Review: A mother’s anguish, a small town’s deadly secrets

Review of: Seven Wings to Glory

Author: Kathleen M. Rodgers

Publisher: Camel Press

Source: Purchase, Barnes & Noble

Grade: B

For young Cade Kitchen, becoming a soldier fulfilled a long-held dream. For his parents, sending a son to war halfway around the world from their peaceful small town of Portion, Texas, was a long-dreaded nightmare. Cade’s mother Johnnie’s father died in Vietnam when she was barely old enough to remember him, but she has lived the decades since in the shadow of her mother’s grief. And with each news report from Afghanistan, with each time she passes the war memorial on the main square of her picture-perfect small town, she fears reliving that earlier tragedy.

But not until the memorial becomes the site of a racist attack on Whit, Johnnie’s African-American best friend, does she realize that terror also hides behind the outwardly sunny façade of her hometown. Johnnie will struggle with the impact of the two wars, one outer, one internal, in the course of Kathleen M. Rodgers’ latest novel, Seven Wings to Glory.

This is the second of Rodgers’ novels featuring the Kitchen family – wife Johnnie, husband Dale, and their children Cade, B.J., and Callie Ann. Johnnie, a recovering bulimic, has only recently reconnected with her mother, who disappeared more than 20 years earlier, leaving her young daughter to be raised by grandparents. In the interim between the first Kitchen family story, Johnnie Come Lately, and Seven Wings to Glory, Johnnie’s beloved grandmother, Opal Grubbs, has died, leaving Johnnie to deal with her grandparents’ house full of memories.

Kathleen M. Rodgers

Among these is a picture of five-year-old Johnnie with her father, taken shortly before his death. Johnnie’s parents had never married. She knows little about her father except his name. She has never heard from his family. Are they still alive? Do they even know of Johnnie’s existence?

Under less fraught circumstances, Johnnie might have tried to locate these missing grandparents, but she already has more than enough personal drama to deal with. Besides her recent enrollment at a nearby community college and part time work as columnist for the local newspaper, there’s a house, husband, and her youngest child, daughter Callie Ann, still in high school. It’s almost – but not quite -- enough to push even her ever-simmering fear about son safety into the background.

Rodgers also dealt with military issues in her previous books, The Final Salute, as well as Johnnie Come Lately. In her latest, Seven Wings to Glory, she adds both spiritual elements and concerns with racial injustice, as one of Johnnie Kitchen’s newspaper columns acts as a catalyst, bringing to light incidents of horrific violence in her town’s past, incidents that still trouble the town’s outwardly placid surface decades later.

Although I applaud her efforts, I’ll admit having qualms about the “magical Negro” effect of some of her otherwise delightful new characters.

However, the newcomers, both white and black, are as varied, as flawed and wounded as the Kitchen family itself. There’s enough warmth, heart string tugging and heartbreak in Rodgers’ blend of an imminently lovable protagonist, a postcard pretty small town, and a cast of quirky townsfolk to give fans of the Kitchen family hope for more adventures to come.

Wordcraft – Putting the real military experience on the page

Somebody at a writing workshop told me not to write about military characters because nobody wants to be reminded about what kind of shape the world’s in now. And I thought – really -- when I’ve got a shelf full of thrillers filled with military and paramilitary organizations, whose readers come out in droves to hear their favorite authors?

However, the real life aspects of military life don’t always find adoring fans. Wondering why, I dropped by a recent panel discussion on “Writing the Military Experience” at local VFW Post 6796 in Garland, Texas, to hear what it’s like to put real life on the page.

Panelists included author/teacher Leila Levinson, ex-Marine Rod Pannek of the Writer’s Garret of Dallas, Vietnam veteran/poet Charles Kesler, and military wife/mom/author Kathleen M. Rodgers. 

l-r: Pannek, Levinson, Kesler, Rodgers

“Civilian families will never ‘get’ what military families go through,” Pannek said. “How do you put military experience out to the public?” It’s an experience that becomes even more urgent because the experiences of war are not solely the problem of veterans.

Kesler is the son of a World War II veteran whose trauma led him to “train me for my war.” The mantra was always, “don’t you dare cry.”

