Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

The Blog Has Moved

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The blog portion of this website has moved to a new location!

I’ve been planning an overhaul of my author website for a while, and one of the planned changes is not to include a blog on the new, streamlined site. But I still wanted to have a place to keep the best of my nonfiction pieces and to blog on occasion, and also to publish some of my own short fiction directly. So I’ve moved to Substack! You can read a few more details about the move and what to expect from the blog in future at my first post over there.

If you’re subscribed to receive posts from this blog by email and want to go on receiving them, you’ll just need to hop over and subscribe at Substack—no account necessary. As of right now, everything on my new publication is free to read, but there is an optional paid “patron” subscription for anyone who would simply like to support my work.

The rest of my author website will look the same for a while, with the goal being to move to a new platform and design a new look within a year (but the web address will remain the same even after that).

I hope you’ll follow me on this new adventure!

Trails of Thought, IV: Quickness and Death

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A series of bite-sized musings on the history of the American West (and its portrayal in film and literature).

A few months ago, some interesting discussion on Twitter about genre tropes got me thinking again about the prevalence of the quick-draw gunfighter trope in Westerns—one of the signature elements of the genre that seems to be least based in fact but most popular in film and fiction. This time I found myself looking not just at the fact of it, but the “why,” and came up with a theory about it which I fondly imagine to be original (but I’d be very interested to know if anyone else has reasoned on these lines).

My theory: the preoccupation with the quick-draw gunfighter is, on some level, a fascination with the concept of a man having the power of life and death (literally) at his fingertips.

At its most basic, a story’s villain having this power makes him seemingly invincible, creating high levels of danger and suspense—while in a more complex story, a morally good or conflicted character with this power becomes the subject of conflict over how (or whether) he ought to use it. Most gunfighter Westerns are ambivalent about this, with the hero’s gunfighter skills being necessary to save the helpless ordinary folk from the villains, while at the same time those very ordinary folk—and sometimes the gunman himself—deplore his possessing those same skills. The classic example of this is Shane, of course, and in some slight degree the movie version of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

In such stories the man with the power of life and death is often presented as an outcast, a “marked man” simply because of that power, not even necessarily his own moral character. This problem is either resolved by his remaining an outsider and riding off into the sunset, unable to become part of the community he rescues, or by his forswearing the use of his powers in order to join it. I wonder if one could say the former resolution expresses the belief that power itself is morally evil, while the latter leans more toward the idea that only the improper use of it is evil (yet still not going all the way in this direction, since the gunman is required to hang up his guns to achieve his happy ending).

It’s also interesting to ponder that the gunfighter plot, while to some degree engaging with the idea that force or even violence is necessary to protect the innocent from wrongdoers and civilize a wilderness, edges round it a bit by putting all the forceful or violent action in the hands of a character who is at least partly outside that civilization—a sort of “necessary evil for thee but not for me” situation. A man who is already morally suspect or tarnished handles the dirty work—even if he’s allowed to reform afterwards.

It’s an intriguing paradox: a fascination with the power over life and death, but an apparent compulsion or obligation to depict power in itself as morally suspect. There’s a lot of interesting food for discussion there, I think. But that is as far as we will go for the moment.

image: “A Fight For the Cabin” by Harold von Schmidt

Previously: Outlaws and In-Laws

Once Upon a Western: An Interview With Rachel Kovaciny

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Today I’m hosting fellow indie author Rachel Kovaciny for an interview, to celebrate this week’s launch of her newest book, Prairie Tales. The sixth book in Rachel’s Once Upon a Western series, Prairie Tales is a collection of short stories—each a retelling of a fairytale, folk tale, or nursery rhyme, and all featuring characters from the previous books in the series. It sounds like such a fun, cozy, altogether delightful collection, with a cover to match! For more about this newest book and the Once Upon a Western series in general, let’s get to the interview:

 

Welcome, Rachel! Tell us a little about yourself, and why you love (a) Westerns, and (b) fairytales.

Hi, everyone!  And thank you, Elisabeth, for having me here on your blog.

The short answer is, I love westerns because cowboys make me happy.  I grew up watching cowboy movies with my dad, and they always left me feeling satisfied and energetic.  Even now that I often watch the more somber westerns as well as the cheerful sort, they still satisfy me in a way no other genre really does.

