All hail Kitchen Sanitation Month. When working with your hands leave your brain free to think broadly and deeply; but leaves you too tired to write anything down.
Which explains a lot about history and literature, actually; who gets to do them, and how, and why. Because for the vast and silent majority of humanity, from before the dawn of man, every day must contain the level of sheer physical labor that Kitchen Sanitation Month entails, in order to survive comfortably. (Or, in a war zone or a famine, at all.)
Got to go get lunch and then get back on it.
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Texas Archeology Month!
It's almost upon us - the state's very own Idea Garage Sale, when museums, archeologists, historical sites, and chambers of commerce open history up and shake it out for public amusement. I don't care how uncreative you think you are - the more you learn about Texas history, the more inspired you'll get.
Here's a smattering of upcoming events, with an emphasis of course on the things that interest me most.
Oct. 1 - Tour of Archeological Ruins of Rancho de las Cabras, Wilson County but within the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park.
Oct. 8 - Archeological Information and Civil War Symposium, Gainesville - Topics at the symposium include "forts, funeral practices during the Civil War, fashions, cotton, and plantations." Also child-centric activities.
Oct. 12 - Face to Face with the Son of America, Huntsville - Forensic artist presents her facial reconstruction of a 10,000-year-old skull found in a cave on the Brazos River.
Oct. 14-16 Rock Art Foundation Annual Rendezvous, Val Verde County - A tent campout with tours of remote prehistoric art sites; only one of several events centered on the hard-to-see Pecos Valley art; plus nature walk, of course. Action! Adventure! Romance! (Well, you'll have to bring your own romance, but tell me you don't see an opening trailer in your head right now, based on knowing such an event exists.)
Oct. 17 - "How Texas Won the Civil War," Lecture by Dr. Donald. S. Frazier of McMurry University, Abilene; Houston - hosted by the Houston Museum of Natural Science, laying out the ways Texas benefited by the late unpleasantness.
Oct. 22 - Gault Site Tour, Bell County. Preregistration required, openings limited, but they also do it on the third Saturday of every month so if you miss October, don't despair.
Oct. 29 - Murder Mayhem and Misadventure Walking Tour at Oakwood Cemetery, Austin - to "highlight the lives and dramatic deaths of local early citizens."
Nov. 18-20 - 2011 Hot Rocks Cook-Off in College Station, "demonstrations and scientific experiments using Native American earth-oven cookery and stone boiling." (Are you smelling a cookbook? I sure am.)
Yeah, I think that's a pretty representative sample. Go look at the calendar - there's something that intrigues you. I need to start planning my month - October's not that far away and I know I can't do more than a fraction of what I'd like to, but that's no reason to miss what I can do.
Here's a smattering of upcoming events, with an emphasis of course on the things that interest me most.
Oct. 1 - Tour of Archeological Ruins of Rancho de las Cabras, Wilson County but within the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park.
Oct. 8 - Archeological Information and Civil War Symposium, Gainesville - Topics at the symposium include "forts, funeral practices during the Civil War, fashions, cotton, and plantations." Also child-centric activities.
Oct. 12 - Face to Face with the Son of America, Huntsville - Forensic artist presents her facial reconstruction of a 10,000-year-old skull found in a cave on the Brazos River.
Oct. 14-16 Rock Art Foundation Annual Rendezvous, Val Verde County - A tent campout with tours of remote prehistoric art sites; only one of several events centered on the hard-to-see Pecos Valley art; plus nature walk, of course. Action! Adventure! Romance! (Well, you'll have to bring your own romance, but tell me you don't see an opening trailer in your head right now, based on knowing such an event exists.)
Oct. 17 - "How Texas Won the Civil War," Lecture by Dr. Donald. S. Frazier of McMurry University, Abilene; Houston - hosted by the Houston Museum of Natural Science, laying out the ways Texas benefited by the late unpleasantness.
Oct. 22 - Gault Site Tour, Bell County. Preregistration required, openings limited, but they also do it on the third Saturday of every month so if you miss October, don't despair.
Oct. 29 - Murder Mayhem and Misadventure Walking Tour at Oakwood Cemetery, Austin - to "highlight the lives and dramatic deaths of local early citizens."
Nov. 18-20 - 2011 Hot Rocks Cook-Off in College Station, "demonstrations and scientific experiments using Native American earth-oven cookery and stone boiling." (Are you smelling a cookbook? I sure am.)
Yeah, I think that's a pretty representative sample. Go look at the calendar - there's something that intrigues you. I need to start planning my month - October's not that far away and I know I can't do more than a fraction of what I'd like to, but that's no reason to miss what I can do.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Black History Month
So anyway I'm reading a biography of David Ruggles and -
What's that, you never heard of him? Actually you have if you've read one of Frederick Douglass's three autobiographies. He's the free black abolitionist who advised and assisted Douglass during the New York phase of his escape from slavery. I didn't know that either when I picked the book up. The title attracted me: David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City. I've been interested in the Underground Railroad since I was nine and first heard of it, and nothing is more attractive than a book about some aspect of an interest which is not generally covered.
The reason for this is simple: These books are idea factories. I'm only on page 79 and look what I've got:
Born free in Connecticut, Ruggles lived in an integrated neighborhood near the family of his parents' former owner and attended a school where one of the teachers promoted the idea that free blacks should recolonize Africa. Imagine a guidance counselor advising you that you can't expect to succeed in your country of origin and should, in your own best interest, go someplace else! A major conflict in the abolitionist platform was between those who called for an end to slavery and those who called for ending slavery by shipping all the slaves to Africa to Christianize it. This resulted in Liberia, a country whose history should be better known. Broadly speaking, black abolitionists regarded colonization proponents as part of the problem; a parallel between the colonization platform and the policy of relocating Cherokees from Georgia was explicitly drawn by them.
In his youth he got into trouble with another young black man whose family was less well-connected and who therefore got sucked into the prison-crime cycle, while Ruggles got off lightly and went on to be a sailor, storekeeper, and activist.
During the Revolution, Connecticut offered freedom in exchange for military service, and self-created a sizable population of black Patriots; in other colonies, the British were the ones offering that deal.
In the 1790s, barely 5% of Connecticut's white male population could vote; not much difference between being black and being poor white.
From p. 24: "In 1798, in a sensational moment, a mixed-race mob protected the eight-year-old James Mars from a Virginia slave catcher."
In colonial times, slaves regularly elected governors and kings in the spring.
Ship captains didn't check papers; a fifth to a quarter of coastal crews were black and seafaring was a good option for male runaway slaves as well as free blacks.
Under the 1808 Fugitive Slave Law and New York's pro-slavery judges, "kidnappers regularly came to the city and grabbed any black whose appearance resembled their quarry." If you've ever read a runaway slave advertisement, you'll know just how big a pool of people the descriptions would have opened up to this form of human trafficking.
Free blacks sometimes turned escaped slaves over to slave catchers for rewards.
Riots against slave catching were a regular form of resistance.
Consumer activism has a longer history than I thought; Ruggles advertised that his sugar was "free sugar," i.e. not produced by slave labor, and this was a selling point for abolitionist housewives.
"[White abolitionist Elizur] Wright chronicled the actions of Richard P. Haxall of Richmond, Virginia, who had taken a seven-year-old schoolboy, Henry Scott, off the city streets and hauled him before Richard Riker, the city recorder, who was about to condemn the lad into slavery. Wright intervened and stopped the proceedings even after Riker ordered the boy to jail until the matter could be settled...Wright then convinced William Goodell, Arthur Tappan, and a group of black citizens to bail Henry out and allow him to live with the Wright family."
In 1829, rioters drove a large proportion of the free black population out of Cincinnati. Those who left went to Canada and founded the town of Wilberforce.
July 1834 saw coordinated race riots in New York, with a mob attacking a meeting of free blacks to discuss abolition and spreading to sack stores, burn churches, and beat folks up. Various organizations blamed the abolitionists for provoking the violence. One white abolitionist bookseller, Isaac T. Hopper, was advised to take down his window display. "Hopper declared that he was not 'such a coward as to forsake my principles...at the bidding of a mob.' When a mob approached his shop intent upon ransacking it, Hopper walked out onto his steps and stared down the rioters, who then moved on without damaging his store."
The troubles with the national designation of themed time periods, like Black History Month and the International Year of the Woman, are many. Black history, women's studies, Latin-American culture, and so on are not separate things from the rest of life. We're all in this together. History and culture appear in most minds not as an integrated whole but as a series of high points, islands in a sea of normal, complexity cooked down to an easily-digestible simplicity that can be absorbed and forgotten. This is not useful, and for the most part theme periods work within this paradigm rather than upsetting it.
But one thing that is accomplished is, that librarians will pull out books like this one and put them on displays where patrons who aren't particularly looking to be enlightened have a chance to see it and be curious and get a taste of how the past relates to the present and how impoverished their public-school history curriculum was.
For my own part, interest in the complexity of history began with fiction, or with nonfiction packaged to appeal to fiction readers. I don't see enough historical fiction with black protagonists. When I do see it, it's normally based around the Civil War and slavery. These are of course interesting times; but other times, as the above indicates, were equally interesting. Because less familiar, I submit that the stories of Northern antebellum black people are even more interesting than those of slaves; or for that matter of Northern antebellum white people. Were you surprised to learn that Ohio had a sizable black population before the Southern Diaspora?
Yes, this stuff is hard to research. Yes, there's a profound discomfort inherent in examining how real people really behaved and spoke as opposed to how we want to arrange them into neat groups of folks we like and folks we don't like; and in seeing how little rhetoric has changed in America during its history. Yes, it can be hard to see your way clear to creating a protagonist with agency in social groups who have been systematically denied agency by the institutions of our democratic government. Those are all reasons to mine this nearly-untapped vein, not reasons to avoid it.
For an example of the possibilities, and the problems, of tackling such topics, I refer you to the remarkable, and remarkably uncomfortable, work The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, by M.T. Anderson. Totally worth the effort.
What's that, you never heard of him? Actually you have if you've read one of Frederick Douglass's three autobiographies. He's the free black abolitionist who advised and assisted Douglass during the New York phase of his escape from slavery. I didn't know that either when I picked the book up. The title attracted me: David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City. I've been interested in the Underground Railroad since I was nine and first heard of it, and nothing is more attractive than a book about some aspect of an interest which is not generally covered.
The reason for this is simple: These books are idea factories. I'm only on page 79 and look what I've got:
Born free in Connecticut, Ruggles lived in an integrated neighborhood near the family of his parents' former owner and attended a school where one of the teachers promoted the idea that free blacks should recolonize Africa. Imagine a guidance counselor advising you that you can't expect to succeed in your country of origin and should, in your own best interest, go someplace else! A major conflict in the abolitionist platform was between those who called for an end to slavery and those who called for ending slavery by shipping all the slaves to Africa to Christianize it. This resulted in Liberia, a country whose history should be better known. Broadly speaking, black abolitionists regarded colonization proponents as part of the problem; a parallel between the colonization platform and the policy of relocating Cherokees from Georgia was explicitly drawn by them.
In his youth he got into trouble with another young black man whose family was less well-connected and who therefore got sucked into the prison-crime cycle, while Ruggles got off lightly and went on to be a sailor, storekeeper, and activist.
During the Revolution, Connecticut offered freedom in exchange for military service, and self-created a sizable population of black Patriots; in other colonies, the British were the ones offering that deal.
In the 1790s, barely 5% of Connecticut's white male population could vote; not much difference between being black and being poor white.
From p. 24: "In 1798, in a sensational moment, a mixed-race mob protected the eight-year-old James Mars from a Virginia slave catcher."
In colonial times, slaves regularly elected governors and kings in the spring.
Ship captains didn't check papers; a fifth to a quarter of coastal crews were black and seafaring was a good option for male runaway slaves as well as free blacks.
Under the 1808 Fugitive Slave Law and New York's pro-slavery judges, "kidnappers regularly came to the city and grabbed any black whose appearance resembled their quarry." If you've ever read a runaway slave advertisement, you'll know just how big a pool of people the descriptions would have opened up to this form of human trafficking.
Free blacks sometimes turned escaped slaves over to slave catchers for rewards.
Riots against slave catching were a regular form of resistance.
Consumer activism has a longer history than I thought; Ruggles advertised that his sugar was "free sugar," i.e. not produced by slave labor, and this was a selling point for abolitionist housewives.
"[White abolitionist Elizur] Wright chronicled the actions of Richard P. Haxall of Richmond, Virginia, who had taken a seven-year-old schoolboy, Henry Scott, off the city streets and hauled him before Richard Riker, the city recorder, who was about to condemn the lad into slavery. Wright intervened and stopped the proceedings even after Riker ordered the boy to jail until the matter could be settled...Wright then convinced William Goodell, Arthur Tappan, and a group of black citizens to bail Henry out and allow him to live with the Wright family."
In 1829, rioters drove a large proportion of the free black population out of Cincinnati. Those who left went to Canada and founded the town of Wilberforce.
July 1834 saw coordinated race riots in New York, with a mob attacking a meeting of free blacks to discuss abolition and spreading to sack stores, burn churches, and beat folks up. Various organizations blamed the abolitionists for provoking the violence. One white abolitionist bookseller, Isaac T. Hopper, was advised to take down his window display. "Hopper declared that he was not 'such a coward as to forsake my principles...at the bidding of a mob.' When a mob approached his shop intent upon ransacking it, Hopper walked out onto his steps and stared down the rioters, who then moved on without damaging his store."
The troubles with the national designation of themed time periods, like Black History Month and the International Year of the Woman, are many. Black history, women's studies, Latin-American culture, and so on are not separate things from the rest of life. We're all in this together. History and culture appear in most minds not as an integrated whole but as a series of high points, islands in a sea of normal, complexity cooked down to an easily-digestible simplicity that can be absorbed and forgotten. This is not useful, and for the most part theme periods work within this paradigm rather than upsetting it.
But one thing that is accomplished is, that librarians will pull out books like this one and put them on displays where patrons who aren't particularly looking to be enlightened have a chance to see it and be curious and get a taste of how the past relates to the present and how impoverished their public-school history curriculum was.
For my own part, interest in the complexity of history began with fiction, or with nonfiction packaged to appeal to fiction readers. I don't see enough historical fiction with black protagonists. When I do see it, it's normally based around the Civil War and slavery. These are of course interesting times; but other times, as the above indicates, were equally interesting. Because less familiar, I submit that the stories of Northern antebellum black people are even more interesting than those of slaves; or for that matter of Northern antebellum white people. Were you surprised to learn that Ohio had a sizable black population before the Southern Diaspora?
Yes, this stuff is hard to research. Yes, there's a profound discomfort inherent in examining how real people really behaved and spoke as opposed to how we want to arrange them into neat groups of folks we like and folks we don't like; and in seeing how little rhetoric has changed in America during its history. Yes, it can be hard to see your way clear to creating a protagonist with agency in social groups who have been systematically denied agency by the institutions of our democratic government. Those are all reasons to mine this nearly-untapped vein, not reasons to avoid it.
For an example of the possibilities, and the problems, of tackling such topics, I refer you to the remarkable, and remarkably uncomfortable, work The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, by M.T. Anderson. Totally worth the effort.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Idea Garage Sale: The Skeletons in the Cave
Friday and Saturday I took more research trips, but Sunday is reserved for the Garage Sale, so let it suffice to say that taking my speed two days in a row has proven to be well worth the inevitable caffeine hangover today, not to mention the six-hour round trip to Del Rio. The Val Verde County Archeology Fair had relatively little archeology alongside quite a lot of history - did you know they have Rip Ford's own flag on display there? Wow!
Anyway, I picked up a rumor; and it will seem to you also to be a no-brainer, an idea anybody, even a non-writer, would recognize as a potential story. A person I wouldn't know again if he bit me told me that a friend of his he didn't name, at a time he didn't specify, was working as a cowboy for a man with a ranch not far (on a scale not defined) from the site of the Battle/Massacre of the Nueces. In a cave on this ranch, he found skeletons. He was intensely curious about them, but as the cave is on private property belonging to his then employer, he did nothing about them.
As Texas readers probably know, the Battle/Massacre of the Nueces is a notorious and fraught incident in 1862 in which a party of "German" military-age men, with a variety of reasons to get out of Texas, were hunted down by a party of Confederate troops. The Germans fought (hence, Battle) and were defeated. Some escaped, some were killed, and of those captured, many were, ahem, summarily executed. (Hence, Massacre. Oddly, I think I am now the first to suggest that "lynched" is a better term. See "fraught" in the first sentence.) "German" did not necessarily mean to a nineteenth-century Texan what it means to a modern American, hence the quotes; but the term is good enough for now.
As I said - the discovery of skeletons in a cave near the site of such an event is a story idea so obvious anyone could recognize it as such; but this obviousness is deceptive. The person passing on the rumor himself brought up the mystery of the identity of the skeletons: Germans or Indians? Other possibilities include settlers, travelers, crime victims, and modern lost hikers. The cowboy witness could probably provide details that would narrow the classification, but since this is a rumor we have endless freedom to speculate.
But we also have another mystery here. The cowboy could not satisfy his curiosity about the skeletons because they were on private land; but if he's going around talking about them, he must have reported them to the property owner. Who wouldn't? And if such a discovery was reported to the owner, why did he not himself follow up? The first thing most of us would do, after such a report, would be to pick up the phone and call the relevant criminal authority; a sizable majority of those who did not do so would ride out to take a look for themselves, and then do so.
And this is where the writer starts earning her pay, because this is where you start making characters and determining what the story is. What reasons might there be not to call the authorities? Is the property owner a murderer who thought his crime was safe from discovery in that cave? Does he have something else out there he doesn't want authorities to see? Does he - like many rural property owners in Texas - have a prejudice against the intellectual investigation of historical and archeological sites and fear loss of control of his land? An archeological dig can in fact be pretty disruptive. Though in Texas, at least, a land owner's least valid objection will trump anyone else's most legitimate interest, you wouldn't know it to hear many people talk; and eminent domain can do some pretty-high-handed things, even here. Perhaps he's paranoid, or perhaps there are local conditions that make not reporting skeletons which appear to him old enough (or thinks he can identify by context well enough) not to be relevant to any modern crime. Perhaps he's protecting an ancestor's part in a shameful incident from public knowledge; or perhaps he fears what would be discovered about his ancestors if the remains are subject to forensic analysis.
