SEARCHING for Carlotta
Frank Thurmond shares about debut novel ‘Lottie Deno’
UPHILIP MARTIN niversity of Arkansas at Little Rock professor and prolific writer Frank Thurmond’s just published first novel “Lottie Deno: A Novel of the Civil War and the American Southwest” is a work of historical fiction set primarily in Reconstruction-era Texas. (See review elsewhere on this page.) I’ve known Frank for nearly 20 years; at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, we’ll have a conversation at Little Rock’s WordsWorth Books at 5920 R St., in advance of a book signing. To RSVP for the free event send an email to info@WordsWorthbookstore.com.
Frank and I recently talked about the book and how he came to write it.
Q. You’ve written in all kinds of genres, so I’m wondering if you distinguish between these different sorts of work or if it all seems of a piece to you. (For me, it’s all rhythm, to the extent that I will write differently on different keyboards, but I tend to give very little thought to exactly what it is I’m writing. I’m just telling the story the best way I can see clear to tell it, and first drafts are always long and filled with discursive thoughts and asides — and sometimes these thoughts and asides turn out to be the real thing I was trying to get at anyway.) What’s your process like?
A. I just follow the muse whenever I’m blessed with an idea or a story and feel like expressing it in a certain way. Often, there’s a crossover among the different genres in which I take a particular interest. For example, the novella “Ring of Five”… was adapted from a real-life Cold War espionage story I’d written as a feature screenplay years earlier. A friend suggested it was such an interesting story that I should “novelize” it, and I enjoyed the process of doing so and being able to publish it as a work of fiction.
My recently published works — including a poetry chapbook and the current novel — were all so-called “pandemic projects,” begun during the lockdown period starting in spring 2020. However, my process is quite different for both. I draft a poem by hand, going
back to my earliest attempts at composing poetry in high school and college. It feels more authentic not typing it up until it’s been polished. This has the associated pleasure of retaining successive drafts — including all the myriad, often quite convoluted scribbles, corrections and annotations — in an old school journal that’s fun to revisit after the poems have appeared in published form.
Fiction … is for the most part banged out on my laptop, though the occasional short story (and a few passages of the novel) were written in a notebook sitting in a favorite local restaurant or wine bar. (Hopefully, readers won’t be able easily to spot the latter passages!)
Working at home, I began each morning with the poetry: I would read a few poems from whatever collection I happened to be reading as a way to warm up, and then would sit at my desk with my poetry notebook with the goal of writing at least one good line of verse for the current poem on which I was working. That done, I would turn to historical research related to my novel … Then I would sit at the laptop often for hours on end, usually with a daily wordcount goal and/or a specific place in the story that I wished to reach. (I had a loose working outline for each section of the story to use as a guide, though this often changed as I progressed and simply followed the trail along with my characters — guided in large part by recorded events, but often sidetracked with new imaginative directions along the way.)
Before completing the novel, I decided to start a feature screenplay adaptation of the story. I’d planned to start this after completing the book, but I was by that time back in the classroom teaching a screenwriting course, and I promised my students I’d have a completed script [by] semester’s end. I therefore got to work on the script, which is an entirely different process, as that requires writing with specialized software to ensure the format is correct.
At one point, I was writing in three very different mediums at once and during the same daily writing session: I began with poetry, followed with work on the later chapters of the novel, finally hammering out lines of dialogue with the script-writing software. Often, of course, the latter two would overlap: There are lines of dialogue and even whole scenes in the novel that emerged in the course of writing the screenplay — hence the rather “cinematic” feel within the story at times — while many novel revisions and additions likewise found their way into the script.
Finally, I had a rather unique muse during the writing: my beloved rescue dog, Ellie Mae, immediately curled up beneath my chair each morning when I sat at my desk, giving me a sense of warmth and companionship during hours that would otherwise have become quite lonely — especially during lockdown. Often the only thing that kept me from giving up in frustration during a given writing session was the wish not to disturb her by pushing back my chair — so I just kept writing instead.
Q. Writing historical fiction requires balancing a certain fidelity to the known (or agreed-upon) facts with the author’s imperative to connect — both in the Forsterian sense (“connect, only connect”) and in logistics of moving characters from one known point to the next. Often, if not most of the time, the most incredible parts of historical fiction are those things that turn out to be true. In researching “Lottie Deno” did you uncover anything so fantastic that it seemed incredulous? And how much detail were you able to extract about this figure? And how much liberty did you take with the story?
A. This was my third major effort in this genre, and I knew about both the excitement and the potential pitfalls of working with real-life characters and historical events, as well as the meticulous research required to get the facts right.
In the case of Carlotta/Lottie’s story, many of her real-life experiences were described by a journalist and Western historian named J. Marvin Hunter, who was a neighbor of hers and her husband, Frank, in Deming, N.M., in the early 1900s. He uncovered her true identity as the “lady gambler” remembered by old-timers who knew her in Texas in the early 1880s. His book about her was published posthumously in the 1950s, and he included artifacts associated with her life in the Frontier Times Museum that he founded in Bandera, Texas. Subsequent writers have explored Lottie’s story, including Texas historian Cynthia Rose, whose research and nonfiction account of the story were a particular inspiration for me. (It was therefore immensely gratifying to receive a blurb for the book from her.)
