About Liz Stevenson
I write literary fiction drawn from real history — the kind of stories buried in court records, census documents, and newspaper archives, waiting for someone to ask what they meant. My debut novel, Willow Creek, reconstructs a true 1864 Oregon murder trial through the eyes of the people who lived it — and the woman whose testimony hanged the man she loved.
Book Highlights
The Story
In 1864, a woman named Nettie Johnson stood up in an Oregon courtroom and spoke. After years of lying to survive, she finally told the truth. It hanged the man she loved and burned her world to the ground. She got up the next morning anyway.
The Setting
Willow Creek is a work of literary historical fiction set on the Oregon frontier during the Civil War years, drawn from court records, census documents, and newspaper archives of a true 1864 murder trial. Nettie Johnson is real. So is the plural marriage no one confirmed aloud, the mixed-race child recorded on an index card as "1/2 Indian," and the jury that took less than an hour to convict a man who swore he was innocent.
The Author
I trained as an attorney and practiced criminal defense in The Dalles, Oregon, where the courthouse that held Henry Deadmond still stands as a museum. I later earned a Master of Public Health and spent sixteen years at Oregon Health & Science University's Department of Psychiatry, where I helped build Unity Center for Behavioral Health and develop a more cohesive outpatient system of care. Between the legal work and the years spent building systems meant to help people get through hard things, I came to this story with two ways of asking the same question: what really happened at Willow Creek, and why did the truth cost so much?