Hello, and welcome to the bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today.

My guest is Phil Oakley, author of Little Hatchet.

Phil, thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you for having me.

I'm really excited to talk about this novel.

This is a kind of a fun, long ranging, expansive story.

can you start by just introducing the book and give a brief synopsis to us, a synopsis?

It's a family story.

It's a Western, but it's a family story.

And.

It was intended to have been a biography of my grandfather, and it is a tribute to him.

He was one of the finest people I've ever known, and I've lived a long time now.

But it's still here, so I'm just going to write a tribute to him.

It was going to be nonfiction and there just wasn't enough information.

So I started out with the story of his lifetime and the family that he accumulated, and I said, how in the world did these people do this?

So it's basically about the struggles of people who grew up in the period after the Civil War and what they had to do to make this country what it is.

And then in the next generation, things fell apart.

I love that idea because I think if, if you have a family that has kind of strong family lore like that, like there's a story in my family about my great grandfather being born next to a covered wagon and you think, okay, how did she get up and cook dinner that night.

No.

How did how do they how do they live like that?

Right.

Like so you try to answer that question.

I think that's such a fascinating because we all we're such you have such creature comforts here in our comfortable lives.

And it wasn't like that.

We do.

But we still have a lot of the same problems that people then had, and that people 6000 years ago had.

except we don't have to spend nearly as much time getting food.

Yes.

That's true, that's true.

Our daily struggles are different but people are still people.

We're going to have conflicts and difficult difficulties and not like our brothers some days and love them the next day.

And we're going to have those kinds of family dynamics.

Yeah.

And Walter Oakley, there was a real Walter Oakley, and he was really my grandfather, and he was a magnificent man.

But this Walter Oakley did things my grandfather never did.

And that's how it became a book, because once I realized that there was no way to get enough information about all the things that happened in his life, it was way too late in on the timeline for that.

Then I started playing with the idea of making it fiction.

I started this book in the spring of 1964.

I was a freshman at the University of Texas and.

50 years later, I published my first book, 50 Years.

No, it's been ten years since then.

So 60 years.

And today, watching a dream come true.

Now, you mentioned this isn't your first book.

I think it's your ninth shot.

Right?

That's, is there did you purposely kind of save this story until you feel more comfortable writing or just wasn't ready?

This, this, this mass of material that's in these three books, in this series has began to come together in the early 90s.

And it's it was it was a stack of type papers about like this, which I thought was one book, and eventually it became three books.

And then when Stoney Creek Publishing offered me this three book deal, it became three much shorter books.

So it's been distilled down a lot.

And in the interim, from from when I had all of this material, I moved on and wrote a whole bunch of other books, and I learned a lot more about how to write a novel, and I was able to take that information and make these novels, make these the best I can be, I think.

I hope so, so how do you take you know, what you what you.

And it may not even be true.

I know in my family we've got some stories that I think did really happen.

But how do you take these kind of true stories and then transform them into fiction?

Use your imagination.

What would I do?

What would he have done?

How would she have reacted?

I know all these characters except the ones I've made up, but all the family characters that have the only name attached to them.

We're all real people.

There are no made up of who grace except we took a lot of license with Walter's life.

But I know the people.

These are portraits of the real people.

They didn't do all of these things, or they did them in a different setting and in different ways.

But they did go through these real hardships.

All of the hardships are real.

And in this book, if you read down about 45, 50%, the real stories that relatives told me began to emerge.

First half of the book, it is absolute fiction.

Okay, okay.

My grandfather never worked for a railroad.

The Walter Oakley in this book spends a career working for the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was the second transcontinental railroad in the United States.

We all learn in history about the Union Pacific and Central Pacific.

And they went across the northern part of the United States.

Southern Pacific came right through most most Texas.

And, that was, big chunk of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Yes.

Yeah, very important to all of our history.

To me, it changed you.

And now you can drive through parts of Texas and see where the railroad went.

Yep.

Survived and where it didn't go.

There's ghost towns now.

Yeah, but a lot of dramatic things happened during the construction of the railroads.

And that's a whole lot of what makes it a great story.

Is what it took to build these railroads.

Yeah.

I was going to say, I bet that makes it for a very rich kind of, setting when you have these moving plate, you know, building blocks being because they had to in some cases, build almost the town, they had to build depots and home.