The vagueness of the initial stimulus to the imagination leaves plenty of room for the imagination to function. The difference between a wannabe writer and a writer is, that the wannabe either lacks the imagination to think of possibilities beyond the first suggested to him and runs with a story full of assumptions, cliches, and bad history; or falters, bewildered, unable to choose among a bewildering variety of possibilities.
A non-fiction writer, of course, tries to solve the mystery using the academic and journalistic toolset - interviews, document searches, lead-following. A fiction writer decides what kind of story she wants to make, weeds out the possibilities that don't suit that story, and does the research that will support the endeavor to write that story. I write for young people, so I might go right back to the cowboy discoverer and transform him into a party of exploring children, or into the property owner's oldest son out riding with his girlfriend, or maybe -- ooh, this is an exciting thought, a teen-age illegal immigrant hiding from murderous coyotes, or merely from immigration officials. There's a person with a motive not to report them for you! But where does that lead? An immigrant wouldn't know about the Battle/Massacre, but will interpret them in his own fashion, and where is the story that stems from that interpretation?
Tony Hillerman could have done a lot with this core idea, dealing as he did with the confluence of living culture, academia, history, archeology, and crime. I am attracted to the idea of the ranch family, proud of their history and perhaps feeling embattled in the face of modern economic, ecologic, and political developments, fearing to learn too much about the history of their legendary founding father, and yet desperately needing to know what the skeletons could tell them about him and his circumstances. A Disney exec might see a handy framework for a save-the-family-ranch plot. A mystery? A thriller? A fantastic magical realist exploration of the psychogeography of the West? A straightforward Western with an ethnic German twist? A journalistic investigation?
We all start at the same trailhead, but the trail we follow will be different for each of us.
And this is why no real working author is afraid that her ideas will be stolen! It's not only unnecessary; it's not possible. Every idea that enters our heads changes and becomes ours. It doesn't matter who else's head it lives in, too.
Anyway, I picked up a rumor; and it will seem to you also to be a no-brainer, an idea anybody, even a non-writer, would recognize as a potential story. A person I wouldn't know again if he bit me told me that a friend of his he didn't name, at a time he didn't specify, was working as a cowboy for a man with a ranch not far (on a scale not defined) from the site of the Battle/Massacre of the Nueces. In a cave on this ranch, he found skeletons. He was intensely curious about them, but as the cave is on private property belonging to his then employer, he did nothing about them.
As Texas readers probably know, the Battle/Massacre of the Nueces is a notorious and fraught incident in 1862 in which a party of "German" military-age men, with a variety of reasons to get out of Texas, were hunted down by a party of Confederate troops. The Germans fought (hence, Battle) and were defeated. Some escaped, some were killed, and of those captured, many were, ahem, summarily executed. (Hence, Massacre. Oddly, I think I am now the first to suggest that "lynched" is a better term. See "fraught" in the first sentence.) "German" did not necessarily mean to a nineteenth-century Texan what it means to a modern American, hence the quotes; but the term is good enough for now.
As I said - the discovery of skeletons in a cave near the site of such an event is a story idea so obvious anyone could recognize it as such; but this obviousness is deceptive. The person passing on the rumor himself brought up the mystery of the identity of the skeletons: Germans or Indians? Other possibilities include settlers, travelers, crime victims, and modern lost hikers. The cowboy witness could probably provide details that would narrow the classification, but since this is a rumor we have endless freedom to speculate.
But we also have another mystery here. The cowboy could not satisfy his curiosity about the skeletons because they were on private land; but if he's going around talking about them, he must have reported them to the property owner. Who wouldn't? And if such a discovery was reported to the owner, why did he not himself follow up? The first thing most of us would do, after such a report, would be to pick up the phone and call the relevant criminal authority; a sizable majority of those who did not do so would ride out to take a look for themselves, and then do so.
And this is where the writer starts earning her pay, because this is where you start making characters and determining what the story is. What reasons might there be not to call the authorities? Is the property owner a murderer who thought his crime was safe from discovery in that cave? Does he have something else out there he doesn't want authorities to see? Does he - like many rural property owners in Texas - have a prejudice against the intellectual investigation of historical and archeological sites and fear loss of control of his land? An archeological dig can in fact be pretty disruptive. Though in Texas, at least, a land owner's least valid objection will trump anyone else's most legitimate interest, you wouldn't know it to hear many people talk; and eminent domain can do some pretty-high-handed things, even here. Perhaps he's paranoid, or perhaps there are local conditions that make not reporting skeletons which appear to him old enough (or thinks he can identify by context well enough) not to be relevant to any modern crime. Perhaps he's protecting an ancestor's part in a shameful incident from public knowledge; or perhaps he fears what would be discovered about his ancestors if the remains are subject to forensic analysis.
The vagueness of the initial stimulus to the imagination leaves plenty of room for the imagination to function. The difference between a wannabe writer and a writer is, that the wannabe either lacks the imagination to think of possibilities beyond the first suggested to him and runs with a story full of assumptions, cliches, and bad history; or falters, bewildered, unable to choose among a bewildering variety of possibilities.
A non-fiction writer, of course, tries to solve the mystery using the academic and journalistic toolset - interviews, document searches, lead-following. A fiction writer decides what kind of story she wants to make, weeds out the possibilities that don't suit that story, and does the research that will support the endeavor to write that story. I write for young people, so I might go right back to the cowboy discoverer and transform him into a party of exploring children, or into the property owner's oldest son out riding with his girlfriend, or maybe -- ooh, this is an exciting thought, a teen-age illegal immigrant hiding from murderous coyotes, or merely from immigration officials. There's a person with a motive not to report them for you! But where does that lead? An immigrant wouldn't know about the Battle/Massacre, but will interpret them in his own fashion, and where is the story that stems from that interpretation?
Tony Hillerman could have done a lot with this core idea, dealing as he did with the confluence of living culture, academia, history, archeology, and crime. I am attracted to the idea of the ranch family, proud of their history and perhaps feeling embattled in the face of modern economic, ecologic, and political developments, fearing to learn too much about the history of their legendary founding father, and yet desperately needing to know what the skeletons could tell them about him and his circumstances. A Disney exec might see a handy framework for a save-the-family-ranch plot. A mystery? A thriller? A fantastic magical realist exploration of the psychogeography of the West? A straightforward Western with an ethnic German twist? A journalistic investigation?
We all start at the same trailhead, but the trail we follow will be different for each of us.
And this is why no real working author is afraid that her ideas will be stolen! It's not only unnecessary; it's not possible. Every idea that enters our heads changes and becomes ours. It doesn't matter who else's head it lives in, too.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Research Walk
Yesterday, I got together my maps, my notebook, some fruit in an insulated bag, and a bottle of water, and I took the bus downtown to figure out where Di was living when Len came to town.
See, I had picked Yturri Street because of its proximity to the cotton yards; but I realized that Yturri (a short street in the middle of the bend in the river, comprising an area analogous to St. Mary's Street between Commerce and the old library) would have been part of the area devastated by the flood of March 26, 1865. According to the two and a half columns of coverage in the April 7 Semi-Weekly News, the "freshets of March 26" were a disaster - families homeless, merchandise destroyed, property lost or injured in areas never flooded before, and loss of life.
Mind you, it's difficult for a modern researcher to be sure where this devastation lay. The report printed in the Semi-Weekly News describes the hardest-hit areas as
As it happens, I know where Nat Lewis's mill was. Not only is it commemorated by one of the Riverwalk's tile historical markers and noted on one of my maps, but I used to work for the local utility company, constructed on what was once known as Bowen's Island near the ford where the mill was located. I remember when Betty Farlow put together a display about the history of the site for the company, back in the 80s. She could never interest the corporation in producing a proper historical booklet, but she did enough work to have written one and would pour her findings into my sympathetic and interested ear at lunch. So I know about the mill, the ford, the Turnverein, the nude bathing off the bridge - the works. But Giddings, Herff, and Simpson are, if not strangers to me (certainly not Giddings, operator of the Jackass Mail), not people I'm on visiting terms with.
Still, Bowen's Island is adjacent to Yturri Street and Main is a couple of blocks west of it, so I would either have to choose another street or enter the complication that when Len goes to the address she has for Di, in order to inform her of her father's death, neither Di nor her house will be there. I chose the complication because, face it, everybody gets lost their first time in San Antonio. I'm not sure how to make this into a way to advance the plot, but that's the sort of thing I can figure out as I go. First thing's first: find where Di and the Middletons moved to, and figure out how hard it will be to track them down.
So off I went, tramping through the streets, map in hand, constantly comparing it to the existing streets. In a couple of places I found helpful historical markers - at the German-English School and at the site of Guenther's Upper Mill - that made it easier to peel back the layers of time to the right year. At the Upper Mill, for example, I found that the mill wouldn't have been there - since Mauermann made his map in 1868, it shows features that wouldn't have existed three years earlier, and this is one of them. The mill was razed for river widening in 1924 - so this tells me not only that the map is "wrong" on this point, but that the river I see today is wider than the river Len will see if she has occasion to go that far south. But wait, there's more! Set into the ground a few yards from the mill marker are a couple of stones, marked "Stribling House 1859-1926;" and between them is a huge black walnut tree. So - no mill, but a substantial house with a stone foundation where the owner has planted a black walnut!
I am tolerably familiar with downtown San Antonio. I lived there, in a now-gone apartment across the street from the Southwest Craft Center and the former KMOL studios (now WOAI-TV) for the crucial years between dropping out of Trinity University and moving in with Damon. Most of the jobs I've had, temporary or permanent, were downtown. When a convention I'm interested in comes to town, like ALA, TLA, or IRA, it's in the convention center across from the German English school. And when visitors come to town, I'm their native guide. I've even done walking research there before, in order to see what Ada and Amber saw when they switched places across time in Switching Well. I can tell you ghost stories, history stories, movie stories, any kind of story you'd like about the heart of San Antonio - and still, the light bulbs kept coming on over my head as I realized - oh, that's what they did with that street; oh, this is where I am; oh, here's where that was.
I never realized before that the famous Market House, a honey of a building cooled by fountains and designed to look like a massive Greek temple, was built on the flood channel. It hadn't struck me that either the old cathedral had to be oriented differently from the new one, or that parishioners had to cross the Main Acequia to get in the front door. I hadn't noticed that Dolorosa Street, rather than turning into Market Street, becomes the sidewalk in front of the courthouse and continues as that little alley behind the old library.
And I finally realize just how wrongheaded it was to continue the line of Navarro Street as South St. Mary's; requiring, as it did, that St. Mary's Street be laid out to turn sharply eastward (about in line with the old bend in the river that delineated Bowen's Island) in order to join up with an existing street that continued the line of Navarro (only it wasn't Navarro at that point; it was Paso). For years I've been repeating the local story blaming St. Mary's Street's bewildering layout - running north, south, east, and west all in the course of a single mile - on the burro drivers who fell asleep on their way home and let the animals find their own way; but in this part of town, at least, blame must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the city engineers.
I'm not going to lay it all out for you in tedious detail. This is sort of place geekery should be done in person, and if you ever want a native guide to San Antonio, give me a call - we're in the book. It's enough to know that I understand the town I love better, and I found exactly the right neighborhood and type of house the Middletons and Di will relocate to, at exorbitant rent, after the flood. I also know exactly where the Plaza Hotel was, where the James Vance family lived (historical marker - corner of modern Nueva and S. Main, then Nueva and Acequia streets, only Acequia didn't run that far) and have a good sense of the cotton yards. I still need to locate some livery stables, an office for Julian Middleton, and no doubt other sites I don't know about yet.
But I know enough to get Len well and truly lost, and that'll do to go on with. It was an excellent morning's work (do not ever devote a summer afternoon to a research walk in San Antonio if you value your health!) and I wrote a fair amount today. I look forward to doing it again.
And again.
And again.
See, I had picked Yturri Street because of its proximity to the cotton yards; but I realized that Yturri (a short street in the middle of the bend in the river, comprising an area analogous to St. Mary's Street between Commerce and the old library) would have been part of the area devastated by the flood of March 26, 1865. According to the two and a half columns of coverage in the April 7 Semi-Weekly News, the "freshets of March 26" were a disaster - families homeless, merchandise destroyed, property lost or injured in areas never flooded before, and loss of life.
Mind you, it's difficult for a modern researcher to be sure where this devastation lay. The report printed in the Semi-Weekly News describes the hardest-hit areas as
running across the bend of the river, one from above Mr. Simpson's house to the rear of Dr. Herff's house, which proved so destructive, and the other from about Mr. Gidding's house to Nat Lewis's mill, across Main Street.
As it happens, I know where Nat Lewis's mill was. Not only is it commemorated by one of the Riverwalk's tile historical markers and noted on one of my maps, but I used to work for the local utility company, constructed on what was once known as Bowen's Island near the ford where the mill was located. I remember when Betty Farlow put together a display about the history of the site for the company, back in the 80s. She could never interest the corporation in producing a proper historical booklet, but she did enough work to have written one and would pour her findings into my sympathetic and interested ear at lunch. So I know about the mill, the ford, the Turnverein, the nude bathing off the bridge - the works. But Giddings, Herff, and Simpson are, if not strangers to me (certainly not Giddings, operator of the Jackass Mail), not people I'm on visiting terms with.
Still, Bowen's Island is adjacent to Yturri Street and Main is a couple of blocks west of it, so I would either have to choose another street or enter the complication that when Len goes to the address she has for Di, in order to inform her of her father's death, neither Di nor her house will be there. I chose the complication because, face it, everybody gets lost their first time in San Antonio. I'm not sure how to make this into a way to advance the plot, but that's the sort of thing I can figure out as I go. First thing's first: find where Di and the Middletons moved to, and figure out how hard it will be to track them down.
So off I went, tramping through the streets, map in hand, constantly comparing it to the existing streets. In a couple of places I found helpful historical markers - at the German-English School and at the site of Guenther's Upper Mill - that made it easier to peel back the layers of time to the right year. At the Upper Mill, for example, I found that the mill wouldn't have been there - since Mauermann made his map in 1868, it shows features that wouldn't have existed three years earlier, and this is one of them. The mill was razed for river widening in 1924 - so this tells me not only that the map is "wrong" on this point, but that the river I see today is wider than the river Len will see if she has occasion to go that far south. But wait, there's more! Set into the ground a few yards from the mill marker are a couple of stones, marked "Stribling House 1859-1926;" and between them is a huge black walnut tree. So - no mill, but a substantial house with a stone foundation where the owner has planted a black walnut!
I am tolerably familiar with downtown San Antonio. I lived there, in a now-gone apartment across the street from the Southwest Craft Center and the former KMOL studios (now WOAI-TV) for the crucial years between dropping out of Trinity University and moving in with Damon. Most of the jobs I've had, temporary or permanent, were downtown. When a convention I'm interested in comes to town, like ALA, TLA, or IRA, it's in the convention center across from the German English school. And when visitors come to town, I'm their native guide. I've even done walking research there before, in order to see what Ada and Amber saw when they switched places across time in Switching Well. I can tell you ghost stories, history stories, movie stories, any kind of story you'd like about the heart of San Antonio - and still, the light bulbs kept coming on over my head as I realized - oh, that's what they did with that street; oh, this is where I am; oh, here's where that was.
I never realized before that the famous Market House, a honey of a building cooled by fountains and designed to look like a massive Greek temple, was built on the flood channel. It hadn't struck me that either the old cathedral had to be oriented differently from the new one, or that parishioners had to cross the Main Acequia to get in the front door. I hadn't noticed that Dolorosa Street, rather than turning into Market Street, becomes the sidewalk in front of the courthouse and continues as that little alley behind the old library.
And I finally realize just how wrongheaded it was to continue the line of Navarro Street as South St. Mary's; requiring, as it did, that St. Mary's Street be laid out to turn sharply eastward (about in line with the old bend in the river that delineated Bowen's Island) in order to join up with an existing street that continued the line of Navarro (only it wasn't Navarro at that point; it was Paso). For years I've been repeating the local story blaming St. Mary's Street's bewildering layout - running north, south, east, and west all in the course of a single mile - on the burro drivers who fell asleep on their way home and let the animals find their own way; but in this part of town, at least, blame must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the city engineers.
I'm not going to lay it all out for you in tedious detail. This is sort of place geekery should be done in person, and if you ever want a native guide to San Antonio, give me a call - we're in the book. It's enough to know that I understand the town I love better, and I found exactly the right neighborhood and type of house the Middletons and Di will relocate to, at exorbitant rent, after the flood. I also know exactly where the Plaza Hotel was, where the James Vance family lived (historical marker - corner of modern Nueva and S. Main, then Nueva and Acequia streets, only Acequia didn't run that far) and have a good sense of the cotton yards. I still need to locate some livery stables, an office for Julian Middleton, and no doubt other sites I don't know about yet.
But I know enough to get Len well and truly lost, and that'll do to go on with. It was an excellent morning's work (do not ever devote a summer afternoon to a research walk in San Antonio if you value your health!) and I wrote a fair amount today. I look forward to doing it again.
And again.
And again.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Marriage for Writers
Today is another personal holiday: married to Damon 23 years today. I wasn't going to write about it because this isn't a personal blog; but then I realized - marriage is a huge career choice for a writer, yet it isn't treated as such by society.
If you look at literary marriages through history, it's not hard to see how important it is. Sometimes (especially reading the biographies of the Romantics) it seems that writers are simply horrible spouses; other times (especially reading the biographies of female writers) it seems that ghastly marriages drive writers.
How many Victorian women took up the pen because their husbands couldn't or wouldn't provide for the family, and no other respectable occupation was open to them? Charlotte Bronte never published a word after she married Mr. Bell. Elizabeth Barrett's only major work after she married Browning was Sonnets from the Portuguese. (Which, okay, is a major major work!) Louisa May Alcott foreswore marriage; Jane Austen opted out of it, and we have to wonder if she'd have produced her six so-nearly-perfect novels if she hadn't. E. Nesbit wrote her influential and diverse body of work in the context of a chaotic marriage to a man who carried on an affair with another women in the same house as his wife. (Nesbit adopted the children of this liasion!) George Eliot defied convention to live with a married man in what today would be a conventional second marriage but in those days cut her off from polite society.
Robert Louis Stevenson's peripatetic lifestyle included a supportive, hard-working, strong-willed wife who was slowly going mad and with whom he often got into a mutually self-destructive loop of bad behavior. (I'm supposed to stop smoking for my lungs but you're supposed to eat fewer sweets. You had cake so I get a cigarette, so there.) Thomas Carlyle's wife Jane died a virgin. Dickens regretted his marriage and used it for literary fodder, trying to work out on paper acceptable roads through the minefield of duty, love, happiness, and gender roles and never finding his way.
