The Heritage Month Project: "The Buddha in the Attic"

So many heritages used to be recognized by the U.S. federal government. You can check them out at this archived website from earlier administrations. May covers a number of them. This post deals with Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Month. 

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka is a lovely and unique piece of writing. It's often described as a novel, though after reading this I feel I don't know enough about novels to be able to comment on that. 

Two Standout Features

The two memorable aspects of The Buddha in the Attic are its subject matter and its point-of-view.

Subject Matter: The book deals with Japanese picture brides, a group I'd known nothing about. (My Heritage Month Project is exposing me to a great deal I didn't know about.) Essentially picture brides were Japanese women who came to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century to marry Japanese men they didn't know, had never even met. The men were already in the U.S. and the couples exchanged pictures. As Otsuka recounts in The Buddha in the Attic, many of the men were less than truthful, using old photographs of themselves so they'd appear younger or borrowing clothes to wear for formal photographs, so they'd appear better off than they were. Many of these women learned after they got here that they were going to work with their new husbands, picking fruit or doing other kinds of field work, and live in tents or barns. "...if our husbands had told us the truth in their letters...we never would have come to America to do the work that no self-respecting American would do." 

Some women turned around and went back to Japan, but a large number of them stuck it out. They worked with these husband strangers, created families, and for their efforts ended up in internment camps during World War II.

(For what it's worth, in the seventeenth century around 700 women went to Canada at the king's expense to provide wives for settlers and soldiers. No photos, of course. Assuming they survived the trip there, les filles du roi, as they were known, would have been part of the mainstream European culture in Canada at the time. The Japanese picture brides were outsiders in the United States. It also sounds as if the French women were in more dire straits in their homeland than the Japanese women were in theirs. The Japanese women had legitimate expectations about what they would find here that often were not met.)

Point-of-view: The Buddha in the Attic uses a first-person plural point-of-view, also sometimes known as a collective narrator. It can be a bit demanding to get used to. However, I recently took a workshop on short stories in which Steve Trumpeter, the workshop leader, said that with every short story you have to teach yourself how to read that particular story. I think that's the case with many books. Once you've taught yourself to read The Buddha in the Attic, it's riveting. The collective narrator works fantastically here, because what we're reading is the shared experience of many people. Occasionally an italicized line appears that is one person's thought that illustrates what the collective had been speaking about. 

Does this book have a plot? Is a group's historical experience a plot? Do life stories have plots? I don't know. At any rate, this is a terrific book about a specific group's experience.

Do I Have A Future In Spiritual Writing?

I was looking for something in the bowels of the blog and came upon this post from 2009. I do write about...ah, churching?...from time to time. I have an entire unsold manuscript about two Edina and Patsy/Grace and Frankie types saving a church from Christian Nationalists. I have a modest interest in spiritual subjects. Very, very modest.

A case in point:

Feb., 2009 I Have Wanted To Do This So Many Times

I had to go to church today because it was my turn to greet. Another way to put this is to say I was a greeter. Or, as a young family member calls it, a Shaker because greeters are supposed to chase down unsuspecting churchgoers and shake their hands in order to make them feel either welcomed or stalked.

My point is, I spent around fifteen minutes (yeah, I was late and should have been there longer) standing by the door, staring dead on at it, so I saw everyone who came in. This explains how I came to see the teenage girl headed up to the loft with a book under her arm.

I have frequently wanted to bring a book to church. You know, just in case I had some free time before service or it took a while to get out of the building because the minister insisted on talking to everyone on the way out. I would have chosen something by Anne Lamott or maybe some kind of philosophical essay or better yet a magazine article about celebrity religious observance, since I might have a prayer of finishing that. At any rate, I would have chosen something I could have pretended was at least spiritual in case a deacon caught me with it.

But the young are fearless, and the girl I saw this morning was lugging a Stephen King novel to service with her.

The Weekend Writer: What We Talk About When We Talk About Shitty First Drafts

Over the years that I have been an active writer, sometimes interacting with

other writers and industry people, sometimes studying craft, I've seen a lot of what I guess could be called "bandwagoning." Somehow an idea gets floated out into the void, and suddenly huge numbers of people jump on the bandwagon and will...not...get...off. Something must happen between the point when the idea comes up and the point when everyone clutches it to their collective bosom, but I have no idea what it is.

