Kathleen Ford, Writer
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WAR AND WATER LILIES

7/27/2019

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When people ask what I write about I used to say “lots of things.” But the truth is, after awhile, if you’re lucky, you don’t write about so many things.  I don’t know how it happens but your material finds you. Certain characters, setting, and time periods never bore you. You keep thinking about what might happen to those people, in that place, at that time.
My characters have been Irish immigrant women who worked as maids and the soldiers of World War I. My interest in these characters and this time period has led to stories about Typhoid Mary, Lizzie Borden, and other maids. It’s also led to stories about Irishmen who served in the British army during the Great War when their own county was in rebellion against British rule.
I thought again about how wonderful it is to find your subject matter when I visited the Monet exhibit at the de Long Museum in San Francisco. Even though I knew of  the artist’s interest in water lilies, I didn’t know that lilies were virtually the only thing he painted in his later years. Monet employed eight gardeners - one to skim the pond, another to remove dust from the plants - six others for additional jobs to maintain his garden pond. He also paid for the nearby roads to be paved so that dust could be kept from reaching his water lilies.
“It took me a long time to understand my water lilies…,” Monet said. “I cultivated them without thinking about painting them ….And then, all of a sudden, I had a revelation - there was magic in my pond. I seized my palette. Since that moment, I’ve scarcely painted any other subject.” There are times when short story writers feel about their material the way Claude Monet felt about his water lilies.

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First Adventure in Audio Stories

2/27/2019

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When I was little one of my favorite activities was listening to my record player tell me the story as I “read” along in my book. Later, all through school, I loved having the teacher read to the class. One of my favorite memories is sitting in Peter Taylor’s writing class -- a hot classroom at the University of Virginia, and hearing Peter read a Frank O’Connor story in his wonderful southern accent.

So I must confess it’s a total puzzle why I don’t listen to audiobooks. I should love them. I love them in principle. I’ve even signed up for Audible. But I don’t do it, and honestly, I don’t know why.

Then came a call for an audio story, and my friend Jackie (Miss Sound Savvy Genius) and I decided to “do” a story. I read my story “Night Patrol,” set in the trenches in World War I, and Jackie put in the sounds that went with the story. It was so much fun. Of course, before we got going we had to find the booms made by Big Bertha, and the whizzes made by the short range howitzers. We had to find the sounds of men marching on cobble stones and slogging through mud. Our most wonderful find though was the sound of a rifle bolt going into the breech. We were ecstatic at that sound and kept smiling every time we heard it.

Coordinating the sounds with my reading was a bit of a challenge but we got the hang of it after three practice runs. The end of the story is the end of this post -- I’m back in love with the audio story. I’ll   post a new World War I story, “Actions in the Field,” next week. It’s in the current issue of the ANTIOCH REVIEW.  The story will definitely have artillery sounds and maybe some mooing cows. Why cows at the front? You’ll have to give a listen to answer that question. Stay tuned to hear it!


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September 28th, 2018

9/28/2018

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ROSE AND THE ANARCHIST
I’m obsessed with World War I.  I love writing about the soldiers, maids, and Irish immigrants that lived through the war and in the decade before and after it. And I’ve been lucky to have a number of family stories - and story fragments - handed down to me from that period. Still, after writing more than a dozen stories set in my favorite time I thought my material had run out. Then I remembered Uncle Jack.
My father’s older brother was a fifteen-year-old messenger boy in the financial district when Wall Street was bombed in September, 1920. The blast, which went off when the streets were packed with lunch time crowds, killed 38 people and injured hundreds more.
Over a hundred pounds of dynamite and five hundred pounds of cast-iron sash weights had been packed into a horse-drawn wagon that was left across from the J.P. Morgan bank. The horse and wagon were blasted into small pieces but the driver escaped before the explosion. Although no one was ever prosecuted, a mountain of evidence - including flyers stuffed into a nearby mailbox - pointed to this being an anarchist bombing.
Remembering that my uncle was a witness to the 1920 bombing motivated me to start writing a story I’d been thinking about for years - a story I’d thought would be set in 1920. My story, inspired by a friend’s account of how her grandfather had been murdered by a drunken friend, didn’t have anything to do with anarchists or bombings. Still, placing the Wall Street bombing in the background was important - especially to Rose, my old lady character, who sits by a window looking for danger in the street when the real danger is in the house she’s guarding.
I love how historical events anchor me in time. In a way, I need them to get me going, and that’s how I came to be writing “Rose and the Anarcist.”
 
 

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Short Story Recommendation: Herman Melville, Volume I

4/28/2017

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I’ve spent half a lifetime reading, writing, and thinking about short stories. A lot of that time was given to figuring out what makes a great story - and (Big Surprise) there’s no right answer. It’s all - as Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography -  “I know when I see it.”
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“Herman Melville, Volume I” by Victor Lodato in the March 27 issue of The New Yorker  is a great work of fiction. It has character, plot, language and theme. It pulls you in, keeps you reading, then forces you to reread because there’s just so much there.
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Three Novels

8/29/2016

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Of course my first love is short stories. Still, I used to read lots of novels. I mean, up until the past two years, I FINISHED novels. But then this new thing happened where I’d get about three-quarters of the way through and lose interest. It wasn’t that I hated the book - I’d read far enough to know I liked it - just not enough. So you can see why I’m excited by finishing three great novels in the past two weeks:

 THE GIRLS by Emma Cline was the first. It’s a great fast read about the Manson girls and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. It’s also a literary jewel with pitch perfect details that create a time and place.

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES by Karen Joy Fowler was the second. The great writing forced me to put up with my confusion. Then BAM! Along comes the big surprise that answers one question but poses dozens more. I kept reading and learning.

