How true does fiction have to be?

I’m reading an interesting book right now—or let’s say the concept behind the book is interesting. I really haven’t gotten far enough into it to be sure about the novel. Titled Mary Coin, it braids a story from the early twentieth century with a contemporary one. The contemporary story seems to be pure fiction, but the historical segment is based on the life of the woman in Dorothea Lange’s iconic Depression photo that she called “Migrant Mother.” A woman, obviously aged beyond her years with work and weather and children, sits on the back of an ancient, broken-down car, surrounded by children with an infant in her lap.

Lange took the photo in 1938 but the woman’s identity was not known until the 1970s. Lange was known for careful record-keeping, but the day she took this she was in a hurry and just happened on the scene accident. The woman was Florence Thompson, although through several marriages she had several last names. Probably at least part Native American, she was a migrant worker, moving from Oklahoma to California. Along the way she had numerous children and several husbands and ended her days living in a mobile park in California, although her children had bought a house for her. None of that, however, relates to my short story or, as far as I can tell, to the novel I’m reading.

Way back when I was inspired by that iconic photo to write a short story titled, “Sue Ellen Learns to Dance.” I was sort of proud of it and gratified when it won a Saddleman (Western Heritage) Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. The award is in the form of a bronze statue depicting a man on horseback. When the emcee handed me the statue, on a glittery awards night, he (It may have been one of President Gerald Ford’s sons—he was there one night), he said, “It’s heavy.” And it was, but it’s one of my prize possessions. I went on to use the story as the lead in my only collection of short stories, Sue Ellen Learns to Dance and Other Stories.

I have not gotten far into the novel, but I can tell that author Marisa Silver sees a far different woman in the photo than I did. Still I am intrigued by the concept of using a piece of art as the springboard for fiction. And the braiding of past and present reminds me of one of my favorite novels, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Stegner took the journals of artist Mary Halleck Foote as the basis for the novel. Foote left her New York career for the rough life of a miner’s wife in the camps of California. Stegner was roundly criticized for having taken liberties with the facts of Foote’s life and journals, introducing a love affair and the death of a child. But Stegner’s book too braids past and present. And it raises the question of how much leeway novelists—or short story writers—can take with the facts of history.

Some are more devoted to historical accuracy than others—and I admit I have not always been a devotee. In historical novels, if there was a gap, I wove in what I imagined might have happened. And in the first short story I ever wrote, I took extreme liberties with the truth. The story, “That Damn Cowboy!” was inspired by artist and sculptor Rufus Zogbaum, a neighbor and, in his mind, rival of Frederick Remington in upstate New York. When Zogbaum’s son rushed in to report that Mr. Remington had sculpted a perfect bucking cowboy, Zogbaum was, so the story goes, furious. But I turned it into a short story set in the West and told by an old woman, the artist’s son, who has cared for him all these years and nursed his fantasies. For a brief period, I was probably the world’s reigning authority on Zogbaum, except maybe for his grandson who I once met, just because no one else knew anything about him.

So tonight I’m left with a couple of thoughts. One is that I should blatantly advertise my short story collection more, so if you want to check it out, you can do so at Sue Ellen Learns to Dance and Other Stories - Kindle edition by Alter, Judy. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. It’s only ninety-nine cents if you read ebooks. But my other thought is that I should revisit my Zogbaum files and maybe do something with them.

Meantime I will forge ahead on Mary Coin.

Dreaming of food

 

Boeuf Bourguignonne
The book I'm reading about France opens with a mouth-watering
description of a simmering pot of 
boeuf bourguignonne

With the newest Irene in Chicago Culinary Mystery not yet in print—almost, watch for it, please, in mid-April—my mind is already turning to the next book in the series. At least that’s what I inferred from my dream last night. I dream often and vividly, and it’s not unusual for me to remember a dream, so that part wasn’t significant. What stayed with me today was the question the dream posed about food habits. There will, of course, definitely be food in the next Irene book—after all they are culinary mysteries. But what direction will that take? I don’t know.

In my dream, I was someplace with an old friend, and she told me she didn’t drink much water because there’s bad stuff in it. I squelched my impulse to preach on the importance of drinking a lot of water. I was also reminded of Jacob when he was about six and we used to go to the Neighborhood Grill every Tuesday night for supper with a group of neighbors. The custom unfortunately phased out due to my hip surgery, pandemic, and Jacob ageing out to the point he didn’t think his elders were that interesting anymore. But one night, before all that, when I asked what he wanted, he looked at me like I was so dumb and asked for his usual: grilled cheese. When I asked if he wanted fries, he said yes. When everyone was almost through eating, I noticed he hadn’t eaten his fries. “Jacob, aren’t you going to eat your fries?” He shook his head. “They’re bad for you.” Pause. “Can I have a cupcake?”

What I did say to my waterless friend was, “You could get hit by a truck tomorrow. Enjoy the present moment.” And therein, to me, lies the description of two culinary camps: deny yourself some pleasures to be safe or indulge to enjoy life. With my passion for chocolate and wine, I surely fall in the latter category. And so do the foodies in my books.

So perhaps the next Irene mystery (tentatively titled Missing Irene) will pit Irene (and Henny, inevitably) against someone with extreme health concern regarding food—as one of my sons once said to me, “too granola.” All I know is that the next Irene begins in a French-style café in Chicago.

As background I’m reading Murder Visits a French Village by Susan Shea. It’s the story of a young Manhattan widow who decides to go to France and renovate the decrepit, abandoned chateau her husband bought as a surprise for her. So far, no murder but the story is loaded with the atmosphere of a small village and with plenty of French phrases thrown in. Shea skillfully eaves the translations into her narrative, something I try to do with the Irene books. I studied French one year in high school (Latin two years but it is long forgotten) and had to pass a fluency test in graduate school. I can now barely stumble through the basics, but it’s fun. I’m wondering if Henny will ever follow Irene to France—I think my limited knowledge will preclude that.

