ALAN Online

An Interview with Helen Hemphill
Author of The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones

by Bryan Gillis
Kennesaw State University 

            Helen Hemphill is the author of three novels, Long Gone Daddy, Runaround, and her latest, The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones. She grew up in Texas and now lives with her family in Nashville, Tennessee, and Austin, Texas.  From a very early age, she had an active visual imagination paired with a sense of drama.

            “It’s almost as if I’m dreaming while wide awake,” she says. I actually see the action of a story in my mind’s eye like a movie running on a projector screen.”  
           
            She also loves hearing stories from her friends and family.

            “I’m a good listener, but I have to admit, some of it is a bit self-serving. Sometimes the material ends up in my writing one way or another. No one is spared!” 

Gillis: Your third novel, The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones, just hit the bookshelves. But before we discuss that, talk a bit about how your writing career began, and specifically how you decided on YA literature. 

Hemphill: I came to writing in a rather circuitous way, by working for 20 years in corporate public relations and then through a second career teaching sixth grade language arts.  I really enjoyed my students, and through our classroom writing community, I started thinking more and more of ‘tweens and teens as the audience for my work. Finally, I did an MFA in writing for children and young adults at Vermont College, and that cemented my interest in YA literature.  There is so much diversity today in the writing being done for teen readers, plus the quality of the work is every bit as demanding as the writing being done for adult markets. For me, that offers a freedom to write the stories that interest me, and the challenge to create really good books for the readers that I care about most.

Gillis: Fourteen-year-old Harlan Q. Stank, the main character in your first novel, Long Gone Daddy, is a preacher’s son from a small town in Texas. Sassy Thompkins, the protagonist in Runaround is an 11-year-old living with her father in a small town in Kentucky. Prometheus, the main character in your newest novel, hails from Texas as well. One of the strengths of your storytelling is your ability to create believable and engaging characters. How has being a southern girl yourself influenced the creation and development of your characters?

Hemphill: There is a kind of vernacular in the South that’s more than slang.  It’s the rhythmical feel of the language, including the accents and the predisposition for storytelling.  My mom always told great stories about her family, and as a result, my sisters and I did funny (and sometimes irreverent) imitations of aunts and uncles and cousins.  So I think we listened to those family narratives with an ear for recreating the voices of our relatives, and it was great fun acting out the stories. Several years ago when he was interviewed about Ava’s Man, Rick Bragg noted that there is a sense of drama and a kind of perfect timing in Southern stories, and I agree. Now, as an adult, I do pay attention to the way people talk. I listen to the phrasing and the idioms and the particular way details work out the timing of a story. I think some of that plays naturally into my writing. I also have an undergraduate degree in theater, so I see the world as an ongoing drama. I’m afraid that’s inbred into my Southern sensibility.    

Gillis: Let’s talk about The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones. Both Long Gone Daddy and Runaround took place in the past, and you obviously did a fair amount of research in terms of including details that helped place the reader into specific time periods for those books. Deadwood Jones, however, is historical fiction. Talk about the process and the research involved in creating a post Civil War western.

Hemphill: It was a big endeavor.  I started by reading—cowboy diaries and memoirs, slave narratives, old newspaper entries, U.S. army reports from the period, non-fiction accounts of historical events, and huge amounts of cowboy folklore and western fiction. I also read several half-dime adventure novels from the period. During all of this, I paid particular attention to vocabulary. I also looked at maps and photos and reference books, and I actually drove the cattle trail through Nebraska and South Dakota to the Black Hills and Deadwood. I also visited the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian and talked to numerous experts about guns and horses, equipment, and food. It was a lot of fun doing the research, particularly when I found details that worked within the context of my novel.  For example, Edward Wheeler was the author of the Deadwood Dick half-dime adventure novels that were very popular with boys in the late 1800s, but it’s generally believed Wheeler never went farther west than Philadelphia.  In one account I noticed that his whereabouts was unknown just prior to the first Deadwood Dick novel’s publication in 1877.  That allowed me to take a poetic license and write Wheeler into my story as a rather pompous writer gone west to do his homework.  Since Wheeler referred to himself as a “sensational novelist” on his business cards from the 1880s, this seemed like the perfect comic relief to the grit of the cattle drive. The research gave me a fresh realization of the hardships of the boys (most were in their teens or early 20s) who drove the cattle up the trail, and of the Native Americans who were left to deal with the thousands of settlers who came into the Black Hills because of the gold rush.

Gillis: Westerns have made a bit of a comeback in movies, but the YA scene seems to be all about vampires these days. What motivated you to jump into the western genre, especially knowing how much research would be involved?

Hemphill: The western genre is a true American literary form, and I wanted to do something beyond the scope of the current craze for fantasy. There is a wonderful tradition of western writing in America, from Owen Wister to Cormick McCarthy, and it was important to me to write something that boys would find entertaining and of interest specifically for them. The research never dulled my excitement for the project; it enhanced it. The history had to be right, to be sure, but I wanted the story to be reflective of the adventure stories of the period.  Maybe it was Nat Love calling out to me from the universe, but it was a project I loved and a story I had to write.  Maybe cowboys will be the new vampires, who knows?

Gillis: Of course the appeal of any YA book is the connection the reader makes with the characters. So many successful YA novels revolve around high school life and relationships, which makes the introduction of vampires and the like a bit easier. So how did you go about creating the character of Prometheus, who is fascinating and totally engaging, knowing that, instead of a familiar high school setting, you would have to engage your readers with a cattle drive as your backdrop?

Hemphill: I don’t think a writer approaches a character any differently (other than specific research), whether that character is a high school vampire or a 1870s cowboy.  Fictional people must reflect our humanity and our connections to one another, and no matter who the characters are, readers have to care deeply what happens to them. As for Prometheus, I knew early on he would think of himself as lucky or blessed in some way, I knew he would be hesitant to trust other people, and I knew he would have a courageous heart.  As I lived with the events of the book, I imagined how Prometheus would react to the situations in which he found himself, given the things I knew about him. Pretty quickly, he was a very real boy to me because I cared about him.  Hopefully, readers will too.

Gillis: You mentioned driving the cattle trail as a part of the research for this book. Long Gone Daddy was a “road trip” story as well, with Harlan and his father making the journey from Texas to Las Vegas. Is this just a coincidence, or is there something special about this type of story?

Hemphill: It was just a coincidence that the two stories are road trips of sorts, but I do like the framework of the journey.  It offers up endless metaphors so a writer has a good deal of flexibility in plotting a novel.  I also think it’s an easy structure for young readers to understand.  

Gillis: Helen, thank you so much for your time. Before I let you go, please tell the readers what you are working on now, so that we have something to look forward to.

Hemphill: You are so very welcome, Bryan.  I have just finished a poetry book, tentatively titled Willie B & the Tragedy Rap Tour: A Concert in Verse. It combines the themes of Shakespeare’s tragedies with the rhymes and rhythms of contemporary rap music.  It’s been great fun to write. I also have a YA thriller in the drafting stage.