Living with Loss

Tags

art, change, childhood, creativity, Crystal Payton, fiction, historical fiction, history, lakes, Leland Payton, literature, memory, Osage, Quincy, writing

A while back I shared a guest post from Dean Robertson about “home” – her recollections of her childhood home, leaving it, and returning years later. Since then that meditation has returned to me on occasion as I work on my next book.

The third book that I have set in the same river valley takes place about twenty years after This Old World‘s end. Some of the characters are still there, some are gone, and new ones have arrived. I’ve been thinking about the complicated emotions we experience when we see a place – our place – occupied by someone else.

Whenever I travel to Quincy, I like to drive by our old house on North 22nd Street, the house my daughter grew up in. For a while it was an unpleasant experience, as the house fell into disrepair (seeing its occupant appear in the police report was the low point). But now it has a new owner, bright shutters, newly planted flowers. So the drive-by is a cheerful one once again.

Still, it’s not my house any more. And even the most dutiful of owners is not me. So even positive change involves loss.

These thoughts were prompted today by the folks over at Damming the Osage, who posted a poem written by a gentleman not of my acquaintance, Rod Cameron of Raytown, Mo. It’s a lovely poem, followed by a reminiscence, of himself and his neighbors losing their land to the building of a reservoir. It’s a darn fine poem. Take a read.

What can we do with loss? Loss is built into our existence. Some losses are inevitable, but others (like the loss in the poem) are not, and we fight like devils to prevent them. In G.B. Shaw’s Major Barbara, a character says, “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.” Perhaps that aphorism can be reversed as well. When we lose something, we owe it to ourselves to learn from it – or at least to make it into a poem worth reading.

And so I return to the last few chapters of my novel-in-progress, thinking about my characters and their losses and their learning.

Close to Home

Tags

Civil War, Fredericktown, historical fiction, history, human nature, Missouri, nostalgia, Ozarks, slavery

I belong to a Facebook group that shares thoughts about local history in and around Fredericktown, Missouri, the small town that figures in the setting of my novels. Most of the posts to this group are of the “who remembers that quaint cafe on the corner?” or “does anyone recognize the man in this photo?” variety, but yesterday, one of the members posted this sobering reminder that the little town we bathe in nostalgia also participated, like the rest of the slaveholding part of the country, in the great evil that tore the country apart. It’s disquieting to remember, yet with only the slightest effort, such reminders are all around. A recent moment’s idle curiosity into the origins of some old-time songs led to some intense discomfort at the astonishingly racist lyrics of turn-of-the-century popular songs. And I recall a time, some years ago, when I was editing a manuscript of the journals of an early citizen of the Arcadia Valley, reading with horror his childhood account of a lynching on the railroad bridge over Stouts Creek. The horror was particularized because this was a bridge I had idly viewed from my car window hundreds of times.

The task for anyone interested in history is to see it whole, not just the parts that reflect well upon our forbears. I’m reminded of that whenever I give a talk about Missouri during the Civil War, because just about nobody of that era comes out well in the moral light of the present day. People will tell me with an element of pride, “My family never owned slaves” or “My family owned slaves, but treated them well” as though those conditions made them exemplary. Let’s face it, owning a human being pretty much rules out the “treated well” claim, and the overwhelming majority of Missourians didn’t object to the practice of slavery, whether they owned slaves or not. Apart from a handful of abolitionists, and the slave families themselves, most Missourians accepted the practice either explicitly or implicitly, with even those who were against slavery holding only the vague hope that it would wither away somehow in the future.

What does this tell us? Not that our ancestors were evil, necessarily. But that they were flawed, and that they countenanced evil things…..just like us.

Excellent Resource

Tags

Arkansas, Civil War, history, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ozarks, Springfield

Someone posted this link on Facebook a while back…..I had not run across this site before, despite having done a lot of research into the Civil War in the Ozarks. It’s a wonderful resource! Well organized, good looking, and informative.

Congratulations to the many organizations that contributed to this website. It’s a great example of inter-governmental cooperation – federal funding, administered by the state, and managed by the Springfield-Greene County Library. I just wish its county-by-county coverage ventured farther east!

 

Of Militias and Land Acquisition

Tags

Current River, history, Jacks Fork, Missouri, National Scenic Riverways, Ozarks, rivers

The news out of Oregon is not good. A few armed crackpots have taken over the unoccupied headquarters building at a wildlife refuge in order to protest the incarceration of a couple of ranchers who were convicted of arson.

