AUTHOR SQUARED
Kelly O’Connor McNees
Wendy McClure

Two Authors chat about writing, books, and everytihng in between!

Please welcome Kelly O’Connor McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, and Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life to On the Bookcase! Take it away ladies!

Kelly: Wendy, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books depict the day-to-day tasks that filled the “pioneer life” in the 1880s, especially the work typically done by women. Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, while set in long-settled Concord, Massachusetts, during the Civil War, also features details of 19th century young women’s routines: sewing, knitting, embroidering, taking firewood and blankets to the poor, baking, and generally working to make the home a “haven.” Anyone who tried to take my washing machine away would have to pry it from my cold, dead hands—and yet I read these books with a fascination and a sense of longing. What is the deal? Why do we love to read about this stuff?

Wendy: Oh yes—I always find these details and tasks so reassuring somehow. And I remember a line I read in Barbara Walker’s introduction to The Little House Cookbook, something about how all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s extensive descriptions “seemed to compel participation.” In the case of the cookbook, of course, it’s actual hands-on participation, but I think any engaged reader becomes a kind of participant just by following along. These descriptions have such an intimacy to them, because through them you inevitably inhabit Laura or one of the March girls and find yourself daydreaming in their kitchens. I know I can recall butter-making with Ma Ingalls almost as vividly as my own memories of helping my mother peel potatoes.

As for that longing you mentioned—maybe it’s because on some level we recognize that we’re not truly there, that there’s a boundary we can’t fully cross, even while we know we don’t really want to sew seams in muslin sheets. We know, though, that we’re at the edges looking in.

Which leads me to my question to you, Kelly, since you created so many of those descriptions of domestic rituals in your own novel: What were the challenges in writing those scenes? Did you feel like you were actively creating this world—or, as a writer of historical fiction based on real people—simply entering it? Or to put it another way, what side of that divide between reader and character is the writer on?

Kelly: Whoa, Wendy. That is deep.

I think in historical fiction there is a fine line between immersion and suffocation. Just the right amount of carefully selected detail and context and atmosphere can create a vivid world. But too much of this—too much exposition and description of every object, gown, and housekeeping chore that might seem foreign to a modern reader—and we are overwhelmed by the weight of it all. Too much of this and the story gets lost. I felt as the writer I was always walking that line, trying to figure out when to expand on something (like the scene that goes into great detail about how Louisa and Anna make candles) and when to scale back to keep the story moving forward, to maintain the tension that makes characters real people to us. I think I succeeded some and probably failed some at that task. It is an ongoing negotiation. But you don’t want the reader to see that struggle—you want to polish the story to a high shine so that the way it is appears seems to be the only way it could have been—if that makes any sense! So I would say I wanted it to seem as if the reader and I were just entering this world that already existed, when in fact I had to work very hard to create it in a particular way.

Speaking of craft, I have a question about your approach to memoir. A novel offers the writer ultimate control—we can change and shape every single detail. But nonfiction in its commitment to truth is much more like life: messy and asymmetrical, it can resist a tidy narrative. And yet your true story is such a compelling read! I want to know how you did it! When you first made a list of the places you wanted to visit and the people you wanted to meet in your efforts to examine the connection you and so many of us share with the Little House books, I imagine you had some idea in mind of what you would find and perhaps an idea of what shape the book would take. But as you went through the journey, I imagine that some of those expectations were thwarted. Was it difficult to make the book adapt as your understanding of Laura culture changed and deepened? Were there any experiences that worked out so differently, you couldn't include them? What dictated the structure of the book?

Wendy: It's been a strange process, Kelly, trying to shape lived experience into narrative, especially with this book. With my first memoir, I’d had a few years’ perspective on the events I was writing about, and time served as a very good editor, filtering out irrelevant details.

