Carol Larese Millward: My Guest Author Shares Her Truths!

Greetings, everyone!

Today I'm pleased to bring you a guest post by my friend and co-WestSide Books author Carol Larese Millward. Carol's book STAR IN THE MIDDLE was a 2010 Galley Cat Best Teen Book!

Be sure to catch Carol's book trailer at the end of this post!



I enjoyed reading this post and hope you will, too. There are also some lovely quotes (which I love, as you know.)

Welcome, Carol!

Many thanks to my friend and fellow WestSide Books author Selene Castrovilla for inviting me to write a guest blog. I admire writers, like Selene, who consistently find interesting topics and issues to tackle and manage to present them in a thoughtful, insightful manner. I was inspired to write this piece after reading Selene’s quote on her blog site --

“Sharing my truths with the world, and helping others find theirs.”

As a writer, my goal is to create characters that share their truths with the world. In my YA novel, Star in the Middle, I found it difficult at times to be true to Star’s character.

I felt so protective of this teen mother, who was not only dealing with a new baby, but also with a painful secret from her past.  Wilson, the young father’s character, was even more of a challenge.

Wil wanted his voice heard, and although this novel at its inception was to be about a teen mother and her baby, how could I deny the father his say?

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.” –Henry Ford

I found truth in the preparation. I wrote page after page of information about my characters and their needs in an attempt to understand and empathize with them. I had worked with teen parents as a Family Advocate and Parent Educator through Family Support Centers, and with the help of my fictional characters, I wanted to explore the many real consequences an unplanned pregnancy can have on young lives.

Writing extensive profiles gave my characters voice. As they told their stories, they revealed their truths. 

What does truth look like, and how can we as writers stay true to our characters and our readers?

Sometimes the truth—the issues--we explore while writing realistic young adult fiction is dark. Writers don’t create that darkness, but we do attempt to shine a light on it and expose it for what it is.

I have been very pleased with the dialogue Star in the Middle inspires among teens at schools and book clubs that I visit. I believe young adults feel less threatened talking about the issues they face, while discussing fictional characters facing the same concerns.

“The worst thing about being lied to, is knowing that you're not worth the truth.” --Unknown

Parents who object to the exploration of topics they find inappropriate or offensive sometimes challenge books and want them removed from their child’s school or library. But we can’t protect children from the truth that bad things happen.  We have all been bombarded with the Jerry Sandusky scandal. How many children witnessed him being led away in handcuffs on national television--with a Penn State jacket hung over his shoulders? Sandusky said that he has never harmed children and is innocent of the Grand Jury allegations that he molested young boys. What is this man’s truth, and what truth can we find in those around him who failed to come forward? Is it better to shield children from this story, or take the opportunity to talk to them about sexual abuse and predators? 

My truth is that I have always been a writer. As a child, writing was my way of processing what happened to me and to those around me. I believe this process helped me to understand myself, and others. I think the most important thing I learned was that mine was not the only truth. I firmly believe that empathy is the most valuable tool a writer can have.

I write for children and young adults because I respect them and the issues they face. I hope that by being true to my characters and letting them tell their stories, I can help young readers feel empowered to tell their stories in their own unique voices.

“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”

–Albert Einstein

Star in the Middle Book Trailer - A Shelf-Awareness Book Trailer of the Day Selection --

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjYijUCeso0

STAR IN THE MIDDLE by Carol Larese Millward

WestSide Books/2009

A GalleyCat Best Teen Book 2010

Order from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Star-Middle-Carol-Larese-Millward/dp/1934813133

http://carollaresemillward.com

Guest Blogger Joe Lunievicz Gives Tea Some Equal Time!

Today I welcome my friend and co-WestSide Books author Joe Lunievicz!

Joe's book Open Wounds received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly (read below)!

And here's a funny coincidence:

Joe was married on my aunt's floating concert hall, Bargemusic!

Today you are treated to a wonderful piece about something you'll probably never read about again on this blog: TEA!!!

You would think that a guy named Joe would drink coffee,

but this is no ordinary Joe!

Inspired by my "bean blog" of a few weeks past, here is Joe's take on tea. (I read it as I sipped my morning coffee, lol.)

Whether you are a tea totaler or not, you will enjoy Joe's words! Read on:

Of Tea and Sympathy

Coffee had been associated with writing for a long time. But perhaps longer still there is an association with tea.

Tea is a way of life in India. I am lucky to have a deep association with Darjeeling teas, which are good for one’s health. They elevate your mood and keep you happy. Tea rejuvenates the body and rejuvenates the mind. Tea is creative. Drinking tea gets you thinking. Tea encourages dialog, it encourages company, it encourages discussion, whereas a cola is encouraged to be drunk in solitude. Even the color is black. It is dull. it is dreary.

By and large humans are habit oriented. You need to have a habit, whether it is a smoke or chewing tobacco or paan (betel leaf), or liquor. I think I’ve got a good habit - I drink tea. I don’t smoke. I don’t chew paan and I don’t lose my temper. I drink tea.

