Category Archives: First Draft Blog

Concrete Images: Emotional Impact

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wasp

(photo: Serena Epstein, Creative Commons)

Author John Thornton Williams, writing a recent Glimmer Train essay about his strategy for connecting readers with characters, touches on “one of the most important accomplishments of fiction” and one of the trickiest. Certainly writers receive plenty of advice not to come right out and say, “Mary was angry that Bethany was flirting with Ben” or “Dan felt sad when his dog died.” First of all, those feelings are pure obvious, given the situation, and second, naming a feeling doesn’t make the reader feel it.

An alternative, which Williams terms “a lengthy expository digression into the psyche of a character, perhaps accompanied by physical cues,” like “his stomach was in a knot, his throat was on fire,” he says, “generally proves detrimental to how I experience the story at hand.” It distracts him from the narrative, rather than immersing him in it. Or, as Donald Maass says, in Writing 21st Century Fiction, “when you supply everything readers are supposed to feel, they may wind up feeling little at all.”

Williams makes a third choice, especially for a story’s crisis moments, when emotions run highest and, often, at cross-purposes. He calls this approach “indirection of image.” To accomplish this, he takes into account how his characters would see a situation, based on their emotional state. “Something as simple as a car parked on the street surely looks different to a lottery winner than to someone who just got evicted,” he says.

His example recalls a favorite exercise from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: “Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, war, death, or the old man doing the seeing; then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover. Do not mention love or the loved one.” This exercise is many times harder than it might appear, and it’s perfect practice for the “indirection of image” approach Williams recommends.

Indirection of image, he says, “is a way to take abstract emotions and project them onto something concrete.” This actually expresses our lived experience. How many times has a car or a piece of furniture or a particular shirt become more significant in our minds because of its symbolic association with a whole range of emotions, beyond what we can tease out and easily express? Our childhood home. The ghastly color of its bathroom tile. The relentless ticking of the mantelpiece clock. A dead wasp.

By giving readers space to project their own emotions into the situation, by leaving a little ambiguity, readers can experience the emotion on a level that connects with their own experience, Williams says. They can, in other words, get inside the character. Here’s a link to one of his stories.

Joyce Carol Oates: “Not in a Car!”

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Tracy, Hepburn, Adam's Rib

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib (photo: wikimedia.org)

The most specific piece of writing advice I gleaned at the Princeton University event celebrating Joyce Carol Oates’s teaching career last week was this: Never let your characters have a conversation while riding in a car. Her former students laughed in a way that suggested they’d heard this one—and other cliché-avoidance tips—before, more than once.

The event included two panels involving 10 of Oates’s former students—all successfully published writers today—who offered wide-ranging reminiscences about their experiences with their teacher and mentor. In last week’s First Draft blog post, I collected their thoughts on what she taught them about “being a writer.” They also let the audience glimpse a bit of what they learned from her about the craft of writing.

Julie Sarkissian, author of the novel Dear Lucy, long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize, recounted how she grounded some of her early writing in her own experiences and how Oates wanted her to separate this work from the lived reality, to make the fiction whole and entire in itself. Apparently the teacher wasn’t swayed at all by Sarkissian’s argument that what she’d written was “true.” Sarkissian learned right then that “the fact that something is true is a pretty pathetic defense when it comes to fiction.”

Is it going too far, then, to say fiction is about lying? Deftly? Another of Oates’s students present was Pinckney Benedict, author of the collection Miracle Boy and Other Stories (my review), and apparently Oates once said something like, “Pinckney seems like the kind of person who would lie to an interviewer.” A startled Benedict found this a revelation: “You can LIE to an interviewer?!” and swore he’s included two or three whoppers in every interview since.

Now I wonder what lies lurk in his excellent Glimmer Train interview from Winter 2013, which has him saying, “I am not trying in my own work to demonstrate that my heart is in the right place because, quite frankly, it is not.” [Is that one?] Trying to establish a common ground with readers—“we’re all well-meaning people together”—he says, “is the antithesis of a powerful or worthwhile literature.” That statement underscores the “don’t pull your punches” approach to writing Oates encouraged in her students.

