Please give a warm Coffee
Pot welcome to historical fiction author, Milana Marsenich. Milana is going to
share her inspirations behind her fabulous book…
Copper Sky
Set in the
Copper Camp of Butte, Montana in 1917, a time when mining accidents were
common, Copper Sky tells the story of
two women with opposite lives. Kaly Shane, mired in prostitution, struggles to
find a safe home for her unborn child. Marika Lailich, a Slavic immigrant,
dodges a prearranged marriage to become a doctor. As their paths cross, and
they become unlikely friends, neither woman knows the family secret that ties
them together.
Author Inspiration
The initial inspiration for Copper
Sky came from a dream that I had after reading A. Den Doolaard’s 1958 novel
The Land Behind God’s Back. The story
talks about a young engineer who builds a bridge over the Tara Gorge in
Montenegro just before World War II. The war starts and he blows the bridge up
to keep it from falling into the hands of the enemy. He is later captured and
hanged over the Gorge. My dream was about a woman who loved him and waited for
him to come home. In the dream she was a healer and she couldn’t understand the
brutality of war. I woke up and wrote the dream down which became a short
story, a story that was far too expansive to be so short. I decided to turn it
into a novel.
When I presented the beginnings of that novel to a teacher, he asked if
I’d ever been to Montenegro. At the time the answer was no, but my great
grandparents had lived there, and I knew their stories. He suggested it would
be difficult to write a book placed in country that I’d never been to, and that
I should place it closer to home. Immediately I seized on the idea and set Copper Sky in Butte, Montana, my
hometown. I’ve lived and worked in many places but my heart has always returned
to Butte. I wanted to write something that represented the courage and
generosity that I’ve witnessed through out my life, and first experienced in
Butte, Montana.
My father was a great storyteller and I grew up listening to his
stories of Butte and Montenegro. My paternal great grandmother in Montenegro
saw the white wolf following her. She could stop a snake with a whistle. She
had once crossed a mountain haunted by the ghosts of unburied soldiers to save
a child’s life. From these stories I deducted that she knew how to heal through
herbs, folk remedies, and all of the mysteries of the invisible world. I drew
my inspiration for Marika’s character from that initial dream, the stories of
my paternal great grandmother and all that I’d imagined her to be. I felt so
close to her, a woman I’d never met, that I can’t help but wonder how many of
her stories got mixed up with the stories of my maternal great grandmother, a
woman I did meet. She was a midwife in Philipsburg, Montana and delivered over
500 babies. She had eleven children and outlived all but two of them, dieing
when she was 93. She was also as a healer, using natural and herbal remedies to
kick out disease and promote recovery, and when they didn’t work, she saw the
white horse—as I remember it—as an omen of death.
More inspiration for Marika came from my father’s side of the family.
In Copper Sky Marika dodges a
prearranged marriage to become a doctor. My paternal grandparents’ families put
them together in a room to discuss a possible marriage. The conversation went
something like this: “Do you want to get married Jovanka?” “I don’t care
Milosav, do you?” “Well if you do.” “Ok then, if you do.” And they got married.
Ultimately they did choose, but the idea of it came from their parents. They
stayed married until my grandfather died, about 45 years later. My grandmother
was significantly younger than him and, as I wrote Copper Sky, I wondered how did she get to “yes”. Was it really that
simple? Or did she have time to think, fight, and decide?
Kaly Shane is orphaned as an infant. Things don’t go so well for her
and she ends up working as a prostitute in Butte’s Red Light District. She
retains a professional distance which becomes much more difficult when she
finds herself pregnant. She wants a good home for her child, something
completely different than her own upbringing. The inspiration for her character
comes through my many years of working as a therapist with children in the
foster care system. I’ve had the opportunity to witness their courage,
self-reliance and fierce fights for survival. Many of my clients have developed
grit and determination in learning to trust and work through a multitude of
traumas. The spirit of this work informed Kaly’s character. I tried to imagine
what experiences in the early 1900’s would push a woman to live the dangerous
life of prostitution. I thought about how the traumas of our lives affect us,
as well as the traumas of a town, and maybe even the traumas that happen before
we were born. I thought of all of the ways that love heals and transforms pain
as cornerstones for Kaly’s character.
Throughout Copper Sky a white
dog wanders the streets of Butte,
representing the good heart of the town. He is a guardian, both alive and
ghostly, who watches over Kaly, her deceased twin sister, and others. He travels through time with “an old
time miner on the edge of his last dust-filled breath”. The inspiration for the
white dog came from my paternal great grandmother’s white wolf and my maternal
great grandmother’s white horse. Many years after I wrote the first draft of Copper Sky the town of Butte erected a
statue to a dog named Auditor. He belonged to the town and the miners who fed
him. He lived 17 years. I knew nothing about Auditor when I first wrote Copper Sky and the four short chapters
from the white dog’s point of view. Now I think maybe the inspiration for the
white dog also came through an opening to the invisible world that somehow
allowed me to find Auditor out there, keeping the miners company.
Butte is a town with a lot of trauma. Like all mining towns, accidents
fill its history, the accidents affecting everyone. In 1895 a warehouse, where
dynamite was secretly stored, caught fire and exploded, killing at least 51
people. In 1917 a cable caught fire in the Speculator Mine, killing 168 men. In
1979 my brother died in a tragic motorcycle accident. Each of these tragedies
inspired the framework for Copper Sky.
I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to make sense of death. The inspiration
for the mystical parts of the story come from my own search for the invisible
world, the other side, the quest to find heaven and God, to put the dead to
rest and understand love. At its heart Copper
Sky is a mining city love tale, inspired by fierce, loyal, and disturbed
love, love that is ultimately a reconciling force in a community laced with
tragedy.
Links for Purchase
About the author
Milana Marsenich lives in Northwest Montana
near Flathead Lake at the base of the beautiful Mission Mountains. She enjoys
quick access to the mountains and has spent many hours hiking the wilderness
trails with friends and dogs. She has an M.Ed. in Mental Health Counseling from
Montana State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of
Montana. She has previously published in Montana Quarterly, Big Sky Journal,
The Polishing Stone, and Feminist Studies. She has a short story included in
The Montana Quarterly book: Montana,
Warts and All, The Best From Our First Decade. Copper Sky is her first novel.
Useful Links
Thank you for sharing your Inspiration with us. Fascinating!!
ReplyDelete