Absolutely.

All this infrastructure, if if the railroad picked the town 20 miles away instead of yours, that town boomed and yours died.

And Texas is full of towns that died because the railroad didn't come there.

Well, what about these stories or maybe, maybe it's your grandfather.

What was so compelling about him and his life.

It made you want to write.

He was a man who was as generous as any human who ever lived.

my real grandfather was a justice of the peace as he.

If you read long enough, you will see that he becomes one pretty far down in this book.

And for years after he was dead, for several decades after he was dead, I would run into people who say, are you related to Walter Oakley?

And they would begin telling me stories about good things he had done for them and their families.

He was a man of courage, but he didn't raise his voice.

He didn't scream at people.

but what?

He said something as a commitment.

It was going to happen.

And I think you've read the book, so you see that it does.

Yes, it absolutely does.

And that's the way he was.

And, my grandmother was Ada Oakley.

Oh, she's one of my favorites.

She was exactly the way I betrayed her as well.

So they were both great people.

They were both phenomenal people.

I think it must be helpful to kind of have that head start with a character, because you as a reader, you kind of know them instantly.

You you do such a good job of translating that to the page that I feel like I mean, we with with Walter, we kind of grow up with him a little bit.

We meet him when he's a young person, but with Ada she comes kind of fully formed and she just barrels into the scene.

She does, and she's a spitfire.

And I just loved her from the first, from the first minute.

Well, I wrote her exactly the way she was.

Only have two cousin and cousins on that side of my family.

There were eight children who were eight of Walter Nader's children, three grandchildren.

On the other side of my family, my mother's side, I got dozens and dozens of first cousins, but there's only three of us.

But not one person has ever.

Of the three of us, no one has ever said, oh, you got that wrong.

We got her right.

And that makes me really happy.

That's wonderful.

I think that makes it maybe more important that you wrote this all down.

When there's so few of you, you want to kind of preserve this family.

It's fiction, but, you know, it is the spirit of the family, you know?

And that's that's what we're talking about.

We're talking about portraits of real human beings.

Most of my other books, a lot more real, and some of them are just totally they they needed to be in the book, so they got to be in the book.

And there's some of that in here, but not for people named Oakley.

And all of these names are real.

And I'm, you know, I'm not in any of these books.

so I am obviously still alive or I was at the time we taped this thing, but, none of them has been alive for a long time now.

And that got back to my publisher's question.

He said, it's somebody's going to get mad at you about this.

Not from the grave, but they can't do that.

It must have been kind of, I mean, you said you get to use your imagination, but it must have been kind of fun to try to imagine, you know, the grandfather you knew.

What was he like as a young man?

As a as a he would have technically been a child, but he was like 12 or 13, I think, at the start of the book.

What would he have been like as a, as a young person?

Absolutely, absolutely.

And, there's another character that will appear heavily in books two and three and is, He's probably in early elementary school when this book, it's named Brooks Oakley and he was so much like my grandfather that I was able to use him.

My memories of him as I shaped this character growing up.

And I knew him at a much younger age, obviously, than I knew my grandfather.

So that part helped.

But, you know, there's a lot of similarity in all of us.

And I'm talking about all of my aunts and uncles and, We have a lot of traits that permeate all of us now.

We don't we don't treat those traits in those human things, all the same way.

But we're a lot alike.

So when you're when you're, you know, when you're working on this, how do you decide what stories to believe in and expand upon or what stories to leave out or, or did you kind of just put it all in in the book?

A pretty much in the three books, I pretty much put it all in.

but again, the caution is front part of the book.

That didn't happen.

Not any of it.

And James Oakley, who does play a huge role in the front part of the book, was my great grandfather.

I never met him.

Most of my aunts and uncles never met him.

my father was the second youngest child in this group of eight, and that was pretty long spread on them.

So only 2 or 3 of them ever knew their grandfather.

And, one of the interesting things I found out when I was doing early research for it was that Walter and Ada in real life, got married very young, and as a matter of fact, they were so young that James Oakley, my great grandfather, had to write the court permission for Walter Oakley to marry Ada Oakley.

No, she didn't need permission because we have always treated women differently.

But he did.

