Tag Archives: women and war

Dispatches from the Writing Life #21: Just Write the Paragraph

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While mucking around in chapter four revisions, which have been taking a very (very) long time, one of the things I got stuck on was where to place a new paragraph. That may seem odd, given that this book project is a chronological narrative of Jane Grant’s experiences connected with The New Yorker. The sequential time frame provides the basic structure, but there are always some issues that need to be addressed about a person’s life that cut across different periods of time. That’s what I was dealing with.

The paragraph only needed about three or four sentences, but it involved a crucial part of Jane’s love life that had the potential to spill over, with perhaps some negative consequences, into her professional life. A bit complicated, but not too much.

I don’t want to admit how long it took me to listen to that little voice that kept telling me to just write the paragraph. When I read through the chapter again later, which I know I’ll do at least once or a million times, I can move it if I decide it works better in another spot. But at least it will have been written.

So, I did, and it was fine, and I moved on. (It has not gone unnoticed that the “just write” advice is also applicable to blog posts, but that, as you must have realized, took even longer to accept.)

Another big chapter four revision achievement: applying my usually pretty good sleuthing skills to verify the identity of an officer Jane knew in France. The relationship was fairly fleeting, but it nevertheless revealed something important about how Jane viewed marriage. I needed to know something more about the man in question. I didn’t have much to start with, but it was enough to eventually match signatures on two different primary source documents.

Now I’m hoping that my next blog post will reveal some lofty views of chapter five revisions.

What I’ve Been Reading

I really enjoyed two mysteries: The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke and Blunt Instrument by Amy Bloom. I especially enjoyed Bloom’s because I’m always here for a good academic murder mystery.

Tana French’s excellent The Keeper is less (much less) a mystery novel than an absorbing tale of the complexities of life in a small, rural Irish village. There’s more conversation than action, so the drama simmers until French delivers a real yikes of an ending. And Ann Cleeves (we refer to her as Anne of Cleves) also dealt a yikes ending in Blue Lightning. I’m a big fan of her Jimmy Perez novels and love the Shetland t.v. series.

Two very good and very different historical novels: Land by Maggie O’Farrell (she always comes up with something interesting) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Questions 27 & 28, about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. While I appreciated that it’s innovative and challenging, I wished that Yamashita’s plot was a bit easier to follow. The subject matter is so very important.

I just started Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins. I’m not sure if it’s going to stick.

I haven’t been motivated to pick up much nonfiction, but I mostly liked Carolines Bicks’s Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, a hybrid of memoir—Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair of Literature at the University of Maine—and literary criticism/history. I also enjoyed Jayne Anne Phillips’s Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir.

What I’ve Been Watching

So much since I last checked in that I’ll try to keep this short rather than exhaustive.

Right now, what I’m enjoying the most is Reacher (Prime) and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+). Saw the first episode of Netflix’s Nordic police thriller, Blood Sacrifice, and it’s intense.

Liked Dark Winds, Mindfully Murder, My Brilliant Career (all on Netflix) and PBS’s new season of Patience. BritBox’s Gone was watchable but ultimately unsatisfying. In the Dark was a bit better, but it needed another season to tie up loose ends. Much more interesting and fun was Ride or Die (Prime). I streamed some good movies: Hamnet, The Friend, Sheep Detectives, Project Hail Mary, and rewatches of MASH and The Big Lebowski.

What Else Was/Is Happening

We went to see the big summer movie, The Odyssey. Our local theater offers $5 Tuesdays (with $2 small popcorn) so it was an easy decision to go. Except for the room-thumping volume, I enjoyed it. I’ve never read any of Homer’s epic, so I only had a general idea of the story.

Then I streamed the 2024 film The Return, with Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, which I liked a lot more. This does not appear to be a majority opinion. “A weary existential funk surrounds the movie from the beginning and never lifts,” is how Matt Zoller Seitz describes it in his review on rogerebert.com. I must have really been in the mood for existential funk, because I found it fascinating all the way through. It almost made me want to read Homer. Almost.

