A Fine Collection That Will Leave You Touched

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books, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, farming, rural life, short stories, To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts

If you’re a fan of short stories, especially ones with a modern rural base, you’ll like this book.

Not that the characters in these stories are all farmers; in fact, few are. Instead, many are that more common species, the offspring of farmers, women and men who went off to college or who have been squeezed out economically, and are now making a living in “the city” – Minneapolis/St. Paul or elsewhere – and feeling the loss and vague guilt that comes with being severed from those roots.

To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts is full of hard feelings. Siblings hold grudges; parents cling to unreasonable expectations; neighbors misunderstand and judge. But below these hard feelings is the longing to make things right. This is a lovely book of stories, in which the drama, unforgiven wounds, and generational misunderstandings of family members are balanced by their halting attempts to heal those wounds and slights. The characters are drawn with a quiet deftness that sometimes make you forget that they are characters at all, in prose that is likewise quiet, not showy, but always well targeted.

“Fish Eyes In Moonlight” was my personal favorite of the collection, a monologue from the point of view of an old man facing mortality, counting up his losses, mistakes, and moments of redemption. But all ten of the stories have a similar yearning for the moments of harmony that occasionally — but only occasionally — counterbalance our stubbornness and failing. A fine collection that will leave you touched.

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Interview: Ed Protzel

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books, Civil War, historical fiction, Missouri, mysteries, racism, reconstruction, writers, writing

My fellow historical novelist Ed Protzel has a new book out today. It’s called Honor Among Outcasts, and it follows his very successful The Lies That Bind. Ed and I have mined similar veins in our work (Missouri during the Civil War), although Ed also has a mystery/thriller coming out this year, also. So it was a real pleasure to visit with him recently about his new release. Here’s our interview:

SW: Thanks for joining me on my blog today, Ed! To start out, I wonder if you could tell us a little about your new book, HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS, and how it connects with your previous novel, THE LIES THAT BIND.

EP: Thanks for having me, Steve. In HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS, the second book in my DarkHorse Trilogy, a Southern abolitionist and a group of runaway slaves form a Union colored cavalry regiment in western Missouri, plunging into the most brutal guerilla war in U.S. history. When the abolitionist and his fiancée are accused of spying for the Confederacy, they must face a corrupt military justice system and other obstacles.

Book 1 of the trilogy, THE LIES THAT BIND, centers on the relationship between these men and their efforts to build their own egalitarian plantation in slavery-dominated Mississippi. HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS begins two years after the end of THE LIES THAT BIND, with the group working as contraband laborers attached to the Union army in Missouri. Both books work as stand-alone novels or, even better, in tandem.

SW: What drew you to this time period in the first place?

EP: I read a lot of history, including the Civil War. Being from Missouri, it felt natural to set HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS in that time and place. However, in my research, Missouri’s terrible neighbor-against-neighbor guerrilla war really caught my attention; it said much about the depths to which hatred could debase the most noble cause. Great material for compelling storytelling. Actually, the periods depicted in the three books — antebellum Mississippi, Civil War Missouri, and Reconstruction Mississippi — form an arc through this pivotal time in American history.

Additionally, all of the DarkHorse novels decry violence, with the main characters attempting to avoid being victims of it. With HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS set during a brutal war to resolve slavery, I didn’t want to resolve the myriad conflicts in the book through violence. Instead, I chose to play out the conflicts  through a courtroom, which tied the plots together very neatly. My characters are seeking justice, and what better place for justice to prevail than a courtroom?

SW: I see that you have a third novel on its way. Did you envision this series as a trilogy, or is that something that just happened along the way?

EP: Yes, I am now happily completing SOMETHING IN MADNESS, the final book in the trilogy. Actually, I imagined the “DarkHorse” concept as a trilogy originally, but had only written the first book (THE LIES THAT BIND). Still I pitched it to my agent as a trilogy, and she pitched the trilogy to the publisher (TouchPoint Press). It’s certainly been an adventure, and I’ll miss the characters once I’m finished, they’re so real to me after all these years.

SW: On a similar note, are you someone who likes to plot your storylines out carefully in advance, or do you discover things as you’re writing? What’s your creative process like?

EP: Actually, I don’t plot out my storylines in advance. Usually, I come up with a strong concept that offers lots of possibilities and powerful themes, plus good main characters that fit the situation. I also come up with an idea for what I think would be a terrific ending, one which will reveal my themes, and I try to keep that ending in mind as I create the story.

As for the rest of it, once I set the story in motion, the characters and the plot take over—that’s the fun of it for me: the reader discovers as I discover. The novel usually morphs into complex plots that gain power as they go forward, with lots of twists and surprises along the way. THE LIES THAT BIND and another novel, futuristic, that was just picked up (THE ANTIQUITIES DEALER) were written like that. Interestingly however, with HONOR I didn’t have an ending in mind when I began, just a number of conflicts and historical events, all of which I had to tie together and resolve. HONOR is quite atypical for me in that respect.

SW: So, you’ve also got a futuristic thriller coming out. I think working on two such disparate genres would make my head spin! Do you see connections between the two types of writing, or do you keep those creative endeavors in separate compartments?

EP: Good question, Steve. Writing THE ANTIQUITIES DEALER was a nice break from writing historical fiction and refreshed me, cleaned out my head. Historical fiction has so many constraints, including language and character viewpoints that can’t be used because they’re too modern, they’d be anachronistic. No such problem with futuristic and sci-fi genres. Further, I wrote THE ANTIQUITIES DEALER first person, which was also liberating, letting me get into the main character’s head in his own words. Also the contemporary setting (St. Louis) is relatively familiar to the reader, mixed with exotic portions in Israel, and partially in Paris and London. And taking place in modern times, with sci-fi-like elements, I was able to really let go and come up with imaginative plot devices that the reader won’t guess. I really enjoyed this genre and have another, EARTH EXCURSIONS, laid out and ready to jump on when I finish SOMETHING IN MADNESS.

SW: Finally, and I know it’s always a little presumptuous asking authors to comment on “themes” and the like, but what are you hoping that readers will take away from HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS?

EP: I hope readers will see a parallel to today’s world and its own set of challenges. I want them to grasp how HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS illustrates that no matter how unjust society may be, love and friendship can enable men and women, regardless of color or class, to stand together and to prevail. And that evil deeds and the lies upon which they depend can and will eventually collapse of their own weight. Think of our country’s advances in civil rights and the women’s movements, gay rights, etc.

Call me an optimist, but history does bend toward justice over time.

Find Ed Protzel at:

Website: http://www.edprotzel

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/edprotzelauthor/?ref=settings

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Honor-Among-Outcasts-DarkHorse-Trilogy/dp/1946920312/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517584302&sr=1-1&keywords=ed+protzel

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14757802.Ed_Protzel

The Historical and the Utopian

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books, historical fiction, T. C. Boyle, Terra Ziporyn, utopia

The visionary plan of the Koreshan settlement near Fort Myers, Florida.

The Historical Novels Review recently published a piece I wrote about historical novelists who write about utopian communities or similar subjects. I’m working on a longer article, but for HNR, I had a tight word limit, so I confined myself mainly to an interview with fellow novelist T. C. Boyle.

Here’s the article as it appeared in HNR. By the way, they also have a review of The Language of Trees, which you can read here.

The list of historical novels grows ever longer, as does the list of utopian (nowadays, more likely dystopian) novels. Yet few novels occupy places on both; the historical and the utopian seem to be antithetical impulses. Although utopias fascinate historians and sociologists, they pose narrative challenges that may help explain why few historical novelists have entered this territory.

The classic utopian/dystopian novel is set either in the future or in a geographically indeterminate present. For this reason alone, historical novelists would find this genre inhospitable. A few novels give fictional treatment of actual communities; Terra Ziporyn’s Time’s Fool (2001) portrays a child of the Oneida colony of New York who becomes a zealot for sexual hygiene, highlighting the oppressive potential of utopian idealism. My novels explore similar themes using a community based on the 19th-century Icarians.

