The Hidden Staircase: Inspiration

A few weeks ago, Alice Munro won The Nobel Prize in Literature.  It was a huge moment for literature, for Canada, and for friendship.  The latter is true because over a decade ago, when my friends Deb and Dave Dunstone were in Canada, they bought an autographed copy of a volume of some of Munro’s short stories.  It was autographed “from one author to another.” At that time, all I had “authored” were some essays and letters-to-the-editor.  Still, that book and friendship remain an inspiration when I knuckle down to finish the sequel to Snoop. I think of Munro and the years she did the grit work of honing her craft. And I think of the Dunstones who believed long before I that I would write and sell books.

And then yesterday I heard that Fannie Flagg has a new book.  I love Fannie Flagg.  Her characters are quirky and her writing is sensitive toward and respectful of them.  Mostly the people she creates are small town hicks, but they give all small town hicks a good name. They care about their friends, family, and community and see humor in small things as they experience the agonies and joys of life. Whenever I hear or see Flagg interviewed, I like her. She’s human and so are her stories, thoroughly human and alive.  I remember reading a catty comment Rita Mae Brown made about a supposed relationship she had with Flagg and how she (Rita Mae) regretted that Flagg wasn’t ready to accept who she was. Sorry, Rita Mae, but I don’t buy it.  I think Flagg merely wants as much respect for herself as she demands for the characters in her books. She doesn’t want her private life flying around in cyberspace. I look to Flagg for inspiration because she writes about the same Cannery Row types that I know from my small town experiences. I don’t judge them. I present them for others to fall in love with–or not. But I do respect them and their privacy.

I’m not a political conservative, but if I  were still teaching essays, I would be using conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer as an example of how to write a thought-provoking essay with language that is both thrilling and alive. Yes, he is on the Fox News panel, but for all those who still fall for the old saw of dismissing Fox, I will add that Krauthammer is a Washington Post columnist, a Pulitzer Prize winner and as fair as anyone I follow regarding politics. His new book Things That Matter is a compilation of his essays and I am urging all my friends left and right to read it. If it doesn’t change their minds, and that’s not my intent, it will at least solder their reasons for why they hold the political views they hold. When you read Krauthammer’s story, you’ll see why he is one of my inspirations in all ways.
As sit in my basement in front of my new computer with the big screen monitor working on the book I want to have done by the first of the year, I think of my generous cadre of fellow authors at Cozy Cat Press out of Chicago. There are about thirty of us now dedicated to the cozy mystery genre. They are hard workers, many holding down full-time jobs, and love writing. Perhaps they don’t love the actual act of writing at all times, but they are grateful for their facility with words and idea and are eager to cheer on fellow writers. In the cut throat and frighteningly diminished world of publishing, I am grateful for the spirit that publisher Patricia Rockwell has woven throughout her little company. A Cozy Cat book promises to be a respite from the frantic holiday season and the stresses and strains of everyday life. In fact, I think they make fabulous stocking stuffers.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m now going to work to add another to Cozy Cat’s “cat”alogue.

Race and Writing

No doubt about it.  This was a tough weekend. The Zimmerman decision took most Americans somewhere. I’d followed the trial because it encompassed so many themes of my own life, and because I am a courtroom junkie. The decision didn’t surprise me, nor did the reaction to it. What did surprise was how disenfranchised I felt–so white. I was no longer the friend, the teacher, the person who has devoted a great part of her life to making others feel worthwhile. I was, to many, merely “one of them.”

One of the terms that surfaced again and again as the trial was hashed and rehashed is “white privilege.” If you’re not aware of  the descriptor, Wikipedia covers it quickly. It’s a relatively new concept that puts white people, privileged people, in the role of “oppressor.” What is dangerous to me about this is that it is, like so many other themes, created to divide rather than blend, hugely divisive. It’s also dismissive of this country’s history. The Great Depression, The Dust Bowl, and so many other periods united Americans in shared suffering and poverty. Don’t get me wrong, all things being equal, I think it’s still far more difficult to be black in America–in the world for that matter– than white, but it’s that divisive them and us that I fight every step of the way. Rush, Al, and Jesse all have become rich by having us tear into each other.

