Johnny's Books

A year ago a Facebook friend announced he would be holding a writer's workshop in Minneapolis. He and I--and many others--had built kind of a club-within-a-club on the social network, and I decided to take myself to one of the twin cities and enroll in his class. It was an adventure that meant the world to me, and I'll tell you why.

Jonathan Odell, charming and chatty as he is on Facebook, is a serious man and a first-rate novelist. His class inspired me to keep at the novel I was working on, and he agreed to be one of the first readers of my rough draft when I finished.

At the workshop he announced that his second book, The Healing, had been accepted by a major publisher and we could expect to see it in print by March of 2012. That seemed a long wait to me, but the time is here, and the book is out. I've been to the local bookstore in Fairhope and bought my copy, but first I wanted to read Jon's The View from Delphi, which preceded it. Jon will be talking about The Healing and the process of writing it at a book signing event at the Page & Palette March 15. I'll be there.

At the Minneapolis workshop, Jon told of growing up Johnny Johnson in Mississippi, conflicted and somewhat unhappy, and that he somehow wanted to be a writer in spite of the fact he had never been encouraged by his teachers or anyone else to pursue his creative side. He wanted to be a writer, but wasn't sure he could write. His first mentor was novelist Mary Gardner, who read his work and said, "This little boy in here is so burdened and victimized he doesn't even seem real. Were you like this as a child? Were you aware of yourself as a victim even then?" Jon said his revelation was that he was not--indeed he remembered himself as been a reasonably happy little kid, doing childish things like sneaking treasures out of the family's drawer and burying them in the back yard. "There," Mary said. "You have a start of a real character." She also said to him, "I don't know if you can write or not, but you have great material." From that insight, he was able to go back and rewrite, exploring what made his mother the kind of person she was (and is), and build a dynamic set of stories around his early childhood during the voter registration crisis period in Mississippi.

The View from Delphi has a little boy named Johnny in it, and one of the things Johnny does is steal things from grownups and bury them in the back yard (under the house, actually). It becomes a crucial part of the plot--and Johnny is both observer and actor in the ensemble of diverse characters in the book. I couldn't help picturing Johnny Johnson as the devilish little Johnny Graham, and I suspect I was right in doing so. It's a complicated, engrossing tale of interwoven lives--a black part of town and a white part of town--and the reader is tossed from one side to the other, never landing where he or she expected to go. I relived some of my own experiences as I read, and met a motley band of Mississippi folks on the journey. I loved every minute of it.

The Healing sits on the coffee table in the cottage I'm renting, and I'm raring to get into it before I take it to the reading for Jon to sign. He's left little Johnny far behind him, and if the early reviews of this book mean anything, his new name of Jonathan Odell will be one to conjure with for generations to come. I expect it will overturn a lot of clichés about the South and be another great ride--led by one of the truly original minds of the region.

The Old Home--Montrose, Alabama

Montrose used to be a separate entity, some five miles north of Fairhope. It was older, more Southern, more settled, less contentious. It was the place my parents found a home for the family in 1949.

"It's not much of a house, we said," my mother told me some forty years later. "But it's a nice place for a house." The three and a half acres was pretty spectacular, even then. It was dotted with oaks, dripping with Spanish Moss; there was space in the back for a pasture for horses and an area for a nice little chicken house to the north of the house. The house sat on a hill and looked grander from the old highway than it really was, but its interiors held cozy corners and great light and high ceilings (is 14 feet high enough for you?) and was designed in the day when it was important to catch the breezes in summer. It was almost as if it had its own air conditioning system.

Our family owned and treasured the house for some sixty years, by which time our mother, who stayed on there, had allowed much of it to fall into disrepair. To say that she had not updated in on a regular basis would be an understatement. Still, the three adult children, all relocated nearby, visited every day and always felt that sense of joy that is the pride of a home. All three of us love old homes and like nothing more than restoring and refurbishing them. But in our hearts there will always be that certain house, that certain place to which our mind returns. It is a specific, special old house, occupying the crest of a hill in Montrose.

