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Letting the Story Lead: Valerie Nieman and Upon the Corner of the Moon

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by Valerie Nieman

Writers are not our characters, most times, though these characters may draw upon our lives, our experiences, our quirks.

Macbeth and Gruach, the main characters of Upon the Corner of the Moon, definitely are not “me” except that I was drawn to the story and felt the urge to tell it – an urge that stayed with me for almost 30 years.

I first came across the facts about the historical Macbeths when I was researching an earlier novel. I did not realize how thoroughly this story had been reversed: Macbeth was a rightful king based on Celtic traditions and ruled for 17 years, being called “The Righteous” and “the ruddy king of plenty.”

How did he become a villain?

Macbeth was cousin to Duncan, and yes, he did kill him – but in battle when Duncan invaded his territory. Duncan’s son Malcolm Canmore eventually claimed the throne through primogeniture and the Celtic system of electing kings was erased. Chroniclers grafted Macbeth’s story with various legends to shape a monstrous, murdering usurper. Shakespeare found this tale in Holinshed’s Chronicles, shaped it to please King James and included the witches that so fascinated the king.   

As to “Lady Macbeth,” we know little more than her name and her father’s name. We do know that she was married to a man called Gillecomgan, also killed in battle by Macbeth, and then married Macbeth. I had to do a great deal of speculation in building a plausible life for her but drew on scholarship from a number of areas including archaeology of the Picts and the study of ancient goddess religions.

This book is the first of two telling the story of the historical Macbeths, hewing to the record where it exists and speculating to fill in the gaps. The Last Highland King will come out in 2027.

My earlier book with Regal House, In the Lonely Backwater, featured the distinctive voice of Maggie, who owes a lot to the solitary girl that I was, simultaneously lost and found between the wonders of the natural world and the books she carried everywhere.

I grew up in New York State, near the headwaters of the Allegheny River. My parents owned fields and woods that I knew well before I learned to read. I fished with my dad and wandered a patch of old-growth forest. Books sustained me — Twain, Poe, and Tennyson in addition to Shakespeare, all in the tall bookcase upstairs – along nature guides, and A Girl of the Limberlost that featured another rural wanderer. Like Maggie, I brought back my finds and interpreted them, generally to amused interest.

After high school and a few erratic years where I took jobs in factories and donut shops while in community college, I slid south along the Allegheny’s path to find myself at the other end of that river system, attending West Virginia University on the banks of the Monongahela. Propelled by the desire to write, I’d determined to become a journalist, as a blue-collar kid lacking mentors to help me along the path toward becoming a novelist and poet.

For nearly twenty years, I worked as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers in the northern coalfields of West Virginia, covering everything from train wrecks to murders to acid spills in the rivers, along with government beats and the “hook and bullet” column that let me hang with scientists at the Department of Natural Resources. During that time, I homesteaded a hill farm with my then-husband, building a house and barn, planting an orchard and organic garden — and, of course, wandering with my dog and gathering wild foods and always writing.

My first poetry chapbook and my first novel, both deeply engaged with the natural world, came out in 1988. Neena Gathering, a post-apocalyptic tale based on the landscape around that farm, was long out of print before being brought back as a classic in the genre. Like In the Lonely Backwater, it features a teenage narrator, though at its debut, Young Adult was not yet a thing and it was listed with general SF paperbacks. I still love that book, and it has many fans who’ve applauded its reissue.

Things change. The marriage ended and I found myself with a small farm I couldn’t manage and the editorship of a newspaper destined for sale. I headed to the Piedmont of North Carolina for a job with the News & Record, living outside of Appalachia for the first time in my life. The move brought new adventures, from getting my MFA at Queens University of Charlotte, to the publication of more poetry and fiction, to learning how to sail. A 25-foot Hunter docked at Lake Kerr was direct inspiration for Maggie’s world of the marina and the landscape of the farms and piney woods of the coastal plain.

I had the pleasure of working with Kevin Watson at Press 53 for all three of my full-length poetry collections and my novel Blood Clay, set in North Carolina. I was delighted when West Virginia University Press, which had also released my short fiction collection, decided to publish To the Bones, a horror/mystery set in the coalfields. It was acclaimed as “a parable of capitalism and environmental degradation” and in the sequel, Dead Hand, Darrick and Lourana flee to Ireland in search of answers to questions raised in the first book.

And then my Queens classmate Pam Van Dyk made me aware of Regal House, and I met Jaynie Royal and all the wonderful folks at my most excellent publisher!

Another marriage came and went, and I found myself freed to wander more widely. Solo hiking was pure pleasure, even when I was quite lost on the trails near Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, slogging through the rain along the Great Glen Way in Scotland, or following the music in Donegal and Dingle. Trailheads beckon me, from the Mountains to the Sea trail in North Carolina to the coastal vistas of San Francisco Bay.

