A Long-Haul Woman Writer Finds Her Way to the Light

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

by Dawn Newton

When you daydream at a young age about being a writer, you anticipate rewards. Book publication, certainly, and a clear validation of your efforts. The brilliant accompaniment – the spotlight, the limelight, the footlights, YOUR NAME in lights. Yet winning an award for the writing you do in junior high, high school, or even college is not indicative of whether book publication will be on your horizon as a writer.

Although I was a first-generation college student of limited means, I determined at Michigan State University that I wanted to pursue a graduate degree in writing. I was overjoyed to receive in my senior year an offer of admission to Johns Hopkins University, along with a teaching fellowship and tuition waiver. The year I spent pursing my degree brought thought-provoking lessons from professors, opportunities to share ideas with my colleagues in the fiction workshop each semester, the experience gained from serving as an instructor of writing and literature at a young age, and lasting friendships with people from across the country. I met literary greats John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Raymond Carver, all notable for their distinctive and innovative prose styles.

My return to Michigan a year later was less exciting from an educational perspective. I worked a day job at a stock brokerage firm while still writing in my “spare” time. I perseverated over how I might ignite my writing career, knowing that I needed to keep getting to the page while determining what my next day job might be. And though the pace of my writing was slow, it did keep moving. At one point I relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and was able to drive to the University of Wisconsin’s campus to discover a copy of my first published short story in the reading room of the college library. As I viewed the magazines on the shelves, my story in a special supplement with its own illustration, the hush of the room and the subtle hum of the lights overhead spun me into a moment of wonder.

In another search for the perfect day job, I joined my significant other in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I pursued a Masters in English Education. I continued writing while finishing the degree, learning new writing prompts in my classes. George Garrett allowed me to take his writing workshop for two semesters, and I once again had the privilege of learning from a gifted writer and workshopping stories with other students in addition to hearing readings from Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, Ann Beattie, Rita Mae Brown, and others.

During my time in Virginia, I wrote a short story collection, which I sent out to literary publishing houses. I came home one day to a blinking light on the answering machine. I’d landed an agent I’d read about in Poets and Writers and queried. In the subsequent year, she tried to place a few of my stories in major glossies. After several months, she suggested that I keep working on the novel I’d begun so we could eventually pursue a two-book deal. Her approach made sense. I was pregnant with my first child, and my husband and I were returning to Michigan. Hope filled the air.  

Yet a few years later, my parents had died of unrelated causes just thirty-six days apart. I carried another child. Grief and parenting consumed me. When I finally completed that novel in early 2001, the market for fiction had changed. The work was too quiet. I dumped the manuscript pages into a tub in my basement and started another novel. I’d landed a job at the local junior college teaching composition and a class on “Writing the Novel.” Even though writing wasn’t my bread-winning job, it was always the project I turned to next.

During this period, I signed up for an afternoon workshop offered by the University of Chicago. Stuart Dybek, a Chicago native with Michigan ties would select up to four stories to use in a discussion of craft. Before I made the trip to Chicago, I learned that my story had been selected. Would the story and I withstand the scrutiny?  

On the day of the workshop, I sat in the large lecture hall. When my story was up, Dybek pointed out several positives. He asked me to identify myself and talk a bit about the story. Then he led the class through a discussion of why the story worked. When my husband met me to celebrate at an Italian restaurant later, I was exuberant as I recalled the moments under the lecture hall lights talking about my story.

After I was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in 2012, I had to make much more strategic decisions about my writing, and I was able to do so with the help of two women writers. During a weekend writing workshop with the University of Michigan’s Bear River Writers Conference, I talked with Valerie Laken, a writer I’d studied with the previous summer. When she learned about my diagnosis, she offered to sharpen the first twenty pages of my old novel, to make it more marketable, and she gave me a list of a dozen small presses to which I could submit it.  Her willingness to help provided me with energy to move forward on more submissions as well as a new project in memoir. The following summer I worked with Anne-Marie Oomen at the Interlochen Writers Retreat, transforming the journal entries I’d logged during my first few years of cancer treatment into linked essays for a memoir. I published Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages in 2019.

At the age of twenty-one, I’d begun a Master’s degree in Fiction Writing at a prestigious university. At the age of sixty-one, forty years later, I published my first novel, The Remnants of Summer. While I have not made any money from my writing or garnered long-term critical acclaim, I’ve earned my own rewards: moments of success, albeit small, intellectually challenging conversations, perceptive students, compassionate colleagues, mentors, and friends. Mesmerizing poems, stories, and essays to think about and explore with others.

The past eighteen months have demonstrated how bleak the world can become, but there are still sparks and flashes – even the sputtering flame of a recycled Mickey Mouse birthday candle my family saves for celebrations, melted near its base, black iconic shoes nibbled by hot wax – brings some measure of triumph. It’s not perfect, this world of the long-haul woman writer, but it’s as real as anything else out there.

Dawn Newton wanted to be a writer when she was younger and aimed during elementary school days to write a book about asthma. During summers, her mother drove her to the branch library in Waterford every two weeks and waited an eternity in the car without ever complaining, smoking Tareytons while Dawn filled out library slips inside for a stack of books.

