Author Archives: Carolyn

Messing with Easter Eggs

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Recently a TV “news” program showed a new scientific advance—a mess-free way to color Easter eggs.

The reporter—a parent—enthused over the convenience as a saleswoman placed a boiled egg in a holder, poured a liquid color into a mini tank behind it, and automated tiny brushes that made uniform blue lines on the rotating egg. She explained that the gadget offered other colors and patterns.

Neat but boring, I thought. Do kids today really enjoy programmed designs more than individual creativity? Back in the feedsack days, my sisters and I relished blending colors and making each egg distinctive. Have attitudes changed that much?

Coloring eggs highlighted our Easter celebrations. We chose some 15 to 20 eggs from our daily gathering to clean and boil, bought a rainbow of colors (in powdered packets, if I remember correctly) to supplement whatever food colors were on hand, and prepared our colors in old cups arranged on the kitchen table. We dipped the eggs into the cups with fingers, spoons, or tongs, often using several dips to vary the colors and designs. Blue, pink, yellow, and green dominated.

The whole process was very, very messy, a rare indulgence in my mother’s kitchen.

About the only eggs emerging with only one color were those on which we drew or wrote our names with a (wax?) marker that the coloring didn’t penetrate.

Early Easter morning my mother played bunny, hiding the eggs in the yard for us to hunt and place in our cherished dimestore baskets. As we got older and the economy improved, she added small chocolate eggs covered in bright paper. If wet weather prevented an outdoor hunt, she hid the eggs in the house. Either way, we competed to find the most edible treasures.

We all loved to eat the chocolate eggs. Only I relished the boiled ones, so those lasted a couple of days. I took mine to school for lunch.

The last Easter egg hunt that I remember on the farm occurred when my nieces and nephews were young. I did the hiding. My sisters enjoyed the hunting more than their kids did.

This year I’ve colored no eggs and won’t hide or hunt any, but I’ll never forget how much we enjoyed messing with Easter eggs.

—Carolyn Mulford

Why I Wrote The Feedback Dress

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Over more than 30 years, I wrote and rewrote The Feedsack Dress, my first published novel. For the record, here are my recollections of why I began writing it and why I persisted in finishing it and finding editors smart enough to buy it.

I grew up on a small farm near Kirksville, Missouri, in the 1940s and 1950s. With cows to milk morning and evening, we stuck close to home, but on Sunday afternoons my father sometimes drove us around on the gravel roads to see how the crops and livestock were faring on other farms.

My world expanded mightily in 1962 when I joined the Peace Corps. I served as an English teacher for two years in Ethiopia and then traveled (on $5 a day, for the most part) through the Middle East and Europe on a slow trip back to the States.

After working on a magazine in Washington, D.C., for two years, I thirsted for foreign places. An editorial job at a U.N. organization headquartered in Vienna, Austria, enabled me to live (and travel) for three years in Europe. I spent a six months going home through the Middle East, Asia, and Australia.

I returned to the family farm to regroup in 1971. When my parents and I followed country roads to look at familiar places, I saw that my childhood world had changed considerably. Most of the one-room schools and churches had disappeared or been repurposed, leaving no place for neighbors to gather. Several once well-kept farmhouses had broken windows and weedy yards. Chickens no longer ran free near occupied houses. Teams of horses, even retirees, had given way to large tractors and unfamiliar equipment.

The traditional small farm where the family raised much of its food and named most of its animals was being consumed by agricultural enterprises, an accelerating trend that depressed my parents.

Recalling the swift changes following World War II, I reflected that my generation was the last to grow up on a small diversified farm. The transformation from labor-intensive to mechanized farming and from a rural to an urban society had both benefited and disrupted lives.

I kept coming back to these thoughts for a couple of years, reading social histories to supplement my memories and knowledge of the postwar period. Personally and nationally, we’d experienced a great transition, and I wanted to write about it. But in what form? I didn’t have the academic credentials to write a social history or the inclination to write a memoir, and postwar rural northeast Missouri wasn’t a marketable topic for magazine articles.

