Deborah Wiles's Blog, page 5

Writers Lab: Audience

Good Saturday evening/Sunday morning, everyone. I’ve almost let this week slip away from me, as I’ve had my head down in Charlottesville so deeply. I had prepared a Writers Lab on “Description,” as I’m writing a ton of description right now, along with studying how other writers (books, film, songs) “do that.”

But I’m captured by some comments in the Lab earlier this week from Lab Coat Peggy, about the novel Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. Peggy commented on a Writers Lab post from February, “What Is Your Canon?” — a Lab post that is open to all —, that you can read and comment on. Come join the conversation, and while you’re at it, tell us about your canon books, if you haven’t already.

I think what Peggy’s asking about, or commenting on, boils down to Audience. And with that in mind, I’m wondering, for those of you in the Writers Lab (and for everyone, really): who are you writing for? Let’s have a lively discussion on this post, in comments on this post, about what you are writing, or want to write, and who you are writing for. I’ll open the comments on this post to everyone. Chat will remain for Lab Coats only. See details below in THE ASSIGNMENT.

In short: Let’s think about Audience this week. In Peggy’s post she brought up questions about plot credibility and how hard it would be to do some of the tasks that 13-year-old Brian tackles when he is the only survivor of a plane crash in a remote area and must make his way with only a hatchet as his survival tool. She also says: “… I’m glad to have been introduced to the book. I would have loved it as a kid!!”

This got me thinking about what a diverse bunch we are, here at Storybelly. I love that. Some of us are writing for young readers (and there are genres within genres there); some of us are writing for adult readers (also many genres); some of us are song writers and singers; some of us are teachers, librarians, fellow writers, beginning writers, poets, memoirists, list scribblers, cake bakers, and candlestick makers, so to speak.

And all of us are readers. Readers and storytellers.

We read all kinds of books, and we have our favorites. I’m not big on reading fantasy, for instance, or science fiction — I know I am missing out. I’m a huge audiobook fan (Libby forever!). I’m really picky about the young adult books I read, and I am now writing for young adults. Charlottesville is a young adult novel, which is a book for readers who are (roughly) age 14 and up. High schoolers. Young adults.

Hatchet is what we call a middle-grade novel, for readers who are roughly the ages of 8 to 12. So it has particular considerations… to consider. :>

Kent State was my first young adult novel, after a scattering of picturebooks for youngest readers and 7 or so novels for a younger audience, which is where I think my sweet spot as a writer for young people lies, although, after decades of reading all the middle-grade fiction I could get my hands on, I don’t read so much middle-grade fiction anymore — this is a story for another day.

I was an essayist, an oral historian, a magazine feature writer, a magazine editor, and a writing teacher, before I was a published author. Each chapter of my writing life has challenged me to meet a new audience — readers! That elusive prize, eh? Readers to understand, respect, and write for.

While writing “rules” or “dos and don’ts” or whatever, are somewhat universal, in order to attract our intended audiences, there are particulars to keep in mind — for all genres. Peggy wrote, re Hatchet, and books for young readers:

I think my interest in having the discussion is that I would like to know what tools you use to write for young adults - literary, grammatical, etc. I don’t necessarily think I would write one but I am just interested in how your mind works, how you settle yourself down in a certain direction.

So, I put the question to all y’all who read books for young readers and/or who write them: what tools DO we use? What considerations are in place? When writing picture books, middle-grade novels, non-fiction for young readers, poetry for young readers, and young adult books, what makes them differ from writing that same novel or adventure story for adults? We know it is different… but how? How do you settle yourself down in a certain direction?

So: Officially for this week, here is:

THE ASSIGNMENT:

This week’s assignment is a bit different, and a bit truncated from my usual verbiage. :> I’d like to hear from YOU this week!

Use the comments section on this post to tell us A) what you are writing or want to write; and B) who is your intended audience? Let’s hear from you, please! Let’s get to know one another, support one another, cheer ourselves on.

Join the Writers Lab discussion about Hatchet (and writing for young people) here. I am already deep into conversation there. Join me. All are welcome.

Those of you writing for young readers: What tools do you use specifically when writing for younger audiences? How is writing for young people different than writing for adult readers?

Remember that all Lab Coats can participate in Chat, and start their own threads there.

Some things to think about:

In your own writing or reading, think about how you might present the same story for adults that you present to young readers, and vice versa. What are the changes you would make? Here’s just one of many examples:

Also think about different ways we present the same story by different writers. When I published Kent State in 2020, so did Derf Backderf. We wrote about those same 4 days in May 1970. I wrote a YA novel in verse with many different voices. Derf wrote a graphic novel:

For different audiences, with crossover, and of course with different voices.

What stays the same when you write for a particular audience? And what changes?

And one more to think about, a similar survival story, one for middle-grade readers and one for adult readers… studying each one might give you clues to what kinds of changes are needed for each audience.

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We are almost ready to being scheduling the summer individual conversations and critiques that O Pioneers! have paid for with their founder’s support for Storybelly. Ops Guru Zach will be reaching out to you… or you can now begin reaching out to us, to let us know you are ready (when you are ready :>). More on how that’s going to work soon. I’m really looking forward to these this summer. Thank you, Pioneers! You have helped make Storybelly possible.

Every subscriber at every level keeps me going. I appreciate you all — and your stories! — so much.

Speaking of SUMMER, we’re changing up the Digest and Lab for summer, more on that soon as well. You’ve probably already noticed that we’re playing with publishing dates and post lengths as we enter the hot (and maybe languid) season of vacations and catching up and (not so languid) deadlines.

As for this household, we leave tomorrow for Nashville and a few days with family there. I hope to visit The Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson’s home in Nashville, while I’m there. I’ll take you with me. From Monticello to the Hermitage, the third president to the seventh, is quite the stretch politically and philosophically… let’s see what it brings me with Charlottesville.

***

That’s the Lab for this week — a softer landing, eh? We need a little softness in summer, I think. I know I do. I look up from the page, blinking. Where am I? How did all that time skid by? Where was I? Either that, or I’m just slogging. Lost for words. Maybe you’ve been there?

I’m sending good writing vibes this week, and — as Brenda Ueland wrote, Strength to Your Sword Arm!

xo Debbie

Storybelly Digest: Peach Season

Here I am. Happy June, everybody. I’m posting the Storybelly Digest on Wed. this week, as we glide into summer. This week, I’m sharing a post from my Blogger archives — a legacy post from 2009 when I was deep in the making of Countdown, the first book of the Sixties Trilogy. That early writing life still shapes how I work today, as I write through Charlottesville and the long — and often dark — shadows of history. The rest of the Digest is below this legacy post… notes from the kitchen, the garden, and the page, moments that are sustaining me in the thick of this story. Here we go!

Here is a post from Monday, January 19, 2009. Countdown was published in 2010.

13 Days

On February 1, I will send off whatever I have of this new novel to my editor, David Levithan, at Scholastic. Please God, may I have an entire book, Book One of The Sixties Trilogy. (Working title: THE END OF THE ROPE. This will change.)

Remember my first line? "I am eleven years old and I am invisible."

Franny Chapman wants to survive nuclear attack, if it comes, and she's pretty certain it will, in October 1962, outside of Washington, D.C. She's writing a letter to JFK and Chairman Khrushchev. She's spying on her older sister, Jo Ellen. She's fighting with her best friend, Margie.

Halloween is just around the corner. So is a gravel pit, a brother who wants to be an astronaut, a fighter-pilot dad, a perfect-hostess mom, and crazy Uncle Otts, World War I vet, who is the self-proclaimed neighborhood air-raid warden. Can you say embarrassment?

Then there is the boy across the street. Don't get me started on the boy across the street, or on those 13 days in October when the world came as close as it has ever come to nuclear annihilation.

That's what I'm writing about, in the larger sense. But it's Franny's story.

I have 13 days to finish it. Same time frame as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I have so much left to do.