Switching subjects, but still thinking about food, Sophie has the most amazing internal time clock. I’ve noticed the last few days that if she wakes at say, 6:45, she’ll go out and when she comes in, I’ll reward her with a tiny snippet of cheese. Then she’ll let me nap until about 8:00. But if she sleeps until 8:00, as she did this morning, she refuses to go out no matter how wide I open the door. She’s waiting for her full breakfast.

In the afternoons, both of us nap, but promptly at four o’clock, give or take a couple of minutes, she’s at my bedside reminding me it’s time for her snack of kibble.

And by 5:30, she’s asking for dinner—that kibble doesn’t stay with her long. If I’m alone in the cottage, she’ll lie on the floor and look at me long and hard as though she can stare me into action. But if Jordan comes in, she’s sure it’s past dinner time and begins to bark and demand. Similarly, if there is happy hour company, she makes her wishes known early, like 5:00 or 5:30.

And finally, she likes to end the day outside, but at eleven o’clock, she comes in. I guess all us girls need a routine. I know I do. How about you?

Bon appetit! je te souhaite bonne nuit.

 

Living in a fictional world

 

The Old Neighborhood Grill
a very real place in Kelly O'Connell's 
fictional world

“Life is real, life is earnest/Dust thou art, to dust returnest.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sometimes had a dour outlook on life, but his words too often ring true. Real life is sometimes earnest and complicated and difficult—and you want to find an escape a place to hide. Readers and authors have such a place—the alternate worlds created in fiction.

On the listserv of Guppies, (stands for Going to be Published, the international electronic chapter of Sisters in Crime), a well-published author recently lamented that she was writing the last book in a series, and it made her sad because she hated to leave the people and the world she had created. Others chimed in, some saying they worried about the future of characters they’d come to love. Someone else assured that it's okay if you leave the characters in a good place with positive outcomes ahead for their lives. Even if you have to write it only for yourself, you may want to have those characters find the job they have yearned for, marry, have children, take a cruise. Whatever would make their lives happy.

I can testify to that. In my Kelly O’Connell Mysteries (my very first mystery and first series), I created a world built around the neighborhoods I know—Berkeley and Fairmount in Fort Worth—with landmarks such as Lily B. Clayton Elementary, The Old Neighborhood Grill, Lili’s Bistro, and lots of the Craftsman houses that dot Fairmount. And I peopled it with characters I could like—Kelly, whose a single mom (one of my daughters said it was a  highly autobiographical novel), Mike Shandy, her policeman love interest, Keisha, her girl Friday who has the sixth sense and is irrepressible.

Perhaps the greatest compliment I ever had as a writer is that those people were someone you would meet in your local grocery store. And one reader wrote that she thought she saw Kelly going into the Old Neighborhood Grill. Those comments meant, to me, that I had succeeded in creating a believable world.

The Kelly O’Connell series ended a few years ago. I had felt it winding down, partly because I let Kelly’s daughters, who were essential to many of the stories, age out. But still today, sometimes my mind wanders back to Kelly and I think of a plot hook that might work. The woman who “saw” Kelly going into the local restaurant still occasionally posts, “I miss Kelly.”

I’ve moved on to other series, other characters, and perhaps that part of the writing life—learning to let go when it’s time. Somehow, there are lessons there for us in daily life, though I’m not sure how to put them together—but having fictional worlds, if only in your daydreams, is not a bad thing. But there’s also a point at which you have to let them go and face reality. Maybe all of that is where the label “escape reading” came from. I admit tht a lot of time I think my mysteries are escape reading.

One of the things I keep reading about is what kind of footprint we each want to leave on the earth—not just our environmental footprint, but for what do we want to be known? I’ve long felt it important to contribute to the world in some way, but I am not a firefighter rushing into burning buildings (guess what’s on the TV in the background as I write) or a physician, saving lives, or even a teacher, helping to spread knowledge. I write for people’s amusement.

I have a friend, a much better and more popular novelist than I am, who tells me to banish such thoughts. By providing escape and entertainment and maybe a bit of enlightenment, I am improving the quality of some lives. I hope it’s true. I hope the fictional worlds of Kelly O’Connell or Kate Chamber in the Blue Plate Murders series or even wacky Irene in my current series carry readers away from the earnestness of their daily lives into a fictional world where, for some time, however short, they are free and happy and safe.

Speaking of making a contribution to the world—and of neighborhood institutions, I can’t help loudly cheering for the surgical team at Fort Worth’s Cook Children’s Hospital who today, in a first for the hospital, successfully separated cojoined twins. The baby girls are only a few months old and are tonight doing well. What a wonderful milestone. I’m in awe, but I also couldn’t help wondering if this provided a moral dilemma for the pro-lifers. If every life is God’s creation and sacrosanct, then perhaps God meant those babies to be forever joined, and surgeons were going against God’s will by separating them. I don’t for a moment believe any of that, but I can’t help wondering what the extremists among us think.[

Meantime, blessings on those babies and their parents who tonight must be enormously relieved. And thanks be to God for skilled surgeons—and fictional worlds.

Thoughts on fiction and fictional thoughts

 

There’s a new website, shepherd.com, where authors are encouraged to post about their favorite books in categories of their own choosing. Some choose books by topic, others by author. There’s a page, for instance, for the best five books with quirky detectives from around the world, and another for novels that get you inside the minds of historical figures. How about a page for books on good and evil? Or the best books for yoga teachers who feel stuck in a rut? Something for everyone, and a great site for browsing.

