(April 30, 2020)

I wrote earlier about how my mother’s death stalled my work on the letter transcripts, both physically and emotionally speaking, but I did get back to them about a year later. However, a return to my full-time teaching job after sabbatical, plus the responsibility of directing a play each year with my students, meant my progress was slow. I managed to finish the transcripts and interlaced them with the research chronology of the war in Europe, especially North Africa and Italy, which took about 18 months, and I was just starting to think about how to present the material in another medium, when another road block slammed me. Hard. My husband died unexpectedly of sudden cardiac arrest, just a few months after being pronounced in excellent shape at his annual medical checkups. This shook my life in ways that I won’t go into here, but it was definitely not conducive to research or writing for several years after that.

Finally, the time came for me to retire from teaching, and following the plan my husband and I had made together long before his death, I moved to western Massachusetts to be nearer to our grandchildren. Once settled there, and with plenty of time on my hands, I was now ready to take on the letters project once again. The first thing I did was to re-read the document I had created that combined the letter transcripts and the wartime chronology. At first, I was looking for ways to create a theatrical event, but after re-reading everything, I realized that there was no true dramatic action to be found. Yes, it was a dramatic time in our country’s history, but there was no conflict in my parents’ relationship, other than the separation created by my father’s wartime assignments overseas. I also came to the realization that the letter contents required too much reading between the lines, so to speak. They were nuanced and delicate, and there was a serious love story involved, one that I knew little about until reading those letters. I started thinking of it a quasi-memoir, and my first working title for the book was The War: A Love Story.

This was a disappointment in some ways but a relief in others. Being free of the theatrical constraints of some measure of realism (for I could not imagine doing the letter texts any other way), I could add a narrator’s voice to the story to explore my mother’s side of the story as well as the many social and political issues my father raised in his musings. So back I went to the source documents, re-reading with an eye to what other kind of organization made most sense. During this phase, I was definitely functioning as an academic, taking copious notes, and organizing what I was reading by various issues that were on my father’s mind or influencing him as he communicated with his wife across a great distance. In addition to the declarations of love and devotion and thoughts about love and marriage, my dad was also concerned with military life and the war in general (including women during wartime), the various technologies of the time that fascinated him (cameras, radios), his local civilian working partners (British, French, Italian), American politics, life on the Homefront, post-war planning, and many other, smaller issues that consumed him regularly. So that’s what I focused on when I first started to write: issues. Since most of the early letters were full of Dad’s anxiety about how bad the mail service was during his first several weeks away from Mom, first in England and then in North Africa, that was the very first chapter I wrote, using plenty of additional research about the wartime postal service for soldiers overseas.

Now that I had a plan and had started writing, I also looked for a writing group. I knew that a group that would offer feedback on my work would be very valuable to me, especially since I didn’t yet have a particularly large peer group in my new community. So I started to put out some feelers. It turned out that a fellow author and sister of a close friend of mine from St. Lawrence was, at that time, keeping lists of various kinds of grant, residency, and workshop opportunities for writers, and she was aware of a few writer’s groups in the region of Massachusetts where we both lived. She gave me the name of someone in my local area who might have recommendations for me, which brought me to a women writers’ group that was just starting a new session and had one opening left. I jumped at the chance. When it was my turn to share my current project, I explained to the group about the materials I had inherited and how the decision to make the project a book instead of a play was very recent, and I shared with them my very first chapter called “Communication Chaos,” which included the history of V-mail and scholarly writings about the importance to the military of communications from home in addition to my dad’s personal frustrations. The astute and supportive feedback was very useful, and as it turned out, spot on. They declared that the chapter was well-written and interesting in an academic sort of way, but they were much more interested in the implied love story, the human angle underneath the research about the military mail service during WWII, and they strongly advised me to consider changing my approach to emphasize the personal story they felt would be much more interesting to a general reading audience. Once I made that adjustment, and just started to tell the story of my parents’ experiences to the best of my ability, words started to flow more easily.

Sixteen mostly-chronological and anecdotal chapters later, I had a good handle on the book’s shape and started in on a second set of revisions based on the feedback the group had given me on the first chapter drafts. Then I brought those revisions back to the group. When everything had been through the critique process twice, which took over a year, it was time to start looking for publishers for my new manuscript. Since I didn’t have an agent, I used my academic connections to start. In fact, when the company that had published my first book on women stage directors heard what I was doing, they had asked for right of first refusal on this new project because they also published military history. But after they read the manuscript, they admitted it was more “human interest” than they were used to (they normally published first-person battle narratives), so they passed on publishing it.

This left me looking for new options, and I started with Oregon-focused university presses, since several of them had published books about individual Oregonians, which both my parents were. However, they, too, felt the book wasn’t academic or combat-oriented enough. Next, I started looking for publishers who published narratives of all kinds about WWII. Luckily there are many of those lists available online, and I started to work my way through them. For several weeks in the summer of 2017, my book proposal got rejected outright or ignored entirely, which can happen sometimes when inquiring about author submissions without an agent. Then I discovered Sunbury Press, a small independent publisher who seemed quite open to accepting my proposal without an agent, and their website was very author-friendly, though they warned me it could take several months for a reply because they had many proposals to consider. That encouragement was good enough for me, so in the early autumn of 2017, I sent them everything they requested as part of the proposal process: table of contents, book summary, questions about illustrations (I had lots of them), etc. Then I waited.

