I began considering my forthcoming novel, Prodigies, after a trip to the old Arizona mining boomtown of Jerome in 2010. By 2015, I was well into a first draft of Prodigies, by this point set in Deadwood and various points east.
In the last decade, I’ve read plenty of fiction and non-fiction set along the North American frontier between the late 18th and early 20th centuries. Recently, I thought about some differences and similarities between Canadian and American literary treatments of frontier themes and settings. The result was this essay in the June 2021 issue of The Literary Review of Canada. https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2021/06/writing-into-the-sunset/