Former Oates student Jonathan Safran Foer recounted how he’d once turned in a set of pages on which Oates wrote: “Confusing, but uninteresting,” with the latter charge the more piercing. Even unpleasant and essentially boring characters have to be made interesting, she said, in the context of fiction. They become interesting through their uniqueness. (Paradoxically, “The more unlike anyone else you make a character, the more universal that character becomes,” says Donald Maass’s in Writing 21st Century Fiction.) Benedict, originally from rural West Virginia, sets his stories in an Appalachian region so vividly portrayed the reader can reach out and touch the surrounding mountains and smell the barns and fresh-turned earth. In commenting on his skill in this, Oates echoed Maass’s counterintuitive statement, “The regional, if it’s intensely felt, is the universal.”

A conversational thread I especially related to was Oates’s dictum that “Writing is about solving problems.” How do you get this character from here to there (believably)? If you need a character out of the picture a while, where does she go? Why? How to get from here to there is what Oates taught her students. Despite having written more than a hundred books, when she has to identify her profession, “If I have to put it down on some form,” she said, “I write ‘teacher.’”

Joyce Carol Oates: Being a Writer

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Joyce Carol Oates, On BoxingJoyce Carol Oates isn’t a person bitten by the writing bug early in life. She wanted to be a teacher. And, it’s as a teacher that Princeton University celebrated her last Friday, with 10 of her former students—all multiply published writers today—returning to talk about their experiences in her classes and workshops and with her personally. She began teaching at Princeton in 1978 and, in 2015, will retire from full-time teaching but continue to teach a course each fall in the Creative Writing program.

While the former students lauded her accessibility and careful attention to their work, Oates also has found time to create more than 100 books, including fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and a memoir. In this list is her “unlikely bestseller,” On Boxing. One of her former students, Jonathan Ames, commented that in his day, the only photograph in Oates’s office was one of her with Mike Tyson. This got a laugh from the 100 or so people in the audience observing Oates’s birdlike frame.

Boxing might seem an activity far removed the daily life of a literary academic, but all writers are boxers, one might say, whose opponents are the words they are trying to batter into place in meaningful sentences that express ideas, display characters, and tell unforgettable stories. While this or that writer is applauded as “brave” for spilling raw emotions messily onto the page, Oates’s former students called her truly “courageous” —and here the boxing metaphor emerged explicitly— for never “pulling her punches.” And she taught them not to, either.

Numerous comments about her guidance related to how she prepares her students to be writers, including, as Jonathan Safran Foer said, maintaining the energy to produce a completed work. Many students—equally talented and ambitious as the published writers present—at some point just stop writing, he said. Oates makes her students excited about the process, in the hope that they won’t stop, because from draft to draft, although incremental improvements may—probably are—achieved, they become smaller and smaller. As Whitney Terrell said, “Half the game is just hanging in.” And the work is hard. Moderator Edmund White called his conversations with Oates “one Sisyphus talking to another.”

Another gift she gave students, they said, was permission to identify themselves as “writers.” Being a writer is not necessarily an identity people are comfortable claiming for themselves. In France, White said, no one ever says “I am a poet.” “I write poems” might be OK, but external validation is needed for writers to assert their status in the creative world. Christopher Beha said that Oates made him feel like a character himself —a persona—apart from his ordinary sense of self.

The students further praised her for finding something in every piece of student writing that she loved. She would point out the particular strengths of a piece of writing, then focus the seminar participants—much as editors of a magazine might, which was a frequent class discussion device—on how to make it better. “You let me hand in all those dirty stories,” Ames said, “and you never just x’d that stuff out.” To which Oates replied, “There wouldn’t have been much left. Your name, maybe.”

Over her years of teaching, she’s observed changes in her students. Most prominently, at Princeton today, the student body is so diverse, coming from many different countries and backgrounds. Students have traveled more, visiting countries that decades ago most wouldn’t even have heard of and encountering different cultures that inevitably affect their work. They also read different books, and Oates emphasized the importance of the earliest books one reads—before college, even before high school. Today’s childhoods typically include Harry Potter and more films. Her favorite reads were Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which she first devoured at age eight or ten. Fantastical. Penetrating. Funny. Inciting curiosity. Qualities we were told she brought to her decades of teaching.

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Life Plus 70

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copyright

(artwork: Christopher Dombres, Creative Commons license)

Copyright is a battlefield for creative types—authors, bloggers, musicians, and artists. As both a producer and a user of digitized content, I want the rights to my creative output (such as it is!) protected and strive to respect the rights of others. At the same time, I want to enrich my content with good graphics, audio and video content, and the resources of other works.

