Double the Recipe for Poetry

by Colleen Alles

The Recipe from The Binnacle Boy

The year I was born, Newberry Medal winner Paul Fleischman published a collection of three long, short stories—one of which features a deaf girl who reads the lips of fellow townspeople as they whisper confessions to a statue of a binnacle boy. This is how she discovers how the entire crew of the Orion was murdered.

The story was impossibly imaginative to me the first time I read it in 5th grade—so much so that years later, I sought out a copy of Graven Images (Candlewick Press). In the book’s afterward—published nearly 25 years later—Fleischman, who writes for young people, does something amazing: he explains where he got the idea.

Or rather, how.

In biology, Fleischman writes in the Afterward, fertilization usually takes two parties; I’ve often found it to be the same with books.

Here’s how it happened: Fleischman had been researching sealers—men who sailed the South Atlantic in the 1800s hunting seals. One detail—a photograph of a boy carved from wood who held a ship’s compass—stayed in his mind. These ornate statues were called binnacle boys. Around the same time, he happened to catch a television program about South America in which a long line of people waited to approach a statue of a saint to pray. He was also reading the Old Testament at the time, thinking about judgmental or pious characters. Lastly, a few memories from his own life bubbled to the surface of his mind—in particular, the time he spent living across the street from a school for the deaf.

This is the magic from which The Binnacle Boy emerged. Devouring Fleischman’s explanation, I was in awe. This is how you do it, I thought. He’s given away the recipe for writing:

¼ cup random facts you find fascinating—the ones that perch on your shoulder and won’t leave you alone, even as you’re falling asleep

¼ cup what you are reading

¼ cup what happened to you this week

¼ cup your most pertinent memories

Double the Recipe for Poetry

So, how does Fleischman’s generous recipe sharing connect to the world of poetry? I think the same recipe can be used to create meaningful and impactful poems—that the poems we feel in our bones come, in part, from this recipe. The more a reader connects with the key ingredients, the more he or she will remember the poem, read it again later, share it with someone else.

Which is what we’ve seen happening lately with a bit of a resurgence of interest in poetry as of late—everything from the influx of Rupi Kaur poems dominating my social media feed to Amanda Gorman’s unforgettable reading at President Biden’s inauguration. My home state is (finally) taking steps to create an official position for a Poet Laureate. When war broke out in Ukraine in late February (rather, when the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine re-escalated in late February of 2022), amidst news articles and opinion pieces, I encountered more than once loved ones sharing the Ilya Kaminsky poem We Lived Happily During the War.

How we heal

Last week, in West Michigan, there was one afternoon when it felt nice to be outside on the back deck, despite the wind and 52-degree temperature. The sun was out. Spring had sprung—kind of. My daughter remembered we’d bought popsicles on our last adventure to the grocery store, and jubilantly licked at her grape treat, insisting she didn’t need a coat.

I sat next to my dog on the deck, idly running my fingers over his ears. I’d learned a few days ago that he would likely need surgery, which didn’t come as a surprise. He’d been struggling for weeks—an injured cruciate ligament. Not life-threatening, but not easy either to watch him limp along on our evening walks—particularly as I use that time to catch up on news podcasts detailing the horrors of Putin initiating attacks on Ukrainian civilians.

At one point, I looked up and saw a cardinal in a high branch of a nearby tree. I watched it hop three times toward a nest I had never noticed. Cardinals make me think of my father—a native of Southern Illinois and lifelong Cardinals stan. He was due to have surgery as well at the end of the month, and while there was no reason to capital-w Worry, I had been thinking about his heart, which doctors had recently noted may need a pacemaker down the line. I’d also been letting go of a friendship that meant a lot to me, yet had grown too threadbare to continue, and I’d had to learn how to let it go, as much as I had wanted to keep holding on.

All of this is to say, suddenly, as the cardinal chirped out, as my daughter grinned at me with purple all over her lips, I wrote a poem in one moment in my head about how when we are hurting, there is always something we can do to take steps away from the depths of our uncertainty and into a place of more optimism, more light, more hope.

I pecked how we heal into my phone in the forty-five seconds before I heard my husband’s truck pull into the driveway, which made the dog bark, and Mara desperately needed to wash her sticky hands, and I was sure it was time to start making dinner—even as I looked forward, later, to taking a longer look at my quickly-drafted lines to see if there was anything in what I’d written worth sharing.