Certainly, some of the most seemingly fantastic elements of the story are recorded as fact. These include the scenes with the ever-intriguing real-life Old West gunslinger Doc Holliday, and also Frank’s violent Bowie knife antics that led to his time on the lam. However, to sustain the narrative convincingly as an engaging and substantial story, I wanted to expand the utterly amazing (and yet hitherto — like Lottie’s story itself — little known) setting of 1880s Fort Griffin. The fact so many intriguing characters could be found there during that time (including the “Buffalo Soldiers” — of the all-Black 9th Cavalry), inspired me to explore that time and place more fully by expanding Lottie’s story. Given the notoriously dangerous nature of Fort Griffin, I took the lead in particular from Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” saga in exploring some of the more violent aspects of that world. This found its way into the later abduction scene featuring several particularly insidious bandits and their unfortunate fate upon encountering a band of Kiowa warriors.
By and large, however, all of the major characters — and how they and their stories are described — are based on reported evidence.
One other liberty I took was inspired by a personal motive. In March 2021, my younger brother Will died tragically and unexpectedly just shy of his 46th birthday. So, in the scene where Carlotta meets the historical Frank Thurmond in the San Antonio casino he runs with his younger brother, I changed the brother’s name to “Will.” I hope in this way to have honored my own little brother in a meaningful and lasting way of which he would be proud.
Q. We talked a little bit off the record about the influence of Charles Portis and “True Grit” on your novel. Can we get into this a little bit? I take it Portis was generous with you and there are certain parallels between the book that seem to rhyme not only with “True Grit” but with Huck Finn and any number of other American road novels.
A. Few things are more inspiring for a writer than the chance to spend time with a favorite living author — that’s what I experienced with Charles Portis. For a two-year period of time between 2011 and 2013, I was welcomed into a small group of regulars at The Faded Rose restaurant on Rebsamen [Park Road], who met pretty much daily during happy hour for drinks and amusing badinage at the bar. My dad had known Charlie — as he was known to his friends at the bar — in their college days in Fayetteville, when Dad knew him as “Buddy.” (I had the great pleasure of reconnecting them after more than 50 years!)
Charlie was notoriously reticent about talking about his own writing, but that didn’t stop me from asking him once if he had any advice. At first he balked, but then turned back to me thoughtfully and said: “You’ve just gotta keep ’em turning the pages. Now, how you do that is up to you. But you gotta keep ’em turning the pages.” That’s remained my mantra ever since!
I’d seen the original film version of “True Grit” as a young boy, and when I first met Mr. Portis, the Coen Brothers’ adaptation had just come out. While I had read much of his other work, for some reason I had never gotten around to reading “True Grit.” So when I got a copy of “True Grit” personally inscribed, I read it and immediately wished I could somehow write a story told in a similar vein. Of course, I assumed it would be impossible even to find an original story idea in that genre, and never even contemplated it again until, as described above, I came across the story of the historical Frank Thurmond and his legendary wife!
Fast forward about 10 years, and while writing my novel I reread “True Grit” and a number of other books with a similar setting (including “Butcher’s Crossing” by the sometime Arkansas author John Williams).
Additionally, along with my historical research in the effort to achieve as much authenticity and historical accuracy as possible — especially in terms of 19th-century American dialogue — I revisited 19th-century American literature, including Mark Twain and a rereading of “Huckleberry Finn” for the first time in many years. (Lottie’s own adventures, like those of the eponymous Huck Finn, lend themselves to the picaresque.)
Once I realized my story was ultimately about Carlotta (as opposed to Frank), I decided to tell the story from her perspective as a first-person narrative. I naturally took my cue from Mattie Ross in “True Grit”; as in that book, Lottie (like Huck, for that matter), narrates the story in her own voice, writing as an older woman looking back on her adventures in what after just a few decades is already remembered with nostalgia as the Old West. She is effectively writing her memoirs — her character arc having been radically transformed by the vicissitudes both of personal change and that of society itself: having grown up in the antebellum South, coming of age in the “Wild West” and finally living to see stagecoach travel morph into modern automobiles and airplanes. She’s seen the devastation of the American Civil war trench warfare repeated on a global scale during the first World War, and she lived long enough to see the silent films of the 1920s feature characters based on the adventures of herself and her husband.
Q. I don’t want to overlook the commercial potential for this project. “Lottie Deno” strikes me not only as a book that might be added to a lot of libraries — and even to some high school and middle school reading lists — but could translate to a film or miniseries. I wouldn’t guess that you thought about this while you were writing but now that you’re done — maybe there’s been some interest?
A. What I set out to do was to write a story that would take the reader back to arguably the most interesting time and place in American history and capture something new about it in terms of both character and setting that had not been done (or at least overdone) before. Now that the book’s out, I’ve heard from a number of people connected with the film industry that this seems like the type of content that could have great appeal to audiences both in America and internationally. The Western has had something of a resurgence in recent years; and in this case, having a Western set in a location (Fort Griffin, in the heart of the Texas frontier) that has been all but overlooked in the genre, and featuring a unique female protagonist (along with a very diverse cast of characters) — all while bringing to life some of the most important historical episodes in our history — provides excellent material for a movie or (more likely, I’m told) a miniseries. So yes, I’m now sending it out to various contacts that I have within the industry. We’ll see.
Q. So what’s next?
A. I’m now working on a travelogue/memoir about some extensive road travels I took around North America (including Canada) with my aforementioned dog and muse, Ellie Mae. She died almost two years ago, and yet she’s one of those pets that you simply can’t forget and continue to miss.
My first book was actually a memoir and “Lottie Deno” is essentially a fictional memoir, so it’s a genre that I very much enjoy working in. Truman Capote once described the memoir as a “nonfiction novel” — and I think the best ones use the narrative techniques of fiction to bring one’s personal story to life. (A wonderful recent example of this is Little Rock author Kevin Brockmeier’s “A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade.”) And while it might seem odd to follow the writing of a novel with a memoir, there’s a clear tie-in: Some of the best adventures I hope to describe involve my traveling around Texas with Ellie Mae in search of Lottie Deno.