As you can imagine, this project demands an enormous amount of research and I’ve found out the wackiest things.

For example, it turns out that for about twenty minutes in the 1890′s, my great-grandfather, Joseph Wright Alsop the 3^rd, was the lieutenant governor of Connecticut.  In 1890, he won on the Democratic ticket as the running mate of one Luzon B. Morris, but the election was contested and the Republicans triumphed after a legal skirmish.  My great grandfather died of a heart attack on June 24, 1891, probably from the stress of the political battle.

So if you’re interested in “watching” a writer battle her way through a project, feel free to drop in here where I’ll be posting my triumphs, my struggles, the ups and downs of wrestling a book like this to the ground.

Ironically this is the town where my father’s family hails from and most of my ancestors, including my father, are buried in the Indian Hill Cemetery up above the college. Back then, I wasn’t particularly interested in my relatives. I was there to hone my writing skills. The director of the program of the conference  introduced me to to two other writers, Margaret and Betsy, and the three of us have remained fast friends and writing companions for almost thirty years.

These are the two writers I trust the most.  They know my work, they know my limits, they know when I can take the toughest criticism and when I simply need to hear what I’ve done well. They don’t mind reading my drafts more than once and I do the same for them. Right now one of us is writing poetry exclusively, one of us is writing memoir and getting a masters degree.  We all live on the east coast, but often we don’t meet for months, even years.  But when I write, I write for them because I know if I have pleased or amused or entertained or touched them, then the book or story or poem is on it’s way.

Everybody should be blessed with readers like these.

I do read and edit manuscripts by friends. I still get up early and sit in my favorite spot where I do poetry exercises. I watch a movie that helps me understand a setting or read a book that’s related to my current project.  But in general, I don’t open up the file I closed on Friday night until Monday morning.

I know there are writers who tap away on a project no matter the day of the week.  I used to do that, when I needed to use every minute I wasn’t working at my day job to finish a manuscript or when I was a young mother and scribbled away weekends in coffee shops when I could get a sitter.  In those days, I was fierce about piling up pages and proud of it.

But times have changed. I’m an older, more experienced writer which simply means I’m smarter about my own process. I find now that although I write for shorter periods of time, I’m more efficient. In a novel, I know pretty quickly when my character has gone off the tracks.  There’s no way she’d be hanging out in that bar or buying a motorcycle.  Or in the personal history piece I’m working on now, when I can’t move the scene forward, it means I need to do more research.  For example, what did the Gibraltar docks look like in 1940?  That’s the only way I can understand what my mother must have seen and smelled and heard when she was boarding the evacuation ship that took her to London.

For years, I’ve relied on Hemingway’s old trick.  Never stop at the end of a chapter or even a paragraph.  On Friday nights, I stop in the middle of a sentence.

But Monday mornings are still hard.  If I can’t get the scene moving or the character talking, these days,  I stretch my writing muscles another way.

I write a blog entry.

When I dug a little deeper into my grandfather’s life, I discovered that in the space of five years, (1888-1893) he lost his four-year-old brother, his mother, his father and two of his sisters, all of whom succumbed to different diseases ranging from diphtheria to typhoid to Bright’s Disease.  By 1900 when the  census taker came to the house in Middletown, Connecticut to record its occupants, the family of nine had been reduced to four; the one remaining sister and her three younger brothers.

No wonder my grandfather was so supportive of his own sons.  He’d had no parent to stand by him.

Writing fiction taught me all I know about what motivates a character and it certainly helped me in this search.  There was a reason that my grandfather, unlike so many other men of his time, rushed to his child’s defense whether he was flunking Latin or flailing about awkwardly on the baseball diamond.  I found what I was looking for by ordering death certificates and perusing genealogical websites.

However, without the experience of creating a character for a novel, I’m not sure I would have known what to look for or even why I was looking.

Now I’m writing a personal history about real people, my parents.

My father died in 1974, so to recreate his life, I’m relying on my own memories, the stories he told us, the letters he wrote and received, and finally, published accounts of his life as a journalist. But it’s been especially easy for me to reimagine his childlhood because I spent many a happy summer in my grandmother’s Connecticut farmhouse where he’d grown up.

With my mother, the challenges have been different.  She was born in Gibraltar and lived there until she was thirteen years old.  Although we’ve spent hours poring over her photo albums and recording her memories on tape and video, I hadn’t been to “the Rock” as it’s called since I was a young and bored teenager visiting my maternal grandmother.

So recently I traveled to Gibraltar to stand outside my mother’s childhood home, to walk down the path she took to school, to pay homage to her relatives buried in the graveyard next to the airport.

If you look at this map of Gibraltar, you’ll see that the place sticks out into the ocean.  From the balcony of our hotel, I could look directly across the bay to Algeciras, Spain and if I turned my head to the left, I was staring at North Africa.  Every day, from the roof of her house which clung to the side of this Rock, my mother saw this view.  Two different countries, two different continents.

