Deborah Wiles's Blog, page 8

Storybelly Digest #4: Paris, Projects, & Rejection

Good morning!

How is it Monday again? Not only that, but we’ve leaped forward an hour in time, which always confuses the cat, and me, and my people. You?

This is the Victor Hugo market in Toulouse. I have never been, but I feel I must go, lol, and what is that saying that the mountains are calling and I must go...

I was dreaming of Paris this winter, a dream that got started when I was a fourth-grader, and my best friend’s mother — a WWII war bride from France — wheeled a cart full of French Things into our classroom at Camp Springs Elementary School, taught us to sing “Savez-vous plante les choux” and became our French teacher once a week for the next three years.

I took French for every year of my schooling after that, wrote high school term papers in French, became somewhat fluent, at least in reading French; my mother told me I might want to be an interpreter at the U.N., which makes me laugh today (and feel so tenderly toward her), and so I gave that desire to Franny in Countdown, as I never did become an interpreter, anywhere, but maybe she will. (I suspect she will not, but that’s not my story to tell.)

My French story goes beyond that small sharing, and is a story that deserves its own post someday; meanwhile, I’ve been dreaming of Paris while hunkering, here at home, and cooking up projects I want to do, but not doing them, lol, because winter, stillness, cold, snow (in Atlanta! Twice!), sticking by the fire, getting Storybelly up and running, writing a novel (also known as bleeding profusely), working on a few old projects (see below) and a thousand other things that I also love.

But… projects. They put me in mind of a little girl I’ve been writing about, Cambria Bold, in an unrelated novel, one I turn to when the calamities of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and the tragedies of my Charlottesville novel swamp me. I *will* finish Charlottesville this year. I am close. I take breathing breaks, for my wee heart. I visit Cambria’s house. It feels good to create in a different way.

Cambria works with her hands and makes things, like I do. (Maybe you can guess that her father is a letterpress operator.) Everyone in her family is a maker of some kind. Writing about them, their mutual affection, and their hapless wackiness — just naming them all! — makes me laugh, calms my anxieties, lifts my spirits, and satisfies something elemental in me that longs to tackle my endless list of projects here, which include:

the pond project, phase two;
the biscotti project, the meatball project, the pimento cheese project;
the apron project (if you watch All Creatures Great and Small, you know);
the heirloom chrysanthemum project, the herb bed project (all ongoing);
the native plant project, the orchard project, the tree guild project (also ongoing);
the edible yard & garden project (ongoing forever);
the prayer-flag project;
the caramel project, the chiffon cake project, the eggnog project;
the scrap quilt project;
the mayo project (with french fries), the kefir project, the sauerkraut project;

I could go on; I will stop. (Also note here my fondness for the semi-colon. It could even be another project.)

My life has been a series of projects, one after another, still learning, still failing, sometimes succeeding, I mean, what’s so hard about a making a delectable hand pie? Savory or sweet (but I am more in favor of savory, don’t tell Jim). What’s so hard? — a lot. For me. But I persevere. I did, finally, master a pie crust by hand that I love, so there’s that.

And, I have writing projects. So. More on Debbie’s many writing projects, both dreams and ongoing slogs, in the Storybelly Writer’s Lab this week. I got a rejection this past week (with an offer to think about revising), and I want to talk about that, too… it’s part of life, eh? It’s certainly part of a writer’s life.

So that’s “This Week” in the Lab. If you’d like to help us, the intrepid Lab Coats, create a place to talk writing, revision, rejection, success and writing again, join us there; (semi-colon) it’s the only paid part of Storybelly, and we have made it so, so that we have a writing community where we can explore all things personal narrative and fiction together, write together, and Chat together about our work.

You can do it! You don’t have to be a professional writer or storyteller, or even an amateur writer or storyteller. We *are* stories! We live them every day. Come write about those small moments in time where you have attempted a project, have failed or succeeded, have learned something about life and love and sorrow and laughter, and all the messy glory, as Uncle Edisto says in Each Little Bird That Sings.

Join the Storybelly Lab

We’ll explore more of Little Bird, here in the Digest, in an extra this week about Listening. Listening Rock is named so for a reason.