And then there's Leonard and Virginia Woolf; he set aside his writing career for her's in a reversal of traditional sex roles (possibly predicated on a realistic judgment of their relative talent; but we'll never know now, will we?). Tolkien wrote against a cozy domestic background of wife and young 'uns and steady paid employment, which ate up time and forced creative writing into late nights and leisure hours. C.S. Lewis's domestic arrangements are far more fraught and mysterious than anything else in his life - what was his relationship with Mrs. Moore, exactly? Is it possible for an outsider to see through the romanticism and sentimentality of Shadowlands to the reality of his marriage to Joy? And how does that interact with his strictures on marriage in his apologetics or his portrayal of women and sex in Narnia, the Space Trilogy, and (what I consider the best but least read of his books) Till We Have Faces? Could Charles Dodgson have become Lewis Carroll if he'd married, and would we be as obsessed with figuring out his sexual proclivities today?
The most straightforwardly beneficial marriages I can think of off the top of my head are same-sex pairings - Gertrude Stein/Alice B. Toklas, and Christopher Isherwood/Don Bachardy. But the biographies of Margaret Wise Brown, W.H. Auden, and other homoerotic luminaries will demonstrate that this is an artifact of my sampling method and that the complexities of the literary marriage are amplified by the addition of societal disapproval, legal restrictions, and the peculiar public morality that makes the cruel hoax of bearding more socially acceptable than honest living.
For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer - who you marry will affect what you write, when you write, how you write. I recommend that every writer who is contemplating marriage read a few biographies with that in mind, and consider how this person fits in with your writing life.
In my opinion, writing as a profession is sufficiently difficult that no one should even mess with it unless it's the most important thing in the world to them. Much, much, much casual and unpaid writing is worth doing; if you are satisfied by writing your church newsletter, the occasional poem in a little magazine, and posting fanfic, you are still writing and no one has the right to look down on you. The whole time and energy black hole with no promise of adequate compensation (not to speak of reward) of the write-revise-submit process is simply not worth it if you don't want publication and a place on the library shelf more than you want the other ways you can spend your time.
If that's who you are, marriage to someone who doesn't get that up front is not fair to anyone. A writer's spouse who is not as committed to the career as the writer is will kill the career, or kill the marriage - and is not to blame for that. Because if the career comes first for the writer - the marriage does not.
That's a hard reality that will make life easier once you look it in the face, internalize it, and learn to work with it. A marriage does not have to fit any of society's ideals for it in order to be a good one for the individuals involved. Nobody else has to be pleased by it or even understand it. Biographers disagree violently about Lewe's treatment of George Eliot, but there's no reason to think she could have had a career at all in a different relationship. Louisa May Alcott was almost certainly correct in her estimation of how her life would have been harder with a husband; but she might have lived longer and enjoyed it more had she taken a wife! (I'm not making assumptions about her sexuality here; she had the role of Victorian husband vis-a-vis her "pathetic family," and might well have benefited from somebody, of any sex, to take the role of Victorian wife to her.)
Ideally, modern marriage is supposed to be an equal partnership. In reality, it's hard to see how things balance out in any given case and most marriages look lopsided at one point or another. No one can be married for 23 years and not accumulate reasons for divorce. Damon has reasons to divorce me and I have reasons to divorce him; these are nobody's business unless we act on them, and we do not. From certain angles we look like the ideal couple. From certain others, we look impossible, but which one of us is accumulating debts to the other that can never be repaid depends on where you put your emphasis. Fortunately, love is not a market economy.
And the bottom line for me is that he gave me a context in which I wrote and published 12 middle-grade novels, and which eventually allowed me to quit the soul-sucking day job.
Good, and good enough. Happy anniversary to us.
If you look at literary marriages through history, it's not hard to see how important it is. Sometimes (especially reading the biographies of the Romantics) it seems that writers are simply horrible spouses; other times (especially reading the biographies of female writers) it seems that ghastly marriages drive writers.
How many Victorian women took up the pen because their husbands couldn't or wouldn't provide for the family, and no other respectable occupation was open to them? Charlotte Bronte never published a word after she married Mr. Bell. Elizabeth Barrett's only major work after she married Browning was Sonnets from the Portuguese. (Which, okay, is a major major work!) Louisa May Alcott foreswore marriage; Jane Austen opted out of it, and we have to wonder if she'd have produced her six so-nearly-perfect novels if she hadn't. E. Nesbit wrote her influential and diverse body of work in the context of a chaotic marriage to a man who carried on an affair with another women in the same house as his wife. (Nesbit adopted the children of this liasion!) George Eliot defied convention to live with a married man in what today would be a conventional second marriage but in those days cut her off from polite society.
Robert Louis Stevenson's peripatetic lifestyle included a supportive, hard-working, strong-willed wife who was slowly going mad and with whom he often got into a mutually self-destructive loop of bad behavior. (I'm supposed to stop smoking for my lungs but you're supposed to eat fewer sweets. You had cake so I get a cigarette, so there.) Thomas Carlyle's wife Jane died a virgin. Dickens regretted his marriage and used it for literary fodder, trying to work out on paper acceptable roads through the minefield of duty, love, happiness, and gender roles and never finding his way.
And then there's Leonard and Virginia Woolf; he set aside his writing career for her's in a reversal of traditional sex roles (possibly predicated on a realistic judgment of their relative talent; but we'll never know now, will we?). Tolkien wrote against a cozy domestic background of wife and young 'uns and steady paid employment, which ate up time and forced creative writing into late nights and leisure hours. C.S. Lewis's domestic arrangements are far more fraught and mysterious than anything else in his life - what was his relationship with Mrs. Moore, exactly? Is it possible for an outsider to see through the romanticism and sentimentality of Shadowlands to the reality of his marriage to Joy? And how does that interact with his strictures on marriage in his apologetics or his portrayal of women and sex in Narnia, the Space Trilogy, and (what I consider the best but least read of his books) Till We Have Faces? Could Charles Dodgson have become Lewis Carroll if he'd married, and would we be as obsessed with figuring out his sexual proclivities today?
The most straightforwardly beneficial marriages I can think of off the top of my head are same-sex pairings - Gertrude Stein/Alice B. Toklas, and Christopher Isherwood/Don Bachardy. But the biographies of Margaret Wise Brown, W.H. Auden, and other homoerotic luminaries will demonstrate that this is an artifact of my sampling method and that the complexities of the literary marriage are amplified by the addition of societal disapproval, legal restrictions, and the peculiar public morality that makes the cruel hoax of bearding more socially acceptable than honest living.
For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer - who you marry will affect what you write, when you write, how you write. I recommend that every writer who is contemplating marriage read a few biographies with that in mind, and consider how this person fits in with your writing life.
In my opinion, writing as a profession is sufficiently difficult that no one should even mess with it unless it's the most important thing in the world to them. Much, much, much casual and unpaid writing is worth doing; if you are satisfied by writing your church newsletter, the occasional poem in a little magazine, and posting fanfic, you are still writing and no one has the right to look down on you. The whole time and energy black hole with no promise of adequate compensation (not to speak of reward) of the write-revise-submit process is simply not worth it if you don't want publication and a place on the library shelf more than you want the other ways you can spend your time.
If that's who you are, marriage to someone who doesn't get that up front is not fair to anyone. A writer's spouse who is not as committed to the career as the writer is will kill the career, or kill the marriage - and is not to blame for that. Because if the career comes first for the writer - the marriage does not.
That's a hard reality that will make life easier once you look it in the face, internalize it, and learn to work with it. A marriage does not have to fit any of society's ideals for it in order to be a good one for the individuals involved. Nobody else has to be pleased by it or even understand it. Biographers disagree violently about Lewe's treatment of George Eliot, but there's no reason to think she could have had a career at all in a different relationship. Louisa May Alcott was almost certainly correct in her estimation of how her life would have been harder with a husband; but she might have lived longer and enjoyed it more had she taken a wife! (I'm not making assumptions about her sexuality here; she had the role of Victorian husband vis-a-vis her "pathetic family," and might well have benefited from somebody, of any sex, to take the role of Victorian wife to her.)
Ideally, modern marriage is supposed to be an equal partnership. In reality, it's hard to see how things balance out in any given case and most marriages look lopsided at one point or another. No one can be married for 23 years and not accumulate reasons for divorce. Damon has reasons to divorce me and I have reasons to divorce him; these are nobody's business unless we act on them, and we do not. From certain angles we look like the ideal couple. From certain others, we look impossible, but which one of us is accumulating debts to the other that can never be repaid depends on where you put your emphasis. Fortunately, love is not a market economy.
And the bottom line for me is that he gave me a context in which I wrote and published 12 middle-grade novels, and which eventually allowed me to quit the soul-sucking day job.
Good, and good enough. Happy anniversary to us.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The Long View
So anyway I was reading Agent Kristin's Pub Rants earlier this week, and one day she had one about the trends she was seeing in the her queries and the next day she had one about how, sure enough, she found one of those trends in the queries she was reading last thing before bed that very night. (Don't get into any aspect of literature professionally if you don't love it. It invades the lives of everyone who works with it in this all-pervasive way, so you're never not working. Maybe not the accountants, but everybody who deals with books as books is going to be working in their sleep, I promise you.) The comments on the first one are full of relief or agony, depending on whether the commenter has a manuscript that fits into one of the noted trends, and the comments on both talk about examples of the trends, how old they are, how bad it is to jump on a bandwagon and why, what to do when you were on the bandwagon before it ever started but no one believes you now, and so on.
It's obnoxious of me, but I want to pinch the commenters' little cheeks. Some of them are probably older than me, and write better, and will sell another book before I do; but talking about trends and fashions and what's new and what's classic and how things used to be different always makes me feel old. When people say they're tired of vampires and the market must be saturated by now, they've been so ubiquitous for the last couple of years, blaming it all on Ms. Meyer, it really is all I can do not to roll my eyes. I was thinking "Vampires must be about to trend out" during WorldCon 1997. (Which I attended walking uphill both ways after a breakfast of ice cold gravel. You think I'm linking to a Python sketch there; but click it and see!)
Vampires had a big mainstream hit in 1976 with Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, which I remember seeing read in my high school by the same girls who read bodice-rippers. The fashion was current enough and vampire tropes familiar enough for everyone to get the joke when James Howe started producing Bunnicula in 1979. Vampires rode the tide of the mainstream horror fad of the 80s; got big among the fen starting in the late 80s when my husband started accumulating vampire series; ran underground among teens with the Goth fashion in the 90s; invaded the romance/soft porn market with Laurel Hamilton in 1993, and thus was created the atmosphere in which Stephanie Meyer could make absurd amounts of money. You won't hear the names P.N. Elrod, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Jim Butcher, or Fred Saberhagen tossed around in most online discussions of the vampire bandwagon, but talk to serious vampire fans like Damon (who won't read Twilight and wants an abridged edition of Anita Blake in which four or five books have the sex scenes abstracted and are published as one slim all-story volume) and you'll see that the tradition has been developing right along under the mainstream's radar.
Bram Stoker's Dracula is often credited with beginning the connection of vampires with sex, but really John Polidori did that when he made Lord Ruthven a Byronic figure in The Vampyre (1819). Stoker's just the guy who took the sexy vampire mainstream. Take the long view like that, and it's much harder to get too excited about who's copying who, how long the trend will last, or how long it'll be possible to make money off of it.
Another of the trends mentioned, dead protagonists (as distinct from vamps) hadn't come to the notice of most of the commentors yet. Recentish examples I can think of off the top of my head: Neal Shusterman's brilliant Everlost (but Shusterman is usually more or less brilliant), Gabrielle Zevin's intriguing Elsewhere, and even my own The Ghost Sitter, though to be fair it has two protagonists and only one is dead. Some commenters traced the start of the fashion to The Lovely Bones (2002), but someone else compares that book unfavorably to Christopher Pike's Remember Me, 1989. I liked Lovely Bones, myself and don't see any need to force things into hierarchies; but that commentor is beginning to see the point. Only she doesn't go back nearly far enough. When I was in junior high my mother got me to read one of the few romances I've ever read: Tryst, by Elswyth Thane (1939), in which one of a pair of predestined lovers dies before he meets his soulmate but the romance carries on anyway.
The trope hit big once with The Amber Gods, by Harriett Elizabeth Prescott Spoffard, back in 1889. To be sure, it's more like The Sixth Sense the movie than The Lovely Bones the book, in that you aren't supposed to realize that the first-person narrator is dead until the realization hits you like a bucket of cold water in the last sentence of this warm, languorous, sun-drenched book. No one remembers it now, the prose style is hopelessly out of fashion, and only those, like me, who read voraciously and indiscriminately or, like the critic who brought it to my attention, systematically and historically, even know it existed. And this fate will befall Stephanie Meyers in time, and J.K. Rowling, and everyone else who makes huge money on trends.
It doesn't matter. We make a fetish of originality in our culture; but we don't know what it means or how to recognize it when we see it. I've seen Rowling extolled as a ground-breaker in children's literature (no, no, no - she wouldn't claim that for herself) and Shakespeare derided as a plagiarist (so what if he stormed folklore, history, and the classics for plots? Who doesn't?) and all you have to do is read a little outside a narrow window to see that it's all nonsense.
Back in the 70s, the "blank books" fashion started. Nowadays they're all hardbound journals, often better bound than real books, but in those days they were plastic comb bound with slick dustcovers and titles like "Some Incredibly Important Trivia." When I was satisfied with my verse (I hesitate to call it poetry these days) I'd copy it into one. The dustcovers had quotes on the flaps, formatted like blurbs: "I wouldn't care who wrote the laws if I could write the ballads" -- Thomas Jefferson; and "Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself" - James Stephens. I'm still not sure who James Stephens is, after googling it, but I expect he's someone to do with Virginia (Stephens) Woolf. Whatever, it's the best advice I ever got.
You can't control trends. You can't predict them. You can't worry about them. And if you don't limit your reading to the tiny narrow window of your lifetime, if you read broadly and deeply and alertly, you'll soon find that you relax about it all. The well of creativity is drawn from a deep, broad aquifer of experience and culture, most of it held in common. Of course trends emerge. Of course we are inspired by each other and draw from similar sources and get family resemblances among works.
What we read, we think about; what we think about, we write. The more vampire books there are the more vampire books there will be; because if you read a vampire book and like it, you'll get an idea for a vampire book. It's inevitable. So it's important to read the kind of thing you want to write. If you want to write children's books, read children's books. If you want to write fantasy, read fantasy. Stop worrying about what everybody else is doing. Stay aware of it, but stop worrying about it.
It's not easy to keep up the current publishing in any field, heaven knows, and we should be aware of what's out there. That's why agents post about what they're seeing a lot of. But stressing about it is counter productive. So take the long view and get back to work.
This, too, shall pass away.
It's obnoxious of me, but I want to pinch the commenters' little cheeks. Some of them are probably older than me, and write better, and will sell another book before I do; but talking about trends and fashions and what's new and what's classic and how things used to be different always makes me feel old. When people say they're tired of vampires and the market must be saturated by now, they've been so ubiquitous for the last couple of years, blaming it all on Ms. Meyer, it really is all I can do not to roll my eyes. I was thinking "Vampires must be about to trend out" during WorldCon 1997. (Which I attended walking uphill both ways after a breakfast of ice cold gravel. You think I'm linking to a Python sketch there; but click it and see!)
Vampires had a big mainstream hit in 1976 with Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, which I remember seeing read in my high school by the same girls who read bodice-rippers. The fashion was current enough and vampire tropes familiar enough for everyone to get the joke when James Howe started producing Bunnicula in 1979. Vampires rode the tide of the mainstream horror fad of the 80s; got big among the fen starting in the late 80s when my husband started accumulating vampire series; ran underground among teens with the Goth fashion in the 90s; invaded the romance/soft porn market with Laurel Hamilton in 1993, and thus was created the atmosphere in which Stephanie Meyer could make absurd amounts of money. You won't hear the names P.N. Elrod, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Jim Butcher, or Fred Saberhagen tossed around in most online discussions of the vampire bandwagon, but talk to serious vampire fans like Damon (who won't read Twilight and wants an abridged edition of Anita Blake in which four or five books have the sex scenes abstracted and are published as one slim all-story volume) and you'll see that the tradition has been developing right along under the mainstream's radar.
Bram Stoker's Dracula is often credited with beginning the connection of vampires with sex, but really John Polidori did that when he made Lord Ruthven a Byronic figure in The Vampyre (1819). Stoker's just the guy who took the sexy vampire mainstream. Take the long view like that, and it's much harder to get too excited about who's copying who, how long the trend will last, or how long it'll be possible to make money off of it.
Another of the trends mentioned, dead protagonists (as distinct from vamps) hadn't come to the notice of most of the commentors yet. Recentish examples I can think of off the top of my head: Neal Shusterman's brilliant Everlost (but Shusterman is usually more or less brilliant), Gabrielle Zevin's intriguing Elsewhere, and even my own The Ghost Sitter, though to be fair it has two protagonists and only one is dead. Some commenters traced the start of the fashion to The Lovely Bones (2002), but someone else compares that book unfavorably to Christopher Pike's Remember Me, 1989. I liked Lovely Bones, myself and don't see any need to force things into hierarchies; but that commentor is beginning to see the point. Only she doesn't go back nearly far enough. When I was in junior high my mother got me to read one of the few romances I've ever read: Tryst, by Elswyth Thane (1939), in which one of a pair of predestined lovers dies before he meets his soulmate but the romance carries on anyway.
The trope hit big once with The Amber Gods, by Harriett Elizabeth Prescott Spoffard, back in 1889. To be sure, it's more like The Sixth Sense the movie than The Lovely Bones the book, in that you aren't supposed to realize that the first-person narrator is dead until the realization hits you like a bucket of cold water in the last sentence of this warm, languorous, sun-drenched book. No one remembers it now, the prose style is hopelessly out of fashion, and only those, like me, who read voraciously and indiscriminately or, like the critic who brought it to my attention, systematically and historically, even know it existed. And this fate will befall Stephanie Meyers in time, and J.K. Rowling, and everyone else who makes huge money on trends.
It doesn't matter. We make a fetish of originality in our culture; but we don't know what it means or how to recognize it when we see it. I've seen Rowling extolled as a ground-breaker in children's literature (no, no, no - she wouldn't claim that for herself) and Shakespeare derided as a plagiarist (so what if he stormed folklore, history, and the classics for plots? Who doesn't?) and all you have to do is read a little outside a narrow window to see that it's all nonsense.
