Bo's Blog, Texas Travel and Minnesota, here we come!

This is summer on the homestead. what you can't see are the roses blooming profusely along the deer fence. But you can see the garden troughs, recycled from the cows we no longer have. They're the metal tanks to the left of the house. I'm looking forward to spending more time on the deck this year, just listening to the river and the birds.

I'm back from a book tour in Texas. Great fun and met many new fans and some faithful ones as well. One even drove 150 miles to attend a signing and two others drove nearly the same distance to share a lunch. The new independent store in Plano, TX called Legacy Books hosted my first signing there with wonderful participants who heard me talk about A Flickering Light.

Texans have big hearts and staying with writer friend Irene Sandell (River of the Arms of God and In a Fevered Land) made the time go quickly. I spoke at the Writer's Garret in Dallas and at the Heritage Village in Old City Park where the Aurora presentation was well-received. Seems there was a utopian community called La Reunion in the Dallas area about the same time as Aurora's origin. Small and connecting world.

By the way, Cindy (her nickname) Sandell has a signing this Saturday at Barnes and Noble in Plano, TX from 2a;oo-5:00. Stop by and say hi.

I'm back now, working on what I call my Oprah book. The working title is "Oprah Doesn't Know My Name" and it's about a writer seeking fame in all the wrong places. It's a departure from my historical novels but never fear, the sequel to A Flickering LIght will be out next April and it's been named: An Absence so Great.

Finally, Bo has begun a blog! It's at www.bodaciousbothedog.blogspot.com. I hope you'll visit now and again to get his side of the homestead story.

Happy writing for you out there and for those in Minnesota, we're coming soon! Please check my schedule at the website www.jkbooks.com. Thanks! Jane

