"Writers and Their Words"
Marshall Cook with special guest, writer Catherine Young
WLSP 103.5 FM Sun Prairie, Wisconsin March 7, 2017
Marshall Cook: It's time to meet today's special guest.
And I know she's listening so she can correct me on it. Yes, Catherine, jump right in.
She has worked as a national park ranger, teacher, farmer, and mother – still doing that job. Catherine Young completed her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Her memoir pieces, poetry, and children's fiction appear in literary journals and anthologies like Imagination and Place, Hippocampus, Punctuate, Midwest Review, Cricket among others. Recordings of
Catherine's readings – she reads some of her own writings – can be found on something called Pageturner Radio. And I've been listening to the archives of this in the last couple days and it's a wonderful feature. It's on WDRT radio – because of the initials they call themselves "Radio from the Ground Up," community radio serving the Driftless Area region of southwestern Wisconsin, where Catherine now lives. She's over towards the Mississippi River in Richland County. We missed a couple of them, her first one ran today, and her second one was today at 8:20 AM but they are available in archives, and she'll be on the rest
of this week and next week on WDRT 91.9 Viroqua, Wisconsin.
Catherine loves thinking and writing about memoir. She's completed a memoir about growing up in coal country. (You'll hear about that in just a minute.) She's working on some poetry collections, and a book of recipes essays and songs about where she lives now. Next great joy in life, she says, will be to move on to leading writing workshops.
She is, folks, a marvelous writer. This is a testimony from my heart. I have read her memoir, still just in manuscript form. It's Called Black Diamonds, Blue Flames: A Childhood Colored by Coal. Folks, I've been teaching writing and reading a lot of stufffor all of my adult life, and this is one of the best things ever read.
(And Catherine, I'll be standing in line for a copy for your first signing was published. It's a very moving story and beautifully written.)
Catherine says she loves stories, radio, and writing, so she's my kind of people. She's your kind of people, too. So we want to welcome you Catherine, to "Writers and Their Words" program. Good morning!
Catherine Young: Good Morning! Thank you for the invitation. It's terrific to talk
about stories.
MC: And it's very nice to talk to you. You have a good radio voice.
Let's start by telling us a little bit about growing up and that coal country. Where did you grow up, and what are some the things you remember about it?
CY: Oh, there's a lot I remember. I grew up in the largest coal mining valley in the
world, and that's the Lackawanna Valley in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
MC: That's one of my favorite names in the English language – Lackawanna.
CY: I'm trying to remember what that means. I think it's Lenape for bend in the
river, or the fork in the river.
It was the place that powered the nation for about 100 years. It's hard coal, the black diamonds, the anthracite. And something happened in the 1850s where the
anthracite wasn't much valued, but but then there was an iron forge. And with the two things came together, really it forged the Industrial Revolution in North America in that place in that steep valley, because the rails for the railroad are made there. And then the rails took off, and then they haul the coal out. And build more rails, and spread across the country. So truly, it was the engine of the Industrial Revolution. I came along hundred years later in the late 1950s, and at that point everything had played out. Everything was closing down – including the mines. We had six railroads that hauled coal out of there, and they were shutting down. The business is in our city of Scranton were shutting down. They were empty, or they were burning down. And then to add to this – I just like to give this picture – we had mine fires. They were under the ground beneath our streets.
There was one section of our city where it was all smoke everywhere, and smoke would come up from the streets in yards. And then there were these huge mountains of coal waste – culm dumps. They were 4 to 5 stories tall standing next to the breakers – hundreds and hundreds of them – and they caught on fire. So we had these mountains of red ash during the day that were covered at night by eerie blue flames. So when I was little girl, there was a lot of
smoke.
It was confusing because our landscape really looked like the 19th century. It didn't look like the rest of the country that we saw on television.
And then all just shut down within a ten year period. It all just of evaporated. The
smoke ended, but so did everything else.
MC: That's heartbreaking.
CY: It's heartbreaking and confusing. And I have to say to, texturally it was a really interesting place to grow up because the resettlement people who came from Europe. Many, many countries in Eastern, Western, and Southern Europe from the late 1800s all the way through, probably the 1940s and 1950s. They came for the work there with anthracite. There was a white lead factory for making paints. There was an anthracite gas company. And the people came, and our landscape was filled with clusters of people speaking their own languages, preparing their own foods.
My relatives came from several countries, and I couldn't necessarily talk with them when I was a little girl. It was interesting sitting down with these old people who would talk another language, and someone would translate. I would go from house to house eating completely different kinds of food. So it was an interesting kind of landscape.
But there's something else I have to say about this. It was a place that was put down. It was a place that was shamed. Adlai Stevenson came as a presidential candidate in 1956, and he called it a "hellhole" – which was an apt description.
I left there not wanting to talk about.
MC: Were you ashamed of having come from there?
CY: For sure. It was a place that was very, very difficult. It was a place made fun of in ever so many ways. And we were called backward! There's no way of moving forward when everything crashes.
I didn't talk about it because every time I tried to describe it, it was inadequate. I
couldn't do it in a few sentences.
And then I had an experience where I was with some people who really put it down. I was livid. I felt I had enough! We had been the place that powered the nation. We were forgotten. We had been in all the school textbooks. As a little girl, I used to look in the school textbooks, and I could always find my city in there, and my valley because it was so important. But all the sudden, it vanished and we were forgotten.
And that's when something awoke in me to say, No, I remember. This is important. This is really important to American history. And these are important stories to be told about coal: what it means; what it meant to us; what it meant to the nation.
MC: … And the people who had come from all over.
CY: And the people who had come from all over and what they contributed! They
really built our country. It was so rich living in a place where there were all these
languages and traditions… it was very territorial. But the stories I got from people –
I can say for my own family, that I was told that I had to remember our stories. I think that was true of most.
I should say something else, too. Whenever we would meet someone, the first
question would be your name, and then the second question would be: What are you?
MC: Hmm. Where are you people from.
CY: Yes. Who are your people? What's your ethnic heritage? Where did your relatives come from? [The questions were asked because] it was so prevalent.
