Rebecca Henderson

When I first moved to Yunnan in 2000, my cousin sent with me a two-CD album of cover songs by Lyle Lovett for the purpose, she said, of reminding me of Texas. Step Inside This House became my “homesick music” over the next decade in China. The album lives and breathes home for me. If you’re not familiar with it, you should change that. Each of the songs is poetry in the form of words and guitar. I regularly included selections from the album on my playlist when I worked at Mountain Cafe — it just made me happy, in a simple way, to be in tropical Xishuangbanna, palm trees overhead and fruity drink in hand, to hear Lyle singing “Texas River Song” or mentioning places like Waco or Abilene.

Now that I’m back in the States, the songs from Step Inside This House continue to make my regular playlist. I wrote on the blog last August how “West Texas Highway” and “Ballad of the Snow Leopard and the Tanqueray Cowboy” were part of my soundtrack as I looked through my grandparents’ photos and schemed about putting together a book on West Texas. Not long after, that book began taking more definite shape, and I continue to turn to those songs for writing inspiration. As I interviewed my grandparents earlier this year, they would often have the satellite on their TV turned to the honky tonk radio channel, and many of the songs from Step Inside This House would come up, though in their original recordings, rather than in Lyle’s versions — those songs literally became a soundtrack to the book, as my voice recorder picked up the music in the background while we conducted our interviews. Then, when I spent a few extra days in the Fort Davis area after Pat and Randy headed home from our road trip in March, I mainly chose these CDs as my playlist for my solo drives.

And now, as I’m 50+ pages into the writing of the first draft of West Texas Interlude, I come to the part of the story where Bob D and Ann (my grandparents) tell of how they got married at ages 20 and 18, set off in their car for the desert, and started raising a family in the dust and drought of 1950s West Texas. How could I not think of “Bosque County Romance,” the third song in Steven Fromholz’s “Texas Trilogy” that opens the second disk of Step Inside This House? Change the names Billy and Mary to Bob and Ann, and it sounds so similar to stories I’ve heard from my grandparents. It’s a beautiful song, with Alison Krauss singing harmony.

The song is a story of love built on more than passing emotion, built on a life lived together working in the same direction. It’s the same story of love I see in my grandparents — it’s one of many things I’ve learned and seen in them that I aspire to as well.

I’d love to embed a video of it here, but alas, I could not find one. Here are a few of the lyrics instead:

Mary Martin was a schoolgirl

Just seventeen or so

When she married Billy Archer

About fourteen years ago

Not even out of high school

Folks said it wouldn’t last

But when you grow up in the country

You grow up mighty fast

They married in a hurry

In March before school was out

Folks said that she was pregnant,

“Just wait and you’ll find out.”

It came about that winter

One gray November morn

The first of many more to come

A baby boy was born…

Now Billy kept what cattle

His daddy could afford

Bouncing across the cactus

In a 1950 Ford

The cows were sick and skinny

And the weeds was all that grew

But Billy kept the place alive

The only thing he knew

And Mary cooked the supper

And Mary scrubbed the clothes

And Mary busted horses

And blew the baby’s nose

And Mary and a shotgun

Kept the rattlesnakes away

How she kept on smiling

No one one could ever say…

Once again I’ve entered into a new phase on my current work-in-progress, West Texas Interlude. Last week I made a firm step out of the research phase and into the draft writing season of the project.

It was almost two years ago that I began this phase on my first book, a middle grade novel based on the experiences of my friend Lydia in Yunnan. I’m finding, though, that this time around the writing phase is different. For one thing, I’ve been working full-time as a writer for two years now, and the day-in-day-out diligence of a writing schedule is perfectly normal to me now. When I first started writing the novel, I was staying with good friends who I would just as soon have sat around drinking coffee with all morning than hole up in their basement to type on my laptop. It was hard making myself work. Somehow, I don’t know how, that book was eventually written.

The other major difference I’ve noticed so far in writing West Texas Interlude is that the words come much easier because they are in my own voice. The novel was written from the perspective of a 13-year-old Bulang girl. I, as you might be aware, am not a 13-year-old Bulang girl. West Texas Interlude is a non-fiction project based on my own experiences and my family’s stories. It’s just me, writing, talking to my readers (whoever they may end up being). Kind of the same way I write these blog posts. I’ve been developing my voice and style long enough now that I don’t have to work to conjure them up. It’s a wonderfully refreshing feeling, fingertips to the keyboard, words popping up on the screen.

