Remembering Diana Wynne Jones

A few days ago a friend let me know that my favorite author, Diana Wynne Jones had passed away. I’m actually pretty devastated by this. No, this has nothing to do with Living History, but I felt I could not let this moment go by without telling everyone about this amazing author.

I came across my first novel by Diana Wynne Jones on the bargain table at a bookstore near my grandmother’s house. That day I purchased Jones’ Charmed Life, Still life with Wings, by Susan Kohn Green and Ashar of Quarious by Clare Cooper. I read them all voraciously, and have re-read them since. The one I re-read the most times was Charmed Life. Then a few years later I was browsing the little shelf of paperbacks that the 10th grade English teacher kept in his classroom. I picked up a Tale of Time City without realizing it was by the same author as Charmed Life. I devoured the book, I loved the characters, the story, the intense sense of danger mixed with amazing amounts of fun. I read it again. I read it again and kind of forgot to return it. I’m sorry Mr. Brandt.

A few years later I was working at a bookstore and playing around in the Books-In-Print database and decided to type in Tale of Time City to see what else I could find. This was in a time before wide internet availability, before Amazon, before Google. I was amazed to learn that the person who wrote Time City had also written Charmed Life, and many other books too! In fact, the store I was working in had copies of all of the books in the Dalemark Quartet. I think I hid them on the shelves until I could purchase them all. These books were a little different, a little more melancholy with a sense of the historic about them, but as a high school senior that suited me fine.

Over the next bunch of years I collected as many Diana Wynne Jones books as I could find. When Amazon.co.uk came along I even splurged on shipping and got some of the ones I could not find in the US. Many years later while living on Cape Cod and working at a different bookstore I found Deep Secret. It is to this day my favorite book. When my brother came to visit me, I asked if I could read aloud to him. I knew it was a strange request, he was a teenager, and we only had a few days before he went home, but he agreed and I started in on Deep Secret. Once we started, we did almost nothing else for days. He’d read sometimes, but most of the time he let me read, and I so enjoyed every minute. We actually did not finish the book until we were in the parking lot where were met up with Mom so she could pick him up and bring him home, but it was so worth it. I hear he has since read it aloud to a few female friends, lucky girls.

Not too long after, the Miyazaki movie version of Howl’s Moving Castle came out. There was only one theater on Cape Cod that played it, I think there were only three people in the theater the night I saw it. The main parts of the plot were there, but the characters were Miyazaki characters. They were not flawed yet lovable, they were not funny. The magic was so predictable, and not breathtakingly original like the book.  But I guess for a book adaptation it was not bad, it meant that the bookstore I was working at stocked more of her books, and I was able to pick up a few more of the tough to find titles.

When I met Stephen, one of the first gifts I gave him was a copy of Dogsbody. At the time he might not have realized that I was sharing with him a deep love in my life, but since then he’s figured it out. On the nights that we are laying in bed reading and I start hooting uncontrollably, or if he has to rush into the living room where I’ve been quietly reading for hours because he’s worried I’m hyperventilating, he inevitably discovers me reading a Diana Wynne Jones book. LOL has become a horrible cliché, but her books truly do make me gasp and roll about, even on the 2nd reading. Even on the 10th. I LOVE her sense of humor, it jumps right off the page at me.

I took Conrad’s Fate and Merlin Conspiracy with me to Ireland on vacation. When Stephen bought us both kindles, I got most of the Chrestomanci series in electronic format so I could always carry them around with me. During my first Christmas with nieces and nephews, I got the oldest girl copies of the first 4 Chrestomanci books, and let her know there were plenty more if she wanted them. In times of great stress I will almost inevitably curl up with a Diana Wynne Jones book, one that I have read 6 or 7 times, and am planning to read at least 100 more.

I know I will always have her books, that they will still comfort me and delight me, but it still makes me so very sad to think that she is gone from this world.

Neil Gaiman's Tribute
Emma Bull's Tribute
The School Library Journal

I also recommend typing "remembering Diana Wynne Jones" into Google. She may not have been incredibly well known, but by those who know her works she is extremely loved.

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First Person Blogs

Some blog entries are easy to write. Others, for no particular reason, I agonize over and the writing just comes out all stilted and weird. This is one of those posts. I am determined to put it up though! So here goes:

Among all my blog searches, rss feeds, and quest for all things Living History related on the internet I come across some beauties every once in a while. Today I want to tell you about blogs from the first person perspective. Yup, blogs written as if they were in a different time, far removed from our own. There are basically two different styles these blogs can take: actual historical text, just digitized in blog form; or reenactors and modern folks writing as if they were a historical character.