I am going to post here every day, and I will tweet multiple times per day (you can see these at twitter, or by going to this blog's online presence -- where some of you are now). I will also separately update my fan page (haha! FIFTY FANS! We're going to have to rent a stadium! Or a stake-bed truck) from under the blankets draped across the furniture. Oh, the perks of being in the all-inclusive club.

So there are several ways to keep up if you are 1) interested and 2) willing to cheer me on. I am seriously behind, but I am determined. You can opt out at any time, of course, you can ignore me the next 13 days, etc., but I could use your energy and good wishes, which is why I'm going to pepper you with posts. I may not be able to reply to comments, but I'll be living on every word.

I tend to write in white heats. I sink down, down, down, and the world goes away while I concentrate for many hours, days, weeks at a time. This next 12 days, I will be in that place, but I will also have three school visits to do, locally, and a non-functioning bathroom. All of this was scheduled when I was going to be done by November 1, of course.

I spent the weekend in my pajamas, in the pink chair, by the fire, laptop and coffee and concentration. I got dressed to go to dinner with Jim last night, as I had eaten nothing but half a chocolate bar all day. Today I ate some Triscuits and mozzarella. I polished it off with a diet Barq's and called it dinner.

This afternoon I researched until I had to take a nap. I read about the Meuse-Argonne Offensive of World War I. I read all about Harry Truman (Harry Truman -- who knew! And I found a wonderful primary source -- his letters to Bess).

I collected recipes from Peg Bracken's I HATE TO COOK BOOK. I gathered the top 100 tunes from 1960 through 1962. I listened to Sam Cooke ("Don't know much about history..." bliss), and studied up on the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary. I took notes on the 1960 Olympics in Rome (Wilma Rudolph, Cassius Clay, Rafer Johnson) and on the 1962 integration of Ole Miss, when federal marshalls escorted James Meredith to register and Governor Ross Barnett refused him at the door. What a time.

I read the following comment on a blog about sixties appetizers, laughed out loud, immediately wanted to create this character, and settled instead for stealing her style and using it to tell you about my dinner:

My mother used to take a slice of salami and put a slice of provolone on top. Then she'd put a plop of prepared tuna salad in the middle, lay an anchovy across it, roll it up and put a toothpick in the whole thing. Then she'd throw back a Grasshopper or a Pink Flamingo, tug on her Doris Day wig, and call it a party.

Yeah! These are the people I'm writing about! I hope they make you laugh. So back to it, armed with today's research to answer the questions I bumped against today. I'm also going to take a bath, because tomorrow, as I said, the bathroom... goes. This is just the sort of distraction I need in the next 13 days.

I was supposed to be done a long time ago, you'll remember. My goal had been Nov. 1. Then I lost an editor in October, lost momentum, began fall travels, slid into the holidays, and... well, now I'm finishing, and the bathroom is beginning, and I will not be delayed again! So. Bath. Then bed. Then -- 12 days.

***

You can read all the Countdown “13 Days” posts here.

I made Smitten’s “Crispy Peach Cobbler” today:

This week’s smoothie game is strong. They include cherries, peaches, blueberries, pineapple, mango, spinach, cocoa, yogurt, etc etc etc:

A garden walkabout, taking stock with “the edible yard & garden project” — that’s lemon balm and elecampane leaves I’m harvesting in the first square:

Two new-to-me Jefferson books, from historians who are featured in Ken Burns’ “Jefferson” documentary:

Bobo sleeping in my writing spot:

Most of my words this week are going into Charlottesville. On my breaks I do a little of what you see here, and I wonder how you are doing, in this first week of June-already, and what is occupying most of your time? I am living in 2017 and 1776 and 1865 these days, coming up for air often, and for perspective.

The garden, the kitchen, the companionable slowness and silence and rhythm of days this past two weeks have been touchstones that keep me grounded in the present, so I can go back to the past again.

I hope you’re feeling grounded and centered these days, or at least can work toward that. What is it that grounds you? I’d love to hear.

The world feels haphazard and untethered. I don’t watch or read the news. I participate in the projects at hand; they include taking good care of myself and protecting my heart; getting enough sleep; moving slowly; creating healthy boundaries; having good work to do; checking in with my people; and using my hands in every way I can, making whatever I can, including this story I’m currently writing, a book that I hope reaches readers in a way that helps the world feel a little less untethered, that serves “to make more gentle the life of this world” (to quote Robert Kennedy in 1968).

We have vast influence in our own orbits. I believe each choice, from watering a plant, sharing a meal, engaging in quiet (or lively!) conversation, to listening closely, creates a slender lifeline that invites hope and connection, that quietly and steadily weaves a larger web of care and belonging, if that makes sense. And I am here for it.

Happy June, everybody.

Writers Lab: The Power of the Paragraph

Afternoon, Lab Coats, you Sweethearts of the Storybelly Lab. I have been SO squirreled down in drafting Charlottesville and have loved every second of this week home in a quiet house with no other obligations or appointments other than those I’ve chosen to tackle, mainly the work in progress, but also a bit of cooking, some dishes, lots of reading and writing and sleeping and eating, and I need to change the sheets on the bed, and I can’t get outside to work because of the relentless rain (which I am so grateful for, and will be doubly glad for in the drought of summer).

What a life, I know! It is a rare week, and a present, after the gift of the organized chaos of last week with my people that I loved so much, and a whirlwind time in Charlottesville. It was a week full of people and places and events and moments to remember. It was so rich… and so is this quiet writing week.

Isn’t this back-and-forth rhythm of life just like the Writers Lab Exercises we’ve been exploring?

The Unity of Opposites, (and here is another one)

The Tendrils of Tenderness,

The Lasso Effect,

What You Know First,

Firsts and Lasts,

“It All Turns on Affection,”

Writing from the Heart of History,

And of course

The Art of Sifting and “Let There Be Cake,” of course, of course, our Theme Song!

So.

I’ve been writing a lot of paragraphs lately, and this week I’m inviting you to write some with me. I want to try an exercise where we add to one another’s paragraphs. We’ll do it in Chat, AND we can do it in comments below, if you prefer to share there or are having trouble getting into Chat (DM me, if so). The settings for comments within a Writers Lab post are available to Lab Coats only, both for reading and responding to them, so here is your safe, welcoming writing space (same with Chat) and a way for us to play.

This should be fun! If you are a free subscriber and would like to play with us, you can sub for a month or more to the Writers Lab here:

Subscribe now

Exercise #13 will be a fun Exercise for the End of May, My Month of May, the end of Spring, where we will play with forms and structures and word play, description, dialogue, whatever strikes your writer’s fancy. All the freedom in the world to make a mess and play.

We’re going to breathe out into the last of this lovely, rainy spring (here in ATL, anyway), and take a deep breath into the heat of June, July, and August. It’s almost time to turn on the a/c here in the Deep South.

Most of the rest of today’s post will be some instruction and word play, aka FUN, and therefore light.

I can’t wait to see what you come up with! Let’s make some joyful noise and messy mess and just have a blast. Yes? YES.

The Charlottesville writing is really heavy this week. I crave some lightness, some silliness, some playfulness, and some camaraderie with like-minded writerly folks, beginners just wading in, and those who’ve been swimming along for a while — you can drop in anywhere in the Lab and find yourself at home.

So let’s get to it. I’ll stick the paywall here, and we’ll get to work.

One last invitation first, though — come on in! The water is fine, the company is sterling, and the energy is sweet. All are welcome!

No experience necessary (but you do have experience, whether you know it or not!), come join us!

And now:

THE ASSIGNMENT

Read more

Storybelly Digest: At Jefferson's Monticello

Today will be a landing day for me, gentle I hope, on the heels of an utterly rich, terrifically full, wonderfully exhausting trip to the Washington, DC area and my old stomping grounds, followed by a day in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a bit more research on the work in progress, and a long drive home.

