J. Arlene Culiner pens Great Romance & Characters to Love #hotwesternnights @PrairieRosePress

Let's offer a big hello to J. Arlene Culiner who pens engaging tales with quirky characters. She's here today to tell us about her story The Lady Piano Player, featured in Hot Western Nights. 

Karen: The readers are curious to know what you are working on now?

Arlene Culiner: I’m continuing to write about Blake’s Folly, and at the moment I’m working on a story that takes place in the late 1940s. The heroine is Polina, a Russian woman, a war refugee who has ended up as a hat-check girl in Reno. The man who falls in love with her, Cal Hardy, owns one of the last saloons in Blake’s Folly. In 1944, Cal was in Europe as part of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and because of this experience, he can well imagine what Polina went through before coming to America.

Karen: Have you ever been to a Ghost Town? If so tell the readers your experience there. If not, where would you like to visit and why?

J. Arlene Culiner:  I thrive on ghost towns and I’ve seen many. One I often visited was an abandoned Hungarian manor lost in weedy fields. It was surrounded by the very many empty buildings where once overseers, servants, farm workers, serfs all formed a whole village. Now nothing was left but gaping windows and destroyed walls. Most of the destruction took place under the communists, just after WWI, and again after WWII.

Other ghostly places were long abandoned Turkish caravanserai, once important stops for merchants of the silk trade; and the destroyed towns in the West Sahara, abandoned by the Saharawi inhabitants during the Moroccan war.

Strongest in my mind is the ghostly community in Pickering, Ontario, Canada where my grandparents once lived. In the early 1900s, this was a Socialist/Anarchist community, and incredibly lively. However, when the original inhabitants died off, no one took their place.

I had no idea what I would find when I went back out there in 2001 — the last time I had seen it was in around 1960. The red brick farmhouse at the entry was now derelict; the gravel lane leading into the colony was overgrown; vandals had burnt down some of the cottages, destroyed the interiors of the others, and decorated all with bullet holes and obscenities.

However, my grandparent’s cottage was still standing. After finding a few old tools in the shed, I managed to pry back the wooden boards covering one window, and I climbed inside. So much had been left behind — crocks, cloths, a copper oiling can, beds with rusty springs, mattresses, the big round table where my grandfather played endless games of cards with his cronies.

Afterward, I managed to enter other cottages, and there, too, I found pictures hanging on walls, clothes on hangers in the closets, curtains in the windows, plates, cutlery, and furniture.

Karen: Wow, that is so interesting. What an intersting experience to find your grandparent's cottage still there. Did the people who once lived there think they would come back one day, pick up where they left off? 

J. Arlene Culiner: Perhaps the word “forever” was too frightening. After that, I returned to this abandoned village each time I was in Canada. It wasn’t really a comforting place: I was always alone out there (at least, I hoped I was) and the only noises I could hear were bare stalks rustling, branches scratching, pines hissing, and loose boards tapping — but ghost towns always do come equipped with thrills and chills.

Sadly, the colony was destroyed two years ago. A developer bought the land, ripped out all the trees, flattened the hills, smashed down the cottages, dug up the lanes, and built ticky-tacky rows of identical houses.

Karen: How heartbreaking that the place is gone, but it is wonderful you have photos of this place in history. Thank you, J. Arlene Culiner, for sharing with us today. 

Readers, please feel free to ask questions or just say hello. Enjoy a snippet below of The Lady Piano Player, too.

About The Lady Piano Player

Essie Delevaux left Baltimore dreaming of freedom and romance in the Far West, but an arranged marriage to a violent drunk shattered her hopes. Tired and worn out when her marriage ends, she still has determination. How do single women survive in rough Western boomtowns? Some become laundresses, or cooks; others go begging or turn to prostitution. The chance to become a piano player in a saloon-cum-bordello seems like the perfect solution for Essie, even though it puts her in constant contact with the dangerously attractive Matt Curley. Still, she is wise enough to keep her emotions in check, isn’t she?

Journalist Matt Curley is a man of the world, and adventure takes him from Philadelphia to steamboats on the Colorado River, and from Canadian snows to boomtowns. He’s every woman’s dream, too, but all know he’s not here to stay. Matt needs all the excitement new horizons can bring. Before he does leave Blake’s Folly, though, he wants to make certain Essie Delevaux is settled in and happy. How he enjoys their mornings together in the empty saloon, drinking coffee, sharing secrets. And what if he wants more than just innocent friendship? 

Available at:

 

 

 

Enjoy an Excerpt: 

 “You a widow?” 

 

“No.” She could hear the tightness in her voice, feel the tension in her shoulders. 

 

His eyes glinted. “A runaway wife.” 

 

“Not that either.” Did she have to say more? Of course she didn’t. But people were bound to be asking her that same question over and over, so she might as well get used to it. “I left of my own accord, but with my husband’s full agreement. He’ll be looking into getting a divorce.” 

 

“And your children?” 

 

“No children. I’ve never had any.”

 

 He nodded, but said nothing. Had he heard the note of anger in her voice? She’d done her best to sound neutral, but neutrality wasn’t an easy note to hit when thinking of Sam Graham. 

 

Matt Curley stood slowly, walked in her direction — no, walk wasn’t the word she could use. He sauntered, a slow, elegant, certain saunter. A man sure of himself, of his power to seduce. Yes, that was why she’d been so wary of him yesterday. Be careful, her mind warned her. 

 

He stopped when he was standing beside her. Smiled. No, there was nothing seductive in his smile. She’d been wrong. What had she been imagining? That she was still the young attractive woman she had been years ago? Attractive enough to interest a man like this? What a fool she was.

 

 About the Author: 

Photographer, social critical artist, musician, actress, and writer, J. Arlene Culiner, was born in New York and raised in Toronto. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, and in a haunted house on the English moors. She now resides in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village of no interest where, much to local dismay, she protects all creatures, particularly spiders and snakes. She enjoys incorporating into short stories, mysteries, narrative non-fiction, and romances, her experiences in out-of-the-way communities, and her conversations with very strange characters.

 You can find the author on the internet at:

J. Arlene's Romance Site  / Website / Amazon Author / Goodreads  / Twitter / Facebook  / Pinterest / Storytelling Podcoast