Aunt Hilda Turns 101

Elizabeth Zelvin

My Aunt Hilda, my mother’s youngest sister, turns 101 today. Born in New York the day before the Titanic sank, she worked in publishing, fought for social justice, had a happy marriage, raised two sons, earned a master’s degree that led to a new career in vocational counseling, lost her husband, took up tennis, moved to Seattle to a retirement community, and still has plenty of mental acuity. I’m glad she was willing to answer my questions on the phone, even though, as she pointed out, she hadn’t yet had her morning coffee.

What was it like being the child of immigrant parents in New York a hundred years ago?
I don’t think it was anything that pulled me down. I didn’t think of it that way. I was a happy child. We were poor, but I never thought about it. I was always very good at school, and I had a lot of friends. The only bad thing I experienced was anti-Semitism. It was always there.

What bad experiences did you have?
When I graduated from elementary school, I had been at the top of my class the whole way. I was supposed to get the scholarship medal. But we had a new principal who had a reputation for being anti-Semitic, and I didn’t get the medal. When they announced it, they said, “The medal goes to—” There was a hesitation, and the whole audience said my name. But I didn’t get it. That’s stayed with me my whole life.

When did your concern with social justice start?
That didn’t begin till I was a teenager. My father died when I was twelve, my mother was always away giving piano lessons, and I had a hard time separating from my older sister (Note: Liz’s mother), who took on all the responsibility for the family. She was very aware of being Jewish and believed that you didn’t stick your neck out. It was just plain luck that I met friends with different values who helped me break away.

What are you most proud of having done in your life?
My stellar years were the period of being a community organizer, an activist. We worked for Social Security and Medicare. I was full of all kinds of ideals. I thought you could change the world. I thought that’s what my grandchildren would remember me for.

What do you think of the world now?
It’s not the kind of world I thought we would have. It’s a lousy world today. It’s a capitalist world, so what can you expect?

If you could change one thing about the world, what would you change?
More equality. Less poverty. I’m disappointed in how the world has become.

Is there anything you regret doing or not doing?
I know I have several regrets, but I can’t think of what they are.

What is your life like today?
My life is good. I have a good support system. My residence has an unusual bunch of people. Many of them were academics who have achieved a lot. Even the food is good: we have a wonderful chef. Nobody ever says, “You look like hell.” The man in my life is a wonderful friend. I’m crazy about him. We’re lucky to have found each other. And my son, who lives close by and picked this place for me, is not just a wonderful son, he’s also a great friend.

Do you still play tennis?
We play outdoors, so I haven’t played since September. I have a very strong right arm. I can still hit! I fell into tennis when my husband died and my job ended at age 70. I was looking for something to do where I wouldn’t have to think, but I really came to love it. Nowadays I’m afraid of falling, so I’ve probably said goodbye to it. It ain’t easy, getting older!

You said a couple of years ago that resilience is the quality people need the most as they get older. What other qualities do you value in yourself?
My sense of humor keeps me going. I’ve been lucky!

The Smoking... E-book?

by Sandra Parshall

If traditional publishing dies, a lot of crime fiction readers will be standing over its lifeless form with smoking e-books in hand. Digital novels made up half of all mystery/detective sales in the final quarter of 2012, beating back print formats to take the lead in the genre for the first time.

According to Bowker Market Research (as reported in Publishers Weekly), e-book sales for the entire year averaged out to 35% of mystery units sold, with a big increase in the fourth quarter. In the same quarter of 2011, e-books accounted for only 38% of the genre’s sales.

As digital sales rose, the numbers for most print formats declined. In the last quarter of 2011, hardcovers made up 27% of the mystery market; in the same period of 2012, hardcovers declined to 19%. Trade paperbacks dropped from 15% to 13%.