The best part: family. What chaos and what comfort. You know, I’m sure. Almost a full complement for grandgirl Delaney’s high school graduation, pulled together from near and far, with various hangers-on we also love, a big dog (hahaha), good food, a stuffed car load of us careening to graduation almost before the sun comes up, swinging by the Dunkin’ for hot coffees and donuts — calling out our orders at the drive-thru from our charades riffs from the night before (“One diary of a large hot coffee!”), doing The Wave when Our Graduate walked across the stage (and a stranger-friend ringing her cowbell for us; that meant we Waved for her child as well, of course); and then there were the crossed wires and the forgiveness, the tears and the hilarity, the reminiscences, new memories made, and the surprises: a grandgirl even came from Spain.

It was a lot. It was epic. And I haven’t even gotten to Charlottesville yet. Jim and I drove to Charlottesville from DC early on Saturday morning and spent a long day there, with tickets to Monticello and the surrounding gardens, the highlights tour, the slavery to freedom tour, poking our heads into all the spaces we could photograph and catalogue with a good tour guide, manifesting Jefferson everywhere we could. I’ve put some photos in a Google photo album (Monticello for Storybelly), and here are a few of them that I’m using to tell my story:

At Monticello itself, I wanted to understand the geography there and walk it myself. I wanted to take shots of the Great Clock in the Entrance Hall — it plays a part in my story — and to see its workings, both in the Great Hall and in the basement, where “Saturday” lives (Jefferson’s calculations for the 7-day clock were off by enough (actually, weren’t off at all, but the room’s ceiling wasn’t high enough) that holes were cut in the floor and “Saturday,” with its weights and pulleys, ends up in the basement).

I also wanted to see where Jefferson might encounter Dan (more on Dan another day), or where Dan encounters Jefferson, more accurately. It would be in Jefferson’s study, I had thought, so I took photos of that as well, and for good measure, the bedroom (where I asked our guide about the room recently uncovered that’s believed to have been a quarters for Sally Heming, and our guide didn’t miss a beat in telling us where to find it).

My bonus was in finding a windowed alcove next to the dining room that gave me a little epiphany for my story, a small change in venue. Now I see Jefferson meeting Dan again, seven years after their first encounter, and saying the same thing he said to him when Dan was twelve: “Tea?” It’s perfect.

We also spent some time with Sally Hemings’ story. I kept thinking of the Monticello chapter in Clint Smith’s book How the Word is Passed. My experience on Saturday was that every tour mentions “the enslaved,” and that Sally Hemings and other slaves were talked about everywhere, including in exhibits… something I never saw or heard about in long-ago trips to Monticello.

I’m struggling with how to present Jefferson in this book about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, but I’m also feeling good about my narrative’s current direction, after years of trying to figure out what this story is trying to tell me, and how it wants to be written. A book always lets me know, and this one has been a long time coming.

[So here is a gentle trigger warning for those who need it (I know I did, for such a long time) about the car attack on Saturday during the Unite the Right rally. The photos below are taken by me, in the alley that is also 4th street, and there is a bit about how I’m writing my story:]

Jim and I took a break and had some lunch at Citizen Burger downtown. Then, fortified, we visited a culminating scene that I don’t think I’m going to include in my Charlottesville novel, although my characters are going to go right up to it. I might change my mind — or my story might — as I had this scene in an earlier draft of the book, but it wasn’t working, and it hurt my heart to keep writing it, so I’m recasting my ending, although the horror of it needs to be coming as the book ends, and the reader needs to know that… or that’s my thinking as I write today.

I don’t want to say too much about this scene, but I want to make it real (to myself) that I’m aware of the ending on Heather Heyer Way, and I’m writing toward the end. Maybe I’m not making sense. That’s just because so much is in flux right now, on the heels of a whirlwind visit that opened up my thinking (and feeling) so visually.

On my last visit to Charlottesville, I concentrated on The Lawn and the Rotunda, at the University of Virginia, both of them places for Friday night’s torch rally during the Unite the Right rally. I visited the former site of the Lee statue (NYT unlocked) and some of the churches. I was getting a feel for the geography of my story, walking through Charlottesville. I also visited Nameless Field, where the Unite the Right protestors gathered before their march on Friday night.

For my next visit I will have interviews scheduled, so I want to make the most of my writing time this summer, in order to get a draft. It is still fascinating to me that, no matter how many times I do it, a book takes its time, and tells you when its ready, and then you’d better be ready to go go go right along with it, on its timeline. It’s as if a story knows, somehow, when you’ve got enough — enough research, enough love for your subject, enough commitment, enough strength — to write with and write well, and now it’s time to settle fully into the work.

I think a story also knows when you are mentally ready, emotionally outfitted, and have grown into the writer you need to be in order to write that story. I have had that experience more than once with a book… Countdown, for instance… it started out as a picture book fifteen years before it was published as a novel and part of the Sixties Trilogy.

You get to this point with a book, and the story is suddenly trusting you and your commitment to do right by it. I feel that as a charge now, and I’m trying to answer it.

I was thinking about our Lab posts this May, about sentimentality vs practicality and I realize I’ve been writing them for me as much as for y’all. I don’t want to get maudlin with this story. I don’t want to over-sentimentalize it or sensationalize any of this story, which is a tall order with a story of this kind.

I felt the same way about Kent State, though, and somehow — with those same parameters in place from the story itself — seemed to manage to find a structure that worked for that novel. I trust we’re on the right path with Charlottesville now, too.

In history this week (if you haven’t had enough already!) I’ll just mention Walt Whitman’s birthday, May 31, 1819. His poetry in Leaves of Grass appears in my third Aurora County novel, The Aurora County All-Stars. Our hero, House Jackson, has been reading to “Mr. Norwood Rhinehart Beauregard Boyd, age eighty-eight, philosopher, philanthropist, and maker of mystery,” who has recently died and left House his copy of Leaves of Grass. There is a mystery (“…moves the symphony true) that House comes to understand by the end of the book, along with a baseball game and a pageant of some kind that defies description. :> I loved writing this book, as I have long loved Whitman. And baseball. And Ruby Lavender returns! She is ready to play ball, when the number one rule is: No Girls.

In the Writers Lab this week, we’ll explore… something. ha. I’m not fully back at my desk yet. It will not quite be June, but I’m moving into June already, so we’ll explore some summer stuff. School’s out for most of us by then, and maybe we can stretch our writing fingers and get down to our own stories for a change.

One thing I learn over and again: Writing is slow magic. In the Lab, we honor the false starts, the pauses, the breakthroughs, and the beautiful confusion. Come write with us. Each week in the Writers Lab, I send a richly drawn Exercise and a nudge toward the story only you can write.

Sometimes what we need is not a deadline, but a circle. The Writers Lab is a place to be among story-minded people, writing alongside one another, gently moving forward. Something like that. I’ll be in Chat later this week, and with a Lab and Writing Exercise post as well.

It’s good to be home for a spell (well, for two weeks, but who’s counting?).

As I say every week, I hope you connect to your own home and place in history when you read and share these books. You can find out more about them at my website, here.

Thank you for the suggestions of books with ghosts in them. I’m also looking for time folding — got any suggestions for that? So far I’ve read Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds this past week — thanks for that suggestion — and it was just what I was looking for. I’m making my way down the list.

As for YOUR writing, maybe let’s think about historical fiction for a moment… I know we concentrate on personal narrative writing here, which can include poetry and memoir and even historical fiction… what historical period would you find yourself in, in a short memoir piece or poem? How would you describe it? What it looks like, sounds like, feels like, etc., in details that would place you in that time or event without telling us too much about the year or the event? Show don’t tell. Etc.

Write me a sketch and put it in comments. I thought just now about how I could do this with Woodstock. That’s something I might attempt…. even though I wasn’t there. :>

And that’s a wrap for Digest #15. Have a great week, everybody. How is it almost JUNE?

xoxox Debbie

Writers Lab: Coming Into Summer

Greetings, Lab Coats and all Storybellers, to the last post of May and spring. I’m out of town, visiting family and celebrating a high school graduation, then headed to Charlottesville, Virginia for another research day for the work in progress. Tickets to Monticello on Saturday and home late Sunday.

