Storybelly Digest: Countdown to October

Good morning from the ‘belly. Debbie here with some Countdown and documentary novel thoughts for you on the last Monday morning in September. It has been way too hot here for September, even in the South. But it has also been glorious and full of forward motion:

Irene, our screened porch in April, before renovation this month The Sixties Trilogy:

The idea for three books about the 1960s began to gel in the early 2000s, when I was criss-crossing the US (and the world), speaking and teaching in schools, conferences, bookstores, and libraries.

I realized (as I had seen with my own kids’ school days) that young people weren’t learning about the 1960s in their history classes, and so knew little about the richness and the chaos of those days — the civil rights movements, the space race, segregation and desegregation, rock and roll (!), and the vast changing America I had grown up in and that defined a generation — nay, generations.

At the same time, I could see that history was being taught — necessarily — as a series of dates, events, people, places… and not as the mosaic it is in real life. No event stands alone. People aren’t static. Moments aren’t monoliths. They depend on what came before — and on what’s happening alongside them.

If we can understand history in this way, we hone our critical thinking skills… and better understand that our country’s complex history calls us to choose our future with care and conscience

This is the way we live life, whether we notice it or not — we are dependent on what’s happening around us, what happened before us, and what we have, in the end, is choice. This is also the way I teach writing.

Since we ARE stories, when we write about our lives, we are writing about how we fit into the panorama of our own history, not to mention the history before us, the ancestors we come from, and the “moments, memories, meaning” we make of the story we want to tell.

Proposing the Sixties Trilogy

I came of age in the late sixties/early seventies, and my story is the story of a time in American history that has defined America as a nation. I proposed a series of three novels that would help young people understand how history is that tapestry of many things happening at once, backwards and forwards, weaving into and out of one another — each character in a story having their own unique perspective, for better or worse.

I wanted to write books that would help young people understand their history — collective and individual history — and write their own stories.

Scholastic said YES. We embarked on a project that had never been done before: the documentary novel with scrapbook sections containing the history of the moment while my characters juggle the chaos and unknowns of their young lives — family, friends, schools, neighborhoods — all shaped by the larger history unfolding around them.

The American history contained in each book of the Sixties trilogy comes from a story and is accompanied by scrapbooks full of the era — songs, photographs, newspaper clippings, advertisements, cultural touchstones, and much more.

Some of the most rewarding teaching I’ve done in the past 17 years since the publication of Book 1, Countdown, has come from talking about life in the Sixties and encouraging and working with writers of all ages as they see themselves as a part of history and write their stories.

Countdown : 1962

It’s Countdown month in October. Each Monday in October I’ll share a piece of the story — the history, the scrapbook, the characters — and how it all fits into the mosaic of history for young readers.

Countdown’s main narrative event is the looming Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, but there are other things happening in 1962 that form the constellation of history at that time, and I can show these events to the reader in scrapbooks.

This is a still from a Countdown scrapbook. “James Meredith became the first black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi today. Federal Marshals escorted Meredith onto the campus where Governor Ross Barnett declared last week, ‘No school in our state will be integrated while I am your governor.’”

John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in February 1962. My character Drew — all of nine years old — so admires John Glenn and the space race, he wants to become an astronaut.

Franny, eleven, just wants a normal life (who doesn’t at that age?).

But at the same time, while she’s busy navigating fifth grade, a fading friendship, and her crazy Uncle Otts, the air raid siren screams at school. She ducks-and-covers under her desk (like I did!) during the drill. She’s making her plan, too: if the siren ever signals an actual bomb incoming, she won’t duck under any desk. She will run get her brother Drew from his classroom and race home. If she’s going to die, she reasons, she wants it to be in the arms of her family.

“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is the song that anchors Scrapbook 1. It’s a show tune from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, so it is a backwards glance, although I was thinking of the 1963 rendition by Gerry and the Pacemakers as I chose it. Then there’s the Josh Groban version. :>

“When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high and don’t be afraid of the dark. At the end of the storm there’s a golden sky and the sweet silver song of the lark…”

I chose “You’ll Never Walk Alone” because of how it captures assurance and hope for the future that people clung to during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and also because, when I was Franny’s age in Countdown, I was in the Glee Club at Camp Springs Elementary School (Franny’s school, too) and we sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” so there’s more than a bit of me in Countdown as well, even though I was Drew’s age, nine, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

History is news, music, film, books, stories of all kinds, including yours. We’ll talk about writing personal narrative this coming month of October, right here in the Digest, and in the Writers Lab we’ll do just that — we’ll write. We’ll talk about turning personal narrative into story as well.

Next week we’ll explore a bit more about Countdown’s structure and how documentary novels work. We’ll examine the power of personal narrative and look for “ways in” to writing YOUR story.

I’m traveling this week, heading to family and friends in New England. I’ve been using Instagram Stories to document the way our home is physically changing, as we demolish a 53-year-old rotten deck and replace it with a new one, and as we update Irene, our carport turned into a gathering room many years ago, with windows, a fresh floor, and a new ceiling. Here are a couple of in-progress shots. There are more photos in the “renovations” highlight on my IG.

And that’s it for this Monday’s digest! Thank you for hanging with me. I’ll queue up posts for while I’m gone, and you can find me in between on Notes and checking in at Chat and elsewhere.

Have a good week, everyone.

Tell Your Story.

xoxo Debbie