This Tuesday we’re going to see Coyote vs. Acme. We contain multitudes.

(Kind of how I’ve been feeling with these manuscript revisions.)

Oh, yes of course, there has been bowling, with its usual ups and downs. This most recent week was one of the best I’ve had all summer, so that was encouraging.

Thanks, as always, for reading. See you next time.

Dispatches from the Writing Life #20: Jane Grant is Back in France

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It felt like I was stuck in chapter one (re)revisions on an endless loop. But, of course, it wasn’t endless because one day I did reach the end **and** realized there was nothing I needed (at that point) to go back and fix. So I left it there.

Then I returned to chapter three, the ending of which prompted me, many weeks ago, to take another look at chapter one and chapter two. New revisions on chapter three didn’t take very long this time around—it was mostly a matter of deciding how I wanted to deal with a couple of secondary source information dumps I had added so I could take some books back to the library before they were overdue. I deleted some of that information because it turned out to be unnecessary. The rest I incorporated where needed.

Now I’m back in chapter four, in which Jane is overseas with the YMCA during and just after World War I. Her first job was as a secretary or clerk at Tours, France, work she found dull even though she understood how it benefited the soldiers. She was much happier socializing with them after hours and tried to split her time as evenly as possible between enlisted men and officers. There was much flirting, but Jane wasn’t looking for a serious relationship.

(Jane Grant stayed here when she came to Paris.)

It wasn’t long before Alexander Woollcott, her friend and colleague from The New York Times, arranged her transfer to the Y’s Entertainment Bureau. That brought Jane first to Paris, where she met Harold Ross (and we all know how that turned out), then on to various locations in France and Germany with a performing troupe.

As I mentioned way back in #4 of this series about this overseas chapter: “There is less to weed out, and more to weave in.” (There was also enough stuff to weave in earlier chapters that I had to create a new one, so what was once chapter three is now chapter four.) I’m still trying to track down a source or two that can provide additional insight on the AEF presence in Tours. There will likely be other things like that to weave in, but I don’t know exactly what right now.

What I’m Reading

Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King by Caroline Bicks. This is an interesting hybrid of memoir—Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair of Literature at the University of Maine—and literary criticism/history. I haven’t read a lot of King’s books (there are so many!), but The Stand is one of my all-time favorite novels, and this is holding my interest, especially as Bicks examines the differences in King’s story drafts.

Karen Tei Yamashita’s unique and challenging novel Questions 27 & 28, about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Stunning.

I finished two excellent books: Jayne Anne Phillips’s memoir, Small Town Girls, and Megan Kate Nelson’s The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. Highly recommend both.

I also finished Sherry Thomas’s mystery novel, The Librarians, which started off well enough but ended up with an overstuffed plot.

What I’m Watching

Eagerly watching season 4 of Dark Winds, which recently dropped on Netflix, and very glad to know that AMC has renewed it for another season.

In the current watch rotation but proceeding rather pokily are season 2 of The Agency (Paramount+), Waking the Dead (BritBox), Lawmen: Bass Reeves and Mindfully Murder (both on Netflix).

We sped through both seasons of Karen Pirie (BritBox), which was a re-watch for me, but a welcome one after having been to Scotland. It was a nice reminder of how good the series is.

I watched all of Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie as quickly as I could. I liked it a lot. That may be because I’m not a die-hard fan of the original books—I don’t remember even reading them all when I was young. Give me Nancy Drew any time. But I’m a huge fan of Caroline Fraser’s book Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’m looking forward to the next season of this series.

I finally finished A Place to Call Home (Prime) and found it an interesting iteration of a soap opera.

What Else Is Happening

No bowling during the week of the 4th of July. The alley shut down for a very long holiday weekend. Returning the week after was a little rough on one of us who bowled poorly with the other rolling their highest score ever, in large part due to two turkeys in one game!

It’s hot, hot, hot. I thought Wisconsin’s heatwave had already come and gone, but that was only the shorter first one. This second one is stretching across at least a couple of weeks. And now we’re getting hit with smoke and haze from wildfires further north. Yikes.

