Guest Post by Connie Corcoran Wilson

 

Connie Corcoran Wilson, author of Laughing Through Life and It Came From the 70's, addresses the importance of laughing your way through a stressful time:

"And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep." (LaBruyere and Beaumarchais)

In 2003 my mother, then 94, began the long slow fade to black that comes for each of us. She was still of sound mind, but she had a series of small strokes which robbed her of the ability to play bridge (her passion), and it was quite clear to me, her youngest daughter, that she was fading fast. In fact, it had become clear to me that the end was near since Thanksgiving.

 Later, nursing home personnel told me it was only my son's  wedding and the festivities  that surrounded it that kept Mom alive six more months. I was hosting a "welcome to the community" party for the bride and groom. They had married in Matamoros and none of our Midwestern friends would be able to attend the ceremony, so a full-on party was planned, a mini-wedding reception, complete with gowns and cakes and flowers.

I carried in various outfits from the nearby shopping mall for mother to try on (over her strenuous objections that she could simply wear an old velour jogging suit I had once given her for Christmas). The preparations to bring her to the party, 60 miles away, for the evening, even though wheelchair-bound, were many and numerous. I even purchased  a giant 52" TV screen (the pre-plasma behemoths) that would replay the actual ceremony in a continuous loop. Mom would be able to see her second (of four) grandchildren being married on this large television set, (contingent upon the store being willing to re-deliver the same TV set to my house after the party was over at no additional fee, which they agreed to do.)

I urged my sister to come with me to visit Mom on Mother's Day in the nursing home where she had resided for 5 years (a necessity imposed by her need for constant medical monitoring for her 4-shots-a-day brittle diabetes.) My 4-years-older sister, who could often be as blank as the proverbial fart,  said, "Let's wait until her birthday."

 My mother's birthday was May 31st.

 I remember saying to my completely oblivious older sister, "Kay, she won't make it to May 31st."

And she didn't.

My mother died  May 2, 2003 and we buried her on May 4, 2003.   I had begun divesting of my businesses, my responsibilities, my very life, in order to be by her side to be able take care of her and, after that, to be able to take care of estate matters when she was gone---something I never really ever believed would actually happen before she hit 100, as my mother was an indomitable force. (My father died in 1986).

 I sold my two businesses (Sylvan Learning Center #3301 and the Prometric Testing Center), businesses I had founded, two months to the day before Mom died, on March 2, 2003.

 I remember asking her, on the final day of her life, as she received oxygen and faded  in and out of consciousness and I held her hand, witnessing her losing the battle that I had always felt  quite sure she would not lose until at least the ripe old age of 100, "What was the favorite city on Earth you ever visited?"

She was very weak, almost to the point of being unable to converse,  but she was lucid. She looked at me and said, "Anywhere your father was. And Iowa City."

Mom died in Iowa City, where she had moved over some objections from her children at the age of 82, after an entire lifetime spent in the small northeast Iowa town of Independence, a life spent teaching kindergarteners while my father worked in the bank he had founded. She slipped away in the early hours of the morning to join her husband of five decades.

While my father's death had come at a time when I was expecting a baby and had just launched a new business, my mother's death came when I had dropped everything else in my life, primarily to care for her. In the process of doing so, I had severed ties with my entire support network of colleagues and co-workers and customers.

My husband, recently retired, was doing taxes for H&R Block. I was at home, alone, for long hours, in what seemed like a very cold house. I later learned that the furnace was broken; it took me the better part of a week wearing a parka and gloves in the house and seeing my own breath in front of me to convince my husband that there really was something wrong with the furnace. (It turned out that it was only blowing out cold air.)

What could I do to cheer myself up? Depression was one silly millimeter away?

I dug out the humor columns I had written for a local paper  in happier times, when I was a young mother, a young teacher, a budding entrepreneur. I added poetry sold, pictures, my lasagna recipe. (Nobody knew what to make of this book, when it was finished, and I imagined it only as a gift for friends and family, like those ubiquitous calendars that you  make as gifts at the holiday season.)  I fashioned anything I had ever sold  into my second book Both Sides Now. (A few of those columns have made their way, again, into Laughing through Life, but much more of the book is new or the product of online blogs for which I have written).

I found that, as I revisited the silly or the ridiculous or the happy times represented in those columns, my mood rose.  Eventually, I sent the columns and pictures off to be published. I did not know this at the time, but this marked the beginning of my "writing long" career. A lifetime hobby had turned into a time-consuming second career as a writer and publisher.

