Deborah Wiles's Blog, page 3

Writers Lab: Core Values, Part 2

stay tuned for this drama on Monday. :>

Lab Coats, good eeevening! Friday night of a very busy week here. Wait, it’s Saturday morning as I finish this. It was an overfull, dramatic week (don’t you love those? jk) —

Let’s get into writing our Core Values, the last foundational element of our Storybelly Summer Project, to go along with our Mission Statement and Vision Statement for our writing, as we get ready to push into fall and change gears.

You’ll remember, I said in last week’s introduction to Core Values, that I was going to be working right along with you this week, on a list of personal core values for my writing. I’ve been doing that. I may not be done yet (well, I’m not), but I’ve got a start. I’ll list those values in the assignment.

I listed the Storybelly Core Values last week, and here they are again, this time with their descriptions. If you are a Storybelly subscriber, you should be able to spot these values in the posts I write each week, and in the work we do together. If you want to sub to the Writers Lab and write with us, you can do that here.

Storybelly Core Values:Empowerment

We stand for the irrefutable truth that every human being is worthy of dignity and respect, and every person’s story is important.

Community

We steer our ship from the standpoint that we are all part of the fabric of nature, history, home, friends, and family. We connect, in our daily lives and work, through relationships, collaboration, cooperation, and mutual support.

Empathy

We seek first to actively listen, to ask questions, and to understand. We work towards openheartedness daily.

Education

We teach and make accessible the creative tools and skills needed to foster a sense of agency, competence, clear vision, and meaning for our team and our clients, who are our partners. We learn as much as we teach.

Courage

We wrangle hard things. We do not shy away from work or our connection to history that is inconvenient, embarrassing, or uncomfortable.

Celebration

We embrace and celebrate every bit of progress along the way to doing our part, in concert with others, to create and nurture a more just world and a lasting peace.

Wow. I’m so impressed! lol. But really… I am impressed with how this came together and how it remains so true, week by week, to what I want to accomplish. I wrote this with the Storybelly team: Ops Guru Zach and Media Guru Charlotte. We hashed all this out over a several-week intensive when I was figuring out my “why”—why add my voice to the many already on Substack?

This is what I came up with. My Why included my own core values, unstated but incorporated into a set of core values specific to the work I wanted to do with Storybelly. Along with the Mission and Vision statements we put into place, I am kept sane and focused each week by having these tools to direct my work — the work that is outside of my writing work, my home work, and my personal work.

THE OVERLAP:

Personal Core Values can overlap with your Writing Core Values or your Work Core Values — which is how I think of Storybelly’s Core Values right now; I call Storybelly my “day job” in the most purposeful sense of the word. Writing is still my art — and my business — which you’ll see in the Assignment.

I recommend you try writing:

core values for how you work at the day job (we can make anything our “day job” and I think we all have them);

core values for your writing — your “why” for your writing; and

core values for your personal why — why are you here? And what is your purpose in being here? Where do you find purpose and meaning in your life?

These might feel like lofty questions, but… why "*wouldn’t* you want to know what you stand for? I’ve found that writing things down—even in rough form—helps me make more informed choices. And, since this IS the Writers Lab, where we do these sorts of things, here’s a little critical thinking and creative exploration for you:

I’m going to ask you to take a few minutes to notice where you are now, what matters to you, and where you might want to go with your writing. Let your values rise to the surface as you write, and see what they reveal.

The Assignment this week, then, is rich and varied and full of good direction for just how to do this. As promised, I’ll include the core values for my own writing that I’m working on right now, and tell you how I put them together.

Come and do this with me? Let’s see what comes up for you.

THE ASSIGNMENT, CORE VALUES:

Read more

Storybelly Digest: Go Gently, Mom

Greetings, Storybellers. Thank you for indulging me.

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Happy Birthday, Mom. Today you would have been 100 years old — what a milestone. I’ve been thinking about you all day.

I could tell this morning it was going to be a beautiful day. Sun spilled into my kitchen and I wished you could see this little house in a little woods in Atlanta, Georgia, where I picked myself up and started over again. The kitchen was your domain, and our family was your life. I feel sure I inherited my fierceness about family from you.

I also inherited a love of the kitchen (although I’m not sure you actually loved it so much, ha… I remember the days when the kitchen felt relentless, both for you and for me).

I spent most of your birthday in my kitchen or nearby. I washed the bird feeders and watering stations and refilled them. I organized the pantry. I made an Indian dish, Murgh Makhani, and the making of it was hilarious. You would have tsk-tsked me into next week, lol.

But I was tired of making my usual bland chicken dishes, so I looked up “butter chicken without using the oven” (it has been ungodly hot), and this is what came up. I chose it without reading the recipe thoroughly (unlike me, but see: hot), I just scanned the ingredients, and I had them all, who knew, so I hauled them out and began. hahahaha! Two or three or ten hours later, I had this fantastic butter chicken dish!

As time spooled out in front of me, I made the marinade and then the sauce and did the grilling (well, that was Zach), and all the stirring and the whisking and the pouring and the sprinkling and omg, Mom, the steps and the ingredients mounted up (why did I have fenugreek?).

I laughed out loud remembering those cookbooks Dad bought for you, some Time-Life monthly gift with cuisines of the world, and how he kept kvetching — for years! — that he couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t cook out of them. WE KNOW WHY.

How fitting that I was cooking a cuisine of the world (very badly) on your birthday. And what a relief that, in the end, it was good.

We all pitched in with the dishes and I remembered you in that little pink kitchen doing dishes in Washington, DC, at the sink, singing Doris Day’s “Que Sera Sera.” Whatever will be will be. I loved to hear you sing.

You did a lot of singing in those heady days. Cathy was little, and you sang to her when you put her to bed at night. I could hear you from my bedroom next to hers: “I hear the cottonwoods whispering above/Tammy, Tammy, Tammy’s in love.” Or, “I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck, a hug around the neck and a barrel and a heap and a barrel and a heap and I’m talking in my sleep, about you!”

I didn’t sing while I worked today, but I did tend to my home, the way you did, Mom, although never as thoroughly or doggedly as you did. That was a source of agitation between us. We also tend our kitchens differently. Me and my nuts and seeds and berries and granola-crunching, ever-full dish drainboard, always a work in progress, always experimenting. You and your organized simplicity: empty countertops, shiny-clean floors and appliances, ship-shape refrigerator contents. There is comfort in the order of things, no matter what kind of order you prefer.

So on your birthday, I filled and organized my too-many-jars on the counter. I emptied the 40-pound bag of black oil sunflower seeds into the galvanized steel can and secured the lid. I topped off the pond and forgot to turn off the hose for hours. I know, I know. “Debbie, you’d lose your head if it wasn’t attached!” But no matter today. I enjoyed doing everyday tasks that need doing, and doing them well. We have that in common.

Our pear tree has gone crazy this year, so I also helped Jim pick some of the fruit. You wouldn’t believe the pears we’ve got this year, Mom. They are so good. I will pull out your old cookbook and see what recipes you have in there, handwritten and saved on the backs of envelopes or on pages from your stenographer’s notebook.

Those handwritten pages — including four pages of instructions on how to prepare turkey and dressing — are one way I feel close to you these days. Your divinity, your “mix,” your cheesecake, your fruitcake, and your flank steak come to mind. Seeing you sign your name, that’s another memory. That flourish you had with the capital K and the capital E particularly.

I used to watch your hands as you worked… your hands were always working at something, and when I was very little, and you would sit for a while (so rare), I would sit close by you and play with your hands.

I’d hold the hand that wore your mother’s ring, the ring she gave you, and then you gave me before you died. I’d hold that big hand in both of my small hands and I’d feel like I was in charge of your hand for a few minutes. In charge of the world. My world, anyway. What’s that all about, that feeling of triumph and empowerment, just by holding onto a bigger, beloved hand?