Along the way, I’ve published poetry widely, in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Chautauqua, and journals across the U.S. as well as Scotland, Ireland, and Greece. Work has also appeared in some fine anthologies, including Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology.

I have been a creative writing fellow for North Carolina and West Virginia, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m professor emerita of creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University and continue to teach writing workshops.

To Pants or to Plot? In Defense of a Middle Way

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By Rebecca Baum

I first encountered the terms pantser and plotter on a writing retreat in New Hampshire on Squam Lake. As dusk gathered and the loons wailed, a writer asked which approach I’d used for the middle grade novel I was working on. She went on to define the plotter as the writer who outlines a beginning, middle and end before the first keystroke of the novel itself; and the pantser as the thrill-seeking, fly-by-the-seat type. All they need is a snippet of a scene, glimpse of a character, or flash of setting — and they’re off!

I confessed to being a pantser. My middle grade book emerged in caffeine-fueled bursts, my outflow hindered only by my too-slow fingers. It was my first novel and the process of discovering the story as it was being written was unbridled fun. The downside (as early readers reported) were moments where the story felt rushed or where plot and character motivation didn’t always jibe. Unsurprisingly, that novel was never published. But it was a valuable exercise in showing up every day to slay the dragon of the empty page until eventually I’d hammered out over 60,000 words.

My novel, Lifelike Creatures, started as a pantser affair but morphed into a plotter-pantser hybrid. I started with a visceral sense of the landscape, lifted from my childhood in Cottonport, La. — fresh, turned earth and muddy fields stretching to the horizon, the stultifying heat of high summer, a gray sky both endless and oppressive. Within this rural setting a girl appeared, 13 years old, most comfortable with her toes in the mud. A boy, perhaps a brother, briefly bobbed into view then disappeared, replaced by the girl’s mother. Soon their relationship took shape, a claustrophobic constellation propelled by addiction, resilience, pain, and fierce love. The girl became “Tara” and the mother became “Joan.”

I brought these green shoots into a writing workshop. Each week, as I worked and reworked a chapter, or even a few pages, the contours of Tara and Joan’s relationship solidified. The details of their home came to life as did the intimacies and tensions of their days. The workshop facilitator challenged me to widen the lens and discover a larger community or cultural conflict against which Tara and her mother could struggle and transform — or falter and fail.

He also encouraged me to write a chapter outline, nudging me into the realm of the plotter.  An early outline, which is very different from the final novel, has Tara losing her way in a salt dome mine during a visit to Avery Island (home of Tabasco Pepper Sauce ). Salt domes are massive underground deposits, some as large as Mount Everest, which feature prominently in Louisiana’s geology. I’ve always found them fascinating and mysterious, an interest I share with Tara:

Before fifth grade, when her class had studied salt domes, she’d pictured the New Orleans Superdome made out of salt, buried a few feet below her front yard. But the teacher had explained that the domes were more like underground mountains, formed when an ancient seabed buckled up over millions of years through the surrounding crush of earth. The salt behaved almost like lava, flowing upwards until it capped near the surface. For a time afterwards, whenever Tara salted her food, she imagined tiny flecks of bizarre prehistoric sea creatures mixed in with it.

–Lifelike Creatures, pg. 36

So the impulse to somehow include salt domes in the story emerged early on, even before I’d plotted the larger conflict that would come crashing into Tara and Joan’s world. With salt domes on my radar, it was inevitable that I should happen upon the other geologic phenomenon of Lifelike Creatures, the one that became the larger conflict — a sinkhole. Turns out the two often go hand-in-hand.

Salt dome cutout, from Louisiana
State Exhibit Museum

Salt domes and sinkholes have made headlines in Louisiana several times over the years, most dramatically at Lake Peignur in 1980, when the drill from an oil rig barge punctured a salt dome beneath the lake. The miscalculation created a sinkhole, triggering an enormous whirlpool that drained the lake and even reversed the flow of a nearby canal, temporarily creating Louisiana’s tallest recorded waterfall.

More recently, the Bayou Corne sinkhole was precipitated by a collapse in the Napoleonville Salt Dome. Or more accurately, the wall of a hollowed out cavern within the dome, near the dome’s outer wall. The cavern was manmade, as are dozens of others nested deep within the dome’s interior. Adding to the mystique of these underground marvels is the fact that they are uniquely well-suited for storing hydrocarbons, natural gas, and even crude oil. If the earth shifts, the salt walls flex and flow. Integrity is maintained as long as the surrounding salt is of adequate thickness. It was not in the case of the Bayou Corne sinkhole. As a result, an entire community was displaced with many residents leaving behind what they’d assumed would be the golden years of retirement.

