Those Other Christian Writers

If I were to take a straw poll of everyone reading this blog, most would give ACFW an enthusiastic “thumbs up.” We appreciate the information, training, and camaraderie we share in this organization of evangelical Christian writers. We feel at home here.  However, here’s an important fact we might overlook:

Not all Christian writers are evangelicals.

Some are devout Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christians while others come from mainline Protestant denominations. They may have beliefs quite different from ours, but they write for the glory of Jesus Christ. For example, this month Christian Theological Seminary will sponsor a Christian writers’ conference in Indianapolis in which none of the conference leaders will be ACFW members. I doubt that any of them would call themselves evangelicals, yet they are all best-selling Christian authors.

We should not ignore or shun these other Christian writers. Let’s remember what happened when Jesus’ disciples complained that some unaffiliated preachers and healers were working in their territory. Jesus told them to treat these other Christians as Christians nonetheless. (See Mark 9:38-41; John 10:14-16.)

Here are some ways that I believe we can respond more constructively to Christian writers who are not like us:

Seek opportunities to learn from them. Other writers can teach us a great deal about the discipline of writing, techniques for marketing, and so one. We don’t have to agree with their theology to learn writing skills. (If you’d like to know more about that conference in Indianapolis, follow this link.)

Visit their worship services. Be a keen observer of differences between their manner of worship and  your own. It’ll help you appreciate how these writers think. It’ll also enable you to create more authentic characters from these traditions.

Affirm the diversity of God’s family. Unbelievers pay close attention to what we say about other Christians, and so do those we talk about! Instead of criticizing their beliefs or behavior, let’s express wonder at the breadth of Christ’s love. We can say, “I’m so glad the Lord brought us together. I believe we can learn a lot from each other, don't you?”

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth and daughter Heather.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Dealing with Religion

Both Desert Jewels and Creating Esther are written for a secular audience, but religion was a part of both cultures. Some mention was necessary for authenticity.

That wasn’t a problem with Desert Jewels. Although most Japanese Americans were Buddhist, many were Christians, and that included the person I used as my model. So I made my protagonist a Christian and avoided the issues I would have faced if she were Buddhist.

It wasn’t as easy with Creating Esther. Yes, some Native Americans were Christians by then, but it was still an anomaly. And the boarding schools did not understand how to integrate Christianity into the local culture. Since I wanted to show a realistic picture of what it would be like for most of the children attending the Indian boarding schools in 1895 and 1896, I had to include the conflict between Ojibwe religious beliefs and Christianity as taught by the boarding schools. My challenge was to be sensitive to Native American religious practices while remaining true to my Christian beliefs.

In the end, I decided to show the conflict between the two without resolving it. Here is a passage from the protagonist’s first boarding school Christmas:

“What is Christmas?” Ishkode asked Mrs. Hansen. “Everyone talks about it coming next week, but what is it?”

“It’s the day Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus.”

Even though Ishkode had been attending chapel every Sunday for three months, she still didn’t understand who Jesus was. Sometimes he sounded like Wenebojo, who was born of a human mother and a spirit father. But she had asked a minister after chapel one day, and he said Wenebojo was not Jesus.

Now Ishkode rubbed her forehead. It was too confusing.

Actually, the book even shows the negatives about how the boarding schools practiced and taught Christianity. The Christianity I found in my research is not the Christianity I find in my Bible. I’m sure many of the teachers and administrators were sincere, but they were also misguided.

Boarding school staff tried to convert the Native American students by forcing religion on them. That approach doesn’t work in life, and it doesn’t work for fiction writers, either.

So use a soft touch when writing about religion.

__________

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. Desert Jewels is searching for a home, and Creating Esther has just begun circulating to publishers. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Language Issues, Part II

As with everything else, dealing with language usage in Creating Esther was much more challenging than it was in Desert Jewels. Except for an aunt and uncle who don’t appear very often, everyone in Desert Jewels is fluent in English, and it’s the only language my protagonist knows. In an attempt to get the aunt and uncle right, I based their customs and speech on real characters described in memoirs. Desert Jewels also used a few Japanese words, which I included in a glossary. Overall, however, language was a minor consideration.