Staring into the summer ahead always makes me think of the courage on display in Mississippi in 1964, and as we head into those Freedom Summer days, I want to share an interview I did with Book Page when Revolution was published.

I’ll be back with June’s assignments next week. Meanwhile, I’m opening the Lab to everyone this holiday week, with an interview, and a short assignment. Welcome to the Writers Lab, everyone!

xo Debbie

June 2014

Deborah Wiles

The big picture

Interview by Angela Leeper

Inspired by the author’s own childhood in Mississippi in the ’60s, Revolution is an unforgettable story of big changes—for a nation and for the two young characters at the heart of this book.

Why did you choose to tell the story of the Freedom Summer through the eyes of a white character, especially one who isn’t initially a firm believer in civil rights?
I chose to tell the story as I witnessed it in 1964. I was a white kid in Mississippi in 1964, and I didn’t understand what was happening. I couldn’t be called a “believer” in civil rights per se, as I didn’t know what that meant. Children have a finely honed sense of justice and fairness, however, and I knew something was wrong and unfair, although I couldn’t articulate it. At first, when “everything closed”—the pool, the rollerskating rink, the ice cream place, the library, the movie theater—all I could think was, now I won’t be able to do these things—how unfair! I hadn’t realized that there were kids my age who had never been able to do these things, because of the color of their skin. I always say this was the summer I began to pay attention.

When I wrote Revolution, I wanted Sunny to have such an awakening. I wanted her to begin to pay attention. I wanted her to expand her thinking, and thereby her world. Everything she hears, sees and experiences serves that awakening.

You don’t shy away from depicting the violence directed at blacks and the whites who are trying to help them. Why do you think it’s important for Sunny to observe this violence firsthand?
I need the reader to observe it! Sunny and Raymond are the eyes and ears of the reader, and through them the reader experiences Freedom Summer, as well as what it’s like to grow up with hopes and dreams within a loving family; what it’s like to weather storms together, to be scared together, to face hatred and change together; what honor and dignity look like; what it’s like to not understand what’s happening in your world, to seek out answers.

You spent much of your childhood in Mississippi. Were you able to draw on any personal experiences when writing Revolution?
I was born in Mobile, Alabama, and spent my growing up summers in Mississippi, at my grandmother’s home. I went to college in Mississippi in 1971, where there were still “colored” and “white” drinking fountains on campus. I grew up as an Air Force kid—which I write about in Countdown—so going home to Mississippi (where my parents were born and bred) was like entering another world, but one as familiar to me as breathing. I loved it fiercely—still do. I was largely sheltered from any civil rights unrest. Our little town was very rural, and there was no Freedom House in Jasper County, but I have vivid memories of “everything closing,” and of the small moments I observed as I began to pay attention. I saw, for instance, how Annie Mae, who worked for my grandmother, was treated in town. I wrote about this in my first book, Freedom Summer. I was confused and longed to talk about these things and understand what was happening. In creating Sunny, I gave myself a way to be part of the Movement.

The articles and photographs never overwhelm the story, but rather provide glimpses of the historical backdrop. How should young people approach these documentary materials?
They serve as a way to look at the larger world while the more intimate story plays out in the book. As writers and readers, we often look at a story—especially historical fiction—as happening in one small pocket of the historical world, when in reality so much is happening that’s important to a story, that defines it. The Beatles coming to America in 1964 is a defining feature of Sunny’s life and friendships, and I want you to see it. I want to see it, as I am such a visual learner and reader. I teach writing in schools, where I tell students and teachers about the awakening moments for me as a writer, when I learned that I could access the whole world in telling my story—an outer story and an inner story, if you will.

What was your favorite thing you learned during the research process for Revolution?
It astounded me, first of all, how little I really understood about Freedom Summer, especially as I had written a picture book called Freedom Summer in 2001, which had required me to do some research into the Civil Rights Act. As I dug deeper for Revolution, to write a documentary novel, I was most surprised to find what a local movement Freedom Summer had been. Yes, SNCC organized Freedom Summer, working with other civil rights organizations. Yes, they came into Mississippi—1,000 strong in 1964, mostly white, mostly college students—to register black voters, and yet the philosophy of SNCC was to help the local people who were already ready for change—already working for it—stand up and be supported and learn the tactics they could use after SNCC left to continue to work for change.

What would you say to young readers who want to make a positive change in the world?
Ask questions. Pay attention. Educate yourself. Find your people and stand for what you believe in. In Revolution, Sunny is almost 13 years old, and she makes a difference. Raymond, who is 14, certainly makes a difference as he learns to work in his community, learns to channel his frustration and anger, and learns that his dignity has no price. He teaches Sunny this, too, without saying a word to her. This is how we make a difference, one choice at a time, over and over again.

What can readers expect from the final installment in the Sixties Trilogy?
Book three takes place in 1968, in the San Francisco Bay area, and takes us into the turmoil of that year with the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the Democratic National Convention, the Vietnam War, the counterculture, rock and roll (baby!) and the antiwar movement. I can’t wait to be steeped in this world and to find my story. I’m convinced that stories help us to understand ourselves and change the world.

A portion of this interview was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage.

Here is Bob Moses talking about Freedom Summer:

If you’ve read Anthem, Book Three of the Sixties Trilogy, you’ll know that the book takes place in 1969 (not 1968 as I said in this interview), so you can maybe guess that there were lots of decisions made about that book in the five years between Revolution and Anthem’s publication! More on that another day.

*****

And now, THE ASSIGNMENT, which is a short one this week, a gift for the end of “My Month of May” and a look into summer.

This Assignment, Exercise #12 is open to everyone this holiday weekend. If you’d like to join the Lab and work with us every week, here’s where you can do that.

THE ASSIGNMENT:

We’re deep into “last days” now — last days of school, last days of spring, last time we’ll walk through a certain door or do a certain thing… and we’re tiptoing into firsts as well.

I am thinking of my grandgirl D who graduated from high school today, and who is stepping into a new world…

I am thinking of teachers who are dismantling their classrooms… or who are starting summer classes.

I’m thinking of librarians compiling summer reading lists and activities for their patrons.

I’m thinking of the trip to Charlottesville tomorrow and what new things I hope to discover about the book I’m writing… and I’m sure I’ll be thinking about last-things, too, with this book. Old things, ancient things. History.

I’m thinking about how yesterdays become last days and how each of us steps into a new day, each day, if we’re lucky, and how each new day is a new opportunity to begin again.

I’m thinking about the Freedom Summer volunteers, both those who came to Mississippi and those who already lived there and made commitments large and small to change history.

I’m thinking about each of us who makes a commitment every day, in small, everyday actions, in sacrifices, in generosity of heart or spirit, in tough choices, in speaking up, in knowing when to listen.

THE ASSIGNMENT is to write about a time that you:

experienced a last day or a last time;

a time you began again;

a moment of commitment;

a moment of courage.

Choose One.

Use this focus sentence: I’m going to write about the time that ___________.

Put it at the top of your page, to keep you… focused.

Begin with a strong lead. Read ’s April post with three great rules for capturing and keeping your reader’s attention:

Killer title.

Open strong

Format with mobile in mind.

Post what you come up with in comments.

Lab post comments are open to all this week; let us hear from you!

Questions? Ask away; the comments section is your friend!

We are off on a new adventure this morning. I’ll take you with me. I’m posting the journey on my IG stories, and will try to remember to put some of those photos here in Notes as well.