Part of my dreaming about Paris for so many years manifested itself in A Long Line of Cakes, which I call the fourth Aurora County novel, after Ruby, Little Bird, and All-Stars. It’s also about Listening, so watch for that this week in the Listening Extra.

I was looking for a way to write about magical realism for A Long Line of Cakes, as magical realism was new to me as a writer, and I wanted to do right by the story, and by the reader. I remembered a movie I loved that carried that magic in such a quiet, simple, magical way, AND that takes place in France: Chocolat. Anybody know it? (Trailer below; let’s have a watch party):

I took the magic from that movie and infused Cakes with it; now there is a mysterious fog that envelopes the Cake family’s arriving and leaving. The trees seem to sway with messages of arrival and leaving, and change. There is mystery in the air, in Halleluia, Mississippi. Mystery surrounding family and history, that of course Ruby Lavender doesn’t catch a whiff of at all, ha, so straightforwardly does she live and breathe.

But Ruby does recognize a new friend in Emma Lane Cake and she does befriend Emma’s wacky family of five brothers, four dogs, and a baking family that arrive in Halleluia to open the Cake Cafe. Aunt Tot and Miss Mattie and all your favorites from Ruby are back, too.

Chocolat comes to Mississippi. I’ve always written like this and I wonder if y’all do, too. I find my mentors for a writing project, and I borrow a bit from this mentor, a bit from that one, and I fashion my own story with my own voice and plot and characters, taken from my own life.

I digress. I am all over the map today, sorry. I blame the end of winter trying to hang on while the pine pollen of spring is itching to coat everything. It’s kind of crazy, no?

So this week in the Lab we’ll talk about writing, of course, and we thought to have a Lab Coat Zoom on Wed. where we can chat about what we cooked up by doing the assignment, Exercise #16. Is this still a good day and time for most? I’d like a show of hands before setting up the zoom. You can comment here or on the Lab Chat. We are early days with the Lab, and are a small and mighty little cohort… I am so happy to have you there! I want to make sure we’ve got a time that works for most, when we do finally zoom. More on this tomorrow in the Lab. Also, writing projects. And rejections. And eating a whole cake in one sitting.

In history this week with my books:

I’ve been writing and researching for my novel Charlottesville, which involves writing about Civil War history and the Lost Cause. This week marks the anniversary of the Monitor and Merrimack battle (March 9, 1862), and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement after the shooting death of Breonna Taylor (March 13, 2020), a tragedy and a movement that plays directly into the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

It’s “Women’s Month” (every month), and I write about capable girls and strong women in my fiction. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born on March 15, 1933.

In personal news, one of my boyfriends, Albert Einstein, was born on March 14, 1879. You’ll see photos of Albert (may we call him Albert) often, in photos I post from inside my home. He lurks in a painting next to my kitchen, and he stands in a life-sized cutout by my front door and scares people who come into my office while I’m working. :>

March 14 is also Pi Day, although it wasn’t Pi Day in 1879, or in 1982, when my ops-guru, Zachary Wiles was born, a mere 43 years ago. He has brightened our lives and this Substack, and we wouldn’t want to do THIS particular project (or life) without him. Happy Birthday, Zach!

I’m proud of the publishing partners who helped give birth to these books, to the teams that have helped them find readers, and I am grateful for every reader who opens these books and sees a bit of history and home, community and compassion. I hope readers connect to their own place in history and home when they read my books. You can find out more about each book, and you can buy them, too, at my website. COMING SOON: My books in a dedicated page at Bookshop.org.

Rebellious writer (and human) that I am, I have always loathed “writing prompts.” I know some people really LOVE them, love them! I am happy for you, I am! It is in that spirit that I offer up this week’s Oh-So-Optional, I’d-Turn-Back-If-I-Were-You Writing Prompt (of sorts), to share, to keep for yourself, or to not do at all:

My writer friend Jane Kurtz reminded me of the time, way back in 1996, when we first met in NYC and went to ALA with new friends Nancy Werlin, Jo Stanbridge, and Dian Regan. We had dinner with Harold Underdown, and at that dinner, this is what Harold imparted to us, we newish writers (I had not sold a book at that time, although I had a busy freelance-writer life). This (above), said Harold, was how to successfully navigate this crazy career we’d chosen. I wonder what y’all think of that, or what you’d make of it inside your own personal narrative — got a “time that” to write about it?