The Bayou Corne sinkhole

The sinkhole in Lifelike Creatures is modeled on this real-life industrial disaster. My fictionalized version not only connects the “small” story of Tara and Joan with larger, catalytic forces. It also mirrors the downward spiral of drug and alcohol addiction and the corrosive effects on the parent-child relationship. I’m fortunate to have a close friend who is a geologist. He generously shared his expertise, allowing me to plausibly plot sinkhole and remediation events that force Tara and Joan into “adapt or die” situations.

So pantser or plotter? Based on my experience with Lifelike Creatures, I’ve embraced a middle way. The tools of the plotter kept me grounded even as the chapter outline changed and evolved. The pantser’s spontaneity offered unforeseen gifts, including a pivotal moment that totally took me by surprise. Early readers have had no qualms about pacing or character motivation. And Tara and Joan were given what every character deserves — a plot integrated with their core desires and beliefs.

Rebecca Baum is a New York City transplant from rural Louisiana. She’s authored several short stories and two novels. The most recent, Lifelike Creatures, was published by Regal House Publishing on September 17, 2020. She is represented by Jeff Ourvan at Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. She’s a cofounder of a creative studio where she is a ghostwriter, copywriter, and blogger. She lives in Greenwich Village with her husband and their cat.

Steven Mayfield: “It’s Hard to Make Up Stuff that Good”

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Writers are always advised to write what they know. I don’t disagree, but think that it’s how you come to know about something that matters. I once took a class from Roger Welsch, the renowned folklorist. He advised us not sell ourselves short on what we knew, recalling a previous student flummoxed by her lack of worldly experiences upon which to draw. Dr. Welsch gave her an assignment. “Think of something about your family that you find interesting.” The girl came back with the following tale: Her grandmother and grandfather lived in a small Nebraska town where everyone knew each other. It was in a time when people talked over the back fence and hung their laundry on a clothesline. Every week the girl’s grandmother washed her husband’s pajamas and hung them on the line. When they were dry, she neatly folded them and placed the PJs in a dresser drawer where they remained until the next week when she removed the clean, unworn pajamas, rewashed them, and again hung them on the line. Why did she do this?

“Well,” the girl told Dr. Welsch, “my grandpa slept in the nude and my grandma didn’t want anyone to know.”

“It’s hard to make up stuff that good,” Dr. Welsch told his student.

So, she did have something to write about, even though it wasn’t drawn from her own experience. She’s not alone. Frank Herbert created the world of Dune, J.R.R. Tolkien the inhabitants of Middle-Earth, J.K Rowling the wizard’s school at Hogwarts. My next book, Treasure of the Blue Whale, describes a town and a time period that I never knew. Don’t blame me for such presumptuousness. Blame Alastair MacClean. When I was a teenager, I loved books by MacClean, the Scottish schoolteacher who wrote The Guns of Navarone and other adventures. His tales of mountain-climbing commandos, nuclear submarines, and double agents were concocted without actual experiences. He did not learn about such people and things by scaling Matterhorn, doing battle with Blofeld, or splitting an atom. He went to the library. Afterward, he didn’t write what he knew; he knew what he wrote.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, CA at sunset.

A few years ago, when I lived in San Francisco, I picked up my wife from an appointment in Pac Heights. When I pulled up to the curb, she was waiting alongside a very old man. “This is Zane,” she told me. “We’re giving him a ride.”

Zane got in the car and introduced himself. “Thank you for your kindness,” he said. “In exchange, you will get a really good story.”

Zane was 90 years old and Nisei—born in America—the son of a Scotch-Irish mother and a father who was Issei—born in Japan. He’d gone to high school in San Francisco, graduating in 1942 just a few months following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Not long thereafter, Zane and his parents were shipped off to an internment camp in Utah. He spent a year there before being allowed to enlist in the Army.

“I moved to New York City after the war,” he told us. “I lived there for twenty-six years. I was a dance instructor.” He offered to give my wife and I free lessons. He said the rumba was easiest and we’d start there.

Zane’s home was in an assisted living facility not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. The sidewalk fronting the building was steep and we offered to help him to the door. “I can make it,” he assured us. “Have you heard of Michael Jackson? He did the moon walk. I can do the moon walk, too.”

And then he did.

“He was interesting,” I said to my wife as we drove home. I was already planning the book I would write, one currently in progress.

“Yes he was,” she replied, “he was very sweet. And his story…can you believe it? Why, you just can’t make up stuff that good.”