Until Monday!

xo Debbie

Storybelly Digest: Stirring the Pot

Good morning to all y’all! (Yes, I’m sending this on Sunday night, sigh… it’s a short work-week for me, so I’m getting a jump on Monday morning, let’s look at it that way. Here’s a Sunday meditation of sorts that I started early this morning):

The skies are dark and thunder grumbles while I heat water in the kettle for first coffee this morning. A steady rain begins to fall and I watch the chipping sparrows — a tiny army of little chippies — snatching their last dry bits from the feeder at the window before they dart for cover. Bobo abandons his chipmunk hunting and comes inside. Jim has left for his Sunday morning church gig and Zach is sleeping — or maybe he’s writing — downstairs. The house is quiet.

Last night we had fried chicken, deviled eggs, three kinds of potatoes (because somebody at the checkout realized too late she had them on the conveyor belt and shrugged what-the-heck, let’s have ‘em all tonight), baked beans, and strawberry shortcake along with a competitive game of family dominoes; often loud, often laughing, often with two or three threads of conversation going at the same time. Like we do.

We had one UN Observer, the usual abstainer, who started (and probably finished) the dishes, and who I spotted at one point casually unwrapping a Klondike bar. Someone else made decaf between rounds. Someone else left the room in order to primal scream outdoors and pull herself together when she got stuck with the dreaded double zeros tile at the end of the game (which she had just picked from the bone pile before someone else went out).

The game names were inventive, as always: I think Gene Shalit won, but he was (somewhat charmingly) ruthless; the word “gaslight” was used quite a bit. I know Cheeseburger Pepsi No Coke lost (she doesn’t care about the score; it’s all about the gathering, to her); Inigo Montoya was up and down in wins and losses, served as scorekeeper, and was a good sport; VMA should have clobbered Gene Shalit; and the biggest comeback in the scoring was from JJ who had flown in from Puerto Rico that morning and was flying out to Nashville today. That’s commitment! Or insanity. Maybe a little of both. Together we are stellar examples of the unity of opposites.

As I write this morning, the skies are clearing and there is a hint of sun on the rim of the treeline in front of me. My resident cardinals have finished their dawn chorus in the azaleas outside my bedroom window and are now at the feeders, looking for breakfast.

I’m starting Sunday dinner. I tumble the soaked pinto beans into an old pot, fill it with fresh water, and start them simmering. Then I go to work at my desk with my coffee until I can smell the cooking beans. Back in the kitchen I decide to add an onion to the bubbling broth. Then, like a painter with a palette, one thing turns into another: a couple of carrots, some celery, salt, pepper.

Keep it simple, Debbie, I say, and I pad back to work with a second cup of coffee. I’m working on Thomas Jefferson’s appearance in my book about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and it’s tricky.

In my next kitchen turn I’ve stirred the pot, added chicken broth and a hefty spoon each of cumin, smoked paprika, sweet paprika, and a tinge of crushed red pepper to the soupy beans. Then a taste test and a dash of Braggs on the next go-round, which is when I have to decide between cornbread and cheesy polenta.

I thought I’d make popcorn later, but I didn’t.

The polenta wins. I use a 4:1 ratio of water to coarsely ground yellow cornmeal that I like to buy at Your DeKalb Farmers Market. I sprinkle the grains over the coming-to-a-boil water, stirring constantly until it thickens and looks just right — not like concrete, not like soup.

I want to layer slices of American cheese on top of the polenta — I’ve recently discovered Borden’s American slices, which I like a lot on a hamburger, so I try not to feel elitist about cheese these days, remembering that there were days I couldn’t afford one slice of any cheese — but we’re out of it, so I grate some cheddar and parmesan (no I don’t, I open bags of grated cheese, lol) and sprinkle it generously on top of the polenta, turn off the heat, and cover the pot. A text from Jim tells me he’s on the way home from the gig. Then I start the salad.

When we sit down to eat thirty minutes later, the three of us with our various bowls filled with Sunday dinner, each bowl layered in our own patchwork ways, it is four hours from the time I started the beans cooking, and four hours — give or take — of a Sunday morning writing session. My version of church these days.

from a 2020 draft of Charlottesville.

Jefferson has not appeared, but he’s close and I can feel him, circling like the steam that rises from the soup pot. I will be inside his Charlottesville home, at Monticello, in person this coming week; maybe then I can coax him fully onto the page.

Still, I made progress. No effort is wasted. And I have a pot of beans, a saucepan of grain that’s sporting a bonnet of cheese, and a bowl of greens with what Jim calls “enhancements” on the side to show for it as well. We eat together, my people and I, while we dissect yesterday’s good time and plan the travel week ahead. And look: the sun is shining.

junipers, black-eyed Susans, a blueberry bush, wax myrtles to the right, and a Sierra Beauty apple tree to the left, in a little guild in a corner of the front deck.

I’ll be back at work tomorrow. I am reminded, as together we clear the table, set the kitchen to rights, and turn toward Sunday afternoon (which, surely, will include a nap?), that history — like life — doesn’t always come in grand gestures. Sometimes it comes in small moments, slowly, layered like a night of family dominoes or tending to Sunday dinner, stirred and seasoned over time, waiting for the opportune moment to appear. My job is to be ready — to set the table, to sift through the past, and to listen for the rustle of a ghost, just beyond reach.

I’m returning to Charlottesville later this coming week, this time for a tour of Monticello and a visit to Heather Heyer Way. I’ll take you with me.

Here’s some history this week that touches the stories I write:

Abraham Lincoln became the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency on the third ballot at the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1860. (Charlottesville)

Civil War: The Siege of Vicksburg began in 1863. US Grant left Vicksburg and set up camp at an antebellum mansion near Natchez, Mississippi, where he planned his next moves. What is left of that mansion now is called the Windsor Ruins. I'm writing an essay about working in Natchez last year and visiting the Windsor Ruins, as well as Forks of the Road, the second largest slave market of the Deep South in the 19th century. Below are a couple of photos I took at the ghostly Windsor last year. (Charlottesville)

In May 1969 Apollo 10 launched from Kennedy Space Center and later transmitted the 1st color pictures of Earth from space. (Countdown, Anthem)

In May 1970 the Beatles' last LP, "Let It Be", was released in the US. It was graduation week at St. Andrews High School in Charleston, South Carolina, and Jim was one of the graduates. We were on a date that night. He gave me “Let It Be” as a “going away” present. He was headed to college at Furman University and I was headed to my senior year of high school in the Philippines, my dad’s next duty station. (Revolution, for the Beatles)

May 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court released its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, and the judgment advanced the controversial “separate but equal” doctrine for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws. (Freedom Summer, Revolution)

May 19, 1925 Malcolm X was born. (Revolution). Here is a new book from Ibram Kendi about Malcolm (NYTimes link, unlocked and excellent) — a fantastic add to your libraries. Title: Malcolm Lives!

As I say every week, I hope you connect to your own home and place in history when you read and share these books. You can find out more about them at my website, here.

I remember how much my Ops-Guru and I laughed when we came up with "Write it (or Don’t)” months ago. It was supposed to be funny, because I’ve always said I hate writing prompts, but the more I look at it these days, the more I think it sounds like I’m challenging you… or, at the least, it’s non-committal… or something. So I’ll change it. For now: Write to me, lol:

Tell me your plans for this long week/weekend ahead, and Memorial Day. Is anybody decorating a headstone? I did that once, long ago. And then we had a picnic.

Tell me about a memorable family time or meal.

Put it in the comments below. :>

I would love for you to give me suggestions of historical fiction with ghosts in them. Please? I want to read some of them, see how it’s done, as I am possibly way out of my depth here. But I am dogged, and I hear whispers, so I am following them.

Ask me where the CAKE recipes are (we’ve made a section for them on the Storybelly home page, but we don’t have it populated yet).

Would an RSS feed for Storybelly be useful to you? I miss RSS feeds like I used at Blogger and Wordpress, where you won’t get email to clutter your inbox, but if you use an aggregator, you can go to, say, Feedly, and read through there. I see that Storybelly does have an RSS feed at Goodreads, here. Huh. Something like that.

Anything else?

