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 I've also written a number of unpublished novels since then. Unpublished, but still time consuming.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.

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.

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.

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? 

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.

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 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?

Does It Seem To You As If It's Been A Long Time Since I've Published Something? Because It Seems That Way To Me. A Story Behind The Story.

Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels

 Today my first humor piece of the year, Trad Parents: Learn How to Go Back to a Simpler, Happier Time  with This Sample of Titles From my Blog was published at Frazzled. 

As I mentioned just yesterday, I am freaked out by trad wives. Being old as mud, I recall the total woman period. So, I believe trad wives will go the same way total women did. We shall see. 

I don't recall the total woman thing being as rooted in nostalgia as trad wives are believed to be. I have a great distrust for nostalgia, perhaps because of my interest in history. Nostalgia became my jump off point for this humor piece.

If trad wives could be nostalgic, why couldn't other groups? The first one I thought of was trad parents. What would turning to, and embracing the past, mean for them? Giving up birth control, maybe? This parody raises the question of what the trad parents here are really nostalgic for...a past they never knew or a past with birth control?

Notice that I mention birth control three times in Trad Parents. That's the rule of three. It's used in many kinds of writing, humor writing being just one of them. 

One Last Publication For 2024, And One Last Story Behind The Story

Image from 2025.org.

Last week my last humor piece of the year, What I Hope Is in Project 2025 was published in The Haven. This means I had thirteen acceptances and publications this year. I was going to hold number thirteen for next year so I could hit the ground running in January. However, it has a bit of a shelf life, so I found it a home.

The story behind the story is very simple this time. We bought a new children's car seat, and my computer guy/car seat guy was very unhappy with how the installation was going. This inspired him to rant, "There should be something about car seats in that Project 2025."

Which inspired me. 

My Twelfth Publication Of The Year, Which Means...A Story Behind the Story!

 I managed to have a twelfth piece of writing, this one humor, accepted at a publication on the Medium platform. Mountain Lake Resort Timeshares: You'll Wait All Year to Come Back was published in The Haven. I hoped I'd manage to get twelve in this year, which would be averaging one publication a month. It was not a goal, however, because I believe goals should only involve things we can control, and I can't control editors. Or just about anybody, for that matter. What I could control was continuing to write and submit.

I began writing Mountain Lake Resort Timeshares last January, even taking pictures for the illustration then. As more hordes of rabid fans know, I go away every January for a week for a sort of reading retreat. With frolicking in the snow. Unless there is no snow, then there is just frolicking outside in the bleak midwinter.

Our retreat spot is wonderful. People love it there. And they say so in guest books in our timeshare unit. Guest books that go back decades. I cannot exaggerate the beautiful things people say about that spot. Really, really beautiful things. 

Beautiful things are wasted on me, so I wrote Mountain Lake Resort Timeshares: You'll Wait All Year to Come Back.

The Story Behind The Story: Some Feminist Humor

Karolina Kaboompics on Pexels

 I am in the midst of a socializing week, which just requires so much of me. Draining. But I can jump in here to tell you that I had still another humor piece published this past Tuesday at Slackjaw. If you are a woman, particularly a woman of a certain age, you've heard that many women object to be calling "ma'am," and you probably know why. If you aren't a woman of a certain age or if you are a man, perhaps What Do You Mean You Hate Being Called "Ma'am?" will be enlightening.

Now many Medium writers publish there every day. I've often seen articles there explaining how various writers write articles in just three hours and either immediately publish them themselves or find a Medium publication to do it. I did, I think, three drafts of the "Ma'am" humor piece and submitted it to two non-Medium sites where it was rejected. Slackjaw suggested some edits before accepting it, which I had no objection to. Working with Alex at Slackjaw makes me feel as if I'm working in a comedy writers' room, which I enjoy.

I will say that the first draft that was rejected elsewhere came off as much more of a humorous argumentative essay with material about old white guys who run the patriarchy wanting women to believe we need to keep them and all their buddies in a constant state of arousal and women accepting that about themselves, thus leading them to believe the word "ma'am" is an indication of having aged out of desirability instead of an indication that a woman has achieved personal power. Yeah, there was, perhaps, some strident feminism in that. When it was rejected, I needed to edit it down in order to submit it elsewhere, which led me to strengthening the narrative voice and focusing, focusing, focusing.

