Book Review/Aurora
Aurora
An American Experience in Quilt and Craft
By Jane Kirkpatrick
Waterbrook Press
A division of Random House
Hardcover $17.95
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
Master storyteller Jane Kirkpatrick has just finished the third novel in her series called “Change and Cherish,” about the life of Oregon pioneer Emma Wagner Giesy, all three novels written in Kirkpatrick’s unique style of historic fiction. Typical of this prolific Oregon writer’s work, the stories of Emma contain a blend of fact and fiction.
Oddly, the series about Emma was inspired by a small paragraph about Emma that Kirkpatrick read in a quilting magazine, an anecdote about Emma being the lone woman to be a scout to find a new settlement in the Northwest for the Bethel Colony, a religious community from Missouri. That paragraph led Kirkpatrick to begin her exhaustive research of Emma and the adventures of the colony that finally settled in Aurora, Oregon.
When she has finished writing the three novels in the series Kirkpatrick felt there was still the untold story of Aurora itself and this could only be told in a non-fiction book, thus “Aurora,” was written and will be released in December. Kirkpatrick spoke last Thursday to an overflow crowd at the Douglas County Museum as part of the Museum’s monthly program featuring Oregon authors. The museum’s authors program continues on Sept, 18 with Kat Atwood of Ashland discussing her book, “Chaining Oregon: Survey of the Public Lands of the Pacific Northwest 1851-1855,” to be followed on Oct. 2 by Janice Marschner discussing her book, “Oregon 1859: A Snapshot in Time.” The sessions are held in the museum auditorium at 6:30 p.m. and are open to the public.
In her presentation, Kirkpatrick spoke fondly of her new book, “Aurora,” saying it has more than 100 photographs of the Willamette Valley community from its founding in 1850 to today. She said the book includes stories told by the descendants of the original colony.
“The non-fiction book is about the difference every ordinary life can make,” she said, pointing out the unique quilt patterns that originated from the community. “It is a beautiful celebration of a time and place in which people expressed their most cherished beliefs through the work of their imagination and hands.”
Kirkpatrick is a retired clinical social worker who started writing in 1982 after she and her husband, Jerry, moved to an isolated homestead on 160-acres in Eastern Oregon at the end of a dirt road, seven miles from the nearest mailbox and eleven miles to the nearest paved road. In 1991 she wrote “Homestead: Modern Pioneers Pursuing the Edge of Possibility,” a non-fiction account of how she and her husband left surburbia to carve out a new life. That book was updated in 2005.
She has written three non-fiction books, including “Aurora,” and said, “non-fiction is much easier for me to write, but novels are more challenging.” While her novels are classified as historic fiction, each one has been well researched with the facts of the story fleshed out through her imagination. She endlessly researches old letters, diaries, journals and even handwritten notes in the margins of old books.
Kirkpatrick said she is concerned that future writers may not have that resource because most of it will be lost as communication to day is mostly in cryptic e-mail messages.
While she finishes her Emma series that includes three books, beginning with “A Clearing in the Wild,” and concluding with “A Tendering in the Storm,” and the last book, “A Mending At the Edge,” Fitzpatrick said she has contracts for five more books and is currently working on a book about her own grandmother, Jessie Gaeble, a pioneer photographer. She is also researching a story about a white woman who befriended the Seminoles in the Florida Everglades to protect their rights.
(Bill Duncan is the editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column for The News-Review.)