I’ve talked ad nauseum about writing cozy mysteries for Cozy Cat Press and the comfort I felt growing up in a small town. In that town, though, the fifties were like most other towns: racially divided. I was part of that divide as a privileged little white girl.  Don’t get too excited, my life took a turn in early high school that veered far from privilege. Anyway, there was a “black” part of town; only in that day it was not referred to as black. And though my classes were racially mixed and kids played together in school, black children and white children parted ways after school. This next part of the story will cast my mother in a not-so-good light but remember this was before Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the eloquence and magnificence of Dr. Martin Luther King. Because the Campfire leader had to step down, she asked my mother to take her place. Long story short, I loved that my mother was the new leader and wanted all my friends to be part of the group. One of the friends was a cute, smart little girl named Pat. She was kind, creative, fun–and black. I couldn’t imagine leaving her out.  Even though I was only about eight, when I asked my mother if Pat could join, I recognized her reluctance. But I wheedled so she caved. The first few meetings went well, and after each, I walked Pat halfway  to where she lived, on the other side of town. But mothers of the other girls started to complain that there was a black girl in the group. And, worse yet according to them, “other black girls want to join.” My mother had a lot of pressure on her so she did something which she later regretted, and which put me in a terrible spot. She told me I would have to tell Pat she couldn’t be part of the group. I was young and sick to my stomach when I told trust little Pat why she could no longer be part of the group. I don’t remember what I told her, but i know it wasn’t the truth. Fast forward sixty years to the obituary of a local man a few weeks ago. He had a last name I would never forget, and In the “surviving him” section was an aunt in North Carolina. I knew immediately it was my Pat, the little girl who had  haunted me. After weeks of debating with myself about whether or not I should, I phoned Pat. After a cheery conversation, I apologized for the Campfire Girls incident.  I could actually see the smile in her voice when she said, “I don’t remember that, Lyla. I just remember that  I stopped going. I want you to know, by the way, that I have had a wonderful life.” She has. She, her children, and husband are success stories. She has traveled widely and far from the small town where we both began. We’ve communicated a couple of times and fully intend to see each other when she comes back to Michigan.

So, like Paula Deen, I have had a racist moment or two in my life. I have since then, however, worked to be fair and nurturing to all people.  Teaching made it easy because when you have students you love, and with maybe two horrifying exceptions, I have loved my students, you truly see no color. Because my husband and I made sure that our own two children went to integrated schools, they have a level of comfort with racial difference that helps absolve the guilt I still feel for that heart-piercing incident so many decades ago.

Now I’m a writer. And in publishing there is the whispered theory that white people should not write about people of color, that they somehow lack the understanding or right to tackle the racial divide. This goes against everything I know and believe and also would have eliminated characters like Haper Lee’s Tom Robinson and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn who taught me more than any textbook about race and its tortured history.  One of the reviews of my little mystery Murder on Cinnamon Street said that I had created in a housekeeper named Martha a kind of “Mammy” trope. I winced because in writing about Maurice’s housekeeper, I thought I had created a wise woman whose dialect reflected her lack of education, not intelligence. In the same book, I also put a best friend who is a young black woman with massive intellect and drive. I want my characters of color to be as broad and unique as other characters I create. I seems to me it would be dishonest to do anything else.

When I was teaching Wiesel’s Night, years ago, we began to discuss racial hatred and bias, one of my white students said, “Maybe we shouldn’t be discussing this, Mrs. Fox.” What happened this past weekend reaffirmed my feelings that we should be discussing it, but we should play fair. As I told my students that day in class, “This will work if we remember two things: one, that the people in this room didn’t make the problem and two, the problem isn’t over.”

 

 

 

Naming Characters

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

A lot lies in a name, and Shakespeare knew it. Writers know it, too.  In our house we laugh at the name of the little boy in “The Walking Dead.”   My close friend will wince when I say that Carl is not a common name for a little boy. But in TWD, Carl is not the usual little boy and the problems that confront him are far from a carefree childhood he should be experiencing.  In a way Carl fits, because the little boy goes from boy to man quickly. 

And my name–Lyla–is not a child’s name either, though friends tell me it is becoming popular. I have never met another Lyla face to face. As I was growing up, I was told that my name didn’t “fit” me. I’m named after my father Lyle and so I take pride in my name, but I won’t lie, it has been a bit of a burden.  When people heard that a “Lyla Fox” had been tired to teach high school English, they later revealed they thought I was a fifty-some year old woman,not the twenty-four-year-old woman that I was. I have finally grown old enough for my name, but my characters and those of others don’t have the luxury of decades for their readers to get used to their names.

Harper Lee gave us two spot-on names when her little girl and boy were nicknamed Scout and Jem.  Their real names are Jean Louise and Jeremy Finch, but the names we who love Lee’s magnificent and powerful novel are attached to are Jem and Scout. For me it wouldn’t have been the same if she’d given Scout another Southern nickname like Sissy or if she’d named Jem something like the more common Beau. The names like her own Harper (rather than her first name Nell) fit. She gave us characters for time immemorial in a story that in many ways still defines the struggles of a nation.

