Review: Carolyn Hart's Letter From Home

Dear Carolyn,

I was struggling with how to write about Letter From Home, the first book of yours that I’ve read, though published ten years ago and one of fifty now to your credit, and then it came to me: I’d write you a letter.

My connection to you began because of something you said at the Malice Domestic Convention XXV, which happened earlier this month.  You were receiving the Amelia award for a lifetime contribution to the mystery community, and you’d already won three Agathas, had nine nominations for them, and been Guest of Honor (1997, Malice IX) and won the Lifetime Achievement award (2007, XIX).  During the interview you quietly said:  “Write what works for you and reflects you.  Don’t write to a trend.  Write what you want to write.”

Afterwards, I emailed you that I’d appreciated your saying that and sent you my blog address, where I’d posted my Malice report and quoted you.  You responded very quickly and said you’d like to link to my blog report from your website’s Malice page.  I’d also told you that I, too, had graduated from the University of Oklahoma, in 1959.  You wrote back that you graduated in 1958 in Journalism, so that we were contemporaries.

My first mystery was published last year, Killer Frost, and your first was published years ago, yet you treated me so respectfully, as a comrade.  Letter From Home had been mentioned in the interview with Katherine Hall Page.  It won you a best novel Agatha in 2004.  I was struck by its being set in 1944, the year, at age six, when I moved with my mother and younger sister to Norman, Oklahoma, where O.U. is located.  Your novel’s heroine and amateur detective, Gretchen Grace Gilman, is thirteen, and she lives in another small Oklahoma town.  

In 1944 I was very aware of the War.  My daddy was a Navy Chaplain in the Pacific.  My mother worked for the YWCA on the campus.  She sat at her typewriter and wrote to Daddy every day.  I didn’t know much about the bigger world in Norman, but I learned, when my mother brought home two Negro women at lunchtime during a Y conference on the campus, that Norman was a sundown town, and Negroes weren’t allowed in town after dark, nor were there any restrooms for them on campus or in town.  My mother, in fact, through the Y, worked toward the Separate but Equal judgment, which the Supreme court made before the 1954 Desegregation decision, which allowed Lois Sipuel to enter O.U. Law School, though she had to sit behind a screen.  

This early experience of racial injustice led me to a lifetime involvement with righting that wrong, but of the complex politics and social behavior of the small town I lived in, I had little idea.  Your book stirred memories though.  The song “Mairsie Doats” [“Mares eat oats”] which I loved, was one from that period.  I was not, however, thrust into the dark side of some of the consequences of that war as Gretchen was.

I like this book because of its “real people struggling with real passion,” your phrase in your essay for the big Malice XXV memory book, of why Malice was begun.  That’s what the traditional mystery was all about.  Not blood and guts.  Not explicit sex.  I found in the pages of your book a deeply human reality–the whole human comedy in the sense of the complete picture, good and bad, of those who people and run this little town.  There are plenty of folks who reject those who are different, as the woman Faye Tatum was rejected, being an artist and going to dances while her husband served in the war.  A crowd mentality comes into being fast once the word is out that the killer is at large and armed.  

Then there are the characters who challenge this small-mindedness, this tendency to condemn and rush to judgment based on fear and well before all the facts are known.  The Gazette’s editor, Walt Dennis, the police chief Frazer, Mrs. Jacobs, Gretchen’s junior high English teacher, who sends Gretchen to Dennis to apply for a reporter job, and especially Gretchen’s grandmother, Lotte Pfizer, who always sees the human beings in whatever situation, and keeps kindness, love, courage, and forgiveness front and center, for herself and for Gretchen.

All the characters are quite vivid and real, but Gretchen is the most remarkable of all to me. There she is, thirteen, asking for job because a reporter has been called up for military service, and she is already a good writer.  Mr. Dennis is rejecting–doesn’t want a girl or one so young, but he reads her “clips,” and says he’ll give her a try.  Then we witness a transformation as Gretchen slips into her new role with relative ease, also learning more about the background of her friend  Barb’s mother’s murder than the police, sheriff, or the main reporter do.

Gretchen is thrust into adulthood, doing a job made harder because Gretchen had liked Faye Tatum and worries about Barb, who is taking it hard, and also about her grandmother, who runs the Victory Café and is overworking and looking ill.  Editor Dennis comes to depend on Gretchen.  Yet she still has the child’s bewilderment, self-doubt, impulsiveness (she sneaks out at night; she doesn’t tell anyone the key information she has learned).

We also have the grandmother’s strong faith and compassion set side by side with the minister’s self-righteousness and pompous assumption that Faye must have sinned.

Throughout the book there is an understated drama of “extraordinary events in ordinary lives,” which one author at Malice said was what the traditional mystery was all about.  The characters’ dilemmas tug at our feelings.  The murder grows out of a tangle of normal and understandable human emotions.  As the book progresses, the reader feels “something is wrong with this picture,” but only at the end do we and Gretchen learn what, in fact, did happen.  I love the way Gretchen persists in doing her job, following her conscience, summoning her courage to write the truth, and taking in stride both her rejection for doing so by other teens, and the praise coming from her editor.

Thank you, Carolyn, for giving us such a book and for emphasizing how important it is to write out of our inner selves, what we know to be true and good and also what we know to be wrong and a disservice to the better part of our human nature.

Another author discovered your wisdom before you and I were born, and her words helped me as I was finding my way as a writer, fifty years ago, and these words still do help me, as did your reminder.  Sadly, this seems often a forgotten truth these days in the larger publishing world.