A few examples: 

• YA fiction must include romance. Nothing else happens between the ages of twelve and twenty. I first heard this twenty plus years ago.
• The freaking hero's journey. Is it really the model for all writing or just the same model for the same cliched stories?
• The whole pantser vs. plotter thing. Again, cliche much? Meaningless cliche? Don't get me started.
• Give your main characters something they want, then keep it from then. Does it seem to anyone else that a lot of traditional writing advice involves teaching how to create formula work?

Which brings me to the shitty first draft.

The Point Is, Don't Expect Much of a First Draft

When Anne Lamott coined the phrase "shitty first draft" in Bird by Bird, she seems to have essentially meant that first drafts aren't good. "All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts." (I would argue that hoping for a terrific third draft is overly optimistic.) "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something -- anything -- down on paper."

Now, it's been many years since I read Bird by Bird, but I think what Lamott was talking about here was eliminating the need to be perfect right away. The desire to create perfect prose can be paralyzing and stop work. Later in the section on shitty first drafts, she writes about her own process, involving writing a shitty first draft of an opening paragraph and going on to more shitty first draft work that she later, over time, cut and revised. 

While she describes her process, she doesn't describe the one and only process for achieving a shitty first draft. And even within the process she describes, she doesn't cover things like how writers might generate the thoughts and work necessary in order to have the material to create the shitty first draft. Her point, I think, is the end result. A shitty first draft.

What Has "Shitty First Drafts" Become?

What I see happening with the "shitty first drafts" line is a shift from "all first drafts are shitty, get over it" to "write it all out, everything, everywhere, all at once," which has become a cliche that is as paralyzing as believing you have to get it perfect on your first shot. It's also unhelpful, because it doesn't address how to write it all out all at once. 

Your most highly skilled plotters might be able to manage this, but my understanding is that most of them do quite a bit of plot planning before they begin to write. (I once read about a writer who spent three months plotting before he would start writing.) They are not getting just anything down on paper. For organic writers, who have trouble isolating plot from story and can't plan those events out first so they have to work with all story elements at once, getting just anything down is mystifying. (Organic writers. Nobody writes by the seat of their pants.)

A Shitty First Draft Is An End, Not A Process

I started thinking about this recently after reading No silos, no hidden truths, and no shitty first drafts: A Q&A with Nicole Graev Lipson by Asya Parton at The Brevity Blog. When asked about shitty first drafts and revision, Lipson said (among other things), "I've never been able to take that approach...I cannot go on to the next paragraph until the one I'm working on is doing the work it needs to do...It's like polishing a stone. When it's ready, I move on."

I've often thought of writing as like chipping away at a block of marble, trying to carve something out of it. Polishing is involved. Because I'm part of an engineering family, I also think of it in terms of a building. The beginning of a work is the foundation. If I discover a third of a way through the project that the foundation isn't right and won't bear the weight of the story, I have to go back and fix the characters or the voice or the plot. How can I possibly go on? Whatever needs to be fixed ends up generating the material for the rest of the story. What is there to write, if I haven't fixed the foundational problems? Even with this blog post, I kept going back and tinkering to change the foundational work as I was working. As Lipson said in her Brevity Blog interview, "...the writing shapes my thinking." In my case, at least, my new thinking then shapes my writing.

Of course, particularly with longer work I still end up with a shitty first draft. But that shitty first draft is a product, not a process.

The Heritage Month Project: "Evil Eye" and "Behind You Is the Sea"

While Heritage Months have disappeared from U.S. government websites and some college websites as well, there's no law, yet, against individuals observing them. So I am.

This month is Arab American Heritage Month. As just a general reader, I'm not aware of having run into or read much by Arab American authors. I have no idea why, because there are certainly plenty of them out there. In fact, I can direct you to a couple of lists of books by Arab American authors.

• 70 Books to Read for National Arab American Heritage Month at Arab America
• Arab American Heritage Month at Brookline Booksmith

The Brookline Booksmith site says that Arab American Heritage Month has only existed since 2021, which might account for me not being more familiar with these authors. Heritage months truly do provide opportunities to promote groups, and those groups that have had heritage months for a longer time may have a higher profile. 

