July 14, 2020

Confessions of a Sequester Wastrel: Yes, My Second Novel Should Be Done, But It Isn’t. Bite Me

July 14, 2020/ Rita Dragonette

Forgive me, novel #2, there is much that I have squandered. I had three months of unobligated, totally empty pandemic time I should have been devoting to you, and instead, I wasted it. I don’t know where it went (but calories and television were involved). I promise it wasn’t even fun (they were stupid wine-and-pizza calories; hypnotizing, beyond-my-control Netflix and news programs). The empty hours just disappeared (I promise it wasn’t puzzles, baking, or closet cleaning). They are just…gone. And I know you remain partially written, spread out across the desk I keep passing on the way to the television… and the refrigerator. I understand how pissed off you must be. Mea culpa. You may never forgive me, but, perhaps, I can make you understand.

The Sentence: Solitary Confinement

Okay, I acknowledge my privilege. I’m fortunate that during this time I have not been trying to keep a business going (it wouldn’t have made it), preventing a sick spouse or a mother in senior living from getting the virus (neither would have made it), home schooling (God forbid), or dealing with the waxing and waning of the anxiety of another (’nuff said). When isolating alone, and taking all precautions, I truly have only risked cabin fever . . . but that is not to be discounted entirely. I have profoundly missed having a pod of fellow prisoners with whom I could have shared safe cooties and conversation—even more than I missed not having outside space (A balcony? My kingdom for a balcony!). This has been 100% solo, Han, and it has. . . well . . . sucked.

Lockdown. Month One. The Early Days

The first few weeks, when it seemed more of a staycation, before we realized it was an actual sentence (even with food delivered, very nearly, through a slot in the door), I did what most did—descended into the malaise of a vast immediate future without deadlines. What was the hurry? I had sixty whole days to get to my book. I wore an indentation in the couch watching ALL episodes of a single Netflix Original within the same day or two (and often until 2 a.m.), emptying ALL bottles in the wine rack (often within the same day or two), and pushing the edge of the envelope with my existing food delivery vendors—”surprise me,” I said about my pizza, anything but pineapples. I got ripe olives. Hmm . . .

It was dull, but not without its pleasures. The demented family of Ozark became strangely relatable, the Broadchurch bunch somehow more virtuous. But by season three of The Last Kingdom, when I was deeply relating to my Scandinavian kinsmen (marauding Danes in Alfred’s England), their adventures were taking over my own life and finding me wanting. If they had been in lockdown in my living room, would they not attack it with relish, blasting through my computer with sword slashes of inspiration, machine-gun flurries of gut-punching scenes, daggers of witty dialogue, and bloody backstory? What a story sissy, they’d call me with disgust.

As the month went on and I’d get messages from people about how they’d finally cleaned their basements, organized their digital photos, and could begin to see the light of the end of their story, novel, memoir, I felt truly ashamed of myself. I lurked in the dust of my uncleaned condo cave. I was weak. I was worthless. This was not sustainable. And yet, when guilt overcame me, I changed the channel to Amazon Prime.

Lockdown: Month Two. Boredom

By this time the deprivation of no health club, lakefront, or parks in which to escape outside my condo walls for a precious hour of exercise was approaching tragic. There was perpetual gunk in my throat that gave a scouring-powder quality to my voice when I answered the phone at 2 or 3 p.m., the first time I’d talked out loud all day. Zoom calls descended into verbal combat—and in my desperation for discourse I took unfair advantage of the speaker-delay, leaving others pouting because they didn’t get their turn. I noticed an absence of recall, incomprehension of information that previously was reliable—names of people . . . or book titles . . . entire countries, the inability to add in my head. In the absence of a village, everything was taking a moment or more (I know, I know. It’s because I refuse to do puzzles). I researched to find out if isolation can lead to early dementia. Alarmingly, I find it’s possible. Still, it’s another excuse. I can hardly write if I’m losing my mind. Right?

Easter in lock down: tp instead of chocolate eggs.

Sequester wardrobe, ready for incineration.

My sequester wardrobe descended into unmistakable rag-tag. Five pairs of ancient Lululemon yoga pants and three oversized t-shirts: one with a symbol of The Year of the Dog from Tsingtao Beer; one threadbare to the point of see-through, left over from the swag bag of the opening of Chicago’s Bloomingdales back in the ’80s; and a nearly-to-my-knees, overwashed-into-baby-softness, official Dragonette, Inc. shirt from my entrepreneurial years, the dragon logo peeled away except for a few fiery curves. They were on their last legs anyway, why not just finish them off? I will burn them at the end of the pandemic, I promise myself. Meanwhile, wearing them is a symbol of survival.

I was appalled to find that my many packages–my lifeline—were displayed on a “safe” table, next to the doorman, fully exposed to the legions of visitors to the high-traffic building to which my condo tower belongs: the wine (is anyone counting?), the supplies for all three juice fasts (the first worked so well; the other two, not so much), the attempts at pre-made, week-at-a-time delivery meals. The latter made me think of the comment by humorist Dave Barry about frozen entrees: “So convenient they are even partially digested for you.”

Month Two Interlude: Encounter with a Human

Garbage Room: Scene of the Potential Crime

Six weeks in, I contemplated severely maiming my neighbor in the garbage room on our floor. Here I was, carrying a trash bag weighed down by wine bottles and foam food containers, in my sequester rags. He was dressed as if fresh for golf, depositing a tiny bag and a broken-down, neatly folded cardboard box (who does that?). We were having a mask-and-glove conversation in response to the question, “How are you doing with all this?” I answered with a shrug, holding up my bag, the ponytail of my Pebbles pandemic hairstyle ascending to the ceiling.

“I figured I had a binary choice,” he said, oozing discipline and—did I catch it?—a whiff of judgment. “I could go the junk food route and sit around or I could make it work for me.” He went on to recount his hours of exercise—biking, walking, running—he even bought a contraption he could put on the back wheel of his bike and pedal inside if it was raining. And, in fact, I’d often hear him clomping away while I waited near his door for a pandemically appropriate empty elevator. Nice to have the mystery of that rhythmic huffing sound cleared up. He had lost twenty-two pounds.

Did I mention he’d also used the time to edit his third medical thriller and has begun a fourth? There must be a can with a ragged edge in my bag, I thought. Or, I could just drop the bag on one of those athletic feet to hobble all that achievement. You know the feeling?

Every time he sees me, he asks how my book is coming along. Grrr . . .

Month Two: Interlude: Breakdown

By the end of the month, the weather had warmed up to the point where I could no longer zip my three-quarter-length parka over my slept-in clothes and pull the hood tight, allowing me to venture out for quick trips to Walgreens, 7-Eleven, or the mailbox incognito and without foundation garments.