Without humor, for me there is no quality of life. And, in life, even in the grimmest of times, as limned recently in the movie "50/50" about a young man battling a life-threatening form of cancer, there can be humor in hardship.

Humor, to me, is as much what I am all about as weeping and gnashing of teeth.  I hope I can continue to see the humor in life, even when I am at my lowest and things seem most bleak. Humor will sustain me and lift me up, I hope, even on my own deathbed.

Maybe I'll leave an epitaph that says, "I can't be done yet. I still have checks left!"

And let us not forget these sentiments from someone far more eloquent than me:

"They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

Love and desire and hate:

I think they have no portion in us after

We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses;

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream."

                                   (Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longani)

Connie (Corcoran) Wilson (MS + 30) graduated from the University of Iowa and Western Illinois University, with additional study at Northern Illinois, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. She taught writing at six Iowa/Illinois colleges and has written for five newspapers and seven blogs, including Associated Content (now owned by Yahoo) which named her its 2008 Content Producer of the Year . She is an active, voting member of HWA (Horror Writers Association).

Her stories and interviews with writers like David Morrell, Joe Hill, Kurt Vonnegut, Frederik Pohl and Anne Perry have appeared online and in numerous journals.  Her work has won prizes from “Whim’s Place Flash Fiction,” “Writer’s Digest” (Screenplay) and she will have 12 books out by the end of the year.  Connie reviewed film and books for the Quad City Times (Davenport, Iowa) for 12 years and wrote humor columns and conducted interviews for the (Moline, Illinois) Daily Dispatch and now blogs for 7 blogs, including television reviews and political reporting for Yahoo.

Connie lives in East Moline, Illinois with husband Craig and cat Lucy, and in Chicago, Illinois, where her son, Scott and daughter-in-law Jessica and their two-year-old twins Elise and Ava reside. Her daughter, Stacey, recently graduated from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, as a Music Business graduate.

Transformational What?

Transformational What?

(A guest post by Alon Shalev, author of The Accidental Activist.)

At a recent author's panel, I was asked what genre I write. I replied: “Transformational fiction.”

“What’s that?”

I was asking for it. I have adopted a phrase I heard from the presenter of a workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference a couple of years before but never heard it used since.

I responded along the lines: “I write about change – ordinary people who want to help fight a social injustice and in doing so experience a life-shifting internal change.”

What followed was a meaningful conversation about the theme that runs through my books. In A Gardener’s Tale, the protagonist helps a young outcast become a meaningful and respected member of the community. In The Accidental Activist, my central character is a self absorbed computer programmer who takes up the struggle against a multinational corporation who is trying to silence protestors in order to get laid (well kind of), but discovers he can harness his talents to help improve the world.

I have written three other manuscripts and, in each, the protagonist goes through a transformative process. Unwanted Heroes will be released in January and tells the story of a young man who befriends a mentally disturbed war veteran and uses his talents to help the old man come to terms with his past and rebuild his life. As I wrote my novels, I never planned this common theme until The Accidental Activist was being critiqued.

The man who asked the question came up to me afterwards and we began discussing which social causes we each volunteer in and when we finished, I felt he had bought my book because of our newly formed connection. We have remained in touch and he later became, and still is, a regular contributor to Left Coast Voices.  I love to share my passion about social injustices and utilize my writing to cultivate relationships that can help empower us all to work for a better world.

I have tried to make my website fit that transformational flavor: the Richard Wright quote, the request to purchase my book at an independent bookstore and showcasing non profits and causes on the Left Coast Voices blog.

And so I will go out into the world and introduce myself: Alon Shalev. I write transformational fiction. And maybe one day, the person I am being introduced to won’t respond: “Transformational fiction – what’s that?”

Maybe one day they will even say: “Alon Shalev? Yeah I read your novels.”

——————————————————————————————————-

 


Alon Shalev is the author of The Accidental Activist and A Gardener’s Tale. More on Alon Shalev at http://www.alonshalev.com.

Guest Post by Christopher Meeks

A Guest Post by Christopher Meeks,  
author of  Love At Absolute Zero  

Christopher Meeks began as a playwright and has had three plays produced. Who Lives? A Drama is published. His short stories have been published in Rosebud, The Clackamas Literary Review, The Santa Barbara Review, The Southern California Anthology, The Gander Review, and other journals and are available in two collections, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea and Months and Seasons. He has two novels, The Brightest Moon of the Century, a story that Marc Schuster of Small Press Reviews describes as "a great and truly humane novel in the tradition of Charles Dickens and John Irving," and his new comic novel, Love At Absolute Zero.

