The Greatest Gift

By Kim

Robert Ahrens and Mildred

I am currently in that no-man’s land called Between Books. My editing is done, the synopsis and query letters are written and have been sent out. Now I wait and try to figure out what to do next. I have a solid idea for the next novel which I have not yet started, hoping I will soon receive “the call” and be thrust me back into a story that still won’t let me go.

Perhaps it is because I live with constant reminders around me—paintings, photographs, Madonna’s bracelet, my daughter’s miniature “Carl feet” and even my own reflection. Perhaps it is because people regularly contact me to add their Ahrens work to my catalog.

Occasionally I receive an e-mail that reminds me of the greatest gift that writing The Oak Lovers has given me. It’s not dreams of fame or fortune, which would be nice, but have nothing to do with why I write. It’s not simply about restoring my great-grandfather’s legacy, much as I hope to do so. No, the greatest gift is that a century-old family rift has been mended. I'm an only child and don’t have a big family, so I cherish any new relatives I can find.

Emily Ahrens

My grandmother grew up knowing her father had another wife before meeting her mother. The topic was not openly discussed, but it was certainly not a secret in her generation or my father’s. I always knew about the family scandal, but did not learn the name of Carl’s other wife and children until I read Madonna’s memoirs as an adult. Names were all she gave.

Inside one of my late grandmother’s scrapbooks I discovered a photocopied letter addressed to “Kim” from “Grandpa Ahrens.” It was about living on an Ojibwa reservation as a child and could only have been written by one of the sons from Carl’s first marriage. Where had it come from? There was no envelope. No clues. My aunts knew nothing about it.

Martha McGowan, Kitty Turgeon, Kim, and Janice McDuffie

Years later, while researching Carl’s file in the local history room of the public library in Kitchener, Ontario, I found a letter. It was written by a woman named Martha McGowan and asked for information about her ancestor, Carl Ahrens. A simple Yahoo people search led me to my half second cousin. It turned out she had found my grandmother in the early 80s and had a brief correspondence with her. She had also forwarded along the mystery letter, originally written to a cousin of hers who shares my name.

Martha and I decided that a century was quite long enough for the two halves of the family to have been kept apart, and we agreed to meet at the Roycroft campus in East Aurora, New York. The very same place where Carl met my great-grandmother and eventually left Martha’s. We laughed about the irony of the situation. About a year later we met again, along with Martha’s mother, a granddaughter of Carl and Emily, at an exhibition of Carl’s work in Ontario.

This week I've had the pleasure of corresponding with the very same Kim who received the mystery letter from “Grandpa Ahrens” when she was in 6^th grade. She has showered me with photographs of a family I never thought I would get the chance to know. It has been Christmas in October.

The biggest treasure arrived in my inbox this morning – the only known photograph that includes Carl and Emily. It was most likely taken as the basis of a painting to be done by Canadian artist George Reid, a friend of Carl’s. Reid is the man seated backwards in the chair. Emily kneels on the floor hunched with two children and seemingly crying. The boy peeking through the chair is Carl and Emily’s son, Robert. Carl is the hunched figure in the background. If you look close, you can see he leans heavily on a cane. He, too, appears to be grieving. What is especially haunting about this pose is that it is a metaphor for his first marriage. Emily, a maternal woman, sheltering their children and keeping her back to the invalid in the corner. The man who has disappointed her for years. Even more telling is that there is someone sitting between them.

Thanks to the internet, chance, curiosity, and a century of time for old wounds to smooth over, you would barely notice a scar where the family rift used to be.  A tremendous gift indeed!

Update: I have just learned that the photograph isn't a photograph, but rather an image of a completed painting by George A. Reid called "Family Prayer." It is one of his best known works and hung in the Salon in Paris in the 1890's. This explains why Carl, who was only 26 at the time, appears to have white hair. Reid could have used his frail build as the basis for an old man and changed his hair color. 

Hurry Up and Wait

You can also play with cover ideas!

By Kim

A couple of weeks ago I edited the complete manuscript for The Oak Lovers and sent it to my first round of critique partners and Beta readers. Fellow What Women Write contributor, Joan Mora, advised patience.

“Don’t be too surprised, or too frustrated, if your Beta readers don’t read as fast as you’d like them to,” she said. Joan’s recently been there, done that, and she knows of what she speaks.

Of course, I thought. Just because people have been telling me for years that they can’t wait to read my book doesn’t mean they will open the document the moment it hits their inbox. Some of them have edits of their own to do or deadlines looming. Many have jobs, kids, or both. One just had a tornado hit her house. Really. Others may be overwhelmed by having a four-hundred page document that they have not only agreed to read, but to comment on. What if they don’t like it? What if something doesn’t work? How can they break it to me? (Hint: Just tell me.)