And that’s Digest #4! Have a good week out there, with temperatures warming (at least, here in the South), and fingers itching to garden, to write, to fix something that’s broken, to create something brand new, to reach out and hug somebody who needs a hug… maybe that somebody is you, too. I hope you give and receive in equal measure and call it good this week. I’m rooting for you. Let’s go to Paris.

xoxox Debbie

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Writing Lab: Exercise #16

Welcome to “Exercise #16,” Lab Coats. I’m going to plunge right in with the exercise, then some thoughts after it, and a zoom possibility as well.

This exercise comes in three sections and ends with some advice from Raymond Carver.

A. Write a list of places you have stayed in but not lived in.

B. Write a list of trips you have taken.

Read more

Storybelly Extra: The Messy Glory of Grief and the Birth of Each Little Bird That Sings

An extra free post this week to celebrate the birthday of Each Little Bird That Sings. In the Writer’s Lab tomorrow, we’re working with how we write about home, in all its messy glory. You can sub to the Lab at the bottom of this page, if you haven’t already, to work/write/chat along with us, in a safe, companionable and communal writing space. Onward:

I wanted to sell Hang The Moon, a novel I started writing in 1995; its four chapters had won the PEN Naylor award in 2004. That novel is a story for another day… it still shows as “untitled” and “available for publication” at the Pen/Naylor page on the PEN America website… maybe one day it will exist as a novel in the hands of a reader…. but I digress.

What I wrote (eventually) and sold instead was a novel about grief and loss and finding home again, in the guise of a ten-year-old girl who suffers loss after loss and who finds her way through with the help of understanding adults, family traditions, an over-organized brother, an over-bouncy sister, patient parents, and an overly-neurotic cousin she would like to throttle.

First edition hardcover of Each Little Bird That Sings, cover art by Marla Frazee, published by Harcourt Brace 2005. That’s Comfort and Dismay on top of Listening Rock, Snowberger’s Funeral Home in the distance.

I wrote this story, which became Each Little Bird That Sings, inside a rush of my own losses, unfathomable to me at the time, overwhelming beyond belief, and in the midst of starting over with just about everything in my life. There was no social media in the year 2000, and what I have of those days is an extensive email trail, although much of it in those early days is lost. I also have obituaries: both my parents, my long-years marriage, my home, my full-time mothering, the good-old-girl family dog, financial solvency, my life as I knew it.

These losses began in an epic cascade two weeks before Freedom Summer, my first book, was launched, and three months before my first novel, Love, Ruby Lavender, was published. I wouldn’t write another word for publication for the next three years, didn’t think I would ever write again, until my editor, Liz Van Doren at Harcourt Brace, asked me to make her a promise.

“I want you to sit down every day and ask yourself, ‘what can I write?’ and send it to me.” And that’s how Little Bird was born. I wrote about my grief, and sometimes all I could write was “SAD.” I sat in the back room of Cindy Powell’s quilt shop, Needles & Pins, on Church Street in Frederick, Maryland, and cried. Cindy’s mother, never one for self-indulgence, visited the shop one day, saw me sitting there, weeping, surrounded by bolts of fabric and batting and notions and said, in so many words, “You will not always feel this way. You are not the only person these things have happened to. You are not unique!” And then, basically, “Take up thy bed and walk,” although it would take time for me to learn how to do that.

People brought food to the house. I lost 60 pounds. My teenage son (who is now my ops-guru) left me notes: “Mom, I made you some food. It’s in the refrigerator. Please eat.” I stood in the Hallmark aisle without enough money to buy a thank you card at a bookstore and burst into tears at the roses, hearts, and sentiments on those stiff-backed, happy cards for lucky people, cards that declared undying love and thanks to a spouse, to a daughter, to a life that was whole, when mine had fallen apart.