A recent Louis Menand article in The New Yorker crosses into this fraught territory, starting with a little history. Legal backing for copyright began with Britain’s 1710 Statute of Anne, and, in the United States with Article I of the Constitution, giving Congress power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” In 1790, the law set that time limit at 14 years, renewable for another 14. By 1998, as a result of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the time limit was extended to the author’s life plus 70 years—which some regard as a lengthy prison sentence for creative works.

Menand points out how different our attitudes about copyright are in the print versus the online worlds. “If , a year from now, someone else, without my permission, reprints my article . . . I can complain that my right to make copies is being violated.” Most people, Menand asserts, would agree with that. But if a Web site (like this one) posts an article referencing Menand’s piece and hyperlinks to it on The New Yorker website (as this one does), that seems normal in today’s world. Even a service. Courts have questioned the propriety of this, and it remains a grey area.

Meanwhile, billions of files are being downloaded—perhaps 40 billion a year—and an estimated 94% of these downloads are illegal and unmonetized, to the tune of $552 billion so far this year, according to Stamford, Conn.-based Tru Optik (“Game of Thrones” has the dubious distinction of being the world’s most illegally downloaded TV series).

Despite the uncertainties, various bibliographic initiatives worldwide are attempting to digitize the content of written works. Most visible in this country is Google’s effort to scan all known existing 129,864,880 books by 2020, an effort that has been plagued by numerous lawsuits. Google settled with publishers in 2012, and authors plan to appeal a negative ruling a year ago that deemed Google’s efforts “fair use,” since only “snippets” of text are provided for works under copyright protection, unless the copyright owner has granted permission for a more expansive view. However, the status of copyright protection is not always clear, as many potential rights-holders are unknown. (Google Books is a boon to genealogists, I can tell you.)

These disagreements arise in part because of a fundamental conflict in people’s understanding of the purpose of copyright. On one hand are those who think that, as Menand put it, “individual rights are intended to promote public goods.” These are the people, like the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who want to see works moved into the public domain for sharing, education, and entertainment. Historian Peter Baldwin characterizes them as “Silicon Valley.” On the other hand are those who believe the right to control one’s works “is not a political right. It’s a moral right.” These are people who want to maintain absolute control—Hollywood and the music industry.

The latter view comports more closely with European than Anglo-American views on the matter. My literary hero Charles Dickens conducted several popular speaking tours in the United States, in 1842 and thereafter, in which he read from his works. They added to his fame here, but his purpose was as much to fight for U.S. copyright protection for his and other foreign works, something that didn’t happen until the early 1890s.

The “moral rights” view is what gives the Broadway producers of Urinetown the ability to sue Akron’s Carousel Dinner Theatre for using “significant aspects” of the original Broadway production—direction, choreography, and design—beyond the script and songs for which the Ohio theater had a license. At the other end of the control spectrum, Menand says Samuel Beckett and his estate were well known for requiring theater companies wanting the rights to produce his plays to comply literally with Beckett’s stage directions. (Perhaps this is why all productions of Waiting for Godot look so bleakly similar—in form as well as content.)

On the Web, the problems and opportunities for misuse of others’ content are multiplied. It’s temptingly easy to obtain words, pictures, film, and music files to repost. The perils of doing so are described here and here. While one might think the sea of website postings offers virtual invisibility for a tiny misuse or sloppy repost, technology works against the user, through imbedded code that might as well put a flashing red light on an unauthorized use and search engines that patrol the web looking for them.

When I started my blog two years ago, I was clumsy in attempts to find good pictures for my posts and used a couple that were found and taken down and replaced with flashing warnings. Embarrassing, to say the least. Now, I check the “labeled for reuse” status in Google Images, have a slight preference for Creative Commons licensed pictures, or use one of my own. I also like the free and low-cost options at Imgembed, and while I can use those purchased photos on my website, I haven’t yet solved the problem of using them in the related social media promotion.

Yesterday, I posted a lighthearted exchange about Eminem and M&Ms, and found a trove of photos linking the two. Most appealing—and found with a second search under “labeled for reuse”—was a graphic portrait of the star created out of the candy. Perfect! I looked at the source website, which is an aggregator of cartoons and images that has lots of rights information for submitters but no information for reusers. I posted the photo, then, working on this article, pulled it down and sent the aggregator a permission request, returned to me as undeliverable. I know somebody “created” that artwork and should have credit. Absolutely not worth it to use it.