- Shiv Saria, Chairman of the Siliguri Auction Committee - The Meaning of Tea by Scott Chamberlin Hoyt.

Now it’s not Starbucks philosophy about the bean, but it does speak to the qualities of the tea leaf and of cola, of which the part about cola may or may not, depending on how you read it sound a bit racist.

But tea, as Shiv says, is creative, or it helps to loosen creativity which could be the same thing. And tea does elevate the mood and rejuvenate the body/mind - which is pretty much what any caffeinated beverage does. And it makes you happy which is what stimulants do. But when you drink tea you do need to drink multiple cups of tea to take in the same amount of caffeine in a single cup of coffee (5 to 1 for black tea, up to 10 to 1 for green and 20 to 1 for white tea) which essentially means the tea makers are simply smart businessmen and women. And drinking that much of anything makes you have to pee. I’m not sure that helps me write but it does help me procrastinate.

As for encouraging dialog, discussion, and company - it indeed helps me with internal dialog and discussion though sometimes too much tea can cause too much internal dialog or crossed discussions about both what happens next and where is the nearest bathroom.

But writers are creatures of habit. I know I am. I don’t smoke or chew tobacco or paan, and keep my beer intake to a minimum (I’ve never found liquor to be helpful in any way to writing though others may argue with me). Don’t get me started on losing my temper - I have a nine-year old and patience wears thing multiple times a day.

So that leaves me with a small caffeine habit that along with the taste and fragrance and ritual of making... tea helps me to align the words wandering around inside my head into sentences that tell a story.

Thanks, Joe!!!

Starred Review of Open Wounds:
Lunievicz s impressive debut is a dark, often brutal story, balancing some of the meanest villains in recent memory with a beautifully portrayed historical New York and a movie-obsessed boy determined to overcome the hand life has dealt him. In late-1930s New York City, Cid has been physically abused by both his grandmother and his father, the latter blaming him for his mother s death in childbirth. His only bright spots are seeing movies with his grandmother and playing with some local kids (while avoiding eighborhood bullies). When his father vanishes and his grandmother kills herself in front of him, Cid is sent to an orphanage and later adopted by his long-lost cousin, crippled veteran Lefty, who helps foster his interests in acting and fencing. As Cid gains confidence, he is drawn back into the tough gang crowd while he econnects with friends and bullies from his younger years. Lunievicz paints a grim picture of Depression-era New York: anti-Semitism, violence, and poverty (an early eviction scene stands out) dominate the storytelling, yet bright spots like Cid s love of cinema are painted with equal brilliance and realism. Ages 14 up. --Publishers Weekly
Joe's bio:Joe Lunievicz has taught stage fencing to actors at HB Studio in NYC and performed improvisational comedy. He drew on his experiences as a fight choreographer, playwright, and competitive fencer in writing Open Wounds, his debut novel. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Guest Blog Friday

Welcome to the inaugural edition of "Guest Blog Friday!"

I'm pleased to host my friend and co-WestSide Books author, Beth Fehlbaum.

She's the author Yalsa Quick-Pick Hope in Patience.



Writing as Healing: 

How writing The Patience Trilogy

helped me move beyond a history of childhood abuse

I was eight years old the first time I wrote about being sexually abused:  “Sssh!!!!!!   He likes to squish my boobs!  Last night in the green chair…”

            I wrote those words in a small diary—the kind with a little lock and key—but anyone knows the lock can easily be ripped away.  I don’t know why the secret I felt compelled to commit to paper was safe within that cardboard cover. 

 I hid the diary in the back of my desk drawer and carried it with me when we moved from the house in rural Texas—the one with the green chair in the den where I’d nearly fallen asleep in my stepfather’s lap and he’d felt me up for the first time.  I was so shocked, I’d pretended to be asleep, and the next morning, when he called me outside and told me to “slap his hands”, I acted like I didn’t know what he was talking about.  That experience became this scene in my first book, Courage in Patience (this is the revised, 2011 version; the book was first released by a now-defunct Canadian publisher, Kunati Books, in 2008):

 Less than a year after they married, he gestured to me to sit on his lap. I did so, enjoying the idea of having a daddy like my friends did. I got so relaxed and content there, I dozed off. He started rubbing my brand-new breasts. I wasn’t actually all the way asleep, but it freaked me out so much that I pretended I was.

            The next morning, a Saturday, my mother told me to go outside because Charlie wanted to talk to me. I approached him like I would come up on a King cobra, full of dread and feeling like a tightly wound spring. His back was to me as he bent under the hood of our car, changing the oil.

            "Mom told me to come out here. Said you want to talk to me," I spoke to the sky as I watched a black vulture circle over something dead.

            He mumbled something and I said, “Huh?”

He backed out from under the hood and took a deep breath.  “Kiddo, slap my hands.” He paused as if waiting for my response.

            "What? Why?" I played dumb, hoping that none of what happened in that chair had really happened. I was nine years old, and I already knew what he was doing was wrong.

            "Last night … in the green chair …" Now it was his turn to stare somewhere else.

            I tilted my head and my voice was so high it didn’t even sound like me. "What chair? When?"