Creating Esther is very different. At the beginning of the book, Ishkode understands some English but speaks and thinks in Ojibwe. Once she reaches the boarding school, she still thinks in Ojibwe but is forbidden to speak it. So how do I distinguish between the different languages without confusing my readers?

A second issue is how to write the dialogue and text when Ishkode and her friends speak or write English. At a conference I attended last year, a speaker said that broken English and grammar errors tell the reader that the character is unintelligent, even when that is neither the reality (to the extent fiction reflects reality) nor the message the author intended to convey. The speaker said the better option is to keep the character’s English sentence structure and vocabulary simple at first and to make them more complicated as the character learns the language. Good advice, and something I may not have thought of on my own.

I bought a number of books to help me bridge these language barriers, including two scholarly studies on how students acquired English language skills in the boarding schools, two basic books on Native American sign language (which I ended up not using), and two Ojibwe dictionaries. But although they gave me some help, I had to figure it out myself.

So what did I do?

I made Ishkode a quick learner who had been attending the reservation day school for several years, which allowed me to start her with a decent command of English. But her vocabulary and word patterns would still be simpler than in her native language? Since I concluded that all of Ishkode’s narrative thoughts were in Ojibwe, they could be more complex than if they were in English. I didn’t have to simplify them at all.

I still needed to signal which language my characters were speaking when there was dialogue. I solved that problem by specifically stating when people are speaking English in Part I (on the reservation) and Part II (travelling to the boarding school), which tells the reader that the rest of the dialogue was spoken in Ojibwe. I reversed the process for Part III (at the boarding school), which mentions when people are speaking Ojibwe. And yes, Ishkode and her friends do defy the ban on speaking Ojibwe.

As far as I can tell, I have succeeded in distinguishing between the languages without confusing my readers. My beta readers all followed the story, and none of them mentioned any problems with how I handled the language issues.

But it wasn’t an easy puzzle to solve.

__________

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. Desert Jewels is searching for a home, and Creating Esther has just begun circulating to publishers. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Naming Characters, Part II

As mentioned in previous posts, the main character in Creating Esther is an Ojibwe girl who goes to an Indian boarding school in 1895. The practice was to “civilize” the students by giving each of them a traditionally white name. So I had to find two names for my protagonist—an Ojibwe name and a “white” one.

One way that superintendents and teachers chose white names was to compile a list from the Bible and assign the next one. Running through some Biblical names in my head, I settled on “Esther” because it just sounded right. But there was another reason, as well. By the end of the book, my protagonist has made some decisions that put her on the path to saving her people, which is what the original Esther did. My Esther will do it less dramatically and as one of many forces, but the concept works.

Coming up with an Ojibwe name was more challenging. I started by going to one of those baby naming websites and looking for Ojibwe girls’ names. I liked “Keezheekoni” because it supposedly means “burning fire,” and my protagonist has a fiery temperament. Unfortunately, based on the sources I found, it appears to be hard to pronounce.

There was an even bigger problem. While most of the baby name sources list it as a Chippewa name, a couple list it as Cheyenne. Worse, I couldn’t find any of its roots in either A Dictionary of the Ojibway Language by Frederic Baraga or A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe by John D. Nichols and Earl Nyholm. So even though I liked the look and the purported meaning of “Keezheekoni,” I ended up rejecting it.

But the meaning worked well for my story, so I checked both dictionaries for the Ojibwe word for “fire.” Father Baraga’s dictionary listed “ishkote,” while the more modern one used “ishkode.” One letter different, but which is correct?

They probably both are. Ojibwe was originally a spoken language with no written equivalent, and the people who tried to write it down used various spellings. In Red World and White: Memories of a Chippewa Boyhood, author John Rogers says that his new baby brother was named Ahmeek, meaning beaver. But the Concise Dictionary spells beaver a-m-i-k.

In the end, I decided to go with the more modern spelling and name my protagonist Ishkode.

It wasn’t an easy choice, but names matter.

__________

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. Desert Jewels is searching for a home, and Creating Esther has just begun circulating to publishers. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Researching Location, Part II

 

In an earlier post, I wrote about travelling to the place where Desert Jewels took place. I did the same with Creating Esther. I dragged Roland along as I travelled throughout Ojibwe country in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to visit museums and reservations and the shells of former Indian boarding schools.