I saw you cry once, when we lived in Mobile. It scared me. You were a spanker. That scared me, too. You told me you had diphtheria when you were five years old and almost died, twice, and that scared me, too.

Your jewelry box played “Stardust” and had a dancing ballerina inside. I didn’t know what that tune was until I was grown and tried to hum it for someone who knew. Oh! Stardust! I was surprised I could remember the tune decades after last hearing it. Inside that jewelry box you kept a small silver medal for spelling, along with all our baby teeth.

Your roses were the pride of the neighborhood. I am terrible with roses — I have tried — but my zinnias (a flower you first introduced me to) are legendary.

You discovered tabis — those traditional Japanese socks — when we lived in Hawaii and you wore them inside the house all the time. I used to watch you put them on; they had silver fasteners on the side. Your feet were so small. My feet were so big.

One summer when we all visited you and Dad in Jackson, you took a car full of us to West Point, your childhood home in Mississippi. Hannah was a year old, so it was close to 40 years ago. We walked through your high school — something we could never do now, even in summer — and saw your picture in a dark hallway full of framed photos. There you were, all 5’2” of you, in uniform with the girls championship basketball team. And you were a star!

We went to the cemetery at Red Hill, to find your parents, and your tiny little brother Jesse who didn’t live long enough. It was so hot that day, and you told stories. I loved that so much.

Your father was fifty years old when you were born, and then he died the day before your sixth birthday. Years later, your mother moved to Mobile to be near you, her youngest child, and she died three months before your wedding to Dad. I have a picture of your mother on my altar here at home. She raised three children through the Depression without their father, and you raised three children through the Sixties without your mother.

You insisted I wash my comb and hairbrush once a week before you washed my hair on Saturdays. You scrubbed so hard I thought my scalp would bleed, and the tangled mass of hair afterward was murder until you discovered creme rinse.

You loved Roger Whittaker singing “The Last Farewell” and Ed Ames singing “My Cup Runneth Over.” You could beat players half your age on the tennis court. You could chase game-set-match with a Coke and a Mr. Goodbar or a Snickers or a pile of peanuts that you roasted in the shell yourself. According to you, Mobile had the first and best Mardi Gras, and Lumar face cream at night was a must.

When you’d go out with Dad to some event — to the Officer’s Club on base or a dinner with friends, you had your hair and nails done and no one was more beautiful than you were (party going or not). You were glamorous. You had taste. You wished I did. You had a “house dress” that you wore most weekdays when you cleaned and ironed and cooked for your family.

In your last year, when you were sick and we kids were doing a round robin of care with you and Dad, you got philosophical and reflective. You also were a stickler about bananas that year. They had to have their own bag at the grocery store, and they had to hang on a banana hook at home and touch nothing else. Ever.

One day you sat at the kitchen table with me and said, “I didn’t think you would ever get away from that boy.” But I did, eh?

Another day you said, “My sin was pride.” In my rush to not hear about it, or to just love you in that moment, I don’t know what it was, I said, “It’s okay, Mom. I love you, we all love you.” And then you were quiet. I wish I had asked you to go on. Maybe you needed to go on.

The night you died you were in so much pain. I helped you take a pill. You said, “Oh, Debbie,” and those were the last words you spoke. When morning came you smiled at me and crooked your arm over your head on the pillow. I went to the bathroom, and when I returned, you were gone. How is that possible?

“Dear one,” you called me sometimes. You have so many dear ones now that I wish you could meet. You would love them so, and they you. Husbands and wives of my children, and the families they have made, the struggles they have weathered, the triumphs they have celebrated… it all goes ‘round again, doesn’t it?

You have four great-grandgirls. You knew sweet Olivia, of course; she was three when you died. She’s 25 now and teaches English in Spain. She’s an amazing young woman, as is her sister, Delaney, who just graduated high school and is starting college. Those girls are each other’s staunchest champions, thanks to their mother, your Lisa. Lisa was your first grandchild at a time when you were not prepared for your eldest child — me — to have a child at 18, but you two grew so close, and it did my heart good to see it, although I was jealous of that closeness, sometimes. I wanted that for us as well.

I wish you could have known Alex, who is so like their dad, Jason, and who is talented in a dozen ways, has a heart as deep and tender as their dad’s, and is having a totally different childhood than Jason had, or I had… or that you had, and certainly than your mother had.

Then there is Evelyn, a little slice of heaven, Hannah’s little daughter, can you imagine? Evelyn turns three tomorrow, Mom. She’s so delicious. Hannah was in labor all day on your birthday, and we thought for sure Evelyn would be born that day, but she wanted her own day, I guess. That’s just like her, that cupcake.

We fought, you and I, over my skirts being too short, and me wanting to wear makeup and stockings and date and drive and have some autonomy in my life, some freedom. We disagreed about nearly everything -- practical, political, personal, philosophical -- or so it seemed to me, as I felt the sting of your disappointment and as I heaped my disappointment on you.

We clashed over how to raise children. I was young and scared and afraid, and I started out doing everything the way you had done it, on your advice, even though I’d told you, in fits of anger when I was young, “I will never spank my children!” I learned differently as I got older and so did my kids, and we all ended up coming home to Mississippi every summer to be with you.

When I opined about how much work it had to be for you every summer, to have us all home at once, the whole Edwards clan, your response was, “Don’t you know this is what I live for?”

I used to spend time thinking about the end of things. The end of the Edwards family, the end of our time together. At the same time, I could not wait to leave home. And then I missed it so badly.

The homesickness is still something I wrestle with. I think it’s THE homesickness, that sense of belonging we all pine for, or an innate knowledge that, like Ram Dass says, we’re all just walking each other home. That’s the meaning of home I think I seek. I’ve been in search of it all my life. I think that’s why I write, Mom. I think that’s why I gather stories.

When you died, Mike gave your eulogy. I guess this is mine for you. I think Mike was afraid I would say something — anything — untoward, after all the fighting, all the clashing of wills and ways in our family. But I won’t do that. I have learned, mostly the hard way, about fallibility, about being human, about making mistakes, about the gift of forgiveness. I have needed forgiveness, myself. And I have needed to forgive myself as well.

I like to picture you as a kid riding the pecan tree and shaking the nuts to the ground, putting them in a burlap sack after eating your fill by cracking them open on a log, using a rock to smash them. A girl who watered the neighbors’ gardens and got paid ten cents every week and took that ten cents to the movies, paid for her ticket and a Coca-Cola. The girl whose prized possession was a pair of roller skates that Seth Stanley stole one day and she never got back.

I loved that girl, even though she was long gone by the time I met her. I saw sparks of her from time to time, in the catfish and chicken livers you loved, the satisfaction you took in having us all gather in the family room for yet-another terrible movie Dad wanted us to watch, when you’d bring us bowls of popcorn and sigh a happy sigh, all of us together for one more moment in time.

I saw that girl when you got together with your sisters. They were your most prized relations, and oh, how your face creased into a wide smile right up to your eyes, and we’d all swap stories and play dominoes into the night.

We still play dominoes, Mom. I ate a dried apricot today and thought of you. I play solitaire and think of you. I have butter pecan ice cream in my freezer — your favorite became mine.

It’s fascinating to me, how many of my memories of you surround food. Maybe because making food for us was one of your main concerns, and you let me know you that way. You let me cook next to you when I was little. I’d dump the ketchup, the mustard, the pickle juice, the salt, the pepper, whatever you were using, into my own bowl and stir away. I’ve done the same with my kids and grandkids.

To this day I say cooking for others is my love language, and I suppose it is. I love working with my hands, hands that are so like your hands today. I garden because you gardened. I labor in the kitchen because you did. I care for my people and my causes — and my ancestors — because you did.

