Books Make a Difference http://booksmakeadifference.com Celebrating books, their creators and fans, and the positive difference they make in people's lives Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:46:37 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.11 Pitch Conferences: Shaping Writers for Publication http://booksmakeadifference.com/pitch/ http://booksmakeadifference.com/pitch/#comments Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:46:37 +0000 http://booksmakeadifference.com/?p=3909 Pitching story ideas to literary agents can happen in a tweet, a face-to-face conversation, or a three-paragraph email. The exercise of condensing 80-100,000 words of a manuscript down to a hundred characters, a few minutes of explanation, or a well-crafted query letter can challenge writers. In order to hone pitching skills, writers attend pitch conferences geared toward equipping them to better navigate the road toward representation. Perfecting the pitch is worthwhile but writers gain the most when they maintain perspective about the journey toward publication. [...]

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Pitching story ideas to literary agents can happen in a tweet, a face-to-face conversation, or a three-paragraph email. The exercise of condensing 80-100,000 words of a manuscript down to a hundred characters, a few minutes of explanation, or a well-crafted query letter can challenge writers. In order to hone pitching skills, writers attend pitch conferences geared toward equipping them to better navigate the road toward representation. Perfecting the pitch is worthwhile but writers gain the most when they maintain perspective about the journey toward publication.

Chris Jones, communications and marketing director for The Loft Literary Center in downtown Minneapolis, has been part of organizing the Pitch Conferences that took place at the Loft in November 2015 and April 2017.

TheLoft_Horizontal_Blue-Web-TransparentThe Loft provides a robust offering of classes year round and opportunities for aspiring writers to network. In an attempt to provide programming for writers seeking to take their projects to the next level, the initial Pitch Conference was organized to teach writers what it takes to enter into the publishing world. In addition to workshops and breakout sessions, the conference provided two opportunities for writers to meet with agents to pitch their projects.

In 2017, the conference expanded from 108 to 144 writers and included three pitch opportunities per attendee. Sixteen agents attended and the pitch schedule was created from the writers’ prioritized list of eight agents they hoped to pitch.

Over the course of the two-day event, and in conjunction with the in-person pitches, eighteen workshop discussions were presented on topics ranging from “Publishing Trends” to “Finding Your Inner Villain.” Other topics included: “Non-Fiction Proposals”; “You’ve Signed, Now What?”; “Agent Life: What is it You Do All Day?” and “Publishing without an Agent.”

Writers who attend pitch conferences are hopeful they will find a literary agent for their books, but Chris hopes the conference provides valuable content outside the ultimate success story.

“It’s a chance to meet, work with, and learn from active people in the field,” he says. “If the number one thing people are thinking is, ‘I’m going to find an agent,’ it’s not the best approach. Instead, they should approach with, ‘I’m going to try to learn where my work stands and how to approach this industry.’”

Pitch Conference attendee Karen Kroll, a freelance writer and editor from the twin cities with a debut novel to pitch, certainly hopes she’ll find an agent to represent her, but she appreciates the value of conferences beyond the eight-minute pitches.

“Meeting with agents is always valuable,” she says.

A member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Karen has attended other conferences, including the Colorado Gold Conference hosted by Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. “I also find it valuable to meet other writers, as well as agents and editors for whom my story likely isn’t a fit,” she says. “It’s inspiring to be among others who are passionate about books, writing, and reading.”

When asked what she learned about the publishing world because of the Loft’s Pitch Conference, Karen responded, “The Fast and the Query-ous Pitch Slam helped me gain a better understanding of what agents tend to look for in a pitch.”

The Fast and the Query-ous Pitch Slam was a Friday evening event focused entirely on the query letter. A panel of four agents read through query letters and buzzed in at the point in the letter where they would have stopped reading. They were given an opportunity to explain why they lost interest and they offered advice for improving the problem areas.

At The Fast and the Query-ous panel discussion hosted by The Loft, agents read writers' query letters and offered tips to keep them reading. Photo by Anna Min of Min Enterprises Photography.

At The Fast and the Query-ous panel discussion hosted by The Loft, agents read writers’ query letters and offered tips to keep them reading. Photo by Anna Min of Min Enterprises Photography.

SHAPE THE PITCH WHEN THE BOOK IS READY

Writers are increasingly interested in learning how to craft pitches and query letters, and agents appreciate those efforts, but it is important for writers to remain focused on the timing of their pitches.

Erik Hane, an agent at Red Sofa Literary out of the Twin Cities, is intrigued by the obsession with learning to pitch and query. He thinks some writers worry too soon in the process about how they’ll enter the publishing side of the conversation and it flattens out their writing efforts.

“Instead of writers writing a book, they spend time figuring out how to find representation or how they will be publishing a book.” Erik, who is rather new to his role as an agent, is surprised by this. “Writers could be mid-novel and they’re worrying about publishing as opposed to working on the book.”

During his two previous gigs in New York, as an assistant editor at Oxford University Press and an acquiring editor at the Overlook Press, Erik was unaware of the level of noise in the pitch conversation, partially because he dealt primarily with represented authors.

Erik understands why writers want to learn about the process of pitching and writing email queries.

“The impulse is good,” he says. “Writers are trying to put their best foot forward. Trying to be professional. It’s just that the balance is skewed.”

He wants to encourage writers to concentrate on the book-writing first and step into the publishing conversation when the book is completely ready. He says, “They (writers) don’t trust they’ll be able to find an agent and start to position a product ahead of writing a good book.”

Publishing is a journey requiring a certain level of endurance. Writers and their stories get in shape by attending classes at places like the Loft, running through multiple revisions, or seeking and following the advice of writers’ groups. Pitch conferences offer shaping tools too, with chances to meet and pitch to agents and learn from the content of the breakout sessions. With the right perspective, writers can gain valuable ground at pitch conferences, even if they are meant to be on that publishing journey a while longer.

Steps writers should take in pursuit of representation:

  1. Write a phenomenal book.
  2. Determine the genre of the book you’ve written. Where would it be shelved?
  3. Know the comparison titles (two or three) and why they are good comp titles for your manuscript.
  4. Research agents who represent the genre of your book. Study the books they represent and try to determine if your book is similar to books they love to read.
  5. Practice and perfect your pitch and approach appropriate agents in the format they prefer. Attend conferences where agents attend. Forge a relationship on twitter. If you correspond by email, send EXACTLY what the agent asks for in submissions.

Guide-to-Literary-AgentsRESOURCES

Pitch conferences:
San Francisco Writer’s Conference
Writer’s League of Texas Agents and Editors Conference
Dallas Fort Worth Writer’s Conference
The Loft’s Pitch Conference

Writer’s Digest offers a wide range of resources for aspiring writers, including an online subscription to daily newsletters, online webinars, in person conferences, books, and website content.

Writer’s Digest hosts conferences across the US, including: NYC (four times a year), Alabama (February), Atlanta (February), Kansas (February), Minnesota (February), Michigan (March), Kentucky (April), Philadelphia (April), Seattle (May), and Tennessee (July).

The book Guide to Literary Agents, published annually by Writer’s Digest Books, lists information for more than 1,000 literary agents. The book also includes articles about query-writing, profiles of reps who are actively looking for new clients, and information about pitching and defining genre. The book purchase also includes a one-year subscription to the literary agent content on WritersMarket.com and access to the webinar “10 Steps to Landing a Literary Agent” by Marisa Corvisiero of Corvisiero Literary Agency.

Web: WritersDigest.com

Twitter: @loftliterary@karenkroll@erikhane@RedSofaLiterary, @WritersDigest@CorvisieroLit

Feature photo: Meagan Frank pitches her debut novel. Photo by Karen Pavlicin-Fragnito.

Meagan Frank introduced her debut novel, A Line in the Water, to agents participating in #adpit. Her favorite of her six tweets was: “It takes being unplugged from everything for Grace to see what it’s like to be truly connected to anyone.” Using a few more words, Meagan pitched agents in person at The Loft’s 2017 Pitch Conference in Minneapolis. Currently unrepresented, she is using the valuable feedback she received from agents who read her pages to get in shape for publication. Read more about Meagan at MeaganFrank.com.

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Corie Weathers: Honoring Sacred Spaces in Marriage http://booksmakeadifference.com/corie-weathers/ http://booksmakeadifference.com/corie-weathers/#comments Sun, 30 Apr 2017 20:06:53 +0000 http://booksmakeadifference.com/?p=3867 Military and first-responder couples often experience intense, life-changing moments while apart from each other. Married for 17 years and veterans of multiple military deployments, Corie Weathers and her Army chaplain husband, Matt, call these unshared experiences “sacred spaces.” Corie’s message, based on her own vulnerable story in her book Sacred Spaces: My Journey to the Heart of Military Marriage is helping couples around the world learn to love each other with new eyes. [...]

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All of me. Why not take all of me?

A young singer in uniform poses the musical question, backed by a jazz ensemble of fellow soldiers. The bass player nods in comprehension as the strings of his instrument and the singer’s query resonate across the room.

Your goodbyes left me with eyes that cry. How can I go on without you?

The room is full of military couples, people who have said their share of goodbyes. On this night, however, they’re together enjoying a nice meal and a night out, sponsored by the chapel at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Gathered at tables for six or eight, the couples swap stories about their assignments over the world, from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Ramstein in southern Germany.

When the band finishes its set, Corie and Matt Weathers take the stage, but not to entertain. They’ve come to talk about the stress military service places on marriage.

Sacred Spaces: My Journey to the Heart of Military Marriage by Corie Weathers

When then-US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter invited Corie, as 2015 AFI Military Spouse of the Year, to join his team on a one-week overseas trip, she eagerly accepted, hoping to gain a better understanding of her husband’s deployment experience and lessen the impact sacred spaces had on her marriage. She wrote about her journey in her book, Sacred Spaces.

Corie is a licensed professional counselor. Matt is a US Army chaplain. Married for 17 years and veterans of multiple deployments, the couple has lived the message Corie wrote about in her book, Sacred Spaces: My Journey to the Heart of Military Marriage.

“We often miss large chunks of life while we are apart during deployment,” Corie tells the Fort Stewart crowd. “That may include intense, life-changing experiences. These unshared experiences, whether positive or negative, have consequences. In our marriage, Matt and I call these ‘sacred spaces.’”

As she and Matt share their experiences throughout the evening, there are nods of understanding, bursts of laughter, and moments of quiet contemplation.

The Weathers have combined their professional and personal expertise in ministry for several years, encouraging couples to care for the health of their marriages through chapel programs and marriage retreats.

After Corie was named the Armed Forces Insurance Military Spouse of the Year in 2015, she was invited to join then Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, on a trip to strategic military locations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf, to report from a spouse’s point of view. On that journey, she also discovered unexpected truths about herself and her marriage, especially when visiting Afghanistan, where her husband served with a unit that experienced several combat losses. Corie realized she was harboring resentment about the ways she and Matt had been changed by deployment and the space those changes created in their marriage.

Corie wanted to write Sacred Spaces because she believed her experience could speak to other couples.

It turns out she was right, and not just in the military community. Her message of recognizing and respecting sacred spaces has resonated with couples connected to first-responder careers as well. In September 2016, the Chris Kyle FROG Foundation invited Corie to be a speaker and facilitator for an Empowered Spouses Retreat in Wyoming. Spouses of military and first responders were invited to the pilot program.

“Both are intense communities with intense experiences,” Corie says. “When we put the two groups of spouses together, we realized that both understand each other and have such sympathy for each other.”

For military couples, intense experiences that create sacred spaces often occur during deployment, when couples are apart for extended periods. For first-responder couples, events that may become sacred spaces are interspersed in day-to-day life.

Angela Horton, wife of a law enforcement officer in Colorado, explains how she and her husband, Craig, experience those events differently.

“It could be middle-of-the-night call outs where my husband is responding to a SWAT call with an armed subject, or a serial rapist, while I am home alone with two small children,” Angela says. “Sometimes I can’t sleep because of fear. The officer’s experience is one of duty, training, and action at that point in time. Mine is one of worry, fear, a racing mind, full of ‘Is he okay?’ ‘Is he going to make it home for our date tomorrow?’ or ‘What and how much do I tell our kids?’”

After reading Sacred Spaces, Angela attended the Empowered Spouses Retreat. Through first reading the book, then hearing from Corie in person at the retreat, Angela gained a more optimistic perspective of her marriage.

“We face incredibly challenging issues, different, say, from the marriages of your neighbors that are engineers, businessmen,” Angela says. “Our stressors are drastically different than those of other marriages, but they also define who we are as a team, if we keep our minds focused on being a team rather than adversaries or competitors.”

Kelli Vincent, whose husband Terrell is an army veteran and now a highway patrolman, attended the retreat as well. She received a copy of Sacred Spaces and read it all on the plane going back home to Louisiana.

“I couldn’t wait to hear more about what Corie had to say,” Kelli says, “then I couldn’t wait to come home and tell Terrell.”

At first, the term “sacred space” didn’t make sense to Terrell at all.

“I thought it was church or something,” he says.

After he and Kelli talked more, they realized the concept of sacred space could help Kelli better understand the triggers that caused him to relive events surrounding the day his brother, also a law enforcement officer, was killed in the line of duty.

“Before that, I don’t think Kelli understood what was going on,” Terrell agrees. “She was like, ‘it’s been a year you gotta get over that.’ … Now she has a better understanding of that. (A trigger) takes you right back—maybe not to that same moment. Time heals the wounds, but it still hurts.”

Corie Weathers, FOB Fenty memorial

Among Corie’s experiences on her journey overseas, she visited a memorial at FOB Fenty, where several of Matt’s fellow soldiers died in battle. Matt’s experience as a chaplain during that deployment and Corie’s experience on the care team serving grieving widows back home, constitute one of the many significant sacred spaces in their marriage.

Corie explains that sacred spaces can form around any significant event—positive or negative—that a couple experiences separately. Kelli recognized that the day Terrell’s brother died was a sacred space for Terrell. Even though she was nearby, he experienced it differently than she did. That knowledge gives her a frame of reference to be more supportive to her husband.

“It’s helped me to be more intentional and understanding his sacred spaces and trying to create more sacred spaces we can share together, rather than he alone and me alone.”

Angela says since she read Sacred Spaces, she and Craig are learning to communicate more effectively about difficult duty calls and how they each are affected by them.

“We are trying to gain a better understanding of how the other is affected by these experiences and how to respect, honor, support one another even though our perspectives are so different,” she says. “We give one another permission to see a critical situation and its effects differently than our spouse and not feel like we need to defend or justify it … to say, ‘You may not understand why I feel this way, but I need you to respect it.’”

Corie travels and speaks to many groups about sacred spaces, loving intentionally, and letting go of resentment. This month she speaks to several Air Force audiences at Misawa Air Base, Japan, as her book takes the message to even more locations around the world.

Lindsay Swoboda, a Marine Corps wife, said she felt “lost” when her husband returned from his fifth deployment.

“I didn’t know how to put our pieces back together,” says Lindsay, who blogs at UpliftingAnchor.com. Looking for resources, she typed “military spouse podcast” into Google and found Corie’s LifeGiver podcast. Lindsay says giving words to her experience has been “life-changing,” opening up healing and sometimes difficult conversations with her husband.

“The book made us talk again,” she says. “We’ve been given the chance with the term ‘sacred spaces’ to step back and understand there is much about our time apart that cannot be explained or fully understood. We cannot walk in one another’s shoes. I have never been deployed and faced a war zone. He has not carried the diaper bag and been awake for months alone with a newborn. But we can seek to love, communicate, and grant graciousness to one another.”

Dina Dziolek, a mental health professional, and her husband, David, an Air Force chaplain, are using Corie’s book as the basis for discussion in a group of military couples at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico. Dinah said she has also seen avenues of communication opened by Corie’s book.

“I have seen service members (in our group) share things they never talked about before regarding their deployment experience and have seen couples grow closer through sharing their experiences and fears openly in class,” says Dinah. “I love to use books written by military spouses and families. I often remind the class this couple is a couple just like them with real struggles and have discovered real intimacy. This is the beauty of being transparent with people. We can find healing together.”

Angela was also moved by the honesty and vulnerability of Corie’s book.

Corie-Weathers_friends

Corie with first-responder spouses, Tamar Harper and Joanna Ruskin-Willis, on a hike in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, part of the Chris Kyle FROG Foundation Empowered Spouses retreat.

“Corie doesn’t hold back or gloss over the struggles, frustrations, and deep pain our marriages go through as a result of service,” Angela says. “She shares from her heart, acknowledging that she doesn’t always have the answers, but that she is committed to learning her husband and herself better and not letting them become yet another statistic.”

Readers write to Corie to say they identify with her feelings. Discovering hidden resentments is one of the greatest common denominators.

“They are relieved to know they are not alone,” Corie says. “Resentment sounds so ugly. We want to hide it, but I hear from people who say they didn’t know how much resentment they had until they saw the words in my book. My goal was to give them a way to move forward on that, versus getting stuck in it.”

In the book, Corie describes the moment when she let go of her resentment while flying over the mountains of Afghanistan, where her husband endured some of his most life-changing experiences.

“You don’t have to be flying over Afghanistan to leave your resentment somewhere,” she says. “When you’re ready, you can do something formal to release it wherever you are. At the retreat in Wyoming, we had this beautiful river, and we could go down to the river and release it, let it go. That doesn’t mean it’s never going to creep up on you, but at least you have a marker to look back on and say, ‘No, I released it.’”

Corie says writing Sacred Spaces felt like a risk to her, because of the principles she lays out in its pages, advising readers to look to their mates first for whom to serve, and to look at themselves first for whom to change.

“It’s a big ask. I’m asking people who are already weary not to give up, to do even more for their marriages. I was expecting a backlash: ‘Who does she think she is?’ or ‘I’m tired,’ but I’ve actually gotten the opposite reaction. When they let that resentment go, they realize they do have something left to give their marriage. They didn’t realize what it was that was holding them back.”

Lindsay found Corie’s call to action a positive push in the right direction.

“It reignited a flame within me to pursue my spouse’s heart,” she says. “It is very easy to slip into being bitter in this lifestyle. It is very easy to feel always last to the greater good of the military career. It’s easy to get exhausted and become unloving.”

Lisa Colello’s husband was injured in a 2003 battle that cost the lives of many in his Marine Corps platoon. After reading Sacred Spaces, Lisa said her eyes were opened to the resentment she harbored because of the changes in her husband and to her life.

“I wanted him to acknowledge just how much I had lost to the military as well,” Lisa says. “I thought I was praying for my husband to be better, but really I was praying for my own selfish needs. He doesn’t need me to pray for him to be fixed. He needs me to pray for strength and understanding to endure our trials. He needs me to show love and acceptance first, because he is the one who feels defeated and scared of who he has become. I left my resentment on the pages of that book. I don’t want to live like that anymore.”

If the objective is unconditional love, says Kelli Vincent, the price is sacrifice and hard work—work she is willing to do.

“You don’t get that kind of undying love in a day. You don’t get that in two years, or thirteen years,” she says. “You get that through your difficulties and working through all of that together. That is how you build that love. No matter what, I’m here. We’re gonna get through this. Knowing it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. It gives us hope.”

Such resolve from her readers fuels Corie’s determination to live out the principles in her book, putting herself aside for her husband but not sacrificing their marriage to the work they do.

Corie-Weathers_shooting

Participants at the Empowered Spouses retreat, sponsored by the Chris Kyle FROG Foundation, tried their hand at skeet shooting. Here, Corie takes a shot at the moving target, a clay disk propelled into the air.

“If I’m going to ask other people to commit to each other, then I don’t have an excuse either to get tired,” she says. “Matt and I are just one more couple in a helping profession. There’s a lot of pouring out and sacrifice involved. That’s what first-responder couples do too. We all have problems knowing when to take care of ourselves before we take care of everyone else. I see marriages sacrificing themselves to take care of others. We are no different.”

Sacred Spaces is making a difference to many of its readers, but the first person to be changed by the book was the author.

“Writing this book rewrote my understanding of love,” Corie says. “I saw myself from an authentic perspective, not just how I want to spin it on Facebook. I realized my capacity to make mistakes, to disappoint Matt and hurt him. In the past, I loved Matt, but I think I saw his potential and loved who I thought he could become. I realized that is a lot of pressure to put on somebody. A much better understanding of love is to say I love you for who you are right now, even in your worst moments and I understand who you are with everything that’s happened in your life, including your sacred spaces. That makes you who you are. I can appreciate and love who you are and not need you to be anything different than you are right now.”

Marriage, in Corie’s book and in her heart, requires total commitment to love her husband, sacred spaces and all.

You took the part that once was my heart, so why not take all of me?

Web: CorieWeathers.com
Facebook: /CorieWeathersLPC
Twitter: @CorieLpc

More about Sacred Spaces: My Journey to the Heart of Military Marriage by Corie Weathers
Buy the book from MilitaryFamilyBooks.com or Amazon.com or your favorite bookstore.
Sacred Spaces is a finalist in the ForeWord INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards and a finalist in the Midwest Book Awards.

Photos courtesy of Corie Weathers.

Terri Barnes is a regular contributor to Books Make a Difference magazine, author of the book Spouse Calls: Messages From a Military Life, and special projects editor at Elva Resa Publishing, a publisher specializing in books for and about military families. Terri’s husband is a retired Air Force chaplain.

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Beach Reads: Mary Alice Monroe Intertwines Storytelling & Nature http://booksmakeadifference.com/mary-alice-monroe/ http://booksmakeadifference.com/mary-alice-monroe/#comments Fri, 31 Mar 2017 23:19:30 +0000 http://booksmakeadifference.com/?p=3842 Mary Alice Monroe doesn’t mind if her books are labeled “beach reads,” as long as they get readers to think about the beach while they’re relaxing there. The bestselling author incorporates environmental issues of animals like dolphins and sea turtles into her stories, and insists the story is paramount. “I’m writing about the people,” she says. “It isn’t just about the turtles. It’s all about emotion and storytelling, and then you let the truth—like a parable—come through.” [...]

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The cries of birds create background music as Mary Alice Monroe—at her home on the Isle of Palms, a barrier island near Charleston, South Carolina—talks about her passion for nature and stories.

The author of twenty books, most of them set in coastal Carolina, doesn’t mind if the books she writes are labeled “beach reads.” In fact, she hopes that is exactly where her books will be read.

“I don’t care what they call it,” she says, “but I want them to pick up that book—hopefully while they’re on vacation at the beach, looking at the shorebirds out there.”

Mary Alice and other members of the Island Turtle Team do all they can to protect the nesting sites of sea turtles on the Isle of Palms and Sullivan's Island, barrier islands near Charleston, South Carolina. Here, Mary Alice (kneeling wearing blue shirt) and other volunteers are preparing to move a nest of loggerhead sea turtle eggs to higher ground for safety. Photo by Barb Bergwerf.

