Send This Page To a Friend

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.

BUY NOW

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

Although he won a Spur Award for The Court Martial of George Armstrong Custera fictional account of the aftermath of the Little Big Horn battleDoug Jones said, "It never set too well with me. Maybe it was because of the gimmick: "What if Custer had survived the Little Big Horn? Or maybe it was because so much of that book came right off the pages of various courts of inquiry following the battle. Hence, there is less of me in its pages and more pure history than in any novel I've ever written."

A retired army officer, Jones enjoyed three subsequent professions as a college professor, artist, and award-winning writer. "I've liked each of my careers, but I've run out of room, age-wise, so from here on out, it's the IBM or nothing."

At least seven of his books were set in the West, but Jones considered himself an historical novelist with an intense interest in the nineteenth century frontier. "The Indians, the army, the railroad, the mining, the cattle industry . . ."

His own frontier extended along the Arkansas-Oklahoma border, which he classified as "middle, not really Western. That shows you that I grew up reading Zane Grey, who so far as I know, never involved himself with any place east of Arizona."

Jones wrote from the time he was a student in Fayettsville, Arkansas. "The germ started growing when I was in high school but I knew I would never be a writer until I'd done a lot of other things not a serious writer at least, trying to earn a living at it."

Mentors who helped him develop his writing skills were Louise Bell, a high school teacher, "who knew how to kick my language in the right direction," and Oliver Knight, a professor of journalism at the University Of Wisconsin. "He showed me how to be, at the appropriate time, clearly brief and I showed him his first look at a belly dancer."

Jones joined the army's enlisted ranks immediately after high school and served in the South Pacific during World War II. He was commissioned as an infantry officer and retired in 1968 as a lieutenant colonel. Prior to his retirement, Jones was a staff member of the Armed Service News Branch at the Pentagon.

The officer decided to write his first book in 1952, after reading Lee's Lieutenant by Douglas Southall Freeman, which he considered "a dynamite book!" He then began collecting research material about the Third Arkansas Infantry Regiment. Thirty years later, his work emerged in 1982 as The Barefoot Brigade. A number of his books were sandwiched between as well as considerable research.

"I was lucky," he said. "I went to the University of Wisconsin for a master's degree while I was still in the army, and that opened my eyes to research possibilities."

Retired from the army, Jones joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, where he taught for six years in the school of journalism and communications. There he found unlimited research possibilities, and "the grad students made available to me their own stuff. I already had about nine novels in my head, so when it was time to come home to Arkansas and start writing, the material was all there on little three-by-five cards." All he needed was a little brushing up on such things as the color of the curtains at Delmonico's Oyster bar in 1878."

William Faulkner was Jones's favorite author, although he said, "I still don't understand him. He wove a web of family people, one novel to the next, and I did the same. In all my Arkansas novels and at least one of the Westerns, there are the same people, or at least the same family popping up. I like that. Each novel stands alone, yet there is a connection for anyone who cares to figure it out."

Jones didn't begin to freelance until he was in his forties, and felt that his background served him well because it injected realism into his work. "I've been around," he said. "I've been shot at and I've taken a few shots of my own. I know what it's like to see a dead man lying in the middle of the road. I've formed some judgments about life, I hope, which is what the old sages say comes with age."

Although not one to discourage young writers "from starting right out of the blocks at twenty-one, all that experience helped when I came eye-to-eye with some editor who'd never seen the things I've seen. All that experience helped when I wanted to convey some gut feeling.

Jones enjoyed writing descriptive passages to convey impressions of how clouds appear, the smell of frying ham, the feel of hickory bark.

"I love to be sensuous. Not explicit sex, you understand, but sensuous in the sense of getting everything involved. How it looks and sounds and feels and smells. Whether it's an Arkansas barn lot, or a blackpowder gun exploding, or a dash of lilac water in a Fort Smith whorehouse, I love to use words that, together, sing. Like a good bit of poetry, so you can read it aloud and there's a swing to it. By the way, everything I write, I read aloud to myself. If it doesn't go smoothly, I rewrite it."

Jones was the son of an auto mechanic who also happened to be a gunsmith. His parents were divorced when he was eleven, and his mother supported him and two younger sisters as a clerk of the Washington County courthouse. He remembered being spoiled by maternal grandparents and numerous uncles and aunts, which led him to believe that he was perfect. "I found that wasn't so, of course, but it took a while." A good student, he brought home grades that made his mother proud until the last two years of high school when he discovered girls and subsequently got his "priorities mixed up."

