February 22, 2019
Hello ,
Weather cooperated. People turned out. Bookstores sold books. The Young Adult Survival Tour in the Seattle area this past weekend was a terrific success.
Bonus! I got to meet and talk with a few subscribers of this newsletter! Karrie, Jeanne, Marguerite, Bob, Robert & Lori, it was so great connecting with you.
Next stop, Inklings Bookshop in Yakima, WA, this Saturday at 1PM. For those who can't make it, here's a
Strategies for Surviving Difficult Times
As I speak more about Standing Up Against Hate themes arise that I didn't see clearly when I was writing it. One is that the variety of ways black women confronted prejudice and discrimination during WWII offer
us all some insight into resilience.
Talking about the women's courageous response to injustice demonstrates the survival theme of our tour and shows that in challenging circumstances we have choices about how to respond.
Maureen McQuerry talks about resilience and how her novel Before, Between and After demonstrates ways of surviving difficult times within one's family.
Stephen Wallenfels also touches on family relationships in his book Deadfall, but in essence it's a story of surviving the snowy mountains of Oregon.
Cultivating hope and a positive vision of the future is one important coping skill of many
women in my book.
Here you see a couple black soldiers
shortly after their commissioning as some of the first women officers in the United States Army.
On the right with the large smile is 1st Lieutenant Dovey Johnson. She was not so happy when her group arrived for basic training to discover black women would be segregated from white women.
“We cried, we didn’t sleep," she said.
"Everyone felt depressed, broken and betrayed. We had come expecting there would be one corps. One. Not two."
In those first few days and later when Dovey was assigned to recruit black women to the corps, she held on to hope and her long-term vision.
“Was [this] opportunity precisely, mathematically, document-able equal to that of whites? Probably not. But the WAAC offered a chance I believed would never come again in quite the same way: the chance to advance, to train for careers, to build the kind of future we women wanted for our children, to stand behind the men who were fighting in Europe and North Africa and the Pacific."
Maybe one of the most difficult things to do when we're in trouble is to ask for help. For black WACs, that option was made easier by the strength of community among African-Americans, as well as their churches, network of newspapers and
black civic organizations.
That first night at Fort Des Moines Training Center Dovey Johnson's first thought was to put in a call to Mary McLeod Bethune, a black activist who'd been instrumental, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, in convincing the war department to allow black women to train as officers in the army. Within a few days, Bethune and a host of news reporters arrived at Fort Des Moines to investigate what was happening.
Photo: Letter written by Mary Elnora White complaining about getting the run-around (because she was black) when trying to apply to enlist in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.
Later in the war when the army suddenly disbanded the Black WAC Band, members reached out for help with a letter writing campaign.
The band had been formed by volunteers when blacks never passed their auditions to be in the official WAC band, which was all-white.
Eventually, the black musicians gained classification as army band members, and the unit became quite popular as both a concert and marching band. When they were suddenly axed and sent back to regular units, letters of protest came from all over the country.
Letters and publicity in African-American newspapers applied enough pressure, the army reinstated the band.
Another thing I've been talking about on the tour is how it feels a bit awkward being a white woman releasing a book about black women when #OwnVoices has become so important in children's and young adult publishing. I write more on this topic in a guest post on Author Kirby Larson's blog published last week here...
The youngest reader to attend one of my bookstore events in Seattle was Elisa Farrell, my granddaughter.
To be honest, she much prefers Sesame Street books, and her reading is to point at and name the characters. Which she does very well! Elmo is her favorite.
Some events coming up...
Portland, Oregon
Thursday, March 28th, 10:30am
Association of Writers & Writing Programs Annual Conference
Panel: Nonfiction for Kids and Teens: The Art of Writing Fact Not Fake
Spokane, WA
Wednesday, March 6, 7pm
Auntie's Bookstore
#YASurvivalTour
Until next week...
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To find out more about my books, how I help students, teachers, librarians and writers visit my website at www.MaryCronkFarrell.com.
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