Tag Archives: narrative nonfiction

Dispatches from the Writing Life #13: More Life Than Writing

Posted on by

I made a bit of progress on revisions, still working through some history of World War I as it pertains to Jane Grant’s experiences. I read up on the 1916 Council of National Defense and the Woman’s Committee it created in April 1917. Once the United States entered the war, the government decided it needed the support of women and tapped into the well-established network of female organizations that had been around for decades.

Then I looked to see what kinds of articles the New York Times published about these developments to better understand the atmosphere at the newspaper where Jane worked. And I started considering how press coverage of the conflict and the existence of the Woman’s Committee (run locally by the upper-class women she covered for the Society Department) influenced the choices she made about what to do during the war.

Writing occupies a significant chunk of time almost every day, yet there are always other things going on, too. I used to think that I would have more time for writing in retirement, but I’ve found more flexibility in my schedule rather than more time. And that’s okay. This past week I met a friend for a leisurely lunch, wrote an endorsement (blurb) for a forthcoming book about the Philippines during World War II, and spent a lot of time getting ready for a weekend with family centering on a baby shower.

What I’m Reading

Gayle Feldman’s Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built remains absorbing. It’s due back at the library in five days and can’t be renewed, so I’ll have to finish it some other time. It’s a remarkable achievement.

What I’m Watching

Only one episode left to finish this season of The Forsytes (PBS).

Watched the first episode of the new Dan Levy comedy, Big Mistakes, on Netflix. Very unsure about it. The cast is great and I get the premise, but the execution didn’t quite land during that first episode. Still, with Levy, it’s probably worth watching at least one more episode. (I had to try Schitt’s Creek twice before I stuck with it, but that was mostly because of the presence of Chris Elliott.)

Nearing the end of all the available episodes of Animal Control on Netflix.

Finished the Netflix series, Detective Hole and the first season of Helsinki Crimes (PBS). I think we started Helsinki Crimes last week, but I forgot about it. Not that it’s bad, but it’s a pretty routine police procedural. It’s set in Helsinki, though, which gives it a little something special.

During one of the several family gatherings over the weekend, conversation turned to one of our favorite good bad movies: VelociPastor. I don’t know if any synopsis can do it justice.

What Else Is Happening

Slightly better bowling this week. There were gutter balls again during the first game, but the second game had a strike and a few spares. And afterward—ice cream!

The two pear trees and the mulberry tree survived a week of rain and winds, so that bodes well. There are more buds on all. A most welcome sight is the rapid growth of the peony bushes. Peonies are my favorite spring flower, and every year I closely watch their progress.

(not our peony bushes)

Have a good week. Hope you stop by for the next installment.

Dispatches from the Writing Life #12: Jane Grant and Elisabeth Marbury

Posted on by

Lots of things happen during revisions, including moments when you feel like doing a gentle head-bang on the desk because you can’t believe you almost overlooked something. That’s also when you realize this is exactly why revisions are essential.

They were right there in the scans from the archives. Two brief letters from Elisabeth Marbury, one to Jane Grant, one To Whom It May Concern, both from the summer of 1918, both a part of Jane’s quest to get an overseas posting.

Jane volunteered for the Publicity Bureau of the Mayor’s Committee of Women on National Defense (MCWND) sometime in 1918. Marbury, who officially headed the bureau, was a powerhouse in New York City theater circles, so it’s also possible that Jane already knew her or at least had known of her through her job at the New York Times.

Elisabeth “Bessy” Marbury was born in 1856, the daughter of a prominent New York City lawyer. A former debutante, she drew from her family’s wealth and connections to set herself up in business to promote and manage actors and playwrights. Marbury met Elsie de Wolfe, an aspiring actor about ten years her junior, in the 1880s. The couple lived together for forty years while Marbury grew her company, opening offices in Paris, London, Berlin, and Madrid, and de Wolfe launched herself as an interior decorator.

Together they bought a home in Versailles, France, where they spent part of every year until World War I made that impossible. But between 1914 and 1916, Marbury coordinated relief efforts for wounded French soldiers while she was still in the country. Queen Elizabeth of Belgium presented Marbury with a medal in honor of her war service in 1919.

(garden at Villa Trianon, Versailles, France)

Once back in the United States, Marbury worked with at least one other wartime organization in addition to the MCWND. Her business also remained open and thriving. Marbury utilized her theater contacts to put on programs to help fund the war effort. In the summer of 1918, Jane was “conducting the Publicity Bureau” for her on the MCWND and doing such a good job that Marbury both hated to lose her and willingly wrote a letter of recommendation to help her get overseas.