Just as I had the hospitality of several friends in Alaska and Fort Worth to give me living and office space while writing the novel, I have friends here in the Tri-Cities who have opened their homes to me to use while they are at their day jobs. I leave my apartment by 8am each day and head over to my friends’ house to set up my mobile writing office. It’s a great set-up. More so than when I’m working on freelance projects and magazine articles, I need that separation of space from my living quarters to help me feel like, ok, I’m at work now, time to get busy.

In addition to writing West Texas Interlude in the mornings, I’m also working on a new project in the afternoons. I won’t divulge all the details about it yet, but I’ll give you a photo hint from a previous post — way previous, like May 2009 previous.

Lately I’ve been on a quest to overcome my dread of the cold. When I spent the summer in Alaska in 2010, I wrote about resigning myself to the fact that I’m a wimp in the cold. I’m not ashamed: I get cold easily and have to bundle up a bit more than the average person in Washington.

But I’m not going to let the cold stop me. (I will, however, let snowy and icy roads stop me.) I cannot let the four or five months of temperatures consistently below or around 40 degrees keep me from leaving my house everyday. As a full-time writer who works out of a home office, I start to go a bit crazy when I can’t get out for breaks to exercise or talk to people, to see something besides the four walls of my apartment. In Texas you can hunker down and not leave the house during the coldest days of the year — because they last for about four days. In Washington, though, I’ve come to terms with the realities of wearing wool underwear and socks, boots with fuzzy lining, scarves, and hats every day until Easter. I invested in cold weather running tights, so freezing temps don’t keep me from putting in a few miles a week. Long wool tights, socks that come up to my knees, and warm boots allow me to wear dresses and skirts year-round, something I never imagined possible. That one little consolation is helping me endure this winter — I love skirts and got used to wearing them year-round with flip-flops in tropical Yunnan, and I feel distinctly unfeminine if I have to wear jeans for months on end. I’m making the best of it and improvising with cold gear so that I can keep dressing and looking like a girl.

I’m trying not to let circumstances stop me in other areas, as well. At this point in life I don’t have the home furnishings or space necessary to have big groups of people over for dinner or to hang out. Having an open house is important to me, and I want my home to be a place where I can entertain, serve meals, show hospitality to people who might need a place to stay. Right now, I only have enough space around the table for six, and two of those people will need to sit on a patio chair or bar stool. Depending on what we’re eating, I don’t have enough place settings to serve those six. But I’m making do. I’ve determined not to be embarrassed about the little I have and to invite friends over now — not wait until I have a larger kitchen and table and plenty of bowls and plates for a big dinner party. I’m not going to let my limitations stop me. If I don’t invite folks over for dinner now, what makes me think I won’t find another excuse to prevent it in two years?

Writing is another example. It’s easy to wake up each morning and look at all the things I need to get done for my bill-paying freelance jobs, or the chores to be done around the house, and think to myself, “I wish I could be completely care-free and have all the time in the world to write each day.” But that kind of care-free scenario is the stuff of dreams. I can arrange my life so that I have as much writing time as possible, but ultimately I have to just sit down and do the writing, stop looking at all the obstacles, get down to business. I can’t let any number of hesitations or fears or distractions keep me from doing the tasks that will lead to my end goal: completed essays and stories and books.

And now I ask, what about you? What are some areas where you catch yourself saying, “One day when the stars are perfectly aligned, I would love to start doing this or that.” Could you take a small step toward preparing for those possibilities, not letting the present circumstances stop you from enjoying today what you desire for the future?

Writing about family members is a terrifying venture.

I have spent the past 2 1/2 weeks asking my grandparents questions about their lives, recording their answers — while hovering near my grandmother as she sliced brisket to put in the freezer, while sitting on the ottoman at my grandfather’s feet as he flipped through photos on my iPad and recalled the locations and stories belonging to the images. I have attempted to piece together the equipment and techniques involved in land surveying as described by my father and grandfather, men who have known the ins and outs of the profession for decades, to the point that they no longer remember what is common knowledge to mankind and what is only known to surveyors. I don’t even know what it is I don’t know, and I have struggled at times to come up with interview questions. But now I’ve learned what a theodolite is, what a bearing is, how to turn an angle, how to identify a monument or find a corner, and next I will sort out the best way to describe it in the context of West Texas Interlude.

