U.S. Support for Heritage Months Appears to Have Disappeared. You Can Do Something About That.

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This year I am doing what some might call identity reading--I'm reading books by authors who are members of groups that have been marginalized in the past or still are. I'm doing that by planning my reading around Heritage Months, months that have been dedicated to recognize various groups. Last month I read for Black History Month, this month I'm reading for Women's History Month.

I used the U.S. Department of State's list of heritage months, which existed in February. It does not exist now. Back in February, when I wrote about this, I carefully made a list of those heritage months, though it doesn't include which heritage groups are recognized on which calendar months. You can also find an archived State Department Celebrates Heritage and History Months from a different administration that looks pretty similar to the page that disappeared. 

You Actually Have the Power to do Something 

You can read anytime

If the removal of that material from the government website is something that concerns you, you can take positive action to compensate for its absence.

You don't need a government agency's guidance to read about women, Arab Americans, Jewish Americans, immigrants, LGBTQ Americans, Hispanic Americans, or Native Americans. Google any of those topics, and you'll find agencies and libraries with book lists. 

More important than reading about these groups, read books by authors who are members of these groups. It doesn't matter whether you buy their books or get them at a library, whether you read a traditional or e-book edition. Read something. If you like what you've read, use your voice to tell people.

• Tell people on Facebook, BlueSky, Twitter, or any other social media platform you are part of.
• On Goodreads? Do a Goodreads review.
• If you can tolerate Amazon, do an Amazon review.

These are important actions for supporting all writers, at any time. You can do these things now for these groups of writers.

A Suggested Schedule

Here's the schedule I'm using for the rest of my Heritage Month reading project. You'll notice a few blank months. I definitely will need them to spread out the reading on some of the months honoring multiple groups. But, you know, we can read and support authors and groups any time of the year. 

• March: Women's History
• April: Arab American History
• May: Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Island Heritage Month; Military
  Appreciation Month; Jewish American History Month
• June: Immigrant Heritage Month, Pride Month, Caribbean American Heritage Month. 
• Sept. 15 through Oct. 15: Hispanic Heritage Month 
• November: Native American Heritage Month. (That wasn't part of the Department of State's website. Make of that what you will.) Military Family Appreciation Month

You may find organizations that support other heritage or history groups. You can read and support anyone you want.

Reading and supporting someone is doing something. 

I'm Thinking of Making Introvert Humor a Specialty. New Story Behind the Story

Image from Netflix

My most recent humor writing, An Introvert's Nightmare, was published at MuddyUm earlier this week. It is far more about being introverted than it is about Megan Sussex, who, if her lifestyle show is at all accurate, is quite extroverted. 

This piece was time sensitive, in that "With Love, Meghan," which did, indeed, trigger the dream described, released last week and anything written referring to it would need to be published soon. This is significant, because in addition to being introverted, I am quite a slow writer. This may only be the second time I've written, submitted, and had something published this fast. Maybe it's the third. I don't know. It's unusual for me, at any rate.

One of the issues I was dealing with here is that this piece is pretty much an essay. Borderline memoir. That cuts down on the number of places I could submit it, because some humor sites don't accept essays. Additionally, as a reader of on-line humor, I don't want to sit in front of a screen reading a lot of text. Thus, the judicious use of subheadings.

MuddyUm requires their writers to use kickers, a line above the title that helps define what the piece is. I came up with "Introvert Humor." Now I'm thinking maybe I could do more of that.

The Heritage Month Project: "The Cooking Gene" By Michael W. Twitty

I know it's Women's History Month, but I had to finish my last read for Black History Month! It was a good book. Pretty amazing, in fact.

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty is another book I've owned for some time but didn't read. I was attracted, I'm sure, by the culinary history aspect. But now that my body is shot and I'm limited in what I eat, reading about food, itself, doesn't interest me as much as it used to. I've started following gluten free Facebook pages to give you an idea how my mind runs these days.  

This book, though, isn't just about food.

Twitty is a food writer, culinary historian, independent historian, and historical interpreter. I'm not sure if he's a cook/chef, though he does cook as part of his work as a historical interpreter, demonstrating food cooked as slaves would have done it in the south. For my last unsold book, I did research on independent historians for one of the characters, and I am delighted to be able to point to The Cooking Gene as an example of the kind of work that historians who are not connected to an academic institution can produce. 

And as a food writer, Twitty does very fine work, too. If he cooks a third as well as he writes, he must be very good with that, too.

