A Christmas Gift

After months of working on a local anthology, we finally have it in print. Holding physical copies of Christmas Carroll and reading the stories and poems makes it all worthwhile. It is a gift to our writers, artists, photographers and Carroll County, Maryland.

How did this happen, you might ask? Well here is some of the basic information.

Several of us in our critique group thought about producing an anthology of works by Carroll County writers. This would give new writers in groups an opportunity to see their name and their writing in print. We also wanted to include published writers.

We thought about a holiday book and our coordinator Joelle Jarvis came up with the name Christmas Carroll, a play on the county name and our musical traditions. However, even with the emphasis on Christmas, we wanted an anthology that provided variety, including other holidays, traditions and winter stories.

We sent out invitations to critique members first, stressing that this was an experiment and publication was not guaranteed. We requested submissions from our friends in the Carroll County Chapter of the Maryland Writers Association and the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Then we encouraged other writers we knew in Carroll County to submit various holiday celebrations, winter stories, etc. We also sent everyone submission guidelines and authorization forms.

We wanted to have the book out before Christmas. If this happened, members volunteered to help sell it at various author and craft events. Besides relatives and friends, the holiday book would make a nice gift.

Joelle, Mary Stojak and I volunteered to critique the submitted works, to catch errors, and make suggestions for improvements, but we did not require writers to change. It was their writings and we wanted to respect their views. Not all writing nor photographs submitted were accepted, but we considered the best.

A member of our group who is tech savvy, Mike Crowl, offered to prepare the manuscript for CreateSpace. He took charge of the layout and design and did a wonderful job. The front cover art is by Lona Queen, writer and artist. The back cover art was from photographer Mary Anne Baker. Mike did the design for both the front and back of the book.

It may not be a “Best of..” but it was a chance to showcase some of the talent in our county and I am proud of everyone who submitted their stories, memoirs or poems.

We also encouraged artists and photographers to submit something to increase the book’s visual appeal. Shawn B. Lockhart, well known artist and owner of Eclecticity, also provided us with some sketches.

My daughter submitted a memoir and my son let us use a sketch he did when he was young to go along with one of my memoirs.

Funds raised may bring additional speakers and educational programs to the county. If this project is successful, we may do another anthology next year. Perhaps we will choose a broader topic and allow more time for writers to write.

Putting this book together was a lot of work, but it also was challenging, exciting and rewarding. I would encourage other writing groups to try something like this to encourage their writers.

Including brief biographies and photos of the authors and artists makes Christmas Carroll special. As it says on the back cover, “…this anthology written by our writing family for yours.”

Check it out on www.amazon.com.

More Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was a prolific letter writer, expressing his activities, thoughts and writing process.

If you read my September 20^th post about Steinbeck, you will know how much I enjoyed learning about his life from Steinbeck, A Life in Letters, which was compiled by his wife Elaine Steinbeck and good friend Robert Wallsten.

After a week’s break, I continued reading the 800-plus page book and I found so much more I wanted to share. I had trouble finding time to read all his letters, often containing minor information to friends, but I kept finding gems among Steinbeck’s letters, and just couldn’t stop reading.

He was a complex man, as most people are, but few people can reveal their feelings as well as he did. 

He loved writing and penned:

“I must say I do have fun with my profession…”

“I’m starting a new book and it is fun. They are all painful fun while I am doing them.”

“I approach the table every morning with a sense of Joy.”  “The yellow pages are beginning to be populated with people and with ideas.”

 “To be a writer implies a kind of promise that one will do the best he can without reference to external pressures of any kind.”

One winter he wrote, “The air has muscle.” What a great way to describe it.

“It takes just as long to write a short piece as a long one.”

About plays – “Dialogue carry the whole burden not only of movement but of character.”

“…it never gets any easier. The process of writing a book is the process of outgrowing it. I am just as scared now as I was 25 years ago.”

He wrote to Peter Benchley in 1956, “”A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.”

“Of course a writer rearranges life, shortens time intervals, sharpens events, and devises beginnings, middles and ends and this is arbitrary because there are no beginnings nor any ends.”

As a former journalist, I was pleased that he was not completely against journalism, as so many people are today.

