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Jean Henry-Mead
began her writing career in 1968 as a news reporter and photographer in central California while serving as her college newspaper's editor-in-chief. She later worked as staff writer-editor-photographer in San Diego, and news reporter in Casper, Wyoming. She also served as editor of In Wyoming magazine.

Mead's freelance articles have appeared in national publications as well as magazines in Norway and West Germany, which have won more than twenty state, regional and national writing awards. Her six books include three volumes of interviews: Maverick Writers, Wyoming in Profile and The Westerners; Casper Country, a centennial history of central Wyoming; and two novels: Escape on the Wind (featuring the Wild Bunch), and Shirl Lock & Holmes (first in a mystery series). She's currently working on her third novel, a Wyoming historical. Founder of the Western Writers Hall of Fame, she's a 23-year member of Western Writers of America (WWA) and former secretary-treasurer; sustaining member of Women Writing the West (WWW), past president of Wyoming Writers, Inc.(WWI), and owner/moderator of the Western Writers Forum on Yahoogroups.com.

Maverick Writers' 271 pages are packed with humor, photos, writing advice and biographies. Authors profiled include: A. B. Guthrie, Jr., Louis L'Amour, Will Henry, Elmer Kelton, Dee Brown, Loren D. Estleman, Peggy Simson Curry, Don Coldsmith, Stephen and Wayne D. Overholser, Don Worcester, Janet Dailey, Matt Braun, Gordon Shirreffs, Lucia St. Clair Robson, Elmore Leonard, J.T. Edson, Benjamin Capps, Jeanne Williams, Douglas Capps and other legends of Western Literature.

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Will Henry is also included in The Westerners, a new collection of Mead's favorite interviews among hundreds conducted over twenty years. Other notables in the book are Vice President Dick Cheney, singer Chris LeDoux, attorney Gerry Spence, sportscaster Curt Gowdy, Marlboro Man, Darrel Winfield; aviatrix and Amelia Earhart friend, Lucile Wright; 96-year-old former cowgirl Beth McElfresh, 91-year-old former cowboy Maynard Lehman,
and a host of others.

Signed copies are only $14.95.

Click to visit Jean Henry-Mead's Website

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee may have been Dee Browns best known book, but it certainly wasnt his favorite. He said, I got very weary of it and had to take a week off and go to a different place and never think about it. It was a most difficult book emotionally to write.

His favorite? Thats easy. The Year of the Century: 1876 was fun to research, and I did a great deal of traveling. I wanted to cover every event of any importance in that year. So I had to immerse myself in microfilm of a dozen newspapers in different cities, and half-blinded myself  looking at it, hour after hour.

Brown also scanned the popular periodicals of the era, and traveled to Philadelphia because the U.S. centennial was the event around which the book turns. The nations one hundredth birthday was also the year of Jesse James last bank robbery, and quite a few other remarkable events that happened in the West.

His most difficult book in terms of research and writing was The Galvanized Yankees, an account of Confederate prisoners who opted to fight Indians in the West rather than spend time in prison. The retired librarian said, It was difficult because very little had been written on the subject. I had to do most of it from scratch in the national archives, which is a very difficult place to work. It wasnt as formidable when I was doing the research, but before I finished, the archives had become entangled in bureaucratic red tape.

Plots germinated in his mind for years and he filed hundreds of story ideas in notebooks before he began to write. Many of the ideas were never explored. Kildeer Mountain came from an actual event I came across in an historical journal years ago, he said. I put the idea in a notebook and then kept thinking about it as time went onabout how to handle the story. Creek Marys Blood was the same way. I read a little four or five paragraph item in an old book about Mary Musgrove, and I thought, Gee, Id like to write her biography. Having lived in Georgia, I dug around trying to find the material, but there just simply wasnt enough to write even a long article about her. So she wound up in a novel, using the material I gathered over a considerable amount of time.

His nonfiction books usually took a year or two to research, and if the landscape hadnt changed appreciably, he traveled to the locale. One of his most pleasant research years was spent on his ninth nonfiction book, The Bold Cavaliers, which tells of the events leading up to, and including, a Confederate regiments raids in Indiana and Ohio during the Civil War. He followed their route from the Tennessee Mountains, where battlefields are still relatively intact.

But if anythings changed, I dont want to see the area, he said. Ill avoid going there.

He used journals of early travelers instead for descriptive passages. If a city had been built on an historical site, he would only look at an important preserved landmark, deliberately avoiding its surroundings.

The quiet southern gentleman knew not why he wrote. My God, Ive never understood it, although it was partially to earn some money. I think theres a compulsion about writing that no one has ever explained satisfactorily to me. But I think I wrote Westerns back in the 1950s because they were doing so wellcompared to nowadays. There were many more published, and it wasnt too hard to get one accepted. The amount of money you received was just about the price of an automobile. So when I needed a car, I usually wrote a Western.

