Sandra Johnson – A Woman Inspired

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inspiration, Reading List, women, writing

Sandra Johnson

Sandra Johnson’s book Flowers for the Living comes with a warning from a reader “the author is going to stab you in the heart with her garden shovel,” but, the warning continues: “and when the last drop of blood is shed, you will find a seed planted there that will blossom…” And with that you have your first kernel of understanding who Sandra Johnson is.

We met at a book event in Atlanta, where I had the great fortune to share the stage with Sandra, the event’s featured author. While I began the day knowing little more than what her website disclosed, I left feeling as if I had known her my whole life.

Shortly after the event, I returned to the Internet to read more about Sandra and then, even more intrigued, shortly after that I read Flowers for the Living in a single sitting. Only then did I come away with the sense of having peeled back one layer of a rosebud. Sandra is a multi-layered person, and one who draws from a place deep inside to write. A place filled with inspiration and worldly experience.

Because I believe my own writing is born of imagination rather than the more profound gift of inspiration, I have a fondness for people who can grab something from their core, their past, their heart, and bring it into the light to examine and write through their struggles, producing something that as Sandra says is “beautiful and true.”

This philosophy is central to Sandra’s approach and one she is documenting in a new self-help book that is a guide for people to journal their way to wellness.  She says, we need to examine where we came from and where we are headed to know who we are.  The approach is something Sandra has used in counseling inmates with severe psychiatric illness in a South Carolina correctional facility. The working title for the book is Finding Peace Within:  A 365-Day Journal for Balance, Clarity, and Serenity.

Sandra has been rewarded for tackling tough subjects—in the most recent case advocacy for those who need psychiatric treatment while incarcerated, and earlier for Standing on Holy Ground the story of the rebuilding of a South Carolina church firebombed in a racially motivated incident. She realized an author’s dream, reviews and mentions in O:  The Oprah Magazine, Publishers Weekly, USA Today, and Southern Living and invitations to speak across the country.

Somehow, though, I suspect having satisfied her own quest to create something “beautiful and true” was the greater reward.

Of course, all this is in the past.  And, as anyone who strives to better themselves knows, Sandra is moving on. She’s writing historical fiction set in the south in the 1700s. It’s no surprise that the protagonist of Luna is a fierce, strong willed woman who perseveres though enslavement and separation from everything she loves during the Civil War to return to her family.

Another heady and inspirational topic and one that deserves Sandra’s keen eye and big heart.

Read more about Sandra on her website: sandraejohnson.net

 

Janet Evanovich – By the Numbers

Tags

author, book, Janet Evanovich, mystery, Stephanie Plum, women

The acknowledged queen of the mystery genre enters the room to a round of applause.  She takes the stage, sits down, and comments about the phallic-shaped mic in her hand and how it reminds her of Ranger a character in one of her books. Only one person can get away with that. Janet Evanovich.

By adhering to my rule of reading no more than a single book by any author (except for … well, that’s another story), I have missed the evolution and intrigue that surrounds Evanovich’s most famous character, Stephanie Plum.  Plum is a female bounty hunter who has a pet hamster Rex and several love interests, including Ranger.  And as legions of Janet Evanovich’s fans the laughter rippling across the room attest, Stephanie Plum is as loved and real as the author herself.

Smart dialog and sexual banter fill much of Evanovich’s writing, including this snippet from Hard Eight:

“He [Ranger] stopped in front of my parents’ house, and we both looked to the door. My mother and my grandmother were standing there, watching us.
“I’m not sure I feel comfortable about the way your grandma looks at me,” Ranger said.
[Stephanie] “She wants to see you naked.”
“I wish you hadn’t told me that, babe.”
“Everyone I know wants to see you naked.”
“And you?”
“Never crossed my mind.” I held my breath when I said it, and I hoped God wouldn’t strike me down dead for lying.”