Similarly, T. C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville (1993) finds the dark and ridiculous sides of another utopian project, John Harvey Kellogg’s sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, where the health-obsessed sought relief through Kellogg’s regimen of vegetarianism, abstinence, and “colonic irrigation.” The novel also sees the authoritarian shadow behind the utopian impulse, especially with a charismatic leader in charge.

I recently posed a few questions to Boyle about his work:

Wiegenstein: American history and literature seem populated by obsessives, cranks, and con-men. Does the American sensibility lend itself to this tendency?

Boyle: Because we are essentially an anti-authoritarian nation founded by and harboring utopian cultists, we are uniquely susceptible to the leader (con man?) who says, “Give yourselves over to me and my regime and I will purify and sanctify you.”  Examples in my work include The Women (about Frank Lloyd Wright), The Inner Circle (Alfred Kinsey) and The Terranauts (John Allen and the Biosphere II project), and that is only a partial list.

Wiegenstein: In The Road to Wellville, the characters’ preoccupation with diet seems to have contemporary resonance. Do you see a connection to the utopian impulse?

Boyle: Yes, even in the early 1990s when I was writing The Road to Wellville, I was inspired by the parallels between the early health-food advocates and the ones we see now, as well as their food and exercise fads.  Kellogg had splendid ideas–vegetarian diet, no alcohol or tobacco, regular exercise–but what made him ludicrous (and suspicious) in my eyes was his messianic and puritanical bent.  (Incidentally, I loved Alan Parker’s film version, with Anthony Hopkins in the ever-so-slightly menacing role of Dr. Kellogg.)  Further, I do see our obsession with purity of food as part of the utopian impulse, as you put it, and, as The Road to Wellville suggests, what does this have to with but the very saving of our souls (and corporeal beings too) through staving off death?

Wiegenstein: In writing The Road to Wellville, did you feel compelled to stay close to facts, or relatively free to invent?  How did you decide where to draw the line?

Boyle: Fiction has no compulsion to do anything but exist as art.  That said, in all my historical novels, I have been motivated by the oddness of actual events and their correspondence with today (how did we get here?), and so have given the history to you as I have received it.  All the facts of Kellogg’s life are accurate (so too with my portrayal of Frank Lloyd Wright in The Women and Alfred C. Kinsey in The Inner Circle)—I suppose I’d be a historian if I weren’t a novelist.  But the novelist can dig into the brains and p.o.v. of historical figures in the way historians can’t, and that is a great joy for me.  As for your final question regarding the line between invention and fact, my conscience is clear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Working on a New Talk

Tags

books, environment, humanities, lumber, mining, speaking, The Language of Trees

I delight in working up talks to give to libraries and civic groups, usually in connection with one of my books. I conduct a great deal of research as I work on a novel, and although that research is not especially systematic or scholarly, I learn a lot about an era and can condense it into an understandable presentation. With Slant of Light, I developed a talk about 19th-century utopian communities; with This Old World, on Missouri during the years after the Civil War.

My new book takes place during the late 1880s, when large commercial interests from the Eastern cities and from St. Louis used the recently-built railroads to extend their reach deep into the Ozarks and set up lumber mills and mines to extract these natural resources. The Ozarks had been logged and mined for centuries, of course, but the industrial scale of this enterprise was new, and the impact—cultural, economic, and environmental—was profound.

Men in a lumberyard near Winona around 1890 (source: National Archives)

So I’m working up a talk about the coming of industry to this hardscrabble, rural landscape, and the changes it wrought on the people. It’s an easy story to cast villains and heroes into, but I think it’s more complicated than that. Rural folk were often their own worst enemies, or willing collaborators, in their conflict with the lumber and mining companies, and those companies themselves were not always the rapacious beasts of our imagining. And the relationship between people and company was not merely conflict or exploitation.

I’ve given talks at so many places by now that I can hardly keep track of them all—libraries, historical societies, Rotary clubs, book clubs, you name it. Every group is a bit different, and no two talks are quite the same.