He had to have his father's permission to get married.

He wasn't quite 18.

Wow.

People got married a lot younger back then, and even when I was young, people got married a lot younger than they do today.

And they didn't live nearly as long, though both.

Walter, I had full and long lives.

You mentioned, research.

What kind of research did you do to to finish out these characters, or maybe to investigate the setting more had to had to do a lot of research on the railroad.

and that was very fascinating because it, there was there was so many tragedies that occurred during the construction process and so many train wrecks.

And, you know, so there was a lot to keep.

And you want.

Things had to be adjusted for story purposes, but I wanted the railroad history to be at least close to accurate.

had to do quite a bit of, of, research on the Mescalero people because I did not want to get them wrong when, when I, when I was growing up, Westerns were a huge staple on television.

Virtually everything was either a western or sitcom, or there were a lot of live variety shows that.

But, Westerns just dominated early television, and I did not want to write the cliches about Native Americans that dominated American movies for a generation or two.

So I hope I was fair to the Mescalero people, and, and I tried to paint them as humans just like anybody else.

Yeah.

I don't I don't know their history, so I can't say if things are accurate or not, but you present them as real characters with distinct personalities, and they're not just kind of one general stereotype of a person.

They're they're individuals.

Well, I'm glad to hear you say that, and I, I hope I hope that's true because, there's just no, no sense continuing these kind of stereotypes that I don't know why people dreamed about the way they did.

But, you know, we didn't get along.

I mean, sure.

Yeah.

The the incoming settlers were taking away some somebody else's land.

And that's never happened in human history by permission.

It just doesn't work that way.

Yeah, yeah.

but speaking of that, that kind of goes to the setting, which is the first part of the book takes place in New Mexico, which I understand is different than where the real stories.

That's right.

I grew up in New Mexico, but nobody ever in my family ever lived in New Mexico.

But New Mexico gets you that kind of more western frontier.

Is that why you chose it as a setting?

Yeah, I, I chose two settings just because they're great settings.

The Texas Hill Country and, far western New Mexico and.

One of the primary purposes of using.

Little Hatchet Creek, which is where the book gets its name.

It's not about a weapon.

It's it's about a creek.

was the Army had a major outpost at Fort Bliss.

Then as now, it was one of the biggest collection of American soldiers in that era.

And the Oakley's in this book raised hogs and made bacon and sold them to the Army and, It also was a long way from the Civil War.

and as, as you will learn early in the book, James Oakley is getting away from the war.

No, the real James Oakley did not fight in the Civil War.

But that's neither here nor there, nor did he have PTSD.

So far as I know.

But this one does, and it serves the I mean, it serves the story to have kind of this.

And also I like that it kind of creates that conflict of when when Walter's coming up, he has a decision to make of what to do.

Do I go out and pursue something different, or do I do what my dad wants to do, or do I stay here in farm?

I mean, you get that kind of.

It's a classic thing that all young people have to decide for themselves.

Like we're still doing the same things about whether do I stay in College Station or whether I take a job in New York.

You know, his stakes are a little higher, a little different.

But it's, it's, it's a, it's a thing that we can all relate to kind of that decision of do I live the life my parents wanted for me or do I stake out on my own.

And you know, it's giving away a little too much.

But James comes to the realization that he was trying to take a dream that didn't happen for him and put it on his son.

You know, which is another thing a lot of people can relate to.

Yeah.

and maybe we all wish that.

Well, my parents were wonderful, but maybe some people would wish that their parents would come to that same realization at the same.

Because, you know, James in the end, was what's kind of cool about it.

He let his son go off and didn't try to control, what Walter did, but I don't, I never met my great grandmother.

but Rebecca Oakley is a very strong character to a very strong character.

And she was typical, I think, of a lot of frontier women.

And, she has to give up her little boy so he can go play on the railroad.

and and, that's a hard thing.

Well, especially as you show in the book, in this time period when the they're not getting mail, there's not telephones, there's not there's there's not reliable ways to communicate.

So when they go, they really go.

Yeah.

They and they did you know, and if, if you send a letter in, in, in the 1890s to a rural part of this country, it might take two weeks to get there.

You know, a letter, a handwritten letter, not a, not a text message.

We're we're spoiled.

have you been to this area in New Mexico?