The stories I got from my family were ones that they wanted me to carry, to say we are important, these are the values we carry, please tell the stories over and over (which I do.)
But then there was another kind of story. I've had to consult with my cousin on some of these. There were stories we heard of crossing the ocean to come here, or of losing a sibling in the mines, or surviving something.
I have a great-grandmother who picked blueberries. She did that and put 30 quarts of blueberries in a pan on her head and walked 5 miles down the mountain to the valley to sell them to help support her family. [So this is an example of a story] that is important to me – I think they are important in a bigger sense because it helps us understand where we come from, and they also help us go forward, understanding what to pay attention to, how to be strong.
I really believe that all of these stories from our neighborhoods, from our families, especially immigrants are what make our country strong because they give us diversity.
MC: That's beautifully expressed in what you're talking about now, the loss the grief, the struggle – is a universal theme in literature. These resonate with us because we're human.
CY: I think that's exactly it.
I believe we're made of story. That maybe there's this soul connection. We come into this world and we have to develop a story – I think some people, call that a
personality – we have these experiences with our families and in our communities where we develop our own stories and then we have experiences and we develop our stories. And then we pass, and we are remembered in story.
MC: That's a great point. Don't the stories, in a sense, become more real? They
become the reality?
CY: They do because it's a sifting and winnowing to get to some kind of gem in there.
I learned one really, really important thing in the graduate program I did.
I have a very visual memory, and if I go into these visions of what I saw as a child, I ask questions about it and move around inside and it's almost as if I'm in a room and looking at an object. Idea myself to turn around and see what else is there. Then I pull memories out, and I describe them, and have to figure out with the people are saying, and what exactly happened.
But the question is why do I have these images in the first place? They're extremely powerful and they go back to my very, very early childhood.
One of the things that was pointed out to me [in my creative writing program] is that when we have a memory – maybe we have no words with it, or we have some kind of image or maybe we do have words with it and a sound and we have no image to go with it – we are retaining it because it was either something that was traumatic or it was a strong emotion of anger, a strong emotion of sadness, strong emotion of exhilaration or joy.
We retain memory because there is an emotion behind it. That's how we as human being stories. Oh, I find that a wonderful tool as a writer and human being to be able to say I have something to work on.
Then our memories change over time. We try to describe them and we bring more of our experiences into. They keep developing as stories.
MC: That's beautifully put, too. I love that phrase We are made of story.
That's really true. And then the mind never stops doing that. When we sleep we get these images and might make a story out of that. We get dreams we don't even understand.
It absolutely never fails to amaze me. We are story and we are
storytellers.
CY: I love that example you gave at the beginning of this program, Marshall, from Robert Frost -- that he had been delirious because he stayed up all night working on a poem. I know about that.
And then all of a sudden that other poem dropped from the sky. It was the poem that was waiting for him. He wrote it down, and it is the poem that we say "Robert Frost" that's the first point we think of about Robert Frost. So maybe the other things were gotten out of the way – sleep for one, logic for another – and he just let it come through. But there we are about that dreaminess and how our mind works and how we bring things in.
27:23
MC: Natalie Goldberg calls it the "Monkey Mind" – the mind it's always keeping track of appointments and babbling and and chattering and filling silence – it stops for a while and you are in a different place.
CY: Oh, you have to have one of those little notebooks ready when this stuff happens unless you're driving a car.
MC: I have found with myself that most of the stuff I jot down in those notebooks
either doesn't make sense later or doesn't lead anywhere, but sometimes there's
something in there that I just take off on and I'm so glad I wrote it down.
Catherine, how old were you when you left Scranton?
CY: I was 18.
MC: To go to college?
CY: Yes. That was my way out. And really, truly, I never went back. I visited, maybe, three times. And that was it.
And so, I have to say, one of the voices in the memoir is the child describing
landscape. It's pretty darn purely child, though the language isn't child. It's the
sensorial experience because I never went back to integrate what I knew as a child into my adult life.
MC: It would have been all different.
CY: It would've been all different in a lot of ways because the child's world is very
sensorial.
MC: And big. Vast. Things aren't so vast when we're adults. But you have been back to visit it in your mind so much. You have lived there a lot.
CY: Yeah. It's true.
29:17
MC: What prompted you to start writing this memoir?
CY: I can say exactly. I was jealous of someone. She had been in a workshop in Duluth. Carol Bly was giving workshops in Duluth, and I know someone who went there. After the workshop they had a writing group, and they were doing memoir.
I had always been scribbling things down. I had always kept journals all the time. I think there was that longing from childhood of: Can it be an author someday? Could I write a book?
That was something that was hard to admit especially because I was told You can't do that! That's not what people do. You have to be a special person with special connections. You don't come from Appalachia and do that.
When this person I know went to this workshop and start talking about what she was doing, I read Carol Bly's book Never to Be Bloody Rabbits. She talked about how often times when people write a story you were told you have to have conflict, and she thought that was nonsense. And she challenged anyone reading the book to write down their memories. Just write them and get out of the way.
And so, I started writing to get my memories out of the way, and I couldn't stop. It went on and on and on. It was as if it just opened this vault. And I filled up notebook after notebook after notebook.
And part of that too [was something that happened in my 40s]. I know that the author Ben Logan went through this because I was mentored by Ben Logan, and he admitted this. In my 40s I would get these images. They were very powerful. I might be standing next to a relative in his garden.
(Why do I have that memory?)
Then there might be a memory of the train crossing the mountain. (Why do I have that memory?)
All of these pictures were inside of me, these portraits.
I'm a geographer by training, I love thinking about land and place and why we choose the places we do, [how do we ] perceive the places we do. I describe place. (I'm not interested in the people at all – I was writing about place.)
Over and over [I was trying to find] what's different that I saw there that we can't see now because it no longer exists. And it's very hard to explain. So I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. And finally, I decided I wanted to pursue this – write a memoir. That's when I contacted you for "How to do this?"
32:39
MC: And I said I don't know, but you figured it out anyway.
CY: Yeah. I figured it out with your help.