I already knew, of course, that different tribes had different customs and ways of life. But I didn’t know that a few hundred miles could make a difference within a tribe.

The main elements of Ojibwe life and history were the same at each location. Every exhibit we saw referred to the Ojibwes’ seasonal way of life: collecting maple syrup in the spring, fishing and berrying and planting gardens in the summer, harvesting wild rice in the fall, and hunting in the winter. (Actually, fishing and hunting took place all year long, but they were more predominant at those times.) Families moved from one place to another for these seasonal activities but tended to return to the same spot every spring, every summer, every fall, and every winter. In all regions, the members of the tribe also had the same clan system (although not always the same clans) and the same teachings passed down through their oral history.

But they didn’t all live in the same type of birch-bark housing.

Before we left, I thought all of the earlier Ojibwe lived in birch-bark wigwams with the rounded shape shown in the museum exhibit above. On the research trip, I learned that the construction materials varied somewhat depending on the season. Woven birch-bark mats covered the frame in the hot summer months, which allowed the wall coverings to be raised so that air could circulate through the lower part of the frame. In the winter, the walls were insulated with moss and the floors used a radiant heating system.

All of that was helpful new information, and none of it surprised me.

What did surprise me was that the Minnesota Ojibwe used a birch-bark teepee during the winter. We saw no evidence of this in Michigan or Wisconsin, where winter dwellings were built using the wigwam shape. A guide at the Mille Lacs Indian Museum told us that the teepee shape keeps the dwelling warmer. (Since heat rises, the smaller air space near the ceiling would keep more of the heat down by the floor.) During the warmer months, there were no regional differences—all dwellings were built as wigwams. But the winter shape seems to have been modified as members of the tribe moved farther west and closer to the plains Indians, who lived in animal skin teepees.

 



It isn’t always possible to take research trips to the sites in our fiction, but it has always been worthwhile for me when I had the opportunity. And this one kept me from falling into the pitfalls created by regional differences.

Because honoring regional differences is part of honoring the culture.

__________

I took the first picture at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabek Culture and Lifeways at Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and the second at Grand Portage National Monument in Grand Portage, Minnesota.

__________

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. Desert Jewels is searching for a home, and Creating Esther has just begun circulating to publishers. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Reading Research, Part II

Desert Jewels was easy to research. Not only was I able to interview one couple who had been in the camps when they were about my protagonist’s age, but there were a myriad of memoirs written by people who took the same path. That’s because the events occurred in a short time frame and many of the people who took that path were students or professors at the University of California at Berkeley—including writers and artists who recorded their experiences.

Researching my second middle-grade historical was much harder. As mentioned in my last post, Creating Esther is about an Ojibwe girl who goes to an Indian boarding school at the end of the 19^th Century. There are plenty of memoirs about the Native American boarding school experience, but few come from the right perspective. Most took place several decades later, when the students knew what to expect. Others came from the male perspective or that of a white teacher.

The three most helpful memoirs are (1) three essays by Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin), which can be found in her American Indian Stories; (2) No Turning Back: A Hopi Woman’s Struggle to Live in Two Worlds by Polingaysi Qoyawayma (Elizabeth Q. White); and (3) Red World and White: Memories of a Chippewa Boyhood by John Rogers (Chief Snow Cloud). The Zitkala-Sa essays tell about her experiences as a Native American student and teacher shortly before the time of my story, but they are short on details. No Turning Back begins at about the right time and provides a few more details, but it spans a number of years and is written by a woman from a different tribe than my protagonist. Red World and White provides a more detailed look at Ojibwe (Chippewa) reservation life around the right time but gives little information about the male author’s boarding school experience.

I also read a number of academic books about the Native American boarding school experience or the Ojibwe tribe. Putting all this information together with what I learned from location research, I believe I have portrayed an accurate picture for my readers. But it wasn’t easy.

Picking the right pieces was hard, but cultural respect requires it.

Next month I’ll talk about the location research that helped me understand the broader picture.

__________

The photo at the head of this post shows one of the abandoned buildings from the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School. I took the picture on my research trip last year. And before you ask, I wasn’t intentionally trying to make it look old. Somehow I set my camera to grayscale and didn’t notice it until later.

