14 May 2018

Highlights Foundation 2018: Narrative Nonfiction

by | posted in: Professional Development | 0

A Few of the Lessons Learned:

Write for yourself; revise for your reader

Trust your material: don’t pretty it up or gussy it up

On craft of writing: every time something gets easier, something else gets harder

Nothing is ever wasted: pieces can always be repurposed, repackaged

Direct quotations should not be more than 20% of text

On the “Own Voices” issue:

Not every story is yours to tell, find the one that is right for you

On the other hand:

You have the right to write about any topic

Anyone else has the right to criticize your work

Sensitivity readers are valuable but would be better called Cultural Fact Checkers and Tone Checkers

13 May 2018

100 Years Ago Today: #HerToo

by | posted in: WWI Nurses | 0

Shirley Eastham’s imagination had caught fire.  “Banners streamed in my blood.  Drums beat in my brain.  Bugles sounded in my ears,” as she wrote in her memoir twenty years after the fact.  She had determined to go to France as a nurse’s aide to help beat back the invading Hun.  She imagined herself “gliding silently among hospital cots, placing a cool hand on fevered brows.”  Eastham even fantasized that Ted, her boyfriend who also enlisted, might be wounded–“oh, very slightly wounded, of course”–and she would care for him in the hospital.  Her upper-middle-class parents objected, but Eastham would not be dissuaded.

As it happened, Eastham reached the front many weeks before her beau.  She underwent her “baptism of fire” just as the German spring offensives were heating up in March, 1918.  The wounded were brought to her French evacuation hospital by the hundreds, all needing attention immediately, if not sooner.  Eastham was thrown into the work, no time for practical training.  She learned in the frenzy of the moment, by observation, when possible; more often by improvisation and pure grit.  When a nurse thrust a hypodermic in her hand, Eastham had to stick it in her patient without practice or guidance.  When asked to “prepare” a patient for surgery, she could only rely on her instincts and make it up as she went.

As the wounded arrived, Eastham had to remove their mud- and blood-soaked clothes, and wash their stained bodies–somehow–without causing pain.  “Gashes from bayonets.  Flesh torn by shrapnel.  Faces half shot away.  Eyes seared by gas.”  She was repelled yet strangely fascinated, too.  The privileged upper-middle-class twenty-six-year-old had traveled a long way in just a few days, a few weeks.  She had “crossed a river of blood,” as she put it, and come out changed on the other side.  Now, when she thought of Ted–when she had time to think of him–she felt “years older” and wondered how she would feel when she saw him again.

Her feelings were complicated by developments in the hospital.  On May 13, she caught Dr. Girard staring at her “in an odd sort of way.”  When she tried to leave the room, he did not let her pass, then forced himself upon her.  Eastham struggled to break free.  Girard, pathetically, asked her to accompany him to Paris.  Eastham’s refusal was unequivocal: “Absolument jamais!”  Absolutely never.

Eastham recorded the unwanted advances in her journal, noting at the same time, that she might rather welcome attention from a certain Dr. Le Brun.  Indeed, she lamented that he hardly seemed to notice her existence. Three days later, though, his coolness thawed.  She recorded the words he spoke as she carried a load of bottles from the surgery: “Bien fait, bébé, bien fait.”  Well done, baby, well done.  It was the start of a consensual workplace romance.

It was not the only one at the Chateau Gabriel evacuation hospital outside Soissons.  Years later, writing under her married name Shirley Millard, Eastham confessed that many of the nurses “were not above flirting outrageously with these indifferent and altogether interesting males who were naturally somewhat woman-conscious after a long period of grim duty and military segregation.  …I think we all emerged from our experiences none the worse, except for an increased opinion of our own seductiveness.”  OK, then.

Eastham’s relationship with Dr. Le Brun could only have been fraught.  He was an officer in the French Army; she a Red Cross volunteer.    He a doctor with years of medical training and experience; she a nurse’s aide with just a month on the job.  France was his country and French his native language; France was a foreign country for her and French her second language.  The power differential was manifest.  By all the evidence, though–and the only evidence we have is provided by Eastham–Le Brun was nothing if not a gentleman.

Eastham described taking long walks with Le Brun while off duty, and sharing tea and chocolate bars with him during breaks.  Eastham wondered if she might just move beyond Ted–“that is if Le B. shows any further signs of interest.”

Understandably, Eastham left the course of the romance to the reader’s imagination.  If Le Brun abused his position as a medical officer to gain favors from Eastham, she did not say.  What she does say is how she used her relationship with Le Brun to advance her position in the hospital.  Sometime in August, after a surgical nurse collapsed from exhaustion, Eastham begged Le Brun to give her (with all of five months’ hospital experience) to take her place.  Le Brun may have been reluctant to say no outright.  He gave her a condition, instead, with a high bar to meet.  If she could learn all “hundred and one” surgical instruments–in French–she might have the job.