Historical texts

Every day I learn about more and more primary source material that is being digitized and made available on the web. Most of these are in archives or library collections, but some of them --particularly those that were written as diary entries in the first place-- are put up bit by bit, blog-style. A blog that I have been enjoying written by "Two Nerdy History Girls" had a post that contains a good list to be starting with here check the comments of this post  too, tons more are mentioned.

Modern Interpretations

There are a few reenactors out there that are writing blogs from the perspective of the persona they are portraying. My favorite is this colonial impression and this later impression, of a doctor both done by the same individual. He wavers between totally history based posts, and some the wink at the current era, but I find he does a great job balancing both.

There are a few blogs that I’m not sure if the writers are reenactors, or what their relationship is to the history they are writing about this Mozart blog is a bit of a mystery to me, but still fascinating. A now solved mystery is about the author of Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog in fact, there was so much mystery and hype about that blog, that a bunch of medieval scholars have written a book about it! I have not yet read the book, but it is on my Amazon wish list!

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Sentimental Story

When I was 12 or 13 I was almost too old for the children’s section of my local library, but I was not old enough for the adult section. I was a late bloomer so I found myself reading more and more as my friends and classmates all went through puberty and got (in my eyes) weirder and weirder. I read books that that were not too lengthy, too depressing, or about falling in love, and was always looking for more books. One day in the kids section in the basement of my local library I found a set of thin books about a girl named Kristin, living in 19th Century America, and next to that was a set of books on a girl named Samantha living at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, and next to that a set on Molly, who lived through World War II. The books were fiction, but they had non-fiction history bits at the end, and each series of books followed the girls through a year of their lives. They had adventures, they went to school, celebrated holidays, got into fights with siblings, and generally acted like girls. No falling in love, no moping about, and doing it all in lovely dresses and interesting times.

I enjoyed all the books, read them all more than once, and in a fit of great rebellion and daring (I still feel guilty) I cut a reply-mail card out of the back of one of the library books and sent for the American Girl catalog. It turned out there were dolls that went with the books, gorgeous dolls with all the clothes from the pictures, plus doll furniture, accessories, and of course the books. I loved the catalog almost more than the books. It came in the mail quarterly, and was thrilling every time. I carried it around in my school bag, I read it cover to cover, over and over. Though I asked my parents and my grandparents for one of the dolls, I knew they were much too expensive. Instead I made lists of all my favorite accessories, I’d mix and match from the different time periods, and make my dream doll, I’d dream about owning all of the book sets in beautiful maroon slip covers. I did not actually get to purchase the books until I was 16 and according to my mother much too old for that sort of thing. But we found them on sale at a discount store, and I did read and reread them. Meanwhile my brother had discovered that he could take the cards out of the back of my catalogs and embarrass his friends by signing them up for a subscription to the American Girl Catalog delivered 4 times a year (very embarrassing for a teenaged male I’m told.)

While I was still receiving the catalog American Girl added a number of girls to the three I knew and loved. Felicity was the colonial girl, Addy escaped from Slavery during the Civil War, and Josephina grew up in what was Mexico before the southwestern states joined the union. They came out with a magazine, which I decided could never be as thrilling as the catalog. Besides, I was getting too old even in my own mind. After I was in high school and college and only peripherally aware of the goings on in American Girl they came out with baby dolls, modern dolls, and added a depression era girl and a Native American girl to the mix. I did hear about developments from time to time, in bookstores, and the occasional catalog, but for the most part they dropped off my radar. Until I started working at Strawbery Banke Museum.

I worked at Strawbery Banke Museum for a year in between my sophomore and junior years of college as an interpreter, or glorified tour guide. As one of the younger interpreters I was asked to work in the American Girl program during the summer.

It turns out there are a number of museum around the US licensed to run programs based on the books and dolls. There is only one museum program allowed specifically based on each of the historical dolls, so only Colonial Williamsburg can run programs on “Felicity”, the Colonial doll. Strawbery Banke has (or at least had) the license to run the “Molly” program to correspond with their WWII program. In this program the participants (mostly girls and their families) pay an extra ticket price and get a special tour of the museum, they get to meet characters from the time period (not Molly though because all the girls on the tour represent Molly) do activities that Molly does in the book (for WWII it was collect scrap metal and make purchases using a ration book) and have lunch from the time period (the poor 1945 girls get peanut butter and fluff sandwiches.)

