On Writing HARDLAND: Ashley Sweeney

How did the novel come about?

Who would have ever thought that in the spring of 2020, we’d be locked down for more than a year due to COVID-19? At the time of the initial lockdown, I was two years and 85,000 words into what I thought would be my third novel, a dual narrative based in Scotland and Astoria, Oregon at the height of the fur trading empire and in present day. I was immersed in Scottish history and language and custom and dress, as well as everything Astoria to get the story right. At the time of the lockdown, there were still some critical holes left to fill, including returning to Astoria one last time.

When the country was plunged into the COVID-19 lockdown, I knew I’d have to shelve that novel and took time to reassess what my next move would be, especially as I’d be unable to travel for research for any novel in the foreseeable future.

I looked out the window from my writing desk in Tucson at the Sonoran Desert and saw the answer. The desert is, if anything, resilient. I’m resilient, too, I thought. Although I had never fully processed a long-buried trauma that had lain dormant for many decades, I knew at that moment that I was not the woman I had been decades before. I was stronger and wiser and fiercer. Out of this revelation came the character Ruby Fortune, as tough a protagonist as they come, who weathers domestic abuse, misogyny, and economic challenges, a product of a hard life in a hard land at a hard time.

Like Ruby, when I was a young woman, I was brutally assaulted repeatedly by a man I loved. I could never see it coming, and then thwack! Out of nowhere, I’d have a welt in the shape of a man’s hand on my back or purplish bruises flowering on my arms or legs or face. There were always apologies and excuses. I stayed far too long, but finally saw that the situation would never improve. And so I left, at great cost and consequence at the time.

The physical scars of that time have long since healed, but the emotional scars have lingered. It’s said that people grieve in their own way and in their own time. Classic stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It seemed I was still stuck in denial, all these decades later. I berated myself: How could an enlightened woman—who graduated from a women’s college and worked all her life to empower women and girls—have been a victim of domestic assault?

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), one out of every three women in the U.S. has been a victim of intimate partner violence in her life. That represents 50 million women—a staggering number. I used the time in the spring of 2020 to work through the gamut of emotions that surround victimhood, talked to other survivors, contacted state and national associations that deal with the issue, and read everything I could about domestic abuse: websites, books, blogs, and statistics.

In the end, I realized that none of the abuse was my fault, none of it. Zero. The fault lay squarely with the abuser, who used physical violence to try to suppress me and my spirit out of a weakness in character. Coming to the conclusion that I was not at fault freed me in a way that is almost impossible to communicate in words. It was ethereal, a lightness of being, a self-empowerment, freedom from pain and guilt and shame. There’s a scene in Hardland that conveys this experience:

The sun edges over the Catalinas, the color of the wide sky nothing short of dazzling, corals and purples and oranges piercing the day. Ruby exhales, as if she’s been holding her breath for far too long.

Ruby feels a stirring, then, from somewhere deep, like an answer pushing up to the surface through rocks and dirt. What is it that burbles up inside her? And in the air around her? The clouds even? Is it a trick of the eye? Or the mind? It looks like the mountains are rising, too.

And then it happens, in the blink of an eye. Something has shifted, like the rock stripped from the tomb. Ruby checks the sky again. The world is on fire.

In the empty post-dawn graveyard, Ruby jumps up, arms wide, embracing the blazing sky, not the same woman she was when she woke up this morning, or all the mornings spooling back years and years. It’s as if the skin has come off her pain and guilt and shame and there she is, naked to the world, beautiful and singing.

In this way, Ruby and I—and every woman who has made the brave choice to leave an abusive relationship—are very similar, although our individual stories are as diverse as the desert flora.

Ernest Hemingway said, “Write hard and clear about what hurts.” My hope is that Ruby’s story of survival will speak volumes to women everywhere that there is a life after physical violence. It’s a tough topic and one that many women are uncomfortable facing. I get that. Maybe in its own time. My mantra during this launch season is this: If even one woman changes her life path as a result of reading Hardland, it will have been worth it coming forward with my own story and writing the novel.

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A native New Yorker, Ashley E. Sweeney is the author of three award-winning novels, Eliza Waite, Answer Creek, and Hardland. She is a member of WFWA, Western Writers of America, Women Writing the West, Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and Southwest Writers, among other professional organizations. Sweeney lives and writes in Tucson and the Pacific Northwest. A fourth novel, based loosely on her great-grandmother’s life, is slated for publication in the Fall of 2024.

Find her online at the following: website: ashleysweeneyauthor.com, twitter: @ashleysweeney57, Facebook: facebook.com/ashleysweeney57,  and Instagram: ashleysweeney57

HARDLAND, Ashely E. Sweeney

Arizona Territory, 1899. Ruby Fortune faces an untenable choice: murder her abusive husband or continue to live with bruises that never heal. One bullet is all it takes. Once known as “Girl Wonder” on the Wild West circuit, Ruby is now a single mother of four boys in her hometown of Jericho, an end-of-the-world mining town north of Tucson. Here, Ruby opens a roadside inn to make ends meet. Drifters, grifters, con men, and prostitutes plow through the hotel’s doors, and their escapades pepper the local newspaper like buckshot.

An affair with an African American miner puts Ruby’s life and livelihood at risk, but she can’t let him go. Not until a trio of disparate characters—her dead husband’s sister, a vindictive shopkeeper, and the local mine owner she once swindled—threaten to ruin her does Ruby face the consequences of her choices; but as usual, she does what she needs to in order to provide for herself and her sons.

Set against the breathtaking beauty of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert and bursting with Wild West imagery, history, suspense, and adventure, Hardland serves up a tough, fast-talking, shoot-from-the-hip heroine who goes to every length to survive and carve out a life for herself and her sons in one of the harshest places in the American West.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers