Deborah Wiles's Blog

Morning, Lab Coats! Morning, Everyone. Lots to get to today!

The saying goes, “Curiosity killed the cat.” I say:

Curiosity is the Mother of All Gifts.

Without it, how do we learn to roll over, to walk, to collect rocks (and put them up our noses), to ask questions (my three-year-old grandgirl — and every three-year-old I’ve ever known: “WHY?”), to survive?

I just made up that sentence about curiosity, that it is the Mother of All Gifts. Then I put it into a search engine and discovered that Eleanor Roosevelt thought the same way:

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.

Rachel Carson said much the same thing — something I have felt in my bones, all these decades that Carson has been a hero to me (so much so that I wrote a book about her):

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Evidently, influence with a fairy godmother helps.

So I have decided: we have a fairy godmother in the Writers Lab — have you noticed, Lab Coats?

You stellar group of scribblers that keeps showing up in the Lab — you thrill me. lol. Well, it’s true. We are beginning to CLICK, and that is indeed a thrill, and a hope, and a wish, and something a fairy godmother probably waved a wand over, who knows.

You are of course more than scribblers, and yet that term is apt, too, for what we do in our Lives! when we write together and share our fears for our writing, share our strengths, and breathe into our bravery as everyone chimes in with “what’s working here?” for each piece. It’s fabulous. It’s curiosity. And we haven’t even gotten to workshops yet.

I have not met this fairy godmother, but I am convinced she exists. Invisible, perhaps, but a force to be appreciated and celebrated and nurtured. I personally will leave out homemade cookies for her this week. Or cake, even better .

I think she has a wand and a tutu, but that’s just me, or maybe she’s amorphous, or orb-like, and hey, that’s the thing about fairy godmothers, you may see her/him/it/them differently, and she is yet the same. Maybe we should name her.

curiouser and curiouser…

I digress. To the curiosity:

In the Lab we are learning to “read like a writer” (I am ever learning this). It’s one of the writing skills that curiosity confers upon us. And boy do we have this skill developing in the Lab in such a strong and supportive way.

KUDOS, Lab Coats, for a fabulous Live! and for the suggestion that we create a Zine (YT, 5 mins, good) from what we wrote last week — an excellent way to celebrate the sense of community we have created, and a reminder, when we look at this Zine, of what storytellers we are — every one of us.

The “definition” of a Zine at this link is very good.

Chat has been very active this week with Zine thoughts and suggestions — and even one Zine that is already finished and posted for us — such encouragement, thank you!

So I’m going to use this Lab post for our Zine Assignment/Exercise, something we can work on in the three weeks before next month’s Live! so we don’t let this excellent idea drift away from us while we’ve got the juice for it.

ALSO: If you missed last week’s Live!, please feel free to check out the Chats about it, and to make your own Zine to contribute to our little book. We’d love to have you.

I’m looking forward to having my own Nutshell Library (good photos here) of individual Zines from Sunday’s Live.

I was going to write about research this week, as my research life has suddenly become an overwhelming morass of links and possibilities, and I thought I might write myself out of it, plus share some strategies for same, but a ZINE SOUNDS MUCH MORE FUN, so let’s do it, yes? YES.

Below are instructions, suggestions, and cheerleading to get you started — and finished.

Thank you, thank you, for being YOU. I think we need CAKE. I’ll put that below, too.

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Afternoon, Storybellers, Debbie here with some context for my documentary novel Countdown.

Tomorrow, October 14, marks the date in 1962 that a U-2 spy plane flying over Cuba captured photographic evidence of a Soviet missile buildup 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The Cold War began heating up.

When you’re a kid, you can’t really understand the scaffolding that underpins adult concerns. Nor should you have to, of course. But that lack of understanding can lead to some pretty serious heart palpitations.

Even if you’ve got adults who talk with you about your fears, there is by nature a lack of context available to young minds and hearts. We haven’t lived long enough yet.

And, often, when a bunch of kids get together, there is a great willingness to pre-disasterize the possibilities. Right?