Entertaining?  You bet. In a televised interview, Janet Evanovich said she thinks of herself first as an entertainer and added delights in providing devoted readers vicarious thrills. I imagine she means both in bed and in hot pursuit of a criminal on the lam.

If there’s a secret sauce in writing mystery, then Janet Evanovich has discovered it, bottled it, and dips from it whenever she sits down at a keyboard.  And that is often.

She even has an app.  Yes, there’s an app for All Things Evanovich.

And there needs to be to keep up with Evanovich’s 68 books. They include a dozen romance novels, the genre in which Evanovich started and never truly abandoned, nine co-authored novels, and five series, including 27 in the Stephanie Plum series. Even if you haven’t read a Plum novel, you have likely seen the covers and the clever titles, beginning with One for the Money then Two for the Dough and on to the most recent Turbo Twenty-Three.

Along the way, Evanovich penned a book on writing, How I Write: Secrets of a Bestselling Author, and a graphic novel — which Evanovich advises is great fun but hard to translate to “bottom line” results.  Take heed, that’s advice from a woman who has combined an in-born sense of business with a knack for writing.  Her husband, son, and daughter, and, I suspect,  many minions behind the scene make the Evanovich enterprise hum.

Across Evanovich’s website are games, puzzles, contests, pet pictures, numerous places to sign up for her newsletter or get a sticker with her signature to place inside your copy of one of her novels — please send a self addressed stamped envelope. And, of course, you’ll find buttons that link you to a shopping cart.

So, with all she has accomplished, what does Evanovich, regret? At the writers conference I attended, she said she misses the time spent talking to fans at book signings in bookstores across the country. Today, the mere rumor of an appearance can shut down a Walmart for hours.  I think I can imagine that, if I close my eyes real tight, I think I can.

Things she promises: Stephanie will always be young and beautiful, Rex will always be by her side, and Ranger, well… I’m waiting for Sixty-Six and Sex to decide.

Read more about Stephanie Plum and, oh yeah, Janet Evanovich at evanovich.com

Miss Jane Marple – A Role Model

Tags

Agatha Christie, author, books, Miss Jane Marple, mystery, women

Last month I profiled Nancy Drew and Carolyn Keene, the pseudonym for the group of authors of the series of detective novels featuring the ingénue detective extraordinaire.  This month, I’ve journeyed to the other end of the spectrum to spotlight Miss Jane Marple, Dame Agatha Christie’s much loved cozy mystery sleuth.

A “cozy” mystery as I had to learn is distinguished from other mysteries and thrillers by an amateur sleuth who solves mostly domestic crimes. The crimes often occur in rural settings and violence and sex are left to the imagination, well, well off stage. Dame Christie is credited with inventing the genre and perfecting it in the character of Miss Marple. The aging crime solver appears in twelve of Ms Christie’s novels that span the period from 1927 to 1976.

While I didn’t use Miss Marple as inspiration for Alicia Blake, the amateur detective and soon to be professional police woman in my upcoming thriller, there are similarities between the two characters. For the most part the two share a reliance on intuition.  Feminine intuition to be exact. The decidedly feminine trait was much used by Christie. In Murder at the Vicarage (1930), Christie compared the skill of intuition to “reading a word without having to spell it out.”

Christie had forty years to hone Miss Marple’s skills, but even at the outset, Miss Marple demonstrated the uncanny ability to take an idle comment from casual conversation and connect the dots, solving crimes that eluded her professional male counterparts. Often, Miss Marple put two and two together while relaxing in a comfortable chair, knitting, or in her garden with a pair of gardening shears in hand. Other times, she stayed in the background and listened while those around her chattered away. From everywhere clues dropped like rain, but only she noticed. And, as every Miss Jane Marple reader knows, if a male character thought he had the crime solved and explained how he believed the impossible unfolded, watch for a roll of Miss Marple’s eyes or a shake of her head. He is inevitably not even close.