The two books by Arab American writers that I read this month were selected because 1. the content descriptions interested me in some way, and 2. I could get them. Coincidentally, they are both written by Palestinian American writers and deal with Palestinian American experience. Times being what they are that ended up being a good thing for me. I knew as close to nothing about the Palestinian situation as it's possible to know and still be alive in the twenty-first century. Now I know a little more.

Evil Eye 

Evil Eye by Etaf Rum is a highly regarded book that has received a great deal of positive attention. I mention this to encourage others to read it even though stylistically it was not my favorite kind of book. I found it rather interior directed, a lot of telling. As an older woman reader, I also found it to be a little bit of a "diary of a mad Palestinian American housewife." By which I mean it deals with issues I've seen in books about women in the past. What this may mean is that Rum is writing about problems middle class first-generation American women face now that were new for other middle class American women a generation or two ago.

Main character Yara married to escape her parents' home in Brooklyn. Marrying to escape family is not that unusual in literature and probably not in life. What is unique here is that Yara married a man she barely knew in an arranged marriage. She also suffers from generational trauma. Her grandmother lost her home in Palestine and lived her life in a camp. Her mother came to America with a new husband, expecting a life as a singer, not a life tied to six children and a husband who abused her. 

Otherwise, like many other women, Yara doesn't want to lose her job and only be a housewife. She wants the same freedoms her husband has. She fears being unable to escape her childhood and becoming her mother. She's miserable and struggling to do more than accept she deserves to be miserable. 

As I was reading Evil Eye, my basic feeling was that unhappy marriages transcend culture.

I also tended to feel that Yara's father was too over the top a nasty dad. (Oh, my gosh. Her mother-in-law!) Then I read Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj.

Behind You Is the Sea

Behind You Is the Sea is another highly regarded book. It's described as an episodic novel, but I found it more to be interconnected short stories. Yeah, that's nitpicking. Even though I occasionally didn't see how a story/chapter was connected, it didn't matter, because they were all terrific. 

What's more, there are characters and situations in Behind You Is the Sea that are similar to what we see in Evil Eye--a married couple who reminded me of Yara and her husband, though there's something very different going on with them, as well as an immigrant father similar to Yara's. It's as if both authors are writing about a culture they know, and I don't. 

Yeah, that's what happens when you read books by authors from other cultures.

At the same time, both books involve cultures I am familiar with. The unhappy marriage in Evil Eye. The wedding reception, the mother dealing with a school issue, the teenager involved with theater in Behind You Is the Sea. These are all things I've heard about before, if not actually experienced, but they're different here, too.

And that is the pleasure in reading books from authors who come out of cultures different from one's own. In addition to experiencing something totally different, you sometimes get to experience a new twist on something that isn't different.

Behind You Is the Sea's title is part of a quote attributed to an 8th century Muslim general. "Behind you is the sea. Before you, the enemy." There's more to it you can read for yourself. It was kind of grim for the situation the general was dealing with, but, personally, I find it a profound metaphor for life. In Behind You Is the Sea a character says something about Arabic being poetic, and there is some lovely language in this book, the title being just one example. Lovely language, in my experience, sometimes weighs a narrative down. Not the case here at all. 

All told, my Arab American reading this month was very satisfying. My only regret is that I didn't have time to do more of it. I'm on to May and another heritage month.

Time Management Tuesday: My Lenten Reading Project. Yeah, It Didn't Go Well

I am what might be called a cultural Christian. I went to sunrise service at our lake this past Sunday, because it only lasts a half an hour, I could throw a coat on over blue jeans and a long sleeve t-shirt, and when I got home around 7:30 AM I could feel that I had been to church on Easter and now had the rest of the day for other things. I took pictures to prove to family members I'd gone.

I cling to some of the trappings of my Christian life. 

For instance, I like using the beginnings of some of the Christian church seasons as temporal landmarks, a point at which I can start a new project that I complete at the end of the season. I've been successful with my Advent/Holiday Hell projects the last few years. I just finished a Lenten reading project that I'm not as happy with.

Traditionally Catholics and maybe other Christians give up doing something during Lent. That's little Catholic Gail's recollection of Lent--fish sticks or macaroni and cheese for dinner on Fridays and giving something up. Sometime in the more recent past I read a suggestion that instead of giving something up for Lent, we take something on we don't normally do.