I submitted a page (five books plus one of my own, per the rules) on outrageous cozies, and it went live this week. Traditional mysteries have many sub-genres--the sci-fi mystery, the thriller, the hard-boiled/noir, the police procedural, the historical, and of course the cozy. Even within the cozy, there are subdivisions, like the noir cozy which is a real contradiction in terms. So why now the outrageous cozy?  I don’t know that it is yet a recognized sub-genre, but I’m working to make it so. The graphic above is for my page, and the link is https://shepherd.com/best-books/outrageous-cozy-mysteries. I hope you find some outrageously good reading in those books. Of course, I included the first of my own outrageous series, Saving Irene.

A friend in a small, online writer’s group recently commented that it amused her that I speak of my characters are though they are real people—sort of like they’re in the same room with me. It’s true, I feel that way about them. Irene and Henny, the narrator, live with me all the time when I’m working on one of their books.

Currently, Irene and her French entourage—Chance, Jean Claude, and daughter Gabrielle—are in Fort Worth for Christmas, visiting Henny’s family. The mere idea of putting the diva chef, with her faux French ways, in the middle of Cowtown is alive with possibilities, and I’m having fun. In line with my political beliefs, I supported a fund-raising campaign titled, “Mystery Loves Democracy.” (Two years ago, “Mystery Loves Georgia” contributed a hefty amount to the campaigns of senators Joel Osoff and Raphael Warnock.) As part of my commitment, I auctioned the right to name a character in my work-in-progress. The woman who bought the right chose to name the character after a friend, and so Kathy Fenton entered my story.

I was about to introduce Kathy as a character when I realized her backstory had already been told. All I had to do was go back and change her name. Once that was done, Kathy added yet another complication to the plot and another name on the list of possible murder suspects. (For me, that’s sort of how writing goes--as I write, ideas pop into my head, and they generally work better than if I had planned them ahead.)

But honest to gosh, when I renamed that earlier character, I thought to myself, “I must remember to tell Henny that I’ve made that change.” I had to slap myself upside the head to remember Henny is a fictional character and only knows what’s on the page. She won’t remember that first name at all. But that’s how real Henny had become to me.

This morning Jean sent me a link to an article about the reading habits of Ken Burns. His reading is so wide and so deep that it’s humbling. I realized once again it’s a tiny, tiny corner of the book world that I inhabit. Burns has a great familiarity with the Russian writers, refers casually to people I’ve never heard of, and cited a long list of those that I have never read but should have, such as Gabriel García Márquez. I was more comfortable with his admiration for Mark Twain and Willa Cather—he was getting closer to my comfort zone. I can’t help recalling that my first adult novel, Mattie, was panned by one reviewer because Cather had told the story better. I didn’t know enough to know my work was derivative, but I still think any comparison to Cather is a compliment.

And speaking of American greats in the literary field, this is a bonus week, with new books due from Cormac McCarthy (The Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men--it’s been a long time since he had a new book), mystery writer Lee Child (the Jack Reacher books), Jude Deveraux (historical romance, including the many volumes about the Montgomery/Taggert family), and Patricia Cornwell (crime writer best known for books featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta). Surely something for every taste from these literary lions.

 

 

The adventures of Irene, the diva chef

Balancing this week of sad news and heavy worries, I have good news—at least from my point of view. I spent the week proofreading Finding Florence, the third Irene in Chicago Culinary Mystery. And I’m glad to report that Irene will be back in Chicago July 5^th, providing Chance’s jet brings her as planned. I may be delighted to report this, but Henny is frantic. Here’s a taste of what Irene’s up to this time:

Irene is obsessed. And Henny’s life is a mess.

Irene has flown to Chicago from France in high style – the private jet owned by her longtime, on again-off again-on again amour, the handsome but mysterious billionaire Chance Charpentier. Her infamous “voices” have told her that something is horribly amiss with a person dear to her.  When she arrives, she learns that a death notice for Florence Sherman, her sometime friend, previous neighbor, and member of an historic Chicago family, has been published in the Sun-Times. Once Irene discovers her friend’s body is missing, the diva chef refuses to leave Chicago until she solves the mysterious disappearance. But, with Irene in Chicago, Henny’s successful “From My Mother’s Kitchen” TV cooking show and her precious time with Patrick, husband of her dreams, are seriously compromised by Irene’s insistence that finding Florence trumps any other concerns. So Henny struggles to balance Irene’s demands with the rest of her life and to find Florence, dead or alive, so Irene will go back to France.

Irene’s certainty that the past holds the key to Florence’s disappearance brings in a bit of Chicago history, and food references season the text. An appendix of recipes from both Irene and Henny’s mom is attached.

 I’ve had a lot of fun with Irene, Henny, and their friends and lovers. In these difficult times, they provide a real contrast, letting me escape to an easier world. In fact, they let me escape to the neighborhood of my childhood—Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side, where everything is different from my days there but in many way still the same. Henny’s world is contemporary but pre-pandemic and politics just isn’t a subject.

Food is a big subject, ranging from Irene’s faux French (she does cook French dishes, but she just doesn’t have the Cordon Bleu background she claims) to Henny’s recipes from her mom’s Texas kitchen. With the latest book, you can cook anything from Coq au Vin to King Ranch Casserole.

Love is a big subject too. After two installments, this third book finds Henny deliriously happily married to the man of her dreams. Patrick not only loves her, he curbs what are sometimes her wildest instincts and her even wilder tongue. And Irene? The domineering diva is a woman in love—just look at her on the cover. The object of her affections is Chance Charpentier, the billionaire with whom she had a daughter twenty years earlier. Like Patrick, Chance is a balance for Irene. You’ll fall in love with him, as I have.