The only print format holding its own in the mystery market was mass market paperback, remaining steady at 16% from 2011 to 2012 -- although the category across all genres has suffered a drastic decline since e-books began their relentless climb to dominance. Publishers Weekly points out that the second highest print sales for a mystery/detective novel reported to BookScan in 2012 were for a mass market paperback: Lee’s Child’s The Affair. Four other mass market paperbacks, all by major authors in the genre, also made the top 10 list for the year. Two trade paperbacks came in eighth and ninth, and only two hardcovers made the list: Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich at number one and 11th Hour by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro at number four.

Other aspects of the Bowker study of mystery sales show that the profile of the most avid book-buyers remains the same: women account for 75% of sales, and 65% of all buyers are over the age of 55. Only 12% of buyers are between 30 and 44, and 16% are between 45 and 54. Readers with incomes between $50,000 and $74,999 bought 26% of the books. People at the top of the income scale, making more than $150,000 a year, bought the fewest books, accounting for only 9% of sales. (Too busy making money to find time for reading?)

Another interesting new survey, done by the Book Industry Study Group, shows that multi-function tablets have surpassed dedicated e-readers like the Kindle in popularity among e-book buyers. So it’s not surprising that Amazon’s share of the e-book market is decreasing.

A couple (or three) questions for readers: 
What percentage of the books you buy is digital? 
Are you buying and reading more since acquiring an e-book reader? 
Do you have a dedicated e-reader or a multi-function tablet? Or both?

 

What sustains writers?

Sharon Wildwind

I’m half-way through writing my next book. In many ways, this is the equivalent of trekking Mt Kilimanjaro in bunny slippers while holding tightly to my teddy bear. The bunny slippers because I feel woefully under equipped for this expedition. I always feel woefully unequipped to write a book. Most writers do. The teddy bear because being a writer is a scary place and I need soft and cuddly reassurances that this book, too, will eventually end successfully.

Part of the challenge is the sheer physicality of the task.  Over the years I’ve learned a lot about  how quickly I can write a book.

I usually aim for a final draft of about 90,000 words.

First draft will be 3 x 90,000 = 270,000 words. For every word I keep, I’ll write two more words that I either discard or which were never intended to appear in the text. This includes research, character sketches, plotting notes, and the like.

Second draft will be 1/10 x 90,000 = 9,000 words. For every word I’ve kept in the first draft, one out of ten will need to be replaced, deleted, rearranged, spelled correctly, etc. Fortunately, these words often come in bunches. When I decide that Chapter 14 is hogwash and completely rewrite it, that will account for about 2,000 of those 9,000 words. Second drafts are easier than they sound.

Third (I hope final) draft will be another 1/10 x 90,000 or a final 9,000 words. That’s a whopping total of 288,000 words, plus the final meticulous spelling and grammar checks before I try to sell it. 

In a perfect world I’d spend two hours a day, every day, focused strictly on writing. At that rate, I could knock out a book in about 5 months. The world is not perfect, and neither am I.

In a gloriously spectacular week I’ll write two hours every day for six days. Most weeks I achieve considerably less. Life happens. That means I rarely achieve a book in less than a year.

The late Darwin Smith was for many years the Chief Executive Officer of the paper products company Kimberly-Clark. At one time he simultaneously faced serious health and business issues. This difficult time in his life led him to examine how passion, talent, and economic opportunity come together. He devised, then answered, three questions for himself.

1. What are you deeply passionate about?
2. What activities do you feel just made to do?
3. What makes economic sense?

For me as a writer, the third question is easy. What makes economic sense? Absolutely nothing. It may take up to three years from the day I start a book until I see any economic gain from it. What sustains me, what I think sustains most writers is passion, pleasure, and persistence. Oh yes, and hugging teddy bears frequently.

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Quote for the week

It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

~ Edgar Lawrence (E. L.) Doctorow, American writer, editor, and teacher

Spelling--A Link to Meaning and Logic

by Julia  Buckley

I teach English, and I understand that not every student (nor every adult) is good at spelling. I acknowledge that English is an arbitrary language with all sorts of weird spelling rules, and if you don't love learning about it, spelling can be viewed as an annoyance.

