|
This interview is excerpted from
Jean Henry-Meads book:
Maverick Writers
Click to order this
insightful book
directly from
Jean Henry-Mead
Maverick Writers: Candid Comments by fifty-two of the Best, is a collection of candid interviews with some of the best and most prolific writers of our time, who discuss their lives, work, successes and failures as well as their journeys into the Western genre. They also take pot shots at the publishing business and give generously of their experience to fledgling writers -- sharing techniques, secrets and humor. Authors profiled include:
A.B. Guthrie, Jr.
Louis L'Amour
Will Henry
Elmer Kelton
Dee Brown
Loren D. Estleman
Peggy Simson Curry
*Don Coldsmith
Wayne D. Overholser
Don Worcester
Judy Alter
Matt Braun
Gordon Shirreffs
and many other legends of Western Literature!
Books by Fred Grove
Western Jesse Wilder is a haunted man who's seen too much violence in his life -- at the battle of
Shiloh, as a prisoner of war, and later in the Union Army fighting Indians on the frontier. After the war, Jesse was ostracized for the part he reluctantly played in it, so he struck out for the West only to face the worst kind of horror: the killing of his wife and unborn child. Now Jesse has a chance to get revenge on one of his wife's murderers -- but the odds are piled high against him
|
The five-time Spur winner says he was provoked into writing at an early age, and at 86, continues to write despite a long-term battle with cancer.
Ten-year-old Fred Grove was visiting relatives in Fairfax, Oklahoma, when a wealthy Indian womans house exploded, killing her and two family members. The novelist graphically recalls details of the 1923 murder conspiracy to appropriate the womans money.
Groves mother was part Osage and Sioux, which thrust the tragedy into sharper focus. He remembers that "the situation was lawless, with county officials apparently doing little to bring the guilty to justice." A subsequent FBI investigation resulted in prison sentences for two white men, one a cattleman and leading citizen of Fairfax; the other the son-in-law of the murdered woman.
"Those were years of fear in Osage County, of rumors and threats. As a boy this intrigued me, angered me. I wanted to write about it someday, and air those wrongs. Of course, I had no idea how to go about it, but the events stayed in my mind. The Osage murders, also called The Reign of Terror by the press, made national headlines."
A number of years later, Grove met the FBI agent who directed the investigation, and they collaborated on a nonfiction book about the incident. But they were unable to find a publisher. "It was very discouraging," he said. "I had spent a year reading state newspapers on microfilm. From this came the novels Warrior Road and Drum Without Warriors. The first was written from an Indians viewpoint, the second from an FBI agent posing as a racehorse owner looking for match races. It sparked my latent interest in quarter horse racing and into what I do todayplus Apache frontier novels."
Grove was born on the fourth of July 1913, in Hominy, Oklahoma, the fourth of five children. His father had been a cowboy in western Kansas during the late 1880s, and later rode with range outfits in New Mexico and Texas, accompanying a cattle drive to northern pastures. He married a woman of the Osage tribe born on the Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and allotted land in Osage County, Oklahoma. Her maternal great-grandfather, a Frenchman, Henry Chatillon, had guided Francis Parkman on his tour of the plains, from which evolved the classic, The Oregon Trail.
The writers parents ranched on his mothers Osage land allotment, where they raised their five children. Freds two brothers died young, which he said, "saddened me considerably." Determined to write, Grove earned his B.A. degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma, Class of 1937, where he was sports editor of the student daily during his senior year, a post he says he loved. He later served as sports editor for two daily newspapers before drifting into general news and desk work.
"This was during the depression and you felt lucky to have a job. My first one on a newspaper paid $18 a week and I was glad to have it." He had attempted to write Westerns after Word War II, and interviewed "a lot of Oklahoma pioneers" while working as a reporter for the Shawnee Morning News. "They were wonderful old people who had made the land runs in that state and remembered the 1870s and 80s. This further spurred my interest in the West."
Grove sold his first short story, "The Hangrope Ghost," to .44 Western magazine in 1951. "I dont remember my first rejection," he says. "Rejections really didnt discourage me then, because I would send the story out again and always had another new one going."
He taught beginning reporting and worked in public relations at the University of Oklahoma, where he had taken creative writing courses from Foster Harris and Walter Campbell (Stanley Vestal). Grove later served as Public Information Director of the Oklahoma Education Television Authority "until the politicians got hold of OETA, demanding the staff perform like trained seals."
