Monthly Archives: May 2012

May 17, 2012 · 10:32 am

Advice to Writers–Helen Dunmore

1. Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.

2. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don’t yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.

3. Read Keats’s letters.

4. Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. It’s a nice feeling, and you don’t want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

5. Learn poems by heart.

6. Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.

7. A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

8. If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.

9. Don’t worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed “What will survive of us is love.”

Good advice, all of it.–DV

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May 15, 2012 · 5:29 pm

An Historical Artifact of a Local Merchant

I was over at J.E. Rice’s Hardware store a while back, talking with Steve, one of the Rice brothers (Chase and Jamie are the other two), whose father established the business 75 years ago. I can always count on the Rices to have exactly what I need and to tell me how to  install it if necessary. And they’re always good for an interesting conversation. There’s no such thing as a “quick trip to the hardware store” when I go to Rice’s.

This time, Steve told me about a ledger book he found in his shed for the accounts of C. C. Leachman, his grandfather, who ran a store at Wellington Crossing of the Southern Railway around the turn of the twentieth century. Wellington today is the name of a road and subdivision in Manassas, but the rails still run where they did over 100 years ago. Leachman traded in all kinds of merchandise, took crops and chickens as barter for goods and was a transfer point for milk from the numerous dairy farms in the area at the time.

I contacted the Manassas Museum to see if they would be interested in looking at this unique artifact, but they are tied up with the sesquicentennial observance of the Second Battle of Manassas in July. After that’s all over, I hope they will take time to look at Leachman’s  record and perhaps even display it at the museum.

I appreciate Steve making copies of a couple of pages of the ledger so I can share them with BC readers.

The note below the pictures is hard to make out in this image, but it says, “1906–C.C. Leachman holding Sarah Leachman–later married J.E. Rice–1923     C. C. Leachman ran this store and train mail drop.  
This is a ledger page, with the careful Spenserian script of a bygone era, showing expenses paid to the “Southern Railway Co.” for late 1899 and early 1900.

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May 15, 2012 · 10:15 am

The Biscuit City Chronicles: Kingdoms and Servants

When I was in fourth grade, I learned something that I thought would change my life.  As things  turned out, it didn’t but I thought that it might for a while.  There was a lot to learn in fourth grade back then, and from what my older daughter Amy, a fourth grade teacher, tells me, that hasn’t changed much.  
Virginia is closely studied in the fourth grade, both as it is now and as it used to be.  If you’re like me, you probably remember Virginia as having three regions: Tidewater, Piedmont (that’s us) and Mountain. Now there are five: Coastal Plain (formerly and also known as Tidewater), Piedmont, Blue Ridge, Valley and Ridge, and Appalachian Plateau. This makes a great deal of sense to me, much more sense than having five kingdoms of living things.  
Back in the day we had two: plant and animal. A couple of weird organisms didn’t fit either category or fit both, so you could call them what you wanted.  When my girls were in high school, they scoffed at my outdated world view. They said there were five kingdoms: plant, animal, monera, protista and fungi. I think monera and protista are microscopic, but we could make them animals since they move around and eat. They also are capable of photosynthesis, but that’s just an added bonus for them.  And fungi are clearly plants.  They look like plants and grow like plants.  You don’t see them running around the back yard barking like a real animal.  So two kingdoms are enough.  My extensive research into this matter has revealed that biologists now speak of three “domains”: Eukarya, Archaea and Eubacteria. Eukarya includes plants and animals.  Don’t ask me how. Two kingdoms are enough for me.
Anyhow, the fact that I thought would change my life came from Virginia history. Since Virginia had the first permanent English-speaking settlement in the New World in Jamestown, the study of early Virginia history involved early colonial history. I learned enough about it to know that I would not have wanted to have been a colonial since I am not fond of starvation, disease and assorted massacres. I did learn about indentured servants, where someone would bind themselves to a master for a period of years.  At the end of the time, they would be set free from their indenture.  I had been looking for an idea to describe how I felt treated by my parents.  They had the nerve to expect me to keep my room clean and pick up after myself. That was the extent of my responsibilities, but for some reason I felt put upon. So I began to consider myself an indentured servant.
I tried out my new idea at the dinner table one night. “I’m nothing but an indentured servant,” I announced.
“Me, too,” my brother said in a rare display of fraternal solidarity.
“Why are you an indentured servant?” my mother asked.
“Because all I do is work around here. I can hardly wait until the day I’m free.”
My parents did work very hard, and this proclamation from my mouth struck them as funny.  They started laughing and couldn’t stop. I slunk off to my room where I did not clean it up.
Ron and I determined that we would have to run away to gain our freedom. I was taken by The Boxcar Children, a book about some children who lived in a box car in the woods completely free from any adult interference.  I don’t recall the book mentioning how they fed or clothed themselves.  They just existed in an idyllic daydream, doing what they wanted.  The idea among kids we knew was that you ran away to join the circus. Since there didn’t seem to be any circuses around, we would have to settle for a boxcar, if we could find one. We had heard from some older kids that there were some train tracks ‘way back deep in the woods.  If there were train tracks, there might also be a box car.
We equipped ourselves with what we considered necessary supplies. I “borrowed” the clothes pin bag to carry our stash, and managed to pilfer some matches and candles from the kitchen drawer. I also liberated a can of pork and beans, which was pretty much the limit of my culinary skill then. I took my multiblade Scout knife which my parents had bought me when I joined the Scouts.  They made me promise to not cut my fingers off.  I wasn’t sure what most of the blades were for, but the knife seemed like a good idea. We were ready.
Next week: The story continues with “The Box Car Boys.”

