Using History to Spark New Writing: Research Methods and My Upcoming Novel Whiskey Rebel
A Writer’s Reflections on Inspiration and Development, A Preface
A Writer’s Reflections on Inspiration and Development
It starts with a gold strike.
Driving along Washington States’ Columbia River, my wife said, “I lived around here back in high school.”
“It was a bad time, right?” I responded. “That was a long time ago. Do you remember the road?”
“Palisades Road. It’s the only road in Moses Coulee.”
“How far in did you live?” To go there meant returning to her heart of darkness.
“The last farm at the end of the road. About twenty miles in. We were hired hands and only lived there for four months.”
“Do you want to take a side trip?”
“Sure, why not.”
After we swung onto Palisades Road, I thought we were on the moon. I don’t like to describe my experiences as surreal, but Moses Coulee was one otherworldly place. In fact, this experience launched me into my new novel Whiskey Rebel (May 2025), the book where the speaker Punxie Tawney says about Moses Coulee:
To my left, the basalt wall of the Columbia Gorge steeply dropped down to the coulee floor. Then to my right, the basalt wall abruptly rose again. I imagined a sign stretching across the entrance to Moses Coulee: “PEARLY GATES.” No, not a chance. “ABANDON ALL HOPE.” Again, I didn’t think so. This place didn’t care that much.
DON’T GIVE A FUCK
Now that seemed about right.
Then the furnace is fired.
For me, place is everything. Once a place like Moses Coulee enters my imagination, I go digging, and it didn’t take long for me to unearth the Sinkiuse-Columbia Chief Moses for whom Moses Coulee is named. Of course, I started with the usual internet search, but I also checked out all links, studied every footnote, and tracked down the noted sources until I came upon Robert H. Ruby’s Half-Sun on the Columbia: A Biography of Chief Moses. My local library had a copy, and soon I had a wealth of information which I could strategically employ to deepen Whiskey Rebel’s characters and plot.
There is a moment in Whiskey Rebel when Punxie Tawney stops to contemplate his next move. He is standing on the Wenatchee side of the Columbia River and brings to mind a story an old timer told him about Chief Moses. In this story, Moses and his horse cross the river from the side opposite Wenatchee and swim to a spot near where Punxie is standing.
When Chief Moses and his horse swam across the Columbia, they would start by walking into the river; then they would begin to swim because the current would take away their feet. While they swam, Moses always had a hold of his horse’s mane, and he always stayed upstream from his horse. He never was downstream from his horse. He didn’t want to tire his horse by becoming a weight dragging his horse downstream.
At this point in the novel, Punxie wonders if he should stay with the girl he’s got or cross the river like Moses into an unknown future. Paired with the Chief Moses story, he also enters a collective flow of time and place.
When it comes to writing, the more you know the better, right?
Soon the gold smelts pure.
But Punxie’s the speaker, not the Whiskey Rebel, a character who goes by the name of Hamilton Chance — Punxie’s male foil and muse (think Sal Paradise from On the Road). Truth is, Hamilton is a different alloy altogether.
To create Hamilton, I began excavating an entirely new mine: the American Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, the first rebellion against the new United States of America, a country whose constitution was but five years old. Again, I started on the internet, but my aim was never to find only the main vein but also to follow its branches.
Soon, I came upon the definitive history of the rebellion, Thomas P. Slaughter’s The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (1986). I ordered an inexpensive used copy from Abe Books, and after reading the text, also followed up on many of its footnotes, especially Hugh H. Brackenridge’s Incidents of the Insurrection in Western Parts of Pennsylvania in the Year 1794, an account written and published in 1795 by a rebellion participant. I then downloaded Brackenridge’s text from Internet Archive, a free service for reading and uploading a wealth of historical texts.
As I researched, I felt Hamilton’s motivation emerge, and then in turn, this motivation became Hamilton’s opening pitch to Punxie.
“Thing is, it’s personal. I’m not the great-great-great-grandson of Bobbi Lee Chance for nothin’. Why, I’m the only child of the Whiskey Rebellion not-at-all removed. I got the Whiskey Rebellion jaw, and the Whiskey Rebellion tongue, and the Whiskey Rebellion lower lip. I’m tellin’ you, the Whiskey Rebellion and me spoon every night.”
“Yes, sir. I understand how you feel. It’s a family thing, your legacy and all that, but you said you had a plan?”
“First off, Punxie, I’m settin’ up a still. And it’s not goin’ to be just any old still, not by a long shot, because it’s goin’ to be of the tax-free variety. Just think about it. Why, together, we could start cookin’ up our forefathers’ whiskey.”
So there you have it, a couple of methods I’ve used to mine history, the ore from which my characters and plots are smelted. But lest you think Whiskey Rebel is a historical novel, you’ve missed my point. Although there is plenty of history in Whiskey Rebel, it in no way fits the genre. Instead, it’s a narrative set very much in the fictional 2000s.
You might also like to know that my method of composition is far from linear. I think of my imagination as a great cauldron where I continually add new ingredients, discard the slag, and collect one or more essences. Sometimes the gold is surreal, the more otherworldly the better. But more on that later.
Jeffrey Dunn, Ph.D. is the author of critically acclaimed cultural fiction including Radio Free Olympia, Wildcat: An Historical Romance, and coming May 2025, Whiskey Rebel (all published by Izzard Ink)
wow, intriguing post! This sounds like an interesting read :^)
Thanks for the ups. Indeed, please snag a copy when Whiskey Rebel is released May 6!