Gabrielle Burton, Impatient With Desire

Talking Leaves…Books is pleased to join Earth’s Daughters Magazine, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and Just Buffalo Literary Center in welcoming back long-time Buffalo resident Gabrielle Burton to read from her just-published novel Impatient with Desire (Hyperion), on Wednesday, May 12, at 7:30 pm in the Cinema at Hallwalls. Copies of Gabrielle’s new novel, and its companion memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner (University of Nebraska Press), will be available for purchase. A small admission charge to this reading will benefit Earth’s Daughters Magazine.

Gabrielle Burton took an abiding interest in Tamsen Donner, wife of George, leader of the infamous Donner Party’s westward journey, about 40 years ago. Last year she published Searching for Tamsen Donner, an account of her obsession and of research travels, usually undertaken with her husband and five young daughters in tow. She discovered some letters written by Tamsen, and evidence that she kept a journal, and has used them as a base from which to imagine her life, in Impatient with Desire.

In the spring of 1846, Tamsen Donner, her husband, George, their five daughters, and eighty other pioneers headed to California on the California-Oregon Trail in eager anticipation of new lives out West. Everything that could go wrong did, and an American legend was born. We think we know the story of the Donner Party—pioneers trapped in the mountains performing an unspeakable act to survive—but we know only that one harrowing part of it. Impatient with Desire brings us answers to the unanswerable question: What really happened in the four months the Donners were trapped in the mountains? And it brings to stunning life a woman—and a love story—behind the myth.

Tamsen Eustis Donner, born in 1801, taught school, wrote poetry, painted, botanized, and was fluent in French. At twenty-three, she sailed alone from Massachusetts to North Carolina when respectable women didn’t travel alone. Years after losing her first husband, Tully, she married again for love, this time to George Donner, a prosperous farmer, and in 1846, they set out for California with their five youngest children. Unlike many women who embarked reluctantly on the Oregon Trail, Tamsen was eager to go. Later, trapped in the mountains by early snows, she had plenty of time to contemplate the wisdom of her decision and the cost of her wanderlust.

Historians have long known that Tamsen kept a journal, though it was never found. In Impatient with Desire, Burton draws on years of historical research to vividly imagine this lost journal—and paints a picture of a remarkable heroine in an extraordinary situation. Tamsen’s unforgettable journey takes us from the cornfields of Illinois to the dusty Oregon Trail to the freezing Sierra Nevada Mountains, where she was forced to confront an impossible choice.
Impatient with Desire is a passionate, heart-wrenching story of courage, hope, and love in hardship, all told at a breathless pace. Intimate in tone and epic in scope, it is absolutely hypnotic.

Gabrielle Burton lived in Buffalo for many years, raising five daughters with her husband Roger while writing and being an activist in the Buffalo women’s and literary communities. Her novel, Heartbreak Hotel, set in Buffalo in a women’s commune, won the Maxwell Perkins Prize for a first novel in 1986. She wrote the screenplay and helped produce the independent film Manna from Heaven with her five daughters. Searching for Tamsen Donner was published to wide acclaim in 2009 in the prestigious series of memoirs edited by Tobias Wolff for the University of Nebraska Press. Talking Leaves and Just Buffalo Literary Center hosted a packed reading from that book in March 2009—the first literary event held in the then just-opened Western New York Book Arts Center space in downtown Buffalo.