Jess Wells

At one point reading The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century, by William Rosen, (Viking, 2014) I threw my hands up and asked the ceiling "can't these people ever catch a break?" Famine, flood, villainy, greed, war, pestilence -- in wave after wave -- hit Northern Europe leaving millions dead and half of the arable land of the entire region washed away forever.

The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century (in a new edition given a new subtitle A Story of Weather, War, and the Famine History Forgot, with a reference to Game of Thrones) is solid scholarship in lively writing.

Here is the tragic chronology:

• In the 1300s, both the King of England and the rebels of Scotland practiced scorched earth warfare: they marched into an area, took the food they needed, then burned all the farms, barns, mills and pastures behind them.
• For four centuries previously, the Medieval Warm Period had doubled the population of Europe and turned the people from self-sufficiency to reliance on trade.
• But in 1315 – 1316 it rained relentlessly, basically two years without sunshine, with terrible flooding and massive soil erosion, followed by bitter winters when even the Baltic Sea froze. Two years of harvests failed, and since 80% of the population (those not in the aristocracy) relied for 80% of their diet on grain, famine swept through northern Europe.
• A logical alternative would have been to eat fish, but North Sea herring spoils quickly without being salted. The Catholic Church had a near monopoly on the production and transport of salt and had already filled nearly half the calendar with fish-only days. But without sun there was no efficient way to evaporate seawater to create the salt needed, so the price of salt skyrocketed, and the Cistercians (in particular, but most monasteries generally) profited greatly.
• In 1318 they finally had a good year with a decent harvest, but in 1319 rinderpest swept through the continent killing 65% of all of the cows, sheep, and goats, followed by sheep liver fluke.
• 1321 was another year of a terrible harvest, this time from drought.
• Then they were hit with glanders, a disease that kills horses, mules, donkeys, dogs, cats, and, frequently, humans: nearly half the horses in Europe died between 1320-1322.
• In 1338, major floods destroyed dozens of towns and villages in central Europe, to be followed by a swarm of locusts that devoured crops from Hungary to Austria to Bohemia, after which an early snowfall destroyed fruit trees and vineyards.

As Rosen says, "The Third Horseman, riding the black horse, carries a set of scales ... a reminder that famine is a matter of equilibrium: of the delicate balance between life and death. The seven years of the Great Famine, and the evil times that accompanied them, are powerful evidence of how sensitive the scales had become, after four centuries of growth, to a sudden shift in the weather." Page 259

Additional Gems: [all quotes from book except for author's notes in brackets]

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In "Unsung Heroes of World War II" (The Great Courses Plus), Lynne Olson introduces us to three women who played pivotal roles in the resistance to the Nazis in World War II. Olson, a bestselling author of eight books, is the historian whom former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called "our era's foremost chronicler of World War II politics and diplomacy."

Here are three women who made Professor Olson's list:

Andree de Jongh

Known as Dedee, Andree de Jongh founded the Comet Line, the largest and most important escape line smuggling airman from behind enemy lines.

Dedee "worked as a nurse for British troops wounded in the fighting. Along with a group of friends and acquaintances, she began to smuggle injured British soldiers out of German-controlled hospitals and take them to nearby safe houses that she had set up. Not long afterward, she traveled secretly to Spain, which, during World War II, was a neutral country" and struck a deal to smuggle fighters through Spain to the coast where they would be flown back to England.

"The majority of Comet Line workers were women," Olson says. "Being part of an escape network was probably the most dangerous form of resistance work in Europe. German officials were keenly aware of the value of these airmen to the Allied bombing effort. If escaped line members were caught, they faced torture, the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp, and/or execution. It was particularly dangerous for the couriers—most of them young women, many of them still in their teens—who escorted the servicemen hundreds of miles across enemy territory.

"The Comet Line would be the largest and most important escape line in occupied Europe. It would be credited with rescuing more than 800 British and American servicemen, getting them out of enemy territory and back to freedom.

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I swear sometimes I can read a 400-page book and discover only one visual or a single trivial oddity that captures my imagination and makes its way into a new novel. I won't tell you which of these fascinating facts is the one but here's what I gleaned from The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages, by Robert Fossier, (Princeton University Press, 2010)

Best facts first:

• The fire or hearth went from outside the house to inside sometime between 900-1100 AD.
• Last rites could be given by laypeople, even criminals, during the Black Death and early Middle Ages.
• Children who died without baptism or were stillborn were buried under the threshold of the home to prevent demons from seizing it and turning it into a changeling.
• Women worked salt marshes and salt pans in fishing villages, hard physical work to produce the salt required to preserve food.
• Churchman San Bernardino of Sienna maintained that a fetus less than 40 days old could be aborted for reasons of health or poverty. Herbal abortion recipes were well known.
• Wine was not kept from one season to the next. It was either consumed or destroyed.
• Houses of prostitution were kept by the Church, noted here and detailed in my first book, A Herstory of Prostitution in Western Europe.  

Here are other gems:

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I'm heartened by the fact that we have been Homo sapiens for 200,000 years and that new evidence suggests that for 190,000 of those years we lived in communal, cooperative and egalitarian groups. No rulers, no class structure or private property, no gender disparities.

And I've mentioned before that there's great work being done to unravel the bias against/invisibility of women in the archaeological and anthropological records. 

