Rita Sims Quillen's Blog, page 3

MUSIC FROM THE COUNTRY

Well, if you're determined to deny yourself the pleasure of reading HIDING EZRA, or you've already read it, here's another creative activity I've been working on that you might enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/user/quillen1

This is my Youtube channel where I post my music. These songs are constructed out of remnants of poems published in my most recent book, SOMETHING SOLID TO ANCHOR TO, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press.

I hope you find something you like- Take care, dear readers.

BEST OF LITTLE-KNOWN AUTHORS

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/7...

Hey friends who've read HIDING EZRA-you can vote on pg 4 of the list for my book as one that deserves to be better known! Love it! ...and would greatly appreciate you taking the time.
I'm in the top 10% right now. :-)
Thanks so much.
Rita

A Little Behind-the-Scenes for Writers: Why We Need Small Presses

When I began to think about trying to publish my novel HIDING EZRA, about the real-life events of my husband's grandfather, I dutifully did my research and talked to other published novelists, and they all told me I needed to write a good pitch letter and focus on agents and publishers who seemed a "good fit." I knew immediately that I was in trouble: I knew my story was not an easy one to categorize.

Some strongly advised me to tap into strong anti-war sentiment that was raging in the Bush years, since the book is about a man who decides to go AWOL during WWI because of family hardship, but that would have been a travesty because it would have been false, untrue to both the real events the book was based on and the integrity of the characters I'd created who felt no such political or philosophical motivations.

Others advised me to build up the love story even more, and spend more time focusing on the women in the story, Ezra's sister Eva and his girlfriend Alma, because "women buy novels, not men." But I was confident that the women were already carrying as much weight in the story as they could and it was Ezra who had to be the spine of the book or there was no book at all. Besides, you can't 'force' a story in one direction or another with that kind of commercial motivation!

After more agents than I could count turned me down with almost identical responses--" You write beautifully but I just don't think I could sell this book."--I thought my next logical step was possibly a university or college press, but those, too, turned it down with almost identical statements.

By this time, I'd been trying to get this novel published for 8 years. I'm not getting any younger. One dream died, but a new one was born, made possible by the fact that neither the commercial publishing industry nor academia control everything these days.

I published my novel with a small press, Little Creek Books, without a lot of the marketing infrastructure and budget of the bigger commercial and academic publishers. They've done a great job with the resources they have. I've worked hard to find creative ways to get the word out, too. And guess what? The book is continuing to sell steadily and is ranked in the top 10 to 20% on Amazon pretty regularly,(it fluctuates wildly, of course, but somebody is ordering and it isn't me. :-) )and is actually selling better than some of the books that came out from much bigger publicity machines about the same time.

Now why am I telling you this? I'm sure many will say, "just to brag." But they would be wrong. My point is that the Smart-Set, for lack of a better word, is wrong. They were sure no one would be that interested, that the book wouldn't sell. But it is selling.. People are interested in the story, and they love both the characters and the world portrayed in the book. It is selling still, over 10 months after publication. Many, many of my readers are men who have astonished their wives by reading a novel. The book has been adopted by a college and a middle-school as a required book for a class.

It seems to me that mainstream publishing is going the way of mainstream popular music. Sure, there's still really good work coming out from the both the mainstream recording industry and publishing industry, too, but there is a lot of derivative dreck, too. At the same time, the mainstream is turning down good work in both music and literature. Now, that fantastic music and literature does usually find a way out into the world anyway, given the brave new connected world we're living in,but the patron has to be really savvy and determined to even find out about them.

I'm thankful people are still willing to write or publish books today when there's so little money in it. We need small presses for the same reason we need all the alternative media for music. If you keep narrowing and narrowing the pipeline for anything, you get less of it, and a smaller and smaller number of people control it. Never a healthy environment for art.....

Uncomfortable Truths and Other Problems in Fiction

ADDENDUM: What follows is my original blog post from 3 years ago when my novel HIDING EZRA came out. As the commemoration of the centennial of that terrible war begins to wind down, I wish I could find a way to get the word out more to WWI history buffs who would enjoy knowing this small part of the war's history. It is real life--not black and white but gray, not easy but hard, not sunshine and roses, but gritty. The story is a reminder that so often the poorer working classes experience history's huge challenges in a much more life-changing way usually and react the way they do to those events due to economic realities for them. *********

BLOG post--
My novel, Hiding Ezra, is a fictionalized account of real life and history, set in the mountains of southwest Virginia during WWI. It describes the reasons for and consequences of a soldier going AWOL in the midst of that terrible war. Right from the start, I knew the book would generate unavoidable controversy.