I want to point out that I am aware that that writer probably meant taking on something spiritual. I took on some different kinds of reading. While I don't actually feel bad about that, I recognize that I should.

In 2016 I did a Lenten reading project involving nonfiction. And you want to hear something bizarre? I see that that is when I finished reading How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sara Bakewell, and a month and a half ago I submitted a personal essay involving Montaigne to an anthology. And just last week I submitted a humor piece involving Montaigne to a humor site. Wow. Is that almost spiritual?

Then in 2023 I read The Essential Ruth Stone during Lent and liked the experience enough that I continued reading the book after Easter until I'd finished it.

2025 Lenten Reading Project

This year I came up with the idea to read a short story a day during Lent...any short story...because I'm focusing on short form writing now and even doing some self-study of short story writing. Expanding my knowledge of short stories seemed like such a good idea.

Except I don't feel I expanded my knowledge much. In fact, I didn't get much out of this project at all. I did read a New Yorker short story I liked a lot and think I can use for next month's Heritage Month Project. But many times, I had to rush to get the reading done for the day and just chose any random piece of flash fiction I could find. Then I wanted to keep a list of everything and that was time consuming.

No, not one of my more successful projects.

Oh, wait. You know what I should have done? I should have done a sentence or two of reader response for each story. Well, live and learn.

Note in the list below that towards the end of Lent, I started reading Shirley Jackson short stories. I have her book, Let Me Tell You, and read some of the essays in that for Women's History Month. If only I'd just read the short stories from that book these past 40 days, I'd probably have finished it. That would have felt like an accomplishment.

In fact, I think that's what was wrong with this project. It wasn't focused enough, the way my reading of Ruth Stone's book was. If I had just read Jackson...yes, that could have worked for me.

My Short Story Reading List

Ash Wednesday, March 5: Good Stretch, Rebecca Meacham https://wigleaf.com/202004stretch.htm

March 6: Maladies, Kevin Yeoman https://www.failbetter.com/content/maladies

March 7: Everyday Miracles, Benjamin Woodard  https://mrbullbull.com/newbull/fiction/everyday-miracles/

March 9: Traps, Kara McKeever https://cutleafjournal.com/content/traps

March 10: This Used to be a Story About a Racoon But Now It’s An Obituary, Ani King   https://gooseberry-pie.com/this-used-to-be/

March 11: Dried Up, Kim Magowan  https://cutleafjournal.com/content/dried-up

March 11 (Catching up for March 8):  “Family Portrait” 1860, Rebecca Meacham https://atticusreview.org/family-portrait-1860/

March 12: Footprint, Jennifer Handy https://flywayjournal.org/fiction/jennifer-handy-footprint/

March 13: The Last Murmuration of Gwyneth, Winnie Bright https://writingdisorder.com/winnie-bright-fiction/

March 14: The Procedure, P.A. Cornell https://www.abyssapexzine.com/2024/01/the-procedure/

March 15: Interesting About E and A, Helen Oyeyemi https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2016/03/interesting-about-e-and-new-short-story-helen-oyeyemi

March 16: The Frenzy, Joyce Carol Oates https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/24/the-frenzy-fiction-joyce-carol-oates

March 17: The Golden Hours, Lynda M. Bayley  https://www.frazzledlit.com/p/the-golden-hours

March 18: The Paradise, Shirley Jackson

March 19: How to Bake Without Eggs, Edith-Nicole Cameron https://literarymama.com/articles/departments/2025/03/how-to-bake-without-eggs

March 20: Books and Roses, Helen Oyeyeme https://granta.com/books-and-roses/

March 21: Death and His Family, Francine Witte https://fictivedream.com/2025/03/02/death-and-his-family/

March 22: Firmanet, Engine Roar, Jewels, https://redrockreview.org/issue-51-2-2/fragment-engine-roar-jewels/

March 23: One Minute Thirty-five Seconds, Caleb Ludwick https://fracturedlit.com/one-minute-thirty-five-seconds/

March 24: How Hauntings Happen, Melissa Ostrom https://www.stonecoastreview.org/how-hauntings-happen/