I’d always wanted to write fiction, and a children’s novel seemed the right choice for the story that my memories and research were germinating. Historical events and economic developments that affected my community and the nation led me to set the story in 1949. For example, the Rural Electrification Act’s lines finally reached us (increasing the number of cows we could milk, decreasing time spent on housework, and enabling us to read and study at night). We bought our first brand-new car (a symbol of growing prosperity).

4-H had come to our community, and mothers joined us in learning to make clothes from such new synthetics as rayon and acetate as well as from cotton feedsacks, a staple for clothing and tea towels during the Depression and the war.

The colorful patterned sacks became my symbol of individual and societal transition—and of being different. By now I’d observed that being unlike the majority—in economic class, skin color, language, religion, whatever—posed a problem wherever you are in the world. Dealing with being outside the norm challenges anyone at any age, but it’s particularly painful for teenagers discovering their own identity. So I forced my heroine to endure being the only girl wearing a feedsack dress as she goes from a one-room country school to ninth grade in town.

The book is set when my older sister went through that culture shock, and the plot is not autobiographical. That doesn’t mean elements aren’t real. The mean girl’s nasty remark about the riffraff on the square on Saturday nights actually came from a favorite teacher, who apologized profusely when I pointed out my family was part of that crowd. I certainly grew frustrated with facing new games in gym class just as I’d learned to play the last one.

I drew on memories in describing mule races and killing chickens. Most events came from my imagination. I don’t remember whether my class elected officers. That plot element derived from the Nixon campaign’s dirty tricks.

Just as Gail, the protagonist, is not me, the other characters are not relatives or classmates. At Class of 1957 reunions, they’ve guessed whom my characters were based on, often naming teachers I never had. I created most by adapting bits of people I’d known during and after high school.

This was my first novel, a major learning experience. I began writing with a setting, a few characters, and little idea of what to do with either. The characters’ personalities and relationships emerged quickly, but the plot had little direction until I realized I needed a major conflict. The first draft that I submitted to agents ended right after the class election. An agent told me I couldn’t end the book on a down note, and I expanded the plot.

The revision still didn’t appeal to New York editors. I put the manuscript aside for years at a time but always came back to it. Each time I reread it, I liked it too much to give up on revising it and finding a publisher.

Thirty years from the time I started writing, I was working with a critique group of mystery writers. Although they were Eastern city slickers, they agreed to give me feedback on The Feedsack Dress. Their ignorance of farming and the mid-century Midwest guided me in clarifying terms and describing things common to me but not to later generations and urbanites.

In a national writers’ newsletter, I read that Cave Hollow Press, a small publisher in Missouri, welcomed submissions set there. The editors bought my manuscript, did a light edit, and published it in July 2007. At the end of 2023, the publisher had six copies left in stock.

In 2009, the Missouri Center for the Book chose The Feedsack Dress as the state’s Great Read at the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The warm reception that readers gave The Feedsack Dress encouraged me to continue my transition from nonfiction to fiction.

Few print copies of this novel remain available, but you can buy the e-book at https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-feedsack-dress-carolyn-mulford/1103622141?ean=2940012128485.

An Aging Writer’s Resolutions

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In my early sixties, I resolved to phase out my career as a freelance writer/editor and ease into semi-retirement as a novelist. As a first step, I took a course on writing mysteries. I followed up by forming a critique group with other aspiring writers and writing, at night, a chapter a week.

I finished the first draft of my mystery in about a year. I learned a tremendous amount and became comfortable writing fiction, which requires a different mindset than nonfiction. I couldn’t sell the manuscript even after revision, but writers learn to withstand rejection. I resolved to devote two hours a night to writing fiction.

By age 68 I had sold a novel and a short story and was balancing my time between fiction and nonfiction. By 75 I’d stopped working for clients and spent most of my time writing and promoting my Show Me mystery series. My fiction earnings didn’t compare with those from nonfiction, but that didn’t matter. Much.

