Sheridan Brown's Blog
April 29, 2024
Viola Factor, second edition
https://browncrawford.wordpress.com/2...
https://browncrawford.wordpress.com/2...
Author is available for virtual or in person book club discussions and entertainment.
https://browncrawford.wordpress.com/2...
Author is available for virtual or in person book club discussions and entertainment.
July 28, 2022
Book Club Questions
Discussion Questions to accompany THE VIOLA FACTOR by Sheridan Brown
The Viola FactorSheridan Brown
1. One of the ways we learn about Viola is through the traumas she experiences. What were the major ones you think that almost “broke” her or “rescued” her?
2. Would the book have been more engaging if the story were written entirely through primary source document letter exchanges? A number of actual handwritten letters are included in this story. How do these affect the pace of reading?
3. What surprises did you encounter while unraveling Viola’s tale?
4. Throughout their life in Louisville Kentucky, Lewis and Viola attempt to learn about the effects of slavery and discuss ways to diminish it. What obstacles were in their way? What else could they have done?
5. Viola’s credo is given to her upon her mother’s death.
“It is you, my precious Vi, … Take risks my daughter. You are ready. You are strong. Be a schooled and tough woman who understands what is fair and just.”
Has anyone ever given you such a promise or responsibility that you felt you had to complete or follow in life?
6. William Henry Ruffner describes his Aunt Viola in vivid detail:
Poor Aunt Viola excites my deepest commiserations. She is a perfectly unique person - the most sensitive person I ever saw-… and the result is that she has abandoned society and spends her life cheaply and brooding over her wounds, griefs & anxieties until she has become the very embodiment of wretchedness. To think of such a woman being married to a Ruffner! I sometimes talk her into a more genial, hopeful mood but she falls back in a day or two, & for a day or two she scarcely comes out of her chambers…which periodically threatens her mind with unhingement.
Do you feel like he treated her fairly now that you know more about her traumas?
7. Booker T. Washington and Viola remain friends for life. What characteristics do you think the two have in common? What insights did they both learn about one another when he worked for her in Malden?
How do you think Viola’s insistence on perfection might have influenced Booker?
8. Locate a time in Viola’s life where you can feel her happiness radiate. Share it with the group.
9. Rewind Viola’s life passage between 1812-1903. What changes in politics, religion, social norms, fashions, and technologies did she experience?
10. How would a photograph of Viola hurt or enhance your head picture of her?
The Viola FactorSheridan Brown
1. One of the ways we learn about Viola is through the traumas she experiences. What were the major ones you think that almost “broke” her or “rescued” her?
2. Would the book have been more engaging if the story were written entirely through primary source document letter exchanges? A number of actual handwritten letters are included in this story. How do these affect the pace of reading?
3. What surprises did you encounter while unraveling Viola’s tale?
4. Throughout their life in Louisville Kentucky, Lewis and Viola attempt to learn about the effects of slavery and discuss ways to diminish it. What obstacles were in their way? What else could they have done?
5. Viola’s credo is given to her upon her mother’s death.
“It is you, my precious Vi, … Take risks my daughter. You are ready. You are strong. Be a schooled and tough woman who understands what is fair and just.”
Has anyone ever given you such a promise or responsibility that you felt you had to complete or follow in life?
6. William Henry Ruffner describes his Aunt Viola in vivid detail:
Poor Aunt Viola excites my deepest commiserations. She is a perfectly unique person - the most sensitive person I ever saw-… and the result is that she has abandoned society and spends her life cheaply and brooding over her wounds, griefs & anxieties until she has become the very embodiment of wretchedness. To think of such a woman being married to a Ruffner! I sometimes talk her into a more genial, hopeful mood but she falls back in a day or two, & for a day or two she scarcely comes out of her chambers…which periodically threatens her mind with unhingement.
Do you feel like he treated her fairly now that you know more about her traumas?
7. Booker T. Washington and Viola remain friends for life. What characteristics do you think the two have in common? What insights did they both learn about one another when he worked for her in Malden?
How do you think Viola’s insistence on perfection might have influenced Booker?
8. Locate a time in Viola’s life where you can feel her happiness radiate. Share it with the group.
9. Rewind Viola’s life passage between 1812-1903. What changes in politics, religion, social norms, fashions, and technologies did she experience?