Know this lady? You can probably guess by the book she’s reading that she’s the author of one of our all-time favorites Gone With the Wind. She also gave  an infinitely popular literary figure what I think is the perfect name: Scarlett. Think about all that the name connotes.  Blood? It’s the Civil War and bodies and blood abound. Scarlett, as in “Scarlet woman,” that she is, again and again in the novel. There are so many words that connect perfectly to the beautiful but flawed character around whom Mitchell built her opus.

At a picnic over the forth, a friend collared me to talk about my own books.  She wanted to know about the characters’ names in Snoop and Murder on Cinnamon Street. (My thanks to friends Jim and Joyce for their cheery promo of my books.) In truth, I gave great thought to all the  names because, as I’ve mentioned earlier, my own name has been at times unwieldy. I want the characters I create to be happy with the names I choose for them so they don’t one day come back on me.  Let’s deal with the characters in Snoop to illustrate how I named a couple of the characters in my cozy mystery.

In Snoop, my protagonist has the name Sam. She’s a girl with a man’s name. It’s problematic, but I have a reason. Her mother’s maiden name was Samuels, and her mother was a virtual orphan whose family name means something to her.  Sam’s father’s favorite fictional character is Sam Spade, thus the nickname.  With this name I have linked character, plot, and genre.  I hope.  One of Sam’s touchstones is a woman named Aggie Chestnut She’s seventy something and irascible. Aggie is a tipping of the hat to Agatha Christie and Chestnut is a name I first heard when I was in college and was fascinated that it would be anybody’s last name.  I loved it and tucked it away to retrieve decades later. My town is Cotter’s Corner because the book’s to-die-for, literally, love interest is Charlie Cotter, heir to the Cotter fortune.  He tells Sam that one of his Cotter ancestors was traveling around the Midwest when he came to a beautiful, picturesque area.  As the story goes, he sat down on it.  Looking around he said, “This is going to be my corner of the world.” The town was named Cotter’s Corner. It is a place that has become real to me and one I’m going to resurrect for the sequel I’m at work on now.

The woman in this picture has my great name, the name I always go to for the most unusual name: Hermione.  Long before JK Rowling came up with her one-of-a-kind muggle, Hermione Gingold was delighting audiences on stage and screen. From her name to her style, she is inimitable and unforgettable.  That’s what I aim for: characters that become etched in my readers’ minds and stay with them long after my little cozy has been read and shelved.  That will leave them wanting more, and give me a chance to do what I love so much–return to places like Cotter’s Corner and visit with the odd assortment of characters who live–and die–there.

 

 

 

 

Knitting and Writing: Odd Bedfellows?

Once a week I knit. Of all the activities in my adult life, knitting has perhaps had the most profound and mysterious effect. Knitting seems far removed from my writer’s life. But oddly, when I’m knitting–usually sweaters for friends’ grandchildren–my mind is also absorbed with my latest book.  After all, I’m alone with my thoughts. And I’m not an accomplished enough knitter to be dealing with difficult patterns. At this point, I can see our gifted instructor Mary Bell Verleger saying, “Oh yes you are, Lyla.” But I’m not. I’m not even close. I am instead frequently caught up in thoughts of just why a body might be found on a turnpike and how perilous an old girlfriend’s divorce might be to my main character’s fledgling love affair. Knitting for me is contemplative and its the juice that often fuels my writing.

There are two Marys connected to my knitting.  This is Mary Stillman, the wonderful and courageous owner of  Stitching Memories. In a climate fraught with peril for small business, she continues and thrives.  A walk through her store, rich with colorful yarns, accessories, and all things that make a knitter’s heart soar, illustrates vividly why people love her and the store. On the nights when we gather to knit, she joins us. In no way does she ever make us feel hurried or unwanted. Our knitting group is  therapy and hilarity all an once, yet she has never shushed us.  My book signing this Saturday is at her store.  “Let’s have a book signing,” was the first thing she said when I told her I had sold Snoop. My first reaction was to think, A book signing at a yarn store? I’m not so sure about that. But then I knew it was perfect. Stitching Memories  is MY yarn store, my club, the place where ideas for stories germinate. So people who come for a book and a cookie this Saturday will also get a glimpse of what is rapidly becoming an endangered species: an independently owned yarn shop.  If you have one, patronize it. Phoenix, where I spend a lot of time, doesn’t have one in an hour’s drive.  Sure I can go to the fabric/crafts shops to get some yarn, but once you’ve experienced a place like Stitching Memories, the big box stores are a poor substitute for the warmth and lusciousness of my little shop.