March 25: Outer Space, Tom Saunders Outer Space - SmokeLong Quarterly

March 26: Sanctuary, JJ Amaworo Wilson  https://www.stonecoastreview.org/sanctuary/

Marcy 27: Gulls of the Argarve, Matt Barrett  https://flash-frog.com/2025/03/17/gulls-of-the-algarve-by-matt-barrett/

March 28: Harrison Road, Kate Gehan https://bluestemmagazine.com/sps24/kate-gehan

Mary 29: Snow Queen Seratonin, Mary Buchanan https://www.tinymolecules.com/issues/twentytwo#mary-buchanan

March 30: Angels, Mary Miller, https://www.vestalreview.net/angel

March 31: Marked, Desiree Cooper https://fracturedlit.com/marked/

April 1: Sorry I Didn’t Call You Back, Arah Ko https://splitlipthemag.com/poetry/0524/arah-ko

April 2: Dream Interpretations for Beginners, Miriam Gershow Issue 19 |Miriam Gershow – LEON Literary Review

April 3: Two Micros, Jeffrey Herman https://okaydonkeymag.com/2024/11/29/2-micros-by-jeffrey-hermann/

April 4: When He Says That You’re A Goddess, Amy Strong https://frictionlit.org/when-he-says-that-youre-a-goddess/

April 5: Materials Needed Kyle Weik https://flash-frog.com/2025/03/31/materials-needed-by-kyle-weik/

April 6: The Books of Losing You https://www.newyorker.com/books/flash-fiction/the-books-of-losing-you

April 7: Micro Monday (3) https://fictivedream.com/2025/04/07/micro-monday-1/

April 9: From, To, David Mezgozis https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/from-to-fiction-david-bezmozgis

April 10: Paranoia, Shirley Jackson

April 11: Still Life with Teapot and Students, Shirley Jackson

April 12: The Arabian Nights

April 13: Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons, Shirley Jackson

April 14: Easy Street, Steve Trumpeter https://www.bartlebysnopes.com/stories/easy-street.html

April 15: How We Met, Bruce Holland Rogers https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/how-we-met/

April 16: It Isn’t the Money I Mind, Shirley Jackson

April 17: Company for Dinner, Shirley Jackson

April 18: The Greatest Guy in the World, Shirley Jackson

 

 

This is a Different Kind of Story Behind the Story.

Janko Ferlic on Unsplash

Yesterday Frazzled published my most recent humor piece, Your Child Is Creepy Good. Frazzled is a publication on the Medium platform, and Creepy Good Child was selected for what is known as the Boost Program there. That means the powers that be at Medium will provide it with additional promotion, leading, presumably, to greater readership. Which is always gratifying. 

Seriously, I have no idea how I came up with this story.  I can tell you, though, it began in December during my annual Advent/Holiday Hell Project. During Advent, which, okay, is the month of December, I don't try to work on anything major or even work on anything regularly. Instead, each day I try to start a flash or humor piece. Your Child Is Creepy Good was one of last year's starts. I found it a couple of weeks ago when I was looking for something to work on.

 I'm not making a major effort to publish regularly at Medium anymore, because readership has plummeted. I'm casting my net wider now, as I'm sure I've mentioned here before. However, I'd already done a lot on Creepy Good Child back in December. The big changes/additions involved the teacher/narrator's hostility. That was significant, but it wasn't weeks of work. Because I didn't have to spend a great deal of time on this, because I thought it would work for Frazzled, and because I've had good experiences with Frazzled, I went ahead and submitted it. It was well worth it.

Of my twenty-five 2024 Advent/Holiday Hell Project starts, I've had three published, submitted one, and have a couple I'm working on. That makes the Advent/Holiday Hell Project a success story as far as I'm concerned.

Getting Serious About Humor: A Truly Funny Novel

Timmossholder on Unsplash

While reading humor books, I haven't come across a lot of fiction I found truly funny. Until I read A Most Agreeable Murder by Julia Seales. The book's publisher calls it a "cozy mystery," but I think it's a parody. And not a parody of cozy mysteries, though I don't read a lot of those so I can't be sure. I think it's more a parody of the couple-historical-detective series I'm fond of and Pride and Prejudice. There's also a nod to the classic/horror mash-ups that were popular fifteen or twenty years ago. (Side note: My husband, son, and daughter-in-law all agreed to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with me, even though none of them had read Pride and Prejudice. We all liked the movie.) 

