It’s hard to find even a used hard copy of The Feedsack Dress, but Cave Hollow Press just issued a new e-edition on Amazon’s Kindle ($2.99). You can also read the opening chapters there for free.

I finished the first draft in 1976. After living in Ethiopia, Austria, and Washington, D.C., I was struck by the huge changes in my northeast Missouri farm community and wanted to share my observations. I read social and economic histories and decided to set the book in 1949, a time of great transition for the whole country and for farms like ours. We were just getting electricity and using a tractor more than horses. For the main character, going from a one-room school to ninth grade in town, was a transition mirroring the time.

My and others’ recollections didn’t provide all the facts that I needed to create my fiction. I studied copies of the Kirksville Daily Express, such picture magazines as Life, fair catalogs, 4-H materials, and school yearbooks. I also read novels for young people to try to figure out how to structure mine.

I worked on the manuscript whenever I had time from my nonfiction career. Finally I sent a draft out to publishers. Everyone said no, but I received a couple of helpful comments.

Every few years I would pull out the manuscript and like it enough to revise again.  On good days, I felt I’d drawn on my life experience to deepen the characters and make the story true to the period yet timeless and universal. Human behavior hadn’t changed all that much. Neither had publishers.

At the turn of the century, I decided to start another major transition—from nonfiction to fiction. I began to read mysteries written by women and study writing them. After working at night for a couple of years to complete a manuscript, I decided to apply what I’d learned to revise The Feedsack Dress. My mystery critique group agreed to read it. They were quite helpful not only because they were good writers but also because none of them knew anything about farming or the period. They made me sharpen my descriptions and clarify points.

In 2006 as I planned to return to Missouri, I learned a publisher in Warrensburg was looking for books set in Missouri. CHP editors were on my wavelength and published The Feedsack Dress in July 2007.

In 2009, librarians and booksellers nominated it and the Missouri Center for the Book chose it to be the state’s Great Read at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

Over the years many readers have told me their—or their grandmothers’—memories of clothing made from feedsacks and life in that period.

When the print copies ran out, the CHP editors and I agreed not to reprint it but to prolong its life by putting it on Kindle.

I’m glad I didn’t give up.

—Carolyn Mulford