What Twitty is doing with The Cooking Gene is using his family history to connect with the history of slaves in this country and tying it together with food. We get genealogy with this book, just as we did with Pearl's Secret, though Twitty has the benefit of DNA testing, which Neil Henry didn't have when he was doing his family research. Twitty did more than one DNA test and got dramatically more information than I got with the one Ancestry.com test I was willing to pay for. He also had a personal genealogist. Here's something you never hear: "If I win the lottery, I'm hiring a personal genealogist!" Just so you know, I'm saying it now.

Twitty travels to different parts of the south where his ancestors lived and writes about the different foods that were common there, as well as historical issues for each area. Once again, I'm supposed to know a little history. When I thought of crops in the old south, I thought of cotton. But it wasn't just cotton. It was tobacco (which I sort of knew about) and rice (which I didn't). As nasty crops to work with go, rice sounds the worst.

Twitty makes an interesting point about cotton: We think of cotton as having a huge impact on the enslavement of Blacks, but it did more. It had an impact on immigration in the north, because of all the cotton fabric mills that employed them. Evidently the so-called "Americans" who didn't want to work in the fields in the south, meaning we needed unpaid slaves, also didn't want to work in the mills in the north, so we needed underpaid immigrants. Which raises the question, what did "Americans" want to do?

The issue of immigration in the north connects with my people, because French Canadians came into this country in the nineteenth century to work in those mills Twitty mentions. But that's a story for another month. 

While I was reading this book, I was acutely aware that Twitty was raised knowing a great deal more about Black cooking than I was raised knowing about French Canadian or even Franco American. But, again, that's for another piece of writing.

This was a great book to finish my Black History Month reading, since it relates to two of the other three books I read. As I said, it does some of what Neil Henry does in Pearl's Secret. But it also covers  grim material like The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. It's grimmer, in fact, because when Twitty writes about auction blocks and Black men and women being stripped so white shoppers can check them out, that was real. Readers can reassure themselves that The Underground Railroad is fiction. The Cooking Gene isn't. 

I've had a good month of reading. Time to move on to Women's History.

Retooling Writing: A Story Behind the Story

 Last week Books Are Our Superpower published my piece, I Came for the Genealogy and Stayed for Something Else. This was a revision of my blog post The Heritage Project: A Black Man's Search For His White Family by Neil Henry. It was the second time I was able to publish a revision of a post I did here for publication at Books Are Our Superpower, the first time being This Year I Am Using Heritage Months to Plan My Reading, a revision of a Time Management Tuesday post. 

As I said earlier, reworking material for different markets is often done. I've been interested in reworking some old OC posts as well as the posts I plan to write for this year's Heritage Month Project. The first draft is done here, anyway, so we're only talking revision. Revising could involve restructuring a piece, as I did with I Came for the Genealogy, or it could mean adding new material. It's interesting work, but not terribly taxing.

Is This a Good Use of My Time Given What's Happening at Medium?

I don't know how long I'll continue with this, though, because the bottom has fallen out of the Medium publishing platform as far as readership is concerned. If you look at the eleven (eleven!) pieces published with mine by Books Are Our Superpower on February 27, no one is getting a lot of attention from readers as far as claps are concerned, even though that publication has 66,000 followers. More people could be reading and just not responding, but the claps are a quick and dirty way for a  reader to see what's going on with other writers. 

Another way is to read Medium articles about publishing on Medium. Readership and income has been plummeting for many writers there since last fall. To give you an example, in the past I've had three articles chosen for what is called the "boost program," meaning they were selected for further promotion. Those three articles made anywhere from $80 + or - to over $600. The Heritage Month article published on February 9 of this year was boosted and made $11.28.

I just realized the other boosted articles were all humor. Maybe that just does better on Medium, though self-help and tech are supposed to be the big draws there. Not that I write either of those. 

At any rate, I am rethinking what I'm spending my time on this next year. I won't be changing my goals, but probably my objectives. 

The Heritage Month Project: "The Underground Railroad" By Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Underground Railroad, and while I don't know what other books were being considered for those awards that year, I have to say I have no problem with The Underground Railroad taking the top spots. It is a great read, both character- and plot-driven and very substantial. You finish this book, and you feel, Now, that was a book. 

The Underground Railroad is the story of an American slave, Cora, living in the early nineteenth century south. The time is significant, I think, because we know the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) is long in her future, assuming she's even still alive when it comes. The beginning of her tale is heart-breakingly grim, about life on the plantation. But it's a kind of heartbreak most of us have heard about before. It's not until she enters the underground railroad that something unique happens.