I have 15 hours of recordings from the first research trip and am daunted by the prospect of piecing together the information that belongs to each town, each photo. How will I decide which photos to include, which stories to write, which stories to summarize and which to elaborate upon? How will I organize it all? Which towns will I need to skim over and which ones will require intensive research? Should I focus more on the vacation spots featured in the photos, or on the little towns where the family may have lived for only a few weeks at a time?

But more daunting than any of that — the technical aspects and the artistic decisions — is the prospect of writing a story whose main characters are ones I sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with every year. Ones who held me as an infant. Ones whose opinion and good favor I value more than just about anyone in the world. They are trusting me with their stories, and I will strive to do my best to write them well. I long to approach the stories and the background research with an objective mind, but I cannot deny that my own memories and impressions, my own point of view as a Henderson, color the picture that I lay out on paper. And since I’ve said from the beginning that the book will be a collection of Bob and Ann’s photos and stories combined with my own experience visiting the places they lived, I think it’s OK to allow my impressions to color the process. Still, I tremble at the thought of trying to capture the character of my family on paper, fearful of what they will think of my words, of what I include and what I leave out.

Last week I took an unexpected break from the blog, as some may have noticed. I have several topics lined up, several posts in various phases of almost-writtenness, but I have found myself caught up in the midst of other tasks. At times it’s easy for a self-employed writer to let the time during the day drift off into all sorts of good projects — volunteer work, small writing assignments to help out others, marketing and all the mundane aspects of trying to keep a freelance business (and life in general) afloat. All of these are good projects to be working on, yet they are not writing for my work-in-progress.

As this has happened in the last couple of weeks, I decided that the blog needed to pause for a week or so. I don’t make any income from this blog, and so there are times when I can’t justify spending a few hours a week working on it instead of working on things that will pay the bills or are directly related to my book projects. It makes me sad to pause, because I love the writing I get to do here, but I can’t work on it in good conscience when I should be sending out query letters or doing research instead.

Hopefully things will settle down in the next couple of days, and I will be able to start posting regularly again. I’m eager to flesh out a few topics I’ve been pondering, and I’m also eager to get this done before I begin traveling in mid-November. Look for posts over the next few weeks about giving and sharing, an update on what I’m learning through West Texas Interlude research, my reflections on Jane Eyre, a Quinault Community Garden update, and my plans for travel this fall to Texas for research and to China to visit friends (I’m going to China!!!!).

And now, back to work.

I’m excited, can you tell?

As of last night, we’re past 100%. After the past three weeks of watching that little green line crawl across the widget, the whole bar is filled in. No white space left. The project will be funded on Friday, September 30, at 11:00PM PDT.

THANK YOU, everyone. I am immensely grateful for your help. This has been an emotional few weeks, but I feel very affirmed that this is the right project for me to pursue. I still have plans for more books about Yunnan, especially ones for young adult readers — but for these next few months, I’ll be devoting the bulk of my creative energy towards West Texas Interlude.

Yeehaw!

I’ve posted this before, but I want to say it again — the campaign doesn’t stop at 100%, it stops at 11pm on Friday, September 30. It is very possible to go over the pledge goal. Here’s my plan for the extra money if that happens:

103% ($8,240) = an added trip to Ponca City, OK, during one of my two scheduled trips to North Texas — this would allow me to visit the Conoco Museum and talk to their archivist.

130% ($10,400) = an added research trip from Washington to West Texas, or an extension of the currently planned trip — this would allow me extra time visiting the towns where Bob and Ann lived and more opportunities to conduct on-site research.

130%+ (anything over $10,400) = less time that I have to spend doing freelance writing jobs, more time that I can dedicate to working on West Texas Interlude.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be an additional 30% over the goal on September 30?

Thank you so much for going through this funding process with me — you are the ones who made it happen. And if you’re new to the blog, you can join the fun! http://kck.st/qzJN98

Oh my. We now only have 15 days left in our 31 day campaign, and we’ve reached 74% of our goal. OH MY.

I continue to be overwhelmed by the generosity y’all are pouring out on this project. I mean, I love these photos, I love West Texas, I love Bob and Ann’s story from the 50s, and I feel strongly that the concept behind West Texas Interlude will make a great book — but when other people also love my idea and are willing to back that up with their money, it’s a huge affirmation as a writer that I’m working on something worthwhile. So thank you for that. Thank you for your pledges and thank you for your votes of confidence.

