Gabrielle Burton, Searching for Tamsen Donner

Talking Leaves…Books and Just Buffalo Literary Center, along with the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative, are pleased to announce a reading and book signing featuring longtime Buffalo resident Gabrielle Burton, to celebrate the publication of her new book Searching for Tamsen Donner (University of Nebraska Press, in the American Lives Series edited by Tobias Wolff). This free event will take place on Sunday, March 29, at 3 pm at the beautiful new home of the WNY Book Arts Collaborative, 468 Washington Street at Mohawk in downtown Buffalo.

Tamsen Donner. For most the name conjures the ill-fated Donner party trapped in the snows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1846–47. Others might know Tamsen as the stoic pioneer woman who saw her children to safety but stayed with her dying husband at the cost of her own life. For Gabrielle Burton, Tamsen’s story, fascinating in its own right, had long seemed something more: the story of a woman’s life writ large, one whose impossible balancing of self, motherhood, and marriage spoke to Burton’s own experience.

This book tells of Burton’s search to solve the mystery of Tamsen Donner for herself. A graceful mingling of history and memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner follows Burton and her husband, with their five daughters, on her journey along Tamsen’s path. From Tamsen’s birthplace in Massachusetts to North Carolina, where she lost her first family in the space of three months; to Illinois, where she married George Donner; and finally to the fateful Oregon Trail, Burton recovers one woman’s compelling history through a modern-day family’s adventure into realms of ultimately timeless experiences. Here Burton has collected and published together for the first time, all seventeen of Tamsen’s known letters.

Searching for Tamsen Donner is audaciously ambitious and utterly original…. This memoir combines—successfully!—domestic, historic, and mystical concerns that bind together our brave but heartbreakingly fragile nation. It’s just a terrific read.”—Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life

“Every great biography requires diligent research, patient investigation, historical accuracy and informed guesses. Searching for Tamsen Donner provides all that and more: Burton candidly identifies which is which. Her own experiences as a woman, a mother, a writer, a wife and a veteran second guesser inform every passage. An original and insightful rendering of a familiar legend, I absolutely loved it.”—Mary Kay Blakely, author of Wake Me When It’s Over

Gabrielle Burton, like Tamsen Donner the mother of five daughters, lived, worked, wrote and raised those daughters in Buffalo, with the help of her husband Roger. She penned the novel Heartbreak Hotel, winner of Scribner’s 1985 Maxwell Perkins Prize, an award for a first work of fiction, here. With the help of her daughters’ Five Sisters Productions company, she wrote & produced the film Manna from Heaven. She now lives and writes in Venice, California.