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The end of another long thinking
about--how am I going to structure this book?!? Here's a picture of what my thinking "looks" like tonight. At one point in the day, I emailed my friend Dot: "What do you think about friendships??" "Well, let's see," she replied. "Friendships are--rewarding, sustaining, inspiring, fun, frustrating, enduring or fleeting, friendships inspire growth, common interests hold them together, old friendships are a great source of comfort, new friendships are energizing and on some days, your pet is your BEST friend!"Feel free to add your thoughts/ideas/experiences on the topic of friendships!
Spent about 16 hours yesterday with the results of my research into the friendship of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. What do I have? Masses of material! Now the writerly question/decision is--what to do with all that material?!? How to turn it into a clear, coherent, compelling (my 3Cs of good writing)nonfiction narrative??? How am I going to structure this book? That question is constantly on my mind. In my sleep last night I was remembering the structures of some of my other books--5 strand interwoven multi-layered structure for Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in World War II, a topical chronology for Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial, a modified chronology for A Woman Unafraid: The Achievements of Frances Perkins. In an early post (8/7) I wrote about a structure I "saw"--"knitting something with a pattern, i.e. I've got two main skeins of yarn--ECS (I'm thinking she's orange) and SBA (perhaps green) and I'll be picking up stitches from other skeins as I go." One of my tests of the viability of an idea is whether or not it sticks with me--that one is still with me. The ultimate test, of course, is whether or not I can implement the idea & this one isn't there yet. So, back to work!
Our Jersey Shore bungalow is near the cranberry bogs in Double Trouble State Park in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Luckily this year, we--me, Linda, and Sophie, my three-year-old granddaughter-- managed to get there from NYC in time to watch the wet, or water harvest; an event I've been curious about, especially after writing my forthcoming book Thanksgiving: The True Story. The first two pictures (left to right) show a cranberry bog with ripe berries (cranberries grow on a dwarf evergreen vine in a peat or sandy bog), and two specialized harvesters that knock the berries off the vine. In that picture, the first driver has lifted up the bar that has 9 metal circle because he's about to turn around (see next picture). The other driver still has the bar down and the circles are rotating and knocking the cranberries off the vine (note the water in the bog splashing up). The man wearing the waders directs the drivers and walks in front of them to make sure they don't hit a rock or other obstacle.
"Hey," I shouted to get his attention. "What do you call those machines?"
"Knockers," he shouted back. "Also pickers, I call them pickers."
"What do most people call them?"
"Ask him," he said gesturing to a man standing a bit behind me. Jose has been doing this for fifty years."
Turning to look as Jose, I asked, "What do you call them?"
"Knockers."
The next two pictures are of the bog after it has been flooded with 6" to 8" of water. Since cranberries float, the workers corral them by encircle them with a very long piece of black, flexible material about 8" wide that floats. We could see two workers standing in the corral using a type of push-broom to move the cranberries around but couldn't figure out why. Walking to the side of the truck, we found a man on a ladder who was watching the cranberries fill up the truck.
"Hi," I called out, "We have a question." I didn't expect him to climb down, but he did and cheerfully explained that there is a tub just below the surface of the water with a suction hose that sucks the cranberries up to a platform on the back of a truck. The men in the water are moving the cranberries toward the tub. Periodically one of the men walks over and tightens the black strip encircling the cranberries, thus making the corral smaller; a task, we all agreed, looks like hard work!
The last picture shows the workers standing on the platform. They remove pieces of vine and use a type of push broom to move the cranberries onto a conveyer belt that dumps them into the back of the truck that will go to the receiving station in Chatsworth, NJ. That is where the cranberries get processed into juice and cranberry sauce. (Cranberries that are sold whole are gathered by a "dry harvesting" method by which mechanized machines "pick" the cranberries). As we were leaving, a woman wearing a "Piney Power" T-shirt hailed us to warn us about chiggers (happily no problems for us). Ever the journalist, I asked her about her t-shirt, etc. and discovered she has a cool website (www.pineypower.com) with lots of material about the Pine Barrens, including information about cranberries.
Dot Emer--Emer being the married name of Dot Chastney whose true stories about being a kid during World War II appear throughout my book Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on The Home Front In World War II (there are also photos from Dot's life then), and who you'll meet again in my forthcoming book Thanksgiving: The True Story--is a middle school librarian in Boca Raton, Florida. Dot just sent me the following email about the photographs of the Monarch butterflies on my blog: "Hi Penny, Just want you to know that your Monarch butterfly photos provided a nice science lesson on Wednesday. I went to the sixth grade science teacher and showed her your blog site with the photos. We threw the photos up on the SmartBoard so the whole class could see them and the teacher read your description. She also told the kids that when her boys were young they vacationed in Cape May and there were so many Monarchs on the move that they were landing on the kids."
This is such a great example of a concept I love to introduce when I teach courses in nonfiction writing and nonfiction literature and that is--a "Nonfiction Moment" i.e. anything real that really happens during the course of a day--a conversation, an incident, an observation, a taste, a surprise, an unexpected encounter, something you overhear--that sticks with you. Something that you remember. It doesn't have to be momentous. It can just be a snippet or a sliver of something. It doesn't have to matter to anyone else, just to you is enough. All it has to be is something that really happened--nothing made up--that catches your attention and hangs around inside you.
Just now, I was working on Stirring Up The World and thinking deeply about the 19th century friendship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony when I heard a vigorously banging on my front door. Disoriented--remember my brain was in the 1800s--I opened the door & had to think a moment when the woman who was holding a big bouquet of flowers said: "Special surprise for Penny Colman. Are you Penny Colman?" The flowers, I discovered, are in celebration of my 20th anniversary as a freelance writer from Jan Kristo, my dear friend and colleague and co-author along with Sandip Wilson of the forthcoming chapter "Bold New Perspectives: Issues in Selecting and Using Nonfiction." Thank you, Jan, for the gorgeous bouquet, and thank you for the timely reminder of the joy and power of 21st century friendships!