Steven is the past recipient of the Mari Sandoz Prize for Fiction and the author of over fifty scientific and literary publications that have appeared in Event, The Black River Review, cold-drill, artisan, The Long Story, and the anthology From Eulogy to Joy. In 1998, he was the guest editor for Cabin Fever, the literary journal of the Cabin Literary Center. He is the author of Howling at the Moon, a Best Books of 2010 selection by USA Book News as well as an Eddie Hoffer Finalist.

Ill-Fated Lovers: Writing About Socioeconomics and Race

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Writing Bliss presented several challenges which I would divide into two categories: the literary and the personal.

Portraying the impediments to Danielle and Connor’s relationship—the central plot of Bliss—was challenging primarily because those impediments are societal, as opposed to interpersonal or circumstantial. It would be one thing if they were merely too stubborn or prideful to admit their feelings, if they only misunderstood each other (which, for much of the novel, they do), or if they were from rival families, he a Montague, she a Capulet. But it is their socioeconomic and racial differences that threaten the love between them, and capturing the implications of these differences was thorny. Societal constructs are both omnipresent, all-powerful and insidious, and rarely discussed in everyday life, much less between two individuals from completely different backgrounds, like Danielle and Connor.

Connor, raised amid affluence and ease in a predominantly white community, has never reflected much on the luxuries of his race, which are apparent to Danielle, raised amid poverty and strife in a predominantly black community. More, she cannot comprehend why someone would forgo the opportunities wealth has offered him, as Connor attempts to do in the beginning of the novel. A rec center employee devoted to the needs of underserved children, she knows that luxury and opportunity are rare and precious blessings, and falling in love with someone who doesn’t understand this feels to her like a betrayal of her community. They are each caught between two worlds—their own and their lover’s—worlds their love can reveal but perhaps never reconcile. Perhaps.

Bliss also presented a personal challenge, because years of examining these characters’ worldviews had a powerful, if disquieting, effect on my own. I am the child of middle class parents who fostered roughly seventy kids. I attended public high school in northern Minnesota, then private college at St. John’s University (MN). I grew up believing I was capable of grasping a wide array of viewpoints. So, when I conceived of the basic premise behind Bliss back in 2014, at the tail end of a brief correctional career in Saint Paul, Minnesota, I felt that my experience—in particular, the year and a half I spent as a guard at the Ramsey County Juvenile Detention Center—offered me unique insights into urban poverty and relations between law enforcement and communities of color. However, the more I explored Danielle and Connor’s lives and the more confident I was in their motives and natures, the more I asked the obvious question: What right do I, a white man in 2020 America, have to write a love story featuring a black woman?

To this I have no answer. I can only take solace in the equally obvious fact that I am no authority, not on America, its merits or ills, not on race, womanhood, or love; rather, my time with Bliss has further convinced me that the realm of fiction is not for authorities. It is for the uncertain, those with more questions than answers, those who wish to understand the things they know they never will.

Fredrick Soukup received a philosophy degree from St. John’s University (Minnesota) in 2010. Excerpts from his works have been published in Fluent Magazine and Sou’wester. His debut novel, Bliss, will be released March 2, 2020 by Regal House Publishing. He lives in Saint Paul with his brilliant wife, Ashley.

The Magic of Place

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by Heather Newton, finalist of the 2019 W.S. Porter Prize for McMullen Circle

Every work of fiction starts with a question, and often that question is “what if?”

I grew up in Raleigh, spent time in Pittsburgh and Boston, but have lived in Asheville since 1992. Western North Carolina is the first place that ever truly felt like home. When I drive I-40 West after visiting my family in Raleigh and round that one bend where the mountains come into view, my heart leaps up. 

I bookended my McMullen Circle story collection with two short pieces from the point of view of a mountain. The “what if” of those pieces is what if the places we love love us back? What if, when my car rounds that bend on I-40, the mountain sees me and its heart leaps up?

Humans’ attachment to place is a mysterious thing. There’s no predicting what locale will take hold in a person’s heart. It might be where we came from, where we fled to, or a town or city or country that we stumbled upon on our way to somewhere else. Maybe a place where light hits water in a way that makes us ache. Maybe where we experienced comfort from people who loved us, or discovered who we were, or briefly became our best selves.

As a writer, I find that no matter what story I want to tell, I need to set it in a place I love (even if my characters don’t love it). I have to know what plants bloom in what season, how the locals speak, the color of the dirt. Sometimes that place exists only in memory, and the very act of remembering changes it.

McMullen Circle is set in North Georgia, an area I have come to love because my husband loves it. There, like Asheville, the Appalachian Mountains lift my mood and calm my stress. I am deeply grateful to Regal House Publishing for creating a home for these stories so that I can share them with you.