Until next time, this is a wrap for Digest #14! Thanks ever for the company.

xoxoxo Debbie

Writers Lab: The Lasso Effect

Welcome, you Sweethearts of the Storybelly Lab, to another Writers Lab Assignment! This week:

Tell me, in the Writers Lab Chat or in the comments below the title of a book(s) that has grabbed you by the mind, heart, gut, or all three, right in the opening paragraph or pages and has swung you around like a lasso and has never let you go. Let’s call them lasso books.

I’ve been in that land this week.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, published April 29 this year by Penguin Random House

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans was my obsession — my lasso book — this week. Her first published novel! I was hooked from the first paragraph. (“How does she DO that?” right?)

It has been a long time since I have been completely captivated by a novel to the point of wanting to do nothing else but listen to it (or read it), and when I’m doing something else, I’m thinking of the next time I’ll get to dip into that book, move forward with the story, live in that world and root for those characters I’m falling in love with, and hope the story never ends.

Is it the voice? Is it the situation? Is it the character? I have many such books in my life, sprinkled over decades of reading. Some of them inform my writing in surprising ways — I touched on this in this week’s Digest, when I wrote about The Reivers, so I’ll expound on it just a bit for our Exercise #11 this week. Here are a couple more examples.

two more “lasso” books

Lincoln in the Bardo was an inspiration for the structure of Kent State. The Lincoln Highway is helping me structure Charlottesville. Both of these books surprised me from the first pages, and kept me turning the pages (listening; I read them both as audiobooks from my library).

I’ll write more about how specifically these books were models for me in my own writing, in future Lab posts, but for now I want to talk generally about good writing and storytelling.

I have a Pinterest board called “Good Writing and Storytelling” that I keep sporadically, partly because I appreciate good writing and storytelling so much. I don’t include my canon books there, or lasso books, but I do include links to… well, good writing, whether I stumble across it in words or song or film. I learn from all of it, and sometimes I borrow technique, like I did with The Reivers.

The opening salvo of The Reivers, which Faulkner calls “A Reminiscence,” is two words: “Grandfather said:” — and then, new paragraph, and we are off to the races with that story. I was totally charmed by this two-word frame for an entire novel:

Grandfather said:

That’s it! That is the frame for the book. We come back to Grandfather at the end, but Faulkner doesn’t mess around, he just plunges us into the story, and what we know from “Grandfather said,” before we read another word, is that we are about to hear a storytelling voice tell us a “once upon a time” story, and we settle in.

I borrowed that frame to tell the story of Robert F. Kennedy, President John Kennedy’s brother, and one of my heroes growing up. I don’t remember how many drafts it took of that picturebook to get it just right, but I do remember that every one of them began with “Grandfather said,” partly as an homage to The Reivers and Faulkner’s influence, and partly because it worked for the story I was trying to tell.

You can see my beginning below, in a 2015 draft. The book was sold in 2008 and was published into the pandemic in 2020. I don’t even know what version of a draft this one is, but it still has that Reiver’s borrowed beginning. (I also think the first paragraph borrows from Jackie Martin’s technique in her Caldecott winning picturebook Snowflake Bentley, but that’s another story.)

Here is the first page of Bobby, below, with that same opening, art by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh:

I’ll not belabor the surprises that lasso texts hold for us — often it is just the great pleasure they give us (“just” — ha, that is everything!) I’ll just say that that pleasure sometimes comes with learning a new skill or using a fresh or novel approach to telling our stories.

We do this in music, too, yes? We have musicians here at Storybelly who are writers as well, with music as their main medium, which also includes lyrics, and I’ve seen my musician husband, Jim, hear something inspiring and set out to create something similar. It’s a big soup out there of all kinds of creativity.

If you’re a free subscriber at Storybelly and you want to work with us in creating your own stories, songs, poems, sketches, vignettes, memoir, you can upgrade your sub and join us here, don a Lab Coat, roll up your sleeves, fill your beakers with words and art and music, and build something of your very own. We are a good group! We welcome everybody.

If you are a Lab Coat already, here’s what we’re going to work with (below) this week. Don’t forget to visit Chat, where all week I’ve been dissecting the excerpts from “The Tendrils of Tenderness/Exercise #10” last week and including what we’re learning when we “Read Like a Writer,” which was Monday’s Digest post (open to everybody). Each excerpt has its own Chat thread for Lab Coats. Start here.

You can also introduce yourself in Chat, here! Come on in. The water’s and word’s and music’s and song’s and connection’s and community’s fine.

THE ASSIGNMENT: Exercise #11

Read more

Read Like A Writer

Good morning! It’s officially Monday evening, but good morning just the same. We’re May-ing over here, which requires hopping from one exciting moment to another, so that by the end of the day, we (okay, I) fall gratefully into bed and sleep like the dead, get up and start the next new day with just as much hopping, just as many exciting moments and exhaustion and — voila! — the week threatens to get away from me.

I was thinking, while I was hopping, about William Faulkner. Like you do. In the Storybelly Lab this past week, the Assignment was to read some passages I selected for study, and discuss in Chat what’s working in them — what tools is this writer using that make this piece work?

The response has been tremendous. lol. Not. :> It got me to thinking about how I learned to read like a writer, which is one of the most important tools in learning to write well — no matter what you’re writing.

I would read something that took my breath away and whisper, “How does she DO that?”

How did I learn to dissect a piece of writing, and THEN — the second part — apply what I’ve discovered to my own writing? I was thinking about a little book I received from the Book of the Month Club way long ago, when they turned 60 years old. They published a slim volume titled The Well-Stocked Bookcase, Sixty Enduring Novels by Americans Published Between 1926 -1986 and how, because I loved to read, because I wanted a well-stocked bookcase, because I wanted to be better educated, because — who knows — I made a commitment to read every one of them.

I think I read 32. But those 32 novels were my teachers. Three were by William Faulkner, and — as a Southerner going generations back and a Mississippian, too — I decided I must read Faulkner. I was young, unschooled, and I had not really learned to read yet. I could read. It wasn’t that. I didn’t understand anything about literary criticism or know how to dissect in any way what I was reading. Symbolism? What was that? Irony? What was that? On it went.

Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Updike, Capote, Hemingway, Cheever, Stegner, Mailer, Gardner, Fitzgerald, Wolfe (where were the women?); Ah, Anne Tyler and The Accidental Tourist; Toni Morrison and Song of Solomon; and Eudora Welty, who wrote what became my favorite novel of all time, Delta Wedding.

These folks were definitely not messing around. I would need help.

At the C. Burr Artz library in Frederick, Maryland, I found the set of CLC books in the reference section: Contemporary Literary Criticism. Every time I finished one of those 60 books, I would look it up in the CLC so I could understand what I had just read.

I began to realize, writers had tools. Specific tools they used to write their stories.

This study took years. It was my college education. And because I was both professor and student, I studied exactly what I wanted to know. I wanted to know how those stories worked. And I discovered something else, too: I wanted to do what those writers did.

So when I say I am a largely self-taught writer, I mean that so many of my teachers were all the books I read and studied and still read and study today. I get so much pleasure out of learning about the many, many ways that stories are told, and how my mentors did — and do — what they do.

Which brings me back to Faulkner. I read The Sound and the Fury — it was on the list of 60 American novels. I had no idea what was going on in that book. I thought Faulkner was just “not for me.” The CLC explained a lot of it to me, but it was slow going, as many of the concepts were new to me. There was another Faulkner on the list that I skipped. Then I picked up The Reivers.

Oh, The Reivers! That book has taught me so many things… one of which is I have family stories to tell. Every Aurora County book owes part of its existence to The Reivers. I have read more Faulkner since I first read The Reivers, but this one remains his most accessible book — for me. It is straight-ahead storytelling with a compelling plot and an oh-so-satisfying conclusion.

