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stevewiegenstein

~ News, announcements, events, and ruminations about my books, including Slant of Light, This Old World, The Language of Trees, and Scattered Lights, and about creativity, fiction, Missouri, the Ozarks, and anything else that strikes my fancy

stevewiegenstein

Tag Archives: writing

Favorite Ozarks Books – 7

09 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, Missouri, Ozarks, Writing

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

country-year-cover

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.

 

Our Ozarks

01 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Missouri, Ozarks

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magazines, Ozarks, writing

Our Ozarks Cover

A new magazine is making a go at the Ozarks niche. It’s called Our Ozarks, and it’s published out of Ozark, Mo. So the name is propitious, anyway.

I’ve subscribed and will be interested in seeing how it makes its way through the shakedown months. So far, the photography looks good, but I think it’s still finding its way in the articles. Those who remember the Ozarks Mountaineer‘s long history will recall that it, too, tended toward very uneven articles . . . some terrific, some cliched. W. K. McNeil’s music history column was impeccable, and often the best thing in the magazine. The quality declined after Clay Anderson died in 2003, and eventually the Mountaineer succumbed. Larry Dablemont picked up the torch for a while with Journal of the Ozarks, which went its way in March of this year. It’s been followed by a magazine called Ozark Hills and Hollows, from Exeter, Mo., which now has several issues out. Haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet, but from what I can tell, their photography looks very good. I looked at a copy online, and I was impressed by its range and by the professionalism of the design.

OHH

Both publications look great on the web. As my friends Emery Styron and Jo Schaper, formerly of River Hills Traveler, can testify, publishing a magazine is a constant grind, and someone who enters into it had better love their subject matter. (RHT is published from Neosho, Mo., now.) Advertising is the great challenge for small-circulation magazines, and I wish all three of these publications well. All three of them have Facebook pages, listed below.

RHT

Ozark Hills and Hollows Facebook Page

Our Ozarks Facebook Page

River Hills Traveler Facebook Page

 

 

Living with Loss

24 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Daybreak, History, Illinois, Literature, Missouri, Ozarks, Personal, This Old World, Writing

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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.

April in Missouri -for the Literary-Minded

26 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, Missouri, Writing

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Blank Slate Press, Bonniebrook, Branson, Columbia, creativity, Kansas City, Missouri, Missouri Writers Guild, St. Louis, Unbound Book Festival, writing

There are lots of literary events going on in Missouri next month, some of which I’m involved with, some not. If you enjoy reading or writing, climb in the car and take a spring road trip!

First, there’s the Afternoon of Authors with Blank Slate Press event April 2, from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Central Library in downtown St. Louis. I’ll be joining two other BSP authors to talk about writing and to read from our work. I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll read from my most recently published book, This Old World, or from my work-in-progress, which I’m getting close to completing. I’m also looking forward to sharing some time with Cynthia Graham and John Ryan.

Next up will be the season-opening open house at the Bonniebrook Gallery, Museum, and Homestead near Branson on April 16. I don’t think I’ll be able to make that event as I have work-related travel, but I’m eager to get down there sometime this spring or summer. The open house runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and will include exhibits, craft demonstrations and vendors, presentations, and musical performances. Here’s a link to an earlier post about that event, including a schedule.

Then the following Saturday is the Unbound Book Festival here in Columbia. This is the initial year for that festival, and it looks very promising.

Finally, at the end of the month, is the annual conference of the Missouri Writers’ Guild. This year’s conference is in Kansas City, and includes workshops, master classes, opportunities to meet with editors and agents, and nonstop networking! I’ve been going to the MWG conference for years and always come away with something valuable, whether it’s an insight on craft, a new thought on marketing, or an important contact. Anybody who wants to take his or her writing to the next level needs to check out this conference.

So change your oil and buckle your seatbelt! It’s time to hit the road for literary adventure.

 

Guest Post – On Violence

31 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, Slant of Light, This Old World, Writing

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Alfred Hitchcock, Dean Robertson, film, The Wire, Torn Curtain, violence, writing

Goya-Guerra_(46)I guest posted over on Dean Robertson’s blog today with some thoughts on creating scenes of violence in my fiction . . . . and on experiencing them in the works of others. Here’s the link! Have a look!

“Home” – Guest Post from Dean Robertson

06 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, People, Rural, Writing

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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.

Log House-Rear View-1After 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.

Cedar Creek from the Patio copyThere 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.

