MAPS: Poetry, Historical Fiction, and My Mind

It feels like I've always loved maps: looking at them, figuring out how places are connected, planning trips, and with historical fiction, discovering more about how things used to be. One of my pleasures has been trying to re-draw maps of the two neighborhoods I lived in as a kid, seeing how many family names I could still place on the houses.

So I was very surprised to learn, some years ago, that maps are not intuitive -- someone has to sit with you and show you how they represent places and distances and relationships. Ever since then, I've tried to include them in school presentations, and once helped a kindergarten/first grade create a map of their town and the bus routes, on an old white sheet.

This map of my home town of Waterford is such a big reference item for me that I have it on the refrigerator, not on the front (where grandkid items and medical appointments may cluster) but on one side, all to itself. Even the smallest notes and family connections on it remind me of things I should make clear in my 1850s historical fiction. I depended on "old" maps of Peacham and Danville for THE BITTER AND THE SWEET. I needed to know the turns that Almyra would make with the horses, and what she'd see along the way.

In the past few months I've tried writing poems in clusters around themes, and MAPS became one of them. So I was tickled when Hole in the Head Review published this one. If the type here feels too small, look on their page at this link.

What kinds of things might you "map" about your life -- as a kid, or now? 

"Day Job" + Poem = A Winner ... in Lit Shark Magazine's "The Best of 2024 Anthology"

Where do poems come from? Each one comes differently for me. My "day job" is copyediting articles and books written by other people, often in the sciences, and one day I noticed some writing about resilience in nature -- how it happens, how to plan for it as you work with your yard or woodlot or forest. 

It sounded good, but I was having a tough time that day on the personal side, really missing my late husband Dave and the way two people do things so much differently from one alone. So I felt a bit skeptical about "resilience." And maybe a little guilty, too, because I don't want to feel sorry for myself. Dave and I had a great "run" of 17 years and there are plenty of great memories. Plus I grew into a different kind of person through that marriage and his constant curiosity and encouragement.

So the poem became both a talking-back to the article, and another bit of the grief process. Lit Shark Magazine's editor chose it to be one of the Poem of the Month group last summer, and she also pulled it into this year-end anthology.

 

Then the editor had the notion of asking for an "old" poem from each of her poets, to add to the anthology -- actually she asked for three so she could pick one -- and that's how Never-Ending List also slid into the pages!

 There are such varied and tasty poems in this anthology. To pick up your own copy, here's a link to the paperback version (you'll see a hardcover is available too, for an extra $5). Let me know if you opt to buy one ... I'll be thrilled.

Book Launch, January 25, 2025: WE'VE GOT SOME THINGS TO SAY, Anthology

I have three poems in this significant anthology, and a group of the authors -- including me -- will be reading pieces in on online format when the book officially launches on January 25. If you'd like to either attend or receive a recording of the author event, please use this form to register.

Why the registration? Well, it's a tough topic -- sexual violence -- and for many of us, it's going to be a bit scary to read aloud what we've put onto paper. So this helps the experience to be a bit reassuring.

I hope you may want to listen. I appreciate that! And if instead you're feeling as shy about the topic as I often do, maybe you'd rather just order a copy to browse in a peaceful moment. Here's the link for both the softcover and the ebook. Thanks for thinking this over.

Poems Published in 2024: Three in a Significant New Anthology

 These are not comfortable poems, but I hope they are strong ones. And I feel enormously honored that they were chosen for the new anthology WE'VE GOT SOME THINGS TO SAY, edited by Mary Simmerling, PhD. Her work in gathering together creative writing that un-hides sexual danger and violence is a gift to all those who've been silenced by others -- and by themselves.

I'm posting images of my own poems here, so you can take a quick look, but I hope you may decide to purchase your own copy of the full anthology, available as softcover or ebook here.

There will also be a reading in January from many of the authors; I'll post about it when it gets closer.

Poems Published in 2024: "Sand Dollars in a Small Wooden Box"

The summer issue of After Happy Hour (what thoughts that journal name evokes!) included my poem on page 71 -- here's the link. There's also an audio segment.

