“Home” – Guest Post from Dean Robertson

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blogs, change, childhood, Dean Robertson, Faulkner, Georgia, home, memory, ostst, St. Benedict, writing

From Dean Robertson, whose book Looking for Lydia, Looking for God I reviewed last month:

Home

A few weeks ago a friend and I walked to the Chinese restaurant near my co-op and brought back steaming cartons of vegetable lo mein, fried rice, two Spring rolls, and my favorite—roasted broccoli (enough to save for lunch the next day). The order—white cartons stacked neatly in a large white bag—of course included small packets of soy sauce and several fortune cookies.

I always look forward to the slight crunch and sweetness of fortune cookies after the salty Chinese food, but the two I grabbed that day were stale. I was on the verge of throwing them out, along with their predictions for my future, when the edge of a slip of paper caught my eye. It read:

“You will find luck when you go home.”

That piece of paper, greasy at one corner, wrinkled from its near-miss with the garbage, is taped to the door of my kitchen cabinet.

 “I know that our relationship to those places we inhabit and leave and for which we search is the informing metaphor of the spiritual life in any tradition and is, in fact, the governing reality in our lives; the spirit of place is in our bones” (Looking for Lydia; Looking for God, 116-117).

I grew up in the South, in the hills of North Georgia, and so—even more than most—I have that bone-deep sense of belonging to a place, of that physical bond with land. In his small novel, The Unvanquished, William Faulkner describes the forced and hasty departure from home of two boys, with their grandmother, just ahead of Sherman’s army on its March to the Sea. They take along basic provisions—and bags of soil from the plantation.

One morning about twenty years ago, one of my cousins and I drove out to the land where I grew up. We were going to see the log house my parents built which neither of us had seen since I left for college at seventeen.

After the house was built, Mother and Daddy carefully cleared narrow paths into the woods and down the steep hill between the house and the “patio,” a structure made entirely of mortar and large stones from the creek bank. On the day my cousin and I were there, all those paths were completely grown over; there wasn’t a trace of them. We sat for a few minutes, looking with a kind of hopelessness at the uninterrupted woods, seeing no possibility for navigation.

I glanced back and stepped out of the car. I walked cautiously, but without hesitation, across the overgrown yard and onto the path that led by twists and turns through a quarter acre of dense trees and underbrush to the edge of Cedar Creek. Those stones and trees, that path, buried in thick vines and roots and many seasons of leaves, are my bones.The skeleton of that land is my skeleton. I never faltered. My cousin followed. We sat by the creek for more than an hour without speaking.

There is a reason that all those houses and apartments and rooms over all those decades never quite satisfied my search for home. Not one of them, even the wonderful co-op, in the wonderful walking neighborhood where I live now, ever will be home.

Home is not a place, not a location, neither house nor woods nor hills nor any ocean. Home is, as Esther de Waal writes in her 1984 book, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict, a sense of being “earthed;” it is the Biblical concept of stability or steadfastness.

Of Metropolitan Anthony, “a monk and a bishop,” she says only,

“He has found his centre of gravity; he is wholly inside himself. This is the stability of the heart.”

Home, the particularity of place, is significant because it points always to something beyond itself.

It points to home.

A hymn whose name and provenance I have forgotten includes this line:

“We are all God’s children; the journey is our home.”

And, finally, this road to our real home can never be easy. Benedict writes in his Rule of the novice monk:

“‘Do not grant newcomers to the monastic life an easy entry’ says the opening sentence, and the novice is to be left knocking at the door for four or five days. He is then warned about ‘the hardships and difficulties that will lead him to God’ If he promises perseverance in his stability after two months. . .If he still stands firm. . .he is taken back. . .and is tested again after six months, and then again four months later.”

Looking for Lydia, Looking for God is also available on Amazon.com.