I was in that boat — along with so many of my classmates and friends — in October 1962, when President Kennedy appeared on television to tell the American public that Russia had installed operational medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles on the shores of Cuba — missiles that could reach most major US cities from Cuba.

“Pointed right at us,” said one of the parents in our neighborhood. “We’d all better get ready for World War III.”

At school we began duck-and-cover drills every day. If we were walking down the hallway when the siren sounded, we were to hug the wall with our bodies rolled up, hands clasped behind our necks, heads tucked into our laps.

We were marched into the cafeteria to watch Civil Defense films. Every day during those two weeks, we were tested to make sure we were ready in case of nuclear attack by the Russians.

President Kennedy addressed the nation on October 22 and said:

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

I could not fathom it. I wrote a letter to President Kennedy:

If you would just invite me to the White House, I could tell you why you don’t want to blow up the world.

Because when you are nine — or ten, or seventy-two — you get it.

It’s simple.

Just stop.

All of this was scary enough, but none of it compared to the fear I felt at home. My father was the Chief of Safety for the 89th Military Airlift Wing at Andrews Air Force Base just outside of Washington, DC, and one of his responsibilities was to ensure safety on the tarmac for Air Force One, the blue-and-white jet that still today flies the president and other dignitaries from Andrews to wherever they need to go.

Dad took dozens of photos of safety violations as part of his job, including this one of Air Force One on the flight line in 1962.

Dad was on high alert for the two weeks of the Cuban Missile Crisis — we didn’t see much of him — and Mom was busy preparing us for nuclear attack.

She never said so. I found out because I opened the downstairs closet door to get whatever-it-was I was after — I no longer remember what — and instead of what was usually there, I encountered a fallout shelter’s worth of supplies:

Canned and boxed food. Blankets and pillows. Matches and candles and Sterno. Flashlights and batteries. Water in canning jars. Clorox. Rags. A radio. A first-aid kit. Aspirin. A box of Saltines. Campbell’s soup.

I remember the wash of fear that instantly drenched me — a crackling tingle I could almost hear — from head to foot, across my shoulders, down my arms, into my fingers. I was rooted to the spot; I could not look away. I still remember sucking in a gasping breath and inventorying what I saw.

I knew what this closet meant:

My mother was afraid. How could that be?

From there it wasn’t hard to make a leap to:

There might come a day when my mother and father could not protect me, and they knew this. And then what would happen?

It had never occurred to me that that could happen. I was nine-years-old. My parents were omnipotent — like all parents seemed to me then.

The “happy family in the bomb shelter,” from Life Magazine. (Photos here are from Countdown’s scrapbooks; credits are listed in backmatter.)

People ordered plans to build bomb shelters in their yards, like Uncle Otts does in Countdown. And I made plans of my own: If the air raid siren went off for real — not the “Alert” tone, but the “Attack” tone — which we had been schooled to listen for — I would NOT duck and cover under my desk. I would run to the other side of the school, to my little brother’s classroom, and I would yank him out of there, and we would run home as fast as we could. We were “walkers,” anyway, we always walked to school, and we didn’t live far away.

My reasoning was, if I was going to die, I was going to do it in the arms of my family. I didn’t know then — and no one told me, or the American people — that had those Russian missiles been fired, we all would have been vaporized.

My heroine in Countdown is Franny Chapman, age eleven. She is a stand-in for me, as is her little brother Drew, who is nine, and her older sister Jo Ellen who is nineteen. Each character in the book represents a facet of that time period, from Franny’s Air Force pilot dad to Uncle Ott’s who tries to build a bomb shelter, to the teachers, neighbors, and friends, along with the customs and norms that peopled my world in 1962.

Writing Countdown helped me understand what I couldn’t grasp when I was nine. What the heck was it all about? I needed to know.

Writing Countdown took me back to a more innocent time as well, if you can call almost being blown up an innocent time.

I think you can. It’s those opposites that Uncle Edisto talks about in Each Little Bird That Sings. We can’t live life without them.

I think of young people today — my grandgirls especially… and all the students I’ve worked with for over 25 years, working in schools, presenting books, asking young people to tell their stories, workshopping with them across the country, watching them build their scaffolding, face their fears, find their anchors, and write their stories.