“We are still a family,” I told my kids. I hoped I was right. The fuel oil company sent me coupons to send in with my monthly payment, so I could afford heat. A neighbor cleared the tree that fell across my driveway in a storm. Others took my growing pile of green trash bags to the dump when I couldn’t afford trash service. Friends financed me until I could finance myself, they found me work, I began to teach. I buried my parents and began my life as a road warrior, where I would remain for the next 22 years, as I wrote books in the cracks and dreamed about coming home to write full time. My friend Kay gave me her boots and a sturdy winter coat, dressed me for the road, fed me at her kitchen table, had her husband, Doug, teach me how to keep ledger sheets (by hand!) to create a budget, and my friend Sue sheltered me in her home when I worked in DC schools after I’d had to sell the home I’d lived in for fully half my life and relocate.

I was still writing in my notebook, “SAD,” and sometimes elaborating on that sadness, but I had no direction. One night, at a rare dinner out with Cindy and Kay (“Come on, it will do you good.”) Kay told the story of growing up a child in the fourth family of her grandfather’s, after his many failed marriages and being surrounded by so many much older brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and various kinfolks who were “dying by the handful every year.”

“Believe me,” she said, as Cindy passed the homemade garlic rolls and we settled in for Kay’s story, “I went to a LOT of funerals, growing up. We’d walk into the funeral home so often that people working there began to say, ‘Here come the Snowbergers again!’”

It felt good to laugh — you had to have heard Kay’s natural-born storyteller delivery and her tales of funerals past, and how Cindy chimed in with “Always be the pace car at a funeral, when you go to the cemetery. That way you can escape before all the fighting starts.” I laughed so hard I cried, a great release, and then Kay offered that quintessential line:

“Let me tell you, Debbie: I come from a family with a LOT of dead people!” We dissolved into the kind of helpless laughter that brings the wait staff over to make sure you’re okay.

“I need to write that down,” I said. And Kay, ever prepared for all contingencies, whipped a yellow Post-it note pad from her purse, and a pen, and handed them to me across the table.

I still have that note. “Can I use your maiden name?” I asked her. She waved a hand above her like she was conferring the name upon me. “If you ever write about all this mess you’re living through, I hope you do.”

And of course I did write about this mess. I used that line from Kay as the first line of what would become Each Little Bird That Sings. I named my main character Comfort, because I needed so much comfort as I wrote my heart out, and I needed perspective, so I created two older characters who I dispatched in the first chapters, but who wove some much-needed humor through a story that I thought would be all about death, but it turns out was all about life. “Open your arms to life!” Uncle Edisto tells Comfort. “Let it strut into your heart in all its messy glory!”

I sent a sudden chunk of chapters to my editor with a note: This is what I can write. She sent me back an email of two words: Keep going.

I wrote Each Little Bird That Sings in less than a year. I set it in a funeral home, of course, and Comfort’s family owns this funeral home — Snowberger’s Funeral Home. Her family is whole, intact, loving, devoted, and stable. When trouble comes, and it does, they weather that trouble together, albeit crazily, but with great heart and humor and stumbling grace. So comes wisdom… and healing.

Comfort’s orderly world gives her the space to write “Top Ten Tips for First-Rate Funeral Behavior,” and “Fantastic and Fun Funeral Food for Family and Friends.” She writes “Life Notices” for the departed, which is what I started doing, and what legions of young writers did with me, for many years.

Comfort has her life figured out until her neurotic cousin Peach shows up to topsy-turvy everything. Comfort learns to let go of what she cannot control, to accept the things she cannot change, and to change the things she can. Her best friend betrays her. Great-great Aunt Florentine dies in the vegetable garden — poof! her skirt flowing around her — while weeding the peas. Peach prostrates himself on her casket at the funeral. Uncle Edisto opens his arms one last time to life and then expires after a picnic. Comfort’s dog, Dismay, goes missing. It’s a sh*tshow of loss and grief, and I was there for it. I couldn’t stop writing about it.