My brother Graham assured me that the family who bought it after our mother died treasured the house just as we did, and wanted to restore it to the best house it could be in today's world.

Today I took the opportunity to visit and my spirits soared. You still enter the house from the kitchen, always awkward, but for the visitor very warm and charming.

The wide center hall is enhanced by the new owners' antiques--and by their good taste in keeping things simple.
They've added a building at the back where they can entertain and just chill out. This is where there was once a chicken house, or a stable, depending on which child tells the story. We had both, at different points in time. Later my father had a carport built, which soon was used for storage and basically became, as Mama would say, a junk pile. It is now cleaned up for useful living space.

I came away from my visit feeling happy and a little nostalgic. But I had long since given the house away in my mind. The property still holds memories, and the new family will build a new life revolving around the heritage of home that shines throughout the simple space. These pictures I shot today give a feeling of what a wonderful house it is for all time.

I Went Somewhere Else

It was overcast and cool, but I had been inside my little cottage most of the day. I knew there was a big football game that would engage the whole country, and if you read yesterday's post you know how I feel about that, so I was looking for something else to do.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy had ended its run at the local cineplex, replaced by Hugo, a fantasy about the early days of motion pictures. In 3-D, no less. It had earned critical praise and not a few awards and nominations for more. There was a showing at 4:40 which would take me away from my TV set for most of the period absorbed by pre-game and post-game conjecture about who was going to do what to whom and what the other side would have to do then.

No question, I was going to see Hugo. There was little traffic on the highways--all those Super Bowl parties, no doubt--and the movie house was all but empty. I took my sunglasses as they were handed to me at the box office and put them on when instructed.

I was enchanted by Hugo. For the first hour, which did move a bit slowly, I worked on suspending disbelief. It was basically a children's movie and I wished I had my grandsons with me and wished they were about six and nine again. I had to settle for my own inner child, who is about five in today's years. She loved it.

My outer adult questioned whether this flick really demanded 3-D, but had to admit it enhanced the show. I literally felt transported to the inside of a clock in a Paris train terminal of long ago, and I marveled at the clarity of the blue eyes of a boy named Asa Butterfield, and soon I was seeing the world through his eyes. In a charming cameo, Jude Law played his father. Ben Kingsley played a villainous old man. A little too cute for words was Chloe Grace Moretz as the well-read smarty pants who accompanies Hugo in his adventures.

I love movies about movies, at least the way they're doing them these days. (On the other hand, I have to say I enjoyed Singin' in the Rain more than The Artist) but I liked Hugo as much as any older film.

Hugo watches the passing scene through the clock in the terminal, where he lives, as one would watch a movie. He tells that he and his father used to go to movies and that his father told him about a movie he'd seen as a child in which a rocket hit the man in the moon right in the eye "And it was as if he was seeing his own dreams." I've seen that ancient bit of movie footage myself and loved the idea of a child in Paris seeing it for the first time. Hugo takes his new friend to her first movie, which shows Harold Lloyd hanging over the city, suspending himself from the hands of a giant clock. This is not the last time we see a scene of someone hanging from a clock in Hugo. I recently saw Tom Cruise hanging off the side of the building in an adventure flick but missed the Harold Lloyd reference. Hugo brings it home.

The experience of Hugo reminded me of a book I read five years ago and wrote a blog post about. My post was called "Dreaming the Movies" and you can find it if you type those words in the search box above. I won't go into all of it here, but the book described the experience of movies compared to the experience of dreams. Hugo captures the experience of both, telling the audience that that is the way it's supposed to work. In Hugo, it worked like a charm for me.

So I escaped the football game, came home to a disappointing episode of Downton Abbey, and climbed into my dreams for a full and pleasant night.