The movie that was made from the book in 1969 stars Steve McQueen and is narrated by Burgess Meredith. My dad loved it so much he piled us all in the car one summer when we came to visit them in Jackson, Mississippi and drove us to the town where the movie was filmed — it was a long way away and the kids were cranky and we all got ice cream when we got there and then turned around and went home because there was nothing to do in this rural town in the middle of nowhere — but I digress. But here is some good news: You can watch the full movie at YouTube here. It is wonderful.

The Reivers changed the way I thought about storytelling. It changed my inner landscape of storytelling. It showed me that there were ways to structure a story that had never occurred to me. Ways to talk about race and generations and small towns and small moments and the affection of growing up in Mississippi — or anywhere, really. Ways of telling. Ways of writing.

It would be 15 more years of study — study that included 10 years of sending off stories that were rejected by editors in New York City — before I found an editor who said, I really like it; are you willing to work on it? and then five years more of learning how to craft and revise a novel before it was finally published. I had so much to learn, and no tool was more foundational for me than learning how to read like a writer.

I didn’t use any excerpts from The Reivers for last week’s Writers Lab assignment, but I’m going to put an excerpt here, in the Digest. And I’m going to assign everyone a writing exercise to do, see below.

In the Lab this week we’ll do continue to explore reading like a writer — look for my posts in Chat for each of the excerpts I offered for study in the Lab on Friday. Join me there, Lab Coats! What tools are these writers using to help them tell their stories?

And if you’d like to hang out with us in the Writers Lab and learn more about reading like a writer and applying what you’re learning to whatever you are writing, you can join us here.

If you’re on Spotify (or even if you’re not), you can hear John Williams and the Boston Pops playing a Suite from The Reivers (that beautiful music you hear in the first minutes of the movie, too), with Burgess Meredith’s voice-over — so nice… the part I most want you to listen to is at the end. Start at either 16:40 or (to follow the excerpt exactly) 17:20.

Here’s the Spotify link:

And here is the excerpt — from the script, similar to the book, but not exactly (or literarily) the same, as it’s meant for another medium:

As we turned up the street toward home, I thought, there’s something funny here; it hasn’t even changed. If all the things I had seen and done and heard and learned had changed nothing, if nothing was smaller or larger or older or wiser, then the last four days had been wasted. I could not understand why everything was the same when I was not the same anymore. For I had had my moment of glory, that brief, fleeting glory, which of itself cannot last, but while it does is the best game of all.

I’ll append Faulkner’s original text below, and we could go into the differences between one version and the other, but what I want y’all to do, really, is this:

Write about your moment of glory. That brief fleeting glory, which of itself cannot last, but while it does, is the best game of all.

Post your moment in comments below. Don’t think too hard about it — just do it — I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

And here is Faulkner’s original:

We crossed the street toward home. And do you know what I thought? I thought _It hasn't even changed._ Because it should have. It should have been altered, even if only a little. I dont mean it should have changed of itself, but that I, bringing back to it what the last four days must have changed in me, should have altered it. I mean, if those four days--the lying and deceiving and tricking and decisions and undecisions, and the things I had done and seen and heard and learned that Mother and Father wouldn't have let me do and see and hear and learn--the things I had had to learn that I wasn't even ready for yet, had nowhere to store them nor even anywhere to lay them down; if all that had changed nothing, was the same as if it had never been--nothing smaller or larger or older or wiser or more pitying--then something had been wasted, thrown away, spent for nothing; either it was wrong and false to begin with and should never have existed, or I was wrong or false or weak or anyway not worthy of it.

Whoa. :> It goes on from here, whereas the Pops version ends the Suite. There are good reasons why each is effective, eh?

You can read the entire novel online here.

The Aurora County books — Ruby, Little Bird, All-Stars, and Cakes, are influenced by The Reivers, and take inspiration and courage from that book.

As I say every week, I hope you connect to your own home and place in history — and tenderness — when you read and share these books. You can find out more about them at my website, here.

And that’s a wrap for Digest #13. Thank you for every comment, every share, every restack, and every good wish — I feel them, and you all inspire me!

xoxoxo Debbie

Writers Lab: the tendrils of tenderness

Happy May 9, Lab Coats! If you haven’t introduced yourself yet, please feel free to do so here, in Chat, a place where all those subscribed to the Lab can get to know their fellow Sweethearts of the Storybelly Lab. You can start threads if you like, in Chat, and you’ll also find a post for each Lab Exercise in Chat, so feel free to participate in any way that works for you, come in and out and roundabout, and I’ll be right there with you. I’m so so glad you are all here!

If you are a free subscriber (thank you, thank you) and want to participate in the Lab, you can upgrade your subscription here, which will cost you a few dollars a month, stop whenever you like, and will give you access to all previous Assignments and Exhortations and all manner of ways to write and revise your story, your memoir, your poetry, your grocery lists. :> Toolbox stuff for everyday life and writing. And fun! Remember: All history is biography, and every person’s story is important. We tell our stories so they aren’t lost, and so that those who need them, can find them.

Let’s get right to it, with this week’s Lab post.

When I planned May’s theme and posts for the Writers Lab, I had pulled up a quote attributed to Tennessee Williams, to start our Lab post today:

The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

This quote serves as a thought-continuation of last week’s Lab post Exercise, “It all turns on affection,” a quote from Wendell Berry in a speech he delivered in 2012 to the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it’s a continuation of last week’s Storybelly Digest, in which May’s theme was introduced with a quote from John Berger: “Tenderness is a defiant act of freedom.”

Tenderness, affection, sentimentality vs practicality, what you know first, letters to others or self, writers to show us the way, creating hope — these are all tools we’ve looked at so far in May (and it’s only May 9!)

So I was surprised, delightfully, to see my friends at post a note a couple of days ago about this very Tennessee Williams quote. I believe this is (in part, anyway) an example of the synergy that happens in life, through like-mindedness, and on Substack. :> We seem to be on a similar wavelength right now, with Wendell Berry AND with Tennessee Williams. In any case, thanks to you, Alexandra and Brad, for such thoughtful words and beautiful art, always. I want to like and restack everything you post. :>

Here is their Note with the Tennessee Williams quote (much more artfully displayed than mine):

Which brings me to this week’s Writers Lab Exercise (Assignment below, for those of you who are Lab Coats):

How do we write with tenderness that isn’t maudlin, saccharine, or — to use our word-of-the-month (one of several), sentimental. Overly sentimental, anyway. And do we sometimes WANT to write with the tenderness that veers into sentimentality?

It depends, eh? Depends on the piece, on the subject, on the mood of the writer, the writer’s voice, the audience for which this writing is meant, and what the writer wants to convey; there are decisions to be made.

Maybe empathy is a better word or way to look at how we write about something or someone with an eye toward curiosity and compassion but with some detachment that’s necessary so we don’t fall into saccharine poesy or prose. (Here I will admit that some of those saccharine poems — and songs! — are my favorites — You? I’ll put one of mine in Chat.)

We can’t be empathetic if we have never been in the position of someone we’re asked to sympathize with; if we’ve never been unhoused or unscathed or unemployed or… unusual. :> Or can we? We can’t be empathetic if we are, ourselves, in the midst of a mercurial moment of violence or poverty or if we are othered, ourselves. Or can we? Can we empathize with “the Pain” or “the Loss” or “the Grief” — the universal “the” — or does it need to be specific?

Writing asks these questions of us. There is no perfect or only correct answer, either. Each writer’s life is unique in the ways that they see themselves, others, and the world. Each writer’s voice is unique as well. You’ll see that in the Assignment this week.

Before we leave Tennessee Williams, I want to refer you to an excerpt from ’s excellent biography of Williams, Follies of God. If you aren’t a Lab Coat and even if you are but haven’t the time or bandwidth for the Assignment this week (it will be here when you are ready for it), I encourage you to read this excerpt for its beauty and for so many examples of that unity of opposites that we talked about in the Digest last month (and that we worked with in the Lab)… and as a revealing meditation on the complexity of loving our mothers… and happy Mother’s Day as well.

