One Writer’s Process: Jeannine Atkins

The woods in Sterling, Massachusetts, where Jeannine Atkins grew up, stimulated her curiosity in many ways.

She wondered about the things that might be hidden under rocks, and years later such wondering led her to write Girls Who Look Under Rocks, a book about girls like Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson, and others who became naturalists as adults.

Wandering near the woods gave her child’s imagination a chance to roam across the boundaries of time, as well, and she grew curious about what it might have been like to live as different people in other time periods.

“When I was a girl, I liked to pretend that I was someone from another time, such as writer Louisa May Alcott, soldier and saint Joan of Arc, or a pioneer girl like Laura Ingalls Wilder,” says Atkins.

                       

A shy girl, Atkins wrote in a diary because “writing things down in a diary made them seem more real” to her. Now, as a grown-up and former high school English teacher, she’s writing about some of the things that she “noticed as a child but didn’t have words for then.”

           

Atkins loves the process of researching and writing her books of nonfiction, historical fiction, and poetry, including such award-winning titles as A Name on the Quilt, How High Can We Climb, Wings and Rockets, Anne Hutchinson’s Way, and Aani and the Tree Huggers, as well as others.

But that doesn’t mean she always runs to her desk to start work each day.

“I have days of discouragement or running into dead ends,” she says.

On those days, when she questions her own goals or when other people question them, and she finds herself stuck, she’ll get up from her desk and gaze out the window at the woods near her home in western Massachusetts to view the birds and natural world that so inspired her as a child.

“It’s lovely, and soon my eyes turn back to the screen and I try out another sentence.”

Atkins was kind enough to take a break from a tour for her newest and highly praised book for adults, Little Woman In Blue: A Novel of May Alcott, to share her thoughts on writing with Wordswimmer.

Wordswimmer: If writing is like swimming... how do you get into the water each day?

Atkins: These days I take short, slow steps into the water. But the “every day” part of the sentence is important to me. I find that if I’ve got my bathing gear at the ready, the water will be fine. Skipping even a day makes the work feel somewhat unfamiliar, and it’s harder to step from shore.

Wordswimmer: What keeps you afloat...for short work? For longer work?

Atkins: The short work can make the longer possible. Little Woman in Blue took me about fifteen years from first thoughts to publication, but I was writing verse, picture books, other yet-to-be-published novels, and articles in between drafts. It’s good to finish something, which is one reason I like keeping a blog with a quiet record of my writing life. I get to say “done,” then move back to the darker waters of longer projects.

Wordswimmer: How do you keep swimming through dry spells? 

Atkins: Happily it’s been a long time since I’ve felt a dry spell, due to the daily habit I mentioned and the inspiration I find in history. I’m motivated by wanting to give women of the past more of a voice, and that small sense of mission keeps me going. But there have been times in my life when I felt blocked, and I offer compassion for anyone trying to break through such rough waters.

Wordswimmer: What's the hardest part of swimming?

Atkins: I think I just answered that. Not being able to swim when you badly want to: I remember such silence as painful.

Wordswimmer: How do you overcome obstacles, problems, when swimming alone?

Atkins: I expect to face obstacles on the page, so am patient with that part of the process. And it’s good to know when it’s not in your best interest to be alone. The three others in my writing group of twenty-five years offer each other not only critiques on our manuscripts but understanding of all the currents.

Wordswimmer: What's the part of swimming that you love the most?

Atkins: So many parts flow into each other when I write. Every day there’s some sort of beginning and end, even if it’s just the beginning and end of a sentence. Every beginning has its sometimes lovely, sometimes frightening sense that anything can happen. Every ending brings a little satisfaction, if not elation, but also the dread that we might have got it wrong. I try to celebrate, though don’t always succeed, the fact that I’m there: in the water, on the mat, at the computer, trying to focus as best I can.