As I look at the numbers for the days left and the amount we’ve already raised to this point, I want to encourage backers (both potential new backers and those already in on the deal) that we can go over the goal. If we reach 100% early, well, then let’s just keep going and see how far we get. The extra money raised would first go towards more research travel and then towards offsetting my freelance writing gigs to give me more than half-time to dedicate to working on this book.

Here’s how my plan breaks down for any money we raise over 100% ($8,000):

103% ($8,240) = an added trip to Ponca City, OK, during one of my two scheduled trips to North Texas — this would allow me to visit the Conoco Museum and talk to their archivist.

130% ($10,400) = an added research trip from Washington to West Texas, or an extension of the currently planned trip — this would allow me extra time visiting the towns where Bob and Ann lived and more opportunities to conduct on-site research.

130%+ (anything over $10,400) = less time that I have to spend doing freelance writing jobs, more time that I can dedicate to working on West Texas Interlude.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be an additional 30% over the goal on September 30? We could make it happen! It would make the book that much better.

Thanks again for all you’ve done and are doing to make this book possible!

P.S. The photo I’m posting today was taken by Bob and Ann on a trip home to North Texas — who can recognize the location? Leave a comment below! If you’re related to me and already know the answer, give others a chance (but feel free to chime in with an “I know, I know!”)

P.P.S I was in such a hurry to publish the original post, I forgot to include a link to the Kickstarter project page. Here it is: http://kck.st/qzJN98 or you can use the widget on the upper left.

I first heard about Kickstarter.com last year when a couple of guys used the site to raise the last bit of funds for the movie version of Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz. Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years meant a lot to me (it was one of my favorite books from 2010), and I was fascinated to see how the story from that book (about the writing of the BLJ screenplay) was continuing to be written by the book’s fans. They wanted to see the completion of the movie badly enough that they were willing to give money to make it happen.

I like that idea. The idea that the people who will eventually enjoy the fruit of someone else’s creative endeavors can become a part of making that creative endeavor happen.

At that time, my thought was that it’s a good thing for me to be able to support other artists, whether through Kickstarter or buying their cds or recommending their books or whatever, and I was excited to think about a group of people coming together to make a project happen. Now, here it is less than a year later, and I’m starting my own campaign on Kickstarter for my nonfiction book, West Texas Interlude.

My campaign launches August 30 and ends September 30. I’ll have one month to reach my fundraising goal for the money it will take to do the research and writing of a first draft of my book’s manuscript. I wrote a blog entry a few weeks back that describes the book (read it here), but basically it’s going to be a collection of photos and stories from West Texas in the 1950s. The vintage photos are oh-so-cool, and there are more than 800 of them for me to edit down to a respectable number for a book. The research for the written sections will require three trips to Texas for interviews and location visits.

So, how does Kickstarter work, and what is it going to involve over the month of the campaign?

* Kickstarter is a website that helps people fund creative projects. Campaigns go through an approval process with the Kickstarter staff. Your project must be creative in nature, and there must be a clear beginning and end to the work you’re wanting to have supported — it must be a true project, not a vague idea or “please give me money so I can write/paint/sing/design more.” My project is to do the research and writing for a completed manuscript. The goal is to help artists finish a project, not just start it and then get stuck without funds to complete it.

* Because the concept revolves around completing a project, funding through Kickstarter is all-or-nothing. I set a funding goal — I wrote a budget for what it would take to do the research and writing from now through June 2012, and that amount is my goal. In order to receive any of the money people give in pledges, I must reach the goal. If September 30 rolls around and I’m short of the goal, none of the backers will be charged for their pledge.

This is one of my favorite things about Kickstarter. All-or-nothing funding is a huge assurance to backers that the project will actually see completion. If I only get 50% or even 75% of my funding goal and backers are still obligated to meet their pledge, how unfair is that to those backers? They were pledging to help me research and write a complete manuscript — not to help me research a book, stop and get a job for several months because I’m broke, lose momentum, and then never finish the book. In some ways, all-or-nothing is extremely stressful for me to think about, but the urgency of it also helps the campaign move along. And when it comes down to it, as a writer and as a person, I would rather work with the type of integrity that all-or-nothing funding demonstrates.

