Deborah Wiles's Blog, page 4

Writers Lab: What's Your Vision (Part 2)

My Aunt Mitt used to sit on her front porch swing in Mississippi and fan herself with a church fan while saying — about the relentlessness of dog days — “It’s hot enough to make me lose my religion.” (And decades before R.E.M. Ha.)

Heat accumulates. By mid-July the earth is hot, the air is hot, the trees are hot, you are hot, I am hot… at least that’s the case here in the American Deep South. But let’s write anyway. It’s perfect weather for foundation work. Come on, you can do it! You know you want to.

Here in mid-July, mid-summer, mid-heatwave, mid-everything, let’s take a step back for a moment and look at where we are with the Storybelly Writers Lab Summer Project.

How’d it go last week, thinking about your Writer’s Vision? What did you write? Let’s share. I shared what I’d call “a version of my vision” (ha) last week, and I will continue to tweak it.

We’re kickin’ it back a little because it’s summer, and because I love and value foundations, and because I know to my bones that writing foundations (my perennial “what’s the point?”) are tools that can help beginning and seasoned writers alike in their writing pursuits.

Knowing your foundations and your overall, big-picture POINT to what you do, helps to take some of the mental load off your poor psyche, a writer’s psyche that works hard, thinking-thinking-thinking to exhaustion, eh? Sometimes. There is so much to juggle.

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." — David McCullough

Let’s make it a little easier on the knob, on the heart, on the spirit. You will be surprised at how often you refer to your foundational documents — post them where you can see them, and tweak them as needed. You’ll be surprised at how often they help you.

You already have them, whether you have ever written them down or not; they lurk in the shadows of the heart or the subconscious, your reasons for writing, your manifesto, if you will… your passions, your hopes and dreams and fears, your WHY.

Even if you *have* written them before (even last week), this is a good opportunity to revisit these foundations. They will stand you in good stead, going forward. I hazard that it’s hard to really GO forward without knowing why. Too much flailing ensues, at least for this writer. And I have little time for flailing without knowing why, at this point.

So, until this insane heat breaks, and before fall gets going in earnest, I would love for all Lab Coats — you Sweethearts of the Storybelly Lab — to have these materials on hand, materials that you have created yourself, for yourself, and for your writing days ahead (and these are materials we are happy to have a hand in helping you think-through and be happy with!):

a mission statement

a vision statement

core values

goals to support the first three on this list

Or not. hahahaha. omg it’s hot. (I once did an assignment, when I was a student in a writing workshop, all about how hot it was in my Mississippi childhood summers, and that assignment eventually turned into Love, Ruby Lavender — another story for another day). In deference to the heat — instead of pushing it away — I offer this idea:

If you are a Lab Coat and want nothing more (and this is everything) than to THINK about these things, or NOT think about these things, and to just do your own thing, to think as little as possible; if you are happy in your support of the efforts of the Writers Lab, we appreciate that — so much! — and that’s perfectly fine. Do that. You may ignore me. :>

On the other hand, maybe you’re here to dig in! Here is Angela Davis exhorting you to think about why we write:

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”

And how are we to do that without a vision of how we might have or lend a hand in the creation of that radically transformed world?

If you want to dig into your WHY and HOW this summer, and work together in that way (its own form of creativity, possibly using a bit more left brain), the Lab is a terrific place to do this good work — it is never wasted work — because knowing your personal why and how will help with focus, choice of project, and sticking with that project when it’s hard (I am talking to myself here, see: Charlottesville 2017 and the Unite the Right Rally, which is my current so-hard “what was I thinking?” work in progress). It will help when the work feels unfocused, or when you can’t see your way forward.

It will also help to refine and define and clarify work you’ve already written, not to mention the work to come. So enough said about that.

Also a quick note to O Pioneers! — founding members — you should have received a letter from ops-guru Zach by now, asking if you’re ready to set up your critiques/consults this summer. If you haven’t, please let me know in comments or DM. Some of you are scheduled already — you know who you are.

Onward. We’re going to look at Vision a bit more during this hot, rainless week, and Eloise Greenfield is going to help us. Last week’s Vision post (Part 1) is here, and you can find all Storybelly Writers Lab Summer Project posts here.

All are welcome to join the Storybelly Writers Lab here. If you are already a Lab Coat, read on. Write on!

THE ASSIGNMENT/INVITATION:

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The New Superman Movie

When we were kids, the imaginary Man of Steel was my brother, Mike, and I loved him.

no cape here, in Louin, Mississippi (our grandmother’s house), on his birthday… I surmise he received a camera.

He was 15 months younger than I — still is. My mother, a steel magnolia, told me once that she was not about to have two kids in diapers, so she made sure I was potty trained before my brother was born. I think this explains a lot about me.

My favorite images of Mike in my mind are of a barefoot redhead wearing shorts and no shirt, his belly well fed, his smile wide, his tongue lolling through his teeth, and, often, wearing his cape — aka one of Mom’s bath towels — that was safety-pinned at his neck and flowing out behind him as he leaped tall buildings in a single bound! from the backyard swing set or even the treehouse ladder (so his cape would fly) and ran off to save the day.

This weekend, I thought about that little boy I knew, when Jim and Zach and I went to the Tara Theater here in Atlanta on opening night to see the new Superman movie (article at ScreenRant that includes the trailer). While I am not a superhero movie fan, my boys are, and — wonder of wonders for me, reluctant superhero movie watcher — the movie is good!

James Weldon’s NPR review of Superman gets it just right. Among many other virtues he extols (including the revival of the classic red Superman trunks that “resemble nothing so much as granny panties. Deal with it”), he writes: “Superman is an ideal. He represents the best we can aspire to be.” And: “The feeling of watching it is similar to that of perusing an individual comic book — it's bright, colorful… it's inviting you into a universe that you may want to spend more time in.”

Bingo. The movie reminded me so much of the comic books Mike and I used to read by the dozens when we were, oh, nine and ten, ten and eleven, eleven and twelve (as I grew out of them) during the three years our family served as caretakers of a rustic, isolated cabin (no plumbing or running water, but yes to electricity), in the woods and mountains of Luray, Virginia, while Air Force family friends who owned the cabin were stationed in Germany.

Mom packed the car and Dad drove the five of us to Luray, a two-hour car trip from Washington, DC and Camp Springs, Maryland (Countdown territory), where we parked in the woods as close as we could get to the cabin and then humped all the gear Mom had packed up a hilly path to the glory of that patch of open sky and a bunch of logs arranged like a house that we’d call home on weekends.

Dad mowed the grass, took Mike fishing — and one year, hunting (I refused to eat squirrel) — and did Dad tasks. For Mom it was relentless work. Hot in the kitchen with a wood stove for cooking, and constant meals, clean up, making up beds or airing linens, marshalling three kids (and keeping the toddler out of the creek), and generally running herself ragged with it all. Still, even for Mom, the place held a veneer of glamour for a girl who had grown up in the Depression and now could escape to the country but come back to her hard-won middle class life in civilization whenever she wanted to.

Mike and I reveled in these trips to the cabin. Days were for exploring the woods, for carrying water from the creek, doing dishes and taking baths outside (both activities involving a huge tin tub and absolutely freezing water), catching crawdads in a creaky silver bucket, picking sour apples from an old tree in the small clearing of the front “yard,” and trying to avoid the hornets who had a nest in the outhouse.

But the best prize waited for us at night. The sons of these family friends collected comics and kept them stacked under the double bed in the bedroom Mike and I shared. The entire space under the bed was taken up with stack after stack after stack of comics featuring Archie and Jughead, Betty and Veronica — I liked those — and The Flash, Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Green Lantern, Justice League, Batman, Incredible Hulk, and so, so many more.

And, of course, Superman. I don’t remember my brother wearing a cape in those cabin days — maybe he had grown out of that phase by then — but I do remember those comics. This new movie, helmed by James Gunn, is a reboot of the DC Comics film franchise. For me, the storytelling, the atmosphere it creates, and the energy it generates bears all the earmarks of those halcyon summer days full of comic books.

It puts me in mind of Mike and me, released from family doings, tumbling in our pajamas into that big bed at night with our evening’s chosen comics stacked between us, and that one yellow light in the room, above the bed, that glowed just enough for us to read by until we got sleepy. We could hear our parents snoring and our little sister, Cathy, fidgeting, the three of them sleeping in the other bedroom in this tiny house made of wood, in the middle of the 1960s, and in the middle of our lives together as a family.