10. How would a photograph of Viola hurt or enhance your head picture of her?
Book Club Questions
Discussion Questions to accompany THE VIOLA FACTOR by Sheridan Brown
The Viola FactorSheridan Brown
1. One of the ways we learn about Viola is through the traumas she experiences. What were the major ones you think that almost “broke” her or “rescued” her?
2. Would the book have been more engaging if the story were written entirely through primary source document letter exchanges? A number of actual handwritten letters are included in this story. How do these affect the pace of reading?
3. What surprises did you encounter while unraveling Viola’s tale?
4. Throughout their life in Louisville Kentucky, Lewis and Viola attempt to learn about the effects of slavery and discuss ways to diminish it. What obstacles were in their way? What else could they have done?
5. Viola’s credo is given to her upon her mother’s death.
“It is you, my precious Vi, … Take risks my daughter. You are ready. You are strong. Be a schooled and tough woman who understands what is fair and just.”
Has anyone ever given you such a promise or responsibility that you felt you had to complete or follow in life?
6. William Henry Ruffner describes his Aunt Viola in vivid detail:
Poor Aunt Viola excites my deepest commiserations. She is a perfectly unique person - the most sensitive person I ever saw-… and the result is that she has abandoned society and spends her life cheaply and brooding over her wounds, griefs & anxieties until she has become the very embodiment of wretchedness. To think of such a woman being married to a Ruffner! I sometimes talk her into a more genial, hopeful mood but she falls back in a day or two, & for a day or two she scarcely comes out of her chambers…which periodically threatens her mind with unhingement.
Do you feel like he treated her fairly now that you know more about her traumas?
7. Booker T. Washington and Viola remain friends for life. What characteristics do you think the two have in common? What insights did they both learn about one another when he worked for her in Malden?
How do you think Viola’s insistence on perfection might have influenced Booker?
8. Locate a time in Viola’s life where you can feel her happiness radiate. Share it with the group.
9. Rewind Viola’s life passage between 1812-1903. What changes in politics, religion, social norms, fashions, and technologies did she experience?
10. How would a photograph of Viola hurt or enhance your head picture of her?
The Viola FactorSheridan Brown
1. One of the ways we learn about Viola is through the traumas she experiences. What were the major ones you think that almost “broke” her or “rescued” her?
2. Would the book have been more engaging if the story were written entirely through primary source document letter exchanges? A number of actual handwritten letters are included in this story. How do these affect the pace of reading?
3. What surprises did you encounter while unraveling Viola’s tale?
4. Throughout their life in Louisville Kentucky, Lewis and Viola attempt to learn about the effects of slavery and discuss ways to diminish it. What obstacles were in their way? What else could they have done?
5. Viola’s credo is given to her upon her mother’s death.
“It is you, my precious Vi, … Take risks my daughter. You are ready. You are strong. Be a schooled and tough woman who understands what is fair and just.”
Has anyone ever given you such a promise or responsibility that you felt you had to complete or follow in life?
6. William Henry Ruffner describes his Aunt Viola in vivid detail:
Poor Aunt Viola excites my deepest commiserations. She is a perfectly unique person - the most sensitive person I ever saw-… and the result is that she has abandoned society and spends her life cheaply and brooding over her wounds, griefs & anxieties until she has become the very embodiment of wretchedness. To think of such a woman being married to a Ruffner! I sometimes talk her into a more genial, hopeful mood but she falls back in a day or two, & for a day or two she scarcely comes out of her chambers…which periodically threatens her mind with unhingement.
Do you feel like he treated her fairly now that you know more about her traumas?
7. Booker T. Washington and Viola remain friends for life. What characteristics do you think the two have in common? What insights did they both learn about one another when he worked for her in Malden?
How do you think Viola’s insistence on perfection might have influenced Booker?
8. Locate a time in Viola’s life where you can feel her happiness radiate. Share it with the group.
9. Rewind Viola’s life passage between 1812-1903. What changes in politics, religion, social norms, fashions, and technologies did she experience?
10. How would a photograph of Viola hurt or enhance your head picture of her?
The Evolution of Viola
During the past nine years of retirement from school administration I have volunteered at various places for various organizations, learned to play new games with friends such as Mah Jong, learned to enjoy gardening, hibernated during Covid, and floundered with how to spend time that used to be twelve hour work-days and working weekends. Then I met VIOLA!Sheridan BrownThe Viola FactorThe Viola Factor
“Welcome to The Booker T. Washington National Monument Living History Guild. We have quite a few members already, who will you be portraying?” I gulped and asked, “How about Booker’s 1860’s owner Mrs. Burroughs? One of her sisters? One of the Burroughs’ daughters? Neighbor Molly Holland or Elizabeth Powell?” They replied, “But all those roles are taken.”