In my experience, what they lack is what I lacked in 1962: Context. That will come.

What they have now is what I had in 1962, and maybe this is the most important thing: A heart that wanted safety, and happiness, and love. For everyone.

I know we can’t always choose what happens in the world. What we can do is learn to choose our response.

Which is why I wrote this conversation in Countdown between Franny and her older sister Jo Ellen, who is preparing to go south for Freedom Summer soon. I want young readers to think about how they do have choices to make, as their context grows, and as their hearts expand.

Franny begins:

“I’m going to change the world, too,” I say.

“What’s your plan?”

“I’m writing a letter to Chairman Khrushchev.”

“You are?”

“I am. I’m composing it at night, in bed.”

“What does it say?”

“It says I want to meet him. If I could just talk with him, I know I could convince him to stop scaring the pants off everybody.”

I can’t help it — I cringe, waiting for Jo Ellen to laugh at me. Instead she says, “That’s a good idea. How would you convince him of that?”

I sit up straight to make my point.

“I would tell him we’re all just people, here in America, and we don’t want to hurt anybody. We just want to live and be happy.”

“My thoughts exactly,” says Jo Ellen. “But don’t you think he knows that, Franny?”

“Well, evidently not! If he knew it, he wouldn’t behave like this.”

“He knows it, Franny. It’s complicated. I don’t think anyone wants to bomb anyone else.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Jo Ellen drops her compact into her purse, looks at me, and says, “There is more going on in the world than the Russians and the Americans screaming at each other about atomic bombs, Franny. Things that are just as scary, actually.”

She sits next to me on the bed, takes my hand in hers, and says, “There are always scary things happening in the world. There are always wonderful things happening. And it’s up to you to decide how you’re going to approach the world… how you’re going to live in it, and what you’re going to do.”

I don’t know what the heck she’s talking about.

“Are we going to get bombed by the Russians, Jo Ellen?”

“No.”

“I’m not so sure. I’m still writing my letter.”

“Good. That’s one way to change the world.”

Who we listen to — and how we listen, and how facts and wisdom are dispensed — matters.

I take my life and I turn it into stories. I say I write for ten-year-old me, as I have a vivid memory of my childhood years and I have stories to share, but really, my stories are for all ages.

Young people, though…. young people are just beginning to try and make sense of their world. I hope a book like Countdown helps.

I know it helps me to “write my letter.”

xoxo Debbie

Morning, Lab Coats. The last quarter of the year is for starting over. Not January/Feb/March, but Oct/Nov/Dec.

starting over in Irene, our screened-in porch that now has windows and an exterior door, October 2025

Yes, this time gets crazy with commitments and holidays and trying to keep what’s-what straight, that’s true enough. But there is something vibrant about a harvest moon, a turn of the weather (late as it is this year), a crackle of leaves underfoot, and the taste of pumpkin or cider or pie that brings us back to basics — well, brings ME back to home and hearth and to the reasons I write.

Home and hearth are for everyone — or, I dearly want them to be. They are foundational. They are where we begin, the doors we step out from into the world, and the places we return to. We reinvent this home and hearth as we grow up: we imagine it, we search for it, define it, nurture it, and we master it, too, if we can.

All our lives we work to master the feeling of “this is where I belong.” I call it charting the geography of the heart.

This geography carries with it the creation of identity, so, self-discovery.

Think of Dickens and the first line of David Copperfield: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

For David Copperfield, belonging is everything. If we don’t belong — to someone, to something, to a cause, to a community, and to ourselves, especially — what do we have of value in this world, and how do we function?

To that end, I’d like to focus this first Second Sunday Live! on “How We Write About Home.” It could also be “How We Write About a Lack of Home.” Or lack of belonging. There you have it, a unity of opposites, eh?

It can be home in your body, home in your mind, home as a series of different physical places you’ve lived. How do we write about this in ways that offer us solace or understanding while also connecting with a reader? There are many mentor texts that show us the way.