I write a lot about families. I write about families of choice and chance, and the ways that we care for one another. I write about community and kinship and the lassos we toss — gently — around one another in order to hold ourselves close through thick and thin (lots of both), and the charm that is held in creating those moments, memories, and meaning I write about so much.

It’s funny to think of the new Superman movie as a movie about family of choice and chance and community, but it felt that way to me. The Justice “Gang” (lol) shows up to help Superman; the Daily Planet gang (Jimmy Olsen among them) pulls together to write about the wrongs of Lex Luthor and inform the public; and the chosen family of Ma and Pa Kent and their adopted son, Clark, is the most touching of all. Then there is the chosen universe of DC Comics, set to rival the Marvel Cinematic Universe, who knows.

The Tara Theater is also a chosen community. It’s a stand-alone art-deco-modern building in a shopping center in Atlanta, that originally opened as Loew’s Tara, and debuted with a 70mm stereophonic screening of Gone With the Wind. It was the South in 1968. It went through various metamorphoses under subsequent owners, and when I came to know it in 2004, it was a Regal Theater with four screens.

I took this photo from my car on the rainy night we came to see Belfast.

I was charmed by it. Foreign films, blockbusters, arthouse premiers, documentaries, quiet indie films (we watched Belfast, with our masks on, in an almost-empty theater in 2021), epic experimental films (we saw Terrence Malik’s The Tree of Life there in 2011 and had a friend walk out of it, lol; it was an acquired taste and I loved it), the Tara showed them all, and within such a communal atmosphere, with a retro snack bar and two busy ticket windows outside… a destination it was, until it wasn’t.

In 2022 Regal Cinemas shuttered Tara “as part of a broader real estate optimization strategy.” What a community loss. But, as Uncle Edisto tells us in Each Little Bird That Sings, life is lived in the opposites. You don’t have yes without no, up without down, in without out, and dark without light.

The light for the Tara came in 2023 when Christopher Escobar, who owns the Plaza Theater in Atlanta, became the new owner and driving force behind a community (Friends of Tara) purchase, renovation, and reopening of the beloved Tara Theater in 2023.

We have since taken our anime-obsessed granddaughter to see My Neighbor Totoro (complete with bento box meals offered for purchase in the lobby — this is “event-driven cinema"). This same grandgirl and I went on a date to the Tara to see Wicked recently, also on an opening weekend.

This opening night, my local AMC theater’s showings of Superman were sold out. I thought about the multiplex crowds, the noise, the lines, the frenetic energy that used to be part of my (happy, actually) movie-going experience, and how, these days, they seem to be a community I’ve grown away from… which is also what happens to us as life goes on. We morph and change — if we’re lucky. We take different paths. And sometimes that means separate paths.

At the Tara, I was greeted at the concession counter instead of the window. There was no line. I showed my pre-purchased tickets on my phone. I bought buttered popcorn and Coca-Colas. We found seats easily. The energy — from film buffs to young families excited to be there — was communal, even joyful, as we laughed at the funny parts, groaned at the awful parts, and — something I don’t often experience at the movies anymore — the audience clapped and cheered at the end! Together.

The physical spaces where we gather are like churches, sacred spaces that anchor our collective identity. They are time folds, as they tell the history of a family, a home, a community, a country… a universe… within those spaces.

“What I’m getting with the Tara is fifty-five years of history,” Christopher Escobar told Garden & Gun magazine. “Yes, it’s a movie theater, but it’s also a bank of memories and stories and love.”

And isn’t that what all of this life is? A bank of moments, memories, and meaning. That’s what James Gunn is aiming for with his Superman movie, and the reboot of the DC film universe. That’s what those cabin years with my family were about: moments, memories, meaning. That’s what every story is all about — the stories you write, the stories I write, the stories we read, the stories we see on a screen, the stories we imagine.

What we know, what we feel, what we can imagine: that is the recipe for every story ever told. Stories told around a fire or carved on cave walls or rendered as comic books or graphic novels or documentary novels or picturebooks or mysteries or non-fiction or — you could go on, right?

Stories fold time. They are also sacred spaces. They represent the best we can aspire to be. They hold us in the palms of their hands.

I cup my hands and imagine my little brother Mike with his knobby knees and his easy smile, a Man of Steel, his life untouched by the vicissitudes of the future, his towel cape rippling behind him as he runs free in those backyard moments, saving humanity, saving himself.

I imagine us both as children, unfettered as we were in that time and place, in that little log cabin in the woods, at ease with each other, fishing for crayfish, and reading comics by lamplight.

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Writers Lab: What's your Vision?

I took this photo when I was writing Countdown — I see the pages here on my writing couch. Not much has changed but my laptop since 2009 — I still write here, still fiddle with (and update, from time to time) mission, vision, values, goals… I keep working toward something I’m still trying to articulate… it’s life-long work, I guess.

If you are just coming into the Lab, welcome! Thanks for subscribing! Don’t forget to introduce yourself here. We want to know you! And we want you to know us. If you haven’t seen the last two Lab posts about Mission Statements, you can find them here and here.

Happy Friday, Lab Coats! How did the week go? How is your Mission Statement coming along? I would love to hear. Some of y’all have sent me your mission statements, and I have loved chatting about them with you… keep going! Keep going! How does it feel? There is more… much more… stay tuned.

We’re spending our summer weeks with a Storybelly Summer Project, coming into and out of the Writers Lab as we can (or are so inclined), writing what amounts to (fancy words alert) a Mission Statement, a Vision Statement, Core Values, and Goals for our writing (yes, I snuck in goals, but really, they slide naturally onto our writing plates when we define why we do what we do, and how we want to show up in the writing world… and you’ll be surprised at how much more accurately your goals are specified and targeted (ugh, I need new words) when your mission and vision and values are clear.

You have a job to do:

“A writer is, by definition, a disturber of the peace.”
— James Baldwin

So, this summer work we’re doing is valuable work you can carry with you. It may be your own peace you disturb (Charlottesville has certainly done that for me, and so did Kent State), it may be the status quo, it may be any number of things, and the word “disturb” can be relative, yes? No matter your reasons for writing, CHANGE is part of the deal we make when we tell our stories. WE change. And that change takes courage. Best to have a mission clearly stated and a vision beautifully articulated, your sights set on the future.

also one word, one paragraph, one chapter, one character, one book, one story at a time.

We have limited time on this mortal coil, so it’s good to take some of it to create tangible parameters you can post somewhere and pull on when you feel yourself going off-course or when you just need some extra oomph, or a reminder (on bad/hard days especially) of why you do what you do.

Clarity, friends. These are tools for clarity. With them, you will always have focus and purpose alongside you for the writing ride. I recommend an ice cream sandwich as well. God knows so much of writing (for me anyway) is a muddle, as I try to figure out just what in the world I’m struggling to articulate on the page. At least I can know my general, overall reason for doing what I do. Which works to keep me at it, most days.

Now: Vision Statements.

A Vision Statement is the North Star of your writing practice. If you’ve been all over the place with your writing, even if you have a Mission Statement, you can rein in your wandering — your wandering with projects, ideas, possibilities, what-ifs, why-nots, notes-to-self and half-written (or rejected) stories — rein them in and help them work for you with a Vision Statement. Let your vision statement help deepen and enrich your mission.

I’ve been trying to write a book about the friendship between Rosa Parks and Virginia Durr for (literally) years. Many years. My mission statement has helped me remember that’s what I do: I write about the confluence of home and history in all it’s grime and glory; my vision statement reminds me that there is a higher reason I want to write this book, and I can depend on that vision to see me to publication one day. Just gotta hang onto it.

The very best example of a Vision Statement I can think of today (possibly because I am working with Jefferson and Charlottesville so deeply right now inside my work in progress) is The Declaration of Independence. Yes, that declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-

Yes, it’s long (the entire declaration). And yes, it is called a declaration and not a vision, but I submit it was written as a vision for young country called America, the United States of America, a vision this country is still struggling to live up to, and in that way it is most definitely a vision. A North Star.

Do take a moment to read it. (Okay, it will take longer than a moment.)

