By Lynn Downey
Works in Progress: Finding Women’s Lives in the Archives
Archives are not just collections of paper, photographs, and artifacts; not to me, at least. I’ve been an archivist and a historian for nearly forty years, and I never fail to find great stories in those files and boxes.
One theme I’ve been writing about for years is the historical treatment of tuberculosis in California, which I got interested in because my grandmother was in a TB sanatorium in the northern part of the state in the 1920s. I interviewed her, rescued the institution’s archives, and published a book about it. I was thrilled when Arequipa Sanatorium: Life in California’s Lung Resort for Women won the WILLA Award in 2020 for Scholarly Nonfiction.
In early 2024 I had a chat with David Turpie, editor of The Journal of Arizona History. I told him I really wanted to explore how tuberculosis was treated in Arizona. I knew many sufferers went there in the early 20th century because the dry air was supposed to be good for their lungs. He told me that the Arizona Historical Society gives grants every year to people who wanted to do research in their archives, and he suggested that I apply. I did, and I got one.
I took two trips to the archives in Tucson, in spring and summer of 2025. I dived into the collections looking for a story to jump out at me. And I found it: the diary of a woman named Maud, who left her home in Indiana in 1902 to spend time in Arizona because she was sick and worried about getting TB.
(https://www.newspapers.com)
In my Wintering talk, I will share how the diary was a jumping-off point for me to delve deeply into the life of a woman seeing the West for the first time. Maud wrote delightful details about what she saw and did in Phoenix and Tucson, even as she penned her fears about her declining health.
(Lynn Downey personal collection)
Women’s diaries are especially valuable for anyone looking to understand a snapshot in time, for writing both nonfiction and fiction. Writers can look behind diarists’ words to find deeper meaning for the work we do.
Lynn Downey is an award-winning historian and novelist. She is a WWW WILLA Literary Award Winner, DOWNING Journalism Award Finalist, and a Past President of Women Writing the West. She just finished writing an article about Maud Buchholz and TB, and is also working on a book about a 19th-century Boston writer whose life intersected with a famous Arizona stagecoach attack.
Be sure to register for Lynn’s Wintering talk on January 21, 2026 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time. Free to members and non-members. Share with your friends!
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