TLC Book Tours: The Widows of Braxton County

Jess McConkey's novel,  The Widows of Braxton County, explores over a century's worth of dark secrets in an Iowa farm family. When Kate Krause relinquishes her city life to move to her new husband's 140 year old farm, she has no idea what she's getting herself into. And it's more than just a cranky mother-in-law and long days doing back-breaking, unfamiliar chores. The Krause family is harboring a  secret, one the whole town has been speculating about for decades. Kate finds herself drawn into a chain of mysterious and dangerous events, as she is haunted by a death that occurred long before her time. Kate Krause, and her 19th century counterpart, Hannah Krause are both abused women, and I always find stories about abusive relationships difficult to read. They make me angry - and I don't always want to be angry when I'm reading a novel. Nevertheless, I love historical novels, and I especially enjoy those (like this one) that show how the past influences the future. McConkey conveys life on the farm in the 1800's through flashbacks, showing just how difficult daily living was for farmer's wives in those times.  The author resides in a small Iowa town herself, and her descriptions paint a vivid picture of life in both eras.

Thanks to TLC Tours for the opportunity to read this book.

The Sunday Salon: Handling the Truth

No one can or should tell you what to write about. But if you don't know where the memoir impulse is coming from, if you can't trace it, can't defend it, can't articulate an answer when somebody asks "Why'd you want to write a memoir anyway?" - stop. Hold those memoir horses. Either the mind has been teased for years upon years, or there's that small thing that won't be refused, or there's something else genuine and worthy. But nobody wants to hear that you're writing memoir because you need some quick cash, or because you think it will make you famous, or because your boyfriend said there's a movie in this, or because you're so mad and it's about time you get to tell your version.  from Handling the Truth, on the writing of memoir, by Beth Kephart

I love Beth Kephart's writing. I love every lyrical, magical, evocative word of it.  I wallow in a Kephart book, marvel at the way she uses language like a paintbrush, eat up her daily blog posts like part of my healthy breakfast.

So how happy am I that she has finally written a book about writing?

Ecstatic.

Handling the Truth distills the wisdom from Kephart's own experience as a writer of memoir, from her class at the University of Pennsylvania, and from the work of those writers  whom she most admires. It's chock full of sound writing principles and  imaginative exercises, set out in a systematic way to prepare you for the actual writing of your memoir.  If you follow it, you will have a firm foundation for writing your personal story.

But what I love most about Handling the Truth is that it reveals a side of Beth Kephart I've not seen before. She is fierce in this book, like a mama bear protecting her cub. Kephart has written five memoirs of her own, each one astoundingly good, each one proving anew her passion for this genre. And throughout handling the truth she exhorts all of us - we fledgling, aspiring memoir writers - not to take this work she loves and mess it up. In the opening pages, she gives us a forthright and adamant list of what memoir is NOT - not "a lecture, a lesson, a stew of information and facts." NOT "a self-administered therapy session." NOT "an exercise in self-glorification." NOT a "trumped-up, fantastical idea of what an interesting life might have been, if only."

What must we do, then, in order to write the stuff of our lives that is good and strong and true? The stuff that speaks?  Real memoirists "open themselves to self-discovery," she says, "and, in the process, make themselves vulnerable...They yearn, and they are yearned with. They declare a want to know. They seek out loud. They quest. They lessen the distance. They lean toward."

Makers of memoir "shape what they have lived and what they have seen. They honor what they love and defend what they believe. They dwell with ideas and language and with themselves, countering complexity with clarity and manipulating time. They locate stories inside the contradictions of their lives...they write the stories once; they write them several times. (...) And when their voices are true, we hear them."

If there is something in your mind that's been "teasing you for years," if there is "some small thing that won't be refused," if you are brave enough to take up the memoir standard, then Handling the Truth is the book you must read.

I have purchased a copy of Handling the Truth to give away to an interested reader. Simply leave a comment with the name of your favorite memoir.  Winner will be chosen at random on August 18.

Handling the Truth, by Beth Kephart

Copyright 2013, Gotham Books, published by the Penguin Group

ISBN: 978-1-592-40815-3

Purchase the book here:

Amazon Barnes and Noble Books A Million Indiebound  iTunes 

Locking the Door for the Last, Last Time

Today I left our old house in Redford for the very last time. Tomorrow (finally) we will finalize the sale of the home to a young couple with a two-year old son named Jackson. The circumstances of the sale were made in heaven (thank you St. Joseph, patron saint of homes).  During the final stages of the major clean-out process, our next door neighbor came knocking at the door.  "Are you getting ready to put the house up for sale?" he asked.

Yes, we answered, already filled with trepidation about dealing with realtors and regulations and mortgage companies.