Jane didn’t forget Marbury. During the 1920s, when Jane was involved in two other quite different endeavors, she looped Marbury into those as well, one successfully, the other not. But by then, Jane was practiced in establishing connections with influential people and making good use of them.

What I’m Reading

Gayle Feldman’s Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built is very absorbing. It’s a huge book, and I admire all the careful research Feldman conducted and her skillful crafting of the narrative.

What I’m Watching

Two very quiet, excellent movies on Prime: Sam and Kate, starring Sissy Spacek and Dustin Hoffman, and The Summer Book, set on a small Finnish island, starring Glenn Close as the grandmother. No murders, nothing blows up. Just relationships.

More episodes of The Forsytes (PBS). Still very unlike the last series and clearly setting up a second season.

Only two episodes left of the Netflix series, Detective Hole.

Finished Mudtown (BritBox). The ending was a bit unexpected, and I still have some questions.

Animal Control (Netflix), an amusing workplace comedy, continues as filler watching.

What Else Is Happening

Voting happened on Tuesday. There were some local races plus the big statewide Supreme Court one that was a decisive liberal victory.

I listened to Megan Kate Nelson’s second appearance on the excellent Drafting the Past podcast, created and hosted by Kate Carpenter. If you like to read good history books, this is the place to hear authors talk about how they research and write them.

I also watched historian Pamel Toler on WW2TV on YouTube. Host Paul Woodadge designs great programs covering so many aspects of the war in addition to military history. It’s really worth a watch.

The usual two games of bowling served as a sharp reminder of the consequences of missing last week. A two-word summation of my experience this week: gutter balls.

More exciting was our first visit of the spring season to the garden center. We returned to Southfork with two pear trees and a mulberry tree, all of which the foreman planted in the front acreage. So far, the deer haven’t eaten them. They’ve also left alone the other tender green shoots that have been popping up in the garden beds. So far.

Have a good week. Hope you stop by for the next installment.

Dispatches from the Writing Life #11: Things, Big and Small

Posted on by

Another new month of revisions, and Jane Grant is still trying to get off to war. It was a big one, first called the Great War or the European War, later to be eclipsed by an even more cataclysmic one that necessitated the numbering of them: World War I and World War II.

Jane played a small part in that first war, but it took a lot of dogged determination before she found a way to get over to France. Her time there is pretty well documented, mostly because it was where she met Harold Ross, which is considered a big, important event in her life because of what their meeting led to.

Yet Jane never explained that was behind her drive to go overseas. Maybe she thought that should be evident. Her country was at war in 1917 and as a citizen of that country, she should support the war. But Americans had been deeply divided over the war since it had broken out in 1914. It was not a foregone conclusion that a citizen would be in favor of U.S. participation.

During this round of revisions, I’ve been bringing into sharper focus the ideas and events that may have influenced Jane. And I think a lot of it comes down to location: living in New York City (and forming romantic attachments to men who lived there, too) and working at the New York Times.

John Purroy Mitchel, the city’s mayor, initially embraced the neutrality that President Woodrow Wilson promoted in 1914, well before the United States joined the European conflict. A year later, Mitchel advocated preparedness and created the Mayor’s Committee on National Defense. (Jane met the mayor at least once, at a social occasion, and the only question she had the opportunity to ask him was the kind that reflected how she received her workplace nickname, Fluff.)

(Illustration by James Montgomery Flagg, 1917)

The Times backed Mitchel’s efforts, as did many of the upper-class people Jane covered for the Society Department. She was not an overtly political person, but she was aware, attentive, and thoughtful. She worked at the Times and she socialized with her colleagues. She could not avoid conversations about the war. But the only thing Jane gave voice to, backed by action, was her desire to go overseas when the United States entered the war in 1917. More than a year passed before she could make it happen.

It’s been hard to move on from this section before I’m satisfied with my understanding of what was happening with Jane during these war years. It may also have something to do with a failed book proposal of mine from several years ago about various America women like Jane who went overseas to play a role in the war. I found the subject fascinating and there was no other book quite like it, so I wanted to write it. Despite a proposal that both me and my then-agent were excited about, no editor shared that excitement. I abandoned the project and moved on to another. It’s just something that sometimes happens in the writing life.

What I’m Reading

I’ve been catching up on recent issues of The New Yorker. I usually don’t let them pile up, but when I’m reading library books with due dates, something has to give.

I finished Ocean Vuong’s novel The Emperor of Gladness. Beautiful and sad.

I finished The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII by Mark Braude. The journalist is Janet Flanner, who Jane Grant recruited in 1925 as the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker. The book, unfortunately, didn’t work for me. I didn’t find the connection between Flanner and the serial killer to be important or even interesting enough to support a book-length narrative.