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.  But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.” Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, p. 110, published in 1929, still in print.

Thank you, Carolyn.  

Sincerely, Judy Hogan

Carolyn Hart’s website has lots of information about her books, awards, and some Malice reports and photos.  www.carolynhart.com

Being Able to Cope = Wholeness

The path into Huntley Meadows, Alexandria, VA, thanks to John Ewing, photographer.  And the paths our lives take?

***

I move fairly quickly these years from seeing problems to working on them.  I divide things up when I have a slew of problems to solve.  One thing at a time.  I had the soybeans.  104 days to maturity.  They’re in the ground now, though I’ll be very lucky if they reach maturity, as November 17 is 17 days past the average first frost date.  In any case, they’ll put nitrogen in the soil.  I did not feel like digging the rows when I finally had the time, so I argued with myself: “Just dig the rows.”  The next day I didn’t feel like planting: “Just plant soybeans,” I told myself.  “Just spray Surround on the fruit trees.”  “Just mow.”  Today: “Just weedeat and weed.”  Divide up the tasks, the most urgent first, to make them feel manageable and bearable. 

That’s one sign that I’m whole, intact.  Another is that I don’t spend much time in anguish and almost none in self-pity.  I don’t blame others for my problems.  They are often the consequences of my own behavior.  My life feels good.  I balance between my plans and their disruption because something compelling (children’s need, politics in Chatham, etc.) feels like a priority, a thing I can’t say no to.  But I can say no when I need to.  I can set boundaries with myself and with others.  I can ask people to wait, to do without me while I take time to write.  I weather things, I cope, whether with car problems, chicken dilemmas, squirrels eating my first peach crop, having to have extra mammograms because of a tiny “spot.”  It’s maybe the main difference between being whole and not whole: being able to cope. 

 

I am amazed at the small things which undo my elderly poet friend Ed.  He never expects any interruption to his plans, and every interruption, no matter how small, becomes a disaster.  I see clearly the limits of his framework.  Mine needs stretching, but his is wholly inadequate for his life as lived now.  Yet I don’t think he has the emotional flexibility to change it.  I don’t think he even sees the problem.

Why the farm?  How does it add to my sense of wholeness?  Why do I hold onto it, invest so much money and time in it?  What does it give me?  I understand much better than I did what it takes from me and demands if it is to be a producing farm, even in its role of adding to my self-sufficiency by providing most of my food.

I have loved farms and the farm life since I was a young child.  I worked to bring my dream of a farm to reality, to make it come true.  I said it would give me work outside so I’d stay healthy.  I spend many hours every day sitting in my writing chair or at the computer.  Farming gets me up and moving.

Once I have seeds in the ground or animals within my care, I feel committed to them.  I may not want to go out and water or weed-eat, but I will.  It’s very hard for me to abandon plants or creatures.  They may get weed-choked or neglected for a short time, but I don’t give up on them.  I go out and start on the horrendously plentiful (lots of rain plus lots of chicken litter) crop of weeds I have.  Lee Calhoun, the man I bought my heirloom apple trees from, said I had to keep a six-foot area around the fruit trees clear of weeds, and that was the first time I’d been that disciplined.  It still slides.  I lost the strawberries because the weeds did block the sunlight and take over.  

I learn from my errors.  Farming is very much a trial and error business, and you work with unpredictables: weather, insect problems, interruptions, other priorities that pull you away from the garden.  Squirrels, voles, rabbits.  With chickens you have predators.  You have to learn their chicken needs.  I now have one baby–two weeks old–separated with her mother from the flock.  Healthy and thriving so far.  Extra protected from predators by rat wire and her mother.  These chickens lay eggs for me, which I so enjoy eating.  And selling.  I can’t imagine now living without them.  Christiana said my rooster was no good because only one chick hatched from eighteen eggs.  But the rooster’s the only chicken to which I’ve promised old age.  Chanticleer is my pet.  He was chosen–the friendliest rooster of sixteen--and named–to escape slaughter.

The farm gets only my breaks from classes, editing, my own writing, but those breaks give me ballast and a rest from mental work.  The immersion in the world outside my back door nourishes me with its beauty, its surprises (all the scuppernong grapes hanging from the chicken wire that covers the chicken yard), its rewards for my labors.

The food I grow gives me better nourishment than what I would buy in the grocery store.  I have more variety to my diet.  I can treat other people to fresh eggs or tomatoes or give away zinnias.  Everywhere I look when I go outside, I see work that needs doing.  I can’t be complacent.

The temptation as we age is to become too attached to our rituals and routines; to become set in our ways.  Someone told someone else I was set in my ways.  True, I spend more time resting, taking breaks, eating quiet meals with a book for company; I sleep more.  But I can let go of my routines for a good reason, as needed, or build a new one, like feeding chickens and letting them out into their yard when I first wake up.  I like my rituals, and I know I need breaks more than I used to.  I try to avoid time pressure, stress, getting into a “hyper” place, but I’m not, I think, complacent or lazy. 

 

After years of trying to, I am finally leading a reasonably paced, even leisurely, life.  I still work hard.  Counting writing and e-mail (much of it political/activist) I work ten hours a day.  I rest, exercise, garden, cook, clean, eat, read six and a half hours a day.  Once or twice a week I meet friends for a meal.  I chat with my neighbors, family, or friends on the phone a few hours a week.  I am always happy to spend time with my children and grandchildren.  My schedule flexes as need be, but I find I get done what I need to and also keep my balance in this way.