Nobody should break the law in this way. But the history behind this standoff goes a long way back. And Ozarks residents probably hear some familiar notes in the complaints of the ranchers. In a smaller and more geographically limited way, the creation of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways caused the same kind of wounded feelings, and had an impact on the lives of longtime residents, as the actions of the Bureau of Land Management did out West.

Any time a government agency moves in to take control of land for a perceived greater public benefit, or to take ownership of privately owned land, the same tensions will come up.

Here’s an interesting article on the history of land acquisition by the National Park Service for the Ozark Riverways.

 

Looking for Lydia, Looking for God

Tags

Aging, Bible, books, Civil War, Dean Robertson, history, Lydia Roper, Norfolk, reviews, Virginia, writing

I came by an interesting book the other day. It’s called Looking for Lydia, Looking for God, and it’s part-memoir, part-religious meditation, part-biography.

The story is this. The author, Dean Robertson (despite the unorthodox first name, Dean is female) had occasion to stay for some months at the Lydia Roper Home, a home for elderly women in Norfolk, Virginia, while recovering from a fall. During her time at the home, Robertson led a Bible study group with some of the women who lived there, starting with four and gradually growing to around a dozen. She also became curious about Lydia Hand Bowen Roper, the home’s namesake and inspiration. Some might say “curious about” is an inadequate phrase, preferring “obsessed with.”

In Looking for Lydia, Looking for God, Robertson draws together three threads: her personal journey from ailment to recovery, from withdrawn-ness to engagement; the stories of her Bible study group, the women who made it up and their encounters with Biblical texts; and the teasing-out of the sparse details of the life of Lydia Roper, whose husband, a wealthy lumberman, endowed the home shortly before his death in 1921. The result is an odd, charming, occasionally frustrating, immensely enjoyable book.

The women of the Bible Study group are a varied group, some inquisitive, some uncommunicative. Robertson portrays them vividly. For a sort-of memoir, the book is less forthcoming about Robertson herself. We learn that she is a retired academic who grew up in north Georgia, and not a whole lot else. This reticence is unusual for a memoir, and I found myself wishing for more internal revelation. Lydia Roper also remains stubbornly inaccessible to Robertson’s efforts at inquiry; she left little written record, and her family’s memories are vague. Robertson describes her frustration at her efforts to uncover more about the elusive Lydia:

At this point, the result is uncertainty, and all I can find is that sometime in 1920 or 1921, Captain John Roper either “built,” “established,” “donated,” or “founded” the Lydia Roper Home. The Home either was, or was not, intended as a haven for Confederate widows. Two sources say yes; a local historian who grew up in the area says, “The Confederate widows twist likely came about as a result of rationalizing having a Damn Yankee establish a very useful and needed charitable home in an extremely Confederate area. Even one hundred years after The War, partisan feelings about Northerners were still quite strong.” A family member says the original charter more likely read something like, “ … for impoverished white women in the city of Norfolk.”
       Well.

Anybody who’s engaged in research into an obscure historical figure or event can relate to that “Well.”

What holds these three threads together? To me, it’s the searching and the losing. The women of the Bible study group work their way through Old Testament and New, responding to the stories in conventional and unconventional ways, searching for meaning, consolation, and explanations, all the while growing older and more frail. They lose their faculties, their health. Dean Robertson keeps looking for Lydia, even as Lydia continually recedes on the horizon. Memories fail; stories prove untrustworthy; yet the effort rewards itself. The writing is literary and highly crafted, but not overly so; the characters of the women shine through.

The book contains a lot of discussion of the various characters in the Bible, particularly women. I’m just about the least qualified person in the country to talk about that element of the book; Bible study has never interested me. So I’ll leave it to others to judge the originality and soundness of the exegesis. I’m more interested in the human stories of the elderly women who gather in the second floor parlor of the Lydia Roper Home. And these stories – warm, touching, and often sad – are well worth the reading. Looking for Lydia, Looking for God is a lovely book, especially for the spiritually-minded.

It’s published by Köehlerbooks and is available from their website, as well as from Barnes & Noble and Amazon. You can learn more about Dean Robertson on her website.

