Elizabeth Winthrop's Blog, page 8
September 5, 2012
My Only Democratic Convention
Watching the Democratic Convention on television last night, I was reminded of the one I attended with my father in Chicago in 1968.
In those days, my father, Stewart Alsop, was a journalist writing the back page of Newsweek Magazine and I was a college student, opposed to the Vietnam war.
Here’s a piece of my new memoir, DON’T KNOCK UNLESS YOU’RE BLEEDING, Growing up in Cold War Washington http://amzn.to/QWwUtu about our trip to that convention.
“During college, I returned to Washington to protest the Vietnam War with a number of raffishly earnest friends. In contrast to Uncle Joe, who always supported the war and thundered at us that we hadn’t seen the “secret documents,” Daddy interviewed us from his customary living-room chair, treating us as worthwhile sources for a column on the protests and the effect they might have on Presidential policy. In 1968, my brother Ian and I traveled with Daddy to the Democratic convention.
I spent my days by his side on the convention floor while Ian stumbled into our shared hotel room late at night from the mass protests down in Lincoln Park. On the day Daddy decided to do his reporting from the angle of the demonstrators, he and I, both asthma sufferers, encountered the tear gas. Of the two of us, he was in worse shape. I managed to steer him through the noisy crowd and commandeer a taxi to get him back to the hotel.”
August 26, 2012
Daughter of A Famous Writing Father
Having a famous writing father is not an easy burden when you want to be a writer yourself. It’s the reason that, until now, I’ve always written under the name Winthrop and of my 62 books http://elizabethwinthrop.com/category... 61 are fiction. But I’m finally acknowledging that I’m the daughter of Stewart Alsop. I’ve just published an electronic book (DON’T KNOCK UNLESS YOU’RE BLEEDING: Growing Up in Cold War Washington at: http://amzn.to/NJ2URh) about my childhood with two famous writing brothers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_... Now I’m working on a family history about my parents’ love affair in England during the war.
I call my blog roll, LOOKING OVER A WRITER’S SHOULDER, but right now, I feel my father peering over mine. I’m writing about the time he worked with the French Resistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_%... in Occupied France from August until November of 1944. He’s mentioned this time of his life in a number of articles and most exhaustively in a memoir he wrote about dying called STAY OF EXECUTION. But the book that told the stories in greatest detail is called SUB ROSA. It was written with my godfather, Thomas Braden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_B... (who later came to be known best as the creator of the TV show “Eight is Enough” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_is...) just a year after they returned from the war. SUB ROSA was commissioned by “Wild Bill” Donovan, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Bil... the founder of the Office of Strategic Services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_o...
the organization responsible for training my father as a paratrooper and dropping him into France.
So here am I, sixty-eight years later, trying to reconstruct my father’s time in France from interviews and unpublished memoirs and nuggets of gold I’ve discovered on the web written by people who were there with him. But inside the book bag by my feet, I have a copy of my father’s book, SUB ROSA. Why not open it? Why not turn to that first?
On some level, I’m scared he’s a better writer than I am. And if I believe that, why bother to write this story at all? What do I have to bring to the page that he, who was there, hasn’t already said?
Nothing sabotages a writer’s self-confidence as much as comparing oneself to any relative, but particularly the father who first influenced you.
But here’s my answer for today. I now know more than my father did about the whole operation, not just his particular piece of it. I’ve seen pictures and essays written about him and about that time that he never saw. And I believe that every memoir needs a committed and interested narrator who acts as a cipher. I lost my father 37 years ago to leukemia. This is my way of getting to know him better, not just as a daughter, but as a fellow writer. Whether or not this work will engage a reader is not up to me.
First I will put the story in my words. Then I’ll take SUB ROSA out of my backpack and let Daddy speak into my ear and see where his version fits into mine.
Where I Work
http://milnelibrary.org/
someone else is sitting in my chair. (I sound like the baby bear in Goldilocks.) He’s wearing spotted jeans, grey sneakers and glasses. I try not to glare. He looks furtive, defiant, even though he has no idea that he’s taken my favorite spot. I am forced to settle with my back to the view of my favorite tree, find a longer cord to plug in my computer, put my backpack on the left of my chair instead of the right. Silly, but until the book takes over, these things matter. Once I’m deep into the work, I could be sitting in a tent in the middle of the Gobi desert. Well, not quite, but you get the idea.
Later, the book has me in its grip. I stand up to stretch and discover that the usurper has left. I never heard him go. To move to my usual spot would disturb the spell. I sit down, sink back into the words.
