Friday, December 15, 2023

Pushcart Nominations Are Pleasant









































Thank you to Heather Cuthbertson and Gold Man Review for nominating my story "Ghosts, Talking" for a Pushcart! 

The story is about -- what else? -- a brother and a sister. It also features their maniac of a father. Not to be confused with my brothers or with our father, who was a sweetheart. 

 If you'd like to buy the latest issue of the journal, you can click here.

Monday, December 4, 2023

Emily and Me

My son and I in 2011
My son and I in 2011.












I'm gnashing my teeth. I'm pulling my hair. 

On November 26, the television series The Gilded Age introduced a new character: Emily Roebling.

Emily, as anyone who's ever walked across the Brooklyn Bridge may know, was a real person, but that didn't stop the writers of The Gilded Age from making up stuff about her, such as saying she studied engineering in Europe and was secretly working as the chief engineer of the bridge. 

No, no, no. She didn't. She wasn't.

I know this because I spent many years researching her life.

Here's the story of how I came to study Emily...and why, although she was neither the  congenial character nor the engineering wizard presented on The Gilded Age, I came to love the woman she was.


Time Travels     

 

It all started with a book.

 

Our son was eight and loved bridges, so every night our family read about a different span, from the graceful arch of the Ross Island Bridge in Portland, Oregon, to the harp-shaped Puente del Alamillo in Seville, Spain. Both our son and his little sister were in their pajamas, all set for bed, when we read the story behind the Brooklyn Bridge, the Victorian structure that was once called “the eighth wonder of the world.”

 

When Washington Roebling, the bridge’s chief engineer, became dangerously ill, his wife, Emily, became his assistant, meeting with engineers and city leaders in an era when women were supposed to stay home and embroider cushions. In a day of corsets and calling cards, Emily talked with contractors and politicians, relaying Washington’s specifications for cutting the stone that would become the bridge’s  towers and for making the giant cables that would hold the roadway.

 

Within days of learning her name, I knew I wanted to write Emily's biography. I’d recently finished writing copy for a catalog that sold things like a cat-shaped clock that kept time by swinging its tail. Reading about Emily was like receiving a key to a door that could lead to a new adventure. Here was a fresh historical figure to inspire school girls, to remind them of what women can do and to keep on taking those math and science classes.

 

Almost as soon as I started, though, my research began running into roadblocks. For one thing, most of Emily’s early letters were missing. What’s more, in her surviving correspondence, she frequently nagged her adult son, John A. Roebling, II, telling him how to care for his clothing, raise his children, and manage his money. “What you call grinding poverty…is having to think before hand [sic] how to spend your money to the best advantage,” she once scolded him.[i] Not to mention that she supported neither women’s suffrage nor racial diversity in the women’s groups she belonged to. Did I even like Emily well enough to write about her?

 

Washington and Emily’s Civil War courtship had been as passionate as Victorian etiquette allowed. Recalling their first kiss, he wrote,

 

…I remember that first tete a tete [sic] evening at the signal station when the moon rose…. I merely ventured to rub my cheek against yours; it could not have been long after that; I know when the ice was broken there was no end to them.[ii]

 

Later though, as a middle-aged wife, Emily sounded less affectionate. She told John, “Your father has taken one of his cantankerous spells again and dies hourly….  I have sent for Dr. Weir to tell us there is nothing the matter.”[iii] With different views on money, too, she said their discussions on how to handle their fortune were like Bull Run, “a battle field that has been fought over more than once.”[iv]

 

By the time I’d learned this much, I’d turned 40. My children were no longer small, and countless hours spent researching my book were gone for good – hours I could have spent writing a novel, publishing poems, or at least keeping the house cleaner. Still, I picked away at my research, heading straight to my desk after dropping my son and daughter off at school. When I discovered the Roebling family papers were saved on microfilm at Rutgers University and could be sent to my library, my enthusiasm for the project rekindled. With this new wealth of later letters, I began to see Emily as neither a cranky wife nor a feminist heroine; she simply became a living, breathing human being.

 

As reels of microfilm spun across a screen, I read about her interests – bowling, bicycling and horseback riding – and the quilting party she attended where the guests stuffed themselves with potato salad. I found a list of Emily’s remedies for common ailments, which included sipping a glass of hot water for a headache and taking a quarter of a gram of codeine for a bad cough. I read, too, affectionate letters from John (“Dear Em” he began one), and a condolence note to Washington after Emily’s death (“Oh my friend, my friend my heart is with you!”)[v].

