Jeannie’s second novel, Easy is soon to be completed.

Cozad
Nebraska
December, 1874



"Ezekiel’s ma put a letter on the table before they left. It was the last thing she did before they got onto the wagon. The letter was written in cursive. He could not read cursive. She had not taught him it, yet. He wanted her to read the letter to him but did not ask it. The only person the letter could be meant for was Pa.
They left just past noon, the buckboard laden with the four hens, the goat doe, a pot and skillet, the treadle sewing machine, a sack of prune stones, what was left of the tomato preserves, pickling, a sack of potatoes and a bit of grain the bugs hadn’t got to. But for a corncake and a cup of milk from the goat, their last meal in the house had been cold.
As they bumped along, the wind hurt his face. He asked where they were going. "We are going to town," she said. It had sent up a flutter in him. Town. But she gathered in her mouth and turned away and made him not sure of the prospect at all.
They had no meat, the sow dead, the cattle gone in the freeze. His ma said Nanny and the hens could not be eaten, not even the biddy. They had not been able to catch the rooster, so they left him.
The freeze had been the final straw she said, and they had to leave. Since fall he and Ma had waited at the farm for his pa to return. Every day she had stood by the two windows looking out at the gray, at the wind, the snow. He tried to pull her back to his lessons, to lure her with his books and pencils and numbers, but she wrapped her arms tighter and did not come.
Then that day, there was no more fuel for the stove, no more wood, no chips, little food left to cook. Ezekiel said maybe they could take a saw to the table, use it for a fire, and his ma wrung her hands on her skirts. "No," she finally got out, "your da’."
"Is Pa coming back?" he said.
She hesitated. "Of course," she said.
"Are we going to freeze?" he said.
"I don’t think so."
That night, the last one there, he had asked if he could sleep with the light of the lamp.
The next day they left.
His pa had said there was a town. He had not mentioned the name of the town, only that it was ten miles and was south. A sun with no warmth had been in their eyes as they passed by the neighbors’ farm. The Andersons built their house of wood last fall, had finished it up just as the weather turned. The old sod house was now the sty for hogs.
He and his ma bucked along, wrapped in all the clothes they owned, their legs buried under their blankets and the China rug. Brown papers his ma had wrapped him in prickled his skin under his clothes. For awhile the hens had squawked but the wind whipped their voices away. The pony clopped behind the wagon, its head low. The wagon tipped over the ruts, the sideboards groaned, the skillet and the axe banged. He had thought they should bring the hammer and saw as well, but he had not said it, they were his pa’s tools, after all.
Not long after they left, his mother turned over the reins to him, his hands grown nearly as large as hers, but hers were no bigger than a small boy’s. He would have his father’s hands, she said, thick and strong with big thumbs. When would his hands be a man’s? When he was six? Seven? He wished Pa were there to see his hands, maybe his pa would think better of him."



Recently rediscovered by art collectors, Robert Henri’s early Twentieth-Century art gave birth to what is now known as the Ashcan School. His art continues to influence the work of artists even today. Beginning with his father’s killing of a rancher on the barren prairie of Nebraska, Easy reveals Henri’s driven pursuit of art as a young man, blending fact and fiction, and interweaving Henri’s life with the lives of his struggling group of followers. Easy is told through the eyes of Ezekiel Harrington, an on-looker. Easy bears witness to the fight for equality of women at the turn of the century, to the vibrancy of early Philadelphia and it allows us into the incredible lives of artists who strove to elbow their ways out of Victorian mores and the confines of traditional art of the late Nineteenth century.

Jeannie is also doing research on her third novel set in a time, not long from now, when the world no longer experiences hunger. The story examines our world crowded with humans whose numbers grow exponentially every month. And it examines the effect when one, lone scientist, decides to take Earth’s future into her own hands.

Jeannie is being represented by Wales Literary Agency