In Nemesis (1971), the last Marple novel, Jane had aged. Nevertheless, she was just as much at work as she was in her earlier days. Christie described her as “old fashioned,” prone to taking naps, and with a rheumatic back that prevented her from working in her garden, but she still knits and she still solves a crime. All it took was a glance at the obituaries in her favorite newspaper to spark a memory and, by page two, Miss Marple was off and running, or perhaps, ambling down a lane in St. Mary Mead.

She had “a scent for evil, in the evening of her days, her peculiar gift,” Christie said.

More than 125 years after Miss Christie’s birth, the literary world is re-examining the prolific writer, casting her in a more modern light as a feminist, an identity others claim she would have resist.  Though Christie brought women characters out of the shadows and gave them center stage, they remain in their decidedly female roles, chock full of feminine intuition.

That’s not a bad role model for my own protagonist. Watch for more news about my upcoming thriller, scheduled for release this fall.

 

A Woman of Her Day (and Ours) – Else Lasker-Schuler

Tags

artist, author, feminist, poet, women

Perhaps it is appropriate that as our country descends into the absurdity of discussions and worse, legislation, surrounding transgender bathrooms, I profile Else Lasker-Schuler, an extraordinary and enigmatic figure from literary history. Else believed passionately in living as she chose without regard to society’s norms and taking a stand against what she saw as an unjust politic. She became notorious in the circles she traveled, dressing often as boy and filling her drawings with a figure, the Prince of Thebes, whose persona she adopted, signing her letters with the man’s name Yusuf.

I discovered Else as the woman Mamah Borthwick befriends in Nancy Horan’s novel Loving Frank during Mamah’s time abroad translating the works of Ellen Key a Swedish feminist of the era. Else was born in 1869 in Elberfeld, Germany to an affluent German Jewish family. She became a poet, playwright, artist, and avant-gardist who moved among the literati that frequented Berlin cafes during the 1930s. Labeled the Queen of Expressionism, she has been recognized as one of the most important poets of twentieth century German literature.

Else led a troubled life, stuck in customs as we might say today. Her life straddled multiple cultures and was a constant battle, ending in near poverty. She wrote in German while living in Israel and became enthralled with all things oriental, a fashionable obsession of the times.

She gained renown as a poet, received the prestigious Kleist Prize for literature and did poetry readings across the German-speaking world. When the Nazi’s came to power in the 1930s, she fled the country after suffering a beating by a rod-wielding group of Nazis, according to one source. Else emigrated to Switzerland but was visiting Israel when war broke out. She was not allowed to return to Switzerland and lived out her life in Israel. Unfortunately, though Else wrote of her hopes for the destruction of Nazism, she died in 1945 before the end of the war and the collapse of the Nazi government.

Today, Else Lasker-Schuler is best known for her poetry, though some criticize her poems as being overly romantic.

At night I used to steal
The rose of your mouth,
So that no other woman could drink there.

Else’s words could also be sharp in their attack on the status quo of religion or politics.

My motherland is souless.
No rose blooms
in the tepid air.

 

As an artist, Else painted in a striking, hard to define style. Her characters often face left or are in profile as in ancient Egyptian tomb paintings, a popular style of the day.  They are also often of an indeterminate gender.

Else Lasker-Schuler was a woman of her times, influenced as some claim by the “gender-bending” stage performances of Sarah Berhardt, the controversial writer George Sand, and the emergence of Freud’s sexually-infused psychoanalysis and, of course WWI, the depression, and WWII.

If you find the woman as fascinating as I do, read more at the National Library of Israel’s site (nli.org/Lasker-Schuler) or the Jewish Womens Archive (jwa.org/lasker-schuler).  My Blue Piano is the title of a collection of her poetry. On a Triangle Reflected Between Here and the Moon written by Dani Dothan is a historical novel that covers Else’s years in Jerusalem, though I could not find an English-language version.

A Woman After My Own Heart

Tags

authors, women

As I am taking a breather of sorts — a few days away — instead of writing a new post myself I am “cheating” and leveraging an article Marta Bausells, social and community editor for The Guardian, recently wrote.

