Day dawned cloudy and raining. Just what we wanted. Up at first light. Fetched Dave Bubier, holding down the lead role of Lester Darrow. He brought the guns. Drove to Roberta and David Manter, gracious providers of the perfect location. Met up with producer Dean Gyorgy (dgmediaarts.com) and his wife Margot, playing the lady from Massachusetts. Dean scouted out the the best camera angles, called for Lester Darrow to come on set. Mounted his Canon 5D Mark II on his Manfrotto monopod and began shooting.
Change of scene. Packed up gear and drove down road for car scene, where Lester Darrow ties the lady from Massachusetts to the steering wheel.
A few last sound clips to capture.
Two hours later and it was all in the can.
I had a feeling this was going to be good when the first thing Dean did was ask to read the book. Then he came to me with a shooting script. I was expecting the usual author interview, cover shot, etc. etc. BORING. Dean captured the essence of the key characters, cast them just right, embraced the location, hit all the crucial plot points, and gave me drama. I love his respect for what his camera can do. The stills do the job of stills; the video does its job. He knows how to build audio. Has great instincts. Kept it true to the book. Stacatto, gritty, honest.
The only thing I didn’t like were the mosquitoes. Dean, next time, no mosquitos.
March in Spring Bear‘s Soper’s Mills is pretty much like March in Dover-Foxcroft, Guilford or Milo — snow’s melting, roads are muddy, flu season’s on the wane, and it sure feels good to get outside.
The time had come to bring Spring Bear home.
The Thompson Free Library booked me into a comfy B&B in Dexter. I took along copies of the book, a GPS device, a cell phone and a supply of cough drops. For three days, I drove from Dover-Foxcroft to Guilford to Milo, talking about writing, the creative life, self-publishing and, of course, Evvie Mallow. The students were shy, surprising, funny, serious, awkward, graceful. (A single word describing middle and high schoolers just does not exist.) Simply being in their lives for a moment is a gift. The teachers and librarians all shoulder a big mission: to bring literature to young minds.
What’s not to love about that?
More trips coming this fall and spring, with books for classroom use funded by the gracious Maine Arts Commission.
“Kids up here in this rural county need to know what’s going on outside of their schools and dooryards,” the charming school librarian at Piscataquis Community in Guilford told me.
So I’m giving it my all.
In just two weeks I’ll be speaking on “Living a Creative Life in Today’s World,” on Tuesday, March 15 at 7 p.m at the Thompson Free Library. I’ll also read from my work, sign books and speak to students in high school classrooms in Dover-Foxcroft, Guilford and Milo on March 15, 16 and 17.
For sure I’ll read from Spring Bear, set in a place very much like the three Maine towns I’ll be visiting. But I probably won’t be able to resist a paragraph or two from the introduction to Back From Tobruk, myfather Croswell Bowen’s long-lost WW II memoir, about Rommel’s brutal destruction of Tobruk, which Potomac Press will publish in 2012.
And I’m closing in on finishing Truth Teller: Portrait of a Liberal in Times of Fire, on how history transformed my father into a crusading liberal journalist.
Just have to read a bit from that, you bet.
But what will I say to those kids? Here’s what I’m thinking.
“Just like any of the arts, whether it’s painting or poetry, songwriting or making movies, writing is not about getting recognition. It’s about taking chances, keeping at it, taking joy in learning how to communicate things you care about to other people. I didn’t ‘get serious’ about writing until a catastrophic accident made me decide life was too short not to do what I love to do. For me, that’s writing. The digital revolution has changed everything for artists, making it possible for just about anyone to get their creative work ‘out there’. But the most important things are still the same: honoring your creativity and learning how to express it.”
People have choices to make in life, and deciding what choice to make
can take time and a lot of thought. Have you ever made a decision as
difficult as Evvie’s or known anyone who did? What was the decision
and what were the factors that you/the person considered?
Do we always know if we’ve made the right decision?
Did Evvie make the “right” decision?
What were the factors that she weighed in making her decision?
What makes a “right” decision?
Was Evvie’s life happy?
Would making a different decision have given Evvie a happier life?
FAMILIES
What went wrong in Evvie’s family?
What was right about Evvie’s family?
TIME AND PLACE IN THE STORY
Could this story take place now? Why? Why not?
Could it take place in a city?
SEQUEL/PREQUEL
If you wanted to write a sequel to this story, what would it be?
Kenneth Gorrell found the manuscript of this book (by UPI reporter Henry Gorrell, his first cousin twice removed) in an attic. He wouldn’t have, had the two sides of his family not been disinherited and un-disinherited from their New Hampshire homestead. He had the crumbling onionskin pages re-typed, did research to amplify and modernize the text, and wrote an introduction. He thinks Gorrell’s life was shortened by the stresses of the war.