A Most Agreeable Murder is such a good parody, I wonder if people unfamiliar with what is being parodied will get it. Must be they do, or enough do, anyway, because a sequel is coming in June.

A Note About the Pride and Prejudice References in A Most Agreeable Murder

Many years ago, I read an essay in which the author noted that while Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is portrayed as shallow and foolish and only interested in finding husbands for her daughters, she is also entirely correct. Without husbands, her daughters will be in dire straits when their father dies. They will have no income, they won't even have a home. While Mrs. Bennet is going all over the neighborhood frantically trying to find men to take care of her daughters, because in the world they live in they need men, her husband is portrayed as this intelligent, benign soul, disappointed by his choice of wife and burdened with her. Yet he is doing nothing, absolutely nothing, to save his children, leaving all the work to their mother.

Yeah, well the Steele family in A Most Agreeable Murder are clearly the Bennets from Pride and Prejudice, and Mr. Bennet/Steele here gets the treatment he deserves. While Mrs. Bennet/Steele gets a little respect.

A Note About the Couple-Mystery-Detective Series References in A Most Agreeable Murder

The couple-historical-detective series I'm familiar with have all involved heterosexual couples, so I don't know how this would play out with same sex couples. But with the heterosexual couples, the woman is usually (but not always) the main character. The male may or may not have some kind of connection, amateur or professional, to solving crime. The two of them meet in the stereotypical hate-to- love/Pride and Prejudice manner, end up working together, and, at some point in the series, become romantically involved.

The male characters fall into a particular predictable pattern. While manly and intelligent and superior in some way, either through achievement or family status, they are always damaged. They had a bad war experience. (As if there are good ones.) They have daddy issues. They had a bad war experience and have daddy issues. They have migraines. They have migraines and daddy issues. They've had bad experiences with women. They've had bad experiences with women, and they have daddy issues.

They are damaged while the female character is not. Other than being female, of course.

I'm recovering from a couple of mild illnesses, so I'm not going to try to unravel what's going on with that situation. But, certainly, something is.

What I'm getting to here is that Inspector Drake in A Most Agreeable Murder plays to the damage business in a very obvious manner, if you're aware of the damage trope/cliche. And another less obvious manner, which I won't mention because I don't want to give it away.

Some Other Random Thoughts

The unsavory cousin who is set to inherit the Steele daughters' house out from under them and is a variation on the same character in Pride and Prejudice was terrific, though I might have found him over-the-top, if I didn't know the parody business going on with him. 

The multiple murderer possibilities were well done. 

The fart joke was excellent, in large part because it was so incongruous.

This is a funny book that also has quite a decent mystery. I definitely look forward to the next book in what may end up being a series.

The Weekend Writer: Getting Started Living Like a Writer

I recently took a Zoom workshop (Zoomshop? Let's make Zoomshop a thing.) with Lori Rader-Day through the Off Campus Writers' Workshop. While checking out her website, I found her suggestions on how to get started writing. 

What I like about them is that they are things anyone can do. She says nothing here about MFA programs. She says nothing about writers' retreats in remote places. She says nothing about putting your butt in a chair and writing every day or you really aren't interested in being a writer, are you?

What she does do is write about things you can do right away. Like this afternoon. 

 A lot of what she's talking about is what I think of as how writers live. We do:

• Look for low-cost resources (Say, Off Campus Writers' Workshop)
• Take individual classes and workshops (Why, OCWW again.) 
• Go to local book events (Look for bookstore and library events. A self-publishing writers' organization in my state runs enormous numbers of gatherings at vineyards, breweries, and other outside-the-box locations.)
• Follow other writers on social media
• Read and write

You don't need to do something big and elaborate to get started writing. You certainly don't have to wait to get started living like a writer.

We Need Diverse Books Day

We Need Diverse Books began in 2014 as a Twitter hashtag and from there became a nonprofit group. In addition to providing books to schools and libraries, it provides support to and publishes marginalized writers. Today they are celebrating the first We Need Diverse Books Day.

To support their effort, here is a list of books dealing with subjects under the diverse books umbrella that I've enjoyed here at Original Content. 