Favorite Ozarks People – 12

Tags

Arcadia, art, books, Frenzel, Ironton, libraries, literature

Stained glass window by Milton Frenzel

When I was a cub reporter, fresh out of college, many years ago in southern Missouri, I was looking for something to keep my mind active. I started attending a Great Books Club at the Ozarks Regional Library in Ironton, about an hour away.

And although I was a college graduate who had aced a couple of literature courses, and a working writer, Milton and Virginia Frenzel, who led the book discussions, were so deeply engaged with what we read, and on such a different level than most of my college professors, that they changed the way I thought about books for good. They didn’t just study them. They looked at them as living things, argued with them, demanded more from them. And by changing the way I thought about literature, they changed the way I thought about myself. And they weren’t even trying to do that. They were just being themselves, authentically and unselfconsciously, and in doing so opened up a new way of defining myself.

Milton and Virginia were an unlikely pair of Ozarkers: intellectual and urbane, they were among several artists who had emigrated from the St. Louis area to the Arcadia Valley, (others included Robert Harmon and Michael Chomyk). Milton and Bob Harmon designed stained glass windows for the Emil Frei Company of St. Louis, and Milton also painted. As I recall, Milton taught some art classes at the high school, although I don’t remember if he taught there full-time. I think they were largely in retirement by then. Virginia later served on the AV School Board.

That book group attracted some remarkable people, both natives and transplants. I may write about more of that group later. But for now, I’ll content myself by observing that if I ever dare to call myself an educated person, it’s a term that first began to become clear to me in a monthly book group at the Ironton library.

— Another Frenzel window.

 

A Writer’s Thanks

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books, Thanks, Thanksgiving, writing

Here are a few things I am thankful for today:

• Readers who like what I do and who post reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere.
• Readers who have comments, questions, or criticism and post them or e-mail them to me. Honest criticism is always appreciated, believe it or not.
• Book clubs! Some of the best times of my writing life have happened at book clubs.
• A publisher and editor who collaborate, respond, and always keep the best results for the book in mind.
• Organizations and civic groups that ask me to come speak to them. And especially libraries. Libraries are the secret weapon of democracy.
• Those who quietly and unfailingly support me as I work. God bless them, and God bless you all.

Good times at Washington U.

Tags

Alpha Delta Phi, books, Eliot, Missouri, St. Louis, Washington University

Every year, the men of Alpha Delta Phi at Washington University choose a Missouri author to read and discuss. This year I was happy to be selected, and here’s a picture of us after my talk! They are aptly known as the Eliot Chapter of their fraternity. We talked for more than an hour, and they had some great comments and questions. Thanks especially to Tarun Chally (third from left), who was my contact person/organizer for the event. And despite the general glow, we aren’t about to be transported into a spaceship . . . just standing in a brightly lit foyer.

The Wayback Machine

Tags

art, books, Ed King, memory, Missouri, publishing, University of Missouri

I had an odd jolt this week when I saw a name in the obits and thought, “That sounds familiar.” I suppose that’s a by-product of aging.

When I was a master’s student, my advisor sent me over to the University of Missouri Press for a class/internship in academic publishing. I suspected then, and still do, that it was some sort of payback, in the “do me a favor, and I’ll send you some free labor” way—I’ve done that myself as a teacher. There were four of us students, as I recall, and our tasks were to proofread, read the manuscript pile, and perform the general publishing grunt work.

Our supervisor was the managing editor, whose name was Sue Kelpe, and she oversaw us effectively, although like managing editors everywhere she had the air of someone who had twenty pressing tasks waiting for her at all times, so our conversations were usually swift and surgical. I had some familiarity with blind proofreading from my newspaper days, when we did it for our major advertisers, so I often took that task. One person would read the proofs aloud while another followed the manuscript; the reader had to pronounce every punctuation mark, every capitalization. Some of my fellow students hated it, but I always found it a weird but calming task, this microscopic tour through the text, although I was never the perfect proofreader because I would usually be revising the work in my head at the same time, cutting extraneous words, replacing dead verbs with live ones.