Bring one with you, if you have it at hand, and tell us about it. I will have some to share, as well as some thoughts from my writing experience, and we will write together to an Exercise I bring us to experiment with.

If you are reading this and want to become a Lab Coat and write with us, you can do that here. We meet this Sunday, Oct. 12 at 11amET until 12:15pm.

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“I am eleven years old and I am invisible.” This is the first sentence from Countdown. (Part 1 of bringing Countdown to life is here.)

What a heady trip it was, trying to figure out how to write about a decade in American history — the turbulent Sixties — by telling stories of the people who lived it. Made-up stories, certainly — I had my characters and their situations to spin a yarn around. But think of it:

A novel (well, ultimately three novels) that held within its covers fiction, non-fiction, and biography — documentary novels.

In my struggle to figure out how to structure such a thing that had never been done before in books for young readers, I stumbled across the USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos:

From Wikipedia:

The trilogy employs an experimental technique, incorporating four narrative modes: fictional narratives telling the life stories of twelve characters, collages of newspaper clippings and song lyrics labeled “Newsreel,” individually labeled short biographies of public figures of the time such as Woodrow Wilson and Henry Ford and fragments of autobiographical stream of consciousness writing labeled “Camera Eye.” The trilogy covers the historical development of American society during the first three decades of the 20th century.

I had forgotten about these books until Hannah was in college and brought home The Big Money and voilà! I had my mentor texts.

When I wrote the proposal for the Sixties Trilogy books, I included the U.S.A. trilogy in my reasoning. My editor, David Levithan at Scholastic, wrote me back: “You had me at Dos Passos.” (lol)

It was a meeting of the minds, and we were off to the races, trying to invent something brand new for young readers that would show them the Sixties, let them hear the Sixties, offer them a story, and insert biographies of the time as well, all in an effort to make history a living, breathing thing — to show them how the mosaic works not only in the past, but in their everyday lives.

We are collections of moments, memories, and meaning, both individual and collective.

This was a tall order. I knew Countdown, the first book in the trilogy, would take place in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, those 14 days that the world came as close to annihilation as it has ever been (that we know of, anyway), when the world held its breath, wondering if — as Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it — we’d ever see another Saturday night.

I began by revisiting 1962 and the days I lived in Washington, DC during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I went back to my old neighborhood in Camp Springs, Maryland, a quarter mile from Andrews Air Force Base. I took dozens of reference photos of where my characters would walk, talk, and live.

As I researched, I collected and curated photos and ephemera of the time and began shaping, on paper, what I wanted for each scrapbook, arranging the material in the order that best served the storytelling and helped me weave the mosaic.

My agent called when he first saw how designer Phil Falco transformed those photos, song lyrics, quotes, news clippings, and more, into the scrapbooks for the book itself: “This is more than inside art,” he said. “This is an experience.”

I wrote four “opinionated biographies” for Countdown as well. I created a family that was much like mine in 1962, put my heroine, Franny, into the same places I had inhabited back then, created new characters to represent cultural and historic moments that defined the era — like Gail Hoffman’s mother who was — gasp! — divorced, and Uncle Otts, a survivor of mustard gas in WWI, determined to build a bomb shelter to keep his family safe.

It was a wild ride. The team that put Countdown together at Scholastic was up for the challenge and so was I. We would have two more Sixties Trilogy books to write before we were done, and the project altogether would take us a bit over 10 years to complete. I am so proud of it.

Alongside the very real and tangible moment in time it recreates, it gave me back my childhood; teachers have taught the novel in classrooms across the country; and I have been able to share in that teaching with them, and to encourage all of them — students and teachers alike — to tell their stories.

Story is the primary vehicle human beings use to structure knowledge and experience. — Richard Rhodes

Story is how we understand where we come from and who we are. This is who I was in 1962:

I always tell students: I’m the cute one on the left with the Buster Brown suede shoes, the white ankle socks, the kitty-cat glasses, hair in a messy ponytail, wearing my ubiquitous headband and a rose from my mother’s garden — all pieces of my own self that I gave to constructing Franny in Countdown. I’m also wearing Comfort’s orange shorts from Each Little Bird That Sings, but that’s another story for another day.

