Sarah’s story takes place during the last decades of the nineteenth century, so settlement is made more difficult by Geronimo and the Apache Indian Wars. A series of tragic events send the family back to Arizona, where they end up homesteading southeast of Tucson, in a fairly fertile valley alongside Cienega Creek. The novel begins with Sarah, her parents, and brothers on the trail from Arizona to Texas, because, as her mother teases, her father’s “feet is just itchin’”. These is my Words verbally replicates her physical growth from awkward young girl to mature wife and mother. Soon Sarah’s prose is fluent, even graceful, so her story is energetic and full of lively details. She also begs for books, reading everything she can find and studying whenever she can find a spare moment. When she meets people who are educated, she begs them to teach her how to improve her writing.

Initially, her prose is awkward and untrained, but Sarah wants to learn. Turner writes These is my Words in the form of a diary kept over a span of twenty years. The fictional Sarah single-mindedly meant to acquire an education. A woman of fine fettle who coped with whatever came her way, Sarah Prine, whether real or imagined, was determined to succeed and to raise her family well. Few of the details of her long life resemble the deeds of Turner’s Sarah Prine, but the real Sarah’s spirit lives on in her fictional counterpart. Turner’s great-grandmother was a woman named Sarah Agnes Prine who lived a long intrepid life, ranching, roping, and rambunctiously raising her nine children. Turner, author of These is my Words, turns a scattering of hand-me-down family stories into a fully imagined pioneer diary.

These is my Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 Arizona Territories

These is my words by nancy turner