PORT TOWNSEND — Step inside the lair of novelist Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and she’ll surprise you with a Woody Guthrie song:
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees.”
Scarborough’s voice is sweet and full of feeling, but she’s no professional songbird. She is a Vietnam veteran, an artist, a nurse and a novelist who’s prolific to a Picassoan degree.
Her tiny cabin in Port Townsend has an even littler studio beside it, where her numerous books and beadwork are stored, and where her beloved Mexican folk art graces the topmost shelves.
Scarborough has published 22 books of her own, from The Healer’s War to Channeling Cleopatra to The Lady in the Loch and beyond. Make that way beyond.
In addition to her science fiction series, Scarborough has coauthored 16 novels with her friend, the Irish writer Anne McCaffrey. These include the recent Catacombs and Catalyst, tales of felines who travel into outer space.
And while many of her novels are flights of fantasy, featuring female characters with special powers — The Godmother, Song of Sorcery, The Unicorn Creed to name a few — Scarborough has also written what she calls her “serious books.” These carry messages about war and peace — but Scarborough remains a storyteller, in the tradition of that most down-to-earth kind of entertainer: the folk singer.
Which is why she offers that Guthrie song.
Its title is “Plane Wreck over Los Gatos,” but people of Guthrie’s era remember it as “Deportees,” the tale of farm workers who, sent back to Mexico after picking crops in California, perish in a plane crash.
It’s this kind of storytelling, unflinching, direct, giving voice to the voiceless, that Scarborough seeks.
“I was brought up to not preach at people,” she adds. But “sometimes I have things I really want to say.” So Scarborough says it with fiction, in novels such as The Healer’s War, 1989 winner of the Nebula award for science fiction.
The book is based on Scarborough’s experiences as an Army nurse in Vietnam — something she didn’t want to write a book about, she says on her website, www.EAScarborough.com. “Vietnam had been a big, black hole in my life for 20 years.”
She embarked on the project out of a sense of duty to her fellow veterans, and to the Vietnamese people with whom she worked.
In the prologue, Scarborough writes in the voice of a veteran still haunted.
“The nightmares have lost some of their power by now. I can haul myself out of one almost at will, knowing that the sweat-soaked sheet under me is not wet jungle floor, that the pressure against my back is not the barrel of an enemy rifle or a terribly wounded Vietnamese, but my sleeping cat.”
In the prologue’s final paragraph, Scarborough wonders about forgiveness, and about what happened to the people she met in Vietnam:
“One hope I have in writing this is that maybe they will read it or hear of it and find me,” she muses, “and we can heal together.”
What follows is the first-person account of Lt. Kitty McCulley, the recent graduate of a Midwestern nursing school; Scarborough herself completed her training at the Bethany Hospital School of Nursing in Kansas City, Kan., and served in Vietnam from June 1969 to June 1970.
“[Bethany] was a very good hospital,” Scarborough said, where she was taught that everybody deserves care, regardless of ability to pay.
The Healer’s War starts with Lt. McCulley working in an Army field hospital in Vietnam. There, she acts on her belief that it’s her duty to attend to each wounded patient, Southeast Asian or American, civilian or military.
One of Lt. McCulley’s patients is an old man, Xe. A shaman, he wears an amulet around his neck; before Xe dies, he makes sure the nurse becomes the new keeper of the necklace. She discovers the amulet has magical powers, which accompany her on the journey that has riveted readers.
Today, Scarborough feels a modest amount of pride in the book. Her fellow Vietnam veterans, including the men, have let her know she did well by them.
“I’ll write fiction,” she adds, “but I won’t write bulls—.” Then as now, Scarborough doesn’t tolerate anything that romanticizes war.
“It’s not just guys with uniforms against other guys with uniforms,” she says. “It’s civilians dying, civilians who are defenseless.”
In 1993, four years after The Healer’s War came out, she traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Nov. 11 dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial.
