Ask the Author: Ernest Brawley
Answered Questions (6)
Ernest Brawley
I put my work aside. Forget about it for a while. Take a trip. Read my old journals from years in the past. Or start a totally different project.
Ernest Brawley
Making your dreams come true.
Ernest Brawley
Get out of your Ivory Tower. Hit the road. Listen to the stories people tell.
Ernest Brawley
I am working on a novel called "The Golden Triangle." It opens when a retired professor receives a letter from a young girl in Laos beginning, “I have reason to believe you may be my grandfather.” The news is so startling that it catapults him into his past as a covert CIA military operative during the Vietnam War and painfully reminds him of his love affair with a beautiful native woman who turned out to be a communist spy.
Ernest Brawley
My high school English teacher, Mr. Millhizer, read a story I wrote for his class, told me I was a “born writer,” and convinced me to do a weekly column for the school newspaper. I called it “Ernie’s Brawlesque,” filled it with comic local gossip, and found that it made me so popular with the girls that I no longer wanted to become an auto mechanic; writing was much more fun.
I was also inspired by my experiences as a tomato picker working with Mexican “wetback” laborers, as a guard at San Quentin Prison, as a penniless backpacker on a round-the-world hitchhiking tour, and by the experiences of my own family in Mexico and the American West.
I was also inspired by my experiences as a tomato picker working with Mexican “wetback” laborers, as a guard at San Quentin Prison, as a penniless backpacker on a round-the-world hitchhiking tour, and by the experiences of my own family in Mexico and the American West.
Ernest Brawley
The tragic, comic, and sometimes romantic events in my new novel BLOOD MOON (soon to be published by Little Machines Press/Roots Digital) occurred in Mexico and Arizona Territory over a hundred and thirty years ago, yet they are still so salient in the collective memory of my family that we speak of them as if they happened only yesterday. My people, Mexican and American, were among the first settlers of Arizona, as witnessed by the place names Brawley Wash, Watkins Road, Robles Junction and Dobson, Arizona. I am a direct descendant of the Brawley, Watkins, Robles and Dobson clans, and several of my ancestors were intimately involved in the bloody actions recounted herein. My great-great-grandfather, Captain W.C. Watkins, for example, was the leader of “The Committee of Fifty,” a group of vigilantes responsible for the summary hanging of dozens of outlaws in the Tonto Basin and Mogollon Rim regions, and his sons Abe and Frank were involved in the ambush of the last of the cattlemen in the Pleasant Valley War. Therefore, if I sometimes seem biased in favor of the vigilantes in this story, and the sheepmen in their battle with the cattlemen, it‘s because old loyalties die hard.
Since BLOOD MOON is a work of fiction, many of its names, places, events and dates have been changed. Yet it is based upon real historical occurrences. Some I read about in books such as Arizona's Dark and Bloody Ground by Earle Forrest and A Little War of Our Own by Don Dedera. Others I heard about with my own ears from aged great-grandparents when I was a small boy in the 1940s. My genealogically-minded cousins Joyce, Jan and Dixie unearthed additional parts of the puzzle from old newspaper accounts, survivors' statements, court reports and moldering attic diaries. Certain details, like the oft-told tale that my great-grandmother Letitia was in the habit of cutting the lean off her meat and eating only the fat, I verified with my own eyes. Certain characters, like the pampered sixteen-year-old daughter of a rich and respected rancher who ran off with a notorious outlaw, and the race-baiting cracker from Louisiana who turned out to be one-sixteenth black, are based upon ancestors whose long-concealed histories I discovered by tracing whispered family innuendos to their logical conclusions through the modern miracle of DNA testing.
The odd thing is that some of the most implausible events and characters in BLOOD MOON are real. The Pleasant Valley War of the 1880s, the deadliest land war in the history of the West, truly happened. The cattlemen really did allow feral pigs to devour the bodies of slaughtered shepherds. US Army artillerymen actually concocted a lethal cannon-cocktail of broken glass and sharp pieces of tin to massacre a band of unarmed Apaches. The effete, erudite Coyotero chieftain who who was one of the leaders of the Ghost Dance insurrection in Arizona is a real historical figure, as is the bereaved Pleasant Valley widow who walked into a Phoenix courtroom to shoot the man who murdered her husband.
If ever I had any doubts about my own family's involvement in Arizona's bloody history, they were put to rest in 2008 when I acquired a yellowing 19th Century mug shot from the state archives. There, in the striped uniform of Yuma Territorial Prison, stood my great-grandfather, Milt Brawley, the same old desperado who had run off with the rich rancher's daughter. And he looked just like me.
Since BLOOD MOON is a work of fiction, many of its names, places, events and dates have been changed. Yet it is based upon real historical occurrences. Some I read about in books such as Arizona's Dark and Bloody Ground by Earle Forrest and A Little War of Our Own by Don Dedera. Others I heard about with my own ears from aged great-grandparents when I was a small boy in the 1940s. My genealogically-minded cousins Joyce, Jan and Dixie unearthed additional parts of the puzzle from old newspaper accounts, survivors' statements, court reports and moldering attic diaries. Certain details, like the oft-told tale that my great-grandmother Letitia was in the habit of cutting the lean off her meat and eating only the fat, I verified with my own eyes. Certain characters, like the pampered sixteen-year-old daughter of a rich and respected rancher who ran off with a notorious outlaw, and the race-baiting cracker from Louisiana who turned out to be one-sixteenth black, are based upon ancestors whose long-concealed histories I discovered by tracing whispered family innuendos to their logical conclusions through the modern miracle of DNA testing.
The odd thing is that some of the most implausible events and characters in BLOOD MOON are real. The Pleasant Valley War of the 1880s, the deadliest land war in the history of the West, truly happened. The cattlemen really did allow feral pigs to devour the bodies of slaughtered shepherds. US Army artillerymen actually concocted a lethal cannon-cocktail of broken glass and sharp pieces of tin to massacre a band of unarmed Apaches. The effete, erudite Coyotero chieftain who who was one of the leaders of the Ghost Dance insurrection in Arizona is a real historical figure, as is the bereaved Pleasant Valley widow who walked into a Phoenix courtroom to shoot the man who murdered her husband.
If ever I had any doubts about my own family's involvement in Arizona's bloody history, they were put to rest in 2008 when I acquired a yellowing 19th Century mug shot from the state archives. There, in the striped uniform of Yuma Territorial Prison, stood my great-grandfather, Milt Brawley, the same old desperado who had run off with the rich rancher's daughter. And he looked just like me.
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