The Work before the Harvest

I had intended to write this truly inspiring piece for you to announce my revitalized website designed by Stonecreek Media. I wanted my first memo to be truly inspiring. And I thought it might be.
Walking the dog yesterday in the morning brought me images of the stacks of hay taken from our alfalfa field lined up against the base of the ridge like green sugar cubes, one on top of the other. They reminded me of how much work had to go into getting them there: seeding the field last year; getting the Verminator (yes that’s what it’s called) to destroy the gophers; irrigating, irrigating, moving wheel lines and hand lines; keeping the tractor, swather and bailer ready to use. And then there are the days of actually cutting and baling and then picking the 75 pound bails up with the bale buggy and unloading them at the base of the hill.
Work before the harvest marks almost every endeavor. Many pitfalls have to be tended to as well. Will it rain on the hay when it’s down? The river ran higher than normal with episodes of very high water this spring that required we remove the pumps then put them back when the river level lowered. We used the internet to check the stream flow at places upriver to gauge whether we could put the pumps back or get ready to take them out yet again. We got through the first cutting and most of the second cutting before the swather lost a part (that we’re waiting for even now). We expect two more cuttings so it has to get repaired. Our neighbor is buying all that we have so there’s a contract that needs to be met. A contract. A commitment.
These are not unlike the work before the work of harvest in writing.
This has been a busy time of writing for me but also completing that early work. Researching for the next book. Revising for final edits for the current novel about my grandmother (A Flickering Light due out next April. Confirming quilt sizes and details for the quilt and craft book that goes to press the end of August. Preparing for September events –a retreat, a writer’s conference and a quilt-speaking event in Wisconsin, all had their time on my “to do” list this month. None of that looks a lot like “writing.”
Publishing issues, working with my team of agent, editors, sales people and more, played parts in my life this month. While in Florida I wasn’t actually “writing.” I attended a Christian writer’s retreat and a convention. Lynn Austin won the Christy for her fine historical novel A Proper Pursuit and I didn’t feel badly at all! It was a delight to have breakfast with her and to share in her acclaim. I was happy to be on the short list for best Historical Fiction, truly. I’ve hung my Christy Finalist medal on the wall already. Jerry had time with his daughter and family who joined us for the Christy banquet (and I shared a room with my agent and her associate across the street from Disneyland so we watched the fireworks each night. During the day I met with editors and marketing and publicity people and marveled that Floridians actually live year round in a place where when you leave an air-conditioned hotel and step outside your glasses steam up!
All those things can seem not like writing at all, right? Writing is that time when one gets to sit and dream and look out over the rimrocks and river but only for brief moments before becoming lost in the 1870s or 1910 and the lives of men and women who somehow seem to speak to us and keep us from being writers who feel life is solitary and lonely. I’m never less alone than when I’m writing, if that makes sense. Writing is getting to see your book or article in print, right? Writing is when you’re gifted with a letter from someone who read your book or article or heard you speak who says what they just read was your best ever and that what you had to say “spoke specifically to me.”
it’s that work before harvest, the tedious, daily, get up and repeat, cope and adapt kind of work that makes it possible. I must remind myself of that sometimes.
My little words line up to make a sentence and then a page and then a chapter and then a book reminding me of that stack of hay ever-growing until completion that later will be consumed (by cows , not ours thank goodness!) and people will be fed from the result. A very agrarian image but one every one of us who wishes for a harvest understands. The daily tasks aren’t always easy or pretty or inspiring but it’s what we do if we’re to meet our “contracts” however we have made them, with whomever we have made those commitments.
That’s what I thought I’d be writing about, encouraging you all to keep going, toward that harvest.
Instead I’m sitting here with a black eye, bruised forehead, cheek and nose, a black and blue swollen thumb, skinned knee and a scrape on my shoulder that looks that that tubby tabby of 44 pounds who was on the news yesterday used my right arm for a scratching post. And my head hurts. And my glasses that actually survived with lens intact have been redone by Jerry to get the bows somewhat parallel and the nose pieces back into place but they aren’t fitting well. They’re trifocals so we’ll have to get them officially adjusted or I’ll be looking through the wrong places…which is probably why I have the headache.
We leave for an event in Portland tonight and it’s our 32nd wedding anniversary so we’re going to do something to celebrate afterwards though I don’t know what, now. I hope my head stops hurting. Tomorrow Jerry will get to meet a reader-writer-turned-friend I met back in St. Louis at a signing last year who flew out for the Willamette Writers conference hoping to connect with an agent for his own book.
So here’s how the egg-plant color of my eye came about: Bo, our wire-haired pointing Griffon is involved. Out of pity I took him outside last night to tend to his daily duties even though he probably didn’t need to do that. It was late. Ten-thirty. But he’d been whining and pestering and I figured that’s what he wanted. I put the choke collar on him and the leash and we walked down the ramp from the swing-deck of the house just fine. But then a streak passed in front of us (a chipmunk who has been teasing Bo often hiding up in the frame of the pick-up truck where Bo can see him but not reach him. We’ve seen a lot more of those rascals since Diego our cat died). Anyway, Bo bolted. I jerked, grabbed a second twist on the leash (big mistake) and tried to pull him back but instead he pulled me forward, right into the ground, shoulder and face first while the leash twisted free but not before twisting my left thumb.
Bo happily chased his chipmunk neither caring nor noticing that I lay there, head throbbing, glasses somewhere in the darkness beyond the porch light. I shouted for Jerry who heard me inside the house and came out to rescue the glasses and help me up. Bo circled the yard a few times and then did decide to do his duty which enabled me to get his leash and bring him back in. He’s clueless of my current discomfort.
So instead of merely packing for our anniversary weekend (that my friend says sounds more like work to her than play since it involves writing events and that I really do need to learn how to play more!) I’m coping. Changing directions quickly without a lot of friction as my infamous coping saw reminds me.
I’ll consider this interlude – the headache and bent glasses – as yet another piece of the work before the work knowing that there are always glitches, always things to distract us. But most of all, knowing that I have much to be grateful for. I didn’t break a bone. The lenses stayed in the frames. The dog didn’t run too far away. Jerry heard me shout. Looks to me like all in all a very good outcome. Jerry’s seen me with a black eye before and he loves me anyway. What could be a better anniversary present than that!
I hope you enjoy the new website design. Hopefully we’ll be updating more frequently now. Please check my schedule for events near you and thank you all for making my writing life one filled with treasures of connections that keep me ever faithful toward that harvest. Warmly, Jane

