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Next up on History Through Fiction: The Podcast is historical novelist and writer of women's adventure stories set in the West, Ashley E. Sweeney. Her novels include Eliza Waite, which tells the story of widow who heads north during the Alaskan gold rush of 1898, and Answer Creek, a gripping tale of adventure and survival based on the true story of the ill-fated Donner Party on their 2,200-mile trek on the Oregon-California Trail from 1846 to '47. In this episode, Sweeney talks about the importance and challenge of adhering to historical accuracy, the value of having deadlines, and the discoveries she made traveling along the Oregon trail.
Wilson’s guest on Delmarva Today is Ashley Sweeney, here to talk about her new book Answer Creek , the story of the Donner Party. The great Missouri-based trails: the Oregon, Mormon, and California, used in the westward expansion between 1829 and 1870 saw approximately 500,000 emigrants making the journey to the west beyond the Great Plains. Most of these pioneers have been forgotten today except for perhaps one, the Donner Party. The 87 members of this party would probably have been forgotten as well except for the ordeal near Truckee Lake and Alder Creek in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the stories of cannibalism. Ashley Sweeney is the winner of the 2017 Nancy Pearl Book Award for her first novel, Eliza Waite . Answer Creek is her second novel. Nancy currently lives in the Pacific Northwest and Tucson but I want to add that her father is Jerry Sweeney, a familiar writer here on the Eastern Shore. He is one of the editors of the Delmarva Review, as well as a past president of The
Bill welcomes novelist Ashley E. Sweeney to the show. Ashley is the winner of the 2017 Nancy Pearl Book Award for her debut novel, Eliza Waite. A native New Yorker, she is a graduate of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and resides in the Pacific Northwest and Tucson. Answer Creek is her second novel. She has long been enamored with underserved women’s voices. Her technique to hitch a heroine to history dovetails with an unfortunate fact: women’s stories make up only a fraction of narratives set in the American West. She aims to rectify that! Don't miss it.
Cypress Island, September 1896: a tragedy has left a young widow, mourning her child, living alone in a cabin on this isolated spot near Bellingham Bay in the very new state of Washington. Once a month or so, Eliza Waite rows two hours each way to the general store on the mainland for supplies. Otherwise, she supports herself through hard work: chopping wood, maintaining a vegetable garden, fishing, cooking, doing laundry. Each day has a chore, and they repeat endlessly until a second crisis and a lucky find send Eliza northward on a boat to Alaska, where the Klondike gold rush is at its height. There the strands of her past interweave in ways she could not have anticipated. In Eliza Waite (She Writes Press, 2016), Ashley E. Sweeney creates a tough, resilient, likable heroine whose compelling story will draw you in and make you pull for her success. And if all this effort makes you hungry, have no fear: the book is filled with Eliza’s recipes, and a plate of gingerbread or miner’s snickerdoodles is never far away. C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cypress Island, September 1896: a tragedy has left a young widow, mourning her child, living alone in a cabin on this isolated spot near Bellingham Bay in the very new state of Washington. Once a month or so, Eliza Waite rows two hours each way to the general store on the mainland for supplies. Otherwise, she supports herself through hard work: chopping wood, maintaining a vegetable garden, fishing, cooking, doing laundry. Each day has a chore, and they repeat endlessly until a second crisis and a lucky find send Eliza northward on a boat to Alaska, where the Klondike gold rush is at its height. There the strands of her past interweave in ways she could not have anticipated. In Eliza Waite (She Writes Press, 2016), Ashley E. Sweeney creates a tough, resilient, likable heroine whose compelling story will draw you in and make you pull for her success. And if all this effort makes you hungry, have no fear: the book is filled with Eliza’s recipes, and a plate of gingerbread or miner’s snickerdoodles is never far away. C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices