An Interview with Morgan Hunt, author of Bad Moon Rising

Posted on August 1, 2018 by Ed Battistella
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Ashland writer Morgan Hunt has written mystery novels, poetry, screenplays, short stories, and magazine articles, including Writer’s Digest. Her poems have been published in the California Quarterly, San Diego Mensan, and she’s considered one of the Oregon Poetic Voices. Hunt’s short story, “The Answer Box,” placed as a Finalist in the 2014 Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction contest and in 2016 she published We the Peeps: A Political Caper and Wish Fulfillment.

Morgan Hunt grew up on the Jersey shore. She is a Navy veteran and a licensed ultralight pilot. She has lived with an aggressive form of breast cancer for more than 15 years.

Her Tess Camillo mystery series (Sticky Fingers, Fool on the Hill, Blinded by the Light) won a Best Books Award (USA Book News) and a National Indie Excellence Award. We talked about book four in that series: Bad Moon Rising.

Ed Battistella: Congratulations on Bad Moon Rising, the fourth in the Tess Camillo series. Tell us a little bit about Tess’s current adventure, which is set in Ashland. It features OSF, SOU and even some cameos from locals.

Morgan Hunt: I decided to set this Tess Camillo mystery in Ashland and to make it an engaging tale. I also wanted to convey to readers my personal sense of gratitude for the Ashland community. I knew theater would be involved (hey, it’s Ashland!), but I also wanted to write about ordinary things — lesser known eateries, a hair salon, cannabis farms, pub trivia, hiking trails, etc. I wanted to give readers a sense of Ashland they couldn’t get from a Wikipedia article.

EB: How did you get interested in the Voynich manuscript?

MH:It was one of those accidentally-on-purpose writer things, Ed. On a “What should my next writing project be?” day, I Googled various provocative terms and phrases to see what would turn up. When I searched for “most mysterious,” Google listed the Voynich Manuscript as the “most mysterious” ancient manuscript. Further research showed me that many scholars had become obsessed, almost addicted, to its study. That gave me an emotional path into the story. An aside: In September 2017, when I’d written two-thirds of Bad Moon Rising, a researcher and TV personality, Nicholas Gibbs, announced that he had translated the Voynich. Headlines popped up all over about his view that Voynich script was a form of Latin shorthand. I held my breath and kept writing. By the time I had edited the final manuscript, Gibbs’ theory had been debunked.

EB: Tess is from New Jersey—like you (and me!). How does she fit into Ashland? She seems rather bemused at times.

MH: Bemused; hmm; yes, I love that word. I am definitely bemused at certain aspects of, shall we say, Ashlandia? I pull about 65-70% of Tess from my own life. And like most writers, I use hyperbole and other devices to create humor, conflict, etc. While there are certain social sectors of Ashland that I may not be wildly comfortable with due to my east coast working class background, most of the Jersey references are there for fish-out-of-water humor. Great question, which makes sense since you’re a Jersey dude!

EB: How did you come up with some of the other characters. Are they based on real people? I’m especially curious about Jefferson Graham and Echo Sapien?

MH: Neither Jefferson Graham nor Echo Sapien is based on a real person. Both are amalgams of my imagination, and a certain trait I may have encountered here and there. Jefferson Graham’s secret craving came about to foreshadow the theme of obsession. Most of us are obsessed with something – food, alcohol, drugs, relationships, religious fervor, politics. Inevitably that affects us. As for Echo, I do know a bit about the NSA because I was married to a Navy cryptologist who later worked as an NSA analyst. When we were married, I met enough of his social circle to absorb the type, I think. As a writer, one of the most delightful challenges of Bad Moon Rising was to see if, in the middle of a book, I could pivot from one sidekick-helper figure to another. And back again. I’ll leave it to readers as to whether I succeeded.

EB: I loved the device of the bargain-basement hearing aid. Did that really happen to someone?

MH: By the time I needed hearing aids, I’d heard enough cautionary tales to avoid that pitfall, but it’s happened to many. I had fun working with the device. Reading “Monkey Vicodin” still makes me smile.

EB: Tell us about the cover, which neatly previews some plot points. Who designed that?

MH: I designed front cover, Ed. Thank you for noticing the details. I went through at least five or six different designs until I landed on one that reflected the sometimes-whimsical, sometimes-macabre, but always-Pacific Northwest-flavored story.

EB: I enjoyed the pace of the book. Any tips for other writing working on pacing?

MH: Honestly, I don’t have any tips to offer, but pacing is an aspect of my writing I’ve been working to improve. I appreciate the encouragement.

EB: Thanks for talking with us. Good luck with Bad Moon Rising!

MH: Thanks for the opportunity to be part of Literary Ashland!

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An Interview with Sandra Scofield, author of THE LAST DRAFT: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Ed Battistella
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Sandra Scofield is the author of seven novels, including Beyond Deserving, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Chance to See Egypt, winner of a Best Fiction Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters.

She has written a memoir, Occasions of Sin, and a book of essays about her family, Mysteries of Love and Grief: Reflections on a Plainswoman’s Life. She is also the author of The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer and Swim: Stories of the Sixties, published by Ashland’s Wellstone Press with a cover image by Ashland artist Abby Lazerow.

Her most recent book is The Last Draft: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision.

Ed Battistella: Congratulations on THE LAST DRAFT: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision. I really enjoyed reading it.

Sandra Scofield: It’s great to have a chance to reach your readers. I think of them as slouched on couches, upright in desk chairs, zipping in and out of bookstores– These are my people.

EB: You mention that the book came out of your teaching. Tell us a bit about that and how the book arose?

SS: I have taught workshops at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival every summer since 1993 (I missed two). The topics change a lot, but what students want is essentially this: a set of guidelines to hold on to as they write and revise. They want to go through the process of figuring out how writing works, in the very pleasant environment of the summer workshop. (No sharp criticism here!) So over the years I accumulated notebooks with all my syllabi and handouts, and one day I realized that I had very practical materials that could be organized into something useful.

EB: I’m curious why you focus on the last draft rather than the first draft?

SS: Tons of stuff out there about writing a novel (mostly following ideas borrowed from screenwriting). But Truman Capote aside, nobody writes a first draft that’s good enough to fly. The first draft is for finding the story and getting something down. You may have to do that more than once. “The last draft” is the one where you apply lots of analysis and turn that story all around; where you discover what you were really after; where you amend and reinvent until you have a finished manuscript. I think it’s fun. Not knowing how to write the last draft stops a lot of novels dead. I’ve heard so many agents say they see books that have good stories but poor structure. Or “that needed another round.”

EB: You break the process down to looking, planning, and polishing? I get the feeling you see “looking” as the key element in revision (as the etymology suggests). What should writers look for in their drafts? What does the revision process tell an author?

SS: This sounds counter intuitive but I stand by the assertion: Most writers don’t really know what their novel is about when they draft it. They have some kind of story idea and they have to pursue that to make it solid enough to carry the rest of the weight of a novel: theme, characters, motifs, etc. In revision you have to take a very intense look at what you’ve done so far in order to gain ground for rewriting. You have to be cool about it, self-critical, but also self-accepting and optimistic. The big question is: what is the story? Is it big enough for a novel? If you think the answer is yes, you begin to deconstruct the early work, seeking the best structure.

EB: I was intrigued by the depth to which you discussed the process of summarizing one’s own novel—right down to ways to make notes on the text. How much of this analytic framework –intension, world-making, premise, action and commentary, agency, and threads—did you know about when you first began writing?

SS: It definitely took me a while, but I knew by the end of my first novel (first draft: 1087 pages!) that I didn’t want to write miles of pages again. My first approach was to think through a sequence of scenes, each one on an index card, with a summary line (a “caption”) and notes as I worked through the writing. (I could go back and add stuff to the card, postponing adding it to the manuscript until later.) By the 3rd book, I was really hooked into summarizing (a) the whole book (b) the beginning, middle, and end; and the chapter I was about to write. (I did that summarizing as I approach the chapter.) I think my graduate work in theatre had a lot to do with how I work, because structure is so key to writing plays. And a summary captures and holds the story so you can focus on the writing (developing) rather than the “making up” part.

EB: Are there some things that writers should definitely avoid doing in revising?

SS: I think the worst possible approach is to pick up a page and start rewriting sentences. The worst.

EB: I was fascinated by the breadth and eclecticism of the novels to discussed as examples—Henning Mankell, Donna Leon, Richard Russo, Sue Miller, Mark Haddon, Jane Smiley, Andre Dubus III, Karen Joy Fowler, and of course Austen and Fitzgerald. You seem to read voraciously. Do you think broad critical reading is crucial to the fiction writing process?

SS: Reading is how you get the sound of a novel in your head, and the rhythm of structure. I don’t know any way to shortcut that. It’s why I don’t think screenwriting principles are good instruction for novelists. Yes, you need a “spine,” or scheme for the plot, but you also need the deep breathing of the novel: that capacity for deep meaning, for introspection, and so on.

EB: As a non-fiction writer, I found myself thinking of how I might apply some of the revising techniques. Do you think THE LAST DRAFT has something to say to the non-fiction writer?

SS: Well sure. Learning to focus, really focus, on your intention, your vision, and your subject is key to developing coherence. Mastering structure is like mastering a skill in any profession or art.

EB: You’ve also done a guide called THE SCENE BOOK. Can you tell our readers a bit about that?

SS: I’ll tell you what I hear from people who use the book: I wish I had had this the day I started writing.

I tried to give writers something that isn’t too heady, too nerdy, too precious; but that absolutely stands on structure. It’s filled with examples, models. Fiction is ultimately scenic, you have to master writing scenes. I figured the people who might need a book would be independent writers who didn’t have opportunities for classes and schools and groups, so I tried to talk to “each one,” if you will, directly, kindly, generously, respectfully. What I discovered, though, is that lots of writers in or finished with writing programs snatched it up! They might have talked about scenes for two years or ten, but this book has an accessible vocabulary and clear concepts that demythologize a lot of “talented writing.”

People tell me the same thing about THE LAST DRAFT–that they can hear my voice in it, as if I am talking to them. That pleases me no end, it’s exactly what I was striving for. I want to be a writing nanny. I want to push writers out on their own. I want more stories in the world.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

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Forensic Linguistics and Authorship Analysis, a guest post by Sierra Adams

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Ed Battistella
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Sierra Adams is a senior at Southern Oregon University, where she studies English literature.

Authorship analysis is a branch of forensic linguistics that can be used to solve court cases as well as identify authors like JK Rowling and (possibly) Shakespeare. The term forensic linguistics was coined in 1968 by Jan Svartvik (Olsson). Forensic linguistics is a relatively new topic that has been used in some high-profile murder cases such as the 1996 case of Ted Kaczynski and more recently Chris Coleman in 2009. Authorship identification is an exciting new form of research that is used to identify authors based on linguistic analyses and computer programs. It can be useful outside of the courtroom as well. Recently, linguists have worked with computer programmers to develop software that can detect authorship, with a high-accuracy rating, within minutes. Because of the growing interest in forensic linguistics and specifically authorship identification some literary scholars have taken this opportunity to bring up the old argument of Shakespeare’s writing. Authorship identification techniques serve useful and interesting in all forms of written investigation.

Interest in linguistic authorship analyses can be traced back to the early 1700s, according to John Olsson, with some discussion over biblical passages in 1711 and Shakespeare studies in 1785. One of the first methods of forensic linguistics involved statistics and was invented by Augustus Morgan, an English mathematics professor, in 1851. However, it was not until the 1940s that authorship analyses using statistics and linguistic cues became a serious study (Olsson 12). With the new invention of powerful computers that could analyze statistics in the 1980s, computational linguistics arose and with it, more ways to analyze a text.

Tim Grant, a professor of forensic linguistics, writes that the study of authorship “attracts researchers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines including those working in linguistics, literature, history, theology, psychology, statistics, and computer science” (Grant 215). These researchers look for a variety of things when trying to understand or detect authorship. How the text was produced (medium, method, materials) is used to establish a basis of the work, especially if it was hand-written. The most important factor in authorship analysis is style (i.e. the use of pronouns or grammar cues such as semicolons, too many commas). Other telling features of writing include: tone, sentence structure, faux oversimplification or up-reaching (trying to sound uneducated vs trying to sound pedantic), and descriptions of people, places, emotions, or situations. Forensic linguists also dip into psycholinguistic profiling which means they try to determine the psychological background of the suspect and answer the question, ‘what kind of person wrote this?’ Lastly, they take a look at the texts relationship to comparison texts (Grant). These techniques allow for forensic linguists to scientifically organize and analyze data from personal writing and speaking.

One of the first high-profile court cases involving forensic linguistics was the case of Ted Kaczynski, or the Unabomber, who published a “rambling thirty-five-thousand-word declaration of the perpetrator’s philosophy” (Hitt). As the investigation progressed with little traceable evidence, the FBI turned to linguistics. They contacted a retired FBI agent and forensic linguist, James Fitzgerald, who used authorship analysis to determine who wrote the Unabomber’s Manifesto and,

By analyzing syntax, word choice, and other linguistic patterns, Fitzgerald narrowed down the range of possible authors and finally linked the manifesto to the writings of Ted Kaczynski, a reclusive former mathematician. Both Kaczynski and the Unabomber also showed a preference for dozens of unusual words and expressions…as well as the less familiar version of the cliché “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.” A judge ruled that the linguistic evidence was strong enough to prompt him to issue a search warrant for Kaczynski’s cabin in Montana; what was found there put him in prison for life. (Hitt)

This fascinating case brought a lot of recognition and interest to the field of forensic linguistics and authorship analysis. It also set the precedent for bringing linguists into the court to help sway the jury.

In 2009, Chris Coleman’s family was murdered after receiving several threatening “ransom notes” asking for money as well as emails threatening both Coleman’s family and his boss’s. No physical evidence connected him to the crime yet something about his story didn’t add up. Coleman was working as a security officer for a televised evangelical Christian company and was also having an affair. Beyond this, many of his wife’s friends testified against him in court. Forensic linguist Robert Leonard analyzed the ransom notes and Cole’s emails, journals, and notes and deduced that he was the killer himself, and even though “Leonard’s testimony was disputed in the courtroom…in a case with no physical evidence firmly linking Coleman to the crime, Leonard’s words—and Coleman’s—took on added weight.” (Hitt). This case, along with Kaczynski’s, put forensic linguistics in the courtroom and led to various classes and degree programs around the country (Butters) as well as made way for authorship analysis to be taken seriously as a form of investigation.

The tools of forensic linguistics and authorship analysis can be used in non-criminal cases as well, “today, computers can do this type of analysis in seconds, whether to uncover a case of murder-disguised-as-suicide, study an anonymous medieval poem, resolve disputes about authorial credit, or even provide political asylum for a refugee” (Juola). Patrick Juola developed a computer program that can detect authorship with over 90 percent accuracy. In 2013 J.K. Rowling published The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Juola’s software analyzed the novel and compared it to her other work. The software matched it within minutes. Juola writes,

Over the past decade, I have developed a computer program to do this sort of analysis of writing style, based on literally millions of different features. This program will take a sample of writing and determine, on the basis of similarity, who among a set of authors was most likely to have written that sample. (Olsson)

His computer program replaces hours of comparison work and helps build up linguistic evidence. An actual linguist would most likely have to double-check the work and be able to explain the differences and why they are significant. Even so, this is still an exciting development in the field of forensic linguistics. Not all, however, appreciate the results of computational authorship analyses.

Literary authorship analysis has been an area of interest since the 1700s and the question of Shakespeare’s authorship began around 1785 when “Reverend James Wilmot wrote that Sir Francis Bacon was the real author of the Shakespeare plays” (Olsson 11) and since then the Shakespeare Controversy has been fiercely debated. Over the years, curious fans of the famous plays have attempted to credit “Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the 5th Earl of Rutland, the 6th Earl of Derby, and the 17th Earl of Oxford” (Dobson). The most convincing and/or popular competitor though, seems to be Christopher Marlowe who was a respected contemporary of William Shakespeare and who has a cult-like following that is just as passionate, if not as large, as the Bard himself. Organizations such as Shakespearean Authorship Trust are very active in the debate and even hold annual conferences to provide platforms for discussion. The founder of the organization runs a website called “Doubt About Will dot org” and signs his welcome letter, “Yours in doubt, Mark Rylance, Trustee of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust” (Rylance). In 2016 the Shakespeare Controversy made headlines after “The New Oxford Shakespeare edition of the playwright’s works — which will be published by Oxford University Press online ahead of a worldwide print release — lists Christopher Marlowe as Shakespeare’s co-author on the three “Henry VI” plays, parts 1, 2 and 3” (Shea). This shocking news was reported by the BBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post among others. The Post reports that in order “to find out if collaboration occurred, 23 international scholars performed text analysis by scanning through Marlowe’s (and other contemporary writers’) works, creating computerized data sets of the words and phrases he would repeat, along with how he did so — all of the idiosyncrasies that comprise one’s writing” (Andrews). They found enough of Marlowe’s presence in the texts to credit him with co-authorship. Most Shakespearean scholars are not pleased with this controversy and have made themselves very clear on who is responsible for the Bard’s famous plays.

A particular favorite retort of mine comes from the 2008 edition of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. This whopping 5.2 pound, 541 page encyclopedia is edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells who are decidedly Stratfordians, or, pro-Shakespeare. Those who question the authorship of his plays are called anti-Stratfordians. In a biting entry under authorship controversy Dobson writes, “many commentators have paid reluctant tribute to the sheer determination and ingenuity which these anti-Stratfordian writers have displayed” (31) and later he goes on to write, “this Authorship Controversy, consciously or not, is very largely about class” (31) and since many of the anti-Stratfordians reside in the United States, Dobson claims that the USA is “a country whose citizens apparently find it easier to entertain romantic fantasies about their unacknowledged talents than do the British themselves” (31). Even though it was a little outdated it was definitely the most passionate and straightforward published response that I could find.

So, after reading this passage from 2008 and then discovering that the publishers at the very same Oxford University Press went ahead and included a co-authorship a mere eight years later, I had to find out how the editors of the encyclopedia responded. It turns out that the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare was published in January of 2016 just before the computational authorship analytics that c-credited Marlowe were confirmed and published. In early November of 2016, the Oxford University Press released a statement by Gabriel Egan saying, “the news is that he collaborated as a writer much more than we used to think he did. We can now say with a high degree of certainty that upward of third of his plays were co-written in some sense or other” (Egan). As to how this was confirmed:

The new machine-based approach – Computational Stylistics – has started to reveal some very startling facts. For example, it is now clear that Shakespeare’s vocabulary – the total body of all the different words he knew – was not exceptionally large (as has long been assumed) but rather was just typical for the period. We now know that a lot of words and phrases that we used to think were coined by Shakespeare were already in use by other writers before him. Wherever his genius lay, it was not in his vocabulary, but in his ways of combining existing words and phrases. (Egan)

This piece seemed so defeated in tone that I began to feel genuinely sad for the self-proclaimed Stratfordians and their ardent belief in the singular-genius that was Shakespeare. I could not find any public responses from the original editors of the encyclopedia but I hope to one day read the updated entry on Authorship Controversy in the next edition. As far as Egan’s thoughts, ultimately he seemed to accept this unwelcome linguistic study by concluding, “we should apply this kind of scientific rigour as much to humanistic study as anything else, since no matter what their fields everyone who undertakes research for a living is ultimately in pursuit of the truth, and these are the best ways we have for finding it” (Egan). Regardless of co-authorship, Shakespeare is still a key figure in literature, history, and drama. The new techniques of authorship analysis may uncover even more shocking discoveries as it develops.

Authorship analysis, whether in the courtroom or in academics, remains a hot topic. This burgeoning branch of forensic linguistics will only get more valuable and more contested as time goes on. With most of us broadcasting our lives on social media, through texts, and online chatrooms, our writing can define us more than ever. How we present ourselves, what words we type, the pronouns we choose, and the slang we use, are all key pieces in creating our written and spoken identities. Now that forensic linguists can work with statistics and programmers to determine authorship from huge samples of personal writing, we will have to pay closer attention to what we are saying.

Works Cited

Andrews, Travis. “Big debate about Shakespeare finally settled by big data: Marlowe gets his due”, The Washington Post, October 25 2016.

Butters, Ronald. “Forensic Linguistics.” Journal of English Linguistics. Sage Publications, 2011.

Egan, Gabriel. “What did Shakespeare write?” Oxford University Press Online, November 8 2016.

Grant, Tim. “Approaching Questions in Forensic Authorship Analysis.” Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008.

Hitt, Jack. “Words on Trial; Can Linguists Solve Crimes that Stump the Police?” The New Yorker, July 25 2012.

Juola, Patrick. “How a Computer Program Helped Show J.K. Rowling write A Cuckoo’s Calling”, The Scientific American, 2013.

Marche, Stephan. “Wouldn’t It Be Cool If Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?” The New York Times, October 21, 2011.

Olsson, John. Forensic Linguistics. Continuum, 2004.

Rylance, Mark. The Shakespearean Authorship Trust, 2018. http://www.shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org.uk/

Shea, Christopher. “New Oxford Shakespeare Edition Credits Christopher Marlowe as a Co-author” The New York Times, October 24 2016.

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An Interview with Ceil Lucas, author of How I Got Here

Posted on June 26, 2018 by Ed Battistella
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Ceil Lucas is professor emerita of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., where she taught linguistics through American Sign Language for 31 years before retiring in 2013. She began teaching Italian at all levels in 1973 and continues to do so. She has edited or co-authored 22 books and also is editor of the scholarly journal, Sign Language Studies, published by Gallaudet University Press.

Lucas was born in the United States, but raised from ages 5 to 21 in Guatemala City and in Rome, Italy, and has written a book titled How I Got Here: A Memoir.

Ed Battistella: How I Got Here is an unusual memoir in that covers the early part of your life—up to about the early 1970s. What prompted you to organize the memoir that way?

Ceil Lucas: I always knew that I wanted to write a memoir about my upbringing in Guatemala City and Rome, Italy, 1956 – 1972. Before I started working on the memoir, I had already started working on my family’s genealogy, and I quickly realized that this information would have to be included in the memoir; it was not enough to tell the immediate stories of my parents. I needed to go back as far as I could. In the process, the stories of my ancestors really became my stories and I couldn’t leave them out. At this point, I feel like I know these people. So the memoir is about the 1951 – 1972 period and also about those who came before. It is about how I got here, in the broadest sense.

EB: What’s the significance of the title?

CL: When I came back to go to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington in August of 1969, I heard myself saying, “Well, I wasn’t raised here; I’m not from here.”, “here” meaning America, the US. But I was starting to plan the memoir at the same time as I was working on my family history and came to find out that my mother’s people came to the Eastern Shore of Maryland from Scotland in 1654, and my father’s people came from England to Philadelphia in 1679. I had to come to terms with the fact that, when your folks arrive in 1654 and 1679, you’re “from here”. So it’s not just about how I came to be born in Phoenix in 1951 or how I got to the US in August of 1969 but how my people got here 122 years before there was an America. The memoir is about the balance between “I’m not from here.” and “I’m deeply American.”

EB: How did your upbringing in Guatemala and Rome affect your perceptions of US events and your sense of yourself as an American?

CL: See above. The effect was more powerful in Rome because I was in Italy during the Vietnam War and got the Italian/European perspective on it, for example, and on US politics in general. But in 1957, my civil engineer father was called to serve as a pallbearer at the funeral of the assassinated Guatemalan president [photo of my father with the casket in the book], in a situation that had totally been engineered by Eisenhower and the brothers Dulles. I was way too young in 1957, of course, to know what was going on, and my father passed before I was able to ask him all the questions I had. But when I went back and studied the history of Guatemala in those days, I was stunned. He was a civil engineer who did civil engineering in Guatemala, worked on irrigation projects, and he was also a fluent Spanish speaker, having been born and raised in New Mexico [he was born in 1909, before it became a state in 1912], but his company was a subcontract to the Dept of State run by John Foster Dulles [of the airport] and Dulles’ brother Allan ran the CIA. I came to find out that they were pretty much the puppeteers. I was ages 5 – 9, having a magical childhood in Guatemala. When I came back for college in 1969, I did NOT have a sense of myself as an American, not at all. I was “other”; Latin American, Italian, European. At 67, that sense of “I’m not from here” lingers, even after 46 years of living and working in the US. I started teaching Italian when I was a grad student, age 22, and am still teaching, not willing to give it up.

EB: When did your travel experiences awaken an interest in linguistics?

CL: Almost immediately; a chapter in the memoir is called Teaching the Dolls, about how I started teaching my dolls English and Spanish in first grade; I learned to read in Spanish and English at the same time and spoke 4 languages fluently – English, Spanish, French, Italian – by the time I was 10. The interest in language was there from my earliest memories. Good thing ‘cause I can’t do math.

EB: There is a good deal of family history in the book—going back to—what sort of research was involved in that?

CL: A lot of archival research. My mother left a good framework and I picked it up. I got comfortable with the National Archives in Washington, DC, the state archives in Maryland, and several historical societies- Eastern Shore of Maryland, Oklahoma Historical Society, New Mexico Historical Society, the Hackensack, NJ Historical Society, I spent many hours at the National Archives, filling in the framework that my mother left and I became an Ancestry.com member (still am a member) and got a lot of information on line.

EB: What was the writing process like for you compared to, for example, academic writing?

CL: It was a lot more relaxed. A lot of the stories were already formed in my head and just came out very smoothly. I am an academic of 45 years, so the first version of the memoir had references and footnotes in the text itself. I had the great fortune to start an autobiographical writing course the fall after I retired, in 2013, and the genius teacher Susan Moger (herself a novelist) said, “Um, no. Have a references section at the back; in the text makes it dry as toast.” I was so lucky to have her help me shape it. That reference section let me follow my very strong academic instinct to recognize the work of others – I can’t claim to know the history of Oliver Cromwell, for example, the dude who got my folks to Maryland’s Eastern Shore; I needed to research that and many other things – but a memoir is not an academic paper and I had to learn that. It was entirely liberating and I’m still taking the course, long after the memoir has been published. It’s really fun to write what I want without the academic constraints.

EB: How long did the memoir process take, and what was the most difficult aspect of the work?

CL: I had been listing the memories that I wanted to write about for about 3 years and eventually came up with an outline; I knew that I wanted to start with the funeral in Guatemala and go from there. I had written some of the pieces in other creative writing courses but in the fall of 2013, I got organized and made a schedule that had me finishing each section within 2 weeks. By early 2015, it was done.

EB: I was impressed with the many historical images in the book. How did you come by those?

CL: Many of them are family photos and documents that my mother had collected and passed to me and I am so grateful. I think the oldest one I have ( not in the book) is of my great-grandmother as a young woman, taken probably in 1885 and there are a number of vintage ones like that in the book; some images came from the historical societies, from newspapers of the time. A classmate in Guatemala who now runs the school that we went to ( his mother started it ) worked with the National Archives in Guatemala City to find the photo of my father at the funeral (p. 6). The census images, like the one on page 64 and the map on p. 51, are openly available; your tax dollars and mine at work. Others, like the image of Eastern Maryland on p. 69, came with permission from a relative who also worked on our family history. I was extremely careful to secure permission for any image that did not belong to me and people were always quite willing to grant it.

EB: Any advice for other aspiring memoirists?

CL: Do the research and include your family history in your memoir. The stories of all of those people are YOUR stories and helped shape who you are.

EB: Are you planning a sequel covering later times?

CL: I don’t think so. The sheer assembly of the images for my first 18 years plus the archival ones took a lot of work. I don’t think I have it in me to tackle the age 18 – age 67 time period…..

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

CL: Thank YOU for inviting me and for your great questions. It has been a pleasure to share all of this.

Visit the How I Got Here website.

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