What happens is that The Underground Railroad turns into alternative history. 

The historical underground railroad was an informal network of people who helped American slaves escape into free states, where they might end up being captured and returned to the south, or into Canada, where slavery had been against the law since 1834, when Great Britain outlawed it in its empire. The railroad metaphor for the system was enhanced by the use of the terms "conductors" for guides, "depots" or "stations" for buildings where slaves could be hidden, and "stationmasters" for the people who owned the homes or otherwise were responsible for a building, accepting and hiding slaves there.

Whitehead's alternative underground railroad involves a real railroad that is truly under the ground. When Cora gets onboard, she begins a journey story in which she makes stops that provide her with respite but only for a while. 

Her first stop is in South Carolina where we immediately understand that we're not in the historical south anymore, because one of the first things Cora sees is what is called a skyscraper. Life is a lot better for Blacks in South Carolina, which has what might be called an enlightened attitude. But there's something not quite right here, in a very futuristic scifi kind of way. Sure enough, South Carolina has a little eugenics thing going on. Before this can become an issue she has to deal with, Cora finds out she is being hunted by someone who makes his living catching and returning escaped slaves to their owners. 

She boards the railroad again.

A second stop has a Holocaust feel and another a utopian commune vibe. The ending reminded me of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, which makes sense. The Handmaid's Tale is a story of a woman caught in a nightmarish future, and The Underground Railroad is a story of a woman caught in a nightmarish past.

I'm not totally comfortable saying I enjoyed a book dealing with a historical issue that is so painful. But the alternative history aspect helps to give distance. Black experience makes some great source material for genre writing. 

Other Alternative History Dealing with Black Experience

I loved Dread Nation by Justina Ireland. It's a zombie story and there were no zombies in the nineteenth century, so while the young Black women in this book are trained as zombie hunters as sort of cannon fodder to protect young white women with money, I can be assured this never happened. Right? As I pointed out in my original post, zombie stories supposedly are never just about zombies, and Dread Nation isn't. It definitely deals with race and politics.

Dread Nation has a sequel! Deathless Divide. Oh, I often recall one of the zombie hordes attacking a town in a scene in this book. Do not know why. Again, this isn't so much about zombies. It's about race and gender. 

More Genre Writing From Black Authors

• Science Fiction and Fantasy 
• Mysteries and Thrillers  I've read My Sister the Serial Killer
• Historical Fiction Several things here look good. So many books. So little time.
• Essays and Memoirs I've read a couple of these and am presently reading The Cooking Gene.

The Heritage Month Project: "Pearl's Secret, A Black Man's Search For His White Family" by Neil Henry

Pearl's Secret by Neil Henry is an older book, published in 2001. It's been on my To Be Read Shelf for a number of years. I probably bought it because of the genealogy and history aspect. I didn't know much about it beyond that.

By the time I finally started reading Pearl's Secret, I thought it was going to be a Finding Your Roots thing. That worried me since I stopped watching that show, because I find it so formulaic. ("Your ancestors suffered horribly. How does that make you feel?") Then I thought the book was going to be a memoir of Henry's experience hunting for his white family members, maybe some nerdy stuff about hunting high and low. You do get a little of that. Genealogical research was much more of a chore before the Internet, even if today sites like Ancestry.com are only as accurate as the strangers who are doing the posting there.

But what the book really is is a family history as it relates to race, first through the Black side and then the white side of Henry's family, once he connects with them. I personally think family histories relate to the greater histories families lived through, and Henry's story supports that.

Henry describes his childhood in Seattle as the youngest son of a surgeon and a librarian as being Leave it to Beaverish. It was an idyllic suburban life interrupted by episodes of racism. He's invited by a couple of little white girls in his neighborhood to come over and play only to be chased down the street by their grandfather when he goes to the door. Not at all surprised he remembered that years later. In his family there is talk of the value of having light skin and good hair while at the same time feeling great respect for their Black history and culture. Believe me, no one was talking about French Canadian achievements and listening to French Canadian music when I was growing up. My mother's side of the family didn't know they had any kind of achievements or music, which I suppose can easily happen when your name is Adams.  