 

Looking for Lydia, Looking for God

26 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by stevewiegenstein in History, Literature, People, Writing

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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.

 

Working Like a Duck

12 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, Missouri, Ozarks, Personal

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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 – 9

30 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, Personal, Writing

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books, creativity, David Blixt, fiction, historical fiction, Italy, M.M. Bennetts Award, novels, reviews, Shakespeare, Verona, writing

Princes Doom

My tour of the M.M. Bennetts Award finalists nears its completion with the shortlisted finalists. First up, David Blixt’s The Prince’s Doom. 

Imagine a world in which the 14th-century historical figures of Italy — the Della Scala family of Verona, the Doge of Venice, Petrarch, the family of Dante Alighieri, the Carrara family of Padua — interacted and lived alongside the characters of Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Katherine and Petruchio, the Merchant of Venice, and so forth. It’s a great premise: after all, Shakespeare did use incidents from Italian history for some of his plays, and historical characters pop up in them from time to time. So why not have them coexist in a fictional universe of their own?

That’s the premise of The Prince’s Doom, and I gather of the other books in David Blixt’s “Star-Cross’d” series, of which this novel is the fourth. The book is an enjoyable literary mash-up of characters we’ve seen before, historical figures we may have heard about but known little of, and entirely new fictional characters brought in as well.

The central character is Pietro Alaghieri (to use the novel’s spelling), the heir to Dante and a knight of Verona. He has been given the task of overseeing the upbringing of Francesco (“Cesco”) Della Scala, the heir to the ambitious and formidable Cangrande Della Scala, Verona’s ruler. Cesco is brilliant, unstable, and vastly promising, so Pietro’s task is not just the obligation of a knight to his ruler, but a personal and moral challenge. Pietro is a complex, sympathetic character, and following the turns of his mind as he tries to understand and curb Cesco’s extravagant behavior makes for great reading.

I would probably have been able to follow the complicated plot of this novel better if I had read the earlier books in the series. These novels are real doorstoppers, with The Prince’s Doom coming in at just under 700 pages, so they’re the kind of books a person can burrow into and enjoy a huge cast of characters, lots of action, and an exotic setting depicted with great care. In addition to being an author, Blixt is a theatre professional known for his skill at the staging of theatrical swordfights, so as you can imagine there are plenty of rip-roaring fight scenes here to go along with the court intrigue and intricate plotting. The Shakespearean characters add a dash of familiar unfamiliarity to the story, and it’s enjoyable to see them reinvented in the mind of another.

You can learn more about David Blixt and his work on his website or his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter.

David Blixt

SW: The Prince’s Doom is nearly 700 pages with an enormous cast of characters. Was it daunting for you to undertake such an ambitious project?

DB: More daunting in hindsight. This is the fourth novel in the series, and the cast and size both grew naturally from the previous books. I had a lot to accomplish in this one, and at the same time wanted the story to have room to develop naturally. That was aided by the visit I made to Verona last year – I was allowed to see places I’d never visited before, and several spots became settings for scenes I hadn’t even imagined yet. The places determined the action, which allowed the city to be as much a character in the story as the people.

SW: I’m guessing that many of us know fourteenth-century Italy mainly through its literary representations. Your novel engages with the actual historical situation of the time, as well as bringing in figures we know from literature. How did you balance the fictional and the historical in the book? Were there particular rules you set for yourself on how much liberty you could take with actual people and events?

DB: My rule of thumb is I cannot contradict the historical record. That being said, I’m lucky there’s a lot of missing data from this period. I am allowed to fill in the gaps, and do so either with literary characters or historical ones I’ve appropriated. When possible, I like to blend the historical figures with the literary ones – Cesco is an example of that, being both historical and literary at once.

As far as liberty, I’m using the historical backdrop to tell my story. I won’t contradict history (at least, not intentionally), but why people act the way they do is open to me. Motives matter a great deal. Part of my great joy in writing historical fiction is the creative detective work of figuring out why one of my characters would have done this or that in the historical record. Sometimes the actions fit perfectly with the characters I’ve crafted. Sometimes they don’t, and those are the fun times, when I have to weave new threads and hatch new plots – political, familial, martial – to explain a seeming incongruity. It has the added benefit of making all my characters more complex.

SW: I’m particularly curious about the characters from Shakespeare that come in and out of the book. Did you find it advantageous having characters with what we might call a “past history” as characters, or did their prior characterization in Shakespeare act as a limitation on what you could do with them?

