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| Cross the Bridge into History |
Unique Challenges
Historic novel writing presents many unique challenges.
Foremost, the writer didn't personally live during that time era, or perhaps he/she
lives in New York but loves writing about the Old West. Slick
documentaries and photos often don’t go far enough to immerse the writer or the
reader in the “feel” of that particular slot of time.
Stories from people who are long gone still live on to a degree
via the written word through journals, newspaper articles, Bible notes,
diaries, even plays. If you are fortunate enough to find someone whose
ancestors lived during a particular historic time, say during the Ellis Island
emigrant burst, all the better because you’re going to get stories no one else
has heard, and most likely, tidbits from a different perspective.
I call those stories, especially the ones obtained first person,
the REAL STORIES because they come from the mouths of those who lived them.
Blackberry Road, my latest novel, is a snapshot of a hot summer in 1934
Oklahoma. A girl called Biddy narrates a whopping tale of murder and spookiness
that begins in May when school is out and ends when the blackberries are
turning brown on the vine – about mid- to late-summer. Biddy’s family
jumps right out at you like a real family, and why is that?
Because they are, and I didn’t let their stories die.
Turning 'Real' into Fiction
Collecting family stories, recipes, lore, and copying old
handwritten Bible notes over the years created the realistic backdrop for
Blackberry Road. Fictional Biddy has twelve brothers and sisters. My
mother had eleven. Both Biddys, the fictional and the real, were from
sharecropping families living in Oklahoma in the 1930s.
Dirt poor, but rock solid, those families had to eat, live, and
survive everything from snake bites to drought (or flood) to miserable housing
conditions.
In my particular case, I was fortunate to mingle and mix with a
real sharecropping family because they were my own relatives. You can be sure
the stories at our reunions or get-togethers flew around like greased
spitballs; and there I was, in the thick of it, laughing and asking questions,
my pen flying over the notebook I kept with me at all times.
Most members of the real Blackberry Road family have now passed on, but their lives and
experiences will live on forever simply because I didn’t let the stories die.
My job as a writer was to make fiction seem like reality and reality seem like
fiction.
You can do the same thing.
No Family Stories to Collect? No
Problem!
Don’t despair if you don’t have
actual family stories to gather. Story opportunities full of
"nuggets" pop up everywhere. All you have to do is cross the bridge,
so to speak, and be ready to take notes.
A chance to record stories “from the horse’s mouth” is as close
as that elderly lady you see every day on the bus. Befriend her and see life as
it was through her eyes. Maybe it’s a friend’s uncle who served in the military and
lived through stories that seem too fictional to be true but are true just the
same.
A person volunteering for a church street choir used to be
homeless many years ago – what was that like, and how did he or she escape
homelessness? The Vietnamese family down the street who barely made it to the
USA in 1971 – how did they do it, and what happened when they got here?
Your friend tells you she has a grandfather who was a butler in
the deep South in the early 1950s. Wow! Can you go see him and make sure his
stories don’t die?
You don’t know until you try, right?
At an Early Age . .
.
This history-collecting mindset can be encouraged at an early
age. Teachers can inspire their students to sit down and talk to their own
grandparents and parents to collect stories from long ago, or even a few
decades ago. Telling the stories to the class or submitting them as a written
assignment wins on all levels. A field trip to a retirement home to sit down
one-on-one with the residents and collect stories from times past could turn up
historical and entertaining information that might lead to a lifetime of story
collection for those students. At the very least, it gives the young and the
old a chance to relate and talk to one another.
Librarians are famous for encouraging the young to “dig and dig
some more” academically. A contest for the most interesting, newly discovered
historic story “as told by” could turn up a goldmine of data! A librarian’s
influence on the young to respect and preserve history is something that cannot
be measured but is truly a stake in our future.
Living stories are waiting for you, your students, your
children, and your friends to discover, record, and save. It’s up to all of us
to not let those stories pass away into oblivion.
Two Old Stories
That Didn’t Die
“I remember Mom making my dresses from flour
sacks and my bloomers from flannel undershirts. She used innertube rubber for
the waist and legs. She made me at least three dresses for the year. When I
grew out of them and had to wear them anyway, it was sure pitiful.” ~ the real
Biddy, age 92.
“It was my job to lead my blind grandma to
the outhouse, and I would read the Sears and Roebuck catalog to her while I
waited. That’s how, when I was ten years old, I got the second doll of my
childhood. We read about her in the catalog, and she cost 95-cents. Grandma bought
it for me for taking such good care of her. I thought my doll was the most
beautiful thing in the world. She had rubber bloomers, and I kept her hung up
on a wall. In those days, we didn’t have screens on most of the windows and
some grasshoppers got hold of those rubber bloomers and ate them up. I had to
kill those varmints for doing that!” ~ the real Biddy, age 92
Jodi Lea Stewart was born in
Texas to an “Okie” mom and a Texan dad. Her younger years were spent in Texas
and Oklahoma; hence, she knows all about biscuits and gravy, blackberry
picking, chiggers, and snipe hunting. At the age of eight she moved to a large
cattle ranch in the White Mountains of Arizona. Later, she left her studies at
the University of Arizona in Tucson to move to San Francisco, where she learned
about peace, love, and exactly what she DIDN’T
want to do with her life. Since then, Jodi graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Business Management, raised three
children, worked as an electro-mechanical drafter, penned humor columns for a
college periodical, wrote regional western articles, and served as managing
editor of a Fortune 500 corporate newsletter. She currently resides in Arizona
with her husband, two Standard poodles, two rescue cats, and numerous gigantic,
bossy houseplants.
She is also the author of a “Nancy Drew meets Tony Hillerman” trilogy; SILKI: THE GIRL OF MANY SCARVES: Summer of
the Ancient, Book One; Canyon of Doom, Book Two; Valley of Shadows, Book Three,
set in the modern-day Navajo Nation and featuring a sassy protagonist with an
addiction to scarves and a penchant for trouble.
Blackberry Road is a panorama
of dirt-poor but honest Oklahoma life as told through a sharecropper’s teenaged
daughter. The murder of a beloved teacher stretches into mysterious sounds
coming from the woods to beyond the hidden caves of Coody’s Bluff. Before it’s
over, the truth brushes shoulders with some of 1934’s most notorious criminals.
Blackberry Road is Jodi Lea Stewart’s
first historic novel.
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