Mary Alice and other members of the Island Turtle Team do all they can to protect the nesting sites of sea turtles on the Isle of Palms and Sullivan’s Island, barrier islands near Charleston, SC. Here, Mary Alice (wearing blue shirt) and other volunteers are preparing to move a nest of loggerhead sea turtle eggs to higher ground for safety. Photo by Barb Bergwerf.

She hopes her readers will take a closer look at the natural world and the ways humans can make a positive difference in it. Her latest book, Beach House for Rent, due out in June 2017, includes themes related to shorebirds, like pelicans and sandpipers, whose nesting and feeding areas are under increasing pressure from beach-going crowds, pollution, and land development.

Since her first bestseller The Beach House, in 2002, Mary Alice has incorporated environmental issues into her novels. In that book, her characters and plot were interwoven with the struggles of loggerhead sea turtles, which come ashore to nest in Mary Alice’s own beach neighborhood.

For nearly a decade, she has been an integral part of the Island Turtle Team, a group of resident volunteers who protect turtles nesting on the Isle of Palms and nearby Sullivan’s Island. Working with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, Mary Alice and her cohorts track and protect sea turtles and their nesting sites.

She is also a board member emeritus of the South Carolina Aquarium in Charleston, and serves on the board of the Leatherback Trust, an international organization that works to protect various species of sea turtles.

Mary Alice is an environmentalist, and she is a storyteller. She wants her stories to make readers aware of environmental concerns without filling her pages with sobering facts and statistics.

“I never forget I’m a novelist first,” she says emphatically. “My readers want a good story. If they wanted a book about shorebirds, they would pick up a nonfiction book. Through story I like to make my readers aware of the passion I feel. I hope I touch my readers with imagination and story, because they’ll remember that.”

Telling the story is paramount for Mary Alice, but her process for creating a novel begins with choosing a species or environmental issue. Although Mary Alice says that choice is based on her “intuition,” a conversation with her reveals that her intuition is firmly rooted in a lifetime of activism and advocacy. Her novels have incorporated the lives of monarch butterflies, various types of fish, mammals, birds, and reptiles, as well as endangered habitats, like maritime forests.

After choosing the natural basis for her story, she employs a systematic and multi-pronged approach: academic research into the species or habitat, followed by interviews with experts on the topic, and always hands-on experience.

Mary Alice has an interest in all kinds of coastal wildlife. In October 2016, she helped to rescue this juvenile female pelican, which was struggling to find food in her natural habitat on the coast of South Carolina. Mary Alice took the bird to receive care and rehabilitation at the Center for Birds of Prey at the Avian Conservation Center in Awendaw, South Carolina. At the end of March 2017, Mary Alice was invited by the Center for Birds of Prey to participate in the release of the young pelican she had rescued.. Although the bird walked out toward the water with Mary Alice and spread its wings, the pelican did not want to fly away that day. "I fear she is habituated to humans and won’t make it in the wild," says Mary Alice. "Without a flock to support her, she’d fail to thrive." The bird will be taken to a protected environment where she can live with other non-releasable pelicans.

In March 2017, Mary Alice was invited by the Center for Birds of Prey to participate in the release of the young pelican she had rescued the previous fall. Although the bird walked out toward the water with Mary Alice and spread its wings, the pelican did not want to fly away that day. “I fear she is habituated to humans and won’t make it in the wild,” says Mary Alice. “Without a flock to support her, she’d fail to thrive.” The bird will be taken to a protected environment where she can live with other non-releasable pelicans.

“I roll up my sleeves and become a volunteer,” she says. “I never write a book about anything unless I’ve worked with a species myself, not only to learn about the animal, but to learn the truth about the people who are involved in protecting it.”

She’s done research for her books alongside other environmental organizations as well, like the Dolphin Research Center in Grassy Key, Florida, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Center for Birds of Prey at the Avian Conservation Center in Awendaw, South Carolina.

Though based on environmental research, her books are not academic. Instead, they lean closely into the personal struggles of her human characters. Mary Alice uses what she learns about her chosen species to create those characters, and to determine theme, plot, and metaphor.

“I create characters with issues that sometimes parallel the issues in nature. When I turn the pages as a writer, I’m writing about the people—what makes them struggle and cry. I don’t have to pound it into my readers’ heads. That’s the power of a good story.”

Mary Alice found plenty of story material from the lives of her neighbors, the sea turtles, who return to the place they were born to lay their eggs, then leave again. They don’t return to care for their eggs or hatchlings, who must find their own way from a nest on shore out to the sea.

“I knew one of my characters would return home. With turtles, there were a lot of nests and eggs and fecundity, so I knew someone would be pregnant,” she says. “The mother turtle camouflages her nest to protect it, but she doesn’t return to the nest, so I knew abandonment would be an issue.”

In her latest book, Mary Alice draws on the lives and habitats of birds—from caged canaries to wild pelicans—to address human issues of isolation, from one another as well as from the natural world. She feels people—as they become ever more tethered to technology—are becoming disconnected from nature.

“We don’t know what wild is any more. We can’t even identify the birds we see,” Mary Alice says. “So many of us spend so much of our time indoors looking out at nature through glass, which is a metaphor for a cage. Like one of my characters, we put our hands against the glass, and we want to go out to feel the breeze on our cheeks, but something holds us back.”

That something, she says, is fear—created by a cycle of avoidance and inaccessibility. The more people stay indoors away from nature, the more they withdraw from it as something unknown. As she intertwines natural themes with character and plot, Mary Alice believes people should be more intertwined with the environment.

Beach House for Rent by Mary Alice Monroe“This book (Beach House for Rent) is really about becoming connected, not only to the outdoors but to each other. For my character, being outdoors heals her. I really believe your connection to nature affects your ability to connect with other humans,” Mary Alice says.

For Mary Alice, connection with nature appears to translate smoothly into connection with fellow humans, namely her readers, who have made her a bestselling author several times over. When Mary Alice speaks to a crowd or when she interacts with an individual, she’s engaged. Personal issues are as important to her as environmental ones, and she connects easily, on and off the page.

The letters she received from readers after the success of The Beach House were more often about personal relationships than environmental issues.

“The letters said things like, ‘I just read your book, and I called my mother for the first time in ten years,’” she says. “It isn’t just about the turtles. It’s all about emotion and storytelling, and then you let the truth—like a parable—come through.”

Her love of storytelling and her love of nature are intertwined as well. Mary Alice says she was born with a desire to write stories, a desire that was sparked by her love of nature.

After living for many years in Washington, D.C., Mary Alice and her husband moved to the coast of South Carolina about twenty years ago.

“I felt when I came to South Carolina, I had come home,” she says. “This area is rich in culture as well as landscape. You can’t have one without the other. If you don’t understand nature, you don’t really understand the culture.”

She calls the Charleston area “Mecca for an environmentalist,” because of the variety of ecosystems, from shorelines and wetlands, to the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, less than a day’s drive away.

Mary Alice has written picture books about nature for children and plans to create books for middle grade readers soon. She writes her books—for readers of all ages—to create awareness and concern for their environment, but she doesn’t tell anyone how to think.

“I like to raise questions and offer possible solutions, but I never tell my readers what to do. The answers come from the reader’s self. They not only read it, they feel it and act on it. When they go to the beach maybe they’ll pick up their trash…leash their dogs so they don’t disturb the shorebirds. If they learn that through story…if I instill curiosity in my readers, then I hope they go to nonfiction and learn more.”

Mary Alice, it seems, is always hungry to learn more. If her latest research is any indication, her next book may take readers on an inland journey.

“I just came back from the mountains, working with animals for two weeks,” she says. “I’m filled with stories.”

Web: MaryAliceMonroe.com
Facebook: /MaryAliceMonroe
Twitter: @MaryAliceMonroe

Feature photo: As part of the research for one of her books, Mary Alice Monroe volunteered at the Dolphin Research Center in Grassy Key, Florida. A dolphin named Jax, who lives at the center, shows his appreciation. Photo courtesy of Mary Alice Monroe.

Terri Barnes is a writer who has also found a home in South Carolina, where her neighbors include egrets, owls, turtles, and ducks. She is the author of Spouse Calls: Messages From a Military Life.

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Favorite Quotes From Books http://booksmakeadifference.com/favorite-quotes-from-books/ http://booksmakeadifference.com/favorite-quotes-from-books/#comments Wed, 01 Mar 2017 03:17:38 +0000 http://booksmakeadifference.com/?p=3767 Writers work so hard to find just the right words. Often, those words spill off the page into readers’ hands and, sometimes, into our hearts. They capture our feelings, stir our desires, push us in new directions, give us reason to pause and consider, and inspire us to keep going.

When we find words that stick, we pull them out of a great story and take them with us on our own journey. We pin quotes to inspiration boards. Or tuck scribbled pieces of paper into a planner or journal. We reread those words when we need to hear the beauty of language or see a reminder of perspective. Some words become a part of who we are or who we want to become.

Do you have a favorite line or passage from a book that has struck a chord with your heart? What language, dialogue, or perspective has inspired you? We asked our readers to share favorite book quotes for this month’s Readers Write.
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Writers work so hard to find just the right words. Often, those words spill off the page into readers’ hands and, sometimes, into our hearts. They capture our feelings, stir our desires, push us in new directions, give us reason to pause and consider, and inspire us to keep going.

When we find words that stick, we pull them out of a great story and take them with us on our journey. We pin quotes to inspiration boards. Or tuck scribbled pieces of paper into a planner or journal. We reread those words when we need to hear the beauty of language or see a reminder of perspective. Some words become a part of who we are or who we want to become.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón writes, in The Shadow of the Wind (translated by Lucia Graves): “Once, in my father’s bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”

Do you have a favorite line or passage from a book that has struck a chord with your heart? What language, dialogue, or perspective has inspired you? We asked our readers to share favorite book quotes for this month’s Readers Write. We could fill pages and pages with your responses! It’s encouraging to know there is no shortage of inspiring words, stories, and authors.

Many passages address multiple topics, but since we received so many, we’ve attempted to categorize these for those readers searching for specific inspiration. And since several readers shared similar or the same quotes, we’ve left off submitters’ names this month. Thank you to everyone who submitted responses. Feel free to share more of your favorite quotes in the comments below if you don’t see your favorites here.