 

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Best Review Ever

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art, Blank Slate Press, blogs, books, Civil War, creativity, Faulkner, fiction, historical fiction, history, human nature, Jim Bencivenga, novels, reviews, This Old World, utopia, war, Yeats

I try to keep my posts on this blog focused on things other than book promotion — that’s really not the point of the blog, which is more focused on offering thoughts and commentary. But once in a while I have to celebrate something about one of my books! And today is one of those days.

Jim Bencivenga, retired book critic for the Christian Science Monitor, recently wrote a review of This Old World that has me simultaneously blushing and making a resolution to work harder on the next book so that it lives up to the expectations it generates. I am grateful beyond words for this review and will do everything in my power to make the next book worthy of this praise.

Here’s a link to the original posting, and here’s the review:

“Since I did not read its predecessor, I came to This Old World, by Steve Wiegenstein, only on the terms inside its covers.

“It is a heart rendering tale in a time of personal and national trauma. Such lasting wounds. Such healed wounds. For Wiegenstein, the war that divided a nation is but background. The hopes and anguish of common people, and more pointedly aspiring women, dominate this book. Utopian hopes, racial hopes, and especially gender hopes play out. The cadenced voice, the agricultural pace of the characters’ colloquial, regional dialog, is the blood flowing through the veins of the narrative.

“The Civil War and the Ozark mountains hold near mythic status in the American experience. Wiegenstein populates these myths with flesh and blood characters literally or psychologically bathed in the blood of battle. Home, family, children – identity – are overwhelmed. He is true to the hymnal inspiration used in the title and which echoes on every page: ‘This old world is full of sorrow, full of sickness, weak and sore —If you love your neighbor truly, love will come to you the more.’

“I couldn’t help but connect the psychological and emotional moods of this narrative work with poems by William Butler Yeats. Both Yeats and Wiegenstein embed the worn and known facets of their nation’s pivotal rebellion/war as spiritual heft for the human hearts animating their writing.

“Yeats’s sentiment about humanity’s connection with God in ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’: ‘Now that my ladder’s gone, 
I must lie down where all the ladders start. 
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart,’ is where ‘This Old World’ begins. Things indeed fall apart in the widening gyre of the Civil War. And, much more than in Yeats, the women of ‘This Old World’ (one advantage of a novel over a poem or hymn) are given full voice to speak.

“I am convinced Charlotte Turner would more than hold her own should she sit down with Crazy Jane to lecture the Bishop. By voice, example, and especially sincere doubt, Charlotte lectures us throughout. Want to know how common folk from a proto-typical American locale not only ‘survive, but prevail,’ as Faulkner would have it? Read ‘This Old World’.”

M.M. Bennetts Finalist Review and Interview – 4

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blogs, books, creativity, Crispin Guest, fiction, historical fiction, history, Jeri Westerson, London, medieval era, noir, novels, reviews, writing

My next fellow M.M. Bennetts Award finalist is Jeri Westerson’s Cup of Blood. This novel’s subtitle describes it as “medieval noir,” and that description gives you a pretty clear idea of what genre expectations are ahead.

Like the protagonists of the noir movies of the ’30s and ’40s, Cup of Blood’s main character, Crispin Guest, is a man with a past, wounded in love, tough on the outside but carrying a history he can’t quite get rid of. And like those noir heroes, he has a dicey relationship with the official representatives of the law, in this case the Sheriff of London and his minions. In classic noir fashion, the book opens with the discovery of a corpse, a discovery which quickly opens out into a web of intrigue that goes far beyond a simple murder, involving the royal court, popes and anti-popes, and a host of characters that vie for the title of “most disreputable.”

Westerson’s characters are creatures of the streets and taverns, and she does an excellent job of conveying the seedy warmth of these locations. The plot takes some twists that I can almost guarantee you won’t see coming – at least I didn’t! This was a very enjoyable read that kept me guessing as to the next turn in the story, with rich description of setting that makes medieval London come to life.

You can learn more about Jeri Westerson from her website, her blog, her Facebook page, her Twitter feed, or her Goodreads page. Here’s a purchase link.

