Mayborn/BIO Fellow Looks at Two Subjects, Two Cultures

April 9th, 2020

Working on a dual biography of a relative who crossed paths with the Chiricahua Apache chief Geronimo, Morgan Voeltz has faced several challenges. She has also come to a conclusion that is probably familiar to many biographers: “Neither of these characters is entirely a hero,” she said, “and neither is entirely a villain.”

Voeltz spoke about her experience working on the biography (her first), at a talk on February 20, at the Women’s International Study Center (WISC) in Santa Fe. The event culminated her two-week stay in New Mexico as the Mayborn/BIO Biography Fellow. The fellowship was initiated by BIO co-founder James McGrath Morris nine years go. (The fellowship is being restructured for next year; you can read about that here.)

While all the Mayborn/BIO fellows have benefited from the chance to put aside daily demands and devote time to researching and writing (and to receive mentoring from Morris), Voeltz found her New Mexico stay especially helpful. During her residency at WISC, she met with some of the Southwest historians whose works she had already read, contacted Apache sources, explored the region’s topography, and saw artifacts from Geronimo’s time. Meeting with a representative of the Mescalero Apache tribe, Voeltz could ask a key question: “What should I know, what should I understand, if I want to write about this culture that is not my own?”

Finding a Focus
The impetus for exploring the intersection of the lives of Geronimo and Voeltz’s great-grandfather, Captain Henry Lawton, came from Voeltz’s grandmother. She suggested that Lawton’s life was worth researching and writing about. A native of Indiana, Lawton joined the army at 18 and fought in the Civil War, the Indian Wars of the West, and the Philippine-American War of 1898. He died in combat during that latter conflict. Voeltz began examining her relative’s life while working on an M.A. in nonfiction writing at Johns Hopkins University. She was struck by how “his life crossed paths with some really formative events for U.S. history during that entire era of the late 1800s.”

Her literary agent convinced Voeltz that instead of giving Lawton’s life a cradle-to-grave treatment, she should focus on one part of his life: the manhunt Lawton led to track down and arrest Geronimo and his Apache followers. But for Voeltz, the story is more than an adventure tale that follows the two men across the Southwest and into Mexico. She also wants to explore the two cultures at play. “Lawton and Geronimo come into the situation with completely different realities,” Voeltz said. “And I want readers to feel that.”

Part of Geronimo’s reality was growing up in the Gila Mountains of southwest New Mexico. That’s where he learned the survival skills that would help him elude capture for some four months in 1886, as Lawton and his men pursued the Apaches over mountainous desert terrain. For Lawton, a motivation in his life was uniting and then protecting the Union he loved.

Shared Traits
During her research, Voeltz learned that her great-grandfather and Geronimo had, as she put it, “a number of commonalities at a very deep human level.” Both chose the warrior life and saw violent conflict at an early age—Lawton during the Civil War and Geronimo while taking part on raids. Both became respected leaders because of their military skill (while Geronimo’s status was bolstered by his role as a medicine man). Lawton and the Apache chief also had strong family and community ties.

Finally, Voeltz said, both men “experienced profound loss in their lives, the kind of loss that knocks you loose from your foundation.” Each lost a parent before the age of 10, and each lost their first three children. Despite those losses, Lawton and Geronimo also had great physical and psychological resilience. Voeltz said the chase through the mountains—the backbone of her story—“puts both of their physical resilience to the test, as well as their emotional resilience.”

Challenges and Conundrums
Finding the sources to give each subject’s perspectives and experience equal weight has presented Voeltz with some challenges. It’s much easier for Lawton’s side, as his letters to his wife are in the Library of Congress. They give Voeltz insight into his character as well as details about life on the trail. But for Geronimo’s side of the tale, there are no written sources from his time when he was trying to evade Lawton. Voeltz is trying to piece together things by knowing how the Apaches lived and traveled in the region at that time. In one example, she noted how Geronimo had been given tips when he was a boy on how to survive in a hostile environment—tips that likely came into play in 1886.