Italy and the next book

Italy was Bella! We had a wonderful time, walking everywhere (except when we took the bus or the train). On Easter in Sorrento, the church bells start clanging at midnight and ring on the hour with fireworks at noon. At the hotel, each room was served a lovely traditional Easter bread shaped like a cross (I didn’t eat it but my traveling friend, Sandy, did and announced it bella!). Behind our hotel a series of steps, hundreds, made their way up the steep mountain side and at different landings were the fourteen stations of the cross. Someone had placed a flower in a vase at each station and at the top there were bouquets of flowers inside the small chapel there. We could see out over the Bay of Napoli to Vesuvius (we could also see Vesuvius from our hotel room window, just lying in our beds!) and view the town of Sorrento with its red-tiled roofs and olive and orange groves throughout the city. Easter morning we kept walking up along a path that eventually took us to another road and there we walked another hour or more past olive groves and orchards where both oranges and lemons grew on the same trees. We carried our umbrellas that day but didn’t need them. It was truly a lovely day of newness all around and I felt so blessed to be spending Easter Sunday in Italy.
At the noon meal later, the hotel brought in a huge (the size of a five year old child) chocolate egg. They then cracked it open and we all got sheets of dark chocolate as dessert for our meal. In Sorrento, they also have a custom where smaller chocolate eggs (the size of footballs) are filled with trinkets, little bracelets or toys for children, and the stores the day before were filled with these presents wrapped like we wrap roses with colorful cellophane paper. Easter Monday is also a holiday there. And by the way, the lemons are the size of grapefruits. We learned that they’re on steroids, really, and people buy them for the novelty of the size but they also cut them open, take out the pulp and put in lemon sorbet that is then frozen and the dessert is served in that huge lemon half with a tiny piece of chocolate for color. I loved that sorbet! It didn’t have flour in it either the way gelato does.
Good Friday was a special day as well as most of the small towns held processions to the church carrying a statue of the crucified Christ. We arrived late on Good Friday and were caught in the traffic jams following those processions. Believe me, the streets are very narrow in places and our driver knew the back roads or we’d still be there waiting for all the little Smart Cars and scooters and three-wheel vehicles to make their way through the maze of alleys and roads so narrow I could stand in the middle and almost touch both sides of the walls lining some of them!
But it was the people and their dogs we loved the best! Of course we were meeting people from around the world, especially Europe, at the conference; but the community of Sorrento was filled with warm and helpful people too. No one every groused at us when we had to ask for directions or asked what something was. I ate gluten-free and only had one bad day (and that might have been from the excess chocolate!) We took some side trips along the Almafi coast, the Isle of Capri (pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable, Cap) and into Rome and even there we figured out how to adapt when the bus we’d planned to take back to Sorrento decided to leave two hours before their printed schedule. So we took the trains and walked back up to our hotel after 10:00 PM feeling very safe (and escorted by some of the street-savvy dogs who show up often to check out the scrap-department. Sadly, we left them few!)
I told Jerry our next project should be to photograph “The Dogs of Sorrento” as they were many and varied but also well-behaved. And it would get us back to Italy!
Maybe I was thinking dogs so much because while I was gone our old lab, Brody, had another stroke and lost control of his functions and Jerry had to have him put him down. I’d said a good good-bye to him before I left thinking that at 14, he might not make it many more months. He didn’t. He was such a good dog and we’d had him at least three years longer than we’d thought we would by giving him what we called “Happy Pills” for his arthritis and other pains. He eventually stopped going on walks with me and with Bo, but before then, he’d walk as far as the two trees that were on the property when we bought it, hackberry trees, growing on the ridge below the house. He’d lie there in the shade and wait until we made the river loop and came back by to pick him up, often having to get the six-wheeler so he could just step in and ride back up the hill. Brody came to us when Mariah did the first time, when she was seven. She’ll be 21 this year so we’ve had a long and loving time with Brody. He’ll be missed.
