What Passes for Professional Self-improvement Here

My Personal Short Story Study

Over the last few months, I've been "studying" short story writing by going over notes from workshops I've taken. I'm done with that. Now I've started going through material I've collected and saved on the subject, including an article listing the best short stories to teach yourself how to write. 

So far, these seem like the best short stories to encourage you to give up writing altogether. Or maybe even reading.

Pinterest

Then today I read Pinterest Is My Best-Kept Author Marketing Secret by Melissa Bourbon at Jane Friedman. Bourbon says that followers don't matter at Pinterest, because it's a search engine. You can use it to direct people to your writing.

Well, I'm on Pinterest, and though I don't have much to sell, I thought maybe I could use it to encourage people to read my humor, essays, and short stories. Maybe I could use Pinterest to get my name out for that kind of writing now that I'm not writing children's books.

Well, I took a look at my Pinterest boards, which I haven't touched in 3 years. As you can see from the menu to the left, I don't even link to it here. I think I forgot about it. I sure hope followers truly don't matter there, because I only have 14. And the page seems kind of a mess of both my writing, my design work for characters in books that never found publishers, and things I'm just interested in. (Learning French!) 

I did a little searching to see what other writers are doing on Pinterest, and it seems the same. Though they seem to have more boards. And are there all that many writers there? Really? 

So maybe I'll do a little work on Pinterest, but it will be low priority.

Lower than the short story study.

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race" and Eugenics

This is it, folks. My last reading post for National Immigrant Heritage Month  related to Franco- Americans and the very fine A Distinct Alien Race by David Vermette.

I have no recollection of ever hearing about the eugenics movement in school, though I was a history minor in college.  In the early twentieth century eugenics, the belief that humanity could be improved through selective breeding, became popular enough in the United States that in 1927 the Supreme Court in Buck v Bell found that "The Virginia statute providing for the sexual sterilization of inmates of institutions supported by the State who shall be found to be afflicted with an hereditary form of insanity or imbecility, is within the power of the State under the Fourteenth Amendment."

Eugenics was a national and international movement, culminating in the Holocaust. 

It wasn't until around 25 years ago while I was taking my one graduate course, which was on essay writing (I aced it, since I know you're all wondering), that I stumbled upon eugenics. I was working on an essay for that class that would one day become Dinner at Shirley Farr's House. At that point, the essay was about a local rube (me) who managed to get into a wealthy person's house by way of the restaurant someone had opened in it after her death, enjoyed the place, and then it became even more of a wealthy person's place, ruining her bliss. I decided I should see if I could find anything about Shirl on-line. The woman definitely used her wealth to help her community. She also used it to support something called The Eugenics Survey of Vermont. and did so for ten years. The survey involved research on families as part of the Vermont Eugenics Project, and it would eventually lead to Vermont's own sterilization law in 1931. (It was one of 30 states to have one.) The goal was to reduce the "population of Vermont's "social problem group."

And What Does This Have to do With Franco-Americans, Gail?

Well, it has plenty to do with them, as Vermette says in his chapter on eugenics in A Distinct Alien Race. He refers to a writer named Madison Grant who believed that the U.S. needed to "prevent an infusion of so-called inferior breeding stock to maintain its racial purity." There's lots of quotes  concerned about who was--and was not--fit to reproduce. 

Various groups tended to turn up as targets for eugenicists and French Canadians were among them. (You see them mentioned in writing about Vermont's eugenics survey.) Grant said of them "The Quebec Frenchmen will succeed in seriously impeding the progress of Canada and will succeed even better in keeping themselves a poor and ignorant community of little more importance to the world at large than are the Negroes in the South." (Hitting two groups at once!) Vermette says that Grant classified Canadiens as "the lowest form of whiteness in his racial scheme."

During this period, the issue of whether or not French Canadians are mixed race came up again. Vermette says that genealogists today are divided on how much early French and Native American marriage actually occurred, but it was a common believe in the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and that was a reason for considering Franco-Americans nonwhite and thus inferior. (Another case of hitting two groups at once.)

Vermette gives the Vermont Eugenics Project its own section in his eugenics chapter. He quotes a letter to Dr. Henry F. Perkins, the head of the Vermont project, from Charles Benedict Davenport the creator of the Eugenics Record Office. "Did you know, that in the study of defects found in drafted men, Vermont stood at or near the top of the list...? This result I ascribe to the French Canadian constituents of the population which, I had other reasons for believing, to contain an undue proportion of defectives."

