Nadene LeCheminant on the power of truth in LDS historical fiction

Guest post by Nadene LeCheminant

Owning our brokenness, claiming our power as storytellers

Three and a half years ago I quit my job and took up a new life. A story had been calling. Long ago my great-great-grandmother had taken a journey; I wanted to follow. She was a poor English girl who converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and emigrated from Victorian England to the Utah Territory in 1856. In that remote desert kingdom, she became the child bride of a much older polygamist. I embarked on a book of historical fiction inspired by her life.

In the beginning …

I had worked as a writer and editor for much of my professional life, but was new to fiction. Like many of you, I immersed myself in “how to” guides. I woke in the middle of the night puzzling over dialogue and hopelessly channeled Jane Austen, trying to master the Victorian vocabulary I assumed my fictional heroine, Josephine Bell, would use. But Josephine’s dialogue was stilted and her character was flat. She lacked personality. Suddenly an idea occurred to me: If I could see her face, perhaps I could find her personality. Hundreds of pioneer photos later, I found my Josephine: eyes that were straightforward yet gentle, a face that combined vulnerability with bravery. I posted the image, as a muse, on my computer screen, and checked in each morning before I began writing. From that point on, her character flowed with ease. She became my friend.

As I wrote, I remembered a piece of advice offered at a writers’ conference. After a full day of workshops on plot and structure and character development, over hors d’oeuvres, someone asked an esteemed author, “But what does it boil down to? How do you become a good writer?” The novelist said, “All this talk about plot is fine, workshops are great, but there’s only one way to learn to write. “Simply write,” he said. “There’s no substitute.”

And so I made my way through numerous drafts during three years, searching for the place where words take on a rhythm of their own and writing feels more like lived experience than craft. When I finished, it was difficult to say goodbye to my daily cast of characters. I had come to love them—the saints, the sinners, the faithful and the lost—all caught in their individual stories of hope and survival.

What does riding a horse have to do with writing?

Along the way, I threw myself into research. I read hundreds of pioneer journals and 19th-century newspapers, perused old hymn books, and made friends with archivists. I also walked part of the Mormon Trail, learned to ride a horse named Flicker, photographed cramped log cabins (how could these homes have held a dozen children?) and videotaped a clackety ride in an antique steam train. I spun yarn (badly!) and churned butter at living history museums. And I stood in gusts of wind on the summit of Big Mountain, where the pioneers caught their first glimpse of the valley. The modern-day city was swallowed up by evening shadows. All I could see was the cerulean, salty lake in the distance.

The most poignant experience came when I walked the ruts made, in part, by my ancestor’s handcart as she pulled it toward the Wasatch Mountains. She had just trekked more than 1,200 miles, and the valley at last felt within reach, but as her party came over the rise, the jagged peaks of the Wasatch towered like a fortress into the sky. Dubbed Heartbreak Ridge, this was the place where hundreds of Saints broke down and wept.

Context is (almost) everything

My historical novel, The Gates of Eden, was inspired by the life of my ancestor, but it doesn’t follow the arc of her life, and the coming-of-age story that emerged is not an innocent, simple story, as many coming-of-age stories are. Instead, it’s grounded in three of the most complicated, heartbreaking and colorful years in the history of the American West.

Between 1856 and 1858, several hundred mostly-poor immigrants perished on the handcart trail. Many arrived in Utah to a fiery Mormon Reformation, with its teaching that plural marriage was no longer just an option, but a commandment. Even as thousands confessed sins, took up new wives, and went down into irrigation ditches for re-baptism, federal soldiers marched on Utah; their charge was to abolish polygamy and rein in Brigham Young’s political theocracy. Fear, memories of persecution, and religious extremism set the stage for the tragic Mountain Meadows Massacre in southern Utah, where much of the story is set.

Looking for the Promised Land

In The Gates of Eden, the fictional Josephine Bell discovers how quickly one can descend from middle-class Victorian comfort to the slums of Liverpool, and makes a fateful decision. Seeking a spiritual anchor and escape from desperate poverty, the girl goes down into the waters of baptism, joins a community of kindly strangers, and embarks on an epic journey across a treacherous ocean and into the wilderness, pulling a handcart over the Rocky Mountains to the Utah Territory.

In her new home Josephine is pressed into a polygamous marriage with a man almost four decades older than herself. Against a backdrop of rising violence and haunting tragedy, Josephine’s struggle to find her own path takes her to unexpected places.

Dismantling the statues

 As I wrote The Gates of Eden, I thought about how I had grown up mythologizing the handcart pioneers. They were placed on pedestals where they loomed—larger than life—over the cultural landscape. Now Josephine Bell and her fictional companions were asking: What would happen if we brought the icons down off their pedestals and allowed them to become real people? If we wrote fiction that allowed them their humanity? If we allowed them to own their fears and brokenness and doubts alongside their faith and fortitude? When we mythologize our ancestors, they lose their ability to astonish, to inspire awe, and to move us with their courage, and we as writers lose our power as storytellers.

Josephine invited me to illuminate the lived experience of polygamy in my storytelling. Latter-day Saints talk about sacred covenants, but plural marriage was a lot more complicated. I wanted to follow the family into the parlor, to follow Josephine into the bedroom. Plural marriage was not easy.

Right now there is immense interest in Latter-day Saint history. Historians and bloggers and novelists write exposés while others disseminate faith-promoting narratives. Somewhere in between, there’s a place for historical fiction grounded in facts, a place where stories are allowed to breathe and emerge naturally, influenced by characters and plot and imagination rather than prescribed script—or religious or anti-religious agendas. History is multi-faceted; humans are complicated; life is not black and white. Stories born in the gray, in-between places are the ones that can take flight.

I believe there is a place where authors of Latter-day Saint literature can write with honesty, but also with compassion. My novel illustrates a troubled time in Latter-day Saint history, but it was written as a labor of love.

Title: The Gates of Eden
Author: Nadene LeCheminant
Publisher: Cottage Street Books, 2019
Genre: Historical Fiction

Website: www.nadenelecheminant.com

Experience the Mormon Trail.

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