And yet, as I found many times this year, spelling isn't just mandatory for the sake of a clean manuscript.  Proper spelling is often the difference between what we mean and what the reader thinks we mean.  This disconnect can be funny or potentially tragic.

The students like the sentence that's been floating around the Internet to show the importance of punctuation:

Let's eat Grandpa.

versus

Let's eat, Grandpa.

Clearly that comma is important, at least for Grandpa's peace of mind.

In the same way, a properly spelled word can convey something clearly--or otherwise.  Here are a few recent examples.

1.  One student, in examining the psyche of Shakespeare's Ophelia, suggested that "Ophelia was considered mad due to her increasingly erotic behavior."  I suggested that, while Ophelia's level of eroticism is a subject for some debate, the word she probably wanted there was erratic, since that implied that her behavior was unpredictable rather than ever-more-sexual.

When I have this sort of discussion with a student, I often get a bleary-eyed response, almost as if they're saying "I came close enough."

But consider this one:

2. A girl who had written a beautiful essay about her summer at camp and her first dance with a boy, wrote "He put his hands around my waste and we started to glide around the floor."  I wrote "unfortunate misspelling" in the margin.  I waited, when she read the comments, for her to turn red and look mortified, but she merely shrugged.

3. I know that many students do take pride in their work, and when I asked on a class survey what they had learned in a recent writing class, one student wrote: "I've learned to express myself in a more sophisticated manor."

Sometimes I yearn to express myself in a sophisticated manor, too, but at this point in life I can't afford it.  :)

4. Another Hamlet fan complained of the injustice of Hamlet having to "give the thrown to Fortinbras."

5. A recent spate of class essays had one student reflecting on a dialogue with a friend not providing "the answer I saute."  I went on a little Englishy rant, suggesting that "sauté" was a word one might use about frying something in butter or oil, while "sought" was the past tense of the work "seek."

But guess what?  One of the biggest reasons (that I've determined, as a test-prep teacher) that standardized test scores are going down is that schools don't seem to make a big deal of grammar anymore, including the list of verbs, regular and irregular; students feel far less confident writing things in past as opposed to past perfect tense, and they are more likely to make errors or not recognize errors that should be corrected.

The other big reason?  Students don't recognize the spelling of words like "sought" because they don't see them in books.  Because many of them are not reading books.

I'm not sure what percentage of my vocabulary I got from my well-spoken parents and what percentage I can attribute to a childhood of reading, but I know that by the time I reached high school, I had a very large vocabulary.  Now when I see students write "I would of given you a ride if you'd asked me" on a paper, I know that the error is rooted in the fact that they've never READ the contraction "would've."  They've only heard it in conversation.  Translation: Would of.  Should of.  Could of.

I'm not suggesting that reading is dead in young people.  I just invited a YA author to speak at our school, and 52 students crammed into our small library to hear her speak.  Many of them had read the book in advance.

But when I see errors in student writing, I can always see the ones that are rooted in a lack of reading.

For example, the boy who wrote that his mother kept her possessions in her Omwa. I stared at that one for a good five minutes before I figured out what he meant: Armoire.

One student wrote, in her final paper, that she didn't really like hanging around with big groups of students, and that "I'm really a loan shark kind of a person."

Here again, I had to use context clues to determine that she meant "lone wolf."  Since the two idioms are significantly different, the spelling of "lone" was significant here.

I realize that decoding student spelling has always been a part of a teacher's job, and in fact spelling mistakes have never been linked to a lack of intelligence.

But they can be linked to misunderstandings and a loss of meaning, which is why I encourage my students to care about spelling.

Building Suspense

Dorothy H. Hayes (Guest Blogger)

Although a murder may be committed at the beginning of a mystery, the reader most likely won’t know who the murderer is until the end of the book.

How do we keep a reader interested until that moment?