Ms. Bausells was responding to the furor that rose from Gay Talese’s failure to cite one woman author as someone that had inspired him.  It’s not an argument I need to rehash or add to here.  Instead, I simply list the reporter’s “10 Inspiring Female Writers You Need to Read” and provide a link to the article in the Guardian.

The list contains more writers I haven’t read than ones I have.  So, for me, it’s an inspiration to go back to my very long to-be-read list and add a few more names and titles.  I hope you too find a new work among those listed.

1. Doris Lessing
2. Toni Morrison
3. Ursula K. Le Guin
4. Virginia Woolf
5. Clarice Lispector
6. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
7. Margaret Atwood
8. Zadie Smith
9. Elena Ferrante
10. Angela Carter

Read the Guardian article: 10 Inspiring Female Writers You Need to Read

Still Life With Quilt

Tags

artist, memoir, mother, quilting, relationship, sister, woman, women

In the months before she died, my mother obsessed over a single event from her early life—a time when she scrawled an image on the kitchen wall, displaying her skill and testing the bounds of parental authority.  Why she returned to that event, telling the story over and over despite the fog of dementia, no one can ever say.  But I speculate her passion for creative expression had a lot to do with how she lived her life, what she chose to remember about it, and what she was proud to pass on.

Over the years, I’ve marveled at how her talent, one microscopic gene on a tiny strand of DNA manifested itself in each of her children.  In my younger sister’s case, it’s at the surface —sometimes in physical appearance, when the light is right and she holds her head at a certain angle.  She paints and sculpts, meeting the technical definition of an artist, but labels her work “completely mixed media.”

Artist.

Not the word my older sister would likely use to describe herself, and yet, she too has a good dollop of my mother’s legacy.  In her case, the inheritance is more a liberal sprinkling of creative dust, like a first winter snow across the landscape.

Recently, she took up the almost forgotten art of quilting.  While our grandmother taught us to knit and crochet so many years ago now, my sister’s quilting is self-taught.  Quilting is a process she describes as creating pattern out of chaos.  Though influenced by available colors and patterns, she says the quilt comes together only after experimenting with myriad arrangements of pieces of fabric.  Her “quilt in progress” is a compilation of hexagons in a dozen ice cream colors, sure to delight a three-year-old granddaughter in her pink phase.  Assembled on a spare wall where she can arrange and rearrange the pieces, the effect is more free-flowing than a series of straight-edged hexagons might suggest.  Still as she contemplates the design, my sister wonders if she’s made chaos out of pattern rather than the other way around.

My mother’s batting three for three, so to speak.

As I consider her endowment, however, I realize how much or little I know about my siblings.  I know, of course, they are wives and mothers and grandmothers and aunts (or in my brother’s case a husband and father and uncle).  But, if asked, I couldn’t say how each would describe their life’s work and their legacy.

From the perspective of a writer (the creativity manifestation I’ll claim), I challenged myself.  I’d explore my sister’s psyche from a distance.  The effort, familiar, like breathing life into a fictional character.

Let’s call her “Liz” and say she is five feet three inches tall with blond hair and blue eyes, though the sterile description offers little insight.  Instead, I could say, she has my mother’s hands, slender fingers with nails in perfect ovals compared with my flat and stunted ones, or she wears her hair in close-cropped curls that conceal gray more effectively than any salon’s dye.  Still, these are barely more than physical attributes.  And I want to give my character more flesh, more color, more life.

As we’re separated by considerable distance, we see each other only once or twice a year.  So what I have to complete the exercise are bits and pieces of a life, images and memories of her logged away in my head.  They’re like little hexagons and squares and rectangles I have to arrange to reveal the woman, or, in quilting terms, make pattern out of chaos.

