DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAINTOP excerpt

Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging by Joshua Doležal is a coming-of-age memoir about moving from the mountains of northwestern Montana to the Midwest. (Publication date: March 1, 2014)

Prelude

If there were a road back to the Montana of my childhood, it would be heavy with rain. The pavement would wind out of Missoula past the old highway cafes, westward through Arlee and Plains, beyond Thompson Falls, Trout Creek, Noxon, then a sharp turn north into the Bull River Valley, where the river is sometimes a marsh. It would be early spring, when the streams churn with the earth, when rejoicing and weeping are one torrent spilling over the banks and there is no telling the shallows from the deeps.

I imagine the road climbing out of the valley to skirt Bull Lake, where a butte rises several hundred feet about the far shore, its image snaking over the water. The surface of the lake ripples in the rain. Dark fir trees flank the highway, light moss in their boughs, dead grass lying matted against the sides of the ditch. A deer bolts from the brush, turns tail, and bounds away.

Then it comes, the long descent into Troy—the huge gravel pit above Lake Creek and the cottonwood trees rising over the town. The chain-link fence around the road graders. The trailer court. The motel and the grocery store. The wide curve along the softball fields, the high school track, and the chipped yellow goalposts. The old wooden grandstand and the railroad tracks and a train rattling through. The caboose. The thump of the tracks, then Riverside Avenue down to the one-land bridge with its wooden planks. The iron trestle crowned by an osprey's nest. The Kootenai River below. A log passing beneath the planks on the steely water.

Across the bridge a few miles out of town, the road climbs above an old farm along the river. The forest grows thick once more, the slope launching straight out of the valley. Gravel roads veer off into the streets, the main road climbing, long sightlines opening over the valley. A logged timber plot appears, then an overgrown apple orchard, and, at last, the driveway angling up a steep grade to the unfinished house with its cedar shingles and tar-papered walls and the large windows overlooking the way back to my home. No matter how many years have passed, whenever I remember those windows streaked with a gunmetal sky, a cold front of lament sweeps over me, and even the clearest day grows dark.

Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging, by Joshua Doležal

Interview with Greta Nettleton, pt. 2

Greta Nettleton’s The Quack’s Daughter tells the story of her great-grandmother, Cora Keck, through her diary and memorabilia from her days as a Vassar College student. This lively biography challenges our assumptions about women’s lives in the late 1800s as it offers an intimate glimpse of a wealthy young woman’s coming of age. Editor Catherine Cocks spoke to the author about what she learned in researching the book.

Catherine Cocks: How much research did you do beyond looking at your great-grandmother’s memorabilia?

Greta Nettleton: I began in the spring of 2006 on a small scale, intending only to share what I found with my two sisters. As I began to look up information about Victorian America on the internet, I quickly discovered many books and other original sources that had actually been used in 1885, donated from the libraries of Yale, Harvard, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and others, which would have been inaccessible to a nonacademic researcher twenty years ago. These precious artifacts are now searchable electronically on Google Books and elsewhere. I also received extensive support from Vassar College and its excellent college archives. I ended up spending seven years working on this, although not full-time.

Catherine: What advice would you give to other people who are considering writing about their family history?

Greta: Dive in and enjoy it! It’s the process as much as the outcome. Don’t be afraid to get started simply by jotting down the facts you have, and don’t forget to document where you found each fact—this proof provides the skeleton for the historical relevance of the history. The hardest part is trying to shape a story arc amidst the scattered events of real lives. I believe it is justified to add your own voice to build motivations, emotions, and context that connect readers to past lives. It’s your family, after all, and you have a right to an opinion about them!

Interview with Greta Nettleton, pt. 1

Greta Nettleton’s The Quack’s Daughter tells the story of her great-grandmother, Cora Keck, through her diary and memorabilia from her days as a Vassar College student. This lively biography challenges our assumptions about women’s lives in the late 1800s as it offers an intimate glimpse of a wealthy young woman’s coming of age. Editor Catherine Cocks spoke to the author about what she learned in researching the book.

Catherine Cocks: How did you find out about your great-grandmother’s college years? And why did you decide to write about her life?

Greta Nettleton: When first I opened up Cora Keck’s 1885 Vassar diary, I knew my great-grandmother’s name, but nothing else. Her voice immediately drew me in. As she wrote, Cora tossed off so many creative starting points. I had her internal thinking, but none of the “obvious” facts about her external life. The mysteries of her lost world begged to be solved. And I quickly developed an emotional link with her warmth and wit, and her genius for relationships.

Catherine: Did your research into your family’s past change your view of your family?

Greta: I come from a very small and sparsely populated family, and it was exhilarating to expand my relationships with some “new” relatives back into the past. The biggest revelation for me was to discover our link to the Anabaptists and the Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite/Amish tradition. It explains a lot about my father’s deep idealism and quiet approach to life. I was also excited to discover a real feminist heroine in Cora’s mother, Mrs. Dr. Rebecca Keck.