Trekking into the Past with Guest Leslie Budewitz #giveaway

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News Flash: Sue Leis is Leslie’s lucky winner! Congratulations, Sue, and please check your email.

Edith writing during summer’s last blast of heat north of Boston.

You know what else is hot? Leslie Budewitz’s new historical short story collection. I love this book so much. I read Leslie’s first Mary Fields story in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and it went on to win the Agatha Award for Best Short Story. Leslie include two more short stories and a new novella, and you’re not going to want to wait one more minute before ordering your own copy of All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: a Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection.

I’ll let Leslie tell you all about her fabulous main character and why she’s so intriguing.

Trekking into the Past

Wicked readers, though we are old friends, I come to you today with a serious case of nerves. My 18th book, All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: a Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection, is just out. I love it dearly, but it’s a departure for me, and I know as a reader that it’s not always easy to follow authors when they take new trails. So I hope you’ll let me tell you about this one, and why I took it.

I don’t remember how I first learned about Mary Fields, but like a lot of people, I was instantly intrigued. Mary was born into slavery in Tennessee in about 1832. After the war, she worked for Judge Edward Dunne in Akron, Ohio, where she met his sister Sarah Theresa, better known as Mother Amadeus Dunne, Mother Superior of the Ursuline Sisters of Toledo, Ohio. In early 1884, Amadeus led a group of nuns to Montana, where they founded schools for girls at Jesuit missions to the Northwest Indians, including at St. Peter’s Mission southwest of present-day Great Falls. In early 1885, Amadeus became deathly ill with pneumonia. Mary joined a group of sisters who traveled west to nurse her. They succeeded, and Mary stayed, first at the mission and then in Cascade, the nearest town, until her death in 1914.

So many questions. Why did she come West? Why did she stay? How did she manage? What conditions did she face, including the physical and economic hardships and the racism of the post-Reconstruction era?

And why is she so interesting?

Although Mary was literate—she is believed to have been the first Black woman awarded a US Postal Service “Star Route,” delivering the mail on the ten-mile stretch between Cascade and St. Peter’s for 9 years—she left no written record. That makes answering those questions difficult. A topic for research and speculation, based in part on what we know of others who came West, both white and Black, and our understanding of the cultural and economic forces of the era.

A topic, perhaps, for fiction.

I can tell you, I think, why Mary intrigues so many people. She brings together three inherently interesting aspects of the American West—that is, the period of westward expansion from roughly 1865 to 1915; the Black experience in the West after the Civil War, the missionary era, and the woman on her own. That intersection is what drew me to write about her. Only through fiction—well-researched and well-imagined—can we begin to grasp the emotional truths behind the known facts. I also wanted to explore some of the myths about Mary and how they came about. (Don’t trust what you read in the pieces that circulate occasionally on Facebook. She was big, but not six feet tall. She never shot a man. She didn’t dress in men’s clothes, except coats. But she probably did have an encounter or two with a wolf!)

In the mid 1980s, after I finished law school and moved back to Seattle, where I’d gone to college, to practice, I attended several series of lectures at the University of Washington and Elliott Bay Books, then a sprawling warren in Pioneer Square, on women in history. Women who’d been well-known in their time, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, and Margaret Sanger, and women who’d worked in the trenches, so to speak, working for women’s property and marriage rights, for the right to vote, and much more.

It’s remained a fascination of mine—you can see some of my resources in this photo, although I relied on many more from libraries. A lot of historical work has been done in the last thirty years looking at the Black experience in the West, particularly for women. I’m grateful to the scholars and researchers who dug up old diaries and letters, plowed through census records and tax rolls and property records, and sorted through photos and other documents to help bring to light the stories of the forgotten, particularly women.

That’s what I hope to have done with this collection. I want people to know about Mary, and about Amadeus, and to think about Black women in the American West. To explore those questions about why she came and why she stayed. I’ve come to believe she found here a freedom she did not have in Ohio or Tennessee, the freedom to create a life for herself and to be part of a community, largely on her own terms.

I hope you’ll take the trip back in time with me, to meet this extraordinary woman, and to imagine the time and place yourself.

Readers, is there a historical figure—male or female—who fascinates you? Someone you’d like the rest of us to know? I’ll will send one lucky commenter a copy of the new collection!