One line from that excerpt:

“And so,” Tenn continued, “what I learned from Laurette Taylor, from my mother, from Menagerie is that we—writers, people—only conquer when we love, because when we love, we see clearly what is in front of us, and what was in our past, and what we own So love your characters, and by doing so you may ultimately come to love yourself.

Let’s talk about that, about how love interweaves with tenderness and sentimentality… and with practicality and other emotions — even hate — as well.

This is something I struggle mightily with right now, in my work in progress, as I try to write with honesty and courage about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, about The Lost Cause of the Confederacy and (the original title for this book) and about growing up in the lap of the Lost Cause, surrounded by confusion as well as the people I loved and who loved me.

Also appearing in this week’s assignment: Harper Lee, Katherine Paterson, Sue Hubbell, and Anne Moody.

THE ASSIGNMENT:

Read more

Storybelly Digest: What You Know First

Morning, Storybellers, Debbie here, thinking about anniversaries and personal calendars today. We have a gorgeous week ahead (according to the weather gurus) of high temps in the 70s (in Georgia! In May!), adequate rain, low pollen counts, and I am making the most of it outdoors. I’m pulling weeds and setting garden beds to rights (it’s so satisfying to do this after a big rain, eh?), I’m planting, I’m basking in the sunshine. It feels so good.

pink evening primrose, lamb’s ear, blueberry, black-eyed susan, heirloom chrysanthemum, ninebark, violets, day lilies, sunchokes, elderberry and pawpaw… for starters. :> And my gloved thumb on the right.

It’s also May, and in some ways it’s the beginning of my calendar year. Once I had children who were old enough for school, September became the beginning of my calendar year… everything started anew in September.

I got melancholy when my kids were all grown up and gone from home, after many, many years of daily, hands-on mothering, from the time I was 18 to the year I turned 50. That melancholy has subsided, though, I hardly dwell there now, in September, and, in some circular (probably age-appropriate) way, I am back to thinking about May and those original anniversaries, and how they grew.

So I’ll write about them, because I’m wondering if you have such anniversary thoughts as well.

When I was elementary-school young, my yearly anniversaries were: Nothing happens from January to May except Easter baskets, but in May: Mom and Dad’s wedding anniversary, my birthday, Cathy’s birthday, Dad’s birthday, and then summer vacation, and it’s August: Mike’s birthday, Mom’s birthday, and then HALLOWEEN and Thanksgiving and Christmas. Done!

Likewise, the nightly prayer before bed that my mother taught me and listened to me recite at bedtime during my youngest years included everyone vital in my world at the time: God bless Mommy, Daddy, Mike, Cathy, Mamaw and Nanny, Peatoe/Flops/Amy, help me be a good girl, Amen.

The dogs rotated in and out. :>

That was it. That was my world, for so long. The first time I remember being afraid outside of my family structure was when I was nine, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I wrote about 40 years later, in Countdown. The next year, JFK was assassinated, then MLK, then Bobby, and I began to pay attention to an expanded worldview, partly because I was older, and partly because there was no denying that there would be anniversaries in my life that weren’t part of that closed loop I had grown up with.

I am thinking about all this in May, in part because yesterday was the 55th anniversary of May 4, 1970, the day the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War at Kent State University, killing four of them, wounding nine more, and bringing a resounding “we’ll show you” end to the Sixties. “Killing our children in their schoolyard,” as I put it in Kent State. Some of them were only walking to class… those bullets flew hundreds of feet to find their targets.

I was 16 years old, living in Charleston, South Carolina then. My dad flew war supplies over to Vietnam and American bodies back. The anniversaries were piling up, so many dates to remember; moments, memories, and meaning to write about 25 years later, as I grew away from my family and toward the world, like all of us do, in some form or another.

We often say, in the US anyway, that the next generation — the young — will “save us,” as we’ve done what we could (or didn’t do it), they will be the ones to fight the good fight, win the battles, set things straight, give us our world intact… whatever that means.

But I know — and so do you! — there are those in each generation, since time began, who have never stopped saving us. The poets, the singers, the actors, the scientists, the engineers, the hunters, the gatherers, the makers, the builders, the farmers; the shapers of young minds and hearts — parents, grandparents, teachers, writers, artists, the activists; all those who remember and tell the stories that make change possible, contribute to our collective human story, inspire community, and embolden hearts. We are stronger together and across generations. And we know that.

I am singing to the choir, perhaps. It just occurs to me today to think about those who came before us, and how, as imperfect as they may have been (aren’t we all), they tried. Tried in whatever way they knew how. As Maya Angelou said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

I think of Steven Spender’s poem “The Truly Great.” Here is the beginning of it:

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

The next stanza begins “What is precious, is never to forget…”

Yes. Never to forget “all the messy glory,” as Uncle Edisto says in Each Little Bird That Sings, not to be captive to it, just to remember it as part of who we are, as part of a tapestry of what-was that informs what-will-be, if we have courage enough (and we do) to work with it.

I think of painter/author/poet John Berger saying, “Tenderness is a defiant act of freedom… it has an enormous amount to do with liberty.” Interviewed at his kitchen table in France in 2015, he talked about how life is full of pain — “not only pain, but it has a lot of pain… and tenderness is, in part, a response to that.” He also calls tenderness “a refusal to judge.” You can watch 13-min. of that conversation here (YouTube). It’s excellent, and it speaks to our time. Times. A clip on IG here, is also part of that conversation about the virtues of tenderness.

“Tenderness” makes me think about prayers as well. My bedtime prayer is not the same as the one my mother taught me to recite. I held that prayer close to me even when I was grown, and for a long, long time. It was a tender time, at my bedside as a small child, with my mother to myself at the end of a childhood day.

In some ways we are all still those small children, yes? Still in need of tenderness, that “human kindness, overflowing,” that we looked at last week in the Writers Lab Exercise, from the song “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” by Randy Newman. I recommend it to everyone this week. This version, or this one, or this one. :>

In the Writers Lab this month we’re playing with sentimentality vs practicality, what each of them gives us in our writing, why, and when to use them, balance them… or not.

Last week we wrote letters. This week we’ll move into the idea of tenderness and how its expressed in those letters, in poetry, essays, fiction, even non-fiction.

You can join us here. We’ve got a Lab Coat waiting for you. :>

All Exercises are stand-alone, so you can join us anytime, for a month, for a year, and come be part of a growing community of writers with all kinds of backgrounds and experiences, with makes the Lab so rich. Come in and out as you please, and come as you are. We are nice, tender even :>, and we welcome everybody.

What we have in common is our desire to tell our stories — write them, draw them, paint them, somehow save them as our legacy for the next generation of those who will be beacons to their next generation — we are multiple generations in the Lab.

At some point, what-generation doesn’t matter. We are all human! We have come this far, and at some point it will be up to the next and next and next clutch of humans. May they know our collective stories. We need all of our stories, now more than ever.

I think of my mother and father and their Greatest Generation, and how, as an adult, I realize I know so little about them when, as a kid, it seemed I knew every little thing about them, as they were my world, my all.

We find out, the world is big. We start out with those we know. As Patricia MacLachlan says, “What you know first stays with you,” and as we grow, we expand or lives out into multiple anniversaries and moments, memories, meanings. At some point, we look back and… what do we see? That might be a writing prompt for those who look forward to a “Write it or Don’t” on Mondays. Go for it! Share here, in comments, what you come up with.

There is so much tenderness in these books of mine, along with a fair share of pain and/or darkness. There is also a whole lot of humor and celebration, as, somehow, they helped to grow me up and teach me what I needed to know as I wrote each one. I feel great tenderness them. :>

As I say every week, I hope you connect to your own home and place in history — and tenderness — when you read and share these books. You can find out more about them at my website, here.

And that’s a wrap for Digest #12. I haven’t been numbering them lately, but this IS Digest #12 — a full three months of Storybelly now. I’m so happy you’re coming alongside — thank you!

xoxoxo Debbie