"My son and daughter in law are really interested," he replied. "If they like it, we could do the deal without involving the real estate."

Wonder of wonders, they took one 15 minute look and they were sold. And so were we.

Easy as pie.

How blessed can you get?

So now we are about to relinquish the Rowan family homestead - the property my father in law purchased in 1948 and the brick home home he built in 1952. And today, I took one last walk through the empty house, and said my goodbyes.

To the living room where I walked the floor with a cranky baby, played my piano for hours on end, unwrapped Christmas presents for 36 years, and drank my morning coffee while I watched the sun come up.

To the bedroom where we slept night after night, where our son was conceived and where we lay, sleepless,  waiting for the sound of his car in the driveway when he was a teenager.

To Brian's room, where he played and drew pictures and wrote stories and made recordings, where he littered the floor with stuffed animals and books and vinyl record albums and Hot Wheels cars.

To the kitchen - oh the kitchen, where I cooked countless pot roasts and casseroles, made innumerable pots of coffee (first in Corning Ware percolators, and then in those new fangled Mr. Coffee machines), washed hundreds of dishes, unloaded tons of groceries.

To the back porch, where I sat in the mornings listening to a symphony of birdsong and watching rabbits play across the grass, rushing to squeeze through their escape hatch under the fence as soon as Magic or Molly would take off after them.

And to the clotheslines, where each week I hung sheets to whip dry in the summer sun and brought them in warm and fresh to put on the bed. I miss the clotheslines a lot.

I even said goodbye to the basement (although I always hated the basement), and the laundry tub where I washed my hair and bathed my dogs.

I have to believe it's a rare thing in this modern world for people to live in the same home their entire married lives - even rarer still when that's the house where you were born.  I don't think life in these United States lends itself to that kind of longevity or continuity. It's expected that you will want more than the "old things" your parents had, that you will continually strive for bigger and better houses, and cars, and vacations. People move all over the country and even the world, traveling wherever their relationships and jobs might take them, looking for the next big thing.

Perhaps it's part of our oddball nature, but we never felt any particular tug for a bigger or better home. Our little house suited us fine. And with every passing year and every increasing ache or pain, it became more and more difficult to imagine the rigors of moving two family lifetimes worth of stuff to another place.

But there are times in life when the need for change becomes palpable, when the yearning for something fresh and new insistently clamors for attention and can no longer be ignored. It took a long time for that to happen to us, but finally it did.

And here we are, saying goodbye to the house.

We've lived in our condo for almost a year now, long enough to feel like we belong, long enough to know we love it, long enough to feel confident we are in the right place. There were no tears today as I walked through the hallways, turned off the lights, and locked the door for the last time.

Just my spirit saying a quiet thank you  for sheltering me and the people I love.

Write On Wednesday: Expanding Time

In a productive, well-ordered life two elements must be managed: time and work. Poor time managers fail to recognize the difference between the two elements: Work is infinite; time is finite. Therefore, you must manage your time, not your work. Work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it. ...The concept of "finishing your work" is a contradiction in terms so dangerous that it can lead to a nervous breakdown - because it puts the pressure on the wrong places in your mind and habits. Time, on the other hand, is finite, though there's much more of it available than people who manage it poorly think. The real problem is we don't have enough disciplined energy to use all the time that's given us. A Writer's Time, by Kenneth Atchity

It's probably the most common complaint heard today, and one I've made myself many times on these very pages. There  isn't enough time to write, play music, quilt, bike ride - whatever your consuming passion happens to be, there's never enough time to satisfy your appetite for it. Time is definitely finite, and while it can expand in horrific ways when you're in pain or worried or bored, it can also expand positively to allow you the opportunity to feed your dreams.

Within the past couple of months, I suddenly find myself with more finite time available than I've had in years.  I'm working part time from home, I'm not currently involved in an active music group, the moving saga is over and our old house tidily cleaned out and sold. Suddenly, my time has expanded before my eyes.

That's a good thing, but it's also a scary thing. Because I know how easy it is to fritter the time away with shopping or social media or dithering over what to have for dinner. Now I'm faced with the task of learning to manage time in a different way - rather than successfully juggling dozens of tasks and responsibilities in a day, I have entire days with nothing on my schedule. (I know, don't hate me.) And I want to make the most of that.

Writing will be a major component of the way I spend my new expanded time. I am poised to make the step from writer to Writer. I have a serious project underway, I've joined a writing group for inspiration, support, and feedback.  Soon I will leave this blogging space behind for a self-hosted page that supports this next step in my writing life.

My "success" in any of this depends on two things - willpower and attitude. Willpower to develop writing habits that work for me at this time in my life and stick to them as much as possible, while retaining enough flexibility to participate in life's other pleasurable and mandatory activities.

