Author Fairs are Back

 

I was scheduled to participate in the Hammond Public Library’s Local Author Fair on April 18, 2020. And then I wasn’t. COVID intervened, and our two local library fairs went on hiatus.

Until now. Saturday was the return of the Local Author Fair, and I was one of approximately twenty authors who participated. I sold six books, making my table fee back plus a little more. But my experience with book fairs has been mixed. Sometime I recoup my table fee and sometimes I don’t. It also takes a block of my time as I wait for people to approach my table, and I would rather be researching or writing. So after each fair I wonder whether it’s worth doing again.

In one sense, you could say it doesn’t matter if I make my table fee back since it supports a local public library. Furthermore, there are other benefits of participating, particularly publicity and interaction with potential readers even if they don’t buy a book right then. Still, writing is a business for me, and it’s nice to see a tangible return.

I’m scheduled to do another fair on May 21 at the main Lake County Public Library. That one is called the Creative Arts Summit, so it will presumably include artists working in visual and sound media. The table fee is also less, so it should be easier to recoup it.

But I’ll reevaluate before doing any more.

Easter Joy

 

Once of my favorite Easter hymns is “The Strife is O’er,” and I’ve left instructions to sing it at my funeral. The words are reproduced below. Some versions include three alleluias sung at the beginning and at the end of the hymn.

The strife is o’er, the battle done,
The victory of life is won;
The song of triumph has begun:
Alleluia!
 
The pow’rs of death, have done their worst,
But Christ their legions hath dispersed;
Let shouts of holy joy outburst:
Alleluia!
 
The three sad days have quickly sped,
He rises glorious from the dead;
All glory to our risen head:
Alleluia!
 
He closed the yawning gates of hell,
The bars from heav’ns high portals fell;
Let hymns of praise His triumphs tell:
Alleluia!
 
Lord, by the stripes which wounded Thee,
From death’s dread sting Thy servants free,
That we may live and sing to Thee:
Alleluia!

God give you Easter joy.

__________

 The painting at the top of this post is “The Resurrection” by Carl Heinrich Bloch. He painted it in 1881 and it is in the public domain because of its age.

Good Friday Sorrow

 

This is a busy week, so my next two blog posts will use two of my favorite hymns. This week I will concentrate on Good Friday, and next week I’ll do Easter.

“O Dearest Jesus, What Law Hast Thou Broken” reminds me that Jesus died on the cross for my sins, not His. It’s an act of love that I find hard to fathom, yet one for which I’ll be eternally grateful. Here are four of the many verses.

O dearest Jesus, what law hast Thou broken
That such sharp sentence should on Thee be spoken?
Of what great crime hast Thou to make confession,
What dark transgression?
 
Whence come these sorrows, whence this mortal anguish?
It is my sins for which Thou, Lord, must languish;
Yes, all the wrath, the woe, Thou dost inherit,
This I do merit.
 
What punishment so strange is suffered yonder!
The Shepherd dies for sheep that loved to wander;
The Master pays the debt His servants owe Him,
Who would not know Him.
 
The sinless Son of God must die in sadness;
The sinful child of man may live in gladness;
Man forfeited his life and is acquitted;
God is committed.

Have a blessed Holy Week.

__________

 The picture at the top of this post is a 16^th century painting attributed to Frans Pourbus the Elder. It is in the public domain because of its age.

A Fiery Business

When 12-year-old Julia is sent to stay with her cousin Fannie in Chicago, neither girl likes the arrangement. Then the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 sweeps through the city and separates them. Can they survive on their own?

I am pleased to announce that I just released my third middle-grade historical novel, Inferno, which is available in paperback or on Kindle. If you or your friends have daughters or granddaughters in 3^rd through 6^th grade, please consider recommending it or buying it for them.

Anyone local to Northwest Indiana can purchase Inferno or any of my other books in person at the following events: 

• Saturday, April 23, 2022, from 12–3 p.m. at the Local Author Fair, Hammond Public Library, 564 State Street, Hammond, Indiana; and
• Saturday, May, 21, 2022, from 12 – 4 p.m. at the Creative Arts Summit, Lake County Public Library, 1919 W. 81^st Ave., Merrillville, Indiana.

If you are local, I’d love to see you at one of them.

For readers who can’t make either book signing, Inferno is available on Amazon at this link Inferno on Amazon. It will soon appear on the Barnes & Noble website, as well.

Mixing Pleasure with Business

 

Roland and I just returned from a trip to Panama. It was intended only as a vacation, but I am giving some consideration to writing a story about crossing the Isthmus of Panama before the canal was built. If I do, I can use some of my photos as examples of what people might have seen along the way.