This poem took root when a local friend gave me a set of sand dollars (yes, box included) and explained something of the living creatures to me. It all felt new, even though I'd held a few of the dry disks in the past. And that, of course, led into the poem.

You'll get the flavor best if you click on the link, but in case it doesn't work for you, here's a screen shot:

 

Poems Published in 2024: "Body in a Box"

What joy it was to enter the pages of Cathexis Northwest Press with this poem, reflecting on how Dave seems often very present, even though his "remains" are buried at the beautiful Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. See the poem and the rest of the issue here. (The poem is on page 43.)

The Winds of Freedom, Book 3: It's the Money, Honey

 

Merchant "scrip" from North Troy, Vermont.

Realizing that the teenaged girl leading the action in THE BITTER AND THE SWEET (Winds of Freedom book 3) would not be either Alice or Caroline -- the teens we follow in the preceding book, This Ardent Flame -- happened well before I started writing book 3. With a two-year jump for each novel in the series, the next protagonist would have to be Almyra Alexander.

Almyra intrigues me for several reasons: She's from Boston, a transplant to the Vermont village of North Upton (aka North Danville), so she's seen more of the sophisticated scenes than either Alice or Caroline. As a result, she brings with her some fashionable clothing and, more importantly, an assertiveness that goes with her outward confidence. That makes her a contrast to the other teens.

But her confidence is a  bit rocky, because she's almost an orphan: Her mother died young, and her father, a political operative, is way too busy to parent his lonely daughter. So when her North Upton aunt and uncle bond with her, and give her the opportunity to stay in the village instead of returning to the city, she's relieved to experience the first real sense of family support she's had in a while.

That's the underlying emotional pin for the book. Add to that her curiosity and unquestioning embrace of the social issues of the day, namely, the abolition of slavery, rights for women, and ending alcohol abuse, and I had the resonant situation that I wanted to write from.

But of course a historical novel is almost always threaded around an urgent plot of some sort, whether it's an adventure, a crisis, or a mystery. Choosing the one for THE BITTER AND THE SWEET came with the discovery of Professor Stephen Mihm's book A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. Not only is this book full of tales of criminal and law enforcement action in our nation's early years, but -- to my astonishment -- one of the major locations for counterfeiters in the early 1800s was our own borderlands of the Northeast Kingdom and Canada's Eastern Townships.

Professor Mihm even replied to some emailed questions, and soon I was on my way, deep into the new manuscript.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR: We'll have a party for THE BITTER AND THE SWEET at Kim Crady-Smith's Lyndonville, Vt, shop, Green Mountain Books, on Saturday Nov. 23 at 11 am. Later the same day, at 2 pm, I'll talk about the book at the North Danville Brainerd Memorial Library, and explain Danville's own connection to the counterfeiting landscape!

Making a Scottish/British Crime Series Powerfully New Again: MIDNIGHT AND BLUE, Ian Rankin

A quick count suggests that MIDNIGHT AND BLUE is the 24th novel in the deeply admired Inspector Rebus series from Ian Rankin. Along with similar protagonists, like Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, John Rebus has reached retirement age. How can a man whose life is framed by his investigative work manage the transition?

Shockingly, it seems Rebus will have to manage it in a dangerous prison, HMP Edinburgh, surrounded by criminals who have good reason to hate and threaten him. "Rebus felt hemmed in, not only by walls but bu the same daily faces too. He had visited the prison many times during his detective years — he recalled being shown the Hanging Shed, now demolished -- but this was different. The various smells were never going to be showered away.  ... Prison, nick, jail, chokey, inside -- many names but only one game: incarceration." 

There's only sparse explanation of how he's landed here with a life sentence, a result of bodily threatening a criminal who minutes later died of a heart attack. Clearly, Rebus's many slippery judgement calls and careless antagonisms of the past must have caught up with him as the courts ground him in their teeth. Protected briefly in solitary confinement, then pressed into the population of his old enemies and, of course, the antagonisms among them, it seems he's only surviving because the death that cost his freedom proved highly advantageous to gang leader Darryl Christie, who's offered to protect him (more or less). 