In a character driven mystery, one with an interesting amateur sleuth, or a savvy kind of hard-boiled Sam Spade character, the protagonist and his backstory will entice the reader. He’s not only solving a crime, but he has a family; a father he doesn’t get along with, or he’s just recently divorced, or has health problems. All the above describe Inspector Kurt Wallander, Henning Mankell’s very popular police detective. While Wallander is working on the case, he’ struggling with his own personal problems.

With regards to the unsolved crime, the secret of holding the interest of the reader is to continue to build suspense.

Lee Child said in an article in The New York Times (December 9, 2012): “As novelists, we should ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, and then we should delay the answer. Readers are humans and humans seemed programed to wait for the answers to questions they witnessed being asked.”

He goes on, “In my latest Jack Reacher novel, A Wanted Man, it’s clear on the first page that a mysterious person has been murdered. Who was he? Why was he killed? He has appeared so early that the reader has no emotional investment in him. He doesn’t even have a name. Even so, the questions nag, and they aren’t completely answered until the last page.”

In Murder at the P&Z, I attempted to make the reader care by introducing the protagonist in the first chapter along with the murder victim. Although, as Child stated, “humans” want the answers to the original questions even if they don’t know the victim, a different curiosity takes hold when the reader learns the name of the victim, meets her family, knows about her job.

Carol Rossi is on the job, as a local reporter covering the Wilton, Connecticut Planning and Zoning Department, in the first chapter. Then she’s sent out, on a dangerously cold December night, because a dead body was found on School Road, in the second chapter. When she realizes that it’s a murder scene, and the body is that of the secretary to the town planner, she’s horrified and promises to find the killer.

With a sense of helplessness I watched Maddy’s body disappear into the hearse. She’d be taken to Farmington to the medical examiner’s office for a mandatory autopsy.... The coroner promised a full report the next morning. Her body would be delivered to Johnson’s Funeral Home in twenty-four hours. As the coroner offered his observations to the detectives, I stood off to the side. With an awkward grip on my pen from frozen fingers, I took down every word.

With each shaky letter I inscribed on my yellow legal pad, I found myself promising Maddy that the truth would prevail. I vowed that we would find the person who had stolen her life.

The trauma to Rossi is made believable by the preceding chapter that showed the relationship between her and the victim. This made all the difference. In my original manuscript, the two chapters were switched. The book began with the discovery of the body. The reader hadn’t meet the victim. The story failed to flow as well. Rossi was left trying to explain her relationship with the victim to the reader for almost the rest of the book.

Now, the reader believes that Rossi will find the killer. But she’s not a detective, so how will she do it? Will she be endangered?

Another technique to captivate the reader is the raising of the ante. For instance, in Mankell’s One Step Behind, three teens are shot. Yet, we learn that another teenage girl may be in danger. Will Kurt Wallander apprehend the murderer before he strikes again? Mankell has raised the ante. For the curious, Wallander fails. But it wasn’t for the lack of trying, so we feel only sympathy for him as he condemns himself for not saving the girl’s life. Again, the attachment to the protagonist keeps us reading.

Getting back to raising the ante, usually the amateur sleuth is forced into attempting to solve the crime. In Murder at the P&Z, when the detectives on the case refuse to consider Rossi’s theory of the crime, she turns amateur sleuth and starts her own investigation. With every bit of information she uncovers, the threat to her life heightens. Soon she’s being stalked, and she realizes that she’s in over her head.

At this point, the ante is raised because another life, the life of the protagonist, is in danger. The reader is fully invested and must read to the end.

So as the readers turn the pages of a mystery book, they are waiting for the answers to the original questions, as Lee Child explained, but they must wait until the end. Yet each sentence, is a step closer to the answer.

Child summed it up this way: “The basic narrative fuel is the slow unveiling of the final answer.”

