Corrales Resident Writes Debut Mystery

Sue Hallgarth’s debut novel “On the Rocks” is set in the summer of 1929, when Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather and her life partner Edith Lewis were in a cottage on the island of Grand Manan in the Canadian province of New Brunswick.

Cather and Lewis did indeed summer on the small island, but the book – a mystery about the death of a man whom Lewis saw falling from a cliff into the rocky edge of the sea – is a work of fiction.

Hallgarth, a Corrales resident, has been studying Cather’s life for decades.

	If you go Sue Hallgarth reads from and signs “On the Rocks” at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Corrales Library, 84 W. La Entrada, Corrales. Proceeds of sales of the book go to Friends of the Corrales Library. She discusses and signs the book at 7 p.m. Thursday at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW; and signs the book at 5 p.m. Feb. 15 at Iris Studio and Gallery, 1751 Bellamah NW. This signing is a benefit for Equality New Mexico.

“I taught writing for years as a college professor, including creative writing,” she said. “I got very interested in doing research on Cather. Originally, I was going to do a critical study of her novel. And then I switched over because I was finding out so much wonderful information about her life and about Edith Lewis, her partner of 40 years.”

Hallgarth wrote a few scholarly works on Cather and Lewis. She became interested in writing a biography. She never got that far because she switched gears, wanting to write a novel.

“The more I thought about it, I thought I could give a richer and full sense of their lives if I turned to fiction. And besides, people would have more pleasure reading it.”

In 1929, Cather was working on her 10th novel, “Shadows on the Rock.” Two years before, her novel set in the New Mexico territory, “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” was published. She had won the 1923 Pulitzer for Fiction for “One of Ours” and is known for her novels about frontier life on the Great Plains.

Hallgarth said Cather and Lewis were together for 40 years, and, for half of those years, from 1922 to 1942, they summered on Grand Manan. Cather wrote, and Lewis painted watercolors.

Usually, biographers and others talked about the island as a place of escape for the two women, Hallgarth said, but what she learned when she visited there was they were associated with a summer colony that had been in existence since 1902.

“That, frankly, blew me away,” Hallgarth said.

“Cather wasn’t running away from the world. She was going to a place where there were other professional women who also summered in this colony. They returned year after year and they were librarians, a social worker who taught at Columbia … teachers, some writers. It was a very vibrant place.”

There were, in fact, two summer colonies on Grand Manan, Hallgarth said. Both drew professional, single women who went to see their friends, rest and relax and, in many cases, get out of hot, humid New York City.

“To find a women’s colony is unusual,” she said.

Lewis, Hallgarth said, was a top account executive with a major advertising agency in New York. She and Cather had also worked as editors at McClure’s Magazine.

And they worked as a team editing the manuscripts of Cather’s novels, Hallgarth said.

She is working on a second Cather-Lewis mystery. This one will be set in Taos when Cather was writing “Death Comes for the Archbishop.”

Hallgarth was an English professor at William Woods University in Fulton, Mo., and an English professor and an administrator at State University of New York at Empire State College.

Mary Ellen Capek is the publisher of Arbor Farm Press, which is based in Corrales.
— This article appeared on page 12 of the Albuquerque Journal