When I meet former students, the class I hear most about — and even from students who never had the class — is what I did when I taught Watership Down by Richard Adams in “Fantasy.” The class wasn’t let into the room until exactly 6pm when they found they had to crawl under a black curtain into a black room and underneath all the tables in the room, which formed the “Honeycomb” where the rabbits lived. We conducted the whole class in the dark, eating carrots and lettuce. A remarkable discovery: When we discussed the book, the students who rarely spoke up in class talked freely in the dark – I could tell them by their voices!
Recording family materials and memories
When people ask me about my writing all these family materials and how they should go about it, I tell them, especially kids and young students, to start right now keeping a journal and putting in interesting bits of what’s going on around them and what they think about these bits (their own thoughts and activities included, of course). Create scenes of action and speech. Also, ask their folks and sibs and neighbors and anybody old 🙂 THEIR memories and get them down. Of course, especially sibs won’t agree on details, but that’s part of the fun. And my dad always said, “Never spoil a good story for the facts.” So I confess, when I get conflicting stories, I choose the most likely or the most interesting, or as the author Robert Maxwell advises in his book Ancestors, “I use them both!”
More bread, please
My last blog mentioned bread. My mother didn’t bake bread, but we would walk over to the Big House for Gramma’s bread. Once, Craig, the youngest, got sent over just before supper; we waited and waited and waited for his return, and finally I was sent out to see what had happened. I found Craig midway between the two houses; he had made a hole in the side of the loaf and eaten out the entire insides.
…breadcrumb trail leads to gold
For Volume 4 of “THE ROUND BARN,” due out early next year, I’ve been scanning photos from (and also reading) newspaper coverage of Farm Progress Days, held on my Grandpa Dougan’s farm in 1961. Here and there, I ran across a mention of Alice in Dairyland. Well, as everyone who’s ever visited Jackie’s downstairs bathroom knows, who could be more perfectly
fitting in a story told by Jackie, than Alice?
fitting in a story told by Jackie, than Alice?
Curiosity well piqued, I turned to google, and found this intriguing (sub)header in the June 25th, 1961 edition of The Milwaukee Journal:
Really– being dry-eyed broke a precedent? Apparently so: it turns out that the role of Alice is Wisconsin’s Agricultural Ambassador, not bad for a “starter” job at age 19. No wonder it was worth mentioning that she kept it together! And look where it’s taken her: I found Miss Anderson’s current name on the Wisconsin Dept. of Agriculture website, and from there, learned that Carol Anderson Koby has a radio show out of Madison: ALL ABOUT LIVING.
Carol says, “These programs are built on the philosophy that age is not a
deterrent to being an active participant in a complex world. In fact, leading a full, productive, and happy life is an “ageless” concept.”
Yes indeed. What could be a better description of Jackie, at age 86, than
leading a full, productive, and happy life?
Naturally, I started listening immediately, and that’s how I found this audio program, which might be of particular interest to Jackie’s followers: TRANSFORM YOUR TRAVEL INTO A COMPELLING MEMOIR,
with guest Sarah White, who offers services and help for writers of personal stories at her website, First Person Productions. Sarah also has a blog:
True Stories Well Told, –definitely worth checking out.
For all of you who have been in any of Jackie’s classes (Family Stories writers, especially! give this show a listen!) over the past 40 years, I ask you– who could possibly be more perfectly fitting for the Alice in her story?
And to Carol and Sarah– thanks for all you do! Now, carry on.
Home for the Holiday
I have a story about Thanksgiving at the Big House: Grampa wanted everyone to know that everything on this table had been raised at the farm (we had three lovely baked chickens instead of a turkey). The squash, the potatoes, the milk and cream, of course, and the apples and pumpkins for the pies, etc. — Except my little brother made a comment about the salt, pepper and coffee; nobody paid him any attention. We did all our own baking from the flour, which came in huge sacks and made us sneeze when it was poured into the flour bin. The flour bin was important because it was where we all sat to watch the goings-on in the kitchen; my father would sit there and argue with Grandma about evolution until she was wild, waving her spoon and screaming, “We are NOT descended from monkeys!”