The mountain feels them walking on its surface. Their feet are part of its wearing down. Feet and wind and freeze and thaw and streams that carry its dust to the sea.

What place has your heart? 

Heather’s short story collection McMullen Circle was a finalist for RHP’s 2019 W.S. Porter Prize. Her novel Under The Mercy Trees (HarperCollins 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection and by the Southern Independent Bookstore Alliance as an Okra Pick (“great southern fiction fresh off the vine”), and was long-listed for the 2012 SIBA Book Award and the American Library Association’s Over The Rainbow project. Her short prose has appeared in Enchanted Conversation Magazine, The Drum, Dirty Spoon and elsewhere.

How I Lost a Girlfriend in a Cave and Learned to Mine Empathy

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by Dan Kopcow, author of Worst. Date. Ever

Worst. Date. Ever. is a fiction short story collection about romantic dates gone horribly wrong.  As I sifted through my short stories to see which ones fit into this collection, it occurred to me that the narrator or main character in some of these stories was not always the one going through their worst date ever.   It reminded me that, as a writer, it’s good to let the reader figure out whom to empathize with.   

We immediately think of ourselves experiencing the worst date ever.  But keep in mind that there were times when we went on a date and caused someone else to have the worst date ever.  There were times in our life when we thought the date went fine but the other person never saw us again.  Perhaps, and unbeknownst to us, they may have had the worst date ever.  And we might have been the cause!

Many years ago, I was dating this woman and we decided to go on vacation together.  It was a tremendous test of our relationship.  For the first time, we would be spending every minute together, observing how we behaved in new situations, bathroom habits, the whole caboodle.  We  traveled to Montana and were having a wonderful time.  Then, we went to Jewel Cave National Monument.  

Jewel Cave

I don’t know if you’ve been but the trip involves driving for hours through prairies, with the mountains glaring down and judging you.  You arrive at a National Park office where you take an elevator about a mile straight down into the earth.  When the elevator doors open, the temperature has dropped and you are immediately aware of humidity and the fact that you are in another world.  A tour guide takes you through a roped-off path through some truly spectacular and colorful caves.  

When my date and I arrived back up to the surface, her coldness toward me matched the Jewel Cave temperature.  For the rest of the trip, she couldn’t wait to go home.  I never heard from her again.  And I couldn’t figure out what went wrong.  

A section of The Miseries

At the time of our trip, we were both in our thirties and she had been very clear that she was interested in having children.  In hindsight, after sifting through details, I pinned down the moment when things fell apart.  It happened a mile below the surface.  While on our family tour in Jewel Cave, we came to the end of our path, marked by some Do Not Enter signs.  Our tour guide told us this was as far as we could go.  We’d have to turn around and walk back the way we came.  The tour guide went on to explain that on the other side of the Do Not Enter signs was The Miseries.  The Miseries are a series of extremely narrow cave openings that only the most dedicated and experienced cave explorers dare to enter.  The openings are twelve to sixteen inches wide by two to three feet long.  You stuff yourself into this opening and slowly, painfully, shimmy your way through, sometimes a few inches an hour.  This goes on for some time while you get bruised and scraped in complete darkness.  For fun, The Miseries alters its claustrophobic openings from a vertical to a horizontal orientation.  It takes about half a day to get through The Miseries.  When you finally arrive through the other side, bloody and exhausted, you witness an enormous and glorious cave.  You camp out there overnight, aided by the camping equipment you have been dragging in a bag which has been tied to your ankle the entire time.  The next morning, you do the whole thing in reverse.

Worst. Date. Ever.

When the tour guide completed The Miseries description, I joked out loud, “Why don’t we send the children through there with cameras so they can show us what it looks like?”  The families held their kids close to them as if I were a serial killer.  My girlfriend, realizing I might not be ideal father material, was suddenly having the Worst. Date. Ever.

I think about that story as a writer and how, depending on whose perspective you’re following,  your empathy shifts and the story’s tone changes from comedy to horror.  My hope is that these stories entertain but also remind us to be more empathetic.  And to keep your mouth shut when you’re trapped a mile underground with strangers.

Dan’s stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines nationally and internationally.  His short story, “Brain Takes a Sick Day,” was selected for inclusion in the Satirica anthology. His short story, “The Cobbler Cherry,” was included in the anthology, Thank You, Death Robot, which won an Independent Publishing Award for Best Science-Fiction and Fantasy and was named a Top Ten Fiction Novel by the Chicago Tribune.  He is currently at work on three novels.

What Empty Things Are These: Why Then, Why There?

