Runner-up, David J. Langum, Sr., Prize in American Historical Fiction, 2012.
In 1985, I was teaching at Centenary College of Louisiana when I came across a passage describing a group of French colonists who had traveled up the Red River in 1848 to found a commune near what is now Denton, Texas. The idea of communists among the Comanches piqued my interest, and ever since then I have been studying utopian movements of the 19th Century.
That interest, combined with my love of fiction writing and my Ozarks heritage, led to the idea of imagining a utopian settlement in the Missouri Ozarks in the years leading up to the Civil War. What would it be like? Whom would it attract? Could they succeed? In April 2012, Blank Slate Press published the results of those musings as Slant of Light, and that book was followed in 2014 by This Old World. The third book, The Language of Trees, is a continuation of that story twenty years later, as the utopians enter their second generation and the country changes around them.
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Here's a sample:
Chapter One
August 1857
The keelboat moved so slowly against the current that Turner sometimes wondered if they were moving at all. Keeping a steady rhythm, Pettibone and his son worked the poles on the quarter-sized boat they had built to ply the smaller rivers that fed the Mississippi. Whenever the current picked up a little, Turner took the spare pole and tried to help, but although he was tall and muscular, with a wide body that didn’t narrow from shoulders to hips, poling a boat wasn’t as simple as it looked. He pushed too soon, too late, missed the bottom, stuck the pole in the mud, all to the amusement of Pettibone’s son, Charley.
“Limb,” Pettibone called. They all ducked.
Turner had unloaded his cargo at a steamboat landing in Arkansas and come the rest of the way on the keelboat, winding through the tangle of bayous where the rivers met, the countryside flat and swampy, the loops of the river indistinguishable. Pettibone claimed he knew the channel of the St. Francis, so there was nothing to do but trust him.
Turner wondered now about the steamboat captain’s advice to take a boat up the St. Francis instead of continuing to Cape Girardeau and traveling overland in whatever wagons he could rent or buy. Mosquitoes woke them before dawn and troubled them until the sun’s heat drove them to the shade, then troubled them again as soon as the sun declined. To give more purchase to their poles, they hugged the bank, but that meant fighting through overhanging brush all day. In the center of the boat was a stumpy mast, a four-inch pole draped with a canvas sail, fixed with a series of shaky-looking braces. Pettibone was constantly adjusting it, but most of the time it just hung slack in the hot, wet air. At night they tied up on the few solid-looking humps of land and slept on the boat for fear of snakes, netting draped over their bodies to slow down the mosquitoes. Even then Turner could not sleep well, dreaming of fat water moccasins slithering onto the deck.