Fred Grove quit his job. "Leaving was one of the best moves I ever made because I then wrote the Osage novels and got into quarter horse writing. I realize it was a turning point in my life." Flame of the Osage was his first book, published when he was forty-five. He had previously sold Western short stories to the pulp magazines and Boys Life during the 1950s.
His writing is more habit than compulsion. "I enjoy writing when I have a feel for the story. Writing hard takes a lot of you. The finished novel is the real reward for me, a feeling of great relief. The best part is discovering an interesting character who comes on stage and you start putting this person into the story. Everything is fresh then. The worst part of writing is having plot problems. Maybe the story is sagging or the freshness has worn off. Of course, a rejected novel is terribly discouraging. I had this happen once after Id already sold five." It would have been his second and great Civil War novel, but the plot was not quite right.
The writers most difficult novel to research was The Buffalo Runners because he knew so little about the rifles used and how hide hunters worked. "But I enjoyed learning," he said. "The top pros called themselves buffalo runners, not hunters, because they had to keep moving the find the herds."
A subsequent novel, The Running Horses, required momentous research on modern quarter horse racing, training and riding, which included fast race timing, and the conditions horseman face at the Ruidoso racetrack in central New Mexico. "Horses coming off the hot flatlands of Texas and Oklahoma generally catch colds and suffer the mud and worst post positions." He also needed to know what transpires in the jockeys room, how a race is started, and the problems encountered in the gates.
The book he most enjoyed writing was The Great Horse Race, which features three disparate characters: "a fast-talking Texan, a cagey, mysterious old man with the face of a saint who knows how to paint one horse to resemble another, and an educated Comanche jockey. When he whoops the horse runs fastera kind of secret weapon."
Grove begins his novels with an interesting character, who usually appears to him while hes working on another book, "sort of a springboard to the next project." He writes notes and widely reads in the area he plans to write, but says, "you can do too much research and not enough writing, letting research serve as an excuse not to write. You need just enough research to make your story believable." Researching as he writes feeds information into the story as it progresses.
Five finished pages a day was his average output until medical problems and doctors appointments cut into his schedule. Due to the loss of sight in one eye, his workday now averages six hours and one novel a year. Fred bought an IBM word processor twelve years ago, which he still uses. Connected to his Wheelwriter typewriter-printer, he says, "Its the best thing that ever happened to the writing profession. Making corrections is so much easier." Although he has considered buying a computer, he says his IBM "still works just fine."
The novelist rarely knows the endings to his stories before he begins. An exception was The Running Horses. "The hero has this little blood-red filly, who has great heart and runs like a bullet. Her sire was murdered in Oklahoma by drug traffickers because the horse owner has identified them in court. The same traffickers steal her a week before the All-American Futurity at Ruidoso, New Mexico, but he gets her back after a shootout in the mountains. Seeing her, he just stands there and weeps. She has rope burns, but he finds no leg injuries. She draws the number one hole, worst position on the heavy track, and slips at the break. Her jockey takes her to higher ground. Ears laid back, coming like hammers, running straight, she wins by a head. I still get excited when I think about that race."
Grove believes that Western gunmen have been overwritten, while frontier women and good horses have been neglected. "Why? Because its easier to plot a story around an aging gunfighter, for instance, than to characterize a Western woman with five kids going about the harshness of every day survival. I guess it comes down to what interests the writer."
Groves most recent release by Five Star Westerns is . Another novel, A Distance of Ground is scheduled for 2000, and hes currently working on Destiny Valley, an exciting story of short horse racing and a jockeys last ride. Also to be released in paperback by Leisure Books (February 2000) is .
In addition to his five Spur awards from Western Writers of America, Fred Grove has received the Saddleman, the first Oklahoma Writing Award, and two Western Heritage awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. In typical Fred-Grove fashion, he says of his career: "Ive been fortunate."
Copyright © 1999 Jean Henry-Mead. All rights reserved.
Reprinted here by permission.
|
about the author...
|
Maverick Writers is Jean Henry-Mead's third non-fiction book and second volume of candid interview/profiles. She began her writing career in 1968 as a news reporter and photographer in California's San Joaquin Valley, while serving as her college newspaper's editor-in-chief. She later worked as staff writer-editor in San Diego, news reporter in Casper, Wyoming, and magazine editor.
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. She also has two novels under consideration at publishing companies and is working on her third, a Wyoming historical. Founder of the Western Writers Hall of Fame, she's a 20-year member of Western Writers of America, sustaining member of Women Writing the West, and until recently moderator and coordinator of the WHR Workshop on AOL.
|
|