No to the Super Bowl

It was in the 1950s--probably midway--when I attended my last football game. Fairhope's biggest rival was Foley. It was the biggest game in the season.

In those days I went to Fairhope's "other" school, the little School of Organic Education with an enrollment of about 50 in the high school. My friends and I faithfully went to all the home games of Fairhope High. I sat with five or six lifelong friends (they are til this day) and thrilled to the sound of the bands, the atmosphere charged by the energy of cheerleaders--the smell of autumn in the air and all the trappings of the game. Going to a football game was exciting, and Fairhope always had a good, competitive team. The Foley game was the highlight of the year.

This particular year Fairhope was winning by a big lead. It was several years before Kenny Stabler was on the Foley team. We wouldn't have known his name in those days anyway.

All I know for sure is that Foley was not going to win this one. It was a slaughter, and we knew it was a slaughter before the end of the first half. That was when one of my favorite people on the planet made an astounding suggestion.

"Let's go sit on the Foley side for the second half," he said. "We can boo until they give up!"

I was shocked to hear this. Stunned and heartbroken. "No!"

But I was much more heartbroken at the response. This bright and beautiful young man got the support of all my friends and a few others from the Fairhope side. Double whammy heartbreak for the starry-eyed girl from Montrose (me).

I said, "If you do this, I'm leaving. And I'll never come to another football game." They were incredulous, but nobody supported my action.

At the break, while the bands were playing and the half-time show was going on, a group of about ten youngsters from Fairhope actually traipsed over the Foley side and found front row seats (Foley didn't have many in the stands). When the game started again there they sat, cheering wildly every time Fairhope had a successful play on the field, no matter how small, and jeering at the top of their lungs when someone on the Foley team attempted a counter action. It was a spectacle I have never forgotten.

By then I was ready to walk away from the game. I lived far enough away that I had to await a ride from my mother, who would pick me up by the time the game ended. There was no telephone nearby so I could let her know I was ready to go home early. I stood near the field but out of sight of the game, and heard the roars from the stands when Fairhope made touchdowns and the slight sounds when Foley did something that might make a point.

I knew at that moment I had changed my life with that action. Never again would I see football or any other sport as an innocent, positive aspect of American life. I would see the whole spectrum of competitive athletics as fostering the opposite of "good sportsmanship." I didn't want to learn the finer points of the game. I would never again thrill to joining the cheerleaders in their chants, yelling myself hoarse with the best of them. I would go to the basketball games for my school; I once even attended a local bush league baseball game and was bored to tears after a few innings. I tolerated sports on television when I had to. But for the next fifty years I would like football least of all.

It was a small incident, really. Over the years I've wondered why I allowed it to be so meaningful in my life. With the orgy of emotion in this country over every game--high school, college, and professional--and the obscene amount of money that controls all organized sports, I suspect this may be one of the times I was wrong. Sometimes it seems to me that football is the engine that drives my country, prepares its young men for actual battle and definitely for the hard core workplace. It makes people happy to win and win big. Cheering for the winners is a national pastime. All of this, with my teenaged decision, was lost to me for a lifetime.

Maybe it was destined to happen anyway. There are plenty of people who have things they'd rather do than watch football. Probably I would have become one of them without the scene I witnessed. Clearly I overreacted. Now when I think of the joy of high school football I remember that night and it is like a black hole in my soul. At 71 it's probably time I cleared that hole out and put something in its place. Even now I don't know what, how or even why I would have to do that, and it is a little late.

I'll never be a football fan, but over time I've learned that it's not the game that creates the dark side in otherwise good people. The episode signaled the beginning of my loss of innocence, but it was highly personal and might have ended another way if I had not been so judgmental of those near and dear friends. I shall find other things to do than attend a Super Bowl party this evening. Maybe I'll use the time to work on ways to replace that memory and not hold all of the culture of football responsible for the bad behavior of a few teenagers in a remote utopian enclave of the distant past.

