...for the love of Texas history and her stories...

 

            A good day for Carmen Goldthwaite means time spent listening to the tales of old-timers, fingering yellowed letters and deed records, or cranking through microfilm or fiche to find out what life was like in different eras of Texas.  Eager to share her finds, she’s written about the “Steamboat that Saved Texas” and icons like Sam Houston.  Fascinated by the distaff side of Texas History, she’s written the “Confederate Paul Revere—A Woman,” “The Unintentional Hostess of the Battle of San Jacinto,” the “Yellow Rose,” and the many women whose names she’s bringing attention to who built the Province, the Republic and the State of Texas.

 

            The “Yellow Rose of Texas—Emily Morgan” is a chapter in Fulcrum Publishing’s anthology, Wild Women of the Old West. http://www.fulcrum-books.com/

 

            The “Confederate Paul Revere—Sophia Porter” is a chapter in the Western Writers of American anthology, The Way West:  True Stories of the American Frontier, to be published by Tor-Forge in 2005.  http://www.westernwriters.org/

 

            Now she’s launching a statewide column, “Texas Dames,” to tell the stories of Texas women who’ve pioneered in many roles and along many paths in Texas history.

 

             Featured in the newly released The Way West:  True Stories of the American Frontier is Carmen’s story on one of North Texas’ dames, Sophia Porter.  “Dancing in the Eye of the Storm,” traces this Texas heroine from her teen years at Washington (on the Brazos) to her reign on the Red River as the “Confederate Paul Revere”.  Published by Tor/Forge, The Way West is a collection of western stories penned by members of Western Writers of America.

 

 

IN THE PIPELINE

Texas Dames…Sassy & Savvy, a collection of her popular columns featuring “sassy &sassy” Texas women.

Three Centuries of Texas Ranch Women, a factual look at 40-plus women who shared in the building of Tejas or Texas.  These queens of the cattle range replaced tents and sod huts with rock and wood homes, saloons with schools, and “houses of ill repute” with churches.  Undaunted by tragedy, undeterred by the scurrilous, they built communities and nurtured dynasties for a love of the land and her people.

Through the chapters in this book, the lamp of history will shine into Texas’s nooks and crannies, illuminating tales of Indian, French and Spanish mythology that have been handed down to us and now mingle with love stories, legal twists, mysteries, hard times, and galas of the Texas Woman.  Whether this Texas Woman is Indian, Canary Islander, Spaniard, Mexican, French, Irish or Anglo, we view the myth and fact of Texas through her eyes. 

Whispering Spirits...an historical novel based on the origins of the family that founded Texas Christian University, Carmen Goldthwaite’s ancestors.    In dramatic form the story begins in 1817 on board a sailing vessel from Marseilles.  Although orphaned, a young girl’s grit and determination holds onto her family—her younger brother—despite society and a prominent Charleston shipbuilder’s yen to split them.

Confronting the challenges of a strange country, relying on instincts to trust some new friends, she makes unusual decisions for that time.  Those bring the French Huguenot girl and her brother to grow up as Texas grows up in subsequent volumes of the saga.