Excerpt from Chapter One, Pushkin and Chickens, 2004, unpublished, copyrighted.

Tree swallows at Huntley Meadows, Alexandria, Va, thanks to John Ewing.  Let us keep our beautiful natural world in mind.

Malice Domestic Convention--Bethesda--May 3-5, 2013

Judy Hogan at the Malice Domestic Sidekicks panel, May 5, 2013
Taken by Malice photographer Greg Puhl.

***

For me Malice 25 represented a double-whammy.  For my fourth Malice, I had my first published mystery out, and I loved the books of the two guests of honor: Laurie King and Peter Robinson, who was interviewed by another favorite author of mine, Louise Penny.  

Louise Penny and Peter Robinson, photo by Jim Jackson

Having a book out meant I was on an author panel as an author, and Killer Frost being my first also meant I was among twenty-six authors honored at the New Author Breakfast.

Sometimes I was so caught up in what was being said during the various panels and interviews, that I forgot to take notes, but here are some snippets of things said and things that happened in a very full weekend.

Laurie King saying “the deductive reasoning that early crime-solvers, like Sherlock Holmes, used is equal to women’s intuition” especially resonated with me, as well as Peter Robinson’s “For me character is more important than forensics.”

Carolyn Hart, receiving the Amelia award for her many contributions to the mystery community, in her interview, emphasized: “Write what works for you and reflects you.  Don’t write to a trend.  Write what you want to write.”

Aaron Elkins won the Lifetime Achievement award, and he seemed surprised that his work had been so widely read and loved, but Gigi Pandian was the real surprise.  Barbara Mertz (Elizabeth Peters) had been meant to interview Elkins, but she was in the hospital, and Aaron chose Gigi, a brand new author who is writing in the same archeological vein as Elkins and Peters.  Gigi handled it with aplomb.

Edith Maxwell, another new Guppy author, and Gigi Pandian

Felix Francis, the son of Dick Francis (Malice Remembers), entertained us with stories about his father and himself.  For a few pence, to prove he could do it, Dick, at age six, rode a mule backwards to jump a fence.  Not only did Felix pick up writing his father’s mysteries five years after Dick’s last published book, but from the beginning his mother had helped with the writing, fleshing out and correcting Dick’s drafts.  She called it their cottage industry, but “without the cottage.”

Laura Lippman, the Toastmaster, urged us to be “honest about what you want.  Until you say what you want, you don’t get it.”

Those nominated for the best novel of 2012, in their panel, talked about their writing rituals.  Hank Phillippi Ryan said hers is to do so many words a day.  Louise Penny’s is to work on her laptop with her beloved espresso machine nearby.  Krista Davis wants a hot cup of tea and to sit at her desk facing the room, not the wall.  None of them outline.  They all begin with an idea.  Louise starts thinking about the book eight months ahead and makes copious notes before she does her first of several drafts.  Hank compared her writing, scene after scene, as like dominoes: one triggers the next in line.  

When asked about their research, G.M. Malliet said she does things like visit a closed mental hospital, and she also goes to England as often as possible, but research is an excuse for that.  Hank said her life in journalism had been her research.  Louise sometimes moves her story from her main setting, Three Pines, which is familiar as she lives near such a town, to other places and then spends time there.  She spent time in a Quebec monastery for this book.

Research was also discussed on the panel with the best historical nominees, and they agreed, “If you don’t like to do research, don’t write historical novels.”  They all emphasized their belief in strong women in the past.  Rhys Bowen said women have always done a lot, e.g., they walked across America in pioneering times.  They were asked, if their mysteries left out men, what difference would it make.  Victoria Thompson likes men there to have some romance in her novels.  Carolyn Todd said her Bess character does things in her own right, but the men have their roles, too.  Catriona commented that her women characters find men a comforting presence but she doesn’t want them to be rescued by men.  She also said the plot of a suspense novel is like a bomb that doesn’t go off until the end.  Someone suggested that historical mysteries were gaining in popularity.  They all felt that men as well as women were reading their books; Carolyn said it was fifty-fifty for them.  

The best short story nominees were asked why they wrote short stories.  Art Taylor said his time was tight.  Sheila Connolly said she uses ideas that won’t fit into a novel.  B.K. (Bonnie) Stevens said some characters and situations only work for thirty pages.  Dana Cameron sees them as a way of having an adventure with her main character in an evil vs justice situation.  Barb Goffman said the Malice (traditional mystery) genre is a big tent with a lot of freedom, taking up ordinary people in extraordinary situations.  B.K. pointed out that, as to writing from experience, Henry James said, “Be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.”

I always learn and get ideas, too, from Luci Zahray, the Poison Lady.  She spoke with enthusiasm about the most famous poisons: arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide.  90% of poisoners are never caught.  All of these poisons are easy to obtain.  Arsenic once was used with burials, so it’s found downstream from Civil war burial sites.  Arsenic deaths can be slow or fast.  In fact, what matters with all poisons is the dose.  You can die in 24-36 hours, with arsenic, or it could take ten years.  Arsenic collects in the body.  There’s a test, but often it’s not asked for.  Arsenic is an odorless, tasteless white powder that looks like powdered sugar and dissolves in water.  It’s the King of the poisons and the poison of Kings.  There was arsenic in the green wallpaper and fabric that the Victorians loved.  It was used in taxidermy and embalming until the 1950s.  A piece of fly paper, if soaked in water, contains enough arsenic to kill ten people.  The U.S. now outlaws wood treated with arsenic.