Levinson, also the child of a World War II veteran, couldn’t understand why her father, a doctor, was one person to his family and a completely different one with his patients. It was only when she found a box of photographs from the Nordhausen (Mittelbau-Dora) Concentration Camp her father helped liberate that she began to understand the trauma he had experienced and repressed.

Her experience in teaching a course on literature of the Holocaust at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, had shown her that the trauma of survivors is passed down to their children. Then one of her students asked, “Did the trauma of the liberators affect their children?”

Gated Grief, cover image

Recognizing that legacy of trauma led her to write Gated Grief, dealing with the aftershocks of the concentration camps on those who liberated them. Her father, she realized, had never been able to talk about what he experienced in the camps because he felt his anguish was trivial compared to that of the prisoners. But it was this legacy of silence and repression that he passed down to his unknowing family, as Kesler’s father had passed down his own advice never to weep.

And the tradition of emotional repression doesn’t end with the passing of World War II veterans.

Rodgers married a fighter pilot who served in combat in the first Gulf War. She learned that life isn’t as glamorous as it looks in the movies and that death and disability are always possibilities, even outside combat, describing her husband returning from work with silent tears running down his face at the news of friends’ deaths. “He never opened up to me in those early years because fighter pilots are macho.”

Then she and her husband became the parents of a son at war in Afghanistan. A proponent of sharing such experiences outside the normal bounds of military fiction and nonfiction in her novels, The Final Salute and Johnnie Come Lately.

Rodgers and her family also share a newer problem, the fact that they and other military families are an increasingly small minority. “In my generation, 40 percent of us had fathers or mothers who were military veterans,” Levinson said. With the end of the military draft during the Vietnam War, it’s now far rarer to find military families in the general population. The fewer who have a direct connection to a military experience, the more remote it can seem.

One outlet for sharing those experiences is Veterans Voices magazine, which Kesler credited with helping him find his voice. Narratives need not be journalistic. Kesler, in fact, favors poetry for the narratives he gathered in his volume, The Book of Willie. See the Veterans Voices site for additional information and submission guidelines.

Wordcraft -- Dark family secrets twist and turn

Johnnie Come Lately

by Kathleen M. Rodgers

***

Kathleen M. Rodgers

Outwardly, Dale and Johnnie Kitchen are the picture of the perfect family: middle-class up and comers still in love after more than twenty years of marriage, they’re both as good looking as when they were college sweethearts, with a beautiful house (renovated by Dale himself) and three children whose worst sin (so far) is a single bout of underage drinking. Inwardly though, they harbor a multitude of dark and sometimes deadly secrets. And in Johnnie Come Lately, the second novel from North Texas author Kathleen M. Rodgers, she digs deep to shed light on the darkness at the heart of Dale and Johnnie’s apparently perfect lives.

“At least we know you’re not dead,” Johnnie writes to her long-lost mother in one of the many journal entries that punctuate the narrative. “Ghosts don’t call home from a payphone.”

But what drove Johnnie’s unwed mother to disappear from her daughter’s life the day of Johnnie’s marriage? Who was the father whose death a callous relative revealed so brutally at one more than usually dysfunctional Thanksgiving dinner? And what is the real story behind the drowning of the uncle Johnnie never knew, the uncle whose name she carries?

“Her mama’s searing words flashed through her mind,” is Johnnie's remembrance of the last day she saw her mother. “Johnnie Girl, every time I look in your face, I cringe. I never should’ve let Poppy name you after my dead brother.”

Why, we wonder, why?

Rodgers reveals the answers, but with the grace of a consummate storyteller, she saves the hardest truths for last.

There are newer griefs as well: Johnnie’s brief extramarital fling, middle-child Cade’s sudden decision to abandon plans for college in favor of enlistment in the Iraq war, Johnnie’s continuing struggle against the bulimia that nearly killed her.

A long-time magazine writer, Rodgers has recounted her personal struggle against bulimia in numerous publications. The descriptions of her character Johnnie Kitchen’s struggle against the deadly eating disorder have the ring of heartbreaking truth, but are told with grace and compassion.