August 21, 2012
DAUGHTER OF A FAMOUS WRITING FATHER
Having a famous writing father is not an easy burden when you want to be a writer yourself. It’s the reason that, until now, I’ve always written under the name Winthrop and of my 62 books http://elizabethwinthrop.com/category/books/ 61 are fiction. But I’m finally acknowledging that I’m the daughter of Stewart Alsop. I’ve just published an electronic book (DON’T KNOCK UNLESS YOU’RE BLEEDING: Growing Up in Cold War Washington at: http://amzn.to/NJ2URh) about my childhood with two famous writing brothers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Alsop Now I’m working on a family history about my parents’ love affair in England during the war.
I call my blog roll, LOOKING OVER A WRITER’S SHOULDER, but right now, I feel my father peering over mine. I’m writing about the time he worked with the French Resistance in Occupied France from August until November of 1944. He’s mentioned this time of his life in a number of articles and most exhaustively in a memoir he wrote about dying called STAY OF EXECUTION. But the book that told the stories in greatest detail is called SUB ROSA. It was written with my godfather, Thomas Braden (who later came to be known best as the creator of the TV show “Eight is Enough” just a year after they returned from the war. SUB ROSA was commissioned by “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services.
the organization responsible for training my father as a paratrooper and dropping him into France.
So here am I, sixty-eight years later, trying to reconstruct my father’s time in France from interviews and unpublished memoirs and nuggets of gold I’ve discovered on the web written by people who were there with him. But inside the book bag by my feet, I have a copy of my father’s book, SUB ROSA. Why not open it? Why not turn to that first?
On some level, I’m scared he’s a better writer than I am. And if I believe that, why bother to write this story at all? What do I have to bring to the page that he, who was there, hasn’t already said?
Nothing sabotages a writer’s self-confidence as much as comparing oneself to any relative, but particularly the father who first influenced you.
But here’s my answer for today. I now know more than my father did about the whole operation, not just his particular piece of it. I’ve seen pictures and essays written about him and about that time that he never saw. And I believe that every memoir needs a committed and interested narrator who acts as a cipher. I lost my father 37 years ago to leukemia. This is my way of getting to know him better, not just as a daughter, but as a fellow writer. Whether or not this work will engage a reader is not up to me.
First I will put the story in my words. Then I’ll take SUB ROSA out of my backpack and let Daddy speak into my ear and see where his version fits into mine.
August 19, 2012
Maia and the Monster Baby
Illustrated by Amanda Haley,
Holiday House, 2012
Maia and her best friend, who happens to be a monster, are both becoming big sisters.
This is NOT good news!
A warm and funny story about friendship, family, and new siblings.
“Maia rocks, tickles, and reads to Monster’s baby sister, while Monster does somersaults and makes goofy faces for Maia’s. Winthrop (The Biggest Parade) and Haley (Reading to Peanut) serve up two winning female characters and a message about friendship and girl power that feels both of-the-moment and deeply empathic. The quietly comedic, matter-of-fact prose is sympathetic to both characters’ considerable intelligence (“My mother says my baby sister is my new best friend,” complains Maia. “We are the friends,” Monster replies. “They are the babies”), while giving readers room to savor Haley’s expansive, cheerily colored scenes that exude a sense of nighttime magic.”
-Publishers Weekly
“Maia grumbles, “My mother says my baby sister is my new best friend,” and Monster responds knowingly, “WE are the friends. They are the babies.” Saturated in purple-hued haziness, acrylic paints and shadowy colored-pencil scenes locate the action in the cozy confines of Maia’s room. Monster’s childlike wardrobe and exuberant demeanor accommodate fur and fangs without any hint of fright.”
-Kirkus Review
Don’t Knock Unless You’re Bleeding: Growing Up in Cold War Washington
At the height of their fame, Joseph and Stewart Alsop were household names. Syndicated columnists who reached 25 million readers at a time, they dined with the power brokers in Cold War Washington, from Presidents to spies, all the while cranking out columns, investigative stories, books, speeches and hundreds of letters. In Washington, information is power, and in those days, reporters and sources passed stories back and forth over cocktails and around the dinner table. Nobody noticed the children listening at the top of the stairs.
An award-winning fiction writer, Stewart’s only daughter, Elizabeth, finally turns her attention to the “two fathers” of her childhood recently portrayed in the play THE COLUMNIST, by David Auburn. In this memoir piece, Elizabeth sheds a unique light on the personalities behind these two powerful men, who not only recorded but influenced American history in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Buy the e-book now:
“Vivid writing about a family engaged in national politics with its own complicated internal politics. Like most of us, when she was a child the author was in the middle of forces she wasn’t yet prepared to understand. The mixture of compassion and irony is potent.”
-Jeffrey Sweet, playwright, author of , COURT MARTIAL AT FORT DEVENS and many other award-winning plays
“A tough childhood in the hands of a skilled writer….the stuff that makes great memoirs.”
-Robin Wolaner, author of NAKED IN THE BOARDROOM
LOOKING FOR MY FATHER
I’m still working on the history of my parents’ courtship and marriage in the middle of World War II.