Writing in the WWI Era

by Hilary Hauck

Fiction set in World War Two is far more abundant than World War One. It’s to the point where a search for WWI stories on Amazon triggers a message asking if I meant WWII.

It makes sense. WWII offers endless opportunity for espionage, dazzling airborne battles, indelible scenes like the Normandy landings and the atrocities of concentration camps, not to mention a clear line between good and evil.

By contrast, the first thing that comes to mind for WWI are the trenches. Four solid years of bug-infested, disease-ridden, muddy ditches. A drawn out and brutal conflict.

Even the notable conflict firsts for WWI, such as the use of planes—mounted, no less, with the first machine guns—fail to ignite the pace, setting up, instead, a crude and clunky mood.

Before I stumbled upon the real-life inspiration for my debut historical novel, From Ashes to Song, I had been working on a story set in WWII. It seemed like a natural choice. Growing up in London in the Seventies, WWII was familiar. We studied it at school, it was the setting for movies and TV shows, entire museums were dedicated to it.

The impact on my family, too, was palpable. A photo of my mother’s cousin, Squadron Leader ‘Gus’, an RAF fighter pilot shot down in the war, hung in pride of place on my great aunt’s wall.

On my dad’s side, my grandmother, ‘Nan’, was the only survivor of a bomb that hit her family home during the Battle of Britain. She lost her entire family—her parents, her sister, and her first child, a daughter named Aileen. Nan, too, was badly wounded, losing a leg and most of the function in one of her arms.

Despite her physical limitations, Nan taught me to bake, to speak French, and to use a home computer—in the Eighties no less, when barely anyone owned a home computer. She was also the inspiration for the novel I was trying to write in the late Noughts, but I wasn’t getting far. In fact, the war era that had seemed so palpable in my formative years now seemed far off, I had inched closer to WWI.

This was because I had recently moved to rural Pennsylvania after living near Milan, Italy, during my twenties. It was not the America I’d seen in movies. Here, amid the WWI era buildings, an air of the town’s coal mining heyday still prevailed. And it wasn’t only the architecture. Everyone, it seemed, had a story to tell of their parents or grandparents who were, like me, ‘off the boat’.

In a way, I’d stumbled upon living history. It wasn’t long before I heard a story that gripped me and would not let go. It was Pietro’s story, told to me by his daughter, Irene Smylnycky. So I had a compelling story and I was surrounded by the memory of the people who’d built the area on a foundation of hope. It felt like it was meant to be.

Luckily for me, Irene welcomed the idea of me writing her family’s story as fiction, and so I set aside my Nan’s story and went back in time. Instead of beginning in 1940 with the Luftwaffe roaring over London, my story now began in 1911 in the peaceful hills of north-west Italy. Pietro is trying his hand at composing for the first time, the grapevines stretching either side of him like lines of music. His world will be in flames shortly—not because of bombs, but on the orders of the Ministry to destroy the vineyard in an attempt to curb the spread of Phylloxera, a disease that will devastate all but a handful of vines around the world.

As Pietro starts anew in America, the landscape turns from green hills to black coal country. He finds work in the mine where his musician’s hands blister, the coal dust stifles his clarinetist’s breathe. It’s grim, cold, dirty.

Though I intentionally kept the war in the background because it must have felt a world away, the setting is similar to the bleak and brutal feel of WWI.

Against the dismal and trying backdrop, without the fury and immediacy of WWII, the characters personal stories could shine. They had a greater opportunity to orchestrate their own paths, or in Pietro’s case, his own symphony.

The pervasive nature of conflict in WWII lends itself to a much narrower stage of opportunity for characters to pilot their own paths. What’s more, those same seductive battles, landings, and atrocities are inescapable. Readers know the horrors that unfolded, so even when a story is one of hope, there can’t help but also be an air of grief.

And while nothing could compare to the horrors of the concentration camps and atrocities perpetrated against Jews, the WWI era is a chance to explore prejudice and discrimination. Even though on a very different scale with a much less devastating outcome, prejudice was much closer to home—in the mines, bars, even the churches—and perhaps because of that, more relatable.

What was once a thriving town with a deep sense of hope for the future is today a quiet town with a deep sense of pride in its origins. Ethnic backgrounds are a point of pride, not division. From this vantage point of 2021, an era of mass migration, that is a lesson worth revisiting.

Both World Wars are no doubt important, lest we forget. They offer ample opportunity to explore the stuff stories are made of—resilience, human strengths and failings, intolerance, what people are capable of in tenuous circumstances. I read WWII stories voraciously but would certainly like to see more stories crafted from the goldmine of 1910s stories still told at the family dinner table, before generations forget entirely how they came to be here. Instead of a re-direct, I’d welcome an ample choice of options when I search for WWI fiction—stories of immigrants, of sacrifice, change, and hope.