One of the interesting aspects, yes, there is more than one, of the eugenics movement is that terms like "defective" do not appear to have ever been defined. Another interesting aspect? It was a Progressive reform.

Vermont's Eugenics Project particularly targeted the poor, the disabled, French Canadians, and Native Americans. Two hundred and fifty-three sterilizations were performed there between 1931 and 1957.  You can also find a breakdown of sterilizations due to eugenics by state.

Eugenics Today? Positive vs Negative Eugenics

Now, there were two aspects to the eugenics movement:

The one sometimes referred to as negative, involved forced sterilizations of people considered unfit to reproduce. Negative eugenics gets a lot of attention for very obvious reasons. In addition to the unpleasantness going on in this country, books on eugenics by American writers were cited by Hitler and his buddies as influences. (Vermette and others.) Hitler...his buddies...the Holocaust.

This past spring, the word "eugenics" turned up in the press in response to some comments from a government leader on the topic of neurodivergence. 

But while the positive aspect of eugenics isn't, shall we say, as dark, it is...impactful. Positive eugenics encourages the improvement of humanity through selective breeding by actually encouraging breeding, but of the right sort of people. We're talking white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or at least western European. In A Distinct Alien Race, Vermette quotes someone who made a distinction between European French and French Canadian, for instance. No one was encouraging French Canadians to reproduce. The French they were more open to. 

An argument can be made that today's pronatalist (probirth movement) may have a positive eugenics tone to it, one involving large white families. Some pronatalists also have a goal of producing lots of children with high IQ. I say may, because it's difficult to speculate about how wide-spread a goal is when the same couple is featured in articles about it.

To Recap

A Distinct Alien Race is an excellent, well-documented history of a group that has seemed invisible to me most of my life, even though I'm a member of it. At one point the author, David Vermette, describes Franco-Americans as "a mostly forgotten, white-identified ethnic enclave in New England." 

It seems bizarre to me that that could happen to a people who were despised as much as Franco-Americans were one hundred plus years ago. However, history tells us that there are far worse things that can happen to a culture.

Comptez votre bénédictions.

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race" and the Ku Klux Klan

My reading for National Immigrant Heritage Month continues.

I grew up in central Vermont and graduated from the state's university. While there, I had a suitemate (later one of my bridesmaids) who grew up in the northern part of the state. One day she casually mentioned that her grandfather had been active in the Ku Klux Klan in Vermont. (No recollection how the conversation came about.)

I was ignorant back then and not shy about showing it. Everybody knew that the Klan was anti-Black, right? And back then Vermont was not known for its extensive Black population. So, I laughed and said, "Who were they against?"

"French Canadians."

Ayeah, I stopped laughing.

And that, mesdames et monsieurs, is why Klan activity in relation to Franco-Americans is something I was aware of a little earlier in life than I was, say, Little Canadas.

David Vermette has a fascinating chapter on the the KKK and its activities in relation to Franco-Americans in A Distinct Alien Race.

The Klan in the Early Twentieth Century

As Vermette tells it, in the early twentieth century, the Klan became very business-like.  The Ku Klux Klan Corporation was formed in 1915. In 1920, its Imperial Wizard (a former minister) hired a public relations firm. There were members who functioned as traveling salesmen, going into new towns to drum up new members. They ran ads in newspapers and offered special promotions. Protestant ministers, for instance, could join for free. New members paid a membership fee, and bits and pieces of that fee were doled out to various people in the Klan hierarchy. Members bought their hoods and robes from the Klan, and that fee was spread out amongst higher ups, too. It sounds very much like a pyramid scheme.

As with all kinds of businesses, the Klan wanted to grow, and it did. It had quite an impressive membership by the 1920s and was pulling in real bucks. To continue growing, it had to branch out to other parts of the country, such as New England. I was right. Back in my day, there was not a large Black population in New England, and the same was true in the '20s. (Before my day!) But as Vermette says in his book, "Since, in most cases, New Englanders had little occasion to interact with non-whites, distinctions of language and faith served as the practical basis for othering minorities."

In other words, New England had a lot of French-speaking Catholics. According to Vermette, in the early part of the twentieth century it also had a lot of Klan members.

