From Outlaws to Outsiders

It’s almost impossible to talk about the era of American history we call the Wild West, without bringing up the outlaws. In movies, video games, and of course in western genre fiction the bandits and baddies make up a huge part of the narrative landscape. As a child, I learned early on that my favorite adventures were the ones that followed characters living on the outside of society, and my own writing now tends to follow the paths of those outlaws and drifters still.

What interests me more than the outlaws, though, are the outsiders. And admittedly, in western fiction those two categories often overlap. Historically, people who don’t fit into society’s momentary ideal are pushed out to the edges. Whether marginalized because of who they are, where they came from, or simply for a community having refused to make room for them.

I love when my writing can delve into history. However, I’m unfailingly drawn to the edges of history. Which people never made it into the text books? Whose names have been forgotten, or were never known? Those are the stories I want to tell; stories about the women who moved the frontier along and did what they needed to do to keep their families alive; the men who couldn’t express themselves and their desires openly but still carved out their own place in rough country; the people of color, Indigenous characters, and immigrants who shaped the open country just as much as the sheriffs and big cattlemen. These are the narratives I try to give voices to.

Why do so many of us living on the outer edges of things resonate so deeply with outlaw characters? Both are defined – to society’s eyes – by resistance. Sometimes it was defiance of the law, yes, and sometimes only against society’s ideas about who does and doesn’t belong. Writing these perspectives allows me to explore resilience, loyalty, and the ways of survival against long odds.

My westerns aren’t about heroes. They’re about complex people, rough around the edges, who often times live in a world that doesn’t want them. Whenever I tell a story, I hope to remind my readers that the Wild West, like all eras of history, was never a single, simple story about one sort of person or one way of life.