Category: Fiction

Some families do a better job of thriving in difficult circumstances and I’ve wanted to imagine through stories how they do it. I’ve selected my parents’ generation as a “lab” to consider surviving tough times. I hope I can discover coping mechanisms that transcend time.

Million Letters Campaign

For thirty years, Andrew Carroll has collected letters, spanning 225 years of American war history. “These letters are America’s great undiscovered literature,” Carroll says.  “They give insight into war and human nature.”

What great timing for me that this article by April White about Carroll’s letter-gathering campaign appeared in the November issue of Smithsonian—just as I’m releasing my book set in the World War II era and focusing on families and staying connected.  Letters play a central role in my story, keeping Connor Conroy and his sister Nora connected to each other and their family on the home front.

Nora’s in Paris at the U.S. Embassy at the beginning of the narrative with the Nazis poised to overrun the city. Connor feels responsible for her circumstances because he goaded her into seeking a career. How could he have dreamed she’d take a job in a war zone? Now he has to decide whether to enlist and maybe get to Europe where he can protect her.

Back to Carroll’s hundreds of thousands of letters (so far).Twice he’s asked Dear Abby to promote his Legacy Project and twice she’s complied. Within four days, thousands of letters had overrun the local post office station.  The letters are now housed in the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University in California.

These are not celebrity letters. Soldiers wrote their own stories in these letters, intimate details of their lives at war and reassurances that “no Jap bullet has my name on it.” Back home, their friends and families wrote about the price of wheat and pork bellies, rationing, collecting rubber, and producing food, uniforms, blankets, socks, and bandages—materiel for the war effort.  

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River People by Margaret Lukas

Whew! I finally got my new novel See Willy See sent off to the printer and ebook distributor. Seems like there are always new hoops to jump through, especially since I’m using a new print-on-demand organization. I may have to reformat my table of contents, but that’s pretty minor compared to days of saving and resaving in different formats to meet printer requirements. Anyhow, I just read Margie Lukas’s novel River People and I wanted to share my thoughts. I read her first and this is as good as her first. Wow!

River People

River People

Coffins or arks? What will you choose to build?

In her historical novel, River People, Margaret Lukas harkens back to a time when women and children were barely more than chattel. It’s an old  story of women’s abuse at the hands of men, but Lukas makes it new by showing us into the heart and damaged mind of the primary male abuser.

Belonging challenges the characters each in her (or his) own way as they struggle to assert their identities. The central villain, Rev. Jackdaw, struggles with gender identity. Effie tries to think herself better than her neighbors, terrified that her life will become as hard as theirs. Henry, known as Chief, finds himself separate because he’s a half-breed. Bridget suffers from abandonment. Her parents left, her uncle died, she sent her own grandmother back to Ireland so she wouldn’t die, the Reverend calls her Rooster—even her name’s in question.

Bridget is the novel’s main character. Her parents left her behind when they immigrated to the U.S. She and her grandmother try to follow, but in America Bridget becomes, for all purposes, an orphan. But she maintains tenuous hope, unlike many of the other characters. Bridget believes in her mythological warrior heroine Nera, and in her connection to the natural world. “The river, Wilcox [a  tree] and all trees, the sky with flying stars, Jake [the ox]. It was all connected and all of it loved her. She was at home in the wide world . . . . when a person fits under heaven, she fits everywhere.”

Throughout the novel, Lukas forces her characters to make excruciating choices. When survival seems impossible, do you acquiesce or do you fight death? When forced to do—or even witness—cruel things, do you come to enjoy cruelty or can you resist? Can one always choose? Are some cruelties so severe that they warp the mind forever? Do fear and pain make cruelty inevitable? How does one small act of cruelty send ripples that expand into more and more lives? 

Coffins or arks. In an historical tour de force I couldn’t put down, Margaret Lukas asks existential questions at the core of our humanity, and she does it with empathy and understanding.

River People Lukas’s second novel is as good as her first and that’s pretty great.

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Scale

I’ve got a couple of story ideas for when I finish revising the last novel of my trilogy—the second is due to release the first week in November. One’s about a woman who drives a truck (semi-tractor/trailer coast to coast) and another about a woman who checks herself in to an inpatient mental institution to escape a brutal husband. I’ve written short stories about both. But as I age, this woman tugs harder and harder on my thoughts.