This is the “other Mary,” our knitting instructor Mary Verleger. In her other life, Mary has been and is a business force to be reckoned with. She’s smart (National Merit Finalist), funny, loving (ask her new husband Ron), and giving. When we sit down to knit, there’s a feeling of shared acceptance and trust that you probably only find in church. Mary is a big part of that atmosphere. “No problem. We can fix it,” she says when we come to her in a state of catatonia with some mistake we’ve just made. Mary was totally composed even with the woman who had decided that she didn’t like the size of the needles or the thickness of the yarn so she changed them (without asking Mary) and turned an adult sweater into something fit only for an American Girl Doll.  Truthfully, we all had a great laugh but not at the misguided knitter’s expense. She laughed loudest of all.  Mistakes are permitted, and we make lots of them. I’ll never master pixie sticks and Mary and I have agreed to accept that fact without judgement.

I wrote Murder on Cinnamon Street just after I joined the knitting group. I I knew I wanted to finish the book, but I also knew that I wanted something that got me out of lmy house.  Writers need to get out and stay in touch with people.  This writer does anyway.  And at first, as I reacquainted myself with an art I hadn’t engaged in for forty years, my mind was on knitting. How did you do that invisible cast-on and what’s the best way to increase? Steadily though,as I gained confidence, I knit and found myself asking questions like, Is my killer too obvious? Will people buy how Elli died? Writing crept into knitting, and I got a twofer. I was doing two things I loved simultaneously without a problem.

This is Shirley. She’s as sweet as the picture shows, and a fabulous knitter. Every weeks she’s accomplished another project–as I take months to do one–but is always supportive of the rest of us. Her smile brightens the room, and if she has a mean streak, I have yet to see a glimmer of it.  I think she’s one of those people who is absolutely as wonderful and beautiful as she appears.

This is Knitting Deb, and I love her.  We all do.  Her honesty and humility speak to us. When I tell her she knits beautifully, she demurs.  But she is a great knitting and a part of my knitting family I could not/would not  do without.  See the kindness that radiates from her darling face? Deb, you are a great knitter. I got the last word. So there!

Here’s beautiful, tranquil Ruth. I have known her the longest because she lives right next door to me in Leave-It-To-Beaverland.  She is nurturing,calm, and talented. There’s no craft or art she can’t do magnificently.  When I had Ruth’s talented daughter Liz in school, she bragged constantly that her mother could do anything. I found out she could. Ruth is a newcomer to our group but when she’s there, the group seems more whole. Oh, and Ruth is extremely humble. Perfection isn’t tolerable without humility, and she has plenty of that.

This is Kathy (or Cathy.) I’m still not sure of the spelling  because she is relatively new to me but not to knitting.  She is a master knitter and a fabulous person.  When I couldn’t remember her name once, I labeled her The Bunny Lady because she was knitting one of the umpteenth bunnies she has knitter for friends and grand kids. She smiled her gorgeous smile and said, “The Bunny Lady is just fine.” So behind her back, when she doesn’t hear me, I still think of sweet K/Cathy as The Bunny Lady.

Not in my pictures are the inimitable Brit Cynthia who keeps us literally and figuratively in stitches. She’s also the world’s best lemon cake and chocolate shortbread baker. Beth is missing, too, but is another of those women who knit convincing you that it truly is an art form. She is gracious and unassuming. Love her. Other people who pop in and out, and trust me when I say there’s not a rotten apple in the bunch. Each brings a unique personality to her knitting and to our group.

So this is my gang, the group of go-to gals that inspire and delight me. My first book Snoop was partially dedicated to lifelong friends who supported my writing.  My next book Deadly Snooping will be dedicated To My Knitters.  Now you know who they are and why I’m having a book signing in a yarn store.  After all, I’m “spinning a yarn,” right?

Everybody Loves a Good Mystery

This is a picture of what became known as “The Morris Murder House.” At my class reunion this week, we talked about it because for high school kids in the sixties, it was literally and figuratively a “favorite haunt.” You see, as legend goes, the Morris family (and I always thought it was Morse family) was well-to-do and lived in the nicest house in the Decatur, Michigan area. In 1879, the family, all but the maid, were savagely murdered. Though there was much speculation the murderer was the maid or a robber who stole the horse and buggy after he murdered the family, the murders were never solved.  But in our teenage imaginations, we solved the murders again and again as we’d sneak out to the old house, decrepit and mold ridden, to scare ourselves and each other to death.  Only after the house was burned to the ground by kids more interested in vandalism than ghost stories did the speculation stop.

Last weekend as  we talked about The Morris Murder house, we also discussed the ghost said to inhabit the upstairs of our old high school and other legends that kept our young minds full of thrills and chills.  Few people can resist discussions of things that go bump in the night and for some reason, we crave thoughts that dare us to go beyond what we can control to a world dark and dangerous.