Le Brun underestimated Eastham’s ability and drive.  (Or, perhaps he did not!)  Eastham studied and passed the surgeon’s test.  She was admitted to the operating room to hand him instruments and serve as his assistant.  It was a most memorable experience for the volunteer aide nurse:

I saw after that, all the surgery I ever wanted to see again.  Difficult amputations, sutures, skull trapening, probing for bullets and shrapnel, blood transfusions, elementary plastics, spinal operations, and too many kinds of human repair to list here.

Le B.’s hands, incased in rubber gloves, were swift and sure.  He always worked with a cigarette hanging limply from the corner of his mouth.  It was part of my job to keep lighting fresh ones for him.  At first when the ashes fell into an open wound over which he was working, I asked him frantically what I should do about it.  He went on calmly muttering: N’importe ça.  C’est sterile.  It doesn’t matter; they’re sterile.

Then, on September 1, Eastham received a letter from Ted.  By this time he had reached the front and already earned a leave.  He asked Eastham to meet him in Paris, sparking mixed emotions in his erstwhile girlfriend.  “Wonder if he will still care,” she wrote.  “So much has happened.  I feel changed.”  Tension erupted with Le Brun, too.  The Frenchman’s jealousy was piqued.  He became a little pushier, verbally, and resorted to flattery: “Yes, you can work like a man,” Eastham recorded him saying, “and at the same time you are soft and sweet, and very brave.  That is the best thing of all, to be brave.”  Eastham didn’t fall for the sweet talk.  She insisted on going to Paris to see Ted.  She understood, wisely, that she needed to see her old beau in the flesh to know how she truly felt.

Her answer came immediately: “Ted met me at the train and I knew the minute he put his arms around me in the dismal old Gare du Nord that he is mine and I am his and, war or no war, we belong together.”

World War I was the first war in which U. S. Army nurses worked alongside Army corpsmen and doctors; the first time men and women (in large numbers) worked side by side near the front lines.  Military leaders understood that women nurses improved the survival rate of wounded soldiers, but they worried that “feminine” personnel near the lines of battle might jeopardize the military (read: “masculine”) mission.  Shirley Eastham did not serve with the American Expeditionary Force, yet her experience, unusual for the frankness with which she recorded it, is illuminating.  Eastham did not buckle under the pressures of war work, nor did she lose her identity as a woman.  She did not allow herself to be dominated by the men she worked with, even when one made unwanted advances and another applied the full battery of his charms.  She kept her poise.  She performed admirably.  She gained valuable new skills and understandings.  Shirley Eastham did not allow herself to become a victim.

Real stories, biographical stories, are complicated.  They don’t follow a satisfying arc; don’t offer a happy ending.  (By definition, they all end in death.)   Eastham returned to the United States after the war and married Ted right away.  She became Shirley Millard.  The couple had to wait eleven long (agonizing?) years for the birth of their first child–then got divorced the very next year in Reno, Nevada.  Shirley Eastham Millard never married again, nor did she ever work as a nurse.  Did she have any more lovers?  We just don’t know.

Source: Millard, Shirley.  I Saw Them Die.  New Orleans: Quid Pro Quo Books, 2011 [1936].

Ancestry.com

6 May 2018

Two Okies, Both Loved

by | posted in: Will Rogers | 0

Before Woody Guthrie strummed out his version of “Hobo’s Lullaby,” he had probably seen–and laughed at–Will Rogers’s lovable tramp, Jubilo, in the movies.  As an older teenager, he had likely heard–and was moved by–Rogers’s words on the radio: “The only problem that confronts this country today is at least seven million people are out of work.”  This was the Depression and the cowboy comedian spoke uncharacteristically earnestly.  “That’s our only problem.  There is no other one before us at all.  It’s to see that every man that wants to is able to work.”

Thirty-three years separated these two men by age, but the roots of both sprang from the Oklahoma heartland.  They came of age in different historical circumstances, yet the significance of their careers was strikingly similar.  Both were champions of the common man.  Both were uncommonly influential entertainers.

Will was born in 1879, when Oklahoma was still Indian Territory; Woody in 1912, five years after statehood.  Okies they might have been, but each had to move to a coastal metropolis to make his name.  Will started out in New York, before establishing residence in greater Los Angeles.  Woody began in Los Angeles before making his way, inevitably, to New York.  Neither man was especially comfortable in the big city–or even staying very long in one place.  The road was their second home (if not their first).  Will covered, by far, the more ground (and air and sea), but Woody’s aimless wanderings were impressive in their own way.

