Margo

This novel, or at least I hope it's a novel, will be based on my Grandma Margo who I loved dearly. She never talked about her past, so what I dig up about her past will be entirely separate from my personal relationship with her. Personally, she was just a great grandma: she welcomed us to her home, she cooked for us, she put all of us grandkids on her lap, and she had an unending positive relationship with all of us.

But she had an interesting life, too, and that's what I want to dig up. Most of the above is fairly typical, and if I get to the part where she's a good grandma, I'll be ready to finish and put the book away. The meat of the book will be culled from a scrapbook that I found that was passed down to me through my mother. Somehow she filed away lots of letters, dance cards, pictures, yearbook pages, that kind of thing, and I plan on going through it carefully, scanning much of it, and putting it in the book.

One of the interesting aspets of it is her mother (see a couple of posts down), Elizabeth Mansfield, who was theatrical and encouraged her daughter to act in theatre performances. For this reason the scrapbook has a lot of theatre bills from Toledo in the early part of the century - 1910's, 1920's, etc., so the book will really take a close-up look at what Toledo was like in that era. That's actually what I'm really interested in researching. I want to know what it was like, and I want to convey it as an author. I experienced Toledo in the 1950's and early 1960's, and I know they had a little in common - they were the same city - but to me a little background will make this a very intense novel.

Not sure if this will be next on my plate. I'm dying to do it. But I have one more big one that I have to do as well, about language. And I'm considerting still working on a string of novels; my novel was so much fun, and so well-received, that I can't resist continuing on my string. Stay tuned. My autobiography is almost finished.

Walking Boots & Pleistocene Geology

Walking Boots & Pleistocene Geology
Biography of Frank Leverett

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Elizabeth Mansfield Irving

Elizabeth Mansfield was born at a time, the late 1800's, when women were challenging the assumptions they'd inherited about women's roles in society. She became very interested in oratory - public speaking - and by the time she went to college, Hillsdale College (Michigan), she was quite good at it. The art of oratory or elocution was considered the foundation of both public speaking and drama, so her passion was well recognized as an important practice and her skill was highly valued.

When it was proposed to Hillsdale College that she give an oration, however, she was denied, and it was a scandal. Hillsdale College was not ready to be a groundbreaker in the battle of women's rights.

She had a friend, Julia Reynolds, who also went to Hillsdale, and who would remain her close friend over many years. Julia married and moved to Council Bluffs, where she met Amelia Bloomer and became her close follower. Women's Suffrage was a big issue in those days, as was Prohibition, which we could now, looking back, say was a failed experiment. Nevertheless these were the times they lived in.

Elizabeth Mansfield married John Irving in Hillsdale and moved to Toledo, Ohio, not far from Hillsdale. They had two children, I believe, but she, now Elizabeth Mansfield Irving, became most famous for taking over her husband's insurance agency after he moved on to other pursuits. As an insurance agent and leader of one of the biggest agencies in the area, she had some fame and a considerable reputation as one of Toledo's first and most prominent businesswomen. It seems that at that time, it was uncommon for women to be in charge of any businesses, so she was even then breaking new ground.

But her greatest fame came from her oratorical skills. It seems that whenever she spoke, people listened carefully and her words had great impact. She was quoted in many journals and spoke on a variety of topics.

In one noteworthy speech, easily found on Google, she argued that it was pointless for women to try to become as much like men as possible in their pursuit of various high positions in business, because that just made everyone look bad. Rather, she said, they should maintain the traits of womenhood that were most desirable and succeed anyway. Because she delivered her speech in exquisite oratory, it made a splash in the world and was transcribed and widely circulated.

At one point someone in Toledo or nearby noticed that she was an expert in articulation and the processes necessary to make correct sounds, so perhaps she could be recommended as being able to help people who were having great trouble with this process. She agreed to try to help one child who was a rather severe case, and slowly and patiently, she taught him how to speak. In severe cases helping people like him is often a matter of unclenching certain muscles that have been fixed in a clenched position for the patients' survival or comfort in the face of other injuries they have sustained. She knew she was over her head in the medical details of the case, but soon she was treating several people, as there weren't too many specialists in articulation in the upper Midwest and people soon found her.

Her daughter, my grandmother, grew up in a household where women were told they could do whatever they set their minds to. She of course was guided into theater activities, and soon found herself in the middle of a lively Toledo social scene where theater performances actually did very well and were well received. By now we are moving into the roaring twenties, when the first major pandemic was over and everyone wanted to get out and have a good time.

Elizabeth Mansfield Irving's granddaughter, my mother, married Julia Reynolds Leverett's grandson, who had grown up in his early years in Council Bluffs. One of the things they had in common was that their grandmothers were prominent in the suffrage and women's rights movements of their time.

Frank

I'm actually writing a biography at this point. A relative grows up in the Iowa Territory. He walks a lot and finds a fossil that they name after him. He walks from Ames to Madison to get a job.