About the book: The stories in All God’s Sparrows imagine the life and heart of Mary Fields (1832-1914), a real-life woman born into slavery who spent her last 30 years in Montana, where she found freedom and community, and her own place in the West, bringing solace and justice to those in need. The collection brings together three stories originally published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and a new novella, “A Bitter Wind,” set in 1897 and 1914, in which Mary helps a young picture bride solve the mystery of her fiancé’s death and his homesteading neighbors’ bitterness toward him. The title story won the 2018 Agatha Award for Best Short Story; others were finalists for awards from the Short Mystery Fiction Society and the Western Writers of America.

“In this beautifully drawn portrait of Mary Fields and life in 1897 Montana, Leslie Budewitz weaves stories of hardship and dedication, mystery and love. From a half-Blackfeet child to a forthright lady of the night to active and former missionary nuns, you’ll read rich studies of human hearts, the tough life of the frontier, and the contemplative mind of Stagecoach Mary, a formerly enslaved woman who finds her own place in the West bringing justice for the less powerful. All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories is a must-read by a master writer.”

—Edith Maxwell/Maddie Day, Agatha Award-winning author of the historical Quaker Midwife Mysteries and A Case for the Ladies: A Dot and Amelia Mystery

All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories: a Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection, out September 17, 2024 in paperback and ebook from Beyond the Page Books. Available wherever you buy books.

All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories | Leslie Budewitz↗

Leslie Budewitz tells stories about women’s lives, seasoned with friendship, food, a love of history and the land, and a heaping measure of mystery. She writes the Spice Shop mysteries set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, a place she fell in love with as a college freshman, and the Food Lovers’ Village mysteries, set in a fictional lakeside town in NW Montana. As Alicia Beckman, she writes moody suspense. A past president of Sisters in Crime and a former board member of Mystery Writers of America, she lives in NW Montana with her husband and a big gray tuxedo cat.

Find out more about All God’s Sparrows and Leslie on her website.

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Published by Edith Maxwell

Agatha Award -winning author Edith Maxwell writes the historical Quaker Midwife Mysteries (Beyond the Page) and short crime fiction. As Maddie Day she writes the Dot and Amelia Mysteries, the Country Store Mysteries series, the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries, and the Cece Barton Mysteries (all from Kensington Publishing). She lives north of Boston in an antique house with her beau and cat Martin, where she writes, gardens, cooks, and wastes time on Facebook.

41 Thoughts

  1. This book sounds amazing and I can’t wait to read it. I’d like to know more about Calamity Jane especially the work she did to help others.

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    1. Thanks, Carol! Calamity Jane lived, for a time, just west of Billings, Montana, where I grew up, and local legend loved her. I wish I knew enough about her to write a story or two.

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  2. From what you have said about Mary Fields, I already find her to be an intriguing person and would enjoy knowing more about her. I admire you from stepping out of your usual genre to write historical fiction. That’s my favorite genre.
    As far as a person from history I would like to know more about, perhaps, Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor. I know she felt prejudice as she took classes to become a doctor, and I know she trained women to be nurses during the Civil War, but I don’t know too much about her. The Civil War is a time period I find interesting also.
    Best wishes ,
    Muriel

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    1. Thanks! And yes, Elizabeth would be an intriguing subject for fiction. Didn’t she have a sister who became a doctor as well? There’s a series from the 1990s by Miriam Grace Monfredo set in Seneca Falls NY in the mid 19th C, featuring a librarian; a spinoff series featuring the protag’s niece take place during the Civil War. Some of the first historical mysteries I read.

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  4. Thanks to my love for the heavy metal band Sabaton, I find at least one new person to be fascinated about with each new album they release. This is because all of their songs are about famous people, places and things involved in warfare. On their ‘Heroes’ album, they have a song called “Inmate 4859”. It’s about the Polish soldier Witold Pilecki.

    How much of an utter badass was he? Well, when you go undercover in Auschwitz so that you can get the information about what’s really going on there and get it out to the world…screw Chuck Norris or Jack Bauer…you are the ultimate badass.

    And given what happened to him AFTER he completed that mission and through the twisting fickleness of fate, he becomes an even larger than life figure that I might have to try to find a book about him at some point to get the full story.

    The Sabaton lyric video link for the song is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pc1oSYXlUQ

    And here’s the Wikipedia entry for Witold Pilecki – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki

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  5. Being an old Army brat, I find Deborah Sampson extremely fascinating. To think one loved their country and wanted to serve strongly enough to disguise themself as a man to to do, is amazing to me.