Next time, I’ll write about what I was doing during the waiting time, what happened after I got the book contract, how I worked with editors and book designers, and then how I learned more about self-marketing with a small press. Enjoy.

(March 31, 2020)

Once I identified all the images I wanted digitized and sent them over to my university’s Newell Canter for Arts Technology, I turned my focus to the memorabilia and letters themselves. I set myself up in an upstairs guest room in my home and started to go through and organize everything I had brought home with me from my mother’s house. At the time, I was a working academic and had a perfectly functional office on campus, but I wanted to keep this new project separate from my teaching and other research endeavors, because for the first time in my life I was working outside my longtime professional discipline in the theatre and on something that felt very personal and private to me.

The first thing I needed to do was to sort the letters, most of which Mom had shoved into plastic bags in no particular order. I suspect she used to grab a letter now and then to revisit their contents, perhaps when she was particularly missing my dad, but she definitely had no sense of these materials as any kind of collection. They were just mementos she kept for memory’s sake. In fact, for someone whose temperament suggested she probably should have been a librarian and who regularly volunteered at the local library, my mom was actually quite cavalier about how she treated those letters.

I started by putting them in chronological order based on the postmarks on each envelope. But some of the postmarks were illegible, so then I started looking at the dates on the letters themselves and discovered that some of them had dates that didn’t always seem to match the postmarks on the envelopes. Then I realized I needed to go back and double check that every letter was in the right envelope (or as close as was reasonably possible once it all got sorted out). In this process, I discovered that some letters didn’t have envelopes, some envelopes didn’t have letters, and some letters didn’t have all their pages. I never did find the missing pieces for every orphan letter or envelope. All this took quite a bit of time and happened before I ever started reading and transcribing the letters themselves. In the midst of all this sorting, I found a huge bonus. Someone, probably my aunt, had saved Mom’s letters home from when Dad was in basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, so I was able to add another voice to the story of what happened from the time Dad was first called to active duty in early 1942.

The next step was to start transcribing the letters onto my computer. This was relatively easy when it came to the letters that were typed, but the handwritten letters were another issue altogether. There are plenty of jokes out there about the terrible handwriting of doctors, but I’m here to report that engineers are just as bad! I remember once when I was first away at college needing several hours to decode my dad’s chicken scratches in his letters to me. I did learn to recognize certain patterns in his handwriting and the unique way he wrote individual letters, but it took a while for me to get back in that groove. And just as I was starting to hit my stride with deciphering his handwriting, I started experiencing terrible headaches. I figured out fairly quickly that some letters had mold and/or mildew on them, and mold was one of the many things I was allergic to, so then I had to invest in protective face masks to wear whenever I was dealing directly with the letters. This also meant that I also had to take more frequent and longer breaks from working with these materials, but I kept plugging away.

As I worked my way through the letters, two things were becoming readily apparent to me. First and foremost, I didn’t yet have a strong grasp of the progress of war in Europe, especially what was happening in North Africa and Italy while Dad was in each of those places. So, I knew that to make sense of any of the contents, I had to do some serious research about the progress of the war. I was already reading about the war in a general sense and had recently found a book series about WWII written by journalist, Rick Atkinson, that focused on North Africa and Italy and was written for a general reader, not for professional historians. Two volumes of this trilogy were among my most influential research sources because they detailed what was happening for the Allies in each of those locations with lots of anecdotes about what life was like for the soldiers involved as well as some information about what was also happening at the same time on the home front. They started me on a path of understanding, but I needed more day to day details in order to see what my dad might be referring to in his letters. Due to strict censorship, his references to things going on had to be couched in language that wouldn’t allow the specifics to be understood easily, except in hindsight. I discovered that there were many highly detailed WWII online chronologies, so I decided to intercut several of these with the letter transcripts, so I could see clearly what was going on around my dad when he was writing his missives home. The second thing that was obvious the more I read was that these letters were intimate love letters from a very private man who rarely showed affection publicly.

I was still teaching while I was working on the letter transcripts, so progress was slow, and stints of working on the letters filled my evening and weekend free time as often as the rest of my life would allow. Further, in the middle of the process, my mother died unexpectedly in her sleep, just a few weeks shy of her 91^st birthday. My dad had died when I was just 23; he had turned 57 in the hospital three weeks before he died. I never had much of a chance to grieve him back then because I was too busy worrying about my mom who went to pieces and had to be sedated for weeks after his death. It was months before she could live on her own again in some semblance of what they call “the new normal” in widow-speak, so I had to be strong to help her find her feet again. When she died while I was in the middle of reading his remarkable love letters to her, I found I was also grieving my dad all over again. I couldn’t work with the letters at all for several months after her death, so the project went on hiatus while I mourned for both of them.

By the time I wove the letter transcripts and the chronological information together into a single document, I had 250+ single spaced pages of material to work with! Next time I’ll share what happened when I was able to return to the transcripts and more about how I turned those letters into what became Keeping the Lights on for Ike.