What's Coming Next?

This was the third piece of writing I've submitted and had accepted for publication in less than a month.  However, they were all started last summer, except for Dinner at Shirley Farr's, which was started 20 years ago. I hope to get a few more pieces written, submitted, and published by the end of the year, but I have nothing actually started right now.

We'll see what next week brings.

Another Story Behind A Story

Farr House as it still looked when I ate dinner there.

The Memoirist, a Medium publication that is new to me, just published my memoir Eating at Shirley
Farr's House in which I write about very much enjoying a restaurant in a mansion I later learned was once owned by someone who might not have been happy about me being there.

Once again, there is an interesting story beyond the story in the story.

In the Beginning

This memoir began as an essay for the one graduate course I took more than twenty years ago, an essay writing course at the University of Connecticut taught by Sam Pickering. Now, Pickering is the author of a few books of essays, but you can't find much about him on-line. Given the little I know of him from that class, I am not surprised. He did not seem to be an Internet-embracing kind of guy. At that point, none of the historical material was in the essay. 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, enjoy the place, and then it became even more of a wealthy person's place, ruining my bliss.

The History Involved

To make a long story short(er), the history involved in this story relates to the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. There were eugenics fans all over the U.S, and the world, since some draw a line between American eugenics and the Nazis. You don't need to know much to think, Gee whiz, don't these things sound kind of similar? The Nazi connection may be why I never heard of eugenics while I was in high school or college, where I was a history minor. Even though I was in Vermont, which definitely was definitely up to its neck in eugenics. Who wants to have been involved with something with possible Holocaust connections?

What Does Eugenics Have to Do with Me Eating Sticky Buns in a Mansion Turned Restaurant?

Well, it turns out the Shirley Farr of My Dinner at Shirley Farr's was active in Vermont's eugenics movement. How active, you ask? Go ahead, ask. She funded what was known as the Vermont Eugenics Survey for eleven years. She spent between fifty and sixty thousand dollars on it back in the nineteen twenties and thirties when fifty to sixty thousand dollars was real money. 

This survey studied a number of generations of families someone had identified as having issues a society didn't want to encourage, issues eugenicists believed were genetic and could be stopped  immediately if these people weren't allowed to reproduce. A number of these families happened to be poor, happened to be Abenakis, or happened to be French Canadian. 

Because, you know, nothing goes wrong in white anglo saxon Protestant families. Absolutely nothing.

Now, I didn't learn anything about the eugenics movement and Shirley Farr until I decided to look her up on-line either while I was writing the original essay or thereafter. And even then, it took a while for me, a second-generation American on my father's French-Canadian side to go, "Wait. Gail. Isn't it odd you were eating dinner in that woman's house? And you took your kids there?"

Still More to the Story!!!

So that was going on in my head, off and on, over the last twenty years. But I did nothing with it because I had books to write that wouldn't sell and humor writing to get started on.

Then earlier this year I decided to start cleaning my massive professional files. My plan was to save anything I thought I could still do something with and toss the rest. I didn't get far, because I found some undergraduate writing that I used for a humor piece and this graduate material about Shirley Farr.

And the rest was doing research to get specific info on Farr, revising to create a little bit of a braided format, and finding an appropriate illustration.

Now I'm done.

The University of Vermont has a great deal of information about the eugenics movement in Vermont. A great deal. So much. 

  

More Humor For You

Priscilla du PreezCA on Unsplash

The humor piece I mentioned in my Friday Done post was published Friday night. Thank You for Reading Scripture During Our Church Service This Sunday was published at MuddyUm. MuddyUm is a new publication for me on the Medium platform.

This publication requires authors to include a "kicker," a sort of subject line above the title and subtitle. So that was new and quite easy to learn. Coming up with the subject line is probably more effort than technically creating it.

As usual, this humor piece has a back story. I did, indeed, have to read that passage at church and was quite...taken aback...by having to use the word "fornication" in church. Is it not a four-syllable word for a four-letter word? Ah, yeah, it is. But I got used to it. I'll probably just slip into a conversation one of these days, that's how cool I am with it.