My series came to a natural end with Show Me the Sinister Snowman. Holding the details of a mystery’s convoluted plot in my brain was becoming a challenge. I resolved to switch to shorter forms and to increase leisure activities, including the reading I’d sacrificed while writing.

In late 2018, cancer made me doubt whether I’d turn 80. As the New Year began, medication-induced insomnia and energy prompted me to concoct the characters, setting, and plot of a new novel. The concept united a leisure interest, Jane Austen’s novels, and a long-time concern, the survival of family farms. My three pages of notes became a lifeline, enabling me to focus on creating and peopling a world rather than on worrying about leaving mine.

My two critique partners supported my faltering efforts, giving me useful feedback in gentle tones. Chemo cripples the brain for months, and words crawled rather than flowed. Still, by the end of the year I’d accomplished enough to resolve to continue.

Since then I’ve finished several drafts, but not the last. That’s partly because real events affected my made-up ones, largely because I wasn’t satisfied with the result. The book I dreamed of writing remains beyond my capabilities. I can no more be Austenesque than I can run a marathon. I accept that. Also, moving interrupted my final edit in 2023. And, to be truthful, writing took more time and energy than I could muster.

So now what? At 84, writing still gives me a rush. In 2024 I resolve to finish my last novel, a couple of short stories, and a dozen blogs.

—Carolyn Mulford

Why we needed Title IX before 1972

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The fiftieth anniversary of Title IX, a landmark law requiring gender equality in schools receiving federal funds, reminded me of how little opportunity to play sports most females of my generation had. (Title IX changed much more than sports, but that’s another story.)

In my one-room school with roughly a dozen students in grades one through eight, we had no organized physical education program for girls or boys. We played together at recess and noon, mostly baseball or games involving some form of tag. Our entire sporting equipment consisted of two bats, a softball, a baseball, and a volleyball (used for playing handy-over, with half the school on one side of the coal shed and half on the other).

In ninth grade, as I wrote in The Feedsack Dress, the most familiar sport to country kids—and the least played in girls’ P.E. class—was softball. By the time I learned the basic skills of an exotic game like deck tennis (played much like volleyball but with a hard rubber ring), a new game popped up. I added little to my homeroom’s intramural teams.

Neither my senior high school nor college in Kirksville, Missouri, fielded girls’ teams that competed with other schools. Neither had a swimming pool, and the high school had no playing field or tennis courts for girls. High school P.E. classes met in the basement gym. There we did boring calisthenics and played deck tennis, aerial darts, badminton, volleyball, and basketball. I was surprised to learn I had lettered my senior year (rare for a girl). I did it by recruiting the school’s best players for my intramural teams. If my memory is accurate, we won all the tournaments. The only mention of girls’ sports in the high school yearbook was the page above, which shows the members of the Girls’ Recreation Association (I’m second from left on the front row). 

The college’s program offered little more than the high school did, though I did learn to play table tennis and jump on a trampoline. My athletic high point: The women’s P.E. Department (two women) let me substitute a softball elective for a required calisthenics course. As a grad student at the University of Missouri, I saw no opportunity to participate in any sports. One woman among several men in the renowned journalism school aspired to be a sports writer.

Finally, during Peace Corps training at Georgetown University, I received introductions to swimming, soccer, and cross-country running. My physical education consisted of appetizers but no main course.

The real national awakening to the potential of women’s sports took place in September 1973, more than a year after Title IX, when Billie Jean King took down Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes. She changed not just tennis but the recognition of women as athletes. She has continued to push for equal pay and power on the court and off ever since.

Even with the much greater (though not equal) opportunities today, I wouldn’t have become a great—even a good—athlete, but several of my classmates could have. And school would all have been more fun.

Equal opportunity, wherever you find it, makes life less frustrating and more rewarding.

—Carolyn Mulford

Concert Jogs Memories of Vienna

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Memories interrupted my enjoyment of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert broadcast last night on PBS.