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May 14, 2012 · 10:24 am

Generations

Early one morning last week (about 7:15, to be exact), our daughter Amy called with the news that her car wouldn’t start. Since she lives about two miles away and since she is a teacher and expected to show up at school before her students do, an expectation shared by students, parents, the administrators at her school, the community, the School Board, the Commonwealth of Virginia and who knows who else, I said I would come over post haste and see if we could give her little car a jump start. We had to link our jumper cables together to reach from battery to battery, and after some grumbling and sputtering, the car started.

The battery looked like it was original to the car and Amy said it had not been replaced, so I allowed that she probably needed a new battery. I know that the guys on Car Talk believe that fathers don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to saying what needs to be done to cars, but they weren’t there and I was.

We worked it out that Amy would drive over to our house, leave her car with me and take one of our cars to work. I would have the battery tested and replaced, if necessary.

And so she was off for a day of fun and learning at her school (that’s how they like to think of the day’s goings on at the school and I don’t doubt that it is true), and I drove her car over to Advance Auto where a nice young man tested the battery and said she needed a new one. He installed one and I was back home after 20 minutes.

Trying the radio on the way back I noticed that all the stations were set at 88.5 FM, an unlikely situation since Amy likes a variety of music, most of which I have never heard of. Then it occurred to me that disconnecting the battery had wiped out all her presets and I had no idea of how to reset them. I tried figuring out which stations and music she would like but I had no idea. My knowledge of poplar music dates to about 1985 and goes not further. No wonder I had no idea of what she would like to listen to.

I texted Amy about her lost presets and she wrote back that she didn’t mind. I think she did find the selection of ten or so CD’s I had in my car amusing, quaint, and “old school”–hits of the ’60’s, Simon and Garfunkel, Gordon Lightfoot, the Eagles, some choral music–and I think she also thought it old school that I was still using CD’s.

I saw that Amy had an iPhone cradle on the dashboard of her car and while I do have an iPhone, I have not put any music on it. I have about 400 songs on my computer, but haven’t figured out how to put them on my phone. I know having them on the phone would make it easier to carry my tunes, but there’s also a degradation of sound with mp3 files as opposed to CD’s. I happen to have a Bose sound system in the station wagon (installed by its former owner, my other daughter Alyssa) and it needs a good sound source to take advantage of its capabilities.

So this whole exercise reminded me of the differences in generations and changes in technology, how we adapt to them and how they affect us.

Some things remain the same: daughters still call fathers for help with their cars; fathers still respond gladly and take care of business; and we both enjoy music. And some day–who knows?–I’ll be completely up to date with my personal technology.

