First Yesterday, Then Today

As sometimes happens, yesterday I started writing a post that I didn't finish, so today I'll show you what I wrote yesterday, and then I'll write what I want to say today, which is actually based on something I read yesterday. Tomorrow I'll write something about tomorrow...maybe. Who's on first?

Before I go any further, I need to set the record straight (so to speak). I didn't provide a lot of details about my short stay in Edmonds because, as you may recall, I've taken a vow not to whine/complain/gossip, etc. But if I gave the impression that I was staying with Rick Steves, I need to disabuse you of that notion. I just dropped his name because Greg told me Mr. Steves lives in Edmonds, that's all. Now that we've cleared that up...

Last night (which was actually night before last, are you with me?) I had dinner with my charming new host, Diane, of the lovely garden. I brought to the feast a baking potato and fresh cherries, which are all the rage in Washington this time of year (cherries, that is, not potatoes). Diane provided leftover chicken thighs that she baked using the Pillsbury Bake-Off-million-dollar-prize-winning recipe, invented by a woman she knows! Here's the recipe:

(This is where I stopped yesterday because Diane wasn't home and I couldn't get the recipe. I just called the house to see if I could come in and get it now but the machine picked up so I still don't have it. But it's a good one and it's coming, I promise.)


So here's what I just wrote today:

Wednesday, July 1, 2009
What I want to share today is inspired, once again, by The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor, for June 30, 2009, who writes:

"On this day in 1936 Margaret Mitchell's (books by this author) novel Gone With the Wind was first published.

"In 1920, Mitchell fell off a horse and suffered terrible injuries. She sort of recovered from the fall, but she kept reinjuring herself in different ways, and a few years later she had to quit her job as a reporter with The Atlanta Journal and stay in bed. Her husband, a newspaper editor, would go to the Atlanta library and bring her back piles of books to read so she could occupy herself while bedridden. One day, he came home and said, 'I have brought you all of the books that I think you can handle from the library. I wish you would write one yourself.'

"He then went out and got a Remington typewriter. When he presented it to his wife, Margaret, he said, 'Madam, I greet you on the beginning of a new career.' She asked him what she should write about, and her editor-husband gave her the famous 'Write what you know' line.

"So she wrote about Southern belles, and she expanded upon family stories and the stories she'd heard from Civil War veterans while she was growing up in Georgia. The one-bedroom apartment that she and her husband lived in was cramped, and she called it "The Dump." She would sit and write in every nook and corner of the tiny place, working in the bedroom or the kitchen or the hallway.

"She told almost no one except her husband that she was writing a novel. When friends came over to their place, which happened often, she'd hide the manuscript under the bed or the couch.
But one of her Atlanta friends, Lois Cole, had found chunks of the manuscript lying around that cramped apartment. Cole was now living in New York City and working in the publishing industry. Cole told her boss at Macmillan, Harold Latham, that her witty Southern friend 'might be concealing a literary treasure.'

"Latham went down to Atlanta to pay Margaret Mitchell a visit and ask her about the novel. Mitchell denied its existence. He spent the day with her, following along on outings with her friends, and asked about the novel again in a car full of her girlfriends. Mitchell changed the subject. But when Latham got out of the car, all of her friends in the car kept up the questioning. One friend was adamant that Mitchell was working on a novel, and asked why she hadn't shown it to Latham. Mitchell said that it was 'lousy' and that she was 'ashamed of it.' The friend goaded, 'Well, I dare say. Really, I wouldn't take you for the type to write a successful book. You don't take your life seriously enough to be a novelist.'

"That did it — Margaret Mitchell was furious and galvanized. She hurried back to her cramped apartment, grabbed the assorted piles of manuscript and shoved them into a suitcase, and drove it over to the hotel where Latham was staying. When stacked up vertically in one pile, the manuscript was 5 feet high. She delivered it to him in the lobby, saying, 'Take it before I change my mind.'

"It was published on this day in 1936, and immediately it was a sensation. Reports abound of people in Atlanta staying up all night to read Mitchell's novel that summer of 1936. It revitalized the publishing industry (italics mine). The next year, Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize. Her book was made into a movie starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, and when it had its premiere in Atlanta in 1939, Margaret Mitchell was there at the Loew's Grand Theater with the movie stars.

"The cramped apartment in which Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind is now the centerpiece of the Margaret Mitchell House in midtown Atlanta, which reopens this weekend after a long period of renovation. There are tours of the apartment, historical performances, and a museum devoted to her life and work."

Now that is a story about a writer who wasn't a writer until she wrote a Pulizer Prize-winner that, for some reason, does not intimidate me, probably because although I never read the book, I didn't particularly like the movie. It makes me think, geewhiz, if Gone With the Wind can be a prize winner surely I can write something as good as that. Well...I could if I wanted to! And if I did, I wouldn't tell you!

Here's a pithy little poem for you while you're waiting for my epic novel.

Tara Revisited

Margaret Mitchell stole a pickle
All on a summer’s day
When Margaret Mitchell ate the pickle
Here’s what she had to say:
As God is my witness,
I’ll never be hungry again!

July 1, 2009
Seattle

(And I suppose she wasn't, damn her eyes.)