To John P. McKnight of the U S Information Service in Rome he wrote, “What can I say about journalism? It has the greatest virtue and the greatest evil. It is the first thing the dictator controls. It is the mother of literature and the perpetrator of crap. In many cases it is the only history we have and yet it is the tool of the worst men. But over a long period of time and because it is the product of so many men, it is perhaps the purest thing we have. Honesty has a way of creeping in even when it was not intended.”

He included some basic hints about writing in a letter to Robert Wallsten, 1962. I am just using excerpts from the letter.

“I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone’s experience which is probably why it is so freely offered. But the following are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.”

1. “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.” He advises Wallsten to write just one page for each day. “Then when it is finished you are always surprised.”
2. “Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down….” Good advice if you are planning to participate in National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo).
3. “Forget your generalized audience…..In writing, your audience is one single reader….”
4. “If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it – bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.”
5. “Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you.”
6. “If you are using dialogue – say it aloud as you write it.”

We’ve heard most of this before, but it never hurts to be reminded.

In 1960s, he wrote, “I find I love words very much. And gradually I am getting the a series of dictionaries of modern languages. The crazy thing about all this is that I don’t use a great variety of words in my work at all. I just love them for themselves.”

Steinbeck wrote newspaper and magazine articles, plays, short stories and even some poetry, besides his famous novels. He was often controversial. But he wrote with feeling and clarity. It was not surprising that he was awarded the Novel Prize for Literature 1962 and received Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

“…a writer like a knight – must aim at perfection, and failing, not fall back on the cushion that there is no perfection. He must believe himself capable of perfection even when he fails. And that is probably why it is the loneliest profession in the world and the most lost,” he wrote. “I come toward the ending of my life with the same ache for perfection I had as a child.”

Less Distance Between Us

Reyna Grande, author of The Distance Between Us, recently spoke about her experiences as a young undocumented immigrant and becoming an American at the Carroll Arts Center in Westminster. 

Her story is relevant in light of the government stalemate on a new immigration bill and media coverage of undocumented children coming to the United States.

Reyna was nine when she came to the U.S. from Mexico, crossing the border with her parents and brother and sister. She was undocumented and not able to speak English when she started school in California.

Like generations of immigrants before them, her parents chased the American dream and wanted a better life for their children. They and their children worked hard to obtain that better life.

Only four years old when her father left, she had a picture of him but to her, he was just a face behind the glass. The children’s situation and life without her parents was more difficult for her older sister, who tried to take care of the younger children, she said. Her sister and brother helped with the book, sharing their memories.

Dr. Bryn Upton, a professor at McDaniel College, led the Question and Answer period. He asked Reyna about life “in the shadows” and to describe her early life as an undocumented immigrant. She said that taking ESL classes and being able to speak English increased her confidence in school. Then President George W. Bush’s amnesty bill allowed her to get her green card at 13. That helped bring her out of the shadows.

After attending Pasadena City College for two years, she went to the University of California, Santa Cruz and graduated with a B.A in creative writing and film and video. She was the first member of her family to graduate from college. Later she received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch College.  Now she teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension.

She couldn’t write this book when she was 22. It still was not easy at this stage of life, but it has been a catharsis, she said. The writing was cleansing. It was therapy.

A professor told her what she was writing at first was an autobiography. She was writing about too much of her life A memoir covers a limited amount of time.

Reyna realized she had to stop looking at her parents as a daughter and look at them through the viewpoint of an author. She began to look at them as characters in a story. As characters, their good points as well as their bad points were revealed, as well as the history that affected them, that made them who they were. She saw her parents were products of their own upbringing.

Before writing this memoir she had written two novels. She received an American Book Award in 2007 for Across a Hundred Mountains. In 2009, Dancing with Butterflies was published.

In her novels, portions of her life are revealed. Worry about a father not returning, came from fear when she was younger that he wouldn’t return for her.

Thoughts about writing were scattered throughout her speech and during the question and answer period.

She said, “Whenever I listen to another writer speak, I am inspired and motivated.” I also think new ideas or changes to an existing work while listening to other writers, just as I did during Reyna’s talk.