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May 11, 2012 · 12:10 pm

Poem of the Week: Retired

If I’m retired
(and I seem to be)
Then why are the blocks
On my calendar
So full?

     –Dan Verner

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May 10, 2012 · 10:42 am

Advice on Writing: Repost of A Writing Teacher Who Writes: A Reflection on National Poetry Month

Laura Tornello does an occasional blog post that is published on the Northern Virginia Writing Project website, generally reflecting on the teaching of writing. Her posts are informative and intriguing. Here she writes about the Poem-a-Day Challenge which a number of Write by the Rails members undertook. I’m here to tell you, cranking out a poem a day is a challenge.

Here’s what Laura had to say about the project:


I don’t write poetry. My thoughts come more naturally in prose, and to write poetry is to cut. I’ve never felt comfortable with the process of constructing a poem, and more often than not, I feel like an imposter; I add some vague imagery that may or may not be symbolic, I splice my sentences at odd syntactic places to appear trendy, and ultimately I feel like what I’ve created is just severed prose. Needless to say, National Poetry Month has never been a source of festivity for me. This year, though, towards the end of March, an inexplicable force took hold of me: I would do the April Poem-A-Day Challenge. I would write thirty poems.Just the thought made me flinch, but at that point, my stubbornness wouldn’t let me back down. 
On April 1st, my pen hovered hesitantly over an expectant blank page and I wrote my first poem. On April 30th, with an odd twinge of sadness, I wrote my last poem—and over the course of that month, I rediscovered the importance of being a writing teacher who writes.
 I rediscovered the messiness of the writing process. Some of the poems I wrote are pretty terrible. Most of them, I won’t ever visit again. Overall, there are only twelve that I really like, that I would consider revising. I think this is such an important message to convey to my students—that even as someone who writes constantly, I only really like 40% of what I wrote during the month of April.  You have to work your way through a lot of tangled ideas and clumsy phrases to get to some really profound stuff. That’s just the nature of writing.
I rediscovered what it feels like to be completely outside my comfort zone. I had a lot of insecurity about form and style, and at times I felt like a fraud, as if I were wearing a sandwich board that proclaimed “NOT A POET” in large bold letters. About halfway through the month, as I struggled with a particularly uncooperative poem, I had an important realization: This is how some of my students feel when they’re working on papers for my class.I think I forget this sometimes—that just because I’ve read The Great Gatsby 800 times and can write a literary analysis paper in my sleep doesn’t mean that my students feel that same level of comfort. They’re navigating unfamiliar waters too, and I think this realization made me a stronger teacher, and most importantly, a more empathetic one.
Finally, I rediscovered the powerful (and often unexpected) connection between writing and thinking. Giving up control was difficult for me, but I tried to start writing and just let the poem take me where it wanted to. You know, in a non-hippie way—because that previous sentence made it sound like I was lighting incense and eating Kashi during this whole process. But truly, there were moments over the course of the month where I finished a poem, sat back, and thought, “Wow. Where did that come from?” Far too often, students have this perception that writing is the process of taking a fully-formed thought and translating it onto paper. It’s important for them to recognize that writing itself is a means for thinking things through and figuring out what they really want to say.
As I write this, it’s May 1st, and (I never thought I would utter this phrase), I’m in poetry withdrawal. I still don’t consider myself “a poet,” but I do know two things for certain: everything I wrote in the last month has contributed to my identity as a writer. And everything I wrote in the last month has contributed to my identity as a writing teacher.

