In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.
Leslie Budewitz won an Agatha Award for Best Short Story in 2018 for “All God’s Sparrows”—a historical mystery focused on “Stagecoach Mary” Fields, a real-life figure who has the distinction of being “the first Black woman to be employed as a star route postwoman in the United States” (quoting a bit of Wikipedia there; see the full entry here). Budewitz followed up that successful story with two more tales featuring Fields, both published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine: “Miss Starr’s Goodbye,” which was a finalist for the Derringer Award, and “Coming Clean,” a finalist for the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award. And now, anchored by a never-before-published novella, comes the collection All God’s Sparrows, out this week in both paperback and ebook.
It’s a pleasure to welcome Leslie today to talk about that new novella, “A Bitter Wind,” and about the larger project too, inspired by so many aspects of the real-life Mary Fields: her actual history, the myths surrounding her, and the larger context of woman and particularly Black women in the American West.
You can order your copy of All God’s Sparrows at many major retailers—full information is on Leslie’s website here. In the meantime, enjoy this preview below of the new novella and the full collection.
Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.
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