She got to see people from her unit again, at the monument and at a dance. She smiles at the memory of dancing with her fellow vets, defiant of their wheelchairs and prostheses.
Some, Scarborough added, still suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and some had children with birth defects, which she believes were due to exposure to Agent Orange.
The Healer’s War, meanwhile, drew praise from critics and from the reading public.
“To me, Vietnam was ‘just another war,’ another chapter in my history textbook — until I came across The Healer’s War,” writes A.K. Berger, a 20-something Nebraskan whose review appears on Amazon.com.
“This book paints a vivid picture of Vietnam . . . the conditions the soldiers had to tolerate, and the daily battles [are] described in excruciating, almost explicit detail . . . I will never look at the Vietnam War the same way again, and I now hold a respect for those that served in it.”
Yet the novel, Scar Âborough adds, didn’t turn her into a major commercial success. She has made a living as a writer, but only because she moved to Port Townsend more than 20 years ago, when she could afford to buy a small house. Then, earlier this decade, she took two bad falls on her kneecaps, and suffered from worsening arthritis.
By 2008, she was considering knee-replacement surgery. But at 61 she was too young for Medicare, and, as she writes on her website, “too precariously self-employed to afford insurance.”
As an in-country Vietnam War vet, though, she was entitled to some benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA diagnosed her severe osteo Âarthritis, but, Scarborough writes, refused to send her to an orthopedist because she was too overweight.
Then, just in time, she was paid for a new book contract. She underwent knee surgery on Election Day 2008.
After her return home, friends helped Scarborough keep her house clean — and her two feline “nurses,” Cisco and Pancho, gave constant and attentive comfort, with “lots of purr therapy.”
Come 2010, Catalyst and Catacombs, Scarborough and McCaffrey’s novels starring the highly evolved, space-faring Barque Cats, were published. The two novelists put the books together by e-mail, since Scarborough couldn’t fly off for a months-long stay in Ireland as she once did.
Now Scarborough is at work on a cat book of her own, with an Olympic Peninsula setting.
Spam Versus the Vampire has as its hero a computer-literate feline named Spam, and a villainous vampire from Canada named Marcel. Spam’s mistress disappears from her Port Townsend home, but the authorities do little to look for her. So Spam embarks on a search on- and then offline.
Scarborough doesn’t yet have a publishing deal for this latest book. The New York publishing houses are struggling, she says, and stingy with the contracts unless the author can guarantee a best-seller. They also want novelists to write outlines – not something she fits into.
“You can’t really categorize me very easily. I do just whatever the force suggests to me.”
E-books — electronically transmitted tomes read on devices such as the Kindle or Nook — are a newer frontier for Scarborough, and one that is starting to generate some revenue. She offers the electronic versions via her website, at a lower price than what a new conventional book sells for.
Another benefit of the e-book, Scarborough adds, is that a reader can obtain titles that have become hard to find, like The Healer’s War.
And as if writing science fiction and fantasy novels weren’t a big enough stomping ground for her imagination, Scarborough has turned to another art form: the creation of stunningly complex bead jewelry. The necklaces have names, such as “Raven Stole the Moon;” then there are the “Dark and Stormy Night” earrings.
“I’m a little bit whimsical,” Scarborough says.
It’s difficult, though, to sell her jewelry at a price that reflects the time and materials put into it. Scarborough does make a bit of money on the beadwork patterns she creates and offers on her website.
Now, at 63, Scarborough divides her time among artistic pursuits, and manages to add in some volunteer work. Each Friday, she goes to the Senior Information & Assistance office in Port Townsend, where she works for the local Disabled American Veterans chapter, helping vets with the paperwork required for V.A. benefits.
She describes her life in her trademark wry, irreverent fashion.
“I tend to do things a little backwards. Other people were becoming artists and hippies when I was busy nursing in the army,” Scarborough writes on her website.
“Now that other people have settled down to work real jobs, or (ahem, considering my age) retiring from them, I’m going through my artistic phase. Long may it last.”