            He smiled that closed-mouth smile from his "model" picture.  “Never mind, Kiddo. You can go back inside now.”

            My heart pounded in my ears as I walked away from him. The morning sun was blinding and felt hot on my hair.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I was in high school, I pulled the diary from its hiding place and burned it in the fireplace when my parents weren’t home.  Couldn’t risk anyone learning the truth about what my stepfather had started doing to me when I was in fourth grade.  The abuse escalated from touching to rape by the time I told, and that was the physical part.  In addition, he played mind games with me and controlled me through threats to leave my mom. 

I became angrier and angrier the longer the abuse went on, and when I was fourteen, I told my mother what was going on.  She neglected to do anything about it.  I drew on this experience as well when I wrote Courage in Patience—because even though twenty-odd years had passed since the day I told her, the feeling of numbness and disbelief were just as raw and overwhelming for me at age 40 as they were when I was 14.  Unlike me, the protagonist of The Patience Trilogy, Ashley Nicole Asher, tells a teacher and CPS acts on her outcry.  She is placed with her biological father in a tiny East Texas town, and her life begins anew.

After the day I told my mother what was going on and she did The Big Nothing,  I endured about six months of her seeming angry and my stepfather ignoring my existence before a switch flipped inside of me and I became The Perfect Daughter.  I did the housework, laundry, ironing, cooking, worked for the family business, began calling my stepfather “Dad”, aaaaaaaaannnnd developed an eating disorder that to this day vexes me.  I also kept writing, especially poetry.  I don’t have any of the pieces I wrote.   Like the diary, I destroyed any evidence on the chance that my mom might find it and be upset.  My whole life was about keeping her comfortable.

Fast-forward to 2004, when I was 38 years old, 100 pounds overweight, on an express train to Crazy Town, and taking four other people—my husband and three daughters—along for the ride.  Simply put, I could not cope with the secrets anymore.  Committing them to paper and burning them hadn’t done jack-shit to deal with the past.

I entered therapy and, true to form, tried to process the agony I was experiencing by putting the pain on paper.  About eighteen months into the recovery journey we were on together, my therapist suggested that I try writing a novel.  It took me about four months of stopping and starting and being stuck on the question of “WHY?”  Why did this happen to me?  Why didn’t my mom act on my outcry when I was fourteen?  Why has she turned her back on me now?  Why does she refuse to know the truth? 

One day, I decided to imagine what it would be like to be someone else having the experience of recovering from childhood sexual abuse  from  one parent, and deliberate indifference on the part of the caretaker parent. That’s how Ashley Nicole Asher came into being, and Courage in Patience, my first book, was written.  I never even planned to have it published; once I finished it, though, I realized that I had been helped so much by the experience of writing it that it might give hope to others on the same journey.  Even though I was thrilled to become a published author,  I was so afraid of upsetting my mom and ruining any chance that she might still come around and be willing to know the truth about what happened to me that I asked my publisher to not be completely forthright  in my bio.  He came up with the story that I knew what it’s like to be an abused child because I’m a teacher and have worked with abused kids in the past.  But, honestly:  nobody bought that story, because anybody who reads The Patience Trilogy can tell that the person who wrote it has lived it.

            I thought I was through with putting my pain on paper.  I wasn’t.  I was still in therapy and trying like hell to accept the way things are with my mom: we have no relationship, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that she didn’t love me with the same fierceness I feel for my three daughters.  Through writing Hope in Patience (WestSide, 2010), I came to acceptance.  It was excruciating to write; I wept when I wrote the scene in the hospital room, when Ashley’s mom tries to get her to admit that her stepfather, Charlie, who has just been killed in an accident, was a good man.  AND— I no longer allowed my fear to silence the person I had become.  I publicly identified myself as a SURVIVOR of childhood sexual abuse on the book jacket of Hope in Patience, as well as everywhere else.

            At the end of Hope in Patience, Ashley begins dating a boy she’s had a crush on.  I explored what it’s like to be a person trying to move on with her life and experience normalcy in the third book in the Patience trilogy, Truth in Patience.  I also gave Ashley the gift of a face-to-face confrontation with her mom about Truth and what it means to her in the life she has carved out for herself.  I have not experienced this myself.

Truth in Patience is not yet published; my publisher, WestSide Books, is for sale, and not currently acquiring new works.  I am in Publishing Purgatory, along with Selene and the other WestSide authors.

            I still have off-days once in awhile, but I made it through the recovery process.  It took six years of intensive therapy; a kick-ass support team comprised of my husband, daughters, and therapist; iron-clad determination to make it through the journey to hell and back; and writing the trilogy of a fifteen-year-old girl who finds Courage, Hope, and Truth in a tiny Texas town called Patience . 

            Beth Fehlbaum is the author of The Patience Trilogy.  Visit her website; friend her on Facebook; follow her on Twitter. And, for goodness sake, PLEASE help Beth and the other WestSide authors spread the word that WestSide Books is FOR SALE!  Beth is wrapping up a month-long campaign which has included making a general pest of herself about WestSide being for sale, AND an offer of a free raccoon to the buyer of the company!