Strychnine kills by causing terrible cramping and muscle contractions.  It inhibits the ability of the body to relax its muscles.  After three-five of these extremely painful contractions you die, and you never lose consciousness.  Heroine and cocaine are sometimes cut with strychnine.  It used to be put in tonics, and arsenic, too.  Strychnine heightens perception and stimulates digestion and appetite and was used for this until the 1950s.  There’s no anti-dote.

Cyanide kills fast.  They used to use it to plate silver onto glass to make mirrors.  Luci repeats her warning every year about Tylenol, one of the most dangerous poisons people tend to have in their homes.  Three-four grams of Tylenol is enough to kill you.

On the first best novel panel, the authors were asked to describe their path to publication.  Susan Boyer [Low Country Boil] tried agents first, but when they didn’t sell her manuscript, she turned to a new small press, Henery Press, begun by Kendel Lynn (Flaum), who, with Diane Vallere, had been moderator of the guppypressquest listserve, to which I and several other Guppies with new books belong. 

Susan Boyer, before she won first best novel, photo: Jim Jackson

Stephanie Jaye Evans [Faithful Unto Death–A Sugarland Mystery] won the Malice Domestic grant for unpublished writers in 2010.  Once Janet Reid came up to her, and Stephanie didn’t know she was an agent, so she asked her what kind of books she wrote.  Janet replied: “I write rejection letters.”  Janet became Stephanie’s agent.

Erika Chase felt she was lucky to get an agent for her A Killer Read.  Mollie Cox Bryan [Scrapbook of Secrets] has had thirty years as a professional writer.  She wrote novels on the side.  Mollie commented that it takes 10,000 hours of writing to succeed at it.  “Once you are published, it’s writing heaven.”

On the panel “When Death and Disaster Come Together” Shannon Baker [Tainted Mountain] takes up an environmental issue: tainted waste water is used to make artificial snow on a mountain sacred to the Hopis.  Her TV reporter Nora has to choose between the story of getting 40,000 people down off the mountain or of writing about the dead body she finds.

Lea Wait [Shadows at the Fair] writes about an unexpected hurricane hitting New England (before Hurricane Sandy).  Moderator Molly Weston suggested that when weather disasters hit, we are often prepared for certain ones but not others.  The unfamiliar ones cause the greatest crises.  New England is prepared for winter but not for hurricanes.

Jess Lourey [December Dread] writes about a terrible snowstorm in Minnesota.  Cold is a killer when people are caught in such a storm.

Nora McFarland [Going to the Bad] writes about a wild fire in California, where earthquakes are expected but not out-of-control fires–yet.  All these disasters up the ante to add suspense to the plot.

Two Guppies were on the sidekick panel on Sunday morning: Carolyn Mulford [Show Me the Murder] and Judy Hogan [Killer Frost].  We also had well-published authors Maddy Hunter [Bonnie of Evidence] and Kate Carlisle [Homicide in Hard Cover].   Patti Ruocco, an adult services librarian in Illinois and a faithful Malice attendee since the beginning twenty-five years ago, gave us questions about our sidekicks (mine is African American Sammie Hargrave, and Carolyn’s is a dog named Achilles).  These questions were great for opening up our books for the audience.

Sidekick panel with Judy talking by Malice photographer Greg Puhl
Left to right, Maddy Hunter, Judy, Patti Ruocco, Kate Carlisle, and Carolyn Mulford.

Patti ended with what she called a CSI Sidekick question.  She brought some objects, and we had to guess which sidekick the object suggested, among the beloved traditional mystery writers (from a list called Malice Remembers).  If we guessed wrong, we could ask the audience to help us.  Someone had to help me out when Patti drew out a child’s water color paint set, and I guessed Troy Alleyn, Roderick Alleyn’s wife (Ngaio Marsh), but it was Lord Peter Wimsey’s Bunter (Dorothy Sayers).  We had all been trying to bone up on the sidekicks of former years, but we didn’t do too well except for Kate, who got hers and won Patti’s prize.  I loved talking about Sammie and how she balances Penny Weaver, my main amateur detective.

As is usual at Malice, many Guppies met for lunch at Boogeymonger, a deli restaurant near the hotel, on Friday.

Left to right, Norma Huss, Kathleen Rockwood, Judy, Gloria Alden, taken by Jim Jackson

Karen Duxbury, our Guppy treasurer and Toni Goodyear, who also lives in Chatham County. Unnamed sleepy Guppy.  No wonder.

Among those Guppies honored at the New Author Breakfast Sunday morning were: Karen Pullen, Carolyn Mulford, Diane Vallere, Kendel Lynn, Jim Jackson, Gloria Alden, Edith Maxwell, Susan Boyer, Gigi Pandian, and this author.

Karen Pullen, also from Chatham County.

A new feature this year was Authors’ Alley, giving folks with new books an opportunity to draw an audience for fifteen minutes.  Among the Guppies doing that were: Gloria Alden, Jim Jackson, Debra Goldstein, Norma Huss, Kendel Lynn, and Liz Zelvin.

Gloria Alden photo by Jim Jackson during Authors Alley

At the banquet, I got to sit at B.K. Stevens’ table.  She was one of the nominees for best short story, and I was next to Linda Landrigan, the editor of Alfred Hitchcock mystery mag.  I told Linda she had rejected my story.  She looked dismayed.  I said, “It’s okay.  I’ll try again.”  Then she and I talked about farming!