I find it fascinating that Abraham Lincoln, in his zeal to save the Union, looked to the The Declaration of Independence (as opposed to the US Constitution) as his guiding light when he was agonizing over how to present the Emancipation Proclamation to Americans and free the enslaved people of this country in 1863.

America had a vision in 1776. But I digress, for our purposes here. Let’s move on to the work at hand. YOU have a vision, too.

THE ASSIGNMENT/INVITATION:

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The Sense of Wonder

Shades of Countdown telling it slant:

When my dad was stationed at Andrews AFB in Washington, DC and I was in the fifth grade at Camp Springs Elementary School, my teacher, Mrs. Rodriguez, taught a unit on “the explorers.” In addition to Balboa, Cortez, Drake, Magellan, and da Gama — all men, of course — she included one woman: Rachel Carson.

I don’t remember if Carson came to us via Our Weekly Reader or if my teacher was just determined to make sure we knew about her, but I do remember the impression they both made on me that year.

It was 1965. Carson had died of cancer the year before, 1964, the same year my family had made the trek to Mississippi, to find “everything closed” on the heels of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. I mention this because history happens as a weave, and not in a vacuum, which is something the Sixties Trilogy books tried to showcase by using scrapbook material filled with song lyrics, photographs, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera of time-and-place.

History is a weave or a web of many things happening at the same time, or stretched over time, related in ways that make us all human, and which touch, ultimately, every living thing, which is one element that makes history fascinating to me. It’s all connected.

Carson’s death was perhaps at least partially related to the DDT exposure of the sprayed areas near her Colesville, Maryland home, which was a stone’s throw from my home in Camp Springs. During her tenure as a marine biologist at the US Bureau of Fisheries, Carson had been advocating for the banning of DDT for years, as she investigated and wrote about bird kills and fish kills and insect decimation in concert with pesticide use across the country. It was an uphill battle to get this particular part of her work noticed until the publication of her seminal 1962 book, Silent Spring.

Carson is often credited with being at the forefront of the modern environmental movement with Silent Spring — a book that so moved President John F. Kennedy (and, in truth, so did public pressure) that he announced the establishment of a special panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee to investigate health and environmental questions about pesticide use.

I came again to Rachel Carson when Linda Lear published Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature in 1997. It was in the pages of Linda’s stellar biography that I learned about Carson’s childhood in Pennsylvania, how she wandered the woods and hills, discovering in that passion her true calling without knowing it yet, bringing back fossils and shells to her mother, researching her geography, writing about her discoveries, even at ten years old, sending off her writing to be published. She fell in love with the sea before she had ever seen it.

And then there was the story about saving a tiny firefly with her great-nephew (and later, adopted son) Roger after a nighttime summer storm in Maine, where Rachel had a cabin to retreat to once a year or so. The firefly was flashing in a tiny puddle on the shore, desperate (so it seemed) to escape and to reach its kind out on the ocean, as the lights in the sea flashed back — luminescence from the algae stirred up by the storm.

I was fascinated by this story and started trying to write about this one adventure, for young readers. It would take me over twenty years to publish it.

Along the way I published Freedom Summer; Love, Ruby Lavender; Each Little Bird That Sings; Countdown; Revolution; Anthem; A Long Line of Cakes; and even, into the 2020 pandemic along with Rachel, Kent State.

Why did it take me so long to write Rachel?

I wanted to do too many things. I wanted to introduce readers to Rachel, for one thing (may we call her Rachel?). There was so much to her life! What an explorer. I wanted to introduce readers to bioluminescence. To the romance of the sea… the sea that Rachel loved and wrote about so eloquently. To a nighttime adventure, and to the little kid in all of us — boisterous, menacing, fearful, loving. All the things.

I dove into research and I kept coming back to that firefly. Here is a snippet of the letter Rachel wrote to her friend Dorothy Freeman that became the bedrock of the book I wrote.

After too many drafts to count, Rachel found a home with Anne Schwartz at Random House. Anne had published my first book, Freedom Summer, in 2001, when she was at Simon & Schuster, so this was a reunion for us. I had never worked with Daniel Miyares before, but I loved his work and was thrilled when he said yes to illustrating the story. I wanted to call it “Luminous Life: A Story of Rachel Carson,” but Night Walk to the Sea won out.

In July 2019 I was lucky enough to spend a week at Rachel’s cabin — the very same cabin where the story I wrote takes place — on Southport Island, Maine. Jim came with me, as did our friends Jerry and Laurie. The four of us arrived during the worst heat wave Maine had seen in years, to a cabin with no a/c, but with all the touches of a woman explorer and scientist who had made the world her laboratory.

The heat broke on the second day we were there, and we became explorers, too. I took umpteen reference photographs for Daniel as well, not that he needed them, but I did. We were in the throes of last-chance changes to both art and text, and we both wanted to get everything as right as possible. Someone had told me (or maybe I read it somewhere) that there were no frogs on Southport Island, and I had frogs in the text of the book and I think Daniel had one in the art, so I tried to verify this fact. I kept hitting dead ends until one morning I stood in line at the only little store on the island, waiting my turn to buy the newspaper and ask my frog question. When I got to the counter, and I asked, the cashier gave me an incredulous look — she was so busy, long lines, who was this stranger with an inane question? — and snapped, “Of COURSE we have frogs! Next!” and that solved that.

The town of Boothbay Harbor was across the swing bridge, and we did visit, but we spent most of our time on the island, although we did take field trips.

The most meaningful room for me was Rachel’s writing room. I took Daniel’s art (on my laptop) and “brought” it to Rachel’s desk, and sat there with my story for a long time.

Oh, to be so inspired. It was hard to leave when the week was over.

My favorite Carson book is The Sense of Wonder. It grew out of a magazine piece Carson wrote in 1956 titled “Help Your Child to Wonder” in Woman’s Home Companion. I was three years old in 1956… who knew that that article would become a book that would become important to me — almost a blueprint for me — as an adult wanting to write about Rachel Carson for young people… to pass on the story. To write for young people, period…

The way history folds in on itself, over and again, fascinates me. In this particular case, here was a fifth grader learning about Rachel Carson and remembering what her teacher taught her, reading a biography as an adult that sparked a life-long curiosity about Rachel, taking notes on index cards in a time when there was no World Wide Web, becoming a writer and learning to endure rejection after rejection, and finally publishing a book about the hero she learned about in fifth grade… it’s a full circle moment, but also a testament to the weaving way that history has with us, as it offers up ways for us to tell our stories.

I would love to hear about your long gestations and how those moments, memories, and meanings take place in your lives. The comments are open to everyone. Have a good week, y’all. Writers Lab appears later this week, see you then!

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xoxo Debbie

Writers Lab: Your Mission Part 2

Morning, Lab Coats! Welcome to Part 2 of writing our Mission Statements. If you haven’t read Part 1, where we explore the WHAT and the WHY of a mission statement for your creative life, you can do that here. The Assignment (or, Storybelly Invitation, as I’m calling it for this summer project) is waiting for you there as well. Thank you for being here with me! If you are reading this and want to join us in the Storybelly Summer Writing Lab Project, you can do that at the button below:

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I have had Mission Statements on my mind all week. You know how it works: as soon as you are concentrating on something, the universe (or some collective energy) begins to help you find it everywhere?

I want to share a video I first watched over a year ago that is full of mission statements, although I’m quite sure that 97-year-old Dot Fisher-Smith would not have used that phrase to define what she’s talking about in this short film (12 minutes) about aging.

I didn’t think “there’s a mission statement!” when I first watched this video a year ago, but boy, I hear “mission statement” laced all throughout this video now, as I work on mission statements for you.

You can be 96 years old (as Dot is, in this video) and still be making plans for your purpose in life. In writing. In love. Even in death. This is what excites me about having that mission statement as a guide! And why I am excited to hear from you about your own mission statements as you craft them.

I will also share mine.

But first, if you have the time, please watch this short video from Reflections of Life. (Right there on their home page is a mission statement: Exploring the Infinite Beauty of Being Human.) As you watch, think of how many times Dot shares with us her mission statement. Statements.

How many do you notice? Let’s talk about this in Chat. I’ll start a thread listing what feels like mission statements that Dot makes as she casually talks about her life now. Here is the Chat thread.

