by Jim Fergus
Q: You seem to have a great deal of familiarity with the landscapes as well as the cultures you write about. What kind of research have you done for your novels?
A: Well, I always start with the landscape, and the research there is simply a kind of accrual of experience in a place. I need to have a certain familial sense of the land in order to situate a novel in it. In the case of 1000WW, I had traveled extensively in the northern Great Plains in the course of my magazine work, and I really knew and loved that country. With The Wild Girl I was less familiar with the landscape of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. But I had recently moved to the Southwest and had already spent enough time down there to know that I would come to love that country too. The northern Sierra Madre Mountains are incredibly rugged and spectacular, and I made several trips down there, traveling through the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. I took a horse pack trip up into the mountains with a Mormon outfitter out of Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua, just to get the lay of the land. And in order to be able to write the scene in which the wild girl is captured, I also went on a mountain lion hunt on muleback with a rancher who hunts lions with a pack of hound dogs. Because of my background in journalism, I tend to be very hands-on that way; I really need to see and experience these things before I can write about them. As for the cultural research, I felt a tremendous responsibility to know as much as I possibly could about the respective cultures and histories of the Northern Cheyenne and the Apaches in order to be able to write as truly and accurately as I could about them. For me the research takes as long as the actual writing of the novel.
Q: Some of your most memorable characters are female—May Dodd in 1,000WW; the wild girl and Margaret in The Wild Girl. Do you enjoy writing from a female perspective? What kind of challenges does it present you as a writer?
A: Yes, I do enjoy writing from the female perspective. As a male writer, I find that it takes you completely outside of yourself, offering a kind of clean canvas, a completely fresh point of view, free of your own ego, opinions, and prejudices. It’s quite liberating in that way. I’ve never been particularly interested in writing fiction about myself or in having myself as the protagonist of my novels, and I find that anytime a male writer writes from a male perspective, the author’s own point of view inevitably bleeds through the character—which is not necessarily a bad thing, either. The challenge, of course, in writing from the perspective of the opposite sex, is to try to do so credibly.
Q: When westerns first became popular, Native Americans were frequently portrayed as savage villains. Then the tide turned and Native Americans were often depicted as noble and victimized. You depict Native American cultures with a great deal of texture and complexity. The Cheyenne in 1,000WW, for instance, are being decimated by the U.S. government, but they also commit terrible acts of violence against other tribes. Do you think about the politics of the way Native Americans have been treated when you write, or do you try to put that aside and just tell the story? Do you set out to make a point in your novels?
A: One of the things I’ve heard from Native Americans who have read my novels is that they appreciate the fact that I try to avoid portraying them as one or the other of those one-dimensional stereotypes—either as the villain, or the noble savage. Of course, the truth is that they’re human beings like the rest of us, capable of tremendous savagery as well as great beauty and spirituality. The revisionist notion of Native American history has it that all the tribes were living together in harmony, each in its own inviolable region, until the evil white man came along to steal their land and disrupt their perfect way of life. But the reality is that long before we showed up, these native tribes were, with some exceptions, warrior societies who had fought one another for centuries. As always in nature, the stronger had pushed the weaker out; they had enslaved one another and committed terrible atrocities. Which is not to forgive, or excuse, our treatment of Native Americans. As for the politics of this, it’s hard to write about the subject, even fictionally, without touching on it, but I certainly don’t set out to write political manifestos or polemics. My main goal as a novelist is simply to tell a good tale, and if readers also find a point in my novels, that’s fine too.
Q: You write a great deal about morals. For instance, in 1,000WW May Dodd is judged to be an immoral woman; the Cheyenne are judged as immoral savages. In The Wild Girl, Billy Flowers is depicted as having a very clear moral code, for better or worse, in great contrast with those around him. What is it about morality that fascinates you?
A: I’m interested in the sort of quicksilver, subjective nature of morality, the idea that virtually every culture, every religion, and even each era, has its own rather specific set of rules for it. And I also find fascinating the nearly desperate need that human beings have to impose their own particular version of morality upon others, to the point that we’re willing to slaughter one another in the name of our own moral codes. At the same time, we have a tremendous capacity to rationalize our own behavior as moral, no matter how despicable it might be. What is more grotesque, for instance, than the killing of babies and children? And yet every nation does it under the banner of morality.
Q: What do you most enjoy about writing novels? What do you find the most difficult?
A: The first part of that question I’m going to answer with a quote from Gustave Flaubert that I have thumbtacked on the wall beside my writing desk:
“It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horse, the leaves, the wind, the words that my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.”
How could I say it any better that? What I find most difficult is creating that universe.