Were you familiar with it, or did you just like the setting?

No, I said, where does this need to be geographically?

Okay.

And I started looking around on the map and I said there's a little mountain area there.

And I looked and there was a little stream.

So you know, how do you expand the screen on Google Maps.

The name of the creek was a cheetah Spanish fur hatchet.

so that's where it came from.

And I wasn't there at the time.

I didn't go, and I've never been there.

I have been to Telegraph, Texas, which plays a big role up here.

And also the Hill Country is a big.

Yeah.

And I grew up in the Hill country or on the edge of it in Austin.

So I knew a lot to write about The Hill.

I think that that was a part that I really like to was you have this this young man from New Mexico, and then he is in a lot of West Texas, El Paso area when he get when he describes getting to the hill country for the first time, you can only imagine how different and lush because yeah, we all go there today because it's still so beautiful.

But what that must have been like for someone coming up to that oasis.

Yeah, and just coincidental, I'm sure.

But the bluebonnets were blooming the first time in season, right?

You know, it's it is a beautiful place.

And and particularly in springtime, it makes everybody sneeze.

But it's beautiful.

We put up with it because it's gorgeous.

It's gorgeous.

Do you what does your writing process look like?

Do you have like a dedicate?

You sit down and write for an hour every day, or how do you do that?

Well, I've always, not always I had I had a nine year period where I didn't have daily employment.

commitments, but except for that long stretch of time, I had to write around work.

And I'm right back to doing that now because I, you know, I have a full time job, so I write when I can.

And, since I work in a high school, I've got a little over two months off in the summer.

Not much over, but a little more.

So, I'm writing a lot right now.

so I'm back to writing when I can.

When, when I, when I didn't have to go to work every day.

I would have intense spells, 4 to 6 weeks where I would write a ton of material, and then I would kind of sit back and look at it for a while, and then, I would go back and start working through what I'd already done between then in the last break.

and usually by the time I got through that first edit process, then I would keep going for another intense period and then kind of give it a rest.

No, I don't I don't say I have to write every morning from nine until 1:00, or from some people.

Early riser.

Yeah.

So everybody does it different them at 4:00, 5:00 and start writing.

Can't do that.

But I just always find that fascinating because everybody writes differently.

And so I think it's just interesting to hear, do you have advice for people who maybe want to start writing or want to get into start writing, start writing and keep writing, and don't get discouraged because there's every force on earth, internal and external, that will discourage you.

If you want to write, you have to write.

There's a there's an old cliche writers write, and even if it's all gibberish and you throw it away in two years time, you've learned enough from that process to keep going.

But you've got to keep going.

And and you, you know, we don't we don't write in ink on paper much anymore.

Some people still do, but most of us don't.

And you can you can always go back and fix mistakes.

You can always go back and change things, and you will a lot.

But if you don't continue the process, you'll never get there.

and it took me a long time to write one book.

A whole long time and 50 years.

Okay, but.

It took me about nine months to write the next one.

Now, I can't write every book in nine months, but.

That's how you learn.

And I'm sure it's good for a lot of people to go take some classes in it.

I will tell you, from having been in writer's groups that those can be a great source of, feedback and, and help your learning process, but just don't give up.

That's fantastic advice.

Well, we are unfortunately running short on time here, so we're on our final two minutes.

What would you hope people take away from your book?

I hope they would learn that as bad as things can get, and they get just about as bad as they can in parts of this book that.

There are forces around you and within you that will make them, if not all right.

Better so you can go on.

And that's what my grandparents had to do over and over again.

And that's why they deserve the tribute that I hope I gave them.

Well, I of course, I don't know them, but having read the book, I will say I think you did them.

We did them great justice because at the end of this, I mean, I know it's not over yet, but at the end of this story, the first story, I, as a reader, you're left with admiration and, inspiration for how they persevere through their troubles.

You see why I write books?

That's it right there.

I wrote it, you got it.

Well, that's that's I don't know.

We can't say anything else.

That's perfect.

that's a wonderful way to end it.

Thank you so much for being here, for writing this wonderful story.

I really appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Well, that is all the time we have for today.

thank you so much for joining us.

The book again is Little Hatchet by Phil Oakley.

Thanks again, and I will see you again soon.