MC: Let me just mention, Ben Logan, very well known in Wisconsin, maybe not so
well known outside of the state. He should be. His memoir is The Land Remembers. It is another beautiful, beautiful memoir.
CY: That's a beautiful book, and it's about where the now in the Driftless Area. It's about growing up here.
I interviewed Ben, and I spent a lot of time asking him questions about writing.
First he was trained as an Agricultural Journalist, and then he worked as a television producer for NBC, and then he moved back to Wisconsin from New York to live on his family's farm as a retired person.
[In his 40s before he returned] he had been scribbling on little pieces of paper and they were all over the place. His wife, Jacqueline, suggested maybe he should do something with those little pieces of paper – and that's how he came to write his memoir, which is exquisite writing.
MC: Thank you, Jacqueline, for putting that idea in his head.
And his second one was Empty Meadow?
CY: Yes.
MC: Beautiful stuff.
As you are writing this memoir and you began to realize it really wanted to be a
memoir and not just some writing you were doing to take care memories and put
them behind you – which we never do, I think – What did you intend for it? Did you intend an effect on other people?
CY: Well, yes, I did. I felt that strong emotion of: We were in a valley that got
forgotten.
34:44
I have to imagine there are many valleys and mountaintops, small cities and small towns and farms that have been forgotten.
I can say where I live now was contiguous dairy farms, and that doesn't exist
anymore.
We need to tell these stories of our history and about how people (I have to say this word) suffered to make this a better nation. We can't let these stories go.
My feeling was: We need to know about this place. And honor the work that was done in this place and what we lived with. And what the mythology about the place was.
Also because it was coal and steel and the Industrial Revolution when we began this, when we opened this up, what did that mean working with fossil fuels?
What does coal mean to us? We're still using coal. What does it mean to still be mining it and burning coal as a source of energy? I feel that telling the stories about how it affects the people is really important to do.
MC: Jerry Apps is doing a very good job telling stories of small farms and the small farmers in Wisconsin. We are losing so many of them to agribusiness and agriculture. I'm very glad he is preserving the stories.
CY: And he seems to get it just right. Anyone who is listening to him out in these farm
MC: And he puts on a great reading. He's just a joy to talk to.
All right, how about folks who might be listening who think maybe I should be writing the stories down. I should write a memoir or. Maybe they already have.
Or, are in the midst of one, and it's just sort of sitting there on the table.
What guidance can you give for folks who are maybe thinking about writing a memoir or one of their memoirs?
CY: First of all, I would say, "Do it."
Writing memories is essential.
Telling our stories in our families and our communities, that's essential because our stories matter. They help us understand one another, where we come from. I believe not only can it help us become stronger people, more empathetic people.
There are many venues for working with memoir. So to anyone who's getting started, I would say write it down or get a tape recorder, and just say what you have to say. Sit down with someone, and tell your story. Have it taped and have someone transcribe it.
And then there are places to shape it if that something you want to do.
You can go find courses in reminiscence writing at community colleges and on UW campuses are Continuing Education classes -- or wherever there are continuing education classes.
MC: As in Continuing Studies – I'll give a plug for them.
CY: There are places where people gather to do this. You can find them somehow in your community.
And if you are someone who wants to be published, there are lots of places to put it out there. There are lots of places to do that now.
It could be a blog.
It could be a journal. There are all kinds of journals online. There are many journals in print. One way I have researched to get published is just to read what
is available online.
I love, love reading memoir.
I love reading nonfiction, and so I see where the person I'm reading
has been published. I find it in the back of the book, maybe one of the chapters was published in a journal somewhere, and then I find that journal. And I read the backgrounds of the people there, and find out where they've been published.
So you can find more places to read and more places to consider sending material to.
MC: That's excellent advice. It's not magic getting published, it's market research. But if you are reading things you love and finding out where those people publish – that it's not market research anymore it's part of what you love.
39:30
I like the fact that you are stressing sit down with a tape recorder with another
person just tell your story. You didn't mention style or voice or any of that. I think
that emerges if people are honest and sincere. You gotta craft it later on, so other
people will understand and feel if not what you're feeling, what they would feel if they were living it. It's storytelling.
CY: I think the stories themselves, if I could give them a personality, want to be told. And sometimes just paying attention to it is enough. It's like you say, it will emerge, and all the tools for crafting it can be used later.
MC: Oh I agree. There's a point in my writing usually where I'm not worried about me anymore. If you get that out of the way. And I'm thinking about a reader. I want to get the story right for its sake. You know what I mean? It's all about the story.
Tell me about your publishing journey so far. You wrote me a wonderful thing the
other day. (She's been telling me about her latest publications.) Catherine, you are on a wonderful hot streak. I'm so glad.
And you said, "It is of course, a matter of persistence to get published. And oh, what glory it is when persistence pays off."
Tell us about how you've gone about your work out there so people can find it.
CY: I have to send these pieces out. And I take a risk every time I send them out.
But I've set it up so that I always win.
I have a penny arcade kind of mentality.
I love those old machines that you could tilt.
I have this competitive streak with myself. And so what I do is I send my pieces out to places that might be interested in them.
And when/if they get declined (I never say rejection – I always say "decline" because it makes me feel better) and in it in they say something nice like
We really enjoyed reading this. Send us something else sometime
I put that in big letters so I'm encouraging myself again.
MC: And they never say that unless they mean it.
CY: Well, it helps, Marshall.
I've got this huge system I'm working with.
I want to say that I have a piece of writing that has taken 3 1/2 years to be published in a literary journal. It has been declined 23 times. And in the last few months it finally got accepted.
It was a wonderful feeling, but it means that I sent it out to four different places and I wait to see what happens. And if when it comes back they say no, I sent it out to the next four places, and I keep going.
42:48
I try to be creative where I can send it out.
I have another piece that was written for a
specific anthology about National Park Service writing, and the person who received it said yes, I want to hold onto this till you have the anthology up and running. Well, she held for four years, and I would check in with her once a year.
And finally she said, I can't afford to put out this anthology. I am so sorry I hope you get it published somewhere.