Jeri Westerson

SW: Cup of Blood was my first introduction to your work, but I see that there’s a whole series of Crispin Guest mysteries. Which book would you recommend for someone as their first introduction to Crispin?

Since Cup of Blood is a prequel I would absolutely recommend it as the first. In fact, the only reason it’s a “prequel” now is that it was the very first I wrote in the series but couldn’t get it sold to a publisher. When we were looking for a new publisher to continue the series after six published volumes, I didn’t want a year to go by without a Crispin book on the shelves, so I dusted off this manuscript (that I always liked) gave it a bit of a rewrite, and called it a “prequel.” So it truly is the first book in the series. It explains where Crispin gets his adolescent servant/thief Jack Tucker.

SW: I gather that at least some of the characters in Cup of Blood are actual historical figures. What can you tell us about the “real” people who inhabit the novel?
The whole series includes real people of the time period, from King Richard II to poet Geoffrey Chaucer to famed alchemist Nicholas Flamel. The sheriffs of London existed, though since we don’t know much about them I was free to cut loose on my characterization of them. King Richard is the young king and despises Crispin for the part he played in committing treason against him, which threw Crispin into his current state as a poverty-stricken “Tracker,” a medieval detective. In later volumes, Crispin’s old friend Geoffrey Chaucer shows up to help and sometimes hinder him in his investigations, and there is also a cross-dressing prostitute by the name of John Rykener–a real person in Crispin’s London–who had helped Crispin learn the ropes of survival when he was first set adrift on the streets with nothing but the clothes on his back. It’s an interesting collection of people cast against a wide variety of events. Never a dull moment!

SW: What drew you to this particular era to set your novels?

I was raised in a household where English medieval history was king, with the numerous works of fiction and nonfiction on our bookshelves to choose from. Even discussions at the dinner table sometimes centered on English history. You paid attention and learned by osmosis. I can definitely name more monarchs of England–in order–than I ever can presidents.

SW: Your website features a quotation from Raymond Chandler, and certainly there’s a noir feeling to this book. Is it difficult to translate the noir sensibility to the medieval era?

It wasn’t difficult at all and I’m certainly glad I thought of it. The dark streets and alleys in London, the people waiting in the shadows with daggers at the ready, corruption from the highest of authorities, the secrets of the Church, and everyday ordinary greed, lust, and jealousy makes it prime for noir and hardboiled crimes.

SW: Your characters have, among other things, a remarkable vocabulary of oaths. What can you tell us about their swearing, and how on earth did you come up with all of them?

As much as we like using our own Anglo-Saxon swearwords, they weren’t really used as such then. True, humor tended toward the scatological, but swearing, oaths, were strongest when they had the tinge of blasphemy about them. Hence, swearing on the body and blood of Christ and his saints was usually where one went. So Crispin’s favorite oath, “God’s blood!” is entirely appropriate for the era.

SW: Crispin Guest seems to me to have both a medieval sense of the world and a modern one. Does that make sense to you? How do you envision Crispin?

He is definitely a man of his time, but there were men of that era that didn’t hold with all that the Church taught or that the majority of the lower classes and upper classed believed. His own mentor, John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, had Lollard sympathies, that is, he was interested in reformation of religion and religious practices, not quite as common in that era as in the later Tudor period but it was still there. Naturally, Crispin emulates his mentor’s ideals. And since he is a man of intelligence (he is an Aristotle groupie) he can weigh the facts and make an intelligent decision based on the information at hand. And that means sometimes changing his mind about long held beliefs. Which is perfectly legitimate for the time period.

SW: What’s next for Crispin, and for you?

Crispin’s eighth outing, The Silence of Stones, will be released in the UK this November, and in the US next March. And I’m finishing up my steampunk novel, The Daemon Device, to hand in to my agent for shopping around. It involves a Jewish/Gypsy Magician who eschews his heritage but can really perform magic with the help of Jewish daemons..for a price, and that price may be getting too high. Then it’s on to the ninth Crispin, A Maiden Weeping. And hopefully by then, my urban fantasy series, Book of the Hidden, will have found a publishing home. So there’s a LOT to do.