For me, that craving was ignited by ghost stories around campfires and radio shows such as The Shadow–“Only the shadow knows.”  Yes, thoughts of sinister forces waiting to grab me were terrifying, but there were also titillating. Life became much more than reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic. Around corners danger waited, an early admonition that much was beyond my control and always would be.

“The Witch Tree Symbol” s one of my all-time favorite Nancy Drew mysteries.  It’s about the Pennsylvania Dutch country and hex signs.  At the time I read the book, I knew little about the Pennsylvania Dutch but good old Carolyn Keene, who ruled the world as far as little Lyla was concerned, taught me about the power of black magic and personal belief systems.  I loved Nancy’s fearless pursuit of bad guys no matter how much she might put herself in peril.  More than than, though, I loved her defiance of convention in order to engage in daring do.

In Deadly Snooping, the mystery I’m writing now, I want to remain true to the cozy mystery tradition, which is also by the way The Nancy Drew tradition: scare them but don’t horrify them. Last week’s episode of Game of Thrones traumatized and horrified everyone I know.  Cozies don’t do that.  They present well-plotted stories with intriguing and amusing characters caught in suspenseful, compelling situations.  But the unwritten pact between reader and writer says that nothing will be so graphic that anti-anxiety meds may be required. Though the books may keep you on the edge of your seat, you won’t get the chair pulled out from under you.

I love Edward Gorey’s illustrations.  He illustrated many of John Bellairs kids’ mysteries and his pictures are perfect for the stories Bellairs created.  The author had a gentle hand for and uncanny understanding of kids, and though his young heroes and heroines often found themselves in peril, the reader trusted the author to bring them home safe and sound.  That’s essentially what J.K. Rowling did with the Harry Potter series. Though the beloved Dumbledore died, he was resurrected for a scene in book seven and the rest of the cherished major players lived to have children of their own. Rowling’s readers hadn’t been let down. She scared them into a delightful frenzy, but hadn’t left them there.

AMC’s Sunday night series The Killing is gory and grisly, and I love it. Set in Washington state, the cinematography artfully keeps the viewers shrouded in a damp, grey haze, perfect for the heinous crimes that have taken place. Yes, I eagerly anticipate the show and hope more people join its growing audience, but I don’t write its kind of mystery. In my office, deep in the bowels of my basement (how’s that for a mystery writer?), when I pull my chair up to my desk, I want to create a world in which I wouldn’t mind living, a world where people may know death is just around the corner, but they won’t have to see the bodies that are piling up. I think that’s the world I started out in as a child and it’s the world that my classmates, fifty years later, still relished as we talked about the old house we used to root around in. 

Thank goodness there are writers courageous enough to take on the grimness of the situations depicted in “The Killing.” But as for me, I’ll hang with John Bellairs, Janet Evanovich, David Rosenfelt, and my fellow authors at Cozy Cat Press as we give readers light mysteries to enjoy before they turn out the light to have a peaceful, uninterrupted night’s sleep. Yes, everyone loves a good mystery, but not everyone needs all the bloody details, not me anyway.

 

 

Class Reunions: A Perspective

This Saturday is my 50th class reunion–a big one.  For my last two years of high school, I moved to Decatur, Michigan, a tiny, tiny town much like the two I write about: Cotter’s Corner and Camphor. It was the 1960’s, and when the Class of 1963 gathers,  we wax nostalgic about what a much better, simpler time it was.  Whether the observation is more fiction than fact is still up for grabs.  Please bear with me as I unabashedly display some self-serving nostalgia on this Monday’s blog.

When I taught high school kids, my anti-bullying message was: be as kind and nice as you can because your fellow students are taking mental snapshots, and no matter where you go or what you do from now on, who you are and the way you’ve acted is forever frozen in their memories as who you were when.  Though we may try to outrun our past mistakes, it’s hard.  Fortunately, the kids I went to school with have grown into quite remarkable people.  They were nice then, and they’re even nicer now.

One of those very nice people is my friend Pat. She was a pretty, mother-hen kind of girl who took me under her wing when I arrived, afraid and unsure, my junior year. Pat even fixed me up with a boy I dated for the next three years. She was a smart girl and a caretaker of all those in her circle of friends.  She went on to nursing school, and eventually took her nurturing and academic gifts to a new level when she became one of Colorado’s most celebrated nurses and health administrators.  Our too infrequent conversations over the years reveal that is now an accomplished, mature, loving woman who still cares deeply about her family, friends, and community. When people see her this Saturday, they will first see her smile and then feel the love she radiates.