Woody and Will both required regular contact with the open spaces and small towns of America.  Their art depended upon it.  For his part, Will served as a kind of mediator between coastal elites and everyday Americans.  His bona fides as a regular guy were beyond question every time he opened his mouth and drawled out a folksy witticism. His star quality was underscored every time he called the president “Cal” or the country’s biggest financier “Barney.”  Will Rogers’s sympathies always lay with the little guy, but his love of schmoozing with bigwigs was obvious to all.  More to the point, Will was a bigwig.  Presidents and CEOs wanted to be seen schmoozing with him.

Not Woody.  He mistrusted the rich and powerful.  He spent his whole career fighting for the American worker, against the owners and the capitalists.  After establishing residency in New York for just two months in 1940, he was already itching to get out.  Too many people full of self-importance, he said.  He packed his family and their belongings in the car and got out of town as fast as he could.

Both men were successful, but no one was successful like Will Rogers.  No one in American history, before or since, wielded such broad appeal or so much cultural influence.  At a time when up to twenty-five percent of the workforce was unemployed, when the median income for the other seventy-five percent was less than $1,500, Will brought in $325,000 in movie income alone.  Newspaper, radio, and public speaking fees would have put him over half a million (at least nine million dollars today).  According to Will’s biographer, Thomas Watson of IBM was the only American who made more money in 1934.

Woody barely raised himself out of poverty–or, at least, never for long.  His biggest hit, “This Land Is Your Land,” led to wide popularity and new sources of income.  (“They are giving me money so fast I’m using it to sleep under,” he wrote to folk music collector, Alan Lomax.)  But Woody wasn’t comfortable being comfortably well-off when so many were still hard-up.  And, too, he chafed under corporate control.  So he let the new opportunities slide.  He slipped back into financial insecurity.

The two Okies’ bank accounts differed, but their attitudes toward money were much the same: They spent it when they had it.  Or gave it away.  Will’s access to large sums made him one of the most generous philanthropists of his day, but even during his more modest Follies days he pledged a hundred dollars a week to the Red Cross for the duration of the war.  Given his poverty, Woody’s generosity was perhaps the more impressive.  His biographer wrote of him in his hoboing days in the Depression, “When he made a little money in town painting a sign, he’d buy food he could share with others, or give the money away to down-and-out people who looked like they needed it more than he did.”

Both men, in the 1930s, sparked controversy by using the N-word over the airwaves.  Woody was only twenty-five in 1937 when he sang “Nigger Blues” during his radio show on KFVD.  He received a single letter from a disappointed listener.  Woody apologized on the air and, for dramatic effect, ripped up the sheet music in front of the microphone.  In 1934, Will was all of fifty-five when he referred to a song as a “nigger spiritual” on his nationally broadcast show.  He received a flood of calls and letters in protest.  Will responded by getting defensive.  “Darkies raised me,” he explained, using an only slightly less offensive term.  “I wasn’t only raised among darkies, down in the Indian territory, but I was raised by them.”  Oddly–disappointingly–he never apologized.

Woody had the benefit of following in Will’s footsteps.  He saw how Will turned homespun commonsense into a virtue.  When Woody began writing a column for People’s World, he named it “Woody Sez,” in homage to Will’s long-running daily telegrams titled “Will Rogers Says.”  In one column, Woody wrote, “Billionaires cause hoboes, and hoboes make billionaires.   Yet both cuss the other and say they are wrong…but personal I ruther trust the hoboes.”  Both the message and the loose grammar echoed his predecessor.  In a 1931 broadcast, Will had told his listeners, “I don’t suppose there is the most unemployed or the hungriest man in America has contributed in some way to the wealth of every millionaire in America.”  Woody’s politics were much more radical than Will’s, whose allegiance to the Little Guy was fundamentally conservative.  But Woody’s admiration for Will was clearly evident in the name he chose for his first son: Will Rogers Guthrie.

 

Will was the more obviously successful in his own lifetime, but Woody has been at least as influential since.  Woody’s hundreds of recorded songs, both original and traditional, led an American folk revival that culminated in the 1960s.  Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, the Grateful Dead, and others built their careers on foundations he helped lay.  Woodstock is inconceivable without Woody Guthrie.