The Klan and Franco-Americans

The Klan response to Franco-Americans was "logical" to the extent that Franco-Americans were both Catholic and foreign. Foreign-ish, even if they were born in the United States, because they maintained their language. The fear that Franco-Americans were too close to their homeland and would thus be able to join with French Canadians in some kind of French Catholic takeover was renewed during this period. To deal with that the Klan encouraged the passage of laws that would enforce English-only instruction in schools, and they were successful with that in some New England states. Dealing with Catholicism was harder. In the South, the Klan worked through the Democratic Party, but in the north Democrats tended to be working class and...Catholic.

And recall that French Canadians and Franco-Americans were sometimes considered mixed race because of the possibility of intermarriage between early French settlers and native people. In addition to being Catholic and French speaking, for the Klan Franco-Americans were not truly white the way European immigrants were. 

Vermette's chapter on the Klan in New England is fantastic in terms of both explaining the Klan's response to Franco-Americans there (conflicts between pro- and anti-Klan groups, bombings, and the burning of a Franco-American parish school, for instance) and in terms of Klan history, itself. It left me wondering why, given the times we live in, we're not hearing about a resurgence of Klan activity.

Perhaps, given the times we live in, those who might otherwise be interested don't feel there's a need for it.

Next time: Franco-Americans and the eugenics movement. 

A Lit Journal Acceptance and a Story Behind the Story

My new short story, What We Do, has been published in Stonecoast Review Literary Journal. It's going to appear in its print journal, as well, which is wonderful, because print still has some...allure...shall we say? I have been published by a few literary journals in the past, but not many so this is satisfying to say the least. Literary journals are where short stories are published these days, so if you want to write them, it's good to break into that market.

This post from back in 2010 helps explain why I've made so little progress moving into short story writing. Other factors:

• Lack of practice. The eight children's books published prior to 2008 took a lot of time. I've also written a number of unpublished novels since then. Unpublished, but still time consuming.
• Lack of training. I'm trying to address that now with workshops and self-study.
• Lack of focus. By which I mean I'm also interested in writing humor and essays. And within essays I'm interested in writing about eating and maybe nature and travel. (I have a submission in somewhere that I'm claiming fits their nature theme.) I recognize that I'm spreading myself pretty thin in terms of developing a level of knowledge of all those forms.

Back to "What We Do"

This story began decades ago. My interest was in the women as a group, as protectors and defenders. I submitted a much earlier third-person version with no main character, to a women's magazine that doesn't exist anymore. I took an on-line flash fiction class during the first year of the pandemic where I was able to get feedback on this particular story from the instructor. At that point, I had shortened it a great deal and created a first-person narrator--the predator. The story began with a description of the setting, and the instructor made the very valid point that if the story was about the women, I shouldn't be giving up the valuable introduction to the beach.

The most interesting part of her feedback was that she didn't see the strength of the women at all. She accepted the women as being mundane, stereotypical moms being dissed by the author and didn't recognize that they were operating on two levels. 

I needed to address both those points.

I revised and then submitted the story five more times before submitting to Stonecoast.

Why I Think This Story Was Finally Published

1. Stonecoast Review made a call for stories dealing with the theme of "power." I find writing on someone else's themes difficult and rarely do it. However, in this case, I felt I already had a story dealing with power. I pitched What We Do as a story about people who are traditionally viewed as powerless but are not.
2. Traditionally, short stories are supposed to show change in some way. By the time I submitted this story to Stonecoast, I had revised once again and given it a main character who has little respect for the women around her in the opening, recognizes what they are doing, and changes her attitude, which is made clear when she entrusts something valuable to one of them.
3. It also had a new title--What We Do instead of On the Beach, which is what I'd been using for the most recent drafts and submissions. Titles in flash are particularly important. They need to be doing some of the lifting and What We Do does, if for no other reason than that it shows action, which On the Beach does not. On the Beach also puts too much focus on the setting, instead of the women.

You can see what I mean about lack of training holding me back with my short fiction writing. This was a long learning curve for me that I hope will have an impact on my future writing.

Oh, And I Attended a Launch Event for This Issue 

Stonecoast Review held a launch event for this new issue to which I was invited. It was held over Zoom. You know how I sincerely love Zoom. 