Browns list of published books includes an equal number of both fiction and nonfiction, several of which were written with Martin F. Schmitt. He said his fictional characters occasionally surprised him by running away with the story, sometimes to the detriment of the book. They simply will not do what theyre supposed to do. They dont say what I want them to say, and they try to move forward when I want them to recede. Ive killed off characters because they begin to bother me.

The author disliked composing in pencil. To me theres something cheap about itits second rate, he said. He also disliked ballpoint pens. You can use soft pens at an angle and get a nice black or blue line that my bad eyes can read. Ive tried word processors, but I think Im too old a dog to use one. If I were younger, Id certainly go for it because I can see how helpful they must be, and how much time you could savebut time doesnt mean much to me anymore.

The Saddleman winner lived close to his roots. He was born along the Red River in northwestern Louisiana, where his father was killed while working for a lumber company when Dee was five. His mother worked at various jobs to support her four children, when women earned half of what a man made while doing the same work. Thats why Ive been an enthusiastic supporter of the movement to give women equal pay for equal work.

Growing up when reading was prime entertainment, he remembers how the Tarzan books first surfaced in his small town. I dont recall who owned the first one, but it was passed around to probably two dozen boys and girls who read it and wore it out. Then the others in the series began to be available. They didnt have paperbacks thenyou could buy these second-hand books for twenty-five cents. But I dont think anybody actually owned them. They simply circulated through the group in school or in the neighborhood.

A good student although poor in math, he wrote letters to Saint Nick in the local newspaper. I always did my best in writing to Santy Claus, but I never thought of writing as something you did for a profession. During high school he read Blue Book magazine, which paid $100 for short stories. Thats equal to $1,000 now, he said. And I wanted to make that $100. It wasnt the writing. It was the money and I wrote about what I knew.

His family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, on the edge of the Southern Association Baseball Park. Engrossed in the sport, he decided to write about it. One of his short stories eventually sold to Blue Book, which was more exciting than any book Ive since published.

Brown worked as staff writer and linotype operator for his local newspaper before enrolling at the Arkansas State Teachers College. An undergraduate library assistant, he found that he had access to more research material than the average student. He also noticed that librarians were rather pleasant people who enjoyed themselves. That discovery, coupled with his fondness for books, decided his career. He worked later as a first-rung librarian for the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C., gradually climbing to the top of his profession at a research center in neighboring Maryland. During his off-hours, Brown attended librarians school at George Washington University.

After a three-year stint in the army during World War II, he worked for the Aberdeen Proving Grounds ordnance department where he catalogued weaponry, from tanks to rockets.

He then spent more than twenty years as agricultural librarian for the University of Illinois, a job from which he retired and enjoyed very much.

Brown wrote his first books during weekends and evenings prior to his retirement. His schedule was then more relaxed and he said his literary repertoire would be small indeed if I had not lived as long as I have. He credited his librarians career with his successful literary avocation.

He enjoyed writing travel articles, but ignored the short story market. His family often accompanied him on research trips and jotted down their impressions in notebooks. He said, If  they get a free trip with me, they gotta keep a notebook. Most of his vacations were spent in research, and his children accompanied him although they rarely saw him.

We went to Wyoming a couple of times and the Black Hills, and I was researching away. They supported me always, but if my work got in the way, they would get a little upset.

His wife had worked as an editor and used to go over her husbands galleys, but that didnt last. She made a lot of extra work for me, he said, so the last book or two I told her she could read, but dont proofread em. She likes to read the proofs before the book comes out, and then after its in print.

The writers family served as sounding boards on occasion, and he sometimes asked their advice. Just the other day, I said, How on earth could this be done? I cant find a solution. My grandson came up with a fairly good one and my daughter came up with the one Ill probably use.

Some of Browns projects died in infancy and he destroyed a stack of partially completed manuscripts after he retired. Ive started many books and would see that there was really no book at all. Or that it was too big for me to handle. But Id overcome the problem by starting up something else. And Ive never suffered from writers block for more than a day. Its usually caused by physical weariness of some sort. If  I cant write, I simply turn to something else.

Brown agrees that persistence is the key to success. You just dont give up. There have been times when everything seemed to conspire against getting a book done or printed, and I would feel like turning my back on the whole thing. But I came back and persisted. He advised fledglings to learn the English language while theyre persisting; Study words and their meanings. And possibly turn their attention to the media of pictures and whatever form its going to takecassettes and TV--because movies may be on their last legs. We may also be seeing the end of Gutenbergs influence in the [21st] century.

With yet another Civil War novel in progress, Dee Alexander Brown read constantly, despite his visual problems. He ended his days reading other writers biographies. Until I quit writing, he said, chuckling, and I dont know when that will be, I will always be reading something that has to do with what Im working on. But for now, it would be more biographies than fiction.

The author passed away in December 2002 but he left behind more than forty pure gems of literature.

Copyright 2002 by Jean Henry-Mead. Excerpted from Maverick Writers and her forthcoming book, The Westerners (November 2002 from Medallion Press.) Reprinted here by permission of the author.