Why author is so passionate about folk hero Daniel Boone

Most of us remember some telling of the Daniel Boone story: A guy who lived in pioneer days (1734 to 1820) and became one of the first folk heroes in fledgling America. Hardly the type of character you would expect a young short story writer from Canada to become obsessed with. Still, Alix Hawley did and the result is her much talked about first novel All Truth Not A Lie In It, which tells the story of the frontiersman in the first person.

How did you become obsessed/ possessed by Daniel Boone?

It’s funny because it did end up feeling like a bit of a possession, literally, and it didn’t start that way. I have absolutely nothing in common with Daniel Boone. I’m female, I’m vegetarian, I love my bed, I don’t love camping.

But once I got the voice down he started speaking through me, if that sounds a little weird.

I’ve always been interested in charismatic people and people who have that kind of ability to draw others and be memorable to others. The idea actually came from a sudden memory . . . I was pregnant with my first child, my boy, and I was lying on the floor in my study, which was about to become baby’s room, trying to think of what I wanted to write about next because my book of short stories was about to come out.

I thought I wanted to try something a little different. And I just suddenly got this image of an illustration from National Geographic from when I was about 9 or 10 — and I hadn’t seen it since then — it just kind of flew up into my consciousness.

It was a drawing of Daniel Boone holding the body of his son.

And I can remember looking at that article over and over and over again as a kid. And again it’s hard to say why, I never used to play Daniel Boone or wild frontier or anything, but I was always really interested in the past, so maybe that was the original draw.

I didn’t remember anything much about Daniel Boone at that point, so I called the library and asked them to dig the article out of the stacks for me, which they benevolently did. I reread it and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s life!’

(His) name is known by everybody and nobody really knows what he did and so little remains of him.

So it made me wonder how does that trace get left? How do some people leave that mark on time? Even when he was alive people were making up stories about him: Byron wrote about him in a poem ( Don Juan) . . . So he was this almost mythic figure even when he was an actual human being. And I think that really fascinated me.

I fought first person for much of my writing career.

I always found it slightly phony to write because my question was always, well, who is this person talking to? Why would he or she be saying this? And the key for me was to figure out who (Boone’s) talking to and that unleashed it for me; my answer was he’s talking to his dead.

So that really unleashed it and then the voice just really started to come through me.

I’m actually working on book two now.

This (first) one ends at a pretty tense point and I’m interested in taking him in a slightly different direction . . . There is more in the historical record.

I still hear his voice in my head. At the risk of sounding like a complete oddball I used to have dreams, when I was trying to write this, about meeting Daniel Boone and (the characters in my dreams) always turned out to be historical re-enactors, they would start to talk like really hokey American modern people. And then once I felt like I nailed down the voice, I had a dream I was walking through a park in Kelowna along a creek that sort of makes me think of Kentucky . . . and in my dream I felt my stance and my gait and my whole body sort of change and I felt myself turn into Daniel Boone.

Fun? Weird? Yeah, you can spin that however you like.

“(His) name is known by everybody and nobody really knows what he did and so little remains of him. So it made me wonder how does that trace get left? How do some people leave that mark on time?” ALIX HAWLEY AUTHOR, ON DANIEL BOONE