I still have Gayle Feldman’s Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built waiting for me to do more than skim. But I get kind of overwhelmed just looking at it.

What I’m Watching

Another couple of episodes of The Forsytes (PBS). This new version has altered some of the characters and the circumstances, and it’s too early in the series to see the point.

More of the Netflix series, Detective Hole, set in contemporary Oslo, Norway, and it’s rather bleak.

Another weekly episode of Mudtown (BritBox), a crime series set in Wales, featuring a female magistrate. Lots of people in lots of trouble.

Finished Young Sherlock (Prime) and it was enjoyable enough, though I think the plot was over-stuffed.

Animal Control (Netflix), an amusing workplace comedy, continues as filler watching.

What Else Is Happening

No bowling! There was a big ice storm, and just when I thought we would get through it relatively unscathed (the shotgun-like popping sounds of tree branches snapping was heartbreaking), the power went out. We were lucky overall. Our inconvenience was small: no electricity or internet for a few hours. Our flora damage was small, too, with all of Southfork’s big trees keeping their branches. We will find out soon enough if our apples trees got too frozen. Other houses in the neighborhood had bigger problems with lots of branches down and longer stretches without power.

Yet new, small greenery has popped up. I think we have tulips and daffodils arriving. Unless the deer get overly interested.

Thanks for reading!

Dispatches from the Writing Life #10: Revisions, Real and Imagined

Posted on by

This past Tuesday, I enjoyed presenting “She Defied Them All.” This talk about Dr. Mary Walker is now available on John Heckman’s YouTube channel, The Tattooed Historian, for you to watch at your leisure. You can also find The Tattooed Historian page on Facebook, Instagram, this podcast, and on Substack. A lot of good history content is there.

Any presentation I give is the result of several days of preparation. I start with a basic set of PowerPoint slides and corresponding notecards (to keep me from wandering from my point) that I created back in 2020, when Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War first came out. Then I tailor it for each individual event. This time, the talk revolved around the theme of defiance, and plenty of it was in evidence throughout Walker’s life.

That tailoring means I reread portions of my own book to reacquaint myself with the details of Mary Walker’s experiences and beliefs. And that’s hard for me to do because I always, always find sentences, paragraphs, and even entire pages that I wish I could rewrite to make them better. It’s less about historical facts and analysis and more about style.

I have yet to find the sweet spot where historical analysis meets elegant narrative. I have to keep working at it. I do this by doing: writing and rewriting. I also read books on craft written by very accomplished people. I take workshops with very accomplished people. I read and reread books that I admire.

Right now, I’m in awe of Julia Cooke’s style. I finished reading Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World this week, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. That’s the way I wish I could write. It’s something to aim for.

And this may be one of the reasons why I’ve been drawn to Jane Grant’s story. She tried to do so many things with her life and rarely achieved the success she envisioned. In writing about her life, I am trying to uncover the source(s) of her motivation, how she handled disappointments, and what she marked as achievements.

These are the things I think about as I continue with this new draft of the Jane Grant book. It seems about as rough as the last one. But I’m still at it every day, still sticking with my decision to carve out a whole separate chapter about Jane’s determination to get the France during World War I. I think it’s crucial for understanding her aspirations for her career and her personal life. And it was a pivotal time for thousands of American women who, like Jane, felt compelled to decide how (or if) they were going to support the war effort.

Women’s History Month

It’s almost over for 2026. Pamela Toler’s annual WHM blog series on History in the Margins ends today, but you can always read the pieces any time. Be sure to take a look.

What I’m Reading

My leisure reading book is Ocean Vuong’s luminous novel, The Emperor of Gladness. I had to skip the section about the hogs.

I’ve started The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII by Mark Braude. Not that you would know it from the title (I know title and cover design are about marketing and selling books), but it’s about the great writer Janet Flanner, who Jane Grant recruited in 1925 as the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker.

I probably would never have picked up this book if I hadn’t read a review of it that actually identified Flanner as that American journalist. For me, that’s the book’s biggest draw. So far, I’ve been enjoying the sections about her life in France and her writing career. I’m curious about how and why a serial killer becomes important to Flanner. So, I keep reading.

I also have Gayle Feldman’s magisterial Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built. I’ve only looked through the table of contents, index, bibliography, and skimmed some of the 800+ pages of text. I don’t know how much of it I’ll have the time to read.

What I’m Watching

One episode in on each of the new PBS dramas, The Forsytes and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Started the new Netflix series, Detective Hole, set in contemporary Oslo, Norway.

Another weekly episode of Mudtown (BritBox), a crime series set in Wales, featuring a female magistrate. It’s intense.

