Spring Newsletter 2023
“The first bud of spring sings the other seeds into joining her uprising.”
As climate change plays havoc with the weather, we have had no more than a whisper of snow all winter and temperatures hit the 70s Fahrenheit/21 Celsius last month in Baltimore. You probably have your bizarre weather stories too, and who knows what spring will bring.
What we do know is that, as we transition from February to March, we are on the cusp of Black History Month and Women’s History Month. I love these heritage months that we celebrate throughout the year, when we can stop to take stock of our diversity—some of the others being Arab American in April; Asian Pacific in May; LGBTQ+ along with Immigrant Heritage in June; Hispanic from mid-September to mid-October; and Native American in November.
William Still | Image: Notre Dame Press
Reflecting on Black History Month, this is the BookNotes podcast about the biography Vigilance: The Life of William Still, the Father of the Underground Railroad by Andrew K. Diemer who, like his subject, lives in Philadelphia, although he's on the faculty of the history department at Towson University in Baltimore County. William Still was the youngest of eighteen children born to Levin, who bought his freedom in 1798 on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Charity, who escaped twice from Maryland to join Levin in New Jersey. Although Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman’s names are resoundingly familiar, I’d not heard of William Still before, and Andrew’s biography goes a long way towards giving him the credit he deserves.
During Women’s History Month, I’ll be continuing to dig as deeply as the limited records will allow into the life of Christianna Lässle. I know that she was born circa 1717 in the German Palatinate, immigrated with her family to Pennsylvania in 1729, and entered the Ephrata Cloister aged 19 circa 1736. There, she composed hymns under her adopted name of Sister Föben, becoming one of the first named female composers in America. How intriguing is that?! I’m still in the process of trying to figure out how to tell her story—whether historical fiction or a biography that would have to include some speculation in the places where I can’t document. I’m excited to write my way into it, and I can already tell that I will come to love her.
The Ephrata Codex at the Library of Congress
It was six months ago now that I wrote here about having witnessed the horrifying attack on Salmon Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institute on Friday, August 12th. While it was entirely appropriate that there was a media blackout as he spent six weeks in hospital and then made countless subsequent visits to doctors, it was so hard not knowing how he was. Now, thanks to Victory City, we do. We know that, although he has lost the use of his right eye and he has lost more than forty pounds, he is still writing. Victory City is one of the books I highlight in the most recent edition of BookNotes Review.
We also know, thanks to the probing piece that David Remnick wrote for The New Yorker, that Salmon Rushdie is planning another book; this one about an event that took place in a matter of seconds at Chautauqua. In the New Yorker piece, Salmon Rushdie says:
“I’ve got nothing else to do. I would like to have a second skill, but I don’t. I always envied writers like Günter Grass, who had a second career as a visual artist. I thought how nice it must be to spend a day wrestling with words, and then get up and walk down the street to your art studio and become something completely else. I don’t have that. So, all I can do is this. As long as there’s a story that I think is worth giving my time to, then I will. When I have a book in my head, it’s as if the rest of the world is in its correct shape.”
In truth, precious few writers can live by their single calling. Ann Patchett, now one of those precious few, has told us how she composed her first book in her head while she was waiting tables. Other writers may be teachers, or baristas, or woodworkers, or editors. I’ve been privileged to support a writing life with a speaking life, and though the spoken word and the written word are more like cousins than siblings, they complement each other in interesting ways. On the face of it, a 350-page novel—with its three-act narrative arc, characters, and scenes—is an entirely different creature from a 90-second on-air break. But an air break also has to have its own little narrative arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end—a back-announcement, station business or a tidbit about the music to make you care, and a forward-announcement. And, since you have to make every word count in 90 seconds, that’s a useful discipline to bring back to writing in long form.
And speaking of cross-overs, I love the way that happens when I go to an art exhibition, as when we visited the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York last month. In addition to dredging up history of art from my undergraduate degree, I now find myself looking for musical references, of which there’s invariably a surprising number. So, I will leave you with some of these Hopper impressions as I wish you a wonderful season of spring and rejuvenation, or of mists and mellow fruitfulness if you live in the southern hemisphere.
Until the next season, take care!
Judith