In one of my novels, I want to refer to lines from “Burnt Norton,” the wonderful T. S. Eliot poem. I’ve heard his estate is prickly about granting usage rights, even though a “Burnt Norton” Google search generates some 2.87 million results. I’ll work around it. There’s only so much time to write, and none at all to sit in endless conferences with intellectual property lawyers.

Additional Resources:
The Copyright Wars – by Peter Baldwin, 2014.
Stanford University Libraries Copyright and Fair Use Center – helpful advice, including for Web usages

Bad Ideas Don’t Become Good Books

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kindle, book, ereader

(photo: www.wired.com)

Helping writers become published seems like as big a big business as writing itself. And writing, we know, is huge. People will help writers write, help them self-publish, and help with the endless baffling tasks—finding an agent, managing a self-publishing path, and promoting their product. As a book nears completion, a writer’s anxiety grows, and the whole process of sending that precious baby out into the marketing void fills authors with not unreasonable qualms.

That some of these purveyors are unscrupulous goes with the territory. (See links below.) That some of them serve ideas that are cold potatoes, ditto. But every once in a while, amid the cacophony of advice available to writers, comes a message that may not be exactly new but really resonates.

Jane Friedman is a consistently reliable, forward-thinking writing-and-publishing commentator and pulls in mostly helpful guest posters on her blog. Recently she invited Laurie Scheer, “a seasoned development exec and writing mentor,” to talk about a topic most authors (me included!) would rather not examine: What if the fundamental idea for your book is, well, mediocre?

Scheer started off with three questions, then presented what I found the most helpful part of her post: an example.

The Three Questions

question, graffiti

(photo: farm4.static.flickr.com)

Every writer, she says, needs to have persuasive answers to these three questions on the tip of the tongue—for dealing with potential editors, agents, publishers, and the (eventual) marketing team and even the public. Why make this? Why make it now? and Who cares?

The answer to “why make this,” needs to describe what about a novel (or screenplay, for that matter) makes it unique, compelling, and authentic. For people who write in genre fiction—mystery, romance, science fiction, horror, and their permutations—this can be especially hard. A police procedural with a flawed detective? Divorced and drinks too much, perhaps? In truth, most plots have been done and done again—because they work—but something about them needs to be unique, compelling, and authentic. This is a flaw with many memoirs. Nothing new or insightful. That’s a hard message for writers delving into their own personal—and very likely painful—history.

Why make this now? Recognizing trends in the marketplace and when they’ve peaked suggests something about timing. In crime novels, the trend has been for ever-more inventive and grisly threats. This has upping the violence ante to the point of unbelievability, in my opinion. In one I read last year, a victim would awake standing up, with the lower half of his body encased in a block of ice. Nowhere did the text mention the amount of time it would take to freeze that much water, the noise of the generators producing sufficient cooling, how the equipment to do it was transported from one locale to another, in other words, a big “huh?”

And, the third question, who really cares? Who will pay good money to read this book? Herein is the flaw in the new Kindle Scout program—“reader-powered publishing for new, never-before-published books.” Potential readers help decide which books the program publishes and receive the book free if it’s selected. In other words, some of the people most interested in the book don’t have to pay to get it. (Thanks to Build Book Buzz’s marketing maven Sandra Beckwith for pointing this out.)

Here’s the Pitch

biological clock

(photo: fc05.deviantart.net)

Scheer gives this example of the kind of ideas writers often pitch in answer to the above questions:

A story about a 43-year-old unmarried woman who has had a successful career in advertising or law or pharmaceuticals or whatever, and decides at the last minute that her biological clock’s ticking and she wants to have a child.

Scheer says, “I will wait for the writer to tell me the rest of the story. And there is no rest of the story, because in their mind, that is the story.” A story that has been done many, many times. Some new element needs to be interjected to create new and unique conflicts (why now?). That new element might be one that would capture attention of some larger audience (who cares?). Perhaps the baby’s father should be a divorced police detective who drinks too much. Just kidding. Half.

So I’m going back to reexamine my pitch letters and make sure I’m not cutting short my three-sentence description of what my books are about before I get to “why now” and “who cares”!

Writer Resources

  • Preditors and Editors – this widely recommended website rates agents, editors, publishers, and many other businesses for writers. Though encyclopedic, it could use a makeover. Especially helpful would be dates added to its one-line reviews.
  • Writer Beware! – highly recommend website and blog maintained by Victoria Strauss for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, but applicable to all writers. Especially helpful information on contracts, I’ve noticed. (Her take on Kindle Scout is here.)
  • Laurie Scheer’s new book—The Writer’s Advantage: A Toolkit (Amazon says Tookit) for Mastering your Genre. I ordered this book, and will review it here.