For more information about Jeannine Atkins, visit her website: http://www.jeannineatkins.com/index.htm

And to read more about her new book, Woman in Blue, check out: http://www.jeannineatkins.com/books/little_woman_blue.htm

And for more info, you might visit:

http://www.teachingbooks.net/tb.cgi?aid=46

http://www.amazon.com/Jeannine-Atkins/e/B000APLPPY

When Poetry Shines a Light

In Borrowed Names, Jeannine Atkins retells the stories of three famous women through verse, using poetry to shine a light on the relationships that these women had with their daughters.

We learn how Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, Rose, encouraged her mother to write down her childhood stories, and the challenges that the two encountered as Rose tried to help her mother shape a book out of her experiences.

Here’s how Atkins describes Rose's feelings about her role in the book-making process:

Stories unroll like a bolt of cloth over the table.
When the pattern looks smooth, Rose turns
the fabric inside out, opens her scissors.
She craves the first stroke of blades slicing
a clear way through cloth.
She is the invisible shaper
behind the page, choosing where to begin
and end this particular history.
(from “Shears” p. 73)

In the same way that Atkins shines a light on the relationship between Laura and Rose, she shares with readers the relationship between Madame C.J. Walker and her daughter, A'Leila.

The descendant of former slaves, Walker founded (with her daughter’s help) a multimillion dollar company built out of the beauty products that she created for and sold to women.

But her relationship with A’Leila wasn’t always easy, given her daughter's rebellious, stubborn nature.

Atkins skillfully reveals the depth of their relationship in this excerpt of a poem that captures A’Leila’s response to her mother’s final days after receiving a telegram while in Cuba:

After A’Lelia gets the telegram, she dives
under warm waves where she can’t hear whispers.
She books passage on a ship. Once in New Orleans,
she learns that her mother’s heart is failing fast.
She boards a train, hears wheels
spin on the track. Hurry, hurry.

It’s too late. She missed
the dying, misses the funeral.
The choir has gone home,
but she’s crowded by consolation:
Your mother was so good, so generous.
The Walker saleswomen insist. She changed our lives.

The casket is left for her to view, the bronze lid open.
Her mother’s hands are folded together, her elegant
neck exposed. Nothing is hidden now,
and nothing will be known
but what she knows already.
A’Leila drops roses on the casket. All the arguments
are over. Who’s spoiled, who’s proud, who works hard,
who doesn’t care enough: What use had they been?
No voice lingers like the one she longs to hear
slow as the Mississippi River sloshing grief
on its banks. Why had she ever before
thought she was alone?
She knows the word’s meaning now.
(from “Circles,” pp. 131-2)

The emotional bonds between mother and daughter are particularly poignant between Marie Curie, who discovered radium and was the first person in history to win two Nobel Prizes, and her two daughters, Eve and Irene (who went on to win with her husband a Noble Prize of her own), especially as these bonds are described in this poem describing Marie Curie’s funeral:

As Marie Curie wished, no men wearing crosses
or medals speak.
Irene can’t keep her mind on a colleague’s praise.
She rubs her fingers, faintly burned at the tips,
remembers,
We are very careful. Surely radium makes no one ill.
Her stockings wrinkle at her ankles,
the way her mother’s had,
the way she believes stockings are meant to sag.
Eve’s hat curves eloquently
over her blue grief-stricken eyes.
She folds her strong, soft hands
as a small dark stripe
zigzags across Irene’s foot, then disappears.
The butterfly casts a long shadow.
Memory shifts like atoms.
Me, come home, Irene wrote
in old letters she finds saved in a candy box
tied with thin ribbon.
Can the past press closer than the present?
Who is a daughter without a mother?
(from “Handful of Dirt,” pp. 195-196)

It’s rare to find a collection of poems focusing on the emotional depth between mothers and daughters with such sensitivity.

It's equally rare to find a writer who can offer such deep insights into the heartache and joy of these relationships, and whose skill as a poet enables her to express these emotions with such compelling force.

Take a look at the poems in Atkins' Borrowed Names, and I think you'll agree that they shine a probing light on the relationships between mothers and daughters, letting us see this world with fresh eyes.

For more about Borrowed Names, visit: http://www.jeannineatkins.com/books/borrowed.htm

And for more about Atkins, visit her website: http://www.jeannineatkins.com/index.htm