Making the Past Present: From Journalism To Historical Fiction

During the summer of 1968 I had the opportunity to work as a reporter for the daily newspaper in Red Wing, Minnesota. Writing up obituaries and descriptions of weddings while seated at my manual typewriter was okay for a week or two but soon I became hungry to get out on assignment to do interviews and write up actual stories.

My first chance came when the official from the U.S. Department of Labor who was responsible for Indian Affairs arrived at Prairie Island Indian Community near Red Wing to inspect a few new houses that had just been constructed on the reservation. I was naïve enough at that time to be surprised to see that he was much more interested in talking with the press—me—than conversing with the Mdewakanton who’d assembled to greet him.

A few years later I was lucky to be hired to write, edit, and index a monumental reference book about primary sources for women’s history—an emerging field in the mid-1970s.  The outrage and frustration I had felt about the disrespect for the indigenous people living on the reservation that I witnessed were akin to the feelings that arose as I learned more about the experiences of women in America over the last two centuries.

I grew passionate about women’s history. I started writing a novel about woman suffrage and women’s right to self-determination, a critical component being access to contraception. Without control over the number and timing of their children, women’s choices about how they spend their lives are severely limited. I learned how fascinating old letters and diaries, clinic records and minutes of meetings can be. I got hooked on doing historical research because when I started to picture the lives depicted in those documents, the past suddenly became present to me.

While I tried to find a publisher for that novel, I also had to earn a living, for I was a single parent without financial support from my daughter’s unemployed father. Writing grant proposals for a variety of nonprofit organizations was the way I made money and kept my tools as a wordsmith sharp. I continued to write fiction on the side, getting up at 4:30 am every morning—two hours before my daughter rose and my working day started.

Being hired to raise money from corporations and foundations by writing grant proposals for the Minnesota Historical Society was a boon, for I could go down to the microfilm room and read old newspapers during my lunch hour. I also bought copies of Life magazine from the 1940s at a used bookstore and poured over the pages at home, even the advertisements, imagining what it was like to live during those days. One of my favorites was an ad for the Campbell Soup Company, entitled “How to Pull Hot Dinner Out of a Jeep.” In the drawing, uniformed soldiers standing next to a Jeep have raised the hood and hold up hot cans of U.S. Army Field Ration meat and vegetable stew created by Campbell.

I’ve always loved to read, and reading novels as well as nonfiction books of the period I am writing about helps me get an ear for the idioms of the day and a sense of the way people were viewing events as they unfolded as well as an understanding of the world being revealed by a given author.

The past can have a huge impact on the present. As Gerda Lerner writes in Why History Matters, documented history began as a way to celebrate the accomplishments of men who were leaders in military, religious, political, or economic realms.  The men who wrote history didn’t think to mention the roles that women, slaves, peasants, colonials, or natives played in establishing the cultures in which they lived. When women are left out of recorded history, the implication is that women have no history worth recording. As a result, women have been robbed of the heroines and role models that could help show them possible new paths for themselves. Writing stories of valiant, talented women is my way of inspiring women today to be everything they can imagine.

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Guest essay contributed by Ames Sheldon, author of the award-winning historical novel Eleanor’s Wars, which received the 2016 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award for Best New Voice: Fiction. Early in her career she worked as a reporter for two small town newspapers in Minnesota and then she became lead author and editor of Women’s History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States, which ignited her passion for writing about the history of women in America.

DON’T PUT THE BOATS AWAY

In the aftermath of World War II, the members of the Sutton family are reeling from the death of their “golden boy,” Eddie. Over the next twenty-five years, they all struggle with loss, grief, and mourning. Daughter Harriet and son Nat attempt to fill the void Eddie left behind: Harriet becomes a chemist despite an inhospitable culture for career women in the 1940s and ’50s, hoping to move into the family business in New Jersey, while Nat aims to be a jazz musician. Both fight with their autocratic father, George, over their professional ambitions as they come of age.

Their mother, Eleanor, who has PTSD as a result of driving an ambulance during the Great War, wrestles with guilt over never telling Eddie about the horrors of war before he enlisted. As the members of the family attempt to rebuild their lives, they pay high prices, including divorce and alcoholism—but in the end, they all make peace with their losses, each in his or her own way.

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