I found myself regularly going bat-shit for about five minutes every other day, symbolically pounding on my picture windows here in Planet Condo, desperate to escape, then talking myself down by realizing there wasn’t a single place on the globe to go, not to mention the petri dish of any vehicle of transportation.

When the governor extended the lockdown into a third month, I LOST IT. Click here to read the ugly details.

Lockdown: Month Three. It’s Becoming a Way of life

The Relentless 90-Day View from Planet Condo

Alas, I must be an adult, put one house-shoe-encased foot in front of the other, and make the most of my tiny environment, even if it feels like No Exit. If Matt Damon can do it on Mars, I can do it here on Planet Condo.

I saw my neighbor again, he asked me how my book was going . . . again. It cut to the quick of my guilt. I had already begun to get kick-in-the-butt messages on social media from other writers: This time has been a gift, no distractions, like a retreat where you can get three months of work done in one. I’ve gained appreciation for the simple pleasures of life. I meditate, write in my journal, map out my projects for the rest of my life. Above all, I have FINISHED my novel, memoir, essay collection and am rewarding myself with quiet time, sitting here in my garden with brie and a lovely glass of Chablis.

Bite me again. My community had passed me up while I was still mired here in inertia. I guilted myself into developing lists: finish the first draft of this damn novel, an essay that is near the finish line, a blog post, clean out my writing space and dump all the detritus from my last novel. It didn’t stop there.

It was also a great time to end my coffee/wine/carb/MSNBC addictions, lose the six pounds that have been hanging around since the holidays (it used to be five), sit still long enough to listen to my meditation app, finally buy that Scriveners writing software and learn it (though I lack access to the recommended millennial guide), get through the TBR file of friends’ books that I need to review/blurb. I was ambitious. Who doesn’t love a list? Cross those puppies off, one by one, and this sequester time will have been fruitful after all, a gift.

What I did instead:

—A lot of research. Of greatest interest were stories in legit publications (Forbes! The New York Times!) about recommended sexual practices for now and the foreseeable future, most likely forever: your best partner is yourself, you need to be unabashedly creative on Zoom—pretend only your intended is watching—consider practices that are so bizarre, even the article had to include the line “Yes, we did just say that?” Check it out. “Masks, No Kissing and ‘a Little Kinky’: Dating and Sex in a Pandemic.” Celibacy will allow me to free up a great deal of time for writing. You know, in the future.

sent myself flowers since there was no spring.

—I replaced my social-media person. Actually, she replaced me. With the pandemic, she needed a full-time job. I hired a part-time publicist who had been laid off from her full-time job. My karma has been fulfilled 🙏🏻Whew! Now my conscience will be free for . . . writing.

—I broke two wine glasses, 🥂 and wore a hole in my sequester sweater. They are in my lockdown debris pile, ready for the fire (though realistically, in my high-rise, for the garbage chute). Nothing to get in the way of . . . you know.

—I switched out my closet. Winter to summer street clothes. I visit the latter occasionally, apologizing for neglect. I will be switching them back soon. Déjà vu. It will be as if spring and summer didn’t even happen, and therefore there were no weeks in which I didn’t write.

—I made a to-do list: find a resource to restuff my couch, buy new leisure wear, join Weight Watchers/AA/a meditation group/a hands-free dating site, buy sex toys designed for solitary use that will be delivered in plain packaging, buy a new TV with a sound system that will pick up the dialogue of mumbling English actors, get a new sweater, cancel all delivery services, look up the address of the nearest grocery store, open old dust-covered cookbooks, and see if I can remember the basics, donate wine rack. Clear the decks from distractions so I will be able to write.

Phase Four: Reentry and a Do-over

I had big plans for this year, the countdown to a major birthday on November 4. They were all dashed. But some wise person posted a hopeful message on FaceBook that resonates.

“I’m not counting this year. After all, nothing happened.”

Words to live by. So I have another year . . . a do-over, in my mind, that I will use more wisely.

Libby Wheeler, author of The Asher Trilogy, has been my Lockdown Lifeline, Helping me turn the corner from malaise to manuscript. — Libby Wheeler, author of *The Asher Trilogy*, has been my Lockdown Lifeline, Helping me turn the corner from malaise to manuscript.

What did save me, seriously, is that midway through Month Two, I reconnected with a writer who lives hours away. Our three-hour weekly calls have been my lifeline, and we are both making more progress on our novels than we have in a year. We text each other daily at dawn to verify we’re sitting at our desks. And we’re kind to each other if we miss. Someday soon, when we’ve completed the first drafts we’ve promised ourselves will be done by Labor Day, we will meet with our masks in the outside garden of a café for brie and Chablis.

I may bring some home for my neighbor. He’s really a nice guy. He doesn’t know I wanted to kill him.

And what do you have to confess?

Final Thought: The Japanese have been forbidden to scream while on roller coasters because it spreads the coronavirus. Instead, they have been encouraged to do what I think defines the entire sequester:

Scream inside your heart.

That’s what we’ve really all been doing, right? Let’s keep it up. Make it loud enough to be heard on the page.

What I DID Do During Lockdown

Held two virtual Book Club Meetings in chicago and Evanston for The Fourteenth of September. — Held two virtual Book Club Meetings in chicago and Evanston for *The Fourteenth of September*.

A reading for The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. Lighting so bad I look like a newscaster taping from her basement.

Joined.

May 04, 2020

The Final 50th Anniversary Post: Remembering the Kent State Shootings of May 4, 1970

May 04, 2020/ Rita Dragonette

On this date in the year 2070, someone will be writing about how the Great Coronavirus Pandemic of fifty years earlier changed the world and why we are better off for it in some ways, worse off in others, and how mystifying it is that there are still those lingering issues that haven’t yet been settled. And, isn’t it about time we finished the job and stopped repeating history?

Anniversaries are important to make sure we ask those questions. It’s why, over the past two years, I’ve written posts about the anniversaries of so many events that shaped the world during the time frame of my novel The Fourteenth of September and still resonate today: the Bobby Kennedy Assassination, the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Moratoriums to End the War in Vietnam: October 15, 1969 & November 15, 1969, the First Draft Lottery and the Kent State Shootings.

This will be the last anniversary post on the history behind my novel; the cycle is done. The story takes place roughly between the first Vietnam Draft Lottery and the Kent State Shootings, two seminal events that book-ended a six-month period wherein I’ve always felt the character of my generation was formed, including its early feminism. The novel ends shortly after Kent State when the country fired on its children, the turning point incident in support of the war when the country went too far and knew it.

Fifty years sounds so long, but in many ways has gone by so fast. What we haven’t learned in that time frame is legion. Just this past December, the Washington Post published a report, “At War With The Truth,” about the war in Afghanistan, that sounded like the playbook for Vietnam: falsified data to show we were “winning,” admissions that the strategy wasn’t working, and the objective unclear. On the positive side, we learned to treat our vets with respect, to never have another draft, and we keep coming close to electing a woman president. Two steps back, one step forward, another we just can’t seem to get quite right.