Bonnie Stevens has published 40 mystery short stories.  I was delighted to sit with her.  She’s worth reading!

The First Best Malice Domestic Traditional Mystery, for an unpublished manuscript, was won by Ruth Moose, of Pittsboro and Chatham County, NC.  Ruth is an accomplished poet and short story author and teacher.  Her novel will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2013.

Then the Agatha winners of 2012 mystery novels and short stories were announced: Louise Penny won her fifth Agatha for best novel, The Beautiful Mystery.  Susan M. Boyer won the first best novel, Low County Boil.  The best short story was won by Dana Cameron’s “Mischief in Mesopotamia,” and the best historical novel was won by Catriona McPherson for Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for Murder.  Best non-fiction was by John Connolly/Declan Burke for Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on World’s Greatest Mystery Novels.  The best children’s/young adult novel was The Code Busters Club, Case #2: The Haunted Lighthouse by Penny Warner.  The winners are voted on by the attendees.

I’m amazed at how thoughtfully Barb Goffman arranges the panels.

Barb Goffman, Program Chair, photo by Jim Jackson

There must have been four hundred in attendance, as there were five hundred at the banquet, when many bring guests.  So many authors, at least two hundred, attended, judging by those listed in the program.  It can be overwhelming for a new author, so I appreciate how Cindy Silverblatt, who was Fan Guest of Honor, led the New Author Breakfast, which she started years ago.  Being on a panel also was great for us newbies.  

It’s amazing, too, how many Guppies I’ve seen get a book published, since I became a Guppy [the Great Unpublished chapter of Sisters in Crime] early in 2008.  Krista Davis and Liz Zelvin were just getting published then, and this year Krista was one of the contenders for Best Novel.  

A fairly new Guppy, Susan Boyer, won first best novel.  Barb Goffman’s description of Malice authors as being under one big tent is a good way of thinking about it.  What a variety of mysteries there were.  For more about Malice: www.malicedomestic.org

Judy Hogan

Review: Belles of Liberty by Linda B. Brown

Cover of Belles of Liberty.  Bennett Students at 1960s Sit-Ins.

***

Belles of Liberty: Gender, Bennett College, and the Civil Rights Movement in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Linda Beatrice Brown.  Women and Wisdom Press, Greensboro, 2013.  ISBN: 978-0-9888937-0-2. 207 pages. $18.  Includes Index and Bibliography.

Belles of Liberty is a long overdue re-examination of the 1960 Greensboro Sit-Ins so as to highlight the role of women, and particularly the role of the students, faculty, and president of the historically black Bennett College.  Until Brown’s book, the written history of the historic event when four African American students from A & T [Agricultural and Technical University] sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter provided only part of the story.

The untold part, presented here in a scholarly but eminently readable way, is of how much preparation went into that first actual Greensboro sit-in.  Dr. David Jones, President of Bennett in the thirties and forties, had been a courageous race leader.  He had brought Eleanor Roosevelt to speak at Bennett and had mentored President Willa Beatrice Player, who followed him and played a very active role in supporting her students in their civil disobedience strategies.  In 1958, when no other college or church in Greensboro would host Martin Luther King, Jr., President Player opened Bennett College Chapel to him and anyone else who wished to attend his speech.

From that time a groundwork was laid by faculty and students at Bennett, A&T, and other local colleges that would support this period, 1960-64, of the racial integration of stores, restaurants, movie theaters, and other public accommodations in Greensboro.

Over two hundred Bennett women students participated in the sit-ins, marches, and voter registration drives.  Their own drive was called Operation Door Knock, and they would offer to babysit or help with housework so the woman could register to vote.  The sit-ins and picketing  gathered momentum as students also came from Women’s College (now UNC-Greensboro), more faculty and staff from Bennett joined the marches, as well as many Greensboro citizens, black and white.  After the initial success in 1960 the movement was sustained and nourished by the students, staff, and president of Bennett, and in 1963-4, it again took off with a new wave of sit-ins, voter registration drives, and mass marches.

The students underwent training in Civil Disobedience.  They dressed as ladies, prepared to go to jail, and they often did.  They did not react as crowds jeered and threw things at them.  They had a clear, strong sense of purpose as they threw off the chains of Jim Crow and second class citizenship.  Their own words reveal how spiritually motivated and connected they felt, how they felt fear but persisted, not only for themselves but for their race and for the justice and equality promised in the American Constitution.

In 1960 Bennett College was seen as the Vassar of the South.  Its students came from all over the U.S.  Bennett also had exchange students from white colleges.  The women’s education included training in the social graces with an emphasis on proper dress and decorum, but they also learned activism and its rationale from their faculty members.  Brown calls attention to the inscription in the Bell House to the right of the chapel, the words in Isaiah 61.1: “... He hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.”  Bennett College has never stayed from this sense of mission.

Dr. Brown read all the scholarly and newspaper accounts of the years 1960-64 in Greensboro, and she explores the question of why there is almost no mention of the role President Player, her women students, and their faculty played in the planning, participation in, and the sustaining of the movement.  President Player was rather retiring.  She was behind her students all the way and cheered them on, visiting them in jail, hosting them when they returned, keeping their parents informed, and making sure that A&T young men were also there when the young women did civil rights work.  She did, however, not seek the limelight.  Though the Bennett students broke the invisible veil of respectability–women weren’t supposed to be so assertive and “out there” in public working to change society.  They were certainly there, but they didn’t call attention to themselves.