Unlike my Show Me protagonist, a CIA covert operative embedded in Vienna, I lived there only three years, but we shared a love of the city’s music. I went to the opera, an orchestra concert, chamber music, an operetta, or some other musical performance once or twice a week. Tickets were cheap, particularly if you were willing to sit in the balcony directly above a chamber orchestra using the instruments in vogue when the music was composed centuries ago.

You could usually get a late ticket to stand at the back of the Musikverein’s high-ceiling rectangular grand hall, and people were there at last night’s event. I could spot where I stood to hear Leonard Bernstein as a guest conductor.

Every venue has excellent acoustics, and every audience knows the music and expresses approval or disappointment through applause. The Viennese love traditional favorites, including such Strauss compositions as Tales of the Vienna Woods. Even so, the 2022 performance included something I don’t remember hearing before, the musicians augmenting their instruments with singing and whistling at one point. The audience approved.

As usual, the favorite final encore, “The Radetsky March,” elicited an enthusiastic audience response. Everyone clapped without missing a beat.

The music lovers wore masks and the walls gleamed with gold (lacquer?) last night, but the orchestra’s performance and the audience’s appreciation have not changed.

—Carolyn Mulford

New Sinister Snowman Edition

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Covid-19 stopped printers cold last spring. Consequently, the mass market paperback edition of Show Me the Sinister Snowman missed its slot in the printing queue. With the snow gone (until next winter, I hope), Harlequin Worldwide Mystery has just released the fifth book in the Show Me series.

 

 

This one finds Phoenix and friends trapped in an isolated mansion by a blizzard. Their housemates are aspiring political candidates and potential donors, one of whom intends to lessen their number before the roads clear.

Phoenix has come to the meeting with two goals: to support Annalynn’s electoral dreams and to rescue a young woman on the run. The former CIA operative’s dual objectives force her to guard against an unidentified murderer within the sprawling antebellum house and a vicious hunter in the deep snow outside it. The latter and Achilles, Phoenix’s clever Belgian Malinois, are the only ones delighting in the snow.

Midwest Book Review praised the book as “very highly recommended” and wrote, “Dedicated mystery buffs will appreciate the deftly crafted characters, as well as the unexpected plot-driven twists, turns and surprises …”

The new edition is available at https://www.harlequin.com/shop/books/9781335299741_show-me-the-sinister-snowman.html. The trade- and e-book editions remain available on Amazon.

—Carolyn Mulford

Memories Sparked The Feedsack Dress

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When I began writing The Feedsack Dress almost 50 years ago, I asked my mother and two sisters to talk about their memories of 1949. I’d chosen that year for the novel because my recollections and my research identified it as a time of transition for the country, our rural Missouri community, and our family.

Our discussion evoked many forgotten details and produced a major plot point.

We gathered around the kitchen table at my parents’ farm on a hot summer day. To my surprise, each of us remembered not only different movies and music but also different versions of events, including family reunions and what happened when I broke my arm. (I tested the knot in a rope I’d tied around a tree limb by sliding down it. The knot failed the test.) The discrepancies convinced me of the unreliability of eyewitness accounts, a factor I consider in writing both nonfiction and fiction.

Judy, four years younger than I, remembered the least, but even she recalled the drudgery of pumping water for the milk cows and the excitement when REA extended the electric lines past our place. Overnight my parents could milk triple the number of cows, my mother didn’t have to bear the heat of a wood cooking stove, and we could listen to Kirksville’s new radio station without fear of running down the battery and read under strong lights rather than dim kerosene lamps. Electricity improved our daily lives and increased our income.

Donna and I spent many hours on 4-H sewing projects. Our mother taught us to sew on a treadle machine, using patterned feedsacks that had contained chicken feed to make tea towels, potholders, pillow slips, and, as our skills grew, clothing—skirts, blouses, shorts, and dresses. An electric sewing machine made the work easier. New synthetic fabrics didn’t, at least for a couple years.