We are still so in the thick of this pandemic that, yes, it’s difficult to focus on anything else. But it’s illustrative, on today’s anniversary, to consider how we might try to learn the lessons of how to be the admirable country we consider ourselves to be, the first—or the fifth—or the fiftieth—try instead of so often falling back into the hamster wheel of history.

A high school friend of my vintage found this recently among his late mother's things. He had no idea she'd been a protester."RIGHT ON, Mrs. Gustafson," It worked. — A high school friend of my vintage found this recently among his late mother's things. He had no idea she'd been a protester.
"RIGHT ON, Mrs. Gustafson," It worked.

Following is a post I wrote on this day two years ago, that includes the story of what happened at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, and why it still matters today. In rereading it, I see that we were only thirteen months into the new administration, dealing acutely with school shootings and already hearing about alternative facts and incredible re-interpretations of reality. I asked readers to look ahead and think about what would be on the conscience of the country on this fiftieth-anniversary date to which we should also be saying “No, that’s not who we are.”

The issues have changed, but not the question. How we’re dealing with acceptable percentages of pandemic deaths and knee-jerk 180 turns in policy that impact lives and livelihoods. I ask again. Haven’t we learned how to be better than this. Are we ready again to stop and say, “No, that’s not who we are?”

The following published on May 4, 2018 under the title:

Remember Kent State, May 4, 1970: An Iconic Moment For A Generation... A Coming of Conscience for a Country

Recently, while promoting the fall publication of my novel, The Fourteenth of September, which takes place during the pivotal 1969-1970 years of the Vietnam War, I was asked if—of the many iconic moments in American history that happened during that time period— one had impacted me more than any other.

I paused to consider the word iconic... icon — a symbol. No question. It was the Kent State Massacre, a symbol at the time of the total chasm between the government and the youth it was supposed to be protecting: the bridge too far that blew away most of the remaining support for the war, though it’s death throes dragged on another five years.

48 Years and We Still Remember

Every May fourth since 1970 there has been media coverage of the shootings, always featuring the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio with arms outstretched in agony and disbelief, kneeling above the body of twenty-year-old Jeffrey Miller. An iconic image of how we felt. Agony and disbelief. This is America? How had it come to this?

We know the facts: The National Guard fired into a crowd of students protesting the war’s expansion into Cambodia. Sixty-seven rounds over thirteen seconds killing four, wounding nine, permanently paralyzing one. The massive national student strike after. A turning point in how the country viewed the war. It was just too much to kill kids.

Early Alternative Facts

It all began with a lie—and it was bald-faced. Nixon was elected because he said he'd end the war—something his predecessor, Johnson, hadn't been able to do. His Administration said we were winding down. Hard as it may be to believe from the vantage point of today, media was limited. We only heard one side and assumed what we were told was true—though obviously that was disavowed later on many levels, most recently in the Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War.

But, suddenly, on April 30, 1970, it's announced we just bombed Cambodia. It was earth-shattering. The war was being accelerated, not contained. Of course, there were protests; of course, they were full of anger; of course, those protests would be on a campus where the populations of draft-age men were among the largest. We had just been through the roulette of the Draft Lottery and the news about My Lai. Nerves were raw, the rage was high. Above all, trust was waning, and this Cambodia lie just wiped it out. How could we believe anything the government told us ever again?

And then, to top it off, unbelievably, students were shot dead at one of those protests. It was the very definition of a word we were just beginning to use to describe what we thought were mind-expanding experiences: surreal.

The Memorial to Jeffrey Miller, Bordering Where He Fell, on the Kent State Campus

Where Were You When You Heard?

I think many people of my generation can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about Kent State, just like all the assassinations that punctuated that time—King, the two Kennedys. I remember walking into the Student Union with a few others and being shocked to hear my friend, Tommy Aubry, screaming from the top of the stairs, “They’re Shooting Us! They’re Shooting Us!” We didn’t know what he was talking about. He pointed to the only television set in the Union and ran past us to shout the news to others.

We didn’t believe it at first. Who would? They must have shot over their heads. It had to be an accident. Surely no one was actually dead. It was too fantastic to comprehend... until we had to. The truth of it was horrible. It wasn’t enough that we could be sent to Vietnam to die; we could die here.

They Could Shoot Us, Too!

I came across a quote by the survivor, Gerald Casale, that summed up a student’s point of view. “It completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of people I knew...”

Abraham and Isaac Sculpture in Commemoration of the KENT STATE Shootings, at Princeton University

In an era of embryonic diversity awareness, it was astounding that supposedly the most cherished of us all were now being killed just outside a quiet Midwestern town. Anything could happen next. Casale founded the band Devo, creating music and a movement as a result of his experience.

I have a chapter in my book you can read here that’s based on what happened at the campus I was on. It was not something I had to research. I still remember every second.

Within days after the shootings, the National Guard actually did arrive on my campus, and we thought we were also going to be killed—another chapter, another iconic situation. We were still teenagers and most of us had been pretty sheltered, but now we understood what it must be like for those fighting for civil rights in the south, for anyone living day in and day out in any country at war. It was a sobering lesson. We were truly in what we called "the war at home."

According to the final report on the Kent State Massacre by the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest: “It was unnecessary, unwarranted, inexcusable”—an iconic symbol of the war that caused it.

A Coming of Conscience Moment. America Said No!

The subtitle of my novel is “A Coming of Conscience,” because it was a time when we weren’t just growing up and Coming of Age. In addition—by the way we chose or were forced to cope with the situations presented by the Vietnam War—we were each defining our own character. We were each faced with decisions where integrity could—or should—trump consequences (pun intended). Would I go to Vietnam or to Canada? If I join ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) am I being realistic or complicit? If I put my head in the sand and try to ignore it all am I being apathetic, cowardly or just understandably self-preserving?

We’re in a period now where we’re questioning our leadership and taking our positions on matters to the streets in massive marches. It’s our right and our privilege, and they don't fire on us—we feel safe. One reason is that on May 4, 1970, the country looked aghast at the bodies of those dead children and decided that this was not who we were. This was not our character. It was a coming-of-conscience moment for the country.

It all reminds me of watching Apocalypse Now, a brilliant film that I admired greatly but could never see a second time. Viewing it made me feel I’d personally been through the war. It told the Heart-of-Darkness story of Colonel Kurtz, who embodied "the horror," as he put it, of how we would actually have to behave to win such a war. In the movie, the government has sent an assassin to eliminate him, because as a people we couldn’t accept that Krutz is what we’d have to become to do what Washington considered so essential—continue as the country that had never lost a war.

With Kent State, the horror rang through every level of America. Is this what it’s come to? We answered, “No.”