The director of the press was Ed King, whom Sue treated with respect bordering on awe, and who didn’t deal with us passing lowlies a great deal. Occasionally he would glide through our workspace, exuding distinguished geniality, and exchange a few words. But mostly he was elsewhere, his office or meetings, although everyone knew that the U of M was his press, and the selection, design, and overall feel of the books were his.

So this week I saw Ed King’s obit in the paper and remembered droning on to my proofreading partner in the sunlit space in the press’s offices, and what I learned there about care and precision. And I walked over to my bookshelf to take down a book from that era. I noticed its design—impeccably elegant if a little old-fashioned, perfectly proportioned, a book designed to last—and it occurred to me that no obituary could be as insightful, as honest, or as  honorific as that finely crafted book.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 8

Tags

Arkansas, books, Sandy and Wayne, Springfield, Steve Yates

I had the pleasure of attending the Ozarks Studies Symposium in September, where I talked about the language we use to describe some Ozarks conflicts. I also bought three books that I’ve been reading, two new and one old, and I want to talk about them in the coming weeks.

I just finished Steve Yates’ novella this morning, and it left me with that sense of sad pleasure one often feels after finishing a touching and beautifully written book. It’s a slender volume, 155 pages, but it feels like a longer one (in a good way).

Although the title says “Sandy and Wayne,” it’s really Sandy’s book: Sandy Coker, a smart, vulnerable, determined, hard-shelled, aching-for-love lead inspector for the Arkansas Highway Department. The complications of her character grow so naturally out of her actions as she interacts with Wayne Sheridan, the dirt foreman for a Missouri-based contractor that has won the bid to build a section of highway in Sandy’s district, that by the midpoint of the book I felt not only that I knew Sandy, but that she would know me as well. Of course, one never actually gets to meet a fictional character, but such was the richness of her portrayal.

Sandy and Wayne circle each other, bounce off, and come together in unexpected ways, but this is no simple romance. Human longing and loss beat through every page, not just in the title characters, but in the minor characters and incidents, in the landscape itself as it resculpted to let the interstate roar through. Sandy and Wayne has sweetness and sadness in near-equal measures, and in that respect it’s a lot like life itself. It’s available from Dock Street Press or your local bookstore.

Steve Yates is a Springfield native who spent summers of his youth working for the Arkansas Highway Department. You can tell he was an observant summer employee by the wealth of detail, and that’s part of the enjoyment of this novella. He now works for the University Press of Mississippi, but you can tell he still has Ozarks blood in his veins by the things he writes. His next novel is coming out from Unbridled Books next spring, and I can’t wait to read it.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 7

Tags

A Country Year, books, Jacks Fork, Missouri, nature, Ozarks, Sue Hubbell, Texas County, writing

I heard a presentation on Sue Hubbell’s A Country Year at the Ozarks Studies Symposium in West Plains last year, from Brian Hardman of the University of the Ozarks, and that presentation reminded me I had been intending to dig out this book and re-read it (I’m pretty sure I had read it years ago). But nearly a year passed before intention became act. Another reason to love books—they’re so patient with us!

A Country Year may remind you of Walden in its seasonal structure (spring to spring), or of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for its devoted entomology, but those comparisons only go so far. For one thing, A Country Year is a quieter book, not as rhetorically extravagant; much of it was originally written for general-interest magazines, so the needs of the intended audience figure into that choice to some extent.

But something else that interests me about A Country Year is its practicality; it’s a working book, not the ruminations of a comfortable observer. When Hubbell writes about jacking up her truck to grease the wheel bearings, she’s not doing it to experience the rusticity of common tasks; she’s doing it because the truck needs greasing, and nobody else is around to take on the job. Real poverty runs through this book and informs it at every turn. For that reason, A Country Year speaks to the Ozarks experience in a particularly meaningful way. A transplant herself (who has since moved away), Hubbell wryly comments on the urbanites who relocate to a scenic patch of Ozark countryside, only to learn that their rural utopia comes with brown recluses and intermittent mail service.

A Country Year embraces both beauty and struggle. It’s unassuming but firm. And in those respects, it resembles a lot of the country folk I know.