I was performing in living history reenactments with the National Park where we live in southwest Virginia. It was time for me to start my research and earn my spot in this esteemed group. But what white woman played prominence in Booker T. Washington’s life and would be worth telling the public about? Then I found her, or she found me!
Because Booker had spent the first nine years of his life carrying water to workers in the tobacco fields, collecting chicken eggs and catching fish with his bare hands in Hale’s Ford Virginia, having to work underground after his emancipated family moved to Malden West Virginia seven days a week packing salt and shoveling coal with his stepfather was scary and sickening to him. His mother helped him find a job in the home of the people who owned the mines, Lewis (1797-1883) and VIOLA Ruffner (1812-1903).
Booker lived and worked as a chore boy in the Ruffner home around 1867-1872, from age ten-eleven to sixteen. Viola Knapp Ruffner had a disposition from which most boys ran. By most accounts she was a stern and exacting former Vermont school teacher whose expectations exceeded anything Booker had ever experienced and whose penchant for perfection teetered on derangement. She is credited with teaching him to read, write, speak, and start his own library of books. What drew these two together, she over 50 years of age and he a pre-teen? How did their friendship grow into a long-lasting closeness that ended only with her death in 1903? What had caused Viola, reportedly a beautiful and scholarly woman, to be such a nervous and high-strung woman totally out of harmony with others?
The first copies arrive
That was the Viola I was now driven to know and admire? My questions filled notebooks, my hours on Ancestry.com beyond number and my emails overflowed seeking more about her in Vermont, North Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, and West Virginia. By now I felt compelled to craft her story and have authored a historical fiction book, THE VIOLA FACTOR, available in paperback and eBook wherever books are sold. I hope you are as magnetized by her as I continue to be!
The book is dedicated to teachers… just like Viola, Booker and me – we’re a tough and classy lot!
“Welcome to The Booker T. Washington National Monument Living History Guild. We have quite a few members already, who will you be portraying?” I gulped and asked, “How about Booker’s 1860’s owner Mrs. Burroughs? One of her sisters? One of the Burroughs’ daughters? Neighbor Molly Holland or Elizabeth Powell?” They replied, “But all those roles are taken.”
I was performing in living history reenactments with the National Park where we live in southwest Virginia. It was time for me to start my research and earn my spot in this esteemed group. But what white woman played prominence in Booker T. Washington’s life and would be worth telling the public about? Then I found her, or she found me!
Because Booker had spent the first nine years of his life carrying water to workers in the tobacco fields, collecting chicken eggs and catching fish with his bare hands in Hale’s Ford Virginia, having to work underground after his emancipated family moved to Malden West Virginia seven days a week packing salt and shoveling coal with his stepfather was scary and sickening to him. His mother helped him find a job in the home of the people who owned the mines, Lewis (1797-1883) and VIOLA Ruffner (1812-1903).
Booker lived and worked as a chore boy in the Ruffner home around 1867-1872, from age ten-eleven to sixteen. Viola Knapp Ruffner had a disposition from which most boys ran. By most accounts she was a stern and exacting former Vermont school teacher whose expectations exceeded anything Booker had ever experienced and whose penchant for perfection teetered on derangement. She is credited with teaching him to read, write, speak, and start his own library of books. What drew these two together, she over 50 years of age and he a pre-teen? How did their friendship grow into a long-lasting closeness that ended only with her death in 1903? What had caused Viola, reportedly a beautiful and scholarly woman, to be such a nervous and high-strung woman totally out of harmony with others?
The first copies arrive
That was the Viola I was now driven to know and admire? My questions filled notebooks, my hours on Ancestry.com beyond number and my emails overflowed seeking more about her in Vermont, North Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, and West Virginia. By now I felt compelled to craft her story and have authored a historical fiction book, THE VIOLA FACTOR, available in paperback and eBook wherever books are sold. I hope you are as magnetized by her as I continue to be!
The book is dedicated to teachers… just like Viola, Booker and me – we’re a tough and classy lot!
