My Writing Journey's Taken Me All Over Texas, on Wheels, by Click, and by Page
- Jann Alexander
- 10 minutes ago
- 4 min read
That's how I gathered ten years of Texas historical research. And now I'm transforming it into The Dust Series, set in a mythical town in the Texas Panhandle — and wherever the characters roam.
Unspoken, the first book in the series, is new historical fiction, featuring strong Texas women who face the worst the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and world war can throw at them, and somehow persevere. Coming July 3
Unspoken is historically accurate, and wickedly fictional.
It's a true enough tale of a Texas girl more tenacious than fire ants who faces air she can't breathe, and what’s gone unspoken, to find family and remake home. Set in the Texas Panhandle during the Dirty Thirties and beyond, an era of drought and dusters and war, it's at once the story of a mother and daughter and a love letter to strong women who blaze trails, bolster one another, and prevail.
There are things, I wanted to tell him, unspoken things that can never be fixed. But I said nuthin. —RUBY
Unspoken is the first Texas novel in The Dust Series to be published.
Featuring dualing narratives of estranged daughter and mother, Unspoken is the second Texas novel I've completed but first to be published. Its predecessor, Vacancy, is the inspiration for the series and coming soon. I'm at work now on Unspoken's sequel, which gives my characters (and me) a chance to keep rambling all over Texas, unearthing some of its lesser-known and fascinating history. For example, my research into the lesser-known events in the Dust Bowl era in the 1930s provided many story lines.
In the 1930s, the main thing that was unearthed was all the soil in the Southern Plains states
There are miles and miles of Texas.
If you don't believe Jim McGraw And The Western Sundowners (who recorded that song in 1961, made more famous by Asleep at the Wheel), just set out in your car from Texarkana one morning, and see how long it takes you to arrive in New Mexico. You, too, may end up asleep at the wheel. To research my books, I drove across Texas in many directions, of course, sometimes following old maps I'd discovered, and after one 600-mile road trip, my license plate and front grill showed it.
A 1940 map of Texas shows you how far you can go.
It's easier to click than to drive. I uncovered this map (and many more like it) by click as I navigated the phenomonal Portal to Texas History archive. As you can see from this 1940 Conoco map of Texas, there's plenty of territory to explore, wherever you land. It's a map I referred to plenty, as I was moving my characters in Unspoken from the Panhandle to Waco to Wichita Falls and points inbetween. (Not all of them were willing travelers, but they were the tenacious types.)
Read an excerpt from the opening pages of Unspoken:
1935 • RUBY LEE
I had never seen anyone dead before.
Momma had hold of my hand, hers larger and warmer and locked tight around mine, while her chest was heaving and she was stifling her gasps in the plain little prairie church so new I could smell its fresh-cut pine boards.
Footfalls echoed as people walked in with tentative steps, as though not to disturb the dead, of which there were two. They were laid out in simple caskets built only yesterday after my grandma, and then my baby sister, died with the brown dirt—dust pneumonia they called it—clogging their lungs.
They made my Granny Alma look like she was at peace, with her hands crossed atop her chest. Except she hadn’t been, because she was coughing in fits right before her eyes flew open wide and then rolled backwards and she gurgled her way out of this dry, dusty world. My momma had grabbed her hands and begged her not to leave us, sobbing and moaning so loud I was the only one to hear baby Nell’s raspy breaths.
I picked her up from the little cradle Pa had carved for my brothers before me and held her close to shush her; she was wheezing so bad. I put her on my shoulder the way Momma had showed me to help clear her lungs. I ran my hand over her silky hair, shush, shush, take a breath now, hearing her chest rattle, wiping the brown spittle from her mouth, until of a sudden I heard her silence louder than Momma’s wails. I shrieked, handing Nell to Momma; I’d felt the life go out of her. That’s when I knew what dying was.
I was ten and prone to coughing up the dust, too. •
There were plenty more pages to turn, too, as I researched.
My collection of books on Texas grew, married, had children, cousins, then grandchildren, great grandchildren, and so on, as I read out-of-print finds from secondhand bookshops or firsthand nonfiction accounts of events I wanted to know more about and art and photography books of the times. Immersing myself in so many visual and written sources spurred many more characters and more than one plotline.
It was powdery and slippery, the idea of family, sliding right through your fingers like flour through a sifter, dust through walls. —WILL
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You can order Unspoken now for delivery upon publication by Black Rose Writing, July 3. When you join my newsletter mailing list, you'll receive an occasional dose of Texas History and Creativity, called Pairings, in your inbox.
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