It was definitely harder with The Wilder Life, where I had less time to ruminate on every experience AND I went into every trip knowing I’d be writing about it a month or two later. Sometimes I really had to struggle with my own instincts when I did all these things, especially when they were weird and uncomfortable (as with the weekend with the end-times-obsessed folks). I had to decide whether it was better to doggedly stick it out for the sake of the book, or just go with my gut. Usually I wouldn’t know whether or not I made the right decision until I went back and tried to write about it later. Thus some of things I did for the sake of the book got left by the wayside—getting fitted for a corset, for example—because in the end it just didn’t feel interesting enough to be worth recollecting.

And then there were experiences that didn’t turn out anything like I’d hoped but were extremely crucial. De Smet, South Dakota, was one of the most important destinations in my homesite trips, and yet I left early. For lack of a better phrase, something “wasn’t working” about being there—something didn’t feel right—and after one full day there, I found myself impulsively hitting the road instead of staying another night like I’d planned. About an hour after I left, I thought, “what did I just do?” I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d blown it, that I’d made a huge mistake. It was hard to go back and write about it and figure out my reasons for leaving, but it was extremely useful, too, and I’m glad I let go of my expectations.

Speaking of expectations: What happens when your characters change course on you? Do you have a sense of where someone’s story is going, or do they take the lead? I only have to worry about myself as a protagonist, but I imagine that with fiction it’s much different . . .

Kelly: Fiction writers tend to fall into two camps: planners (the outliners) and pantsers (the writers who fly by the seat of their pants). I’m always a little embarrassed to admit this for some reason—maybe it feels a little like cheating—but I am a planner, in writing and in life. I can’t go to the grocery store without a list, and I can’t start a novel without an idea about what’s going to happen. That said, even when I do have grand plans for my characters, sometimes they surprise me. One of the characters in a novel I am working on right now recently did this. Rowena is an upper-class woman who, because of her husband’s death in the Civil War and her father’s deteriorating mental health, has lost all her money and is trying to figure out what to do with her life. I knew she would be pretty angry about what happened, since it was completely out of her control, and I knew she would start to resent her friends who continued to live comfortable lives. But I wasn’t sure exactly how she would express what she was feeling. Then one day I was writing a scene in which a friend comes to visit, and out of nowhere, Rowena steals a brooch off the woman’s coat as she hangs it up in the hall. I thought it was an isolated incident, but a few scenes later she was stealing again. I had not planned for this, but Rowena has a mind of her own.

Those little surprises happen, I think, when the character becomes real enough to be a whole person who (strange as it sounds) really is capable of acting independently of your will. The trick is to have a plan but a loose plan, so that the characters can change it.

Last question for you, Wendy—what are you working on now?

Wendy: I’d love to say I’m working on a book, but the truth is that I’m working on planning my wedding next month! But at my job at Albert Whitman and Company, we’ve just launched our young adult imprint, so in between all the craft store shopping excursions, I’m still getting my new-book excitement fix in. Hoping that once the dust and the petals settle, I can start on something new, the way you are.

Kelly: Oh, boy. Planning a novel has nothing on planning a wedding. Wishing you and your sweetie a lifetime of happiness, with lots of time for reading and writing!

Thanks Kelly and Wendy!

Kelly O'Connor McNees is a former editorial assistant and English teacher. Originally from Michigan, she now resides with her husband in Chicago.

Wendy McClure has been writing about her obsessions online and in print for nearly a decade. In addition to her 2005 memoir, I'm Not the New Me, she is a columnist for BUST magazine and has contributed to The New York Times Magazine. McClure holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She lives in Chicago, where she is a senior editor at the children's book publisher Albert Whitman & Company.

How Sisters Shape Our Lives, a Book Club Discussion by Neely Kennedy

The special bond of siblings can often be the longest and most important relationship in our lives, transcending friends, jobs, parents, and sometimes even marriage. This month’s LHJ Book Club pick, The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen, tells the story of sisters Milly and Twiss and the heartbreak, sacrifice, love and secrets that they share through childhood, adulthood and old age.

Here are some tips to enrich your book club discussion, exploring how your sibling relationship has influenced the trajectory of your own life. Encourage members who are only children to participate, as they offer a fresh perspective to the discussion.

