What really aroused my empathy for Clara and Helga on their trek was a road trip with my daughter, driving part of the route that Clara and Helga took across the country. After the years you dedicated to the story of your ancestors’ 232 day trek across that same distance, what were your thoughts during that trip? The prize provided you with a flight from Washington State to New York City. Just as they kept focused on their goal, one step at a time, I kept writing and re-writing, one word at a time, until I found a publisher.īefore the publication of your book, you won the Sue Alexander Award for most promising new work. I also took eight college-level writing classes and attended at least a dozen workshops. During the fifteen years of rejections, I rewrote the book from Helga’s point of view, Clara’s point of view, as diary, as narrative, first person, third person, at least a dozen or more complete re-writes. I took each rejection as a sign that I needed to try another approach, or that I needed to work more on craft. I did inherit the perseverance gene though. I didn’t inherit Clara and Helga’s extraordinary physical strength – I can’t imagine walking 25-40 miles a day, day after day for seven and a half months.
Married with two grown children and two grandchildren, she writes in Everett,Washington and in a converted woodshed on San Juan Island under the supervision of her bossy cat.Ĭarole, thank you for visiting with Healing Hamlet! Please tell us what inspired you to write The Year We Were Famous? Why do you feel the story of these women needed to be told? She has worked as a CPA, children’s librarian, and assistant library director. As a child, books served as loyal companions to Carole as the family moved a dozen times due to her father’s career as a construction engineer. If they had repeatedly risked their very lives to prove women could walk across the country on their own, how could I be afraid of something as innocuous as a rejection letter?Ĭarole Estby Dagg is the author of The Year We Were Famous, the story of her great grandmother and great aunt’s walk across America in 1896.
Clara and Helga’s story kept nagging me, though, so for their sake I decided to risk rejection. Instead of writing books, I became a librarian, surrounding myself with books other people had written.
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