Another New Humor Publication. And This One Has a Really Interesting Backstory. With a Moral.

The college paper 

Today Jane Austen's Wastebasket published my latest humor piece, Does "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear Support Our Community's Values? Now, I know that I think everything I write has an interesting backstory, and I am always right about that. But this is a particularly good story.

Last month, I started to clean out my writing files, thinking I would get rid of old starts that I'm not interested in anymore to make more room in the filing cabinet for new work. I didn't get far because the first thing I found was my notebook from my college expository writing class. So, of course, I have to look through it. And what do I find but something called "The Subversive Aspects of The Owl And The Pussycat:  Including A Discussion Of Its Influences On Youth, Sexual Mores, And Society As A Whole."

Now this was a redneck kid's attempt to write a parody of an academic paper, something she didn't know a whole lot about even though she was, indeed, a college undergraduate. The piece is also now very dated, claiming the Owl and the Pussycat's guitar was an influence on a generation of folksingers and the dancing on the edge of the sand at the end "inspired a whole flock of C beach movies." But at the time the instructor was kind.

More importantly, I looked at this thing last month and said to myself, "You can do something with this."

What I did was reframe it and bring it up to date. It is no longer a parody of an academic paper but a parody of a book complaint to a librarian. Instead of hitting on folksingers and movies, it hits on religion and gay couples. The only carry overs from the original are the concerns about money and the Owl and the Pussycat being alone together while unmarried. Money and pre-marital sex are timeless.

I didn't get far with my file cleaning, because I found two more manuscripts I think I can rework for a humor piece and an essay. One is from the graduate-level essay writing class I took a long time ago, and I don't know how long ago I wrote the other one. I have the typed manuscript. It's probably from a couple of computers back and saved somewhere if I only knew where to find it.

I promised you a moral. It's a moral for writers. Never throw away work. 

A New Humor Publication. With A Bear.

June has been a rough month for me as far as work is concerned. I spent a week celebrating a birthday with a family member. Then there were a number of days of preparation for John the Baptist Day. Then there was some this, and there was some that. 

But I did have a humor piece accepted for publication. Things I Don't Want to Hear from My Hiking Group was published this morning at Greener Pastures Magazine.

This piece as an interesting backstory. But, then, I think everything I write has an interesting backstory. But this one really does!

1. It began when I would do "Things You Don't Want to Hear on the Trail" posts on Facebook after my husband and I had been hiking.

2. Greener Pastures suggested I make some changes in the original submission, including coming up with a different title. (A truly excellent idea. I'll spare you why. Take my word for it.) Between the time I first submitted the bit and the time I revised it, my husband and I came upon our first bear while hiking. The thing was actually coming toward us on the trail. That is why there is now a bear joke in this piece. Originally there was no bear reference. 

3. My husband worked on the first draft with me, since our exchanges on the trail inspired it. At one point he was looking at what I had and said, "How about X?" "No, no," I said. "Y would be funnier." 

I then told him that we sounded like Ava and Deborah on Hacks. Which led to a discussion of which of us was Ava and which was Deborah. To be clear, at my house I am Deborah. If Deborah spent most of her life in sweatpants.

I Guess I Have Joined The Ranks Of Controversial Humor Writers Part II

Hert Niks on Unsplash

Who? What? When? Where? and Why? are the classic questions writers deal with. For me, the most important is why? The eternal why? In this case, why did What We All Want to Say to That One Out-of-Touch Grandfather at the Playground,  a light-hearted consideration of male authority figures out of their element in a kid-centered situation (an example of using incongruity in humor, by the way), incite the heated response I described yesterday? 

Some thoughts.

The Nastiest Comments

The nastiest comments came from people who were registered with Medium under assumed names and had not published anything there. I have no idea what to make of that. Were they regular Frazzled readers? Were they parents or regular humor readers? Do they use that language with their kids? With their grandfathers?

Romanticizing Grandfathers

I also received comments that were not nasty from nice people who had nice things to say about their own grandfather experiences, which somehow seemed to keep them from finding any humor in what I had written. The whole concept of grandfathers may be very warm and fuzzy for some people, something they want to embrace and can't see anything funny about. The feeling seems to be that we shouldn't be laughing about situations involving a grandfather character. We should enjoy grandfathers in some other way.