All writers encounter this no-man’s land between composition and submission, so I thought it may be helpful to offer some suggestions for how to pass the time.

Research agents and compose your query. A no-brainer.

Google yourself. Has your blog been neglected? Do you have a website? If not, do you need one? If so, does it need a facelift? Mine did! (Check out my handiwork here.)

Purge office of clutter. Obviously, I’m not about to throw out family documents, but I no longer need files on secondary characters or books on Ojibwa ceremonies. Vintage postcards of settings used in The Oak Lovers can be stowed away like old love letters. This is a break up of sorts. If old voices linger in my mind, it will be harder to hear any new ones.

Brainstorm new projects. I have a few ideas.

Cook. This tip may work better in other homes. In mine it's a futile exercise. I have yet to find a single thing that all members of my family enjoy.

Clean. Dust those high shelves. Organize those cabinets. Dare to face your child’s closet.

Tackle unfinished house projects. Paint a room. Hang new blinds. Install new flooring. Garden.

Read. I don’t know about you, but my to-be-read pile has became a bookshelf, and it's overflowing!

Have a glass of wine. Or two. You’ve earned it.

What you should not do: Open your manuscript. You will think every word you've written is crap. Trust me on this.

Vision Quest

By Kim

A mother’s heartbeat is the song of her child, connecting her child to the world. You are the Earth mother’s child. Hear her vibration and connect to her pulse, for the drum speaks through her to those that listen. – An elder’s wisdom

This morning as I sat here in my “office” pondering what to write for today’s post I felt a slight shiver and promptly opened all the windows in the house. This time of year usually makes me long to lie on a carpet of fiery leaves and stare in wonder at the ceiling of a forest cathedral. (Such churches are in short supply here in Dallas, which is perhaps why I still don’t consider it home despite having lived here for thirteen years.)

It isn’t the forest I long for now, but a river. The smooth triangular shaped rock I plucked from the banks of the Saugeen six years ago today sits beside me on my desk as I write.

I’ve been to many places while researching for The Oak Lovers, following Carl Ahrens’ footsteps all over southern Ontario and western New York. Knowing that little remains of the reservation where he was once adopted into an Ojibwa tribe, I almost skipped making the trip to Southampton in 2004. It’s true that the rock garden and the amphitheater were not there in my great-grandfather’s time, but he surely stood on the bluff and watched the silvery light dance off the Saugeen River. I’d seen more dramatic landscapes, certainly, but never before had I heard music in the rustle of branches or felt such a profound sense of peace and belonging. My cousin, traveling with me at the time, dared voice the thought: “His spirit’s here.”

I saw no specter, heard no voice from the past in any conventional sense, but as I nodded my entire concept of the world and what comes after we leave it altered. My pulse, racing up to that point, slowed. The names, dates, places and events I had come to Canada to learn about were gently swept to a far corner of my mind. I saw them for what they were then; a thousand trees that would prevent me from ever seeing the forest. I took a deep breath, but before I could fully form the question in my mind, I felt a strong urge to get in the car and continue our journey to Tobermory. My vision quest had begun.

Three hours later and sixty-six miles north, I approached a ceremonial teepee in the woods behind an Ojibwa-themed campground. I expected a cheesy re-enactment of a full moon ceremony for the benefit of tourists, but curiosity led me to join a circle of eight strangers around the campfire in the center of the teepee. I was at least twenty years younger than the other women and the only one not holding a hand-made elk skin drum. The Ojibwa elder smiled and bid me welcome in her native tongue. As I watched her construct a tobacco offering resembling an umbilical cord, I realized that my need to be there was no longer about my book, or even my ancestor, but about me. I desired to listen with my instincts instead of my ears, to put my faith in those wonders that can be neither seen nor explained, merely experienced.

I followed her lead: one knot for myself, one knot for my children, a third for my ancestors, and a fourth for a special friend. The elder sang as she worked, a haunting melody in a language both unintelligible and oddly familiar.

Each woman in turn stood in front of the fire and said a payer of thanks. Some addressed God, others Kitche Manitou (Great Mystery). After dropping the tobacco offering onto the fire, each added a cedar bough, which smelled heavenly. Next came a water offering – one spoonful to the ground, one to the fire, one to the rock, and one to yourself.

These are the things I learned that night:

I can’t make a buffalo call to save my life, but I can feel it in my bones.