May 4, 2020, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre. Over the coming years, let’s remember and honor what happened at Kent State. And, in this current moment of dubious facts, incredible re-interpretations of truth and Never Again, let’s think of what else is on the conscience of the country to which we should also be saying, “No, that’s not who we are.”

November 15, 2019

On this Day in History: November 15, 1969. The Moratorium March on Washington. A Million Reasons to End the War. . . Or So We Thought.

November 15, 2019/ Rita Dragonette

The First Time the Size of the Crowd on the DC Mall Really Mattered

On this day fifty years ago, the second phase of the hopeful Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam took place. Unlike the previous month’s event, it wasn’t a quiet series of strikes by students or others. It was to be a million marchers in Washington, D.C., right outside President Richard Nixon’s White House window. The portion of the divided country convinced it was time to stop this seemingly endless and pointless conflict was ebullient. We were confident that with numbers like these showing up, it would be impossible for the president to dismiss the will of the majority: the war had lost its objective; it was unwinnable; it was time to Bring the Troops Home NOW!

Like the first Moratorium that October, the march was to be inclusive of as many subsections of the country as possible—an unprecedentedly huge aggregate of voices all asking for the same thing. And, it was to be peaceful, to make a point without becoming who we were not, and without alienating those who’d like to join, but feared to in the shadow of the violence that began with the Democratic Convention in 1968. The Chicago Conspiracy Trial had just begun that September and was still going on. We were changing the image: There are so many of us; lots of us look like you; it’s safe to join us. You know we’re right.

We Had to Be There. And to Be Counted.

Young people were particularly activated and ended up comprising the majority of the marching crowd. The war affected them most, after all—they were the fuel for the new draft lottery, coming in just three weeks, that was to determine who would go to Vietnam at a time when that meant a death sentence.

800px-Vietnam_War_protestors_at_the_March_on_the_Pentagon.jpg

College campuses, representing the largest concentration of draft-age men, mobilized. Across the country, buses and other transportation were arranged to bring flocks of students to the event. Preparations covered the scope of the guerilla marketing options of the day: posters were painted, banners made for display by marchers, armbands and pins created for every message out there, from the remaining vestiges of flower power, “War is hazardous for children and other living things,” to the clenched-fist yelp of the day, “Hell No, We Won’t Go.”

We had to be there, somehow, we told ourselves. The numbers were important. A million marchers! We had to be counted. That was the galvanizing cry—and so close to the December 1 lottery date that it was worth risking all. Like the main character in The Fourteenth of September, I was on a military scholarship, the only way I could afford to go to college. I was deep into plotting how to get out of it by this time, but I couldn’t risk losing it, which I surely would if I got caught traveling to Washington, thereby going AWOL (which I’d technically be, away from my “duty station” at school). But I felt certain this was a pivotal moment in history, and I had to be a part of it, or I’d never forgive myself.

And it was the most exciting thing to be happening so far in my teenage life: Genuine action, people from all over the country, a city I’d never been to. Above all, I was going to make a difference. It’s hard to describe how certain we were that we would be heard at last and that this would work. A million marchers! We’d stop the war that was eating up our generation. It was easy, Kool-Aid, and I drank it down like so many others in the guilelessness of late adolescence. After all, we were right: people were dying without purpose; the war was bad; it had to end. Who could quibble with that?

Even my mid-size school, Northern Illinois University, was going to send three buses to Washington. It would cost $40 a head, which was stiff for students in those days. I got such a secret kick out of using my army pay to finance my rebellion. I couldn’t tell anyone, but I’d know. I made my plans. I left my army ID in the only locked drawer in my dorm desk, joined in making dozens of PB&J sandwiches for the bus ride, and set out to change the world.

Off on a Fateful Adventure with a Million Marchers

It was a long night’s drive, and we arrived late, after the famous “March Against Death” that took place the night before Saturday’s big event. Thousands of people had walked in single file down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, each carrying a placard with the name of a dead American soldier, presaging the eventual form of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. The placards were placed in coffins, and we saw them lying in front of the Capitol Building as our bus pulled into the city and dropped us off.

We hastily joined the other marchers, lined up for the main event. We jumped around to stay warm in the bone-chilling November cold, none of us dressed for the weather. We’d been more concerned about the message of the imitation fatigues we were wearing under our protest buttons—olive drab and khaki jackets we’d picked up at the army surplus store in our campus hometown. We wanted to look the part. We waited. . . and waited, only to be ultimately frustrated when city officials stopped the march on the stroke of the three-hour parade permit time limit, despite the thousands of us who had not yet put one foot in front of the other to make our involvement official.

We swallowed our disappointment and followed the crowd down the Mall, amazed at the sheer numbers of people, a moving swarm of protestors filling up every space between the white buildings we’d heretofore only seen in pictures or on television: the Capitol, the National Gallery of Art, and ahead of us the grand obelisk of The National Monument. We met people from all over, from pacifists to anarchists, but mostly just kids like us, totally psyched that we’d choked the streets and shut down the capital of the United States. Rumor was we’d pulled off the biggest protest ever. Of course, this would end the war. How could it not?

We were tired, hungry, and on the hunt for bathrooms but also riding high, eagerly joining in singing along with those ahead of us, who in turn were singing along with performers we knew were ahead of them but we couldn’t possibly see or hear ourselves—Peter, Paul and Mary, Arlo Guthrie, Country Joe and the Fish.

Read Chapter Excerpt

When we filed onto the buses after only six hours in the city and headed back to campus, we were exhausted but elated. We’d been counted, we were sure. The war would end. We gave them a million reasons why. This is what it was to be a responsible citizen. This is what it was to join the long tradition of activism in our country. This is what it was to be an American.

Read the excerpt about the day from The Fourteenth of September.

“Young Marchers Ask Rapid Withdrawal from Vietnam,” The New York Times

Media coverage and access to information was so slow back then. There were many “no-news” hours between boarding the buses and arriving back on campus, leaving us blind and deaf to the national reaction to the March.

By the time we returned, the newspapers were out, but the number was wrong— they were saying only 250,000 people had been in Washington. That number didn’t make sense if you’d been there. No one could imagine how they’d arrived at it. Someone suggested it was possible they’d only counted the ones who actually marched before the permit ended. It was the only reasonable explanation. Or was it an intentional plot—purposeful misinformation to show that though we boasted of having a majority we could only deliver a fraction of it?

And then there was the devastating caption that told us Nixon hadn’t been looking at a million marchers from his window. . . he had been watching a football game.

Dreams dashed.

**“It Remains the Largest Political Rally in the Nation’s History,” Time Magazine**

The numbers were revised with time to 500,000, but the damage had been done. We’d been so excited; I’d personally risked so much, and we were dismissed. To Nixon, we were a few thousand kids versus his great silent majority. His contempt for the concerns of our entire generation oozed over us. There were tens of thousands of faces who’d traveled from across the country over which he presided, beckoning for his attention in the freezing cold and he hadn’t even looked up from the television screen, or so he boasted.

