Think back to 2004. Do you recall anything you did that year? Among the things I remembered recently is that I read a story in the July, 2004 Texas Coop Power magazine. The title tempted me to pass up the recipes and other interesting items usually found in that magazine and stop to read—it was “Sanctified Sisters” by Joe Holley. The article told of a group of women in Belton, Texas who founded the Belton Woman’s Commonwealth in the post-Civil War time when women—some widowed, others abused or abandoned by broken soldiers returning from the war, and all near destitution—who were sheltered by their founder, the wife of a local merchant. I tore the article out, placed it in my “later” file.
At that time, I had just begun to attempt writing something other than the monthly health promotion column in The Farmer-Stockman magazine, aiming to eventually write fiction. That article by Joe Holley rested in my “later” file for some years. Then life intervened. But I didn’t forget the question the article prompted for me. What would happen in subsequent generations of women from that group? Surely there was fiction waiting there.
In 2012, “later” finally arrived for me. I completed graduate study, a Master’s degree in Creative Writing. So write, I told myself. I wrote a grant proposal to the Elizabeth George Foundation. From that award, I received funds to support travel and research assistance to write a novel based on that early question—what if? I chose to create entirely fictional characters based on the premise that they descended from women who had been a part of a group like the Belton Sanctified Sisters, not the actual Belton women.
What happened next? I wrote, workshopped, revised the novel. It was submitted to potential agents. Kind rejections followed. Eventually, an agent tried valiantly to find it a home with a national scope publisher. More rejections. Again, a revision went to workshop, etc. FINALLY in July, 2024, after I lost count of the number of revisions, good advice led me to submit A Good Family to Stoney Creek Publishing. The call from the publisher saying they wanted to be my publisher reminded me that old saying is true: Some Good Things Take Longer Than Others.
I will post more here in the following months about the story of Imogene Good and her young life as the owner of a boarding house in Borger, Texas in 1929, a wild boomtown. The hardships she encountered, learning how the people she had thought were here family were connected by a strange common background, and setting out to create her own family of her choosing. And I’ll keep you up to date on the progress of the novel’s publication.