Wordcraft -- The quest to find our own wings

The book clubs packed the largest meeting area in Highland Park United Methodist Church for last week’s Authors LIVE! program last week, to welcome Sue Monk Kidd, the unassuming-looking nurse turned author to Dallas. I give the book clubs credit, because I shuffled from place to place as people draped books, book fliers and sweaters over seats, pleading for space for late-coming friends.

I didn’t begrudge them. After all, Kidd’s first two novels were bestsellers made into movies. Her third, The Invention of Wings, the novel all of us had braved the vagaries of Dallas winter weather to hear about, had debuted on the New York Times number one bestseller spot less than a month earlier. And it made Oprah Winfrey’s book club list.  But the crowd wasn’t composed only of the usual white women over a certain age I’ve come to expect for book club favorites. White, black, women, men, old, young or in between, they exited with multiple copies of the book in hand.

Pretty darn good for a historical novel set in an obscure decade of the early nineteenth century, in the cultural backwater of the southern United States, about a subject--slavery and the birth of American racism--that’s still a painful topic in this country’s public discourse. Oh, and it's about feminism, too, still a sore point for many in this election year.

But audiences have learned to trust Kidd, who began her writing career with inspirational essays in Guideposts magazine, to deal compassionately, even lyrically, with topics others only rant about. She stood alone on the stage and read, “There was a time in Africa the people could fly. . . When we came here, we left that magic behind.”

The year is 1803, and the speaker is an enslaved young girl, Hetty Handful Grimke, and the story is about a quest for freedom, “our ability as human beings to transcend, to find our wings,” Kidd told her audience.

“Handful was my basket name. The master and missus, they did all the proper naming, but a mauma would look on her baby laid in its basket and a name would come to her. . . If you got a basket name, you at least had something from your mauma. Master Grimke named me Hetty, but mauma looked on me the day I came into the world, how I was born too soon, and she called me Handful.”

The idea of Handful came to Kidd from the historical record of a girl given, like a doll or a puppy, to almost as young Sarah Grimke, later to become, astonishingly, an early Southern abolitionist and feminist. Handful’s historical record disappears early, leading Kidd to believe she died young. But in Kidd’s atoning hands, she finds a voice, the voice of an “enslaved people who really did struggle and die, not the passive, happy members of the family” who too often figure in Southern mythologies of slavery.

In Kidd’s hands, Handful will discover her own identity, becoming party to a failed slave revolt led by the man she learns is her father, free black Denmark Vesey, and inspire Sarah. “My body might be enslaved,” Handful tells Sarah, “but my mind is not. For you, it’s the other way around.”

“One of the things I really wanted to get across,” Kidd said, “was, it was in fighting for the rights of others that women discovered their own rights. . . You want your novel to be a carrier of ideas, but what I really want is the reader’s heart. Taking another’s experience and making it our own is the greatest power of literature.”

For more about Kidd, her books and other appearances, see
http://suemonkkid.com/.

See more about Authors LIVE! including future programs, at 
www.hpumc.org/authorslive/.

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Additional business that’s piled up in my inbox--the 2014 manuscript contest of The Writers’ League of Texas, one of the state’s largest literary organizations, has been extended to February 28. For specifics, see www.writersleague.org/.

Places for the 2014 Dallas FenCon writers’ workshop with Hugo-nominee Carrie Vaughn are now open. For workshop information and writing contests sponsored by the science fiction/fantasy convention, see www.fencon.org/.

Wordcraft -- A thousand stops around the world

How can you describe a thousand wonderful places in an hour? If you’re Patricia Schultz, author of the newly-revised, 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, you don’t even try.

Instead, she treated the luncheon audience at Highland Park United Methodist Church Tuesday to what she called “thirty favorite places” from the newly-revised second edition of her bestseller. But what’s her most favorite place? Whichever one she’s visited most recently, she said. For her, that’s the Hebrides Islands of Scotland. “I can still smell the heather and feel the mist on my face -- because it’s always raining in Scotland.”

A rainy vacation may not be everybody’s tea and scone, but for Schultz, it’s not just the places, “it’s the people you remember.” Especially, but not only, when they’re people she met over the whiskey bar -- fifty varieties of single malt scotch -- on the ferry to the Hebrides.

Even while showing slides of postcard-perfect views, she emphasized the people she met along the way. From the children who surrounded her broken-down van on the way to the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia, asking to hear about Beyonce. (“I read People,” Schultz told us, “so I was up to date.”) To “Edith from Machu Picchu,” a ninety-year-old native of New Jersey she met in a hotel in Peru, who recommended Schultz’s own book to her as a guide.

Schultz said if she hadn’t already chosen a proverb recommended by a Mongolian friend to open the second edition of her book (“better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times”) she’d have used Edith’s mantra -- “get the hardest trips done first, because your knees have expirations dates.”

(Edith was on her second set of knees -- titanium -- for help in getting around the ancient Incan capital, she informed Schultz.)

Other favorite places ran the gamut from an elephant-back safari in Okavango Delta of Botswana, to towns in the Palestinian Authority running side by side with Israel, to newly tourist-friendly countries in the former Yugoslavia. (She recommends staying in Tito’s old palace.)

And of course, there’s Italy. With an Italian mother and years of residence there, Schultz has such a warm spot for that country, she’s written a 2012 calendar just about Italy.

Schultz, however, spoke warmly about any travel opportunity.   Although amazed that only thirty percent of Americans have a passport, she didn’t believe that we need to see other countries first to experience the benefits of travel. In fact, she’s also written a Thousand Places guide to the U.S. and Canada.

“There’s no education in the world like you experience when you leave your home, when you get out of your comfort zone,” Schultz said. “You see things differently. . .and you appreciate what you have when you return.”

(Schultz’s books are widely available in bookstores -- she also spoke at the Lincoln Park Barnes and Noble Tuesday -- and online. For a complete list of her works, see www.workman.com/authors/patricia_schultz/. For information about Highland Park’s sponsorship of authors, see www.hpumc.org/authorslive/.)