Understanding Humor

When I saw the first insult comment, by which I mean the one about me being a bigoted, anti-male feminist who should mind my **** business, I thought, Okay. I don't want readers to see this comment and leave with that being the last thing they think about. So I will use this opportunity to show that I know something about what I am doing and that I have even been recognized for it in the past. After thanking him for calling me an anti-male feminist, I said, "However, "What We All Want To Say..." is not a feminist piece but an example of hyperbole--exaggeration that is not meant to be taken seriously. Hyperbole is often used in humor writing, and I've been known for it throughout my career. "Gauthier demonstrates a real talent here for humorous hyperbole..." BOOKLIST."

More and more of these comments kept coming. In response to one of them, I said, "This isn't a memoir..." But before long I just started saying, "Thank you for your comment." Because if people are so irate they are moved to tell a writer she is an ass, it's pretty unlikely they will appreciate being told they don't understand what they're reading. Perhaps it is also arrogant to try to tell them. And since I've already been accused of being superior, let's not go any further down that road.

Some Kind Of Ageism

As I mentioned in my last post, the subject of ageism came up several times in the comments I received. Which is a laugh, what with me being older than mud, myself. This blog is over twenty years old. Does anyone think I started it when I was twelve? But I believe there is, indeed, some kind of ageism at work here. However, it's not on my part.

One of the more thoughtful, less antagonistic comments I received advised me to punch up, implying that I was punching down in this humor piece. I had to think about that, because, yes, I do not want to ever punch down, meaning direct humor at the powerless. But after a couple of hours, I suddenly thought, Hey, how is humor relating to grandfathers punching down? Why are grandfathers powerless? The grandfather characters I created were not ill or physically unfit. One had been in upper management. One had been in the military. Why was this a powerless group that needed special consideration? 

The only reason I can come up with is the grandfathers' age. Were readers perceiving grandfathers as weak and inappropriate topics for humor merely because they were...old-er...old-ish...old?

Which I believe is ageist. I'm not ageist! You're ageist!

It never occurred to me that fit, healthy men my age would be perceived as lesser because of how old they were and thus require special consideration when writing about them. When I realized two days ago that this might be what was happening, I was livid. How freaking patronizing! Yesterday morning I was depressed about men having to accept this unnecessary protection from strangers who think they've grown weak and inferior with time. 

But the depression only lasted for about forty minutes. I don't stay down on the mat long. 

Maybe This Thing You Wrote Just Wasn't Funny, Gail

All writers need to accept the possibility that something they wrote wasn't good, after all. I can live with that and have for many years. I have lived with thoughtful critiques of things like my pacing and how I develop conflict. Now I will live with obscenities from people who feel a need to use them and name call when they don't get the laugh they were expecting from something I wrote.

I will not claim that I was not shaken by this experience. I ate half a bag of vegan chocolate chips over a twenty-four hour period. Vegan! But like the grandfathers in What We All Want to Say to That One Out-of-Touch Grandfather at the Playground, I am neither powerless nor lesser. In fact, I may have just come up with an idea for a humor piece relating to what happened these last few days.

Thanks, commentors!

I Guess I Have Joined The Ranks Of Controversial Humor Writers Part I

Hert Niks on Unsplash

I have been a published writer for going on twenty-six years. In that time, my work has been critiqued in various ways, as it should be. If you are a writer, you want to be known as a writer. You want to be part of literary discussion. Being part of literary discussion can mean professional reviews, blog reviews, Goodreads reviews, and personal responses from readers. Or it can mean comments on your on-line publishing. I've always found those to be pleasant, until last week when I was told I was a "bigoted anti-male feminist" and that I should mind my "**** business." And that was just getting started.

By the way, I am of the philosophy that everything is a writer's business, so that last bit wasn't as great an insult as the person who left it hoped it would be. Sorry. Also, the commentor used the asterisks. So he wasn't that offensive.

The Kind Of Less Than Stellar Criticism I Used To Get 

My first publications were books that were reviewed in professional journals. Now professional book reviewers tend to consider structural type things. On the occasions when they were pointing out negatives, they might say things like:

• "Readers may find the ending abrupt and learn more about Ethan Allen than they want to know..." Booklist
• "...the office politics at times slow the pace..."  Publishers' Weekly
• "There is little cohesive development or central conflict in this short novel;" "The pacing is also somewhat uneven, with some stories losing their comedic effect as they drag on for several chapters." The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. Ouch!