My Portable Life

Here I am in Fairhope again, driving around in a rental car and staying in a sweet one room cottage.It's one room with a little kitchen, a little bathroom--and a lot of charm. It's in a pretty corner of Fairhope, close to town (and to the bay, of course--every property in Fairhope is always advertised as "Walk to town and bay"). I do walk some, and drive some too. I deliberately go out of my way so that I might see what has changed and what has stayed the same. I show up at the door of people I used to know and they are telling me the latest news and gossip.
Above is very close to the center of town, the gaping hole on Fairhope Avenue where the movie house used to be. Soon a new edifice will be erected here for yet another building for gift shops and tourist attractions. It's the way things are going (and have gone for the past 25 years or so).

The weather is pleasant--it'll be 73 degrees today--and birds are singing and people are smiling. All of that is to be expected in Fairhope at this time of year, although I'm told it's been a mild winter, even for here.

I lived here for almost 20 years before I decided to move away in December of 2007--to a more hostile climate and a more confrontational atmosphere. I live in New Jersey, and for the first year, whenever I met someone and said I had just moved there from Alabama, people said, "Oh, you're the one..." I'm close to New York City, where I can go to matinees of first rate productions of first rate plays as often as I can afford it, and where I'm a 20 minute bus ride from a trip to visit my daughter and grandsons.

Whatever I may say about not missing Fairhope, it's always fun to return. We who leave are tempted to quote Thomas Wolfe's famous title You Can't Go Home Again, but I have found it possible and in many ways the best of both worlds.

Most of the time so far on this trip I find I'm still doing what I do in my non-vacation life. I check and write email, go on Facebook and make snarky comments to strangers. Soon I'll resume sending my query letter to agents who may be willing and able to hawk my novel to legitimate publishers. I've gotten two rejections so far after sending the query to ten high-powered agents--I should have a full complement by the time I go home at the end of March.

I'm catching up with friends and relations one by one and observing the changes in all. I think it's going to be a lovely two months--even though I can't say I left to get away from bad weather. I came home for a visit.

My Grandma Moses Book

I moved back to Fairhope in 1988, expecting to live out my days there. My mother was nearing 80 and my husband, 17 years my senior, was having a hard time in retirement and was suffering from a terrible disease: Alcoholism. I thought Fairhope would be a good place for all of us.

The twenty years I lived there proved full of changes for us. I found myself through the 12-Step programs (mostly Al-Anon; but six months in AA was a huge help as well), but my husband didn't. He died at the age of 78. My mother lived many more years and made it to 92. In the meantime, I discovered Fairhope's history through working at the Marietta Johnson Museum, and dedicated myself to the recovery of the School of Organic Education as well. I did the best I could, but the school suffered one of its most traumatic periods during this time. All the while I was watching Fairhope change and savoring my memories of what it once was, and learned its deeper nature. I started this blog and continued writing as constantly as I had all my life; poems, journals, letters--and collaborated with Robert E. Bell on a book about Fairhope memories called Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree.

I began to think it would be nice to live out my old age like Grandma Moses, but instead of painting charming primitives I would write novels set in Fairhope in its early days, little word pictures of the kind of people who once moved to the utopian village with an eye to changing the world for the better. Marietta Johnson would be a peripheral character in these books, as would E.B. Gaston, the single tax advocate who founded the town with a goal of demonstrating economic reform, but the books would be about other people and their adventures in the village in bygone days. Fairhope didn't last for me after both my husband and my mother died there, but it haunts me in my new home and I still have a need to write about it.

I wrote The Fair Hope of Heaven, another non-fiction book about Fairhope and some of its eccentrics and nonconformists, which I had to self-publish and has just about made its nut back. It's still around, at the local Fairhope bookstore Page & Palette and on amazon dot com. I tried to place it in independent bookstores in faraway places like Montgomery but was told that nobody in Montgomery had any interest in Fairhope. I've given and sold copies to friends all over the world who never heard of Fairhope and they love the book, but they are friends so they're probably just being nice. I thought it was kind of a Lake Woebegone Days with a single-tax slant, but publishers think otherwise.

