Louella Bryant's Blog

In early spring of 2004, when Howard Dean was running for President, my husband Harry sat on the front porch of our Vermont house with a glass of beer and talked about Howard’s younger brother Charlie. Harry had met Charlie in 1968 when they were students at St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island. There were only two hundred students in the boarding school—all boys—and they knew each other well.

Harry had told me about visiting a farm commune some friends had started in Australia. Three friends had dropped out of college—Harvard, Yale, and University of Denver—during protests against the Vietnam War. They traveled in Kenya and drove the coast of Australia. On York Peninsula they purchased 460 acres of land and started a farm commune they dubbed Rosebud.

Harry and Charlie finished college—Harry at Harvard and Charlie at UNC—and in 1973 they joined their friends at Rosebud Farm. After six months of tilling fields, fertilizing with chicken manure, and lots of partying, Harry headed back to the U.S. and Charlie traveled in Southeast Asia, planning the join the Peace Corps the following year.

Although U.S. troops had left Vietnam and Cambodia, Laos was still at war. While Charlie and an Australian friend were traveling on a Mekong riverboat, members of the communist Pathet Lao ordered the boat to dock. Charlie took a picture—his big mistake. For three months he and Neil were held in a rainforest prison camp. In December 1974, they were both executed.

Harry finished his story, put down his beer and disappeared into the house. He returned with a shoebox filled with letters from Charlie, written from Bangkok and Cambodia, and a journal covered in red leather. I leafed through pages barely holding onto the binding after thirty years and found an almost daily accounting of those days in Australia.

I had met Howard when he was governor of Vermont and when I tracked him down on the campaign trail, he gave me permission to tell his brother’s story. Harry’s journal entries and Charlie’s letters reveal vulnerable young men trying to find themselves. Their privileged families gave them the means to travel the world, buy a large parcel of land, build a 54-foot sailboat, and know that they would never have to be chained to a desk or to scramble for a living. They had the freedom to explore and take risks. But with risks come mistakes born of youthful exuberance. Mistakes must be paid for, and Charlie paid the dearest price.

While In Darkness There Is Light is available from Black Lawrence Press (https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/...) and from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

My next novel, Sheltering Angel, A Titanic Story, is based on the true story of wealthy New Yorkers who found an ancient connection with the Scottish steward who served them in first class aboard the ill-fated ship.

Is anyone still interested in reading about the Titanic? Let me know because I'm looking for a publisher.

What's intriguing about the story is not only the obvious warnings of ice in the navigational route, a coal fire in the furnace room, and White Star Line’s desire to set a speed record from Southampton to New York. There also were subliminal messages that New Yorker Florence and steward Andrew picked up. Both of them had misgivings about Titanic's maiden voyage, but their concerns were dismissed as silly. How could such a magnificent ship founder?

But, as we know, founder it does. And what became of Florence and of her husband Bradley and of Andrew? Let's hope readers will want to know.

I'm in the final edits of a new novel titled Sheltering Angel: A Titanic Story. It's a roman a clef, which is fiction based on a true story, and involves my husband's great-grandmother who survived the Titanic sinking and saved her steward from the frigid North Atlantic while she watched her beloved husband go down with the ship.

I've known for a decade that I should write this story, but no matter how many books I have in print, I approach each new manuscript as a beginner. I have the same trouble with plotting, character development, basic structure, and those inevitable and annoying repetitions of any first draft. I've probably written twenty drafts (or more) of the current book and still tremble at having anyone read it. I have a publisher who has asked to see the manuscript, and I'm dragging my heels about sending it. How do you push your precious fledgling, the baby you've handled and sheltered, from the nest?

Here's how. You take a deep breath and pack it up with the best cover letter, summary and sample pages you can put together. And you drive to the post office or you hit SEND. And you wait for the response that never comes. Or the dreaded rejection. If a rejection pops into my inbox, that means I go back to the pages and see where I can improve the story.

Writing is like being strapped to the rack until I spill my confessions and am set free. Then there is great relief until the next story idea crosses my mind. I know writing the story will mean going back to the rack. But stories need to be told and need to be read, so we're in this business together, dear reader. Without you, what would be the point of writing at all?

Be well,
Louella

Creative writing is a mad and capricious process. If you’re a writer, it helps to be a little zany. After all, we invent worlds, create monsters and villains, and give our heroes superpowers even if they are just ordinary people. The trick is to create an impossible situation and have our characters figure out how to emerge unscathed—or only a little scathed.

Several years ago I drove the writer Nancy Willard from her home in Poughkeepsie to a writing workshop she was teaching and I was attending. After a fascinating three days of writing poetry, I drove her home and she invited me in. Her house looked as if a brilliant six-year-old lived there. A large wicker angel wearing a funny hat stood by the door to accept my coat. Life-sized manikins guarded the living room hearth, one with a teapot head. “Someone gave me the teapot,” she said, “and I felt sorry for it not having a body.”

The kitchen cabinets were painted evening blue and decorated with moon and stars. When a big apple tree in the back yard died, she had the hollow trunk cut down and fixed to a platform on wheels. The trunk, set in a corner of the dining room, had a door cut into the side with hinges to open it. Inside stood an angel two feet tall. When I peeked through a knothole, I found the inside lit with Christmas tree lights illuminating a Chinese Fu Manchu figure looking down at a manger while a toy tiger stood guard.

Some writers stare at a blank wall to access their creative muses. Others, like Willard, live with their creations.
Willard published two novels and eleven books of poetry for adults. She also was a prolific writer of children’s books. A Visit to William Blake’s Inn was the first book of poetry to win the Newbery Medal and also a Caldecott Honor, and she published a retelling of John Milton’s Paradise Lost for young readers. For many years she taught at Vassar College. Her work—in all genres—teaches us to experience the common in a most uncommon way.