I wear your mother’s ring on a nylon string around my neck; I don’t know how you wore it for so long; the band is bent and battered from all the years of working with your hands, those hands that I loved so much.

One day when Lisa was little, she sat next to me on the couch and started playing with my hand, and I was thrown instantly back to the memory of doing the same with you. The moment brought tears to my eyes.

What is it they say about mothers and daughters? That they are destined to be at odds with each other? Then you hear about those who say they are each other’s best friends and you think, what happened to us? Or I used to think that way.

Today, these 22 years after your death and on the occasion of your 100th birthday, I think sometimes people love each other so much while struggling with the vagaries of life that are out of their control — or that they have inherited — that they have trouble expressing that love in a wholehearted way while laying down their defenses. Life has thrown them so many left curves and there is enough blame to go around, isn’t there?

I want to drop any blame — I dropped it long ago — and say thank you, Mom. Thank you for all of it. It means a lot to me that you hung in there, and so did I. I am grateful for your many sacrifices and for all the love you had to give. Today I understand the meaning of that love, and the burden of those sacrifices.

Go gently, Mom. I love you.

xoxoxo, Debbie

Writers Lab: Core Values

Good Friday afternoon, Lab Coats, and welcome to the last of our Foundational Elements for the Writers Lab! We’ll have a couple more weeks of our Storybelly Summer Project before wrapping it up and moving into some exciting — really! — fall writing.

Today’s post on Core Values is an essay open to all Storybelly subscribers. This week is informational — next week will be the Assignment. If you’d like to join the Writers Lab and own your very own Lab Coat (mixaphorically speaking) and write with a warm-hearted community of folks who have stories to tell, you can do that by clicking here.

And now — onward!

I love the scene in the movie Moonstruck where Loretta Castorini’s (Cher) mother Rose (Olivia Dukakis), who is married to a man she knows is having an affair, stands outside her NYC brownstone in the winter dark, with a man who has walked her home after meeting her for dinner. This is not their first encounter. He wants to come inside. No one is home. She tells him no. He wants to know why not. Her answer is six words of pure poetry: Because I know who I am.

She is calling on one of her core values as she makes this snap response. She knows this value to her bones. It’s deeper and more meaningful than the first part of her answer, which is practical: “No. I think the house is empty. I can’t invite you in because I’m married…

“… because I know who I am.”

Her values are so deeply ingrained she doesn’t need to explain them or even think about them. If you tried to dissect this scene with Rose the next morning, using the phrase “core values,” she would order you out of her kitchen.

But the writer, in this case John Patrick Shanley, would have been familiar with the term “core values,” and was certainly working with them as he characterized Rose for us. Moonstruck is a fabulous film to watch in order to see core values at work in all Shanley’s characters. He delivers these values through (among other things) his expert use of dialogue.

We’ll delve into dialogue (and film) more deeply this fall in the Writers Lab, and you’ll be prepped for it by having completed the Storybelly Summer Project.

For now, a refresher, as we get ready to tackle core values. This summer — which is soon over (unbelievable) — we have devoted time to figuring out what it is we DO on the page, what we write about, and WHY.

Earlier posts can be worked on in any order, any time:

Our Summer Project, Week 1
Your Mission
Your Mission, Part 2
What’s Your Vision?
What’s Your Vision, Part 2
The Manifesto: A Declaration for the Writing Life

Along the way this summer we’ve added in breathers and tools to help you think about your mission and vision:

20 Projects to Make a Poem
Sets of Three: A Simple Practice for Finding Your Voice

And so! 8 weeks of good stuff, eh? It’s also a way to get ready for Core Values—and for a fall of writing your heart out in the Writers Lab, now that you’ve got foundational work behind you. You have done good work. It will soon be time to move forward.

Whether you're choosing your next project or wondering if you should let one go, your mission, vision, and values become solid tools that can help you decide not just what to keep and what to let go, but how to shape each project.

I’ve shared my Storybelly Mission Statement and Vision Statement in previous Summer Project posts. Here are the Storybelly Core Values:

Empowerment

Community

Empathy

Education

Courage

Celebration

Each of these values has a one-sentence description of how it fits with and enhances the Storybelly mission and vision. I get so much guidance for Storybelly from this foundational work.

I’ll share more (including the descriptions) next week. In the meantime, be thinking about what your list of one-word personal or professional core values might look like. Use your notebook for ideas, thoughts, dreams. We’ll walk through it next week with lots of examples and good direction.

I will do this work with you. I don’t have personal core values in a written form yet for my writing — I’ve relied on my gut feelings and journaling over the years, and there’s nothing wrong with that, of course… but for this stretch of my writing life, I want something I can look at every day, to keep me focused on writing exactly what I want and need to be writing. So I’m going to be doing next week’s assignment right along with you.

The very act of writing reveals to us our core values. Perhaps those values shift as we grow, as we understand ourselves better, and as we think more critically about what we’ve internalized and inherited. So let’s assess, shall we?

At heart, core values are not aspirations, not goals, not even rules—they are fundamental truths you already live by. They shape how you write, what you choose to write about, the voice you write with, and how you navigate both rejection and praise.

Your values shape and define your characters. They give readers a lens through which to see your take on the geography of the human heart. They help heal us, comfort us, and shape our response to the world we live in. They are a kind of faith we live by.

The unexamined life
is not worth living.
— Socrates

So watch Moonstruck this week. I love this hymn to family in all its messy glory, in all its possibility, of being willing to forgive, to begin again, to laugh at life’s absurdities, and to hold close what we treasure.

Compare Moonstruck with another of your favorite films. Watch with intention. Comment below about what you’re watching, reading, listening to and discovering about the values inherent in how a writer/artist showcases a story, an essay, a poem, a character. How do they make you feel about your own core values as you write your way to a finish line, or tinker with a new idea?

And meanwhile, let me ask you: What is Rose Castorini’s core value at work in that scene from Moonstruck?

xo Debbie

Storybelly Digest: August 11, 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia

Hello, Everybody, and welcome to this week’s Storybelly Digest. The tl/dr is in the last sentence of this essay: “How are you staying grounded, even in the midst of struggles, or beyond those struggles… what says “peace” or “beauty” or “love” or “softness” or “gentleness” or “generosity” for you right now? “

This is the fifth summer I have struggled to write a book about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, and today is the eighth anniversary of that weekend in August when white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville with the goal of unifying their movement and protesting the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue from Market Street Park.

Three people died on Saturday, August 12 — Virginia State Police troopers Lieutenant H. Jay Cullen and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates, in a helicopter crash while monitoring events; and paralegal Heather Heyer, who was among the counter protesters who were mowed down by James Fields, who plowed his Dodge Challenger into them. Dozens were injured, many of them seriously.

This was the moment the nation was put on notice that white supremacy no longer works in the shadows. Those who espoused hate would now be out in the open, clawing with their ideology into the mainstream. I believe (like many others) that without Charlottesville in 2017, there would not have been a January 6, 2021.

The mainstream looked like the photo below on the evening of August 11, 2017 when, in a surprise and unpermitted action, hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis (all the neos), Klansmen, members of the alt-right and far-right militias, assembled in Nameless Field near the University of Virginia stadium, lighted torches, and marched to and across the UVA Lawn, around the Rotunda, and to the Thomas Jefferson statue in front of the Rotunda shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and Soil!” and “Whose streets? Our streets!”

They surrounded a clutch of hastily assembled, mostly-white UVA students who themselves were surrounding the Jefferson statue and shouting in counter-protest, “Black Lives Matter!” and “No Nazis! No KKK! No Facist USA!”

Scary doesn’t begin to cover it.