Q: What do you read when you’re not writing? Who are your favorite authors?
A: Like many novelists, I’m unable to read fiction when I’m writing it, as we’re so easily influenced by other voices. And because I’m almost always writing I’m afraid I’ve gotten way behind on my reading, particularly of contemporary fiction. While I was writing The Wild Girl, I actually re-read Anna Karenina, because I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t start writing in Tolstoy’s voice. And I was struck once again by what an enormous novel that is (and I don’t mean just in terms of page length, though it is a doorstopper). What a truly omniscient performance; the characters of all ages, sexes, classes, professions are all such individuals, so vivid and perfectly rendered, such complete and “real” human beings. I was humbled and stunned all over again by Tolstoy’s greatness. Right now I’m in the middle of writing a new novel, and I recently decided to re-read Flaubert’s (whom I also revere) Madame Bovary. I also love Knut Hamsun. And in terms of living authors, who’s greater than Gabriel García-Márquez? Although I don’t dare read him when I’m writing. My other favorites are too numerous to mention.
Q: Can you recommend some books for fans of your novels who would like to get even more perspective and historical background on the time period, cultures, and events that you depict in your novels?
A: Partly for that purpose, I’ve included extensive bibliographies at the end of both novels. But if I had to recommend just one book to provide historical background about the Indian wars in both the Great Plains and the Southwest, it would have to be Captain John G. Bourke’s, On the Border with Crook. Bourke was General George Crook’s aide-de-camp and a fine amateur ethnographer in his own right. He participated in almost all of the important events and military campaigns, against both the Cheyenne and the Apaches. It’s an absolutely fascinating true account of that era.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Fergus is a freelance journalist whose writing appears in numerous publications. The author of two nonfiction books, his first novel, One Thousand White Women, remains a bestselling epic of the American West. He lives in southern Arizona.
PRAISE FOR JIM FERGUS’S
THE WILD GIRL
“Fergus makes unforgettable characters move against vivid landscapes in this laudable encore.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A literary, but accessible tale … beautifully told.”
—Malcom Jones, Newsweek
“Illuminated with the Technicolor scenery of a John Ford Western.”
—Gotham
“The Wild Girl has all the hallmarks of a classic. You enter the story like a time machine and are instantly transported back to the Southwest at the true end of the ‘Old West.’”
—Judith Chandler, formerly of Third Place Books
PRAISE FOR JIM FERGUS’s
ONE THOUSAND WHITE WOMEN
WINNER OF
THE MOUNTAINS AND PLAINS BOOKSELLERS AWARD
“An American western with a most unusual twist. Fergus is gifted in his ability to portray the perceptions and emotions of women. He writes with tremendous insight and sensitivity about the individual community and the political and religious issues of the time, many of which are still relevant today. This book is artistically rendered with meticulous attention to small details that bring to life the daily concerns of a group of hardy souls at a pivotal time in U.S. history.”
—Booklist
“An impressive historical … terse, convincing, and affecting.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The best writing transports readers to another time and place, so that when they reluctantly close the book, they are astonished to find themselves returned to their daily lives. One Thousand White Women is such a book. Jim Fergus so skillfully envelops us in the heart and mind of the main character, May Dodd, that we weep when she mourns, we shake our fist at anyone who tries to sway her course, and our hearts pound when she’s in danger.”
—Colorado Springs Gazette
“Jim Fergus’s One Thousand White Women is a splendid, fresh, and engaging novel. Strikingly original.”
—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall
“A most impressive novel that melds the physical world to the spiritual. One Thousand White Women is engaging, entertaining, well written, and well told. It will be widely read for a long time, as will the rest of Jim Fergus’s work.”
—Rick Bass, author of Where the Sea Used to Be
“Jim Fergus knows his country in a way that’s evocative of Dee Brown and all the other great writers of the American West and its native peoples. But One Thousand White Women is more than a chronicle of the Old West. It’s a superb tale of sorrow, suspense, exultation, and triumph that leaves the reader waiting to turn the page and wonderfully wrung out at the end.”
—Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump
Also by Jim Fergus
Fiction
ONE THOUSAND WHITE WOMEN
Nonfiction
A HUNTER’S ROAD
THE SPORTING ROAD
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 2005 Jim Fergus
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fergus, Jim.
The wild girl : the notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 : a novel / by Jim Fergus.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Americans—Mexico—Fiction. 2. Photographers—Fiction. 3. Apache women—Fiction. 4. Young men—Fiction. 5. Mexico—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3556.E66W55 2005
813′.54—dc22
2004054161
FIRST TRADE PAPERBACK EDITION
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-1-401-38241-4
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