Next week we continue looking at how historical fiction comes together. We’ll get into those 14 days in October where the world held its breath, and what that was like. Just what WAS the Cuban Missile Crisis? I’ll give you some resources for that as well.

Thanks for coming with me this far. October is Countdown month, here at the ‘belly.

xoxo Debbie

Greetings from the road, Lab Coats, where I’ve found myself happily ensconced in the world of a three-year-old, which is rich and wild and funny and completely captivating. In New England, no less, and in October. Bring on the pumpkin patches, the apple orchards, the brisk cool mornings and the firelighted evenings. And lots and lots of questions. “Why, Gigi?” Those are my favorites.

Some Housekeeping

If you haven’t introduced yourself in the Lab yet, please feel free to do so here, in Chat, where all Lab Coats can get to know one another and admire each other’s work. Start threads if you like — there’s a post for each Exercise. Join in however it works for you; I’ll be right there with you.

If you are a free subscriber (thank you, thank you) and want to participate in the Lab, you can upgrade your subscription here, which will cost you a few dollars a month. You can stop whenever you like. As a Lab Coat you will have access to all previous Assignments and Exhortations and all manner of ways to write and revise your story, memoir, poem, even grocery list. A toolbox for everyday life and writing — plus a stellar, crackerjack community of Lab Coats to welcome you.

You’ll also have access to this past summer’s foundational writing where each of us wrote Mission and Vision Statements and Core Values, offering us clarity and purpose as we write forward.

Last month we held four September Sunday Writers Lab LIVES! On our last Sunday, our guest was Jane Kurtz, who walked us through incorporating extraordinary details in our writing, and how to get started (among other wonderful gifts). Lab Coats can watch the recording of that session anytime — I’ll put the link below in The Assignment section of this Writers Lab post.

We’ve been having fun this week writing 5-minute poems every day and sharing them in Chat — another perk of the Writers Lab. Most importantly, we are creating together a writing community that is helping us feel like the storytellers we are, using all tools at our disposal, including song, poetry, film, mentor texts, and so much more.

Remember: All history is biography, and every person’s story is important. We tell our stories so they aren’t lost, and so that others can find them, whenever they need them. We write them so we can say we were here, so we can be seen, and heard, and celebrated. All voices are welcome. Come join us.

Let’s get right to it, with this week’s Lab post.

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Good morning from the ‘belly. Debbie here with some Countdown and documentary novel thoughts for you on the last Monday morning in September. It has been way too hot here for September, even in the South. But it has also been glorious and full of forward motion:

Irene, our screened porch in April, before renovation this month The Sixties Trilogy:

The idea for three books about the 1960s began to gel in the early 2000s, when I was criss-crossing the US (and the world), speaking and teaching in schools, conferences, bookstores, and libraries.

I realized (as I had seen with my own kids’ school days) that young people weren’t learning about the 1960s in their history classes, and so knew little about the richness and the chaos of those days — the civil rights movements, the space race, segregation and desegregation, rock and roll (!), and the vast changing America I had grown up in and that defined a generation — nay, generations.

At the same time, I could see that history was being taught — necessarily — as a series of dates, events, people, places… and not as the mosaic it is in real life. No event stands alone. People aren’t static. Moments aren’t monoliths. They depend on what came before — and on what’s happening alongside them.

If we can understand history in this way, we hone our critical thinking skills… and better understand that our country’s complex history calls us to choose our future with care and conscience

This is the way we live life, whether we notice it or not — we are dependent on what’s happening around us, what happened before us, and what we have, in the end, is choice. This is also the way I teach writing.

Since we ARE stories, when we write about our lives, we are writing about how we fit into the panorama of our own history, not to mention the history before us, the ancestors we come from, and the “moments, memories, meaning” we make of the story we want to tell.

Proposing the Sixties Trilogy

I came of age in the late sixties/early seventies, and my story is the story of a time in American history that has defined America as a nation. I proposed a series of three novels that would help young people understand how history is that tapestry of many things happening at once, backwards and forwards, weaving into and out of one another — each character in a story having their own unique perspective, for better or worse.

