Lisa Ohlen Harris's Blog, page 4

Community

Last Sunday night Todd and I gathered with friends from our Presbyterian church to celebrate the Protestant Reformation. I served myself from the potluck of Swiss steak and chicken, fondue, and a punchbowl of iced Swiss rum (all in honor of Zwingli), and I sat next to my friend Marj.

“I brought a DVD of the 1971 Billy Graham Crusade,” she said conspiratorially. “A fan sent it to me.”

“No way,” I said. “You opened for Billy Graham?”

Marj nodded modestly.

You see, Marj cut her first album in 1971, at seventeen. She was something of a star in the Jesus People movement

“When you watch the video—when you see that girl, do you remember being in her skin?” I asked. “Do you feel like she’s still there inside you, like you’re the same person?”

“I do,” Marj said. “And I want to tell her not to act so silly, that she’s singing a little flat.”

After dinner we watched the video, and I couldn’t take my eyes from the screen, from the girl singing to me and to her grown self standing beside me.

“My mom sewed that dress,” grown Marj whispered as teen Marj smiled a small smile and strummed while the breeze lifted her long hair.

I almost felt the breeze, felt the dreams and questions running under and through the lyrics. She’d found Jesus, found peace while trouble surged around and through her generation. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, and I reached my arm around Marj as she watched herself.

Even now I cannot put words on what I felt.

As the DVD was pulled from the player and our friends applauded, Todd said to me, “That was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” And at the end of the evening, as we walked out to our car, Todd asked, “Why was it so moving to see young Marj sing?”

“It’s like time travel.” I said. “Or magic.”

We were, for a few moments, back in Oakland in 1971, when a girl with her whole life ahead of her stood with a guitar slung over her body, eyes down, long hair lifted by the breeze, singing to a future she couldn’t see. Marj would become moderately famous, would cut several albums, but, as one fan puts it, “she was a great talent that was never really discovered.”

Marj toured and sang in the U.S. and Europe. She married at 34, started a family right away and had four children by forty. Now her grown kids—musicians, all of them—perform at coffeehouses, at pubs, at festivals. Last summer I sat in the back row at an outdoor concert while Marj’s kids performed. Marj sat a row ahead of me, tapping a foot and nodding, smiling her small smile, hair lifting in the breeze.

I am always watching. I see the people in this town, my friends and acquaintances. I’m moved by their lives, by their dreams and disappointments, by what I know and what I don’t. This is community—not just knowing one another, but watching the years pass and superimposing the past on the present. When we’ve known each other long and longer, there is an element of time travel—of transcendence to our relationships.

It is 1971. The girl on the cusp of her fame, her life, sings to me. I hear her voice on the ocean breeze of my own Southern California home. I am seven years old and I have no idea who Billy Graham is or that a girl old enough to be my babysitter will one day open her heart to me and become my friend.

Book Launch Party

The launch party for The Fifth Season was great fun. My only regret of the evening is that I was so engaged in conversations that I didn't get a chance to really listen to the live music by my favorite local singer, Marj Snyder Hegeman. 





Marj's songs complement the content of the book, and she included lots of spirituals and folk songs expressing a sense of longing for release from a season

Sweet Relief

Three Cartons of Books

Oh, such a lovely, busy September. I've been practicing my rusty, clutzy Arabic with a new Saudi student in my beginner-level ESL class, which is great fun (and also quite humbling). Oh, yes, and my new book! The Fifth Season came back from the printer about ten days later than expected. With my vast experience now as an author of two books, I know that things don't always go as planned and that

At Long Last

Today was the last day of the third week of classes. I'm carrying nearly a full teaching load this semester but still managing to be out of my office and into the car by 3:00 p.m. each day to pick my kids up from school. When I pulled into the driveway this afternoon I spied a FedEx package on the porch. Todd often receives desk copies of textbooks at home, so I was pleasantly surprised to see my

The Fifth Season Available for Pre-order

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To Everything a Season

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Revision: Getting Started

Two weeks ago I signed an advance contract for The Fifth Season: A Daughter-in-Law’s Memoir of Caregiving. The completed manuscript is due June 1, and even though my ESL classes aren’t over till the end of April, that still gives me all of May for writing. But what if something comes up in May and I don’t have the time after all? What if the looming deadline makes me so nervous I can’t write? I

Do I Need a Book Proposal? (Part 2)

In my last post, I promised to give an overview of the elements in a book proposal. Different sources list variations on what should be included, but here’s a basic outline.


Overview and Audience

Marketing Plan
Competing Titles
About the Author
Table of Contents (annotated)
Synopsis
Sample Chapter



Overview and Audience 
(sometimes separated out into two sections) Here’s where you tell

Do I Need a Book Proposal? (Part 1 of 2)

I used to be the kind of writer who hated with the utmost hatred the idea of writing a book proposal. I may have even whined that my manuscripts should be judged on literary merit rather than marketing potential. I stubbornly refused to query agents or editors who required book proposals (which severely limited my prospects, by the way).
Then one day I got a boomerang response from an agent who