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May 9, 2012 · 10:40 am

Conversations: Gloria Duncan on Using Bibles for Genealogical Research

I met Gloria Duncan about a month ago when she came to church one Sunday while visiting her daughter Andrea Matthews (the subject of a BC post on February 21—Andrea is a pediatric pharmacist) and her son Cameron. Andrea of course knew about my interest in writing and mentioned that her mom was a writer, and that she had produced a genealogical study of their family. 
When I talked to Mrs. Duncan, her enthusiasm for her writing and for research into her ancestors was evident. She spoke of using Bibles to find information about forbears, which had never occurred to me but made perfect sense. 
I have done a little with genealogical research, which means I sat down with Ancestry.com one day and in an hour found out that a line of descent on my mother’s side went back to an indentured servant who came to the Jamestown area in 1640. His grandson was a captain in the Virginia militia during the Revolution.
Mrs. Duncan by way of contrast had invested countless hours, traveled thousands of miles and met dozens of people doing her research, resulting in a beautiful book that was truly a labor of love. I have cut in some image of several representative pages of the book at the end of this post. I hope you enjoy reading them.
Mrs. Duncan wrote me in more detail about her use of Bibles for research.
Since you are interested in my reliance on Bible records I thought I would tell you about what resulted from some Bible pages.
My husband’s sister, Joyce, had done some family genealogy work in the 1970’s.  During that time she had copied some Bible pages that their uncle had copied from a Bible that was in the family.  She didn’t remember who had the Bible at the time and the uncle has died, so I had no idea where the pages had come from.  One page of notes Joyce had from her uncle mentioned that “Sammy says this is all of the Bible pages.”  I tried and tried to find out who Sammy was…there were several Samuels in the family…but could not locate who would have had the Bible.
In collaborating with another researcher of the family in Texas, I mentioned I had some pages that had come from a Duncan Bible.  She had been researching about eighteen years and had not heard of the Bible.  As it turned out, she had been looking all those years for when my husband  Joel’s great-great grandfather, Browning Duncan, died.  The Bible page had his death date.  I also had the birth and death of a child whose lone tombstone was in Tennessee that we were then able to identify.  The children of his great grandfather were also unknown until we looked at the Bible pages.  About four of the five girls had died before adulthood and were unknown to the present families.  So the Bible pages turned out to be the ONLY source for this data.  The other researcher found out that the only thing any of her contacts knew about the Bible was that supposedly it had survived a tornado in Oklahoma.
Just this February when Joel and I were in California, I went through all the old notes of his sister’s again and found a manila envelope from the same uncle who had copied the Bible pages and just written on the envelope, but not as an address, was the name Sammy Duncan, Mulhall, Oklahoma.  I felt sure that I had discovered the Sammy who had had the Bible. 

 
The white pages on the Internet confirmed the existence of a Sammy Duncan in that town and gave a phone number for him.  When we contacted him it was indeed the Duncan in possession of the old Bible and it had survived a tornado and was in very fragile condition.  I actually had copies already of all the pertinent pages for genealogy, but it was so gratifying to know where it was and who had it.  It also opened up another branch of the family and Joel discovered more second cousins he knew nothing about.  One is the State Music Director for Georgia Baptists, Jon Duncan.

What an incredible story! Thanks to Gloria Duncan for sharing with us. 

The title page of Gloria’s book

First page
Family page

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May 8, 2012 · 9:53 am

If You Can’t Be Good, Be Lucky

The title of this post is a favorite saying of my brother’s. I like it–it applies to a number of circumstances.

We spent some time last summer with long-time friends who have a nice house on Cape Cod, in a part of the peninsula that hasn’t been developed. It’s a relaxing and entertaining place to be.

I am a huge baseball fan, and I had heard for years about the Cape Cod Baseball League, which is an NCAA college level organization which has sent a disproportionate number of players to the majors. One evening, we caught a game between the Brewster Whitecaps and the Falmouth Commodores. It was a beautiful night, and because it was a college game, there was no admission charge. People drew up portable chairs around the perimeter of the outfield of a beautiful little park.
I thought it was baseball as it should be.

I also thought back to my own undistinguished career in baseball,  which ended when I was twelve. My basic problem was that I was afraid of the ball. I thought this was a reasonable attitude to have since a baseball hurts a lot when it hits you. As a right-handed batter, I consistently hit to right field, which meant I was swinging late. There was so much to think about during an at-bat. Do I want to hit this pitch? Will this pitch hit me? What should I do? Duck and cover? Scream and run? So much to think about…

Because I was not very good at the sport, although I loved it, I ended up twelve years old in the minor leagues. Most of the twelve-year-olds were in the majors, but for some reason, the coaches decided to put all the uncoordinated twelve-year-olds on one minor league team. Because we were uncoordinated, we didn’t play very well but, because we were bigger than the rest of the kids in the league, we could win enough games to make it worthwhile. I remember one game we won 63-0. Our coaches kept telling us to make outs to end the spectacle but we kept merrily hitting and running around the bases. I pitched that game—not that I was any good–but asked to be taken out in the fifth. I felt too sorry for the opposing team who cried their way through the last couple of innings. As a result, they couldn’t see well enough to hit anything. It was pitiful.