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Regal House Publishing author J.L. Crozier, author of What Empty Things “Why,’ so many ask me, ‘write about this period?’ That is to say, 1860, and London, no less. I’m not English, and honestly, I wasn’t around then.

But context is all. I do absolutely think that history can tell us much about ourselves, and my abiding impression of Victorians is that they are very, very familiar to us. We can see ourselves in them. Much, believe me, is explained about our times by looking at theirs.

Who the Victorians were – or at least, who they believed they were – was pretty well established by 1860. They had travelled far, metaphorically speaking,   from the Georgian period, when, frankly, life was a lot more laid-back for the moneyed classes. That was because these were mainly the titled, and society was not based so consciously on commerce. Their houses were outward-looking, with large windows and balconies. The sun shone in on apartments where rooms did not necessarily have established functions, where servants were just as likely to share sleeping quarters with their masters. They might, in fact, all end up after a late night snoring gently on a handy couch.

Victorians by 1860, however, lived in a very different society. The industrial and agrarian revolutions had changed many things. Never let it be forgotten that there were legions of vulnerable people destroyed by these revolutions (some of whom were transported to the penal colony of Australia, in punishment for attempting to establish some rights), but in the meantime town and cities became swollen with the newly and vastly expanded middle class. Life was suddenly much more urban in general, where time was no longer measured in seasons and harvests but by clocks, minutes and hours. People were more educated. Transportation – trains particularly – linked them and proved the means of carrying food and other stuffs from city to city. Newspapers and periodicals spread far and wide, of course, and, with newly educated markets and the means of reaching a far-flung audience. Discussion and commentary, poetry and literary works boomed.

Patterns were established to demonstrate that the finer people deserved their status: the family was headed by the patriarch (a little like God), and everybody else ranked beneath him. It was not only important that society be aware that these families were awash with money, but that (there was perhaps some guilt here) they were nonetheless good. The home itself reflected the sense that the Victorian family was a virtuous entity – nothing loose about the way they lived, no sir. The family (and this was a nuclear family) was the centre of everything, and so the house looked inward. No more balconies; many heavy curtains over the windows. Every room must have its designated function; servants would begin to have their own tiny bedchambers immediately below the roofline; as far as possible (and even though it might reduce the actual bedchamber to cupboard-size) those who could began to insist on adjoining changing rooms. Roles were strictly delineated. ‘Upstairs’ was not to mix with ‘Downstairs’; the lady of the house worked hard to do the right thing, symbolising the virtues of the family (and of herself) and displaying her home and family at their best.

Victorian parlor
The parlour, or front parlour, or drawing room was essentially meant to display the Victorian family at its ‘best’: its virtues, its taste and its success.

The front parlour or drawing room was the formal room of display, and she would also have a morning room.

Once again, however, this was a society where virtues were on display, but also concealed some dark contradictions.  People were conscious that appalling housing in the cities were a very bad look indeed, and they spoke about the need to clear whole areas of verminous and noisome habitations. They were not, however, so attracted by the idea that urban renewal – that is, replacement housing – might be a companion notion. And where the fortunes of many increased during this time, there were also many charlatans who would became obscenely wealthy through shonky schemes that ruined the more credulous investor. Railroads, real or fables, were a favorite ploy.

Interestingly, crinolines – that odd piece of underwear so identified with Victorian women – in themselves say a lot about the times. By 1860, for example, these were now made of hoops of fine steel, and were therefore far lighter and more comfortable to wear than the bent-wood and horsehair versions of a few years before. Thus, you could say, industry had improved the lot of women in general. But that’s not all that can be said about crinolines. Punch, the satirical periodical, had quite a lot to say, in fact. Crinolines enabled skirts to bell-out to some ridiculous dimensions, with which cartoonists had a lot of fun, and, since a crinoline meant that very few petticoats were now needed to create a really impressive width… ladies were very vulnerable to a high wind. Punch loved it.

The Perils of the Crinoline
A high wind was not a friend to a lady out for a stroll. Luckily, she was wearing underwear.

But there’s more. Crinolines meant, as I said, that a fine impression could be made with a much-reduced acreage of petticoats. Yards and yards of dress material advertised the status of the wearer (and her husband and father, perhaps more to the point), but the expense need not extend to the underwear. Victorian dress of 1860 was a bit of a shop-front, indeed. Except for the important point that a certain vulnerability in windy weather encouraged the rapid development of good, solid underwear – drawers and stockings, and so on. In my researches, I was surprised to learn that undies were not so common before the advent of Victorians and their crinolines.