Cooking as a career is front and center in Irene’s stories, as told by Henny. Irene now runs a small café in a small French town near Aix-en-Provence. It is the kind of place where the old men go to drink wine, eat a hearty gibbolet with duck, and tell tales—until Irene calls their wives to come get them. Henny, on the other hand, has a TV show with a national network, “Recipes from my mom’s kitchen.” She works hard and sees her star rising—until Irene comes into town and demands her attention.

The Irene/Henny adventures, which Henny tells in her own, slightly snarky, slightly insecure voice, began in Saving Irene, when Henny was gofer for Irene’s cooking show—and ended, with Patrick, saving Irene’s spoiled daughter, Gabrielle, from a kidnapper. Irene subsequently decamped for France, but in Irene in Danger, she came back to Chicago for Henny and Patrick’s wedding—and nearly caused the cancellation of the wedding by getting involved with some unsavory characters.

I had so much fun with these stories that I already know the fourth one—Irene simply has to go to Texas. Can’t you see the clash of cultures? And the cover art? Irene in a Stetson! That’s another thing—I love the cover art of these books. For the first one, I knew what I wanted—Irene front and center, in a toque, with a background of typical apartment dwellings in Hyde Park. Having Irene as a central figure worked so well that we put her against the gilt of the Palmer House Hotel in the second book. And now for the third—don’t you think she looks like a woman in love? And of course that’s the wonderful skyline of Chicago’s North Shore. Thanks to designer Amy Balamut for the covers and the formatting.

Watch for Finding Florence July 5^th on Amazon!

Fiction as disguised memoir

 

Georgia Arbuckle Fix (and Mattie) did not consider herself attractive.

“Write what you know” is classic advice to beginning writers. Sometimes it’s true. I probably shouldn’t write about traveling to Antarctica because I’ve never done it, and no amount of research will make me warm to the subject (okay, bad pun). The flip side of that advice though is the general belief that creative writers pour some of themselves into everything they write. I’ve had a strong lesson in both these truths this week.

I’ve been reading proof of Mattie, my 1988 novel that will be reprinted by Two Dot in coming months. First published by Doubleday in 1988, it tells of the life, career, and loves of Mattie Armstrong, pioneer woman physician on the vast and bare prairies of western Nebraska in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The novel is loosely based on the life of Dr. Georgia Arbuckle Fix, who was the first woman physician in Nebraska and who really did leave Omaha to heal the widely scattered settlers in sod huts on the prairie. But don’t attribute everything in the novel to Dr. Fix. That the novel won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America as the best novel of the year, was high praise, especially in a category one man angrily declared was for the men’s action adventure novel.  The funny news about the original Doubleday hardback is that it was in their Double D Western line, which sold mostly, I’m told, by subscription to prison libraries. The digital edition, indie published by me at something like ninety-nine cents, sold well for years, making it the bestseller of any book I’ve written. Now it will be in a hardback again.

If you can’t attribute the fictional story to the real Dr. Arbuckle, you can attribute a lot of Mattie’s story to the real Judy Alter. Re-reading it, after all these years, I realized that in some ways I had written the memoir that I was always reluctant to attempt. When she was first settles on the prairie, Mattie meets a charming, charismatic man with a sad story about being disowned by his wealthy family back in St. Louis. Against the advice of her brother and stepfather, Mattie marries Em Jones, who turns out to be, as we would say in Texas, all hat and no cattle. In 1964, against the advice of my family, I married a medical student and followed him to Texas (the Texas part worked out well). The two stories are variations on a theme, but it’s all there—the sweep-you-off-your-feet joy, the domesticity, the quarrels over money and child-raising (I had a few more children than Mattie’s lone daughter), the growing estrangement, and the final betrayal. My ex and I divorced in 1982; the book was published in 1988. I had had time to process, but I don’t think at the time that I realized that I was writing my own experiences into Mattie’s life.

In her forties, Mattie Armstrong developed an unlikely relationship with the uneducated but skilled workman who single-handedly built her a two-story sanitarium on the prairie. Here’s a spoiler: the relationship was never meant to last, and he rides away, both of them filled with regret for what could not have worked on a permanent basis. As I was writing the last pages of this book, I was in the midst of the one serious relationship I had after my divorce. I clearly remember sitting at my desk and pecking out the scene where he leaves—and the realization came like a load of bricks that the man I thought loved me—and who I thought I loved—was going to leave. As it was for Mattie, so it was for me—decisions turned out to be right, and a more than satisfactory life followed.

I have talked before about my reluctance to write a memoir. Oh, I wrote Cooking My Way Through Life with Kids and Books, but it was a surface memoir, hung on a peg of cooking. I don’t think in it I came to grips with the emotions involved on my journey. And I have since shied away from memoir.  With minor variations, this novel is the memoir of two significant periods in my life. I’m still processing that realization.

My children may say this is TMI, as they put it, but it’s something I felt I needed to say. And one other thing: Mattie’s husband was Em, short for Emory; the builder was Eli (okay I hadn’t yet learned the lesson not to give two characters names starting with the same letter). The original dedication to the book was “For Em and Eli/They know who they are.” Em is dead now, and I suspect Eli maybe too. But I have asked the editors to restore the original dedication, replacing the one now that says it is for my daughters. They have enough books dedicated to them. I want them to know how close this story hits to home.

 

 

 

 

 

Trees, flowers, and memoirs

    

My flowers and Jordan's Little Red Riding Hood basket

The neighbors behind my cottage are adding a screened porch to their house, a pool, and a cabana/guest house. Behind me is close—the cabana will maybe be ten or twelve feet from the wall of my cottage. These neighbors are good, responsible citizens, and they have bent over backwards to assure I am not disturbed. I am not. The only time noise would bother me is when I want to sleep in the afternoon, and my bedroom is pretty much like a cave.

