Jocelyn Cullity is the author of the new novel The Nurse at Baker Hospital. Her other books include The Envy of Paradise. She is the director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama.
Q: What inspired you to write The Nurse at Baker Hospital?
A: When I first arrived in Missouri, the wonderful writer Laura McHugh told me about the Dairy Hollow Writers Colony in Eureka Springs, in the Arkansas Ozarks. I fell in love with the quiet and mental space Dairy Hollow gives writers.
One evening, Elise Koenigk, an owner of the Crescent Hotel and a board member of the colony, came to dinner and told me about Norman Baker, who had run a fraudulent cancer hospital out of the same building that now houses the Crescent Hotel. I became obsessed with him—particularly with the way this demagogue used radio to con so many Americans into believing in him.
This was at the start of Covid, when I was also thinking a great deal about nurses and what it meant for them to be on the front lines. I began to wonder what the nurses at Baker Hospital must have felt, working inside this strange and increasingly troubling institution. From that question, Della, a young nurse, began to take shape as my main character.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you find that especially surprised you?
A: I was incredibly fortunate in the people who helped me. Keith Scales, a historian and longtime tour manager at the Crescent Hotel, was enormously generous with the abundance of research he had done. John Cross, another living historian in Eureka Springs, shared his remarkable archive of Baker letters.
And Rebecca J. Becker, executive director of the Crescent College History Project, was a meticulous reader and fact-checker. Her project recovers the stories of the young women who attended Crescent College and Conservatory, which occupied the Crescent Hotel from 1908 to 1934.
She has written extensively about these women and their lives: for the past 11 years she's published monthly articles in the Ozark Mountain Fun Guide, and has thousands of profiles on her public history Crescent College History Project Facebook page.
What surprised me most was how familiar Baker felt. Demagogues seem to be a recurring part of the American landscape. Baker used radio much as politicians today use social media: it allowed him to speak directly to his audience, bypassing traditional gatekeepers.
He was particularly adept at making Midwestern listeners feel seen and heard at a time when many felt ignored by the East and West Coasts and battered by the Depression. He presented himself as the champion of the “common man” against powerful institutions and elites. The echoes of our own time were startling.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote the novel?
A: I wanted to stay as close to the documented facts about Baker as possible. I read everything I could find about him, went back repeatedly to check details, and did two meticulous fact-checks with Rebecca J. Becker.
But there are always gaps in the historical record, and that is where the novelist has to enter. You have to make the most reasonable imaginative assumptions you can in order to connect A to B without distorting what is known. That takes a surprising amount of thought and time.
My hope is that I’ve created as truthful a sense of the place, the period, and the people as possible, while recognizing that fiction will always involve subjectivity.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope the novel gives readers a larger, more complicated sense of the American character. Demagogues are absolutely part of our history, but I was still surprised to see history repeating itself in such a recognizable way.
I also hope readers come away with a strong sense of Eureka Springs itself and its extraordinary people. It is a fascinating, beautiful, complicated place, and I feel very lucky to have spent so much time there.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m drafting short stories while I get ready to delve into another novel based on a true story. Balancing historical fact and the imagination requires such a deep dive that I’m taking a breath before I plunge in again.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m very grateful for the way you so persistently support writers and their work. Thank you!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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