Colleen Alles is an award-winning writer living in West Michigan. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of literary magazines. Her first full-length poetry collection, After the 8-Ball, is available now from Cornerstone Press (the University of Wisconsin, Steven’s Point). Colleen is a graduate of Michigan State University and Wayne State University, and a contributing editor for short fiction at Barren Magazine. When she isn’t reading or writing, she enjoys distance running and spending time with her family, including her beloved hound, Charlie. You can find her online at www.colleenalles.com, on Instagram at ColleenAlles_author, and on Twitter at @ColleenAlles.

Romancing Nellie Bly: Inventing A Love Life For a Notable Historical Woman

By Maya Rodale

The beats of Nellie Bly’s life are legendary: she got her start writing for the local paper as a young woman, a few years later she took off for New York City to make it as a reporter and the only assignment she could get was to feign insanity, get herself committed to the local asylum and write about it. “I said I could and I would. And I did,” she writes. From there, Nellie’s unique approach to journalism launches the era of “Stunt Girl”  reporting and culminates with the ultimate stunt: a solo race around the world. As a young woman. Alone. In 1889. She then married a millionaire and became a “Gilded Age Girl Boss” when she took over her late husband’s business. Through it all, Nellie Bly championed women’s stories and voices. Though Nellie Bly died a hundred years ago, but her well-known professional life qualifies her as a feminist icon by even modern standards.  

Much less is known about her personal life, however, especially her years as a famous single twenty-something woman living and working in Manhattan. Having been a twenty-something in Manhattan myself once upon a time, I had a hunch that maybe Nellie’s adventures didn’t stop when she hit her deadline. I thought she’d be a very fun heroine for a novel.  

It was with that perspective that I wrote The Mad Girls of New York, which is based on her first big story after her arrival in New York City in 1887. The only assignment she could get was to feign insanity, get herself committed to the notorious Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum and write about it. But my version of Nellie’s big break wouldn’t just be about her professional success, it would be about her personal life, too. 

As I read her writing—and she produced a lot of writing—I was captivated by her voice, as so many of her readers were. Nellie centers herself in every story, and writes as if she’s speaking to a best friend, which makes her writing easily read even today. Even when she’s being evaluated for insanity by doctors, she still comments on how handsome they are. Even as she’s being stripped of her clothes and forced to bathe in horrific conditions, she still worries about her hair. Nellie, I realized, was not a machine, she was a young woman—unapologetically so.  

What fun it would be to write Nellie Bly, feminist pioneer, as a young woman in Manhattan! I was thinking Sex and the City with social justice and longer skirts. The next step was to make up the characters in her world—the crew of lady friends who challenge and support her, plus the romantic leads.

For her female friends—I believe no feminist heroine is complete without female friends!—I drew inspiration from other real life women in journalism, like Harriet Hubbard Ayer who oversaw the ladies pages of The New York World (before there was Anna Wintour, there was Harriet Hubbard Ayer) and two fellow female reporters, Marian and Dorothy, who understand Nellie in a way no one else does and share her ambition. They’re supportive and competitive all at once—especially when it comes to a subplot in the novel about the mysterious origins of one woman Nellie meets in the asylum (to say more would be a spoiler!). My favorite scenes to write are the ones with Nellie and her female friends, bantering over lunch.  

And romance...there must be romance! I knew I had to write Nellie’s story when I stumbled across one of her lesser known articles in which she interviews the bachelor mayor of New York City name Hugh Grant about whether women should propose marriage. Every drop of that sentence is true and delicious. As a historical romance novelist, I was required by sacred vow to make a romance out of it, so sparks start flying between Nellie and Mayor Hugh Grant in The Mad Girls of New York. A romance between a mayor and a reporter is riddled with complications, which makes it all the more fun!

But then there was another hero of my own invention: Sam Colton, an earnest and determined reporter who is competing with Nellie for a job at the New York World because I believe every story is improved with a rivals to lovers plot. One of my favorite scenes to write in the novel was the one where Nellie crashed Sam’s interview and they vie for one open position at the paper. Fierce competition plus grudging attraction and glimmers of admiration is a wonderful start to a romantic relationship. Indeed, much of Sam’s journey in the novel is falling hard for Nellie and discovering some elements of her past that she doesn’t want to share.

In researching and writing the lives of historical figures like Nellie or the real life inspiration for her fellow cast of characters, I’m reminded that they were people with hopes, dreams, ambitions and feelings of their own. It reminds me why I think so many of us love historical fiction: it allows us to experience historical figures as intimate acquaintances, and it allows us to live in their world. It makes for a fun, fast-paced and entertaining story that also happens to make history come alive. My hope with Nellie and The Mad Girls of New York is that readers have a rollicking good time discovering what a legend she was.  