Dorothy H. Hayes taught Language Arts in Connecticut schools, was a staff writer for the Wilton Bulletin and The Hour, and received an award for her in-depth series on Vietnam veterans from the Society of Professional Journalists. She also worked as a staff writer for a national animal protection corporation. Her mystery, Murder at the P&Z, appears this spring from Mainly Murder Press. She blogs for womenofmystery.net and criminalelement.com.

A Brand New Bag

by Sheila Connolly

The black hole. See my problem?

This past week I purchased a new purse. I have one that is serviceable, although items like my keys tend to disappear into the black depths, requiring much embarrassing scrabbling in public and/or small nervous crises.  But this is a special purchase:  I need a new bag for a trip to Italy.

When I first started traveling, as a young woman, I was warned to hang on to my bag (which held my passport and money, if not much else—I didn't have a credit card for years).  Conventional wisdom said: Keep it tucked under your arm at all times; don't set it down on a counter while haggling with a vendor; never flash what cash you had. Pickpockets and purse snatcher abounded, especially in Italy.

I did have my purse stolen once, but that was in London—by someone who had to climb across the façade of a building on a busy street to come in through my third floor window while I was taking a bath down the hall.  I didn't see that one coming.  That necessitated making a police report (a lovely sympathetic bobby came to the B&B and talked to me in the kitchen over the classic cup of tea), finding the US Embassy and getting a new passport, and after I'd moved on to France with my new passport, wheedling a rental car company into letting me have a car despite the fact I had no driver's license.  The French were very accommodating, and I didn't even have to bribe anyone.

I have also been accosted by gypsies in France, including one small grubby boy who kept saying "donnez moi un sou" and was rather annoyed when I didn't.  For your information, the sou hasn't been currency in France for quite a while, and it never was worth much.  It had devolved into a stock phrase for panhandlers. Anyway, I didn't open my purse.

Back to the bag.  The first thing I wanted was a shoulder strap, a long one so that I could wear it across my body, thus keeping my hands free.  Funny—there aren't that many bags with functional shoulder straps available these days, although there are some with very decorative shorter straps.

I also wanted pockets that zipped—and I got that with a vengeance.  The new purse has six outside zippered pockets and one interior zippered pocket, plus two open pockets, one for the ubiquitous cell phone.  And (drumroll, please) it has its own umbrella, which lives in its own little inside pocket that snaps shut.  Once I saw that I was sold.

The best part is that all the pockets and the interior are lined with a bright, cheerful print fabric—not like my current black pit of a purse.  I might even be able to find something (and will take along one of my mini LED flashlights in case I do need to search)!

The thing should also be indestructible, because it's not real leather—it's a believable fake.  My grandmother would be appalled:  in her world, ladies carried leather bags and wore leather shoes, preferably matching.  She was a woman who had more than one real alligator handbag (it was a long time ago, and I didn't keep them). But this handy (and inexpensive) fake leather bag is something I don't have to worry about.  I can drag it through puddles and carry it in the rain and it will probably fare better than I will.

But it needs to be sturdy, because my bags usually average about eight to ten pounds in weight.  What's in there?  Wallet (ID, credit cards, health insurance card), small notebook (hey, I'm a writer!), usually a camera, cell phone, keys, cash (the coins to fall to the bottom and get forgotten), about a dozen pens, Tylenol, antacids, tissues, often a book to read, in case I have to wait somewhere, now and then a tablet computer…the list goes on.  I think I'm permanently tilted from carrying this accumulation on my left shoulder for decades. But I'd bet that if I walloped somebody in the head with it (especially with that nice long strap), the guy would drop in his tracks!

Sometimes I envy men:  they stick a wallet in their back pocket and go.  I don't know how they do it.

Roots and Branches

Elizabeth Zelvin

I remember how I laughed the first time I heard someone computer-savvy talk about digitizing a word-processed (or typed, as we called it back then) manuscript to “put it in a usable form.” I also remember how the audience at New York’s Shakespeare in the Park laughed in 1967 when it was announced that “Hair, a tribal love-rock musical,” would be opening in the fall. How quickly, and how radically, the world changes!