I didn't volunteer to read, since I hadn't been to one of these events before and wanted to test the waters. I'm glad I didn't, because at that event I wasn't in children's publishing world or on-line publishing world. I was in academic/literary world with people who had had work nominated for writing awards, who had or were editors of literary journals I'd heard of, who had MFAs and were up for Ph.D.s and who are teachers. I definitely have professional writing accomplishments, but they aren't the same kind of accomplishments these people had. Mine aren't better, they aren't worse, they're just different. 

This was a very different kind of pool for me, and I'm glad to have had an opportunity to wade in it.

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race" and Little Canadas

My Reading for National Immigrant Heritage Month Continues

One of the many things author David Vermette writes about in  A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans  that I knew nothing about growing up is Little Canadas. I mean I didn't hear about them until the last ten years or so. I had some knowledge of Little Italies, Chinatowns,  Little Polands, and Little Swedens. But I'd never heard of Little Canadas, even though there was supposed to have been one in the early twentieth century in Winooski, Vermont where I was a student teacher in the middle school years later. I now also wonder if the extremely small  town in which my father was born and grew up would qualify as a Little Canada, but one that grew up around farming, not mills. My Gauthier grandfather was 

The Gauthier family on their Vermont farm. 

from eastern Ontario and came here with his wife and older children after WWI, making him and other French Canadians like him different from the French Canadians who came to the U.S. from Quebec in the nineteenth century to find work in mills. My American-born father, who as an adult lived in a neighboring, very nonFrench town, spoke his native language with nearby people he'd grown up with right up until his death. (He didn't speak it in his own adult home, of course, since his wife and daughters didn't understand a word of it.)

Otherwise, Petite Canadas were neighborhoods that developed around mills and Catholic churches, primarily in the nineteenth century. People shopped in French-run stores, attended French-speaking schools, and may have been able to read locally published French newspapers and go to French doctors. I'd say they could attend French churches, but the Mass was in Latin in the old days, so that wouldn't have mattered as much, though French-speaking priests did appear to be common in them.

According to Vermette, it may have been possible for many French-Canadian immigrants to not have to speak English if they lived in a Little Canada.

What Happened to Little Canadas?

Why do other areas associated with the ethnic identities of immigrant groups still exist, but we find so little left of Little Canadas? Even Chinatowns, which experienced serious racism in the late nineteenth century, are still around and attract visitors. Many of the other ethnic "towns" may have grown up around mills or some other work situation, as Little Canadas did. But when the mills closed down, the big factor in the end of Little Canadas, some aspect of Italian, Polish, Swedish, etc. culture remained. 

Why were Little Canadas different?

My own speculation:

1. Vermette says in A Distinct Alien Race that there was incredible poverty in Little Canadas, at least in those in New England. He talks of housing built for Franco-American workers by the Cabot Company, which owned a number of mills in the area that employed them. Typhoid and diphtheria were an issue in the 1880s. He has quotes from a newspaper editor and doctors from the same time period complaining of the sanitary conditions.  Vermette also has statistics suggesting that education levels stayed low among Franco-Americans into the twentieth century. Among my father's siblings, only one of the eight finished high school. For all I know, she was the only one of the eight to even attempt going to high school. My point being, if the living conditions were not as bad in other ethnic communities and if the groups living in them were able to improve their personal situations with education faster, that would explain why they stayed in them while Franco-Americans got out of Little Canadas, many of which were then just absorbed into the English-speaking world. Lowell, Massachusetts' Little Canada, for instance, was demolished as part of an urban renewal project.
2. Because the French-Canadian immigrants came from a country that bordered the U.S., their need for an ethnic community where they could speak their own language and practice their own faith may not have been as great as it was for people who came from Europe and Asia. People arriving from Italy, Poland, and China in the nineteenth century, for instance, probably had no expectation of ever being able to go home again. But the French Canadians, the only immigrants arriving in this country by train, could "go home again." In fact, there was a great belief at that time that they were here just to make money, and when they'd made enough, they'd go back to Canada with it. (I don't know how many of the French Canadians knew that, since so many of them stayed here.) My husband's family has heartbreaking nineteenth-century letters from Irish parents writing to their children in America, asking them when they're coming home. My father's family, who arrived here in the twentieth century, went back to Canada for funerals and events and had family members coming down here to visit them, which explains why I know some of my father's cousins. That kind of familial interaction may have been enough to satisfy the cultural needs ethnic communities filled for other groups.