We learned much later that this march had been historic, that it had had an impact, that it had been significant in the sequence of resistance that eventually led to the end of the war. In retrospect, we’d been an important part of the story of our country. Today, we smile and feel proud to read the fifty-year-old news accounts.

But it sure didn’t feel like it at the time.

The war went on for another six years. Thousands more died. We felt the power we thought we had heading into the march begin to dissipate, sifting through our fingers. We were too young to know change was that hard, and would take that long. We thought we’d failed.

A few years later, that president, who finagled crowd numbers on the Mall, would become so cocky he’d push it to the point of breaking the law. He got his comeuppance with Watergate.

We didn’t think it could ever happen again. We didn’t imagine we were in the first cycle of the hamster wheel of history.

LATEST UPDATES & NEWS

When Integrity Trumps Consequences

“Consideration will change the world, and I’m ready for it. It’s time for change, and it’s the time to start being brave.”

— Coming of Conscience Scholarship Applicant

Each person coming forward in the impeachment process has made a Coming of Conscience decision.

BOOMERS ARE OK

Two authors were pitted against each other at the Louisiana Book Festival on November 2nd—a military wife and an anti-war activist. Fireworks were assumed as Bev Marshall and I recounted our stories in Back Home: A Vietnam Veteran’s Wife’s Short Memoir about a Long War and The Fourteenth of September. But this “Yankee” and this southerner found common ground and became fast friends.

Screen+Shot+2019-11-13+at+12.43.07+PM.jpg

October 15, 2019

October 15, 1969: The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. A Pause for Reflection in a Polarized America.

October 15, 2019/ Rita Dragonette

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The anniversaries of seminal events that rocked our world fifty years ago are coming hot and heavy this fall. Today, we remember a time when we tried a reasoned strategy to attempt to deal with a generation-defining issue in a country as divided then as we are now.

TIME Magazine Cover: Vietnam Moratorium — Oct. 17, 1969

By the time of the Moratorium, America had been involved in Vietnam, in one way or another, for nearly ten years. Any initial objectives for the war were long gone, the domino theory relegated back to the game it was named after, the war’s progress descended into body counts, the goal now so incrementally small that there was no big picture left or possible. Our defense secretary was telling us that if we killed more Vietnamese than they killed Americans, it was a good week. Period. The Killed in Action Numbers came out on Thursdays.

It was pretty universally agreed that the war was a disaster. What wasn’t agreed upon was what we were going to do about it. Half the country felt we should stay in Vietnam until we “won,” because America had never lost a war. The other half felt that we should cut our losses and get out—those losses being so obvious in the form of body bags containing young adults (many just teenagers) we were seeing each night for the first time on television, on the nightly news, just before dinner, when the numbers of killed and wounded on both sides were announced with a chart, like sports scores. No one could not know—or pretend not to know—what was going on.

On October 15, 1969, America was stuck in an existential dilemma. Who were we if we stayed in Vietnam? What were we if we left? Lines were drawn at the dinner table; people couldn’t talk to their own relatives; friendships were made or lost depending upon which side of the argument you were on. The country was at a loud and strident impasse—no one was budging. And the policies of our new president, Richard Nixon, despite campaign promises, were alarmingly close to those of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, who’d abdicated the presidency because he couldn’t figure it out.

One Day in October, Two Days in November, Three Days in December. . . A Strategy That Should Have Worked

THE NORTHERN STAR, NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 1969

A moratorium is defined as a delay, a postponement, to give time for reflection. The plan for the Moratorium that October was to apply this concept to ensure the country didn’t stumble blindly ahead in a direction that might be wrong. It was to be peaceful: to put the war on pause, while we reflected about how we had arrived at this point. How did the war begin? What were we trying to do? How could we bring it to an end? The theme was grief, sorrow, and solidarity, rather than anger and rage. It was important to demonstrate that a war protest didn’t have to be violent and destructive like the one at the Democratic Convention. Instead, the tent was wide and had room for anyone with doubts about the war and the direction of the country, knowing this cut across all segments of age, race, and economic status. The concept was to build a groundswell—to engage the widest representation of all groups and factions. You didn’t need to be a radical to be against the war. Your desire to end a war that had lost its way was the common thread.

And it worked—huge groups gathered in Washington (250,000), and cities across the country. The idea was to expand it month by month, to increase participation and demonstrate the widespread support across all subsets in the country—civil rights organizations, churches, business groups, universities, unions—to end this war that affected everyone. After all, who didn’t have a connection: a child, a boyfriend, a student, a brother, a cousin—some family, some connection, anywhere. A war experience enters the DNA of a country, our DNA. Our lack of power over its escalation gripped us all: it was time to build our side of the argument. What were Communist dominoes and saving the world for democracy, versus the loss of actual lives? Did we need new ways of looking at conflicts—of considering more carefully how we got into them, and the points at which we needed to get out? Just what were the ethics of unwinnable wars?

Students Went on Strike

The way this played out on college campuses—which represented the largest concentration of draft-age men—was in the form of “strikes.” Students were encouraged to skip classes and attend informal education sessions about the roots of the war, the options for protest, how they could regain power over their lives. Since Vietnam had been around through most of the students’ childhoods, they had grown up with it, and now were in it, without really understanding how the country had ended up where it was. It was time to revisit the Gulf of Tonkin, the French involvement, the anti-communist fear that ensnared John F. Kennedy. Or, to learn about them for the first time.

Ken Burns traces all this beautifully in his PBS series The Vietnam War, but back on October 15, 1969, no one was piecing it together, talking about what it all meant, what was really at stake, perhaps, versus what had previously been wagered in other wars. We needed new comparators.

Teachers were encouraged to suspend their syllabus of the day and discuss the war with students. The chemistry teachers balked, but the history and political science professors were in heaven. Students came, the straight (in the old definition of representing the norm) and the freaks. People were talking. Check out the excerpt from The Fourteenth of September that takes place on that date, and you’ll see that it was an opportunity for people to talk about what they felt, to finally ask their questions, to face their fears, to begin to understand rather than just react.

Read Chapter Excerpt

Time magazine said the Moratorium had brought “new respectability and popularity” to the antiwar movement.

The Aftermath

The Moratorium was a huge pearl in the string of events that eventually led to the demise of this long national ordeal, that would take until 1975—six more years—to conclude. Though the administration retaliated with Nixon publicly stating that “under no circumstances will I be affected,” he was. The event led to Vice President Spiro Agnew’s infamous speech when he called anyone against the war “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals” (which would have made an exquisite tweet in today’s world). Significantly, it also resulted in Nixon’s defining “silent majority” address, asking for the support of what he assumed was the vast heretofore quiet bulk of Americans for his Vietnam policy—that we had to stay and win. Peace with Honor, he called it. He conceded the point that South Vietnam wasn’t important, the real issue was that America would lose face. This was startling. From then on, the country knew what it was in for, what side he was on. And each of us had to decide what was more important—an escalating number of soldiers killed with no objective or end in sight, or maintenance of a perfect victory record? As a young person with your life or that of your friends on the line, you had to wonder if it was worth it when some old guy said it would hit us in our pride. We did not think this was a compelling case for the carnage, not a decade into this war, with a possible additional decade ahead.

