INTRODUCTION In her third novel, author Elizabeth Crook creates a transporting story of one family''s legacy over the course of one hundred years, stemming from the diaries of a frontier woman faced with the duties, passions, and dangers of her times. In The Night Journal , the diaries of Hannah Bass have attracted the attention and devotion of academics and readers for decades. Candid and passionate, written in the 1890s, the journals offer the rare account of a woman in the American West during the Victorian era, a time of expansion, indiscriminant violence, and burgeoning industry. Nearly a century later, the journals have been edited and published to great acclaim by Hannah''s only child, Claudia Bass, known to all as Bassie, now a retired professor of southwestern history and respected worldwide for her work transcribing her mother''s journals. Bassie''s granddaughter, Meg Mabry, however--a thirty-seven-year-old career woman who as a child was raised by Bassie and remains bitter toward Bassie''s domineering, caustic guardianship and the burden of her expectations--finds the very thought of the family legacy oppressive and refuses even to read the journals. When Bassie learns that the hill on the property of her childhood home is going to be flattened to make room for modern expansion, she insists that Meg travel with her to New Mexico to recover the skeletal remains of two dogs her mother buried there. She recalls being awakened during the night to the sound of gunshots and remembers seeing her mother, Hannah, and a man named Vicente Morales take a pickax to the frozen ground and dig the grave for a dog shot by poachers. Driven and determined in her memory, Bassie refuses to let this one final and vivid image of her mother be bulldozed away.

But when the ground is excavated, far more than dogs'' bones are unearthed, and the discovery of what is buried in the grave sends Bassie and Meg on a search back through time to the turn of the last century and into the secret lives of Bassie''s mother and father--Hannah and Elliott Bass--and Vicente Morales. The journey shakes the foundation of the history on which Bassie has built her life and her long career and changes Meg''s perception of the past as well as her expectations for her own future. In the fabled landscape of her ancestry, Meg allows herself at last to read the journals and reconstruct the past, solving a shocking and confounding mystery. With the support of Jim Layton, the archaeologist involved in the excavation, she sets out to find the one missing journal--suspected to exist but never confirmed--that will detail the final year of Hannah''s life and shed light on the unexplained disappearance of Hannah''s husband, Elliott. Both a fascinating historical epic of the Southwest and a searing personal story of one family''s coming to terms with its own past, The Night Journal is a contemporary love story and a historical mystery, depicting the conflict between cultures in New Mexico at the turn of the last century, between sexes both then and now, and inevitably the conflicts between generations. It is centered on the mystery of the contents buried in a dog''s grave, but the underlying, broader mystery is about connections between the past and the present and the ways in which people relate to their ancestors both in life and in legacy. ABOUT ELIZABETH CROOK Elizabeth Crook is the author of two previous novels and has been published in anthologies and periodicals such as Texas Monthly and Southwestern Historical Quarterly . She has devoted most of the last decade to researching and writing this book.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW Your previous two novels were works of historical fiction, and The Night Journal contains a historical novel of sorts within its framework, in the journals of Hannah Bass. What is it about historical fiction that interests you as a writer? My mother read a lot of historical fiction to my brother and sister and me when we were growing up: the Newbery winners like Caddie Woodlawn and The Bronze Bow , classics by authors such as Frances Hodgson Burnett and Fred Gibson, and a long list of others-- The Witch of Blackbird Pond , Roller Skates , Five Little Peppers , and Thee, Hannah! come to mind--these books were an enormous part of my family life as we experienced them together. There was a magical book called Blue Willow and one that I still cherish in a battered old copy, The Colt from Moon Mountain , and all the books by Louisa May Alcott, which were not exactly historical when they were written but were old-fashioned and otherworldly to me. My brother and I also watched a lot of old westerns, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza , on television; so I suppose I became comfortable at an early age moving in and out of the past. As a teenager I fell in love with the Brontë novels and Dickens and historical novels by Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Goudge. The Child from the Sea was particularly moving and unforgettable and I can still remember almost word for word an image described at the very end. I never liked fantasy books--even those my brother loved such as the Narnia series and A Wrinkle in Time --I found them unnerving and ultimately unbelievable as they suspended the rules of life. History, to the contrary, defined and clarified the rules, and this was a great relief to me as it gave me an understanding of reality.

To study an era of time and be able to fathom it--that was satisfying. I''m not an adventurous person as far as travel goes, being fairly rooted, but researching the past is like traveling in time and is preposterously exciting for me. Stories about the past, even violent and disturbing ones, seem comforting and familiar as they are based on the premise of real life. How did this novel, which is based both in the 1890s and 1989, pose challenges to you as a writer? What was it like to balance and juxtapose the frontier diary voice of Hannah with the more modern perspective and voice of Meg? When I started this book I had just completed my second book, which was an old-fashioned historical epic about love and war set in Texas in the 1830s. I was reluctant to get back into the chaotic and extensive research required for historical fiction and decided to try to write a contemporary novel. I cast about for material, but was uninspired. Then my husband and I took a trip to New Mexico, and some friends whom we were staying with suggested I drive over and look at some Pueblo ruins in the area. So I drove over to Pecos Pueblo.

I think writers are always in search of those places that suddenly, for inexplicable reasons, set their minds on fire. Pecos did this for me the same way that the mission at La Bahia did when I wrote Promised Lands . I went down into one of the kivas and found it to be mesmerizing, with bits of floating dust illuminated by the light that came down form the entry above. And I knew this was a place I wanted to write about. Still, I was reluctant to start into so much heavy research again, so I had the sudden idea that perhaps I could set only half of the book in the past, and that this would liberate me and require me to do only half the amount of research. However, this plan turned out to be ridiculous. To write even a few historical scenes with any authenticity--even just to get your characters out of bed and feed them breakfast--you have to know the period intimately. You have to know everything about it that would affect the characters, which is pretty well everything.

In the end the book took twice as long to write as my other books, instead of half as long. I was developing two sets of characters, in two different time periods, writing in several different voices; and then I had to piece it all together and make it work as a whole and cut each story down to half the size it wanted to be, so that the book would be a viable length. Writing Hannah''s part, once the research was done, was not too difficult, but I had trouble settling on the contemporary narrative voice and struggled with this right up to the last draft. Third person is more difficult to write than first person, as it requires more discipline. So each story presented its own specific challenge: for Hannah''s story it was the research, for Meg''s it was the voice. Which is one reason I was relieved to go back and forth between the two. Ultimately that jump in time became the most important thing about the book. The book is about family legacies and how our generation often feels like a paler version of our ancestors, and what it would be like if we could actually go back and reconstruct the lives of our great and great-great grandparents, and see these lives not as they have been represented to us but as they really were.

So it necessarily needed to span the generations. All of us live our lives with some amount of secrecy, and this influences how we will be remembered: most of us in subtle ways edit the real story to put ourselves in the best light. Later the stories about us that are passed down and the photographs and letters that survive are all to some extent altered by successive generations and by the arbitrary deletions and distortions of time--artifacts are lost, records are destroyed, evidence goes up in flames--so that often what is left is a long way from the truth. History does not take place in a vacuum; one day leads to the next, and I wanted this book to show how even the events that are untold or forgotten string along from the past to the present on a continuous strand. How much research did you do in the course of writing this novel? A great deal. When you write historical fiction you have to disappear daily though a wormhol.