Next, the Assignment, where I’m also going to bring in the Lillian Smith documentary that I mentioned in Monday’s Digest — you can read a bit more about Lillian Smith in that Digest. For now, though:

THE ASSIGNMENT/INVITATION:

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The Revolution that was Freedom Summer...

The year I turned eleven years old, my parents stuffed us kids in the car and drove to Mississippi from Washington, DC to visit kinfolks in the house where my dad had grown up, and to do the things we did there every summer with the cousins and aunts and uncles and hangers-on. We’d find ourselves with a few minutes of fame because our names would appear in Myrtis Rogers’ column of Happenings, written up in the local paper as returning once again to visit, in a town where there was absolutely nothing to do but melt into the non-airconditioned heat and humidity, wander the cemetery, plunk the piano in the unlocked Methodist church, and read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland one more time.

We had our routines. My great-grandmother, Nanny, would work in her garden in the early morning while her daughter, my grandmother, made dinner in the middle of the day. After dinner, my grandmother pulled the tablecloth up by the corners and draped it over the food on the table, to save it for suppertime. Nanny watched “As the World Turns” and then took to her bed to read the newspaper until she fell asleep in the hottest part of the day with the paper in a tent across her face The attic fan droned like an idling airplane engine, as it pushed the hot air around the house.

I’d help Annie Mae shell butterbeans on the front porch. I’d go to the post office with my grandmother, then to Mr. Jeff’s store to stock up on 6-ounce Coca Colas in glass bottles that would line the inside of the refrigerator door when we’d arrive (what treasure!). I’d listen to the old folks swapping the same old stories on that same old porch in the evenings, moths dancing around the porch light as the day cooled enough for the adults to brave sitting outside with a slice of coconut cake and conversation to go with their sweet tea.

My brother and I slept in the spacious “back room,” a room that my father — a pilot and not a carpenter — had built onto the house as a young man, many years before. The room spanned the back of the house and held two big beds with iron frames and feather pillows and springy mattresses. The beds sat perpendicular to each other on opposite sides of the room. There was a mysterious built-in closet. It’s door was positioned flush with the exterior wall, so its innards protruded to the outside, giving the exterior wall a decided bump-out. My brother and I tried opening that door once, and found it locked.

A built-in bookcase housed milk glass, a vase with dead (or were they dried) flowers, and a clutch of dusty books. A chest of drawers was decorated with a crocheted doily and a fold-out trio of 8x10 framed photos of my dad and his two sisters. The floor of this long wide room sloped just enough that you could place a marble at one of the two doorways (one opening directly into my parents’ bedroom and one opening to the only bathroom in the house) and watch it roll in a lazy, bumpy pattern across the planked floor to the outer wall of the room, where it would settle with a clack under the treadle sewing machine.

The room was a time machine. I adored it.

The year was 1964. These were sleepy days in a sleepy Mississippi town with one unnecessary stoplight and a train to Laurel that no longer stopped there. Time had already forgotten Jasper County, Mississippi, or had it? 1964 was the year that “everything closed” and no one in my small world talked about it to us kids. But, of course, we noticed. And we had questions.

In the county seat of Bay Springs, which was seven miles from my grandmother’s house in Louin, Mississippi, the Lyric Theater closed. We rarely went to the movies, but the summer I was eight — or was it nine — I had watched an Elvis movie with a local friend who was older than I was by three years and was mad about Elvis. It would be some years before I appreciated Elvis Presley, but I wanted a friend in this town where there was nothing to do, so I sat through that rather-confusing movie and was content with popcorn in the dark, a summertime friend, and luxurious air conditioning.

The summer I turned eleven, the Lyric closed. So did the Cool Dip, where we’d get ice cream now and then, and so did the public library. Between Louin and Bay Springs was a little pass-through on a curving two-lane road traveled by logging trucks that we called Pine View. There was a cafe on one side of the road — the Pine View Cafe of course — where they served blue plate specials cooked fresh every day, a meat-and-three destination for locals. It closed.

Across the road from the cafe sat the Gem of Summer for me: the Pine View pool and the roller skating rink. I could convince my parents to take us there at least once a summer. I lived for that outing.

The pool and the roller skating rink were nestled against a pine forest on two sides and the railroad pond on another. The train that picked up passengers in Louin long ago stopped at the railroad pond to take on water, hence the pond’s name. I have a photo of my parents, before the world had touched them, sitting on the steps of that porch at my grandmother’s house with their fishing poles between them, holding a clutch of catfish on a stringer. My heart catches, every time I see it. They are so young. So young.

Eventually — not that summer, but one summer in the future — the library reopened, but all the seats had been removed. The Cool Dip closed its indoor seating, so you had to order your frozen treats at a hastily constructed window that abutted the too-small parking lot. The Lyric never recovered, and the Pine View cafe and pool and roller skating rink fell into abandoned disrepair.

still from a Revolution scrapbook, photo by Herbert Randall

The summer was called “Freedom Summer,” or if you were part of the Movement that year, “The Mississippi Summer Project.” The Project had been hastily decided upon (yet, miraculously, meticulously planned) to coincide with the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Across the South especially — but not only the South — the response to the passage by Congress and signing by President Lyndon Johnson of this new Federal legislation into law was swift and intentional.

Many towns in Mississippi, such as Greenwood, in the Delta, had much more visceral responses than a sleepy rural town like Louin, but the reverberations were felt across the country, and they are still being felt today. .

Revolution takes place in Greenwood, Mississippi in the summer of 1964. It was the headquarters of SNCC during Freedom Summer.

One thousand souls came South to Mississippi in 1964, most of them white, many of them college students who had been recruited by CORE or SNCC or COFO on their college campuses. They trained in techniques of passive non-violent resistance at Miami University in Ohio, they boarded busses for their Mississippi assignments, and they lived in Black communities, with Black families and volunteers.

Their project was to register Black voters in the state of Mississippi, “the Closed Society,” where Blacks had been disenfranchised since 1890 at the death of Reconstruction. The Freedom Summer volunteers were to open Freedom Schools where Black children and families could learn their history and basic educational skills, and to rent houses in the Black community to serve as community centers and Freedom Houses, where everyone could congregate to be together and learn and plan the next days’ actions. Volunteers would also go to the courthouses with prospective new voters so they could register to vote in the next election. When Black citizens (and white and black volunteers) were arrested, beaten, and harassed to the point of not being able to register at all, volunteers simultaneously worked to register their new voters themselves in order to form a new Freedom Democratic Party to be seated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The volunteers were in Mississippi to support Black activists who were already on the ground working in their communities; to bolster their efforts; and to leave them at the end of the summer with as many tools of support — and new voters — as possible.

a still from a Revolution scrapbook, photo by Ted Polumbaum/Newseum

It would be decades before I researched what had happened, that childhood summer of mine, before I met my heroes in print: Ella Baker, Bob Moses, Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Casey Hayden and countless volunteers both local and national, including the Wednesdays Women who worked tirelessly from “up North” to bridge gaps of understanding between black and white women, who flew South weekly to meet over tea and talk and to foster understanding between courageous black and white women in Mississippi towns, and who helped to raise funds up North to send to Freedom Houses for the work they were doing, in hopes of making change and forging a path for future generations.

a still from a Revolution scrapbook, photo by Danny Lyon

There was an energy in the air, the summer of 1964. Eleven-year-old me could feel it, too, could feel some kind of enormous, serious, almost-dangerous change in the hot, humid, over-emotional atmosphere in Mississippi, even if I couldn’t name it.

Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner went missing on June 21, 1964. It was Andy’s first day as a Freedom Summer worker; Mickey and James had been working with COFO in Meridian for some time. They picked up Andy and drove to Neshoba County, Mississippi to investigate a church burning. When their car got a flat tire outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price arrested Cheney for speeding and held Goodman and Schwerner for investigation. All three were taken to the Neshoba County jail.

a still from a scrapbook in Revolution

Later that night, they were murdered by local members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Their bodies were not found until August 4, as the Mississippi Summer Project was wrapping up and the Mississippi Freedom Party delegation was heading North to the Democratic National Convention with 80,000 new voters on its rolls, voters black and white, Mississippians who were not required to take literacy tests in order to vote, and who could register in their homes, with a Freedom Worker to sit with them and help them fill out the paperwork, if necessary.

There had been uncountable numbers of arrests, beatings, lynchings, harassments, threats, bombings, torchings, and tortures of Black Americans throughout Mississippi through the decades, and the summer of 1964 was no exception.