Henry's own story of being adrift while attending Princeton and working for Ben Bradlee at The Washington Post tended to drag for me, because I've read about guys going to private schools and having good jobs in journalism before. His grandparents are nice people, but he doesn't talk that much about them. The relatives who are the stars of his family show are his parents, who experienced life under Jim Crow and survived and overcame it. Their stories are riveting, shocking. Seriously, I am shocked by how little I, who have taken a history course or two and read a few history books, have known about the Jim Crow era until recently. I kept talking about these people at the dinner table while I was reading about them. 

Netflix! Where are you? I would watch this mini-series.  

I don't want to say too much about the Beaumonts, Henry's white family, because there's sort of a creative nonfiction thing going on here, with a narrative climax that I don't want to give away. Though I will just say, "boll weevil." Yes, I had heard the name, just as I had heard "Jim Crow." I had no idea the significance, though.

Regarding Peal's secret, itself--That's a bit of a surprise, too. It's not that she was a Black woman hiding her white background or a Black woman passing as white, because she was neither of those things. Her secret is something else. 

Pearl's Secret is a great example of how reading about people you are less familiar with opens up opportunities to see something different, to add to your personal knowledge base. My feelings about this book reminded me of reading Don't Hold Me Back, a picture book memoir written and illustrated by the late artist, Winfred Rembert. Rembert was a few years older than me, but not a lot, and I actually met him. In his book, he writes about growing up in the south at the end of the Jim Crow era. I found it disturbing that someone nearly my contemporary had to pick cotton as a child and saw the bodies of lynched Black men hanging from trees. Now I realize that growing up poorish in rural Vermont when I did, without weekly news magazines or a daily paper coming into the house, was probably a great protector for little Gail in terms of what was going on in the rest of the world.

James Marriott, a columnist with The Times (London), wrote a few days ago that "Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable."  It's also inconceivable if we never knew it happened.

 

Friday Done List February 13

 What's happened these last two weeks?

Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor    

• I made three submissions.
• I received one rejection.
• I had three pieces published. (One of these had been submitted before this period.)
• Had just about decided to try Substack but immediately decided not to. The thinking behind that may become a blog post.
• I worked on two humor pieces, one of which had been rejected a couple of times.
• Readership has plummeted on Medium, which is encouraging me to work harder on submitting elsewhere.
• Last weekend's Weekend Writer post has made me think I need to do a study of short story writing. I've done this in the past, but my success rate with publishing short stories suggests I need to do more. Just in case the whole world isn't wrong, and I'm right. 

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Have done five blog posts.
• Promoted the three pieces published on Medium.
• Continue to work on building community on BlueSky and Medium.
• Have been reading for Black History Month and published blog post on first book read. 
• Promoted my Black History reading post.

Goal 3. Submit Book Length Work to Agents and Editors

• Received rejection on last submission

The Heritage Month Project: "Colored Television" by Danzy Senna

My very first read for my Heritage Month Project, and Black History Month, was a good one, Colored Television by Danzy Senna. This novel was a Good Morning America Book Club Pick (there's some good stuff at that link) so it has had plenty of attention. I, however, didn't hear of it until I saw it on a list of humorous novels. As is often the case for me, while I liked the book very much, I had mixed feelings about how funny it was.

Jane, our biracial main character, is going through a desperate period. She teaches writing at a so-so college where she is at a crucial point. She has been on leave for a year where she is supposed to be finishing...and selling...her novel about mulattoes that she has been working on for ten years. If she can't sell it, she won't get tenure and will be stuck with the heavy workload that the untenured have to shoulder there. Additionally, her funny (yeah, he is funny) artist husband is talented, but his work doesn't sell. The family is constantly moving from one less than desirable living situation to another. One of their two children appears to be in the early stages of being diagnosed with a neurodivergent issue. (Seriously, that can take what seems like forever.) Jane's hopes for a black bohemian bourgeois life for herself and her family are all pinned on that book. That desire is intensified after having housesat for a year in her wealthy TV writer friend's home and experiencing the good life. 

I may not have found this book particularly funny because this white/failed middle grade writer/homemaker identified a lot with its mixed race/failed literary writer/academic. I mean a lot. I, too, am a woman writer who can no longer sell a book and is flailing around with other kinds of writing and has a little boy like Flinn in my family.  I found myself shouting to Jane in my head. "Come on, Jane! You wrote and published one book. You know another book isn't going to fix everything." "Jane! Jane! Don't drink all Brett's expensive wine!"