SOME WRITING BACKGROUND:

When I researched Countdown, which takes place in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the US, I researched Camp Springs, Maryland in the 1960s, as that’s where I lived during the missile crisis, and where I put my characters. I came across several photos like this one:

I didn’t include those photos in Countdown, as that wasn’t the focus of Book 1 of the Sixties Trilogy, but I did create a storyline for Jo Ellen, Franny’s older sister who is in her first year of college. I include photos of the emerging civil rights movement in Countdown scrapbooks as support/context material, and to bounce us into Book 2, Revolution.

Even though each of the trilogy novels are stand-alone stories, Jo Ellen will go South in 1964 as a Freedom Summer volunteer in Mississippi, so we meet her again in Revolution. And again she appears, in 1969, when my characters encounter Jo Ellen as a brand-new public defender in San Francisco, in Book 3 of the trilogy, Anthem. We are also going to meet Jo Ellen in Charlottesville.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Hate has always been with us. How does one write about hate for young adults who are on the cusp of their own decision making? I worried over this when researching and writing Kent State, and I have wrestled mightily with those same concerns as I write Charlottesville.

When I struggle like this — and today is one of those days — I gather primary source material to me and keep it close. Even when it is hard to read, reality is what I need in order to write historical fiction. These two books about the Unite the Right rally are my companions on this anniversary day as I write:

Cry Havoc, written by then-mayor Michael Signer, is rooted in the political and civic leadership of Charlottesville. It gives me a political perspective on how the city and its leaders navigated the complexities of race, free speech, and public safety during the rally… it’s also a treatise on how public officials can protect their communities from hate while upholding constitutional rights.

Standing Up to Hate presents a religious and spiritual response to the rally, written by the clergy who were involved in the interfaith efforts during and after the rally, offering insights into how faith leaders responded to the violence and the deep moral questions raised by it. It is excellent, full of heart and courage.

I need both perspectives in order to write authentically about the Unite the Right rally, and I need lots of personal stories, which I have been gathering — for years — from multiple sources: interviews, excerpts, newspaper articles, magazine features, archives both academic and cultural, visits to Charlottesville, and more.

Three more good books to start with, if you are ever interested in a deeper dive full of personal stories: 24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of the Stand Against White Supremacy by Nora Neus; Summer of Hate: Charlottesville, USA by Hawes Spencer; and Deborah Baker’s fine new book, Charlottesville: An American Story.

WE CHOOSE ACTS OF RESISTANCE

What I really want to talk about today, though, is acts of resistance. I’ve buried the lead. As usual. I’ll keep it brief (bwahahaha!) so I can get back to work—and because, honestly, this is enough tilting at windmills for one day. I already went on a wee rant, over at Instagram, about the planned return of a Confederate monument to Arlington Cemetery. You can read my thoughts there, in a highlight I’ve called “monument talk.”

I think I can see the home stretch with this book, thanks to a sustained push this year, far-enough past the pandemic and its vicissitudes. God, I hope so. Please let me be finished with this book. Not with the act of resistance it demands of me, no, but the book itself, because the story of that weekend and of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy that is behind it sometimes lays me low.

What do we do about the acts of hate we are steeped in around the world, and in our own orbits? I’ve appreciated so much the ideas I keep encountering, that every small act of kindness has a ripple effect. I agree.

Assembling in October 2022 in Washington, DC with Hannah, to protest the coming war with Iraq.

There are days when speaking out, posting a thought, or joining in the chorus of voices demanding urgent, visible, and necessary change feels like the best way to resist. And then, some days or stretches of them, you find yourself in a season of tending, as you quietly, carefully, with intention, anchor yourself in actions that feed hope. You become an expert in taking the long view, investing in the generations to come, which is also necessary.

WE KNOW WHAT TO DO:

Simple things, such as cutting a watermelon with friends, celebrating a summer birthday, finding a pond to fish in, a river to swim in, a garden to tend, a loved one to visit, corn to grill or an animal to befriend, a child to read to and gently see off to sleep, and rest for ourselves when it’s time to rest as well… whatever your rituals are that defy the hate, they are acts of resistance. Acts of creation. Acts that say “every human being — and this earth — is worthy of dignity and respect.”

I wrote an essay last summer that you can read at my Wordpress blog about “what stays and what goes” when trying to write historical fiction. It centers around Charlottesville. Here’s one more from last summer where I write: “I don’t know. I vacillate, with this current book, between knowing I am in way over my head, to the sure knowledge that I know exactly what I am doing.”

Do we ever know what we are doing? Of course we do. Uncle Edisto knew it, in Each Little Bird That Sings, when he told Comfort that life is lived in the opposites, that we can’t have up without down, yes without no, light without darkness. His advice: “Open your arms to life! Let it strut into your heart in all its messy glory!”

So, here in late summer, on this particular day, I’m going to remember some lightness from the days when I had all four of my kids at home, and how chaotic it was when they were 16, 14, 6, and 2. I have often called these “the glory days.” One kid in high school, one in middle school, one in elementary school, and one in diapers. It was great. Truly. I loved those glory days.

AND WHAT ABOUT YOU?

My two oldest children were born in the summer, school’s out for the summer, and summer meant going to Mississippi, it meant root beer floats on the last day of school, wading pools, and real pools (cement ponds) and a 30x30 garden full of tomatoes and peppers that began their lives sprouting from tiny seeds in paper cups on my kitchen windowsill bay window, packed together in cookie-sheet trays. Summer was barefoot in the grass and drinking from the hose and sitting on the porch at night watching the thunder clouds gather and growl, the lightning flash, and the day’s rain pour. Those were the days. And of course, there are rituals I tend to these days as well:

What rituals are you tending to this summer? What hate are you resisting? What are your acts of creation, activism, resistance? What rhythms are you inhaling this summer to keep you solid and centered and grounded?

Can you share them with me? I am trying my best to stay in that grounded place while writing about a decidedly ungrounded time. How are you staying grounded, even in the midst of struggles, or beyond those struggles… what says “peace” or “beauty” or “love” or “softness” or “gentleness” or “generosity” for you right now?

xoxo Debbie

Writers Lab: Sets of Three

Welcome to the Writers Lab! The Lab is the only paid portion of Storybelly, which all subscribers can read until we get to THE ASSIGNMENT. If you have a story you’re itching to write, we’ve got you, in the Lab. We’re a warm-hearted community of messy writers. Feel free to subscribe, or read along for some weird-but-wonderful enlightenment to happen along your writing path (ha!), and come back anytime.

On Sundays/Mondays I publish the Storybelly Digest for all subscribers to read, see yourselves in (or not), and comment on — this is where the conversation begins. On Thursdays/Fridays I try to have the paid-tier Lab post out — and here we are.

{We return to Mission and Vision Statements and Core Values next week, so you’ll have all that material ready to go this fall, for our Writers Lab fall semester. I want to ensure we don’t fall into fatigue with this summer project, so let’s do a writing exercise this week.}

Onward!

History: Yours.

This week we’re turning our attention to personal narrative, to writing directly from our lives.

I write a lot about moments, memories, and meaning in this space (most recently, here), and that’s what I teach in workshop. Our lives unfold, moment after moment. We remember some of those moments, and we assign meaning to them. That’s the shape of a life.

When we write about those moments, we call on our senses, and we write about what we know, what we feel, and what we can imagine. That’s the shape of a story. I write about this in my “About” as well, which you may have seen.

As we write, we pay attention, ask questions, and make connections.

These three sets of threes stack together in an infinite set of possibilities that make up every story I write, and every story you write or tell as well: Fiction, non-fiction, memoir, poetry, prose, on and on.

We are storytellers. Every one of us. I always say in workshop, we *are* stories, because we are, every one of us. .