I had written it specifically for her. It was about islands, about
living on an island in the National Park Service, and it's called "Island Voices". So I just went online and I googled literary journals island. I came up with one called The Island Review. I sent it in a couple of months ago and it's going to be published there.
MC: So this is your favorite piece of writing.
CY: Well, it's one of them. I'm going to read today from the other island piece.
Yes, it's my favorite kind of writing.
MC: Well, Catherine, if you're not doing it already you will make a wonderful
workshop leader for writers.
And I have my stories of 23 rejections and all of that. I was nodding as you were talking and I was thinking every writer who is listening to this is nodding.
CY: I've now come up with a system where when I get the acceptances, I put them on the chart in bold, and I gray out everything else. It's always tricking the brain into seeing, "Yeah, good job, good job" because you are alone doing this.
MC: And you don't want to keep your batting average in front of you. It's all about the hits.
CY: You always have to encourage yourself. It's all about the hits.
MC: Don't worry about the strikeouts and the pop-ups. It's all about the hits.
~[Reading from “Island”]~
MC: Do you like reading aloud?
CY: I love reading aloud.
MC: It shows.
CY: I think part of the reason for being an elementary school teacher was that I got to read aloud, and I got my kids to read aloud.
You know, again, it's that whole sense of
story.
Story has been carried many thousands of years beyond paper and marks on
the page. People used their voices and carried it when they could carry nothing else.
MC: Tell us about the one you're working on now. The food memoir.
CY: Yeah. I'm a little nervous about calling a food memoir, but maybe that's what it is. I live on a farm that we use as a subsistence farm. It's in the Driftless Area. It is a farm of many springs and waters, and rich land. We have produced our food here, for ourselves, for 30 years. We are an artisan cheesery as well, and we produce that for the Dane County Farmers Market but we don't milk anymore. And in all of these years of living here, I developed foods and ways of living to take care of my family. But I also I grew up in a city of immigrants where our backyards were filled with fruit trees and gardens, and often people had chickens in the backyards, and rabbits and dovecotes.
Oh, and there was even one woman up on the mountain, couldn't speak a word of
English, she was dressed all in black and she had her hair in a bun, and she raised
goats. And that was at the edge of the city.
MC: The goat lady.
CY: It was a Hungarian goat lady. I came walking up to her yard one day and was
stunned. She talked to me in Hungarian was so kind to me...
So, I have these stories of food, growing up with family members, making the foods with them, making the foods where they were from. Doing big food.
My family made wine. My family produced many jars of canned things.
My Italian grandfather's house has special little room with shelves with jars of food that he raised to feed 13 people in the house. So I grew up with that.
Now I am replicating it here, by myself. Taking some of those ideas to feed my family, and some of the wisdom about eating dandelions and eating nettles and other things.
So in this book, I go month-to-month and have a series of recipes that have to do with that month – and might be drying egg noodles or might be putting up a certain herb
or it might be canning something or it might be making freezer pies in September to use up the fruit so that we can eat it all winter long.
So, there are recipes, stories, and a song round for each month. And that's challenging. I have 10 of the rounds done. They are complex little pieces of music.
MC: So you are writing these?
CY: Oh, I am writing these. And they have to do with what I see on the land, or the
birds that are singing at the time, or what's growing or what the colors are.
I'm stuck with it now – with January and December! They are hard ones to write!
52:08
MC: Yeah, no birds around. It makes it difficult.
CY: It's pretty quiet!
MC: A technical question for folks who don't know: What does the Driftless Area
mean?
CY: It's the huge corner Southwestern Wisconsin that is a landscape that has never been glaciated. Parts of it going to northeastern Iowa, northwestern Illinois southeastern Minnesota, but by far the largest area is in Wisconsin.
It's a rugged land.
If you were to drive west of Madison you would go out Mineral Point Road and dropoff what's called the terminal moraine, the glaciated area, and then all of a sudden you would see more creeks running and curving and you would see different kinds of trees and hills that stick up little bit more because the land has been carved. It's considered an ancient landscape is not been glaciated in over 200,000 years.
MC: It's beautiful.
CY: It's beautiful and the springs create all these creeks and carved the land and run to the Mississippi River. So it's a little different from the rest of the state.
MC: I learned to ask this was a freelance writer: What question haven't I asked you that you'd like to answer?
CY: You haven't asked me how I structured my memoir, the book called Black
Diamonds, Blue Flames. To try and take the stories I had to do something with the
child trying to describe a landscape.
But I kept coming back to a famous painting by George Inness called The Lackawanna Valley.
54:08
It was painted in the 1850s. I find it my icon. I have looked for it everywhere I've
gone. I now have a small reproduction of it on my wall. It shows a locomotive crossing the river, and 1850s locomotive. It shows a boy leaning on his elbow who is watching cows and he's dressed in rustic clothing. It shows the fledgling city behind the train where there is smoke coming up. It shows the mountains and it shows the sky.
I've learned a lot about the painting over time, and it's really a story in itself. And so, the memoir is framed by seven pieces of writing, seven essays about my journey with the painting, going from my childhood view and understanding of it to what I understand about it now.
And now, I have a completely different perspective from when I first saw it as a child, when i tried to locate my place, my home in that painting.
MC: It was a long time ago that we discussed this, and I looked at a copy of that
painting and I've never forgotten it.
CY: It's an iconic painting. The way it's made, it turns out, it draws all your attention to the center.
It makes your eyes move up the middle to the mountains, and half of the painting is sky. Your eyes go up the sky, they drop down, and you go through the
same experience over and over. It was designed way. Landscape paintings gave
people a way of looking instead of motion pictures – which they didn't have. That was their motion picture!
MC: They supplied the motion.
Oh, Catherine, it has been such a joy talking with you. I want everyone to go back to the archives and listen to this program. I'll tell them so. You keep in touch with me about how you're doing, and boy, when that memoir comes out, let me know because I'm going to tell everybody.
CY: Thanks so much Marshall, it was a really fun. Have a lovely day.
MC: You, too, thank you so much.