 

Best of all, I saw that Emily could laugh at herself. When she was elected to Sorosis (a prestigious women’s society), she joked that now the club would be considered an intellectually superior group. Likewise, she was amused when a newspaper article on clubwomen said that “Mrs. Roebling is not half as disagreeable as we thought.”[vi]

 

Despite her grumblings about her husband and son, she also freely expressed her love for them. Even in her advice-laden letters to John, I recognized the tenderness a mother feels for a grown son she can no longer hold. From my own experience, too, I thought I understood her complaints about Washington. I wasn't half as far with my writing work as I'd like to be,  but I knew that was nothing compared to the frustrations of being a full-time care-giver for a chronically-ill husband. In this light, I began to think that Emily’s more querulous remarks might be the expressions of a smart, energetic woman who longed to get out of the house and in society. Although she died almost 60 years before I was born, I felt I knew Emily as well as a dear friend.

 

Life opened up for Emily after the bridge was done. By 1903, she’d edited a book, taken a women’s law class at New York University, served on the board of a woman’s college and been presented to Queen Victoria. She’d also helped organize camps for the Spanish-American War veterans who were sick with yellow fever, traveled across Europe on the Orient Express, and joined thousands of dignitaries and upper-class spectators in Moscow for the coronation of Czar Nicholas II. Her lively lectures about her Russian travels were particularly popular, as she cleverly peppered her talks with detailed descriptions of everything she saw, from the peacock feather in the Chinese viceroy’s hat to the sad, pale face of the last czar of Russia. 

 

On a hot Sunday morning 12 years after I first heard of Emily Roebling, I rode the subway with my family to the entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge. Expecting to be bowled over by the moment, I found myself feeling oddly calm. Up close, the bridge was still beautiful, but I could see it was a combination of concrete and wires more than a thing of magic or myth. Yes, I was thrilled to walk beside my tall, 20-year-old son as we crossed the span Emily had helped her husband build, but it had been just as exciting to read the words written in her hand, to hear her voice in my head, to reach across time and see the common ground where she and I both stood.


Standing by a plaque that honors Emily.






[i] All quotes from letters and scrapbooks are from Roebling Family Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Archives. Emily Warren Roebling (EWR) to John A. Roebling, II (JAR II), April 25, 1893.

[ii] Washington A. Roebling (WAR) to Emily Warren, September 19, 1864.

[iii] EWR to JAR II, May 20, 1894.

[iv] EWR to JAR II, July 18, 1898.

[v] JAR II to EWR, April 21, 1898; Letter to WAR in1903 Scrapbook: “In Memoriam, Mrs. Washington A. Roebling.”

[vi] EWR to JAR II, March 22, 1896.


Monday, November 27, 2023

Ghosts, Talking

 



Fifteen years ago, my son and daughter were my first audience for this story. I read the beginning to them during a heat wave. We sat beneath a dogwood tree, cooling our feet in a plastic kiddie pool. 

Later, they graduated from high school, then college. Then went back to college and graduated again. Got jobs. Meanwhile, I was coming back to this story again and again, believing there was something there.  Looking at it from different angles. Shaping it. Trying to decide how it ended. Renaming it.

And here it is. 

All that time and thought makes the happiness of seeing "Ghosts, Talking" in the new Issue of Gold Man Review all the sweeter. You can take a look here. 

Thank you to the editors!

Friday, November 24, 2023

A Funny Story (sort of)

In the creative writing classes I led this month, we took inspiration from Anne Carson's Short Talks. Here are a couple of freewrites/short talks I came up with.


Some Thoughts on Radiation, part 1

My final dose was on Halloween. The staff had been excited about their costumes for weeks. One of the nurses planned to come as a shark. She had her nails specially painted (gray with black teeth). Surely the therapists (the team that positions you on the table then delivers the dose) won’t be in costume, I thought. My therapists on that last day were a powder blue bear and a white unicorn with a silver horn.




Some Thoughts on Radiation, part 2

Outside the thick-walled radiation room, with its red light and yellow and black warning sign, is a bell. Probably for emergencies, my husband and I thought.

Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, The China Syndrome, Me.

After my final dose on October 31, the therapists gave me a certificate of congratulations printed on pale pink paper. The staff’s signatures were copied and pasted at the bottom. The doctor didn’t write her whole name, just her initials: K.C.

The therapists were beaming and clapping. One of them threw confetti. They also invited me to ring the bell. 

Sure, I said and rang that bell so hard the stones buried beneath hell shivered in their flaming beds.

As I was leaving, an octopus hugged me.


Tuesday, November 21, 2023

awe/struck

 























Here's my Willamette Week review of the world premiere of Christopher Oscar Peña's awe/struck at Profile Theatre.

Sunday, November 5, 2023

Getting to Know You

 












Thank you, Willamette Writers! What a great time chatting with Francesca G. Varela, Mark Teppo and other writers at The Portland Book Festival. 

Photo by Gail Pasternack.