Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Short Story: “Flyover”

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I wrote a short story on the spur of the moment this month. I didn’t know whether it would end up being any good or not; it was just something I had to write, to crystallize some thoughts and emotions and get them off my chest; and if it turned out decent enough to share, all well and good. It is very much a story for 2020, though true to my usual form, it’s set in a different era than our own.

So here it is, and this is my very small Christmas gift to you. A short story dedicated to anyone who has had a plan upset, a dream dashed, a light at the end of the tunnel moved further away, but is still trying to keep their eye on it.

* * *

Almost at the crest of the slope Linda paused and looked back. For a moment she thought she heard the distant hum of engines, and was not sure whether the responsive feeling was expectancy or a sinking feeling. She stood still and listened, her hands deep in her coat pockets, the cold biting her toes in the few seconds’ break from walking, and concluded she had been mistaken; for the dim blue horizon remained empty, the stillness of the wooded hills and rolling cornfields unbroken.

She turned and trudged the last few paces up to where the hilltop leveled out and the bare cornfield stretched for a quarter of a mile ahead of her along the high ground. The cornstalk stubs ran in rows between lumpy furrows of half-frozen soil; ice-skimmed puddles lay flat and opaque between them, and here and there a smashed ear of corn half-eaten by deer or squirrels. Linda tramped steadily forward for ten yards or so, then paused again to look back down on the house before the rise she had climbed hid it from view. The small, slightly dingy white farmhouse lay down in the hollow surrounded by a few pine trees and a couple of big, spidery ancient maples, reached by a long curving driveway winding down from the road. The roof needed fixing, Linda thought; it sagged a little and the shingles were lichened on the side where the trees were closest. A thin gray thread of smoke from the kitchen stovepipe was promptly whisked away by the wind as soon as it got above the level of the hollow, conveying an impression of chilliness rather than warmth. [Read more…]

Favorite Children

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Yes, it’s true: authors can have favorites among their own books. (Which I suppose is better than having favorites among your children, since a story’s feelings can’t be hurt.) Even though a little piece of me has gone into everything I’ve written, good, bad, or indifferent, there are certain books and stories that I’m especially fond of for one reason or another…or maybe for no definable reason at all. These are my personal favorites among my published stories right now:

• A Sidekick’s Tale. To this day, I can still pick up this book and open it, and start laughing. It makes me wonder sometimes, should I be writing humor more often? Or was this just an accidental one-hit wonder? Either way, I regard the adventures of Marty, Chance, Lem, Aunt Bertha, the Justice of the Peace and the rest of them as one of the best things I’ve ever done.

• Lost Lake House. It was an impulsively-concocted plot, set in a decade of history I’d never given much thought, and with a semi-imaginary setting of lake and villa that I could play around with and dress up in all kinds of delicious detail as I liked. Maybe all of that subconsciously told my brain to switch off the “work” setting and regard the writing process as play! The characters also seemed to spring straight to life, not really based upon or inspired by anything else as some characters are; and I’ve been immensely fond of them ever since.

• The Mountain of the Wolf. Somewhat like Lost Lake House, this was an idea that came quickly and clicked quickly and delighted me with the way the execution fitted the concept (Red Riding Hood retelling in the West). It’s more dramatic and intense than anything I’d written up till that point, and I think I kind of wanted to prove to myself that I could do that if I wanted to.

• The Silver Shawl. It was the first mystery I ever successfully completed and published; and I still think it has one of the trickiest plots in the series, to the point that it’s still somewhat of a mystery to me how I came up with it! My writing has probably gotten a little more polished since then, but I’ll always have a soft spot for my first adventure with Mrs. Meade & Co.

Short stories:

• “The Bird of Dawning.” I love Christmas stories; I always wanted to write a good Western Christmas story. The characters and themes of this story are close to my heart, and I absolutely loved writing the descriptions of winter weather.

• “The Rush at Mattie Arnold’s.” I think I wrote this in about two sittings. I figured out most of it while in the shower, and I think I pretty much had a grin on my face throughout the whole creative process. You need to write stories like that every once in a while.

These also are, probably not coincidentally, all among what I regard as my best stories in a technical sense. Although that could just be parental partiality.

Now Available: The Complete Western Stories of O. Henry

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I forget how many years ago it was. I’d been reading O. Henry’s Complete Works and musing, not for the first time, on how Henry is seldom included in discussions of early Western authors. Heart of the West comes up every now and then, but Henry wrote many more Western stories beyond the nineteen in that collection—some of the others being even better, in my opinion.

It would be great, I told my mom, if somebody got the idea to put together a collection of all O. Henry’s western stories. A volume with all of them in one place would be a great addition to any Western enthusiast’s library, and I’d bet many would be pleasantly surprised by some of those lesser-known stories that were scattered throughout Henry’s other anthologies—“Friends in San Rosario,” “The Roads We Take,” “Madam Bo-Peep, of the Ranches,” and so on. Everybody knows titles like “The Caballero’s Way” and “Hearts and Crosses,” but who’s heard of “Art and the Bronco” or “The Red Roses of Tonia?” If only one of those publishers who specialize in vintage public-domain reprints would have the idea—

It was about this point that Mom said, “Why don’t you do it?”

Publishing this collection has been a daydream of mine ever since then. It’s been something I dabbled with in spare moments and shoved to a back burner in busier times again and again: researching the publication dates of the stories, finding original magazine illustrations, cleaning up and formatting the text, and producing a cover. I had some grand aspirations at first, involving in-depth introductions and glossaries and such, but in the end I kept it simple with just a foreword and some appendices. The main point is that all of O. Henry’s Western stories—over forty of them—are collected in one volume; something that to my knowledge has never been done before. There’s also thirty illustrations from original magazine publications. And it’s now available on Kindle!