When I’m working with young people, and especially when presenting my books, Freedom Summer — which is a picturebook about the closing of the pool — and Revolution, which is a documentary novel for middle schoolers and older, about the summer of 1964 in Greenwood, Mississippi, which was the headquarters of SNCC, I always tell them that every human being is worthy of dignity and respect, and that it’s hard to hate someone when you know their story.

Even as I say it, I think of that summer in Mississippi and of the crimes committed in the name of white supremacy and white power and control, and out of the white fear of being replaced. We see that power-grab and white fear across the country in present day, too, in the very public deaths of those whose names are so familiar to us now: Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and so many more — people who had mothers and grandmothers and sisters and brothers and summertime rituals. They had routines and tablecloths and Sunday dinners and movies and ice cream and kinfolks and porches or stoops and bodies of water to swim in or rooms with sloping floors.

I think about Lillian Smith. Smith was a white writer, educator, and human rights advocate who lived in Rabun County, Georgia, in the North Georgia mountains. She fought all her adult life against segregation and racism at a time when few white voices did so, so vocally. In 1920, her parents started a private summer camp for young white girls from Atlanta families of means, and (among other amazing accomplishments) Smith made it part of her work to educate these young ladies about the South they lived in, to help them envision change and question everything they had been taught about the status quo and segregation in the American South.

In 1949 she wrote the ahead-of-its-time book Killers of the Dream which begins:

Even its children knew that the South was in trouble. No one had to tell them; no words said aloud. To them it was a vague thing, weaving in and out of their play…. they had seen it flash out and shatter a town’s peace, had felt it tear up all they believed in. They had measured its giant strength, and felt weak when they remembered.

In a 1961 letter to her editor, upon a new edition of the book being published, she wrote:

I am caught again in those revolving doors of childhood… it is a book brought to life, I see plainly now, by young questions that begged for sane answers…

And then she writes a sentence that speaks to me across the years about what I write and why:

I wrote it because I had to find out what life in a segregated culture had done to me, one person. I had to put down on paper those experiences so that I could see their meaning for me.

Lillian Smith firmly believed that racism hurt all people, all colors, all nationalities, all identities, all. We hurt ourselves when we hurt other people. Every human being has a beginning. How do we take care of one another in such a way that we render ourselves harmless and we are, all of us, unafraid?

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Robert Kennedy Sr. was campaigning for president. He landed in Indianapolis minutes after he heard the news. He put aside his campaign speech and spoke to a waiting crowd that — in an age before cell phones and a 24-hr news cycle — did not know yet about King’s death.

RFK broke the news to them in a simple, heartfelt speech that I go back to again and again. The entire speech is worth reading, and the line that comes to me as I finish this essay is, “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

And that is why I write. I, too, am caught in those revolving doors of childhood, hoping to connect with readers who, no matter their ages, are still like all of us, young people begging for sane answers, and I am still that child of a Mississippi summer reaching for meaning, self-understanding, and change.

Writers Lab: Your Mission:

Morning, Lab Coats! This is Part 1 of a 2-part post about writing your Mission Statement. Part 2 will follow close on the heels of Part 1, so you will have both posts to play with this coming week and through the summer.

Remember, this is a Storybelly Summer Project. We are beginning! You have all the time you need to play with these ideas and make them your own. I’m so glad you’re here!

By the end of this summer, you will have:

a Mission Statement — the WHY of what you do —

a Vision Statement — how to DEVELOP the WHY —

your Core Values — guiding principles that will keep you on course.

You don’t need theme music or a self-destructing cassette tape. This is not Mission: Impossible. But you do need — in my opinion, though I’ll speak for myself — to understand why you do what you do, whether that thing you do is with story, in song, in the garden, in the city, in the country, with your people, with strangers… whatever it is you are passionate about, it deserves a mission statement.

Conversely, a mission statement can help you decide that a project is NOT for you as well. I’ve had that happen to me before, and I’m sure I will again.

A mission statement will give you a reason to return to the page, if you are writing, a reason to return when the story/song/event wobbles (trust me, it will); when the middle sags (it does); or when the world makes you wonder once again that perennial question: What’s the point?

With a mission statement, you will KNOW the point. You will know it to your bones, and if you forget it temporarily, through angst or circumstance, there it will be, posted where you can see it and remember. Ah, yes. This is why. And this is good.

SO. This summer in the Storybelly Lab, we’re going to take time to uncover the foundation beneath your work — not just the project you’re writing, but the deeper thread that runs through everything you create.

Now: A Mission Statement is not a public declaration, or a marketing line. It isn’t a slogan or a brand. It’s a few quiet words you can carry with you, and a line you can return to. Think of it as a real, true compass for when you feel lost.

I have felt so lost, from time to time, over the years, and most recently in these past five years since everything shut down in 2020 and the world became such a tender place. I have needed a reason to return to the world. Putting my mission statement, my vision statement, and my core values in print has helped me begin again, and it has given me a boost when I need it as well.

Want to see what it can do for you? For your art? Great! Your mission, should you choose to accept it…. etc. :>

This is the first of two posts. Today, we’re going to sew a little. I’ve had my sewing machine out lately, sewing on Scout patches, repairing a bedspread, gazing at a vintage pattern for an apron I want to sew this fall, digging through my material stash and my thread stash and thinking about how apropos this search is to the writing I do, when I search for the threads to pull on that will help me tell a story.

That’s what we’ll do in Part 1 today. I’ll show you how to listen to the threads that are tugging at your sleeve, at your mind, at your heart, maybe more hidden than in plain sight, threads that loop or lace through every project you tackle or dream of tackling; every thread that helps connect you to the larger purpose you are reaching for, and to the readers, listeners, and seekers you are hoping to connect with.

Let’s start shaping those threads you have been pulling on into a sentence that feels true to you. Your writer’s mission. One sentence. One rich, glorious, practical, honest sentence that will lend clarity to your art and your purpose.

Ready for the Assignment? Here it is, in 3 Steps:

THE ASSIGNMENT:

Read more

The Summer the Pool Closed

Before there was a Sixties Trilogy, before there were novels and school visits and research trips and ghosts to wrangle, there was Freedom Summer — my first published book, and the beginning of a lifelong effort to understand the American South I love, the injustices I witnessed, and the stories I needed to tell. These three short essays, originally published on my Field Notes blog in 2019 and 2020, trace the roots of that book through my childhood summers in Mississippi; my realization that something momentous was happening, at age eleven; and my early days as a writer finding my way. They are precursors to and context for the new Sunday essay I’m writing now, which will set up our summer-essay weeks into September. As always, welcome, welcome, and thank you for being here! xoxo Debbie

diversity and my books, part 1, freedom summer

by Deborah Wiles | Feb 13, 2020 | Field Notes

[Note: this is a February series on the diverse themes and characters in Deborah Wiles’s books. I’m publishing the series during Black History Month, with the full knowledge that my books are written from a white person’s point of view (as I am white), and that every month is Black History Month. For more on that, see this essay by Michael Harriot at The Root, and for more on Freedom Summer see this essay by Henry Louis Gates (also at The Root). You can buy this book, Freedom Summer, at Indiebound or Amazon or B&N or at your local independent bookstore. There is likely a copy at your local school or public library as well. More about the book itself is here on the website. Part 2 of this series is here.]

When I started writing Freedom Summer, in the late 1990s, I didn’t think about the word “diversity.” I just wanted to tell the story of what happened the year the pool closed in Mississippi, the summer of 1964, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

I was eleven. I went “home” to Mississippi the way my family did every summer, and suddenly everything had changed. We couldn’t go to the Cool Dip for ice cream, or the movie theater, or the public library in Bay Springs — everything had closed, it seemed, including the Pine View Cafe and the Pine View Pool and the roller skating rink next to it.

This was the Pine View Cafe. It’s gone now. It was across the highway from the pool and roller skating rink. They served a delicious blue plate special every day… to white folks only. The pool is on the left beside those tall pines. This is the roller skating rink next to it. It never occurred to me as a kid that there were only white kids in that pool or skating around that gleaming wooden floor… until the passage of the Civil RIghts Act, which was an awakening for me at age 11.