And here at Southfork, the loaner cats only have a couple more days with us. It will seem very quiet when they are back in their own home.

Thanks, as always, for reading. Stay cool. See you next time.

Dispatches from the Writing Life #15: Of Primary and Secondary Sources

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This book I’m writing about Jane Grant will be the first full-length one focusing on her. She has turned up in a few other books published by both trade and academic presses, so I was able to consult some secondary sources for part of my research.

The information they contain needs to be verified, and occasionally that process sends me down research rabbit holes. This is what happened with one piece of chronology in my fourth chapter, in which Jane travels overseas with the YMCA in World War I.

The most valuable secondary source has been Susan Henry’s 2012 book, Anonymous in Their Own Names, a scholarly look at three women, including Jane, who pushed for legal changes to ensure that married women, if they chose, could keep their birth names. I always start my secondary source research with academic works.

Henry wrote about Jane’s trip: “In September 1918 she sailed for France. Her first stop was the Stars and Stripes office in Paris where she hoped to visit her friend Woollcott, who had been working there since February and with whom she had been corresponding. But he had left for the front, so she continued on to her duties in Tours.”

Henry took that information from a 1943 letter that Jane wrote to Woollcott’s biographer, Samuel Hopkins Adams. The letter is part of the Jane Grant papers at the University of Oregon and is one of the many documents I read and scanned on my research trip there a few years ago.

So I pulled up the letter and read what Jane wrote:

“In September, 1918, I went to France with the Motion Picture Bureau of the Y.M.C.A. When I arrived in Paris I went at once to the office of the Stars and Stripes in search of Aleck…and learned that I could not see Aleck, although he [a commanding officer she spoke to] would not tell me if Aleck was out of Paris or when he would return. I was mighty young then and mighty lonely and as Aleck was the only person I knew in Paris I made going to the office of the paper a regular stint until I was detailed to Tours.”

Jane’s 1968 memoir, Ross, The New Yorker and Me, contains this recollection: “Once I had hurdled the obstacles of getting to war Aleck resolved to have me detailed to the Entertainment Bureau of the Y. ‘They need singers badly and your dancing will be no hindrance,’ he wrote me at Tours. I was delighted with the prospect and elated when I was summoned to Paris to arrange for transfer to my new duties with the entertainment unit Aleck had assembled. He had met me at the station the evening before.”

I need to fashion a chronology that makes sense. I have to consider that Jane’s letter to Adams was written twenty-five years after her trip to France, which brings the issue of memory into play. Also, in 1943, in the middle of U.S. involvement in World War II, Jane had a lot going on. She was busy with a project for The New Yorker and with duties on the Writers’ War Board. She may have still been processing her feelings over Woollcott’s unexpected death early in the year.

Her memoir came even later. Jane spent over a decade researching, writing, and rewriting that book. But as much as she drew on her journalism training, the memoir wasn’t meant to be objective. She had a specific purpose for writing it. As with her letter to Adams and with Henry’s account of these events, the information in Jane’s memoir must be verified by other sources.

That’s what takes a lot of my time. I usually find some interesting things along the way, and in this case, I have. My goal is to get the information as correct as possible.

I thought once again of historian Jill Lepore’s “Plymouth Rocked: Of Pilgrims, Puritans, and Professors,” which I mentioned last week. (Here again is The New Yorker article, though it may be paywalled.) “History isn’t brain surgery,” she wrote. “Even when it’s done poorly, it’s not fatal. Still, it can knock you down.” I don’t want to do it poorly.

What I’m Reading

I started another big biography of another important man in the book world: True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson. It’s good but very stuffed with details. It reminds me of how hard it is as a biographer to figure out what to put in and what to leave out.

What I’m Watching

The second weekly episode of After the Flood (BritBox) and over on Netflix, Unfamiliar, a German spy thriller.

Still enjoying the amusing British version of Ghosts (Paramount+).

What Else Is Happening

Another very acceptable bowling this week.