So here’s how I’m meeting this week’s GirlieOnTheEdge blog challenge prompt. The word is scale.

She stepped on the scale and groaned—she’d just checked the zero balance and knew it was accurate.

When did her body go to hell?

She’d never needed to diet and she got plenty of exercise in her job—the camping, swimming, and canoeing didn’t hurt either. But then sometime in her late fifties and early sixties, her metabolism changed and it seemed like she could look at a dish of ice cream and gain a pound. Not spectacular, but annoyingly inexorable, the weight gain joined a host of aging signs, all of them familiar—graying hair, thin skin (there really is such a thing), stiff joints—she felt vaguely depressed.

But the symptom that really fried her bacon was the way people called her honey or patiently explained stuff she already knew rather than answering her question—and ignored any idea she presented as if she weren’t even in the room.

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Mom’s Cardinal Rule(s)

This six-sentence blog challenge prompt from GirlieOnTheEdge is the word cardinal. I’ve been thinking about my mother this week, I guess, so here’s another bit of Ella Mae-ism.

Cardinal: the color of a tufted red bird that sings “pret- ty,  pret-ty, pret-ty” to his mate; the color of garments in the Catholic hierarchy; the color of the handmaid, Offred’s cloak; and a rule of primary importance.

My mother’s cardinal rule for her female children (that’s all she had) was, “You can do anything you want if you work hard enough for it.”

That translated into things like, “Can’t never done nothing, he died a long time ago,” and “Ignore it (your little aches and pains) and it’ll go away,” and my favorite, “Stand up, speak up, and pick up your feet.”

So, like the queen whose husband was off fighting a war when his enemy surrounded the castle, I stood up straight and tall and pretended I feared nothing, I spoke up for myself (the employee’s union didn’t hurt) so that I could advance with my male colleagues, I ignored a lot of “stuff,” and NEVER, EVER accepted can’t.

Now I’m revising my sixth book, even though I didn’t get started with this kind of writing until I’d retired.

And as for picking up my feet, I still work out barefoot (do almost everything barefoot) because the toe I drag always trips me when I wear shoes—sorry Mom.

Here’s Mom looking almost as shell-shocked as I suspect she was, but that’s another story.
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Categories: Families Fiction

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Two Protagonists, Yikes!

For my listeners: Due to technical difficulties, my recordings sound like it was made from inside a barrel. I apologize, but I’m simply out of time.

My current work in progress centers around two main characters. I’ve read that that’s against the rules, and I understand why–more so every day. The point of these two characters is to explore how much a stable family (secondary characters) can contribute to healing deep psychic wounds and whether a pair of committed, self-aware individuals can heal themselves and one another. How can that happen?

This novel is the third in a trilogy. I didn’t intend for it to get this massive, but there you are. In the first novel, I introduced Bobbi Bowen, stymied by economic depression from her desire to attend art school, and then I inflicted her with repeated sexual assaults, betrayal, and near starvation. In the second, I introduced Connor Conroy, a Nebraska farm boy, thwarted in his desire to attend college, who spent years traveling the West as a hobo and then got sucked into World War II as a combat infantryman. The third, my work in progress, puts them together, complete with their psychic traumas, to see if there’s a way for them to heal and thrive with only the rudimentary mental health care available in Nebraska at that time.

I’ve just begun my second draft and find that the point of view jumps from one headspace to another with breathtaking frequency. I knew at the outset that point of view would be tough in this novel, but I’m only beginning to realize the depth of the challenge. I’ve thought of using an omniscient narrator, but I prefer more immediacy.

HOWEVER, I’ve just finished editing a scene in which the POV leapt from one head to another five or six times, including a couple of jumps to a secondary character’s thoughts. It appears that this draft will be almost nothing but point of view rewriting, and that leaves out structure, actual character development, layering backstory, pacing, language, rhythm, and cutting the crap I don’t need. I even have a few scenes in which I will need diversity editing.

 This may take some time. I don’t suppose I’ll be selling boxed sets any time soon.

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Zoning out

The word for the six-sentence blog challenge this week is Zone. I thought of dead zone, but that was too depressing, I thought of residential zoning, I thought of hardiness zones in gardening. And then there is IN the zone or zoning OUT. So here’s my GirlieOnTheEdge blog challenge.

I make my living behind a tough sheet of Plexiglass™—driving a Kenworth coast to coast.