Purpose/Living life:

The Secret Life of Bees“And when you get down to it, Lily, that’s the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.”—The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

“Maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it.”—My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

“How will the world change if we do not question it?”—The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”—The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

“‘This’, cried the Mayor, ‘is your town’s darkest hour!…So, open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!’”—Horton Hears a Who! by Dr. Seuss

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”—Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

“We believe in the wrong things. That’s what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We’re just so damn good at reading them wrong.”—Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

“I still think that everyone’s life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst—the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere—it’s what comes after that determines the result.”—The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider

“Each day means a new twenty-four hours. Each day means everything’s possible again. You live in the moment, you die in the moment, you take it all one day at a time.”—Legend by Marie Lu

“Not all those who wander are lost.”—The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings) by J.R.R. Tolkien

“It’s a lot easier to be lost than found. It’s the reason we’re always searching and rarely discovered—so many locks not enough keys.”―Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”—The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings) by J.R.R. Tolkien

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”—Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

“Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.”—Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt

“If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself.”—The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) by Rick Riordan

“If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives.”—The Ersatz Elevator (A Series of Unfortunate Events) by Lemony Snicket

“I know that the whole point—the only point—is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.”—Delirium by Lauren Oliver

Perspective:
“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate.”—Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

“For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.”—The Magician’s Nephew (The Chronicles of Narnia) by C.S. Lewis

“A person’s a person, no matter how small.”—Horton Hears a Who! by Dr. Seuss

“The universe is bigger than anything that can fit into your mind.”— Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira

The-Little-Prince“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”— The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

“You never know ahead of time what something’s really going to be like.”—Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

“It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. My mom says some days are like that. Even in Australia.”—Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst

“You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.”—An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

“Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.”—The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

“Sometimes crying or laughing are the only options left, and laughing feels better right now.”—Divergent by Veronica Roth

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”—Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach

“Anybody who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.”—A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck

“What we are tempted to call a disaster is sometimes the first, painful stage of a blessing.”—The Frog Prince: A Fairy Tale for Consenting Adults by Stephen Mitchell

“The universe is energy, energy that responds to our expectations.”—The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield

“I don’t want to die without any scars.”—Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

“Most people are [nice], Scout, when you finally see them.”—To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The-Invisible-Bridge“He allowed himself to imagine for the first time that the rest of his life might not be shaped by the misery of his past.”—The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

“There’s some good in this world…and it’s worth fighting for.”—The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings) by J.R.R. Tolkien

“The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.”—The Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach

Gratefulness/Happiness:

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”—The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

“’But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’
‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’ There was a long silence.
‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.”—Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

“It’s not easy to write thank-you notes for the stuff you didn’t want in the first place.”—Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

“The more he gave away, the more delighted he became.”—The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister

“Happiness can be found in the darkest of times if only one remembers to turn on the light.”—Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

Growing up/Being true to yourself:

“She refused to be Shirley, to cover everything up with a frilly little tablecloth of polite fiction.”—Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”—Autumn Leaves by André Gide

“…you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”—The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”—Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

“If you’re good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can’t be wrong.”—The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

“Some walks you have to take alone.”—Mockingjay (The Hunger Games) by Suzanne Collins

“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”—The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

“You cannot change your journey if you are unwilling to move at all.”—Reached by Ally Condie

“Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.”—The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”—Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked chin and stick out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”—The Twits by Roald Dahl

The-Velveteen-Rabbit“It doesn’t happen all at once,” he said. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”—The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

“Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels, but old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”—Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling

“When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You’d be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It’s the saddest thing I know.”—Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

“The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.”—Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.”—A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Grief/Loss/Suffering:

“Judaism offered no Shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn…no injunction against listening to music or going to work.”—The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

Peace-Like-a-River“Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone’s been missing too long.”—Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”—The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

“It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.”—The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

“It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.”—The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”—Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom

“And just like all the people who lost no one, the tourists, who go to New York to cry over the rubble…. I want to tell them to go home and hold their children or their lovers or their parents. I want to tell them that they are using that place as an excuse to be sad and afraid when there will be reason enough for that in their own lives if they just wait.”—Dear Zoe by Philip Beard

“It’s strange indeed how memories can lie dormant in a man’s mind for so many years. Yet those memories can be awakened and brought forth fresh and new, just by something you’ve seen, or something you’ve heard, or the sight of an old familiar face.”—Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

“She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there—like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.”—Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

“’The death of a loved one isn’t really something you ever get over,’ the group leader explains… ‘Instead, one morning you wake up and it’s not the first thing you think of.’”—Good Grief by Lolly Winston

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it….We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”—The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”—What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

“After you get stung, you can’t get unstung no matter how much you whine about it.”—The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”—Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

“But the children knew, as I’m sure you know, that the worst surroundings in the world can be tolerated if the people in them are interesting and kind.”—The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events) by Lemony Snicket

“You— you alone will have the stars as no one else has them…In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night…You—only you—will have stars that can laugh.”—The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The_Fault_in_Our_Stars“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.”—“Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” Different Seasons by Stephen King

“That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.”—The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

“All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”—The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

“I can tell you that the end of a life is the sum of the love that was lived in it, that whatever you think you have sworn, being here at the end of Jem’s life is not what is important. It was being here for every other moment.”—Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare

War:

“Strange, Andras thought, that war could lead you to involuntarily forgive a person who didn’t deserve forgiveness, just as it might make you kill a man you didn’t hate.”—The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

“All four of us were walking skeletons and had you asked any of us what had brought us through, the answer would have been the same—our time had not yet come.”—Bataan Survivor by David L. Hardee, edited by Frank A. Blazich, Jr.

the-things-they-carried“We have all been affected by war. I didn’t have anyone to blame for what had been introduced in our lives. It was life, war, and brokenness….I made my peace with my role as a military spouse. I made my peace with Afghanistan, too. As we flew over the mountains, this time in the darkness, I forgave them for what they had taken.”—Sacred Spaces by Corie Weathers

“War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”—The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Courage/Fear/Hope:

“Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something is more important than fear.”—The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

“…when you need courage the most is when you realize what’s happened in your life and you decide to get up the next morning anyway.” Summer of Courage (Perch, Mrs. Sackets, and Crow’s Nest) by Karen Pavlicin

“I haveDivergent a theory that selflessness and bravery aren’t all that different.”—Divergent by Veronica Roth

“If you ain’t scared… you ain’t human.”—The Maze Runner by James Dashner

“There’s no shame in fear, my father told me, what matters is how we face it.”—A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”—Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

“Fear doesn’t shut you down; it wakes you up.”—Divergent by Veronica Roth

“You could rattle the stars… You could do anything, if you only dared. And deep down, you know it too, and that’s what scares you the most.”—Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

“Hope? Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.”—Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

“‘We’ll never survive!’
‘Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.’”—The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Love/Friendship/Family:

“You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing.”—Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

“And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.”—Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

“For without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.”—Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle

“It is when we are most lost that we sometimes find our truest friends.”—Snow White by The Brothers Grimm

“This is the danger of loving: No matter how powerful you are, no matter how many kingdoms you rule, you cannot stop those you love from dying.”—The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”—The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

“Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.”―I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson

“Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything— that’s how it is between people who are each other’s first memories…”—The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

“Always be a little kinder than you have to be.”—We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

“You see, you closed your eyes. That was the difference. Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too—even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling.”—Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom

Every-Day“There was a memory here. A beloved person. A loss. A flood of hope. A pit of despair. How many feelings can one heart hold?…Infinite, Luna thought. The way the universe is infinite. It is light and dark and endless motion; it is space and time, and space within space, and time within time. And she knew: there is no limit to what the heart can carry.”—The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

“This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.”—Every Day by David Levithan

“And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn’t matter.”—The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

“There’s no place like home.”—The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

“Just as a river by night shines with the reflected light of the moon, so too do you shine with the light of your family, your people, and your God. So you are never far from home, never alone, wherever you go.”—Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman

Dreaming/Believing/Possibilities:

“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”—The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

“Let your curiosity run away with you. Know that beyond every ordinary explanation there is a deeper and more exciting discovery to be made.”―The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Andrews Edwards

“So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.”—The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

“And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder…Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Through-the-Looking-Glass“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”—Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Caroll

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”—The Critic as Artist by Oscar Wilde

“You’re never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.”—Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach

“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”—“The Cloths of Heaven” The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats by William Butler Yeats

“If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”—Paper Towns by John Green

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.”—Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

“Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.”—Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

“Believing takes practice.”—A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”—Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

Writing/Storytelling/Books:

“A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”—The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

”And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”—The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”—The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”—No Man Is an Island by Thomas Merton

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”—I Can Read With My Eyes Shut by Dr. Seuss

Shadow-of-the-Wind“I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That’s right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that’s kind of perverted or maybe it’s just romantic and highly intelligent.”—The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

“I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”—The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”—The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like clouds, and she would ring them out like the rain.”—The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

“Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.”― Eragon by Christopher Paolini

“I read because one life isn’t enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody;
I read because the words that build the story become mine, to build my life;
I read not for happy endings but for new beginnings; I’m just beginning myself, and I wouldn’t mind a map;
I read because I have friends who don’t, and young though they are, they’re beginning to run out of material;
I read because every journey begins at the library, and it’s time for me to start packing;
I read because one of these days I’m going to get out of this town, and I’m going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready.”—Anonymously Yours by Richard Peck

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”—The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“And it strikes me that this is how writing anything is, really. A collaboration between you who give the words and they who take them and find meaning in them, or put music behind them, or turn them aside because they were not what was needed.” —Reached by Ally Condie

Karen Pavlicin-Fragnito is a writer, publisher, and reader who believes we receive messages when we most need to hear them. She often writes down favorite lines while she’s reading a book, and either posts them to her inspiration board or promptly loses the little pieces of paper—only to find them months or years later when she needs that inspiration again. 

First published: March 2017

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Present Meets Past at Historic Timrod Library http://booksmakeadifference.com/timrod-library/ http://booksmakeadifference.com/timrod-library/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2017 02:10:47 +0000 http://booksmakeadifference.com/?p=3731 The Timrod Library has been a gathering place for residents of Summerville, South Carolina, for more than a century. Today's Summervillians are drawn to the library by book discussions, story time, and appearances by local and regional authors, as well as by the old fashioned library experience of card catalogs and rubber stamps. Books are checked out the old fashioned way here, but wi-fi is available too, one of the many ways old meets new at this historic library. [...]

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Sun pours through the diamond panes of hundred-year-old windows at the Timrod Library in Summerville, South Carolina. Footfalls on the worn hardwood floors create the occasional squeak, as a visitor peruses the bookshelves, hunting down a murder mystery.

At the front desk, another patron is checking out a book. There’s a soft “thunk” as the librarian stamps a date on the card, slips it into a pocket inside the back cover, and holds out the book.

“There you go,” she says. “It’s due in two weeks.”

In the children’s section, a mother and two little boys browse through picture books.

“Look! I want to read this one, Mommy,” says a small voice.

Just beyond the red brick fireplace and its patterned hearthrug, library director Cindy Koontz sits at her desk answering emails. Bells chime from the Methodist church across the street, serenely marking the hour: one o’clock on a quiet Thursday afternoon.

On another day, the library crowd is standing room only. After a presentation by a local author, the high-ceilinged rooms reverberate with the conversations of happy book lovers. Library volunteers fill cups from a crystal punch bowl, serving those waiting in line to get books autographed. The line winds past bookshelves displaying well-worn classics and shiny new releases, as well as the wooden card catalog, still in regular use.

On this busy Sunday afternoon, Cindy makes her way through the throng, handling details of the event, part of the Timrod’s Southern Author Series, and greeting visitors by name.

Timrod-Library

The Timrod Library has been a fixture on Central Avenue in Summerville, South Carolina, since it was dedicated in 1915. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is one of two membership libraries still in operation in South Carolina.

The 102-year-old Timrod Library is on the National Register of Historic Places, but it is much more than a period piece. On quiet days and busy ones, it’s a gathering place for the community. The library is a historic hub in Summerville—a town that became popular in the 1800s as a place where residents of nearby Charleston could escape the heat and enjoy the reputed health benefits of Summerville’s many pine trees.

“We want the Timrod to be a place for people to come together,” Cindy says, “to read books, talk about books, meet authors, and meet each other.”

Cindy and a part-time staff of two work with a board of directors and a cadre of volunteers to operate the library six days a week, plus occasional weekend events. Cindy has been the library director since 2013. She became a volunteer at the library soon after moving to South Carolina from Maryland in 2000.

Her love for the library, and for those who keep it running, is evident.

“We really have a working board,” she says, adding that the board members show up for much more than the regular meetings, as important as those are. Board members also pitch in for manual labor, like power washing the front steps, mowing grass, setting up chairs, and cleaning up after events.

Southern Author Series is a big yearly event for the Timrod, one for which Cindy, the board, staff, and volunteers spend many hours of planning and effort.

Two authors are featured in the program taking place this month. At one event, Cassandra King will discuss her writing and the work of her late husband, Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini and many other novels with South Carolina connections.

On another day, Michelle Moore will be the Timrod’s featured writer. She is the author of The Cigar Factory: A Novel of Charleston, historical fiction about black and white workers in the early twentieth century.