Some Fiction Related to this Subject

Last week I happened to stumble upon and start reading The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie. It's primarily set in 2016 in what's left of a Little Canada in Maine, where the number of remaining French-speaking residents can fit around a kitchen table. So far, it's terrific

Next Time: Franco-Americans and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race"

As Heritage Months go, June is primarily known as Pride Month. But it is also National Immigrant Heritage Month. (Once again, I want to point out that those links are to archived material from former administrations. It appears that the present one doesn't observe them.) I hope to get to Pride Month in a few weeks. (I have a book!) But I'm beginning June with the first of four posts on my own favorite immigrant group, French-Canadians, and a fine book about their immigration to New England in the nineteenth century, A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans by David Vermette.  

What's that you say? You weren't aware that Franco-Americans, Americans of French-Canadian descent, even were an immigrant group? Not a real immigrant group? That may be because though the term Franco-American isn't new according to Vermette, it is more common in New England than in other parts of the country. Like him, I never heard the word Franco-American until I was an adult, though I grew up in New England and even around French speaking family and neighbors. (I had only a few American-born French-speaking cousins. By our generation, the language was pretty much gone, but my American-born father didn't learn to speak English until he went to school.) The lack of a well-known unifying name may help explain why we are a very low-profile group. That's in spite of the fact that in early days the French were all over North America. It's also in spite of the fact that, as Vermette explains, in the United States in the late nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries, French Canadian immigrants were...maybe reviled is too strong a word. Something like reviled.

How the Press Treated Franco-Americans in the Nineteenth Century

The press in the nineteenth century had a great deal to say about the French-Canadians moving into the United States according to Vermette. He quotes British-American Citizen from 1889:

"The French number more than a million in the United States...The number of their children is unimaginable for Americans...They are kept a distinct alien race subject to the Pope in matters of religion and politics. Soon, with the Irish, they will govern you, Americans."

Well, the British have always had a thin about the French, haven't they? Should we expect them to feel any differently about French-Canadians?

The New York Times also had things to say about French-Canadian immigrants in the late nineteenth century.

May 1, 1881. "They are, for the most part, ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world...They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.,,[T]he feeling which they excite...is not fear or jealousy, but a sort of contempt."

French-Canadian immigrants were believed to be temporary here. They'd only come to the U.S. to make some money and go home with it. The New York Times, 1885, Canadians in New England:

"In such towns as Fall River and Holyoke the French Canadians have nearly shouldered out the native American operatives, who a generation ago impressed foreign observers by their superiority to any persons engaged in similar occupations elsewhere...he [French Canadians] cannot be brought to take any interest in the life around him of a community in which he regards himself as merely a sojourner. He maintains his own churches and no schools. Add to this feeling of alienism that he is absolutely unenterprising, and it becomes evident that he must be a troublesome element in the population."

Notice the term "native American" in the above quote. Vermette says that the descendants of English Protestant settlers in the United States managed to establish themselves as the native, original people here, even though the French had been on the North American continent as long as they had and the original native people had been here for thousands of years. 

Going back to 1878, Vermette quotes another New York Times article:

"...beyond dispute that there is hardly a French Canadian family...that does not inherit strongly-marked traces of Indian blood."

This is a reference to a belief, which Vermette discusses, that French Canadians were mixed race because of intermarriage with native people in earlier years. While I had not actually heard that, I wasn't surprised. Years ago, I'd read that the French settlers in Canada were far less brutal towards the native people there than the English settlers were toward them in the United States. Certainly, there was violence there. But, as I heard it, the French were often more interested in trapping than farming, which meant they didn't feel a need to take as much land, and sometimes married native women. It never occurred to me that that would have some kind of impact generations later. It would come into play during the twentieth century eugenics movement. But that is another blog post.

One attitude toward Franco-Americans in the nineteenth century is particularly interesting for us today. At the end of that century, there was a fear that French Canadians wanted to take New England to create a French Catholic country. The New York Times was on this in January, 1889:

"The tradition is that within a period not included within the present century there will be a country in North America called New France. It is to be constituted of Quebec, Ontario as far as Hamilton, such portions of the maritime provinces as may be deemed worth taking, the New England states, and a slice of New York. No effort is to be made to realize this tradition until the French race in America reach a certain number."