    Can’t wait for the opportunity to read and review “All God’s Sparrows and Other Stories”. It’s on my TBR list and has been since I first read about it. Thank you for the fabulous chance to win a copy!
    2clowns at arkansas dot net

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  6. the book sounds fascinating. I’m glad you took a step outside your normal bounds and tackled it. I would love to have a copy to read.
    fruitcrmble AT comcast DOT net

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  7. Hi Leslie. As a child, I was fascinated by the Lewis and Clark expedition, whose hero for me was Sacagawea. Now, as an adult, I worry about how she was really treated, traveling alone with all those men, but that doesn’t keep me from continuing to see her as a magnificently brave and resourceful woman. Imagine setting out on that extraordinary journey with an almost-newborn baby!

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    1. Hi, Kim! Like all good little Montana kids, I too was fascinated by Lewis & Clark, and loved trekking to Pompei’s Pillar outside Billings, on the Yellowstone, which Clark named for Sacagawea’s baby. I’m right now reading The Lost Journals of Sacagawea by Debra Magpie Earling, a fabulous writer and Salish tribal member who will be the keynote speaker at our Authors of the Flathead Writers Conference next month. Her use of language as the way into the character, and the writing style itself, are really intriguing. Milkweed Press. Look for it!

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  8. Congratulations on your new release, Leslie! As a young girl I devoured books on historical women who accomplished great things. I love that you’re bringing an obscure woman to the limelight and giving readers a chance to get to know her and her achievements! I’ve recently become fascinated with Heddy Lamarr, not for her acting career, but because of her intelligence and scientific inventions that, as too often was the case, were stolen by men.

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  9. An extremely interesting book. A historical figure whom I have always held great interest and revere is Sir Winston Churchill.

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  10. Congratulations, Leslie. Mary Fields sounds like a fascinating character.

    Like Kim, Hedy Lamarr has always fascinated me. But I’m reading a history of the US Navy during WWII and another figure I’d love to learn more about is Japanese Emperor Hirohito. From the tiny bit of history I get, I gather he was much more worldly, liberal, and cosmopolitan as a young man. After a failed assassination attempt, he was shut away by the “old guard” of the Japanese court and isolated. Imagine the difference to history if he’d been allowed to be who he was before he became Emperor.

    Also intrigued by Admiral Yamamoto, who absolutely disagreed with the decision to attack Pearl Harbor, although he was loyal enough to plan and execute the attack when ordered to do so.

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  11. Your hard work on this book deserves congratulations. Historicals are my favorite since they are meaningful. An individual whose life was beset by numerous trials and tribulations. marie Curie.

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  13. Inspiring to see your success after chasing your passion, Leslie. Best of luck with ALL GOD’S SPARROWS AND OTHER STORIES!

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  14. Thank you for shining a light in Mary’s incredible story, Leslie! And for doing it in such an entertaining way. Cheers!

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  15. After spending more years of my life than I thought possible behind a computer monitor, I find myself more and more wondering about Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace who were so instrumental in the development of these amazing tools.
    Am so glad you pursued your passion project. I think it will be a fabulous read. I am so looking forward to it.

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  16. These stories sound fascinating! There are so many historical figures that I know little about. Bessie Coleman is definitely somebody that should get more acclaim and recognition. Everyone knows about Amelia Earhart but but know about Bessie Coleman. Laura Bridgman was deaf and blind, and quite famous in her day. But history has forgotten her, even though she came before Helen Keller.

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    1. Thanks, Sue! I admit, I have not heard of Laura Bridgeman. Wasn’t Bessie Coleman featured on a stamp?

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  17. I have a fascination Twith Mark Twain! There is a historical home in Hartford, Connecticut that he once lived in, and it is worth visiting if you ever get the chance. Besides him, I also like Paul Revere. There is also a historical home that he once lived in in Boston. Only four rooms remain, but it is still worth seeing! It’s part of the Freedom Trail tour, too.

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    1. I still remember fondly visiting Twain’s childhood home in Hannibal, MO, and the house where the real Becky Thatcher lived!

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  18. Growing up, I was always fascinated by Florence Nightengale as well as Presidents Washington, Lincoln and Kennedy. I had a wonderful time last night at the Cozy Mystery Party. Thank you. God bless you.

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  19. Thanks for opening my eyes to this historical figure. I enjoy historical fiction. The one person I can read about again and again is Eleanor Roosevelt.

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