Just as for me, the internet made his research so much more possible, helping him get in touch with members of his extended family — Henry Gorrell’s grandson and through him, Henry’s three children.
One problem he had, I did not have. Chunks of his text had been razored out by the censors. Croswell Bowen ignored censors (although he didn’t always get away with it).
You just never can tell what you’ll run into. “Back from Tobruk” has a missing relative, and tomorrow I’ll know more.
I’m going to a Virginia Festival of the Book talk by Kenneth Gorrell, who discovered in an attic the manuscript that became “Soldier of the Press: Covering the Front in Europe and North Africa, 1936-1943.” It’s a WW II memoir written by his grandfather’s cousin, UP reporter Henry Gorrell, and just published by the University of Missouri Press.
Gorrell and my Dad had much in common. They were both storytellers — Gorell with his dispatches; Dad with his camera and notebooks. Both could not find publishers for their memoirs when they came home, so they simply dropped them and went on with their lives. They married, had children, found work they believed in. Gorrell started a newspaper in Washington DC; Dad worked as a journalist and biographer. Both suffered from the psychological wounds of war, and I’m wondering if Kenneth Gorrell, like me, thinks there’s a story in the subtle ways those manifest themselves even among the “tough guys.”
It is not often that a fiction writer can capture the complete, vivid flavor of a full story in less than 100 pages, but Betsy Connor Bowen has done it with her debut book, SPRING BEAR. Bowen is a journalist and filmmaker who lives in central Maine. Although she has published numerous articles and made several short films, this is her first novel, a gripping Maine tale of “rich land, poor people, hard living.” This slender, self-published novella is a masterpiece of concise writing where every phrase and sentence is important. No words are wasted, yet she does not sacrifice the story’s plot, atmosphere, suspense or emotion for brevity. This is a grim story of a family falling apart under the weight of poverty, hard times, bad luck and worse decisions, and a young teenage girl’s desperate effort to make things right. Evvie Mallow is a fourteen year old girl, born and raised in the Maine woods. Her father was badly injured in an accident and is basically alive but unaware of anything. Her long-suffering mother is stoic, trying to make ends meet, fearful of being alone. Evvie is smart and feisty, and she hates Lester Darrow, rough woodsman who traps and kills bears illegally and who is making the moves on her mother while her father sits in the living room, silent and unblinking. Evvie is desperate to escape this unhealthy home, but gets pregnant, making her options fewer and her desperation greater. Evvie’s two life-determining decisions focus on the baby and Lester, and her actions are stunning and final – setting her up for a lifetime of guilt – but knowing she did the right thing in both cases. And only a kindly, perceptive game warden knows the truth. This is a fabulous story well told.
Bill Bushnell lives and writes in Harpswell, Maine.
(c) Bill Bushnell, Kennebec Journal ON BOOKS Sunday, November 15, 2009
Kirkus Discoveries wrote:
Survival of the fittest in a remote Maine village.
In her first novella, documentary filmmaker Bowen sympathetically depicts the hardscrabble life of 14-year-old Evvie Mallow, one of the otherwise forgotten residents of tiny Soper’s Mills, Maine. The lives of the entire Mallow family change dramatically the day high winds fell a giant oak, crushing the cab of Henry Mallow’s truck and part of his skull. No longer capable of speech or performing the simplest of tasks, Evvie’s father, Henry, nonetheless remains his family’s primary breadwinner as Evvie and her mother, Bessie, now survive mainly on his insurance money.
Henry’s unlikely tragedy draws the attention of Lester Darrow, an unsavory bear-poaching local, who opportunistically comes to roost with Bessie, much to Evvie’s disapproval. In Evvie’s view, Darrow exacts on her and her mother the same degree of heartless cunning he employs while trapping a mother bear whose young cubs huddle round her dying body for warmth. When Evvie learns she is pregnant a couple months after her very first summer romance has ended–and the father, whose last name she never learned, has left the state–she decides the best way for her unborn child to escape this unrelenting circle of hardship is to be given up for adoption. Ever the antagonist, Darrow steps in to thwart Evvie’s escape plan, at which point she takes over, summoning courage and a resolve she didn’t know she had.
Bowen’s roundly atmospheric setting nicely complements the slow-brewing tension among characters, offering as full a portrait of her intimate cast of characters as of the daily challenges of their class and naturalistic village ways. The book engagingly explores loneliness and the moral relativity involved in valuing one’s fellow creatures, and is engaging from the very first page.
A life journey of many decades led me to a place in my imagination named Soper’s Mills, where the people who live there are not ‘fast food.’ They are your mother’s meatloaf – baked in a woodstove, with gravy like nobody else makes, garden vegetables – you can’t get it anywhere else. Not in a million years. I love these people and I love writing about them. [ read on ]
You just never can tell what you’ll run into. “Back from Tobruk” has a missing relative, and tomorrow I’ll know more.