This appears to have been quite a widespread belief, and you can read more about it in an article by Vermette in Smithsonian Magazine, When an Influx of French-Canadian Immigrants Struck Fear Into Americans. 

Vermette says that in a region/culture where there aren't clear physical differences between people, language and religion become far more important in classifying others. You can see that with almost all immigrant groups, but it seems to have been happening in spades with Franco-Americans in the nineteenth century. The attitudes toward Franco-Americans in the past that Vermette reports are so extreme that it's amazing to me that now we are pretty much invisible. 

Given the fear of a French-Canadian plot to take over a section of the United States a hundred and fifty years ago, more or less, it is jaw-dropping to me that there are U.S. folk (at least one, anyway) who now want to push the issue of making Canada a fifty-first state. The reversal is just amazing. 

Coming up next: Little Canadas

The Heritage Month Project: "Hula"

For those of us who observe Heritage Months, it is still just barely May and thus Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Month. I'll remind you that the link I just used  takes you to U.S. State Department archived material on the subject. Otherwise, the State Department Heritage Month Page disappeared earlier this year. But look! It's back with one entry for Black History Month from January of this year, in which the current administration recognized February as Black History Month.

I'm not touching what's going on with that, except to say huzzah for Black History.

Now, on to the Native Hawaiian portion of my reading this month. Which was Hula by Jasmine Iolani Hakes. Of all the books I've read for heritage months this year to date, this is the one that has made me the most aware of my ignorance of other groups. I had vague knowledge that historically U.S. involvement with Hawaii was not our finest hour. But for the most part, I just thought of Hawaii as a vacation destination. I didn't even know about the 1993 Apology Resolution, in which the U.S. government recognized its part in overthrowing the Hawaiian government in 1893.  

Hawai'i is spelled Hawai'i, but because it was spelled Hawaii in the act making it a state, Hawaii has to be used in many situations. I mention that, because I have a thing about how groups lose their language after becoming part of the United States. 

My last Heritage Month book, The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsaka, used a collective narrator/first-person-plural point of view/narrator. Lo and behold, Hula does, too! At least some of the time. 

There are two things going on in this book. In part it is the story of three-generations of women in a Hawaiian family in which the question of what does it mean to be Hawaiian is very important. In part it is the story of Hawaiian culture. When the book is focusing on Hawaiian culture, the collective narrator is used. That narrator pretty much disappears when the second and third generation women take center stage.

Though not humorous, Hula reminds me of the fantastic new Netflix sitcom North of North in which a woman leaves her husband and is starting a new life. Seen it before, yeah? The big draw here is the woman is Inuit, and the story is set in her contemporary Inuit village. We're seeing someone else's world. Like North of North, Hula rises above being something we've seen before, another mother/daughter identity drama. In this case, the story is set in late twentieth century Hawaii, where we see another world, and the characters are Hawaiian. 

Or are they?

Hula can be a little demanding to read at times, because the characters use a dialect that will probably be unfamiliar to a lot of mainland readers. But it's worth the effort because of the wealth of knowledge about Americans who we rarely see unless they are the backdrop to a vacation story.

Hula, the dance, by the way, is so much more than a dance. This clip from This Morning covers the Merry Monarch Festival and the hula competition that is part of it, both of which are in Hula. In fact, I kept going on-line to check facts from the book. Everything I looked for was there.

Yikes! I Was Rejected For Not Meeting A Publication's Standards. And I Don't Think They Were Talking Writing Quality.

Remember the post I did here a couple of weeks ago on Anne Lamott's writing advice regarding shitty first drafts? Yeah? Weeellll, I revised it and submitted it to a publication on the Medium platform that focuses on writing. It was rejected because "This does not meet the publication's quality standards. Review our rules for next time."

The issue, I believe, was the word "shitty."

Now, I did read the rules before submitting, and I did see "Submissions must be family-friendly. We reserve the right to reject offensive or inappropriate articles." I took this seriously enough that I did some rewriting so I could remove as many "shitties" from the text as possible.

Original cover. I remember it.

I knew I was taking a risk. But Bird by Bird, the book in which Lamott writes about shitty first drafts, is thirty-years-old. The concept has been discussed among writers for that long. I thought it was possible that it was so well-known that the name for it would not be considered shocking in writing circles and that a publication that publishes writing about writing would be interested in this. Also, I used the book's original cover as my illustration to try to make clear that I had some support for my essay.