 

Thank you, Lori, for joining the Love At Absolute Zero blog tour and for letting me jump in here. You asked me about the research I did to get the scientific details down pat in the novel. Your question coincidentally came on the opening day of the Steven Soderbergh film Contagion, and from an article I read recently in the Los Angeles Times, he had the same goals I had: to get the science right yet not let the science be overwhelming or hijack the story.

As you have in your review, Love At Absolute Zero centers on a physicist using the tools of science to finding a soul mate in three days—which I find funny. One of the things I most adore about writing novels is I get to research and become expert at something that I hadn’t ever thought of being an expert on before. Here, I had to learn quantum physics and then be able to explain it to the average reader. However, before I jump
ahead, let me clarify why Gunnar is a physicist.

When I conceived this novel, I needed my protagonist to work in Denmark for plot reasons, and it’s difficult for Americans to get a work permit there unless no other European can fill the job. Denmark is big into physics as I learned when I’d spent my junior year abroad in Denmark. I lived in a town called Roskilde, and there was an important nuclear research facility there called Risø, which was a part of the Niels Bohr Institute. Some Americans worked for Risø. I’d met them at a local bar, long before I was thinking of this novel.

Once I decided Gunnar would be a physicist, I made him nuclear, and he worked at
Risø—easy enough. Then I’d learned the Danes had outlawed all nuclear facilities in the
late 80’s. He couldn’t be a nuclear physicist. So what would he do? I leaped onto the
Internet and looked up the Niels Bohr Institute. I found the email addresses of many
people who worked there—graduate students, post-docs, researchers, and even the
director of the Institute, Nils O. Andersen. I wrote a handful of them a note explaining I
was a novelist looking to write about a physicist working in Denmark but I had to make
him real. What kind of research might he be doing that year?

The only one who wrote me back was the director, Dr. Andersen, and he was fascinated
by what I was doing. I learned from him that the hottest research topic was in the
ultracold. He and others were exploring what happens to matter near absolute zero.
Atoms become a new form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), which
turns out to be a really strange thing. Many known laws of the universe fall away when
atoms become BECs.

From there, I had to understand the simplest things about the subject, and I found a

great book called Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold by Tom Shachtman. I also saw
a great Nova program on Absolute Zero.

I ended up studying more and more history and even using physics textbooks to grasp
how quantum mechanics came about and played into BECs. There’s a wonderful play
called Copenhagen by Michael Frayn about Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg that uses
real science as background, which I found inspiring.

I called on Dr. Andersen several times, as well as scientists I found in America, such as
Dr. Sidney Nagel at the University of Chicago and Dr. Mark Saffman at the University
of Wisconsin, where I’d already decided Gunnar would be working. I knew the Midwest
well, having grown up there. Because my last novel, The Brightest Moon of the Century,
took place in Minnesota, this time it would be Wisconsin. Once I grasped the science,
then I used it to inform my characters.

This takes me to a truth I have about people. What a person does for a living colors the
way he or she looks at the world. Police officers who deal with the more twisted people
in society tend to look at anyone they meet with suspicion. Kindergarten teachers tend
to smile a lot because kids and people are inherently good. And scientists have a certain
sense of logic to them. The physical rules of the universe make things clear, and why
shouldn’t love be observed and quantified and understood?

As I explored quantum physics more and more, I came to understand how Gunnar
might view love from his angle of the way atoms in the ultracold behaved. Atoms in a
BEC no longer have an individual identity. They become a wave—a wave with properties
like no other wave. For me, this became a metaphor for love. Gunnar’s despair at
one point screams so overwhelmingly, it’s as if his soul joins the souls of other love-
saddened people, and they are a single unique wave racing through space.

To build on this, I started every chapter with an epigram, a law of physics that might
connect to the emotions that Gunnar experiences in that chapter. I didn’t expect most
readers to catch onto this—that it’s an extra, simply there for the taking. However, when
I gave my first polished draft to several trusted readers including my mother and father,
who are very intelligent readers, they didn’t get what I was doing with the epigrams.