These sets of three supply a rhythm — one I’ve come to trust — in both my writing and my teaching. I fashioned them from experience and observation over many years of studying how we structure our narratives — spoken or written — and how to write or tell our stories in ways that feel true to us and also make space for others to connect.

This week I’ll share these sets of three with you in a particular way — not just as something I teach, but as a way to ease into a story or poem from your own life, and how to find your authentic voice.

This is a chance to:

Write something new.

Or return to something you’ve already written and see it freshly through this lens of threes.

THE ASSIGNMENT:

Read more

Storybelly Digest: Sunday Drive

Good Monday evening! (It was morning, lol.)This newsletter, the Storybelly Digest, is always free each week, for every subscriber. Thank you for hanging out with me in this space. It’s August and it’s 63 degrees this Monday morning — incredible. How was your weekend? Here’s an essay that started yesterday as a letter to a friend and that I turned into an essay for the ‘belly. What were or are your Sunday rituals?

Sunday, August 3, 2025

We are having a full day of steady rain here in Atlanta. Daytime temperatures have dropped from the mid-90s, where they have strafed us for weeks upon weeks, into the 70s… what a gift. Time stretches out and moves slowly in a completely different rhythm, as I stand at my kitchen window and watch the rain. I am reminded of the completely different rhythms of my childhood Sundays in the sixties, in Camp Springs, Maryland — Countdown territory. Sixties trilogy territory.

There was some sort of cinnamon roll breakfast from a can, which I learned to bake early-on. I popped open the can, arranged the rolls on a foil-lined cookie sheet, undercooked them by two minutes, let them cool just enough but not too much, while I pried the metal top from the icing container and then slathered the warm buns with goo.

Sunday School happened at the same time as church at Bell’s Methodist. If we happened to go to church service with our parents for some reason, my dad sat next to me and sang softly off-key on purpose, trying to get me to laugh. Which I did. At home we ate sandwiches — egg salad often — and potato chips for lunch. I sprawled on the living room floor on my belly and read the full-color, multi-pages comics section from the Sunday Washington Post, lost in my favorite stories and the feeling that all was steady, easy, and right in my world.

I often played in the neighborhood with other kids who were set free to wander and roam in one another’s back yards or ride bikes down the woods path to the gravel pit, which none of us told our parents about. Sometimes a dad or two joined us to play ball in the empty back lot behind our house, a lot that all the neighbors together had cleared, then turned into a sandlot for pickup games.

Sometimes I’d find my dad in his “office” downstairs, cutting and splicing reel-to-reel film for his home movies. My mother started supper or sewed or mended something for one of us to wear, or… what did she do? I didn’t know what she did. Maybe she appreciated the quiet. The television was never on during the day on Sundays, unless it was football season — then I knew where both my parents were. And Mom was making snacks!

the most exciting car in the world today!

In the later part of the afternoon, my dad wanted to “go for a ride.” That was the phrase he’d use: “Let’s go for a ride.” We’d pile into the car — my parents, my brother and my sister. Sometimes even the dog. We had a Chrysler back then, a DeSoto — those fins! But the family car I remember most was from a little later in the sixties. It was a green 1968 Chrysler Imperial, a boat of a car and the reason I can parallel park anything today.

Dad loved to drive, and America was car crazy. It was the era of chrome-for-days, tailfins and hood ornaments, V8 gas guzzlers with wide front bench seats and a brand-new-thing —air conditioning — white-wall tires, cigarette lighters and ashtrays, and trunks so spacious you could fit a week’s worth of groceries and a picnic table in them.

Dad’s Chrysler Imperial was nearly 19 feet long. It had the turning radius of a barge, the gas mileage of a jet engine, and — according to the brochures Dad had studied before he bought the car — it oozed style. You didn’t just drive a ’68 Imperial... you arrived in it.

Gas was 30 cents a gallon. A Texaco man wearing a starred shirt pumped the gas for us and cleaned our windshield while we waited. Mom kept road maps in the glove compartment, neatly folded (the only human of my acquaintance able to refold an accordioned road map neatly after it had been fanned out). There were no seatbelts in the back seats, and maybe there weren’t seat belts in the front… I don’t remember wearing one when I took my driving test in that car.

There was something wonderfully cinematic (and absurd) about piling into that land yacht with the scent of gasoline and Aqua Net hanging in the air, everyone sweating in the summer heat until the a/c kicked in, but oh — the style!

After meandering along two-lane roads and motoring once again along the four-mile finished stretch of a harbinger of things to come – the brand-new interstate highway – we arrived at one of the many new neighborhoods under construction around us. They all sported model homes for us to go through. And go through them we did.

Housing the families of the Greatest Generation was a huge undertaking after WWII, and my dad, a war veteran and now an Air Force pilot, was eager to leave the past and adopt all things modern, from ice crushers to rocket ships. If it was new, he wanted to be part of it. And the suburbs, where we lived and owned a home, wasn’t just a geographical place; it was a post-WWII promise.

Franny’s house in Countdown, and my house in real life, on the corner of Coolridge and Allentown Roads in Camp Springs in probably 1962. This house was being built when we moved to DC from Hawaii. It was in an old neighborhood, and not one with model homes and tract houses, maybe that’s one reason Dad was so fascinated with the new subdivisions. As I tell kids when I show them this photo, the side angle of the photo makes it look huge. It wasn’t. :>

Mom and Dad were children of the Depression. I have to imagine that watching America move from cities (or, in their case, the poor and rural South) into a newly created place to live — the suburbs — was exciting stuff. We trooped through all those model homes in all those new subdivisions with the same zeal that Dad thumbed through the Sears and Roebuck catalog, like a liturgy, like students in a master class: Look how they modeled that kitchen! A breakfast nook! Those built-ins! Ooo… Frigidaire, Maytag, Formica. Mirror tiles covering a wall! We can do that!

Mom and Dad were so young, so much younger than I am now. I couldn’t appreciate that then, of course. Today I feel like they were learning to be homeowners, learning to be parents, learning to grow up and grow older in a whole new world. And we kids were learning how to be their children.

Time spooled out on Sundays, full and rich inside a whole lot of nuthin’, which was, of course, everything: ice cream cones on the way home; the way the turn signal click-click-clicked as we neared the turn-in to our neighborhood and the way Amy, our dog, perked up with excitement, tail wagging, because she knew we were home; supper ready to eat, whatever that supper was; baths, pajamas, Walt Disney’s Tinkerbell and the Wonderful World of Color, books, bed… it all felt like a gift and I knew it at eleven years old, even if I couldn’t articulate it that way. It was solid, steady, stable, known… and privileged, though I didn’t know that then.

I tried to recreate that feeling with my own family, once I had one, while I was learning to be a parent and my kids were learning to be my children. We went through a stretch where we made bacon and waffles on Sunday nights. Then Xena, Warrior Princess. The X Files. Books, bed… a gift.

Tonight I made bacon and waffles again, for me and for Jim. We watched something together on television, we disappeared into our various pursuits. I started the elderberry syrup with the fruit I’d harvested from our trees. I opened my mother’s Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook to the “Oh Boy Waffles” recipe and I thought of her. Her own recipes, written on the backs of envelopes and scraps of papers, spilled from the covers.

I served the waffles with good butter and real maple syrup. All day I felt the presence of those long-ago Sundays, both with my own kids and when I was a kid. My life is so good. I don’t long for those days, but I think it’s okay to miss them now and then, on a rainy Sunday when the oppressive summer heat finally breaks, the earth cools, and my mind casts itself back to the days when a car idling in the driveway on a Sunday afternoon meant one more loop through the neighborhoods that made me, and gave me something to write about.