Picture Books

 A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet

Fancy Party Gowns by Deborah Blumenthal and Laura Freeman

Bad News for Outlaws by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and R. Gregory Christie 

Company's Coming by Arthur Yorinks and David Small  

Middle Grade

Figure it Out, Henri Weldon by Tanita S. Davis

Don't Hold Me Back by Winfred Rembert

March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Ayden, and Nate Powell      

Finding Langston by Lesa Cline-Ransome

One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

Jasmine Toguchi, Mochi Queen by Debbi Michiko-Florence and Elizabet Vukovic

Strange Fruit by Gary Golio and Charlotte Riley-Webb

YA

Home Field Advantage by Dahlia Adler

Mare's War by Tanita S. Davis

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland

The Field Guide to the North American Teenager by Ben Philippe

Dear Haiti, Love Alaine by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite

The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz

Open Mic: Riffs on Life Between Cultures in Ten Voices, Mitali Perkins, editor

A Sitting at St. James by Rita Williams-Garcia

Adult Books

Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell                                              

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty

The Heritage Month Project: The Lives of Housewives With Shirley Jackson and Erma Bombeck

The Women's History Month portion of my Heritage Month Project has provided me with an opportunity to do some thinking about two women writers who worked in times that were close together in terms of timeline but different in terms of what was going on in society. They also both wrote about the lives of housewives. 

I am talking about my obsession, Shirley Jackson, and Erma Bombeck.

Shirley Jackson

While Shirley Jackson is known today for writing literary horror, during her lifetime she also wrote memoirish essays for women's magazines, work that paid rather well and was well received. She turned out two collections of these things in the early 1950s, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. In 2015, fifty years after her death, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings was released, which included more of her housewife work. It's been fifteen years since I've read the first two books, but at the time I found one of them "just so well done." The same is true of her housewife essays in Let Me Tell You, which I've been reading this past month.

These essays are drole, but they don't focus on being funny. They are not jokie. There is no reaching to get a laugh, because making readers laugh isn't the point. The family members who appear in the essays are well-defined characters. Whether they are true to life or not is another thing, but from essay to essay they stay true to the characters Jackson created. 

Because these essays were written so long ago, some of them seem like historical documents. The one on teenagers' need to conform, for instance. That was an issue in the 1950s? Who knew? Jackson gives the best explanation for the teenage desire to sacrifice individuality for the crowd that I've ever seen. 

What Jackson doesn't do in the housewife essays in Let Me Tell You is complain about doing housework. I kept waiting for that, but it never came. She certainly doesn't glorify it or say anything to suggest it is women's God given role for which they should be grateful. Housework isn't a good thing, it isn't a bad thing. It's just a thing.

Erma Bombeck

Around the same time Jackson was writing for women's magazines, Erma Bombeck, a humorist who wrote specifically about being a housewife and mother, began writing a column for a local newspaper. It wasn't until the mid-sixties, however, that she became a syndicated columnist and the '70s and '80s were her era.

Being old as mud, as I am, I remember Erma Bombeck. It is difficult to exaggerate how successful she was. I remember being surprised to see her as a guest on some evening television special. I was totally blown away when I learned she was pulling down half a million dollars a year, because that was real money back then. I didn't know until recently that she had an eleven-year gig on Good Morning America or that she developed and wrote for a sitcom. It was not a successful sitcom. However, this was before stand-up comics were getting their own shows. To me the failure of the show is far less significant than the fact that a woman got a chance to create one. 

I have huge respect for Bombeck's achievement. I was just never a fan of her writing. It may have been because I was younger and felt the things she wrote about were somewhat dated. I may have found her humor obvious and contrived. I can't even recall. I tried to read one of her books this past month and just couldn't get through it. Bombeck's success must have put her under tremendous pressure to produce content for the columns and appearances she was making, which Jackson probably didn't experience. The "rush to publish" could easily have had an impact on her writing. 

Is Writing About Housewives a Good Career Move?