That's Catherine Young. Our special guest today, memoirist, soon to be teacher on writing memoir. A poet, songwriter, and radio personality on WDRT.
And I know she's listening so she can correct me on it. Yes, Catherine, jump right in.
She has worked as a national park ranger, teacher, farmer, and mother – still doing that job. Catherine Young completed her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Her memoir pieces, poetry, and children's fiction appear in literary journals and anthologies like Imagination and Place, Hippocampus, Punctuate, Midwest Review, Cricket among others. Recordings of
Catherine's readings – she reads some of her own writings – can be found on something called Pageturner Radio. And I've been listening to the archives of this in the last couple days and it's a wonderful feature. It's on WDRT radio – because of the initials they call themselves "Radio from the Ground Up," community radio serving the Driftless Area region of southwestern Wisconsin, where Catherine now lives. She's over towards the Mississippi River in Richland County. We missed a couple of them, her first one ran today, and her second one was today at 8:20 AM but they are available in archives, and she'll be on the rest
of this week and next week on WDRT 91.9 Viroqua, Wisconsin.
Catherine loves thinking and writing about memoir. She's completed a memoir about growing up in coal country. (You'll hear about that in just a minute.) She's working on some poetry collections, and a book of recipes essays and songs about where she lives now. Next great joy in life, she says, will be to move on to leading writing workshops.
She is, folks, a marvelous writer. This is a testimony from my heart. I have read her memoir, still just in manuscript form. It's Called Black Diamonds, Blue Flames: A Childhood Colored by Coal. Folks, I've been teaching writing and reading a lot of stufffor all of my adult life, and this is one of the best things ever read.
(And Catherine, I'll be standing in line for a copy for your first signing was published. It's a very moving story and beautifully written.)
Catherine says she loves stories, radio, and writing, so she's my kind of people. She's your kind of people, too. So we want to welcome you Catherine, to "Writers and Their Words" program. Good morning!
Catherine Young: Good Morning! Thank you for the invitation. It's terrific to talk
about stories.
MC: And it's very nice to talk to you. You have a good radio voice.
Let's start by telling us a little bit about growing up and that coal country. Where did you grow up, and what are some the things you remember about it?
CY: Oh, there's a lot I remember. I grew up in the largest coal mining valley in the
world, and that's the Lackawanna Valley in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
MC: That's one of my favorite names in the English language – Lackawanna.
CY: I'm trying to remember what that means. I think it's Lenape for bend in the
river, or the fork in the river.
It was the place that powered the nation for about 100 years. It's hard coal, the black diamonds, the anthracite. And something happened in the 1850s where the
anthracite wasn't much valued, but but then there was an iron forge. And with the two things came together, really it forged the Industrial Revolution in North America in that place in that steep valley, because the rails for the railroad are made there. And then the rails took off, and then they haul the coal out. And build more rails, and spread across the country. So truly, it was the engine of the Industrial Revolution. I came along hundred years later in the late 1950s, and at that point everything had played out. Everything was closing down – including the mines. We had six railroads that hauled coal out of there, and they were shutting down. The business is in our city of Scranton were shutting down. They were empty, or they were burning down. And then to add to this – I just like to give this picture – we had mine fires. They were under the ground beneath our streets.
There was one section of our city where it was all smoke everywhere, and smoke would come up from the streets in yards. And then there were these huge mountains of coal waste – culm dumps. They were 4 to 5 stories tall standing next to the breakers – hundreds and hundreds of them – and they caught on fire. So we had these mountains of red ash during the day that were covered at night by eerie blue flames. So when I was little girl, there was a lot of
smoke.
It was confusing because our landscape really looked like the 19th century. It didn't look like the rest of the country that we saw on television.
And then all just shut down within a ten year period. It all just of evaporated. The
smoke ended, but so did everything else.
MC: That's heartbreaking.
CY: It's heartbreaking and confusing. And I have to say to, texturally it was a really interesting place to grow up because the resettlement people who came from Europe. Many, many countries in Eastern, Western, and Southern Europe from the late 1800s all the way through, probably the 1940s and 1950s. They came for the work there with anthracite. There was a white lead factory for making paints. There was an anthracite gas company. And the people came, and our landscape was filled with clusters of people speaking their own languages, preparing their own foods.
My relatives came from several countries, and I couldn't necessarily talk with them when I was a little girl. It was interesting sitting down with these old people who would talk another language, and someone would translate. I would go from house to house eating completely different kinds of food. So it was an interesting kind of landscape.
But there's something else I have to say about this. It was a place that was put down. It was a place that was shamed. Adlai Stevenson came as a presidential candidate in 1956, and he called it a "hellhole" – which was an apt description.
I left there not wanting to talk about.
MC: Were you ashamed of having come from there?
CY: For sure. It was a place that was very, very difficult. It was a place made fun of in ever so many ways. And we were called backward! There's no way of moving forward when everything crashes.
I didn't talk about it because every time I tried to describe it, it was inadequate. I
couldn't do it in a few sentences.
And then I had an experience where I was with some people who really put it down. I was livid. I felt I had enough! We had been the place that powered the nation. We were forgotten. We had been in all the school textbooks. As a little girl, I used to look in the school textbooks, and I could always find my city in there, and my valley because it was so important. But all the sudden, it vanished and we were forgotten.
And that's when something awoke in me to say, No, I remember. This is important. This is really important to American history. And these are important stories to be told about coal: what it means; what it meant to us; what it meant to the nation.
MC: … And the people who had come from all over.
CY: And the people who had come from all over and what they contributed! They
really built our country. It was so rich living in a place where there were all these
languages and traditions… it was very territorial. But the stories I got from people –
I can say for my own family, that I was told that I had to remember our stories. I think that was true of most.
I should say something else, too. Whenever we would meet someone, the first
question would be your name, and then the second question would be: What are you?
MC: Hmm. Where are you people from.
CY: Yes. Who are your people? What's your ethnic heritage? Where did your relatives come from? [The questions were asked because] it was so prevalent.
The stories I got from my family were ones that they wanted me to carry, to say we are important, these are the values we carry, please tell the stories over and over (which I do.)