I wanted to write books that would help young people understand their history — collective and individual history — and write their own stories.

Scholastic said YES. We embarked on a project that had never been done before: the documentary novel with scrapbook sections containing the history of the moment while my characters juggle the chaos and unknowns of their young lives — family, friends, schools, neighborhoods — all shaped by the larger history unfolding around them.

The American history contained in each book of the Sixties trilogy comes from a story and is accompanied by scrapbooks full of the era — songs, photographs, newspaper clippings, advertisements, cultural touchstones, and much more.

Some of the most rewarding teaching I’ve done in the past 17 years since the publication of Book 1, Countdown, has come from talking about life in the Sixties and encouraging and working with writers of all ages as they see themselves as a part of history and write their stories.

Countdown : 1962

It’s Countdown month in October. Each Monday in October I’ll share a piece of the story — the history, the scrapbook, the characters — and how it all fits into the mosaic of history for young readers.

Countdown’s main narrative event is the looming Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, but there are other things happening in 1962 that form the constellation of history at that time, and I can show these events to the reader in scrapbooks.

This is a still from a Countdown scrapbook. “James Meredith became the first black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi today. Federal Marshals escorted Meredith onto the campus where Governor Ross Barnett declared last week, ‘No school in our state will be integrated while I am your governor.’”

John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in February 1962. My character Drew — all of nine years old — so admires John Glenn and the space race, he wants to become an astronaut.

Franny, eleven, just wants a normal life (who doesn’t at that age?).

But at the same time, while she’s busy navigating fifth grade, a fading friendship, and her crazy Uncle Otts, the air raid siren screams at school. She ducks-and-covers under her desk (like I did!) during the drill. She’s making her plan, too: if the siren ever signals an actual bomb incoming, she won’t duck under any desk. She will run get her brother Drew from his classroom and race home. If she’s going to die, she reasons, she wants it to be in the arms of her family.

“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is the song that anchors Scrapbook 1. It’s a show tune from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, so it is a backwards glance, although I was thinking of the 1963 rendition by Gerry and the Pacemakers as I chose it. Then there’s the Josh Groban version. :>

“When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high and don’t be afraid of the dark. At the end of the storm there’s a golden sky and the sweet silver song of the lark…”

I chose “You’ll Never Walk Alone” because of how it captures assurance and hope for the future that people clung to during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and also because, when I was Franny’s age in Countdown, I was in the Glee Club at Camp Springs Elementary School (Franny’s school, too) and we sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” so there’s more than a bit of me in Countdown as well, even though I was Drew’s age, nine, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

History is news, music, film, books, stories of all kinds, including yours. We’ll talk about writing personal narrative this coming month of October, right here in the Digest, and in the Writers Lab we’ll do just that — we’ll write. We’ll talk about turning personal narrative into story as well.

Next week we’ll explore a bit more about Countdown’s structure and how documentary novels work. We’ll examine the power of personal narrative and look for “ways in” to writing YOUR story.

I’m traveling this week, heading to family and friends in New England. I’ve been using Instagram Stories to document the way our home is physically changing, as we demolish a 53-year-old rotten deck and replace it with a new one, and as we update Irene, our carport turned into a gathering room many years ago, with windows, a fresh floor, and a new ceiling. Here are a couple of in-progress shots. There are more photos in the “renovations” highlight on my IG.

And that’s it for this Monday’s digest! Thank you for hanging with me. I’ll queue up posts for while I’m gone, and you can find me in between on Notes and checking in at Chat and elsewhere.

Have a good week, everyone.

Tell Your Story.

xoxo Debbie

Evening, Lab Coats. You’ll find the LAB NOTES and suggested reading, watching, listening and THE ASSIGNMENT/EXERCISE from today’s Writers Lab LIVE below.

FIRST THINGS FIRST:

Wasn’t that an awesome Live! Thank you to the inimitable Jane Kurtz for sharing so much of her writing wisdom, and thank you to all of you for your richness of spirit and depth of heart — what a welcoming audience. This small and mighty community of writers continues to swell me with pride in our cohesiveness, our willingness, and (as CyndiC put it so well today) our curiosity.