AN UNNECESSARY WOMAN by Rabih Alameddine is the ultimate literary novel. The old woman narrator has given her life to literature - as a translator. She’s a quirky hermit who keeps her work to herself - in tied up boxes in her Beirut apartment - while her mind is totally unbound. I wondered how this brilliantly meandering book could possibly stop - and there it was - the perfect ending. 
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THE STUFF

8/11/2016

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Women my age are always talking about CLEANING OUT THE STUFF. You can’t have a conversation about hair, diet, and exercise anymore because now it’s all about what you’re going to do with the stuff. By stuff, I mean the clothes, furniture, books, papers and clutter that rob you of your sanity and make it impossible to concentrate in your own house.  
Here’s what we say (We’re all talk and no action). Give it to the kids. Put it in the attic. Die and let somebody else DEAL WITH IT.


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Insights Into Endings

1/4/2015

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I thought I had an insight into what was holding me up from finishing a story I’d been working on for months. I was obsessively rewriting the first part of the story and holding back on the final scene -- the scene which was the impetus for the story and the reason I was writing it in the first place. I’d planned that the story, set in Ireland, would end with my character deciding to end her marriage while touring the jail where Irish nationalists were executed in 1916. But instead of moving my characters to the dark mildew-smelling jail where I wanted them, I kept them touring the Emerald Island. There they stayed -- climbing cliffs, visiting pilgrim sites and drinking Guinness.

I kept my characters out of jail because my last two stories -- also with first sections rewritten dozens of times -- gushed out their final scenes with what I thought were perfect endings. In those stories, I’d trusted that when the time came to end the story I’d do it fast. And I did.

This Irish story was different, and while I waited for some magical flow that would finish it, I began to hate the over-worked early parts. That’s when I realized I couldn’t count on the ending coming when it was ready. I had to get in there and struggle with it -- fight for every sentence.

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Why It's Still Armistice Day For Me

11/11/2014

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Image obtained from mirror.co.uk
British troops sitting in trenches at Zillebeke, 1917.
I don’t know how it all got started. It may be because I went to a women’s Catholic college that didn't have a psychology major which meant I majored in Sociology. In my junior year, I got a job with an anti-poverty program in Baltimore and found myself in inner city schools observing teachers. I fell in love with the idea of teaching (the power of teaching really), but I didn't have a major that was actually taught in schools, so after graduation I went to Teachers College, Columbia University, to take  history classes and get credentials to teach.

As student teachers preparing to teach history and social studies, we needed to develop a unit of study. I chose World War I, and, as Robert Frost said in The Road Not Taken, "that has made all the difference." I was enthralled with the notion of a historical watershed. The idea that the Great War changed the way people thought -- not just how they thought about war, but how they thought about everything -- captured me. After the war people’s ideals and beliefs about patriotism, authority, religion and class were different than they’d been before. Even now that realization staggers me.

Well, of course, I got obsessed with soldiers’ lives. Because of family lore, I was especially drawn to the Irish soldiers who fought in the British Army. I couldn't look at enough pictures or read enough journals.  Many of the soldiers’ journals mention the lack of feeling that came over the men when the fighting stopped at the time of the Armistice. It was almost as if they couldn't celebrate the cessation of war, because they were grieving. They grieved for their buddies and for what the war had done to the world and its ideals. They grieved for what the war had killed inside of them -- the thing that could never come back.

It’s Armistice Day. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day in the eleventh month, we remember.
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Writers Dare Not Speak Its Name

10/31/2014

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Unattributed Comic from Google (if you know where it's from, let me know!)

I don’t like to think about writer’s block. I’m not even sure it’s a real thing. I just know that sometimes I have trouble finishing a story. Weeks can pass when even though I think I want to write the story... I just don’t. I have a writer friend who believes that even when you’re not working on your story, your subconscious is. I don’t know if that’s true for me.


I’ve tried to understand if this stalling period follows a pattern. The only thing I’ve figured is that I usually stop (if I’m going to stop at all) on page four. My stories tend to be between 12 and 20 pages, and for some reason, when (and if) I get to page four I get a rush that tells me I really have a story. But that’s when this thing that I don’t want to call writer’s block can set in. It’s happened this past month. The story is there in my head. I want to write it but something is holding me back. I’m editing, teaching my adult ESL students, and doing other things. Mainly, I’m taking comfort in the fact that I already have four pages.

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Ms. Ford (and Ms. Barnes) Go to Washington

10/28/2014

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On Saturday my friend Jane Barnes and I went to Washington D.C. for a forum on independent publishing sponsored by POETS & WRITERS Magazine. It was pitch dark when we set out from Charlottesville, and pitch dark when we returned. The time in between was filled with enlightenment. We left suspecting the word “platform” meant something other than a wooden stage. We returned knowing we had a lot of work to do if we were to continue being published writers in the internet age. Our return trip was punctuated with sighs when we thought about the staggering amount of change that had occurred in publishing. The sighs alternated with bursts of brave talk as we told each other we could learn what needed to be done.

The POETS & WRITERS LIVE
program featured authors and editors from “innovative independent publishers." Despite the diversity of the presenters, one message came through: writers need to be actively engaged in the publishing and marketing of their work. Jane and I were especially grateful for the panel entitled “The Savvy Self-Publisher.” It was led by Debra Englander who gave an overview of the self-publishing process and directed a conversation with award-winning author Jeffrey Blount, literary agent  Anna Sproul-Latimer, and Bradley Graham of the book store Politics & Prose.

Jane and I have been in the same writers' group for 30 years. She recently wrote a book about Joseph Smith, which you can read more about on her site:
http://janebarnesauthor.com/.

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