Conversations were stirred up, assumptions were being challenged. It was a brief illuminating moment. We learned a lot. It was a start.

Power to the People

We all looked forward to the next phase of the Moratorium on November 15, 1969, which was to be the biggest March on Washington ever. We were empowered and activated to change the world. It felt so good, finally, to think that we could be heard. Illusions about this would be shattered as events progressed rapidly through the end of 1969/1970, but it’s instructive to remember that there are moments when progress did happen, and that it takes so painfully long. We paid a price for not listening to each other back then.

March at night to the White House, led by Coretta Scott King, part of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam

It makes you wonder if we need a Moratorium today—a time for reflection, to really think about the character of the country. Who are we if we continue on our current path? What are we if we choose another, hopefully better, one? We lose all when we stonewall and stop talking to each other. Perhaps our Moratorium is the impeachment process? It could be. Let’s be open. The sin of what happened fifty years ago was that we took so long to do what was inevitable in ending the war. The horrible price was in loss of life and damage to our national integrity. Our DNA is still frayed. There are echoes of what is at risk at present today in our country. There is a war going for our integrity. But there could be hope.

Like Judy in The Fourteenth of September who went through a Coming of Conscience journey to a decision where integrity trumped consequences, there are a lot of people today who are or who need to make a similar Coming of Conscience decision. Whether you agree with them or not, you have to admire their willingness to risk personal consequences for doing the right thing. We need so many more of them. The country awaits how this current Coming of Conscience moment will resolve—not just how it will be written about in the history books, but how will happen right now.

We can still change the world. . . if we listen.

All power to the people.

LATEST UPDATES & NEWS

Integrity Trumps Consequence

“I have learned that I am not afraid to stand up for others, even if that means standing alone.”

— Coming of Conscience Scholarship Applicant

"I have visited nations ravaged by civil war. ... I have never imagined such a quote to be repeated by a President. This is beyond repugnant."

— Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.

Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner

As I was about to cross the stage at last week's Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner I realized I should have provided period-specific music from The Fourteenth of September as background. Turns out I didn't need to—watch and see what they came up with.

Limited Time Only! If You Haven't Had a Chance to Get a Copy, Stock up Now for Yourself or Gifts.

She Writes Press has teamed up with NewInBooks and BargainBooksy in celebration of #NationalBookMonth. For a limited time only, from October 18-27 the eBook version of The Fourteenth of September price will drop to $0.99.

Coming of Conscience and Fighting for Roe by Rita Dragonette

Check out my latest op-ed for Ms. Magazine: “Fifty years from now, the future cannot look like the world we've already changed.”

September 23, 2019

The First Anniversary of "The Fourteenth of September:" The 50th Anniversary of Everything That’s In It 🎂

September 23, 2019/ Rita Dragonette

It’s been a year since the publication of my debut novel, The Fourteenth of September, and I can’t believe it either. To answer so many of your questions, yes, it has done well (outperforming the average independent book, I’m told) and continues to be of interest. It’s fulfilled all my hopes and dreams, and I’m humbly grateful for the wonderful year I’ve had due to the support of many of you. I intend to continue the ride as long as it lasts, however wild. This last quarter of 2019 alone is filled with the fiftieth anniversaries of so many of the seminal events of the time that are dramatized in the novel: the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, the first Moratorium Against the War, the March on Washington, the first Draft Lottery. Their commemoration shows us how the decades can seem very long ago, and yet as short as a heartbeat, with in-your-face reverberations today.

To be honest, everyone is right when they say publication is not for sissies. Though incredibly affirming and rewarding, it’s also been, in the favorite words of the colorful Joe Dragonette, “three yards and a cloud of dust.” To my surprise, the part that gets so many writers, the marketing, was often overwhelming even to my PR veteran self. But the biggest challenge was always that my topic was so fraught on so many levels. Me, being me, I just couldn’t begin with a simple starter novel with a few characters and a feel-good climax. And that made the hill I had to climb pretty high, though a few major things did finally break in my favor.

Following is top-line some of what I learned during the year of the launch of The Fourteenth of September.

Vietnam is No Longer the Voldemort of Wars

Timing is everything, and there was a long period when I thought I’d totally blown mine for publication. The book took thirteen years to write (and that’s once I actually put fingers to computer) and I suffered through many questions about why I was writing about Vietnam—a subject no one cared about, I was told. It was the Voldemort of wars, as one of my book-launch salon participants put it: We lost, there were atrocities, and we treated our vets badly. Nothing anyone wants to revisit. And besides, it’s the past, not relevant for today. Why waste your time?

READ SAMPLE CHAPTER

Fortunately,my au contraire moment was created by Ken Burns (The Vietnam War PBS), Steven Spielberg (The Post), the writers of This is Us, and other popular culture curators who reminded us at the fifty-year point after the war that it was time to look back, learn, and even—be still my heart—be entertained. In addition, with the interest in women’s issues and diversity, there was increased openness to new points of view. As a result, once I published, I became part of the zeitgeist. In fact, the New York Times recently pointed out that three of the current bestselling novels are also at least partially set in 1969, with Vietnam themes or plot points: Summer of ’69, Mrs. Everything, and Chances Are…, the latter of which is actually about three college buddies whose lottery numbers pretty much determined their lives.

Unfortunately, world events have lined up to show that if not examined, history will always repeat itself. So alas, counterintuitively, what’s uncomfortable for the country makes The Fourteenth of September more relevant than ever. It was chillingly familiar when Pete Buttigieg reminded us in the second Democratic Debate that wars are “very easy to start and very hard to end.” He was referring to Afghanistan, but the echo to Vietnam, that limped on five years after Kent State turned the country firmly against the war, was loud and clear.

It’s time to embrace the subject of the Vietnam War as we would any in history. Check out the article I wrote about this for Independent Publisher: “Five Reasons Why It’s Okay to Write about Vietnam Today.”

Vietnam Is Still a Tough Subject, but Not One to Shy Away From

—People actually do want to talk about Vietnam, given the opportunity. In over thirty events during the past year, I’d say, men, in general, are eager to share their particular stories—how they did or did not get out of the draft, the near-miss life-saving efforts of helpful doctors, the miracles of lost or destroyed draft documents. They also remember where they were on Lottery Night—in a bar, huddled around a TV in a dorm, in a pool hall—afraid to listen, feeling powerless, their destiny out of their hands. They shared stories personal and painful as if they’d been just waiting for an opening. They talked about what got them through—tales and talismans. The real-life model for the character of Wizard in my novel pulled the remnants of his draft card out of his wallet and reassembled them on a countertop to show me they never left him.