But then there was another kind of story. I've had to consult with my cousin on some of these. There were stories we heard of crossing the ocean to come here, or of losing a sibling in the mines, or surviving something.
I have a great-grandmother who picked blueberries. She did that and put 30 quarts of blueberries in a pan on her head and walked 5 miles down the mountain to the valley to sell them to help support her family. [So this is an example of a story] that is important to me – I think they are important in a bigger sense because it helps us understand where we come from, and they also help us go forward, understanding what to pay attention to, how to be strong.
I really believe that all of these stories from our neighborhoods, from our families, especially immigrants are what make our country strong because they give us diversity.
MC: That's beautifully expressed in what you're talking about now, the loss the grief, the struggle – is a universal theme in literature. These resonate with us because we're human.
CY: I think that's exactly it.
I believe we're made of story. That maybe there's this soul connection. We come into this world and we have to develop a story – I think some people, call that a
personality – we have these experiences with our families and in our communities where we develop our own stories and then we have experiences and we develop our stories. And then we pass, and we are remembered in story.
MC: That's a great point. Don't the stories, in a sense, become more real? They
become the reality?
CY: They do because it's a sifting and winnowing to get to some kind of gem in there.
I learned one really, really important thing in the graduate program I did.
I have a very visual memory, and if I go into these visions of what I saw as a child, I ask questions about it and move around inside and it's almost as if I'm in a room and looking at an object. Idea myself to turn around and see what else is there. Then I pull memories out, and I describe them, and have to figure out with the people are saying, and what exactly happened.
But the question is why do I have these images in the first place? They're extremely powerful and they go back to my very, very early childhood.
One of the things that was pointed out to me [in my creative writing program] is that when we have a memory – maybe we have no words with it, or we have some kind of image or maybe we do have words with it and a sound and we have no image to go with it – we are retaining it because it was either something that was traumatic or it was a strong emotion of anger, a strong emotion of sadness, strong emotion of exhilaration or joy.
We retain memory because there is an emotion behind it. That's how we as human being stories. Oh, I find that a wonderful tool as a writer and human being to be able to say I have something to work on.
Then our memories change over time. We try to describe them and we bring more of our experiences into. They keep developing as stories.
MC: That's beautifully put, too. I love that phrase We are made of story.
That's really true. And then the mind never stops doing that. When we sleep we get these images and might make a story out of that. We get dreams we don't even understand.
It absolutely never fails to amaze me. We are story and we are
storytellers.
CY: I love that example you gave at the beginning of this program, Marshall, from Robert Frost -- that he had been delirious because he stayed up all night working on a poem. I know about that.
And then all of a sudden that other poem dropped from the sky. It was the poem that was waiting for him. He wrote it down, and it is the poem that we say "Robert Frost" that's the first point we think of about Robert Frost. So maybe the other things were gotten out of the way – sleep for one, logic for another – and he just let it come through. But there we are about that dreaminess and how our mind works and how we bring things in.
27:23
MC: Natalie Goldberg calls it the "Monkey Mind" – the mind it's always keeping track of appointments and babbling and and chattering and filling silence – it stops for a while and you are in a different place.
CY: Oh, you have to have one of those little notebooks ready when this stuff happens unless you're driving a car.
MC: I have found with myself that most of the stuff I jot down in those notebooks
either doesn't make sense later or doesn't lead anywhere, but sometimes there's
something in there that I just take off on and I'm so glad I wrote it down.
Catherine, how old were you when you left Scranton?
CY: I was 18.
MC: To go to college?
CY: Yes. That was my way out. And really, truly, I never went back. I visited, maybe, three times. And that was it.
And so, I have to say, one of the voices in the memoir is the child describing
landscape. It's pretty darn purely child, though the language isn't child. It's the
sensorial experience because I never went back to integrate what I knew as a child into my adult life.
MC: It would have been all different.
CY: It would've been all different in a lot of ways because the child's world is very
sensorial.
MC: And big. Vast. Things aren't so vast when we're adults. But you have been back to visit it in your mind so much. You have lived there a lot.
CY: Yeah. It's true.
29:17
MC: What prompted you to start writing this memoir?
CY: I can say exactly. I was jealous of someone. She had been in a workshop in Duluth. Carol Bly was giving workshops in Duluth, and I know someone who went there. After the workshop they had a writing group, and they were doing memoir.
I had always been scribbling things down. I had always kept journals all the time. I think there was that longing from childhood of: Can it be an author someday? Could I write a book?
That was something that was hard to admit especially because I was told You can't do that! That's not what people do. You have to be a special person with special connections. You don't come from Appalachia and do that.
When this person I know went to this workshop and start talking about what she was doing, I read Carol Bly's book Never to Be Bloody Rabbits. She talked about how often times when people write a story you were told you have to have conflict, and she thought that was nonsense. And she challenged anyone reading the book to write down their memories. Just write them and get out of the way.
And so, I started writing to get my memories out of the way, and I couldn't stop. It went on and on and on. It was as if it just opened this vault. And I filled up notebook after notebook after notebook.
And part of that too [was something that happened in my 40s]. I know that the author Ben Logan went through this because I was mentored by Ben Logan, and he admitted this. In my 40s I would get these images. They were very powerful. I might be standing next to a relative in his garden.
(Why do I have that memory?)
Then there might be a memory of the train crossing the mountain. (Why do I have that memory?)
All of these pictures were inside of me, these portraits.
I'm a geographer by training, I love thinking about land and place and why we choose the places we do, [how do we ] perceive the places we do. I describe place. (I'm not interested in the people at all – I was writing about place.)
Over and over [I was trying to find] what's different that I saw there that we can't see now because it no longer exists. And it's very hard to explain. So I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. And finally, I decided I wanted to pursue this – write a memoir. That's when I contacted you for "How to do this?"
32:39
MC: And I said I don't know, but you figured it out anyway.
CY: Yeah. I figured it out with your help.
MC: Let me just mention, Ben Logan, very well known in Wisconsin, maybe not so
well known outside of the state. He should be. His memoir is The Land Remembers. It is another beautiful, beautiful memoir.
