Sunday Reading Suggestion

I read Threads and Flames a few weeks ago.  I think I needed to ruminate on it a bit before reviewing the book because it's so much like something I have been working on for years.

This is a turn-of-the-century historical fiction novel about a young woman's who immigrates to America and attempts to make a life here.  The main character ends up working in the garment district and becomes one of the many women trapped inside when the Triangle Shirtwaist Company went up in flames.  Like the last historical fiction novel I reviewed, What She Left Behind, there was an overall feeling of cliche for me that I couldn't get past.  I'm not sure if this is because of the included romance (and in this book it's done with less melodrama) or because I know what will happen to these characters.  I feel as though I have to go back and re-read some of the historical fiction that really worked for me in order to suss out the differences.  School Library Journal lists this as a book meant for grades 6th through 9 and I hadn't realized that I was reading YA so perhaps that's why the romance was subtle.  At any rate, the reviewers at Amazon seem to love it and I certainly think it does a nice job of bringing the history to life for a YA or even middle grade audience.

History

Guest post by Kathy Wiechman who recently won second prize in The Center for Writing Excellence contest for historical fiction writing. 

      Kathy is on the far left in this photo from a Highlights Foundation workshop.

             History was never my favorite school subject. Back then, we were taught to memorize dates and battles. I confess I once confused the Battle of Bunker Hill with the Battle of Bull Run. (Not even the same war.)

 We had to memorize lists. The list of the colonists’ grievances against the Crown. The list of inventions that led to the Industrial Revolution. The list of causes of the Civil War. Lists can bore me still.

     At the same time, I loved reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. I didn’t realize her stories were about Westward Expansion that we studied in history class. (There must have been a list involved with that, too.) But the missing ingredient in the classroom was people. I needed someone to care about.

     Laura’s books involved me in her family’s struggles as they settled in different places across America. Because of her, I learned to love history. But what I love about it is the people who lived it. Without them, I can still be bored.

     As an adult, I visit historic places, places where Lincoln spoke or Washington gardened or Jefferson invented. But it’s about more than presidents. What I truly love is the average, everyday people, people like Laura and Mary and Pa.

     When I write historical fiction, I always begin with a character, a person whose eyes I can tell the story through, a person a reader can care about. The story might be set against an actual event or maybe just an interesting time period. But it has to begin and end with a person.

     When I first learned about the Monongah, West Virginia coal mine disaster of 1907, I was intrigued. It remains the worst industrial accident in US history, but I had never heard of it. This horrific event killed hundreds of miners. Real people who had real families and led real lives. And few people knew about it. It was the kind of story I wanted to tell, wanted to make more people aware of.

I read everything I could get my hands on about it. I visited the site where it happened. I saw the church where hundreds of funerals took place.

But I didn’t begin writing the story until I envisioned Lucia Riccardi (a fictional character) and put her in that place at that time. A miner’s daughter and granddaughter. Her eyes were the ones who witnessed the event in my story, ONE YEAR AFTER.

Twice, I entered versions of this story in Historical Fiction Writing Contests, and it took fourth place from the Children’s Writer in 2011, and second place from the Center for Writing Excellence in February, 2013. Judges read my story and learned about an event that happened more than a hundred years ago. But it took prizes because a thirteen-year-old girl drew those readers into her life.

     This is why I write. I want a reader to see through a character’s eyes and feel her heartbeat. I want them to care enough so that history lives.

     (ONE YEAR AFTER will be published in an anthology put out by the Center for Writing Excellence in July, 2013.)

THE ROOM IN WHICH I SLEPT - AGE TEN, 1950

ONE IN THREE WOMEN ON THE PLANET WILL BE RAPED OR BEATEN IN HER LIFETIME

Our second assignment in my historical fiction writing class is to move the first assignment into the 1950's.  I chose to compose it as a response to the first - to describe my bedroom at age ten.  But I also post it here in honor of V-Day and the upcoming One Billion Rising event this Thursday.  I tend to allude to the violence I experienced as a child rather than writing about it head on and that's true in these pieces too.  I think, as women, we have all experienced some form of violence.  There are the more subtle jeers and sexual innuendos from male strangers and co-workers to outright forms like rape, assault, molestation and murder.  I'm not ready or I don't feel entitled to hang my own detailed experiences out like shingles as they are no more or less important than any other woman's. But I will honor them by acknowledging that I am one of one billion women rising above the violence and today, I intend to dance.  Happy Valentine's Day.  

            To imagine the room I slept in at age ten if it had been 1950, instead of 1970, I would have to both resist and utilize the sepia toned images of my mother’s childhood photographs.  I’d have to fight against them because the colors they conjure imply something less real than the rainbow burst of my 1970’s bedroom.  But their content would be perfect as a primary source.  

Instead of the gingham bedspread across my twin mattress, I would have had a white terry loop woven blanket with knotted fringe just like my mother and her five sisters had on each of their small beds.   The mattress and box spring I slept on, were it twenty years earlier, might have included a wooden frame with thin spires on all four sides.  Or, during the baby boom of the 1950’s, I might have had a room packed tight with the matching beds of my siblings.  My parents, both born in the 1950’s, had five and twelve siblings respectively. 

            The sky blue painted walls of my 1970’s room might have been pasted in pink damask paper in 1950.  And instead of that loud shag carpeting, my floor would be bare except for an oval knotted rug.  An article on carpeting in the 1950’s, insists that post war families could rarely afford wall-to-wall carpeting, perhaps my family would be careful with their money.   