“Why?” I asked. And no one could explain it to me. I never forgot my confusion and, later, my dawning awareness of how white people were doing all they could to keep black people from “invading” their public places. Growing up summers in Mississippi — a land I loved because my people were there… people who loved me and couldn’t wait for my return every summer — growing up in Mississippi, along with a checkered childhood where I lived around the world in a military family, gave me a perspective on life and injustice that has colored everything about who I am and the writing I do.

There was nowhere more special to me on earth than Mississippi, and nowhere more hard to understand. I have spent a lifetime writing about Mississippi, injustice, and the American South in an effort toward not only understanding, but in an effort to tell the truth about privilege and prejudices and to help usher in a world where fairness and justice-for-all actually exists. That effort extends to me and my own privilege and prejudices as I dismantle, unpack, and think about my own life and daily choices.

This is why you’ll see my dive into Freedom Summer once again in Countdown, Revolution, and Anthem, and why you’ll see my dream world reflected in my books The Aurora County All-Stars and A Long Line of Cakes, books that imagine a Mississippi where black and white live together in (relative; they’re novels, everybody’s got their stuff) harmony, which I’ll profile in future diversity posts this month.

I’m writing for ten-year-old me, I always say, who needed, as a white kid, to understand the landscape of privilege, and of racial prejudice, and to realize that she had choices, and still does. And of course I write for anyone who needs to find my stories — I trust that you will.

When a book leaves my hands, it no longer belongs to me, but I hope you will read these books and laugh, cry, share, and see yourself in them, as a human, and as someone who looks or acts like you, in the many characters who populate these stories.

I have always said, “the only story I know how to tell is my own,” so the main point of view in my books has always been that of the kid I was at ten, or twelve, or sixteen: white, middle class, curious, questioning, and wanting to learn, desperate to understand, and trying to discover her place in the bigger conversation and continuum. I’m still that kid at heart.

Of course there are black characters in my stories about the South, and they need their own voices as well. In Freedom Summer, John Henry wants to swim in the pool that his best friend Joe swims in every day, now that the new law says the pool will open to “everybody under the sun, no matter what color.”

“Is it deep?” asks John Henry. “Real deep!” answers Joe. “And the water is so clear, you can jump to the bottom, open your eyes, and still see!”

“Let’s be the first ones there!” says John Henry, as the two friends make plans to show up the next morning to swim together. “I’ll bring my good luck nickel. We can dive for it!”

The original Freedom Summer cover. The one at the top of this post is a refreshed cover created for the 50th anniversary edition of Mississippi’s Freedom Summer.

Things don’t go as planned, needless to say. It took me 30 years to write Freedom Summer and 45 years before I (quite literally) hacked my way back into the piney woods to find my pool. What had happened to it?

My research told me that many pools at that time — across the country — had been emptied and filled in with asphalt (as in Freedom Summer — that was my artistic choice) or turned into parking lots (Revolution) or filled in with earth and turned into parkland (like the pool in Lynchburg, Virginia’s city park), but mine had simply been abandoned. When I show photos of what that abandoned pool looks like today, you can hear a pin drop, even in a room filled with 350 students and their teachers.

It seems unbelievable today that people of color and whites could not swim in the same pools or eat in the same restaurants, or partake of the same public services, but today we are still struggling with the 400-year-old legacy of slavery in this country. It has just changed flavors. When I first started taking Freedom Summer into schools, in 2002 or so, a few teachers wanted to know why I wanted to bring “that history” up again, when their students were colorblind. No one asks me that question today. We are — slowly — making progress. I am, too. And there is still so much work to do.

Freedom Summer was published by Simon & Schuster/Atheneum in 2001, illustrated by Jerome Lagarrigue, and edited by Anne Schwartz. Its first review was a star from Kirkus and it has been a perennial best-seller as well as a core standard in many county school districts over the years. The largest portion of fanmail I receive is from students writing a new ending for Freedom Summer — the book ends on a “what happens next?” note. It’s so interesting to see their takes on it, which, most of the time, translate into their own hopes and dreams for a different future.

Freedom Summer was my first published book, at a time long before our current conversations about diversity and inclusion, and at the beginning of a writing career about those very themes in everything I write. I’m proud of the book, and of the team that published it, and of every librarian, teacher, and bookseller who has placed this story, and its context, into the hands of young readers.

Next time: the Aurora County novels and my sometimes-stumbling path to writing, in long-form fiction, about diversity and inclusion for young readers.

This blog also publishes at goodreads; you can find me getting started there, and if you are reading at goodreads, the blog post is here on my website, where you can comment or subscribe in an email.

summer reading: Freedom Summer (and deadlines)

by Deborah Wiles | Jun 20, 2019 | Field Notes

Whew. I’ve had deadline-brain. I turned in the revision and backmatter to the Kent State project (book, now), which publishes in April 2020, and that intensity, on the heels of bringing-in the last bits for ANTHEM, Book 3 of the Sixties Trilogy (publishes October 1, 2019), shoved me right over. Tilt.

Noodle-brain, I started calling it. For days. I’m slowly pulling it back together, and so back to Summer Reading. Let me finish writing a bit about my first book, FREEDOM SUMMER and then on to RUBY next time.

I often say that Mississippi was/is the landscape of my heart. It is certainly the geography of my childhood. Both my parents were Mississippi born and bred, so it become our homeplace each year, as we lived all over the globe in an Air Force family. I started school in Hawaii (before it became a state!) and I graduated high school in the Philippines, at Clark AFB.

Mississippi was the place where everyone knew me and couldn’t wait for me to return each summer, to pinch my cheek and tell me how much I’d grown, and to celebrate their most famous citizen (or so it seemed to a young girl then), my dad, who had left this tiny town of a few hundred people in the middle of nowhere, and gone out into the world to become a pilot and a war hero. If the town had been big enough for parades, I thought they’d have had one for my father’s return each summer.

Those childhood summers were idyllic for me, with nothing to do, and nowhere much to go, except to the cemetery to visit all the relatives, to play piano in the unlocked (and un-air-conditioned) Methodist church, to ride to the Cool Dip for ice cream in the next town over, and, if you were lucky, to go roller skating and swimming at the Pine View.

Here’s what the Pine View Cafe across the road from the pool and roller skating rink and pond looked like before I was even born, probably:

We ate there once that I remember. It was the first time I’d heard the term “blue plate special.”

This was the roller skating rink, and next to it (hidden by cars, but on the left in front of those pines) was the pool.

In 1964, the year I was 11, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and the pool closed. The roller skating rink closed. The Pine View Cafe closed. The Cool Dip closed. The Bayless Theater in Bay Springs, the county seat a few miles away, closed. The public library closed.

It would be years before I began to understand what had happened. And even more years before I wrote about that time in FREEDOM SUMMER. And even more years before I revisited that pool.

I have been to see it many times since, have photographed it in all seasons, and show those slides when I speak at schools or conferences, after I read FREEDOM SUMMER on slides. And always, there is a hush. You can hear a pin drop. The proverbial pin.

My pool (as I have taken to calling it) was abandoned in 1964. (In the book I have it filled in with tar/asphalt, the way the pool in Greenwood, Mississippi was turned into a parking lot.) I can’t stop visiting this town, every time I go to Mississippi. I still have precious family in Mississippi, although my parents have both died, and I still feel pulled to this geography of my childhood, this time and place, this trying-to-understand.

I’m still trying to write about this time, which I’ve done specifically in REVOLUTION (Freedom Summer in novel form, and Book 2 of the Sixties Trilogy), and in THE AURORA-COUNTY ALL-STARS, and in A LONG LINE OF CAKES, in which the Pine View Cafe becomes The Cake Cafe. Possibly I will write about this time in our American history for as long as I live, in one way or another. It shows up in all my novels, in some form.

FREEDOM SUMMER got me started. Here’s how.

In 1997 I went to the (then called) IRA — International Reading Association — conference in Atlanta (I lived in D.C. at the time, and went to support a friend). I met Anne Schwartz there, who was then at Simon&Schuster/Atheneum. My good bud Deborah Hopkinson introduced us and said, “Debbie is working on a book about the civil rights movement for children.”

I wasn’t. I had been writing and submitting manuscripts about my southern childhood for many years, and had collected a sizeable batch of rejection letters, but I hadn’t sold a book yet.

