some housekeeping

by | Aug 3, 2019 | Field Notes

Well, it’s August, and we’ve made it as far as Ruby in Summer Reading, hahaha. Lord it has been a busy time. I’m declaring Summer Reading can go into fall and even winter — I won’t abandon it. I hope you stay tuned.

In the meantime, there is this:

from the research trip and getaway I made last week to Maine, to Rachel Carson’s cabin by the sea. More on this soon. 

I’m juggling (delightedly, gratefully) a particularly rich time in my writing life right now. Here is just yesterday’s work:

I finished researching niggling details and sent in final revisions, author’s note, acknowledgements, dedication, etc etc, to a picture book I’ve written about Rachel Carson that publishes next fall (Random House), art by the stupendously talented Daniel Miyares — all very exciting.

I sent in a revision of the galley letter that will go in front of all KENT STATE galleys — which will be here very soon. That book publishes (Scholastic Press) in April 2020. Also exciting. We have an amazing cover for this book that I can’t wait to share when the time is right.

I prepared for Scholastic’s sales conference in NYC next week, where I’ll be speaking about KENT STATE to sales reps from across the country. I’m scripting myself for this 5-8 minute talk, and selecting some slides.

I spoke with my agent about illustrators for a picture book I’ve worked on for many years that may be sold soon. The editor in question wants to take it to acquisitions with an illustrator and vision in mind. Very exciting! So many books take me such a long time to figure out.

I worked back-and-forth with Scholastic audio on listening to auditions and selecting a reader to be Molly for the audiobook of ANTHEM. Also very exciting! We’ve been bouncing this around for some time — we have decided on Norman, and we have our narrator, and we were trying to get Molly just right. I think yesterday we found her.

I corresponded with my uber-talented and patient webmistress about moving A LONG LINE OF CAKES off its prominent “new book” position on my home page and moving ANTHEM into its place, and I set up a training time with her, so I can make these changes myself in time.

I answered a backlog of email.

When I showed up mid-afternoon to get my hair cut, here is what I heard: “Your hair is very emotional today!” hahahahaha. Yeah. It’s an emotional time. And so very busy. I know how lucky I am. 

I got mostly off the road late last year, which has given me the opportunity to write more and have days like I had yesterday, and like I hope to have more of going forward.

I’ve been writing professionally for 35 years now, in one capacity or another, and working in this book business for a little over 20 years now, publishing books since 2001, and this is the first time I’ve had TIME stretching out ahead of me.

Part of it is age, and stage, part of it is getting off the road, and part of it is finishing up major projects, like the Sixties Trilogy (which I sold in 2008) followed immediately by KENT STATE. 

It’s also the first time in 11 years I haven’t woken to a publishing deadline. Everything is turned in, finished. It’s luscious. I don’t want to give up that feeling! But I have work to do. So — what now?

I have two proposals to write, both for big writing projects. I spoke with my agent this week about those. I have picture books to go back to. A bunch of other writing and home projects I’m eager to paddle around with, in what’s left of this summer.

Also, there is housekeeping.

I have a new website! Is it not GORGEOUS? Thank you, Cyndi Craven! We are still tweaking, and having fun with it, and I am ever grateful for such a professional looking site. I hadn’t updated my website design in 9 years, since COUNTDOWN was published. Ulp.

Check out the BOOKS page, so lovely, and see how each book’s page (click on REVOLUTION for an example) now has excellent information for readers, teachers, librarians, parents, and more. I see this new website as a beautiful workhorse for me into this next part of my writing life. I’ll have to do a separate blog post about it at some point.

I’m moving this Blogger blog to my WordPress website soon, just fyi. It’s already there, actually, and you can go sub there soon as well, although I won’t be completely away from Blogger for some time yet, so no worries if you want to hang out here on Blogger with me while we transition everything.

My idea is to “own my own content” and eventually be off social media platforms and have everything about me at my website. I was off social media for four years, and it did me good. I’m trying to figure out a way to return that works for me. Hence, having all content in one place. More on that as we transition.

In the meantime, I am once again (mostly against my will, hahaha) at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (you’ll find me here most often because I like the visual storytelling, and it feels less nekkid-making). 

And I’m at Pinterest, never left Pinterest, as this is where I catalog resources for my work in progress, so it’s a work tool, it’s messy, but it’s process, and maybe useful to readers… it’s certainly useful to me, and I love this tool for that reason.

And I’m here, once again, at the blog, and very happy about that. Thanks for hanging out with me.

xoxo Debbie 

summer reading: Love, Ruby Lavender

by | Jun 30, 2019 | Field Notes

Here she is, Ruby Lavender. She has quite the story to tell.

Ruby started as a picture book I worked on in the mid-1990s, in a poetry workshop I took at Frederick Community College in Frederick, Maryland, where I lived at the time. I was a freelance writer and editor, after having been a magazine editor for one fateful year.

I was also in the midst of some grant-funded oral history work for the Community Foundation of Frederick County, which took me to the most interesting places, with the most interesting voices: people over 100 years old; knife makers, farmers and farm wives, potters, artists, community activists, former mayors and police chiefs, civil rights activists, and more.

Their voices, and their stories, in concert, over the years I interviewed them, reminded me so much of the voices I heard telling tales (some of them tall) on the front porch of my grandmother’s house in Jasper County, Mississippi in the sixties.

Ruby was born because I missed them all so much, wanted to bring them close to me, and wanted to honor their memories through telling a story, just as my new friends in Frederick had honored me with their stories.

So I went back to Mississippi, like I did every summer, and this time to document a time and place. I’ve been back so many times, always back, although no one I grew up with lives there anymore.