 But there is one noise that sounds worse than scratching on a blackboard to me, and that’s the saw that tree trimmers use. So this afternoon, just as I lay down to nap, someone started to take out a whole tree. Have you ever tried to sleep with that high-pitched whining? I closed the bedroom doors, confining Sophie with me. That worked for about two seconds, and then she protested. I think she must be claustrophobic, because when I opened the sliding door into the kitchen and told her she could do what she wanted, she settled down and slept next to my bed. Serendipitously, the whining noise stopped, and I did get a nap.

Jordan made up for my interrupted nap by bringing me flowers. She stopped at Central Market for the feta I need tomorrow. After declaring she didn’t want to run around looking for a lot of things, she confessed she overbought—including flowers, Cotswald cheddar, a new flavor of yogurt, and other delicacies.

She was cooking dinner tonight since I wanted to attend a six o’clock Zoom meeting, but all the ingredients for supper—chicken/pesto pasta—were in my fridge. So she loaded up a basket and announced, “I am Little Red Riding Hood.” The picture above combines her basket and the flowers she brought me.

The Zoom meeting tonight, sponsored by Story Circle Network, featured two authors—one a novelist, the other a memoirist, talking about the requirements, advantages, and drawbacks of each genre. I have, as I’ve mentioned, been interested in memoir in a sort of distant way. I always thought a memoir was the story of your life. My first novel, After Pa Was Shot, was fiction based on a memoir by the mother of a friend. The woman, probably in her eighties in the fifties or sixties, sat down at a typewriter, wrote “The Story of My Life,” and created a fascinating manuscript. But these days some people are writing several memoirs. The thought today is that memoir covers one episode, say three to five years. I can’t wrap my head about that. I want to look at the whole of my life put together. One author tonight said if you write about your life, as Michele Obama has done, it’s biography—I would correct that to autobiography. But the difference to me is that autobiography recites the facts; memoir invests those facts with emotion.

Both authors have written books about adoption, which should have hit home to me—but didn’t, because their experiences were so different. Julie McGue’s memoir, Twice a Daughter, is about her experience as an adoptee seeking information about her birth family so that she might have some family health history. The Sound Between the Notes, by Barbara Lynn Probst, is a novel based on her experiences with her adopted daughter and the daughter’s affinity for music and the health history that intervened. One great line: “You can’t create music when you are angry.”

But both are about searches for birth parents, and that’s foreign to me. My four children have never expressed any desire to search, even in the face of such health concerns as epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, and possible effects of maternal drug use. I suppose the two authors wouldn’t understand my feelings—Probst, for instance, knows her daughter’s birth mother. For me, I am more than content that my children are mine. I am grateful to their birth parents, aware of the sacrifice they made for the child’s sake, but I see no need to share them. We are an unusually close and happy family—no small trick with four adopted children and a mostly single mom.

Memoir to me would involve what one author tonight called “working through stuff.” I would want to recall my life, to figure out its patterns. I’m not fooling myself that the world is waiting breathlessly for this story. If I write it, it would be for me—and perhaps for my children.

Enough. I’m going to read a mystery and forget the thornier problems of life in general or writing in particular.

You can go home again—or, using your hometown in fiction

I grew up in the Hyde Park/Kenwood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, and Chicago still holds a large part of my heart. So it was no surprise when I began to write a new mystery, Saving Irene, with new characters, that I discovered the protagonist lived in Hyde Park. What was a surprise was the learning I had to do to create a realistic fictional world in that familiar neighborhood.

If my character—Henrietta (Henny) James, a TV chef’s gofer--was to live in Hyde Park, she needed first an apartment. I chose Cornell Avenue, because I remembered rows of three-story buildings, some once private homes, others always apartments, but most with the bay window that for me characterizes much of Chicago’s older residential architecture.

Henny, who hates her full name, must learn where to shop, and dine out, and go to church, all the things that tie us to the neighborhoods where we live. All these years later (we won’t say how many), I found my memory was good on the big things but weak on the details. I would have to do a lot of research to create a believable fictional world. The internet proved to be a huge help.

Online, because I had no inclination to travel to Chicago during the pandemic, I discovered that some places prominent in my memory are gone. The YMCA where we had sock hops has been moved now far south and renamed. Cunag’s, the candy shop that made the thickest chocolate milk shakes ever, closed years ago. But the United Church of Hyde Park still dominates its corner at 53^rd and Blackstone, its congregations dwindling and the church in financial difficulty, the result probably of an aging congregation. Henny goes to church there—once.

Promontory Park

Keying in remembered names, I learned a lot: the Point, a grassy finger of land extending into Lake Michigan, is now part of Burnham Park which extends along the lake shore from 12^th Street to 57^th and is called Promontory Point. Its shelter house looks in much better shape now than when my friends and I went there to sunbathe and swim. Henny and her friend, Patrick, bike to the Point on rental bikes—yes, Chicago has a Bike Share program. I can even tell you where the rental stations are.

Being the assistant to a chef, even a second- or third-tier one with a show on a local television channel, means a lot of cooking off-screen. I discovered that the venerable Coop, once a pioneer in changing community grocery shopping, is no more, but Henny shops at a nearby Whole Foods and at Harper Foods on 57^th Street. The Hobby House coffee shop, where we went for late night coffee, disappeared, but there is a wealth of small restaurants—Valois, rumored to be a favorite of the Obama family, an upscale restaurants called

appropriately Promontory, and a university neighborhood pub, The Woodland Tap, known familiarly as Jimmy’s after the late owner, where they serve terrific Polish sausage sandwiches.

In my day, Hyde Park was the home of the first Morton’s Steak House. When I was in college, I worked in a hospital administration office (the hospital now condos), and my boss used to take me to Morton’s for lunch and let me have a Brandy Alexander. It’s gone downtown now, but there is a boutique hotel, the Sophy. Henny has a lobster roll there and luxuriates in a place she can ill afford.