Of course, Christie is powerful, menacing, and in Rebus's estimation, quite mad. So that protection immediately equals additional danger. Too bad there isn't time to sort it out any further before Rebus's miseries are compounded by a death inside the prison, and fresh expectations from both the investigators and the prison's governor that Rebus will help solve this murder. To do so would quickly mean his death at the hands of the other prisoners, though. Or would it?

It's no spoiler to admit that all the action of this very high-action crime novel takes place in one dangerous week of Rebus's incarceration. Walking with him through the seeming impossibility of crime-solving while balancing threats around him is fascinating and suspenseful, and Rankin provides plenty of aggressive and startling twists along the way.

British cover.

MIDNIGHT AND BLUE will also satisfy readers who want a chance at the better side of human nature despite darkness and violence. Rankin's final acknowledgment shows he knows exactly what he's painstakingly built into this book: "I am grateful to staff and inmates (present and past) who spoke to me and allowed me to tour the facilities. I have taken a few necessary liberties, but I hope I have also managed to show that prisons are places where compassion and hope can be manifested on all sides."

In other words -- you might think you know the author, and the series, but this is a must-read to add to the experience. On my bookshelves, it's hanging around for a second delicious reading over the winter. 

Oh yes, the publisher is Mulholland (aka Little, Brown); I like the British (Scottish) cover design better than the American.

Three Teenaged Girls in 1850s Northern Vermont: My Protagonists for The Winds of Freedom

When I wrote THE LONG SHADOW, the story of Alice Sanborn's discovery of injustice and loss in her home village of North Upton, Vermont, I reached for integrity: not just for Alice and her family as they continue their commitment to the abolition of American enslavement, but also for how we see that time, that piece of our past. I wanted to give readers an experience of aromas and tastes as much as possible, along with the binding constraints of the layers of women's garments at the time, and the ways family could be both supportive and harsh. When Alice's uncle rages about the politics of the time, I want you to feel with Alice the scary and exhilarating moment of seeing someone take a stand for a difficult position.

In fact, I was so immersed in this 295-page novel that when I completed it. I was startled to hear the editor at Gale/Five Star, the publishing house, say "I hope we'll be seeing more of Alice!" "How much more are you thinking?" I asked. She responded, "Until everyone is free." That is, from 1850 to 1865.

Well, why not? Alice's interactions with her younger Black friend Sarah and the innkeepers' daughter Jerushah came to a natural end at the end of that novel. But as we all know, when one friendship ends or changes, another often comes along.

 

For THIS ARDENT FLAME, I chose a very different sort of new friend for Alice: Caroline Clark. Because of her inability to hear, Caroline's spent her school years in a boarding school for the deaf and hearing impaired, in another state. Returning to North Upton for Caroline could be far more traumatic if it weren't for Alice. As the two teens learn to communicate in a layered set of "languages," they learn more about the diverse people around them, and develop their own fierce commitment to abolition, as well as to the linked issue of women's roles and rights.

Readers may have been startled by the decision of these characters at the end of the book: They are headed West, to a place where their presence may be critically important to how America develops the laws and freedoms of its added territories, soon to be states. How could the Winds of Freedom series continue? Was it moving West?

Not at all. When the editor invited me to develop a series for this "young adult crossover" genre -- that is, one that features young adults (teens) as protagonists, but is read enthusiastically and with curiosity by adults, including parents and grandparents -- I saw right away that pushing the sequence by a year at a time, all the way to 1865, would mean a much longer and slower sequence than I wanted to write ... and, more urgently, it would mean that after the first few titles, the main characters would no longer be teens. Not only would that break the genre, it would take me into a kind of novel that didn't interest me. I really like writing "YA crossover."

So I came up with a plan: Each book would jump forward two years, not one; and the protagonists would shift with the timing, like a relay race, passing the action to another girl growing into the responsibility of working for a more moral nation and for the freedoms of those around her.