COMING UP NEXT:Second Sunday Live Labs

We’ll meet three more times Live this fall, always on the second Sunday of each month. Our next Live will be on Sunday, October 12, 11amET, for 75 minutes.

If you’re just coming into the Lives, no worries, as each craft focus also stands alone, so wherever you are in your writing life, you can find good stuff to keep you company and help make your writing sing.

Also, once you are in the Lab, you’ll have access to all past Lab Posts and Assignments. If you’d like to join us in the Lab and be a Sweetheart of the Storybelly Lab, this is where you do it.

We’ll continue to use Chat and a weekly Friday Writers Lab post to stay in touch and keep writing together. More on that below.

Now for Lab Notes and this week’s Resources in film, books, and songs for you to take into the week and into your work. You’ll also find the link to the recording of this week’s Live, below.

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Morning, Lab Coats! Our fourth and last Storybelly September Sunday (Live) begins this morning, Sept. 28, at 11am Eastern Time.

Click on this Google Meet link at 11amET and join us! (You can actually click anytime and find yourself in the queue before 11AM. Check in, grab your coffee or cake, get comfy.

Today we’ll expand and expound on our first three weeks, which were:

Writing preambles — what is the story about? What helps me tell it? What thoughts, questions, links, quotes, mentor text reminders, and possibilities can I post where I look at them as I begin each day (often at the top of the ms)… and how does that help me keep going?

Crafting Beginnings that tug a reader into a story and invite that reader to stick around — tempting and rewarding readers (and us) along the way.

Scaffolding Dialogue that creates character, moves your story forward, and provides needed information (an excellent way to handle exposition, too, and insights).

Jane Kurtz is joining us! Writer, author, teacher,…

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Good Friday afternoon, Lab Coats (and all Storybellers). Debbie here, excited to announce that, for our final September Sunday Live (Sept. 28, 11amET), we’ll be going to church with Jane Kurtz! Woot! Jane is an author, poet, teacher extraordinaire, and all-around amazement. You can check out her books and bio at her website.

Janie on zoom with me

Jane’s newest book is Oh, Give Me a Home. It’s a memoir to my mind, an almost true story in verse to Jane’s mind, “based on a true story of the author’s one-year adventure as a young girl traveling between Ethiopia, Africa and Boise, Idaho with her family, and with the question:

“What does it mean to call a place home, anyway?”

There are SO many ways we can go with this 75-ish minutes we’ve got on Sunday. As I told Janie when we talked by phone this week, the Writers Lab is already brimming with stories, poems, and memoirs, and I’m excited to hear Jane’s take on what she calls “the distilled language and rhythms of dialogue and how they add power to stories, songs and poems.”

Personally, I’m looking forward to talking about how this perspective helps us structure our work as well.

****And there will be writing time together, of course.****

So set your calendars and clocks. Same time, same place. Our last September Sunday Live on Sept. 28, 11amET.

Join us!

Below you’ll find the link to the Google Meet. If you are not yet a Lab Coat and you’d like to join us in the Lab anytime, for a Live or for a weekly craft focus and some writing to an (optional) Assignment, you can do that here.

More Lives!

There will be three more Lives this year, each on the Second Sunday of the last three months of this year: October 12, November 9, and December 14. We’re looking at the possibility of actual workshops together in the new year. Stay tuned.

Read more

Mornin’ y’all, and welcome to the Autumnal Equinox of 2025. I love thinking about the equal daylight we all share for one day (2:15pm is the magic moment, here in ATL today), as the sun crosses the celestial equator.

Jim hugging a tree in 2014, with a cemetery waiting to be explored in the background (as you do, if you’re with me). I think this was near Stone Mountain, Georgia. Photo by me.

On the equinox, we experience an equal time of sunlight and darkness, up and down, in and out, ebb and flow… the opposites, such as freedom and oppression, justice and injustice, life and death — the opposites that Uncle Edisto tells Comfort we can’t live without in Each Little Bird That Sings.