—Women are mixed. They usually don’t feel they have stories of their own and start with those of their men: fathers, uncles, husbands, sons, students, relatives relegated to the dark and never talked about. Once they “claim” their experiences, their stories are as compelling. One woman told me she’ll never forget picking up the paper on the front porch the morning after the second draft lottery to read that if she’d been one of her five brothers instead of a girl, she, too, would have the lowest lottery number and been off to Vietnam. Many were apologetic—they’d been focused on raising kids, or writing papers at college amid the chaos, or just keeping their heads down and their lives moving forward as the world was blowing up. One of the most telling comments was from a seventy-nine-year-old woman in Wisconsin who came up to me after a book club. “I got married young and didn’t go to college,” she said as if I’d judge. “My husband was on the road as a salesmen five days a week and I was overwhelmed raising three kids. I thought all the protesters were entitled rich kids, causing trouble.” She thanked me for showing her their perspective as she revised her own.

—Young people are very curious. Not so much Millennials, who find it hard to relate, but Xers and younger who say they want to hear more about a subject no one talks about or teaches. They haven’t heard about the Lottery and have a hard time believing that it happened as it did—like a game show on television. They instinctively feel that Vietnam is an important part of their history and that others have decided it’s not to be shared. They want to understand why.

It Still Hurts. Time Helps but Doesn’t Heal.

—Vets are still angry. Some violently so. Several of the comments to my Facebook Ads were pretty hot, by vets viscerally reacting to nothing more than the photo of a protest sign and the name of a female author. I tried to engage with a few to tell them the book wasn’t anti-vet, and one did respond, thanking me. But I had to pull back on my audience target, realizing I was pouring kerosene on a wound that was still open.

—Vets are still profoundly hurt about how the war was conducted and how they were treated. Callers-in on radio shows spoke primarily about that. They were anxious to share. I was willing to listen. My attempts to donate some proceeds to The Wall or Vietnam Vet organizations were mysteriously rebuffed. One sympathetic man finally told me it was too much of a reach. The Vietnam Vets were focused on supporting vets of subsequent wars, so they wouldn’t be treated poorly like they had been. When I brought book copies as giveaways to my high school reunion, I had to start by saying the book was anti-war for that war at that time—not anti-vet.

When my publicist emailed with a link to a review of The Fourteenth of September in The Veteran I held my breath. To her, this had been an obvious media target, but I knew better. Now, I’m more proud of this than any other I’ve received:

Few books have taken the time—and space—to examine so thoroughly the collegiate antiwar movement in small-town America. The story held my interest and reminded me of what was going on in Pullman, Washington, around the same time. The tone rang true in every line.

I was interested in the impact that the draft lottery and its rippling effects had on a generation heavily influenced by the chance uncertainty the lottery had on hundreds of thousands of young people. I had barely paid attention to the lottery because I was one of the young men drafted before it was instituted.

This novel opened my eyes to issues that my thick skin and my age had protected me from. We are admonished to read this book and weep, and I actually did shed a tear or two of sympathy.

If you’re like me, after you read this well-written novel, it will be difficult to put it out of your mind.

We Can Still Be Surprised by the Past

In one of my book-launch salons, I met Pam Tarr, daughter of General Curtis Tarr, who was the much-maligned “inventor” of the modern draft lottery. I didn’t know her history but had been warned she’d attend and I should be prepared for tough questioning. That didn’t happen. She was open and sympathetic to the story of characters protesting what had been her father’s program. Later, she told me about how the objective had been laudable—to come up with a uniform, fair program versus the uneven and “bribable” local draft boards than in place. Her father and her family had been vilified and taunted. She told a story of how President Nixon had urged her to be brave. Her best friends were the daughters of Ehrlichman and Haldeman. It had been a hard adolescence and she felt it hadn’t been fair to her family. And, of course, she was right. War does so much unseen damage to so many unappreciated victims. Many of the overlooked are women and girls. I’m hoping she and I will be willing to work together on this story at some point.

Historical Fiction Is a Pathway to Understanding

I’ve always felt that we learn our history through facts and nonfiction, but we understand our history through narrative—where we can actually feel ourselves in the shoes of a character we can relate to and wonder what we would have done. Then, we can begin to know what it was like to weigh the stakes and dangers against the valor and objective, and consider what it was like to live in another time: to make a fateful decision in the narrow vision of a single person’s experience of the past without benefit of the panoramic reevaluation of the present.

Historical fiction typically takes place at least fifty years in the past. The Vietnam War, as a subject, is now just squeezing into that category by its chin hairs. It’s complicated. Living people bring the lens of their authentic, yet specific involvement to the story. Some feel that unless they had their own experience of Vietnam this story wouldn’t be relevant. This story is only for a Boomer audience of a specific age, in this micro-targeted world. Right?

And yet, we openly welcome stories of topics of which we have no living experience—the French Resistance, German prison camps, home-front US—in stories like The Lilac Girls, All the Light We Cannot See, The Beantown Girls, The Lost Girls of Paris. Members of book clubs press novels on me about other wars they see as parallel and relevant. People send books, poems: Pandora’s box has been opened. Vietnam is as relevant as today, as nostalgic and fascinating as the yesterday of World War II and all the history that’s gone before. The stories the War has to tell are compelling, gut-wrenching, instructive, revelatory, and

. . . entertaining. The Fourteenth of September, for example, is full of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the time. It’s impossible to write about 1969-1970 without being a bit uncomfortable, yes, but also with singing and celebrating.

It’s time to open ourselves to the narrative. Over the next few months, as we commemorate the pivotal events of fifty years ago, this blog will utilize The Fourteenth of September as a lens to allow you to experience this chaotic and prescient time from the perspective of the nineteen-year-old you once have been, will be or still are. And, to consider what you would have done then, and may yet need to do, again in the near future.

When Integrity Trumps Consequence

“If we strive to normalize courtesy, integrity and making moral decisions we can inspire others to act in a similar manner. I am committed to making these practices a standard of human experience: encouraging change one by one, creating a better world.”

— Coming of Conscience Scholarship Applicant

Common Sense Gun Control

"Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We're not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore."

— Beto O’Rourke

August 15, 2019

Audiobook of "The Fourteenth of September" Now Available: Leave the Reading to Us

August 15, 2019/ Rita Dragonette

Now that I have your attention, I will fess up that the novel has been available as an audiobook via Amazon since the book launch back in September of 2018. However, since I didn’t do any specific promotion on the format, it has just been sitting around, quietly, with modest purchases by experienced audiobook fans who knew how to find it. It’s time I gave it some love.