 

That's why book 3 in the Winds of Freedom series, THE BITTER AND THE SWEET, features would-be minister in training Almyra Alexander, whose Boston mother has passed away and whose politically active father is far too busy to raise a teenager (other than perhaps planning a marriage for her!). Readers met Almyra in book 2, when she was a pesky newcomer, dressed in city fashions and ignorant of rural ways, but already interested in the role she embraces in book 3: to become qualified to lead her own church. What about the push for abolition, a necessity for a moral person of her time -- will that get in the way of becoming a minister? And who ever heard of a woman leading a church??

I'm eager to learn what you think of Almyra's choices and adventures (including with a notorious counterfeiter) in THE BITTER AND THE SWEET. Please do let me know.

And when you've finished the book, tell me who you think the next young woman (teen!) is that I've chosen for the focus book 4. Think carefully, and remember the two-year jump involved. Can you guess the right one? I want to hear your thoughts, of course!

Apples and Autobiography

Cortland apples.

This is a classic "writer's autumn" for me: bringing out a novel in print at last, while also working on a book version of the Vermont memoir I began after Dave's death. (Segments piled up on Medium; if you're curious, read them here.)

In writing the memoir as segments that I placed online, I excavated a heck of a lot of trauma. That turned out to be healthy for me -- but only, I think, because I grew through it, and now I'm in a stage of life that I loosely label "getting off the trauma merry-go-round." Life is good, and I want to pull the pieces together and show how that happened.

So the working title for the book is LOOKING FOR THE LIGHT, and today in chapter 2, I'm writing about apples and related recipes and reasons.  Here's a scrap:

Today I still rely on a shelf of traditional cookbooks, but it’s leavened (that’s a baking powder term!) with vegetarian ones, a paleo gem, international and ethnic compendiums, and, most important for this region, the Bentley Farm Cookbook.

This astonishing volume, eight and a half by twelve inches across the front and more than an inch thick, contains the hand-lettered recipes of one of the region’s beloved home cooks, Virginia Bentley. When I complimented a slice of pie at a community dinner last year and (as we do here) asked for the recipe, the baker said, “Oh, it’s Virginia’s, from the book. You have the book, of course.” She wasn’t asking me whether I had it—she knew I must.

Here's the cookbook, with a bit of the apple portion of the index, and a recipe to show you how different Virginia Bentley could be in how she talked about cooking.

 

The Winds of Freedom: How Vermont's Northeast Kingdom Approached Abolition

In this presidential election season, I think it's been clear that the effects of the American Civil War continue to affect beliefs around the country. President Lincoln's long approach to the abolition of human enslavement in America gave us a fundamental piece of today's view of human citizenship in our nation. At the same time, the long delay in getting there, with some 250 or more years of enslavement behind that, contributes to an awareness that we are not always as "good" or principled as we ought to be. And now we have a nation divided on what goodness and principle mean.

In the 1990s, when I began writing my historic novels, I came face to face with prevailing myths in Vermont history that dismayed me. Many of them revolved around the Underground Railroad, one of the heroic efforts in America in the early to mid 1800s. What we know today, historically, is that the Underground Railroad in Vermont might as well have been called the Aboveground Railroad -- because in the theme noted now at Rokeby in North Ferrisburgh, Vermont, if you were Black and reached Vermont in the 1850s (or had lived here for many years already, like the Mero family of Coventry), you were "Free and Safe." No need for hiding places.

But many people couldn't process that idea when I talked about it. So, based on my personal connection with historic fiction, I opted to write about the 1850s here through the voices and experiences of local people, hoping that readers could internalize that experience and reshape their own vision of what happened.

That led to THE LONG SHADOW, book 1 in the Winds of Freedom series, set in North Upton (aka North Danville) in 1850, from the points of view of teenagers enmeshed in adventures there. At the moment, the printed version is out of stock, but you can get the ebook here. Also ask Kim at Green Mountain Books to watch for a gently used copy for you!

More about that story later this week ... and then about books 2 and 3.

If you'd like to hear how the abolitionists of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and the surrounding towns saw their world in the 1850s and how they entered the movement toward abolition, here's my talk recorded at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum. I hope you find some fascinating discoveries when you listen/watch it.