March 2010

Next week Rick and I are taking our daughter, Shannon and her two kids to Washington, DC, and I can hardly wait. Getting ready to go has brought back memories of traveling with my mom and dad.  Both wanted me and my brother to see the country – which meant every National Park they could squeeze into two week vacations every summer.   It always involved a LONG drive.  We stopped for gas and a potty break.  We stopped for lunch, usually a picnic Mom made beside the road.  We stopped to camp.  It often took several days to reach our destination where we would stay for a day or two, and then turn around for the long drive home.

As a child, sitting in a hot car for hours on end was less than exciting.  No Nintendo DS’s or portable DVD players in those days.  No air conditioning either.  We kept the windows open and a bag of water hanging on the front of the car to keep the engine cool. 

Mom and Dad saw these trips as...

Every book has a “working title”.  Her Mother’s Hope had several.   The first one, Floodwaters, fit what I was feeling when I started working on the story:  drowning in memories, being swept toward the sea.  In other words, I was way over my head.  Would I find the answers I was seeking?   I held Mom and Grandma so close while writing that it was more biography than fiction – and the first rendition did not work. 

Sometimes the hardest thing a writer has to do is get out of her own way. 

First draft (all 1000 pages) set aside, I took another dive at the story, this time as a saga, moving from one generation to the next.  The story began to unfold.  The characters took on a life of their own.  It became less about Grandma and more about Marta, less about Mom and more about Hildemara.  I thought about using the first title, but my daughter Shannon pointed out with her usual sense of...

My mother kept a diary.  She had a favorite fountain pen and bought a new hardbound journal every year and seldom missed a day.  When dying of breast cancer, she walked me through her house and asked what I would like to have.  I asked for her journals.  They are the most important part of my family inheritance. 

Grandma didn’t write a journal.  I had to beg her to write her life story.  More than beg, I nagged until she sat down and wrote it out – in beautiful, tiny script that covered fourteen pages on a legal pad.  That’s also in my binder, under its own heading. 

Mom never wrote about “feelings”.  She said emotions change, and she didn’t want to write about a conflict and forgot about the resolution, leaving anyone reading the journals later to wonder if the hard feelings had never been resolved.  Later, when reading her journals, I found impassioned essays unrelated to family, and I wondered what had...