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The Presbyterian church
The old door shook. It wasn’t his intent to harm anything. Fact is, the once-reverend W. W. Ronin wouldn’t think of making light of the buildings that had given him succor over the years—initially in Greensboro, Pennsylvania where he was in training, and later in Wichita, Kansas as the second rector of the St. John’s Episcopal Church, when it was still made out of logs and situated between the confluence of two sometimes over-flowing rivers. There was still something sacred about religious places, even if he didn’t embrace the faith they sometimes contained. The church wasn’t just about “the people,” as he used to say while preaching, one hand on the lectionary, the other searching for a Bible in the event his people asked an unexpected question or two over the meal that many times followed services. Church was the building, too, though he didn’t understand that at the time. He lifted his knee up to his chest and pushed again, the bottom of his foot—the ball, actually, not the heel as it dissipated too much force to use his boot that way—and the old wooden doors, crafted from pine planks harvested in the Sierra mountains, just up the Kings Canyon toll road he figured not that it mattered, splintered into pieces like the old man’s leg caught under the wheel of an errant coach from Benton’s Livery on Carson Street last week. The door swung back and forth, its lock shattered, shards of it rolling lifelessly across the entry way of the building, erected in 1861, before Nevada was even a state. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain’s) brother, Orion and his wife Molly attended there, though Clemens was now dead, having died a year ago, about the same time he began to wonder if there was anything real at all to the Protestant convictions he once proffered as an Episcopal priest on the American frontier. He dumped the shorter of his two Colt handguns over the back of his holster, until it was level, and then slowly extended it forward into the midnight darkness of Nevada’s oldest sanctuary, as long as you didn’t count the Mormon meeting place in Genoa, or the Catholic church which was actually finished before the Presbyterians were, though the Calvinists had started earlier but ran out of money. Read more…
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3 Ronin books and a detective novella in 2015
This will be a banner year for me. Two Bears Books will publish three more Westerns—Home Means Nevada, Bathhouse Row and The Mountain Is Easy. The publication of Home Means Nevada finishes the core books in the W. W. Ronin Western series, introducing the characters and establishing the history and time period. The first five books are written as an easy to read “third person” narrative, placed in 1880s Lake Tahoe, Reno, Virginia City and Carson City, Nevada. About book five: When Genoa farmer Orrin Hickman decides to resurrect the Mormon militia group the Danites to settle some long-standing accounts, an old curse threatens fire and floods on the people of northern Nevada. Ex-priest and Pinkerton Detective, W. W. Ronin finds his heart broken and his hands full and guns blazing as a returning husband complicates his personal life and prison-breaking felons join the “rising tide” of Latter Day Saint hit men in the fifth of the W. W. Ronin adventures, Home Means Nevada. Home Means Nevada defines place-based fiction, where real people and real places become the setting for hauntingly real human adventures. Home Means Nevada takes place in Carson City, Genoa and Gardnerville, Nevada, and tells the true story of what happens when religious dreams meet present-day realities among Nevada’s earliest settlers. A full-length piece of historical fiction, Home Means Nevada should be available in April. Bathhouse Row re-launches the W. W. Ronin epic. Written in a more active style, “darker and deadlier than ever,” my beta-readers say you’ll love Bathhouse Row! I’ve set the “first person” tale of murder and intrigue amidst four well-known northern Nevada hot springs—Steamboat, Carson, Genoa (Wally’s) and Markleeville (Grover’s). The book is out-of-sequence, moving the adventures to 1889, has all new historical content and will be available late summer. The Mountain Is Easy pretends to be a long lost W. W. Ronin journal, recently found under my bed, dating to 1901. Ronin, settled down at Lake Tahoe, having just turned fifty. Be prepared to find out what happened to some of the series’ regulars as Ronin considers retirement… You can download the first six chapters of The Mountain Is Easy by simply signing-up for this site’s newsletter. I’ll send it to you FREE, as a PDF file. You’ll be surprised to hear that I have a 21st century detective novella in the works, too. Read more…
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About the Author
Gregg Edwards Townsley is a reflective, free-thinking ex-pastor, martial artist, writer and Western Fast Draw enthusiast living in St. Helens, Oregon. No stranger to the places his Western characters inhabit–Reno, Carson City, Virginia City and Lake Tahoe–he raised his children in northern Nevada, from 1984 through 1993, while serving as pastor and head of staff of the First Presbyterian Church in Carson City. Prior to living in Nevada, he made his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Penns Grove, New Jersey, “a veritable fountain,” he says, of people and places he likes to visit in his Tommy Valentine, PI series of short stories. Townsley is a member of the Western Writers of America. His wife, Nancy, is also a writer and the managing editor of the Hillsboro Tribune and Forest Grove News Times. Read more…
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Writing place-based fiction
Author Katie Schultz has some interesting thoughts about writing “place-based fiction” in an energetic blog called “The Writing Life.” I stumbled on them, and her, while wondering if there were other people who enjoyed setting their fictional stories in actual places. Clearly, of course, there are. Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Steinbeck should have come immediately to mind, Faulkner too as these writers were a staple in my middle and high school years. (I confess a fondness for pulpier novels nowadays, particularly Florida fiction writers Carl Hiaasen, Randy White and (gulp) Tim Dorsey, but that’s another post.) It’s just that I get so excited at times writing about people’s actual stories and places in the context of my make-believe ones that it never occurs to me that doing so is “burnt-over ground,” so to speak. Schultz, who is a mentor to writers far and wide, describes her process simply. She buys maps, borrows library books, then pins what she’s learned about a particular place on butcher paper before actually visiting. At least that’s my take of the February 2011 piece I found while Google-searching the words “place-based fiction.” Her approach initially sounded sort of old-school, given what’s available on-line. I’d have no more idea where to buy a map than a home-made candy bar nowadays, though I do have a personal librarian who is an absolute peach in getting me what I need for W. W. Ronin’s next adventure. The more I thought about it however, the more I realized I was doing nearly the same thing when writing W. W. Ronin Westerns. My historical fiction books–the Ronin series of Westerns–are set in northern Nevada. And each of them is the benefit of hundreds of dollars of books, many of them out of print, personal visits and interviews, too. The first three books put me on a four-wheeler in the mountains above Carson City in order to get a good look at what used to be the old Bigler Toll Road, from Carson City to Lake Tahoe. A couple of days later, I tipped a man $20 to take a twenty-minute peek at the supposedly haunted remains of an old social club in Virginia City. More so, I’m the only person I know who has ever been in the basement of Bowers Mansion. All in a day’s work, so to speak. I’m working on the sixth and seventh in the series now. The fifth is with my editor, who is crazy enough to actually read my books in the raw. She sleeps with me, too. I’m that lucky. Read more…
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