The folks who staffed the program were all the younger interpreter/tour guides (we represented the camp councilors like when Molly went to summer camp.) The kids who went on the tours tended to either know a lot about the story, or know nothing about World War Two at all but from what I could tell they all enjoyed a museum program designed especially for them. Younger brothers enjoyed the Fluff sandwiches if nothing else. I liked working the program, though Molly was the least interesting to me, being the doll closest to modern times. I did not tell my fellow interpreters about my earlier obsession with the books and dolls, we were all college students, and above that sort of materialism.

While I was working on the program American Girl was bought by Matel, which was a huge disappointment to me, I hoped that American Girl would not change too much, but did not hold out a great deal of hope. At the end of that summer American Girl, the books and the dolls, dropped out of my life for the second time. Or more precisely, I was no longer keeping track of American Girl. I did not think about American Girl again until I acquired pseudo-nieces and nephews.

I now often spend Christmas with my boyfriend’s family and his siblings’ children. Giving gifts to kids can be a lot of fun, it is the chance to introduce another generation to all of the things that I loved as a kid. After the first couple of Christmases giving my favorite books and giving a lot of cool toys, I dared think about American Girl again. The 13 year-old was probably too old, and the 7 year old might be too young, but I dared to hope that the 7 year old could grow into it, and convinced a number of people to go in with me (the dolls are still darned expensive) to get Tessa the Felicity books and doll. I enjoyed my time browsing through the online catalog, and picking out a doll and some accessories, but that was nothing compared to the day that the box arrived on my doorstep. I came home from work and saw the box, lightly dusted with snow, in that telltale shape, and my heart beat a little faster. I had been waiting for 15 years for a package of that size and shape to show up on my doorstep, and while it was not for me, it was still thrilling. I did not attend the Christmas celebrations at which the books and doll made their debut, but I’m told that Tessa loved the books, was amazed by the doll, and (perhaps more telling) her older sister expressed her desire for an American Girl doll and promised she was not too old at all. (Maybe next year Alyssa.)

As for myself, when Stephen and I exchanged gifts that Christmas, there was a suspicious shaped box in my pile, and I did not get much past a corner of the wrapping before I was in tears. I received Samantha Parkington, my own American Girl, when I was 29. Some things are worth waiting for.

At the end of 2008 American Girl retired Samantha Parkington, the Victorian-era girl and the first book and doll set ever made. You can no longer buy Samantha, her outfits and accessories. Today the historical doll and book sets are only a small part of American Girl’s offerings, with baby dolls, modern dolls, and books and magazines on topics for modern girls (hair braiding, peer pressure, and many more.) It is my hope that the Samantha retirement is not the first of many more. There are those of us out there who love the dolls not just for their book tie-ins, but also for their historical subjects. And childhood dreams can be fulfilled many years later.

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Personal Ghosts

Most of us carry personal ghosts in our hearts and in our memories. Those of us who have portrayed historical people sometimes carry ghosts from long ago.

Point of Dreams a novel by one of my favorite authors Melissa Scott, and her partner Lisa Barnett incorporates a very interesting premise, that of the ghost tide. In Point of Dreams, a historical based fantasy, ghosts are very real and astrology rules everyone’s lives. So when the stars are right everyone’s “personal ghosts” make themselves felt more strongly than any other time. In the story it is not necessarily a scary thing, in fact most of them are a comforting presence. An old woman who misses the companionship of her sister can talk to her again, the main character hears the patter at his heels of his favorite childhood pet. My favorite part of the ghost tide concept comes when it is revealed that one of the characters is haunted by a long dead king of his native land. He is of no relation to this king, but having studied the king and made contact, he will be greeted by the king every ghost tide.

Most of us carry personal ghosts inside us, in a much less manifest way of course. But we know people who have died, that we think about, care for, and all that. Some of us, especially those who have made history a part of our lives, may have ghosts from places and times well removed from our own but have quite a strong connection with.

The first specific person that I portrayed as a costumed roleplayer was Martha Wheelwright, poor widow of a sea captain, in the Wheelwright house at Strawbery Banke Museum. When her husband died and left her with a lot of debt the 26 year old Widow Wheelwright was granted permission to live in one third of her husband’s house after it was sold. On quiet mornings at the museum I sat in her kitchen and thought and thought about what it would have been like to be Martha. Was she angry, depressed, resigned to her fate? Was it as quiet in her kitchen as it was right now? I was never able to learn much more about her than my initial research revealed, but I thought a lot about her, and think about her still. Martha Wheelwright has become one of my personal ghosts.

Oh the things I would ask her if there really was a ghost tide. I’ll leave out a soul cake tomorrow just in case.

Photo of Alena (not in costume) and Nate Shumway at Wheelwright house, 1999, photo by Don Shumway. Read this entry on entry page