Human Trafficking: An Everywhere Story

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10/23 UPDATE: Hidden in Plain Sight, a new study released 10/21 by the Urban Institute and Northeastern University evaluates for the first time the comprehensive state of labor trafficking in the United States. Just one fact from the study shows how little most people understand about this problem. How do these trafficked people come to the United States? Most of us might guess they walk through the desert bordering Arizona and New Mexico. That’s wrong. Some 71 percent of them arrive by airplane. The study’s grim conclusion: “There’s a long way to go when it comes to thinking about how to prevent 21st-century slavery within American borders.”

Original Post:

city street, night, noir

(photo: farm3.staticflickr.com)

Once Governor Rick Snyder signs a series of new bills sent him last week by the Michigan legislature, minors involved in prostitution will be treated as victims instead of criminals, and children will be able to clear their records of crimes their traffickers forced them to commit. Amazingly, such laws are not universal in the United States, according to Rachel Lloyd, who created the New York-based Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS) to help girls and young women experiencing commercial sexual exploitation or domestic trafficking.

The message of a current exhibit at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, uses quotes and photos to tell the story of four people, three from the local area, to show that “human trafficking is a local problem, and there are things people can do in Eastern Iowa to fight it,” says exhibit organizer Mindy Pfab. She wants people to realize that even if they don’t know someone who is being trafficked, they may well know someone who is vulnerable—runaways and other children with unstable home lives, minority and low-income children, those with a history of sexual abuse, and young women involved with gang members—bearing in mind that the average age when a person is trafficked is 12.

A forum last Thursday in Lima, Ohio, focused on human trafficking in its annual Take Back the Night event at the Ohio State University-Lima campus. As the keynote speaker from the state Attorney General’s Office said, we will not “arrest our way out of” this problem. Reasons other simplistic solutions don’t work, including “why don’t they just leave?” arguments, are explored in Rachel Lloyd’s TEDxUChicago talk. Escape isn’t so easy. A little more than 12 years ago, Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom and found nine months later in a Utah town only 18 miles from her Salt Lake City home. As an articulate advocate for abused children, Smart provides compelling testimony (here in a New Yorker article by Margaret Talbot) about why the determination to survive sometimes means staying put.

It Happens Here

night walk

(photo: freeaussiestock.com)

I focused on these current stories from the American heartland to emphasize that no part of our country is immune from this problem. In the United States, several hundred thousand people—many of them children and teens—are sexually exploited and engaged in forced labor. This number includes both boys and girls, pre-teens, teens, and adults, native-born Americans, people smuggled in from other countries, and foreigners here legally. Journalist Faricour Hemani explores the range of countries and types of trafficking in a TEDx SugarLand talk that includes excerpts from situations uncovered in a 6-part BBC series.

Readers who work in the health care industry may be interested in a 10-minute Catholic Health Initiatives educational video introducing the topic of human trafficking (definitely safe for work). My friend Colleen Scanlon opens the video, which recognizes that many trafficked or sexually exploited individuals come into contact with the health care system, making it a potential point of intervention. Because these young people are living on the margins, solutions also must include economic empowerment, not just for current victims, but for preventing future victimization.

It Happens to Individuals

Prompted by Colleen’s video, I collected resources for this post, and they represent a sea of powerful individual stories, each one unique—stories of cruelty and resilience, tragedy and escape. These are real-life stories in numbers we don’t like to think about. Not just somewhere else. Here. And they are stories that need to be told until laws, such as Michigan’s change and society refocuses on prevention. Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, shocked by the reality of human trafficking in his own country, took up the challenge in The Shadow Girls, reviewed here in 2013. There’s no bottom line to this, except for the greater need to be aware and beware. In Michigan, in Cedar Rapids, in Lima, Ohio, where you are.

Resources

Huffington Post’s “10 Things You Didn’t Know about Slavery and Human Trafficking and What You Can Do about It” – pleased to see New Jersey has some of country’s best anti-trafficking laws!

The Polaris Project – named after the North Star that guided slaves to freedom in the U.S.

GEMS – Girls Educational and Mentoring Services

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Ravel-Edged Storytelling

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forest poetry

(photo: as0.geograph.org.uk)

A walk in the woods of poetry and prose and pleasantly lost in thickets of words.

