Showing posts with label childhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label childhood. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Childhood Writings by Priscilla Brown

 

 He almost runs her over, she breaks a shoe in a drain.

What else can he do but play Prince Charming?

https://books2read.com/SilverLinings

 

I'm an author of contemporary romantic fiction; I've recently discovered my first interest in 'published' writing was in a small way not far from the genre in which I now write. My brother while clearing out his attic went through numerous boxes containing items which belonged to our mother that he stored when widowed several years ago she moved from the family home to be nearer to him (I live in a different country). He had never looked into any of these, until this day when he took from a larger carton a shoebox marked PRISCILLA, the box with an illustration of child's sandals. Interested, he found not sandals but several yellowing sheets of paper cut, not torn, from an exercise book and covered in handwriting, and sent them to me. The handwriting is that of a child who has learnt a simple cursive, so I guess I was about nine or ten, since on starting high school I deliberately changed this style that I considered childish, and developed a personal one.

These pages are from a weekend 'newspaper' written for our family, proud editor Priscilla Brown. This is the only extant copy, and perhaps the only issue ever. Reading it now, I smiled at my book review of the Children's Encyclopedia, which I patronisingly referred to as 'also suitable for adults'. I wrote a Woman's Page (at this young age!) where I described how to paint designs on salt and pepper shakers - cheeky from someone who has never had any artistic ability. I'm intrigued by what appears to be the first few pages of  'a new serial by the editor'; to my surprise it's what today we might describe as a historical romantic crime. Set in the 16th century, it portrays a heroine falling in love with 'a very wicked man'. I would have liked to read Next Week's Chapter. This brief excerpt makes me wonder what kind of children's story I had been reading. I still have several books dating from my childhood (amazingly, I did date them), but they are all what could be termed classics. Perhaps others I may have acquired or borrowed from the library were not judged by our parents as suitable for a supposedly well-educated young girl. Actually, I do recall hiding in a corner of an infrequently used room to read...I wish I could remember what it was, but I bet it wasn't Dickens or Charlotte Bronte.

My venture into creative writing did not survive high school; sadly, this was not on the curriculum, and there was no time outside study. Once, however, an English literature teacher wrote 'Very creative' on my work, accompanied by a zero mark. This sarcasm was a consequence of my response to the essay topic 'What does the poet mean by...' Never enamoured of poetry anyway, I wrote 'I have no idea and as he's dead I can't ask him.' Stupid question.

And then, from this somewhat unfocused background, as an adult I found my place in authoring contemporary romance.

Here's to many happy reading hours, love Priscilla

 

https://priscillabrownauthor.com

https://bwlpublishing.ca 

Friday, March 6, 2015

The Happy Place - Gail Roughton

           “I need to visit my happy place.” How often we hear that! But what, exactly, is a happy place? And where is it? “Oh, it’s all in our heads!” you say. Well, that’s right. And then again—it’s not. We all carry our permanent happy place with us. See, it’s not limited in location or the space-time continuum. It can be with you any place, any time. All we have to do is remember. Remember the place where magic lived, where memories were made, the memories of things past that shaped us, changed us, molded us, into the person we are. Where was my place? A little beat-up, sun-seared wooden fishing dock on the banks of Stone Creek.

I was born in the Deep South in the 50’s and grew up in the early and mid-60’s. It was a pivotal time in history when the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the space program began to drag even the sleepiest little Southern town kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. Rowan & Martin regularly socked it to the country as Laugh-In looked at the news, and Simon & Garfunkel sang of their brother who had died so his brothers could be free. None of that made much never-mind to me, though. I was busy following my Daddy around like a shadow whenever he was home from work. He was a construction foreman and a master carpenter. On weekends, he’d take me to his building sites, where I walked on the long light poles of Macon’s Henderson Stadium when they still lay on the ground and wrote on the chalkboards of schools-to-be long before students entered their doors. Daddy’s gone, but most of the structures he helped build still stand, strong and functional, still in use. That’s rather a form of immortality, don’t you think?
We lived a few miles outside the mid-sized Middle Georgia city of Macon in a small country neighborhood of only four or five houses, perched on the banks of Stone Creek Swamp. Readers might recognize the name from The Color of Seven. Stone Creek itself ran about half a mile behind the house. I guess I was nine or so when our neighbor “up the hill”, Mr. Emory Scoven, built the dock over the spot where Stone Creek expanded into a small pond.

Mr. Emory was a retired railroad man who lived with his brother, sister, and sister-in-law in the house on the hill next door to us. I ran in and out of that house without knocking, with total impunity. Nobody in our neighborhood knocked back then. I loved the other residents of that house, Mr. Will, Miss Lucille, and Miss Ethel, but Mr. Emory? Mr. Emory was a modern day Pied Piper. Children loved him like lint loves wool. Once upon a time the neighborhood had brimmed with kids who’d dogged his every step, but in my time, the child population was down to one. Me. And on summer days when school was out and Daddy was still at work, I trailed the man unmercifully while he tended the yards and fruit trees he so loved. If he ever grew impatient or tired of my company, he never showed it. His railroad tales were better than the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm.