Back in the 70s, the "blank books" fashion started. Nowadays they're all hardbound journals, often better bound than real books, but in those days they were plastic comb bound with slick dustcovers and titles like "Some Incredibly Important Trivia." When I was satisfied with my verse (I hesitate to call it poetry these days) I'd copy it into one. The dustcovers had quotes on the flaps, formatted like blurbs: "I wouldn't care who wrote the laws if I could write the ballads" -- Thomas Jefferson; and "Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself" - James Stephens. I'm still not sure who James Stephens is, after googling it, but I expect he's someone to do with Virginia (Stephens) Woolf. Whatever, it's the best advice I ever got.
You can't control trends. You can't predict them. You can't worry about them. And if you don't limit your reading to the tiny narrow window of your lifetime, if you read broadly and deeply and alertly, you'll soon find that you relax about it all. The well of creativity is drawn from a deep, broad aquifer of experience and culture, most of it held in common. Of course trends emerge. Of course we are inspired by each other and draw from similar sources and get family resemblances among works.
What we read, we think about; what we think about, we write. The more vampire books there are the more vampire books there will be; because if you read a vampire book and like it, you'll get an idea for a vampire book. It's inevitable. So it's important to read the kind of thing you want to write. If you want to write children's books, read children's books. If you want to write fantasy, read fantasy. Stop worrying about what everybody else is doing. Stay aware of it, but stop worrying about it.
It's not easy to keep up the current publishing in any field, heaven knows, and we should be aware of what's out there. That's why agents post about what they're seeing a lot of. But stressing about it is counter productive. So take the long view and get back to work.
This, too, shall pass away.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Filling in the Blanks: An Idea Garage Sale Interlude
It is a truth not at all universally acknowledged that scientists and historians, when interpreting data, are making stories every bit as much as novelists are.
The big difference between a theory or hypothesis and a story is that a story is entitled to bridge gaps and fill in story holes with invention; whereas the most a theory or hypothesis is allowed to do is to point out a hole and offer suggestions for where to look and what to do in order to fill it. If these suggestions are investigated and pan out, this is called "successful prediction" and the hypothesis is strengthened; if investigation contradicts the hypothesis, the hypothesis is discarded or changed, as appropriate.
A fiction writer can, up to a certain point, change her story to accommodate new information, too, but once she's published she's locked in for the duration. Jean Auel, for example, is now stuck with inarticulate Neanderthals even though evidence uncovered since the first publication of Clan of the Cave Bear indicates that they would have had a full range of phonics available to them.
I do not, at the moment, have all the available data behind the site of the dig just completed at the Old Alsatian Steakhouse site in Castroville, but based on the data I have - consisting of local tradition, US Army reports, and the parts of the dig I witnessed - this is what went down.
In April of 1861, due to the secession of Texas from the Union, all units of the US Army were recalled from the frontier. Ben McCulloch, with dubious authority, corralled General Twiggs of the San Antonio garrison and persuaded him to surrender. His men were variously imprisoned or inducted into the Confederate Army (more or less) and their equipment confiscated. When Robert E. Lee came through town on his way to report to Washington, McCulloch demanded his surrender, too, but Lee declared that, though he had not yet decided where his duty lay, he knew he owned none to "any rebel government of Texas" and refused. His luggage was confiscated, and was still in San Antonio when the war ended.
The garrisons of the distant frontier forts Quitman, Davis, and Bliss were still en route to civilization in early May. When they reached Castroville - which, despite the presence of a castle of the Knights of the Golden Circle, voted overwhelmingly against secession - they were warned of a force being sent out to meet them from San Antonio. The force arrayed against them was variously reported as somewhere between 1500 and 1700 (the offical count was 1370) and included cavalry and artillery to the tune of six field pieces. The full force of the US Army at the time of leaving the frontier was 320, including 12 musicians. The meeting of these two forces at San Lucas Springs 15 miles west of San Antonio on May 9 was not so much a battle as a surrender, since by then the Union force had been reduced to 270 by "sickness, desertion, and stragglers...who remained at Castroville from drunkenness and other causes." (All this is according to the official report.)
At some point in the process of straggling and getting drunk in one of Castroville's 30+ liquor-providing establishments, some contingent of the US forces got into conversation with one of Karle family, Unionists who had recently purchased a property on the corner of Houston Square from the equally Unionist Widow Krust on condition that they build her a little house in the rear of the property and rent it to her at a dollar a year. Ben McCulloch was confiscating all the US Army-owned equipment he could get his hands on for the Confederacy. To prevent this, Mr. Karle offered his property as a dump site for anything the people he was talking to wished to get rid of. The soldiers took him up on this offer, unlimbered their trenching tools, and dug a deep, narrow pit on the east side of his smokehouse.
According to local story, these soldiers wished to take their chances heading north on their own, so they would have counted in the official report as deserters, though they were motivated by a desire to evade capture and report for duty with the nearest Union forces. Based on the number of mule bits found, all jumbled together, and the quantity of black leather, at least one of them was a mule driver. At least four people dumped their sabre belts, and one officer knew about the plan, because the leather holster of his sidearm wound up in the pit; though in the absence of an officer named in the report as a deserter I conclude that he gave the sidearm to one of the deserters, wished him well, and returned to his duty station. Mr. Karle donated some meat from the cookhouse (possibly fearing that the soldiers would break in and help themselves if he didn't), and they ate and drank as they dug, dozens of wine and beer bottles finding their way into the pit. Perhaps Mr. Karle, originally planning to do a kindness to one or two people, grew fearful as more men showed up - so many, and so drunk, and him with children in the house! An infection of fear spread through the soldiers as their alcohol intake increased, so that they dumped armloads of harness and belts willy-nilly till, perhaps, dawn approached. The soldiers covered the hole, but the disturbance of the ground was visible, so the Karles, along with Frau Krust, piled trash on top of it as the men lurched away.
The spot became the household's regular dumping spot for all manner of trash until garbage service was introduced in the 20th century. Once or twice, before the construction of Medina Dam upstream changed the flood zones, it was inundated. The cookhouse deteriorated and underwent repair, fences came and went, tenants came and went.
In the early 21st century, Ken Smith rented a portion of the property from Don Belcher, the current owner, for a restaurant, and undertook extensive renovations to the portion of the sprawling structure (comprised of four different houses) containing the restaurant space. Belcher agreed to the construction of a barbeque pit by the old cookhouse, and his son participated in part of the work. Belcher Jr. knew the trash pit contained interesting junk, as he had once found a US Army belt buckle out there, and worn it for some years. Sure enough, he and his fellow workers pulled out lots of bottles (some of which they smashed for the fun of it), belt buckles, a huge interlocking mass of mule bits, a leather holster, and another belt buckle, before Arlene Smith asked them to stop. As a member of the local historical society, she knew an archeological site when she saw one, but it took her most of a year to find an archeologist who was interested. At last she did, and the TAS field school was the result.
We never found what we most wanted - the insignia of the 8th infantry, which would have confirmed the identity of the people doing the dumping - unless it turned up in the last bucket of the last day, the one I was too dizzy to attend. Everything we found was consistent with the story I told here, but a number of different interpretations are also possible. Maybe the Karles didn't volunteer. Maybe they were intimidated by drunken ruffians intent on escape, or maybe the drunken ruffians dug the pit by night without consulting them, or maybe the drunks broke into the smokehouse and littered the property with their cast-offs, leaving the Karles to dig the pit in order to hide the material and avoid the condemnation of their few, but triumphant, secessionist neighbors. Maybe the material doesn't date from this period at all, though since Castroville was never a military station it's hard to match any other event with the distinctive army gear found. (All those mule bits!) Maybe there was more than one deposition of army gear, or it was moved to this location from another one at some point - with so many artifacts coming out of an unstratified pile of barbeque pit spoil, the available stratigraphy doesn't prove much.
As a novelist, I can pick a story and run with it. As a historian or scientist, I would have to acknowledge lots of alternative scenarios and try to suggest further action that could give us more information. In this case, a painstaking document search (including perusal of private sources from the time, such as letters and diaries) and digging up even more of the yard and or digging deeper are almost the only options.
If you go to the Old Alsatian (and I recommend it - they accommodate dietary restrictions and the food is wonderful) and ask Ken or Arlene or a random server, they will happily tell you their version of the above story, which will differ from mine in many respects because they are not me. They will also, with varying degrees of prompting, tell you another story, one the historians and archeologists won't, about the daughter of the Karle family who died in 1856 at the age of 16, was buried in the yard, and now haunts the dining patio. They might even tell you that the dig turned up part of her gravestone.
This last detail is not true. While moving the rock fence, field school members found a slab of native limestone with a broken edge and the numbers "56" carved into it, but the carving is far too casual for a gravestone and by 1856 the cemetery at Cross Hill was well-established. There would have been no reason for the good Catholic Karles (remember that rosary? And the property is cattycorner from the church) to bury a daughter in the yard.
Unless she was a suicide and the priest refused to bury her in sacred ground; as I thought, but did not say. I would never slander the memory of these people, whose family still live in the vicinity and of whom I have heard nothing negative, by openly positing such a thing. But if I were writing a story, and I weren't using Castroville but an analog small town, and I needed a grave in the yard - well, that would be different.
When telling a story, you do what's good for the story. Facts are useful servants but a bad master to a storyteller, and as long as that's clear in everyone's head, no harm is done. Nor should we blame the Smiths if the stories they tell their patrons polish the rough edges and fill in the holes of the messy, incomplete truth. A historic restaurant without a ghost, especially in an area with a high tourist traffic, is at a commercial disadvantage; and one with a ghost moving bottles or appearing as an apparition without any explanatory tale attached is not much better off.
Stories. We all make them, and we all use approximately the same methods to do so, whether as historians, as novelists, or as contributors to the oral tradition. The difference lies in the use to which we put the stories and the degree to which we lock them into final form. History and the oral tradition are fluid and can be adjusted with the discovery of new facts or (in the case of oral tradition) new motives in telling the tale. Only fiction has a point at which it is locked in; in which case, you'd better tell it well enough that the audience that now has better information is willing to set that information aside and believe in your story for the time it takes to read it.
The big difference between a theory or hypothesis and a story is that a story is entitled to bridge gaps and fill in story holes with invention; whereas the most a theory or hypothesis is allowed to do is to point out a hole and offer suggestions for where to look and what to do in order to fill it. If these suggestions are investigated and pan out, this is called "successful prediction" and the hypothesis is strengthened; if investigation contradicts the hypothesis, the hypothesis is discarded or changed, as appropriate.
A fiction writer can, up to a certain point, change her story to accommodate new information, too, but once she's published she's locked in for the duration. Jean Auel, for example, is now stuck with inarticulate Neanderthals even though evidence uncovered since the first publication of Clan of the Cave Bear indicates that they would have had a full range of phonics available to them.
I do not, at the moment, have all the available data behind the site of the dig just completed at the Old Alsatian Steakhouse site in Castroville, but based on the data I have - consisting of local tradition, US Army reports, and the parts of the dig I witnessed - this is what went down.
In April of 1861, due to the secession of Texas from the Union, all units of the US Army were recalled from the frontier. Ben McCulloch, with dubious authority, corralled General Twiggs of the San Antonio garrison and persuaded him to surrender. His men were variously imprisoned or inducted into the Confederate Army (more or less) and their equipment confiscated. When Robert E. Lee came through town on his way to report to Washington, McCulloch demanded his surrender, too, but Lee declared that, though he had not yet decided where his duty lay, he knew he owned none to "any rebel government of Texas" and refused. His luggage was confiscated, and was still in San Antonio when the war ended.
The garrisons of the distant frontier forts Quitman, Davis, and Bliss were still en route to civilization in early May. When they reached Castroville - which, despite the presence of a castle of the Knights of the Golden Circle, voted overwhelmingly against secession - they were warned of a force being sent out to meet them from San Antonio. The force arrayed against them was variously reported as somewhere between 1500 and 1700 (the offical count was 1370) and included cavalry and artillery to the tune of six field pieces. The full force of the US Army at the time of leaving the frontier was 320, including 12 musicians. The meeting of these two forces at San Lucas Springs 15 miles west of San Antonio on May 9 was not so much a battle as a surrender, since by then the Union force had been reduced to 270 by "sickness, desertion, and stragglers...who remained at Castroville from drunkenness and other causes." (All this is according to the official report.)
At some point in the process of straggling and getting drunk in one of Castroville's 30+ liquor-providing establishments, some contingent of the US forces got into conversation with one of Karle family, Unionists who had recently purchased a property on the corner of Houston Square from the equally Unionist Widow Krust on condition that they build her a little house in the rear of the property and rent it to her at a dollar a year. Ben McCulloch was confiscating all the US Army-owned equipment he could get his hands on for the Confederacy. To prevent this, Mr. Karle offered his property as a dump site for anything the people he was talking to wished to get rid of. The soldiers took him up on this offer, unlimbered their trenching tools, and dug a deep, narrow pit on the east side of his smokehouse.
According to local story, these soldiers wished to take their chances heading north on their own, so they would have counted in the official report as deserters, though they were motivated by a desire to evade capture and report for duty with the nearest Union forces. Based on the number of mule bits found, all jumbled together, and the quantity of black leather, at least one of them was a mule driver. At least four people dumped their sabre belts, and one officer knew about the plan, because the leather holster of his sidearm wound up in the pit; though in the absence of an officer named in the report as a deserter I conclude that he gave the sidearm to one of the deserters, wished him well, and returned to his duty station. Mr. Karle donated some meat from the cookhouse (possibly fearing that the soldiers would break in and help themselves if he didn't), and they ate and drank as they dug, dozens of wine and beer bottles finding their way into the pit. Perhaps Mr. Karle, originally planning to do a kindness to one or two people, grew fearful as more men showed up - so many, and so drunk, and him with children in the house! An infection of fear spread through the soldiers as their alcohol intake increased, so that they dumped armloads of harness and belts willy-nilly till, perhaps, dawn approached. The soldiers covered the hole, but the disturbance of the ground was visible, so the Karles, along with Frau Krust, piled trash on top of it as the men lurched away.
The spot became the household's regular dumping spot for all manner of trash until garbage service was introduced in the 20th century. Once or twice, before the construction of Medina Dam upstream changed the flood zones, it was inundated. The cookhouse deteriorated and underwent repair, fences came and went, tenants came and went.
In the early 21st century, Ken Smith rented a portion of the property from Don Belcher, the current owner, for a restaurant, and undertook extensive renovations to the portion of the sprawling structure (comprised of four different houses) containing the restaurant space. Belcher agreed to the construction of a barbeque pit by the old cookhouse, and his son participated in part of the work. Belcher Jr. knew the trash pit contained interesting junk, as he had once found a US Army belt buckle out there, and worn it for some years. Sure enough, he and his fellow workers pulled out lots of bottles (some of which they smashed for the fun of it), belt buckles, a huge interlocking mass of mule bits, a leather holster, and another belt buckle, before Arlene Smith asked them to stop. As a member of the local historical society, she knew an archeological site when she saw one, but it took her most of a year to find an archeologist who was interested. At last she did, and the TAS field school was the result.
We never found what we most wanted - the insignia of the 8th infantry, which would have confirmed the identity of the people doing the dumping - unless it turned up in the last bucket of the last day, the one I was too dizzy to attend. Everything we found was consistent with the story I told here, but a number of different interpretations are also possible. Maybe the Karles didn't volunteer. Maybe they were intimidated by drunken ruffians intent on escape, or maybe the drunken ruffians dug the pit by night without consulting them, or maybe the drunks broke into the smokehouse and littered the property with their cast-offs, leaving the Karles to dig the pit in order to hide the material and avoid the condemnation of their few, but triumphant, secessionist neighbors. Maybe the material doesn't date from this period at all, though since Castroville was never a military station it's hard to match any other event with the distinctive army gear found. (All those mule bits!) Maybe there was more than one deposition of army gear, or it was moved to this location from another one at some point - with so many artifacts coming out of an unstratified pile of barbeque pit spoil, the available stratigraphy doesn't prove much.
As a novelist, I can pick a story and run with it. As a historian or scientist, I would have to acknowledge lots of alternative scenarios and try to suggest further action that could give us more information. In this case, a painstaking document search (including perusal of private sources from the time, such as letters and diaries) and digging up even more of the yard and or digging deeper are almost the only options.
If you go to the Old Alsatian (and I recommend it - they accommodate dietary restrictions and the food is wonderful) and ask Ken or Arlene or a random server, they will happily tell you their version of the above story, which will differ from mine in many respects because they are not me. They will also, with varying degrees of prompting, tell you another story, one the historians and archeologists won't, about the daughter of the Karle family who died in 1856 at the age of 16, was buried in the yard, and now haunts the dining patio. They might even tell you that the dig turned up part of her gravestone.
This last detail is not true. While moving the rock fence, field school members found a slab of native limestone with a broken edge and the numbers "56" carved into it, but the carving is far too casual for a gravestone and by 1856 the cemetery at Cross Hill was well-established. There would have been no reason for the good Catholic Karles (remember that rosary? And the property is cattycorner from the church) to bury a daughter in the yard.
Unless she was a suicide and the priest refused to bury her in sacred ground; as I thought, but did not say. I would never slander the memory of these people, whose family still live in the vicinity and of whom I have heard nothing negative, by openly positing such a thing. But if I were writing a story, and I weren't using Castroville but an analog small town, and I needed a grave in the yard - well, that would be different.
When telling a story, you do what's good for the story. Facts are useful servants but a bad master to a storyteller, and as long as that's clear in everyone's head, no harm is done. Nor should we blame the Smiths if the stories they tell their patrons polish the rough edges and fill in the holes of the messy, incomplete truth. A historic restaurant without a ghost, especially in an area with a high tourist traffic, is at a commercial disadvantage; and one with a ghost moving bottles or appearing as an apparition without any explanatory tale attached is not much better off.