Now I'm giving fiction a try. My first Grandma Moses book has the working title of That Was Tomorrow, but is my second choice of a working title and it too may be changed. I'm in the first rewrite stage, and damned if it doesn't read sorta like a Grandma Moses painting--quaint and maybe a bit awkward, but with heart and an old-fashioned style, and a certain sense of the place. I tried to marginalize Mrs. Johnson, but she has become a major character in spite of my best efforts. I may cut a great deal before an agent or an editor sees it, but I do not plan to self publish under any circumstances. (Famous last words)

Grandma Moses painted her first picture at the age of 78, because it was easier than baking a Christmas gift for the postman. When her work was discovered years later in the window of the local drugstore (at $3 and $5, depending on the size of the work), she was lucky that the art dealer who snapped them all up didn't say, "Very good work, but it would never be of interest to anybody outside of Hoosik Falls!"

Maybe I'll be lucky this time.

Living in a Magical Place

Photo by Susan Stein

I just saw a movie about life as it once was, as it was conceived by its Creator to be, and as it is. This is the profound The Tree of Life, which got me thinking about my own book.

The Tree of Life was set in a little Texas town in the 1950's; my book, That Was Tomorrow, was set in Fairhope in 1922. There is not really any similarity between the two works, but as an author perhaps I can be forgiven the indulgence of imagining my little novel being made into a little Indie movie one of these days. In my mind I've cast a few of the leading players, and I did that as I wrote. The hardest part of my movie project would be to recreate the Fairhope of 1922. I suspect it would have to be built from scratch on a Hollywood back lot.

The Fairhope of today really doesn't look anything like the one of 1922. In those days the population was under 500, and the houses were literally few and far between. The streets were not paved, there were few automobiles, and there were few shops. There were several guest homes, hotels, and hostelries, as Fairhope was a retreat for intellectual Northerners in the winter. There was a pier stretching out into Mobile Bay, where steamers docked after ferrying people from the city. There was a main street, Fairhope Avenue, and it was crossed by Section Street. At that corner were some of the businesses in town--a pharmacy, a harness shop, a general store, and next door a millinery and gift shop. As you walked down the hill--no sidewalks, just packed dirt--there was the office of the local weekly newspaper, The Courier, the doctor's office, and then, on Church Street was The Gables, a large wooden hotel run by Capt. and Mrs. Jack Cross. A few more guest houses, a cable car running down and up the hill to the bay, and the Colonial Inn on the corner of the street running parallel to the bay and Cliff Drive. Cliffs and gullies. Satsuma trees everywhere. Little kids climbing trees and playing in the gullies.

The Tree of Life was filmed in Smithville, TX. So was Hope Floats, and apparently many other movies with a nostalgic setting. For a moment during the film, when I saw a shred of Spanish moss on the trees, I thought it might make a nice backdrop for That Was Tomorrow. But really not. When they walked through town it was a typical, town-square-in-the-middle, layout from days past. In Fairhope there was Knoll Park, azaleas, wisteria, and all the beautiful beach parks. My characters have a number of cookouts on the beach.

Sonny Brewer, author of The Poet of Tolstoi Park, a novel set in roughly the same place and time as my book, said they considered Bayou La Batre, AL when it was under consideration for a movie. How they'd get the sun to go down in the East I don't know, but in Hollywood, all things are possible.

As a matter of fact, I'm still in dreamland myself. The book has been sent to three friends for evaluation of the first draft. If the reaction is good I still have a lot of work to do, depending on their suggestions. If the reaction is universally not good, the book project will be set aside indefinitely. Probably I'll become a more active blogger again.

In the meantime, if you can think of any location that's a little like Fairhope would have been in 1922, let me know.