The first step to writing a novel is building a world and in historical fiction it is more like having to recreate a time and place that actually existed, a mighty undertaking. I love using photographs for my construction of Moonflower and I found a treasure trove in the Farm Security Administration photo archives from the Library of Congress. Taken during the depression and the war years and including much more than Dorothea Lange's iconic images of a mother and her children...
Read this post from Yale's Photogrammar for why such wonderful photogrpahs were part of FDR's New Deal, but thank the powers that be that someone did document this hard time in our nation's history.
The whole archive is on the Library of Congress site, but its is hard to navigate, best viewing is probably Google Images, here.
I could go on, well, I could go on with some kind of "words", but I won't just really look at the few below or in your own searching, of the fathers and mothers, the shacks and the dirty kids, the attempts to keep a sense of pride and the ones who gave up....these photos don't need words...
But in writing Moonflower, I learned much from them, what was on the sparsest of diner tables, how long has Mircle Whip, a family favorite, been around, how men crouched in conversation, what they wore when they worked the farm. Apparantly, according to my mother, the reason men wore their overalls cuffed at the bottoms was to collect the ash from their cigarettes. Yup, my grandfather knocked his cigarette ash into the cuff of his overalls and it was a horrid thing if my mother or grandmother forgot to shake the ash out before washing the clothes. Can you imagine? I would have loved to include that in Moonflower, but the religious fundamentalists in the Four Corners definitely did not smoke and it just seemed out of character for Josh, ( whose Josh? read here).
My grandfather was also a dairy farmer and my mom was a little girl in the area of Moonflower, so much was learned from her stories of my grandpa in the dairy barn, with the strength to lift a container of milk into the separator with one hand and his tendency to talk naps hidden away in the hay.
My family did not have to move off their farms in the depression. They are not from the Four Corners there is no polygamy in our history, but my great grandparents really really liked each other and my grandmother was one of thirteen children with six brothers and I have always heard stories of when they were boys....
and worked the Minnesota farm with their dad...
Sadly, I knew many of my great uncles longer than I knew my grandfather, who died when I was four, but my childhood was full of trips back to my grandmother's brothers' and my grandfather's brother's farms.
For Moonflower, I decided that one of the universal truths I was going to hold on to was, big families are big families whether they are big because your father has four wives or because your Danish great grandmother and grandfather were really nuts about each other, sibling dynamics are probably very similar. One thing my grandmother would always say was, " don't kid yourself, the older children raised the younger."
One oddity I did copy from my family was my great uncle Harry, my grandmother's oldest brother was the same age as his uncle, my great, great grandmother's youngest son. In the book, mother and daughter overlap having babies...
Even family pictures from the sixties, have proven to be helpful, my great uncles and grandfather helping fix up a old cabin in the foothills near Boulder with my dad, a cabin about the same age as the era of the forties of my story....
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