Stories. We all make them, and we all use approximately the same methods to do so, whether as historians, as novelists, or as contributors to the oral tradition. The difference lies in the use to which we put the stories and the degree to which we lock them into final form. History and the oral tradition are fluid and can be adjusted with the discovery of new facts or (in the case of oral tradition) new motives in telling the tale. Only fiction has a point at which it is locked in; in which case, you'd better tell it well enough that the audience that now has better information is willing to set that information aside and believe in your story for the time it takes to read it.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Location Scout #2: Medina County
Almost as soon as I get past the shadow of the I-35 heading south and west of downtown I begin to feel the sky opening up into the South Texas plain. It's hard to judge how far west the city extended in the days I'm thinking of. It's tempting to cut off the town at the present interstate highways running down either side of it, 10/35 on the west and 37 on the east. Mauermann's map encourages me to do so, extending only as far as Pecan in the east and with Laredo the last named street to the west; but since historically these areas are the "black" and "Mexican" parts of town, respectively, and since numerous important sites are indicated off the edges of the map, I'm disinclined to take it at face value. The area west of San Fernando, per one source, was called "Laredito" during the relevant period; and west of Laredo Mauermann shows two distinct streets (modern Santa Rosa and San Saba, I think), numerous tracks, clusters of buildings, the "Dutch windmill," and the plain where Gen. Sheridan reviewed troops. My 1852 plat map also lays out much of the area inside modern Loop 410, with small townlots not giving way to larger lots till west of Alazan Creek. My impression is that the town became less townlike and more villagelike out this way, and that I should mentally replace the present lively cultural life represented by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and the giant votive candle with an equally lively suburban life of market gardens, jacales, and a working class that (if we may believe all the accounts of nightly fandangos from this period) also knew how to party hard.
Anyway, I was going somewhere with this, and that's Castroville. The Old Castroville Road loses its identity and merges with U.S. Hwy. 90 at Callaghan Road, within site of Wilford Hall, the tallest portion of Lackland AFB, and it doesn't take long after that to feel that you've "left town." The south side doesn't sprawl nearly as much as the north side (which is a shame, because there's less aquifer to interfere with out there) and though technically you're not out of town till you pass 1604, functionally the border is still 410. This is rolling prairie, not rolling hills, and its beauties require a more trained and subtle eye willing to see a good long way. I like it, myself. The flowers were overwhelmingly yellow and the sky was overwhelmingly blue.
Although technically Castroville was an information stop to get local maps and information to assist me in getting as close as possible to the old Mormon settlement shown on my mid-19th-century county map, I spent a lot more time there than I meant to. Medina County presents a more diffuse historical presence to the visitor than Bandera did - not that local history isn't being done, or that tourist interest is not sought, but that it has no central depository and no single figure that automatically draws the eye. The online presence is negligible, and has no central building. I've received no reply from the first e-mail I sent and the Chamber of Commerce had no contact information to give me. The historical walking tour is on my List of Things to Do, and if I spent too long at Koenig Park blame the barred owls (two of them!) that all by themselves made the day worthwhile. The librarian with the son in Mico and the Chamber of Commerce maps agreed that getting around the west side of Lake Medina was not practical, but were a big help in sorting out what series of county roads to follow.
To approximate the route to the Mormon settlement, take 471 north from Castroville. This is open prairie, with a fringe of hills cutting off the far distance to the west. At Rio Medina, turn west to cross the river on 2676. This bend is shown clearly on the 19th-century map and I presume the river at this point is fordable, but the bridge feels so high above the river and I had already spent so much more time than I intended that I didn't get a good look at. I did not stop in Rio Medina on the way up; and on the way back the "lady who knows," Bonnie Jaks, wasn't at the general store, so I'm still not sure whether Len would meet any real people on her way through here; however, I'll find out.
The Medina River at this point is a boundary line - once across it, you're in the Hill Country. Turn north again at the first right turn you come to. This is CR 271 and will be your lifeline. The road is narrow, with a marge of wildflowers - Indian blanket mostly right now - and then cedar/live oak scrub with some mesquite. The open sky prairie is gone, and I'm afraid I didn't see as much as Len did, because Moby, unlike Len's faithful steed Bean, cannot be trusted not to go off the road while I'm figuring out what the understory plants are. If you want to stop you generally have to block a gate across a private drive or road or crush some wildflowers. The road winds more than it appears to on the map; and Mico is less obvious.
When the dam was constructed in 1912, it drowned not only the Mormon Settlement, but the road to it. As near as I can tell, present-day 151 was the Castroville Road down from Bandera; it vanishes on the north side of the lake now into a maze of private roads. Its nearest heirs on the south side of the lake are the complex, twisty network of 260, 264, and 271. In 1936, a historical marker for the settlement, under the name of "Mountain Valley" (not to be confused with modern Mountain Valley Ranch) was erected on the dam; however, Homeland Security has closed the dam and you can't see even the historical marker anymore. Although the marker claims the settlement was abandoned in 1858, I've seen other information indicating that it had people in it who needed relocating in 1912. The nice Mr. Wilburn I ran across in front of the Mico Volunteer Fire Department gave me the phone number of the man organizing the centenniel, so maybe I'll be able to find out! (Their web page calendar is blank, but their fund raising barbeque is Saturday, May 8th, so if you're in the neighborhood, consider showing up.)
I began to feel discouraged poking around back there. I ate lunch in a turnaround on CR 271 because all the lakefront recreational areas on the south side of the lake are privately owned. I only had $16 on me, and entrance fees based on the assumption that you and a carful of kids are going to hike, boat, fish, swim, picnic, and generally raise cain on the property all afternoon were too rich for my blood. What started out as a massive irrigation project has turned into a recreation lake and a flash point for property rights and public access disputes.
I don't blame the proprietors for my lowered mood. Everyone I spoke to was as friendly and helpful as I could wish. This isn't like the hotels on South Padre Island cutting the locals out of beachfront for the sake of rich tourists; or even the gated community syndrome of rich folks buying up all the pretty and shutting the riffraff out, though such people exist. Locals trying to support a rural lifestyle by making rural pursuits available to citydwellers would be fools to charge less than they can get or make exceptions for researchers who just need a quiet spot to eat trail mix and make notes on floral and faunal assemblages. The only state park on the lake is in Lakehills, on the Bandera County side of the lake, and as state parks go it's nothing to write home about, at least not when the water's down and, as I was, you're too tired to explore properly. (There was supposed to be a $10 use fee even there, but I didn't see anybody to pay, so I didn't.)
The discouragement was the result of a number of factors - frustration at not being able to peel back the present and see the past underneath; the balance-challenged prairie native's unease at having all her lines of sight cut off by graded roads, hills, and second-growth brush; and my natural afternoon crash. But I realized, sitting at a picnic table and wondering if the relief of getting into the water with the frolicking dogs would be worth the effort of finding a place to change into my suit, that my discouragement is a road into Len's head. She wouldn't be crossing this terrain alone (except for Bean) in the first place if she weren't in deepest black teen-age despair. So I thought about that for awhile, and made notes. Mountain Valley to her would feel like the Valley of Doom. And then, on the wind, the letters blowing into her hand, Di's voice in the silent paper; and the echoing directionless shots, and the vultures circling.
So I headed back the way I had come - it would have been shorter to go up to 16, but that wasn't the point of this trip, and I wanted to stop in Rio Medina. Along a stretch of 271, I had noticed different flowers among the Indian blankets, flowers I haven't seen anywhere else so far, of a deep wine color, and when I started coming to them again I stopped to take a closer look. They're poppy mallow, or wine cups. And as I studied them, and tried to decide if the drive I was blocking was ever used, I heard a deep "chup chup chup" across the road. So I crossed. And there they were. The vultures.
Black vultures, which are expanding their range and I suspect will have to be displaced by turkey vultures in the story. I didn't have my camera on me and they flew off, chup chup chup with their ponderous black wings, but first they told me clear as can be: the body's here, among the winecups. And Len, gathering as many of his daughter's scattered letters as she can, comes out of her own blackness to resume the duties of humanity, hard as they are.
I didn't take a picture because I know how it would turn out, the birds all flown, just an open space in the brush with a mesquite tree. It didn't look like this back then, anyway. Livestock has been run up here; people have tried to make their living off this land; it would have been a more open and a more mature vegetation and I'll have to do the best I can with it. Since that moment of certainty I've been awake half the night working out what problems this site solves and which new ones it creates. But I'm not going to argue with vultures.
Half a mile later a roadrunner let me see him scamper along the roadside. I project my feelings onto nature and give meaning to birds. The barred owls in the morning were a promise; the vultures fulfilled it; and the roadrunner confirmed it. Knowing that the birds didn't notice me and couldn't care less if I ever write a story or not doesn't change that. Meaning is a human construct.
Anyway, I was going somewhere with this, and that's Castroville. The Old Castroville Road loses its identity and merges with U.S. Hwy. 90 at Callaghan Road, within site of Wilford Hall, the tallest portion of Lackland AFB, and it doesn't take long after that to feel that you've "left town." The south side doesn't sprawl nearly as much as the north side (which is a shame, because there's less aquifer to interfere with out there) and though technically you're not out of town till you pass 1604, functionally the border is still 410. This is rolling prairie, not rolling hills, and its beauties require a more trained and subtle eye willing to see a good long way. I like it, myself. The flowers were overwhelmingly yellow and the sky was overwhelmingly blue.
Although technically Castroville was an information stop to get local maps and information to assist me in getting as close as possible to the old Mormon settlement shown on my mid-19th-century county map, I spent a lot more time there than I meant to. Medina County presents a more diffuse historical presence to the visitor than Bandera did - not that local history isn't being done, or that tourist interest is not sought, but that it has no central depository and no single figure that automatically draws the eye. The online presence is negligible, and has no central building. I've received no reply from the first e-mail I sent and the Chamber of Commerce had no contact information to give me. The historical walking tour is on my List of Things to Do, and if I spent too long at Koenig Park blame the barred owls (two of them!) that all by themselves made the day worthwhile. The librarian with the son in Mico and the Chamber of Commerce maps agreed that getting around the west side of Lake Medina was not practical, but were a big help in sorting out what series of county roads to follow.
To approximate the route to the Mormon settlement, take 471 north from Castroville. This is open prairie, with a fringe of hills cutting off the far distance to the west. At Rio Medina, turn west to cross the river on 2676. This bend is shown clearly on the 19th-century map and I presume the river at this point is fordable, but the bridge feels so high above the river and I had already spent so much more time than I intended that I didn't get a good look at. I did not stop in Rio Medina on the way up; and on the way back the "lady who knows," Bonnie Jaks, wasn't at the general store, so I'm still not sure whether Len would meet any real people on her way through here; however, I'll find out.
The Medina River at this point is a boundary line - once across it, you're in the Hill Country. Turn north again at the first right turn you come to. This is CR 271 and will be your lifeline. The road is narrow, with a marge of wildflowers - Indian blanket mostly right now - and then cedar/live oak scrub with some mesquite. The open sky prairie is gone, and I'm afraid I didn't see as much as Len did, because Moby, unlike Len's faithful steed Bean, cannot be trusted not to go off the road while I'm figuring out what the understory plants are. If you want to stop you generally have to block a gate across a private drive or road or crush some wildflowers. The road winds more than it appears to on the map; and Mico is less obvious.
When the dam was constructed in 1912, it drowned not only the Mormon Settlement, but the road to it. As near as I can tell, present-day 151 was the Castroville Road down from Bandera; it vanishes on the north side of the lake now into a maze of private roads. Its nearest heirs on the south side of the lake are the complex, twisty network of 260, 264, and 271. In 1936, a historical marker for the settlement, under the name of "Mountain Valley" (not to be confused with modern Mountain Valley Ranch) was erected on the dam; however, Homeland Security has closed the dam and you can't see even the historical marker anymore. Although the marker claims the settlement was abandoned in 1858, I've seen other information indicating that it had people in it who needed relocating in 1912. The nice Mr. Wilburn I ran across in front of the Mico Volunteer Fire Department gave me the phone number of the man organizing the centenniel, so maybe I'll be able to find out! (Their web page calendar is blank, but their fund raising barbeque is Saturday, May 8th, so if you're in the neighborhood, consider showing up.)
I began to feel discouraged poking around back there. I ate lunch in a turnaround on CR 271 because all the lakefront recreational areas on the south side of the lake are privately owned. I only had $16 on me, and entrance fees based on the assumption that you and a carful of kids are going to hike, boat, fish, swim, picnic, and generally raise cain on the property all afternoon were too rich for my blood. What started out as a massive irrigation project has turned into a recreation lake and a flash point for property rights and public access disputes.
I don't blame the proprietors for my lowered mood. Everyone I spoke to was as friendly and helpful as I could wish. This isn't like the hotels on South Padre Island cutting the locals out of beachfront for the sake of rich tourists; or even the gated community syndrome of rich folks buying up all the pretty and shutting the riffraff out, though such people exist. Locals trying to support a rural lifestyle by making rural pursuits available to citydwellers would be fools to charge less than they can get or make exceptions for researchers who just need a quiet spot to eat trail mix and make notes on floral and faunal assemblages. The only state park on the lake is in Lakehills, on the Bandera County side of the lake, and as state parks go it's nothing to write home about, at least not when the water's down and, as I was, you're too tired to explore properly. (There was supposed to be a $10 use fee even there, but I didn't see anybody to pay, so I didn't.)
The discouragement was the result of a number of factors - frustration at not being able to peel back the present and see the past underneath; the balance-challenged prairie native's unease at having all her lines of sight cut off by graded roads, hills, and second-growth brush; and my natural afternoon crash. But I realized, sitting at a picnic table and wondering if the relief of getting into the water with the frolicking dogs would be worth the effort of finding a place to change into my suit, that my discouragement is a road into Len's head. She wouldn't be crossing this terrain alone (except for Bean) in the first place if she weren't in deepest black teen-age despair. So I thought about that for awhile, and made notes. Mountain Valley to her would feel like the Valley of Doom. And then, on the wind, the letters blowing into her hand, Di's voice in the silent paper; and the echoing directionless shots, and the vultures circling.
So I headed back the way I had come - it would have been shorter to go up to 16, but that wasn't the point of this trip, and I wanted to stop in Rio Medina. Along a stretch of 271, I had noticed different flowers among the Indian blankets, flowers I haven't seen anywhere else so far, of a deep wine color, and when I started coming to them again I stopped to take a closer look. They're poppy mallow, or wine cups. And as I studied them, and tried to decide if the drive I was blocking was ever used, I heard a deep "chup chup chup" across the road. So I crossed. And there they were. The vultures.
Black vultures, which are expanding their range and I suspect will have to be displaced by turkey vultures in the story. I didn't have my camera on me and they flew off, chup chup chup with their ponderous black wings, but first they told me clear as can be: the body's here, among the winecups. And Len, gathering as many of his daughter's scattered letters as she can, comes out of her own blackness to resume the duties of humanity, hard as they are.
I didn't take a picture because I know how it would turn out, the birds all flown, just an open space in the brush with a mesquite tree. It didn't look like this back then, anyway. Livestock has been run up here; people have tried to make their living off this land; it would have been a more open and a more mature vegetation and I'll have to do the best I can with it. Since that moment of certainty I've been awake half the night working out what problems this site solves and which new ones it creates. But I'm not going to argue with vultures.
Half a mile later a roadrunner let me see him scamper along the roadside. I project my feelings onto nature and give meaning to birds. The barred owls in the morning were a promise; the vultures fulfilled it; and the roadrunner confirmed it. Knowing that the birds didn't notice me and couldn't care less if I ever write a story or not doesn't change that. Meaning is a human construct.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Idea Garage Sale Interlude: Clio Wants You!
The theoretical person out there in the blogosphere who's been reading all these excessively long posts and anticipating the next one probably thinks she knows what's coming today, more or less, and is wondering which of the tempting side trails I ran across in Bandera I'm going to wander down today. The romantic history of Annie Schickenden and her shawl? The action/adventure/spiritual journey of Policarpo Rodriguez? The time portal in the old house that would overlook the Medina River if the trees weren't in the way? The possibility for a thrilling detective series centering on a small-town museum docent?
Okay, that last one is close.
Tossing ideas out onto the ether for anybody to pick up if they want to is fun, but I'm under no illusion that anyone will ever use them for anything more than a writing exercise, and I thought now would be a good time to take a moment and address underlying processes for the benefit of a particular segment of the writing community.
Unless participation was limited in some way, every writing conference, class, or group I've ever attended, in person or online, has included a few examples of the tentative amateur; the person who is still wondering where ideas come from, who has a sense of a creative urge without any clear idea of what to do with it, and who has at best a vague notion of what constitutes The Writing Life, but is usually sure that there is a standard Writing Life to which they might aspire. They usually assume that they're supposed to be writing novels and that publication is the big shiny goal at the end of the road. They might be very young and experimenting with their self-image, or retired and looking to cultivate neglected talents; either way, they haven't yet grasped the amount of work involved and are usually still looking for the secret formula or the set of rules that will get them what they want.
Some of these people will become perpetual wannabes or drift away to some other hobby because they are interested in the trappings, not in writing itself. Most of the rest will knuckle down and join the mainstream of the profession - award winners, mid-list authors, bestsellers, and a strong substratum of people who, despite all the hard work, talent, dedication, and business savvy anyone could ask of them, never quite get where they want to go. Some will remain lifelong hobby writers, content to evade the agony of the publication search and write poetry for their grandchildren; some will become editors or agents or publicists instead; some will find their niche and set up shop there happily; some will die still floundering.
Of these outcomes, only perpetual wannabeism and floundering are truly bad outcomes; though those among us who produce publishable work, shop the hell out of it, and still can't land a contract may feel that I dismiss the frustration of their situation too easily. (I don't; but am defining this not as an "outcome" but as "process" - a new day may be around the corner for any of us, and that's why we keep stuff in the mail.) So the idea up for sale today is not a story idea per se, but a lifestyle one; a suggestion for those who know they have potential but don't know what it is.
History has a muse. It is as much an art as poetry or fiction; it uses many of the same mental muscles; it requires similar writing skills and benefits from similar creative talents; its roads also lead to publication; and Clio, the muse of history, works and plays well all her sisters. Her raw material is everywhere. Though the academic discipline of history dominates its expression, it has plenty of room for the avocational amateur. J. Marvin Hunter did not work out of a university, but his work is essential for anyone researching his particular area of Texas - like me - and both the museum and the Frontier Times magazine he founded made history accessible to laypeople.
