12 minute read
AUTHORS INTERVIEWING AUTHORS
Claire Hamner Matturro interviews Kelly Stone Gamble
Kelly Stone Gamble is the USA Today Best Selling author of four novels, including her most recent, Ragtown. She is also a faculty member at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, where she shares her passion for literature, the humanities, and writing with students. Her best-selling novels include a connected trio of wickedly sharp, yet tender, stories about a woman named Cass Adams, who may or may not be crazy and who may or may not have killed her husband, but who can see things others cannot. These books include the USA Today bestseller They Call Me Crazy, plus Call Me Daddy, and Call Me Cass. I was thoroughly delighted by each of these novels, which focus not only on Cass but on a small town filled with quirky, fascinating characters. While serious—and not without drama and suspense—these stories also have a wry humor in them.
Ragtown, a historical novel set in the Great Depression, represents a sharp turn away from the contemporary era in those early books, yet the young female main character shares some of the same spirit, spunk, and determination as Cass. Kelly and I will discuss why she took this leap from modern to historical. But first let me tell you a bit about Ragtown. The protagonist, seventeen-year-old Helen Carter, has dreams of being a photographer, but unfortunately these aspirations are inconsistent with her sparse and challenging life. She is living in the back seat of her father’s Model T in the harsh Nevada desert, trapped with thousands of others enduring the harsh, hungry times of the Great Depression. Her father works on constructing the Hoover Dam diversion tunnels, but when he dies, she finds herself alone without protection or income. She quickly becomes desperate. Actual starvation raises its ugly, frightening head and her limited options go from bad to worse. It will take all her resourcefulness, and the help of a few other weary folks, to survive, let alone achieve anything like her dream. The novel, while fictional, incorporates actual dramatic events Kelly learned from studying the oral histories of the dam workers, and highlights a difficult time when ordinary men and women struggled to overcome the cruel circumstances of the Great Depression.
Claire Hamner Matturro: Thank you, Kelly, for taking the time out to do this interview. With teaching, writing, and that precious new grandchild, your time is valuable, and I appreciate your willingness to let Well Read Magazine and me intrude. My first question is perhaps the most obvious. Why Ragtown? Why the jump from our contemporary era in the Cass Adams stories, where you found such success, to a historical novel? And why the era of the Great Depression? And why the location and set-up of building Hoover dam? What intrigued you the most about the Hoover Dam that you would write a novel about it?
Kelly Stone Gamble:
Ragtown was actually started before the Cass Adams series. I began writing it in 2010 and over the course of twelve years, it went through at least ten rewrites. I lived in Nevada for twenty-five years and while working on my bachelor’s degree, had to find a subject for my senior project which would incorporate history and business. The dam intrigued me, and it seemed like the obvious choice. After visiting the Hoover Dam museum in Boulder City, I ended up volunteering for the oral history project they were conducting about the Hoover Dam. The stories told by not only the workers but the family members who lived and survived the building of the dam were absolutely fascinating to me, and I found myself down the rabbit hole of research to learn as much as I could about the dam. I wanted to tell others everything I’d learned, and creating characters and dropping them in that environment seemed like a good way to do that.
CHM: Where does the title, Ragtown, come from?
KSG: When the Hoover Dam project was announced, thousands of men converged on the Nevada desert hoping to gain employment. There weren’t nearly enough jobs for all of them, and although Six Companies, the company building the dam, had some housing available for workers, they were only available for single men, not families. They would eventually provide housing for all the workers, by building the town of Boulder City, but at first, many were forced to live in squatter’s camps around the dam area. Williamsville, named for the Federal Marshall who oversaw it, was the official name of the camp in Hemenway Wash along the Colorado River. To the residents and others in the area, Williamsville was known as “the hellhole” or “Ragtown.”
CHM: I’ve read Ragtown, and greatly admire the story, the research, and the poignant social issues raised in the novel. You avoid preaching—nothing in the novel approaches the didactic tones found in some novels with a message. Yet you show your readers the harshness of life without any safety nets. The protagonist Helen is left desperate when her father—her sole support and protector—dies while working on the Hoover Dam. What little she owns is mostly stolen from her after his death. The workers on the Hoover Dam had no workers compensation survivor benefits. If they didn’t work, they didn’t get paid. Their families received no help. Social Security, SNAP, and Aid to Dependent Families and other social programs simply did not exist. Helen, at being orphaned as a teen, finds herself with bleak, harsh choices—marriage to someone she does not love, prostitution, or starvation. How did you feel writing about such a time and such a situation? You convey Helen’s emotions and thoughts so very well, I wonder if her character might have been based upon or inspired by anyone in your own genealogy.