 

An Hour in the Life of a Nerd

Tags

Delaware, history, New Jersey, No man's land, Research

• Try to remember the name of the waterway that separates Delaware from New Jersey. Can’t recall. Go to atlas. (It’s the Delaware River/Delaware Bay, by the way. You’re welcome.)

• Spend fifteen minutes or so with atlas. Dang, those things are addictive.

• Notice that the atlas appears to show a tiny bit of Delaware on the east side of the river. Can that be right? Head for the computer.

• Sure enough, there are not one but two pieces of Delaware on the New Jersey side of the river! Oooo, time for Wikipedia.

• Wikipedia gives me the names – Killcohook and Artificial Island – but that can’t be the whole story. Time for more searching.

• Aha! Great stories! Killcohook is known by locals in Salem County, N.J., as “the Baja,” and it’s where teenagers go to drink, criminals go to dump cars (and once in a while, a body), and hunters go to shoot out of season. Because the local authorities can’t touch them! They’re legally entitled to, but it’s a roadless, mucky area, and their patrol cars get stuck. And it’s an hour by road from the rest of Delaware.

• But why is it in Delaware in the first place? Ahhh…..a better story! During Colonial days, a British court ruled that the entire riverbed within a twelve-mile radius of New Castle, Delaware, belonged to Delaware, up to the low-water mark of the river. Not a big deal until the 1920s, when the Army Corps of Engineers began dredging the river channel and dumping the silt on the New Jersey side. The manmade island that was created at Killcohook was part of Delaware, but eventually merged with New Jersey although the old low-water-mark boundary remained. As for the poetically named Artificial Island, it was created when fill dirt from the creation of a nuclear power plant crossed over that magical twelve-mile radius from New Castle, thus creating a little piece of Delaware where none had existed before.

• Learned that the geographical term for these odd bits of territory is “exclave” (as opposed to “enclave”). Nice word. Gotta remember that. Kaskaskia, Illinois, is the nearest example that comes to mind, along with the “Kentucky Bend,” a chunk of Kentucky that is separated from the rest of the state by a bend in the Mississippi River. The biggest exclave I can think of worldwide would be East Prussia when it was separated from the rest of Germany, but maybe there are others that don’t come to mind immediately.

• But what’s up with that “twelve-mile radius“? Back to Wikipedia. Turns out that the circular top of Delaware is part of that twelve-mile circle, which was specified in 1682 when the Duke of York granted the land to William Penn (although it wasn’t until 1750 that the center of the circle was definitively established as the cupola of the courthouse in New Castle.) That weird border delineation led to court fights that lasted until 2007 involving Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware at various times. In 2008 the Delaware House of Representatives considered a symbolic bill to call out the National Guard to defend its interests against encroachment by New Jersey.

• Now wouldn’t a war between Delaware and New Jersey be something to behold? I don’t know about you, but to me this was a heck of a successful hour.

Working Like a Duck

Tags

Arkansas, art, books, creativity, history, Missouri, Missouri State University, music, novels, poetry, West Plains, writing

You know that old saying about how a duck works — calm and still in the visible part, but paddling like heck down below? Well, that’s how I’ve been the last couple of weeks. I’ve been quiet on this blog, on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere, because I’ve been focusing on a couple of projects that have taken a lot of time and concentration.

There’s the next book, which is rounding the turn toward home at last, and I’m very excited about that. You hit a moment when things start coming together, when the plot threads that you put down months ago in earlier chapters finally start tying up, and it’s an exciting passage that makes all the groaning of earlier months feel worthwhile. Still some distance to travel, but the finish line is in view.

I’ve also been working on my presentation for the Ozarks Cultural Symposium, which is next week in West Plains. I was honored this year to be asked to be the keynote speaker. I’m hoping to live up to that honor with a talk that will also draw together a lot of the threads of thought that I have about the Ozarks, its image, and its representation in creative culture.

If you’re near the West Plains area, you should definitely come to this symposium! It’s put on every year by the branch campus of Missouri State University there, and they always draw a wonderfully diverse group of presenters from Missouri, Arkansas, and elsewhere. It’s interdisciplinary and includes creative presenters (poetry, music, fiction, etc.) as well as scholarly ones.

