Etowah Cliffs, Bartow County Georgia
I feel blessed as I move toward the end of pushing my Taken by the Shawnee—eight readings so far, three more to go—that my wonderful publisher, Turtle Point Press in New York, steered by my best-of-all editor, Ruth Greenstein, has committed to publishing my collection of eighteen short stories, Cowboy Tales in the fall of 2025.
This is every author’s dream: to have the next book published before the glow of the most recent book fades. Readers who love Taken by the Shawnee—and there are a lot of them!—will be startled and entertained by Cowboy Tales, full of outrageous humor and the demolishing of stereotypes about men, the West, horses, sex, dysfunction and so much else.
So how do I dare to project yet another book beyond Cowboy Tales? May I live that long! I won’t say too much about it since I’m in the very early stages. The big round table at my studio, Dragonfly, is layered with beautifully copied and enlarged versions of Caroline Clifford Nephew’s commonplace books collected when she was a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl at the Lafayette Academy in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1824.
Because my sister Eleanor Bingham Miller and our niece Emily Bingham in an extraordinary act of generosity loaned me the blue box of ancient letters Eleanor had found at the top of our mother’s closet after she died, I’m now about to embark upon this, my third book based on the contents.
The first, The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters, published by Sarabande Books, is built on the letters from my mother, Mary Caperton Bingham, my grandmother, Helena Lefroy Caperton, and my great-grandmother, for whom I’m named, Sallie Montague Caperton. These three Virginia-born ladies were full of surprises, adventurous in periods when women were encouraged to stay at home, well-educated if self-educated, and insightful, amusing writers of many letters, largely to relatives in the south or Ireland.
The second book to draw on the blue box is my Taken by the Shawnee, based on my five-times great-grandmother, Margaret Paulee Erskine, and her four years with the Shawnee in Ohio. The brief account she dictated toward the end of her life to her grandson, Allen Caperton, provided me with an outline, enriched by three years of research and illuminated by the use of my fictional expertise, honed through many decades of writing novels and short stories.
And now comes the last layer of letters, some so faded and nearly illegible I’ve been fortunate to have the expertise of my webmaster, John Niernberger, to enlarge and illuminate them.
Carolyn Clifford Nephew, later Stiles, will be my central focus in this next historical novel. I know I’ll start with the day in 1824 when she read her long, elaborate poem of praise to General Lafayette when he stopped off at her school, renamed for him, as part of his triumphant return as a hero of the Revolution to the United States. Amazingly, Caroline is my three-times great-grandmother, a direct descendant of her great-grandmother Margaret whom she never knew!
How fortunate I am to have access to this incredibly rich trove of letters! Now that letter writing is at an end, there will be no more such collections.
Many of the women who come to my readings mention having a box of old family letters in a closet, and wonder what to do with them.
Above all don’t throw them out! They are the last writings of history as it was perceived and written by women, an absolutely priceless rendering of times and places we will never know about, from women’s point of view, again.
This is not about family worship. In fact, letters may astonish and even shock you since we women tend to see events from the inside.
This is our history. Find a writer, or become a writer, to bring them to publication. It’s a long struggle but an eminently worthwhile one.
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