In May 1964, several hundred students were arrested, mostly from Bennett and A&T, and jailed in the old Polio Hospital.  For the women there was only one toilet and few beds.  Some slept on the floor.  They did a lot of singing, and they did have visitors, like President Player.  They refused to leave until their goals were met, though they were released earlier because of the unsanitary conditions, while negotiations went on.

***

Bennett Alumni who protested in the 60s, come back to celebrate the publication of Belles of Liberty.

***

Fifty women wrote, or were interviewed fifty years later for this book, about their experiences between 1958 and 1964 at Bennett.  Iris Jeffries, ’61 (pages 116-17) told this story: “This single mission of challenging social injustice was a hallmark for many of us in defining ourselves at that period of our lives.  What a wholesome impact it made on our characters and principles and what wonderful leadership we had in our president, Dr. Willa B. Player.  While sitting at the lunch counter one day, after a grueling chemistry class and prior to eating, a young child asked his mother, ‘Mama, why aren’t the niggers eating?’  The stoic mother replied: ‘The niggers aren’t hungry.’”

I like Brown’s closing thought (page 152): “Passing the torch of liberation to the next generation is more and more a necessity.  Our polarized world must find its hope for reconciliation in the great granddaughters of Harriet Tubman.  This legacy that stretches back for almost 200 years must be passed on.  My hope is that this story of the stand taken by the Belles of Liberty and their College will bring growing awareness to the young people of today, for there is still a great work ahead, perhaps more complicated than ever, ‘to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.’”

***

Linda Beatrice Brown has taught at Kent State University, UNC-Greensboro, and Guilford College.  A graduate of Bennett College, she is presently the Willa B. Player Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Bennett College, where, until this year, she taught African American Literature.  She is the author of three novels, Rainbow ’Roun Mah Shoulder [published first in 1984 as the winner of Carolina Wren Press’s Minority Book Prize], Crossing Over Jordan, and Black Angels.

Linda usually writes about the African American experience.  She is also a poet and playwright.  Her play Congo’s River Song was performed by the NC Museum of Art.  Linda’s novel Black Angels was the “Okra Pick” for the 2009 annual conference of South Carolina Independent booksellers and was named one of the best books of 2009 by the Chicago Public Libraries.

Belles of Liberty grew out of Linda’s lifelong conviction that she has a responsibility to speak out for justice and equality.  She is now at work on the sequel to Black Angels.  She lives with her husband, Gerald White, in Greensboro.

Pre-Sales for Beaver Soul and Farm Fresh and Fatal

Cover image of Beaver Soul, both Russian and English editions; Drawing by Mikhail Bazankov, the Russian editor.

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I'm happy to announce that Farm Fresh and Fatal, the Penny Weaver mystery which follows Killer Frost, will be published October 1, 2013, not in November, as I had thought earlier.  Beaver Soul will come out in early September, and I’ll be hosting a launch at my Hoganvillaea Farm on Sunday afternoon, October 20.  If you’d like to come, contact me, but I will be inviting quite a few people.  I’m accumulating fans.  Hurray.  

I’m setting up readings and signings now beginning October 24 at the Pittsboro Farmers Market, Thursday, 3:30-6 PM, and then my first bookstore reading at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, 2 PM, Saturday, October 26.  I’ll keep you posted as I schedule other readings.  You get two books for one reading.  I’ll read some from each.

Pre-sales will be available for both books.  For Farm Fresh and Fatal, you may order now from me for picking it up or having it shipped as soon as I get them, probably in September. $17, includes tax, to pick up; $20, with postage and handling, for shipping, to Judy Hogan, PO Box 253, Moncure, NC 27559-0253.

Pre-sales for Beaver Soul begin May 13, Monday, and last through June 28, Friday.  These orders will go directly to Finishing Line Press, PO Box 1626, Georgetown, KY, 40324, and will cost $14.49, including shipping.  The book sells for $12, and shipping is slightly marked down, which is also true of pre-orders for Farm Fresh and Fatal.  In the case of Beaver Soul, the pre-orders will determine the print-run.  I need 55 pre-orders for them to print 250 copies, etc.

Beaver Soul was first published in Russian in Kostroma, Russia, by the Kostroma Writers’ Organization, and we’re using the same drawing on the cover of the English version.  

***

Here are the back cover quotes, to give you an idea about the book.  I think you’ll like it, whether you normally read poetry or not!  Many of you will receive a postcard at the beginning of the pre-sales period.  Others, an email.

***

Judy’s writings about the natural world use metaphors as a way of exploding the bounds of perception.  Her poems are informational, compressing experiences, and continue over a span of thirty years to help us see the likenesses between systems of human, plant, animal,  and celestial worlds.  Judy teaches us how to use our poet eyes, how to guide us to truths beyond the scientific way of seeing, weighing, measuring, abstraction, and dissection. 

–Jaki S. Green, 2003 winner of the North Carolina Award, 2009 Piedmont Poet Laureate  

These are love poems.  The heroine-hero is the Earth.  In this way, Judy Hogan’s poems remind me of Thoreau’s journals.  Like Thoreau, she is a natural-born lover of anything that grows, anything original, most particularly the earth that looks after itself continually... You hear Emerson’s world in the background, that yearning to transcend the self.  To do this the poet must keep open house to the world.  So Judy Hogan writes within the romantic sensibility.  She is a passion child.  Her structure is the old and classical kingdom’s.  