Hilary Hauck is the author of From Ashes to Song, her debut novel. A writer and translator, her work has appeared in the Mindful Writers Retreat Series anthologies, the Ekphrastic Review, Balloons Lit. Journal, and the Telepoem Booth. She moved to Italy from her native UK as a young adult, where she mastered the language, learned how to cook food she can no longer eat, and won a karate championship. After meeting her husband, Hilary came to the US and drew inspiration from Pennsylvania coal history, which soon became the setting for her debut novel. Hilary is Chair of the Festival of Books in the Alleghenies, past president of Pennwriters, and a graduate of RULE. She lives on a small patch of woods in rural Pennsylvania with her husband, one of their three adult children, a cat with a passion for laundry, and an oversized German Shepherd called Hobbes—of the Calvin variety. 

Dating, Depression and Double Espressos - Author K.A. Masson On Writing As Escape

Hello there! My name is Kat Masson and I’m a new writer, based in London, UK. I published my début novel in October 2020, though it took me four years to write it, and it was kicking around in my head for ten.

I hadn’t written anything longer than an email since my college dissertation, and not since school had I produced anything that was entirely fictional. But when my relationship began to seriously fall apart as a result of my partner’s serious depression, and with a young baby to look after and having to keep working as I was the only breadwinner, I turned to writing down my thoughts as a way to cope with the stress.

The first of these musings was an imaginary journey, written late one night. I had tried so many different approaches with my partner. I knew he needed help to deal with his depression, but he refused to do anything. Actually, that’s not entirely correct. He did go to see our GP who then gave him some anti-depressants and signed him up for talking therapy sessions. A week or two after starting the medication, and spending much of the time asleep, he stopped taking it, complaining that it made him ‘feel nothing’. That was that. He went to one of the sessions but had no appetite to continue.

I had a friend from a baby group, another new mum, who I talked to a lot at the time. Her partner had suffered badly from depression but had recently turned a corner and was improving. But she told me she no longer loved him; she too had tried everything and felt like she’d just completely run out of patience and sympathy. She told me how, at times, she felt like throwing the baby out of their second floor window. I completely understood. Depression breeds depression, I think.

The enormity of my dire situation, and my then inability to see a way out, became too much one evening and I had what I now understand was my first and only depressive episode, possibly post-natal. I described my emotions, and then detailed how I would grab my handbag, get in the car, stop at a petrol station to fill up, and then head out of London on the M1, north, and keep going until I hit the west coast of Scotland, around 500 miles away. I would find a quiet spot on top of a cliff, wait for sunrise and then drive at high speed towards the edge, Thelma and Louise style.

This escapist fantasy didn’t last. My son, asleep in the room next door, turned over in his sleep, and the green lights on the baby monitor gently glowed before dying down. What would happen to him? I was shocked at how seriously I had considered the trip, however briefly. I felt guilt, so much guilt, but at the same time it had made me realise that I needed to do something, and that matters would not resolve themselves on their own. It took two years but I finally managed to get my ex to move out. My son and I began our lives as a smaller unit. Going it alone was a scary prospect at first, but I really believe we have both been happier, calmer and more content than if we had continued to live with his dad.

To this first piece, I added a few scenes typed on my laptop and grouped together in a folder entitled ‘Dating, depression and double espressos’. A friend who I mentioned them to said I should start a blog with the same name. At the time, that sounded like quite hard work; what did I know about writing a blog?

The blog didn’t materialise, but the idea of a book did. In early 2017, after a design contract ended a month or so earlier than planned, with an amazing stroke of luck, I found myself enrolled on a short course at the Faber Academy in London: ‘How to Start a Novel in a Week’. That gave me the impetus I needed; I had to continue working, but at any time when I had a free day or even a few hours, I worked on the book.

The day before the first lockdown in the UK was announced, I had a call from one of my main clients; their Head Office in Germany had put an immediate stop to all marketing spend. This meant that all the projects I was working on would either grind to a halt or not happen at all. On the upside, I knew this also would mean more time to write! At around the same time, Mark Dawson’s Self Publishing Formula beginners’ course, 101, was open for registration; the timing was so fortuitous, I jumped at the chance to do this. In tandem with writing, I worked through the course, learning how to build your audience, setting up an author profile on Amazon and other retailers, how to find advance readers… it was all exciting but absolutely new territory for me.

Through the course’s Facebook page, I met a fellow new author based in Pennsylvania, Jessica Stone, who was writing a memoir, Craving London, about her time in London in the 2000s. We really clicked and began having regular video calls, talking about our writing, dating (we had both done a LOT!), children (we were both mothers) and life in general. We both supported each other as our respective publication dates grew ever closer. And now we are both about to embark on Book Number 2… actually this Saturday coming, Saturday 1 May. Not only, as writing buddies, will we hold each other accountable, it will also be a lot more fun than going it entirely alone!

K.A. Masson is a graphic designer who lives in London with her teenage son and cat Slinky. Alter Ego is her first novel, jump-started by a chance encounter with a Faber Academy “Start Your Novel In A Week” course. She is fascinated by books with a psychological element and the lengths people will go to when pushed by anger, fear, jealousy, and hate, and is currently working on her second thriller. You can find out more at her website, kamassonwriter.com.