M.M. Bennetts Award Finalist Review and Interview – 1

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blogs, books, editing, England, fiction, historical fiction, history, novels, reviews, war, World War II

My first review and interview of the other M.M. Bennetts Award finalists is of Liverpool Connection by Elisabeth Marrion.

If you’re familiar with John Boorman’s classic film Hope and Glory, you’ll immediately appreciate the social setting of Elisabeth Marrion’s novel Liverpool Connection. The setting is Liverpool, not London, but the theme of finding hope amidst deprivation is the same. Liverpool Connection tells the story of a working-class family before, during, and after the Second World War, and the hardships, love, loss, and far-flung connections they encounter during those years.

I was struck by the realism of this novel. The characters are believable, with their struggles and sufferings portrayed faithfully. These characters lead lives of hardship that to most of us today seem intolerable, but they manage to find love and friendship in the tiny spaces left them by their daily battle to earn enough to feed themselves and their families.

The central character of the novel is Annie, who emigrates from Ireland to Liverpool as a young woman, motivated partly by the need to relieve her family of the burden of another mouth to feed. She trades one hardscrabble life for another, only now as a wife and mother, and there are times when I wondered whether Annie would make it through her troubles, especially once the bombs began to fall. But somehow she does, and the book takes an unexpected turn when the point of view shifts to that of a German family experiencing the same kind of hardships at the same time.

The ground-level view of life during wartime appealed to me. The characters are both acutely aware of the war – it alters everything about their lives – and only dimly aware of the sweep of strategy. Young men sign up for the Africa Corps while barely knowing the location of Africa on the map.

I do have a few complaints about the book. I found it dialogue-heavy and wished for more description at times, and at other times I found the editing less than satisfactory. But overall I admired the grit of these characters as they coped with the many difficulties handed them, and when I learned in the interview below that English is Elisabeth’s second language, some of my complaints about the style lost significance in that context.

You can learn more about Elisabeth Marrion and Liverpool Connection at her website, Facebook page, and blog. Here’s an article by Elisabeth and a purchase link, too!

SW: Elisabeth, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. Could you start by telling us a little bit about what inspired you to write Liverpool Connection?

Steve, first of all I would like to thank you for asking me to take part with an interview  for your Blog.

Maybe I have to tell you the story from the beginning. I started the ‘Unbroken Bonds’ Series with my mother’s story. As soon as I wrote it, I knew it had to be a trilogy, but in a way that the books can be read as a series, or as stand alone books. Whereas the first book tells us about Hilde’s life before and during WW II in Germany, Liverpool Connection looks at the life of Annie, her friends and her family in England covering the same timespan. Amazingly family life on both sides of the War was very similar. My mother was German and lost her officer husband on the Russian Front. My father, from Liverpool, was in the Royal Air Force, later stationed in Germany where he met my mother. Both sides of this conflict share similar experiences and this I needed to tell in Liverpool Connection.

SW: One thing I found striking about the book was its depiction of the poverty that the main characters endured, not just before and during the war, but after it as well. Do you think contemporary audiences grasp just how hard conditions were during that time?

I believe that because of media, books, television and movies, Audiences now have a much better understanding about the hardships and poverty before, during and after WWII. Readers are eager to learn what life was like in Europe at the time.

SW: What was the most difficult part for you in writing this book?

The most difficult part of writing books about WWII, is that I am German! German people do not speak about the War. That is still the case today, 70 years after it ended. My German family was very much against me writing  the story, And not only did I write about them, now Liverpool Connection views the War from the other site. The German version will only be released in Germany Autumn 2015. Oh dear.