The equinox brings us a momentary balance between those opposites. Then there is the opposite of equanimity that is expressed so well (in context) in John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire that I’ve always remembered: “You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows.” (The entire passage is here, at Goodreads, and worth reading today.)

That was a mantra of mine after I read Irving’s novel, lo these decades ago. I was 28 years old and full of passions. I still have plenty of passions, but, somehow, I have a more temperate way of working with them today. More equanimity, more balance.

Ha! Who am I kidding? Yes. No. Maybe so. It depends.

And ain’t that the truth with every story we read, watch, listen to, or write? I’d love to hear about what you are reading and writing and watching these days. What is speaking to you, opening up your mind and heart… what is it asking you to think about? What are you discovering? How is it helping you navigate the days?

On Sept. 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that as of January 1, 1863 "all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."

I’m steeped in this history at the moment because of my Charlottesville work-in-progress. The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the passage of the 13th Amendment, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Charlottesville’s 2017 Unite the Right rally are all profoundly entwined.

To that end, here is a passionate monologue by Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln insisting on getting the two votes necessary for the passage of the 13th Amendment. (At this link, and below.) The Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime measure that only applied to states in rebellion against the Union, leaving many enslaved persons in border states or areas under Union control still enslaved.

Those of you who are Lab Coats working in the Writers Lab with me will remember we explored yesterday how monologue is similar to dialogue (and there IS dialogue in this scene) and how it also serves to move us in a passionate way. No equanimity and balance here:

“See what is before you. See the here and now…
that’s the hardest thing.”

And isn’t that one of the many hardest things we grapple with today — to see the here and now of history and recognize ourselves in it. Whether with equanimity or in the heat of passion, “we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I know. I’m careening from Spielberg’s Lincoln to Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, but hey… whatever gets you to the point you want to make. My point, I suppose, is that Lincoln’s “here and now” monologue feels unbearably fractured and at the same time impossibly familiar.

What’s before me, here and now, is to finish a novel that has both deep echoes backward to the first colonizers on American shores, and correspondingly broad touchpoints forward to today’s political, social, and cultural climate.

I wish I had adequate words to describe what it’s like to be living in centuries past with this novel, while watching the same historical touchpoints unfold around all of us today.

It would take too many words, and I can’t do it dispassionately, and I’m saving all my passion for the page and for my characters, as much as possible right now.

I do think and will say that books for young readers are and will continue to be a vital link in helping to bridge our national polarization. I feel the burden and the privilege of that as I write Charlottesville . As I write anything.

I’ll bet you do, too.

I realize this is saying nothing. Who was it who said (paraphrasing) if you want to know me, read my books… probably a lot of writers have said that.

I’m leaning on Vonnegut right now, and his opening to Slaughterhouse Five:

“All of this happened, more or less.

The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.”

Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time, in order for Vonnegut to write about the horrors of the bombing of Dresden in WWII, which he survived. Likewise, my characters are well-known by me, beloved, and unstuck in time.

I’m also leaning on Tarantino and his endings to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Inglorious Basterds. I’m not at the end of my novel yet, and I have probably been avoiding it because I know how it ends. Or do I?

I lean on words, images, beauty, comfort, and on an autumnal equinox that has returned with its balance and its promise of another season to come, a marvel of days ahead, days in which to find my way through this story, please god and nature and those who have come before me, before us. I think of these words from the scene above spoken by Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, and I insert, in place of Lincoln’s fight to end the 19th-century’s slavery, today’s national estrangement — a splintering that feels like war:

“I can’t listen to this anymore. I can’t accomplish a g-damn thing of any human meaning or worth until we cure ourselves of slavery and end this pestilential war.”

And then I turn to Lincoln’s own words, spoken at his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861, as seven states — South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas — had already seceded from the Union:

“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends.

We must not be enemies. Though passion may have

strained it must not break our bonds of affection.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every

battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and

hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the

chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely

they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Amen. Shanti, shanti, shanti. Peace, peace, peace.

xo Debbie