Unlike me, Donna loved to sew, partly because it gave her a chance to expand her limited wardrobe in an age of hand-me-downs. Five years older than I, she’d been born in the Depression, walked alone a mile and a half to the one-room school (New Hope) that my father and his mother had attended and at which my mother had taught, and become a teenager as my parents put aside every possible penny to pay off the farm they bought at the end of World War II. My big sister became a skilled seamstress. For decades she took pleasure in making clothes to wear to college and then to work as a bookkeeper. She also made clothes for others, including her kids and me.

I took special note of Donna’s difficulties in moving from a class of three in a grade school with about 15 pupils to classes of 30 in a junior high with about 500 students. She was tiny and timid, preferring to be unseen and silent. Our grade school’s limited resources and mediocre teaching hadn’t prepared her well for the tough competition. (Judy and I had an excellent teacher and went to town better prepared.) Determined to hold her own, Donna studied hard and earned membership in the National Honor Society. One test day when snow blocked the roads, she persuaded my father to take her the five miles to high school on the tractor.

A key plot point for The Feedsack Dress came to me when Donna vividly recalled ninth graders passing around slam books, often the little autograph books then popular, with mean comments about fellow students. My protagonist has to deal with those slams as she forms friendships and makes enemies.

I recalled the four of us talking about 1949 recently because my big sister, Donna Lee Mulford Helton, died February 5, 2021. Now no one shares those memories.

—Carolyn Mulford

Earthquakes on My Mind

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2020 has been a horrible year. I hope it doesn’t end like another bad year, 1811.

That year, rains brought mud and flood to Upper Louisiana. The nightly appearance of the devil-tailed Great Comet prompted rumors of destruction. The brilliant Tecumseh campaigned for tribes on both sides of the Mississippi to unite to beat back the encroaching Americans. The adolescent United States crept closer to the War of 1812.

Then a natural disaster struck the middle of the newly expanded United States.

In early morning on December 16, a series of earthquakes, aftershocks, and tremors began, interrupting New Madrid’s French settlers’ Sunday night dance and rousting others in the river port from their beds. Brick houses and chimneys collapsed, and fires destroyed cabins.

That night the Mississippi ran backwards, driving boats up the river or capsizing them. Riverbanks gave way, casting camping travelers into the roiling water. Lakes drained, lakes formed. Wave-like furrows formed in fields. Trees fell or split up the middle as birds flocked to safer surfaces.

Many in the lightly populated region where Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee now come together feared the world was ending. The odor of sulfur encouraged that belief, and hundreds of the thousand or so townspeople in New Madrid fled through a giant swamp toward a huge hill. Residents of a village south of there waded through the overflowing river for hours to reach dry ground.

Church bells rang as far away as the East Coast. In Washington, D.C., dishes fell from cupboards, and President Madison was all shook up.

The last of three, or perhaps five, major earthquakes (estimated around 8 on the Richter Scale) occurred February 7, 1812. By then a scientist in Louisville, Kentucky, had measured a dozen or so major aftershocks and hundreds of tremors.

The tremors never really stopped. The biggest one this year has been a 3.6 in Marked Tree, Arkansas. Dyersburg, Tennessee, near quake-born Reelfoot Lake, has experienced two at 2.8 recently. To check on the latest, go to https://earthquaketrack.com/us-mo-new-madrid/recent. The site’s map shows where the tremors occur.

Few people lived near the epicenter (northeast Arkansas) at the time of the New Madrid (Missouri) earthquakes. Yet some researchers estimate as many as 1,500 died, many of them disappearing into the Mississippi.

Scientists have theorized that the earthquakes occur on a cycle, possibly every 500 years, possibly 200. Some expected the big one about 30 years ago. Some schools in southeast Missouri dismissed on the predicted doom’s day.

Today a comparable series of earthquakes would result in billions in damages and affect millions of people, including those who live in such cities as St. Louis and Memphis and rely on bridges to cross the Mississippi River.