The current (subscription only) newsletter from AGNI—Boston University’s well-regarded literary magazine—includes an interview with prize-winning poet and nonfiction writer Rosalie Moffett about “Ravel-Edged Storytelling.”

A Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Moffett says she mostly considers herself a poet, but believes that the two genres—poetry and nonfiction—“share a border, and sometimes I look up to find I’ve crossed it.” A work that started out to be one thing takes an unexpected and serendipitous turn to become the other. In reading this month’s submissions to the writer’s workshop I attend, I encountered one 1200-word short story excerpt that seemed to want to become a poem and might have become one, by just changing the line lengths.

Answering Questions

Moffett says she writes prose and poetry for the same reason: to answer questions and, most of the time, poems “end up being the best arena for my mind to answer them.” This suggests a mind that ranges freely through a forest of possible answers, where the ambiguity of words can be pulled into service of meaning and intent. Strung together in a particular way, they can be the perfect example of the whole being more than the sum of the parts. That phenomenon is is one function of subtext.

dinner table, family

(photo: creative commons generic license)

AGNI online offers Moffett’s essay Sidney, whose story she says absolutely required “the ravel-edged” kind of telling offered by prose. Prose also provided a more valid recreation of how she originally heard—or overheard—the family stories, and the stories about Sidney himself, with all their half-bits of information, inferences, and unanswered questions like loose threads in a bag of knitting ravaged by moths or kittens. Prose “puts our stories together in a way they never had the chance to be before people died, got bitter, or went off their rockers.” I urge you to link to it and start reading; you won’t be able to stop!

And Telling Stories

In the essay about Sidney, she talks about how as a child younger than six visiting her grandparents, she got up late in the evening feigning hunger, so she could camp out in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal and overhearing the adults’ conversation in the next room: “I remember the music of the stories more than their substance. I sensed their pull and power. I wanted, suddenly, nothing more than to have stories to tell, and to sit at that table and tell them.” “Sidney” shows she absolutely got her wish.

I think I resonated with her responses in the interview largely because of the process in the last two weeks, of writing my blog posts, The Rouge Shadow and Coming to Amerika, based on a longer essay about my father’s immigrant parents. So different from Moffett, who can draw on a deep well of family detail—conversations, rooms she’s spent time in—I know next-to-nothing about my father’s parents. Yet, even from the few stray threads I have, many stories could be woven. To write these essays, I pieced together the backdrop for a plausible narrative from minute clues. Moffett says writing an essay “feels like the hunt for an answer.” And sometimes the answer is that there is none.

Further Reading

Rosalie Moffett’s website includes links to some of her poems, including this one, “Gifts from the 7-11.”

Agni is the ancient Vedic god of fire and guardian of humankind, a messenger to the other gods. You can find out more about this aptly named literary magazine here. And about the god of fire here.

The Art of Subtext, by Charles Baxter– The most eloquent and approachable group of essays on subtext that I’ve found. For only $3.88 used to $10.28 new, you can awaken to new possibilities. Reading it was like seeing, after not seeing.

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The Rouge Shadow

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I see my grandfather in the background in Diego Rivera’s North Wall mural at the Detroit Institute of Art, (here’s a link; these famous works aren’t free for reproduction), dwarfed by the scale of the machinery and the enterprise around him. For decades, he worked at the legendary Ford Rouge plant, where Great Lakes freighters brought sand (for glassmaking), iron ore, and coal to the mile-long factory, and, every 49 seconds, out rolled an automobile.

Ford Rouge plant, Dearborn

Ford Rouge plant, Dearborn, Michigan (photo: wikimedia)

Today, a tour of an auto plant suggests a relatively clean job. Robots do the heavy lifting, with just-in-time sourcing of parts. In the 1920s to 1940s, when my grandfather worked there, the Rouge was the country’s only auto factory with its own steel mill, and clouds of sulphurous smoke and grit filled the air. It had a tire-making plant, a glass furnace, plants for making transmissions and radiators, its own railroad, and even a paper mill. As I understand it, one of my uncles was in charge of keeping the steel mill’s fires stoked, which explains why he always had to work Christmas Day.