I too have come to see digital material as “usable form”—though I’ve also learned the hard way that if I want materials to be accessible ten or fifteen years later, I’d better keep paper copies as well, because technology changes fast. Anyhow, I’ve recently started the long-term project of scanning my pre-digital family photos into the computer. Especially important are the few remaining “ancestor pictures” I possess, faded and crumbling but irreplaceable: my parents, aunts, and uncles in their youth, my grandparents, and even one set of great-grandparents who never made it out of Europe.

I marvel when I meet Americans who can trace their ancestry many generations back. My blog sister Sheila Connolly here on PDD is one of them. I know a guy who has framed a five-generation series of pictures: himself, his dad, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, all looking much like him. More recent immigrants, especially Jewish families like mine, can’t do the same. A number of years ago I came in contact with a genealogist with the same last name as my maiden name, ie my father’s family name. She had grown up in Dublin and currently lived in South Africa, part of the modern-day diaspora that reduced the Irish Jewish population from 800,000, if I remember her figures correctly, to 15,000 (or was it 1500?) families. She was systematically tracing everyone with that last name and eager to hear what I knew about my family’s past.

Her research turned up far more people than expected. Like me, she’d started out thinking the name was quite unusual. She even turned up folks who were not originally related to anyone of that name: emigrants to Israel who changed their name to ours because they perceived it as “more Jewish” and followers of a “rebbe” (a Chasidic Jewish leader) who changed their original names to his. It’s not clear whether even those with a genetic right to the name are all related. There’s a mention of the name in the Old Testament, so it can hardly be traced all the way back. But even in the last two or three generations, even with people all over the world contributing what they know and the genealogist and her colleagues checking tombstones and written records, there are gaps.

The twin reasons for these gaps are emigration and the Holocaust. The precious handful of old photos I’m now preserving on my computer include those my grandparents carried with them: my paternal grandparents from the Ukraine via Liverpool in 1905 and my maternal grandparents from Hungary via Bremen in 1906. (My parents, both young children at the time, came with them.) I’m still moved when I think of my maternal grandmother (Gran), who lived to 92 and whom I loved dearly, saying goodbye to her mother at the age of 29 and never seeing or speaking to her again. During the Nazi era, not only Jewish records but whole families and whole villages were destroyed. Many of those connections are lost forever.

Here are some of the pictures that I’ve got.

Gran and her daughters, my mother at the wheel

My maternal grandparents

My dad (in suit) and his siblings

My paternal grandfather

My paternal grandmother

Gran's parents

My mother's sister (looks like me)

The mystery of the Melungeons -- solved?

by Sandra Parshall

Two continuing characters in my Rachel Goddard series, Deputy Sheriff Tom Bridger and Rachel’s young friend Holly Turner, are Melungeons, descended

from mixed-race people who have lived in the southern Appalachians for hundreds of years. Unlike most Americans, who know where their mothers’ and fathers’ families originated, Tom and Holly have no firm answers to the most basic human questions: Who am I and where did I come from? For them, the quest for identity requires navigating through centuries of misinformation and huge gaps in history, and overcoming an entrenched sense of shame.

Myths and legends abound. Melungeon DNA projects, including a widely-reported study released in 2012, have produced conflicting results and no indisputable answers. 

As the most popular legend goes, Melungeons were “discovered” by explorers 400 years ago, living deep in the mountains in houses with windows, a European feature of dwellings unknown to Native Americans. Their dark skin and straight black hair, together with European features and, in some individuals, blue eyes set them apart from both Caucasians and the native tribes in the area. According to the legend, which many have long accepted as history, they spoke broken English and identified themselves as “Portygee.” Who were they? Where did they come from? And what does the name “Melungeon” mean?
Their self-identification as “Portygee” created speculation that they descended from Portugese sailors whose ship sank off the coast of Virginia, forcing them to make new lives in a new land. Moving into the mountains, as the legend has it, they became farmers and found mates among Native Americans and escaped slaves. Certain names – including Bridger and Turner – have always been common among Melungeons.