At IRA, I’d sat up late the night before with Deborah and another writer buddy Jane Kurtz, and each of us had talked about the book we’d write if we got only one book to write in our lifetimes. I talked about the summer the pool closed. “But that’s not a book for children,” I said. And Deborah said, “Why not?”

On the exhibit floor that day, Anne shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “If you write that book, I want to read it.”

And four years later, S&S published FREEDOM SUMMER.

Perhaps I’d become a better writer in the ten years I’d been practicing and collecting rejections. Perhaps it was an editor’s challenge and invitation. Perhaps it was good friends believing in me. Perhaps it was a story I knew was mine to tell, and mine alone, and perhaps all those things came together in a moment that I was prepared for by all the days of my life trying to figure it out. I don’t know.

I’m grateful for this book, though. It has helped. I will read it to anyone who will listen. And I will learn from it, for all the rest of the days of my life.

summer reading: Freedom Summer

by Deborah Wiles | Jun 3, 2019 | Field Notes

I’ve about forgotten how to blog. :> But it’s summer, and summer always meant reading, to me, along with bike rides in the woods and friends over to play, swimming pools, baseball, family camping and fishing, and trips to my grandmother’s house in Mississippi, where we’d have nothing to do but breathe, try not expire in the heat, and listen to the kinfolks swap stories and gossip. Nothing and everything. I grew up on stories.

I had a stack of library books that rotated in and out of my bed, my brother’s tree house, my bath (until they were dunked under accidentally), the dinner table (until they were confiscated), and the car. I read everything I could get my hands on, even encyclopedias, even Popular Mechanics. Even stuff I didn’t understand at 12, like Dracula. It scared the pants off me.

And now I write about those summers, in books of my own. I have a newly-designed website ready to share this summer, and as I do, I want to revisit my books, as much to reacquaint myself with their characters and stories, as to share them with you. A book and a story each week for the summer weeks, from June into August.

So let me begin at the beginning:

Freedom Summer was the first book I published, with editor Anne Schwartz, at Simon & Schuster, in January 2001. Anne’s imprint was Atheneum Books for Young Readers. Jerome Lagarrigue illustrated my 760 words, and we were off into a whirlwind year of unexpected excitement. More to come about that!

Jerome had illustrated his first book, My Man Blue, by Nikki Grimes. This would be his second. He was 28 years old, from France (his father) and Brooklyn (his mother), and wasn’t even born in 1964, when the book takes place.

I was convinced he wouldn’t be able to understand the Southern time and place I was writing about, but I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Smart Jerome interviewed his grandmother, who lived in Richmond, Virginia in the Sixties, who had seen her share of racism and civil rights unrest, as an African-American woman living in the American South; she had stories to tell. And Jerome did his homework. As did I. As did Anne.

We lovingly put together, together, the story of the friendship of two boys, one black and one white, and what happens when the segregated pool is supposed to open to “everybody under the sun, no matter what color” in July 1964 after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Freedom Summer was published almost 20 years ago. It still sells and sells, out there in the world, a story about friendship and fairness and the decisions two young boys face together in the segregated South of the Sixties.

In 2014, at the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, S&S issued an anniversary edition of the book, which is the cover you see here.

Next up: the story of how Freedom Summer came to be, how it grew from a piece of my own childhood personal narrative, to a book for young (and older) readers.

But for now, I’m going to pull the book off the shelf and read it again, out loud, this time doing something I haven’t done for years: turning each page as I read aloud, and taking my time, listening to the cadences of the language just for myself alone, and admiring Jerome’s art.

For years I couldn’t read this book without tearing up. Now I have it memorized, and rarely have the book in my hands when I read it. I’ve put the pages on slides (PowerPoint, today), and I have “read it” many, many hundreds of times, over the past 18 years, to children in pre-K through college, in schools and libraries and bookstores across this country, and even around the world.

Today I watch young people and their teachers have the same reaction I did as I read it years ago, when “John Henry’s eyes fill with angry tears. ‘I did! I wanted to swim in this pool! I want to do everything you can do!'”

Writers Lab: Our Summer Project Week 1

Welcome to Storybelly Summer and the Writers Lab, everyone! Whether you're already a Lab Coat (a paid subscriber) or just curious, I’ve had a host of questions lately, so let me try to explain the Lab a bit. First:

For Lab Coats, your Summer Project and first summer Assignment begins below the paywall. The Project is a season-long, very cool undertaking that will shape your writing life. Short Exercises will complement the project work each week, to keep your writing whistles whetted. Is that a word? It is now.

If you are a founding member, summertime is when we do writing critiques and consultations, stay tuned for that. Our ops-guru Zach is making good recovery progress and will be reaching out to you soon.

For free subscribers: I'm so glad you're here. If you are happy and content as a free subscriber, sip on an Arnold Palmer and do nothing! (Maybe “relax!” is a better way to put it. Or… “comment and participate as you’re led!” etc.) It’s fabulous to have you here as well — we need one another! We need all voices. You'll always get weekly Storybelly essays, and if you'd like to join the Writers Lab this summer, now’s the perfect time, with our Summer Project just beginning. You can join the Lab here — consider this your heartfelt invitation.

For everyone: Here are some answers to questions I’m getting often enough to figure that even those not asking them might be wondering, as we have a lot of newbies-to-Substack here (and that includes me), so please indulge me a moment. I’ll do my best.

What’s in the Writers Lab? What does it cost?

You’ll get a post labeled “Writers Lab” (like this one!) in your email inbox or at the Substack app once a week. I know, this post has a “locked” sign on it to designate it’s for “paid subscribers only” but you will still get a snippet of it, like you’re getting today.

There is always a paywall in the Writers Lab posts that free subscribers will eventually come to, with the Assignment part of the post under that, but there will be no paywall for paid subscribers in that post, as you’ll be a $6/month subscriber for the three months of summer Lab posts, so $18 will give you a summer of writing together (and $55 will give you a year) and you’ll be helping us create a warm, safe, encouraging community of writers both beginning and seasoned, each of us cheering the other on.

Where IS the Writers Lab? How do I get there?

The Writers Lab is right HERE. It lives under the paywall on this post, and on all Writers Lab posts. That’s where you get your Assignment, comment on the assignments, bolster one another by replying to comments, and use Chat for tangents and more detailed looks at life, writing, food, and community engagement.

I hope that helps make the Lab feel a little clearer. It’s right here, at the bottom of this post. :> If you are a Lab Coat, you don’t have to write. You can cheer others on. You don’t have to post. The Writers Lab is just a quieter (and, yes, paid) space within Storybelly — a place for those who want to dig into stories a little more, in whatever way feels right to them. There’s something here for you, whether you’re writing, reading, or just want to be part of a curious, creative, and encouraging community online. We are explorers. Some of us are writing poetry, some are writing non-fiction, some are writing recipes. Some are writing memoir, personal narrative, fiction, the possibilities are endless. You can join anytime. Come as you are. We’ll save you a seat.

What am I paying for?

Paying for a monthly or yearly subscription at Storybelly means you are a Lab Coat — a Sweetheart of the Storybelly Lab. It helps us create and facilitate a teaching space, a safe, supportive environment full of curated and shepherded writing lessons/tutorials/classes/workshops (and recipes and words of sorta-wisdom, and humor and whatever else we collectively feel like making Storybelly as we grow), as well as lively conversations and lots of learning together the art of telling, writing, and saving our stories.

You can help us shape this space. It’s an exciting thought, eh? Something new and meaningful and useful and funny and warm-hearted and caring.

Wearing actual lab coats is optional (ha!). I supply cake. So do others. We are gathering our recipes. Can a meet-up be far behind? What about a cookbook? (Be still my heart. lol.) Come be part of something lovely.

Here is the actual subscribe button if you need it. lol. (I dislike the buttons, so I usually just link, as I did above):

Subscribe now

You can unsub at any time. If you need financial help with the Lab, let me know. We have scholarship money set aside. No questions asked.

My short-version “WHY” with Storybelly (see the Assignment for more on this) is simple: I want to help create a caring community of people in this crazy world right now, and help get more of our stories — all stories — out into the world as well, with you. This is the way to peace. Trust me, it is. As I always say when teaching: “It’s hard to hate someone when you know their story.” Same goes for ourselves… the more we understand ourselves, the more grace we can give to ourselves and others.