Anyhow, we ended up in the playoff game for the championship—one game, winner takes all. Larry, our third baseman, had the most athletic ability of any of us. He could field anything hit to him and make an accurate throw to first, which made him a rarity on the team. He used a big black bat that was his personal stick: no one dared touch it. He occasionally banged the ball off the fence but never hit a home run. He also struck out a lot.

I remember one situation well. I was playing shortstop and we were behind 3-0 in the top of the sixth (the last inning for Little League games). The other team had loaded the bases with no outs and it looked like they were going to increase their lead. The hitter smacked a sizzling line drive straight at Larry. He caught the ball, stepped on third to double the runner who had taken off at the crack of the bat and reached over to tag the player coming from second who apparently ran at the sound of the bat and didn’t look to see that Larry had the ball.

There was a stunned silence. “Unassisted triple play,” my coach said with total admiration in his voice.

 So we were up, but still three runs behind. Larry came to bat with the bases loaded and two out. I was on deck.

He swung at the first pitch and missed. He swung at the second pitch with the same result. He stepped out of the box and wiped his eyes. C’mon, Lar, don’t tear up now, I thought. I was ambivalent about getting to bat. If Larry made an out, the game would be over and we would lose. If he didn’t, I would be up and the thought of all that pressure made me feel queasy.

The third pitch came in to Larry and he whipped the big black bat around. Crack! It was the sweet pure sound of bat meeting ball cleanly. We all watched, frozen, even the runners who should have been running, as the ball sailed high through the air and dived into the deepening twilight beyond the fence. I could hear my coach screaming above the tumult, “Grand slam home run! Grand slam home run!” We had won the championship.

I played a few more games after that, but never managed to swing at pitches at the right time. I don’t know what happened to Larry or the rest of the team. Somewhere I have a team picture, a collection of eleven gangly, goofy-looking kids tagged as losers who ended up winning it all. And I know it wasn’t because we were any good: we were just extraordinarily lucky.