My grandfather was born in 1888, and I could not find his immigration record until I realized the Hungarian spelling of Frank is Ferencz. Even then I had to search using all the spellings of the family’s last name my various uncles used: Hadde, Hedge, Hegyi, and Heddi. By the process of elimination, my best candidate is Ferencz Hegyi, who immigrated from Fiatfalva, Transylvania, Hungary, in 1906 and arriving at Ellis Island aboard the S.S. Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Alfred Stieglitz’s photo “The Steerage,”—called “one of the greatest photographs of all time,” was taken aboard that ship.)

(2017 research unearthed my grandfather’s naturalization papers, which reveal a quite different story. It was hard for me to give up this Transylvania connection!)

Coming to Amerika

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In a historical irony, both of my paternal grandparents listed their country of origin as Hungary when they immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s and continued to do so in census records up through 1940, yet both their towns of origin were lost to Hungary after World War I. The treaty of Trianon punished Hungary for siding with Germany in that war, and gave vast areas of its territory (see map) to surrounding countries. Hungary once comprised all the pink areas, but today is just the red-outlined middle portion of the map that includes Budapest.

Dissolution of Austria-Hungary

Dissolution of Austria-Hungary (source: en.wikipedia.org)

The town I believe with some confidence was the original home of my grandmother—Maria Krausz—is now part of Slovakia. What on the map is labeled “Czechoslovakia” was split in 1993 into the prosperous Czech Republic and the proud but impecunious Slovakia (on the map, the pink part of “Czechoslovakia”). Similarly, the small town in Transylvania that I believe my grandfather—Ferencz Hegyi—emigrated from is now part of Romania. This remarkable territorial loss helps explain the running street battles between the Hungarian and Romanian boys in the Dearborn, Michigan, immigrant neighborhood where my father and his brothers and sisters grew up in the 1920s.

The history of middle Europe is long and complex and generally unknown to Americans, unless they’ve made a special study of it. I learned a tiny portion when we took our 2013 Danube cruise from Budapest to Bucharest, as I did some pre-cruise reading. I hadn’t known, remembered, or thought about the many years in which that part of the world was under Ottoman rule. Centuries before that, the Roman empire had a significant presence there (some remnants of which are still visible). That influence explains why the Romanian language is more similar to Italian than to the Slavic languages (at least in appearance; the pronunciation is different), and the fact that the Hungarian Parliament conducted its business in Latin until the mid-1800s, so I was told.

One tantalizing possibility is that the Mongolian hordes that repeatedly crossed middle Europe from the East, doing what invading hordes do—raping and pillaging—left a legacy for my family, too. Estimates are that one in every 200 males on earth is related to Genghis Khan. In part that’s because Khan’s forces killed off most of the men where they rampaged, which meant his own genetic heritage had less competition from the existing population. Khan, his son, and his grandsons had dozens of legitimate—and who knows how many illegitimate—sons who spread his genetic code far and wide.

In 1241, Mongol forces conquered medieval Hungary at the Battle of Mohi. An idea regarding how this distant episode might relate to our family—if it does—was unexpectedly sparked by an experience I had in the dentist’s chair. The endodontist required a large number of visits to finish my root canal (don’t ask), and finally said, “No wonder it’s taking so long! You have an extra root on this tooth. I hardly ever see that, except among my Chinese patients.” Thanks, Great Khan.

Gizella, Queen of Hungary

(photo: author)

History also explains the tantalizing bit of information from aunts Gizella and Clara that their mother was actually German, which was always a little confusing. It turns out that the immigration of German-speaking peoples into Hungary was widespread and began in approximately 1000, when German knights came into the country in the company of Giselle of Bavaria (Gizella in Hungarian), the German-born Queen of Hungary’s first king, Stephen I. (Boldog Gizella, in the stained glass panel means “Blessed Giselle”). Hungary by the 1800s had numerous German settlements, which is how Maria could be both Hungarian and German.

According to the manifest of the ship Amerika, which by a process of elimination I believe included my grandmother among its passengers, Maria traveled to the United States from Dobšiná (German: Dobschau) Hungary (photo below). Dobšiná is located in the Carpathian Mountains, “to the south of the beautiful Stratená valley,” near the Hnilec (Slana) River, and enclosed on all sides by mountains.The historic postcard below is of a hotel built near the town’s famous Ice Cave.

In the town’s heyday, local tilt hammers produced high-quality steel, and so it was no accident that during the anti-Habsburg uprisings of the 18th century, it was Dobšiná that supplied swords, cannonballs, and rifle barrels to the rebel armies of Ferenc Rákóczi II. When peace was established between the Habsburgs and the rebels, army workshops in the town had to be torn down. With the lengthy history of steel-making in her home town, Mary’s ultimate residence in the shadow of the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, and the patina of fine steel grit on every surface must have felt very familiar.