The fact is that many of the urges that lead people into experimenting with writing can be satisfied by working on local history - or on geneology - or on weekend archeology - or on nature study - or on any kind of public outreach. And you stand an excellent chance of doing tangible good in the world by putting some energy into these tasks. A family historian in Germany, Ilse Wurster, found letters from a Texas branch of her family, and the book on which she collaborated with Texas relatives, Die Kettner Briefe/Die Kettner Letters turns out to contain the answers to questions concerning what happened in Fredericksburg during 1864 that I had resigned myself to never getting. Similar gaps might be filled in the history of New York City if anybody ever transcribes that diary. Consider the role played by the geneologist in the drama of Susan Taylor Brown's discovery of her father's second family - a drama which would never have begun if Susan hadn't challenged herself to write poetry in public on her blog, by the way.
You may think there's no such drama lurking in your mundane little town, or that the history of your area is thoroughly understood and has no hidden crannies; but you'd be wrong. Somewhere within fifty miles of you is an untranscribed diary; is a record that will connect two disparate people or events in a network of narrative; is an old person with memories about to be lost to the ages for lack of someone to ask questions; is an artifact or a fossil or a building that needs you to discover its importance. If you don't see these things, it's because you're not looking.
Once you've uncovered a true-life story, you have a lot of options - far more than the authors of fiction. Local history is the quintessential niche market. Depending on the nature of your material, you may see your name attached to a brochure published in association with the local newspaper or to a book with a major house. Certain small presses specialize in local-interest publications, and self-publishing should not be dismissed out of hand. Die Kettner Briefe is a Lulu.com publication, but the San Antonio Central Library has a copy for the Texana room. As a commercial venture it's a mug's game; but money is not the only way to measure success.
Maybe you're positive that this isn't enough for you. Maybe you know in your heart that "novelist" is what you need to be, what you will be - as soon as you find the story that presently eludes you. That's fine. What are you doing to hunt that idea down? Where are you looking? And what are you doing with your liesure time that will encourage it to come find you? If you're not writing anyway, why not volunteer at the old folks' home and encourage them to tell their stories? Why not take on the project the head of the local historical society can't get time for? Where do you think all those historical novels out there come from?
"Not a historical novelist!" You protest. "I want to write fantasy blockbusters!" Then you should be reading them; and you should have noticed how ubiquitous and tiresome the generic medieval fantasy world is, how exciting it feels to pick up a book like Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, or Lois McMaster Bujold's Sharing Knife and see something that resembles an American historical backdrop. Maybe you've noticed how much the history and folklore of Britain have informed British fantasy. I'll tell you a secret - your neighborhood has history and folklore too!
Or maybe you want to write a modern detective series. Count up in your head the number of mysteries you've read that incorporated some specialized subculture into their background, and in particular into the character of their detective. Wouldn't an amateur historian or a geneologist make a great amateur sleuth? And how would you write convincingly about that subculture if you weren't a part of it? Isn't there a lot of potential for nitty-gritty crime novels in the sordid scandals of your city's past? What about that story you used to scare each other with in high school, the one about the unsolved murder in that dark and spooky house? Is there any truth to that?
Nobody's going to hand you The Perfect Idea. You'll have to dig for it and be ready to know it when you find it. You may as well do something useful while looking for it.
And if in the process you find that your vocation isn't for writing, but for something else - that's a win for you, too.
Okay, that last one is close.
Tossing ideas out onto the ether for anybody to pick up if they want to is fun, but I'm under no illusion that anyone will ever use them for anything more than a writing exercise, and I thought now would be a good time to take a moment and address underlying processes for the benefit of a particular segment of the writing community.
Unless participation was limited in some way, every writing conference, class, or group I've ever attended, in person or online, has included a few examples of the tentative amateur; the person who is still wondering where ideas come from, who has a sense of a creative urge without any clear idea of what to do with it, and who has at best a vague notion of what constitutes The Writing Life, but is usually sure that there is a standard Writing Life to which they might aspire. They usually assume that they're supposed to be writing novels and that publication is the big shiny goal at the end of the road. They might be very young and experimenting with their self-image, or retired and looking to cultivate neglected talents; either way, they haven't yet grasped the amount of work involved and are usually still looking for the secret formula or the set of rules that will get them what they want.
Some of these people will become perpetual wannabes or drift away to some other hobby because they are interested in the trappings, not in writing itself. Most of the rest will knuckle down and join the mainstream of the profession - award winners, mid-list authors, bestsellers, and a strong substratum of people who, despite all the hard work, talent, dedication, and business savvy anyone could ask of them, never quite get where they want to go. Some will remain lifelong hobby writers, content to evade the agony of the publication search and write poetry for their grandchildren; some will become editors or agents or publicists instead; some will find their niche and set up shop there happily; some will die still floundering.
Of these outcomes, only perpetual wannabeism and floundering are truly bad outcomes; though those among us who produce publishable work, shop the hell out of it, and still can't land a contract may feel that I dismiss the frustration of their situation too easily. (I don't; but am defining this not as an "outcome" but as "process" - a new day may be around the corner for any of us, and that's why we keep stuff in the mail.) So the idea up for sale today is not a story idea per se, but a lifestyle one; a suggestion for those who know they have potential but don't know what it is.
History has a muse. It is as much an art as poetry or fiction; it uses many of the same mental muscles; it requires similar writing skills and benefits from similar creative talents; its roads also lead to publication; and Clio, the muse of history, works and plays well all her sisters. Her raw material is everywhere. Though the academic discipline of history dominates its expression, it has plenty of room for the avocational amateur. J. Marvin Hunter did not work out of a university, but his work is essential for anyone researching his particular area of Texas - like me - and both the museum and the Frontier Times magazine he founded made history accessible to laypeople.
The fact is that many of the urges that lead people into experimenting with writing can be satisfied by working on local history - or on geneology - or on weekend archeology - or on nature study - or on any kind of public outreach. And you stand an excellent chance of doing tangible good in the world by putting some energy into these tasks. A family historian in Germany, Ilse Wurster, found letters from a Texas branch of her family, and the book on which she collaborated with Texas relatives, Die Kettner Briefe/Die Kettner Letters turns out to contain the answers to questions concerning what happened in Fredericksburg during 1864 that I had resigned myself to never getting. Similar gaps might be filled in the history of New York City if anybody ever transcribes that diary. Consider the role played by the geneologist in the drama of Susan Taylor Brown's discovery of her father's second family - a drama which would never have begun if Susan hadn't challenged herself to write poetry in public on her blog, by the way.
You may think there's no such drama lurking in your mundane little town, or that the history of your area is thoroughly understood and has no hidden crannies; but you'd be wrong. Somewhere within fifty miles of you is an untranscribed diary; is a record that will connect two disparate people or events in a network of narrative; is an old person with memories about to be lost to the ages for lack of someone to ask questions; is an artifact or a fossil or a building that needs you to discover its importance. If you don't see these things, it's because you're not looking.
Once you've uncovered a true-life story, you have a lot of options - far more than the authors of fiction. Local history is the quintessential niche market. Depending on the nature of your material, you may see your name attached to a brochure published in association with the local newspaper or to a book with a major house. Certain small presses specialize in local-interest publications, and self-publishing should not be dismissed out of hand. Die Kettner Briefe is a Lulu.com publication, but the San Antonio Central Library has a copy for the Texana room. As a commercial venture it's a mug's game; but money is not the only way to measure success.
Maybe you're positive that this isn't enough for you. Maybe you know in your heart that "novelist" is what you need to be, what you will be - as soon as you find the story that presently eludes you. That's fine. What are you doing to hunt that idea down? Where are you looking? And what are you doing with your liesure time that will encourage it to come find you? If you're not writing anyway, why not volunteer at the old folks' home and encourage them to tell their stories? Why not take on the project the head of the local historical society can't get time for? Where do you think all those historical novels out there come from?
"Not a historical novelist!" You protest. "I want to write fantasy blockbusters!" Then you should be reading them; and you should have noticed how ubiquitous and tiresome the generic medieval fantasy world is, how exciting it feels to pick up a book like Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, or Lois McMaster Bujold's Sharing Knife and see something that resembles an American historical backdrop. Maybe you've noticed how much the history and folklore of Britain have informed British fantasy. I'll tell you a secret - your neighborhood has history and folklore too!
Or maybe you want to write a modern detective series. Count up in your head the number of mysteries you've read that incorporated some specialized subculture into their background, and in particular into the character of their detective. Wouldn't an amateur historian or a geneologist make a great amateur sleuth? And how would you write convincingly about that subculture if you weren't a part of it? Isn't there a lot of potential for nitty-gritty crime novels in the sordid scandals of your city's past? What about that story you used to scare each other with in high school, the one about the unsolved murder in that dark and spooky house? Is there any truth to that?
Nobody's going to hand you The Perfect Idea. You'll have to dig for it and be ready to know it when you find it. You may as well do something useful while looking for it.
And if in the process you find that your vocation isn't for writing, but for something else - that's a win for you, too.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Location Scout #1: Bandera
Mentally stripping away the changes wrought by the passage of time and the activities of humans is something I'm accustomed to doing by now, but there's no denying it's harder to do while driving than at any other time. So I pulled off onto the shoulder a couple of times, to birdwatch and make copious illegible notes (it'll be all right as long as I transcribe them soon enough) on soil characteristics, the succession of wildflowers, the smell of the air, insects and other fauna, and other things that my characters, picking their way down from the hills on horse and possibly camel-back, will have plenty of time to notice. I'll have to take care to remove some features - starlings and dandelions did not overrun the Texas countryside in 1864 - and add in others - the faunal assemblage would have been far more abundant, with butterflies rising at each step, and more diverse, including mustangs, bears, and panthers - but that's easy enough. The climate has also changed, but both 1863/64 and 2009/10 were unusually cold, long winters, and though we haven't had anything like the spring floods that hit the Hill Country and south Texas in late March 1864, I've been through enough floods to extrapolate.
From San Antonio proper to Helotes, the terrain beneath the asphalt and years of brush spread by domestic livestock and fire suppression is all open, rolling hills, at one time covered with rich nutritious mesquite grass and mottes of live oaks. Past Helotes, the Hill Country starts, high sculpted hills with cedar (as we call ash juniper) clinging to thin soil over limestone, cut by frequent creeks. The air, when you get far enough away from the internal combustion engine, has a distinct aroma, partly a generic "country" smell that anyone from Iowa would recognize, but with a spicy undertone that I don't think is the cedar, but might be. The term "spicy" is used by travel writers of the 19th century, too, so whatever generates it, it is native.
A picnic in Bandera's city park on the Medina River rewarded me with several cypresses plenty old enough to have been there when Len would have been. The bridge swallows in Bandera build rough pebbly nests not at all like the firm clay ones under San Antonio bridges, and I didn't see a single heron. Nor did I see any fish in the river, but one of the decaying cypresses had boards nailed on it that could most parsimoniously be explained as a seat for fishermen, and a dead alligator gar was washed up on a sandbank near the bridge, so I expect that was a function of the time of day.
The Frontier Times Museum has the virtues and the defects of the local museum. Founded as it was by J. Marvin Hunter, Bandera County's most dedicated historian and founding editor/publisher of Frontier Times, it is larger and more coherent than a lot of them, with a purpose-built building erected in 1930. History is literally built-in, with the fossil-studded central fireplace sporting a millwheel cemented into its mantelpiece: the very same millwheel that washed out of a mill on the Pedernales, that Mormon leader Lyman Wight saw in a vision and went out to retrieve. Not only that, but an Indian mano or grinding stone is inserted into the axle hole. Everybody in the county who had anything remotely interesting deposited it at the museum when they couldn't keep it anymore, from taxidermied animals to a huge collection of bells, from a comforter spun, dyed (with elderberries; a beautiful blue in a complex check pattern called "Snail Trail and Cat Track"), and woven at home to a shrunken head; from a Civil War era rag doll to a picture of John Wesley Hardin's corpse.
Therein, of course, lies the weakness; despite the general Western theme, a lot of "cabinet of curiosities" stuff (dressed fleas), exotic items, and personal-interest collections with little provenance are included. Not everything is labeled, and some of the labeling is inadequate, with "x number of years ago" and "very old" used instead of dates. The large collection of books is all under glass, which is just as well as most of them are falling apart; but that means if the title isn't clear and there's no label, or you can't tell which book a label refers to, you're out of luck. Still, it was possible to get a fair idea of what sort of books the pioneers of Bandera had available - lots of religious tracts, a tiny Iliad, Burns, McGuffey readers, arithmetic books developed in England and printed in New York, Luther Bibles and King James Bibles, Webster's Dictionary, a French book detailing the names, life stories, and associated flowers of each saint for each day of the year.
I saw first-issue Confederate money (I suspect that second issue money never made it as far as Bandera), shinplasters, and one-cent pieces from the 50s, but no Mexican gold or silver older than 1883. Oh, well, I can find books about that. Amasa Clark's camel-hair pillow is on display; so is the shawl which Annie Schickenden wore when she sang for the King and Queen of Prussia, and brought with her when she came to Texas in 1846. Where else would I see those?
I also brought in my Peterson and compared it to a taxidermy display of the birds of Mason County. (I guess there wasn't a Mason County museum when the person who stuffed these died and his grandchildren had to decide what to do with them; or maybe the taxidermist was a friend of Hunter's. You can't think to ask everything!) Now I know regional names for the lesser goldfinch (Mexican canary or Arkansas goldfinch), Bullock's oriole (Texas oriole), kestrel (blue darter sparrowhawk), and summer tanager (redbird). That Mexican canary answers a long-standing question. Wild-caught "canaries" used to be routinely sold in straw cages San Antonio markets, as pets, and I've always wondered what species this might be. So now I know!
Wonderful opportunities lie in the collection, as the staff will tell you. A diary sits in one case, written by some nameless person in New York in 1835-37. It was bought in an antique store in San Antonio in 1916, where it no doubt landed because it mentions the fall of the Alamo. I asked if it had ever been transcribed, and was told no, but not because they don't want it to be! Transcribing is hard, time-consuming work and volunteers can only do so much. If I ever write a story set in that time period, and no one has gotten to it, I may do it myself; until then, I can't spare the time from the rest of my life. She's hoping to lure a graduate student into the job.
The sole staff member on duty that day, whose name I'm afraid I never asked (she never asked mine either, but I don't think that makes us even because I doubt she's blogging about me), was extremely helpful. She took the rag doll, fragile as it was, out of its case to be photographed, and she knew where "the Slide-off" is - the hill where, do what they would, the shingle-makers who founded the town always lost the top of their load when they took their shingles in to San Antonio to sell. She also gave me directions to the oldest building in town, currently under renovation.
Huffmeyer's Store on Main claims to be the oldest, but it wasn't built until 1874, and a block beyond is 11th street, the actual first street in town. I took a picture of a real estate office which claimed to have been built in 1860 and operated as a home, store, school, and first bank in Bandera (banking was illegal in Texas until Reconstruction; this explains much of our economic history); but the oldest building in town stands at the corner of Cypress and 11th. It's a limestone building with a gallery, once covered with a coat of stucco, and currently in the revealing disarray of restoration. It looks to me as though its two rooms were built at two different times - the limestone blocks are different - and with the stucco mostly worn off and windows glassless you can see, even from the street, how the wooden frames were fitted and the windows arranged to catch the breeze. Across the street is a sharp drop-off into a lot full of trees and cedar waxwings; beyond that lot, I almost immediately came to the tourist cottages on the edge of the park where I picnicked. The builder chose the best spot in town - a view of what would have been the ford of the Medina, but well out of the flood plain. Our Texas summers would have been relieved by the position of the house and gallery relative to the prevailing breeze, while the northers would have been closed out with shutters and the thick stuccoed limestone blocks. Who needs central heat and air?
At the library, a beautiful well-designed building, they told me that the historical marker I'd failed to find as I came into town was Polly's Chapel, and it was well off the main road. I had turned back when I drove for a while on a road that got ever narrower, thinking I'd missed the marker and was heading into somebody's ranch; and they said you did feel that way getting there, and to just keep going. So on the way back I tried again.
If I had known in detail what the route was like, I probably wouldn't have gone; and wouldn't that have been a shame? If you are ever in the Bandera vicinity and want to visit Polly's Chapel, you should turn off at the Historical Marker sign, on Privilege Creek Road. Follow Privilege Creek Road, at 30 MPH or less, through all its many lane-and-a-half windings, being prepared to pull over and creep past any of the people who live back there on their way out. Be polite and wait your turn at the narrow bridge over Privilege Creek - watch for killdeer. Drive right on through the cattle guard at the sign that warns: "Loose livestock" and onto the gravel road. If you don't mind the dust you raise (the slower you go the less dust) this is a beautiful stretch of road, parallelling the creek, which at this point is lined on the opposite bank with steep limestone cliffs. The first fork you come to won't confuse you as it will have a sign saying "Polly's Chapel" pointing straight over the ford.
Yes, you will have to drive through Privilege Creek. Don't do this if the water is at all high! Moby has a low undercarriage, but we got through all right. On the other side you'll soon come to another cattle guard, and right past it there's another sign for the Chapel, pointing you to a two-rut road with a slight grade on one side and cedar and live oak scrub all around. If you meet somebody coming out, one of you will have to back up. That's all there is to it.
But the chapel clearing is beautiful and peaceful (except for the sound of destruction equipment beeping and roaring somewhere - the terrible thing is that the country is so beautiful, everybody wants to live there, but they can't live there without dragging the city after them), and the chapel itself is a tiny gem. Policarpo Rodriguez, one of the most interesting men to ever live in Bandera County, built it himself out of limestone blocks after he got religion of the Protestant kind in 1878. The date on the cornerstone is 1882, too late for me; but that's okay. It's in use today, with electricity, an acoustical tile ceiling, picnic tables, and a garden-shed-sized restroom building out back. Lots of tempting trails lead into the live oak/cedar brush, but I restrained myself and did a single circuit of the clearing. Most of the birds eluded me, as they always do in this sort of terrain; but that's all right. The birds are an excuse to go to places like this. One bird I thought was going to be a mocker showed me a head like a chickadee, then vanished, so that's my big birding mystery for the trip.
I saved one shot in the disposable camera (I'd have a digital one by now if I hadn't driven into that light pole) to take the view from the Slide-Off; but when I got there I didn't think it wise to stop. Another time, perhaps. After all, I might not even use this location.
Next week, if all goes well, I'll scout Medina County.
From San Antonio proper to Helotes, the terrain beneath the asphalt and years of brush spread by domestic livestock and fire suppression is all open, rolling hills, at one time covered with rich nutritious mesquite grass and mottes of live oaks. Past Helotes, the Hill Country starts, high sculpted hills with cedar (as we call ash juniper) clinging to thin soil over limestone, cut by frequent creeks. The air, when you get far enough away from the internal combustion engine, has a distinct aroma, partly a generic "country" smell that anyone from Iowa would recognize, but with a spicy undertone that I don't think is the cedar, but might be. The term "spicy" is used by travel writers of the 19th century, too, so whatever generates it, it is native.