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May 7, 2012 · 10:19 am

Pocketing the Change


As I was loading my pockets the other day, I thought, “I sure do carry a lot of stuff when I go out for a guy who doesn’t really have a job. Depending on what I’m wearing, I have between six and eight to ten pockets. In these pockets, if I am under full sail and going to be out for a while I have four sets of keys (don’t ask me why—I just do), two pens, maybe a pencil or two, my cell phone, a small calendar, a supply of my blog cards and Observer business cards, my wallet, which is a world into itself, and about a dollar in change. I’m set for most contingencies like this, but it does take a while to load and unload all this stuff when I leave and when I come back. But I’ve found I need everything I carry into order to function. I feel a little like the soldiers in Tim O’Brien’s marvelous book, The Things They Carried, except I don’t carry weapons and ammo and I don’t run the risk being shot when I go out. Not a high risk, anyhow.
I was thinking about pockets and remembered one of my colleagues, a woman named Mary, who was very involved in her three children’s lives, like many other working moms, in spite of the demands of being a full-time teacher. She was always doing something for them or involved with some activity at their elementary school. We ate lunch with about six other teachers, and one day Mary came into the room where we ate, sat down and put her head on the table.
 Some one asked, “Are you all right?”
“No,” came the muffled reply, “I’m not.”
“What’s wrong?” someone else asked.
“I agreed to be the Pick-a-Pocket Lady again this year,” Mary answered.
“What’s a Pick-a-Pocket Lady?”
Mary lifted her head up. “It’s something I do for the kids’ school carnival every year. I wear a big smock covered with pockets with little prizes in them. Kid come up and take a prize out. It’s like being nibbled to death by ducks. I hate it.”
“Why do you do it?”
Mary put her head back down. “It’s for the kids. And I’ve always done it so I can’t get out of it.”
Eventually Mary’s kids finished elementary school and the job of Pick-a-Pocket Lady fell to another hapless mom.
As I load and unload my pockets I feel like a kind of minor league Pick-a-Pocket…Guy.  I have moments when I wonder if I should carry some sort of man bag. I decide against it since I’d have to answer a dozen questions about one if I did carry it. I do have a handsome canvas messenger bag that I carry teaching materials in. If ever I went to a carryall that would be it.
I thought of all this because I was, as I said, thinking about pockets and about the five pockets of Biscuit City I fill every week. The blog has been running since May 24, 2011, with 265 entries to date. I enjoy writing the pieces: it does take some time and effort, but I’ve met some terrific people (on line) because of it. I get good comments and readers tell me they enjoy or are stimulated by some of the posts.
In reality, writing a blog every weekday is about like writing a daily newspaper column. Before my editor Susan Svihilik, was summarily fired from her position (and I resigned my column writing job with that paper in protest—and started “Biscuit City” as a replacement), she and I were talking about daily columns one day and we agreed that a single writer would need at least one assistant to do a daily column.
 My assistant is Nacho the Cat, and the conformation of her paws makes typing difficult for her so she’s not much help, although she does listen carefully when I read something aloud to see how it sounds.
So, I want to tell my Faithful Readers about some changes to BC—not major changes like switching to all posts on fashion or some other impossible (for me) subject. The changes are with how each daily pocket is filled.
Mondays I will continue to write about whatever pops into my head or something that has happened to me or interests me.
Tuesdays I plan to share some stories from my past. There’s a lot of past and so I have a lot of stories.
Wednesdays I have been featuring an interview with a writer for a while and more recently with an artist. I love doing this post, but it is rather labor-intensive so I am going to switch out and write about technology and society, a subject I find fascinating. I’ll drop in an occasional interview from time to time.
Thursdays will continue to be observations on writing, generally gleaned from other sources.
Fridays will continue to be Poem of the Week, although I plan to use poetry I have written, at the urging of some friends.
So there you go. Thank you for being BC readers. I hope you find the posts to be amusing or enlightening or stimulating. And please remember to click on the ads. :^) Rock on!

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May 4, 2012 · 9:12 am

The Biscuit City Exceptionally Immodest Poetry Series Presents a Poem by Dan Verner, Who Has No Shame

Along with several other Facebook friends, I wrote a poem a day to observe National Poetry Month in April. Some people actually have asked me to share these poems on Biscuit City, so here is the first one. If I run one a week, it will be about December by the time they’re all presented. Thanks to all who encouraged me in this, and to those who have not read them yet, enjoy!

                              Bus Stop

When I was teaching,
I read or a student read
A Poem of the Day
To start the class.
It was a tradition
And some students said
It was the best part
Of the class.
I’d agree, most days.

I chose the poem
Out of one of several collections,
Mostly edited by
Garrison Keillor,
Daughter Alyssa’s literary nemesis,
Although she objects to
His style rather than his content
Having experienced M. Keillor
As a high school student
With his “Writer’s Almanac” feature
On National…Public…Radio,
Inflicted by her English teacher,
A station on which, she says
The announcers speak slowly
And deliberately as if they
Knew somehow
They were addressing
Old people.

I know, youth is wasted
On the young and I exact
Some satisfaction
By reminding her that she
And her friends
Will pay my social security.

In any case, when I retired from teaching
Some nine years ago this July,
My department gave me a book of
Read-aloud poems
Edited by you-know-who
And Lisa Green, my department chair,
Allowed as how I would go out in my
Neighborhood every morning
And read to the kids
At the bus stop.

A school bus stops right outside my house
And each school morning
I hear the quiet sleepy talk
Of the students as they wait
For the roaring yellow machine
To take them away
To another seven hours
Of high school.

I want to take my book of poetry
And go out to them
And read them a
Poem of the Day
To fortify them against
All that day will bring
But that would be too weird
And so
I don’t

(But sometimes
When the house is quiet
And they are standing in silent clusters
at the bus stop
I go into the living room
And there
Read them
A Poem of the Day.)

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