__________

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. Desert Jewels is searching for a home, and Creating Esther has just begun circulating to publishers. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Native American or Indian, Ojibwe or Chippewa?

 

When writing outside your race or culture, it is particularly important to avoid labels that unintentionally disparage the race or cultural group.

My second middle-grade historical novel, Creating Esther, is about an Ojibwe girl who goes to an Indian boarding school at the end of the 19^th Century. My first dilemma was whether to use “Indian” or “Native American.” I didn’t want to offend anyone by using the word “Indian,” but that was what Native Americans were called at the time of my story, and every boarding school had “Indian” in its name. For historical purposes, that was the best choice. But was it acceptable?

In September I’ll write about my research trip through Ojibwe country in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. For now, it’s enough to say that one of the stops in Minnesota was at the Grand Portage National Monument, where the museum answered my question about using the term “Indian.” I’ll let you read the answer for yourself in the first photo, which I took at the exhibit.

My second question was what to call the tribe itself. The legal name is Chippewa, and that is the name I was familiar with when growing up in Chippewa County, Michigan. But most tribes call themselves Ojibwe (or Ojibwa or Ojibway). Then there is Anishinaabe, which is the older version. Again, I’ll let the exhibit at Grand Portage provide the answer.

 

Based on those exhibits, I ended up using “Indian” and “Ojibwe.”

When writing historical fiction outside your culture, it is important to balance historical accuracy with sensitivity to the feelings of the culture’s members. Sometimes history has to win out, but think carefully about your choice.

And sometimes it’s as easy as asking.

__________

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. Desert Jewels is searching for a home, and Creating Esther has just begun circulating to publishers. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.



Writing Outside Your Culture: The Importance of Interviews

As I researched Desert Jewels, I read a number of memoirs about the Japanese American incarceration and spoke very briefly with one or two people who had been in the camps, but I did not have the opportunity to interview anyone in depth. Then, while we were on a research trip actually visiting the sites in my book, our local newspaper published an article about a Korean War veteran who was willing to serve his country even though he had been incarcerated as a teenager. Friends helped me connect with him, and I discovered that Ken’s wife had been incarcerated in a different camp. (They met after their release.)

I talked to Ken for a short time but spent most of the day with Chiyo.

In the book, my protagonist is incarcerated at Topaz in Utah. Ken was at Gila River in Arizona, and Chiyo was at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. But even though the settings were different, the experiences were similar. Well, not completely. As with anything, personality colors experience.

Ken’s passion was cars, and the only vehicles at Gila River were the trucks owned by the administration. He was in high school but didn’t get involved in sports or other activities. So except for the summer he spent riding around with the garbage men, he felt that his stay at Gila River was wasted time.

Chiyo had a different experience. She has an outgoing personality and attended dances and other activities at Heart Mountain. She also loved ice-skating, and Heart Mountain had long winters. So Chiyo actually enjoyed her time there.

In many ways, the interview simply confirmed what I had already learned from other sources. Even so, it was invaluable because it gave me a stronger sense of the people involved. Not that I didn’t get some of that from the memoirs I read, but there is nothing like sitting across from a living person and listening to his or her stories.

It isn’t always possible for a writer to interview people who have been through the events depicted in a historical novel, especially if everyone is long dead. But if you have the opportunity, take it.

Your story will be better if you do.

__________

A Time Life photographer took a picture of Chiyo’s family at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, but that photo is under copyright and Time Life did not respond to my request for permission to use it. The picture at the head of this post shows the Shikano family and was taken at the Central Utah War Relocation Center (Topaz) on January 3, 1945. Charles E. Mace took the picture as part of his official duties as an employee of the United States government. Because it is a government document, the photo is in the public domain. I don’t know anything about the Shikano family and have include the photograph merely for ambiance.

__________

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Language Issues, Part I

When writing Desert Jewels, I needed to use Japanese names and a few Japanese words to make it authentic. As I mentioned last month, I pronounce words in my head as I read, and I assume many others do, too. I’ve always been lousy at foreign languages, but I did my best to learn basic Japanese pronunciation using Internet and print/CD resources.