CY: That's a beautiful book, and it's about where the now in the Driftless Area. It's about growing up here.
I interviewed Ben, and I spent a lot of time asking him questions about writing.
First he was trained as an Agricultural Journalist, and then he worked as a television producer for NBC, and then he moved back to Wisconsin from New York to live on his family's farm as a retired person.
[In his 40s before he returned] he had been scribbling on little pieces of paper and they were all over the place. His wife, Jacqueline, suggested maybe he should do something with those little pieces of paper – and that's how he came to write his memoir, which is exquisite writing.
MC: Thank you, Jacqueline, for putting that idea in his head.
And his second one was Empty Meadow?
CY: Yes.
MC: Beautiful stuff.
As you are writing this memoir and you began to realize it really wanted to be a
memoir and not just some writing you were doing to take care memories and put
them behind you – which we never do, I think – What did you intend for it? Did you intend an effect on other people?
CY: Well, yes, I did. I felt that strong emotion of: We were in a valley that got
forgotten.
34:44
I have to imagine there are many valleys and mountaintops, small cities and small towns and farms that have been forgotten.
I can say where I live now was contiguous dairy farms, and that doesn't exist
anymore.
We need to tell these stories of our history and about how people (I have to say this word) suffered to make this a better nation. We can't let these stories go.
My feeling was: We need to know about this place. And honor the work that was done in this place and what we lived with. And what the mythology about the place was.
Also because it was coal and steel and the Industrial Revolution when we began this, when we opened this up, what did that mean working with fossil fuels?
What does coal mean to us? We're still using coal. What does it mean to still be mining it and burning coal as a source of energy? I feel that telling the stories about how it affects the people is really important to do.
MC: Jerry Apps is doing a very good job telling stories of small farms and the small farmers in Wisconsin. We are losing so many of them to agribusiness and agriculture. I'm very glad he is preserving the stories.
CY: And he seems to get it just right. Anyone who is listening to him out in these farm
MC: And he puts on a great reading. He's just a joy to talk to.
All right, how about folks who might be listening who think maybe I should be writing the stories down. I should write a memoir or. Maybe they already have.
Or, are in the midst of one, and it's just sort of sitting there on the table.
What guidance can you give for folks who are maybe thinking about writing a memoir or one of their memoirs?
CY: First of all, I would say, "Do it."
Writing memories is essential.
Telling our stories in our families and our communities, that's essential because our stories matter. They help us understand one another, where we come from. I believe not only can it help us become stronger people, more empathetic people.
There are many venues for working with memoir. So to anyone who's getting started, I would say write it down or get a tape recorder, and just say what you have to say. Sit down with someone, and tell your story. Have it taped and have someone transcribe it.
And then there are places to shape it if that something you want to do.
You can go find courses in reminiscence writing at community colleges and on UW campuses are Continuing Education classes -- or wherever there are continuing education classes.
MC: As in Continuing Studies – I'll give a plug for them.
CY: There are places where people gather to do this. You can find them somehow in your community.
And if you are someone who wants to be published, there are lots of places to put it out there. There are lots of places to do that now.
It could be a blog.
It could be a journal. There are all kinds of journals online. There are many journals in print. One way I have researched to get published is just to read what
is available online.
I love, love reading memoir.
I love reading nonfiction, and so I see where the person I'm reading
has been published. I find it in the back of the book, maybe one of the chapters was published in a journal somewhere, and then I find that journal. And I read the backgrounds of the people there, and find out where they've been published.
So you can find more places to read and more places to consider sending material to.
MC: That's excellent advice. It's not magic getting published, it's market research. But if you are reading things you love and finding out where those people publish – that it's not market research anymore it's part of what you love.
39:30
I like the fact that you are stressing sit down with a tape recorder with another
person just tell your story. You didn't mention style or voice or any of that. I think
that emerges if people are honest and sincere. You gotta craft it later on, so other
people will understand and feel if not what you're feeling, what they would feel if they were living it. It's storytelling.
CY: I think the stories themselves, if I could give them a personality, want to be told. And sometimes just paying attention to it is enough. It's like you say, it will emerge, and all the tools for crafting it can be used later.
MC: Oh I agree. There's a point in my writing usually where I'm not worried about me anymore. If you get that out of the way. And I'm thinking about a reader. I want to get the story right for its sake. You know what I mean? It's all about the story.
Tell me about your publishing journey so far. You wrote me a wonderful thing the
other day. (She's been telling me about her latest publications.) Catherine, you are on a wonderful hot streak. I'm so glad.
And you said, "It is of course, a matter of persistence to get published. And oh, what glory it is when persistence pays off."
Tell us about how you've gone about your work out there so people can find it.
CY: I have to send these pieces out. And I take a risk every time I send them out.
But I've set it up so that I always win.
I have a penny arcade kind of mentality.
I love those old machines that you could tilt.
I have this competitive streak with myself. And so what I do is I send my pieces out to places that might be interested in them.
And when/if they get declined (I never say rejection – I always say "decline" because it makes me feel better) and in it in they say something nice like
We really enjoyed reading this. Send us something else sometime
I put that in big letters so I'm encouraging myself again.
MC: And they never say that unless they mean it.
CY: Well, it helps, Marshall.
I've got this huge system I'm working with.
I want to say that I have a piece of writing that has taken 3 1/2 years to be published in a literary journal. It has been declined 23 times. And in the last few months it finally got accepted.
It was a wonderful feeling, but it means that I sent it out to four different places and I wait to see what happens. And if when it comes back they say no, I sent it out to the next four places, and I keep going.
42:48
I try to be creative where I can send it out.
I have another piece that was written for a
specific anthology about National Park Service writing, and the person who received it said yes, I want to hold onto this till you have the anthology up and running. Well, she held for four years, and I would check in with her once a year.
And finally she said, I can't afford to put out this anthology. I am so sorry I hope you get it published somewhere.