Crowded teepees are sweltering even on cold nights.

Time travel is possible. Listen to a native drum with your eyes closed and you'll forget which century you're in.

The combination of burning cedar, sweetgrass and tobacco will keep you blissfully disoriented until you can fully get the smell out of your clothes and hair. You will miss the intense dreams when you do.

I rose before the sun the next morning, something I never do, and this view greeted me.

What about you? Have you ever been on a vision quest or experienced anything that has altered your perception of the world around you? If you write, how has this affected your work?

Note: Painting is Indian Camp by Carl Ahrens, oil on canvas, undated.

Escaping From Word Count Hell

By Kim

When I first began writing The Oak Lovers I didn’t consider the issue of word count. Both my other novels hovered around that magic 80-100,000 word mark. While this book would be longer, surely there was an agent or publisher willing to take a chance on a well-written, compelling, mostly true story even if it soared to 150,000 words.

My muses spoke. I transcribed.

The first hint of trouble came when I got to the point in my story when my protagonists (and great-grandparents) Carl and Madonna are finally together. (No, this is not a spoiler.) My critique partners (Joan and Pamela) sent that chapter back saying something along the lines of, “This is great. How many chapters left? Two? Three? You must be about done.”

I was taken aback. Carl and Madonna indeed surmounted many obstacles to be together, but their story didn’t end with marriage and a happily ever after. Not even close. I said I was about a third done. But how many pages have you written, they asked. I honestly had no idea, as I keep each chapter in a separate file. A quick calculation astounded me – 175 pages - about 44,000 words.

“Can you break it into two books?” they asked.

I considered this, eventually deciding that the answer was yes and no. A stand alone book would sell far easier than two books. I could, however, write the second book about Eleanor Douglas, an artist with a compelling story of her own. She lived with the Ahrens family for six years, including the time they lived on the Ojibwa reservation. Carl was her teacher, and they were close, but not as close, I suspect, as the relationship between Eleanor and Carl’s first wife, Emily.

I kept going, determined to finish and worry about length later. The book would be as long as it took me to tell the story. If that was 140,000 words, so be it. Someone would take it on anyway.

But what if they didn’t? Or did, but told me I needed to slash 30,000 words before submitting to publishers. What would be stronger, my artistic ego or my desire to see this story in print?

I knew the answer to that. I went back through my chapters, tightening dialogue, abolishing chit-chat, and made obvious cuts. Down to 81,000 words. There’s no way I could finish the story in 19,000. Even 29,000 would feel rushed.

I took a deep breath, knowing that if I didn’t do something now, every new word I wrote would be labored, rushed and, frankly, not very good. The only way I could relax is if I bought myself more words.

I started with chapter one and am now up to sixteen (of twenty-seven). I’ve cut 11,000 words so far. Here’s how:

1. I look at the chapter as a whole. If there are any scenes that don’t move the plot forward, enhance character or relationship development, or include something that definitely comes into play later, it must go. I move it to a separate file in case I change my mind. I don’t wallow on how long I struggled to write the scene, or how nicely the words flow. Is it better to spend 500 words on a sweet scene that serves no purpose other than being sweet, or use those words for a visit from the Prime Minister of Canada?
   
   
2. If the scene stays, are there unnecessary paragraphs? Does the reader need 320 words about why Carl fears death, just because the story happens to be true? Yes, it’s interesting, but a sentence or two in a key place would establish his above-average dread.
   
   
3. For what remains, I review each sentence. Is there a shorter way to say the same thing (remaining consistent with the tone of the story, of course)? Is the paragraph stronger without the sentence? Are the characters speaking in complete sentences, when it’s more likely they’d use fragments, as we all do?

Had I waited until the end of the book and then been asked to cut 30,000 words, it would have been agonizing. Cutting 11,000 (and counting) now has been liberating. Do I think I can finish in fewer than 100,000? Unlikely. Under 110,000? Quite possibly. Will this length be forgivable? I sure hope so.

If anyone has any further advice for writers attempting to tame their epic, or simply have any word count stories to share, I’d love to hear from you.

A Room of My Own

By Kim

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. – Virginia Woolf

Growing up as an only child, I always had my own room. At times I had my own bathroom, even my own balcony. When I was nine the entire top floor of our condo, which included two rooms and a loft, belonged to me, though I usually played in the storage nook halfway down the staircase, which I also claimed. At our house in Maine, the basement was mine, though it may not have been such a prize as I shared the space with the wood stove and had no door until my dad built me a proper room down there.

