Getting Real

This week has been a mish-mash of activities. My 25-year-old niece, Carly, is visiting from Ohio. She’s volunteering at the museum where my husband works—the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Va.  She’s working on her master’s degree in Historic Textiles, Costuming and Material Culture. Um, er, or something like that. Interesting, isn’t it? I never knew such a degree existed.

She is hoping either to get into teaching or museum work—although after finding out more about museums and how little they pay and so on, she’s giving it some serious consideration. I envy her on the one hand because she has her whole life in front of her—a world of opportunities. She's smart, educated, has a common sense approach to life and I think she will be fine. More than fine.

But on the other hand, it is not easy getting real about your life, no matter how smart you are.  Sometimes I think our culture forces our young people to make choices too early about what they want to do with their lives. How does an 18-year-old really know what they want to be for the rest of their lives and so are able to choose a college, a major, and a place to live and so on? When I think back to when I was 18, I know now that I didn't have a clue. Even though I knew I wanted to write. Even at 25, I'm not sure how much of a clue I had.

Very few of the folks I went to journalism school with are actually doing anything in the field, for example. One brilliant journalism major I knew is now the executive director of a small nonprofit. Another one works in fundraising for public television. Yet another is a minister.

For most of us, life isn’t a linear progression. Especially these days, many people that I know are sort of patching it together with work coming form different sources. I know my immediate world is nothing like I imagined it would back when I was in college. How about you?

My Zumba Moment

I’m heading off to teach a mystery writing class at the Roanoke Regional Writer’s Conference on Saturday. I’m a new mystery author, but I’ve studied and learned a lot over the past few years. I’m looking forward to sharing what I’ve learned—and learning a thing or two myself.
I’m always a bit nervous when I head off to a conference, so I’ve been thinking about my presentation a great deal—even while huffing and puffing at Zumba class. For those of you who don’t know, Zumba is an aerobic/dance class with a Latin flair. I love it—and am now doing it three times a week.
The thing about taking a class like this at a gym is that sometimes they switch instructors around on you. They all have different routines, approaches, and so on. So, I’ve been sort of having problems with one of the new instructors. I like her. Her moves are fun. Love the music she selects. What is the problem? Why am I not bathed in sweat when I leave her class like in other classes? I began to research by watching the clock.
In my favorite teacher’s class, I’m sweating at five minutes into the class. In the new instructor’s class, I am not really sweating until half way in. And then the level starts to fluctuate—an easier routine, then a harder on, and so on.
Hmmm.
The pacing was way off. If I were to compare it to a mystery novel, the murder wasn’t happening until midway through the book. How invested would my “mystery” readers be by that point? Not very. Many readers would have chucked the book after the first few chapters. We hear this time and time again—you have to capture your reader’s attention immediately and work to keep them interested.
But if I hooked my reader in with murder in the first chapter, then didn’t give any clues, or any red herrings until the half-way point in the book, they probably would have not finished the book either.
I think it is a tricky balance—this pacing in a mystery novel thing. Have you, as readers, noticed when it’s “off”? Writers, how do you deal with pacing?

Favorite Teachers & Another Contest

I guess two of my favorite teachers would be from high school, Mr. Rankin (his first name, if I ever knew it, has vanished into the mists of time) and Miss Mary D. Black.

Mr. Rankin was a short man, bald, with a brow ridge you could rest a pencil on over small, dark eyes. He was very, very bright, deeply educated, and could make Shakespeare comprehensible and enjoyable. He loved to start discussions in our “gifted“ class, and had a talent for drawing out opinions in a way that made a student feel bright or clever or witty. One of my proudest moments in high school happened in his class when I ventured an opinion on a scene in Macbeth and he praised it, saying, “I never thought of it that way.”

Miss Black was also an English teacher but of a totally different sort. Miss Pederson, another English teacher, had already (in 1959!) picked up the notion that spelling and grammar were difficult and we shouldn’t be too concerned learning all those complicated rules. But Miss Black was of the opinion that her generation had learned to speak, spell, and write correctly, and, by gum, so would we. She was a tall woman, with silver hair set in disciplined waves, a big voice, a formidable bosom and a chin not to be trifled with. Even the football players in her classroom were afraid of her. And over and over down the years I have thought of her with gratitude. Deciding to become a writer is not the time to try to gain the tools of that trade. It was already having the tools that made that decision easier for me.

I was twenty-five or -six when I started college, part time. I took a class called Women in Medieval History, taught by a professor who had a singular prejudice against religion -- an odd stance, I thought, for someone who had devoted her life to the study of that profoundly religious period. In her first or second class she remarked sarcastically, “St. Augustine (she pronounced it ‘OW-gus-teen‘ in an exaggerated way) wrote that there is no such thing as evil,” eliciting a sycophantic chuckle from the freshmen sitting before her. Well, my hand shot up and I said, “I haven’t read St. Augustine (pronouncing it ‘uh-GUS-tin’), but C.S. Lewis wrote that there is nothing that is intrinsically evil; sin is the use of a good thing in a way or at a time that is forbidden. Is that what St. Augustine was talking about?” She conceded that it was. I did far more reading and research for that class than any other college-level course I took, trying to stay ahead of her. I wasn’t the only older student in her class, and by the end of the semester, many of us had her number, and I wasn’t alone in challenging some of her statements. Because of the extra effort I put into it, I learned more about medieval thought in her class than in almost any other class I took. For that reason I should also put her on my list of favorite teachers. (Her final comment? “Go ahead and fill out that teacher survey; I have tenure!”)

A CONTEST!

I will stitch your name first on a bookmark and send it to you if you can tell me: What are the “crystal spheres” of medieval astronomers? How many were there?

If more than one person sends me the correct answers (send them to marypulver@aol.com), I will pick a winner from among them at random. Contest ends Thursday, September 9, at 8 pm, Central Daylight Time.