Brian Hicks, author of several books including Toward the Setting Sun: John Ross, the Cherokees, and the Trail of Tears, was part of last year’s Southern Author Series. Also a columnist for the (Charleston) Post and Courier, Brian calls the Timrod Library a “cultural resource” for Summerville.

“I consider it the heart of the town’s very rich arts community,” he says, “a place where people can still go to enjoy literature, discuss ideas, and words, and great books.”

The library is an important feature of the town, but it is not part of the county library system. It is a nonprofit and raises funds to maintain its collection of books and their historic home. Author lectures, barbecues, book sales, and other events serve as fundraisers and create opportunities for community gatherings. Library memberships are another source of funding.

The distinctive diamond-paned windows of the Timrod Library let in the sunshine from the front of the library facing Central Avenue in Summerville, South Carolina. Although the library has three wings, built as much as seven decades apart, the design of the original windows and brickwork was carefully re-created to keep the library's appearance as faithful as possible to the original design.

The distinctive diamond-paned windows of the Timrod Library let in the sunshine from the front of the library facing Central Avenue in Summerville, South Carolina. Although the library has three wings, built as much as seven decades apart, the design of the original windows and brickwork was carefully re-created to keep the library’s appearance as faithful as possible to the original design.

The Timrod is a subscription library, meaning patrons pay a yearly fee for library privileges. Subscription libraries, forerunners of public libraries, have been around since Benjamin Franklin created the first one in the United States in 1731. These libraries were once fairly common across the US; now only twenty are still in operation. The Timrod is one of two subscription libraries in South Carolina. The other is in nearby Charleston.

At the Timrod, members pay $15 yearly for a household membership, which includes book-borrowing privileges, discounts for ticketed library events, and many reading programs, like book discussions and children’s story hour, at no additional cost.

“Sometimes people think we’re private, because there is a membership fee, but we are open to anyone,” says Cindy. “We want to include all members of the Summerville community by hosting free literary events.”

The library has been providing books and gatherings in Summerville for more than a century. It began in 1897 with nineteen women who formed a reading circle, inspired by the Chautauqua movement. The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle is a national society, founded in 1878, when higher education opportunities for women were limited. The Summerville reading circle and its collection of books grew into a lending library, which then became a membership library. On April 23,1908, the library was incorporated and chartered as the Timrod Literary and Library Association. The association began raising funds to build what would be the town’s first library.

The town of Summerville donated the land, and the library association raised funds and obtained donations of material and labor from local businesses. The first wing of the library was dedicated in 1915. The library grew, supported and funded by subscriptions, charitable donations, and community events. Ice cream socials, bake sales, horse shows, and craft bazaars all played a part in funding library operations, including expansions in 1927 and 1985.

Minutes of the library association and other historical records reveal the path of the Timrod through landmarks of American—and Summerville—history. In the 1920s, the library received a donation from the Carnegie Foundation, which gave money to create libraries all over the nation. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, winter hours of the library were curtailed by the limited amount of coal available to heat the building. The library also became a beneficiary of the Works Program Administration, which provided workers to help staff the library and catalog the books. During World War II, the library building housed the local chapter of the Red Cross.

In 1949, the minutes of the Timrod Literary and Library Association recorded the establishment of a small branch library across the street—the George Washington Carver Library—for the town’s African-American residents. The Timrod Association paid to refurbish the building, supplied books, and paid the librarian, but the two libraries— like the town and much of the nation— were segregated for many years. Now, the Timrod is open to everyone.

Timrod_Rollins-Edwards

Rollins Edwards (left) and Tim Rodriguez, a past president and longtime member of the Timrod Library board, share stories at the Timrod’s centennial celebration in 2015.

Rollins Edwards, a long-time African-American resident of Summerville, remembers the Carver library and attended the segregated schools of the time.

“On the way to school, we would walk by the (Timrod) library, and I wondered why we couldn’t go in there,” remembers Rollins, who is 94. “I couldn’t quite understand it. Things changed a bit. Now, I’ve been in there several times and I’ve enjoyed it.”

Cindy remembers Rollins’ first visit to the library, the day he also became a library member.

“He walked in and said, ‘I’m 93 years old, and I decided I wanted to come into this library before I die, so here I am,’” she recalls. “He sat down and talked to us and told us some of his story.”

Decades before that visit, Rollins became the first black citizen elected to the Dorchester County Council and served on the Summerville Town Council as well.

Until the Summerville branch of the Dorchester County Library was constructed in the late 1970s, the Timrod was Summerville’s only library. Now both libraries serve the community in ways that are complementary, rather than competitive.

The objective of the county library is to provide access to as many people as possible, and it houses many more books and resources in a larger space. The Timrod provides access on a smaller scale, in an incomparable setting, with a focus on preservation.

Subscription libraries like the Timrod often house specialized collections. Here, the specialty is in preserving history: the historic building as well as historical books, both local and regional, including more than 700 volumes about the Civil War, donated by a library patron.

The library’s newest wing houses the reference section and some of its oldest books. Though decades newer, the shelves, windows, and floors in this room are a near-perfect match to the older portions.

Many of the books here are bound in subdued shades of red, green, gold, and brown, some embellished with curling gold letters. Most are fabric, but some are leather. One tall shelf is full of books whose spines are marked with shiny golden tags. Cindy explains these, the “Gold Collection,” were all published earlier than 1930. Many are from the nineteenth century, and others—not displayed—are even older.

They are not just books about history. Each is a piece of history, recorded and preserved in the words of those who lived it.

“Our history section is as big as our fiction and nonfiction combined,” Cindy says. “We have an amazing number of people who come in and do research here.”

Reference books cannot be checked out, but a large wooden table and chairs are provided for the use of studious visitors who wish to explore the collection.

The collection is eclectic, reflective of the region. An early edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1903 seminal work of sociology, The Souls of Black Folk, is shelved not far from the works of the poet laureate of the Confederacy, Henry Timrod.

Timrod, the library’s namesake, was a nineteenth century poet born in Charleston, who is believed to have spent time in Summerville before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 39. He wrote poems about nature, the brevity of life, and the depredations of war, as well as the ode that became the South Carolina state song.

His work had another musical moment in 2006, when Bob Dylan borrowed some of Timrod’s words for his album Modern Times. Critics disagree over whether it was homage or plagiarism, but either way, Henry Timrod rubbed elbows with another laureate who turned out to be of the Nobel variety.

To some, the Timrod Library might seem like an anachronism, with its card catalog, its membership requirements, even its name. Some of its historic books, valuable when read for their context, express scientific or social views that have been disproved or disavowed in the intervening years. Yet, these difficult chapters are no less worthy of preservation.

“You can’t change history, or try to go back and make it pretty,” Cindy says. “If we learn from it, that’s what we want. If we don’t, we might repeat it.”

The present meets the past every day at the Timrod Library, like neighbors meeting one another on the sidewalk. New residents, curious about the history of both the town and library, mingle among the bookshelves with longtime residents, just as historic books share their home with newer ones.

A bell on the front door of the library announces every entrance and exit, as readers come and go— the music of a community coming together.

Web: TheTimrodLibrary.org
FB: The Henry Timrod Library

Photos courtesy of Timrod Library.

Terri Barnes is a freelance writer, frequent visitor to the Timrod Library, and the author of Spouse Calls: Messages From a Military Life.

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Collaboration: Key for Musician Authors http://booksmakeadifference.com/musician-authors/ http://booksmakeadifference.com/musician-authors/#comments Sat, 31 Dec 2016 23:01:48 +0000 http://booksmakeadifference.com/?p=3696 Grammy-winning children’s Americana folk artists The Okee Dokee Brothers, award-winning solo indie pop/rock artist Korby Lenker, and legendary country music singer and songwriter Whisperin’ Bill Anderson are all music makers who have made careers of songwriting. Compelled by storytelling, these artists have most comfortably navigated the world of notes and audiences, and each has recently found ways to tell stories on the pages of books as well. Their journeys can teach every storyteller a thing or two about the power of collaboration. [...]

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Grammy-winning children’s Americana folk artists The Okee Dokee Brothers, award-winning solo indie pop/rock artist Korby Lenker, and legendary country music singer and songwriter Whisperin’ Bill Anderson are all music makers who have made careers of songwriting. Compelled by storytelling, these artists have most comfortably navigated the world of notes and audiences. Each of them has recently found ways to tell stories on the pages of books as well. No publishing story is the same, but the unique nature of getting songwriters’ stories bound into books can teach every storyteller a thing or two about the power of collaboration.

Track 1: The Okee Dokee Brothers
The trees were littered with crudely hung ropes, the grassy lawn home to hand-crafted bows and arrows staged for the pair of young boys to run through with their stories and grab the purposefully placed props. Joe Mailander and Justin Lansing, aka The Okee Dokee Brothers, have been collaborating around stories since childhood. Collaboration defines them, and their efforts in songwriting, performing, and storytelling are why the pair are now authors as well.

okee-dokee-bros_sing

Even at book signings, The Okee Dokee Brothers get their fans clapping, singing, and dancing to their storied songs.

“We loved to tap into imagination that entertains, to write our own stories in our heads,” Joe says. As kids growing up in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, the pair acted out timeless stories, made up new versions of age-old folktales, and lived in a world of their own making. Now, as Grammy-winning musicians of children’s folk songs, much of the recipe remains the same. They write songs that include reference to something outside, something mimicking a grander story, and always the two of them.

“It’s natural for people to think it would be easier to do this type of work alone, but we’ve always been proven wrong. It’s a better product when we put it through our creative relationship,” Joe says.

From the backyard games to a variety of musical stages and movie creations, the duo has shared their stories by offering their audiences a visual and musical experience. Some of the songs/stories that have been a part of their experience have finally found their way to the pages of a book, Can You Canoe? And Other Adventure Songs, a collection of songs from four song albums chronicling the pair’s adventures on a river, in the mountains, camping near lakes, and wandering around the world making new stories. It wasn’t the book The Okee Dokee Brothers initially proposed to publishers, however.

The pair has long shared an idea to rewrite the “happily ever after stories” into stories that end “simply ever after” instead. They sent the first manuscript of reworked folktales to a publisher, and the publisher counter-proposed with a two-book deal. They wanted to publish a book of their songs first and then publish the storybook manuscript.

CCan You Canoe? by The Okee Dokee Brothersan You Canoe? provides a “one stop shop for what we’ve done over the last six years,” Joe says, and with compelling illustrations by Brandon Reese, the stories become something even more. “It told a story we couldn’t tell with just music. There are stories in each illustration and when lyrics are on a page you can study what the words mean. It’s a different way to consume stories.”

The book contains a CD and a map of where the two of them traveled and where they worked together to write each song/story. It’s a collaborative experience in life and on paper and one they hope to continue through songwriting, performing, storytelling, and book writing…together.

It will remain a collaborative venture. “In each creation,” Joe says, “the other one always makes it 100 percent better. We have a much better chance of connecting with people if we stick together.”

The Okee Dokee Brothers’ second book, Thousand Star Hotel, releases in spring 2017 and will continue the journey they began long ago…in a land not so far away.

Track 2: Korby Lenker
Korby Lenker wears striped socks and leaves car doors open overnight during snow storms. He improvises when he forgets his guitar strap and engages with the people who attend his small-venue gigs. Korby is a musician with stories. He also plans to be a novelist. He hopes to fashion himself in the likes of Tolstoy or Hemingway or Steinbeck. But until that happens… he plays music.

Korby Lenker

Korby Lenker performs hundreds of shows around the country as both storyteller and musician.