Late spring and summer evenings were the best times of all. Daddy came home from work, showered and ate. That’s when we headed out the back door to join Mr. Emory at the dock and cast our lines into the leaf-brown waters of the creek. The three of us sat for hours in perfect contentment, talking or not talking, it really didn’t matter either way, while the corks from our fishing lines bobbed on the water. It didn’t matter if we caught anything, either, and in fact, we preferred not to, especially since we always released any fish caught that evening back into the creek when incipient darkness forced us back up the trail toward the house. We caught some of those fish pretty much every day. I learned to recognize them over the course of a summer because all fish don’t look alike, not even fish of the same species. They have individual shadowings of color and irregularities in their gills and fins.

That’s childhood. That’s my happy place. The creek, the dock, Daddy and Mr. Emory. Sitting cross-legged on bare planking, slapping at mosquitoes as they discovered my bare arms and legs. Cane poles only, of course, because rods and reels were useless in the close confines of the creek and its small pool and would only catch uselessly in the brush and undergrowth of the banks.

I remember the sound of the frogs as dusk fell, and birds flying low across the pond’s clearing. Sometimes you could see the head of a water moccasin swimming across the creek further downstream, crossing a safe distance from the intrusion of the dock upon their territory.

Nothing else on God’s green earth feels like late evening in the spring in the Deep South. The air feels like velvet, light trembles off the water, birds fly overhead. The sounds of the frogs and insects make their own symphony. I have no pictures of that creek and dock to post. Digital cameras were far into the future. Children don’t think of such things as recording special moments on film. No matter. There’s no way any camera could have properly recorded those moments, those men, that place, that time. The photographs are in my heart. They always will be. I take them out and look at them frequently, especially when I’m writing. 

I know somewhere out there, they’re still fishing together on the banks of Stone Creek. I love you, Daddy. I love you, Mr. Emory.

Find all Gail Roughton titles at http://bookswelove.net/authors/roughton-gail/
And at Amazon at http://amzn.to/1DZ6Mte
You can also visit at http://gailroughton.blogspot.com
And

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

WRITER ROOTS


What makes a writer? There are said to be a lot of ways to get into this particular form of insanity, but I can only speak for myself. Personally, I believe writers are born, not made.

I’ve just returned from a small visit to an old friend. We reconnected through our 50th HS reunion, which is a little odd, as I didn’t graduate from that school, but from a grammar school in Barbados. My friend and I hadn’t spoken or written since the 9th grade. That summer, my mother fled an abusive marriage and went to see old friends in the UK. She thought she and Dad were taking a break; he knew that the marriage was over, although he didn't say so . When I left home that summer, I expected to return to the US by Christmas. My father, however, already had a woman waiting in the wings. Instead an eventual reunion, there was an ugly long distance divorce.  My school friends soon stopped answering my sad letters. In the '50's, a divorce sent you into social exile.

Over time, I’d set the past aside. "Lost and gone forever" and "stiff upper lip" were the lessons. Imagine my surprise upon receiving an out-of-the-blue note last summer from this long-lost BFF! Apparently, one of our old classmates was with the FBI. For the fiftieth reunion, he’d pulled out all the stops, and located everybody even remotely associated with his graduating class.

So what made this old friend so special?   Well, Gemma was a co-conspirator in the great game of acting out the stories that filled my head. Her Mom sent her to ballet class and they had a wonderful costume box, too, something that every well-equipped home possessed in those days. I wanted to retell the stories I'd read, and sometimes to rewrite them—what is now called “fan fic” -- but mostly, in those days, we shared a desire to act them out.

As we approached our teens, Gemma was among the few who would still engage in the make-believe which remained the center of my world. I was the story-teller, the director. Gemma intuitively understood the world of theater. She created dances and she had a fantastic sense of design, so she did costuming and make-up. Her house was large; her parents indulgent. We could stay up late, until our projects were complete.  Favorites came from history and Greek myths--the gorier, the better. Cleopatra and the asp, Iphigenia on the altar, the Princes in the Tower, Aida and Radames buried alive! We always had musical accompaniment, too, so there was Beethoven, Schumann and Smetana’s The Moldau and all of Tchaikovsky's ballets. We had Grand Opera, too. Puccini and Verdi wrote music full of high drama, and their librettos reliably ended with someone tragically expiring.

In our late sixties now, we reminisce, discussing marriages and schools, children and grandchildren, parents and trips abroad. Gemma became a college professor. I became (finally) a writer. Her job was a wiser choice, but I still can’t quit those old habits of falling in love with passionate characters, the kind whose stories I've just got to tell.
       

~~ Juliet Waldron~~
Historical Novels 
Mozart's Wife
Roan Rose
Genesee
and many more
 


 

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