I also had a reviewer call one of my books a one-joke story, and someone said of another that my main character was no Junie B. Jones, which is a big blow in children's books.

Regarding responses from readers, I once had a very civil exchange with a man who felt I shouldn't have used "goddamn" two or three times in a book in which Ethan Allen, who was a legend in his own lifetime for his use of profanity, figures prominently. We agreed to disagree.

Goodreads often gets mentioned for having unpleasant reviewers. I don't have any big complaints. Because I used to write children's books, I often saw reviews at Goodreads that were obviously from kids. My favorite is a short one from over ten years ago that begins with "I just read this book Happy Kid by Gail Gauthier but it wasn't very good." It ends with "I would not recommend this book to anybody, ever." Come on! That's adorable!

The Kind Of Less Than Stellar Criticism I Got Last Week

I have been writing humor and essays for various publications on the Medium platform for close to four years. Readers are extremely important at Medium. You get paid by the number of people who read your work and the amount of time they spend reading it. Readers also provide any critiques writers will receive in the form of either claps (applause) or comments. I've had thirty-one pieces of one sort or another published there in one place or another. When I've received comments, they've either been positive or engagement--as in discussing more ideas that could have been added to the piece or things that had happened to the reader that were similar to what I'd written about. We would have a nice little back and forth about it. 

So imagine how unprepared I was two days after What We All Want to Say to the Grandfathers at the Playground* was published at Frazzled to see the comment about my being a bigoted anti-male feminist and minding my **** business. I'm hesitant to do direct quotes here, by the way, because I just don't know how to attribute them. Feel free to go read the comments yourself. Enjoy.  (*Original title mentioned in earlier blog posts. It has been changed, as you will see. Read on!) 

Now keep in mind, Frazzled specializes in parenting humor. I've always liked it, because it does a good job of sticking to its theme while publishing very funny material. I've submitted a lot of work there, because I wrote situational humor for and about children for many years and am on my second generation of children in my family. The parent-child world is a milieu I enjoy and have experience with. 

Also keep in mind that I have written and published elsewhere at Medium a humor piece called The Best Moments For A Sex Scene During A Thriller. It was illustrated with a picture of two very scantily dressed people making out on a beach. Nobody had a problem with it. I also wrote Your Guide To Finding The Perfect Church in which I suggested making your decision on the basis of the quality of the coffee hours offered. No one was bothered by that, either.

No, they came out with pitchforks and torches for a list humor piece about grandpas at the playground.

How Bad Did It Get? 

   

So far, I've been told:

• I sound like an ass. 
• I was being a jerk.
• More about me being anti-male. And also ageist.
• A suggestion that I may not have had good relations with my grandfathers, father, or any man.
• A question about whether I got out on the wrong side of the bed the day I wrote that piece. 
• I may have been called a sanctimonious shit sack, but I'm not sure. I had a little trouble figuring out who that person was talking about. But I'm betting it was me!
• I sound whiny.
• More on the ageist business.
• I have no empathy and am potentially cruel. That guy was actually kind of nice.
• I have a superior attitude and probably not that much to be superior about. This one was pretty civil, and the second part is sadly all too true.
• I was insulting old white men, and I could only do that because they are the only nonprotected demographic left. It took me a while to get my jaw up off the floor after I saw that.
• It's been over a week and a half now, and someone just called me a boobie!
• I will continue with updates if any more come in.

Now please don't think this was the only kind of comments I got. There were people who liked the piece. There were people who clapped for it. There were people who clapped for some of my responses to comments. I had some lovely exchanges with people that I won't go into in the interests of time.

But many of the comments I was seeing were markedly different from anything I'd seen before. In fact, they were different enough that the very supportive Frazzled editor contacted me to say he was sorry about them and to offer to let me tweak the title to see if that would help readers recognize the humor  and take some heat off me. (Which is why it now does, indeed, have a different title.)  And he said yes, these comments were unusual.

So what was going on?