Liz caught each chapter as it landed in her email inbox. She read it, responded, I revised, and wrote more. I had no idea where it was coming from, but of course it was coming from my life. It was teaching me how to live again.

And I *was* living again, slowly, surely, moving into a new life, in a new town and a new home, with new adventures, new books, new everything, eventually becoming the age of my parents, watching my children grow up and find love of their own, bury their father, birth their children, life going on, while we, it turns out, are still a family.

We are differently configured, as happens to all families, and yet we are whole, intact, loving, devoted, and stable. When trouble comes, and it does, we weather that trouble together, albeit crazily, but with great heart and humor and stumbling grace.

The messy glory. I am one of many, as Cindy’s mother told me that day at the quilt shop. I am not unique. But Comfort is. There is only one of her in the world. Only one Each Little Bird That Sings. And this is the story of how she was born, and how she saved me.

Paperback cover, cover by Marla Frazee, published by Harcourt Brace 2007

Storybelly Digest #3

Good Monday morning, y’all. It was 35 degrees last night, will be 31 tonight, and then the almanac says we’re climbing out of winter, here in the American South, and maybe we’re done with freezing temperatures that will surely, once again, kill the blossoms on my nectarine trees that have burst into bloom since the last killing frost. Every year, it’s a dance with the weather.

Each Little Bird That Sings is 20 years old this week! Happy Birthday! Let there be cake! This book was first published in March 2005 — we’ll celebrate Little Bird all year. Watch for posts about this book’s genesis later this week, both in the Writer’s Lab, for those of you who have Lab subscriptions, and in Notes (you can find “Notes” on the top ribbon of Storybelly’s home page at Substack).

This is Comfort, sitting on top of Listening Rock with her dog, Dismay. I named her Comfort because I needed a lot of comfort when I wrote this book. This is the paperback cover, art by the fabulous Marla Frazee.

I’m wrestling with scheduling the Writer’s Lab posts far enough in advance to tell you what they’ll be about. My soliloquy to my ops-guru, aka He Who Rolls His Eyes, about having to feel my way into these things so maybe I’m finishing them on the day of, or a day late, I’m sure YOU would appreciate, yes? All to say, trust me, it will be phenomenal, maybe even life changing, hahaha. If you’re interested in writing with me, or delving deeper into personal narrative writing techniques and the stories you have to tell, the Storybelly Writer’s Lab is open, if you want to join us there… this is the only paid area of Storybelly. Writer’s Lab posts will be going behind the paywall this week, and will be archived at “The Lab” at the top ribbon on the Storybelly home page.

This is last night’s late supper: Breyer’s butter pecan and the last square of “spicy ginger applesauce cake with cream cheese frosting”(NYT, unlocked) that I made this past week when we welcomed friends from Maryland, who had never been to Atlanta. The cake is worth making! Don’t be afraid of all the ginger in it —dried, fresh, and candied (instead of crystalized) — alongside the cinnamon, cardamom, allspice, and orange zest — it’s a flavor burst but subtle, if you can believe it. I left the lemon zest out of the cream cheese frosting; the cake was zesty enough. Tell me what you cooked this week! How was it?

When I published A Long Line of Cakes, the 4th book in the Aurora County Series (Ruby, Little Bird, All-Stars being 1, 2, and 3, respectively), Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi organized a Cake Walk when I visited on tour, and here are some of those cakes — we had fun! And CAKE. Many who showed up didn’t know what a cake walk was (do you?), but they figured it out quickly. We need more cake walks in this world.

Me’n’cake: I wrote an entire novel about a family with the last name of Cake. My grandmother, the original Miss Eula, always made a yellow cake with white coconut icing every summer, when we visited. You can imagine that icing sliding off the cake, in non-air-conditioned June in Mississippi, but I never noticed that. I only knew I wanted a second piece. When we’d visit Aunt Mitt (who becomes Miss Mattie in Love, Ruby Lavender), she would parade out slices of *her* yellow cake with a white icing, too. No coconut. But no matter, two cakes by two kinfolks in one day… it invited comparison. :> “If I knew you were comin’ I’d’ve baked a cake” is a real Southern thing… or was. Maybe it’s more than Southern?