A picnic in Bandera's city park on the Medina River rewarded me with several cypresses plenty old enough to have been there when Len would have been. The bridge swallows in Bandera build rough pebbly nests not at all like the firm clay ones under San Antonio bridges, and I didn't see a single heron. Nor did I see any fish in the river, but one of the decaying cypresses had boards nailed on it that could most parsimoniously be explained as a seat for fishermen, and a dead alligator gar was washed up on a sandbank near the bridge, so I expect that was a function of the time of day.
The Frontier Times Museum has the virtues and the defects of the local museum. Founded as it was by J. Marvin Hunter, Bandera County's most dedicated historian and founding editor/publisher of Frontier Times, it is larger and more coherent than a lot of them, with a purpose-built building erected in 1930. History is literally built-in, with the fossil-studded central fireplace sporting a millwheel cemented into its mantelpiece: the very same millwheel that washed out of a mill on the Pedernales, that Mormon leader Lyman Wight saw in a vision and went out to retrieve. Not only that, but an Indian mano or grinding stone is inserted into the axle hole. Everybody in the county who had anything remotely interesting deposited it at the museum when they couldn't keep it anymore, from taxidermied animals to a huge collection of bells, from a comforter spun, dyed (with elderberries; a beautiful blue in a complex check pattern called "Snail Trail and Cat Track"), and woven at home to a shrunken head; from a Civil War era rag doll to a picture of John Wesley Hardin's corpse.
Therein, of course, lies the weakness; despite the general Western theme, a lot of "cabinet of curiosities" stuff (dressed fleas), exotic items, and personal-interest collections with little provenance are included. Not everything is labeled, and some of the labeling is inadequate, with "x number of years ago" and "very old" used instead of dates. The large collection of books is all under glass, which is just as well as most of them are falling apart; but that means if the title isn't clear and there's no label, or you can't tell which book a label refers to, you're out of luck. Still, it was possible to get a fair idea of what sort of books the pioneers of Bandera had available - lots of religious tracts, a tiny Iliad, Burns, McGuffey readers, arithmetic books developed in England and printed in New York, Luther Bibles and King James Bibles, Webster's Dictionary, a French book detailing the names, life stories, and associated flowers of each saint for each day of the year.
I saw first-issue Confederate money (I suspect that second issue money never made it as far as Bandera), shinplasters, and one-cent pieces from the 50s, but no Mexican gold or silver older than 1883. Oh, well, I can find books about that. Amasa Clark's camel-hair pillow is on display; so is the shawl which Annie Schickenden wore when she sang for the King and Queen of Prussia, and brought with her when she came to Texas in 1846. Where else would I see those?
I also brought in my Peterson and compared it to a taxidermy display of the birds of Mason County. (I guess there wasn't a Mason County museum when the person who stuffed these died and his grandchildren had to decide what to do with them; or maybe the taxidermist was a friend of Hunter's. You can't think to ask everything!) Now I know regional names for the lesser goldfinch (Mexican canary or Arkansas goldfinch), Bullock's oriole (Texas oriole), kestrel (blue darter sparrowhawk), and summer tanager (redbird). That Mexican canary answers a long-standing question. Wild-caught "canaries" used to be routinely sold in straw cages San Antonio markets, as pets, and I've always wondered what species this might be. So now I know!
Wonderful opportunities lie in the collection, as the staff will tell you. A diary sits in one case, written by some nameless person in New York in 1835-37. It was bought in an antique store in San Antonio in 1916, where it no doubt landed because it mentions the fall of the Alamo. I asked if it had ever been transcribed, and was told no, but not because they don't want it to be! Transcribing is hard, time-consuming work and volunteers can only do so much. If I ever write a story set in that time period, and no one has gotten to it, I may do it myself; until then, I can't spare the time from the rest of my life. She's hoping to lure a graduate student into the job.
The sole staff member on duty that day, whose name I'm afraid I never asked (she never asked mine either, but I don't think that makes us even because I doubt she's blogging about me), was extremely helpful. She took the rag doll, fragile as it was, out of its case to be photographed, and she knew where "the Slide-off" is - the hill where, do what they would, the shingle-makers who founded the town always lost the top of their load when they took their shingles in to San Antonio to sell. She also gave me directions to the oldest building in town, currently under renovation.
Huffmeyer's Store on Main claims to be the oldest, but it wasn't built until 1874, and a block beyond is 11th street, the actual first street in town. I took a picture of a real estate office which claimed to have been built in 1860 and operated as a home, store, school, and first bank in Bandera (banking was illegal in Texas until Reconstruction; this explains much of our economic history); but the oldest building in town stands at the corner of Cypress and 11th. It's a limestone building with a gallery, once covered with a coat of stucco, and currently in the revealing disarray of restoration. It looks to me as though its two rooms were built at two different times - the limestone blocks are different - and with the stucco mostly worn off and windows glassless you can see, even from the street, how the wooden frames were fitted and the windows arranged to catch the breeze. Across the street is a sharp drop-off into a lot full of trees and cedar waxwings; beyond that lot, I almost immediately came to the tourist cottages on the edge of the park where I picnicked. The builder chose the best spot in town - a view of what would have been the ford of the Medina, but well out of the flood plain. Our Texas summers would have been relieved by the position of the house and gallery relative to the prevailing breeze, while the northers would have been closed out with shutters and the thick stuccoed limestone blocks. Who needs central heat and air?
At the library, a beautiful well-designed building, they told me that the historical marker I'd failed to find as I came into town was Polly's Chapel, and it was well off the main road. I had turned back when I drove for a while on a road that got ever narrower, thinking I'd missed the marker and was heading into somebody's ranch; and they said you did feel that way getting there, and to just keep going. So on the way back I tried again.
If I had known in detail what the route was like, I probably wouldn't have gone; and wouldn't that have been a shame? If you are ever in the Bandera vicinity and want to visit Polly's Chapel, you should turn off at the Historical Marker sign, on Privilege Creek Road. Follow Privilege Creek Road, at 30 MPH or less, through all its many lane-and-a-half windings, being prepared to pull over and creep past any of the people who live back there on their way out. Be polite and wait your turn at the narrow bridge over Privilege Creek - watch for killdeer. Drive right on through the cattle guard at the sign that warns: "Loose livestock" and onto the gravel road. If you don't mind the dust you raise (the slower you go the less dust) this is a beautiful stretch of road, parallelling the creek, which at this point is lined on the opposite bank with steep limestone cliffs. The first fork you come to won't confuse you as it will have a sign saying "Polly's Chapel" pointing straight over the ford.
Yes, you will have to drive through Privilege Creek. Don't do this if the water is at all high! Moby has a low undercarriage, but we got through all right. On the other side you'll soon come to another cattle guard, and right past it there's another sign for the Chapel, pointing you to a two-rut road with a slight grade on one side and cedar and live oak scrub all around. If you meet somebody coming out, one of you will have to back up. That's all there is to it.
But the chapel clearing is beautiful and peaceful (except for the sound of destruction equipment beeping and roaring somewhere - the terrible thing is that the country is so beautiful, everybody wants to live there, but they can't live there without dragging the city after them), and the chapel itself is a tiny gem. Policarpo Rodriguez, one of the most interesting men to ever live in Bandera County, built it himself out of limestone blocks after he got religion of the Protestant kind in 1878. The date on the cornerstone is 1882, too late for me; but that's okay. It's in use today, with electricity, an acoustical tile ceiling, picnic tables, and a garden-shed-sized restroom building out back. Lots of tempting trails lead into the live oak/cedar brush, but I restrained myself and did a single circuit of the clearing. Most of the birds eluded me, as they always do in this sort of terrain; but that's all right. The birds are an excuse to go to places like this. One bird I thought was going to be a mocker showed me a head like a chickadee, then vanished, so that's my big birding mystery for the trip.
I saved one shot in the disposable camera (I'd have a digital one by now if I hadn't driven into that light pole) to take the view from the Slide-Off; but when I got there I didn't think it wise to stop. Another time, perhaps. After all, I might not even use this location.
Next week, if all goes well, I'll scout Medina County.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Once more, into the breach
I'm mostly recovered now and trying to get focused on the next big phase of research: the Day Trip(s). (Though I also need to get some queries out again...sending queries is like sweeping; no matter how good a job you do, it'll need doing again.) I could research Civil War Texas for decades and not get done; but it's getting to be time to plot the story in detail and for that, I need to get away from the libraries and the computers and go out to look at things. The plot and the research are leading me inexorably toward Medina and Bandera counties as the necessary setting for certain crucial sequences; possibly, for the bulk of the book. I'd rather have it set in town, but some important things can't happen here.
I know that some people set books in places they've never set foot in, and for the life of me I can't understand how they do it. Maybe the left and right turns and the views from the heights and the particular quality of the light at certain times and seasons won't make it into the published book - but if I'm not anchored in all of that, I can't write the book at all.
I think this has its source in Air Force Bratism. Though, looking back on it, I didn't have as peripatetic a childhood as some people, at the time it felt like we moved a lot: the Rio Grande Valley where I was born, the San Antonio area, two places in Alaska, Iowa while my dad was in 'Nam, Maryland, and finally West Texas, before I came to San Antonio and felt like I was finally in a place I belonged. One of the methods my mom used to ease the transitions was to read up on an area before we moved there, and then to aggressively read the local literature when we arrived. We stopped and read historical markers, went to all the log cabins and pioneer villages and museums, toured the houses of local celebrities, and found out all the cool things there were to know. The better you know people and places, the better chance you have to love them; or at least to rub along with them in comfort.
So now I have to go look at Medina and Bandera counties. I'm trying to reduce the mileage Moby and I have to travel by hunting up local sources of information on the Civil War period beforehand, so I can make arrangements to view them, but it's uphill work. As I believe I've mentioned before, the Civil War was a sufficiently nasty time for community relationships in western Texas that nobody wanted to remember. Consider this quote from a postwar letter to a Northern cousin by a Castroville man:
If that doesn't say "interesting times," what does? But as for what specifically happened when, who robbed and murdered whom, and why - nothing to see here. Move along. I need to call Ms. Ludwig and see if she has anything more on the topic, but I'm not going to hold my breath. I suspect if she had more she'd have put it in.
The story occurs between Appommatox and the beginning of Reconstruction, so I need to get moving if I want to view the geography at the proper season. At the moment, I'm planning to drive out to Bandera one day next week, see the Frontier Times Museum and scout the geography, do a little birding and hope for a lucky break. If I get one, good. If I don't - well, I write the story anyway. Maybe I won't happen upon a piece of ground and realize: "Here, right here, she finds the body," or be told the local ghost story that ties in perfectly; but maybe I will. Maybe I'll see the bird that achieves metaphoric significance. Maybe I'll come back feeling that I'm no further ahead, and then next week gain the key piece of folklore that makes it all come together, but wouldn't recognize if I were never on the spot.
It sure won't happen if I don't give it a chance.
I know that some people set books in places they've never set foot in, and for the life of me I can't understand how they do it. Maybe the left and right turns and the views from the heights and the particular quality of the light at certain times and seasons won't make it into the published book - but if I'm not anchored in all of that, I can't write the book at all.
I think this has its source in Air Force Bratism. Though, looking back on it, I didn't have as peripatetic a childhood as some people, at the time it felt like we moved a lot: the Rio Grande Valley where I was born, the San Antonio area, two places in Alaska, Iowa while my dad was in 'Nam, Maryland, and finally West Texas, before I came to San Antonio and felt like I was finally in a place I belonged. One of the methods my mom used to ease the transitions was to read up on an area before we moved there, and then to aggressively read the local literature when we arrived. We stopped and read historical markers, went to all the log cabins and pioneer villages and museums, toured the houses of local celebrities, and found out all the cool things there were to know. The better you know people and places, the better chance you have to love them; or at least to rub along with them in comfort.
So now I have to go look at Medina and Bandera counties. I'm trying to reduce the mileage Moby and I have to travel by hunting up local sources of information on the Civil War period beforehand, so I can make arrangements to view them, but it's uphill work. As I believe I've mentioned before, the Civil War was a sufficiently nasty time for community relationships in western Texas that nobody wanted to remember. Consider this quote from a postwar letter to a Northern cousin by a Castroville man:
"I had a store before the war & sold a good deal, but during the war, I stopped selling, for there was nothing but robbing, stealing, hanging, & killing, that no one was secure of his life if he was a Confederate, but now the war is over, & everything quite as before, & I mean to reopen the store again."(TX 976.442. Castroville, Texas 1844-1899, Illustrated by 3 Pioneer Families, the Pichots, Pingevotes, & Ihnkens. Yvonne Chandler Ludwig, "Bonnie." )
If that doesn't say "interesting times," what does? But as for what specifically happened when, who robbed and murdered whom, and why - nothing to see here. Move along. I need to call Ms. Ludwig and see if she has anything more on the topic, but I'm not going to hold my breath. I suspect if she had more she'd have put it in.
The story occurs between Appommatox and the beginning of Reconstruction, so I need to get moving if I want to view the geography at the proper season. At the moment, I'm planning to drive out to Bandera one day next week, see the Frontier Times Museum and scout the geography, do a little birding and hope for a lucky break. If I get one, good. If I don't - well, I write the story anyway. Maybe I won't happen upon a piece of ground and realize: "Here, right here, she finds the body," or be told the local ghost story that ties in perfectly; but maybe I will. Maybe I'll see the bird that achieves metaphoric significance. Maybe I'll come back feeling that I'm no further ahead, and then next week gain the key piece of folklore that makes it all come together, but wouldn't recognize if I were never on the spot.
It sure won't happen if I don't give it a chance.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Appomattox Day
A hundred and forty-five years ago today, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. This is widely regarded as the end of the Civil War, or at least of the part that mattered, but I can't think of it that way. I'm from the Trans-Mississippi District, the red-headed stepchild of the Confederacy, whose top brass didn't surrender till June. General Kirby-Smith had been hemorrhaging men for months, and even early in the war had a hard time keeping his hands on his troops; the high command kept demanding that the states under his command send levies to fight east of the Mississippi, while the bureaucracy made no attempt to compensate the western frontier for the men it took. Indian defense was not a priority. Economic support of the families of conscripts - not a priority. Not even the improvement of infrastructure in order to transfer the relative abundance of resources from the west to the east was a priority.
Unlike other parts of the South, Texas never came close to starving, but our roads were in terrible shape, our harbors were blockaded, and our manufacturing facilities are exemplified by E. Krauskopf's percussion cap factory, which employed an assembly line consisting entirely of his daughters. Honest government officials (and they existed) were outnumbered and outgunned by the cotton speculators in the only industry that had a hope of rendering the Confederate States of America financially viable.
I finished the Semi-Weekly News reel yesterday. The latest paper (but not the last one on the reel, as they were microfilmed out of order) is for April 7, 1865. I need to cross reference this with the microfilms of the Newcomb Collection, to see if they have any missing dates. My head is clogged with tidbits and anecdotes, cryptic partial stories, mysteries and rumors. Cannons were fired in Texas for non-existent victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, for the capture of Baltimore and the burning of Washington, DC. The victories of General Tom Green, which feature not at all in most histories of the war, were celebrated in the Texas press (and the county I went to high school in was named after him). Inflation, corruption, extortion, and speculation are a constant concern in the pages of Mr. Finck's paper and of the Texas papers from which he reprints stories. "Have you ever seen a private or a non-commissioned officer dressed in government-supplied clothing?" asks the Freeman's Champion late in the war, returning yet again to the constant question: Why, when the government buys so much cotton, impresses so much cotton, ships so much cotton, is there never any government-owned cotton to speak of being loaded onto ships to make money for the government? The question was never answered to the satisfaction of the public.
Men died and women and children suffered obstensibly for a freedom that martial law on the one hand and lynch law on the other prevented them from having. Gen. Houston wrote to the governor objecting to martial law, but his letter was printed in the papers only after that law ended. Albert Pike spoke before Congress avering that personal freedom was even more important than the political freedom the war was supposedly fought for. But the contradiction of fighting for freedom and preserving slavery was never addressed. By anybody.
Thanks to all the reading I did beforehand, I was able to fill in some gaps and make note of names and events that might otherwise have passed me by, but though I have a sense that I could understand a great deal about the war if I could sort it all out, I'm reluctant to do so. My characters need to be a little confused, a little off-balance. Everybody was.
I know this much: the Civil War taught us lessons that we still have not learned. That we deliberately refrained from learning. It ended, sort of, and the Confederacy became, not history, but myth. Texas never surrendered, and the blood bath of the final ten years of rebellion is divided into two new myths - that of the evils of Radical Reconstruction and the nobility of the Old West. We still declare wars victorious before they're over; we still stand by and let speculators ruin our economy; we still shout for freedom in theory and fear to exercise it in practice.
And nothing I write is going to change that.
Unlike other parts of the South, Texas never came close to starving, but our roads were in terrible shape, our harbors were blockaded, and our manufacturing facilities are exemplified by E. Krauskopf's percussion cap factory, which employed an assembly line consisting entirely of his daughters. Honest government officials (and they existed) were outnumbered and outgunned by the cotton speculators in the only industry that had a hope of rendering the Confederate States of America financially viable.
I finished the Semi-Weekly News reel yesterday. The latest paper (but not the last one on the reel, as they were microfilmed out of order) is for April 7, 1865. I need to cross reference this with the microfilms of the Newcomb Collection, to see if they have any missing dates. My head is clogged with tidbits and anecdotes, cryptic partial stories, mysteries and rumors. Cannons were fired in Texas for non-existent victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, for the capture of Baltimore and the burning of Washington, DC. The victories of General Tom Green, which feature not at all in most histories of the war, were celebrated in the Texas press (and the county I went to high school in was named after him). Inflation, corruption, extortion, and speculation are a constant concern in the pages of Mr. Finck's paper and of the Texas papers from which he reprints stories. "Have you ever seen a private or a non-commissioned officer dressed in government-supplied clothing?" asks the Freeman's Champion late in the war, returning yet again to the constant question: Why, when the government buys so much cotton, impresses so much cotton, ships so much cotton, is there never any government-owned cotton to speak of being loaded onto ships to make money for the government? The question was never answered to the satisfaction of the public.