Searching for cookbooks for her chef employer to reference, Henny goes to 57^th Street Books, an independent bookstore with an electric choice of titles with plenty of browsing chairs and corners. I used to go there on Sundays in college to buy The New York Times.

Henny’s work requires her to consult with Irene Foxglove, the chef, at the Foxgloves’ North Shore apartment. A search led me to put the apartment on North Clarendon; actual buildings there gave me details to describe the apartment. Henny is not quite brave enough to drive on Lake Shore Drive, known in my day as the Outer Drive (it always scared me a bit), but I learned that she can take a public bus from Hyde Park right up to Clarendon Park—an hour-long bus ride.

Writing about and discovering the changes in my little corner of Chicago was a lot of fun but also educational. I hope the combination of memory and internet research allowed me to create a realistic fictional world for Henny, Irene, and Patrick. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

Putting good memories into fiction

Palmer House loobby

In the fall of 2016, my four adult children and I went to Chicago. It was a pilgrimage for me—I wanted them to see where I grew up. We stayed at the Drake Hotel, epitome of luxury when I was a Chicago kid, we toured my Hyde Park/Kenwood neighborhood, they gawked at my childhood home (a sort of red-brick brownstone built in 1893—I had always stressed the modest means of my family, and I guess they thought I grew up in a shack), and we ate at fantastic restaurants, mostly on the near North Side. It was a trip that made memories I will treasure forever.

One highlight though, for me, was lunch and a tour of the famed Palmer House Hotel, now a Hilton property. I had researched the hotel for my “big” Chicago novel, The Gilded Cage, which is fiction loosely based on the life of Bertha Honoré (Cissy) Palmer, one of the first women to combine wealth with philanthropy. Cissy’s husband, entrepreneur and robber baron Potter Palmer, built the hotel as a wedding present for his bride in 1871. Within weeks, the city of Chicago burned, taking with it the hotel. Potter Palmer rebuilt, and for a few years the Palmers and their two sons lived on the top floor.

In the 1920, the original structure was rebuilt into a 25-floor hotel. For well over a century, the Palmer House has provided luxurious splendor in its public areas, oversized private rooms, and sumptuous meals. It has hosted the rich and famous – Mark Twain spoke at a reception for General Ulysses S. Grant (related by marriage to the Palmers) and Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland were among the entertainers who performed in the Grand Ballroom.

museum

The Palmer House is the only hotel I know of with a museum and an on-staff historian who gives daily tours. Historian Ken Price presides over a tiny, glass-walled museum tucked away in the mezzanine and overflowing with memorabilia—menus, hotel bills, signed celebrity photos, newspaper clippings, portraits, books, even ashtrays and a teapot. On his daily tour of the hotel’s public spaces, Price takes visitors to the Grand Ballroom, the Red Lacquer Room, and, of course, the lobby where he is quick to point out the Tiffany chandeliers. Afterward, there is an informal discussion in the museum.

I loved every minute of it, and this week I’ve been able to weave that experience into my work-in-progress, a culinary mystery set in Chicago. The Palmer House fit into my plot as though I had planned it all along, and I’ve had fun mentally replaying that tour, sitting again in awe in the lobby, ogling like a teenager just off the farm.

Is it a stretch to put the hotel in the mystery? I hope not, but you’ll have to tell me when Saving Irene is released, probably in September or October. Meantime I have memories to savor.

Red Lacquer Room

Dreaming a novel

Last night was one long dream for me. I was telling myself a novel in three parts—three parts because twice I got up to use the restroom, not out of necessity, but because I wanted to leave the world of that dream. But the characters were persistent and kept returning, although they changed considerably from segment to segment.

At first, there were three people, two men and a woman, incarcerated at a prison in a desert, presumably for nonviolent crimes. They escaped disguised as employees (more like cleaning people or someone in scrubs than guards) and spent the night in a nearby empty house. Then they took off in a van.

Sometime during the night they morphed into three women. Think Thelma and Louise or a “Golden Girls Take to the Highway” episode. While they were always on the run and in some perilous circumstances, including snowbound in a cave, they agreed it was the best time of their lives. (Don’t anyone get Freudian on me!). Finally, they ended in a twin city area—two small towns. They grocery shopped in the lesser town figuring they would not know anyone. But they ran into the husband of one; then another met the love of her life, and the third asked for a ride to the bus station. I woke up, and my mind finally went back to my WIP.

I know I’ll never turn the dream into a novel, what with changing characters and a lot of unexplained things like the snowy cave, but the kernel of a story is there if I wanted to pursue it. What I found interesting is the process involved, the way the story flowed in spite of my efforts to stop it. I thought of Elmer Kelton, the late dean of Texas fiction. He once described writing his award-winning novel, The Good Old Boys, saying he was sitting at the bedside of his dying father and listening to stories of the old-time cowboys at the turn of the twentieth century. Suddenly, he began writing, and the words wouldn’t stop. Elmer used to say that it was like a horse with the bit in its teeth, and he was just along for the ride.

Elmer wrote that way. One of his favorite pieces of advice was, “Listen to your characters, and they will tell you what’s going to happen.” He did not use Scrivener or Grammerly, a story bible, or any other devices and aids designed to help novelists tell a story. He simply told the story. A graduate of the University of Texas, he was not some unlettered genius but was knowledgeable about structure and the need for a story arc. He just never let those things dominate his storytelling.

For me, the three-part structure of my dream is significant, because I too learned about structure in school. Not so much the arc within an arc and subplots and all the intricacies that guide us today, but the basic Shakespearean pattern of rising action, climax, and denouement. To this day the parts of a novel to me are the beginning, middle, and end. 

To say that storytelling should be natural is not to jump into the pantser vs. outliner controversy. I’m a pantser who works best from a page of rough notes. But I know everyone has to choose the way that works best for them. Perhaps what I want to suggest about storytelling is that it should be less of a science and more of an art, more instinctive and organic.