My sessions at the conference went well. Talking about Enduring Stories or The Seven Thoughts that Hold us Back and how we can transform them, appear to be universal issues. The women from Qatar spoke to me afterwards (there were three of them attending the conference) about how fear and anxiety and unworthiness have to be addressed as their country undertakes an amazing commitment to education bringing six American universities in to provide degrees in medicine, engineering, architecture and more at the upper end while committing to extensive early childhood education and on up to stop what they called the “brain drain” of their countrymen and women who leave to study abroad and often don’t come back. They hope to educate their citizens there and keep them there to continue to advance this small Middle Eastern nation rich in natural gas reserves. The head of their ministry of education is a woman whom these women said was truly a model for them. It was a delight to discover that the material I had to offer, the material that is both a part of my mental health life and my writing life and homestead, too, can speak to people on the other side of the world, about changing how we feel and changing the lives around us by how we live our own.
The main presenter was Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind man to climb all seven of the world’s highest mountains including Mt. Everest. His presentation brought both tears and laughter along with awe of the power of the human spirit to dream big, to gather up a team of remarkable people (19 of the 21 person team also summitted, the greatest number of team members to do so on any expedition) and to learn to reach further and higher and to inspire those around them to seek greater heights as well. He also showed video clips of some of the challenges of the climb; but also of new technologies that showed that the brain continues to “see” even when the eyes don’t and he is testing a device where he holds a sensor on his tongue which is connected to a computer carried on his back that sends him messages where he can “see” to play tic tac doe with his daughter and see well enough to catch her cheating! He did have three O’s in a row before her three X’s! Ah, the amazing brain.
His story also spoke to me of the work I did with families challenged by developmental disabilities and several other presenters spoke about educational successes around the world in serving students with special needs. The head of the Perkins School for the Blind also presented and gave a horrifying statistic that over 6 million blind children world-wide are not involved in any educational programs because in many countries they do not believe they are entitled to education. Through Erik’s non-profit foundation, he took six blind Tibetan students on a rock-climbing expedition. Imagine the soaring of their spirit to know that they could indeed learn to do things that even sighted people (like me!) quiver at doing, climbing some huge rock, and be successful at it!
So this April, I hope you’re ready to see how eariler inspiring moments and beliefs of my life and Emma’s history got translated into A Mending at the Edge. It’ll be out in two weeks! You’ll be getting a postcard if you’re on my mailing list and there are a number of events where I hope to see you including the coast launch of the book sponsored by Time Enough Books in Ilwaco, WA, not far from where Emma and Christian lived their lives (at the Heritage Museum there, April 20th at 2:00 PM) and of course in Aurora itself on Mother’s Day at 2:00 PM. A new exhibit is opening that weekend as well “All About Emma” and I believe there’ll be tours of some of the museum sites including the house that Emma once lived in. So if you’re in the Northwest….come visit.
I’m scheduled for a number of blog tours during the next weeks. I just have to figure out how to let you all know that! Hmm, maybe posting them on my own blog? You think? I’m still getting the hang of all this!
We’ll be back on the Oregon Coast on April 26th in little Toledo, OR at 1:00 at the Methodist Church there. We’re (Jerry and me) invited back by the Serendipity Book Group that’s been meeting for many years and one of their members, Dixie McKay, is the mom of the woman who invited me to Sorrento as part of the European Council of International Schools. Her daughter is second from the left in this photograph (with new friends Fran (on the far left) and Adelle, next to me, also presenters at the conference). This was at the gala on Saturday night where we were serenaded by waiters who sang so beautifully they could have been on stage. Maybe during the day, they are! Dixie, the mom, rounded up close to a hundred people in that little church the last time we came. We hope we can repeat it!
Very soon, the first chapter of A Mending at the Edge will be posted on my website, www.jkbooks.com I hope you’ll be interested enough to want to read more and then this fall, will also want to see photographs both old and new of the quilts and crafts for which the Aurora colony was known regionally in the book Aurora: An American Experience in Quilt and Craft. We hope through the photographic non-fiction book to let people around the country (maybe the whole world!) know of this group of Christians who sometimes stumbled and fell but who picked themselves up and did their best to live out their Christian beliefs including the Diamond Rule, where they hoped to make others’ lives better than their own. It’s a worthy effort to pursue and this month of spring I hope to do something each day that just might make another’s life better than mine. It will be a challenge for I am humbled by the richness of my own life.
I hope you’re humbled by your own as well. Ciao for now!