Korby is a bit of a solitary guy. Casual observers might go so far as to call him a loner. A self-proclaimed solo indie artist…it doesn’t get much more solitary than that. He travels around the world, touring alone, and he carries with him not much more than his instruments, something on which to write, and a suitcase filled with his CDs and his recently-released book of short stories. Seated on a chair in the center of the spotlight, he methodically strums out his stories and captivates his audience with recollections and reflections about life.

His fans know Korby is good for an interesting story. He has been a writer his entire life, sometimes writing stories and sometimes writing songs, but it’s always been about the writing.

“It’s what I’ve always wanted to do,” Korby says. “I wanted to spend fifteen years touring and playing music and then I wanted to be a ‘real writer.’”

Originally an Idaho boy, Korby studied philosophy and music at Western Washington University, in what he calls an intense writing program. His band kept him mindful of his performing goals. He sought out a career in music, eventually moving to Nashville. But he needed to do the writing thing too. He would squeeze in writing while traveling on the road, often holed up in a corner of a room on Sundays. He compiled a number of original stories and put together a book, Medium Hero: And Other Stories.

Performing alone is what Korby does, but creation of his art has always been dependent upon the support of others. Initially utilizing Kickstarter, a crowd-funding application that helps people fund projects through donation or investment, Korby was able to produce an album and his self-published book. He sold copies of that book out of his suitcase when he performed.

He couldn’t have known when he self-published his book that a traditional publisher would discover his writing when it ended up on a table at Parnassus Books store next to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

“A lot of the things I do in my life, I come to because I try to say yes to things,” Korby says.

Korby's new Medium Hero book cover includes praise from awarding-winning fiction writer Tim O'Brien.

Korby’s new Medium Hero book cover includes praise from awarding-winning fiction writer Tim O’Brien.

One of the things he had said yes to was an invitation to be on the board for The Porch Writers’ Collective in Nashville, an organization promoting and supporting the work of writers through workshops and events. At a board meeting Korby attended, an idea began to float about a creative fundraiser for the collective. They were brainstorming for an event idea that would be some sort of a collision of names and music and writing. They decided to pursue A Tale of Two Tims: an event that would feature literary great Tim O’Brien and Grammy-winning musician Tim O’Brien. The pair was slotted to read, tell stories, and play music. It was the sort of night suited perfectly for Korby Lenker.

Korby agreed to contact the musical Tim O’Brien while another board member secured commitment from the writing Tim O’Brien, and the stars aligned.

Korby attended the event in January 2015 and put his self-published book on a table next to Tim O’Brien’s. A representative for Turner Publishing happened to be in the room that night and, after reading Korby’s collection of stories, offered to work with him to get it published in their house. A Tale of Two Tims has become part of Korby’s tale too…the part of the story where Korby’s stories found a new page.

It’s probably true Korby Lenker will be a novelist some day. He’s prepared for the solitary space often occupied by novelists. The introduction of Korby Lenker, musician, into the book world, depended upon the collaborative effort of musicians and writers and the opportunity he found there to put his book on the right shelf (or table) at the right time.

Track 3: Bill Anderson
Whisperin’ Bill Anderson, world-famous country songwriter (six-time Songwriter of the Year Award winner and the only country songwriter to tally a Top 40 hit in seven consecutive decades), wrote his first autobiography in 1989…alone. There is nothing fantastical about a self-written autobiography because that is the nature of an autobiography. It is a pure reflection of the life Bill had lived and a snapshot of his individual achievement up to that point. The thing is, Bill’s story was far from finished. In the 1990s, Bill discovered the power of co-writing. His willingness to enter into collaborative creation in songwriting afforded him an opportunity to experience a revitalized career that warranted the writing of a second autobiography, and this one, he co-wrote.

whisperin-bill-anderson-coverWhisperin’ Bill Anderson: An Unprecedented Life in Country Music, is the co-written autobiography that, upon the urging of Bill’s publicist, he wrote with Nashville journalist Peter Cooper. Bill had been toying with the idea of writing a second book, but he was struggling with the project. The insight Peter was able to offer after combing through a copy of Bill’s original autobiography, proved to be invaluable.

“He (Peter) had a much more objective view of it than I would have had,” Bill says. “My view was not nearly what it should have been.”

Without the challenge of another writer’s perspective, Bill would have continued to struggle with getting to the whole story…the extended story. Peter forced him to work through and write down relevant parts of the difficult decade that nearly derailed Bill as a songwriter.

“Peter helped me a lot to organize the book and organize my thoughts. I went through a ten-year period when I don’t know what happened to me except I got side-tracked doing other things besides dancin’ with the one who brought me to the dance. He helped me dig into that.”

Bill writes, “Songwriting had always been something very personal to me. I had written many songs at three in the morning, in dimly lit rooms with the curtains closed and the shades pulled down. Could I bare my soul in front of another writer and create the same kind of emotion I had created many times in solitude?”

Bill’s crossover into a second career literally came through a song titled “Which Bridge to Cross (Which Bridge to Burn)” he co-wrote with Vince Gill.

After a decade of misfiring, bad investments, and personal struggle, Bill writes, “I had written another hit song, my first on the charts in more than twelve years. And I’d written it with someone else.”

Bill had discovered through the co-writing experiences of his second career that co-writing is about setting aside personal viewpoints in order to look at things from a different perspective.

“I didn’t co-write at all for about thirty years,” Bill explains. It was only when he allowed himself to work in tandem with the younger songwriters that he realized, “I had something I could teach them, and they had something they could teach me.”

Aspiring songwriters Karen Pavlicin-Fragnito and Meagan Frank enjoy a hug from songwriting great Bill Anderson as he shares his revelation that you are never too late or too old to follow your dreams.

Aspiring songwriters Karen Pavlicin-Fragnito and Meagan Frank enjoy a hug from songwriting great Bill Anderson as he shares his revelation that you are never too late or too old to follow your dreams.

Similar to the layering that happens in co-writing songs, in the venture of his co-written second autobiography, Bill tapped into some of the same strategies. Bill says of his songwriting process, “I am a better lyric writer than a melody writer. I’m the idea guy. I come at it from the lyrical side of things. Here’s a good story to tell, can we put a tune to it?” Bill’s story had his viewpoint, but Peter’s efforts in the co-writing bolstered the melody.

“I wrote most of the book,” Bill says, “but he (Peter) showed me how to make certain parts count and how to weave things together. The little interludes he writes in between the chapters are very insightful and they tie a lot of things together.”

Modern songwriting is a team effort, relying on the talents of not just one, but sometimes two or three songwriters on the same song. Joining the team meant a transformation of Bill Anderson’s process and a seismic shift in his view of artistic creation. His life story, the one he lived and the book he wrote about it, reflects the power of creative collaboration.

Some of the notable artists with whom Bill Anderson has written include: Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, Kenny Chesney, Alison Krauss, George Strait, Elvis Costello and many more.

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No creation happens in a vacuum. All artists are inspired by those around them, and compelled by the pulse of life they observe. For some artists, creation happens alone, but as these three musicians will attest, collaboration has power too, and is the reason any of them have their recent books on the shelf at all.

Okee Dokee Brothers
Kids’ Storybooks/CDs Americana Folk Music
Web: OkeeDokee.org
Twitter: @OkeeDokeeBros
Can You Canoe? And Other Adventure Songs
Thousand Star Hotel (due out in March 2017)

Korby Lenker
Indie Rock/ Pop/ Folk/ Bluegrass Solo Indie Music
Web: KorbyLenker.com
Twitter: @korbykorby
Medium Hero: And Other Stories

Bill Anderson
Country Music
Web: BillAnderson.com
Twitter: @WhisperinBill
Whisperin’ Bill Anderson: An Unprecedented Life in Country Music

Photos courtesy of Karen Pavlicin-Fragnito.
Book covers courtesy and copyright of respective publishers.

Meagan Frank is a songwriter and freelance writer, inspired by tales of collaboration to align the stars as she finishes writing her first novel. MeaganFrank.com

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Readership of One: Wisdom Books Share Words of Love http://booksmakeadifference.com/wisdom-books/ http://booksmakeadifference.com/wisdom-books/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2016 04:57:59 +0000 http://booksmakeadifference.com/?p=3654 One heart speaking to another doesn’t require a publisher, book tour, or notch on the bestseller list. Well-chosen words and stories carry the assurance of love. They share knowledge and reveal the ties that connect family and friends to the world and to each other. Whether in the form of advice for a life milestone, photo collection, or a legacy journal, a personalized wisdom book communicates love and belonging, and can make a difference, even to a readership of one. [...]

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At a gathering of friends, each was asked to bring a favorite thing, or an object to represent something she loved, to share with the group. One who enjoyed baking brought a mixing beater. Another who liked to write brought a pen.

When it was Beth Hjort’s turn in this grownup version of show-and-tell, she held out a small notebook with a worn black leather cover. It was given to her by her grandfather, for her high school graduation. In it, he wrote down lessons he learned, his philosophy for living, and prayers. Before he died at age 90, he had written a similar book for each of his eighteen grandchildren. Whenever Beth needs inspiration or comfort, she opens the book and reads her grandfather’s words. It is a connection to a man she loved and admired. His words in his own handwriting. Little pieces of his life she can translate into her own.

People often wish to hear the stories of those who have gone before and to pass along their stories to those who come after. Well-chosen words and stories carry the assurance of love. They share knowledge, perhaps providing a clearer path for another. They reveal the ties that connect family and friends to the world and to each other.

Ultimately, sharing stories is what every author does. A book is a way to pass along significant ideas, to convey what one has learned about the universe. Some with a gift of words to bestow may feel unequal to the task of becoming an author, but Beth’s grandfather’s writing reveals that a meaningful book can be a very simple thing.

Personal messages in your own handwriting can mean so much to the recipient of your loving words. Using a blank journal, you can create entries on any subject—stories about your life or the recipient's life; a philosophy or belief you want to pass along; messages of love, faith, or inspiration; family history or traditions; prayers, or words of wisdom.

Personal messages in your own handwriting can mean so much to the recipient of your loving words. Using a blank journal, you can create entries on any subject—stories about your life or the recipient’s life; a philosophy or belief you want to pass along; messages of love, faith, or inspiration; family history or traditions; prayers, or words of wisdom.

When my oldest son, Will, was preparing to leave home for the first time, I began writing a book for him, filling a leather-bound journal with handwritten entries. I recalled stories and experiences from his life and included Bible verses, to illustrate principles his dad and I hoped he would carry with him through life. I did the same for our daughter, Jessie, the next child to leave the nest, and now I’m working on the third edition for Wesley, our youngest.

When I visited Will and his wife recently, I saw the book I wrote for him on a living room shelf alongside some favorite books.

Just days before that visit, I talked to my daughter on the phone. She’s out of college now and has been going through the transition from college life to working life. She was telling me about some of the lessons she is learning in her newly independent life.

“I’ve been reading through that book you wrote for me again, Mom,” she said, “I read it when you gave it to me, and it was great then. When I picked it up this time, it was even more powerful because of the transition I’m going through now and the way I’m living through it. What you wrote spoke to the way I process things, because you know me so well.”

One heart speaking to another doesn’t require a publisher, a book tour, a notch on the bestseller list. A book can be significant, even to a readership of one.

Karen Pavlicin-Fragnito drew on the wisdom of close friends and family members to create a book for her son, Alexander, for his thirteenth birthday. She asked significant people in Alexander’s life to send words of advice to him as he entered his teen and young adult years.

“The theme for his book was ‘It takes a village.’ His dad died when he was very young,” Karen says. “Many people have played important roles throughout Alexander’s life, even though some live far away. I wanted him to realize all those people love him, and their wisdom will continue to influence him.”