Men died and women and children suffered obstensibly for a freedom that martial law on the one hand and lynch law on the other prevented them from having. Gen. Houston wrote to the governor objecting to martial law, but his letter was printed in the papers only after that law ended. Albert Pike spoke before Congress avering that personal freedom was even more important than the political freedom the war was supposedly fought for. But the contradiction of fighting for freedom and preserving slavery was never addressed. By anybody.
Thanks to all the reading I did beforehand, I was able to fill in some gaps and make note of names and events that might otherwise have passed me by, but though I have a sense that I could understand a great deal about the war if I could sort it all out, I'm reluctant to do so. My characters need to be a little confused, a little off-balance. Everybody was.
I know this much: the Civil War taught us lessons that we still have not learned. That we deliberately refrained from learning. It ended, sort of, and the Confederacy became, not history, but myth. Texas never surrendered, and the blood bath of the final ten years of rebellion is divided into two new myths - that of the evils of Radical Reconstruction and the nobility of the Old West. We still declare wars victorious before they're over; we still stand by and let speculators ruin our economy; we still shout for freedom in theory and fear to exercise it in practice.
And nothing I write is going to change that.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Projecting Embarrassment into the Future!
It occurred to me almost as soon as I made that last post that it's not the first thing I want an agent or editor who happens to google my name today to see, so while lunch is cooking let's get something less whiny up top. And the first thing that occurs to me, because of the era I'm currently most involved in researching is a question I ask myself periodically:
What opinion or behavior that I am currently squeamish about discussing openly will my theoretical biographer (Um - we all have imaginary biographers following us around, right? Even Virginia Woolf did - I think it's in Jacob's Room.) feel entitled to poke around in, and frustrated that I didn't talk about it more?
Conversely, what opinion or behavior that I currently take for granted will that same biographer feel a need to suppress, excuse, or explore as a pathology?
I first thought of this when I was in high school and Madeleine Stern started digging up and publishing my idol Louisa May Alcott's "Jo" stories, the thrillers she later chastised herself (through Jo) for writing, but loved to write nonetheless. There's drug use in those. There's a major squicky passage in one with the young narrator leaning on her uncle's knee and smoking a cigarette. By modern YA standards it's pretty tame but to those of us raised on Little Women it's a shock. Especially when we learn that the drug passages were based on reality; which is not the thing she herself was uncomfortable about. Opium was an abusable medicine, not a controlled substance. People gave opium to babies. I think laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol!?!) is used by characters in the canonical Alcott YA stories.
These days I read a lot of things that make me remember that. In nineteenth century Texas, no one would fess up to being an abolitionist, any more than a modern Texan would express approval for child molestation or terrorism. Even if you had the guts to be a Unionist, you'd disown abolition. Sam Houston, for one, was a slave-holding Unionist. (I almost went on a long disquistion about it, but I can do that later.) And I get to write sympathetic characters who fit within this mileu, oh joy. Early 20th-century historians from the South have a disturbing tendency to root for the Confederacy in studying the era; and if anyone isn't a racist he tends to be po'faced and apologetic about it.
This creates an ugly problem for later readers, who may be willing to admit that racism existed back then, but hate to accuse any individual of it. So they ignore it, or make excuses, or try to turn blatant and obvious racism into nothing of the sort.
But that's not productive, is it? Because once you do that with blatant and obvious racism you keep doing it to the subtler and more insidious racism of the modern day. It's more productive to face facts, and asking myself that biographer question makes it easier for me. I can easily imagine a biographer gleefully talking about - well, I'm not going to tell you! - and being evasive about my caffeine dependence, or making excuses for my use of internal combustion engines.
So hey - you - whoever you are - You don't have to tell me what your biographer won't be embarrassd about, but won't you think about and maybe say something about what will embarrass him? Or her? Or whatever the pronoun will be in a hundred years? It's a liberating exercise. I promise.
What opinion or behavior that I am currently squeamish about discussing openly will my theoretical biographer (Um - we all have imaginary biographers following us around, right? Even Virginia Woolf did - I think it's in Jacob's Room.) feel entitled to poke around in, and frustrated that I didn't talk about it more?
Conversely, what opinion or behavior that I currently take for granted will that same biographer feel a need to suppress, excuse, or explore as a pathology?
I first thought of this when I was in high school and Madeleine Stern started digging up and publishing my idol Louisa May Alcott's "Jo" stories, the thrillers she later chastised herself (through Jo) for writing, but loved to write nonetheless. There's drug use in those. There's a major squicky passage in one with the young narrator leaning on her uncle's knee and smoking a cigarette. By modern YA standards it's pretty tame but to those of us raised on Little Women it's a shock. Especially when we learn that the drug passages were based on reality; which is not the thing she herself was uncomfortable about. Opium was an abusable medicine, not a controlled substance. People gave opium to babies. I think laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol!?!) is used by characters in the canonical Alcott YA stories.
These days I read a lot of things that make me remember that. In nineteenth century Texas, no one would fess up to being an abolitionist, any more than a modern Texan would express approval for child molestation or terrorism. Even if you had the guts to be a Unionist, you'd disown abolition. Sam Houston, for one, was a slave-holding Unionist. (I almost went on a long disquistion about it, but I can do that later.) And I get to write sympathetic characters who fit within this mileu, oh joy. Early 20th-century historians from the South have a disturbing tendency to root for the Confederacy in studying the era; and if anyone isn't a racist he tends to be po'faced and apologetic about it.
This creates an ugly problem for later readers, who may be willing to admit that racism existed back then, but hate to accuse any individual of it. So they ignore it, or make excuses, or try to turn blatant and obvious racism into nothing of the sort.
But that's not productive, is it? Because once you do that with blatant and obvious racism you keep doing it to the subtler and more insidious racism of the modern day. It's more productive to face facts, and asking myself that biographer question makes it easier for me. I can easily imagine a biographer gleefully talking about - well, I'm not going to tell you! - and being evasive about my caffeine dependence, or making excuses for my use of internal combustion engines.
So hey - you - whoever you are - You don't have to tell me what your biographer won't be embarrassd about, but won't you think about and maybe say something about what will embarrass him? Or her? Or whatever the pronoun will be in a hundred years? It's a liberating exercise. I promise.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
In Special Collections
I finally got back to Trinity University library yesterday. The last time I tried to go was the day of the hard freeze and the temporary death of Moby Dick, the Great White Car. Although it's theoretically possible to ride my bike to Trinity, it's farther than I've ridden since I was in junior high, and the weather hasn't been conducive to it. But now I have the car back and, although I technically should have been prepping queries for the SCBWI Austin agents and editors, I decided I wanted to go to the library.
First I finished what I'd started last time I was there, when I ran out of money photocopying the pages of Vinton Lee James's Frontier and Pioneer: Recollections of Early Days in San Antonio and Western Texas in which he describes postwar San Antonio, so I'll have them to refer to. (I still need to get a map). I'd made a note of which pages I needed, so that didn't take long. Then I went to Special Collections to read Amasa Clark's Reminiscences of a Centenarian.
Special Collections at Trinity is a large comfortable room like a library in a stately house, with locked bookcases, tables, a cozy arrangement of chairs and sofas in front of a fireplace with a floral arrangement in it, and a huge Mannerist tapestry on one wall, depicting an American Indian noble with a crown of feathers and a pet gator, or possibly Komodo dragon. I had to surrender my ID and use only pencils in making notes, and the book wasn't where it was supposed to be so the student at the desk wound up calling the retired research librarian who has the place memorized for help locating it.
Clark is refreshingly detailed in his recollections of the Civil War era compared to most people - which still leaves out a lot of what I wanted to know. He was injured in a robbery in 1857 and claims to have still been recovering in 1861; otherwise, he says, he probably would have joined the Union army, though really he didn't want to fight either his neighbors or "the flag" that he fought under in the Mexican War. This makes him sympathetic to the victims of the political violences he recounts, both military actions against groups of men attempting to avoid conscription into the Confederate Army by heading for Mexico. He describes with certitude and circumstantial detail the robbery and lynching of eight draft evaders by soldiers from Camp Verde, but this creates a puzzle for the researcher.
Per Clark, the men surrendered peaceably on being assured of a fair court martial, that when the arresting party made camp some of the men suggested that they proceed with the hangings; that those who objected to this proceeding left in order not to witness it; that the officer in charge was not among those who left; that one of the men was shot with a gun that still had the ramrod in it; that the boy with the eight men was spared but no one knows what became of him (there's a central character for a historical YA if you like); that the men were hung one at a time with a hair rope, strangled, then cut down with the noose still around the neck and the next one hoisted; that the officer and soldiers were indicted after the war but never brought to trial.
Now, the ramrod was still in the body of one of the men when Joeseph Poor, on his way to visit a neighbor, stumbled upon it, mistook the ramrod for an arrow, and ran to warn of an Indian raid. The posse that he collected found the remains and presumably reconstructed the method of execution by examining the evidence. Clark doesn't say that he witnessed any of this, but names the people who examined and buried the bodies. Presumably everyone in Bandera County knew pretty much everything this party of men observed and accepted the conclusions they drew. But what is the source of the information about the surrender, the dispute over whether or not to summarily hang them, and the boy being "let go" rather escaping? How much of this is speculation? How much is derived from the testimony of members of the military unit who left rather than participating in the hanging? Was any of this information divulged under oath when the indictment was made after the war?
These questions are not answered, or even addressed, either in this volume (edited by his daughter-in-law) or in the Pioneer History of Bandera County written by Clark's friend, J. Marvin Hunter. It is possible that later research will turn up other versions of the story, or more source information, or even the documents connected with the indictment. It's possible I will always wonder. For purposes of my story, it's enough that this is a version which my heroines will be familiar with, and believe; if I need to, I can have one of them wonder the same things I wonder, but since this all happened in 1863 and my story is set in 1865, it probably won't come up.
Same thing with the discrepancy between Clark's version of the fate of Bill Hurt, one of the men suspected of the attack on him, and that given by Mr. John Dobbin in William Corner's San Antonio de Bexar (1890), which I also saw in a facsimile edition yesterday. Clark, Hurt's victim, was presumably still being nursed back to health when Hurt died of excessive numbers of gunshot wounds in the streets of San Antonio, but he would have been very much interested in the news and would have repeated the story numerous times between 1857 and the late 20s, when his daughter-in-law was taking down his reminiscences. Mr. Dobbin was in town during the event and talks like an eyewitness when he recounts the story for Corner in 1889 or 90. He doesn't mention the crime for which Hurt was wanted, Clark doesn't describe the tactical situation of the Vigilance Committee's ambush of him; the overlap of names in the two accounts is minimal. I am happy I don't have to choose between the accounts for this particular story. If I were writing a different book, I might have had my work cut out reconciling them!
Corner's book is an excellent one, but a source of frustration for me. It's a guidebook for visitors, which made it perfect for Switching Well (in which a girl from 1991 swaps places with a girl from 1891), but Corner in his historical overviews and recordings of the oral history of old-timers treats the eighteenth century and the 30s and 40s as the most interesting periods. When introducing the reminiscences of Dr. George Cupples, he taunts me by referring to the story Cupples could tell of his "recollections of the know-nothing movement here, of the great war and of the famous Vigilance Committee troubles. But as Mr Kipling would say -- that's another story." Yes, and it's a story I want, thank you very much! Perhaps Corner took that oral history in another publication that hasn't turned up in my researches yet, or perhaps he let the opportunity slip. Somebody, sometime, should have recorded the history of the Vigilance Committee.
But if I ever find it, it will have many of the same faults and virtues as the accounts I read yesterday. That's the deal with research. People write history for the reasons that suit them, not for the reasons that suit me. It's my job to hold these fragmentary names and events in my head, ready to pounce on the clues casually dropped by folks interested in something else and put them all together until I know enough to write my story.
I have this advantage over the professional historian: What I can't find out, I am at liberty to make up, within certain parameters. It is only my own preference for fitting my made up stuff as seamlessly as possible into what really happened that keeps me on the trail at this point. I know enough to plot the book and with a little bit of physical exploration of locations I'm about ready to write it. But I will feel better if I know about the Vigilance Committee, if I have eliminated all possibility of putting my characters in places where they should witness or participate in an event, and don't, or of misrepresenting a real person - whether well-known historical figure or not.
When I was young, I assumed that all authors researched like this and that the way they depicted real people was based on more than their imagination. Now I know better; but I don't want to mislead the kids who don't know better yet.
Besides, someone out there knows more about this stuff than I do; that person is part of the natural audience for the intended book. I don't want a scathing letter explaining where I went wrong!
First I finished what I'd started last time I was there, when I ran out of money photocopying the pages of Vinton Lee James's Frontier and Pioneer: Recollections of Early Days in San Antonio and Western Texas in which he describes postwar San Antonio, so I'll have them to refer to. (I still need to get a map). I'd made a note of which pages I needed, so that didn't take long. Then I went to Special Collections to read Amasa Clark's Reminiscences of a Centenarian.
Special Collections at Trinity is a large comfortable room like a library in a stately house, with locked bookcases, tables, a cozy arrangement of chairs and sofas in front of a fireplace with a floral arrangement in it, and a huge Mannerist tapestry on one wall, depicting an American Indian noble with a crown of feathers and a pet gator, or possibly Komodo dragon. I had to surrender my ID and use only pencils in making notes, and the book wasn't where it was supposed to be so the student at the desk wound up calling the retired research librarian who has the place memorized for help locating it.
Clark is refreshingly detailed in his recollections of the Civil War era compared to most people - which still leaves out a lot of what I wanted to know. He was injured in a robbery in 1857 and claims to have still been recovering in 1861; otherwise, he says, he probably would have joined the Union army, though really he didn't want to fight either his neighbors or "the flag" that he fought under in the Mexican War. This makes him sympathetic to the victims of the political violences he recounts, both military actions against groups of men attempting to avoid conscription into the Confederate Army by heading for Mexico. He describes with certitude and circumstantial detail the robbery and lynching of eight draft evaders by soldiers from Camp Verde, but this creates a puzzle for the researcher.
Per Clark, the men surrendered peaceably on being assured of a fair court martial, that when the arresting party made camp some of the men suggested that they proceed with the hangings; that those who objected to this proceeding left in order not to witness it; that the officer in charge was not among those who left; that one of the men was shot with a gun that still had the ramrod in it; that the boy with the eight men was spared but no one knows what became of him (there's a central character for a historical YA if you like); that the men were hung one at a time with a hair rope, strangled, then cut down with the noose still around the neck and the next one hoisted; that the officer and soldiers were indicted after the war but never brought to trial.
Now, the ramrod was still in the body of one of the men when Joeseph Poor, on his way to visit a neighbor, stumbled upon it, mistook the ramrod for an arrow, and ran to warn of an Indian raid. The posse that he collected found the remains and presumably reconstructed the method of execution by examining the evidence. Clark doesn't say that he witnessed any of this, but names the people who examined and buried the bodies. Presumably everyone in Bandera County knew pretty much everything this party of men observed and accepted the conclusions they drew. But what is the source of the information about the surrender, the dispute over whether or not to summarily hang them, and the boy being "let go" rather escaping? How much of this is speculation? How much is derived from the testimony of members of the military unit who left rather than participating in the hanging? Was any of this information divulged under oath when the indictment was made after the war?
These questions are not answered, or even addressed, either in this volume (edited by his daughter-in-law) or in the Pioneer History of Bandera County written by Clark's friend, J. Marvin Hunter. It is possible that later research will turn up other versions of the story, or more source information, or even the documents connected with the indictment. It's possible I will always wonder. For purposes of my story, it's enough that this is a version which my heroines will be familiar with, and believe; if I need to, I can have one of them wonder the same things I wonder, but since this all happened in 1863 and my story is set in 1865, it probably won't come up.
Same thing with the discrepancy between Clark's version of the fate of Bill Hurt, one of the men suspected of the attack on him, and that given by Mr. John Dobbin in William Corner's San Antonio de Bexar (1890), which I also saw in a facsimile edition yesterday. Clark, Hurt's victim, was presumably still being nursed back to health when Hurt died of excessive numbers of gunshot wounds in the streets of San Antonio, but he would have been very much interested in the news and would have repeated the story numerous times between 1857 and the late 20s, when his daughter-in-law was taking down his reminiscences. Mr. Dobbin was in town during the event and talks like an eyewitness when he recounts the story for Corner in 1889 or 90. He doesn't mention the crime for which Hurt was wanted, Clark doesn't describe the tactical situation of the Vigilance Committee's ambush of him; the overlap of names in the two accounts is minimal. I am happy I don't have to choose between the accounts for this particular story. If I were writing a different book, I might have had my work cut out reconciling them!
Corner's book is an excellent one, but a source of frustration for me. It's a guidebook for visitors, which made it perfect for Switching Well (in which a girl from 1991 swaps places with a girl from 1891), but Corner in his historical overviews and recordings of the oral history of old-timers treats the eighteenth century and the 30s and 40s as the most interesting periods. When introducing the reminiscences of Dr. George Cupples, he taunts me by referring to the story Cupples could tell of his "recollections of the know-nothing movement here, of the great war and of the famous Vigilance Committee troubles. But as Mr Kipling would say -- that's another story." Yes, and it's a story I want, thank you very much! Perhaps Corner took that oral history in another publication that hasn't turned up in my researches yet, or perhaps he let the opportunity slip. Somebody, sometime, should have recorded the history of the Vigilance Committee.
But if I ever find it, it will have many of the same faults and virtues as the accounts I read yesterday. That's the deal with research. People write history for the reasons that suit them, not for the reasons that suit me. It's my job to hold these fragmentary names and events in my head, ready to pounce on the clues casually dropped by folks interested in something else and put them all together until I know enough to write my story.
I have this advantage over the professional historian: What I can't find out, I am at liberty to make up, within certain parameters. It is only my own preference for fitting my made up stuff as seamlessly as possible into what really happened that keeps me on the trail at this point. I know enough to plot the book and with a little bit of physical exploration of locations I'm about ready to write it. But I will feel better if I know about the Vigilance Committee, if I have eliminated all possibility of putting my characters in places where they should witness or participate in an event, and don't, or of misrepresenting a real person - whether well-known historical figure or not.
When I was young, I assumed that all authors researched like this and that the way they depicted real people was based on more than their imagination. Now I know better; but I don't want to mislead the kids who don't know better yet.
Besides, someone out there knows more about this stuff than I do; that person is part of the natural audience for the intended book. I don't want a scathing letter explaining where I went wrong!
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