DB: Mostly advantageous, though an occasional trouble was wanting to resolve their issues, and knowing that cannot happen. At this point in the series, I’ve hit about a third of Shakespeare’s Italian plays – Shrew and Merchant are behind us, Much Ado, 2 Gents, and R&J are ahead of us. So some characters have their histories behind them, but for most their famous scenes are yet to come. So, just as I can’t contradict history, I cannot contradict Shakespeare. I very much wanted to end the Capulet/Montague feud – I love Mari and Antony, and want them to stop their nonsense. Yet as the play is still years in the future, the feud must continue to exist. But for Tybalt, Romeo, Friar Lawrence, Juliet, the Nurse, it was just pure fun to give them their early years. And of course Mercutio, whose series this is.

SW: One of the focal characters is Francesco della Scala, known as “Cesco” in the book. How much is known about the actual individual? What attracted you to him as a character?

DB: I came at him backwards. When I created the series, it started with the feud from Shakespeare. Then I delved into the history of Verona, and was astonished by Cangrande. He’s a figure deserving his own books, and so I gave them to him. Yet he reminded me of someone, too. Shakespeare’s wildest spirit, Mercutio, who is referred to in R&J as the Prince’s “kinsman” and “near ally”. So when I discovered Cangrande had a bastard son, one whose life was mostly unknown, I decided to merge them. That decision has dominated fifteen years of my life, and will continue on for some time.

As for the historical Cesco, his marriage is factual. The rest is me, a la Shakespeare.

SW: Reading The Prince’s Doom, I felt a real fascination with the city of Verona. Can you tell us a bit about Verona? What do you find interesting about that location?

DB: One of my favorite things about Verona is that it is a living city. Whereas all the ruins in Rome are only tourist attractions, the historical sites in Verona are still in use today. There are operas and concerts in the Roman arena, Cangrande’s palace is city hall, his suite of rooms the residence of the Chief of Police. Verona is not a monument to the past, but has incorporated its past into its present. And the wine in the region is marvelous.

SW: What’s next on your writing agenda?

DB: Talk about daunting. I am skimming the surface of four different novels, seeing which one takes hold. I have to edit the next volume in my series on the Roman-Jewish wars, WAIL OF THE FALLEN. I’m dabbling in an Elizabethan noir. I have a book about Hell, another about the supernatural, and I’ve just started research for the next Will & Kit book. I want all of those out of the way before I dive back into Cesco’s world. Yet I have to admit, there’s an itch, a longing, to do it now, this minute. The Star-Cross’d series is where my heart resides. These are the stories I most want to tell, and count myself lucky that I’m allowed to do so.

M. M. Bennetts Finalist Review and Interview – 6

12 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Literature, Personal, Writing

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books, farming, fiction, historical fiction, human nature, novels, reviews, writing, Yorkshire

Tizzie

Next stop on my trip through the M.M. Bennetts Award finalists is P.D.R. Lindsay’s Tizzie. Although Lindsay lives in New Zealand, her family roots are in Yorkshire, the setting of this novel.

I mention that only by way of partial explanation of one of the most striking features of this book – its utter and complete mastery of the rural Yorkshire dialect. From the first paragraph onward, Tizzie captures the speaking rhythms and vocabulary of 19th-century Yorkshire farmers with amazing fidelity and precision. I was immediately immersed in the concerns and thought patterns of the main character, Tizzie Cawthra, simply by virtue of her poetic and quaint rural dialect.

And oh, Tizzie has troubles. As an unmarried woman thought to be past marrying age (29), she has been “taken in” by one of her brothers, whose family treats her as little more than a slave, or worse. Her immense store of knowledge about dairying and cheesemaking, handed down through the female side of the family over the generations, serves as the family’s financial bulwark, but Tizzie never sees a penny of it. Scorned as a failure by the family because of her lack of a husband, Tizzie can only find comfort in her beloved niece Agnes, who is similarly abused as a “useless girl.”

Tizzie’s brother’s family surely enters my list as one of the most appallingly vile sets of people I’ve read about in a long time, counterbalanced precariously by the kindly schoolmaster and fair-minded squire of the village, who appreciate Tizzie’s talents and share her aspirations for young Agnes. Tizzie’s struggles to find a sliver of freedom for herself, and a glimmer of hope for Agnes, are depicted with heart-aching care.