Okay. ONWARD (and thanks for your patience):

(see the Assignment for more)

When my kids were growing up in Frederick, Maryland, in another lifetime, I made lists every summer of movies we’d watch (which we rented at our local Erol’s Video, which was next to the old Giant Food on the Golden Mile at Baughman’s Lane), and the books we’d read, together and separately. We’d also have a project to complete every summer… I don’t know that I posted that project, but I’m going to post our Writers Lab Summer Project today.

In those other-lifetime years, the lists lived on the bulletin board at the stair landing to the basement, and items got crossed off, signed off on, whatevered, depending on how many kids and readers were in the house that summer.

Before those Frederick days, when there was just one child, and then two (before the full complement of four and hangers-on), library lists — the ones you’d find at checkout — were my Bibles for what to read aloud to toddlers and elementary-aged readers. I always had those lists tacked on the bulletin board as well.

We called the movies on the list (or I did) “the Summer Family Film Fest.” We had no central a/c, and the basement was the coolest area in the house in summer, so we’d congregate down there and watch “To Kill A Mockingbird” for the third time (I have not heard the end of this yet); “Gremlins” or “ET” or “Back to the Future” and so many other movies… “The Wizard of Oz” and “Flight of the Navigator” and The Princess Bride” and the ever-popular “Goonies” (which I was not a fan of, but hey, I could sneak in an occasional “Mockingbird” or “The Reivers," so I was happy). We ate a lot of popcorn on those movie days.

The books we read, the movies we watched, the projects we worked on (often garden-related or cooking-related, or sewing/crafting/building-related, I remember) are part of family lore now, and are a piece of who we were becoming back then… and who we are now.

I feel the same way about writing. I have lived long enough to look back on my body of work and see how I have been influenced by what I watched, what I read, and what I wrote. (And that’s not counting the influence of others, although that is certainly a factor, but for this Summer Project, let’s narrow the scope enough to make it doable, and so we don’t have to visit our therapists.)

Let’s think this summer on what you’ve read, watched, heard (include music, conversations, etc), over a lifetime, and what you’ve tried to make from all of it — how has it influenced you as a writer?

This is elemental stuff, but not hard. It’s worth taking a bit of time to make this a project — I’ll walk you through it, see the Assignment below. It’s foundational work, fundamental work, and it can be alternately heartbreaking and heartfelt. It involves thinking. And feeling. But not onerously so. It should serve as a help to you in why you write what you do, how you write it, and where you want to go with what you write in the future.

AND SO: THE ASSIGNMENT

(This is where the paywall begins, and if you are a Lab Coat, you won’t notice it, you will just read on and be “in” the Writers Lab):

Read more

Welcome to Storybelly Summer

Morning, everybody! Here I am, home after away, catching up and welcoming summer. Read on for our Storybelly summer plans, and thanks so much for hanging out with me here. A reminder that Chat is available for all Lab Coats, and comments on most posts are open for everyone. We have new Lab Coats this week — don’t forget to introduce yourself! Onward!

This is Andrew Jackson’s home, the Hermitage, in Nashville, Tennessee, where we visited last week. I was curious as to how they would handle the Trail of Tears, as well as slavery and other events and experiences of the seventh US President’s life. I have thoughts, from a writing perspective as well as a historical perspective. I will express them in the Lab this week. I think.

Summer’s here, and so is a new season of Storybelly. From solstice to September, we’re going to read what we love, write what we can, gather our gumption, and bask in some sunshine (and some a/c). Here is an invitation to join me for photo-centric weekly essays, light-hearted writing prompts, book talk, and good company in the Lab and beyond. Come as you are. Bring your books, your words, your lemonade, your deadlines, your dreams. I’ll supply the cake.

Let’s begin—everybody in!

“Oh, the places you’ll go!” came to my mind today, as I contemplated the intensity of this year so far. The very best thing about it: I’ve seen all my kids — and their kids — multiple times, and some of them are far-flung, so getting to spend time with them was an absolute treat. Here’s what we’ve done and what we’re currently wrangling:

The Rites of Passage!

Two graduations, one impending move, two spring concerts, one surgery, one job change, a few holidays, many birthdays, field trips, Sunday dinners, quiet times, and chaos, and all of it good.

The Deadlines!

I’m working hard now toward getting pages to my editor at the end of this summer. Am I okay with this? Yes. Moving forward. There was a time when I couldn’t.

I’m passing the absolute-last dates for getting seeds in the ground or in pots for this growing season. My seed packet pile is from last year and the year before. I didn’t buy seeds at all this year, thinking I’ll get last year’s in the dirt and growing… ummm… maybe not. Am I okay with that? Yes. The perennials are putting on a show, and they make me happy:

I’m finding it hard to keep up with Storybelly in this inaugural year, and I have more plans than I am able to wrangle, most days. I am okay with this because still, I persevere. lol. And I enjoy it. And it’s helping me segue to and from the page with Charlottesville. And so:

Welcome to Storybelly Summer.

The summer solstice and the longest day of the year is at the end of this week. From summer solstice to some time in September, I want to try writing an essay each week for you, for me, for us, something I’m working on or something I’ve written already that I want to share.

I’m going to try. Je vais essayer. essay: to try. Want to try with me? Say yes.

Let’s write, and let’s read. Here at the ‘belly lately, Hatchet by Gary Paulsen has been a read and a re-read. Here’s the (ongoing) discussion about that book — see the comments on that post, “What is your Canon?”

Let’s read what we wanna read this summer (as much as possible, anyway) and report in. I’ll start, below and in comments.

So, for everybody, we’ll move into this summertime with books and notebooks and lemonade and fruit bars and somebody to sit on the ice cream churn as it gets too hard to turn the handle, and somebody else to brave the kitchen in this heat and make us a cake.

I braved the kitchen this early quiet morning with a new stainless French press for coffee, one that I hope will keep a pot of coffee warm enough for drinking during deadline mornings:

In the Lab, we’ll start a workshop of sorts, if’n you’re all willing. Loose and free, short and sweet, not too taxing, light and easy, like the summers we remember and romanticize from childhood (in books or in reality). Stand by. I’m thinking about a once-a-week short, live check-in with what we’re writing, and cheering each other on.

And for everybody, if you want to join us in the Writers Lab this summer, you can do that here, with a monthly or annual subscription to the Storybelly Writers Lab. Lab posts appear weekly, and welcome you into a warm-hearted writing community just for you. Come explore and experiment with us.

I’m going to work on shorter intros to THE ASSIGNMENT in the Lab for summertime, before the paywall on each week’s Lab post. Get ready for some really simple but oh-so-interesting and useful writing exercises for this summer, you Sweethearts of the Storybelly Lab.

Those of you who are founding subscribers who got us off the ground earlier this year — O Pioneers! — you will be talking with Ops-Guru Zach soon about consults/critiques. Zach has had a wee bit of outpatient surgery — one reason this past week was jangled, schedule-wise. He’s doing well, but give him a little time and he’ll get with y’all, as soon as he can make cogent sentences again. :>

Meanwhile, here’s a new book suggestion for you: Pam Munoz Ryan’s new book El Niño.

Isn’t it beautiful! I feel the tiniest bit like an auntie to this book, as I got to hear part of it on a writing retreat a couple of years ago, got to read the book in manuscript before it was published, and basically got to watch it grow up. I love the story (and Pam), I love the beautifully detailed bookmaking here, from Scholastic Press, and I hope you’ll love this story, too. It’s a book for our time, by a master storyteller. A couple of glowing stars say:

★ "Glistens like sunlight on waves." ―School Library Journal, starred review

★ "Ryan’s skill as a writer shines." ―The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, starred review

★ "Lingers like the echo of thunder―powerful, haunting, and deeply core-shaking." ―Shelf Awareness, starred review

“Sometimes the only way to hold onto what we love is to let go.”

Proud Auntie here! Happy sigh. Congratulations, Pam!

***

What are y’all reading this summer? Here’s some of my library at the moment:

Then, lastly, since every one of you who has subscribed to Storybelly has seen my welcome email with my photo and all that long hair — I called it my pandemic hair — I got a haircut. My pandemic is over. Do I need to redo my welcome page photo? :>

And that’s a wrap for this last Storybelly Digest of spring. Come help me welcome in Storybelly Summer next week! Until then, happy reading, writing, sunning, baking, cooking, digging, and people-ing, as you sail into summer.

xoxoxo Debbie