Every day, information seems to be falling out of the sky on me. I’d reached the point in the book when I had my father’s feet sticking through the hole in the bottom of a Lancaster over German Occupied France in mid-August 1944, I stopped writing to research. Now I can’t stop researching… or at least accepting the gifts that come my way.
This month alone I’ve been in contact with the 88-year-old radio operator who jumped with my father as well as the son of the French army officer who was the third member of the team, code name Alexander.
I’ve made contact with a British historian who sent me my father’s personal file for with the time he was with the Jedburghs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedburghs a group formed by the O.S.S., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_o….
I just located a man in France who has written on Team Alexander. He sent me a picture of my father standing behind the wife of the French Resistance Officer in the Maquis,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_(…, a man named Rac who my father revered and wrote about years later in an article for the Saturday Evening Post.
All of these people seem so touched and honored that I’ve found them, that we are connecting. My father died 37 years ago, but we knew him at different times in his life. They knew him before I was born. I knew him long after they had lost touch. We are putting together the jigsaw puzzle of one man’s life: the soldier in World War II and the journalist during the years of the Cold War.
I feel oddly consoled to have found these fellow travelers as I try to retrace his footsteps winding back from this century to the middle of the last.
August 6, 2012
WHERE I WORK
This morning, when I arrive at my “office”, which is a particular desk facing the windows in my favorite public library, Milne Public Library,
someone else is sitting in my chair. (I sound like the baby bear in Goldilocks.) He’s wearing spotted jeans, grey sneakers and glasses. I try not to glare. He looks furtive, defiant, even though he has no idea that he’s taken my favorite spot. I am forced to settle with my back to the view of my favorite tree, find a longer cord to plug in my computer, put my backpack on the left of my chair instead of the right. Silly, but until the book takes over, these things matter. Once I’m deep into the work, I could be sitting in a tent in the middle of the Gobi desert. Well, not quite, but you get the idea.
Later, the book has me in its grip. I stand up to stretch and discover that the usurper has left. I never heard him go. To move to my usual spot would disturb the spell. I sit down, sink back into the words.
July 30, 2012
LOOKING FOR MY FATHER
Every day, information seems to be falling out of the sky on me. I’d reached the point in the book when I had my father’s feet sticking through the hole in the bottom of a Lancaster over German Occupied France in mid-August 1944, I stopped writing to research. Now I can’t stop researching… or at least accepting the gifts that come my way.
This month alone I’ve been in contact with the 88-year-old radio operator who jumped with my father as well as the son of the French army officer who was the third member of the team, code name Alexander.
I’ve made contact with a British historian who sent me my father’s personal file for with the time he was with the Jedburghs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedburghs
a group formed by the O.S.S., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_o....
I just located a man in France who has written on Team Alexander. He sent me a picture of my father standing behind the wife of the French Resistance Officer in the Maquis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_(..., a man named Rac who my father revered and wrote about years later in an article for the Saturday Evening Post.
All of these people seem so touched and honored that I’ve found them, that we are connecting. My father died 37 years ago, but we knew him at different times in his life. They knew him before I was born. I knew him long after they had lost touch. We are putting together the jigsaw puzzle of one man’s life: the soldier in World War II and the journalist during the years of the Cold War.
I feel oddly consoled to have found these fellow travelers as I try to retrace his footsteps winding back from this century to the middle of the last.
LOOKING FOR MY FATHER
I’m still working on the history of my parents’ courtship and marriage in the middle of World War II.
Every day, information seems to be falling out of the sky on me. I’d reached the point in the book when I had my father’s feet sticking through the hole in the bottom of a Lancaster over German Occupied France in mid-August 1944, I stopped writing to research. Now I can’t stop researching… or at least accepting the gifts that come my way.
This month alone I’ve been in contact with the 88-year-old radio operator who jumped with my father as well as the son of the French army officer who was the third member of the team, code name Alexander.
I’ve made contact with a British historian who sent me my father’s personal file for with the time he was with the Jedburghs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedburghs
a group formed by the O.S.S., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services.
I just located a man in France who has written on Team Alexander. He sent me a picture of my father standing behind the wife of the French Resistance Officer in the Maquis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_(World_War_II), a man named Rac who my father revered and wrote about years later in an article for the Saturday Evening Post.
All of these people seem so touched and honored that I’ve found them, that we are connecting. My father died 37 years ago, but we knew him at different times in his life. They knew him before I was born. I knew him long after they had lost touch. We are putting together the jigsaw puzzle of one man’s life: the soldier in World War II and the journalist during the years of the Cold War.
I feel oddly consoled to have found these fellow travelers as I try to retrace his footsteps winding back from this century to the middle of the last.