Writers Lab: The Manifesto

Happy Friday! We have several new Lab Coats this week, welcome, welcome to the Writers Lab! Be sure to introduce yourselves here, so we can welcome you officially. You can choose whatever lab coat pleases you, one size fits all, be as artistic as you like (mine is tie-dyed), roll up your sleeves, and let’s dig in. We have a great Assignment this week. Thanks for joining us!

Also a note to Founding Members (O Pioneers!): we are wrapping up the summer critiques and consultations this month. If you are wanting to sneak onto the schedule for some one-on-one work with me and your own writing, please reach out to our OpsGuru Zach at ops@deborahwiles.com.

I took this photo in 2008 on a research trip for Countdown. I’m at Camp Springs Elementary School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where I went to school. It was a senior center in 2008, but same blue curtains and stage as when I was a kid there in the Sixties. I walked behind the curtains to see if the bookshelves and books were still there. I knew they wouldn’t be, but I wanted to see that space again.

When I was a kid reading through the library stacks at Camp Springs Elementary School (like Franny in Countdown), stacks that were on bookshelves that lined the stage, the stage that was in the cafeteria, behind heavy blue curtains, the stacks that held books that had those card-stock sleeves pasted to the inside back cover, with a lined card in the sleeve that you’d slip out and sign your name to (and see who had signed it before you), and then get the card stamped by — who? the librarian? I don’t remember a librarian, I think it was our teacher who came with us to the library at the back of the stage — anyway, stamped the card with the date that you needed to bring the book back by… what a long sentence. I will begin again.

When I was a kid, I didn’t realize that human beings wrote books. I didn’t think at all about how stories came to be written, and I didn’t much care who wrote the stories I read, as long as the stories were there, somewhere, in the school library, or in the base library at Andrews AFB in Maryland/DC… I was after Story. I wanted to be transported.

There came a time when I did look for a particular author, who turned out not to be an author at all, or even a real person: Carolyn Keene. “She” wrote the Nancy Drew books I began collecting. I had no idea that there were multiple authors of Nancy Drew mysteries… and if I had known this, I doubt I would have cared. I was still after Story. (Now that I think about it, Nancy Drew books were a marvel of branding, eh? One author, a specific/same look to each book, affordable and easy to spot, reliable formula for young readers, etc etc.)

It didn’t occur to me that I could be a writer. In those early sixties years, in my mostly white, middle-class neighborhood, I saw women who were mothers, teachers, nurses, and that was about the extent of it, until I took nine years of French and my mother said, “Maybe you’ll be an interpreter at the UN!” (So, of course, Franny thinks she may be an interpreter at the UN as well.)

At some point I did understand that humans wrote books, that many women were writers and authors, but I was well grown before that knowledge sunk in in such a way that I connected with it, even though I wrote like crazy in school, starting with reports (because I liked them!) and then stories for my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Adler, who was the first teacher to insist we write something creative every week.

Camp Springs, Maryland, left to right: me, my sister Cathy, and my next-door neighbor, Gale. I’m wearing Franny’s Buster Brown shoes and her headband. Got my hair in a ponytail like Ruby Lavender. And I’m wearing Comfort’s orange shorts.

I was not popular in school. I was plain and awkward and uncoordinated (probably like everyone else, but who knew that, then). But the first thing I wrote in Mr. Adler’s class got a huge, genuine laugh when I read it out loud, and from that moment, I was hooked on wanting to repeat this phenomenon.

Still, I would be in my twenties before I realized that the newsletter I wrote for the construction company where I worked, and the letters I had spent so many years writing to friends by hand, and the recipe cards I filled out with little stories about that cake or these biscuits and stacked carefully in a wooden box, and all those books I read in all those stacks for all those years, were preparing me for real work that I loved.

I wanted to write. And I knew, to my bones, that this awkward and uncoordinated kid who was all heart as well as an expert over-thinker, felt more suited temperamentally to a writing life than any other endeavor she thought about pursuing, even “interpreter at the UN.”

The Moment

I remember the day this realization came home to me. I remember where I was sitting, I remember getting out the pad of paper and a pen and putting my name and the date at the top of the page: Debbie. 1-25-79.

I was 25 years old. I wrote a manifesto. I had no idea that’s what it was. I just wanted to DO something with this feeling I had so suddenly: I knew what my work was. And, as totally vague as it was in that moment, I needed to capture the wave of realization that was being born in me, revealed to me, right then and there — an epiphany! (I have made myself laugh, but you know what I mean — YES?)

The Manifesto

Who here has not had an epiphany about something, anything, major or minor, many epiphanies. It’s how we grow. (Well, it’s one way.)

I still have this piece of paper. I stapled it to one of those tabbed notebook dividers for a three-ring binder… I must have put it in a binder then, but I don’t remember that. I just remember sitting on the stairs in the first house I ever owned, a townhouse, after years as a single parent who moved often, in order to stay ahead of the landlord. I was newly married (again) at 24 with two small children who were upstairs sleeping, as was my new husband of nine months, and I was sitting on the stairs, writing this epiphany, my notebook in my lap.

I’m going to share my manifesto with you. You’ll see all the hubris of a 25-year-old who suddenly wants to set the world on fire because she just “knows.” lol.

I’ll put it in THE ASSIGNMENT this week, both because it’s intimate and I’m wondering if I might feel sheepish to have it publicly out there (but oh how young I was!) and because — mostly because — I’m going to ask you to write your Manifesto this week.

A Manifesto is a kind of Vision Statement. I’d like you to write it before we get to Core Values next week, as the manifesto will reveal those core values as well. We’re doing the foundational work here that we’ll pull on for all future assignments, and by summer’s end, we’ll be raring to go with lots of exciting writing to explore.

Something I marvel at, as I read this 45-year-old, handwritten manifesto is: I wrote about what I still believe in my heart of hearts is why I write today. Writing the manifesto has held me steady through so much thick and thin, even when I didn’t look at it for years and years — even when I thought I’d lost it. Recovering it gave me a start: a Wow! At heart, I still believe these things. I am just (I hope) more mature today, more tempered, more realistic… about some things.

But the heart of who I am as a writer and why I write is held in my manifesto.

I know it will be in yours as well. So let’s get to it. I have some directions for you below in THE ASSIGNMENT.

If you’re reading this and want to join us in the Writers Lab this summer, you can join here, for a month or more, your choice… we are a friendly and supportive bunch of Lab Coats who work alone or together, share or don’t share, and who appreciate a good cake recipe. (Someone is behind in the cake making, but I will remedy that soon — it’s just so hot right now.)

Links for you, if you’re just joining us: This post is part of the Storybelly Summer Project 2025 in the Writers Lab. We’ve been working for two weeks now on vision statements in the Storybelly Writers Lab, and for the two weeks before that on mission statements… you can find all of these posts here. If you want to join the lab, you can work at your own pace (we all do) and in any order; drop in anytime.

THE ASSIGNMENT:

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The Things We Carry

Happy new week, Storybellers, welcome to the last week in July, “the middle of the middle” of heat season, here in the Deep South. Thank you for being here. I’ve got my cardboard church fan and my tall glass of sweet tea next to me, ready to share with you a summer story. Here we go.

This is not the house I knew in Mississippi, not the house where my dad grew up and where my Aurora County stories take place. That house is further up the road, but we still drove by this house where my dad was born, on every trip we made to Louin.

This is the house in Louin, Mississippi, where my dad was born at home in 1924. He is the reason the Aurora County books exist — Love, Ruby Lavender; Each Little Bird That Sings; The Aurora County All-Stars; and A Long Line of Cakes.

He is the reason my first book, Freedom Summer, exists. And, of course, he is the reason I exist. We had a complicated relationship, and that’s putting it mildly; as Chick (Tess Harper) says to Lennie (Diane Keaton) in “Crimes of the Heart“ — That is putting it mildly, Lenny honey. That is putting it mighty mild. lol. (YT, at 1:31, makes me laugh every time.)