No one is certain where the term Melungeon originated, although it could be a corruption of the French word melange, meaning a mixture, the Old English word malengin, meaning deceit or trickster, or the African word malungu, meaning shipmate. Wherever it came from, it was an insult. Melungeons have always suffered from racial discrimination, so it’s not surprising that for most of their history they have despised the label. Those who moved away from the mountains usually left the name behind, and their children grew up believing they were “Black Irish” or Spanish or Italian.

In recent years, largely thanks to Virginia scholar Brent Kennedy’s exploration of his own roots in The Melungeons: Resurrection of a Proud People, many Americans have uncovered and claimed their Melungeon history. The Melungeon Heritage Association, based in Wise, Virginia, has opened a window on the past, and its website (http://www.melungeon.org) is a treasure trove of information.


For most Melungeons, though, the basic questions remain: Who am I? Where did I come from?

A study of Melungeon DNA conducted more than a decade ago by Kevin Jones, a biologist at the University of Virginia College in Wise, was intended to shed light on diseases such as Familial Mediterranean Fever, sarcoidosis, and thalessemia, which appear to occur more frequently in Melungeons than in the general population. Thirty men and 120 women participated. In the course of the study, Jones discovered a rare DNA sequence that is common only to the Siddis, a northern India tribe of “untouchables” descended from African slaves, sailors, and merchants. Brent Kennedy had previously learned through a private study of his own DNA that he was genetically linked to the Siddis.

Results of the more recent study, begun in 2005, were published in "Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population" in the Journal of Genetic Geneaology, April 2012. Participation was restricted to 69 male lines and eight female lines that can be traced unbroken back to Melungeons in the 1800s and early 1900s. The evidence showed that these genetic lines were descended from sub-Saharan African men and from white women of central or northern European origin. The authors of the study theorized that the first Melungeons were the offspring of black and white indentured servants who lived in Virginia in the 1600s, before slavery.

Lead researcher Roberta Estes told the press that the study left “a whole lot of people upset” because it appeared, according to news media accounts, to refute claims to Mediterranean heritage and define Melungeons as a simple black/white biracial group.

But Wayne Winkler, a leader of the Melungeon Heritage Asssociation, doesn’t see it that way. In comments to Blue Ridge Country magazine, he said “there are still a great many possibilities open to exploration.” While the study found genetic links to sub-Saharan Africa in the male descendants of some early Melungeons, it did not rule out Native American or Portuguese ancestry. In fact, one man participating in the study has Native American genes.

Research will undoubtedly continue, because this sort of mystery is irresistible both to the researchers and the people hungry for answers about their heritage. Wherever the first Melungeons may have come from, they and their offspring married not only other Melungeons but also whites, blacks, and Native Americans. Today Melungeons are part of the great melting pot like the rest of us, and due to intermarriage many lack the physical characteristics that would identify them at a glance as mixed race.

Appalachian writers from Jesse Stuart to Sharyn McCrumb have included Melungeons as characters in their fiction, usually presenting even present-day Melungeons as mysterious, isolated, unpredictable and potentially dangerous. But Melungeons no longer live in distinct communities, and many left the mountains long ago. My characters Tom and Holly both have dark olive skin and black hair, and Tom’s profile makes Rachel think of a Cherokee chief, but they are very much a part of the mainstream community. They are, more than anything else, Americans.

Brain Plot

Sharon Wildwind

When we pulled out of our parking spot to go to Easter dinner there was a lot going on. The sky was blue and a slight breeze blew. There were traffic noises from the large thoroughfare a couple of blocks away. Snow mounds, scraped from streets and stored in a vacant lot, had almost melted, leaving a mucky, dirty landscape. A woman picked up gardening tools from her front lawn. Several houses away was a boy wearing a purple sweatshirt.