Back to the Sand Box: Tell a specific story from childhood that recalls a vivid memory about your sibling. Sharing personal anecdotes can make great ice breakers to get a group discussion flowing! Add some depth by asking members to bring along pictures of their sisters or brothers to share.

The sight of the Mason jars led her back to the town fair. She could see Twiss rearranging her jars of Purple Prairie Tonic from a simple line into a pyramid, trying to sell them with a manic energy and an equally manic twinkle in her eye. She could see her mother and father strolling along in the late light, untwining their fingers, it seemed, just so they could entwine them again. And she could see Bett.

Stiff Competition:  Competition for mom or dad’s attention is often at the heart of sibling issues. Was this the case in your family? How do you think birth order affects sibling relationships?

“Beauty gives you choices,” their father said to Milly. “Ugliness doesn’t.”… “What about me?” Twiss said. “Your hands belong on a golf club,” their father said.

Compare & Contrast: Identify the similarities and differences between you and your sibling. How have they shaped your personality?

Although Milly was the one who earned perfect grades term after term, Twiss was the one with all of the creativity and the daring. Milly may have known how to balance both ends of Mr. Stewart’s chemistry equations without making a mistake, but Twiss was the one who possessed the heart to be a real scientist.

Life Lessons: What life lessons have you learned together?

Twiss traced the rim of the teacup. “Remember what she used to say?”… The two sisters lingered in front of the sideboard, as if waiting for their mother to appear and caution them, before they took up their lists and went about their chores. “Bone china is like your heart. If it breaks, it can’t be fixed.”

The topic of sibling relationships offers so much to ponder; I hope that your book club enjoys a rich and rewarding discussion of The Bird Sisters.

Please welcome author Talia Carner. She tells us about the research behind her lastest novel Jerusalem Maiden!

Exposing The Secrets of Jerusalem Maiden
By Talia Carner

Willa Cather said, “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”

I was sixteen, though, when I visited Paris for the first time. Walking the streets of Montmartre, the fifty dollars my grandmother had given me to buy us “luxury soaps” burning a hole in my pocket, I suddenly realized with unshaken clarity that my grandmother belonged here. She should never have married, should never have had children. Instead, I saw her as a Bohemian in Paris during the avant-garde era, achieving international acclaim as an artist.

My family joked that they could never balance a plate on my grandmother’s tablecloths. Each of her embroidered flowers raised out of the cloth to full bloom, creating a field of soft sculptures.

The goo of my grandmother’s unfulfilled life and her untapped artistic genius seeped into the veins of her daughters, and I struggled to drain it out of my own.

It was not hard to imagine that my grandmother had been held back by social expectations of her time. But I needed to crawl inside the skin of such a trapped young woman, to go back to when her talent and passion were formed—and immediately stifled. What was the inner world of my feisty grandmother in the early 1900s? What was the life of my young protagonist living in the ultra-Orthodox society of Jerusalem one hundred years ago, compelled to follow a predetermined path that had no patience for the individual sum total of a maiden’s inclinations and wants?

I soon discovered that the lives of Jewish women at that era was veiled in secrecy. Historians, all male and unaware of women's concerns, failed to document the daily lives of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women, while the women believed that suffering in Jerusalem—pestilence, starvation, squalor, maggot-filled water cisterns, and burying half the children they bore—hastened the messiah's arrival.

The Zionist women who immigrated to the Holy Land in the dawn of the 20th century were driven by ideology to seek equality with men in the new Kibbutzim or politics, (such as Israel's late Prime Minister Golda Meir.) They wrote letters home, kept journals, and penned poetry and stories. Not so the ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in the Holy City, who remained invisible behind the walls of their insular neighborhoods, underneath modest clothing and hair coverings, and behind fear of "others." Moreover, they were isolated by religious decrees, Commandments and dictates—as well as by ignorance: while all boys studied from dawn to dusk starting at age three, most girls were not schooled at all.