In her role as mother, and endowed with another family trait, a love of food, my sister cooked countless family dinners.  Occasionally, she shared recipes she’d borrowed, tweaked, worked and reworked, and perfected.  While I experiment in the kitchen, and sometimes relegate an entire meal to the garbage disposal, a few of Liz’s recipes are family lore.  If her thanksgiving specialty, caramelized pecans and sweet potatoes, is absent from the table, everyone is disappointed.

And, while I am on the subject of mothers, let me not overlook the art of motherhood.  Liz is mother to three—all adults, all gainfully employed and all with families of their own.  Not one has robbed a bank, dealt in drugs, or run off to join Ringling Brothers, at least, not that I know.  It’s an achievement deserving of the word “art” in capital letters.

Liz also has a facility with words, this perhaps inherited from my father’s side.  She’s a wordsmith, someone I would not want to tangle with in a game of Scrabble, or “Words with Friends”.  She’s fluent in French, a language we both learned as children.  I long ago forgot all but a token tourist phrase or two, but somehow the language stayed lodged in her brain and on the tip of her tongue.  She’s worked as an editor and copy writer and authored a children’s book.  She’s a voracious reader and devours two or three books a week.  And, as far as the more traditional visual arts go, she’s painted landscapes and still lifes, even sold a few.

As I reflect, I realize how many pieces and shapes I’ve unearthed from memory.  Perhaps, if I tack them to the wall, step back, and squint my eyes, I’ll see my sister as a whole woman.  Sister, daughter, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, and artist.

One you can expect to see in disguise in a future novel.

“Master” of the Short Story – Alice Munro

Tags

Alice Munro, author, award, nobel prize, Runaway, short story, women, word

Though I am skeptical of awards, things like the Oscars or Emmies and even the Nobel Prize for some of its more questionable honors or honorees (IMHO of course), I was delighted with the awarding of the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature to Alice Munro.
Her stories–ashamedly, I’ve only scratched the surface–portray everyday people from anytown North America. I say North America, though as a Canadian writer her settings are undoubtedly Canadian, they are a universal place. In these small towns, people go about their day-to-day existence until interrupted by something seemingly ordinary. The tension running below the surface, often from the very first sentence, promises to transform the ordinary to the extraordinary.
Ms. Munro crafts her stories in words and a language palpable to readers from all walks of life and all manner of backgrounds and origins. In the lead story to “Runaway”, she writes of the “…leaves overhead sending down random showers even in those moments when there was no actual downpour from the sky and the clouds looked like clearing.” We’ve all experience those moments, but, a few pages later, we’re catapulted into a scene as far from normal as it can be. “The fog had thickened…transformed itself into something spiky and radiant. First a live dandelion ball, tumbling forward, then condensing itself into an unearthly sort of animal, pure white, hell-bent, something like a giant unicorn, rushing at them.” It is these juxtapositions that draw us in with the familiar then turn on us and beg us to reach to understand. Simple and complex. A joy to read.
Unfortunately for her public, I read that at age 82, Ms. Munro claims to have written her last stories. I imagine there are many more bottled up in her head, stories that only she will know, both simple and complex.
I was unable to find an official website, but Alice Munro does have a facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/alicemunroauthor

Much More Than Roses and Violets – Karen Head

Tags

girls, imagery, Karen Head, poetry poem, Sassing, Southern, women

I’ll be honest, I rarely read poetry. Perhaps it’s because reading poetry is hard work. So many words, written and unwritten, are packed into those short lines. You can’t read a poem at breakneck speed as you might flip through a thriller or skim through a novel’s slow paced scene. No, you have to read poetry as if you were savoring a favorite dessert, taking one spoon at a time and holding it on your tongue to make it last, then counting to ten before taking another.
From time to time though, I stumble across works of poetry that make me pause and want to read more — most recently at a poetry reading. What was I thinking? I’m not sure I even knew there were such things. I’d certainly never been to one before and envisioned something out of Jane Austen’s parlor. Instead, the hour proved to be highly entertaining with two poets dueling with their works, each picking up on a word or image or theme from the other’s then reading from their own work.
Karen Head and Collin Kelley were the duelists at this particular reading, and though there were some similarities in their work, Karen’s appealed on a number of levels — the poet’s voice is a southern voice, smooth as molasses with a dark aftertaste and the images ring true, especially those of young girls puzzling the world ahead, and the focus on family, all with a touch of attitude.