Now there's fresh, startling evidence that Neanderthal culture was far more advanced that previously thought.

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)

This book is written in a lively and entertaining style, is very serious about its scholarship while being entirely assessable and, as it was just released, contains all the very latest discoveries and some musings about Covid-19. (Also, thank you Ms. Sykes for including female scientists among your sources.)

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I've been struggling with the process of letting go of a newly finished novel, surprised at the hole it has left behind. I loved the characters so much that I grieved when they left the stage, so to speak. Their departure was part of a perfect storm of 1) the Covid quarantine that kept me from my gal-pals; 2) my son moving to NYC; and 3) finishing the novel that had consumed so much of my thinking, and that, additionally, pointed out to me that most of my friends are imaginary. But working through it, I've come to believe in these stages in writing:

1. In the Glorious Zone: This is the beginning, when the imaginary world is dense and thrilling, the condition all writers wish they could live in all the time.
2. Intimate Relationships: when the characters make demands and reveal themselves in return.
3. Leaving and Returning to the Stage: the book seems finished, but characters keep coming back on stage and you are commanded by the characters and your own sense of duty to the craft to record what they're doing.
4. Grieving the End: celebration over the completion of the book but it soon feels like a wake, grieving for the loss of the imaginary friends your characters have become.
5. Facing the Void: so much in your life has been sacrificed for your art, which you have justified as 'it's not really important anyway' but now that the art has quieted, you have nothing left other than things that "aren't important." It's like the empty nest pheon. Additionally, filling the void is hampered by...
6. Honoring the Empty Well: you can't read other people's work and are too tired to start research on something else, not even to blog. The void is terrifying but it's what happens when you give it everything you've got.
7. Harnessing the Energy Somehow: taking on other projects or creative expressions to burn off the creative energy that's been building but won't take the shape of words.
8. Surviving the Disappointment: now you get to weather the process of taking your art to market.

#writersbetweenbooks #writinglife

I am seeking representation for my sixth book, Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar, a novel of magical realism set in 1865 in the riverside shanty town of Tartatenango, known as Caketown to raucous miscreants and cast-off mothers, muleteers and forgers, drunken monks and bridesmaids, Romany and bastard children who flout the borders between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The mayor of the city on-the-right-side-of-the-tracks is bent on their destruction, but they are led by Jaguar Paloma, a woman with an ability to control weather and water, the fecundity of animals, and the blooming of flowers. She is co-founder with her estranged best friend, a shrouded woman of extraordinary but unseen beauty, Orietta Becerra. 

An entirely original work, Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar is inspired by the cast-off women of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo who lived one hundred years of servitude.

If you can recommend a great agent, please post their name and number in comments. Thanks!

Please enjoy video readings from Straight Uphill: A Tale of Love and Chocolate.  In the first video, I introduce you to the beautiful Italian village and the main character.

In the second video, you'll meet Caterina, the chocolatier who finds love in WWII and courageously protects her village.

I'm convinced that solitude and silence are the first two ingredients in art. They're essential for getting into and staying in The Zone, that elusive flow where the words spill out and time spins away. So I asked 20 writers how they get there and how they return. Here's the secret sauce from five of them:

Trebor Healey

I get in that zone by having an empty day, free from obligations, or at least a few empty hours. It starts with coffee and reading the New York Times, but only a little...headlines, maybe two articles that make me feel my passion, so I curate what I read...and some carefully selected emotional music after that to open my heart if you will...usually '70s soul, like "Me and Mrs. Jones", something like that. Then I open up a story or two and go to work.

If I fall out of zone, a walk is always good...nature...sometimes a swim. The sauna afterwards will also get me inspired...something about the heat...then back to the desk, a few emo songs, and off I go.

Tinney Sue Heath

Regarding your first question, I wish I knew - I'm in between projects right now and current events are proving quite distracting.

Re: the second, when I am actively writing, I usually find that rereading the results of my last session or two is enough  Read More 

The Chinese doctor who first identified the coronavirus was arrested for speaking out, eventually dying of the disease. And just in case you're still not a huge champion of a free press in America, here's an incredible example of what happened when the U.S. dabbled in its own version of 'just print good news': it contributed to the death of 50 million people in what was called The Spanish Flu.

Though the Spanish Flu started in Haskell, Kansas on an Army base, it was named after Spain because Spanish journalists "had more freedom and more courage to report the truth, and they were neutral during World War I." They were the first to report on the rapidly rising death rate, according to Jennifer Wright, in her breezy but graphic book on global pandemics, Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them. "A morale law had been passed in 1917 after the United States entered World War I. It stated you could receive 20 years in jail if you chose to 'utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government of the United States.' This law seems unconstitutional,  Read More 

History books often described women as being "relegated" to spinning or embroidery, and one thinks of a woman in a fussy dress wasting time with an embroidery hoop. Elizabeth Wayland Barber in her book Women's Work: the First 20,000 Years, however, describes in great detail a world where the work of women – and trading skills of women -- ran the world economy, producing the world's most coveted, sold, and plundered product.

Cloth Drove the Global Economy

You have to remember that until recently, with the invention of plastic and the availability of metals, everything was made of either fabric or wood. Objects were wrapped in cloth, carried in a sack, and even wooden boxes were frequently lined with fabric.  Read More