Dorm life in college was miserable. With parents who lived overseas, all of my things were with me, and I had to share a room a fourth the size of what I was used to. My roommate and I agreed an off-campus apartment was in order the moment we were allowed to have one. I had my own room again, and eventually my own apartment. Heaven.

Then I got married and had kids. I’ve accumulated more things over the years and my personal space has shrunk. I have to wonder what Virginia Woolf would think of my ‘room’ today.

Here is my desk. It’s a bit cramped, but it’s mine, at least until one of the kids commandeers my computer to play Webkinz or leaves artwork or trinkets they’ve made for me on one of my piles of papers. During the day, it’s a little oasis in an otherwise chaotic house. Beside me, I have vintage postcards of Roycroft and other places featured in my work in progress, The Oak Lovers. Look up and there’s a stunning portrait by Edmund Wyly Grier of my great-grandfather, Carl Ahrens, the protagonist of my novel. From my chair I can see several of Carl’s paintings. (Note the bright pink earplugs sitting near my monitor. I’ll get into why those are an important fixture soon.)

To my left is a wall of photos and sketches of the women of generations past and present, other than for a lone photo of Carl by the lamp. The cabinet, not generally left open, is where I cram correspondence and research material related to my book. What doesn’t fit in there fills filing cabinets under the printer, the lamp and my desk. Things I've not yet found a home for wind up stacked behind my monitor. That pile is frightening. Yes, I can find things, but only when I don’t need them.

To my right hang examples of the artwork my great-grandmother, Madonna, did at Roycroft. On the bookshelf rest a menagerie of family photos and rocks plucked from the spot where Carl and Madonna met and the Ojibwa reservation where Carl once lived. One of Carl’s paintbrushes is in the vase, though I often fiddle with it when the words don’t flow. It still smells faintly of turpentine and I love running my fingers over the patches worn smooth from long use. In case you're curious, the nude woman in the one photo is Madonna.

My most constant companion through the day is the dog. If only he would always be as sweet as he is in this photo. While writing this he’s attempting to hump one of the cats. Seeing she just spent the last 20 minutes sharpening her claws, I imagine she’ll win this battle soon. In the meantime, I have earplugs.

My space is cramped, but manageable, at least until three o'clock on school days. After that, all hell breaks loose. My room is not a room at all, you see, but one wall of a living area in the middle of the house. This space is also occupied by three animals and three kids. The 39-year-old boy may not look like a kid, but he’s the loudest and has the biggest toys.

Here is his space. Keep in mind that I took this photo while sitting in my desk chair and no, I did not zoom in. The corner of his desk is 52 inches from the back of my chair. He’s a gamer, so when he’s home, he rarely leaves this desk unless one of the kids needs him or I present him with a list of chores. Now, out of courtesy to me, he does wear headphones. This prevents me from hearing the incessant music, gunfire or other sound effects. A drawback of his chivalry is that the children always come to me to fix drinks, snacks, malfunctioning electronics or out of boredom. Another negative is that his new headphones are equipped with a microphone, in which he frequently talks to other players. Imagine what a disruption it is to be immersed in the world of 1908 Toronto and have the guy behind you pipe up with, ‘Can I blast this one away with the regular machine gun or do I need the vaporizer?’

Hence the bright pink earplugs. Yet, if I wear them while children are home, who will notice when heads are bonked or the verbal sparring comes to blows? Even on those occasions when I put my husband in charge of his offspring for a few hours, I can't escape the household melee because I don't have a laptop. Volcanoes built in the kitchen erupt to squeals of delight uttered less than ten feet away from me. When the phone rings, I hear it in triplicate. If a visitor should push the doorbell, it chimes directly overhead. Just seventeen feet of echoing laminate floor separates me from the big screen TV, fully pimped with surround sound, a Play Station 2, a Wii, and an Xbox.

Sometimes desperation allows me to tune it all out enough to work. I wrote a heated argument scene to the soundtrack of Dora the Explorer. A pivotal romantic scene got penned while my husband and a neighbor jammed to "American Woman" on Rock Band. Madonna was indeed an American woman, but Carl was decidedly not telling her to stop knocking round his door ‘cause he didn’t want to see her shadow no more.

Clearly I need a proper space of my own, but my only option is to take one of my daughter's rooms. I can’t ask an eight-year-old to share with a four-year-old, especially since she's had her own room since birth. Doing so would rob them both of a private place to dream, something that was vital to me as a child and helped shape me into the writer I am today. There’s no place for a makeshift office in my bedroom, and I’d never sleep if my computer were there anyway. A room could be built above the garage but at great expense. Right now I’d settle for a little shed in the backyard, provided it had electricity and a window air-conditioning unit. Texas summers are a little toasty after all.