Last night, my friend Phyllis and her husband stopped in on their way to Decatur.  If the “Who Came the Farthest” award is given, Phyllis always wins. She has lived in Japan for most of her adult life, raising two remarkable  sons and tending to the beauty of her physical and emotional world. Her home is on a flower-filled, tranquil island. In 1963, few of us would have placed our ball-of-energy, hard driving valedictorian in such a place.  A born leader, Phyllis was the glue of the class, monitoring and admonishing us when we occasionally devolved into mean little splinter groups. When she went on to the University of Michigan for her BA and MA, she continued to observe political and social spheres. She also keenly sifted and sorted the elements she knew she needed to be happy. And Phyllis, perhaps more than any of us, has total contentment and happiness.  Things don’t matter. People matter. Ideas matter.  My mother loved Phyllis because she always brought fun and new ideas. Phyllis’ eyes still gleam with curiosity and excitement. Retirement? Never. She hasn’t drawn a paycheck in a long time, but she is always working, whether it’s regarding the environment, her family ancestry, her friends, her world.  She and her acupuncturist husband have traveled the world and believe me when I say that she has come as close to perfecting a peaceful, accepting, and joyful existence as any one I know. 

My friend Margie, a farm girl who married her high school love, will also be at the reunion.  I didn’t know Margie as well when we went to school together as I’ve gotten to know her since we graduated.  She and her husband, a retired Army colonel, have traveled the world. And in her new life, Margie remains who she always has been: a peaceful presence who calmly manages any task without ruffling feathers. She gets the job done while sweetly cheering on those around her.

My friend Jeff will be there, too, and he will bring his handsome son.  Way back when, Jeff was one of the best guys you’ll ever meet, and he still is. For decades, he taught and worked with the blind. Then he turned selling antiques. In both professions he has been heralded for excellence. He hasn’t been able to attend the previous couple of reunions so I know that we are all anxious to have him back in the fold. He’ll tell funny stories and be that same totally great man everyone in our class has adored forever.

There are so many more terrific people, like my friend Marcia who was a fabulous pianist and organist in high school.  While so many of us were worried about how to sleep with huge rollers in our hair, Marcia had already begun the journey toward a demanding career as an organist. Her marriage to a man who became The Director of Concert Bands at The University of Iowa has taken her far away from small town life, yet she is still that beautiful, wholesome person led cheers for our sports teams (we hardly won any games but had “star” athletes–a puzzle) and who graduated near the top of our very bright class.

If I write about Dr. Jean Haefner, who has carved a distinguished career for herself at The University of Toledo, she will be angry. But I will tell you that she was smart and also led cheers. Like the rest of us, she was also the child of parents who wanted more for her than they’d been able to do for themselves. She too has traveled the world to teach and learn.

But it’s not all about the PhDs, lawyers, and other academically inclined individual. In our class were those quiet people who didn’t groove on Thomas Hardy and who refused to polish apples in order to have teachers adore them.  They might have been exceptionally mechanically inclined, but that wasn’t important, was it? Turns out it was. We’ll hold our reunion at the bucolically magnificent home of one of those quiet boys whose head was moving too fast with designs and ideas to be enthralled by split infinitives or chemical compounds. Bob Haas has made a fortune in burglar systems. Who could even envision in our safe little town in the 1960’s that they would one day be so necessary? Bob did, probably on one of those days he was getting yelled at for daydreaming.

And there is quiet Dick McGrew who grew inches taller after high school and went on to be a police officer at Western Michigan University.  In high school, I knew Dick as a boy with a sweet smile but have very few other recollections.  The ensuing reunions, however, have greatly expanded my knowledge of Dick McGrew.  After he retired from the university, he took another job. This time he was chief of police at The College of William and Mary. There he met the most powerful people in the world.  In fact, he was held in such high esteem that Lady Thatcher even insisted he “ring her up” for tea when he was next in London–which he did.  Dick delights us all with the stories of that tea.  The quiet boy became an very impressive man.

In my graduating class, most students had parents who grew up in the depression and who couldn’t afford the luxury of college. Most couldn’t even finish high school. They taught their kids, though, that school mattered. It mattered a lot. They also taught them that hard work was essential to lasting success. In a small class of less than seventy  people in a  town that was relatively poor, nearly ninety percent went on to college. 

And me? What was I like in high school? I might have bragged a bit too much about my relatives, trying to make up for the insecurity I felt when I left my old home and school. And I think I was a bit bossy.  In other words, like the rest of my class, I haven’t changed much. But I hope people will remember me as kind.  Kindness really matters.  It’s what you remember long after the awards and activities have faded away.  It’s those smiles and humble gestures from others that leave lasting impressions.