Late at night under a waxing three-quarter moon, with a full tank, 1,000 miles of I-80 ahead before the next fill, and hardly any other traffic, I was alone at the wheel, in the zone, when I spotted the elephant in the middle of the road.

I locked up the brakes, watching the elephant get bigger in my windshield, smoke billowing from my drive tires in the side mirror, and my trailer staying mostly behind me where it belonged, not swinging around in a jackknife.

When I finally came to a stop, the elephant had vanished, so I drove to the shoulder, set the brakes, pulled on the flasher, and climbed out on the step, my hand cold on the hand grab, to track the elephant into the trees, because even Pennsylvania potholes aren’t deep enough to hide an elephant.

Three more times, I saw the elephant, her trunk waving like a benediction over the hood, somehow opening a window to a forgotten childhood trauma.

When the beast appeared during a blizzard in Nebraska, I packed it in because, if you can’t trust what you see with your very own two eyes, it’s time to get off the road and get your head straight.

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I Double Dog Dare You

This week for the Carrot Ranch Literary Community flash fiction challenge, we were to write something about the safe cracker’s daughter. I thought for a while about the stereotypical safe cracker, then I wondered what would happen with a little gender bending and maybe a dare instead of a crime. So here’s my contribution.

I was thirteen when Mom went to prison for cracking a safe. I’m actually pretty proud of her because she never took anything. It was just a dare.

She’d been raggin’ on my dad for not giving her jewelry—like her friends got.

“I ain’t got that kind of dough,” Pop said, “so when you rob a bank, I’ll get your diamonds.”

We knew she had the skills and what she didn’t know, she’d learn. But it was just idle conversation.

“Maybe I will.”

“I double dog dare you,” Dad said. “You ain’t got the nerve.”

But she did.

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Countdown

This is my Six-Sentence Thursday contribution to the GirlieOnTheEdge blog. Sometimes I use these tiny flash-fiction prompts to see how far I can condense a piece of writing without losing the meaning of the story.

This one is truly worthy of a howl. Fortunately, Harold did not blow the house down, although he displaced a small portion of the foundation.

We were starting high school and I was thrashing through cobwebs in my nerdy friend Harold’s basement so I could watch his latest experiment. He had me hunker down behind a bunch of dusty old boxes while he struck a match and lit a fuse hanging out of the foundation.

“What are you doing?” I howled.

“Ten,” he said.

“Come on, Harold, you’ve set your little experiment under the sill plate of your own house.”

He finished his countdown, smoke poured out of the little hole in the foundation, I ducked behind the boxes just before I heard an explosion and a spattering of stuff, and Harold jumped up and yelled, “It worked! It worked!”

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Atmospheric Pressure

As I write prairie, weather sometimes becomes a character with as much effect on human outcomes as my imagined people. The GirlieOnTheEdge six-sentence blog challenge word this week is atmosphere.

When he’s done yelling and screaming, he trundles off to bed and I stalk the house.

I feel the atmospheric pressure change; the screaming wind stills suddenly and I know what that means.

In the dark, I step outside to watch seething clouds above the house, where they swarm and churn.

I wish myself part of them, lifted out over the prairie, a swirling of atoms.

A spiral sorts itself out—a little, black tongue drops and recedes, moving to the northeast, dropping again, and I know someone not far away will lose something tonight.

In this house, for the first time, I’m allowing myself to recognize that it’s already lost.

What I didn’t realize when I shot this photo is that over the hill a little way, a tornado was upsetting a pivot irrigation system.
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Perpetual Motion

I guess last summer’s wildfires, this spring’s floods, miscellaneous hurricanes and tornadoes, and finally mass shootings, not to mention the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, finally got to me. This one’s a dark response to a Six-Second Challenge posted by Denise on her GirlieOnTheEdge blog. The prompt this time is Fare. Maybe you’ll want to try something cheerier.

I’ve got my fare and just a trifle to spare,“ but this is no Chattanooga Choo Choo? I’ve paid through the end of the line, across the continent to the end of a world crunched off into the Pacific. I can barely see through the filthy train window but it doesn’t matter; there’s nothing to see. I didn’t even see them bury my family, didn’t know they were gone until two weeks after the funeral—all done while machines breathed for me. Too slow, I tried to cover them with my body. Now I have no home; no place to stop; nobody left; just endless motion.

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