I feel unbelievably lucky to make a modest living as a writer.

Jim Fergus: Novelist

Books

Fiction

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd (1998)
The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 (2005)

Marie-Blanche (France, 2011)

Nonfiction

A Hunter's Road: A Journey with Gun and Dog Across the American Uplands (1992)
The Sporting Road: Travels Across America in an Airstream Trailer—with Fly Rod, Shotgun, and a Yellow Lab Named Sweetzer (1999)

Jim Fergus has also written articles that have appeared in Newsweek, Newsday, The Denver Post, the Dallas-Times Herald, Harrowsmith Country Life, The Paris Review, MD Magazine, Savvy, Texas Monthly, Esquire, Fly Fisherman, Outdoor Life, Sports Afield, Field & Stream, Rocky Mountain Magazine and Outside.

Awards
Moutains & Plains Booksellers Regional Book of the Year (1999)

Our faithful and sometimes interested audience.

While still in Portland and before we set out on this adventure to meet writers, we’d read and fallen in love with the novels of Jim Fergus. Because of their topics we suspected he lived in the Southwest, but we didn’t know exactly where. So you can understand our excitement when we learned he was spending a month encamped in his classic Airstream trailer just up the mountain from us, working on a screenplay adaptation from one of those novels.


And what happened next proved to be a couple of interview firsts for us: we got the immense delight of the “scoop” of conducting Jim's first American interview. And second, we held our interview in front of a discerning, curious and editorially severe audience. Jim's Airstream was parked in the middle of a horse pasture, and some of the horses became the first to witness our interview style, and with their horse-sense, pass judgment on our efforts.

Jim honed his skills with years of free-lance writing, and finally saved a small "grubstake" to move into a small cabin with no running water or electricity, to write his first book.

Interview Movie
(Embedded version below)

MP3 Audio File
(Note: To download the podcast,
right click on the link if you are on a PC,
or
control click if you are on a Mac. )

Location:

Patagonia, AZ

Run Time:

30:31

Genre:

Historical fiction, western

Website:

www.jimfergus.com

Raised:

Chicago, Massachusets (high school), Colorado (college)

Youthful Influence:

'Young male fiction' such as J.P. Donleavy and Tom McGuane. French and Russian authors. A favorite high school teacher.

Favorite Authors:

Too many to say. He has been revisiting many of his old favorites, such as Flaubert, lately.

Literary Habit:

A lot of research first - on location, in libraries, on the web, etc. If fiction, writing seven days a week to 'keep the fires going.'

Jim Fergus isn’t the first author we’ve spoken with who has felt the changes in the American publishing industry, but he is the first to talk about finding receptive and vibrant markets outside of America. His debut fictional work, One Thousand White Women has sold over 250,000 copies in the U.S., primarily by word of mouth, but it has sold almost twice that number in France, which has less than one-fifth the U.S. population. Once classified as a 'hook and bullet' writer, Fergus has had a hard time convincing editors he can do more. Now pigeon-holed as a 'Western writer’ in the U.S. he is again thwarted in his attempts to expand his genres. His third novel, Marie Blanche, which is not a western, has only been published in France.

We hope you enjoy this interview as much as we enjoyed making it and presenting it to you. Or, as our four-hoofed critics reminded us that day, never look a gift horse in the mouth….


These were our greeters when we arrived at the pasture for Jim's interview.
By the time we left they had better things to do.


Jim's dogs Tux and Annie


Contact: info@authorsroad.com