For the Apache side, Voeltz has also turned to accounts left by Apache scouts who traveled with Lawton and his men, though they were recorded years later, as told to white men. Geronimo, likewise, dictated an autobiography later in life to a white notetaker. Voeltz also relies on Apache oral histories, including some from men who lived with Geronimo after his capture.

Voeltz is also considering the language she uses. Geronimo has often been described as a renegade, but is that the proper word, she wonders: “Can you really be a renegade if you’re traveling through a region that you perceive to be your own land?” And Voeltz has tried to find the proper description for Geronimo and his men, and has ended up using Apaches, Indians, and Native Americans interchangeably.

Perhaps her biggest conundrum, Voeltz said, is how to grapple with issues of privacy and taboo. She said, “To the Apache, one does not speak someone’s name after that person has died. My book is full of the names of people who died. How do I navigate this?” Along with that, she is wrestling with how to do justice to Geronimo’s world view, one that included his belief that he could communicate with the elements and stop time.

Voeltz will continue to sort out these and other concerns as she works on her book. In the meantime, her fellowship in New Mexico has prepared her for the next phase of research and writing, even as she juggles a full-time job and raising a family. After the fellowship, she said, “the pump is primed.”

New Hidden Figures Fellowship Replaces Mayborn/BIO Fellowship

April 9th, 2020

James McGrath Morris, the driving force behind the Mayborn/BIO Fellowship, is helping to launch a new fellowship program to assist aspiring authors working on a book about a lesser-known figure who merits a biography. The Santa Fe Hidden Figures Fellowship will provide a grant of $1,000, a two-week stay in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a casita at the historic Acequia Madre House in cooperation with the Women’s International Studies Center (WISC), dinner five nights a week in the Morris home, a public reading, and a meeting with a literary agent.

Fellows will also have time for consultation with Morris on research and writing techniques suitable for a book on a hidden figure. Morris is the author of, among other books, The New York Times bestselling Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, The First Lady of the Black Press, which was awarded the Benjamin Hooks National Book Prize, given annually for the best book on civil rights history.

The fellowship evolved from the Mayborn/BIO Biography Fellowship, which for the last nine years has provided a creative residency to biographers. “We felt it had run its course and there was a greater need for a different fellowship program,” Morris said. “When I accepted the BIO Award in 2019, I said that BIO needs to find the way to support and foster works by those whose actions—rather than their fame—merit a biography. This new fellowship is an attempt to put that idea into action.”

The fellowship is open to women writing about a hidden figure or to men writing about a female hidden figure. The selection will be made by a panel that will include a former Mayborn/BIO Fellowship recipient. Details on the application process will become available in late May.

Morgan Voeltz Swanson Wins Mayborn Fellowship

August 9th, 2019

Morgan Voeltz Swanson won the Biography Fellowship awarded annually at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, held in July at the University of North Texas. The fellowship is cosponsored by BIO and BIO co-founder James McGrath Morris. With her fellowship, Swanson receives a two- to three-week residency in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and mentoring from Morris during her stay. In addition, she will receive complimentary admission to the 2020 BIO Conference and a $500 stipend.

During her stay in New Mexico, Swanson, a BIO member, will be working on To the Edge of Endurance: American Soldier Henry W. Lawton, Apache Leader Geronimo, and a Manhunt Through the Desert. Her previous writings include journal articles about Lawton and his wife, Mamie.

In 2020, the fellowship will be relaunched as the Mayborn/BIO Hidden Figure Fellowship, intended to assist aspiring authors working on books about figures who merit a biography through their actions rather than fame. “The marketplace is a cruel arbiter of who is deserving of a biography, reflecting our worse biases,” said Morris. “The publishing industry will eagerly commission yet another biography of Washington, Lincoln, or Roosevelt rather than a biography of someone we don’t know but ought to know. The lives and voices of the lesser known need to have their day on the bookshelf.”

The change in focus for the fellowship began following Morris’s address to the 2019 BIO Conference, where he received this year’s BIO Award. “This issue has implications far beyond a writer’s personal writing ambitions,” Morris said at the conference. “It bolsters a leader-centric view of history. In this manner wars are won by generals, economic crises solved by presidents, and industries built by moguls. In turn this elevation of leaders creates historically inaccurate expectations.”

The fellowship provides for a grant of $1,000, a two-week stay in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a casita at the historic Acequia Madre House in cooperation with the Women’s International Studies Center (WISC), dinner five nights a week in the home of James McGrath Morris and Patty Morris, a public reading, and a meeting with an agent. Time will also be set aside for consultation with biographer Morris regarding research and writing techniques for a book on a hidden figure. Morris is the author, among other books, of The New York Times bestselling Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, The First Lady of the Black Press, which was awarded the Benjamin Hooks National Book Prize, given annually for the best book in Civil Rights History.

Mayborn/BIO Fellowship Winner Hones Her Work

December 15th, 2018

Alison Owings knew she wanted to write about homelessness, but she wasn’t sure how to approach the topic. Then, on a walking tour of San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin neighborhood, she met Del Seymour, an elderly African American man leading a group of curious whites through the streets he knew so well. After all, he had earned the unofficial title of “the mayor of the Tenderloin.”

As he recounted some of his experiences as a homeless man in the neighborhood, Seymour said, “I could have gotten a Ph.D. in sidewalks”—and Owings knew she had the focus for her book. She would make Seymour a “micro example of the macro American scourge of homelessness.”

Owings talked about her subject and the biography-in-progress of his life at a reading marking the end of her residency in Tesuque, New Mexico, where she had spent several weeks working on the book as the ninth winner of the Mayborn/BIO Fellowship in Biography. Her host and mentor for her time in New Mexico was BIO co-founder James McGrath Morris, who also hosted Owing’s reading in his home.

Owings had previously written four books, but her book on Seymour is her first biography. Its working title is The Book of Del: Scenes from a Life Before, During, and After Homelessness. Owing began interviewing Seymour, now 71, in late 2015, and she also talked to about 15 people who had crossed his path in the Tenderloin—including his former crack dealer.

Seymour, a Vietnam War veteran who served as a medic and later became a successful contractor and engineer, found himself on the streets during his 18-year addiction to crack cocaine. During that time, he was a self-described hustler—acting as a go-between for other homeless people in myriad situations, legal and otherwise, and always for a fee. For a time, he was also a pimp.

Now clean and living in his own place, Seymour helps run Code Tenderloin, an organization he founded in 2015 to help provide education and ultimately jobs for people in his neighborhood. He also speaks frequently about homelessness to church and civic groups, and he shared his views on the “scourge” at the White House with the Obama administration.

While Seymour has been a cooperative subject, he is often fuzzy on dates and jumps around in his chronology. Owings has decided to present her material in impressionistic scenes. Right now, she envisions somewhere between 50 and 100 of these vignettes that show Seymour’s background, his descent into addiction and life on the street, and the positive path his life has taken since kicking crack.

Owings said the Mayborn/BIO Fellowship has given her what every writer craves: “uninterrupted time.” She has also received Morris’s help in structuring and condensing her writing. That included printing out her interview transcripts, which totaled two reams of paper. At the reading, Morris noted that Seymour’s domination of the research material and non-chronological presentation posed a particular challenge for Owings: “Organizing that so she can write a narrative is very hard.”

Another challenge Owings might face is finding a publisher, since she presently does not have any kind of collaboration agreement with Seymour, though she has promised him a share in any profits. Owings said, “Del has told me, oh, he’ll sign anything, don’t worry about it,” but as one audience member pointed out, he is a self-confessed hustler.

Still, Owings believes Seymour is motivated mostly by a desire for some kind of redemption: “He’s still trying to exonerate himself from what he did before . . . make good for what he did bad.” And while Seymour’s life dominates the story, Owings has kept a focus on the larger issue of homelessness and how people on the streets—or, increasingly, those working full-time jobs and living in their cars—struggle to survive.