{"id":8839,"date":"2021-02-16T08:09:43","date_gmt":"2021-02-16T13:09:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8839"},"modified":"2021-03-03T08:49:40","modified_gmt":"2021-03-03T13:49:40","slug":"an-attention-span-of-more-than-5-minutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8839","title":{"rendered":"An Attention Span of More Than 5 Minutes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Erica Obey, president of the New York chapter of Mystery Writers of America, had some preparatory thoughts about our panel on New Jersey crime\/mystery writers<\/a>, taking advantage of having Mally Becker with us. Just last week, Becker published her first novel, The Turncoat\u2019s Widow<\/em>, set in the Revolutionary War period. Aside from Malley, we were Jeff Markowitz, me, and discussion leader RG Belsky, and Obey wondered how each of us connects with the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was an interesting question. My public school education included very little history, none of it presented in an interesting or memorable way. It really wasn\u2019t until I married Neil, who trained in history, that I learned what I was missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But history didn\u2019t come to live in my heart until I started working on my family genealogy. In 2012, I extended my stay at Killer Nashville, and my cousin from Texas joined me for a two-day excursion to Wilson County, just east of the Music City. We wanted to see if we could learn anything about our great-great grandparents who\u2019d lived there two hundred years ago. As it turned out, we learned a lot (patient people there, at the Wilson County historical society).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The artist Jeff Koons advises people to \u201ctake your history on board,\u201d and I\u2019m still working on it. One of the chief benefits of genealogy is recognizing more acutely how my ancestors\u2019 lives were affected by where they lived and when they lived there. It gives me a specific, personal reason to become aware of the movements and events of the past. It isn\u2019t all pretty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you start asking \u201cwhy,\u201d you come up with some powerful answers. Why did my family end up in Central Texas? Because the ruin and devastation of the Civil War was so great in Central Tennessee, my great-great grandparents and their eight children became part of the GTT (Gone To Texas movement). They had to start new lives with nothing but each other. Why were they so badly affected? Their homes and farms and animals were collateral damage in the Civil War Battle of Stones River (Murfreesboro), just twelve miles south of them and involving more than 78,000 soldiers. (The abandoned cannon pictured is from the Stones River National Battlefield.) So, why were they in Tennessee in the first place? Because the men served in the Revolutionary War and were given settlement land in western North Carolina (now central Tennessee). Lots of drama and passionate feeling there for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among their Tennessee neighbors was the Huddleston family, ancestors of New Yorker<\/em> and Atlantic<\/em> writer George Packer, who says, \u201cHistory, any history, confers meaning on a life.\u201d I do know it\u2019s affected my writing. Only two of my stories are overtly historical, but genealogy has taught me to think about more kinds of connections, past and present, as I write. It\u2019s helpful grounding in this era of \u201cnothing matters but the last five minutes\u201d attention spans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Erica Obey, president of the New York chapter of Mystery Writers of America, had some preparatory thoughts about our panel on New Jersey crime\/mystery writers, taking advantage of having Mally Becker with us. Just last week, Becker published her first … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"An Attention Span of More Than 5 Minutes - history has a place in our writing, even when we're not writing about history.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41,266,104,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genealogy","category-history","category-the-morgue","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2iz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8839"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11257,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8839\/revisions\/11257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}