There were people in the industry-both on the publishing side and in the film side-- who encouraged me to take advantage of the anti-war sentiment of the time ( back about 10 years ago when I began shopping the manuscript around) that had been stirred by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It would have been easy to give in to that; I probably could have sold the book for a nice advance and maybe gotten a film company interested, too.

But it would have been an assault on truth. The story I'm telling is literally true; it was my husband's grandfather who inspired the character of Ezra; though there are some key differences in the true story vs. my fictionalized account, the basic truth is preserved. You see, if you read Hiding Ezra, you'll see that the 175,000+ men who went AWOL during WWI were not political protesters or even "conscientious objectors" for the most part, according to my research, but were economic and personal victims of a very poorly conceived and executed set of draft laws and military policies.

Don't take my word for it about the poorly thought-out policies; look at what the government and military did to mitigate those errors before the WWII draft! You'll see that even they had to admit that these men and their families had been put in an untenable position. You can see that by how they dealt with most of those deserters and how they changed draft policy for the next generation!

My purpose in writing the book was not to glorify desertion or be anti-military or anything of that sort. I wanted to understand. To tell the truth. To tell larger Truths about human nature, about family, about how history is made by real people.....

HIDING EZRA review-

I'm really pleased with this published review in the ETSU Center for Appalachian Studies and Services magazine, NOW & THEN, by former English department chair Dr. Judith Slagle.

HIDING EZRA-Based on a True Story
Rita Quillen
Johnson City, TN: Little Creek Books, 2014
$12.95 (paperback), 220 pages
Poet Rita Quillen’s foray into the genre of long
fiction with Hiding Ezra offers readers an adventure,
a mystery, a history, a love story, a tragedy, and a
tale of redemption. Set near Quillen’s family home
in the hills of Southwest Virginia and East Tennessee
during World War I, Hiding Ezra is based on a true
story about a soldier who leaves Camp Lee to visit
his dying mother. When she convinces him to stay
with her beyond his leave, he becomes AWOL and
is soon labeled a deserter by the U. S. Army. After
Ezra Teague watches his mother’s funeral from the
woods, he must take to a life on the run, although
never far from Gate City and surrounding areas such
as Clinch Mountain, Hale Springs, and Knoxville.
Staying close to his sister Eva and the love of his
life, Alma, Ezra communicates with these women
through notes left in strategic places. He sometimes
leaves his sister firewood in the winter as she leaves
food for him. The harsh conditions of living alone in
an unsympathetic landscape in winter are intensified
through Ezra’s journal entries—at times funny,
poignant, and philosophical. Ezra ponders the Bible,
tries his hand at map-making, collects ginseng, reads
old newspapers, and muses over the absurdity of
outlawing liquor—all this to keep his sanity in the
woods. As Ezra’s story is told through multiple
perspectives, the accounts are pieced together like
the quilts that become a principal theme in the novel.
The second part of the novel, Ezra’s second
year on the run (beginning October 1919), adds
a dangerous human element to the peril already
present in the environment when the Army sends Lt.
Nettles to round up deserters—some of whom will
clearly be hanged. As fear and hunger set in, Ezra’s
mental and physical health deteriorates. Finding
shelter in Mrs. Osborne’s barn saves his life, and it is
obvious that people in the community feel a duty to
one another. But it is also clear how tough the women
characters are, for it is Eva and Alma who ultimately
bring about a solution to Ezra’s predicament as they
realize their physical and emotional potential in
scenes that are both earthy and sexy.
Hiding Ezra is the product of Quillen’s rich
heritage. While the journal entries she writes for
Ezra are, in fact, fictional, such a journal did exist
in her family. These journal entries bare Ezra’s soul
to the reader, and Quillen’s lyrical voice peppers
the narrative with sensory images. On his route to
catch Teague, Lt. Nettles finds himself standing
in a cemetery and realizes “that what he had first
thought were rocks were actually old headstones
with only illegible ghosts of words still visible.”
There are symbols of death throughout the novel,
but a significant symbol is also quilts and quilting,
prevalent as both a means of financial support
and physical comfort—emblematic of piecing
together individual lives and families. As this novel
concludes, Quillen braids contradictory spiritual
images when Ezra “baptizes” his baby daughter
Katie in the river, saying, “I baptize you in the name
of caves, the waterfall, these hills, the stones and
the stars.” This is the perfect culmination to a novel
fraught with contradictions about duty, religion, and
relationships.
v
Judith Bailey Slagle is Professor of English and Chair of Literature
and Language at East Tennessee State University.