SW: The term “war novel” tends to summon up certain associations in people’s minds – great feats of courage in crisis, battlefield confrontations, and so forth. Are you comfortable with referring to Liverpool Connection as a “war novel”?

I can not see any problem with the definition of ‘War Novel’ for  Liverpool Connection. I believe the publisher has expressed in the book cover the spirit of the book wonderfully. The reader is drawn to the book by its cover and realises, this is about family life and not only about horrors on the battlefield. Maybe on this occasion it is a case of ‘judge the book by its cover’.

SW: Did you need to conduct a lot of research for this book, or was most of the material already known to you through personal sources?

I knew my mother’s and my father’s story. It is true that the generation who lived through the war speak about it very little. But since the father of my German brothers and sisters did not return to see his children grow up, my mother made true on his wish in the last letter she received from the front. ‘Tell the children about their father, live your life and through you and the children I will also live,’ he said.  I listened carefully to everything my mother told us. Later she came to spend many months with me in England and together we started the project. My father’s story was not that dissimilar. He however did not want to go into too many details. What I did not learn from my family I researched, especially times, dates, speeches, I really did learn a lot and I enjoyed the research very much.

SW: My readers are mostly American, and of course they have an American picture of the Second World War, based on what they have read and learned from family members who went through it. What do you think American readers will find most surprising about the war from the perspective they would get from Liverpool Connection?

I receive a lot of comments from American readers. Most of the readers enjoyed reading about the war viewed from a family life. You are right when you say hardly anybody realised the poverty before, during but especially after the war. Ration coupons were issued until the early 50’s, something which is hard to believe now. Sweets were the last items to be rationed and ended on February 5th 1953. Immediately the shops had plenty of stock and children queued for hours. Toffee apples were the most popular sweet on that day.

SW: I see from the Epilogue that this novel has considerable basis in your own family history. Was that an asset to you in the writing of the book, or an obstacle? I’m thinking about how much freedom you felt in shaping the plot, creating characters, and so forth.

My family history was certainly an asset and an inspiration to the story. I was concerned at the beginning how my family would react and worried about the characters and their names. At the end I decided, that this is my family history and I have all right to talk about it. Mind you I did change some of the names. I really enjoyed shaping the plot and developing the characters. I hear from readers who tell me who are their favourites in Liverpool Connection and for whom they have no sympathy at all. It is really nice that the reader takes it on board.

SW: I see that Liverpool Connection is part of a trilogy, with the third book scheduled for release this spring. Can you give us some more information about that book?

‘Cuckoo Clock – New York’ is Esther’s story. Esther and Ibrahim are separated after the Burning of the Synagogues in Germany in November 1938. Ibrahim is taken to Dachau. Esther tries to keep her promise to him and flee to England and later to New York. In England she meets Anna Essinger, who is instrumental in saving German Jewish children by arranging, what is now referred to, as ‘The Kinder Transport’. Again there is a connection between the first and second book.

SW: Thanks so much for your time! Best wishes on your next book!

I Haven’t Been Blogging . . .

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blogs

. . . and I don’t care! (Sung to the tune of “Jimmy Crack Corn.”)

I haven’t been blogging lately because I’m deep into the next book, and that work has been taking all my concentration. I don’t know how many writers are like me, but I find that once I’m in the zone of concentration required for sustained fiction writing, I don’t like to get out of that zone for other types of writing. I dislike it so much (I would say “hate,” but that’s too strong a word) that I resort to all sorts of procrastination strategies to avoid other forms of writing.

When I worked in newspapers, back in days of old, we used to joke that you could always tell it was time to drop a columnist when that person wrote his or her column about how hard it was to write a column. So this blog entry is not to be that same self-justifying whine about how hard it is to blog. It’s just a notification that I’m still alive and plan to be back blogging soon.

On Twitter

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art, blogs, books, Columbia, creativity, fiction, Missouri, Twitter, writing

I am on Twitter, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve not mastered the art of communicating on that particular social medium. I’m instinctively reticent about my own life, which a lot of people broadcast on Twitter, and I have a hard time compressing my thoughts into manageable form.

