Two months ago, I wrote that my agents had sent Unremembered Lives out to publishers. In that blog, I compared the publishing process to selling a house. Well, last month, the right buyer took a good look at the property and said, “I love this. Let’s talk.”
Tara Parsons is the editor-in-chief at Touchstone Books, a Simon and Schuster group. She is especially drawn to novels and nonfiction about the lost or hidden history of women — forgotten but important figures who shaped today’s world.
Unremembered Lives is the story of the women who formed the backbone of a copper miners’ strike in 1913: wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of the men who worked underground at the Calumet and Hecla Mines in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This was not an easy story to sell, but my agent Jane Dystel persisted (lotta that going around these days), and now we’ve got the right publisher to acquaint modern readers with towering figures like Mother Jones, Big Annie Clements and Ella Bloor, who risked so much and fought so hard to get justice for working people.
Here’s a photo of Anna Klobuchar Clemenc, a.k.a. “Big Annie Clements” of Calumet Michigan, president of the Women’s Auxiliary of Local 15, Western Federation of Miners.
This 25-year-old woman was once known as “America’s Joan of Arc.” I hope those who carry the flag today will come to love her as I do.