Why A Writer Smiles When Simply Walking Thru the Mall...

https://www.facebook.com/ritaquillenh...

This picture shows a poster sported by the front entrance to our local indie bookstore. :-) While visiting my Facebook Author page, I hope you'll LIKE it and also check out my website--www.ritasimsquillen.com--where you can find all kinds of interesting stuff, from music videos to links to many great writers.

Thanks!

Circumstances Beyond My Control

I just wanted to let everyone know that my book SOMETHING SOLID TO ANCHOR TO, a poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press, has experienced significant delays at the printer due to circumstances beyond my control!

If you pre-ordered a book or won a copy in the Goodreads Giveaway, you should get your book in about 2 weeks or so. I am SO sorry about this-thank you all so much for your support and for your patience through this snafu!

Rebecca Elswick-Reviews HIDING EZRA!!

So happy to have this good review of HIDING EZRA by author Rebecca Elswick! If you haven't read her fine bildungsroman, MAMA'S SHOES, add it to your To-READ list. Rebecca is also from southwest VA and a member of the wonderful Appalachian Writing Project. Our region is a hotbed of literary activity!

http://wwwrebeccaelswick.blogspot.com/

Let's Talk About How We Talk

No issue confounds the writer from Appalachia more than the question of how to present our dialect. No other dialect in America carries with it the stigma, the baggage, of mountain speech. It is considered the mark of the uneducated, unsophisticated, unassimilated cartoon characters, the only group it’s still okay to openly display prejudice toward!

When I began to work on my novel HIDING EZRA, I knew only that I would not “handle” dialect as it was usually handled by my fellow Appalachian writers. There would be no “hit” for “it,” no “them thar” for “those,” very, very little in the way of phonetic spelling. Why? After all, those are all perfectly accurate and common occurrences in Appalachian speech, especially of the WWI generation I was portraying in the book.

The first reason was that I learned from my years of teaching that writing dialect as people actually speak, with the phonetic misspellings, etc., made the work much more difficult and often frustrating for readers. How many times did students almost mutiny on me over HUCK FINN, THE SUT LOVINGOOD TALES, and THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD because their authors used heavy phonetic dialect and students couldn’t follow those parts? I have lost many hours of class time over the years because a class would ask me to read aloud and “translate” those sections so they could understand them. Because I wanted to write a book that everyone could read and enjoy—not just people from the region—I opted not to make my book that difficult to read.

The second and more important reason was that I wanted to emphasize different aspects of the dialect: specifically, I wanted readers to hear the extraordinarily figurative nature of the language, its vividness, its lyricism, its descriptiveness, its attention to rhythm, and the continuous seasoning of scripture that permeates. My role model in thinking this way about the language of HIDING EZRA wasn’t an Appalachian writer at all. It was African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston and her marvelous book THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD. In that book, all Hurston’s characters, especially Nanny, the grandmother of protagonist Janie, have an unforgettable way of talking about things. For example, when Janie comes back complaining to her grandmother about her new husband and how he just isn’t what she really wants, how she’s really not in love with him, Nanny says, “Dats de very prong us black women gets hung on! Dis love! Dat’s just whut got us uh pullin’ and uh haulin’ and sweatin’ and doin’ from can’t-see in de mornin’ till can’t-see at night!”
Now, is that the way all black women in Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida talk? No, of course not, but I bet a lot of them did. And in the world Hurston was creating in her book, Nanny talked that way all the time. And that’s what Hurston wanted to share with us-the tremendously creative, entertaining, and original way those women talked. Hurston also chose to do the phonetic spellings, but even if she had not done that, she still would have portrayed an important truth about her world, her characters, and the way language happened in that world. I wanted my character Ezra to be like Nannie in that he would represent the way speech can be more than just pedestrian communication. In my world talk is an art form; it’s currency that can buy you friends, respect, popularity and status. Reader after reader has told me that the journals where Ezra tells his story in his own words were their favorite part because “you can just hear his voice,” and he’s so funny and interesting in the way he talks about things.