But more than my room might have been different.  My mother was seventeen when she discovered she was pregnant with me.  Had my parents met in the rigid 1950’s rather than the sexual revolution of the 1960’s, I might never have existed at all.  But I know from studying and teaching women’s history that had my mother become pregnant just after World War Two, my parents would have been swayed by a different set of social constructs.  They were more likely to have married before I was born and probably would have tried harder to patch their opposite personalities together and assemble it into something called “nuclear.”

Yes, it definitely would have been nuclear.

            But maybe they had money.  My father was a veteran after all.  He’d have qualified for a GI loan, put a down payment on a small suburban home and took on the upstart role so many men did when they filched the jobs from the Rosies after the war.  In that case, my room might have had a vanity to sit in front of, the top littered with tiny bottles of perfume and pale pink curlers.  That room would have smelled like talcum powder and a 1950’s mother might have swept through it every week, cleaning it from tail to tip.

            In place of the sodden prom dresses in my closet, I’d have flouncy new dresses that fit, and were fit to wear in public.  The stuffed animals would still line the shelves.  But in the 1950’s, my collection might have included a few porcelain dolls.  And the grimy fingers of other children might never have loved these toys.  Their colors might be a host of pastels rather than primary, and perhaps I wouldn’t have felt such a desperate need for them to prove I was worthy of my peer’s approval. 

            But most important, we would never have lived in California.  (My father hated the sunshine and the pretense he saw there.)  So, in 1950, I might have made it home safely.  And The Color Purple would have been someone else’s story.

           

THE ROOM IN WHICH I SLEPT– AGE TEN

I just registered for a historical fiction course at Columbia College.  For our first class assignment, we were asked to describe our childhood bedroom.  I had many, so I chose the one that brought me the most joy.

           My ten-year-old bedroom was a palace of sorts.  I created an imaginary world where my immigrant ancestors were royalty rather than dirt poor and drunk with their own religious convictions.  Without understanding its power at the time, I needed this room.  With its mismatched items and almost sickly display of colors, it became one of the best and most important gifts my mother ever gave me.

By the time I lived in a real house (rented, of course,) Mom was working three jobs, going to school and engaged to a guy with kind eyes and wide, black curls that reached his shoulders.   They pooled their monies together and we set off to raid the local thrift shops for couches, dressers, curtains and bedspreads.

Mom let me choose every stitch in my new domain, provided I could keep it within a ten-dollar budget.  Lucky for me, my new bedroom floor was already two inches thick in rough lilac shag.  I only needed to find matching items to complete my royal purple paradise.  Never mind that the walls were sky blue.  The right accessories would bring out their inner lavender.  

In the sweaty scented bedding area of our local Salvation Army, I struck out on the perfect Color Purple but was delighted to find a lime green comforter with a thick white ruffle, trimmed in eyelets.  At two dollars, it was mine!  Heart thumping with joy, I stuffed it into my cart.

            Next, I made a beeline for the toy department.  For a nickel each, I could line my new shelves with vibrant array of previously loved stuffed animals.  This would add a splash (or splatter) of color to the room and make me the envy of every ten-year-old girl in town.  My little sister slowly pushed her own cart nearby.  Hers, was conspicuously empty.  Leah's new room would be kiddie corner to mine and we would sleep apart for the first time.  Thinking back now, I ache at the image of her bewildered and lonely as I gleefully rushed through that store.  
           But back to that pile of once fluffy toys, which had to be carefully pawed through to find ones that didn’t smell like urine or have crusty black edges.  I unearthed a collection of ten, but the best of the lot was a three-foot long, rainbow-colored snake!  A heady squeeze across his belly and I could feel the tiny Styrofoam beads inside squeaking against each other as they squirmed.  I pictured him draped over the edge of the lowest of three shelves, jutting from the east wall.

            Last, I made my way to where window treatments were heaped onto metal shelves.  My eye caught on a pair of purple gingham café curtains with white eyelet trim, a flawless companion to my new bedspread!  And at only one dollar for the pair, I’d still have plenty leftover to raid the formalwear area for stained prom dresses to hang in my two by two closet.

            When we got home, I set to work right away.  Mom hung the purple curtains on my tiny, northern facing window that overlooked the huge willow tree in the backyard.  At the same time, I lovingly spread the new comforter across a twin mattress and box spring, tucking in one corner where the trim had ripped at the seam.  This used bed was a soft glory compared to the lawn chairs my sister and I had slept in before the move.

The sky darkened around our new home as I worked to arrange the rainbow of stuffed toys across the long shelves that ended just before my small closet full of someone else’s discarded formalwear.  I remember taking a warm bath before sleeping in the room for the first time, my toes curling with pleasure under a sea of white bubbles.

            For the next two years; after the tragedy that sent us running from California with a profound sense of the world’s dangers, this would be my safe haven.

            

The Small Things

Celebrating the small things this Friday.

Juliet is soooo tired this week (lame, I know.)  But she did have a few moments:

1. Skipped her historical fiction class to attend a meeting at Willard School in order to recruit a new COPE.

2. Wrote two pieces for said class and sent homework by email.  (She will post one of those next Thursday.)

3. Had a fabulous slumber party with friend and friend's newly adopted baby, Zachary.  Rocked and fed him at five am Tuesday morning.  Then, snuggled next to him as he fell back to sleep among shared girl talk and morning breath.

Regina:

1. Submitted a poem.

2.Wrote everyday.

3.Saw a Snowy Owl for the first time up close and personal in the wild and snapped a photo(though it is grainy, she cherishes it).