I write memoirs, historical fiction, some contemporary short stories, environmental essays—in other words, I write my passions. I do not write about rich and famous people. They already have plenty of biographers. This is a little bit of an obsession with me, so please bear with me for a moment.
I’m aware that people make a big deal of our Great Leaders, but here’s what I know about them. Those big shots could not accomplish a single thing without the labor and consent of the rest of us. The peons. The ordinary folks.
You see, there is no such thing as a story that’s exactly like somebody else’s story and here’s what I think. I think that each story, no matter how seemingly insignificant, is a piece of the patchwork we call our history. It’s just that those “little stories” don’t often get heard. But remember, history is the training wheels we use to get into the future. So maybe your granny didn’t change the world in any way you recognize, but she somehow survived the loss of a baby (or several) and lived a full life. You might want to know how she did it.
I can talk about all kinds of set-backs our people, those who settled on the Great Plains, suffered and how they survived them. That’s what I’ve been doing in my books, including my most recent novel about Nebraska farm boy and his sister, nearly as close as twins who went to war on opposite sides of the world. Not all Nebraskans come from Nebraska and my first novel is about a woman who grew up in the cities during the Great Depression and then joined the Army (WAFs) and ended up in Nebraska.
Below are some of my stories, the ones I’ve already published. What kinds of stories do you like?
Gravy
They survived the Great Depression and World War II, but can they survive the peace? Struggling to act normal, whatever that means, Connor William Conroy, a farm boy just back from combat in the Southwest Pacific with shell shock, meets a girl. But he doesn’t remember how to behave—and then there are the flashbacks. Nightclub singer Bobbi Bowen joined the Women’s Army Corps because the nightclubs were cutting back on live entertainment and her band members were getting drafted. Now she’s building and repairing radios for B-24 Liberator bombers and singing in a nightclub when she’s off duty. And then, she meets Connor.
See Willy See
Caught in the run up to World War II, Connor considers enlisting, expecting he will go to Europe. Maybe he can protect his sister who’s in Paris with the Foreign Service. But, it’s hard to think about leaving home and family, for another years-long exile. Filled with flashbacks of his travels living off the land and letters to keep him tethered to his family, Connor’s story spans two of America’s most disruptive decades (The economic Depression of the 1930s and World War II of the 1940s) in which Connor finds his most closely-held expectations thwarted. For sample chapters, information sources, and places to buy, click here
The Reluctant Canary Sings
The only way to save her family was to sing. Bobbi Bowen lived in Cleveland. In 1937, during the second dip of a double-dip Depression, she had one chance to keep a roof over her family’s heads—to turn her voice, her most private pleasure, into a public commodity. She gave up her dream of becoming an artist to spend her nights singing in nightclubs. Even though she could make enough to support her family, security remained an illusion she couldn’t seem to capture no matter how hard she tried. For sample chapters, information sources, and places to buy, click here
Threshold
Here’s what Linda Hasselstrom said about my first award-winning book: Faith A. Colburn has created something like a prairie in this ambitious book: an interwoven tapestry of eight generations of family, their lives nourished by Nebraska’s farmland. The real importance of the people in this book may be not that they are members of Colburn’s extended family but that they are recognizable as family belonging to everyone with ties to the prairie. – Linda Hasselstrom, author Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains For sample chapters, information sources, and places to buy, click here.
From Picas to Bytes
The ways in which families support their communities drew my attention for my second book, From Picas to Bytes: Four Generations of Seacreast Newspaper Service to Nebraska. The newspaper family I followed in this book owned the Lincoln Journal for 100 years. The Seacrests had a great influence on Nebraska’s almost unique open meetings and open records law. Their advocacy for open courts also gave the public more access than most states to the working of the justice system. The family worked tirelessly in support of press freedoms because, without information how is the public to know how to vote. Early adoption of new technologies helped keep a mid-sized daily newspaper in business long after most of their peers turned off the presses and closed their doors. A newspaper is a big business in a mid-sized community and Seacrest donation of time and money to community projects made a lot of difference in the viability of that community. If you want to know how a newspaper can help a community thrive, here’s how it is done. For sample chapters, information sources, and places to buy, click here.
Prairie Landscapes
A little prose poetry, a little animal antics, some book reviews, and a lifetime of environmental journalism, this book represents the rambling of one mind prowling around on the Great Plains. In a series of 300- to 700-word essays, it’s focused on families and landed communities, bringing you face to face with the land and its creatures. For sample chapters, information sources, and places to buy, click here.