This is my house in Decatur.  Well, it’s not my house any more.  It belongs to a new family who have lovingly dressed it up and made it theirs.  When I lived in it, it was white. Now it looks more like “the painted ladies” that I write about.   This house actually had a back stairway that my children loved to run up and down, pretending it  led to all things dark and dangerous. 

So this Saturday I go back to the reunion to see old friends and laugh at the same stories we’ve told a dozen times. In fact, because I spent only two years there,  I will have little recollection of a lot of what will be discussed, but I know I will feel grateful to have shared such an important time with people so willing to make new friends and share their small community.  Though I’ll go back to recall who we all were, the best part of this reunion will be to celebrate who we have remained: smart, kind, purpose-driven people who feel grateful to have grown up in such a time and such a place. Long live the Class of 1963.

Remembering

It’s Memorial Day and because I have vowed a blog will appear on Mondays, I am writing this even though I will be lucky to finish it by midnight.  And since it is Monday and Memorial Day, I am going to focus on the mentors I’ve been lucky enough to have in my life as I encourage other writers to take into their hearts those who approach them asking for help with their writing.  I’m living, breathing proof that it doesn’t take much to keep a neophyte writer going. It also takes very little to discourage talent, perhaps driving it away forever.

My first mentor was undeniably my mother.  She was a writer at heart, but five children depleted her of the energy and self confidence that might have put her on literary maps. Her blessing to me was an extraordinary command of the English language and a love of books.  I had a mother who read to me and that is invaluable.

My second mentor appeared from the sheer dumb luck of my marrying her nephew.  Dorothea Warren Fox was a magnificent, magical person, but she was also an artist and wordsmith.  Most households of her era had a copy of the Dr. Spock she illustrated and her Miss Twiggley’s Tree won the Parents’ Magazine Press Award.  Dottie had the ability to find art in almost anything, even my  five-year-old son’s black trees, with black, barely discernible, leaves. “Oh, look at that lovely tree,” she said. “How did you ever think to paint it that brilliant color?” Our son beamed, and Dottie had again waved her wand and turned a frog into a prince.  She loved whatever I wrote and whatever I did.  It was only at her funeral that I realized all the people there had had the same experience. Each one thought she loved them best and found them the most wondrous. Still, no one in my life convinced me as quickly that I could do anything. She was, as everyone says, one-in-a-million because she was generous with her time and her praise. She knew that you never have to worry about someone getting too much acclaim.  You can count on some dark force to come along and slap the confidence out of you.  The miracle people are those who see the genius in the ordinary.  Dottie was one of those people.

My son and daughter both loved the eerie, well-written, quirky mysteries of John Bellairs.  I loved them too.  In fact, I loved them so much that I called Bellairs one day. No guts no glory, I thought.  I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated the fact that he had strong boys and girls in his books and that the vocabulary was rich and challenging while the stories were creative.  Right away, he answered, and right away I knew he was lonely.  He was the Lewis of his stories.  He was also kind.  He took to returning my calls, asking about my family and my children.  He even read the story I was working on and had both praise and some constructive criticism. He was funny and human.  He talked about growing up in Marshall, Michigan, not far from me, and about the odd house on which he based one of my favorite books The House With a Clock in Its Walls.

He died too young, but not before he left an indelible impression on me and on the thousands of children who read his books.  In his book The Secret of the Underground Room is the inscription: To Lyla a Good Friend in a Difficult Time. It’s a touching sentiment, but in truth John Bellairs did so much more for me than I for him. He convinced me to keep writing late at night and early in the morning (easier for me at night) and not to be discouraged.

I have saved my most constant mentor for last because it will hard to write this.  Betty Horvath, who wrote the groundbreaking Jasper books, featuring a young black boy with big dreams and ten other children’s books reprinted in most basal readers, was my friend for over thirty years.  Because she went to my Episcopal church and because I wanted to meet her, I made sure I got into a “small group” she was in. I think you can probably go to hell for such calculated moves, but I was a young mother at home with a six-year-old and a baby and still yearned to be a writer in my spare time.  Betty was a legend in our town and our church. I wanted to sit at her feet and learn from her.  I did. She was a self-effacing member of Mensa who painted fabulous pictures with words.  Out of her mouth flowed such gems as, “Trust in the Lord, but tie your donkey.” She kept me laughing and learning.  Even at the end of her life, those last eight plus years spent  in an assisted living place near her son in Minnesota, she was upbeat and writing stories she never intended to publish. Betty taught me what may be the most important lesson I learned: you are a writer if you write, not if you sell or publish, but if you write.  Some of Betty’s stuff will be seen by only a few, but it was brilliant and hilarious. The reason this is hard to write is that Betty’s birthday was a few days ago, but she died a couple of months before that.  Up to the end, I received witty, interested emails, and  I could tell her that my second book had been bought and that it was dedicated to her.  I read the dedication over the phone: Dedicated to Betty Horvath, my very own Charlotte A. Cavatica, a true friend and a good writer. She paused after I read it and said, “I hate to sound stupid, but exactly who is that?”  I reminded her that the Charlotte of Charlotte’s Web had a full name. It was Charlotte A. Cavatica. So on this Memorial Day besides remembering the magnificent men and women who live and die keeping our country safe, I am also thinking of the heroes of my writing life. Leading that list is Betty Horvath who was indeed a true friend and a good writer.