Fans of the gauzy PBS version of Yorkshire rural life will find parts of Tizzie hard to take. Farm work during that era was backbreaking and mind-numbing, set against an omnipresent worry that the year’s earnings might not make the rent and the family would be put off. The economic and social pressures that weigh on Tizzie make her battles against them all the more heroic. And I use the term “heroic” most intentionally here; Tizzie is indeed a hero as she labors to carve out a space of freedom for herself and her niece.

Learn more about P.D.R. Lindsay at her website, her publisher’s website, her Twitter feed, or her Goodreads page.

- PDR Lindsay

– PDR Lindsay

SW: Tizzie struck me immediately with its evocative use of Yorkshire dialect. Can you tell us about that dialect, and how you came to have such a mastery of it? Did the use of that dialect pose particular challenges for you as a writer?

I grew up in Yorkshire listening to several of the Yorkshire dialects. My father was strict and my siblings and I were not allowed to speak like that ourselves, but we heard it daily from the men on the farms around us, the women in the street and shops, a sort of general broad accent was used by most Yorkshire people. Being kids we picked up and could use some of the more colourful expressions. I used to love listening to the oldest grannies and grandads who spoke the purer dialects where I could only understand one word in twenty. There was a special rhythm to that speech. Even now I love the sound of the Dales dialects. Many of the words are pure Old English, or Norse-based and have fascinating histories. Sneck and thwaite, yat and mither, thole and crowdie, nipper and laiking, they sound grand. And it is not only the words but the way they are used which is a delight to my ear. I tried to convey some of that musical quality to the readers without losing them but any real dialect expert would not approve of the way I’ve used some of the words. My American Beta readers hated the dialect and asked me to take out as much as possible. It became a delicate balancing act, but Tizzie had to sound on the page as she did in my head.

Dialect is always a difficult choice for a writer as many readers are put off by having to deal with the unknown. As a writer I have to make things clear for my readers so I did try to put every word in context or use it in such a way that a reader could substitute a word they would know and so understand what Tizzie was thinking or saying. I know I did not succeed, but some readers have told me they loved the way she spoke, or they loved it because she sounded just like their old Nan, so perhaps a little of the music of the dialect made it off the page.

SW: A little further on that topic — I noticed that some characters are distinguished by their ability to shift in and out of the local dialect, while others are not. And then there are characters for whom the local dialect is practically a foreign language. Do you see the characters’ language use as a marker of social distinction?

Oh yes, speech marked your social class and from the Regency onwards people were clearly ranked by their speech. The old Squire, Sir Charles’s father, would have been a jolly, broad Yorkshire speaker and not give tuppence for London and London society and their pernickety ways, but his wife had had a London season and did mind about being thought a country bumpkin. Their son and heir, Sir Charles, was brought up to remember that and went away to an expensive public school where any dialect would be beaten out or mocked out of him. It was the language of the peasant not the gentleman. Even servants who wished to be more than gardeners, stable men or kitchen maids had to try and mend their speech. Readers of The Secret Garden will remember that the serving girl, Martha, tells Mary that she is only allowed to help in the house as a favour because her speech is ‘too broad.’ People learned to manage this dual system in order to get better jobs or positions. Dialect at home and standard at work.

The Schoolmaster is an interesting character in this way of dual speech in that he had joined the army and been made sergeant then was invalided out. But his friendship with his captain, Sir Charles, (he’d saved him from a couple of disasters) and their mutual interests meant that he could train as a teacher, with Sir Charles’s support, and so he had to move up the social ranks. As a senior teacher and Sir Charles’s school inspector he needed to speak ‘standard’ English but as a Yorkshire lad he knew his dialect and used it occasionally to good effect.

SW: Tizzie herself is such a great character — so rich and well-rounded. Had you been thinking about this character for a long time? What got you started with Tizzie?

I like cooking, especially old recipes. Dorothy Hartley’s book Food in England had a bibliography which set me chasing up books. I found the wonderful Elizabeth David’s book on bread which had a reference to an old Scottish cook book. I was hunting up oatcake recipes and this book was recommended for its scone and oatcake recipes. The writer aimed to preserve traditional recipes and mentioned their history and why they were made. One of these traditional oatcakes was the St Columba’s cake, an oatcake made on June 9th, St Columba’s eve. Into this cake went a silver coin. The cake was toasted over a fire made of sacred rowan, yew and oak wood and the child who found the coin in their piece of cake got to keep the year’s crop of lambs.

What an idea for a story!