Dress, being such an item of personal display, is a fine subject for those analysing any society. Really, it is. Victorians went through many versions of the dress that not only demonstrated how little a woman was required to do in the way of work (if they weren’t farm workers, servants or factory hands, of course), but that also displayed the status of their husbands or fathers. But, in addition, their dress – especially in 1860 – absolutely demonstrated how confused and contradictory was the prevailing attitude to women. Just look at it: the woman was covered from neck to toe, but her shape was almost grotesquely sexualised.

The Countess Castiglione
The Countess Castiglione used the crinoline to perfection as a display, not just of wealth – but also of an exaggerated and almost cartoonish sexuality.

This of course, is where the corset came in, as the companion-piece to the crinoline. (As a little aside, however, the corset in 1860, while it could be tugged very tight, was itself a part of a piece of trompe l’oeil: a good, wide crinoline could help give the impression of an hourglass.)

Not enormously surprising, then, that the bourgeoise in her finery was subject to the politics of the time. This seems a bit unfair, to me, since she and her dress were always in effect lived statements about her husband or her father, really. She herself owned nothing. However, John Ruskin, commentator of the time, was quite caustic about the ostentation implied by extremes of bourgeois female dress; and there arose at this time the Aesthetes and their ‘rational dress’, which did away with both corsetry and crinolines.

Jane Morris, née Burden, a Pre-Raphaelite model
Jane Morris, née Burden, was a Pre-Raphaelite model and muse whose face graced myriad paintings and drawings of the time. Here she is without corset or crinoline, wearing ‘rational’ dress in 1865.

These were political statements in themselves, absolutely, and a sign of revulsion at so much conspicuous consumption. But they were not necessarily a sign that women’s lot in particular was being seen as political – Ruskin was no feminist, and there was a lot of idealisation in artistic circles that really doesn’t suggest women were being seen as anything more that symbols. Just as the nouveau riche, bourgeois class saw them, really.

However, let it also be said that education was reaching women, too, to an unprecedented extent, and that there were some intellectual giants about, who were beginning to speak of the condition of women. John Stuart Mill was one such. Another, if less well-known, was Barbara Bodichon, feminist and member of the Langham Place Circle, which argued for dress reform. She had already written in 1850, after a walking holiday in which she and Mary Howitt opted for practicality and comfort, turfed their corsets and shortened their skirts:

 

Oh! Isn’t it jolly

To cast away folly

And cut all one’s clothes a peg shorter

(a good many pegs)

And rejoice in one’s legs

Like a free-minded Albion’s daughter.

(Wojtczak, date unknown)

Thus it is clear that in the midst of what was not, to tell the truth, a very liberated space for most women, there were the seeds of a very different set of views altogether. And of course, while not everyone was conscious of taking up anything like a feminist cause, the expansion of the middle classes and the proliferation of journals and literature meant that more women were being heard as writers, and occasionally as commentators. And women were increasingly characters in novels, as well, characters who were active and intelligent. Even children’s literature might sometimes recognise girls. Who could forget Alice in Wonderland or Alice Through the Looking Glass, both of the 1860s?

What Empty Things are These, a novel by Regal House Publishing author Judy CrozierAnd it struck me, while indulging my fascination for all things Victorian by writing a novel about this most interesting time (remember, 1860 was also the year after Darwin’s theory of evolution crashed onto the scene) that some intriguing questions could be asked. What, I mused, would happen if the patriarch of this most Victorian of households were to lose his hold on it? What if he and his domestic influence were to fade? What would change?

Adelaide encounters many things in my novel, in her search for a life that would have meaning for her once George, her comatose husband, finally passes on. But fundamental to all the changes she goes through are the alterations to the patterns of her own home, including all of the relationships under that roof.

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For those interested in pursuing some of the themes mentioned above, my Master’s thesis: Beneath the carapace: virtue versus sexuality, and other contradictions behind meanings imposed on English female shape and clothing in the 1860s is available at my website: www.jlcrozier.com

Regal House Publishing author J.L. Crozier, author of What Empty Things Are TheseJL (Judy) Crozier’s early life was a sweep through war-torn South East Asia: Malaysia’s ‘Emergency’, Burma’s battles with hill tribes, and the war in Vietnam. In Saigon, by nine, Judy had read her way through the British Council Library, including Thackeray and Dickens. Home in Australia, she picked up journalism, politics, blues singing, home renovation, child-rearing, community work, writing and creative writing teaching, proof reading and editing, and her Master of Creative Writing. She now lives in France.

J.L. Crozier’s historical novel, What Empty Things Are These, is available from booksellers all over the world.