An Educated Man
When I was ten, I visited and got know my Kirk second cousins in Mason City, Iowa. Dorothy is the youngest, in ninth grade. I went to school with her, and pored over her Latin book. I was able to figure out the first several lessons. I decided I’d take Latin when I reached ninth grade.
Back at the Kirk house, I said, “Latin really makes you think!”
Dorothy said, “When I was in Wisconsin, Uncle Wesson said something to me about thinking. I wrote it down in my diary.”
“What?” I asked. “Can I read it?”
“I remember it,” Dorothy said. “We were talking about my future and where I wanted to go to college, and what I thought about life, things like that. And he asked me if I knew what an educated man was. I said ‘No, I don’t.’ He said, “An educated man is one who has taught his mind to think. And his hand to act. And his heart to feel.'”
I, too, thought that was worth writing down. It’s a description of Grampa himself.
Freak snowstorms and weather reports
Here’s another research story, which keeps writing fun. My brother, a doctor in Oregon, treated an elderly woman, Elsie, in the ER, and as she left, he said, “I love your Swiss accent–just like my Auntie Irmy.” The woman stopped, they talked with excitement–Auntie Irmy was Elsie’s sister and they had both worked on the Dougan farm! We kids called her sister “Auntie.” Irma’s first son was named after my uncle Trever, and her second, after my grandfather: “And Irma had to go to the hospital on a bobsled, it was a freak April snowstorm, and on Trever’s birthday!” Elsie said.
I had enough to write up a story about the bobsled trip, and I was currently studying my grandfather’s letters of 1921, which mentioned the baby’s birth, and also a freak snowstorm–but the dates didn’t match. It seemed an odd bit that Elsie would have remembered, if it hadn’t happened — so I looked up the weather following the baby’s birth. I found the freak snowstorm — really freak, it blocked all the roads — for the day that the baby came HOME to the farm from the hospital. So Elsie Did remember!
I called up that baby, now 80 years old, and he said he’d never heard about a bobsled, coming or going, when he was born. But my research proved Elsie’s story and her memory (almost) true. What a research pleasure!
Harvest of a Lifetime
Check out Corrine Frisch’s beautiful review of The Round Barn, Volume 3 in this week’s Illinois Times, here.
Found picture: “the sidewalk”
This picture (circa 1930) of “the sidewalk” was intended to be in Volume 3, but didn’t surface until after the book went to press
“…Jackie, perhaps six, experiences a kind of spiritual moment on that sidewalk. She’s coming back from Grama’s in the dark, there’s a moon overhead. Shadows are sharp. All the fields are so clear, so bright, so quiet, that something inside her demands response. She creates a ritual, turning first east, then north, then west, then south. She counts slowly to ten and lifts her face so that it is bathed in moonlight. With eyes closed she stands quite still till she is soaked through with radiance. She then gives a little skip and continues on to the lighted Little House.”
…from The Round Barn, Vol 3
govt follies poem #77
Here’s another poem I printed in the Illinois Times, in my regular column of the letters page. I’ve never thought of myself as a poet so I just write what I want about happenings, memories, etc, and my style is limited to my space—a column’s width and not very long. I’ve followed John Knoepfle’s lead in using no punctuation or caps except when really necessary. Some caps are necessary in this poem about a transaction between myself and my daughter who teaches in a Wisconsin high school:
——–
I recently sold my daughter my pickup
she changed title insurance got new
plates but didn’t bother to switch yet
there was still some illinois grace
period yesterday she opened the packet
found wisconsin had issued her
F U TRUCK she called me how can
I be a respectable high school reading
teacher driving F U TRUCK her friends
whoop think the state out of its mind no
surprise with government they’ll probably
change them if you ask but it’s a nuisance
I say why not fix a flap to hide the letters
when a cop stops you lift the leather ask
what he’d suggest or maybe get some paint
change the F to P the U to O then you’d be
P O TRUCK only piss off the post office
you’re F U full of good ideas says my kid