It was a real bird week here at Southfork. Woodpeckers, orioles, and grosbeaks have been spotted at the front feeder. And in the neighborhood, a hawk (probably a Cooper’s hawk) and a few backyard chickens. Lucky chickens—the hawk wasn’t in the same part of the neighborhood.

(an orchard oriole)

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

Dispatches from the Writing Life #14: Calling it Done

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The chapter that covers Jane Grant’s efforts to get overseas during World War I, that is. I think this version finally works, so I’m calling it done. This version. There will assuredly be another.

For this one, I really had to focus on finding what I think of as the feeling or texture, a kind of “you-are-there” sense of the narrative. I’m an academic writer and these more creative “writerly” aspects are difficult for me to get right when I’m trying to tell a story. I could better utilize the tools of creative writers and journalists. Finding the right balance or blend is key. This week I was reminded how much writers of all kinds have to learn from each other.

Historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist author Megan Kate Nelson posted on BlueSky a few days ago: “Watching and waiting for more historians to write short sentences, short paragraphs, and short chapters.” She’s a very good writer and a very good historian, so her advice is worth considering. Once I’m satisfied with content, I’m going to go after style.

One of Jessica Meyer’s recent posts on her blog, Arms and the Medical Man, reminded me of the tensions that sometimes surface between different types of writers. Meyer is Professor of Social and Cultural History at the University of Leeds, and she researches the intersections of the histories of gender, disability and warfare.

Meyer’s piece, “Picking Up the Threads,” in part considers the differences between academic historians and what she calls “professional historians (that is, those who communicate historical research in order to earn a living).” I’m not crazy about the term “professional historians” to describe nonfiction writers who focus on historical topics, but I get her larger point. Meyer finds it “always slightly disconcerting” to read one of those works “that identifies a methodological approach or source base that I have long been familiar with as a new discovery.”

Academics and nonfiction writers generally have different reading audiences to address, but both could learn valuable skills from each other. Some academics have become very interested in writing for the non-academic reader, and sometimes they are referred to as public scholars. (Historian David M. Perry has just published a book on the topic.)

Meyer’s blog post in turn brought to mind one of my all-time favorite book reviews, “Plymouth Rocked: Of Pilgrims, Puritans, and Professors,” in which Harvard historian Jill Lepore cast a critical eye on Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. (Here is The New Yorker article, though it may be paywalled.) Along the way, she considers who writes history, how and why. Lepore takes Philbrick, who trained as a journalist, to task for his uncritical reading of sources, which to her, resulted in a misleading, distorted history.

She acknowledged, though, that “History isn’t brain surgery. Even when it’s done poorly, it’s not fatal. Still, it can knock you down.” I think about this a lot when I’m working on a book.

And, relatedly, worth a weekly read is Black and White and Read All Over, which carries the marvelous subtitle “Where Scholarship Meets the Public.” The website is hosted by scholars Vaughn Joy and Ben Railton.

What I’m Reading

I didn’t quite finish Gayle Feldman’s Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built before it was due back at the library. I really enjoyed what I read, though, and the way she presented Cerf as a multi-faceted person.

Not the kind of novel I normally read, but Heartwood by Amity Gaige kept my interest all the way through.

What I’m Watching

Got through all six episodes of Fallen, a Swedish police procedural set in a cold case unit. The first season is on Prime via MHz for a limited time. MHz is also home to the excellent World War II series A French Village, a wrenching examination of occupation and collaboration.

On BritBox there’s been Dark Heart, interesting if disjointed, and the second season of After the Flood, which seems so long after the flood that I can’t really remember much from the first season.

Started the British version of Ghosts (Paramount+), and it’s amusing.

Finished this season of The Forsytes (PBS) and all the available episodes of Animal Control on Netflix.

What Else Is Happening

Very acceptable bowling this week.

(Bowling scene from The Big Lebowski)

Flowers continue to bloom in the gardens here at Southfork, the pear trees are budding, and even the smallest peony bush has shot up. The birds are very active and vocal, and chipmunks and rabbits keep racing through the back forty.

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

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

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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.