His big thing is Pleistocene geology. He knows what happened 20,000 years ago, based on what he sees. This is a rare skill but he just picked it up, so to speak. After thousands of miles, he knows what he's looking for.

When it's all over he knows that what was Iowa to him, was at one time east of the river. The rich riverbottom soil he grew up with was just a temporary thing. Temporary in the sense of three or four times the span of human occupation, but still nowhere near 20,000.

He gets old and dies in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

kindle Vella

A new opportunity has come down the pike, namely Kindle Vella. The concept is simple: serialized fiction. You write a story the goal of which is to make them come back and read the next story. and it goes on and on.

I can do this. I'm not sure where to start or whether this is a good idea, but I know I can.

One possibility would be to base it on my ESL teaching experience. To be specific, I spent a lot of time, maybe thirty years, in the classroom, and I saw quite a bit. Never really had the desire to turn it into a serial novel, or a series of stories, but I could, no doubt about it. enough happened, and it all made good stories.

perhaps it's the fate of my 18-year employer, to be turned into a serial novel. I'll stew on it.

possibilities

update

The Dawgs project is stalled in the water. I'm not sure what to do with it. There are many possibilities. I had to shelve it momentarily which is what I do when I really don't have a clue where to go next.

I'm kind of eager to get started on a biography of Frank Leverett, scientist who walked from Ames to Madison, and might start as soon as I can. But I have never written a biography, and haven't read one in ages.

I'm trying to finish Prairie Leveretts, which will actually take some work to make a book out of it. Pulling together pictures, files, getting everything in there....I've got a ways to go.

I've been drawn up by a fireman's class.

Finally, I have this idea that I have to get on paper before it's too late. It is roughly this. We are all cards in a deck, equal when the game starts, except for the jokers which are generally excluded. but some of us get to be aces, while others are twos. In other words, while we have the fundamental equality of being just one card in the deck, we have "acting status" that allows some of us to win by virtue of being who they are, while others will always be at the bottom unless they "play their cards" very well. Now this setup implies that there are four different kinds of people (spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs) and I haven't quite worked that out. Or, similarly, thirteen levels, or castes, one could say. And these would be natural castes; you're born as a two, or born as a king. The world recognizes your status. No matter what game you play, you live with your caste.

Just an idea. But mind, you saw it first here.

Who Let the Dawgs Out

On a whim I started a new crime novel, Who Let the Dawgs Out? (tentative title), but had to shelve it mostly because I didn't have it planned out carefully enough. What I am finding is that in order to follow all the way through with a long novel, I need careful planning and several different levels of motivation. In this case I had the motivation to document the evolving Carbondale Halloween riots, which were different throughout several decades including the two I was there, and the motivation to write a good crime thriller, which I want to write just for experience.

But I got caught up because I didn't have any overall message - and also because I didn't really map out the plot. I am still working on these, as there are several possibilities, but one of the things that caught me up was that I am really standing on the fence between fiction and non-fiction.

Having done the true stories of several ancestors, I find myself fascinated by the effort to make a gripping story out of absolute truth. And I find that everyday lives are as good a way to do this as anything. I go in there, find out what I can, lay it all out on the table, and the reader can make a gripping interpretation of it, just as I did, constructed totally on absolute truth.

Now my first novel, which turns out to be a roman-a-clef (this is a fictionalized memoir - I didn't know it at the time I wrote it, but that's what I wrote) straddles the two genres, but I find that a little unappealing now. For that one I really needed to document the vegetarian restaurant and the actualist poetry movement, and I did, and I changed a lot of facts and basically told a personal story of growing up. All fine and good, and the motivation was complete enough that I actually finished, first time in forty-five years. The lesson in it for me is that if the motivation is there, I can do it.

On the non-fiction side I finished my third family book, in the same month, telling the story of a single ancestor who rode a stagecoach 1600 miles from Maine to Illinois. My story telling needs some work in non-fiction, I admit it. These books are not my best writing, though the motivation, to put everything I found in one place, is sound. I've got what I need and can do #4 and possibly a biography of Frank after that. So I'm on a kind of roll with this family non-fiction and, though I'm not crazy about the writing itself, it doesn't matter as much because only my family is reading it.

But the process of rustling up true facts and documents from that era is really exhilarating and fascinating. Also, to be done and say, it's all true to the best of my knowledge, I like that too. I find myself being pulled into non-fiction and I have a yen to move everything over there, and just do that for a while.

With the biography of Frank, that's still a whole 'nother genre, and I'm not even sure how to approach it. It was while documenting Frank that I found enough information about the other two: his father and grandfather, the grandfather being my own great-great-great grandfather. I have enough to make a good story, for sure.

I don't know what to do; I'm just putting this out there. And, for the moment, writing a play about Nixon.