I had lived in Jerusalem as a student at the Hebrew University and traveled there for work. I had waded in the cool water of Hezekiah's Tunnel and kissed a boyfriend on the ramparts of David Citadel. Now I returned there to record oral histories of old women about their mothers’ lives, interview historians, and read hand-written journals at a special library. In a museum that replicated a typical one-bedroom home down to tools, utensils, linens, furniture, books and mementos, I lingered at the primitive kitchen nook and its miniature attached yard—where women toiled their entire lives. In Mount of Olives cemetery, a tombstone read: “She provided for her husband and family for thirty years,” summing up thousands of unrecorded lives of women who were both the bearers of over a dozen children each and breadwinners in support of their husbands’ lifelong Torah studies.

As I walked the streets of Jerusalem aided by a detailed 1912 map that showed most old buildings intact, my mind's eye stripped the streets of all modernization, for in the Ottoman era even the thoroughfares remained unpaved since biblical times. Nor had there been any running water, electricity, or sanitation. Once, waiting for the traffic light to change near Me’ah She’arim, Jerusalem’s most religiously strict section where my protagonist lived, I stood next to a very young and pregnant woman. Fully covered in spite of the blistering heat, she had four children in the stroller and hanging onto her long skirt. I wondered, how much freedom had this mother had as a teenager—in our modern times—to assess her future?

Just then, a car stopped, blasting pop music through its open windows. And I thought of my protagonist, who, in a world devoid of electricity or even cars, there had been no news broadcast, no music, no sense of what lay beyond the neighborhood. My protagonist Esther knew only the Bible—and whatever she was being told was her destiny: to hasten the Messiah’s arrival. What if she dreamed of being an artist in Paris instead?

My Esther, as I was certain my grandmother should have done, was determined to bolt and follow her talent and her heart.

Author Talia Carner’s latest  novel Jerusalem Maiden, (HarperCollins, June 2011) tells the story of a young woman struggling between her passion and faith.        

Please welcome
Sebastion Barry,
author of On Canaan's Side,
to On the Bookcase!

Who is Lilly (Dunne) Bere?

Lilly is her own woman firstly. She’s the daughter of the Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Police of the old Imperial regime in Ireland, a sister of Willie Dunne in A Long Long Way, and so a sister of Annie Dunne in her own novel Annie Dunne. Willie fought and died in France in the First World War, Annie stayed at home, but Lilly is obliged to flee Ireland and try and make a go of it in America. She is a person rooted in Ireland but grateful in her heart to America for offering her sanctuary, her version of Canaan. Her principle possession is the characteristic of resilience. Otherwise she is servant, mother, grandmother, and friend.

Who inspired her and is she based on anyone you know?

I first wrote about Lilly many years ago, using a pet name of Dolly. She is referred to in the play The Steward of Christendom as her father’s favorite daughter, and as the youngest and the prettiest of the three daughters. Her mother died in giving birth to her. I have been thinking about her for many years and hoped to build the confidence as it were to follow her to America. She is not truly based on anyone, being very much fictional in the actual story, but I did have a great aunt that seemingly fled to America in the terrible circumstances during the Irish war of independence. In the real story, which may also be not quite true, or not untrue let us say, she fled with her fiancée and another of her brothers. The two men for some reason had been under a death sentence from the old IRA. This is a well-buried family secret and even now I know only tiny hints of it. But seemingly one of these men, probably my great uncle, was eventually gunned down on a street in Chicago. Nevertheless, the one time as a little boy that I met ‘Lilly’, she seemed to me the very happiest person I had ever encountered, very pretty even in what were likely her sixties. I remember her outside my father’s house, almost dancing where she stood in the street, full of radiant silent laughter.

Lilly’s life seems largely filled with tragedy and loss. Is she a victim of circumstances or was she in some way responsible for creating her own misfortune?

I think certainly the first, a victim of circumstances, except she does not ‘play the victim’ at any point. There is a moment in the book where she wonders is she responsible for some of what happens. I am anxious for the reader to decide for her!

On Canaan’s Side is largely set in twentieth century America from the 1920s to current day. How did you go about researching the time period and locales to create authenticity?

