what stays and what goes

by | Jul 30, 2024 | Field Notes

Our CSA box this week from Riverview Farms here in Georgia. A boon to a writer on a deadline.

I am about at the halfway mark with my 13 weeks, writing from the summer solstice to the fall equinox, when I hope to turn in a chunk of the new book, temporarily called CHARLOTTESVILLE, to my editor. I can’t remember what specifically about the book I’ve talked about before, as I’ve been working on this book for so long, and for long silent stretches, which have felt necessary to my progress, not to mention my sanity, when trying to make sense of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and the Rise of White Supremacy… which was my working title for so long.

I don’t want to belabor the years, now, of research and lived experience, as the thought of that accounting is boring even to me right now, but I thought I would list here, for my own edification and to look back on, the list I made a week or so ago of what I want to include in this draft, knowing that I will have to choose what stays and what goes. ugh.

My characters are in the thick of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA on the night of Friday, August 11, 2017, as the book opens, and somehow I want to get them — or me — to these places below, each of these people or places chosen because, as I’ve researched far and wide and deep, these are the events that call to me over and again as foundational to the story I’m trying to tell, so I list them here (and I think they are in date order):

Scotland? Walter Scott?
Virginia Dare and the Roanoke Colony
Ashley’s Sack
John Brown and Harper’s Ferry
Fort Sumter (whose letters? I saw someone’s, not just Mary Chestnut’s)
The Battle of Resaca in Sherman’s March to the Sea, Mary Jane Green
Appomattox and the Lost Cause, the UDC and Confederate monuments, Mildred Lewis Rutherford
The Oregon Trail, immigration, Replacement Theory
Leo Frank, Birth of a Nation, Stone Mountain, rebirth of the Klan. Jews will not replace us.
Lillian Smith, LGBT
Civil Rights Act? Freedom Summer?
Charleston 2015, Mother Emmanuel
Charlottesville 2017, Lee statue
January 6, 2021

There are so many more I could choose to weave into this narrative/novel/whatever-this-is I’m writing. There is no “right” list… but there is a “heart” list, or a list of what pulls me as a writer and as someone who grew up in the Lost Cause mythology and still works to dismantle it in my own life, to write about it, to understand it.

Some of what I’ve listed above is something I wrote about in many different previous drafts of CHARLOTTESVILLE. Many previous drafts. I felt married to the way I wrote about Virginia Dare and the Roanoke Colony, for instance. I *love* that section of a previous draft. I don’t want to give it up. But I can’t keep it, not in the form it’s in now, which is a connector to a prose poem — it’s actually beautiful and heartbreaking and I miss it in this draft… but maybe that vignette can be used elsewhere, sometime. I have to let it go.

I mention “what stays and what goes” so I can refer back to it as I’m writing, and because I want a record of how I’m putting this draft together. This draft is the one I’m going with, come hell or high water. The material is often hellish, but at the same time it is becoming compelling from a structural standpoint, which is always where I excel in my efforts to tell stories — how is it best structured? That has been my mission with this draft (well, one mission) — and I find myself falling into writing techniques and choices now, now that I have a sort of scaffolding that might work, instead of despairing that I have no way to tell this vast and complicated story.

I might sound convoluted here. lol. It’s not on purpose. I’m just checking in, for now, I’ll try to be more specific another time. Thanks for reading and being there… I feel like I have someone(s) to share with, and that helps as I navigate the swamp. Maybe you’ve been in the slough, too, and if so, you are not alone. It helps to know I’m not alone, either.

Back to work.

by | Jun 1, 2024 | Field Notes

I’ve been collecting oral histories of the Battle of Resaca, part of Sherman’s campaign to capture the city of Atlanta and win the South for the Union in the Civil War. This snippet is from Daniel Ransdell, who fought with the Seventieth Indiana Regiment, commanded by Colonel Benjamin Harrison, who would become the 23rd president of the United States.

Ransdell became sergeant at arms for the Senate, from 1900 to 1912. From senate.gov: “On May 15, 1864, while advancing with Union troops on Atlanta, Georgia, he suffered the loss of his right arm in an engagement that produced more than ten thousand Union and Confederate casualties.”

I have gone down several rabbit holes while writing this current book, including this one about the carnage of battle in the Civil War, from the viewpoint of the soldiers who lived through it. I’ve been juxtaposing this history against the carnage in Charlottesville in 2017, in Charleston in 2015, in battle after battle through the years in which citizens of the United States fight themselves. I want to understand why we do it. Maybe that’s not even the point. I lose track of the point.

Then comes a day like Thursday this week when a former president of the United States is convicted of 34 felony counts and I hear Harry Litman, a former law clerk to Thurgood Marshall and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General say, “Today the Republic held” and I think: that’s the point. That’s what I’m writing about — the Republic for which we stand. One nation. With liberty and justice for all.

I seem to write about war a lot, in my effort to write about the importance of peace. Countdown is about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War; Revolution is about Freedom Summer; Anthem has as its strong undercurrent the Vietnam War, which is also the flash-point for Kent State. My books Freedom Summer and The Aurora County All-Stars both pivot on the Civil Rights Movement, another war we fought against ourselves and the better angels of our nature, to use Lincoln’s phrase from his first inaugural address in 1861, words spoken as seven Southern states had already seceeded from the Union.

I don’t know. I vacillate, with this current book, between knowing I am in way over my head, to the sure knowledge that I know exactly what I am doing. I have been to the Confederate cemetery at Resaca, Georgia. I dreamed about the Battle of Resaca last night. I woke up thinking about the impossibility of imparting to young adult readers the foundations of democracy, the blood shed for its continuance, the responsibilities of citizenship, and the importance of voting. So unsexy. But so vital. Which, I guess, is why I continue to write about these things. I don’t want to lose hope.

Musing on a Saturday morning. #thelostcauseproject #charlottesville2017 #amwriting #wip