My middle-grade readers are unlikely to do that, so I tried to choose names that made it as easy as possible for them to hear the words correctly in their heads. I don’t expect total accuracy, however. Some of the tongue and mouth actions that form the sounds are unfamiliar to most English-speakers, and even the various sources I’ve listened to pronounce the same words differently, much like the use of English across the U.S. (Do you say tomayto or tomahto?) But I wanted to get as close as I could.

I have the biggest difficulty when two vowels are next to each other. Unlike English, in Japanese you get only one vowel to a syllable. That means contiguous vowels are in different syllables and are pronounced separately. At least that’s the theory. Americans have a tendency to run syllables together, and many of the Japanese speakers I listened to did the same thing. It’s even more complicated when the vowels aren’t pronounced as most American readers expect. My natural inclination is to pronounce the name “Keiko” as Kee-koh, when it is really more like Keh-ee-koh.

Although I went out of my way to choose names without two adjacent vowels, I couldn’t avoid words like “Issei” and “Nisei,” which run rampant throughout my manuscript. They were common terms for Japanese Americans and highlighted a distinction that was extremely important at the time. “Issei” were the first generation in America, and U.S. law denied these immigrants the right to become citizens. “Nisei” were the second generation, and they were citizens by virtue of being born here. If I wanted to create an authentic experience, I had to use those words.

I tried incorporating the meanings of Japanese words into the flow of the story, but I also put a glossary at the end of the book. And that’s where the dilemma came in. When I added pronunciation to the glossary, should I have used the technical Japanese phonics, the formal American pronunciation key, or an informal one close to the actual sound?

Take “Nisei.” My language research indicated that the formal Japanese pronunciation should be broken down to something like nee-seh-ee for the three syllables ni-se-i. Online dictionaries all use nē’sā (the formal American pronunciation key indicating that it is pronounced as two syllables with a long e and a long a) or the less formal nee-sey. When I hear it, I hear nee-say. So what did I do?

Given the nature of my audience, I chose nee-say.

What would you have done?

_________

The Japanese characters at the top of this post spell “Nisei” according to Wikipedia.

__________

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Naming Characters, Part I

When I started writing Desert Jewels, my protagonist’s name was Martha. Although her father is Japanese, many Japanese Americans from her generation have European American first names. I chose Martha because it fit the picture I had in my head and seemed to work from both a historical and a cultural standpoint. I also wanted something that was easy for my English speaking readers to pronounce.

Unfortunately, my protagonist referred to her mother—also a main character—as Mama. My online critique partner said that the two M names had her confusing the characters. Since Mama is of Swedish descent, I decided to keep that title and rename my protagonist. I tried Ellen, then Jane, and neither felt right. I ended up with Emi, which is a Japanese name that is easy for English speakers to pronounce.

These issues persisted as I picked names for other characters. To make the story realistic, I needed Japanese first names for some of the children from Emi’s generation as well as for the generation before. Then there are the last names. I pronounce words in my head as I read them, and I assume that at least some of my readers do, too. So I looked for Japanese names that my readers could pronounce correctly.

The biggest roadblock came with names that had two adjacent vowels. (More about that in next month’s post.) I tried to avoid them when I could. For example, Emi’s last name is Katayama, and her Japanese American friends include Toyo and Yuki and Sam and Goro. But the entire process took on greater importance than it had for my previous books.

Because choosing realistic names and pronouncing them properly is part of honoring the culture.

__________

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Researching Location, Part I

As I mentioned in last month’s post, my protagonist in Desert Jewels lives in Berkeley, California when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. She has a Japanese father and a Caucasian mother, but that is more than enough Japanese blood to send her to Tanforan Assembly Center (a converted racetrack) and Topaz Relocation Center.

I wanted to do on-site visits, but I had a significant problem. Tanforan is now a two-level shopping mall, and Topaz is open desert. That means I had to (and did) get most of my knowledge about both from reading memoirs and newspaper archives. Even so, visiting added a sense of place that I couldn’t get from books.

The books told me that Topaz was isolated and desolate. Being there made it real. It took hours of driving through mountains and deserts to get to Delta, Utah, which was the closest town, and then my husband and I drove another half hour in the car before we reached our destination. The residents of Topaz spent two nights and a day on a train to reach it, with each mile taking them farther away from their beloved San Francisco. After transferring to a bus at Delta, they finally arrived at their destination to find nothing but rows and rows of tar-papered barracks in the middle of nowhere.