Since I am philosophically opposed to lengthy blog posts, which this one already is, I've done some editing and am  publishing my take on that question separately.

Another Story Behind The Story

I had a new humor piece published yesterday at Frazzled. As with many of my humor pieces, What We All Want To Say to the Grandfathers at the Playground has a backstory.

Tom Barrett on Unsplash

Last year I spent a couple of afternoons alone at a popular town playground with a kindergartener who had a half day of school. Great times, great times. On one of those visits I witnessed an older man yelling at a child who did not appear to be his family member. The old guy moved off, and I saw a woman holding a little boy in a Spiderman costume who was sobbing. Okay, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the kid just happened to have a sad thought at the same moment a stranger was shouting. Nonetheless, I stuck to my kid like a leech the rest of the time we were there, prepared to take care of that guy if he came near my boy. 

Then the guy actually spoke to me! As we were discussing leaving, I told my little guy that I had cupcakes in the car. (Because I did! Honest to God, I had cupcakes in the car!)  Lo and behold, the guy and his child companion were walking along beside us, he heard me, and said, "Yeah, good luck with that." I am ashamed to say that I just laughed and hauled our butts out of there. I should have said something like, "I don't need luck, sir. I have cupcakes. You should try it. Also, I don't yell at other people's kids unless they're about to run into the street, but that's just me." 

Yes, cupcakes do appear in this humor piece.

This whole thing happened close to a year ago. I have been enraged ever since. I like to think of myself as being too zenny to hold a grudge, but...maybe.

I finally started putting together things to say to guys like him as a humor piece, because I wanted to have something I could submit while I was feeling down about the short story I've been working on for months and not finishing. So that worked, anyway.

I've Written A Doughnut Essay

My second publication of the year, Confessions Of A Doughnut Eater, is what I call an eating essay. My eating essays tend to be memoirish. We could call it a doughnut memoir, inspired by my children who were both burning up our family text one weekend with news about their doughnut excursions. They inspired some of my earliest work and continue to do so. 

Interested in literature? This piece has a couple of references for you. There's one to Jane Eyre, and the title is a shoutout to Thomas de Quincey's 1821 classic Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Everyone loves Thomas de Quincey, right?

My First Publication Of 2024.

Andrea Piarquadio on Pexels

My first publication of the year is a humor piece, Useful French Phrases For Madame Keith's World Languages Class at Slackjaw. And, of course, there is a story behind this piece, because there is always a story behind everything I write. For books there are usually multiple stories, and, sadly, I often can't remember them all because it takes me so flipping long to write books.

But I've got this one.

The Story Behind Useful French Phrases For Madame Keith's World Languages Class

I have been studying French moi-meme for years. By moi-meme I mean, really, myself, because I haven't taken a real French class or even an adult ed class in decades. J'etude de temps en temps, sometimes going years without making an effort. In fact, for the last few years studying French for me has involved watching French TV shows with English subtitles. Je me dit, "You're studying, you!" Mon objectif, because of course I have a goal, is to speak pig French, a term used by Marcel, a man I knew briefly years ago, or even rise up to franglais, which I understand is common with some of my family members in Ottawa. But let's be honest. I'll be satistifed to parle comme un couchon.

That's background. Psychological background, you might say.

Okay, last September I was on the Cape (That's Cape Cod, if you're in New England. There are other Capes, I'm sure.) and playing Monopoly with an eleven-year-old family member. The Monopoly part is important. We're chatting away (I don't care much for Monopoly so don't feel any need to concentrate while playing it), and it comes out that said eleven-year-old family member is taking a world languages class. And what is the first unit? You guessed it! French!

I'm sitting there thinking, I have someone to practice French with? Comment je dit "your turn?"  "How do I say" should probably have another verb in there, but, remember, I'm only shooting for pig French and "How I say?" is all I can manage.

So that got me thinking about kids and French and French classes. And the Monopoly game is important, because there is a section in Useful French Phrases on playing games. Our eleven-year-old is in sixth grade, but I kicked the speaker in Useful French Phrases up to seventh, thinking that would be more believable for the amount of French being used.

While I checked all the French phrases on Google (I didn't replace my last French-English dictionary when it fell apart, because I like Google so much) most of the French I used is at least familiar to me.