August Newsletter

By Jessica Page Morrell

Noticing

There have been many troubling stories in the news lately. I've been particularly distressed by the rash of abductions and murders of young girls. But last week my attention was caught by the story of the nine miners in Pennsylvania imprisoned deep below ground, awaiting rescue. After days of waiting, listening for the sounds of rescue, after an auger broke and there were 16 hours of terrible silence when they thought the rescuers had stopped trying, they were freed.

But the detail of their story that strikes at my heart is how they decided to lash themselves together, not only for warmth, but so that they would be saved or die as one. And how those ropes kept their hopes alive.

The world arrests us with its horrors, hope and beauty, time after time. We're surrounded by daily wonders, struggles and drama, all witnessed, all part of the shimmering reality that makes us a writer. Influences come from a walk on the beach, memories of a long-ago childhood, a glimpse of a stranger in a cafe which sets us wondering.

Writers are collectors, gathering bits of color and voices from all around. In order to gather the images that we need to translate into words, we need to notice, to always notice. Noting the wind, the clouds scuttling in on new weather, the seasonal changes.

We need to hear the nuance in each speaker's voice, the longing or unspoken behind the words. We need to study children, hear their bold assertions, witness their delight in minutia-the things we often overlook. We need to listen for the secret laughter.

As the world offers up its wonders, we also need a method of collecting all this data. Because of course, these tiny miracles and events are fleeting. At a park the other day I saw two small, white dogs launch themselves again and again into a spinning sprinkler. Each leap was accompanied by hysterical barking and a near backflip. Nearby, a table of seniors ate a picnic lunch, their voices a quiet murmur, ignoring the dogs. All around a lush, green haze and a peace seemed to settle on the park, the day, and my senses.

I'll probably never write a story where these dogs appear. But their exuberance struck me that day. And I'm also struck by the contrast of the brash little dogs and the seniors, content as cows in a summer meadow. And the quiet that slipped into me as I walked. Luckily, every day the world offers up its charms. What a treasure box we live in, particularly this time of year when it seems like everything is bursting with an exotic ripeness. I'm going to a farmer's market today and I'll file away the memory of the brilliant hues of berries and golden loaves of bread, the jewel colors of flowers, the smells of tamales and dill and basil, and the tumble of tomatoes piled high in a basket. Colors. Shapes. Smells. Smiles from farmers. A callused palm handing me change. And noticing will feed my senses and of course, my writing in days to come.

When I was a kid my mother and grandmother never had an adequate explanation for the "dog days" of August. After a certain date, we weren't allowed to swim in the creek or river any more. The waters indeed looked murky with algae and tall grass sprouted above the waterline. So August was a slow month-of outlasting the heat, cheating it by reading a book under a tree, sipping Kool Aid on the porch, the drum beat of the new school year thrumming in the distance. Summers back then were blistering hot, humidity choking you, chasing you through the day. And while August was survived, it was also savored with corn on the cob and tomatoes from the garden. There was a visit to the county fair, and a trip downtown for new shoes, underwear and mustard-colored pencils. August was the beginning and end but no matter how slow each day, it always went by too fast.

"If there is no wind, row." Latin proverb

Book Notes
Enemy Women, by Paulette Jiles

Enemy Women is a novel about a seldom-told chapter of American history, Missouri's divided loyalties during the Civil War. It is a deft and stunning novel and introduces a memorable heroine, eighteen-year-old Adair Colley. We meet her when Adair is tossed into a nightmare as the Union Army arrives to arrest her father and set fire to her home. In the following days she's separated from her family and falsely arrested as a collaborator. Adair is assigned to the perilous confines of a women's prison in St. Louis. While in prison Adair meets a Union major who helps her plot her escape. Her journey home is one of the most harrowing in all of literature as she slips southward through the plundered and devastated state, the ravages of war everywhere.

While Adair's hazardous journey will keep you riveted in the story, it is likely that Jile's style and voice infused with poetry will drift into your veins. After days of traveling alone on foot, her luck finally changes when she finds two of the family's stolen horses, Whiskey and Dolly. "There was a vanishing quality now to the light and the portions of the day. The day vanished into evening, one valley into a forested highland, the evening vanished into the dusk and from there seamlessly into the night and the stars also were imperceptibly quenched as the daylight grew. The bloodroot flowers opened themselves and the old leaves drifted down from the oaks, pushed off by the new ones. In St. Louis there had been such violent sharp edges to time and light and occurrences."

Jiles is the sort of writer who includes the details that most intrigue her readers. She continues: In the days that followed she grazed her horses as often as she could, for here and there the great forests seemed to open of their own accord to form a prairie of grasses an acre or two acres in size, and in these prairies the bobwhites and yellowhammers flushed up from the grass at their feet. She let them go all night and in the mornings would find them coming toward her where she slept, with that alert and nervous air unridden horses always have at dawn. They are remembering some far time when predators came for them at first light."

This is a novel written with all the elements in the fiction writer's arsenal, a story that wanders but never strays, filled with reversals, complications, heartbreak, and danger. The author also introduces each chapter with real-life newspaper accounts, letters, diary entries and official reports reminding us that the ruins of war and the daily dangers were all too real.

Inspiration:

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with a first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." Richard North Patterson

"Details are what make you get under peoples' skin." Bruce Springsteen

"When you depict sad or unlucky people, and want to touch to reader's heart, try to be colder-it gives their grief, as it were, a background, against which it stands out in the greater relief. As it is, your heroes weep and you sigh. Yes, you must be cold." Anton Chekov

"Begin with something interesting rather than beginning with something boring; begin with action rather than beginning with background information; speak about the characters after they have appeared rather than having them appear after having spoken about them." Alexandre Dumas