So we had company for the first part of the week, and then attended the 7th and 8th grade orchestra concert at A’s middle school. The 7th grade orchestra played “Be Thou My Vision” one of my favorite hymns.

Every time I hear this hymn, I tear up. I am touched by how ancient both the tune and the lyrics are, and how they both, working together, speak to something ancient in us, to our common humanity, so I went in search of a sung version I could share with you this morning… I love this one, below. Get yer tissues ready.

I want to compile a list here at the ‘belly of what I’m calling “Hymns to Humanity.” They don’t have to be hymns, and they can span any creed or culture (as is fitting!) —will you list some of yours, please, in comments?

That’s some of what I’m listening to this week. I’d love to hear what your week was like, what you’ve been listening to, watching, reading, making. And what are you writing??? Hoping to write? Please do tell!

Mardi Gras in New Orleans is on March 4 this year. I have two memories of Mardi Gras: one is standing on a corner in Mobile, Alabama, when I was five years old and watching the parade. My mother always said, with a rather Superior Southern Sniff in her voice (to which I gave an Appreciative Nod), that Mobile was the site of the original Mardi Gras. My second memory is of my friend Coleen Salley (pictured here with Jim), Queen Coleen, always in my heart. When my mother died in 2003, Coleen called me and said, “Oh, honey. *I’ll* be your mother!” (Use your most Southern drawl for this.)

Some history that relates to the books I’ve written, either directly or in context:

On March 1, 1961 JFK established the Peace Corp. (Countdown)

March 2, 1965 Operation Rolling Thunder authorized by LBJ - America begins saturation bombing of selected targets in North Vietnam. (Anthem)

March 2, 1963 “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles released as a US single (Revolution)

March 6, 1857 The Dred Scott decision is handed down by the Supreme Court (Revolution)

March 7, 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches begin, Bloody Sunday (Revolution)

March 8, 1965 the first US combat troops arrive in Vietnam (Anthem)

I’m proud of the publishing partners who helped give birth to these books, to the teams that have helped them find readers, and I am grateful for every reader who opens these books and sees a bit of history and home, community and compassion. I hope readers connect to their own place in history and home when they read my books. You can find out more about each book, and you can buy them, too, at my website.

Rebellious writer (and human) that I am, I have always loathed “writing prompts.” I know some people really LOVE them, love them! I am happy for you, I am! It is in that spirit that I offer up this week’s Oh-So-Optional, I’d-Turn-Back-If-I-Were-You Writing Prompt (of sorts), to share, to keep for yourself, or to not do at all:

you know you want to tackle this one…

And that’s a wrap for Digest #3. Here’s to a good week for everyone, a vision for an “us together, indivisible” instead of an “us vs them” and the grace to make that vision a reality. Long game, but possible. That’s my vision.

xoxo Debbie

Storybelly Extra

Happy Friday! In Monday’s Digest, I promised an extra post this week with two recipes, one for food, one for writing. Food first.

I don’t know when I started the ritual of making popcorn when I’m writing, but it always makes me happy, for many reasons, the highest of which is, it means I *am* writing, and usually it means the writing is going well. I don’t mess around, either. I use my deepest, heaviest pot, and always make two big bowls. One pot full of popped corn will fill them both.

I always make it from scratch, meaning not from a box, but using corn kernels, a heavy pot, some neutral oil (I use canola), salt, and nutritional yeast. Those are your ingredients.

Microwave popcorn or store-bought popped corn can’t touch this method in taste and freshness and ingredients you can pronounce, and honestly, it takes about the same time as unwrapping the microwave packet, fidgeting it into the microwave, and waiting for it to pop. Invest you in some good yellow corn kernels (my preference, I am not partial to the texture of white, but I’d like to try red kernels sometime), a container of nutritional yeast (I buy it in bulk at YDFM - Your DeKalb Farmers Market — here in ATL, but I also use Bragg’s), some sea salt in a generous shaker, and you’ve probably got the oil on a shelf. Olive oil is too heavy, canola or grapeseed or even coconut oil is just right.