Take for example, this excerpt from Southern Gothic in Sassing:

“The best I can offer
is that my granny and papa
lived on a dead-end dirt road
in a single-wide trailer,

that one of Daddy’s sisters
accidentally drank rat poison
stored in an old green wine jug
after a night of cards and drinking,

that Mama and Daddy married,
sixteen and eighteen,
three weeks into his Army Basic Training
and no baby came for over a year, …”

This and so much more (back porches, mill creeks, warts, spells, and black magic) make it worth a look. But read only one or two poems at a time, not too many, just like dessert, they’re special.

See more on Karen Head at:

The accompanying photograph is one I shot of family members on a stroll on a bleak southern winter’s day. A jaunty hip thrust and prancing stride also speak of “Attitude”.

American Letters – Joyce Carol Oates

Tags

authors, books, imagery, Joyce Carol Oates, literature, Southern, women

 

I have come to believe the saying that education is wasted on the young.  A few months ago, I read Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates and though I had come across her works in a literature class at Newcomb College, I remembered nothing about her other than she was (is) a writer.  I am embarrassed to say I could not have named a single book she has written.  I can’t say why I picked this particular work of hers to try, most likely the cover art (a bird sitting on a wire against a cobalt blue sky).  Regardless, I will not forget her name again.

Tell me you could read the opening lines of her novel and not be sucked in.  

“The yearning in my heart.  This was a long time ago.  ‘Can’t go inside with you, Krista.  But I promise I won’t drive away until you’re safe indoors.’  “

In these very few sentences, we already know Krista is the protagonist and someone she loves and who loves her (it turns out to be her father) is promising to watch over her until she is inside a house, her home.  Yet, too, all of the coming tension is revealed:  Why can’t he accompany her?  What rift has occurred that this daughter cannot enjoy her father’s company, that he is not welcome in her home.

Besides the compelling hook at the opening, the book holds a treasure trove of imagery:

“…the least noise and sudden movement like a butterfly beating its wings, a hummingbird or just some thistle silk blowing in the wind.”

Even unseemly characters are portrayed with a deft hand:

“… out of the car which was not new … there climbed, like a soft-oozing mollusk squeezing out of its shell, … the deLucca woman.”

Now, with Little Bird of Heaven under my belt, I am compelled to read more of Oates body of work.  But oh where to start?  She has fifty-seven other books to her credit.

Any Woman – Katharine Tynan

Tags

1900s, grief, poetry, sorrow, Tynan, women

I discovered Katharine Tynan’s poems while researching settings and sentiments of the early 1900s for my novel The Hummingbird’s Cry.  It is set in that period and follows the life of one woman as she experiences and copes or fails to cope with grief.  This poem, Any Woman, like many others of Katharine Tynan’s works seem to be filled with sorrow.

I am the pillars of the house;
The keystone of the arch am I.
Take me away, and roof and wall
Would fall to ruin me utterly.

I am the fire upon the hearth,
I am the light of the good sun,
I am the heat that warms the earth,
Which else were colder than a stone.

At me the children warm their hands;
I am their light of love alive.
Without me cold the hearthstone stands,
Nor could the precious children thrive.

I am the twist that holds together
The children in its sacred ring,
Their knot of love, from whose close tether
No lost child goes a-wandering.

I am the house from floor to roof,
I deck the walls, the board I spread;
I spin the curtains, warp and woof,
And shake the down to be their bed.

I am their wall against all danger,
Their door against the wind and snow,
Thou Whom a woman laid in a manger,
Take me not till the children grow!