If you’ve never read Elmer Kelton, you have a treat waiting for you, whether you think you’re interested in cowboy literature or not. Start with The Good Old Boys, move on to The Wolf and the Buffalo—Elmer set out to tell the story of a particular buffalo soldier, but a Commanche chief kept taking over the story. And then move on to his classic, The Time It Never Rained, described as one of the twenty or so best novels by an American of the twentieth century.

Me? I’m going back to sleep and see what happens next.

The back story behind a novel

       

Today is what I’m calling a soft launch for a reprint of one of my early novels about Texas, So Far from Paradise. But I’m sharing the story behind this one, because I think it’s kind of interesting. I hope you will too.

In 1986 a kind of fervor swept Texas as the state prepared to celebrate its 150^th anniversary. The governor appointed a Texas Sesquicentennial Commission, cities hired special coordinators to oversee events, and everyone practiced pronouncing “sesquicentennial.” Larry Swindell, then-book editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, called me to say he was looking for a novelist to do a commissioned work for the newspaper. I immediately suggested Elmer Kelton. Larry countered with, “I like the idea of Judy Alter.” At that point in my career I had only published two young-adult novels. Me, take on a long adult novel? I hemmed and hawed and suggested other people, but Larry was persistent. Suddenly it dawned on me I was looking opportunity in the eye and about to blink. I agreed to write a novel that would be serialized in the paper. Shades of Charles Dickens.

Larry was liaison for the project, and I remember him emphatically declaring, “We are not going to write a novel by committee.” He was available and generous with his advice, but he never dictated. I was on my own, a greenhorn at fiction, but I produced 75,000 words which were published in twice-weekly installments. The newspaper provided striking illustrations.

Reaction to the novel was a surprise to me. One woman called to say that her great-grandfather lived in Paradise (it actually is a small town in Texas), and I responded with a polite, “Really?” She was a bit exasperated when she replied, “Don’t you see? They would have known each other.” A man wrote to say he’d gotten a degree from TCU and did any of the Beldens go to TCU? My fiction had become my readers’ reality—a high compliment, I think. I admit I got used to answering the phone to hear praise, so it was a shock one day when I cheerily said, “This is Judy Alter” and the voice on the other end informed me it was the IRS calling and my ex- and I owed them a bunch of money.

The year came and went, and Sesquicentennial faded as folks moved on to other things. I began writing historical fiction in earnest, put So Far from Paradise behind me, and sailed on to a career that involved historical fiction, cozy mysteries, cookbooks, a book column or two, essays, book reviews, even blogging. Lately though, my research has turned back toward Texas and its rich history, and suddenly So Far from Paradise seemed relevant again. Thanks to Steve Coffman, editor, and McClatchy newspapers for giving me permission to give the novel new life as an eBook.

Ranching is a man’s story, but in So Far from Paradise, Cassie Belden recalls the story from a woman’s point of view—life on the plains of North Texas, the Comanche and Kiowa raids, the cattle drives, the building of an empire, and finally the move to Fort Worth, where the city shaped her family’s life even as the cattle barons shaped the city of cowboys and culture.

Fort Worth historian Carol Roark, who edited this go-around for me, said the novel reads like a cozy only it’s a western, not a mystery. Maybe I’ve, unconsciously, combined the two genres that have always held my attention.

So Far from Paradise, as an eBook, is available for $3.99 on Amazon, Kobo, B&N, Apple Books, Tolino, and several subscription services.

A bit of excitement for the day--and the plots of possible novels

            Jacob called a little before noon.  “Lock your doors,” he said breathlessly. “The police are driving up and down our street looking for someone.” It seems he and his mother were outside when a policeman drove up and told them to go into the house and lock the doors. I did as I was told.

Thereafter, for almost three hours, we got bits and snippets. I couldn’t see the police from the cottage, but I certainly could hear multiple helicopters overhead. Jordan reported that police presence on the street was heavy. The neighborhood email listserv came alive with this bit of information and that. Put altogether, it revealed that a mental patient wearing a floral shirt and possibly armed had escaped from Baylor Scott & White Hospital, perhaps half a mile north of us. Police were concentrating their search around the hospital, but then I heard of a heavy convergence of helicopters and police cars in the southwest corner of our neighborhood.

Jacob came out to the cottage, again breathless, to report police were still everywhere, and he thought he saw the man riding a bicycle. He protested it looked like him, even if the clothing was different. He warned me that Sophie could not go out. She looked at him in despair. Police were discouraging pedestrian travel, so Jordan drove a woman, a stranger, to the Old Neighborhood Grill. Then she urged our neighbor, who was outside sweeping her walks, to go in the house. So proud of my daughter.

About 2:45 I texted Jordan to say I was going to take a nap, and she said it apparently was all clear. Police had left the neighborhood; the helicopters were gone. But there was no official word. Tonight I watched the local news but there was no mention. What became a big deal for our neighborhood was not such to the city at large apparently.

Note to the Fort Worth Police Department: I know it’s difficult and in a crisis,  you have many demands on your time and services, but a public relations announcement to neighborhood listservs would help keep neighbors informed and safe. And you could let them know when the all clear sounded—and maybe what happened. Even a truck with a loudspeaker might be useful—the water department does that, so why not the police?

Tonight we did find out it was not (necessarily) a mental patient (who knows for sure?) but a domestic dispute, apparently in the hospital. The guy was armed or so they think, and the girl screamed for security. He was last seen walking away from the hospital. Hours later he still had not been apprehended. Thanks to our neighborhood police officer (NPO) for the update

I can sure see at least the subplot of a cozy novel in this incident—maybe Kelly O’Connell to the rescue in my Fairmount series.