I don’t usually think about the ongoing threat except when I pay my earthquake insurance, but 2020 does seem to be a year when bad things happen.

—Carolyn Mulford

Summer Before Air Conditioning

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Air conditioning keeps me comfortable during the current heat wave, but I remember how we tried to cool off when nothing but the movie theater was air conditioned.

July and August approximated hell when I was a kid. No day was so hot that we wouldn’t work in the fields and the garden. Only the persistent breeze made the heat and humidity bearable.

The steamy days heated the house, making it equally miserable. When we got electricity, fans helped a little. During the day the coolest place to be was in the shade of a big elm. (Sadly Dutch elm disease killed these majesic trees some 50 years ago.)

After we’d milked and watered the cows in the evening, we’d sit on the front porch to catch the breeze, or to create it by swinging in the swing suspended from the porch ceiling with chains. When the sun set and the lightning bugs came out, my sisters and I would leave the porch to catch bugs to put in a fruit jar. We’d also compete to see the first star (the one you wished on) and then the Big Dipper.

Most nights we’d sleep inside, often after sprinkling the sheets with water the way we did the clothes before ironing them. On particularly hot nights, my sisters and I would spread an old blanket on the grass and try to sleep there. I don’t think we ever lasted the whole night. Chiggers, mosquitoes, and dew drove us inside.

Despite the discomfort, those nights sleeping in the yard thrilled me. The star-stuffed sky offered a magical, memorable panorama.

Carolyn Mulford

Mixing Memories and Research

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When I started writing The Feedsack Dress, my own memories of farm life and the ninth grade guided the plot, but I needed facts about life in 1949. I looked for them in the same places I would have if I were writing an article.

At the library I wore out my eyes scrolling through microfilm copies of the Kirksville Daily Express and two great photo magazines, Life and Look. These answered such questions as the styles of dresses or skirts and blouses a fashionable ninth grader wore to school and how much they cost. Few girls wore jeans or slacks to school back then.

Copies of fair catalogs told me what exhibits 4-Hers would enter in hopes of winning prize money. As a 4-Her in the 1940s and 1950s, I knew that only country kids belonged to 4-H then.

Books and local and national newspapers told me about historical events. By the time I did my final draft, I used the Internet to find such riches as President Truman’s speeches, the history of feedsack dresses, and lists of popular songs, radio shows (almost no one had television), movies, and books.

The most enjoyable part of the initial research was talking to my mother and others who remembered 1949 well. They linked important events in their lives to that year. They, and I, recalled how a chicken bounded around after a well-aimed hatchet removed its head and the awful stench when you dunk the chicken into a bucket of hot water to make it easier to pull out the feathers.

Some things you’d rather forget.

Giveaway of New Show Me the Ashes Edition

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On May 7, Harlequin’s Worldwide Mystery will release a paperback edition of Show Me the Ashes, the fourth in my series featuring former CIA operative Phoenix Smith solving murders in rural Missouri.

Box of Harlequin Worldwide Mystery edition of Show Me the Ashes

In this one Phoenix and friends, including Achilles, her Belgian Malinois, take on a cold case involving a coerced plea deal (far too common), a string of disturbing burglaries, and crippling bigotr

The WM editors insisted on one editorial change from the original Five Star hardback and e-book editions: “Tramp” replaced “slut.”

The covers of the paperback and hardback editions look nothing alike, which is also true of the covers of the first three books in the series.

Another major difference is the price. The hardback edition (now out of print) listed at $25.95. The paperback sells for $7.99 (discounted to $6.39) on Harlequin’s direct-to-consumer site (https://www.harlequin.com/shop/books/9781335455345_show-me-the-ashes.html).

To read the first chapter, go to https://carolynmulford.com/mysteries/show-me-the-ashes/show-me-the-ashes-chapter-one.

U.S. residents may enter to win one of five giveaway copies by leaving a brief comment on what social or legal injustice they find most disturbing. The deadline is May 5, 2019. I will select winners randomly.