Be generous with the oil — not too much, not a pool, but also more than a coating on the bottom of your heavy pot, or the popcorn will burn at the bottom. This sometimes takes practice to know just how much to use in your particular pan. Toss in a few corn kernels, cover the pot, turn your stove not quite to high (gas or electric — I go just below “Hi” on my ‘lectric, this is key), and wait for those kernels to start popping, then quickly add in as many kernels as will cover heavily the bottom of your pot. I use an over-full 1 cup in my 5qt pot. Mom always used a half-cup, but her Revere Ware pot was a 3 quart.

Mom shook the pot in a vigorous back-and-forth motion across the eye, as the corn popped. Very dramatic! No need to shake, except at the beginning, before popping begins in earnest, to make sure all kernels are coated with the oil. Then you wait, and things happen fast.

I love it when my pot lid begins to push up from the pot because I’ve got the just-right amounts (eyeballed, of course) of oil and kernels and heat going, and I know I’m going to have fluffy popcorn to coat with salt and nooch, and now all I need is some fizzy water or — wait for it — strong coffee laced with a glug of whole milk to go with my popcorn feast and the next chapter (paragraph? page?) banged out on the laptop, while sitting in my writing place (the green chaise that is worn and well-used only for writing the next great American novel, heh-heh).

There are no calories in this popcorn when writing.

where I write… this was taken in 2009 while I was writing Countdown

And now a writing recipe:

In yesterday’s Writer’s Lab post I talked about how I teach writing. One of the “getting ideas” things I listed was making a list. A list is a recipe for ideas, and it can be many other things, from a grocery list (I am famous for them; my notebooks are full of grocery lists), a to-do list (ditto), and lists of birds in the back yard, whatever you want, lists are amazing. lol.

Well, they are. I used to tell my students, “I put the date on front of a notebook when it’s full, put it with the others I have filled, and I can pull one out and tell you what we had for Thanksgiving dinner in, say, 2003.” They were not impressed, but for this writer, knowing that might come in handy. It also comes in handy at the grocery store, even though now I often use the app. Still a list. :>

Here’s an idea/recipe of sorts. Make a list of ancestors, of people you knew when you were young, or those whose stories were told to you, and/or a list of the young people you know now, maybe your own kids or other kin. You’ll write from this list, maybe about the one name or photograph that suggests a story, “the time that.” That’s the way to frame it, “the time that ____” you can write that down, and voila, a focus sentence. When I made such a list, years ago, Miss Eula and Ruby were born, and they eventually populated Love, Ruby Lavender.

Here is the altar in my writing studio. It is the living/dining room (Ruby would call it “the front room”) of my house. I call the studio “my office” most of the time, because my dad always used that term for the bedroom he turned into the space just-for-him, where he lined one wall with shelves and filled it with Time-Life books, encyclopedias and their yearbooks that came in the mail every January, Scientific Americans, Book of the Month Club books, Reader’s Digest condensed books, and old books that held such mystery for me, such as My Search Through the Heavens, a book that felt out of place with the others, but that moved from house to house with us, from office to office, so it must have meant something to my dad.

That’s not a “one clear moment in time” memory, but it could jump-start one clear moment, say, the time that I watched my dad shelve a new book in the bookcase. It was 1964. I was eleven years old, the same age as Franny in Countdown. We lived in Washington, DC, where my dad was a C-130 pilot, stationed at Andrews Air Force Base. Again, the same as Franny. I had been sent by my mother to call my dad to dinner but I stopped at the doorway to his office because I knew something was off — I could feel it.

He looked up, saw me standing there, but didn’t acknowledge me. I knew not to say a word. He closed the book gently, pushed back from his desk, lifted the book with two hands, although why, I didn’t know, as the book was so slim. It was white, too, which made it stand out as unusual. He walked the book over to the shelves and made a space for it between some darker spines. He slipped it in quietly, with ceremony. “Let’s go,” he said, almost tenderly, and we went upstairs to our supper.

I didn’t ask him about the book, but I did slip down to his office later. I gingerly and quietly pulled the book from its protected place and looked at the cover. Four Days, The Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy.

