Waterfall at Silver Falls State Park near Salem, Oregon.
About me
I was born and grew up in a small town in Utah but now live in Oregon’s beautiful Willamette Valley, near Corvallis. Being from Utah, most people assume that I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am not, nor have I ever been a Mormon. But I have witnessed their ways. I chose Elizabeth Loveless as my pen name as a tribute to my Loveless ancestors who settled in Southern Oregon in the 1870s. For the same reason, I christened the main character in I Saw the Elephant Betsy Loveless. My actual name is TA Thurston.
Oregon State Capitol in Salem.
What it means to “see the elephant”
“Seeing the elephant” is a nineteenth-century American phrase meaning to experience something unusual and oftentimes horrific too. Oregon Trail emigrants made frequent references to “seeing the elephant” in their written diaries of the overland journey. Soldiers in the American Civil War likewise would write about “seeing the elephant” after experiencing combat for the first time.
Book 1: Time travel to the future
In July of 1852, I called upon my friend Polly but never made it to her family’s farm. Instead, I encountered the all-fired pachyderm in all his monstrosity. Quicker than a power of lightning, I went from farm girl on the Oregon frontier to the new kid at Forestview Middle School. Of course, there’ll be naysayers who claim that I fabricated my memoir, but I most certainly did time travel from 1852 to 2015. Habituating myself to iPhones, automobiles, computers, and other such-like things was disquieting and arduous in and of itself. However, just when my life had settled down, I discovered Mormons had festered out from their stronghold in Utah. Sakes alive! Exactly like when I lived in the 1800s, I once again suffered the inspired idiocy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Released on June 1, 2024
Book 2: The big move to Utah
In the second installment of all my adventures my adopted father loses his job. Mr. Kim searches far and wide for a new one in Oregon with no luck. Finally, he gets a fantastic offer from an aerospace company in Brigham City, Utah, and despite me making lots of protests, we move anyway. School therein was worse than expected on account of 85% of the pupils being Mormonites. It really got bad after I accidentally let out how my kin and I are from Carthage, Illinois—the very place where Joseph Smith was executed for his myriad crimes.
Released on June 1, 2024
Book 3: Back to the past
In the last volume of my trilogy, my great-great-great-great-great niece Beth, this kid named Howie D’Amato, and I get sucked through another time hole. To our grievous misfortune, my squad and I were still in Brigham City, except now it was 1856. My Land, our circumstances were plum awful. As fate would have it, before long, we got hauled to Great Salt Lake City, landing in the lap of one the most heinous criminals to have ever lived in the United States—Brigham Young. Even worse, every creepy old polygamist was a-hunting for new plural wives, the younger, the better.
Countryside south of Salem.
The Green River in Western Wyoming near the end of Greenwood’s cutoff. The Mormon Ferry was located here.