I was wrong. And also a little bit arrogant.

I Broke the Most Basic Rule for Submitting Writing

The most basic rule for submitting writing is:

• Read the editor's/agent's guidelines and follow them.
• You know better than the editors/agents? Sure, you do. Follow their guidelines, anyway.

We sometimes hear stories about writers who broke this rule and became wildly successful in spite of it. But you don't hear them often, do you?  That's because they are very rare.

• Read the editor's/agent's guidelines and follow them.

I Am a Little Embarrassed About This

Not because I used "shitty" in this particular context. As I said, it's been discussed in writer circles for decades. The Brevity Blog used "shitty first drafts" in a title just last month. Also, I'm not embarrassed about intentionally breaking a rule and losing a big opportunity. I was published at this particular publication once before and only made $1.76. At Medium, you're paid by the reader and by how much time those readers spend reading your work. What I ought to be embarrassed about is how few readers I attracted there last time. My point being, though hope springs eternal, I wasn't expecting a big payday that I'd lost by intentionally ignoring the editor's guideline.

No, I'm embarrassed because I tried to work around the guideline at all. Just a bit unprofessional, Gail.

Not that embarrassed, though, since I got a blog post out of the experience.

A Story Behind the Story with Food and Stanley Tucci

Jonathan Taylor on Unsplash

This is a story of writing reality. It's not a story many writers will want to hear.

I wrote a humor piece called My Dinner With Stanley Tucci back in 2022 after watching his CNN series, Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, which dealt with food and culture. Italy isn't a major interest for me, but food and culture, yes. For people who aren't into Italy or food and culture, let me tell you that this was a popular series, as CNN series go. I believe it had two seasons.  

Why did I find something amusing regarding this show? Well, as it turns out, I have a few not-very-serious chronic health issues that are greatly improved if I limit what I eat. As much as I enjoyed Tucci's show, I can't eat most of what he talked about, at least as he talked about it.

It's the incongruity theory of humor, people. Watching all those shows about food I can't eat.

A Bit of a Timeline

I wrote the humor piece and submitted it to McSweeney's back in 2022. I used to make jokes about how the McSweeney's humor editor and I were on a first-name basis, because I'd submitted there and been rejected so many times. No, you're right. It's not that funny.

Then I submitted it to a Medium humor site, which also rejected it. 

By that point, Tucci's Searching for Italy show was getting too far in the past for a humor piece to work. Without it being in the news, as it had been while it was on, only fans would recognize the reference.  So I decided to wait for a new season before making more submissions. Then I learned that CNN was canceling the show, because they were going to do less original programming. Though it later ran Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico, which sounds like the same show to me, except for the part about Eva Longoria hosting it and it being in Mexico. Now, I like Eva Longoria, but, come on. They had Stanley Tucci who is a known food person!

Anyway, the cancelling of the show made my humor piece seem even less of a go. 

Then, Stanley got a new show! Tucci in Italy! 

With a few edits to bring the piece up to date, I was ready to submit again. Another rejection, but then it  found a home  with Muddy 'Um.

Except for the creepy child piece published at Frazzled, which was new material and has done well, I haven't been making a giant effort to write anything original for Medium publications. Readership is way down there for many people, myself included. I was never a big draw there, but over time there was a possibility that I would eventually draw more followers who would actually read what I wrote. Because of whatever has happened there, that seems unlikely, which has motivated me to write things to submit elsewhere. As a result, I've mainly been submitting revisions of blog posts to Medium pubs. (In fact, I have a revision almost ready to submit now.) 

But My Dinner With Stanley Tucci was already written and just needed to be brought up to date. Of course, I did some other tinkering, because I'm always tinkering. But I wasn't starting from scratch. Since I didn't need to put a lot of time and effort into it, and it was probably time sensitive just as the original piece had been, I believed it was worthwhile to submit to Medium. Whatever I get for readership and income will be fine, and it will fill a gap in my publication timeline. I don't like a lot of gaps.

So there you go. That's what happened here.

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.

UPDATE 5/24/25: I took a workshop this past Thursday on novels-in-stories. I wonder if Behind You Is the Sea would fall under that umbrella.

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