In the foreword to Let Me Tell You, Jackson's biographer, Ruth Franklin, says that Jackson "considered herself at least a part-time housewife." A lot of the writing she did about that part-time life was done in the early 1950s, a period we think of as the Golden Age of Housewifery, the era I've read that trad wives look back upon with nostalgia. Yet an article in The Guardian from 2016 raises the question of whether critics didn't take her seriously for a long time because of "her busy sideline producing funny tales about life as a housewife and mother for women's magazines."  The era when being a housewife was most highly accepted was also a time when being a housewife marked you as lesser? Twisted much? 

Bombeck, on the other hand, was writing during the second wave of feminism. Women were leaving the house. You'd think that would be a really bad time to be trying to make a career writing about housewives. But, no, Bombeck did fantastically well. Two theories about why, both my own:

1. While Jackson didn't complain about housework, Bombeck did. She made it okay to complain, and her housewife readers appreciated that. 
2. Bombeck's housewife humor was nonthreatening. Readers could embrace this housewife stuff at the same time that women were turning their backs on it in order to do other things. Jackson's housewife writing was nonthreatening, too, but there wasn't anything going on culturally at that time that would make people seek it out for comfort the way they might have in the '70s and '80s.

Hey, Maybe Networking Does Help Writers

In Haunted Houses in The New Yorker (2016), author Zoe Heller says that Jackson and her husband were part of a social set that included Ralph Ellison and Bernard Malamud, and I've seen several other references to them knowing those writers. But I don't know what that means. Jackson lived in Bennington, Vermont in the 50s and 60s. (There's not much there even now.) What access did she have to these writer friends? How much did being part of group of writers help her? (Note: I have not read Ruth Franklin's Jackson bio, which might address those questions.) 

However, even I knew Erma Bombeck was friends with Art Buchwald, a high profile humor writer of the period, and I believe there may have been other humor writers she was connected with. All men. In those days, it would have been helpful to be tight with men in your profession. I recently learned she was also friends with Phyllis Diller, a stand-up comic who specialized in housewife humor. These names mean nothing to you now, but these people were a very big deal in Bombeck's day. More so, I'm guessing, than Bernard Malamud was in Jackson's. Coverage in the press of friendships among well known writers/comics could benefit all of them.  

Don't Let Your Mind Wander

Jackson did more than one type of writing. In addition to the housewife memoirs and the literary horror, she wrote short stories. As I said earlier, the question has been raised as to whether or not the housewife work hurt her with critics of her time. But the refusal stay in a lane may not have helped her, either. The literary world does like its labels and pigeonholes. So does the publishing world. There's nothing like a nice clear book category to make marketers happy. Because Jackson did different types of work, it may have been difficult to define her during her lifetime.

Bombeck didn't just stay in her lane, she owned it. She wrote about housewives and mothers. People liked reading about housewives and mothers. People knew what they were getting with her. The publishing world knew how to sell her. Everything fell into place.

Life After Death

I believe Shirley Jackson has always maintained a bit of a reputation, even if it was primarily for her short story, The Lottery. Horror fans have kept up interest in her work as well. Recently, though, she's been experiencing a comeback. Part of that is due to her children's efforts to manage her estate. (Well done, guys.) Part of it may be that she's been dead more than half a century, and the 50-year anniversary might have triggered some attention. Then there was Netflix's beautiful version of The Haunting of Hill House in 2018. That could well have encouraged readers to go back to her books. I think she's doing pretty well right now, though probably not for her housewife writing. 

Erma Bombeck is all housewife writing.  A play about her was being staged a few years ago and the University of Dayton runs a writers' workshop named for her, but it can be difficult to find her books in libraries or places like Libby. She's been dead for just under 30 years, and her time for a revival of interest may still be coming. Also, humor writers may not age well.  A 2022  Guardian article claims that Bombeck's friend, Art Buchwald, who died in 2007, has been forgotten. Finally, humor about women's lives is more common than it was in Bombeck's day, and it's not just about being a housewife or a mother. Readers can find more up-to-date material. 

Housewife Writers

Though both Jackson and Bombeck self-identified as housewives, they were also both writers. The extent of Bombeck's career demands and the money her writing earned her may have meant that there came a point where she was no longer doing housework. I don't know that Jackson ever made enough money to be able to pay for someone to take over housework for her. 

While their lives as housewives had an impact on their writing, it's hard to determine what kind of impact their writing had on their lives as housewives. Did the writing become such a big factor for them that they were no longer living the experience they were writing about?