The longer answer is that westerns provide so much opportunity for variety of characters and settings.  The American West isn’t only mountains or only plains or only deserts.  And the characters can be from any background around the world, really – not only people from the East Coast, or people born in the West, but Canadians, Mexicans, Europeans, Asians, Australians, South Americans, Africans – when the West was being settled, it drew people from every place and every walk of life.  There is no limit to the kinds of stories you can tell when you throw together people of such different backgrounds, beliefs, hopes, dreams, and desires.

As for fairy tales, they are one of the friendliest forms of mythic storytelling, and I gravitate toward myth-based story structure.  Because the Wild West is America’s great national myth, in a way, it makes sense to me to blend the two together.

 

Your first foray into Western fairytale retellings was a Sleeping Beauty story in the multi-author anthology Five Magic Spindles. How soon after that did you get the idea for your next Western retelling, and when did you realize it was going to be a series?

I had actually had the idea of retelling fairy tales as westerns a year or so before I wrote The Man on the Buckskin Horse for Five Magic Spindles, but I never went anywhere with that idea.  While I was doing revisions on Buckskin, the editor from Rooglewood Press I was working with said she thought there would be a real audience for more wild west fairy tale retellings, and encouraged me to consider writing another one.

“Little Red Riding Hood” is a pretty obvious one to retell as a western, what with the wolf and the dangerous journey, so I settled on that one for my next story.  While I was writing Cloaked, I did a little brainstorming and figured out how to make “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Cinderella,” and “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” into westerns too.  So the idea of it being a series came pretty early on, definitely before I finished the first draft of Cloaked.

The Once Upon a Western series features stories of all different lengths, from the short stories in Prairie Tales up to short novels. How do you pick which fairytales you want to retell at full length and which will be shorter tales—or do they kind of decide for themselves?

They kind of decide for themselves, usually.  I’ll get an idea for how a fairy tale would work as a western, figure out who the characters could generally be and what the plot line would be, and once I know the basic plot, I know whether it will be a book or a short story.  Usually!  I actually wrote a retelling of “The Seven Swan Princes” last year that I thought was going to be a short story, and it got to be almost 30,000 words!  And it needed to expand more yet.  So, I now plan to turn that one into a full book.

 

I know some of your characters make cameo/crossover appearances in different stories across the series. Is that something you plan out or is it more spur-of-the-moment?

I have planned all along for these books to take place in a shared universe, if you will, and to have them connected to each other in the background while still being stand-alone adventures.  But I don’t always know until I’m planning the next book how it connects to the previous ones.  For instance, there’s a character from Cloaked who shows up in a later book, and I did not expect that until I got about a third of the way through the first draft of that later book.  Suddenly, I was looking at my series timeline and going, “Wait, could this work?  Could this person be in this place at this time?”

Other things, I knew before I started the next book, like Marta Beckmann from My Rock and My Refuge being the cousin of Hauer from Cloaked.  That made obvious sense, since they both have German ancestry.  And there are a lot more connections that get revealed in this short story collection, some quite obviously and some a little more subtly.

 

Do you have a favorite decade or period of Old West history? If so, are most of your stories set in that time or are they scattered across different decades?

I particularly love the classic Cowboy Era of 1865-1885, and this whole series takes place then.  But I am currently writing a fantasy western for a multi-author series called the Cornerstone Series, and that takes place in a magical realism version of 1807 California!  That one’s called A Noble Companion and is set to release November 12.  It has no relation to my Once Upon a Western series, but it IS a fairy tale retelling.  It retells “The Ugly Duckling,” but focusing on some side characters.

 

Can you tell us anything about future plans for the Once Upon a Western series?

I think the next book in the series will be Steadfast, a retelling of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” set in Texas and involving a cattle drive.  After that will be either a “Cinderella” retelling set on the Santa Fe Trail or that “Seven Swan Princes” retelling I mentioned earlier, which I’ll expand into a book.  I have ideas for a couple more short stories already, too, so I’ve called this new release Prairie Tales: Volume One because I fully anticipate putting out a Volume Two one day!

Thanks so much for this interview, Elisabeth!  This has been so much fun.

You’re so welcome! It has indeed!

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