Jones sent his first short story to a pulp detective magazine during the post-war period while he was earning his BA degree in journalism. He said, "I expected to be rejected, so it was no big deal." The University of Oklahoma later published his first book, a rewrite of his master's degree in 1966, which concerned the treaty of Medicine Lodge.

"There were a couple of mistakes in it, but I learned that in historical works the only stuff that doesn't have a few mistakes never gets published, because the writer wants to keep researching and doesn't get around to writing."

Jones observed that his characters, if they were good, always behaved unexpectedly and he gave them free rein. Major characters have sometimes been relegated to minor roles by the third chapter, and minor characters have been known to claim the book. "Each one has to carry his or her own weight or their roles fade. If they become real, their places are assured. It's the most exciting thing about writing, watching these people develop."

While a professor of journalism, Doug Jones wrote various historical pieces for literary magazines. Ten books followed, including his master's thesis. "I like solid historical settings, but I like more of my own creatures moving around on the stage." Because he enjoyed the process, "if the writing itself isn't enough to excite me, I open a can of beer instead."

Three to three-and-a-half hours of writing left him drained, "but when I'm charging toward the end of a novel, I write regardless." While working on a book, he wrote every day, composing his first drafts on his typewriter, or with pencil and lined paper.

"I use an IBM Selectric because it's fast and big and sturdy enough to take my pounding," he said. "Besides, it makes the language sing sometimes."

Jones used a rough outline to stay on course, and rewrote each paragraph until it was right. "Sometimes that means throwing it out altogether." He always produced a finished chapter before going on to the next. "I never do a complete book in draft. Only individual chapters. Some of those may go final after one shot. Others may take ten rewrites."

The author had an extensive resource library of his own but depended on the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and it's branch in Fort Worth. He called the University of Wisconsin library "fantastic," and used such sources as the Gilcrease holdings in Tulsa and the Newberry facilities in Chicago, "a purely research library where you can only get in by appointment." He said he would travel anywhere to find the information he needed, and always carefully scrutinized the actual location of his novels.

"For Winding Stair, I finally got sick and tired of sitting in Judge Parker's court in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I felt as though I knew every splinter in that place."

He felt that publishers spend too much money on what he called "nonbooks: How to have a flat belly, how to sharpen a cross-saw, how to get along with the S.O.B. who lives next door. That stuff's got a place and should be printed like cookbooks, but I hate the thought of the money being unavailable to publish a good history or biography or poetry or novel."

Finding an agent was his biggest break. The association came about by accident when he met another writer at a cocktail party, who recommended George Wiser. "He sold my Custer book and TV rights to "the Hallmark Hall of Fame" before I'd ever met him except on the phone."

Wiser arranged for promotional tours, which Jones called "the pits." He hated airports, and once spent three weeks flying to seventeen cities. He said the rest of the business of writing wasn't so bad. "I've been pretty fortunate. I did have one editor, a young Smith-type lady, who read my Arrest Sitting Bull, and couldn't believe there was such a thing as a virgin maiden of twenty-eight. The time-set was 1890, you understand, and I told her I could bring her to the hills of Arkansas and introduce her to a couple of such women right then, and that was 1977. I don't think I convinced her."

Among his favorite novels were The Searchers and The Unforgiven, both written by Alan Le May. "He makes history come alive. He knows his Comanche and Kiowa history and ethnology. He creates great suspense and makes the language sing. Of course, I can't discount Owen Wister because he started it all, didn't he? Or Zane Grey, who caught the mood of the frontier better than any other dentist. Or L'Amour, who wrote more of it than anybody else. Or A. B. Guthrie, a class act always. And of course, Kenneth Roberts, who is not considered a Western writer, but he did write about the frontier of the colonial and revolutionary periods. And maybe Willa Cather, too, because she's also a class act. Edna Ferber wasn't far behind."

The recipient of at least two Spur Awards wanted to be remembered as an honest man in everything he accomplished, including his writings. As far as he was concerned, he had already reached his ultimate life's goal. "I've been published," he said. "I've had a lot of good reviews. I've met a lot of interesting people, along with a few interesting bastards. Most of all, there's something laying around now that my grandchildren and their grandchildren can pick up and be holding a part of me. That's the only immortality I ever expect or want."

©Copyright 2003 by Jean Henry-Mead. Excerpted from Maverick Writers. Reprinted here by permission of the author.