I had written it specifically for her. It was about islands, about
living on an island in the National Park Service, and it's called "Island Voices". So I just went online and I googled literary journals island. I came up with one called The Island Review. I sent it in a couple of months ago and it's going to be published there.
MC: So this is your favorite piece of writing.
CY: Well, it's one of them. I'm going to read today from the other island piece.
Yes, it's my favorite kind of writing.
MC: Well, Catherine, if you're not doing it already you will make a wonderful
workshop leader for writers.
And I have my stories of 23 rejections and all of that. I was nodding as you were talking and I was thinking every writer who is listening to this is nodding.
CY: I've now come up with a system where when I get the acceptances, I put them on the chart in bold, and I gray out everything else. It's always tricking the brain into seeing, "Yeah, good job, good job" because you are alone doing this.
MC: And you don't want to keep your batting average in front of you. It's all about the hits.
CY: You always have to encourage yourself. It's all about the hits.
MC: Don't worry about the strikeouts and the pop-ups. It's all about the hits.
~[Reading from “Island”]~
MC: Do you like reading aloud?
CY: I love reading aloud.
MC: It shows.
CY: I think part of the reason for being an elementary school teacher was that I got to read aloud, and I got my kids to read aloud.
You know, again, it's that whole sense of
story.
Story has been carried many thousands of years beyond paper and marks on
the page. People used their voices and carried it when they could carry nothing else.
MC: Tell us about the one you're working on now. The food memoir.
CY: Yeah. I'm a little nervous about calling a food memoir, but maybe that's what it is. I live on a farm that we use as a subsistence farm. It's in the Driftless Area. It is a farm of many springs and waters, and rich land. We have produced our food here, for ourselves, for 30 years. We are an artisan cheesery as well, and we produce that for the Dane County Farmers Market but we don't milk anymore. And in all of these years of living here, I developed foods and ways of living to take care of my family. But I also I grew up in a city of immigrants where our backyards were filled with fruit trees and gardens, and often people had chickens in the backyards, and rabbits and dovecotes.
Oh, and there was even one woman up on the mountain, couldn't speak a word of
English, she was dressed all in black and she had her hair in a bun, and she raised
goats. And that was at the edge of the city.
MC: The goat lady.
CY: It was a Hungarian goat lady. I came walking up to her yard one day and was
stunned. She talked to me in Hungarian was so kind to me...
So, I have these stories of food, growing up with family members, making the foods with them, making the foods where they were from. Doing big food.
My family made wine. My family produced many jars of canned things.
My Italian grandfather's house has special little room with shelves with jars of food that he raised to feed 13 people in the house. So I grew up with that.
Now I am replicating it here, by myself. Taking some of those ideas to feed my family, and some of the wisdom about eating dandelions and eating nettles and other things.
So in this book, I go month-to-month and have a series of recipes that have to do with that month – and might be drying egg noodles or might be putting up a certain herb
or it might be canning something or it might be making freezer pies in September to use up the fruit so that we can eat it all winter long.
So, there are recipes, stories, and a song round for each month. And that's challenging. I have 10 of the rounds done. They are complex little pieces of music.
MC: So you are writing these?
CY: Oh, I am writing these. And they have to do with what I see on the land, or the
birds that are singing at the time, or what's growing or what the colors are.
I'm stuck with it now – with January and December! They are hard ones to write!
52:08
MC: Yeah, no birds around. It makes it difficult.
CY: It's pretty quiet!
MC: A technical question for folks who don't know: What does the Driftless Area
mean?
CY: It's the huge corner Southwestern Wisconsin that is a landscape that has never been glaciated. Parts of it going to northeastern Iowa, northwestern Illinois southeastern Minnesota, but by far the largest area is in Wisconsin.
It's a rugged land.
If you were to drive west of Madison you would go out Mineral Point Road and dropoff what's called the terminal moraine, the glaciated area, and then all of a sudden you would see more creeks running and curving and you would see different kinds of trees and hills that stick up little bit more because the land has been carved. It's considered an ancient landscape is not been glaciated in over 200,000 years.
MC: It's beautiful.
CY: It's beautiful and the springs create all these creeks and carved the land and run to the Mississippi River. So it's a little different from the rest of the state.
MC: I learned to ask this was a freelance writer: What question haven't I asked you that you'd like to answer?
CY: You haven't asked me how I structured my memoir, the book called Black
Diamonds, Blue Flames. To try and take the stories I had to do something with the
child trying to describe a landscape.
But I kept coming back to a famous painting by George Inness called The Lackawanna Valley.
54:08
It was painted in the 1850s. I find it my icon. I have looked for it everywhere I've
gone. I now have a small reproduction of it on my wall. It shows a locomotive crossing the river, and 1850s locomotive. It shows a boy leaning on his elbow who is watching cows and he's dressed in rustic clothing. It shows the fledgling city behind the train where there is smoke coming up. It shows the mountains and it shows the sky.
I've learned a lot about the painting over time, and it's really a story in itself. And so, the memoir is framed by seven pieces of writing, seven essays about my journey with the painting, going from my childhood view and understanding of it to what I understand about it now.
And now, I have a completely different perspective from when I first saw it as a child, when i tried to locate my place, my home in that painting.
MC: It was a long time ago that we discussed this, and I looked at a copy of that
painting and I've never forgotten it.
CY: It's an iconic painting. The way it's made, it turns out, it draws all your attention to the center.
It makes your eyes move up the middle to the mountains, and half of the painting is sky. Your eyes go up the sky, they drop down, and you go through the
same experience over and over. It was designed way. Landscape paintings gave
people a way of looking instead of motion pictures – which they didn't have. That was their motion picture!
MC: They supplied the motion.
Oh, Catherine, it has been such a joy talking with you. I want everyone to go back to the archives and listen to this program. I'll tell them so. You keep in touch with me about how you're doing, and boy, when that memoir comes out, let me know because I'm going to tell everybody.
CY: Thanks so much Marshall, it was a really fun. Have a lovely day.
MC: You, too, thank you so much.
That's Catherine Young. Our special guest today, memoirist, soon to be teacher on writing memoir. A poet, songwriter, and radio personality on WDRT.
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