Dobsina Slovakia Ice Cave hotel

(source: wikimedia.org)

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Life is a Riddle and a Mystery

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By Linda C. Wisniewski, Guest Blogger

pen and ink, writing, memoir

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

At my Unitarian church, we sing a hymn with the repeating refrain, “Mystery, mystery, life is a riddle and a mystery.” I read lots of mystery novels, and I write and teach memoir. For me, the two genres are not that far apart.

Writing a memoir is a lot like unraveling a mystery. Where you think you are going is often very different from where you find yourself at the end. Good memoir writing, and I mean good for the writer as well as the reader, always involves the process of self-discovery.

Just as all stories begin with the main character’s motivation or desire, the same is true in memoir. The writer wants to discover something about his life, or the characters in his life story. Quite often the process of writing changes the motivation of the memoirist.

In my memoir, Off Kilter, I wrote that “I wanted to understand why my mother couldn’t protect me from my father’s verbal abuse. I wanted to know why she cut me down instead of building me up….She let herself be silenced. She silenced herself. More than anything, I want to understand.”

While writing is not therapy, it can be therapeutic. It wasn’t so much that writing helped me understand my mother, but rather that it helped me accept who she was. I discovered the answer to the mystery of my life: I held in my hands the ability to create my own happiness, as a grown woman, apart from her. After Off Kilter was published, friends suggested more ways I could try to understand my mother. Call relatives, research history, read self-help books. But I was no longer interested. My motivation had changed.

In his memoir, Elsewhere, Richard Russo comes to suspect his mother suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and feels tremendous guilt, seeing himself as her “principal enabler. Because…like other addicts, obsessives can’t do it on their own. As they gradually lose the control they so desperately seek, they have little choice but to ensnare loved ones.” He holds this discovery for the very end, creating a powerful resolution for himself and the reader.

Years ago, I opened my lunchtime talk at a senior citizens center with the rhetorical question, “Why should you write your memoir?”

A tiny woman in the front row piped up so all could hear, “Yeah, why should I?” She made me laugh, but I totally get where she was coming from. I’ll bet her children and grandchildren were always telling her to write down the stories of her life. But she didn’t want to, and I was hard-pressed to convince her otherwise. I listed the mental and physical health benefits of writing about emotionally significant events, but she did not sign up for my class. And she had a very good point. She could see no reason to revisit the past.

Critics complain there are too many “confessional” memoirs, perhaps recalling the confession or romance magazines aimed at working-class women. In the New York Times Book Review Neil Genzlinger wrote a piece called “The Trouble with Memoirs,” in which he asked for a “moment of silence for the lost art of shutting up.” It caused quite a stir, but the conclusion can be drawn that he was complaining about badly written memoirs, of which there are many.

Stephen Elliott wrote in The Rumpus that “…celebrity memoirs are rarely interesting, despite how interesting their lives appear from the outside. The problem is not that they don’t live interesting lives, it’s that they’re not writers.”

Memoir writing is a risky proposition. “I see you in a whole different way now,” said my book club friend after reading Off Kilter. When I started to write seriously, I joined an online group called Risky Writers. We wrote and critiqued short pieces which involved emotional risk when shared. What would others think if they knew we had done these things? We learned to critique the writing, not the life style of the writer.

Despite the temptation to judge the lives of memoir writers, we don’t think of judging fictional characters. “She shouldn’t have done that!” Well, yes, she should have. That’s how she got into trouble, and why we keep turning the page, especially in a well-plotted mystery. Will she get what she wants in the end? Or does she discover something better?

Genzlinger ended his Times Book Review piece like this. “Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it.” I would add, don’t publish it yet. And don’t give up looking for the mystery.

Linda Wisniewski

Linda Wisniewski (photo: courtesy of the author)

Linda C. Wisniewski lives in Doylestown, Pa., where she teaches memoir workshops and writes for a local newspaper. Her credits include newspapers,  Hippocampus, other literary magazines, and several anthologies. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won first prizes in the Pearl Buck International Short Story Contest as well as the Wild River Review essay contest. Linda’s memoir, Off Kilter: a Woman’s Journey to Peace with Scoliosis, Her Mother, and Her Polish Heritage, was published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press. Visit her at www.lindawis.com.