Her stepdaughters, Ciana and Malaina, are younger than Alexander, and Karen made “wisdom books” for them as well, on their respective thirteenth birthdays. She created each child’s book very different from the others in content and appearance, to go along with their personalities. Contributors to Ciana’s book filled her pages with affirmations, along with life advice. Malaina, the youngest, after seeing the older two receive their wisdom books, said she did not want “a book full of people telling her what to do.” So Karen had to be a little more creative with Malaina’s book.

“She enjoys baking, so I decided to make her a recipe book,” Karen says. “I asked friends and family to contribute recipes and to creatively weave in ‘recipes for life.’”

Contributors to Malaina's "Recipes for Life" cookbook shared messages about life and cooking advice, along with favorite recipes.

Contributors to Malaina’s “Recipes for Life” cookbook shared messages about life and cooking advice, along with favorite recipes. Karen collected the recipes and photos from family and friends via email over several months, then created the pages on her computer, printed the pages at a local photo printer, and put them in an 8″x8″ scrapbook from Michaels.

When creating the books for her stepdaughters, Karen asked the girls’ mom to help her get input from extended family and friends on all sides of the girls’ family.

“This was a way to bring our blended families together in a special way, so our kids could feel good about themselves, their families, and their situations,” Karen says. “Their books are a way to show they have so many people who love them. All kids need reminders of how much they are loved.”

This is true for children of any age. Emily Bush was about to become a mother herself when her mom, Amy Houts, created a wisdom book for Emily and her husband, Nick.

Amy began with the idea of a photo album of the parents-to-be as babies, but by the time it was complete, and Emily gave birth to twin boys, Amy’s creation was much more than a collection of pictures. During the months of Emily’s pregnancy, Amy had contacted relatives and even carried the book to family gatherings to collect handwritten wishes and wisdom to go with as many of the pictures as possible. Amy said she especially liked having photos of smiling grandparents, aunts, and friends holding Emily and Nick as babies, showing how much they were loved.

Nick’s father died in a car accident when Nick was two, so the photos his mother, Julie, contributed showing Nick with his father were especially meaningful. Both grandmothers-to-be contributed nursery rhymes and lullabies, as well as advice for the new parents.

“It was a celebration of our family and the love we felt for our daughter and son-in-law and the precious gift of life they were bringing into the world,” Amy says.

Emily says the words of support in the book were helpful when she was a new—and sometimes overwhelmed—mother of twins.

“I also used the lullabies and nursery rhymes that our moms included, both with my twin sons and now with my five-month-old daughter. I remember saying and singing some of them with my mom as a young child,” Emily says. “Seeing the love that was put into the book makes me want to create and preserve special memories for my children, too.”

Linny Gardner enlisted the help of her adult children to create a book for her husband, Scott. Her book began with a number: 30.

“I started thinking about all the cars we’ve had over the years, and realized we’d owned 30 cars in 30 years of marriage,” Linny says. So, for their 30th anniversary, she made a book for Scott that told the story of their life together—in cars, complete with photos and some of the stories that went along with each vehicle.

She says her children helped her remember some of the stories about each car and where the family lived when they owned them. A military family, the Gardners have collected car stories from all over the world: Germany, Alaska, Nebraska, North Carolina, several more US states, and even Iceland.

Linny says her method of creating the book was simple. She typed up the stories connected to each car, printed those and the car photos from her computer, and glued them onto colored paper. Then she put the pages in a binder. Recently, she suggested to her husband that she should have one of her daughters recreate the book in a more professional format, but he disagreed.

“This is your handmade book,” Scott told her. “It has your fingerprints on it.”

Linny agrees: “It was a labor of love. It wasn’t just about the cars. It was all the places we lived and how we got there, the moves, the long road trips to visit family,” she says. “It’s a book about how the stories of our lives and our cars intertwined.”

dsc_2862_wisdom-books-640

A wisdom book can take many forms: Scrapbook, photo album, journal, cookbook, or a personalized combination of any of these. It can be handwritten or typed, printed professionally or at home. A wisdom book can be created by one person or collected from multiple sources. It might commemorate a milestone, such as a birthday, parenthood, or graduation, or become the perfect Christmas gift.

Any book will be a “labor of love,” as Linny says, requiring thought, planning, and preparation. The holidays—when friends and families gather, when meals and memories are often exchanged—is a good time to think about creating a book. Long-range planners can start now for events in the coming year, though industrious creators might be able to put one together in the weeks before Christmas.

Mine took a lot longer. The handwritten books required only a blank journal, a good pen, and subject matter for the entries. Each entry took twenty minutes or so to write, but the preparation and research may have taken up to two hours or more before I started writing. I began collecting ideas and material to fill each book several months to a year ahead of the time I wanted to present them.

For their books, both Karen and Amy allowed plenty of time for their contributors to respond, as well as time to create the books. This is the case whether they are made by hand, at a local printer, or online at a photo or book creation site like Snapfish or Blurb.com.

For the short or long project, creating a wisdom book requires a plan. Here are some things to think about:

Occasion: Wisdom books can commemorate a milestone or event like a wedding, birth, retirement, farewell, birthday, or anniversary. They can also be presented for any other occasion, or simply to pass along love or legacy.

Timeline: Decide when the book has to be completed, or when it must be sent to a printer or ordered. Allow some extra time for unforeseen delays. Create one sample page so you have an idea how long it will take you to create content for the book you have in mind.

Fill-in-the-blank journals such as A Grandparent's Legacy: Your Life Story in Your Own Words  by Thomas Nelson are a good choice for those who want to record family history, stories, and memories with the aid of journal prompts.

Fill-in-the-blank journals, such as A Grandparent’s Legacy: Your Life Story in Your Own Words by Thomas Nelson, are a good choice for those who want to record family history, stories, and memories with the aid of journal prompts.

Format: Choose a scrapbook, journal, cookbook, or other structure. Fill-in-the-blank journals are a simple way to record memories for children or grandchildren. Books can be handmade, handwritten, printed at home or created professionally, produced either online or at a local printer. You can ask contributors to give you a finished page in a certain size, or you can create the pages yourself by hand or on the computer, transferring words from emails or letters and placing digital or scanned photos.

Theme: Creating content for the book will be easier with a unifying theme, like the cars in Linny’s book. Travel, hobbies, and quotes from favorite authors can provide a good framework. Or focus on an occasion, milestone, or special interest of the recipient.

Contributors: If the book will include other contributors, decide who will provide the input, and if you want photos, words, or artwork. Decide theme, format, and timeline, and provide guidance to contributors about photo size and length of letters. Contact people early to allow time for all to respond. Follow ups and reminders are helpful. Request materials early enough to allow for late arrivals and to allow time to fill in if necessary for no-shows.

Have a party: If enough contributors live close by, consider a book-making or writing party. The holidays provide a perfect opportunity. Gather the potential contributors in one place, and feed them in exchange for their help and input. If a family gathering is already scheduled, follow Amy’s example and use that opportunity to get in-person contributions.

Materials: Resources abound for all kinds of wisdom book choices. Collect materials before beginning to be sure all necessary materials are available. Blank books, scrapbook paper, professionally printed photos, photo paper to print at home, glue sticks or adhesive tape, markers, stickers, scissors, page protectors, all are available at craft stores and online. When choosing materials, consider longevity and who will be looking at the books. Page protectors are a good idea for any photo books, so readers of all ages can handle them safely.

Online resources: Online sites like Shutterfly and Picaboo.com print photo books and also allow for some journaling capability. There are also many online sites for creating cookbooks. Some of these allow multiple users to enter photos and recipes, allowing easy access for multiple contributors, no matter where they live. Friends and relatives who are less comfortable with the computer can still send contributions by mail or email to the book creator.

Multiple copies: With multiple contributors, there may be some requests for multiple copies if the book will be professionally produced. Consider ahead of time how to handle these requests and whether to create additional copies if possible, even if it’s just one to keep and one to give. It can be a gift that gives back to the author as well as to the recipient.

“I don’t know if our kids will look back at these books in the years to come,” says Karen, “but I can already see how the wisdom shared is developing in their lives.”

Whatever form they come in—wisdom book, photo collection, fill-in-the-blank record, or a legacy journal passed along like the book from Beth’s grandfather—words from a loved one matter. A personal book created especially for someone communicates love and belonging, and it can make a difference, even to a readership of one.

Photos courtesy of Karen Pavlicin-Fragnito.

Terri Barnes is a writer, editor, and the creator of multiple books, several of them written especially for her husband and children. She is also the author of Spouse Calls: Messages From a Military Life, a collection of her columns for Stars and Stripes.

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Books & Babies: Sally Hepworth on Writing & Motherhood http://booksmakeadifference.com/sally-hepworth/ http://booksmakeadifference.com/sally-hepworth/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2016 01:54:20 +0000 http://booksmakeadifference.com/?p=3632 Authors often compare producing books to birthing babies, and novelist Sally Hepworth finds more than the usual similarities, including the nine months it takes her to write a book. She’s now awaiting the arrival of her third baby and publication of her fourth book, The Mother’s Promise. Birthing and mothering are prevalent themes throughout her writing. Her books are not all about having babies, however. Through the lens of motherhood, Sally examines a variety of topics in her writing: single parenting, infertility, children with special needs, aging parents. [...]

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Authors often compare producing books to birthing babies, and novelist Sally Hepworth finds more than the usual similarities, including the nine months it takes her to write a book. She’s now awaiting the arrival of her third baby, due this month, and publication of her fourth book in February 2017. Birthing and mothering are prevalent themes throughout her writing, and the title of her forthcoming book is The Mother’s Promise.

The Mother's Promise by Sally HepworthHer books are not all about having babies, however. Through the lens of motherhood, Sally examines a variety of topics in her writing: single parenting, infertility, children with special needs, aging parents.

The plot of Sally’s The Secrets of Midwives, published in 2015, turns on the secrets mothers and daughters keep from one another. In The Things We Keep, published earlier this year, she depicts characters with dementia and their relationships both romantic and familial. Sally describes her newest book, The Mother’s Promise, as an exploration of all the ways a person can be alone.

“Alice is a single mother. Kate is alone in a decision about her fertility,” she says, listing some of her characters. “Sonja is alone in her marriage; and Zoe, through her social anxiety disorder, is alone even when surrounded by people. I wanted to explore the way people end up so alone, and how they can come together to support each other when they need it most.”

The lives of these characters, like those in her other books, intersect in unexpected ways, allowing Sally’s narrative to show the gray areas between her characters and their points of view.

“Things are always clear when you look at them from one angle, but when you throw in another person or two, it becomes much muddier,” she says. “It forces the reader to explore a subject more fully—which as a reader, writer, and a person, I always appreciate.”

Having several principal characters also means the reader hears from several voices, giving breadth to her stories.

“I always start my novels by asking myself the question—who should be telling this story? If I can find two people who sit at opposite corners of the same issue it’s ideal, but even finding people on the same side—but facing different challenges—can serve the story’s overall theme. In The Mother’s Promise, four women all confront their own issues, which at their core are all the same: being alone.”

Sally HepworthA native of Australia, Sally lives in Melbourne with her husband, Christian, and their children, Oscar, 7, and Eloise, 4. Though she writes often about motherhood, Sally insists her own mothering stories are “not nearly interesting enough” to make it into her books. Still, she says, her own experiences naturally inform what she writes.

“A lot of myself spills onto the pages when I’m writing about motherhood,” she says. “The hardships, the joys, the wonder. It’s a topic with so much to explore, and it’s a subject so dear to me. The emotion of being a mother has a way of finding its way onto the page.”