 

Cozy in a Small Town

Only when she heard the door open, did she remember she’d forgotten to lock it. For a few seconds, the fear that accompanied her most of her life returned in a surge. Then she saw the figure in the doorway and relaxed. It was always good to see a friend. That’s why the first blow caught her totally off-guard and sent her reeling. “Why?” was the question she struggled to utter before another blow rendered the answer irrelevant. Clara was dead.

So begins Murder on Cinnamon Street, the first book in my second cozy mystery series.  Like the characters in Snoop, the first book in another mystery series, the characters in MOCS (as my publisher Patricia Rockwell of Cozy Cat Press has dubbed it), live in a small Michigan town.  This time the town is Camphor, Michigan. I think the name is perfect since most all cozies are set in sleepy small towns which wake to startling truths once murder rears its ugly head.

For many reasons, small towns are the perfect homes for this popular genre. One reason is that you need a setting in which gossip spreads like wildfire. Anyone who has ever lived in a small town, and I lived in two when I was growing up, knows that they are places where myths quickly become truths.  In Murder on Cinnamon Street (MOCS), myths regarding the unmarried, overprotected, and totally-reclusive Clara abound.  Her murder is the catalyst for truths to be revealed and lives to be destroyed. Just as in real small towns, people in Camphor continue to live their lives, i.e. carry on petty fueds and begin love affairs, as death and danger swirl around them.

Another reason the small town and the cozy mystery  are a perfect match relies on a misconception. Because small towns have the “less-sophisticated” tag, they are seen as a  breeding ground for rumor and scandal. If you’ve lived in both small towns and larger towns and  cities,you know that the only real difference is size.  But size does matter.  Though certainly rumor and scandal punctuate larger towns and cities, the idea of knowing what your neighbor is up to is less credible when buried in anonymity. Cities like to see themselves as above such a base pursuit as spreading gossip. Not true, but if you want to involve your reader quickly in your premise, then you put your cozy in a small town where it’s more believable that people are peeking out their windows or whispering in coffee shops.

In Murder on Cinnamon Street, Clara has a past much like that of a young woman in the town in which I grew up. But as a young girl, I heard about her and formed my own ideas regarding why she had been sequestered by her parents, shut away from the wagging tongues of people who had way too much time on their hands and took a certain perverted pleasure in destroying a young girl’s reputation.

So I started my book with the memory of that town and that young girl.  All I really knew was that once in her adolescent life, she had done something perceived to be so bad that her parents closed her off from the world. The writer in me then had the fun of expanding the legend into small Camphor’s reality. The girl I knew was no more than fifteen or sixteen.  Though I added no new information concerning her, I  let Clara grow into a woman in her sixties.

The house at the beginning of this blog looks like one of the houses I lived in and is very similar to the houses that reign on Cinnamon Street. Small towns in Michigan have these houses rich with history.  My main character Elizabeth Catherine Clary (E to her friends) lives in one of Cinnamon Street’s majestic Victorians. Down the street and next to each other, her late mother’s two best friends Mignon Dalton and Madge Bobik live in even more elegant homes. And at the far, far, end of Cinnamon Street living palatially is the quirky, old bachelor Maurice Brunson, of the rich, powerful, and dominant Brunsons. These are the people who occupy the pages of MOCS and whom the gossipy little town watches with curiosity, greedy for news to swallow and regurgitate.

My father exhibited a savvy understanding of the nature of small towns over forty years ago when he said to his five children,”This town waits for you kids to run downtown and grab the gossip so you can spread it all over.” But it wasn’t just us. It’s what everyone did, and it’s what the characters can be depended to do in Murder on Cinnamon Street. I suggest, however, that gossip sometimes serves a purpose. Once in a while,  it can stop a vicious killer from annihilating an entire town, just as in does in Murder on Cinnamon Street.