel or shaft so the men can work on the face of the rock.
I helped timber—bracing beams against the slimy, slipping menace of the hanging-wall until the men could nail them fast . . .feeling the ooze rise steadily up about my knees . . . feeling the weight and horror of the bulging darkness settle down upon my skull.
I “gophered” through old diggings . . . crawling, belly flat, through eighteen-inch fissures . . . under rotting timbers that whined and cracked.
Hour after hour the sun clanged across the hard, hot anvil of the earth. Hour after hour we crawled . . . gray specks . . . in an infinity of blazing light. No thoughts. No emotions. No sense of outer world or inner plan. Only that blistering heat. Only that blasting light . . .
Then the God-given relief of night. At first I could only sprawl headlong where I dropped. Too tired to eat or clean myself or even undress. Too beaten to think. Beauty above? Adventure below? They did not exist. Only coolness existed . . . blessed coolness . . .blessed darkness—
I had crossed the wall—left woman’s world behind me. Now I was with men . . . always with men . . . only men. I heard no other voices . . . knew no other problems.
When they raced up the shaft—away from the shot—I ran with them. When they piled down into the shaft again—fumbled, gasping, through the half-cleared air to peer for the miracle of gold across the face of the rock, I piled and peered with them.
Sometimes we didn’t get up quick enough, or came back too soon. Then, when a shot went wrong, I held them in my arms . . .gagging, cursing, howling huddles of pain . . . while some calloused fist yanked slivers of steel and rock from mangled eyes and flesh. Or—when the emergency was graver—sat on their struggling chests, holding the ether cone by main force, until they went limp beneath me, while someone rode hell-bent for the nearest doctor, ten miles away.
Scared? I was so scared that my toe nails would have curled if there’d been room! But when your only chance of living is to keep going . . . and it’s a cinch you’ll die like a smashed toad if you stop . . . why you just naturally cut out the hiccoughs and wiggle right along.27
Click on the below link to purchase “Listen, World! How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman” from Amazon.
Why was this one fact or one set of facts so compelling for you to discover and to write about? Elsie worked in a mine in 1915 when she was down on her luck and struggling to support her child. It must have been incredibly intimidating to gin up enough courage to ask the foreman for a job – the only woman in the mine. Sometimes we have to fall flat to pull ourselves up.
We used Elsie’s voice as much as possible in the biography because she had such a unique, personable voice that doesn’t seem dated.
Click on the below link to visit Julia Scheeres’s website
https://www.juliascheeres.com/
Click on the below link to visit Allison Gilbert’s Website