Learning the New House

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by Tim J. Myers

You move into a new house, and of course it’s a hell of a lot of work.  We’ve been pulling fourteen-hour days, hauling boxes till our arms and legs ache.  And you start setting things up, just so.  This goes here—should we put that over there?  A seemingly endless number of objects to be placed, to be positioned as the perfect slaves they are, never moving unless we bid them.  And you start learning the little peculiarities of the place—the way you have to pull just so to get the shower to work—how the front door sticks a bit.  Even the sounds of it, a kind of minor encyclopedia:  the kitchen tile you keep stepping on, that makes an odd squelching noise—the way china rattles in the hutch when someone walks past.

But all along you’re engaged in another kind of house-warming too, almost without thinking.  You hardly notice it.  And it’s more than one’s emotional attachment to a house, as real as that is.  It’s something that takes no notice of the elements of “home staging,” like the smell of fresh-baked bread to entice renters or buyers, or general “home-i-ness,” any of that.  You’re seeking, feeling for, slipping into, something far deeper.

I worried for days, unaware of it, that there were no mockingbirds here.  So many in our old neighborhood—and just three miles away!  The world alive with them in May and June, their songs filling me whether I listened or not.  Then I heard one, here, from the branches of the Modesto ash in our front yard.  Fool, I told myself—you just happened to move in early July, the season shifts, they stop singing then.  Mates are already won, sex on hidden branches has filled the world with a different, silent kind of song—eggs are growing in feathered bodies, nests being built.  They’re here too.  Of course.

We think about shower curtains, where to hang the mirrors, how to pack our plastic Christmas bins in the little shed.  I try to remember how to reconnect all the parts of my computer.  I go out to the car at night, off to grab some fast food, and notice a gleam of stars through leaf-thick branches above me.

We talk continually about what we need to buy.  A new rug for the dining room—what color?  Indoor-outdoor is best—they wear better, and easier to clean.  At night I fall into bed, my head as weary as my body.  But I find myself waking to sunlight crowding at the window, warming my limbs.  Ah, the window looks east—it can be for us like it was for those who lived here long ago, homes arranged so their doorways always faced the dawn.

And my neighbor, whose backyard is a botanical version of a middle-class pleasure palace, a Cheesecake Factory of greenery and garden knick-knacks—he tells me off-handedly that he gets hummingbirds all the time.  That eases me—eases this part of my self that’s learning the new house, the new street, the new bit of Earth beneath it.  Eases the part of me that fears a particular kind of emptiness amid the great but level fruitfulness of a modern American suburb.

The flurry of questions continues:  Where’s the closest grocery store?  How long will it take us to get to work from here?  Oh, you can’t go that way—that’s our old route, it’ll take too long.  But under those questions, a quieter one, less pressing in the practical world, far more pressing in the depths of myself:

What capacity does this new place have?

The question keeps rising in wordless form; I realize with only mild surprise that I myself am asking it, again and again.  And I know, without thinking, exactly what it means.

Capacity—for Vision.  For some strange sudden eruption of spiritual truth into my consciousness.  How will I encounter the sacred in the minutiae and particulars of this one small place?  What relationship may arise between my spirit and the sidewalks, the front lawn, the feel of the house at midnight?  It’s happened before—Vision has come to me, changing everything.  Can it happen here?

In the middle of our big moving day, sweating and dirt-smudged, she and I paused at twilight to glimpse the new crescent through vines and trees in the backyard.  Nothing made us feel more at home.

I took all the power strips and extension cords, cleaned them up, rolled and rubber-banded them, put them in a drawer so we can find them when we need them.  The cable guy came and connected us.  There’s an enormous deciduous, huge rounded leaf-heavy crown, off beyond the houses across the street.  It must be on the next block, maybe farther.  I step out the side door of the garage to finish a drink, find myself peering beyond the top of my new fence to those high branches as they shift in the wind—

Yes, I think.  Yes.  The way those leaves move, the sway of those branches in wind just after the sun sets.  Yes.

It can happen here.

My spirit begins to take its ease.  It has its own great animal faith in eventuality, even concerning that which seems, by its very radiance, impossible.  And now it feels this place, begins to let itself seep into everything here, the slope of the roof, the dirt of the empty flowerbeds, the worn wood of the back fence, the stuccoed walls, each blade of newly-sodded grass.  It greets passing breezes, neighborhood smells, little rainbows in the sprinkler arcs.

I begin to wait.

Regal House poet Tim J. Myers

Tim J. Myers is a writer, storyteller, songwriter, and senior lecturer at Santa Clara University.  He writes for all ages.  Find him at www.TimMyersStorySong.com or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TimJMyers1.  Regal House is proud to publish Tim J. Myers’ poetry collection, Down in the White of the Tree:  Spiritual Poems in the fall of 2018.

 

Learning a New House,” was originally published in: America:  The National Catholic Review. 2017, with the title: “Looking for God while moving into a new house that doesn’t feel like home.”