Why I Chose Historical Fiction to Tell My Cherokee Stories

At book fairs and speaking engagements, this is the question I'm asked most often. And when someone has already read one or more of my Cherokee Trilogy novels, the follow-up usually comes fast: "Why don't you write Cherokee history books instead?"

The answer is simple, though for some it takes a little unpacking. I came to my Cherokee heritage late in life. My father, who gave me my Cherokee blood, lived in a time when Native Americans were looked down upon, and in all my memories of him, he never once spoke of it. I'm an artist — a creative person who graduated cum laude from one of the finest mass communications schools in the country, but without a history degree. And my mind has always been drawn more to people and human relationships than to dates and events.

Discovering My Cherokee Heritage Late in Life

My father served a career in the Army, which meant I attended a different school nearly every year until seventh grade. My mother, like many of her generation, carried a quiet resentment toward people of other races and cultures — including my father's family, and my father himself. My parents separated early in their marriage, and I never once heard anything Cherokee spoken of in our home.

I never knew my grandmother, Ella Waters, a Dawes Roll signee and the inspiration for the heroine who shares her name in Cherokee Rose — the second book in my trilogy, but the first one I actually wrote. Family stories say she died in 1935, worn down by overwork on an East Texas farm and by the toll of bearing five Cherokee sons and two daughters, all of whom were put to work on that farm under my grandfather, a man family talk remembers as harsh and unyielding.

About twelve years ago, I decided to investigate a family rumor that I carried Cherokee blood. That search led me to my grandmother Ella's name, and her name opened a door I hadn't known existed. One discovery led to another, and that original investigation eventually grew into three historical novels: Cherokee Rock, Cherokee Rose, and Cherokee Reel. I came to Cherokee history late, and I'm still learning it today — which is exactly why I don't consider myself qualified to write Cherokee history. I write historical fiction instead.

My Cherokee Blood Came From a Different Time

Being Cherokee today is often treated as a matter of ancestry — something curious, something noteworthy, something that makes a person stand out in a world that can feel increasingly uniform. Sixty or more years ago, that was not the case at all.

Cherokee people faced racism, stereotyping, and discrimination. Jobs were denied. Education was scarce. The American dream, as it was sold at the time, was reserved for people who looked white. My father looked Cherokee. Given the climate of the time, it still surprises me that my mother married him.

The more I learn about Cherokee culture — its clan structure and its matrilineal society, in which fathers historically held little formal responsibility for children while mothers provided the emotional and logistical center of the family — the more I wonder whether my father simply accepted my mother's rejection of him as something closer to a Cherokee norm than a personal wound.

I Am an Artist With a Mass Communications Degree, Not a Historian

I am an artist. What does that mean, and why does it matter when it comes to choosing fiction over history?

An artist's mind works differently than a historian's. Mine leans toward creativity, intuition, and emotional processing rather than chronology and citation. Writing history and writing historical fiction are both creative acts, but historical fiction goes a step further — it carries history into the emotional lives of the people who lived it, and into the repercussions that rippled outward from them. As the saying goes, you learn history, but you live historical fiction.

I hold a degree in mass communications from Pratt Institute in New York. In my case, that has nothing to do with telephones or telephone engineering — it means learning how to communicate to a broad audience, in my case through writing. To be precise, writing itself wasn't the focus of my studies; visual communication was. But as a writer, my process has always been the same: I picture what I'm writing about, then use words to paint that picture for the reader. My degree, as it turns out, prepared me for exactly that.

So Why Fiction Instead of History?

The story that produced my grandmother, Ella Waters, is one I don't believe can be told through facts and timelines alone. It's a story of raw emotion, born out of the turmoil of Cherokee history — and I believe that kind of story can only be told through historical fiction.

I invite you to experience that history with me in the pages of my trilogy. Start with Cherokee Rock; it lays the groundwork for the trauma of removal in Cherokee Rose, and for the survival at the heart of Cherokee Reel. By the time you finish, I believe you'll understand exactly why I chose historical fiction to tell my grandmother's story.