Those emotions include both laughter and tears, of course, but Sally says her crying has mostly been the good kind.

“I cried in my son’s classroom the other day while speaking to his teacher, because she told me what a lovely little boy he was,” she confesses. “Happiness has always been more likely to make me cry than sadness.”

Being a mom makes her laugh as well, especially when she overhears conversations between her children.

“I’m often privy to listening to my kids talking to each other, and I get lots of giggles from this. The other day my son told my daughter, ‘It was the worst thing that has happened to me in my whole first life.’”

Amid the laughter and happy tears, Sally says the daily grind of motherhood is her biggest challenge.

“The laundry, the tidying up, the meals!” she exclaims. This sentiment finds an echo in her writing life, where the grind for her is honing a manuscript.

“My favorite part of writing has always been the first draft—watching the characters come to life, seeing the story develop. I find the endless rounds of edits much more challenging, though it is incredibly rewarding seeing the story improve.”

As a novelist and a mother, Sally makes the choices about how to spend her tightly-budgeted time with those objectives firmly in mind.

“The truth is, I am totally wedded to novel-writing, and don’t tend to do any other kind of writing,” she says. “The goal of writing for me has always been to entertain, so any writing that is not supposed to be shared, like journaling, feels somewhat pointless. Also, between writing a book a year and raising two—and soon three—kids, I don’t have time for any other kinds of writing.”

Sally doesn’t feel limited by her focus on mothering, saying she hopes to explore other kinds of relationships in future books.

“Recently, I’ve been thinking a bit about writing about sisters,” she says. “I don’t have any sisters, so it’s always been an interest of mine.”

Sally HepworthShe is also intrigued by the many ways having children changes a woman’s life and has started working on a book with that in mind.

“I am very interested in post-partum issues; not only the obvious ones such as post-partum depression, anxiety, and psychosis, but also the general effect that having children has on a woman, a marriage, and a person’s role in society,” Sally says. “I think this would be an interesting topic to explore from several points of view, as no two women experience motherhood in the same way.”

Though she sees strong connections between writing and motherhood, Sally sees contrasts as well.

“There are those intense few weeks after a baby is born, and after a book comes out, when you don’t sleep much and feel rather anxious all the time,” she points out. “But in other ways, the two things are quite different.

“Most significantly, eventually I finish writing a book, and I move on to new characters. My children, on the other hand, are the characters of my life. They constantly grow and change, and I grow and change with them. I will never finish being their mother.”

Sally also doesn’t expect to be finished writing about mothering any time soon.

“I suspect writing and motherhood will always be my passions and will forever be intertwined,” she says.

Web: SallyHepworthAuthor.com
Facebook: /SallyHepworthAuthor
Twitter: @SallyHepworth
Goodreads: /SallyHepworth

Photos courtesy of Sally Hepworth.

Terri Barnes is a writer and mother of three. Motherhood is a prevalent theme in her book Spouse Calls: Messages From a Military Life.

First published: November 1, 2016

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Muir’s Words Continue to Inspire Love of Nature http://booksmakeadifference.com/john-muir/ http://booksmakeadifference.com/john-muir/#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:55:06 +0000 http://booksmakeadifference.com/?p=3575 John Muir, often called "The Father of Our National Parks" wrote about the beauty of America's natural lands and the spiritual interconnectedness of humanity and nature. His writings influenced a grieving President Theodore Roosevelt to establish additional national parks, monuments, and federally-protected forests. President Barack Obama continued the legacy, using executive action to protect more than 265 million acres of public land and water. As the National Park Service celebrates its centennial anniversary, Muir's words continue to inspire people of all ages to enjoy nature and preserve our natural resources. [...]

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“It is an incalculable added pleasure to any one’s sum of happiness if he or she grows to know, even slightly and imperfectly, how to read and enjoy the wonder-book of nature.” —President Theodore Roosevelt

From views of the Grand Canyon’s staggering drop to the ocean-washed shores of Acadia National Park, the National Park Service for a century has provided citizens from all over the world the opportunity to experience the heart of nature, with a spirit of preservation and conservation at the forefront. Were it not for the eloquent words of conservationist writer John Muir catching the eye of a forward-thinking President Theodore Roosevelt, however, the wonderful monuments, parks, forests, and trails we treasure today may not exist.

John Muir at Mirror Lake in Yosemite. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress.

John Muir at Mirror Lake in Yosemite. Muir dedicated his life to writing about and advocating for natural resources, cofounding the Sierra Club and lobbying for the protection of national parks. His books influenced President Teddy Roosevelt to establish additional national parks, monuments, and federally-protected forests. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress.

John Muir began his life on a small Wisconsin farm, but ultimately became famous for his writings on the spiritual interconnectedness of humanity and nature, which were published in major magazines at the time, such as Overland Monthly, Scribner’s Magazine, and Harper’s Magazine. Muir’s more-famous books, such as Our National Parks (1901), My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), and The Mountains of California (1894), caught the eye of President Roosevelt.

Roosevelt’s love for the frontier life was matched by his lasting grief over the loss of both his wife and mother. To Roosevelt, nature presented a chance to settle his grief and be, as John Muir once stated, “close to Nature’s heart…wash[ing] your spirit clean.”

Roosevelt’s fascination with Muir’s work intensified as the two camped together on a three-day trip to some of Yosemite’s finest wilderness near Glacier Point. During the trip, a deeply-moved Roosevelt offered his assistance in making a concerted effort to protect natural wonders like those of Yosemite Valley, a place at the time still not under the federal authority of Yosemite National Park. (Most parks at the time were owned by individual states, and even the five then-owned by the federal government sold land to private mining and oil industries.)

Muir Woods National Monument, named in Muir’s honor, continues to be a testament to his relevance in society today, inspiring others in a spirit of conservation to create a positive lasting impact on the natural world.

Muir Woods National Monument, named in Muir’s honor, continues to be a testament to his relevance in society today, inspiring others in a spirit of conservation to create a positive lasting impact on the natural world. Photo by Karen Pavlicin-Fragnito.

During his presidency, Roosevelt established five additional national parks, as well as eighteen national monuments and more than 100 million acres of federally-protected forests, in addition to being a strong voice for conservation and sustainability. Muir played an active role in conservation throughout his life, cofounding the Sierra Club and lobbying for federal protection of numerous natural sites and watersheds.

While Muir’s final conservation effort, preventing a dam from being built in Yosemite Valley, was largely unsuccessful, his legacy continues to inspire others today, both through the national parks he worked so hard to protect, and in the beautiful words he left behind. Muir’s words, encapsulated in John Muir: The Eight Wilderness Discovery Books, encourage people of all ages to go out and enjoy nature, while being careful to preserve natural resources: “Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.”

President Barack Obama continued the legacy of Roosevelt and other environmentally-conscious presidents, using executive action throughout his presidency to protect more than 265 million acres of public land and water, including national monuments, wilderness study areas, and ocean marine reserves.

President Obama had vacationed in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming as a child, fondly referring to it as the greatest experience of his childhood. In June 2016, he visited Yosemite, reaffirming the conviction of the National Park System as “America’s best idea.” As he hiked through the same region of Yosemite that ignited Muir’s and Roosevelt’s passion, President Obama reflected on his experience, noting that nature is a way for families to reconnect with each other and with the world. A painting of Yosemite’s Vernal Falls and Half Dome in the White House West Wing lobby reminds him of his love of nature.

August 25, 2016 marked the centennial anniversary of President Woodrow Wilson’s Organic Act, which created the National Park Service. As the NPS invites all to celebrate 100 years, it seems fitting to remember some of Muir’s elegant words that fueled Roosevelt’s innovate conservation programs and heartened the actions of future leaders: “A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.”

As Roosevelt summed up: “The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books.”

John Muir: The Eight Wilderness Discovery BooksAdditional Resources
To find out more about how you can help with the National Park Service’s conservation efforts today, visit the Centennial invitation or one of the many US national parks or monuments, including Muir Woods National Monument, named in Muir’s honor.

The text of John Muir’s books may be found in print form as well as online at the Sierra Club.

Select quotations by John Muir.
National park history from PBS.
Timeline of conservation history from Library of Congress.

A high school senior, Alexander Pavlicin is cofounder and copresident of Youth for Sustainable Solutions and serves on his community’s sustainability committee. He chose Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming as his first major national park excursion when he was ten years old. He was inspired to learn more about John Muir and the impact of his writings after a recent visit to Muir Woods in California (feature photo).

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Colleges Gift Book to High School Leaders http://booksmakeadifference.com/college-book-awards/ http://booksmakeadifference.com/college-book-awards/#comments Sat, 30 Jul 2016 19:31:34 +0000 http://booksmakeadifference.com/?p=3549 Many colleges and universities across the US partner with high schools to ceremonially award College Book Awards to exceptional high school upperclassmen, usually juniors. Each award recognizes a certain area of excellence and achievement, such as talent in music or the arts, academic success, political advocacy, or service in the community. What separates a College Book Award from other acknowledgements of high achievement is the unique gift each college provides—a book. [...]

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Many colleges and universities across the United States partner with high schools to ceremonially award College Book Awards* to exceptional high school upperclassmen, usually juniors. Each award recognizes a certain area of excellence and achievement, such as talent in music or the arts, academic success, political advocacy, or service in the community. While the ceremony and criteria for the award varies from school to school, the purpose of a College Book Award is essentially the same: to recognize distinguished youth, provide the next generation of emerging leaders an opportunity to develop a broader perspective of the world, and attract high-caliber students who are likely to succeed in the college’s programs.

What separates a College Book Award from other acknowledgements of high achievement is the unique gift each college provides. Each College Book Award recipient is presented with—as the title of the award suggests—a book. Some colleges choose a book about living life to the fullest or how to create change, while others choose books written by alumni or faculty. Since colleges look for well-rounded students who want to make a difference in their community, nation, and world, College Book Awards offer an opportunity to nurture students’ desire to learn and foster their growth and development.

Norton-Womens-LivesHillary Clinton attended Wellesley College and was deeply impacted by the university’s goal to empower women to make a difference in the world. She is now a prominent advocate for women’s rights, with an accomplished political career. The Wellesley College Book Award mirrors that goal, “recognizing young women who have excelled in their intelligence, determination, motivation, and achievement… [and are] visible members of their schools and communities.”

Perpetuating the shared belief of lifelong learning, College Book Awards are usually presented by alumni, and the books are sponsored by a local alumni association. The alumni associations sponsoring the awards may change the book given from year to year. The Wellesley College Alumnae Association offers The Norton Book of Women’s Lives, a collection of twentieth century literature—autobiographies, journals, memoirs—celebrating women’s lives.

Other recent examples of College Book Awards include:

Perhaps the most interesting part of College Book Awards is that the message of each book travels far beyond the reach of the pages. As an alumnus from the college places the book in an aspiring youth’s hands, symbolically passing down knowledge from one generation to the next, the book takes on new meaning.

Each word on the page becomes a new path for the reader to follow into the future, encouraging an atmosphere of lifelong learning. Each chapter becomes another way to use knowledge to create positive change around the world.

In today’s world, often filled with sadness and fear, College Book Awards preserve the joy of reading and instill hope for learners and leaders of the future.

Alexander Pavlicin is a high school senior and published freelance writer. During his junior year, he received the Brandeis University Book Award.

*College Book Award recipients are selected by partnering high school administrators or counselors based on student applications or demonstrated contributions. Contact your local high school counselor to find out which colleges or universities your school partners with. Receiving an award does not guarantee admission to the respective college or university, but often carries a cash scholarship for recipients who do attend.

Logos are trademarks of respective institutions.

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