Only one episode left of Young Sherlock (Prime)

The filler sitcom has been Animal Control (Netflix), an amusing workplace comedy.

Still haven’t been back to Hope Street (BritBox) or Scarpetta (Prime).

What Else Is Happening

Back to two games of mediocre bowling for me. But it was still fun.

Almost all the snow from the big blizzard is gone. The birds are singing again in the morning. I watched a young buck saunter through the back forty here at Southfork. But I haven’t seen any new greenery popping up yet.

Thanks for reading!

Dispatches from the Writing Life #9: A Blizzard and Its Aftermath

Posted on by

Two things from this week:

1. In revisionland, it was another week of digging into primary sources. This time I was examining a pair of letters that Alexander Woollcott sent to Jane Grant while he was in France during World War I. They were colleagues at the New York Times where he worked as a drama critic before he enlisted, and they exchanged gossip about co-workers and other people they knew in New York.

I fell down a bit of a research rabbit hole trying to fill in the details about one of the subjects of their gossip whose important position with the newspaper was tied directly to the war. And I kept coming up with almost nothing. I searched through the Times as well as the Newspapers.com database, both of which returned scant information. Ancestry returned to many hits that sorting through them would have taken much more time than I wanted to devote to a short scene. But I had to know something more about this person.

Turns out I had been misspelling the name. It all came down to the placement of one “e,” which actually belonged someplace else. That threw everything off in the searches. Once I corrected that I found what I needed, finished writing the section, and moved on.

2. I’ve been thinking a lot about Jennifer Szalai’s review of Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World in the March 15 issue of the New York Times Book Review. It is a positive review. Szalai pronounces the book “a vibrant triple biography” of the writers Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn, appreciating how Cooke writes with “verve and expansiveness.” Although I haven’t finished reading Starry and Restless yet, I agree. Cooke is a wonderful writer, and I get totally immersed in these women’s lives whenever I sit down with the book.

Then there is Szalai’s final paragraph:

“Apparently the cultural imperative to wrest salutary lessons, even from the most audacious and defiant women is strong: ‘Maybe they offer a new compass by which a person may orient herself within her own choices.’ Maybe. Or maybe the idiosyncratic lives of these peregrinating writers invite a simpler, but no less significant, proposal: Read this book and be enthralled.”

That’s the part that has stuck with me all week as I think about the subject of my book and the very different worlds of writing (i.e. Toni Morrison’s advice: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”) and publishing (i.e. who is going to read and buy this book?)

And how many times do you think I checked the spelling of Szalai’s name?

Women’s History Month

Final reminder that I will appear live on John Heckman’s YouTube channel on March 24 at 2:00 p.m. Central to talk about Dr. Mary Walker. The installment bears the bold title, “She Defied Them All.” You can find The Tattooed Historian’s page on Facebook, follow him on Instagram, listen to his podcast, read him on Substack, and/or watch his YouTube channel.

Pamela Toler’s annual WHM blog series on History in the Margins is still posting new Q&As. Be sure to take a look.

What I’m Reading

As mentioned above, I’m still reading Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World by Julia Cooke. I’ve found Emily Hahn’s life particularly fascinating, plus it’s been interesting to see Alexander Woollcott make an appearance. He was one of Jane Grant’s first friends when she joined the New York Times.

Finished Dinner at the Night Library, a novel by Hika Harada, translated by Philip Gabriel, which was lovely.

Kind of hurriedly finished Mike Pitts’s Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island because it was due back at the library and was non-renewable.

What I’m Watching

Finished How to Get to Heaven from Belfast (Netflix) and liked it. Not sure what will come next.

Sticking with Mudtown (BritBox), a crime series set in Wales, featuring a female magistrate, with episodes that drop once a week. That’s okay. We’ve never done binge-watching.

Also continuing Young Sherlock (Prime) but haven’t been back to Hope Street (BritBox) yet because of its unevenness and soapiness. And haven’t felt at all compelled to return to Scarpetta (Prime) after that first episode.

What Else I’ve Been Doing

This was the first time in over three weeks that bowling went very well, this despite a bigger crowd because of spring break, one lane that stopped properly resetting the pins, and another lane that only periodically returned the balls. Yet one of us had their highest lifetime score and the other one had no trouble breaking 100 in each game. Then we went for ice cream.

I finally hemmed a pair of black jeans, just in time to get a few more wears out of them before I do my seasonal closet changeover.

We got through an actual blizzard. More than 20 inches fell here at Southfork over last weekend. But thanks to prompt and excellent snow removal (especially by the foreman) plus moderate to mild temperatures, right now it looks like only an average amount of snow on the ground for early spring.

So, happy spring and thanks for reading. See you next week.