--Shelby Stephenson, Playing Dead and Play My Music Anyhow, Finishing Line Press.

Judy continually weaves the golden thread of her lyric meditation and her philosophical comprehension of nature, its creatures, and people, into the fabric of her observations.  Her own soul in her poems is associated with the image of the beaver–a builder, patient and persistent in its work and in taking care of its family.  And everything that takes place in the beaver’s life–its joys and sorrows, its misfortunes and successes–corresponds to events in her own life.  The motto of Judy Hogan is creating and overcoming.

–Nonna Slepakova, Russian translator of Beaver Soul

***

Here is our first back cover quote for Farm Fresh and Fatal from our own Chatham entrepreneur, Lyle Estill.  I’m so proud.  More blurbs are coming.

***

Photo which I hope to see used in the cover of Farm Fresh and Fatal.  Real local vegetables at the Pittsboro Farmers' Market.

***

In Farm Fresh and Fatal Hogan serves up a complex dish that is flavored with community and family drama.  It is spiced with intrigue, finished with mystery and delivered right off the vine.

–Lyle Estill, President, Piedmont Biofuels and author of Small is Possible

***

Here’s a short plot summary of Farm Fresh and Fatal:

When Penny Weaver joins the new Riverdell Farmers’ Market, things go from bad to worse.  The county’s poultry agent is poisoned, apparently after drinking fruit punch provided by the abrasive market manager, who claims innocence but is arrested.  The state ag department threatens to close the market.  Penny and her friend Sammie work to uncover the real poisoner.  Kent is unpopular with the quirky farmers, with the exception of the genetically modified seeds man and the baker/jelly maker.  Penny and Sammie discover that the poison was black nightshade, but which farmer grows it and who put it in the punch?

***

I feel very lucky to have two books coming out this fall.  I hope you’ll want to read them and come to some of the events/readings.  I love having readers and hearing what they have to say!

Judy Hogan

Review: Jenny Milchman's Cover of Snow

Cover of Snow.  Jenny Milchman, Ballantine Books, 2013.  326 pp. ISBN: 978-0-345-53421-7.  Hard cover, $26.  

Jenny Milchman’s Cover of Snow, whose pages haunted me days after I finished the book, reminds me of something author Doris Betts said years ago.  “The best writing is memorable.”  It leaves an indelible impression.  In my experience few crime writers do leave in our minds scenes and characters we will never forget, but the best do.  Jenny’s book does.

I am not usually drawn to thrillers, and I’d say that Jenny stretches all the sub-categories of crime fiction.  It isn’t a conventional mystery, but it does have one central question the main character, Nora Hamilton, is trying to answer.  Not who but why?  Why did her beloved husband, Brendan, kill himself?  

As in a thriller the reader is given knowledge of the harm that has been done and is still being done behind the scenes before Nora learns about it, hence we fear for her safety, and the suspense is racheted up.  All the characters, however, are fully realized and fully human.  There are no good and evil stereotypes here.  The evil in the book is something we are all capable of if we feel desperate enough, but this doesn’t excuse it.  It makes it more terrifying.

Set in the small town of Wedeskyull, New York, in the Adirondacks in mid-winter, where Nora Hamilton is a relative newcomer, whereas her husband had grown up there and works for the town police, the couple are living in Brendan’s Aunt Jean’s house.  Brenda’s mother, Eileen, also lives in the town and accuses Nora of being responsible for her husband’s death.

Nora’s plight is not unlike Antigone’s.  Unwittingly, she is taking on the whole power structure in which she finds herself.  Every attempt she makes to understand why Brendan committed suicide is blocked; people she believed she could trust turn against her.  Her situation is reminiscent of any human struggle toward knowledge or justice when the odds are so stacked that those in power are willing to do anything to keep their secrets, including killing.

I’m also reminded of that myth of the three sons sent out into the world with the goal of chopping down a certain magical tree.  The first two brothers fail.  The third brother is more attentive to the landscape.  When he sees the old man with his beard stuck in a tree, calling for help, he helps him.  He also shares his bread and ale with an old woman who begs it of him.  These people help him so that he easily fells the magic tree.

Nora pays attention to the people in her landscape whom many would have ignored: an autistic auto mechanic, a newspaper reporter who wants her to help him remodel an old house, an old woman, her husband’s aunt.  In their various and unexpected ways these people, as well as other clues Nora notices and puzzles over, lead her through a chilling, terrifying landscape.

This plot has its roots so deep in Western civilization’s archetypes that no wonder its suffering heroine and her persistence against odds sticks in the mind.

I also think of Henry James’s advice re fiction writing, that the most powerful plot involves a heroine who is intelligent enough to feel intensely but blind enough to suffer in the situation she finds herself in, and then is “ministered to” by a fool.  Here, more than one fool.

The snow and the cold are like characters, too, and people keep going into the cold without enough protection.  Nora, of course, has no real protection of any kind.  She is alone, keeps losing what she does have, and yet people one wouldn’t have predicted come to her aid quite ingeniously.When novelists I admire like Louise Penny, Julia-Spencer-Fleming, and Nancy Pickard, give the book their rave reviews, I can only add: Amen.  Read it.

