Three books simmered in my periphery

I’m in the editing stages for Meadowlark Songs: A Motherline Legacy. The ideas for the way it’s written were planted by three books, starting with Luanne Castle’s Kin Types, which I discovered about 2019.

(Tintypes are an old method of capturing photographs on metal, especially popular around the Civil War. I am the keeper of a few small tintypes of my own kin, and I have a feeling that the portrait on the cover of Luanne’s book began as a tintype.) 

Kin Types

I first “met” Luanne Castle through her genealogy website, The Family Kalamazoo. Soon I discovered her delightful collection of poems and flash prose of family stories, Kin Types, in 2019. It must have planted a seed or two about capturing individuals in glimpses, but I was in the middle of publishing Leora’s Letters.

My review: “The stories of ancestors help keep them alive. Luanne Castle does that regularly on her blog called The Family Kalamazoo, but in this slim volume of 19 poems and flash prose, she captures individuals with a vignette of well-chosen details that give you goosebumps, even a lump in your throat. They are poignant, sharing some harsh scenes as well as how one name is so ubiquitous in her ancestry.

“I especially enjoyed the one about family resemblances in old photographs, and noting the names, dates, and places as her forebears crossed the ocean from The Netherlands and Germany and ended up in Michigan. I also enjoyed finding pictures of some of these on her genealogy blog.

“This delightful chapbook helps keep alive individuals largely forgotten otherwise.”

The Horse Lawyer and Other Poems

When I came upon The Horse Lawyer and Other Poems by Greg Seeley in 2021, I was so taken with it. What a compelling way to preserve and share the soul of three generations of farm families, through the author’s fatherline in free verse! Not only that, but the Seeleys lived on the same nook of Iowa soil over a span of 125 years.

Even then I wrote that Greg’s book made me want to try something akin to it with my own family stories. My brain began gathering ideas for five generations of my motherline.

Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance

Leora’s Dexter Stories came out in 2021, the same year Elizabeth Gauffreau’s Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance was published. Liz’s beautiful little book sparked a longing to try something similar, sometime. My review: “These captivating poems, along with winsome photos, is a bittersweet journey through grief over profound losses but also deeply layered family love. The pipe, those saddleshoes, a dress with smocking–what endearing details. A very compelling collection.”

Again I was taken with how details about a person could be conveyed with so few words, powerful glimpses bringing them to life.

Nurturing the Ideas

These three books simmered in my periphery while I worked on Leora’s Early Years and What Leora Never Knew, but once in awhile a free verse about a family story would nudge forward. I’d started notebooks for three other possibilities for the next manuscript, but the motherline idea began to germinate. And their stories wanted to emerge mostly as free verse.

Luanne and Liz are award-winning authors with several published books. Both have offered welcome encouragement for the Leora books these last few years. I’m so thankful they planted seeds, plump with promise, which I tucked away until time to encourage them to bud in the soil of my own motherline stories (which have grown to include seven generations).

Greg Seeley, a retired CPA, has also written family-based historical fiction. Recently he’s been caring for his wife who unfortunately has dementia. Greg graduated from the University of Northern Iowa, which was called the State College of Iowa when Favorite Guy and I studied there. Greg’s verses are set near Afton in southwest Iowa, where his dad was the last generation on the farm.

One endorser of Kin Types called it the “place where literature and history intersect.” My verses will never be called literature, but I hope the way they’re presented will spark ideas for readers to capture stories of their own kin.