My father grew up on a dairy and shade tobacco farm in New England and my mother in a British crown colony surrounded by the sea.  How did these two wildly different settings change their characters, their perspectives on life, their dreams for the future? What about these two individuals attracted one to the other?  I think every child, on some level, wants to know the answer to this question.

For me, part of the answer  lies in the setting. That’s why with every book I write, be it fiction or memoir, I try to walk the ground of the story even if that ground is on the other side of the ocean.

Well, actually, a writer never takes time off.  Someone once said, “A writer is never not writing,” and it’s become one of my mantras.  I’ve been writing poetry in the early morning as usual, I’ve been setting myself up in a different work space in the country and just this morning, I typed PART 3 at the top of a new screen.  But for the last week, I haven’t been sitting down at a designated time, turning off the email, and allowing myself to become completely absorbed, to fall into the dream if you will, of my current book.  But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing.

I always carry a notebook with me and as usual,  I’ve been jotting down titles of books I want to read, ideas for poems, descriptions of a scene or a person in front of me.  That’s writing.

I’ve been trying to teach myself iambic pentameter by creating as many as I can scribble down in ten minutes (from an exercise in Stephen Fry’s wonderful book THE ODE LESS TRAVELED).  Here’s my favorite.  “The chairs recline as if they had a right/to be the humans they’re supposed to host.”  That’s not good poetry, but I think it counts as iambic pentameter. (I have a tin ear when it comes to meter.)  And it means I’m writing.

I’ve been eavesdropping in diners at breakfast. That’s writing.

I’ve been walking and browsing in stationery stores and knitting and swimming laps and listening to recorded books and all the time, my mind is wandering, and all of that is part of my writing process.  Things are cooking in my unconscious mind, so that when I come back from vacation and sit down at the computer,  the book will surprise me by suddenly opening up in a new direction. The work my unconscious mind does when I’m “on vacation,” informs and directs and enriches the writing I do when I’m planted in the chair.

But the vacation time, the “never not writing”, wandering time cannot go on for too long or else I get grumpy.  I call it creative anxiety.  I snap at my husband, make mistakes in my knitting, tense my shoulders when swimming.  It creeps up on me.  It means I have to get my ass to the chair, my fingers to the keys, the words moving on the screen.

It means vacation is over.

For me, it’s simply this.  I can’t not write.  It’s what I do.  It informs the way I think, the way I read.  Writing weaves itself through my day whether I enter a note in a notebook or don’t.  It’s always there.  So that keeps me writing.

Publishing?  That’s another story.  For now, I’m so deep into the writing mode that I try to stick my fingers in my ears when it comes to publishing news.

“My agent doesn’t want even to read my work unless the book has a clear, defined audience.”  “I’m publishing my book myself.” “Writers can no longer make their living from copyright.”  “Ebooks are killing traditional publishing.”  Some of these dark messages come from the media, from the blogosphere, but most of it from my friends, long published authors themselves.

But still, every weekday morning, I find myself back at my desk, ass to chair, researching my father’s military record or my mother’s trip to Paris the day Hitler invaded Norway, fitting the jigsaw pieces of their life together to make a coherent narrative.  Someday this book will be done and I will lift my head from the screen and start trying to sell it.  But I won’t go there now.  I’ll simply keep writing because that’s the first and most important part of my job.

Finally, I’m lucky enough to hear through the Internet or my guestbook, words from my readers. They feel to me like messages in a bottle thrown onto the waters of the web.  Last week, this one floated up onto my shore and into my mailbox from a blogger at this link:

http://vcmw.livejournal.com/124434.html

To keep the kid’s book theme running, I guess I’ll go with my first favorite book.  That would be The Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop.  Mrs. Wood gave it to me to read in the 1st grade.  It wasn’t the first chapter book I read but it was the first one given to me by someone at school, and I got to sit in the back of the classroom and read it all by myself.  This was huge, and I can still remember how it felt to sit there and be given permission to lose myself in this story, just privately.  I don’t think I had to write about it or give an oral report about it or draw or do a diorama or anything.  No one else in the class read it – just me.  Sometimes it’s lovely to have a book you share with others, but a private book is also a great pleasure, especially when you’re small and don’t have many private things.

I loved the medallion that made things small.  I still think the lesson in it is a good one, and the idea that even if you love someone that doesn’t mean you can hold on to them no matter what they want was a really tricky one for me to get my head around at age 6.  I never learned to do gymnastics, but somewhere in the back of my mind I was always fascinated by them because of this book.  I suspect the book may have something to do with the number of apples I eat as an adult, too.

Imagine that. Something like twenty years ago, a teacher gave this first grader my book to read.  And she or he still remembers it and remembers it well.

Now that keeps me writing. How could it not?

I knew that even though my mother had qualified to take the exams for Oxford University in 1942, because it was wartime in England, she was sent instead to a secretarial school in Gloucestershire named Carr Saunders so that she could be “useful in the war effort.”  And even though her memory at 84 years is not as good as it used to be, she can still come up with remarkable details about her past.  “Because the Carr Saunders sisters were bombed out in London, they moved down to Stanway House,” she tells me on the phone.  “It was a house in the Charteris family.  He was the Earl of Weemys and March.”