“These ‘ghosts inside’ were demanding attention,” she said. “I also am reminded about the basics: good characterization and setting.”

It bothers her that so many people look at immigration as numbers, not as people. Individuals lose their identity. She included only one statistic in the book: that 80 percent of children in ESL classes come from families split by immigration, and hopes teachers keep in mind the hurdles they are facing.

All Americans are immigrants, but the younger generations tend to forget where their ancestors came from. All had difficulties when they first came to their new country.

I wish I had written this blog right away instead of just jotting down notes. I feel I’ve lost a lot of the impact of the evening. It was interesting and enlightening to share some of this writer’s life and thoughts. If you have a chance to attend one of the events featuring Reyna Grande I definitely would recommend you go.

Thanks to the Maryland Humanities Council, the Carroll Citizens for Racial Equality, United Hands of Carroll County, McDaniel College  and the Carroll Library Partnership for sponsoring this program.

Steinbeck in letters

Reading Steinbeck, A Life in Letters has proven more enjoyable than I expected and I wanted to share some of what I have been getting from the book.

John Steinbeck preferred writing letters to face-to-face contact. I can understand that. Don’t many of us writers feel we can communicate our thoughts better by putting words on a page than through speaking?

“In sixty years, I‘ve left a lot of tracks,” he wrote in 1962. Following those tracks through his letters led to this book edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallston. They collected several thousand letters and compiled them, primarily in date order, with an occasional comment about his life at that time.

Besides revealing a lot of Steinbeck’s personality, the letters contain a lot of information about writing. He took his craft seriously. In spite of writing about the darker side of human nature and often being depressed, he did have a sense of humor.

In 1931, he wrote, “I learn that all of my manuscripts have been rejected three or four times since I last heard. It is a nice thing to know that so many people are reading my books. That is one way of getting an audience.” He also wrote, “Kids don’t believe in emotion in adults since they invented it themselves.”

He sometimes used “Pegasus the flying pig as a symbol of himself, “earth-bound but aspiring. A lumbering soul, but trying to fly,” he once explained. Another time he wrote “not enough wingspread, but plenty of intention.”

Depressed after the death of one of his best friends and divorce from his second wife, he wrote, “If I can write again then I can be happy again.” By this time he had already become famous for The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row, but worried that it had all drained out of him.

Advice on writing appears often throughout his letters. In 1949, he wrote to John O’Hara, “But we must first use the adjectives before we can know how to leave them out.” In 1950 he wrote, “…all filler wants to come out… I’ll want no word in dialogue that has not some definite reference to the story.”

He was very good with keeping to a schedule and meeting deadlines and was not adverse to taking advice from his publishers and editing his work. However, he refused when asked about changing the ending of The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck wrote, “I have never been touchy about changes, but I have too many thousands of hours on this book, every incident has been too carefully chose and its weight judged and fitted. The balance is there. One other thing – I am not writing a satisfying story. I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied.”

He also kept a journal, he called his “diary day book.”  Steinbeck wrote, “It is a kind of warm-up book. When I am working it is good to write a page before going to work. It both resolves the day things that might be distracting and warms up my pens the way a pitcher warms up.”

I worried when I first started reading this book, published in 1975 and more than 850 pages long. But I couldn’t stop reading it after a letter Steinbeck wrote in late 1930. “It is a gloomy day: low gray fog and a wet wind contribute to my own gloominess. Whether the fog has escaped from my soul like ectoplasm to envelope the peninsula or whether it has seeped in through my nose and eyes to create the gloom, I don’t know.”

What a picture of emotion. I can see the fog and almost feel it seeping into my body. Also I can understand how we sometimes feel that negative emotions escape us and create a fog-like atmosphere.

Steinbeck wrote in1961, “I am just as terrified of my next book as I was of my first. It doesn’t get easier. It gets harder and more heartbreaking and finally, it must be that one must accept the failure which is the end of every writer’s life no matter what stir he may have made…… So it is that I would greatly prefer to die in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a book and so leave it as all life must be – unfinished.”

He was awarded the Novel Prize for literature in 1962. In 1964 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.