For more about Maya Rodale and The Mad Girls of New York, visit www.mayarodale.com or find Maya on Twitter and Instagram as @mayarodale.

Catherine Hokin On Being A Visual Writer

by Catherine Hokin

I am a visual writer.

No, you didn’t read that wrong. What I mean by that statement is that I am inspired by the things that I see and by the way images are used to tell stories.

 Pictures or films or photographs are most often the inspiration for my novels. If you know me you won’t be surprised by that. The walls of our house are covered in paintings and film posters and prints. My noticeboard plays host to the maps I draw – from country down to street level – of the places I am writing about and the cinema is my favourite hang-out.

Like all historical fiction writers, I am obsessed with research and my starting point for this – and for idea generation – is usually physical places. I prowl round art galleries, museums, streets and sites of historical interest like a magpie with a smartphone, snapping at anything that sparks my interest. And, because my books are set in Berlin, it’s usually Berlin where I can be found going walk about.

Both The Commandant’s Daughter and The Pilot’s Girl, the first two books in what will be a four-part series about photographer Hanni Winter, started this way. A good photograph –which my main character becomes a master of, although not in the way she imagined that she would – can take us on a journey. It can also tell a very different story to the truth and that’s where my writer brain starts. And where book one of the series, The Commandant’s Daughter began.

The image which kicked off Hanni’s story is in Berlin’s German Historical Museum and was taken in 1933 on the night Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany. It records a moment from the torchlight procession which Goebbels organised to sweep through the Brandenburg Gate, past the Adlon Hotel and along Wilhelmstraβe to the Reich Chancellory where Hitler was waiting to be adored. The photograph is in black and white and yet it isn’t: the river of torches springs out of the frame like molten silver. It is glorious and it is also, when you stop and consider what the picture commemorates, truly terrible. And that was my starting point. A little girl standing on a balcony, staring down enraptured at the dancing flames, who is about to be taught to properly look at them. A little girl who, from that moment, will never see the world in the same way again.

The Pilot’s Girl also had its start with a museum and a photograph, but this one can also claim an artifact (a very big one) and a film in the mix as well.

The museum this time was The Allied Museum which is located in an old movie theatre in the area which was once the heart of the American forces in Berlin. I went there already knowing that I wanted Hanni’s story to advance from 1945/46 into the Berlin Blockade of 1948/49. What I didn’t know was that I would be able to climb into one of the airplanes that was used to fly supplies into the city and is now a museum exhibit. And what I also didn’t know was that I would find my key character – the blockade pilot in question – grinning down from a wall there. The first thing I noticed about him was that he bore a passing resemblance to Montgomery Clift, the American heartthrob from the 1940s and fifties. I grew up in the days of Sunday afternoon films which I used to watch with my father who was a massive film buff and I’ve had a bit of a thing for a chiseled jaw ever since.

When I got home, I started to watch a number of films which were made and set in Berlin at the end of the war and one of those – The Search – starred the aforesaid Mr Clift. The film  tells the story of an American soldier who is stationed in occupied Germany in 1945 and finds a young boy living wild in the ruins of the city. The film is fascinating for lots of reasons – not least that most of the children who feature in it were actually from Displaced Persons Camps and had lost everything in the war, including their families and sometimes their names. Clift also apparently made a lot of alterations to the script so that his character was less a hero and more a flawed human being shocked by the truth of life in post-war Berlin. His character is part of the city and also not; highly visible but also able to retreat back into his American safety-net. And that was where I picked up the thread…

My character Tony in The Pilot’s Girl looks like Montgomery Clift but that is where the resemblance ends. I have taken the idea of a dashing hero who is the toast of the city and made it very dark. But his beginning was in a photograph in the same way that Hanni’s was.

And what about book three in the series which is coming next year? I’ve gone back to a film again – a shocking piece of propaganda shot by the Nazis in the ghetto town of Theresienstadt – and to photographs of the bombed out remains of Dresden and the empty spaces in Czechoslovakia where towns like Lidice were raised by the Nazis to the ground. And Hanni is now something of a celebrity herself, mounting – rather dangerously given what it contains – her first exhibition.

As I said, I am a visual writer. Images tell stories to me. I tell stories from them. Fingers crossed for the next magpie expedition…

Catherine Hokin is from the North of England but now lives very happily in Glasgow with her American husband. Both her children have left home (one to London and one to Berlin) which may explain why she is finally writing. You can find her on  Cat Hokin FB page or on twitter @cathokin