If I’d had no way to filter and prioritize that information, plus what my sig other was saying, plus my transient worry about how the potato casserole in the trunk was travelling, I would have missed the most important detail. That was the boy in the purple sweatshirt abruptly turning his bike. He  was either going down the sidewalk or across the street into our car’s path. By the time I realized he was headed down the sidewalk, my sig other had already slowed the car to a crawl.

We didn’t leave home thinking, “Watch for boys wearing purple sweatshirts and riding bikes because they may not be aware of traffic.” Years behind the wheel sensitizes drivers to kids+bikes+cars = Danger, Will Robinson. When the kid+bike+car info triad reached a small section of our brainstems—the reticular activation system—the brain got rid of blue sky, potato casserole, traffic noises, garden tools, and melting snow. It yelled, “Pay attention to that kid on the bike!”

I didn’t even know I had a reticular activation system until last week when a local writer talked about solving plotting problems. One suggestions was to put the request out to the world that we had a plot problem. When we did this we programmed our reticular activation gate, which in turn, heightened our sensitivity to the world providing a solution.

My first thought was Cool. My second was Wait a minute. I know a lot about the brain, from nursing; from authors, artists, and other creative people talking and writing about creativity.

How had I missed hearing about this cool brain feature that supposedly comes as standard human equipment? If something sounds too good to be true, chances are that it is.

I went to the Internet. From the neuro-technical sites I learned that the reticular activation gate is the part of our brain stems responsible for the sleep/awake switch and the conscious/coma switch.  It does filter and prioritize information, but the prioritization is based on which information represents the greatest danger. Potato casserole = low danger; kid+bike+car = high danger. Kid+bike+car wins.

It’s also possible to consciously program the gate for a forced attention span. I want to watch a trashy movie, but taxes are due by midnight, so I program my brain for form over flick.

Other sites I checked out worked from a high motivational, you can control your own life viewpoint. This part of the brain works this way because we say it does.

Who am I to say otherwise? There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. I’m going to take this one on faith. Maybe there are times the world does work this way because we say it does.

And that sleep/awake switch? It just might explain why sleeping on an idea sometimes provides a solution. Just a thought.

Quote for the week

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

~ Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish Poet, Novelist, Dramatist, and Critic

The Joy of Unexpected Bookstores

by Julia Buckley

In the little waterfront town of Saugatuck, Michigan, down Butler Street, there is a doorway, tucked between two stores, that you might miss if you're not looking.  Beyond this is a long, narrow staircase, and if you ascend it you will find yourself in Singapore Bank Bookstore, which looks, at first glance, more like an intimate little apartment than like a place of business; yet here you will find books in every genre, new and used, scattered across shelves in an artistic way.

 The proprietor, Judy Nye Hallissey, is also an artisan, and her blown glass is arranged throughout the store as a colorful accompaniment to the beautiful book covers.  This is the sort of store where one can browse and browse and find little delights--some from this era, some from another--that might tempt a booklover.

The joy of places like this is that while it was once easy to find a whimsical bookstore that offered books and  knickknacks, it is now a rarity.  When we looked online for bookstores in the area, we found only two, and one of them was closed until summer. Even when we asked in town, people seemed unsure where to send us; their furrowed brows seemed to suggest that they did not frequent bookstores.

I chatted with Ms. Hallissey about books and found her well-versed in the mystery genre. She recommended quite a few titles to me, and also referenced some mystery blogs that I could read.  The books themselves seemed particularly lovely in this setting--artistic, colorful covers on which my hands lingered.  So many choices!  Since I was selecting titles for my sons and my husband, who all lean toward the hard-boiled, we ended up choosing Ed McBain, Carl Hiaason, Lee Child, and Jason Pinter.  There were many other titles I would have purchased for myself, but I have a pile of reading waiting for me that will last quite a while (a good thing)!

This store was an unexpected delight in a short but lovely vacation. 

Do you know of any whimsical or unexpected bookstores?  Be sure to visit this one if you ever go to Saugatuck.