Will’s movies, by contrast, were cinematic dead-ends; his vaudeville roping tricks are as lost to us as Atlantis.  Yet political commentary like that in his weekly articles, daily telegrams, and radio broadcasts has become a defining feature of modern American culture.  In the twenty-first century, millions of Americans tune in to political comedy, of the kind Will initiated, on a virtually nightly basis.  Tens of millions follow bloggers daily in the same way that millions in the 1920s and 30s read the columns just one man: Will Rogers.

Woody and Will each brought something new to America, even as they reached back to keep alive important traditions of her past.  Not a bad legacy for two Okies, both loved in their own day and since.

Sources:

Gragert, Steven K., ed.  Radio Broadcasts of Will Rogers.  Stillwater, OK: Oklahoma State University Press, 1983.

Partridge, Elizabeth.  This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie.  New York, Viking: 2002.

Ware, Amy M.  The Cherokee Kid: Will Rogers, Tribal Identity, and The Making of an American Icon, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015.

Yagoda, Ben.  Will Rogers: A Biography.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

30 Apr 2018

The Fire Next Time

by | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction | 0

Woody Guthrie lost his older sister when he was not yet seven years old.  Clara should have been at school taking final exams, but her mother insisted she stay home to do the ironing.  Mid-morning, Clara burst out of the house, screaming.  Her dress had caught fire, no one knows how.  In the days before “stop, drop, and roll,” Clara ran around the house two times, fanning the flames all the while.  At last, a neighbor was able to catch her and wrap her in a blanket.  But the damage was done.  She died the next day.

This wasn’t the first time fire had brought tragedy to his family.  Before Woody was even born, the Guthrie home burned to the ground.  Mother, Nora; father, Charley; four-year-old Clara, and three-year-old Roy lost everything.

Nor would it be the last.  In 1927, when Woody was almost fifteen, Nora poured kerosene on her sleeping husband, setting him and the house on fire.  Charley survived a protracted and painful recovery, but Woody’s mother was lost forever.  She was sent to an asylum for the insane.  Rumors of her role in the earlier fires buzzed around town like flies in a summer kitchen.  She was diagnosed with Huntington’s Chorea (now simply Huntington’s), a hereditary degenerative disease.  Did Woody carry the gene?  Would he be afflicted, as his mother had, later in life?  Woody faced many more pressing questions than these: Where to live?  How to get his next meal?  And he had too many ideas bouncing around in his head to write down into songs.

One would think Woody Guthrie’s fire-borne tragedies would have burned themselves out by this time, but, no, they just went on hiatus for a couple of decades.

Then, when Woody was a father for the fourth time over (but only the first as a truly engaged parent), he lost his precious daughter, Cathy.  Marjorie, his second wife, had left her unattended for a few minutes while she crossed the street and purchased an orange for her four-year-old.  By the time she returned black smoke was billowing from the windows of the apartment building.  A teenage boy rescued Cathy, but he was too late.  Her body was charred.  Woody and Marjorie lost their only child.

The bitter memories came roaring back: his mother’s disease, his sister’s death.  Was he jinxed?  In the depths of his grief he wrote in his notebook, “And the things you fear shall truly come upon you.”  Woody might have given up the ghost, but he hung on.  And the wheel of fortune spun back: he and Marjorie had three more children in quick succession.

Fire stopped haunting him, but the ravages of the Huntington’s gene were just beginning.  Woody’s behavior became erratic, then dangerous, as Nora’s had been.  For the sake of the kids, he moved out.  He went back on the road, where he was always most comfortable, anyway.  He found a new love in L.A. and a new lease on life.  He bought a strip of land north of Santa Monica, pitched a tent, and cooked his meals over an open fire.  Irony caught up with him when a fire marshal followed his smoke and told him to put out the fire–and keep it out.  It was too dangerous.  As if Woody Guthrie needed be reminded about the dangers of fire.

It turns out he did, for in Florida the next year, he made a careless–and costly–mistake.  Trying to get a campfire started, he poured gasoline over an unlit fire pit.  The still-hot coals hidden underneath erupted into flames.  They leapt up the stream of gasoline and, after he fell back, onto his hands and arms.  Blackened and blistered, they took weeks to heal, never fully.  His right arm stiffened, making it hard to play the guitar ever after.

Woody was in the middle of a long Huntington’s-induced decline.  In an act eerily reminiscent of his mother just before her institutionalization, Woody set a friend’s couch on fire (thankfully with no casualties or major damage).  Woody, who had been in and out of an unsatisfactory institution, would soon be hospitalized for good.  Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, New Jersey, met his needs and served as his home for the last dozen years of his life.  It kept him safe from the worst ravages of his disease and any last encounters with the scourge of fire.

 

Source: Partridge, Elizabeth.  This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie.  New York, Viking: 2002.