Susan Tepper/ Donna Baier Stein |
Writer Susan Tepper interviews Donna Baier Stein in this legendary literary stomping grounds."
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LIVE at THE ALGONQUIN in NYC ~
Susan Tepper Interviews Donna Baier SteinDonna Baier Stein is the author of The Silver Baron's Wife (PEN/New England Discovery Award, Finalist in Foreword reviews 2017 Book of the Year Award, and Finalist in Paterson Prize for Fiction), Sympathetic People (Iowa Fiction Award Finalist and 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist), and Sometimes You Sense the Difference (poetry chapbook). She was a Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and founded and publishes Tiferet Journal. She has received a Scholarship from Bread Loaf, a Fellowship from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, four Pushcart nominations, and prizes from the Allen Ginsberg Awards and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and anthologies. www.donnabaierstein.com
Susan Tepper: Your fictionalized historical novel The Silver Baron’s Wife begins its journey in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, during August of 1866. This is a rags-to riches-to rags story of a particular woman. What drew you toward this woman, who did indeed exist, and was called Baby Doe Tabor?
Donna Baier Stein:
The seed for my multi-decade obsession with Lizzie, or Baby Doe, Tabor
was planted when I was seven years old, during a family vacation to Colorado.
Two photographs of Lizzie mesmerized me. In one, she wears an elegant ermine
opera coat. In the second, she stands in front of a run-down shack, wearing a
man’s old coat and cap and holding a rifle. Even as a girl, I wondered how this
woman could journey from Point A to Point B, living in such drastically
different circumstances. I was also very intrigued by the fact that Lizzie
wrote down thousands of her dreams, many of which are now housed in the History
Colorado Center.
Susan Tepper:
Did you ever read any of her dreams?
DBS: I
did. In fact I photo-copied about 100 or
more of them. I read and copied them
prior to the writing of this book.
That’s how much they fascinated me.
A woman during the time period of the early 20th Century
writing down her dreams, well that was an unusual thing. She jotted them on the back of grocery lists,
Western Union Telegrams, scraps of paper.
Anywhere.
ST: Kind of
how a poet works. You’re in some ‘place’
and your head starts a line of poetry and you jot it on a napkin or anything
you can get your hands on. She sounds
compulsive in that same way. What were
her dreams about?
DBS: Members
of her family would appear in them. Also
images of Jesus, Mary, the Devil. Many
vivid spiritual images came into her dreams. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams
was published in 1899 but I don’t know if she would have read it. And I
certainly don’t think there were many people in America writing down their
dreams or noting spirit visitations on their calendars in those days.
ST:
Fascinating. I would love to read
some of those dreams. Particularly since
I’ve read this book and have such a strong sense of the character.
DBS: Although
I didn’t have the language at age seven to articulate any of this, I somehow
saw the amazing contrasts in her life—wealth versus poverty, materialism versus
spirituality, family versus solitude.
As I matured myself, I learned what we all
learn—that the things we are told will make us happy don’t always completely
satisfy. Marriage, motherhood, money—Lizzie experienced all these gifts and yet
longed for more than these outer trappings.
Here was a woman whose second husband, Horace, was worth $24 million (or
about half a billion dollars in today’s currency), who lived in a huge villa
with 100 peacocks roaming the yard and who wore a $90,000 necklace at her 1883
wedding, who gave birth to two beloved daughters… and yet still felt, I
believe, what Rumi calls “this longing” or what St. Augustine calls “the
god-shaped void.”
In her later life, she experienced many visions of
Jesus and Mary. Some theologians think she may well have been an American female
mystic. Some think she experienced lead poisoning, or had dementia, or perhaps
went crazy in her grief. Spiritual visionaries are often seen as crazy
eccentrics!
The other important thing that made me want to tell
Lizzie’s story is that it has so often been told only from a male perspective.
One notable exception to this is Judy Nolte-Temple’s nonfiction book Baby Doe Tabor: Madwoman in the Cabin.
But long before Judy’s book, an American opera was written about her by Douglas
Moore. Called “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” it focuses primarily on the love
triangle between Lizzie, Horace, and his first wife Augusta.
ST: Before
Horace (the rich husband), she went into her first marriage to Harvey with such
a clear head and high expectations that all would remain wonderful in their
life. Harvey must have been a huge
disappointment as he devolved into alcoholism and lost his will to work and
provide for his family. That’s when her
tremendous strength kicked in with such ferocity and she found herself working
down in the silver mines, despite a strong superstition that women brought bad
luck and danger to miners.
DBS: An early
movie starring Edward G. Robinson called Silver
Dollar portrayed her as a beautiful young blonde who broke up a
long-standing marriage (to Horace). To my mind, she was much more than a
mistress or wife of a wealthy man. She was instead a woman who bucked all the
social expectations of her time. She worked in the silver mines when women
simply didn’t do that.
ST: Out of
necessity because Harvey had thrown in the towel. You wrote him really well, by the way. A young man who started out so bright and
earnest, then collapsed when the weight of life became very heavy. She carried that burden for them both.
DBS:
Yes. But I also feel she was
drawn to the mines on some psychological level.
She was searching for that ‘invisible something’ that wasn’t part of her
life. Going deep below the surface of
the earth may have been a way for her to search out this emotion.
ST: Very
daring. I felt she was an
extraordinarily strong and risk-taking woman throughout her lifetime.
DBS: She
divorced her first husband, Harvey Doe, when that was rarely done, especially
considering she was Catholic. She
remained with her second husband Horace long after he lost his fortune, despite
peoples’ expectations that she had only married him for his money.
ST: When
things were going well Horace was worth about $24 million. I have to admit I might have been less
forgiving (laughter).
DBS: That was
a tremendous sum of money for those times, around half a billion in today’s
calculations.
ST: I’m still
digesting that. So he loses $24 million
and she sticks by him anyway. It says a
lot about her character as a human being.
DBS: Yes, I
think so. I believe she truly loved Horace and stayed with him despite that the
drastic change in his fortune. I feel her story has a tremendous amount of
wisdom for us today. It shows the fickleness of wealth, the importance of equal
rights and respect for women to enjoy, and the need in all of us to search
inside for our own spiritual questions and answers.
****Susan Tepper, an award-winning writer, has been at it for twenty years. Six books of her fiction and poetry have been published, with a seventh book, a novella, forthcoming in the fall of 2017. FIZZ her reading series at KGB Bar, NYC, is sporadically ongoing these past nine years. www.susantepper.com
****Susan Tepper, an award-winning writer, has been at it for twenty years. Six books of her fiction and poetry have been published, with a seventh book, a novella, forthcoming in the fall of 2017. FIZZ her reading series at KGB Bar, NYC, is sporadically ongoing these past nine years. www.susantepper.com
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