The Earl sounds to me like something out of Alice in Wonderland, but I go trolling around the web and find lots to help me imagine my mother’s nine months learning how to type and take shorthand.

I find pictures of Stanway House.

Home of the Carr Saunders Secretarial School during WW II

I find a biography ofFrancis Charteristhe man who lent the two sisters Stanway House so they could continue to run their secretarial school. I learn the proper way to spell Wemyss!

But best of all, I find a book called OLD STONES, The Biography of A Family. In a snippet about Stanway House, I learn that her mother went to the secretarial school two years before my mother, that she remembers it was so cold that the water in the glass by her bed froze at night. The author, A.S. Penne, has a website so  now she and I are in touch and may meet on one coast or another.

Today I am grateful for the web!

Lately, I’ve been working on a section of the story that takes place soon after my parents met in August of 1942.  Somehow, although my mother was sixteen and living in Stanway House attending a secretarial school in the Cotswolds and my father was training with his regiment in Yorkshire, he managed to get down to London on leave to meet her.

In putting together the puzzle of that fall in 1942, I assemble all the pieces I can;  a timeline of the war in England, letters from my father to his family, letters from his brothers and father to him, my mother’s memories of the time.   But I find  I’m often distracted by bits and pieces that might not fit, but still give such eloquent testimony to the daily life during the war on both sides of the Atlantic.  As an example, here is a piece of a letter from my grandfather, a dairy and shade tobacco farmer in Connecticut, a staunch opponent of FDR, even though his wife is Eleanor Roosevelt’s first cousin and they will spend that Christmas in the White House.

November 1, 1942

Dear Stew,

One other rather amusing form I received the other day was in regard to my bees. It transpires that beekeepers need a small amount of sugar to feed their bees during the winter in order to keep them happy and strong for their spring activities. The Connecticut Beekeepers Association, of which I am a humble member, has evidently taken this up with various governmental authorities, because they have received a form which they have in turn distributed to their members in order to secure this extra sugar. The first question on my form was, “How many hives have you?”  The second question was, “How many bees in each hive?” I didn’t read any more after that, as I felt pretty well stopped. If I could get some of the bureaucrats to come and count the bees for me, why then it would be okay.·

I love the irony in my grandfather’s voice, the anti-administration dig he gets into this description, knowing his own son is a confirmed and enthusiastic Democrat.

Can I use this letter in my book?  I’m not sure yet, but no matter what, reading it enlivens and enriches my own knowledge of the time and of the characters I’m portraying. That can only help make my book richer and more satisfying for the reader.

Wendy Lamb Books/Random House, ISBN # 0-385-74644-X

Paperback Yearling, ISBN # 0-553-48783-3

“Winthrop’s compelling story vividly captures the mill experience. Much information on early photography and the workings of the textile mills is conveyed, and history and fiction are woven seamlessly together in this beautifully written novel. Readers won’t soon forget Grace.”
–Starred Review, School Library Journal 

1910. Pownal, Vermont. At 12, Grace and her best friend Arthur must leave school and go to work as a “doffers” on their mothers’ looms in the mill. Grace’s mother is the best worker, fast and powerful, and Grace desperately wants to help her. But she’s left handed and doffing is a right-handed job. Grace’s every mistake costs her mother, and the family. She only feels capable on Sundays, when she and Arthur receive special lessons from their teacher. Together they write a secret letter to the Child Labor Board about underage children working in Pownal. A few weeks later a man with a camera shows up. It is the famous reformer Lewis Hine, undercover, collecting evidence for the Child Labor Board. Grace’s brief acquaintance with Hine and the photos he takes of her are a gift that changes her sense of herself, her future, and her family’s future.

“Winthrop vividly portrays mill life and four characters who resist its deadening effects. Solid research and lively writing make this a fine historical novel.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Elizabeth Winthrop weaves this story of life in a 1910 textile mill with exquisite authority. Grace leaps off the page, grabbing us, completely engaging us…”
-Karen Hesse, OUT OF THE DUST, Newbery Medal Winner

“…a powerful novel that recreates the hopeless lives of young mill workers in an abusive company town. Winthrop’s remarkable writing talents bring Grace-and the past-alive.
-David Gill, “Bill’s Best Books” ALAN

“Winthrop’s compelling story vividly captures the mill experience. Much information on early photography and the workings of the textile mills is conveyed, and history and fiction are woven seamlessly together in this beautifully written novel. Readers won’t soon forget Grace.”
-Starred Review, School Library Journal

“The most compelling thread of the novel chronicles the mounting tension between Grace and her demanding mother who dominates the other workers. This enlightening novel explores the perils of mill work for children and adults alike. Readers will cheer the feisty heroine when Grace uses her smarts to triumph…..”
-Publishers Weekly

“The strength of this book lies with its endearing portrait of Grace. Readers will appreciate the fine attention to historical detail and Winthrop’s first-rate prose.”
-VOYA, Voice of Youth Advocates