M.M. Bennetts Finalist Review and Interview – 7

Tags

Andalusia, books, creativity, England, Granada, historical fiction, history, M.M. Bennetts, mysteries, novels, reviews, Spain

I was unable to complete the interview for the next book by a finalist for the M.M. Bennetts Award, but here’s the review. The book is The Red Hill, by David Penny. This book was a revelation to me for several reasons.

The setting is fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, in the final years before the fall of the last parcels of Islamic Spain. Thomas Berrington, an Englishman serving as physician to the Sultan of Granada (or Gharnatah as Penny spells it, following the Moorish pronunciations that would have been in use at the time), finds himself with an unexpected task – finding out who has been committing a series of gruesome murders within the walls of the Alhambra itself.

I rarely read mysteries these days, so it was a treat for me to get back into the pleasures of mystery reading – watching for clues, trying to outthink the protagonist, all the while enjoying the benefits of characterization and setting. In this book, the main character is richly characterized, with a range of secondary characters who provide good balance to his strengths and weaknesses. There’s a host of potential suspects, and the setting is rich in detail.

Several things set this book apart for me. One was the variety of characters. I have read that Moorish Spain was a remarkably diverse location, and Penny takes full advantage of that diversity, populating the novel with a wide range of characters. Of particular interest is Thomas’s partner in detection, a palace eunuch named Jorge. Penny avoids the cliché of medieval historical fiction and makes Jorge an interesting, complicated character, rather than a creature defined by his difference. The book also effectively conveys the reality of life in an absolute monarchy, where the whim of the Sultan carries the power of life and death.

The Red Hill takes a few liberties with the actual history of the era, which Penny carefully points out in his afterword. But in terms of capturing the feel of a time and place, the book does a marvelous job of conjuring up the last days of Islamic Spain, with a dandy murder mystery as the driving force of the plot.

You can learn more about David Penny on his website and order the book here.

David Penny

On Confederates and Confederate Symbols

Tags

Boone County, Civil War, Columbia, history, memorials, Missouri, war

The current controversy over Confederate markers and symbols has come to Columbia, in the form of the “Confederate rock” which sat in the center of the University of Missouri campus when I was an undergraduate, was quietly and unceremoniously whisked out of sight during an earlier period of racial turmoil, and wound up a few years later on the lawn of the Boone County Courthouse. Now a petition is circulating to have the rock removed.

I completely support the idea of removing the Confederate battle flag from state monuments and public areas; the flag was appropriated by racist groups in the 1950s and 1960s to become an unmistakable symbol of hatred and intimidation. (For proof, check out this image of the flag’s use during the 1957 Arkansas desegregation battle.) But the monuments and other commemorations present a more complicated issue.

Descendants of Confederate veterans defend the monuments, statues, and other such emblems as non-racist commemorations of their ancestors’ valor and sacrifice. And there is no doubt that many thousands of soldiers for the Confederacy fought for their side while having little or no sympathy for the institution of slavery. But even so, the cause of the war was slavery. The claim of “states’ rights” being the cause of the war is unpersuasive; if anything, the Southern states were angered by states in the Northeast exercising their rights by refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Any doubt that slavery was not the principal cause of the war can be dispelled by reading Alexander Stephens’ “Cornerstone” speech, considered to be the “Confederate Declaration of Independence.”

So how to commemorate brave men who fought for an evil cause? Especially in states that participated in the rebellion? The plaque on the Confederate Rock seems bland enough: “To honor the valor and patriotism of Confederate veterans of Boone County.” But what’s patriotic about declaring war on your own country? Especially when the cause of that rebellion was the stated desire to maintain millions of Americans in subjugation? Is this something to be honored or embarrassed about?

The post-Civil War years in Missouri were characterized in Aaron Astor’s book Rebels on the Border as a time of “retroactive secession,” in which the state’s mixed association with the Confederacy was reinterpreted to reinforce ideas of white supremacy and white cultural superiority that had been unexamined on both sides during the war itself, but which then came under attack because of rising black political assertiveness. The erection of monuments does not happen free of a political context, and those monuments carry that stain today.

Confederate monuments are not like other war memorials, which commemorate occasions of national solidarity and effort. On battlefields and in cemeteries, the monuments appropriately recognize human sacrifice and bravery; on the courthouse lawn, they inappropriately fix a time of national agony as something uncomplicatedly worthy of honor. The rock belongs in a cemetery, not a place of public business.

Best Review Ever

Tags

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’.”