The Writing Gene is Finally Creeping out of Kori's Hidden Recesses

I knew it would happen someday. I've seen it in her since she before she entered school.

Kori is a born writer, although she has always denied it. I knew that someday, it would come out of her, either creeping into the light or bursting out full-blown. It started with "books" in kindergarten, took the next step with the Dandelion Cookoff cookbooks she produced in her early to late teens. And now THIS, just over a month past her 25th birthday. Who'da thunk?

Today I got an e-mail from dearest daughter that read like this:

I was wondering, have you ever considered that Grammy didn’t like mom because she was German?

Random, I know….I’m writing down a storyline that I’ve been thinking about. The kind of thing I could turn into a book one day if I ever get around to it. Anyway, I’ve been doing character analysis on one of my characters – a Hungarian holocaust survivor living in Budapest. I was thinking about why this character wouldn’t like certain people, and a German, came to mind…which made me think of Grammy and mom. Anyway, have a great day!

Love you!
Kori

Here is my reply:

Knew it would happen one of these days. Writing is in your genes. You can't escape it.

However, as to your question, it is an interesting angle. I hadn't put that spin on it before.


The main reason Grammy gave was a class difference. My mother came from aristocratic Jewish stock-- important father who was president, CEO, manager of steel mills, coal mines, etc. -- part of the Budapest social scene. She herself was part of the 1920's equivalent of the jet-setters-- a social butterfly going to all the best Hungarian parties. They were wealthy people until the War stripped them of most of it.

Your mother's parents, on the other hand, came from German peasant stock-- farmers, butchers, bakers, shopkeepers, people of the soil --coarse, working class folks just one step up from poverty in the eyes of people like my mother.

That alone was enough to make her think that I could do better-- I was marrying beneath my station, as it were, and she didn't like that. I'm not sure how German commoners who didn't have anything to do with the Third Reich and its activities would have factored into her feelings, but it could have. It was never mentioned, so I don't know.

I'll do some checking around, however, and let you know what I discover.

Now, with regard to helping your writing urges evolve:

One thing I have done over the years to help writing projects evolve is to write newspaper articles-- sometimes monthly or bimonthly columns-- on segments that I wanted someday to collect into a book. My "On the Trail of the Volunteer Vegetable" column for the Business of Herbs forced me, every two months for ten years, to write a profile of a different backyard weed, and these columns (which I got paid for as I wrote them, by the way) were what I collected into the book which is now called The Volunteer Vegetable Sampler: Recipes for Backyard Weeds.

Back then, I just wrote them in the computer, along with the articles I wrote for the Plain Dealer, Ohio Magazine, Plain Community Business Exchange, and all the others. They are all there now, ready to be arranged in logical collections, given titles, edited a bit, and published as books of my collected contribution to the learning of others.

Today, things are different, however. Thanks to blogs, all this can be published right away in a personal blog on the internet, so you can share it with whoever you want, get their input and help in research, etc.

Start a blog for the book project, and write everything you are thinking and discovering, no matter how well developed, as entries in your blog. You will never know which pieces will come in useful some day. Different entries might be useful in different articles, or form chapters of the book. That way you will have them electronically, so you can massage them into different forms later. Take a look at my new blog http://www.goosefootacres.blogspot.com/ to see what I am doing. Titled Doc Weed's Doin's, it is my first effort at keeping a journal electronically. Some entries are detailed answers to questions asked on one of the list serves I belong to. Others are recountings of adventures with the grandkids and others. One is the story about our getting a Jack LaLanne Power Juicer and how we are enjoying it.

Some may never go any further than being an entry in my blog, but the one on "Heat to Burn" in Firewood may well become a column or book that I will use in teaching about making fires for welfare training, and/or may submit for inclusion in http://www.providentliving.org/, and/or prepare for Boy Scouts , or whatever. It is a very important thing for everyone to know, and no one teaches it anymore. However, now it is started, and will be easy to add pieces to as more comes to mind or to my attention, so that someday soon, it will emerge as a full-blown article first, and then maybe expand into a booklet or small book. In this case, everytime I learn something new, I will open that particular blog entry and expand it, rather than write a new entry. That is the nice thing about blog entries-- you can always open an old one and edit it to make it better.

The winter edible wild plants will be added to as I find more of them on other trips to the farm, and that will become a chapter in my Dinner Underfoot book-- or may be added to the existing small chapter on winter fruits to enrich it and add dimension.

If you start a blog and let me in to it, it would be fun follow your creative process and input to it as your writings trigger memories that otherwise would stay hidden away. I'm excited.

Love you
Dad