Willard’s inspirations came largely from the house in which she grew up, which was much like the inn she wrote about in A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. Her grandfather lived on the third floor with his chewing tobacco and his books, including the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, treatises on beekeeping and osteopathy, and the shadowy works of Edgar Allan Poe, from which he recited loudly every evening. For most of the day, her grandmother talked aloud to her ancestors, and in the evening she recited prayers in German. Nancy listened to the ramblings of the houseguests and noted them in the margins of her school papers. To be a writer, she concluded, is to be a listener.

With more than sixty books to her credit, Willard seemed to have a boundless fount of creativity. What draws Willard into a story or a poem is never the plot, she says in her collection of essays, Telling Time. “No, it is the teller, the witness, who gives direct testimony, not simply information.”

Publishers have told me that it is the characters that the reader falls in love with. We have to believe in a story’s characters and care about what happens to them. When they rise up from the page with verisimilitude, we are willing to follow them anywhere.

If you’re a painter, you have to keep painting. If you’re a dancer, you must keep dancing. And if you’re a writer, Willard says, “You have to sit down every day and write. What if the angel [of creativity] came and you were out shopping for shoes? God helps the drowning sailor, but he must row.”

It can always help to believe in angels or muses of one sort or another. Nancy Willard did. She died in 2017. Quite possibly she has become a muse to another lucky writer.

How I came to write COWBOY CODE

One holiday while visiting my mother, I went up to the attic and rummaged through boxes for anything I had left up there when I left for college. In an old trunk I found hundreds of letters my parents had written to each other while my father was in the Navy. Letters to him were imprinted with lipstick kisses. His were typed on onionskin paper using manual typewriter. A censor had sliced out any hints he had given to his location somewhere in the South Pacific. When I asked, Mom let me have the letters. Through their words of passion, I felt a book coming to life.

I grew up in the era of Gene Autry, a squeaky-clean singing cowboy who respected women and never touched alcohol. Unlike my father, good cowboys never got drunk and always defeated the bad guys. My father wasn’t a bad guy, but his drinking nearly destroyed our family.

From the time I was young, my mother told me stories about her early life in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, and many of those tales bore fruit in Cowboy Code. Panthers came down from the forests at night and stole chickens from her father’s yard and the woods were full of ticks and poisonous snakes. She recalled the train stopping at the town’s station and unloading wealthy visitors and dignitaries headed for the elegant Homestead resort a short drive away to play tennis or golf and soak in the hot springs. She spoke about the African settlement where the Negroes lived. Her father, a mill foreman and secretly a member of the Ku Klux Klan, hired one of the young men from the settlement to help him with his small farm. My mother had been the oldest of three children, and her father inflicted harsher discipline on her than he did on her younger brother and sister. At eighteen she married to escape the sting of the razor strap for even a minor infraction of his rules.

My mother’s two sons were still young when their father was killed in an explosion at the paper mill. In her early twenties, Mom was a beautiful widow with no means of support, so she took a job at the mill and hired a nanny for her boys. In Cowboy Code, I replaced the older boy with Bobbie, a 14-year-old girl, because I wanted the story to reflect a girl’s coming of age in Appalachia.

After her husband’s death, Mom married a sailor who struggled with alcoholism. Shortly after he moved the family to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the U.S. Navy Department, I was born, followed five years later by my younger brother. The six of us lived in a development of small houses built for families of WWII veterans just outside the nation’s capital.

Cowboy Code took twenty years to find its way into print. I was reluctant to release the story and expose the shame I’ve felt for most of my life around my father’s drinking, my grandfather’s racism, and the soot and poverty of my family’s Virginia roots. But in writing about the people of the fictional town of Pine Cliff, I have come to realize that they are the embodiment of dignity, honesty, a strong work ethic, and a deep spiritual faith, and I’m proud to say that they are my people.

I'm delighted to have an author page with Goodreads and to meet followers. Hello and hurrah! I know you're all reading, and some of you are writing, too. I can help with both. I hold the MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in fiction and a Master's in Education and Human Development from George Washington University. My undergrad degree from GWU was in English, focusing on writing of the Elizabethan era. That didn't get me far, haha. I edit writers' work and am happy to look at yours. See my website for contact info: http://louellabryant.com.

When I began teaching high school English in 1976, I was asked to teach American literature. I was as much a student as my 11th graders when it came to U.S. authors. But after 25 years of teaching, I finally got a handle on writing that is truly American.

For several years, I read mostly books and stories by black writers, including Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Alexis De Veaux, Maya Angelou, Wanda Coleman, and many, many others. Their writing is diverse and ranges from African topics to inner-city tales in the U.S., from New England to Southern California, and everywhere in between. I fell in love with the cadences of their writing and the brutal honesty of what they had to say. For many years, these women were my teachers.

Three of my published books deal with the topic of race, The Black Bonnet, Father By Blood, and Cowboy Code. My forthcoming memoir, Hot Springs and Moonshine Liquor, includes stories about black women working in the underground during Prohibition as well as Native Americans who made hooch. And even though my working novel, Sheltering Angel, is about the Titanic (on which there were few if any black passengers), I include a chapter about Booker T. Washington and his conflict with Boston's black newspaper publisher Monroe Trotter. To see how I managed that trick, you'll have to get the book.

Hot Springs and Moonshine Liquor is due for release December 23, but you may preorder with a 15% discount using the code PREORDER2020. Just go to the Black Rose Writing website and be sure to click the preorder link: https://www.blackrosewriting.com/nonf....

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