Jane leaves novel writing after it becomes clear her second book is dead before it even gets in the water. She finds it a relief. I have left novel writing, too, and Jane is right. It is a relief. Except all the little writing projects I come up with for myself can be overwhelming. And, wouldn't you know it, Jane comes up with smaller writing projects that are overwhelming her. Her's involve pitching a comedy show about mulattoes to a Hollywood wheeler and dealer named Hampton Ford.

Now Hampton Ford is also desperate. He complains that the ideas Jane pitches him aren’t mulatto enough, that they’re about random things and the characters she's talking about don’t have to be mulatto. They could be anybody.  I wonder, is that why this book grabs me and evidently a lot of other readers? Is this a book about a mixed-race woman living a desperate life, writing a book about mulattoes, pitching ideas about mulattoes, but she could be anybody?

She could be so any of us?

The Story Behind the Story Times 3

After what seemed to me like quite a bit of rejection the past couple of months, including two last Friday, I had three pieces published in three different Medium publications this past week. 

Kitchen Culture?

The story behind The Big Advantages of Small-Batch Baking was published in Tastyble on the fifth. This is one of my essays about eating/cooking. I have to come up with a name for this category, because as I've probably said before, I'm not interested in traditional food writing. Food writers need to know something. I'm interested in what I think of as nonprestige food. And I'm interested in life around eating. I just thought of "kitchen culture," right this minute. Perhaps I'll use those words somehow. 

Anyway, the backstory to this story is pretty much there in the story. The only interesting bit is that the weekend before it was accepted, I found myself with some extra time, because we were expecting snow the day I was supposed to visit with some relatives and help with the little people there. I spent this time making three small-batch recipes while my husband made one, so I could take pictures for this submission. One of my recipes didn't get into the pictures, because it was not photo ready when it came out of the oven. But that's how the photos in the article came about.

Interesting point: Tastyble has editors who do edit. Many publications on Medium don't. Editors can be helpful. The Tastyble editor I worked with made an excellent point about my original title. It was arty, but told nothing.

The snow didn't develop, I could have gone to my family's house instead of baking and taking pictures for work, but probably wouldn't have because it ended up that two people therre were sick. I worked instead of doing the mother thing. 

Bookish Stuff

I have published a few book-related things in various places on Medium. Last week I revised last Tuesday's blog post about using heritage months as temporal landmarks for planning reading. I'm interested in reworking blog material for publication elsewhere, though Medium would allow me to publish my blog posts there just as they are. 

Nonetheless, I did a big revision and expansion and published This Year I Am Using Heritage Months to Plan My Reading in Books Are Our Superpower. The piece was accepted for Medium's boosted program, which means it will get more promotion.

Reworking material for publication in different venues is a traditional free-lance writer thing, and I'm interested in doing more of it. 

I worked on this intently last Friday and Saturday when I was supposed to be getting ready to go to that same family member's house and then going there. However, they had more sickness there and cancelled. I worked on that photo I used for the illustration in addition to revising and revising and revising instead of bursting into that sick house and making everyone well, which, of course, I could have done with my magic. Working mother guilt lasts for generations.

A Writer on Writing

Erdal Erdal on Pexels

Yesterday The Writing Cooperative, a very big Medium publication that had rejected something I submitted there a few years ago (I can't remember what it was about) published my piece A Hermit Crab
Walks into a Bar. This was something I wrote at least a year and a half ago, so we're talking about submitting something from the files.

I didn't abandon any sick children or refuse to go out into a storm to work on this one, so that's good.

It's gratifying to have had so much published in such a short period. However, Medium has been experiencing a crisis related to payments going down for those writers accustomed to making regular money there and readership going down for writers like me who think they're doing well if they make a few dollars per story. We will have to see whether this recent work (and child abandonment) broadens my readership, which is my major reason for publishing on this platform.

More to follow?

The Weekend Writer: Story and Short Stories

Two articles turned up recently on Medium regarding story, both of which started out good but then drifted off. They reminded me, though, that I think defining story is significant. And, it turns out, difficult.

In years past when I was trying to do it, I found confusing info. For instance, some people use plot and  story interchangeably. Plot is an element of story, so it cannot also be story.

My favorite definition of story comes from L. Rust Hills in his book Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. He says that in a story, something happens to somebody and the somebody is changed as a result. I like to think of it as "something happens to somebody and so what."   

Relating to short stories, which I am more interested in writing than I used to be, Edgar Allan Poe had some significant things to say. They are summarized in How to Write a Short Story According to Edgar Allan Poe at Dark Media. One incident, Gail. One central event.

Hmm. With that in mind, maybe one of my short stories is really a tiny novel.