Just as important is adjusting my attitude from one of laser focus on the finished product to one of full participation in the process. I've always been a product oriented type of person, trying to get things done as quickly as possible. And I sometimes burn myself out early, lose interest if things take too long.  I've realized that this constant pressure  to finish things is adversely affecting my work habits. Kenneth Atchity also writes, "Instead of trying to finish your work, you need merely find time to do your work; then simply concentrate on doing it the best you can. The satisfaction will come from knowing that each day you've allotted time for the work you love, the work you want to do."

Do I want to finish this novel I've started to write? Of course. But I also want to savor the process. A novel is so much more than the sum of its words. I want to take the time to think about these characters I'm creating, to immerse myself in the work of other novelists who have written books I admire in similar genres, to research and study the psychological aspects of my subject matter, to surround myself with the soundtrack of music that will be a major component in this story. I want to live in this world I'm making so it becomes reality to me, and, as a result, will be a reality to the people who read the book.

The emphasis must be on the process rather than the product.

One of the perks of being menopausal is the tendency to wake very early in the morning. Instead of lying in bed, tossing and turning, I'm looking at this time of wakefulness as a gift, a sign that there's something I'm meant to be doing, so I'm getting up and doing it.  I've set a manageable goal - 30 minutes of actual writing on the novel each morning, first thing with my coffee when I'm at my most creative, and before the distractions of news or Facebook or dogs can deter me.  Any time during the remainder of the day, usually in the latter part of the mornings and afternoons, is for researching,  reading pertaining to the novel, or other writing (blogging or articles for ATG).

Will every day be easy? Will the words always flow in a direct line from my brain through my pen and onto the page? Certainly not.

But there is time. There really is.

It's expanding all around me.

How about you? Do you feel as if you have a handle on managing your writing time? Are there places you've not explored in your daily life where you could find time to write?

The Sunday Salon: Quietude, and the July Reading List

Oh my, the house is quiet. For the past two weeks we've been reveling in a visit from our son, daughter-in-law and 19 month old grandson. But now they've headed back to the extreme heat in their hometown near Dallas, and we are left to bask in the cool breezes of  our near-perfect Michigan summer.  We've traded our grandson's precious babbling for the symphony of bird song, accompanied by the rustling of leaves and the mongolian tones of our backyard chimes.

July is historically my busiest reading month. Looking back over the past 10 July's in my reading journal, I've routinely records 10 and 11 books read during this long summer month.

This year totaled only 7  (but then I'm not counting the dozen or so books I read to Connor during the time he was here. And re-read. And read again.)

Here are three of the highlights of my July reading:

The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer: This novel was bound to appeal to me, as it featured a group of young people who meet in the 70's at an arts camp and become friends for life. Their relationships criss cross in unusual ways throughout the intervening decades. Wolitzer writes of the foibles and concerns of my generation, and she does it superbly.

Tomorrow There Will be Apricots, by Jessica Sofer: This beautiful debut novel is the story of two women in New York, a widow and an almost-oprhan, each seeking love and connection, using their common love of food to bring them together. Sofer writes with elegant detail about our relationships with family  - the one we are born to and the one we find for ourselves.

One and Only, by Lauren Sandler: Billed as a "humorous, tough-minded, and honest case for being and having an only child," Sandler's book appealed to me on several fronts. Because I am not only an only child myself, but also the daughter, wife, and mother of other "singletons" (the new terminology), I naturally have a vested interest in the subject. Sandler, an only child now raising an only child of her own, is almost rabid in her defense of the one-child family.  She makes her case using more sociological and psychological research than personal examples - this is not a memoir, although her own experience informs her interest in the subject.  As a "mature" only child, one who has been caring for elderly parents for the past two decades, and now facing the perils of old age looming on my own horizon, I would have been interested to see some discussion of how singletons in my demographic are handling their status. Overall, the book was well written and researched, and inspired me to thoughtfully consider my own feelings about this very current subject.

All month long, I've been listening to Tumbleweed, by Leila Meacham, a real pot-boiler of a novel about a triumvirate of friends growing up in the Texas panhandle (circa mid 1980's to the present). I LOVE lisetning to these kinds of books - love the long story, the plot twists and turns, the relationship arcs. Impeccably read by Angele Masters, it's the kind of novel that so completely engrosses me I sometimes forget where I'm driving (and they talk about cell phones being distracting!)

So far this August, I'm completely engrossed in Sight Reading, a novel by Daphne Kalotay (author of Russian Winter). This is another guaranteed "like" for me, since the main characters are professional musicians. Kalotay has done a marvelous job of research with this novel, as she explores the complex relationships between couples and their work.

How did July shape up in your reading life?