The poem I wrote in the Open Write with EthicalELA and linked to in last week’s Storybelly Digest is still on my mind this week. It’s tempting to spiral to the wreckage of those traumatic years, but after reading the 2019 blog entry I was going to post here today, about the genesis of Love, Ruby Lavender, I am thinking about another legacy my dad left me, which was our common love for Louin, Mississippi, which becomes Halleluiah, Mississippi in my Aurora County books.

The actual sign we passed on the backroads from Jackson to Louin. I borrowed it for the Halleluia sign on the map in Love, Ruby Lavender.

Dad grew up in Louin, left it for the Marines, and then for a 30 year career in the Air Force. All my growing up years, he took his family home to Mississippi every summer, except for the three years we lived in Hawaii, when he brought my grandmother to us, the year my sister was born.

Dad and Mom retired and lived in Jackson, seat of the Mississippi state capitol, for 30 years, so every summer that I toted my kids to Mississippi, in the same way he had carried his kids to Mississippi, Dad and I carved out one day to make the hour’s drive south, into the piney woods, to Louin. “When?” Dad would ask at the breakfast table, the morning after our arrival. Everyone else came up with something else to do (lol), so it was almost always just the two of us.

Louin was a ghost town by the time we started our yearly jaunts — no one we had known or that he had grown up with was still living (or living there). The town that had bustled in the 1930s, when folks drove teams of oxen to town and did their weekly shopping, was a decaying, forgotten place in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

But we didn’t let that stop us. We drove to all the old haunts, including the Bayless in nearby Bay Springs, where we ordered the Blue Plate Special and the “world famous coconut cream pie” (A national magazine had decreed it!).

We’d visit the cemetery — once again — to find all the players from Dad’s life and mine, all the best beloveds from decades ago. I remember thinking about how my great-grandmother, Nannie, whom I knew well and loved so much, had been born during Reconstruction. I’d once again wish I had been old enough or aware enough to ask her All The Questions.

My grandmother -- my dad’s mother and the “real” and beloved Miss Eula — had divorced an abusive husband and moved home to Louin with three small children — an unheard-of occurrence in the 1920s. My dad was four years old at the time. It was an event that influenced so many of his choices in his adult life.

Our trips to Louin were steeped in silence. Dad had had a stroke at age 54 and now lived with aphasia, so his vocabulary was limited. He was paralyzed on his right side, but he could walk with a brace and drive with a tricked-out car.

Driving had been a love of his life. I was content to ride in his Cadillac (he traded it in for a new one every three years) and spend time with this altered man who had altered the course of my life and our family in such a devastating, destructive way.

So I sat next to Dad in the silence, the car’s air conditioner running against the stifling Mississippi heat outside, the tires eating up the miles beneath us on Route 80 backroads through Brandon, Puckett, White Oak, Raleigh, Bay Springs. We picked up Highway 15 then and drove the 7 more miles, around what my grandmother always called “the longest S-curve in the world,” to Louin.

The first stop was always the house. Dad parked the car in the pebbled dirt driveway and faced my grandmother’s empty, dilapidated house. What was he thinking as we sat there? I tried to imagine him as the kid of a thousand stories told about him. The kid who jumped off the barn roof holding an umbrella, to see if he could fly.

His name was Tom. They called him “Ikey” when he was small, but he could no longer remember why. Our trips to Louin started after the stroke. They were possible because of the stroke. Those trips, in an unexpected way, brought us together in time.

I have hauled my cousin Carol to Louin, my husband Jim, and a kid or two or three over the years. Once, my Aunt Beth, Dad’s baby sister who was the keeper of family stories, traveled with us to Louin, but these days going to Louin is a trip I make on my own, as Dad died in 2003, twenty-five years after his stroke.

Louin, however, in all of its faded glory, lives on as Halleluia in the lives of Ruby, Melba Jane, and Miss Eula; House and Cleebo, Honey and her dog Eudora Welty, Finesse and her Uncle Pip; Emma Lane Cake and her five brothers, four dogs, and family bakery; Miss Mattie, Uncle Tater and Aunt Tot, sweet Dove and her anthropology equipment, and all the characters (including the chickens!) who inhabit my heart and people my imagination still today.

There was a time, after Dad’s retirement, that he wanted to be a writer. He was such an avid reader and history buff. The novel he started was about Lincoln and the Civil War in the West. He was writing it when he had his stroke.

A year into his recovery, still not able to read or write, he gave me the manuscript, which had been typed by my mother on onion skin paper, as Dad finished each handwritten chapter. A giant metal clip at the top kept the typed pages together. Dad held up the index finger of his left hand and said, slowly and carefully, “One. Year.”

He could no longer remember how the book was supposed to end. He wanted me to finish it. In one year. It was 1978. I wanted to be a writer, but I had written nothing for publication yet. I was touched and terrified.

I was 25 years old and unschooled, newly married (again) with two small children, lived a thousand miles away from Mississippi, and worked full time at a construction company in Washington, DC.

I still have those thin pages but I have never finished the book. It’s not my story. But… thanks to my dad… I do have stories to write. And that is my inheritance.

For all the destruction and chaos my father brought to my life, he also did good things, of course, and of course I loved him with fierce abandon. Isn’t that the way it is with children?

I think a lot about what he gave me. Does it outweigh what he took from me? I don’t think that’s the right question to ask. I consider the vicissitudes of life. I think about those opposites — the messy glory — that Uncle Edisto, in Each Little Bird That Sings, tells Comfort she can’t live without, and the way Miss Mattie tells Ruby “we’ve all dampened a pillow” in our lives.

I have created, in each of my novels, families that love one another, listen to one another, champion one another, show up for one another. Messy, wacky families in small Southern towns with sometimes stubborn hearts, with dire disagreements or misunderstandings, but always, ultimately, families that provide safe landings, because that’s what I needed most when I was most vulnerable.

I give those safe landings to myself now. I write about children who experience loss and love, who learn to trust that they can hold both truths at once. My stories are about belonging. They are about finding and defining home.

My fondest wish is for a safe harbor for every child. I know that books change hearts and lives. I know it because I am a kid who fell into books in order to save her own life. Now I try to return the favor. The world is so unpredictable. Humans are so fallible. The opposites in life and on earth have never been more volatile. I am humbled by the challenges, and I am grateful for good work to do.

Dad

xoxo Debbie

Writers Lab: 20 Projects to Make a Poem

Riffing off of Monday’s Storybelly Digest, I want us to take a break from the hot summertime, big-picture, thinking-thinking-thinking work of writing a Mission Statement, Vision Statement, and Core Values. Let’s take a breather from that focused, foundational work and let’s have some fun… some nonsensical and yet oh-so-sensical, fizzy-even, fun.

An exercise my mentor Nancy Johnson gave us years ago was to take a poem by poet Jim Simmerman (1952-2006) as inspiration and write what she called “20 Projects to Make a Poem” or, as Simmerman named the exercise, “20 Little Poetry Projects.”

I did this exercise in 1996 and turned it into Love, Ruby Lavender, my first novel, which was published in 2001. I submitted it — in its 20 projects form (sans numbered lines) — as a picturebook manuscript that intrigued Liz Van Doren at Harcourt Brace. She called me (after my ten years of rejections, everywhere I sent my stories) and said, “I really like it; are you willing to work on it?”

cover art by Marla Frazee

Was I willing? I want to write “You bet your a** I was!” but I have too much class for that. Not. I was willing, and Liz was willing, and — over time — that poem got longer and longer, fizzier and fizzier, until it turned into a novel — that’s a story for another day, but I will say that this novel is beloved (I can say that, yes?) and has sold almost a half million copies in its 24 years in print. Who knows where a fizzy little poem may take you?

