Thoughts Upon Writing a Book

It has been two years since I finished writing and subsequently published The Education of a Teacher (Including Dirty Books and Pointed Looks.) At the time it seemed like a gargantuan effort, especially since I began it in 2004.  But little by little, word by word, sentence by sentence, it trickled out of my head and onto the page.

Since that day wonderful things have happened because of the publication of my memoir. I have spoken at the national convention of the National Council of Teachers of English and the 2012 fall conference of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English. I've also presented at a number of colleges and universities to groups of students who are thinking about teaching. I envy them at the very beginning of their careers.

The book has brought former students and colleagues into my life again, some in person and other by email, mail, and phone. Not only did I speak with many of them as I wrote the book, but I also was contacted by others who heard about it and decided they wanted to read it.

Rarely are we offered a glimpse of what our lives have meant--unless we are Jimmy Stewart--but sometimes we do get to see through a tiny crack in the door back to the past. I am humbled and grateful for the many comments by those readers and also their reflective, interesting, funny stories that I didn't know.

To be able to recreate a time and place with people who shared them is a special blessing.

Two of my favorite authors, Emerson and Thoreau, often wrote that winter is a time of reflection, a time to let the smoke go up the chimney and sit down with a good book or even one's own thoughts.  So as I head into this winter season I will take their advice and count my blessings, good friends, and the many times my life has been ordered and enriched with special people whom I called "students," and whose current friendship and trust I respect and cherish.


Blessings to all my blog and book readers during this special season.

Sisters in Crime Loves Libraries!

Libraries have always been a huge part of my life, so I am especially thrilled to be working on Saturday at the Warren County Public Library on behalf of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women writing crime fiction and mysteries.  It's a way to say "thank you" for the wonderful help libraries and book stores give to writers.

Growing up in Galesburg, Illinois [population 35,000], I spent many Saturday mornings in its library's children's room.  The Galesburg Public Library was built in the 1870s, a product partly of the generosity of Andrew Carnegie.  A huge, dark stone structure, it was built in the Romanesque style.  Even though I was a child at the time, I remember the unique glass floor on the second story and the doll's house in the children's department.  Many a Saturday I sat and peered into the windows of the doll's house, wondering who could have created such tiny people and furniture. It was a never-ending source of imagination for small children.


When I was twelve, that beautiful library burned to the ground on May 9, 1958.  I remember that night because my father managed the drive-in theatre, almost three miles outside of town.  I was at the theatre that night and we could see the flames roaring high into the darkness.  It was a terrible loss, even for the mind of a child.  For a brief time the city had a temporary library housing what books hadn't been destroyed by fire or damaged by water.  Then, in 1961, a new, more modern building rose on the same site as the old library.  It wasn't the same, but it still became a place where I researched debate topics in high school and checked out books. 


At the same time I was aware of the library at Knox College, also in my hometown.  A friend of my father's was a librarian there.  In fact, I was allowed to use the rare book room as an 8th grader, poring over the papers about Lewis and Clark.  The library fed my love of history and that love became the major of my undergrad studies at Knox.  I worked at the library as part of my work/study job and loved every minute.  I can still smell the books,  see the row after row of non-digital newspapers and magazines, and remember the historical artifacts and papers.

So that brings me to a magnificent library, one I have used since 1968, when I moved to the small town of Monmouth, Illinois [population 10,000], and discovered the Warren County Public Library <www.wcplibrary.org>.  It began as a reading room and library in 1868, shortly after the Civil War, housing only newspapers and magazines.  In 1870, a donor offered funds to build a two-story building, the first building in the state of Illinois given for a people's library.

The library grew and branched out, literally!  By 1904, WCPL had five branch libraries and in 1920 it became a library supported by state funds under a new law.  In 1921 the branches had grown to twelve.  The library expanded in 1962, 1992, and 1996.  A genealogy area was added and a children's area expanded.  Since then a teenage area has been added.




I came into this picture in 1968.  By then the WCPL had begun issuing library cards.  My number is in the low two-hundreds, a badge of honor, because today the library has 14,035 current patrons with library cards.  I have used this library for 44 years and have yet to stump them when it comes to acquiring or having on hand a particular item I want.  Recently, I used both the library and genealogy room to research information for my book, The Education of a Teacher (Including Dirty Books and Pointed Looks).  In fact, the library sold hundreds of copies of my book locally and sponsored a reading and book signing when my book first came out.  


Currently, I am researching a mystery which has historical ties to events that happened in Monmouth.  The library has been an incalculable source of information.  


In short, the Warren County Public Library is a gem that would be impossible to replace!


[Photos from the websites of the Galesburg Public Library and the Warren County Public Library]

From Creative Nonfiction to Fiction Writing: Torturing Characters

            Writing fiction can result in a strange intertwining of imagination and real life.

Many years ago a young woman from my home town died in a terrible fire.   I did not know her well, but was acquainted with her since her family went to my church.  The fire began in the night because of an electrical short and the entire house sustained terrible damage.  It was an off-campus college residence and she was the only fatality.   That incident has remained indelibly etched in my memory, perhaps because I was in high school, a time when the highs and lows of adolescence seem, well, much higher and much lower.  I felt such empathy for her family and the years they would have without her. 

             One of the maxims of beginning fiction writers like me is to write what you know.  Because I’ve lived in a small town all my life, all of the stories from my first book,  The Education of a Teacher, came from that small town.  The people were real, the stories were true.  The dialogue and choices about the arrangement of the plot were creative.  But always this book was mainly concerned with what actually happened in my teaching life.

 Now I move into fiction as I write my second book.

            Early in my teaching career, I taught a young woman who could not give a speech in front of an audience without sneezing, sometimes a hundred times.  She connected any kind of situation where she was the center of attention with a terrible experience that had happened to her when she was in elementary school.  A teacher had embarrassed her, unmercifully, in front of her peers.  Because of the way her brain processed that event, she believed that if she spoke in front of an audience she would be mortified, humiliated, and unable to proceed.  Perhaps because a sneeze was involved in the earlier incident, her body chose that reaction and it convinced teachers that she could not speak.  So they would give her a different assignment and call it a day.

That episode represented an extreme instance of an idea called perceptual constancy. If something happens to us—especially an emotionally terrifying event—we believe, under somewhat similar circumstances, that the result will be the same the second time.  The classic cliché is the example of a youngster who is afraid of dogs all her life because a dog bit her when she was young.

So, to repeat myself, writing fiction can result in a strange intertwining of imagination and real life.  The main character in my new novel, Grace Kimball, carries a terrible burden.  She survived such a fire in college and others did not.  Grace carries a physical reminder of that fire, a small, white scar on one of her hands.  Whenever she is feeling stressed or unsure of herself, she relives—in a dream—that terrible fire.  Any situation where fire is involved causes Grace to have both a strong physical and emotional reaction.

So, what is a good fiction author to do when it is her responsibility to put her main character through the grinder of stress, emotional terror, physical discomfort, and downright horror?   Hmmm… think I might need to have a fire in this book?