When I expressed my desire for my own space to my husband, he smiled, kissed my cheek, and told me I could have anything I want if I just sell a couple of million dollar books.

Yeah, I’ll get right on that, Honey. Now, go watch the football game in our bedroom.

Who's afraid of a genre change?

By Kim

A few years ago I had an informal chat with an agent about my current work in progress, which I had not yet started. She was intrigued by the story of Carl Ahrens, a pivotal yet often neglected painter from the early 20th century. After I admitted I’m Carl’s great-granddaughter, she leaned forward in her chair and asked about my sources of information on him. I replied that I have a stack of newspaper and magazine articles, obituaries from four different countries, exhibition catalogs, family photographs, works of art, correspondence with Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, and about a dozen drafts of an unpublished memoir written by his wife, Madonna. “Why on earth would you write this as fiction?” she asked. “Narrative nonfiction is so much easier to sell.”

Having won a grant from Iowa State for a narrative nonfiction essay while in graduate school, I thought surely I could do it. Writing the book as nonfiction gave me an excuse to travel to places Carl had lived and I dove into researching the artists, actors, journalists, musicians and politicians he associated with. Knowing the importance of having a platform, I built and maintain a website where I feature his paintings, a short biography, journals of my research travels, and excerpts from my work in progress. Two of my articles on Carl have been published. One was the cover story for the Waterloo County Ontario Historical Society’s annual volume.

I soon began to question the wisdom of my genre choice, however. How do you tell the ‘truth’ when your sources all offer different versions of the ‘facts’? Many of the reporters who wrote articles on Carl were his friends; they pieced together stories he had told them over the years, exaggerating as they saw fit. Or, perhaps, the ‘faction’ came from Carl himself, as he was not above telling a few whoppers (he remained forty years old for about twelve years). Madonna, a newly converted Catholic at the time she wrote the memoir, had incentive to gloss over details the Church would frown on. She states her relationship with Carl was platonic until he left his first wife. Several other sources, including a rather suggestive poem written by Carl himself, make me question whether she just didn’t want to admit to having an affair with a married man at seventeen. Can I prove either version? Nope.

I began writing, ignoring the nagging feeling I violated some ethical code every time I included dialogue, and worked in every fact I could find to ease my guilt. The result was good though mildly strangled prose, and I was stuck at page 125. I knew that if I survived writing the whole book in that manner, I’d edit the thing to death because I’d never be satisfied enough to submit it. As agent Jessica Faust stated in her July 20th blog, ‘good enough is never enough.’ Good enough is all it would ever be as narrative nonfiction. Perfection required a leap of faith.

The first thing I had to face was that my book was not, in fact, a biography. Carl and Madonna were like the tree lovers he often painted; fused at the root, wrapped so tightly around each other that it’s impossible to tell the story of one without telling the story of the other. The book would have no soul if I separated them long enough to chronicle the first forty years of his life. Yet that’s exactly what my proposal said I was going to do.

So I started over.

I was writing ‘faction’ before and I’m still writing ‘faction,’ only now I can transform characters back into the flesh and blood people they once were. I don’t want to simply engage the reader during passages of intense restraint between Carl and Madonna. I want to make them physically ache. I want to give Carl’s first wife a voice and show a marriage shattering rather than demonize her just because the only information I can ‘prove’ is tainted by Carl’s hatred of her. I can now skim over the mundane bits of their lives and focus on the conflict. I stick with the facts when I have them and no longer lose sleep when I don’t.

The time I spent writing a nonfiction proposal and building my platform was far from a waste. I visited the Ojibwa reservation where Carl lived. Like Carl, I’ve now heard the native drums and the hypnotic sound of the Anishinabe language, smelled the sweet grass and sage. I’ve stood where Carl and Madonna met, felt the creative energy that still haunts the Roycroft campus. In just a couple of weeks I’ll once again stand in the studio where he created the paintings that hang on my wall.

Google Carl’s name and mine is linked with his on nearly every site. I’ve found over three hundred pieces of art and my website has caught the attention of collectors, art galleries, painters and curators. I’ve gained public speaking experience and been paid for it, learned the importance of networking, and made very close friends along the way.

The moral of this story is to go with your gut instinct when it comes to your writing. Just as we should not write for a trend, we also should not go for the “easier sell” if we must sacrifice the story to do so. After all, if we can’t believe fully in the product, it likely won’t sell anyway. If it does, we will always be disappointed that we settled for “good enough.”