My goal is to communicate, so with a few more drafts, I played with those epigrams,
moved them around in some cases or found better ones, and I hired a fantastic editor,
Lynn Hightower, who happens to teach fiction at UCLA Extension, as I do. She teaches
a master class in fiction where she makes her students outline their books after they’d
written a draft. As my editor, she suggested that some of my epigrams might go outside
of physics—to psychology or religion, for instance. Some might even be funny.

Hightower gets my humor, so this was what I needed. With her, I played more with

the epigrams. I cut out some chapters for pacing and added two characters, Gunnar’s
research partners, for more comic possibilities. The last thing I did is change the ending.
After all the drafts I did, I wasn’t happy with the end. It was too pragmatic, and if
Gunnar learns anything, love isn’t neat and tidy. The end couldn’t be true to scientific
logic, but it had to be true to love. In one clear vision, it came to me. I’m pleased that the
reviewers agree.

The science in the book is real, but it’s simply background in understanding who Gunnar
is. If plumbers and lawyers and hairdressers can fall in love, why not a physicist? It’s
meant to be a fun book, and if you learn something about the universe along the way,
that’s not so bad.


Thank you so much Christopher and Virtual Author Book Tours!
Be sure to check out the links below for more information and links to more reviews and giveaways:

http://christophermeeks.weebly.com/

http://www.virtualauthorbooktours.com/

Guest Post: Connie Corcoran Wilson

 

 For a Special treat, please allow me to present a guest post from Connie Corcoran Wilson:    

     

It Came from the '70s: From The Godfather to Apocalypse Now

by Connie (Corcoran) Wilson, M.S 

  

A long time ago, in a far-away corner of the state of Iowa (the Quad Cities), a young English teacher at Silvis Junior High School (Silvis, Illinois) approached the Editor of the Quad City Times newspaper (Davenport, Iowa) and said, "I could write your movie reviews for you. I have a Journalism and English degree from the University of Iowa and a Master's beyond that, and I've been obsessive about movies since the first one I ever saw. Plus, I used to hang out with the film crowd in college, including Nick Meyer, the director of "Time After Time." I've won a contest predicting the Oscars every year for 10 years, and I just won the (Moline, IL) Daily Dispatch Oscar-predicting contest. You don't have anybody local reviewing movies. Would you like me to take a crack at it?"

The gentleman who came out to talk to the English teacher from East Moline, Bill Wundram, assigned me to write a "trial" review of "Lipstick." I did. He hired me as a stringer and I dutifully trotted off to the movies 4 to 5 times a week and wrote up my impressions, typing "First Rights Only" in the top left corner as I had been taught to do in a Midwestern Writing Conference class taught by Max Collins (writer of "Road to Perdition"). I dedicated my book to Bill Wundram, who has been writing a column for the Times for 67 years, since 1944---longer than any other columnist in the country--- and continues to write for them today.

My reviewing for the Quad City Times soon included books and plays, but movies were my main focus. As Bill would later "blurb" on the cover of It Came from the '70s:  "Connie Wilson, the inveterate movie-goer, writes like you're sitting in the middle of the theater.  If anyone knows the silver screen, its hits and misses, it's Connie Wilson.  For years, she was a valued writer for the Quad City Times with weekly (sometimes daily) reviews.  This book is not only a good read, but a fine reference tool.  It makes me think of the days when an usher would call out, 'The best seats are now in the balcony.'"

After I sold my two businesses in 2002, I got out my old reviews, carefully preserved in nearly 15 scrapbooks, and began re-reading them, reliving the days when I was 25 to 35 years of age. These reviews read like a tiny time capsule. They could not be written this way today.  They preserved the history of the decade as it was occurring. With a few exceptions that had to be written from the viewpoint of looking back, these reviews preserve the zeitgeist of an era.

I began the process of trying to bring the 150 dots-per-inch of 1970 up to the 600 dots-per-inch needed for this book. It was not easy. In fact, the entire process of deciding what films to include and securing some original previously-unpublished photos from directors and searching through microfiche for missing reviews and reviewing a few of the major films from the vantage point of "looking back" took me 8 years. But I had always said I was going to do this "when I retired."

I'm not very "retired" right now, with 12 titles up on Amazon and a newly-launched e-book Imprimatur (Quad City Press), but this book was a true labor of love. I hope you enjoy reading about these 70's movies as much as I loved watching them and writing about them. (www.ItCamefromtheSeventies.com).

Thanks, Connie! Don't forget to enter the giveaway for It Came From the 70's luggage tags by July 30th!