***

 

Jenny Milchman 

I had the pleasure of having Jenny and her husband Josh, children Sophie and Caleb, at my house for dinner back in February when she was on her seven-month book tour and in central North Carolina.  They came early to see the farm, though in February this year there wasn’t a lot to see.  The hens were interesting, and the children enjoyed gathering the eggs.  We had daffodils and crocuses; we could see the beginnings of the buds on forsythia and peach trees.  The children ate everything: my chicken stew from my hens, the fruit salad, the sweet potatoes, the bread, and they all enjoyed the apple pie from my own canned apples.  They also made me drawings, about the farm, and Sophie wrote on hers: “Farming is peace on earth.”  

Jenny’s road to publication took her eleven years, and in the process she wrote and revised many books.  By the time Ballantine accepted Cover of Snow, she was well-known among mystery and thriller writers because of her support to other writers, especially debut writers (she hosts many of them on her Suspense Your Disbelief blog on her website) and independent bookstores.  She started a program called Take Your Child to a Bookstore, so when it was time to persuade bookstores to take her book and give her a reading, they already knew Jenny.  

These days writers don’t have as many bookstore tours as once, especially debut writers.  The burden is on us to get our books known and sold, but sometimes it’s hard now to get that local audience to a bookstore.  Her publisher supported her, but it was her dream and determination that put her on the road with her family to visit independent bookstores and read all over the country, January to July this year.  If she comes near you, don’t miss the experience.  Jenny is friendly and supportive of other writers, and so it’s easy for us to turn and support her.

www.jennymilchman.com

http://www.takeyourchildtoabookstore.org

WHY NOT A NO-FRACKING ORDINANCE FOR CHATHAM COUNTY?

Late March 2013 pear (in front) and peach blooms (behind) at Hoganvillaea Farm.

***

CHATHAM COUNTY ORDINANCE TO BAN FRACKING--DRAFT–4-7-13  By Judy Hogan

Hereby be it resolved that we, the County of Chatham Board of Commissioners, declare that in our role of governing Chatham County, we are authorized by our citizens to protect them from undue harm by any state or federal government agency or corporation which uses practices such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involve dangerous chemicals, excessive amounts of water use during a time when North Carolina is subject to droughts, and in the process generates both poisonous gas releases into the atmosphere, toxic chemical waste spills, and the risk of poisoning our water table and aquifers, and hence wells, which lie close to the shale under which the natural gas lies.  

In addition, due to the fault line running through the Triassic Basin in which Chatham County lies, and the positioning of the Shearon Harris nuclear plant on that fault line in adjacent Wake County, we ban the process of hydraulic drilling in our county because such drilling is fraught with the catastrophic consequences of a large scale nuclear accident should it occur.

We assert that our citizens and property owners within the borders of Chatham County have the American Constitutional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and not to have our living environment, water, air, earth, and health harmed by corporations bent on fracking and seemingly heedless of the consequences, for which there is no clean-up possible. 

We also assert that no citizen of Chatham County should be subject to forced or compulsory pooling by the corporations pursuing fracking, nor by state police should they be used to force us to comply with horizontal drilling under our property or pipes being laid over our property or our county’s roads being subject to chemical, machine-carrying, and other forms heavy trucking which accompany the practice of fracking, thereby putting at risk our roads and the citizens who live near such roads.

Because Chatham County is known nationally for its agriculture and recreational opportunities, especially at Jordan Lake, which is also part of the Triassic Basin where the natural gas lies, we  therefore, for the sake of our citizens and property owners, forbid damage by the state, the federal government, or corporations to our agricultural work and our recreational and tourist industries, which would be harmed by the process of fracking, nor would they ever recover.

***

Here is a petition you may sign now, which will be delivered to the Chatham County Commissioners, Governor McCrory, the NC Legislature, and other relevant officials and public servants.

***

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/fracking/

Lastly, here is a poem I wrote back in March of this year, when I decided I needed do more than token work against fracking, and which I gave out at the Pittsboro Farmers' Market on April 4:

***

RIPENING XIX.

March 3, 2013

Under heaven nothing is impossible.
All you need is a human being with a heart.  Chinese Proverb.

What can one person do, I ask myself.

I see the dangers, the indifference 

of those in power to how we will suffer 

if those obsessed frack the ancient

rock under us to release the gas they 

claim we need.  Scientists warn of air,

water, and earth pollution, of earthquakes

along our fault line.  What can I do?  I

planned to be a token activist, use my

books, my letters to the editor, my work 

on Election Day as my part.  In two years

the drilling may begin.  I hear despair

in people’s voices.  They tell me the rich

and powerful have it all sewed up.  

Nothing can be done.  They speak of

leaving the state, of its being ten years

before we can shift these leaders 

who have gerrymandered themselves 

into office and now attack voting 

rights.  It’s as if they aimed their 

high-powered rifles at poor people:

they cut unemployment benefits,

increase the sales tax, refuse to 

extend health care.  One of them said,

“Let people get hungry; then they’ll

go back to work.”  How?  Where?

Good people, thoughtful people act

like terrified deer unable to move

out of the headlights of an oncoming

truck.  One human being with a heart 

can change that, wake those who

despair, save us from this evil hurricane 

set to blow us off course, away from

true democracy, away from civil and 

human rights.  People say change 

yourself first.  I will.  I’ll write more 

letters, put up more signs, send more 

emails, talk to more people.  People 

can change things.  I have the 

heart, the time, the will.  I can’t 

do it alone, but I can start a 

revolution, one person,

One word at a time.

judyhogan@mindspring.com