I’ve made some new friends there, though, and they come out to see me every time I stop by. And my kinfolks live an hour north, near Jackson. I go there, too. And if I’m lucky, I wrangle one of them to go with me to Louin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I remember my great-grandmother, Nanny (great-great Aunt Florentine in Each Little Bird That Sings), coming out this door (it leads to the kitchen) in the early morning, after eating her toast and drinking her coffee, and walking down the steps in her long button-down dress and wide-brimmed hat, heading for the garden, which is behind me.

I remember those cousins as kids, and that cemetery as a playground, and the pie at the Bayless is still that good (like the Cake Cafe in A Long Line of Cakes).

I remember watching Sea Hunt on a black and white television in the living room at night, with all the lights turned off. I remember Miss Eula’s dentures in a glass of water by her bed at night. I remember the moths that danced around the porch light and the beez that buzzed in the car house.

I remember what it all looked like to a ten-year-old kid, what it smelled like, felt like, tasted like, sounded like, and I remember it all now as if I were still ten, that place that became a little girl’s homeplace filled with those who loved her best in the world and couldn’t wait to see her from summer to summer, every year.

Next: How did these memories turn into Love, Ruby Lavender? How did that book get written? I promise to be back soon.

summer reading: Freedom Summer (and deadlines)

by | Jun 20, 2019 | Field Notes

Whew. I’ve had deadline-brain. I turned in the revision and backmatter to the Kent State project (book, now), which publishes in April 2020, and that intensity, on the heels of bringing-in the last bits for ANTHEM, Book 3 of the Sixties Trilogy (publishes October 1, 2019), shoved me right over. Tilt.

Noodle-brain, I started calling it. For days. I’m slowly pulling it back together, and so back to Summer Reading. Let me finish writing a bit about my first book, FREEDOM SUMMER and then on to RUBY next time.

I often say that Mississippi was/is the landscape of my heart. It is certainly the geography of my childhood. Both my parents were Mississippi born and bred, so it become our homeplace each year, as we lived all over the globe in an Air Force family. I started school in Hawaii (before it became a state!) and I graduated high school in the Philippines, at Clark AFB.

Mississippi was the place where everyone knew me and couldn’t wait for me to return each summer, to pinch my cheek and tell me how much I’d grown, and to celebrate their most famous citizen (or so it seemed to a young girl then), my dad, who had left this tiny town of a few hundred people in the middle of nowhere, and gone out into the world to become a pilot and a war hero. If the town had been big enough for parades, I thought they’d have had one for my father’s return each summer.

Those childhood summers were idyllic for me, with nothing to do, and nowhere much to go, except to the cemetery to visit all the relatives, to play piano in the unlocked (and un-air-conditioned) Methodist church, to ride to the Cool Dip for ice cream in the next town over, and, if you were lucky, to go roller skating and swimming at the Pine View.

Here’s what the Pine View Cafe across the road from the pool and roller skating rink and pond looked like before I was even born, probably:

We ate there once that I remember. It was the first time I’d heard the term “blue plate special.”

This was the roller skating rink, and next to it (hidden by cars, but on the left in front of those pines) was the pool.

In 1964, the year I was 11, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and the pool closed. The roller skating rink closed. The Pine View Cafe closed. The Cool Dip closed. The Bayless Theater in Bay Springs, the county seat a few miles away, closed. The public library closed.

It would be years before I began to understand what had happened. And even more years before I wrote about that time in FREEDOM SUMMER. And even more years before I revisited that pool.

I have been to see it many times since, have photographed it in all seasons, and show those slides when I speak at schools or conferences, after I read FREEDOM SUMMER on slides. And always, there is a hush. You can hear a pin drop. The proverbial pin.

My pool (as I have taken to calling it) was abandoned in 1964. (In the book I have it filled in with tar/asphalt, the way the pool in Greenwood, Mississippi was turned into a parking lot.) I can’t stop visiting this town, every time I go to Mississippi. I still have precious family in Mississippi, although my parents have both died, and I still feel pulled to this geography of my childhood, this time and place, this trying-to-understand.

I’m still trying to write about this time, which I’ve done specifically in REVOLUTION (Freedom Summer in novel form, and Book 2 of the Sixties Trilogy), and in THE AURORA-COUNTY ALL-STARS, and in A LONG LINE OF CAKES, in which the Pine View Cafe becomes The Cake Cafe. Possibly I will write about this time in our American history for as long as I live, in one way or another. It shows up in all my novels, in some form.

FREEDOM SUMMER got me started. Here’s how.

In 1997 I went to the (then called) IRA — International Reading Association — conference in Atlanta (I lived in D.C. at the time, and went to support a friend). I met Anne Schwartz there, who was then at Simon&Schuster/Atheneum. My good bud Deborah Hopkinson introduced us and said, “Debbie is working on a book about the civil rights movement for children.”

I wasn’t. I had been writing and submitting manuscripts about my southern childhood for many years, and had collected a sizeable batch of rejection letters, but I hadn’t sold a book yet.

At IRA, I’d sat up late the night before with Deborah and another writer buddy Jane Kurtz, and each of us had talked about the book we’d write if we got only one book to write in our lifetimes. I talked about the summer the pool closed. “But that’s not a book for children,” I said. And Deborah said, “Why not?”

On the exhibit floor that day, Anne shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “If you write that book, I want to read it.”

And four years later, S&S published FREEDOM SUMMER.

Perhaps I’d become a better writer in the ten years I’d been practicing and collecting rejections. Perhaps it was an editor’s challenge and invitation. Perhaps it was good friends believing in me. Perhaps it was a story I knew was mine to tell, and mine alone, and perhaps all those things came together in a moment that I was prepared for by all the days of my life trying to figure it out. I don’t know.

I’m grateful for this book, though. It has helped. I will read it to anyone who will listen. And I will learn from it, for all the rest of the days of my life.