There are probably some that would believe that those journals don't sound authentic, that it's unrealistic for a character like Ezra to have written the way Ezra writes in his journal; they would be wrong. In the four years I spent researching the book, I read thousands of pages of newspapers, including letters to the editor, and correspondence from soldiers. To be literate at all in that day and time was to be very literate, compared to today. My own grandfather, who had only an elementary education, had the most beautiful handwriting I’ve seen in my lifetime, loved Yeats, loved the opera, did the New York Times crossword puzzle every day.. He was a cook in WWI and came home to the coalfields afterward to a job as the bookkeeper in the company store in the mining town of Splashdam, VA. The real Ezra, my husband’s grandfather, was also quite literate and actually kept a journal; that’s where I got the idea. So the “soft bigotry of low expectations” is at work in those who would make those assumptions that a simple farmer with an elementary school education would have to speak and write in a very uneducated way or would be unable to use anything approaching standard English, in my experience.

I had many stories to tell in HIDING EZRA. One of them was about our language. Our unique mountain dialect is rapidly disappearing, and it’s the world’s loss. My novel simply tries to capture and hold on to it a little longer, like putting lightning bugs in a Mason jar. I’m grateful that Dr. Amy Clark and Dr. Susan Hayward “got” what I was trying to do and included two short sections of the novel in their wonderful scholarly study of Appalachian dialect, TALKING APPALACHIAN, published by the University of Kentucky Press last year.

I would just like to add that anyone who interprets anything I’ve said here as a criticism of any other work or any other writer’s choice would be mistaken. It’s all good. . Other writers have made different choices for different reasons, and that’s okay by me.

Game changers

There are people who drift in and out of our life all the time, but sometimes, even though our time with them is relatively brief, they are game changers who have a profound effect on us. I'd like to tell you about a few of my game-changers.

The first two were a pair-a minister and his wife--who started a Glee Club at our little elementary school in the heart of the southwestern Virginia mountains. We didn't do Broadway-level theatrical productions like the show on tv, but we did an annual show each year that certainly merited an awful lot of preparation and hard work and nerves for a bunch of 11-13 year olds. So why did singing in a little elementary school choir change my life? Well, because they taught me to read music as a singer and to sing harmony with anyone on anything. And they convinced me that I could actually sing and should. I also learned how much I liked being part of something but invisible, out of the spotlight glare. Creating harmonious perfection is a high like no other! My love of harmonizing has provided my main hobby over the years. Music is fun and it's stress-reducing-that's what I learned from Mr. and Mrs. Argoe.

The next path-shaper was also a teacher--a bear of a man named Jack Higgs. Jack had been a linebacker at the Naval Academy and had an IQ probably close to his body weight. One of the most well-read, interesting, thoughtful, and funny teachers anyone ever had, he was able to not only teach you facts and theories and ideas, but also to present a coherent vision of the world, specifically of American literature in a larger historical context. I learned a great deal about my country from him, but more than that, I learned what kind of teacher I wanted to be: To challenge students, to try to inspire them, to make them curious, to take them seriously, to help them see their own potential.

Finally, one of the most inspiring of all was not a traditional teacher; in fact, she was the cook in the lunchroom in our school. Her name was Janette Carter and she was the daughter of A.P. and Sara Carter of the famous first family of country music--The Carter Family. I was fortunate to get to spend a good deal of time in her house when I was a little kid because her daughter (also named Rita)and I were best friends in elementary school. Janette had a hard life-twice unhappily married--and she was herself the child of a sad divorce who never completely recovered from that heartbreak, it seemed to me. I remember thinking even as a small child that some great hurt was written on her face that never completely disappeared, despite having one of the most beautiful smiles and melodious laughs I ever heard! But despite any problems and heartbreak she suffered, Janette never gave up on her family legacy--she loved the music of the mountains. Even more, she deeply loved and respected her parents' love of it and her father's dogged persistence in bringing that music to a wider world.

So in the 1970s, with no money, she started a weekly music show in the little store building that her dad had used so many years before. The crowds came and grew and came and grew. She did it, she said, to honor her father's legacy and her promise to him, when he had asked her in his last days, to try to keep the music alive. Inspired by her and the thousands of musicians she and later Rita and Dale brought to that stage over these last 40+ years, I learned to play the autoharp like she did, and the guitar, a little bit anyway, and sing the old songs. I have done what little I can do to pass on the love of music to others. I now know that teachers aren't in classrooms much of the time, that my life is a school for others who might be watching, unnoticed by me.