It’s tempting to see this novel as a self-portrait of Rodgers, who has put so much of herself and her milieu into it: the little Texas town of Portion, with its quaint main street patterned after the equally small and quaint North Texas suburb of Grapevine; Rodgers’ own battle against bulimia; the anguish of her son’s wartime enlistment.
I’ve known Rodgers for the past several years, since our initial meeting at the Dallas Writers Garrett, and then learning that we’d both participated in Southern Methodist University’s creative writing program, although in different years. Rodgers is not Johnnie, but she’s made a place for Johnnie in the hearts of her readers.

Rodgers’ Johnnie Come Lately made its debut last Saturday, February 7, at the Southlake, Texas, Barnes and Noble. It and the new edition of her first novel, The Final Salute, are shelved under “new fiction” at the Southlake B&N, and are available at
www.barnesandnoble.com/.

For more about Rodgers and her writing, including her next novel, see www.kathleenMRodgers.com/.



Wordcraft -- Bringing sanity to your synopsis

The good news from my interviews with literary agents at last month’s DFW Writer’s Conference was that several wanted to see pages or chapters from my novel. And oh, was I prepared for that. I’d thrown my whole heart, not to mention computer, into polishing those opening chapters shiny enough to flash heliograph messages.

The bad news -- some agents also wanted a synopsis of the novel. Considering that I’d been to at least one agent panel and read any number of blogs in which agents all but swore on their grandmothers’ graves that synopses were a waste of time, I hadn’t written a synopsis worthy of the name. With hands I hoped didn’t tremble visibly, I wrote “synopsis” on the agents’ business cards and staggered from the room.

Maybe you’re thinking -- she wrote four hundred pages but she’s scared to write a one-page summary telling what the whole thing is about? Except if you’re thinking that, you’re not a writer who’s ever tried to cram four hundred pages into one.

Fortunately, Facebook friend and fellow writer Kathleen M. Rodgers had posted a link to “How to Write A One-Page Synopsis,” from Susan Dennard’s blog Pub(lishing) Crawl. I’m here to tell you that following this “three rules of thumb, eleven-point method” gave me a coherent one-page (single-spaced) summary within an hour or two. I haven’t had responses yet from the agents, so I can’t guarantee this will get you offers of representation. But it saved my sanity and it can save yours.

First -- the rules of thumb. Number one -- Dennard advises against naming more than three characters in a synopsis this short -- the protagonist, antagonist, and relationship character. I admit -- I broke this one for a couple of secondary characters. With words at a premium, it took less space on a page to use a one-word name than the two word description, “protagonist’s mother.”

Second rule -- Tell the ending. Right, spoilers and all.

Third rule -- Do not include sub-plots unless you have enough space. This one I bent. One agent had said she wanted to know if there were subplots. I sacrificed a single sentence to convey the biggest one briefly.

The eleven steps will be familiar to anyone who’s read Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey (although the nomenclature differs slightly) or any works dealing with three-act structure. They are: (1) opening image; (2) introduction to the protagonist, including his/her desire; (3) inciting incident; (4) plot point one; (5) conflicts and character encounters; (6) midpoint; (7) winning seems imminent, but. . . ; (8) black moment; (9) climax; (10) resolution; and (11) final image.

Weirdly enough, I got stuck figuring out what the midpoint was. In desperation, I thumbed halfway through my printed manuscript. And found what I needed.

If you’ve written any story at all, something major has happened halfway through the pages. If nothing leaps out at you from the exact numerical center, flip back or forward a few pages. Picking random examples from what’s on my nightstand -- it’s the place in Wuthering Heights where Catherine dies; where Tita of Like Water for Chocolate refuses the summons of her abusive mother; where the narrator of The Island of Dr. Moreau learns the extent of what the mad scientist has done. You will know the midpoint of her novel when you see it.

Susan Dennard applies this with examples from the movie Star Wars, which will also give you a much needed laugh. See her complete explanation at www.publishingcrawl.com/2012/04/17/how-to-write-a-1-page-synopsis/.

For more about my generously-sharing friend, Kathleen M. Rodgers, and her work, see her author page at www.facebook.com/.