In the midst of the search, I turned on the TV hoping there was an update on our local bad guy. No such, but I got extended “special report” coverage of the helicopter crash on a skyscraper in Manhattan. A horrifying accident that for many of us, even those not in the city, brought back 9/11. Planes crashing into buildings, buildings on fire. Fortunately tonight there seems to be agreement that this was a tragic accident, involving a seasoned pilot but not terrorism. Still, imagine the fright of the people in the building as they were evacuated and, like 9/11, not allowed to use elevators to go down fifty-four floors.

In this accident, I see the makings of an espionage novel—not my cup of tea, but someone could sure run with it.

And, hey, I’m still gonna lock my doors tonight.

Fictionalizing your life, or how autobiographical is your fiction?

I’ve been proofing Mattie, the first adult novel I ever wrote and winner of the 1988 Western Writers of America Spur Award for best traditional novel. It’s been available on Kindle forever and done well at 99 centers--#64 today in Kindle ebooks, Genre Fiction, Medical. I’m going to post it to other platforms and thought after almost thirty years it deserved another proofing.

Mattie’s story is loosely based on the life of Georgia Arbuckle Fix, a pioneer woman physician in western Nebraska at the turn of the twentieth century. I didn’t know at the time that Mari Sandoz had also fictionalized Fix’s life in Miss Morissa, and the comparison by loyal Sandoz devotees was not kind to me.

It’s intimidating to re-read something I wrote all those years back. My style is different—the 167-page book is all long chapters and lots of space breaks, and did I really begin every other sentence with “So”? I’m correcting only egregious errors; why mess with success?

The content is more interesting though. I was seven or eight years out of a marriage that started wonderfully and eventually disintegrated. Mattie goes through the same experience two-thirds of the way through the novel; her once-passionate marriage is gradually chipped away until she and her husband, Em Jones, can barely stand each other. Mattie’s retrospective wisdom about the situation struck me—I didn’t realize that I had learned that much from my own marriage, but, darn, sometimes Mattie really seems to understand life. Wish I’d put that knowledge to work years ago

At the time I wrote, I was raising teen-age daughters, with all the angst that involves. The angst is reflected in Mattie’s rebellious daughter, Nora. Only Nora never reaches the wonderful reconciliation my girls did—they are now best friends with each other and with me. When I wrote, we hadn’t reached that reconciliation either, and the angst was much too familiar.

Late in the book, Mattie takes into her home and bed a drifter named Eli, skilled carpenter, a good man, but not one to settle down. I took a week off from work to write the last chapter. The words came in a rush as though someone was channeling me who knew the story. Eli simply rides off after a while, moving on as is his nature, leaving Mattie devastated again—and puzzled. At the time, I was seeing a man I liked well enough to envision a future with him—he liked my kids and wasn’t scared of them, rare in suitors. He was gentle, kind and fun. But as I wrote those last pages, I had a flash of clarity: he too would be moving on. He was no longer going to be a part of my life story. We were together that night—celebrating our joint birthdays, I recall—and I was sad. But I couldn’t tell him why.

Scary thought, especially for mystery writers, if your writing not only reflects your past but predicts your future.

Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone.

With every season.....

Please welcome Jennifer Anderson, my Wednesday guest. Ref, chauffer, master chef and booboo kisser. When she’s not wielding her super mom powers, she likes to weave sentences together and offer a little escape to readers. You can usually find her sitting in the dark in front of her computer, falling in love with her characters. Send chocolate!
Today she talks about change—in real life and in fiction.

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With Every Season...

The seasons may do it four times a year, but we as humans experience change on a more rapid pace, if not daily. And some handle it better than others. My husband, for example. I love him to pieces and over the twenty-plus years together, I know this little trait about him and try to soften the blow when I know I’m about to change up his routine.
But I feel I’m a happy-go-lucky kind of girl and crave change. Or at least, I thought I did. I blame getting older or maybe just the current age I’m in where I have three kids who are constantly changing.
Ding. Ding.
My oldest daughter is thirteen going on twenty-three, and she’s making plans for high school *gasps*. During her 7^th- and 8^th- grade years, she’s allowed to shadow a high school girl at one of our local Catholic High Schools, deciding whether or not she wants to attend their school when she graduates *grabs chest*.
When did my baby become a teenager looking at high schools? Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was giving her baths in the kitchen sink and reading her bedtime stories? Next, she’ll be driving a car, going on dates, prom, high school graduation and then she’ll want to look at colleges. The nerve!
So while I might think I’m strong and brave when it comes to change, my inner mommy is cowering in a corner, rocking back-and-forth crying in her empty glass of pinot.
Lucky for me, good fiction should tell a different story. A heroine/hero is faced with a change (death, affair, end of the world) in their life and we want to see them push past the difficulty and succeed. In Finding You, a bomb is dropped in Jessica’s lap. How she deals with the news tells us how strong she is and if she’s adaptable.

Finding You

Jessica Crispin sets out to find her mom but discovers more than she planned.

A long-lost grandfather dies, leaving Jessica Crispin a sizable inheritance. The only catch? She has to find her mom, whom she hasn’t seen since she was two, and she only has thirty days to do it.
Enlisting her best friend Violet, Jessica sets out on a road trip determined to solve a mystery fed by deceit and misinformation from people she thought she could trust.
On the way, she meets Jackson, whose kindness and sexy pale blue eyes make her wish he would come along for the ride.
Clues from her mother lead her far from home and to a secret Jessica never imagined. And as the deadline looms, Jessica must make peace with the ghosts of her past and risk dreaming of a future pursuing her secret passion with Jackson by her side.
Find Jennifer at Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5326672.Jennifer_Anderson;

Website (http://jenandersonauthor.com/)

Twitter   @JenniA8677

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