For now, Lab Coats, let’s get to writing 20 projects poems!

If you’re reading this as a free subscriber (welcome, welcome, glad to have you!) and if you want to write with us this summer as well, you can sign up for the Lab here, for a month, or a year, whatever suits you, and drop in anytime.

Onward:

Your poem will be in 20 lines, with directions I’m going to give you for each line. When you’re finished, you’re going to have something fabulous, and you’ll have it without too much thinking-thinking-thinking.

That’s the beauty of a 20 projects poem. Let it flow and put down whatever comes to you, within the parameters you’re given. You may love it so much you do two of these or three — and I am hoping you’ll share them with us.

Here are the “rules,” along with Jim Simmerman’s 20 projects poem: “Moon Go Away, I Don’t Love You No More,” and then my 20 projects poem that turned into Love, Ruby Lavender, originally titled “We All Be Jovie, and That’s the Truth!”

THE ASSIGNMENT:

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The Eagle Has Landed

Long ago, long before I was a published author (or a published anything), I took a poetry class with Washington, DC poet Nancy Johnson, who was moonlighting at Frederick Community College (good ol’ FCC) in Frederick, Maryland.

I had been in Nancy’s fiction writing class the semester before, thanks to a friend who knew how much I wanted to write fiction, and now, here I was, in this poetry class feeling out of place with all these “real poets” who had vied for a place in Nancy’s class.

I’m not sure how I made the cut. Maybe it was because I had been in the fiction class and got some sort of first dibs before the poetry class was announced, I don’t remember.

I listened to these poets read their work in workshop each week. I narrowed my eyes and twisted my mind, trying to figure out what-the-heck some of them were trying to say, and I always missed the point, until one week Nancy announced that we had played around enough with free verse, we would now work with verse forms.

And that is when the world of writing poetry — and fiction!… well, writing anything, really — opened up for me.

To have a form — who knew how freeing it could be? I embraced this amazement and met each week’s challenge — a terza rima, a villanelle, a pantoum, etc., forms I had never heard of — with great enthusiasm.

I made messes. I revised. I made more messes. I was in love with words in a way I had never been before (and that’s saying something). Who knew I could say so much in so few words?

Here are three triolets I wrote in Nancy’s class, in 1996, paired with some stills from my Sixties trilogy books, which were published 15-25 years later:

Lost Youth:

I was an early Sixties child
Rock candy and Fizzies, not flowers.
White rubber bathing caps, Velveeta mild,
I was an early Sixties child
Before the black granite war beguiled
I pedaled a Schwinn and danced in May showers
I was an early Sixties child,
rock candy and Fizzies, not flowers.

Military Service:

The time of uniforms did me in, carried
me into the wild blue yonder.
Hers was a housedress for she was married.
The time of uniforms did me in, carried
my life to the edge of the end, varied
epaulets of shame, leaving me to ponder
the time of uniforms. Did me in. Carried
me into the wild blue yonder.

Bomb Shelter

Single file into the hallway and crouch:
lock your fingers together behind your neck.
It’s the perfect position for a deathbed slouch
Single file into the hallway and crouch
or run out of time and your desk is a car-pouch
for your body to vaporize in, an atomic highway wreck.
Single file into the hallway and crouch:"
lock your fingers together behind your neck.

They aren’t GOOD poems; they are first attempts. But I felt no longer at-sea as I wrote them. A verse form to work with made the poem accessible to me. Forms gave me direction. They required that I choose, and choose carefully.

I focused on my childhood, on the Sixties, so I had a geography to mine. These poems, and so many others I wrote in that semester, became the seeds that grew into my published work.

Freedom Summer, my first published book, is a prose poem. Love, Ruby Lavender is sprinkled with poems I wrote for Ruby and her grandmother. Kent State has been called a narrative poem, or a novel in verse. I am not sure what it is, but I do know that Kent State, published in 2020, was possible for me to write — and to choose the form I made up for it — because of the class I took with Nancy Johnson in 1996.

lots of poetry laced through all these books… One Wide Sky is written in rhymed couplets. Simple Thanks is a poem. And on it goes…

Nancy fervently believed that you needed to learn the rules before you could break them — something I tell my students all the time now. I don’t talk about her as much as I should, but co-hosting the Open Write at EthicalELA yesterday brought Nancy back to me in a real-world way, as I read the dozens of poems that were offered up yesterday in the “What I Knew” prompt for Open Write.

The inspiration for yesterday’s Open Write was Nancy herself. The exercise she gave us in 1996, “Exercise 16,” is the one I gave my Storybelly Writers Lab colleagues earlier this year, and it’s the one we used yesterday for Open Write.

Reading all those courageous, gorgeous poems yesterday, as they flowed into the Open Write, educators exercising their creativity and encouraging one another so beautifully and generously, inspired me to try the exercise again, myself. What I came up with floored me. So did the response — we were all responding to everyone’s poems — something I hope we do here in the Writers Lab more freely, as we grow — and the entire experience was heady.

Two more things, and I’ll quit for today. Yesterday was also the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, when America first put a human (and the first human) on the moon. It’s a miraculous event I build up to in the Sixties trilogy. Even though it isn’t in the narrative, it’s in the scrapbook materials in all three books:

… because I loved the very idea of rockets and space and America’s space program. Because I watched with my family as Neil Armstrong said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” I created a character in Countdown, Drew, who is nine years old in 1962 and is convinced he will become an astronaut.

Oh, it was an intoxicating time. The entire Sixties felt like one amazement after another. No wonder I decided to focus on that time period with my writing. I lived it then; I’m figuring it out, now. :>

In 1969, the Eagle had landed. I felt that same infectious energy when I took Nancy Johnson’s class 30 years later… something magical was happening then, too… everyday miracles — epiphanies, maybe — do happen, and without Nancy Johnson, I don’t know if I would have found my way into writing historical fiction and certainly not poetry. Maybe it’s a case of “when the student is ready the teacher appears.”

Whatever it was… it was real. And Nancy was the realist of the real. Hilarious, generous, encouraging, smart, and at a time when “such things were not admitted to aloud,” even told us all, oh-so-casually — as we sat around the workshop table captured by her every word — about her penchant for halving a leftover vicodin when life was just too stressful, arranging herself comfortably on the couch for the afternoon, and… enjoying it. lol. Said with her trademark conspiratorial smile.

Nancy died of ovarian cancer in 2012 and I miss her. But (of course) she is still with me. I am linking to her effervescent (yes) obituary here, in honor of her time on this planet and all the good work she did for so many. She published a chapbook while I was her student, called Zoo & Cathedral (her Northwest DC home was situated between the National Cathedral and the National Zoo). We her students went to what felt like countless readings when the book came out, partly because it won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize that year.

The book is mentioned in the obit, but what I love even more in that obit is the sure sense of a true poet’s heart and spirit, and you get that right out the gate:

Nancy Johnson, one of the smartest, strongest, most beautiful women in the world (why mince words?), died on January 21 from ovarian cancer. She was 63, but anyone who saw her could not believe it.

LOL! I’m quite sure Nancy’s husband, Arthur, wrote the obit… it still gives me great pleasure to read about how “Nancy was stylish, feisty, independent, competitive, fun, joyous, angry, classy, combative, and complicated.”

Amen. She was one of a kind, as we all are, even if we don’t realize it. Nancy did. And because she knew this, she taught more than “mere” poetry. She taught me how to see a story within a poem and how to make a poem into a story. She taught me that my meager efforts were worth it. She taught me the importance of being a mentor to others. And she taught me what it means to live — and write — with abandon.

xoxo Debbie