One route to California during the gold rush of the mid 1800s was via the Isthmus of Panama. Gold seekers would board a ship at New York City or Boston or Philadelphia or New Orleans and take it to a small port on the eastern cost of Panama. From there, they would cross the forty miles between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by foot, mule, and canoe. When they reached Panama City, they picked up a ship to San Francisco, completing their trip.

The photo at the top of this post shows part of a mangrove forest. This particular one was in Belize, but travelers would have seen a similar sight as they approached Panama from the east.

Then there is the wildlife. The following photos were taken in Costa Rica but their subjects would likely have been seen in Panama as well. They show, in order, a bare-throated tiger heron, a caiman (relative to alligators and crocodiles), an emerald basilisk, and a howler monkey. The caiman and the emerald basilisk blend in with their surroundings, so it may take a minute to see them.

The Panama trek would also have shared vegetation with other parts of Central America. These photos were taken in Roatan, Honduras. The first shows a chocolate tree, with the chocolate coming from the seeds inside the green pods, and the second is heliconia, prevalent throughout the tropics.

Once the travelers reached Panama City, they would have seen the streets of what is now the old town, as shown in the final photo.

So although my trip was purely for pleasure, I may have gotten some business out of it as well.

Be Your Own Photographer

 

I’m currently working on a story that takes place in the Pullman neighborhood of Chicago during the 1894 Pullman strike. I found a number of images online, but since I live in the Chicago area, I decided to take a field trip and check it out for myself.

The Pullman factory is no longer there, although some of the buildings remain. More importantly, though, the residential parts are much as they were then. I can look at old photographs, and I did, but they didn’t give me the sense of place I received from walking the same streets my protagonists did and taking in some of the same sights they saw every day. Unfortunately, the feeling will eventually fade, so I try to keep it alive as long as possible through my own photographs.

Here are some I took while walking around the neighborhood. The one at the beginning of this post shows the wide, tree-lined streets, which were a drawing point back then as they are now. The next one shows the type of skilled workers duplex that my protagonists live in. The rest show, in order, the Greenstone Church my protagonists attend, part of the old Pullman factory, and the Pullman Hotel.

Fortunately, Pullman is a historic neighborhood and much of it has been preserved and/or restored. The same isn’t true of the Topaz War Relocation Center.

Topaz was dismantled and the buildings sold off after the war, and the last two photos show what it looked like when I visited on a research trip in 2014. Even though the camp itself was gone, being there reinforced the photos taken during the war and emphasized the sense of isolation and desolation the 8,000 inhabitants must have felt.

So if you have the opportunity to go on location to research your story, be sure to take a camera along.

Photos Tell the Story

 

Last week I wrote about using memoirs and other personal accounts to research a historical novel. This week I’ll cover the benefits of using old photos to supplement those resources.

Again I’m going to draw my examples mainly from the research I did for Desert Jewels because the War Relocation Authority hired professional photographers to take thousands of photographs during the removal and internment of the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. The photos were presumably intended to show the country that the Japanese Americans were being treated humanely, but some, especially by Dorothea Lange, ended up being censored because they showed a different story. Fortunately, they have since been released and are available for historical research.

In most instances, the Japanese Americans were originally sent to assembly centers, which were intended as temporary homes until more permanent camps were built. The photo at the top of the page shows four children, presumably siblings, after arriving at the Turlock Assembly Center. Notice the tags they had to wear for identification but which also made them feel like a number rather than a name.

Then there is this photograph, showing the horse stables that were turned into makeshift “apartments” at Tanforan Assembly Center and were occupied for months before the families living in them were transferred to the Central Utah War Relocation Center, commonly known as Topaz. As you can see from the photo, living conditions at Tanforan were not humane.

The third photo is a panoramic view of Topaz. Several families were crowded into each of those barracks. Worse, the desert was a desolate setting for the Japanese Americans, most of who were used to the lush vegetation of western California.

Or to use a research example from another book, here is how downtown Chicago looked a day or two after the Great Chicago Fire had burned itself out. (The photo shows the corner of State and Madison.)

Memoirs and other personal experience accounts are the most important research sources, but photos can supplement that research by providing a more a vivid picture (literally and figuratively) of what life would have been like.

And that makes them another valuable research tool.

__________

Dorothea Lange took the first two photographs and Francis Stewart took the third. All three are in the public domain because they were taken by War Relocation Authority photographers as part of the photographers’ official duties as employees of the United States government.

The last photo is in the public domain because of its age.