KSG: This may sound cliché, but Helen is every woman. I think, at some point in our lives, we’ve all had to make a choice when our options weren’t at all what we really wanted. Granted, my life choices have never been as bleak as marriage, prostitution, or starvation, but I’ve done things I didn’t really want to do, especially forty years ago, because of society’s expectations for me as a woman. Now things are a lot different, but women still feel that pressure. I’ve known a lot of Helen’s in my life, women who refused to do as society dictated, but I wasn’t one of them, at least when I was her age. For example, I have always liked to build things, and I remember in high school telling my mom I wanted to one day do construction work. She laughed at me, told me I should be more serious about life, etc. Of course, I caved, and never pursued that. But even now, there’s nothing more satisfying to me than to have a stack of 2x4’s and an idea, and I often wonder how different my life would be had I just pulled a Helen. So it was easy to draw on experiences and emotions and allow Helen to be the fighter I wish I had been.
CHM: One of the things I enjoy about quality historical fiction—and Ragtown is definitely high quality—is the way it makes me, and presumably most readers, want to learn more about the history in the story. Intrigued as I was about your story of Helen and the building of Hoover Dam, I did some of my own reading into the building of the dam. Your historical facts are accurate, so you obviously did your homework with research. Might you tell us a bit about the process and the research? And how long did it take for you to research and write Ragtown?
KSG: It was 2006 when I started working with the museum for the oral history project, and I finished the first draft of Ragtown in 2011 as part of my thesis for my Master of Fine Arts in Writing. I read every book I could find about the dam, read documents and looked at photos not only in Boulder City but at UNLV special collections library, read newspaper articles from the time at Nevada State Museum, even found a Las Vegas phone book from 1931 which helped me construct a mental map of downtown Las Vegas. But the oral histories were key. Oral histories are like no other form of research. They are individual stories, from one persons perspective, and based on their memory of that time or event. Although the interviewee is asked questions, they are encouraged to expand and talk about things that aren’t always verified or that others may not have experienced. And like any story, they are sometimes embellished, sometimes incomplete, but most definitely fascinating. Several of the scenes in Ragtown were constructed from bits I read in the oral histories. For example, one scene, I’ll call it the fire ant scene, really happened in Ragtown. So for one person, at least, that horrible scene stayed with them, long into old age, and once she included that in her history, it forever became a part of the Hoover Dam construction story.
CHM: You created such a wonderful, complex, sympathetic, and ultimately strong character in Helen. Will we get to read more about her in a subsequent novel? I know I want to know what comes next for her.
KSG: I don’t know. Of course, Ragtown takes place during the first phase of the project, the river diversion. The actual building of the dam doesn’t start until the day after my readers see THE END. So there’s a whole other story just waiting to be told about the dam, and there are a lot of things that Helen has yet to experience and learn. If one day, she starts whispering in my ear again, I gladly tell her story.
CHM: Ragtown came out first as a Vella book on Amazon. Many of the readers of Well Read Magazine are authors themselves, so I wonder if you’d share what that experience with Vella was like and if you recommend it.
KSG: When the Vella platform was announced, my publisher, Red Adept Publishing, wanted to try it and asked if any of the authors had something they would like to put out and basically, experiment with. I thought the idea of having author’s notes was perfect for Ragtown, so I submitted it. Ragtown debuted on the Vella platform in the top 5, reached the number 1 spot for three days, and remained in the top 20 for quite some time. In 53 weeks, it never left the top 100. So Vella was good for me! But, it’s like anything else; it’s a different form of publishing and authors have to determine for themselves if it’s good for them and their work. I had so many comments and reactions to the author notes that Red Adept included them in the print version of Ragtown, which is something quite different that most readers are used to. The great thing is, if a reader finds them distracting, they can just skip them and read the story. But if they want to know a little more, the author notes are there.
CHM: On a final note, you obviously lead a full and demanding life between writing novels, teaching college, your family, and other pursuits. On the website for your publisher, Red Adept Publishing, you mention building projects and travel too. So, when do you write? Where do you write? Do you set routines in your fiction writing?
KSG: I tried routines, and I’m not very good at following a schedule when it comes to writing. It seemed every time I’d set aside time to write, that time would come and I’d sit and look at the screen with nothing to say. So I write when a story starts developing in my mind, and once one does, I’ll be up all hours of the night writing. And I usually have an idea of where it’s going, but don’t really figure it out until I’m at the end. I have a book currently with an agent, Nobody’s Hero, which I wrote a few years ago. After I finished writing the novel, I went back and started over and rewrote the entire thing. Which was fine-it took me 80,000 words to figure out where I really wanted it to go. That’s a lot of “pre-writing” for some people, but, it works for me. And yes, I love to travel, spend time with my family, work around my house, but I also love to write, and when a story is there, I find time. I don’t sleep much.
CHM: Thank you, Kelly, for sharing your time and answers with Well Read Magazine readers. All the best to you with Ragtown and subsequent books.
KSG: Thank you for having me.