Steinbeck had been a war correspondent during World War II and went to write about Vietnam, as a correspondent for Newsday in 1967. Besides his 29 published titles, he was a journalist, short story writer and playwright. He is known primarily for his novels: Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, a Pulitzer Prize winner, Cannery Row and East of Eden. He died in 1968 at the age of 66.

In one of his last letters (1967), he wrote “And do you know, journalism, even my version of it, gives me the crazy desire to go out to my little house on the point, to sharpen fifty pencils, and put out a yellow pad. Early in the morning to hear what the birds are saying and to pass the time of day with Angel and then to hitch up my chair to my writing board and to set down the words—‘Once upon a time…”

Beginning Again

I am ready to start blogging again after taking an extended break to finish working on my middle grade novel and finish some other projects. Not that I ever really stopped, I only stopped writing about observing. I was surprised to find that I missed the writing. Although writing the blog was time-consuming, it often helped me clarify my thoughts.

 After initially choose the title of this blog - josobservations, I questioned why I had chosen something so long and forgettable. I planned to write primarily about writing and writers. However, I sometimes strayed away from that limiting premise. An art exhibit isn’t writing, but I find all creativity is inspiring.

After I started thinking about writing my blog again, I realized that I did want to discuss a variety of subjects, primarily still connected to writing, creativity, inspiration, etc. I promise I won’t write about what I had for breakfast, unless it was amazing.

I am lucky that I was able to earn a living with my writing. I wrote for a newspaper while going to college and later freelanced for several newspapers and an aviation magazine. There I wrote features and a monthly column. For a few years, most of my writing was in business. 

Then I returned to journalism, writing for a daily newspaper, The Cumberland Times-News and winning several awards.   Next, I wrote about business and tourism in Mountain Maryland for the Garrett County Chamber of Commerce. Recently I have been trying my hand at fiction.

I do still love non-fiction and admit I enjoyed journalism for its variety. I might cover a government meeting, explain an educational budget, or be paid to have fun at a festival, as long as I wrote about it. I liked writing about a program that helped seniors pay for their medicines or about Special Olympians conquering the slopes.

As a writer, I held a bear cub, went into a deep coalmine, climbed through a children’s play area in a new Burger King, went into the woods with a Search and Rescue crew and flew in a glider. Many articles were educational, at least for me, if not for my readers. Some stories, I wrote through tears.

Like most writers, I also like to read and may share my thoughts on certain books. In addition, I like to learn and am interested in hearing from others. What have you read, written or learned?

So now, I am a blogger again. I won’t promise to be as consistent as many others (I envy them), but I will try to write often. So here I am and here I will be next week. I hope you enjoy reading these blogs as much as I enjoy writing them.

Listening to Authors

Several Maryland writers have been speaking recently at area libraries and colleges about writing and publication.  It is interesting to hear authors talk about their inspirations and writing process.

Doug Norton, author of Code Word: Paternity, A Presidential Thriller, discussed his journey in self-publishing.  As a naval officer throughout most of the cold war, he had personal experience with nuclear weapons, both as objects of diplomacy and politics and as objects under his command responsibility--antisubmarine missiles that he might have to launch under cataclysmic circumstances. After his retirement, Norton began to record scenery, how people spoke and reacted, and began to think about actions and gray-area decisions made during his career.

He felt the book Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable did not receive enough attention. That 2004 book by Harvard scholar Graham Allison explained that terrorists had been trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Because of his own experience, he felt this idea was important. After taking a writing course, he made the decision to write about a fictional President and what it would cost him to do his duty if terrorists gained control of a nuclear submarine.

Although originally he sought traditional publication, he realized it would be several years before his book would appear on shelves. Since some of the information was time-sensitive, he decided to self-publish. This requires a lot of research for editing, book design, etc., followed by marketing. Self-promotion is not easy and takes time away from writing his second book, which tentatively will be published traditionally.

Another speaker, Jack Downs, president of the Carroll County branch of Maryland Writers’ Association, spoke about creating the short story and how this tight, focused style helped him write his novels.