I grew up in a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and the isolation at Topaz suffocated me. Think how it must have affected people who were born and raised in a major metropolitan area.

Then there was the size. I already knew that the residential part of the camp was a mile square, but that was just a number until I walked and drove it. Now I can’t imagine how they managed to cram 8,000 people, two elementary schools, a high school, a hospital, and a number of offices in such a small space. More suffocation.

 

Topaz was disassembled after the war, and there is very little left at the site. However, part of the original barbed-wire fence still stands, and it confirmed the impression I got from my reading. As you can see from the picture, there was plenty of space to crawl through, and the residents often did. Not to escape, though. The War Relocation Authority used the surrounding land to grow crops and raise animals to feed the people in the camp, and many of the residents worked outside the fence in the agricultural areas. Although the Topaz Times contained frequent pleas not to climb through the fence, many residents used that route as a shortcut to their jobs. (And no, the fence was not electrified.)

Dust storms were a frequent experience for the Japanese Americans who lived in Topaz and other desert camps. Crazy as it may seem, I wanted to experience one while I was there. Unfortunately, it had rained the night before so the dust stayed put. Driving through Utah and Nevada the next day, however, we did see a number of dust clouds in the distance.

At Tanforan, the inhabitants would have felt a different kind of isolation. They were in the middle of a bustling metropolitan area that was closed to them. Still, during the five months they lived there in horse stalls or barracks with gaping holes in the walls, at least they were still in their home state of California. And they were close enough that their Caucasian friends could visit them occasionally.

The building in the middle of this picture is the current BART station. Imagine that it is the grandstand roof and you are sitting there, as many of the residents did in 1942. They could see civilization all around them, but they were forbidden to join it.



From our hotel near Berkeley, it took a hotel shuttle, a bus, the BART (with one transfer), and 2 ½ hours to get to San Bruno, where Tanforan is. On the way back, every connection came right away, and even the hotel shuttle arrived just as we were getting ready to call for it, so the return trip took only 1½ hours. The Japanese Americans made the trip by bus and with no stops or connections, but they also had to contend with traffic. I’m assuming it took them at least two hours, and probably much longer. Hours filled with apprehension and uncertainty.

I did the trip backwards for practical reasons, but at least I did it.

As writers, we can’t always visit the locales we write about, but we should if we can.

Even if everything has changed.

__________

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Reading Research, Part I

In January, I told you why I write outside my culture. This month I’ll tell you how. Not how I write, but how I learn about cultures I don’t belong to and events I didn’t live through.

Have you ever been told to “write what you know”? Some writers think that means they should only write about things they have directly experienced. But if everyone felt that way, we would have no historical fiction, no biographies of long-dead individuals, and no fantasies from Middle Earth.

So what does the phrase really mean? I think it has two components. One is the writer’s reaction in situations that evoke the same emotions. Can I know how my protagonist felt when the government took away her freedom and placed her in what was essentially a prison camp? Not really. But I do know how it felt when my parents punished me by taking away something I really wanted. By remembering that feeling and magnifying it exponentially, I may come close to what my protagonist would have felt.

But it is the other component that I want to concentrate on in this post. To write what you know, you must research, research, and research.

Autobiographies, letters, newspapers, and “as told to” accounts are better than history books for learning what people actually experienced. For more recent events, interviews provide additional information by showing the anguish in the person’s voice and the pauses for composure before talking about certain subjects. I will cover interviews in a later post.

I was fortunate to have good materials available when writing Desert Jewels. I followed the footsteps of Yoshiko Uchida, who lived in Berkeley before Pearl Harbor, was initially incarcerated at Tanforan Assembly Center, and was then sent to Topaz (officially known as the Central Utah Relocation Center). Hers was one of several memoirs by people who were sent along that same path. In addition, the camp newspapers from Tanforan and Topaz are available online. So I had a wealth of information to use when trying to create an authentic experience for the reader.

Using that information, I attempted to capture both the facts and the external and internal reactions they produced. Accuracy is crucial if I want to honor the culture and the people who lived through the events that provide the background for my story.

The main point here is that you and I don’t have to belong to a culture or live through an event to write about it.

But we’d better have done our research.