I wrote one, not a great one because it was all sweetness and light and a good story needs friction. But the idea grew because I know families. Imagine what happened if the same child found the coin? Would a mother cheat to see all the children had the coin and so those valuable lambs? Would children fight and fall out for ever because one had the lambs and the other did not? The ideas buzzed inside my head quietly for a while and I tried to write a story, but the idea grew too big for a short story. It might be a novel though and I wondered about who and what and where, which is when I first began to hear Tizzie’s voice, this Yorkshire voice, in my head. Other writers will know what I mean, but it does sound a little crazy, this voices in the head business. It comes about, for me, after a lot of thinking and musing and wondering about a story idea. I will find that a character is coming to life, first as a voice I hear, then as a face I see. Thus Tizzie appeared. Tizzie, the aunt who wanted her niece to get the coin and the lambs. Tizzie who had to stop wearing rose tinted glasses and see her life as it really was. Tizzie, who was a simple, kindly soul, trying to cope with a great deal of devious evil. She was, for me, real and alive.

SW: The farther I got in the book, the more I felt that a dominant and growing theme in it is the amount of casual violence that occurs, and the disregard some of the characters have for the harm they cause. Nowadays we would call it “domestic violence,” but in that time seemed to be part of the fabric of existence. Do you see this as a theme in the book?

I have the greatest problem with themes because I always start off thinking I am writing on one theme but the story ends up about others. Any first draft is a confused mess as I try to force it my way and it goes off on its own path. In Tizzie what I wanted readers to understand was that we all wear rose tinted glasses and we need to see truly and honestly to live our lives well, which is not easy. We can choose to see or not to see. I always write about people having choices. But there was also this underlying theme of man’s inhumanity to man, and the casual unthinking unkindness which people with power often show to those who are powerless. It can be seen in families, in groups who have to work together. There is nothing ‘old’ about Tizzie’s treatment. It still happens today. I have seen in schools and in businesses the Killing by Kindness method of putting people down, pushing them out, or rendering them powerless. I have also seen the outright, devious and cruel methods which people use to gain power or get rid of people. Tizzie faces both sorts of ‘violence’ and yes, it became a theme, one I hope readers will think about and may be more aware of it happening around them.

SW: Another element of book that resonated with me is the sense of old folkways and folk wisdom being slowly lost, with Tizzie as an example of someone who possesses an enormous store of folk wisdom. Do you see this time period as a shift in our ways of knowing and doing things?

It seems to me that every generation discards the old, the things the parents did, and takes up the new. Traditions which parents valued are often derided as old fashioned or useless. Sometime traditions had to change for simple economic reasons. With luck the following generation might seize on some of their grandparents’ traditions as quaint or an excuse for a celebration, drinking or stopping work, and there might be a few people around who remembered how the traditional activity went.

In Tizzie’s era, the 1880s in Victorian Britain, economics played a large part in losing traditions. It was a period of economic depression and there was a world-wide slump in agricultural prices because New Zealand had just learned how to send chilled meat to Smithfield market in London and their cheese and butter soon followed. Exports of cheese and butter from America also added to the English farmers’ problems. Prices fell. Farmers had a hard time paying their rents. The pressure was on for change in order to survive.

Maggie was always chasing Tizzie up to make more cheese, butter, and clotted cream. Tizzie used the old, careful, slow methods traditionally successful, but you can see how the pressure would build to become more efficient, cut out some of the traditional ways in order to speed things up and produce more. The blessing of the Hall dairy is one example of a traditional way of introducing the correct bacteria to a new dairy, but it was slow and there were other ways of doing it.

SW: What’s your next project?

Right now I’m fighting my way through the first draft of a novel set in 1872 in the India of the British Raj. I anticipate that the characters end up in New Zealand, however I am not sure where the novel will now end as the characters have done their take over and might go back to Britain. I am at that dreadful writing stage where I have to make the middle of the novel fit onto the end and it is tough going as my carefully planned ending has vanished and I don’t know where I am going. Writing becomes an act of faith until that glorious moment when it all makes sense.

Tizzie had to be written in the 3rd person POV because it was too painful to write in 1st person. This is a 1st person novel simply because my male main character insists on having his story told this way. He is a merchant banker, son of bankers, an observer, thinker, and excellent seeker of new opportunities for banks and business. His family is one of the new Victorian families whose wealth and education made them independent of the mainstream upper middle class Victorian mores. He has a Quaker mother and a Jewish father. He’s been tipped out of his comfortable life in the bank to extract justice and revenge on behalf of a group of families, and himself, and he has to travel to India to deliver it. It’s another difficult story to write because of what the poor MC has to go through.

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