Some of the people I follow on Twitter junk up my feed with random links that don’t add anything, and some engage in continuous self-display that just annoys. Probably my favorite Twitter feed is my friend and fellow Columbia resident Daniel Green, a highly engaged literary critic. He reads widely, thinks a lot about what he has read and written, and posts comments and links that create a great sense of continuing conversation. If you’re at all interested in the state of contemporary literature, you should follow Dan Green.

Look Left!

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blogs, Civil War, history, Joplin, Larry Wood, Missouri, Ozarks, Springfield, writing

In case you haven’t noticed, the Blogroll at left contains a whole bunch of links to interesting sites, most of them having to do with the Ozarks. Some of the bloggers are prolific, some only post once in a while. Check them out!

If you’re at all interested in Ozark history (particularly of the bloody and violent type), you should make a regular habit of reading Larry Wood’s blog. He collects some of the most fascinating tales of jealousy, greed, and mayhem!

Fantastic Blog/Website from an Old Friend

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art, blogs, creativity, nature, photography, Randall Hyman

One of my dearest friends from childhood days is Randall Hyman. From his youngest days, Randall was determined to become a world-class photographer, and he set about accomplishing that goal with a single-mindedness that anyone would envy. And by golly, he did it! Randall received a Fulbright Scholarship to spend four months in the Norwegian Arctic, chronicling science, technology, culture and tourism in the Arctic Ocean in the wake of climate change.

His blog and website, containing his amazing photos and comments about the changing life of the Arctic, can be seen here.

I am just amazed at the vibrancy and beauty of his photography. Randall’s general website is here.

And just to plug, let me say that he’s available for speaking engagements, commissions, workshops, teaching gigs, and everything else an artist does to keep food on the table these days. I have two prints of his Iceland photos on the wall in my office and prize them enormously.

 

Historical Novel Society

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Blank Slate Press, blogs, books, fiction, historical fiction, history, novels, writing

I had the great good fortune to attend the biennial North American conference of the Historical Novel Society last weekend. By nature I am, shall we say, socially avoidant; at parties I’m the guy holding up the wall. So it was good exercise for me to travel to this conference, socialize with about 300 other novelists, publishers, and lovers of historical fiction, appear on a panel, and generally enjoy the company of like-minded souls.

The highlights of the event were many, but for me, they included:

• Being on a panel with Emily Victorson of Allium Press, Kristy Blank Makansi of Blank Slate Press, J.S. Dunn of Seriously Good Books, and Joanne Lewis of Telemachus Press about self-publishing, indie publishing, and alternative pathways to the market;
• Meeting Ann Weisgarber, author of The Personal History of Rachel DuPree, getting my copy signed, and having some great conversation about American historical fiction. Also in on one of our conversations was David Langum, a dedicated promoter of quality historical writing in America, and meeting him was a real thrill. Langum, by the way, is a superb legal historian, and his book on the cultural and legal history of the Mann Act is well worth a look.
• Listening to panels on writing about women in history and about non-mainstream approaches. The “Off the Beaten Path” panel was a particular favorite because it included a couple of bloggers I like to read, Unabridged Chick and The Queen’s Quill.

All in all, it was a great weekend, downpours notwithstanding!

Focus

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blogs, creativity, editing, fiction, historical fiction, writing

Apologies to followers for my lack of posting in the last couple of weeks. I’ve been finishing the first draft of the sequel to my novel, and to be honest, I hardly had time or mental space to think of anything else. This need to focus has caused me to step away from my blog, my Twitter account, my website–everything, in fact, except my regular job.

So far, the working title has been “Second Book,” but I have come up with a few good candidates for a better title.

On first review, I see some places where the narrative needs to be shaped better and some aspects of characters need to be brought out more. So back into the kettle we go! Luckily for me, I enjoy revision. I know some authors hate it, but I always find it rewarding.