Downs is author of Buried Treasure,  about how the disappearance of a baby in a quiet neighborhood affects the lives of his two older brothers and other family members.  CATTAILS, the Edenmist Affair, will be released soon. Part of a romantic, suspense series, it will be followed by Hermes Project.

Downs discussed where ideas come from, breathing life into characters, creating conflict and providing the appropriate setting for your story. Many of the same procedures used in writing short stories also apply when writing a novel. Downs recommended reading your story aloud when it was finished to feel for flow and discover problem areas. He also suggested running the spelling and grammar review on your computer program and joining a critique group to get feedback from other writers.

B. Morrison, author of Innocent, Confessions of a Welfare Mother, talked about creative nonfiction, described by Lee Gutkind as “true stories well told.” The key factor is that the story is true. Romance writer Pamela Morsi spoke last month at the Westminster branch of the Carroll County Public Library. Her main character in the recently published Love Overdue is a librarian. Morsi’s characters are well developed. It is easy to picture the scenery and be drawn into the life of this small Kansas town and its inhabitants. 

Besides local authors, also featured recently in the Carroll County area have been Wally Lamb, Taylor Branch and John Searles. It is wonderful to be able to hear from so many writers thanks to the Carroll County Public Library, McDaniel College and the Carroll County Arts Center.

Soaring in body and spirit

Flying

The sky’s so perfectly clear

As over the world we fly.

We can see both far and near

While creatures of the sky.

We can look down on rivers and streams

Carving through the land;

Watching the water flow along

Until stopped by a man-made dam.

We can see the roads and the houses,

The farmlands and the towns,

The lights of the city, sparkling like jewels

Along the contours of the ground.

Then approaching the runway,

stepping foot again on the land,

We leave the world of the gods

And return to the world of man.

I wrote this poem years ago, combining my love of flying and poetry.

The above poem was dedicated to my father, Joseph Farinholt, who flew small airplanes (I even remember a cloth-covered one) from Westminster airport and took me up. Years later he and my Uncle Oliver Farinholt cleared property for a runway and started Clearview Airport.

When my uncle died, my aunt Martha wanted to keep the airport running and even had a small restaurant in the terminal Building. I went over some weekends to help flip burgers. If some of these men can learn to fly an airplane, so can I.

You might ask, except for the inspiration for a poem, what does this have to do with writing. Just be patient, there is more and I will keep it brief.

My lessons began in a Cessna 150 with instructor Billy Joe Mathis. After receiving my license, I also flew a Cessna 172 and a Cherokee 140, taking several of my friends for their first airplane ride. Exciting and frightening, this was just a challenge to me. I hadn’t thought of aviation as a career, but to prove to myself that I could do it. My aunt also took lessons and received her license. Maryland Cup Corporation, where we worked, ran my picture and a short article in the company newsletter about the flying Farinholts.

Because of my experience flying and hanging around airports, I was able to land a freelance job writing for an aviation magazine, Pilot’s Preflight, unfortunately now out of print. (I still have my old copies). I wrote some features (such as Bill Kennedy and Fly-in Ski resorts), plus a monthly regional column, Baltimore North, writing what I knew and learning more.

It was a wonderful time, flying to different airports, meeting all types of pilots and getting free rides in a wide variety of aircraft. Plus I was getting paid for it and now I have plenty of material for my memoirs. Although I don’t fly by myself anymore, whenever I hear an airplane my eyes go heavenward. I still have my log book and other mementoes of that exciting time.

I found the following quote and poem on www.skygod.com/quotes/poetry, that express some of how I felt as I traveled through the heavens.

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. — Carl Sandburg, 'Poetry Considered.'

Impressions of a Pilot

Flight is freedom in its purest form,
To dance with the clouds which follow a storm;
To roll and glide, to wheel and spin,
To feel the joy that swells within;
To leave the earth with its troubles and fly,
And know the warmth of a clear spring sky;
Then back to earth at the end of a day,
Released from the tensions which melted away.
Should my end come while I am in flight,
Whether brightest day or darkest night;
Spare me your pity and shrug off the pain,
Secure in the knowledge that I'd do it again;
For each of us is created to die,
And within me I know,
I was born to fly.

— Gary Claud Stokor