I read in the usual way a little pyramid of books. I have been interested for decades for instance in the building and the demise of the Ohio Canal, a fabulous feat of engineering built by Irish and Chinese workers, that already was in deep decline by the 1910s. Cleveland has also been an obsession, and I have a wonderful book called the Book of Cleveland produced in the shaken optimism of the early fifties. Also the White House Cook Book was very helpful! I have travelled widely in America and without being sentimental, the elementals and nature of North America always seem to strike in deeply. Tiny things gathered over the years. An ancient cab driver in Washington who told me his father was an Irish American who on his death was discovered to have had two families, obviously one white and one black… Wonderful things that set me thinking, thinking… The four thousand miles I hitched in 1974 as an amazed young Irishman of 17… That Van Gogh self-portrait in Chicago… The astonishing cleanliness of everything in fifties photographs… All the lost worlds of America, as multiple as the lost worlds of Ireland, and they are legion.

In your last novel, The Secret Scripture, the heroine was a 100-year-old woman with a complex life. What is your technique and inspiration for creating such convincing characters of the opposite gender and of an older age?

I wait a long long time for the voice of the character to grow inside to a sufficient degree that their existence is more vivid during the writing of the book than my own. I more or less believe that character lives inside the syntax of sentences, that every person not only has an individual soul but an individual and unique birdsong, a way of expressing themselves. So I wait for that. I have to forget I am a man and 55, in the mountains of Wicklow, and be Roseanne or Lilly for a season!

How are Joe, Ed, and Bill connected to Lilly and what were their fates?

Joe Kinderman is Lilly’s husband, although she also refers to Tadg Bere as her husband, though Tadg did not live long enough for the actual ceremony. So Joe is her first/second husband. Ed is her son by Joe, and Bill is her grandson. Both of them were soldiers in the US army, just as Lilly’s brother Willie was a soldier in the First World War. Indeed Joe Kinderman, like Tadg and Lilly’s father, was a policeman. Their fates…. I would love the reader to find out for themselves. But the fate of Bill was the deepest cause of the book. I had a great friend called Margaret Synge, then in her eighties, whose own grandson came back from the war in Afghanistan, and very very sadly took his life, although, as she said, he was paradoxically ‘full of life’. Margaret said to me, ‘why didn’t He take me instead? I am ready to go.’ It was the most profoundly moving thing I have ever heard in my life. And it is with a moment like that, in another time and another country that On Canaan’s Side begins.

What is the thinking behind telling Lilly’s story over the course of seventeen days with each chapter title counting the days without Bill?

As I was writing the book I knew there was a tension between Lilly’s wish to tell her story and that other imperative, the death of her grandson, and what she wanted to do about that. I was interested in the fact that she was sitting down every day to begin again, take up the thread. I envied her a little, being able to complete her book in 17 days! But I was always aware she wouldn’t linger long, at least in the writing of it. She was to me like a bird in the garden, and I was being very careful not to make a sudden movement, and scare her away. You cannot put the bird back in the garden, or the lily back in the bowl. I was always very grateful that she was still there. 17 times grateful. But I can still sense her in my workroom, as I write this. Writing for myself. Come back, Lilly.

What is the ultimate message or lesson that you would like the reader to take away from On Canaan’s Side?

That the world is an infinitely strange place, which we visit briefly, both to fall in love with it and endure it, and delight in it, and to suffer sometimes beyond the capacity of the human heart. That to have lived a life here is a kind of ultimate achievement in itself. That the sorrows of others are often deeply deeply hidden from us, but are still there. That maybe the seeming ‘old’ have the most urgent and necessary messages for us, that will solve the riddle and lose the knot, but that sometimes we forget to retrieve.

But I would also like the reader to know far more, and better, about it than myself, as readers always do.

Sebastian Barry's plays have been produced in London, Dublin, Sydney, and New York. His novel A Long, Long Way was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, as was The Secret Scripture, which was also a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, as well as the Irish Novel of the Year. Barry lives in Wicklow, Ireland, with his wife and three children.