The Casting Cloud

The audiobook deserves its solo spotlight, given all the time and attention that went into producing it, but also because its development challenged me as an author in ways I’d never expected.

Right off the bat, the process of choosing a narrator sounded like great fun, but in practice it was unnerving. I can see why authors so often hate the films that are made of their novels. As a writer, you spend years picturing and “hearing” specific faces and voices in your head, and it’s very hard to envision, if you will, a stand-in. Very.

Though I was asked many times to narrate the The Fourteenth of September myself, I felt it needed a voice for my nineteen-year-old main character, Judy, that sounded the right age. The casting process for identifying potential narrators was exceptionally efficient. Over sixty professionals sent audition tapes based upon an excerpt I had provided. Just pick one, easy-peasy, right?

Hardly. I did have the foresight to hire an experienced producer to help me with the project—primarily because I was totally focused on the all-consuming production and promotion of the paperback and e-book. We both thought it would be a piece of cake. Not so much.

Thankfully, my producer winnowed the audition tapes down to a dozen for me to review to make it an easy afternoon project. Instead, it was... just... too much. All those voices—all good, all young, all saying the same thing, all sounding so... SIMILAR, but not at all like Judy. I felt instead that I was listening in on a gaggle of her friends at the Tune Room, the site of so much of the story’s action. I finally had to do what I’d been hoping to avoid—listen carefully to each audition over and over, trying to pick the voice I thought I’d want to listen to for hours on tape, but actually found myself looking for reasons to eliminate, so the last person standing (or in this case, talking) would be the obvious choice. It was a bit like shifting through great candidate resumes back in the day but with higher stakes for me and my story. I finally got it down to three, and the producer and I compared our choices and picked a final voice. Whew! I was ready to turn the nuts and bolts over to my producer to get back to the world of words on paper. But no such luck.

Nailing the Voices

Before I could walk away, the producer sent me the recording of the first two chapters, where each of the large cast of characters appeared at least once, to ensure the narrator had the voices correct. I was appalled. None of the voices matched the characters in my head. And all of them—male and female—had two things in common. They were PERKY, and the inflection of every sentence went up at the end. To borrow the vernacular, we SO didn’t talk like that back in 1969. We were happy or sad, sarcastic or whiney, enamored of the curse-word vocabulary we were trying out like truck drivers now that we had left home, but we weren’t full of endless pep every minute. We were never, ever PERKY. And, not being interrogative-loving French, we preferred to swallow the end of our sentences and let the words descend into unintelligible mumblings that our elders would struggle to understand perhaps, but we would never go UP. After all, that implied asking permission, and in Judy’s era we were more likely to be trying to disappear, be sullen, or have POWER. Oh, the Valley Girl of it all. I considered removing the word like from anywhere in my manuscript. It wasn’t there much, but somehow, after listening to the narrator, it sounded as if it were. I can fix this, I thought.

Author as Actor... Not

After years making business presentations, I told the producer I would settle this quickly. I recorded my own voice reading my own first two chapters, filled with my own intended tone and inflection, so easy then for the narrator to imitate, right? I was sure I’d be great. I’d once harbored an inclination toward the stage. The narrator would probably be in awe, and I needed to be prepared to keep her dauber up by reassuring her that she could do it, perhaps not as well, but she’d be fine.

Again, a surprise. I virtually slapped myself in the face. First of all, it was exhausting. Forget the character voices: I could hardly manage to keep the energy of my voice up let alone on inflection pitch for twenty pages in one sitting. And I... there is no more politic word to use... sucked. As the narrator might put it, “I am SO not an actress, ya know?” I couldn’t listen to myself, and above all, I DIDN’T SOUND LIKE JUDY. It was so hard to wrap my head around that. A few decades on or not, I deep down inside guess I thought the words in my mind would come out the way I heard them, sounding like Judy, and Wizard, and Vida, and David, and all my other characters. It wasn’t age, it was... like listening to your voice on the telephone. It wasn’t me and it wasn’t Judy. Instead I sounded vaguely like a more nasal version of my sister and the guys sounded like cheery kids, not the voices I needed to communicate the sarcastic bravado in the face of fear that ruled the story’s Draft Lottery time frame.

I feared what the narrator would think when she listened to my version; suddenly I felt that I was the one auditioning. “You call this acting?” I could hear her complain. “Don’t give it to her,” I said to my producer in a middle-of-the-night, follow-up email. Too late. “It did confuse her,” the producer admitted. “I think her narration is fine,” she added after a long, diplomatic pause, asking how I wanted to proceed. Someone needed to listen to the narration chapter by chapter as it was recorded, to be sure it was accurate, words weren’t dropped, etc. “It was critical,” she said.

I humbly told the producer to take me out of the loop and just run with the project. Like Puff, this little dragon sadly slipped into her cave, realizing that there was a reason I had chosen the boardroom over the stage in my earlier career.

In the end, I came to see why movie directors ban authors from the set. We are pathetic, not capable of suspending our belief. We are in love with the vision we put in words, yes, but also the one in the netherworld between the words we write with our inside voice and how they are delivered out to the world. Mere mortal actors/narrators who cannot hear inside our minds will never rise to this impossible-to-articulate ideal. And in fact, once I was out of it, things proceeded just fine; as pointed out by my producer, the narrator may not be “me,” but she is Judy. And isn’t that the point? I was a bit taken aback—after all, there would be no Judy without me—but of course she was correct.

Listen to an excerpt from the audiobook.

A message from Marissa DuBois, audiobook narrator.

At this point audible Judy is doing pretty well. See listener reviews on Audible and Goodreads, and listen to the excerpt. And also hear the narrator, Marissa DuBois, talk about her excitement for the project in this interview. Then, check out the audiobook yourself, which is available on Amazon on the same page as the other formats for The Fourteenth of September. One tip, be sure to turn up the speed when you listen, Judy has a lot to say... she needs to talk fast.

Audio Is Cooler Than You Think

My first audiobook was my own novel and that helped me catch the bug for my long, fair-weather walks along Lake Michigan and car rides. The more you use it, the more you think about where to use it. My trainer listens to audiobooks while she cleans her apartment, an idea I can absolutely get my head around. I’ve begun to inventory life activities that don’t require paying attention.

Above all, to my friends and family who tell me they support my story but just aren’t “readers,” or who only read nonfiction: Please try The Fourteenth of September on audiobook, and Judy’s voice will make it all go down in an exciting way. Let me know what you think... and about new creative ways to listen. I personally, for example, think my brother should read it during those endless hours of home repair and tinkering in the garage. I mean, he’s already on engineering-genius autopilot—he can listen to a story at the same time, right?

Purchase Audiobook

Time flies when someone’s telling you a story. For me, the audiobook experience is like Mrs. Sellen, my first-grade teacher, reading us Dr. Seuss’s The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Its like a personal movie. They talk and you imagine. You know, just like a book. Hands free. Enjoy!