Content Dictates Form: Jane Candia Coleman on Writing the West

“The West is vast and varied,” said Western writer Jane Candia Coleman.  “It has mountains, desserts, great rivers and small ones, endless sky, pine forests and cactus, cliffs and canyons that beg to be captured in words.  (I am a frustrated painter, so I do it in words.)  In my books the land is always present, as much a characters as the human protagonists.  In short, I love this country and all in it and find it endlessly captivating.”

Jane Candia Coleman writes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction.  She is the author of such books as The Silver Queen, Bandit Queen, and the forthcoming Range Queen.  Five of her 21 books have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and three have won the Western Heritage Awards given by the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.  When not writing, she teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Carlow University.

“I first discovered Jane Candia Coleman in Louis L’Amour Western Magazine,” said Johnny D. Boggs, author of Whiskey Kills and other Killstraight stories, “first with her short story ‘Lou,’ which I thought was brilliant, then a few years later with another short story, ‘Are You Coming Back, Phin Montana?,’ which also blew me away. She’s an absolutely amazing writer — whether she’s writing short fiction or historical novels — with a strong sense of place, and wonderful characters. Her prose often reads like pure poetry. No surprise there. She’s also an incredible poet.”

Below, Coleman and I talk about writing, the landscape she loves, and the characters that populate it.

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What do you enjoy about writing the West?

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Jane Candia Coleman:  Everything.  I love traveling the country, I love doing the research, getting the facts and the characters right.  Writers of historical fiction have an obligation to readers to be informed about everything possible and write the truth.
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What is the biggest challenge in writing the West?
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Jane Candia Coleman:
  Again, it’s the research, not only about what happened and where and when but knowing the country, the geography.  It’s been my experience that some writers haven’t even looked at a map, let alone seen the place for themselves.  The land shapes us and is an important factor in any western.
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What sort of westerns do you write, and what are the key elements?
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Jane Candia Coleman:
  I write everything from historical fiction – Doc Holliday’s Woman, the true story of Big Nose Kate, Tombstone Travesty, Allie Earp’s story, Matchless, about August Tabor, the scorned wife of silver magnate Haw Tabor – to collections of short fiction, Moving On, nominated for the Pulitzer, Country Music, and Borderlands, – to memoir, Mountain Time, and three collections of poetry.  My motto is Content dictates form, to paraphrase the architectural dictum.
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What does writing poetry allow you to say that you can’t say with fiction?
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Jane Candia Coleman:
  Poetry can capture the essence of a moment, a single idea, in a way prose can’t.  In writing The White Dove, a collection of poems about the 17th century Jesuit, Eusebio Kino, who changed the face of Sonora and the Southwest, it seemed that poetry could best explain the man, his dreams, his vision far better than a long-drawn-out novel that simply connected the dots.  This is a book that took me 10 years, again because of the research I had to do on Kino’s life, his education, his travels, his many, many accomplishments.  It, too, was nominated for the Pulitzer.
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How have your novels and/or your approach to writing changed?
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Jane Candia Coleman:
  Right now I am concentrating on a memoir, A Woman’s Garden, about the years my husband, Glenn Boyer, and I lived on a ranch in Cochise County.

And, because of my involvement with Mexico, due to my work on Fr. Kino, I have begun a second book on my experiences there and the problems that Mexico and the U.S. have faced in the past and are facing now.  I can’t see either of these books as fiction, but I want to write them, want to say some things that I know and that might be memorable or touch someone.  But who knows what I might do in future?
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What can a writer who doesn’t usually read Westerns learn from reading within the genre?

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Jane Candia Coleman:  As an example, my mother who knew nothing about the west, about horses, cattle, the country, read my book, The O’Keefe Empire, which is about a cattle drive from Arizona to San Diego.  When she finished she said, I learned more about the West from this one book than I ever knew or even thought about.  That is where tireless research proved valuable – to her and, I hope, to others.  Note:  This novel will be re-released in December by Leisure Books under the title, Range Queen.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

2 thoughts on “Content Dictates Form: Jane Candia Coleman on Writing the West

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