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The photograph at the head of this post shows the stables that were turned into living quarters for some of the Japanese Americans incarcerated at the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California. The June 16, 1942 picture was taken by Dorothea Lange as part of her official duties as an employee of the United States government. Because it is a government document, the photo is in the public domain.

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Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.

Writing about Other Cultures

I recently completed a middle-grade historical novel about a Japanese American girl who lived in California at the start of World War II. Now that Desert Jewels is circulating to publishers, I am working on my second middle-grade historical. Creating Esther is about a Native American girl who leaves the reservation in 1895 to attend an Indian boarding school.

This year I’m going to depart from the legal theme and write about lessons I’ve learned from writing outside my culture. But I’m going to use this first post to answer the most basic question: Why bother?

It would be easier to stick with what I know, and there are dangers in writing about races and cultures I don’t belong to. These days “political correctness” trumps intent, and many well-meaning authors have been condemned for their perceived insensitivity and bias.

Earlier this month, Scholastic pulled a picture book called A Birthday Cake for George Washington after receiving numerous complaints that it presented a false picture of slavery. The problem wasn’t that the story and the illustrations were incorrect. In fact, the author had done extensive research about George Washington’s slave cook and his relationship with the family, and the illustrator’s work was consistent with the author’s research. The main reason for the complaints was that the illustrations showed smiling slaves. (Although I wasn't able to get a copy of the book, it appears that they were smiling because they took pride in their work, not because they were happy in their lot. In fact, as far as I can tell, the book tries to point out that there is nothing sweet about living in slavery.) To learn more about this controversy and get the author’s side of the story, read her thoughtful blog post at this link: http://www.cbcdiversity.com/post/137284630773/the-first-bite-slicing-through-a-birthday-cake-to.

This isn’t the first time Scholastic has faced a similar controversy. Its Dear America series included a book called My Heart is on the Ground: The Diary of Nannie Little Rose, a Sioux Girl, which takes place at the Carlisle Indian School in 1880. That book covers the same subject as Creating Esther, although my story takes place at a fictional—but realistic—boarding school. While My Heart is on the Ground did show some of the negatives of boarding school life and the efforts to Europeanize the Native Americans, the complaint was that the book didn’t go far enough and that the protagonist ended up embracing the white lifestyle.

I’ve read My Heart is on the Ground and done extensive research on the Native American boarding schools. I agree that the book paints too humane a picture of the experience, but I’m not willing to assume—as some of the commenters do—that the white author was attempting to cover up the truth. And it is well documented that some of the graduates of the Carlisle Indian School did embrace the white lifestyle.

I am half German, one-quarter English, and one-quarter French-Canadian (therefore French) in ancestry, so I am the quintessential European American. I’ve never been subjected to any real discrimination, not even when I was a woman working in a male-dominated industry. So why would I step outside my own experience and risk the criticism that can come from writing about other races?

It’s because European Americans like me need to understand our role in marginalizing people from cultures that are different than ours. This gap can be as wide as the one between Native Americans and European Americans or as narrow as the 19^th Century divide between upper-class English Americans and working-class Irish Americans. But if we want to be part of the solution rather than the problem, we must understand how those events affect the subjects of our prejudice.

While I’m making every effort to avoid the controversy that surrounds A Birthday Cake for George Washington and My Heart is on the Ground, there is no guarantee that I’ll succeed. I have done my best to ensure that Desert Jewels presents a realistic picture of the loss of freedom and the terrible conditions in the incarceration camps. Creating Esther shows the horrors of the boarding school life and the loss of identity resulting from the schools’ mostly unsuccessful attempts to Europeanize the Native American students. But life in the camps wasn’t all misery, and a number of teachers at the Indian boarding schools truly thought they were doing what was best for the students. Those facts are part of the reality, too, and they must be included to paint an accurate picture. But including them may open me up to criticism.

It’s a risk I’m willing to take.

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The photograph at the head of this post was taken at the Raphael Weill Public School in San Francisco, California in April 1942, shortly before the Japanese American children in the picture were sent to incarceration camps. Dorothea Lange took the picture as part of her official duties as an employee of the United States government. Because it is a government document, the photo is in the public domain.

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Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014. The second edition of Kathryn’s first book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, was released on September 30, 2015. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.