A Northampton writer will debut her first novel this Saturday — the same day its author turns 88 years old.
Patricia Lee Lewis, founding member and past president of the local writers’ association Straw Dog Writers Guild, will release “Thorns of the Mesquite” at a book launch at Florence Civic Center on Saturday, Nov. 15 at 10:30 a.m.
The novel is about Dona Rose “Doney” Willis Turn, a west Texas rancher in 1938. As family members and community members come in and out of her life during a time of commonplace spousal abuse and the ever-present threat of the Ku Klux Klan, Dona has to protect herself and her loved ones, even when doing so threatens her own life. (Advisory: this book contains content related to domestic violence, racial violence, sexual assault and misogyny; characters also use period-accurate racial slurs.)
One of the book’s key elements is the importance of standing up for what’s right, even in the face of danger, which is where the title comes from. The sharp, spindly thorns on a mesquite tree are “not aggressive, they’re protective,” and guard the tree if any predators should get too close, Lewis said. The act of moral courage is something that Dona has to reckon with when Samuel Washington, a Black man and occasional ranch hand, comes to her door seeking shelter from a lynch mob.
“It’s important to have a way of protecting yourself and others when somebody really wants to chop you down,” Lewis said.
In the same vein, Lewis decided she wanted to use the book as a way to help protect civil rights and support survivors of domestic violence. As such, all of the profits raised by the book will be donated to Safe Passage — the longtime Northampton nonprofit whose mission is to end domestic violence and help survivors — and the American Civil Liberties Union. She got the idea after learning that Safe Passage would be losing a significant amount of federal funding — that, as is the case with so many other organizations, “Money is being dragged away from people doing the best kind of work.”
Lewis, a native of Texas, grew up on a ranch in San Angelo. She moved to western Massachusetts in 1968, though her voice still carries a Texas twang. While her book isn’t autobiographical, it is inspired by her childhood. The character of Dona is named after Lewis’s great-aunt. And though Lewis doesn’t have many memories of her, one that made a lasting impression is shared through Dona’s character: throwing feed to her chickens, saying, “Here, chick, here, chick, here, chick chick chick.”
“I never knew anything more about her,” Lewis said.
Lewis also noted that she liked the name “Dona.” As a child, Lewis often sang in choirs, and she knew the Latin phrase “dona nobis pacem,” which means “grant us peace.”
Although “Thorns of the Mesquite” is Lewis’ first novel, her poetry, fiction and feature articles have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Sunday Globe. Lewis holds a Master’s of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and completed her undergraduate degree at Smith College, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1970.
Trained to teach English to speakers of other languages, Lewis has volunteered in the Maya village of Santa Cruz la Laguna on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, where she led retreats beginning in 2006, at Villa Sumaya Retreat Center.
One day, while leading a writing workshop in Ireland, Lewis gave participants a prompt, wanting to help them “get out of their thinking brain and into imagination, into image and memory and feeling.” The prompt provided her inspiration as well. What came to her “unbid, totally unbid, hadn’t thought about her in a long time,” was an image of a woman walking with her back to Lewis, wearing a brown dress appropriate to the time, walking toward a high hill on her family’s ranch.
“It was clear to me as day,” Lewis said. “I really did just follow her. I thought, ‘That is Dona,’ and that’s how it started.”
However, the process of completing the book took far longer than a momentary flashback — it took 15 years. In the beginning of the process, her mind moved quickly with images accompanying and she swiftly completed her first draft in 2016. It was 604 pages long, approximately 151,000 words.
“(It was) completely insane!” Lewis laughed.
Lewis developed and refined the story with the assistance of local writing groups and had a friend edit it down to 450 pages, or about 112,500 words. She wrote the ending of the book, then “put it in a drawer — many times, I put it in a drawer.” She wasn’t sure how to continue writing the story, and she paused her work on the book for a few reasons —”partly time, partly not having the courage to go back in and do what I knew had to be done with it.” At the time, she was chiefly preoccupied with supporting Patchwork Farm, the rustic Westhampton retreat center where she and her family lived from 1977 to 2020.
“You have to really focus if you’re going to publish something, if you’re going to get it really, really ready,” she said. “And it wasn’t.”
Lewis was able to further edit the story down to 130,000 words, but it was still too long. She met an agent at a conference sponsored by Straw Dog Writers Guild [fixed in the nut graf], whom Lewis chose specifically because the woman was from Oklahoma and had also written a historic novel based in the 1930s.
“I’d love to work with you,” Lewis recalled the agent telling her, “but you’ve got to get this shorter.” That meant no more than 100,000 words.
Fortunately, Lewis had a friend who let her stay in a cottage on the Cape in February and March of 2024, where she was able to sequester herself as she kept editing the novel: “Ice storms, wind storms, everything else,” she recalled. “It was perfect.”
Once she felt her novel was ready for the agent to see again, she learned that agent moved to another agency and wasn’t allowed to take the book. Instead, Lewis considered showing her book to Levellers Press, whose poetry imprint had published her second book of poems in 2011.
Now, publishing her first novel at the age of 88, “It feels like it’s about time,” Lewis said.
“It feels great because it allows me to keep doing something that feels like it might be useful … and that’s always been important to me,” she said.
The moral Lewis wants people to take away from the book is “really not hesitating to put whatever resources you have to protect or to serve, or to support somebody who’s really in trouble.”
“We’re not all brave; we don’t all have resources to give, I realize that,” Lewis said. “But to do what you can, where you are, with what you got — that is really what happens in this book. … I believe that ordinary people can be heroes through very small acts of bravery.”
“Thorns of the Mesquite” is available from Levellers Press for $25.