I could expand this one clear moment in time to tell you how my dad looked as he shelved that book, or when he said let’s go, what we ate for supper and what the conversation was about, and how it felt to see that cover, and later, to go through those pages of photographs and relive the fresh grief of a nation that had just been through the assassination of a president and its aftermath. We were all still reeling.

I could bring in standing in the freezing cold in November 1963, waiting in line with my brother and mother to pay our respects in the rotunda of the Capitol, where JFK lay in state. Or a dozen other memories… it would be a good vignette or essay, one that I wouldn’t publish, but a memory that stayed with me for decades, and that accompanied me as I wrote Countdown, some 40 years later.

Lists. Recipes for ideas. Also no calories.

Happy listing. Tell me what you discover; I would love to hear. Maybe you’ll take it in another direction, but you’ve got an idea now, I’ll bet, as you list.

Good weekend to you. We sold our washer and dryer. The plum trees are blooming. Stories for another day. See you Monday with the Digest.

xo Debbie

what stays and what goes

I am about at the halfway mark with my 13 weeks, writing from the summer solstice to the fall equinox, when I hope to turn in a chunk of the new book, temporarily called CHARLOTTESVILLE, to my editor. I can’t remember what specifically about the book I’ve talked about before, as I’ve been working on […]

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the solstice to equinox project

I am at a point with my work-in-progress — all of my works in progress, but especially with what I’ve been calling The Lost Cause Project (aka “Charlottesville”) — that I need to concentrate. Both focus and concentration have been hard to maintain since 2020 and the onset of the pandemic — I am not […]

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I’ve been collecting oral histories of the Battle of Resa...

I’ve been collecting oral histories of the Battle of Resaca, part of Sherman’s campaign to capture the city of Atlanta and win the South for the Union in the Civil War. This snippet is from Daniel Ransdell, who fought with the Seventieth Indiana Regiment, commanded by Colonel Benjamin Harrison, who would become the 23rd president […]

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BOBBY: A Story of Robert F. Kennedy

To celebrate the publication (today!) of BOBBY: A Story of Robert F. Kennedy, here is a book-birth story. The path to publication began in 2007 — 15 years ago — at a conference in Washington, D.C. where I had lunch with some publishing people and we got to talking about Bobby Kennedy and I told […]

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bookshop.org

Here we go. I want indies to survive this pandemic so they are still here, creating community and a literate society, for us and with us, as they’ve always done, when we emerge from our sheltering in place. Please consider opening a book buying account at bookshop.org if you have the means to do so in these uncertain times.
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You’ll see when you swipe thru this post [go here, for this post and photos], that my books, as an example (all book shots are from bookshop.org) are not only competitive w Amazon prices (within a dollar or even less in most cases), they are available, and they come to you from business owners in your local communities who will employ your neighbors and serve you personally, culturally, specifically, and joyfully. And again, one day, face-to-face.

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Now is the time to help them help you through this pandemic. We need stories like we need each other, because we *are* stories. We need puzzles and games and laughter and stuffed animals, and togetherness, even as we need to shelter at home and stay informed. Indie bookstores stand ready with all these things.
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Follow your bookselling friends on IG, FB, etc, and let them hand sell you visually in their feeds… they are so good at this — and then order directly from them or use bookshop.org.
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Every dollar you spend at bookshop is divvied up to help your chosen bookstore as well as all bookstores under the bookshop umbrella (swipe to see snippets about how this works, from the Forbes article about bookshop that I linked to here on Feb 15).
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The bottom line is, we all benefit. We all keep reading and telling stories and puzzling with one another and squeezing our chosen comfort softies through hard times. We can do this, together. Love and light and reading, xo Debbie
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— click on my IG bio to go to bookshop.org, and thank you. I’m going to tag some of my bookstore friends in the comments [on IG], locally and including those I’d been scheduled to tour with this month, so you can follow them, too, along with some folks who partner w indie bookstores in a myriad of ways. Please add your favorites to this list – you, too, Indies — so I can follow them, too. Here we go.

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