* The other cool thing about using Kickstarter to fund projects is that backers get some pretty great rewards that correspond with their level of support. The rewards are all related to the project itself and usually involve the finished product that the artist/writer/whoever is wanting to fund. For my campaign, anyone who pledges $25 or more will get a digital version of the completed West Texas Interlude manuscript. There are other rewards that are rather fun as well (postcards from West Texas, prints of the vintage photos, a homemade cream pie), but I like it that my backers can get an actual copy of what they’re supporting, for a reasonable price.

Look for more to come about the campaign — I’m not going to turn my blog into all-Kickstarter-all-the-time for the next month, but I will definitely keep you posted on the progress.

I ate a piece of chocolate cake made by a 90-year-old lady who baked the 6-tier wedding cake for Elvis and Priscilla Presley.

No kidding. A few weeks ago, several friends and I were hanging out on a lazy Saturday morning, and the subject of grandparents came up. And one of my friends says, “I haven’t visited my grandpa and his wife in a while.”

“How far away do they live?” I asked.

“About an hour.”

“Oh, you should definitely go.” Pause. “I’d go with you.”

Pause. “Would you?” My friend brightened up a bit. “Yeah, you should meet Ruby. She’s a great cook — she baked Elvis’s wedding cake.”

Excuse me, what? And why haven’t you told me before now that the lady who baked Elvis’s wedding cake lives an hour from here, and she’s married to your grandfather? But I guess these things don’t always come up in normal conversation.

So, we called up Grandpa and Ruby and drove out to their house for a nice Saturday afternoon visit.

Ruby happened to have made a chocolate cake earlier in the day. Maybe it’s because we called to let her know we were coming. Or maybe she just loves baking cakes that much that there’s always one around. Either way, Elvis was right to have hired her as his wedding cake baker.

Ruby is a talker, and she’s got 90 years worth of experiences to talk about. I didn’t think it would be polite to pull out my notebook and take notes, but man, I wish I had. Or even better, wish I had brought along my voice recorder. Another day.

The best part of the afternoon was that it came during my social media fast. Any other time, I would have sat there on the couch, crumbs from Ruby’s chocolate cake still on the plate in my hands, one ear half listening to her fascinating stories of working as a chef in Las Vegas hotels, the other half of my brain composing a Facebook status to be posted 30 seconds after I got home and got on the computer.

Instead, I knew I wouldn’t be posting on Facebook any time soon, so what would be the point in silently composing a status? Rather than obsessing over the cleverest way to write a line that would gain me the most “likes” or comments of “no way! that’s so cool!” — I was able to be in the moment. To enjoy hearing Ruby’s story. And to think in bigger writerly ways than just a throw-away Facebook status. I could enjoy Ruby, and I could pay attention to her intonation, to how she would say things like, “Oh Janie, now this will stop your clock” before she launched into another story. To how she lowered her voice to say sweet things about Grandpa when he stepped out of the room. I walked away from the afternoon having enjoyed the day for what it was, not for the opportunity to get a one sentence post out of the experience.

That’s the reason I stayed off social media for a couple of weeks — to see if I could retrain my mind to think in the bigger picture, to get out of the habit of thinking in 140 character blurbs that are designed to draw attention. I don’t think Facebook and Twitter are bad, but I don’t want to lose my ability to think and write and express ideas that can’t be reduced to one sentence, ideas that will last beyond the next 48 hours worth of newsfeed.

And really, if you’re going to eat cake baked by Elvis’s favorite baker, it’s much better to blog about it than post a Facebook status.

I’m not working on the writing for my West Texas project yet — these days I’m mostly writing about how I’m going to write about West Texas. Gotta do the ground work first, put the initial pieces together, see how the project takes shape. It’s a great place to be, in the dream phase of the project, the phase where I play around with different ideas and see where they go.

As I’m looking through the photos and plotting points on the map for my research trips, I find myself needing a little background music. And the obvious choice for me for this project, so far, has been Lyle Lovett. Yesterday, I smiled quite a bit over his version of “West Texas Highway” — I couldn’t find it on YouTube, though, so I’m posting another one that makes for a good soundtrack to my work, “Ballad of the Snow Leopard and the Tanqueray Cowboy”:

Comfort me, said she, / With your conversation, / With the cocktails / And the candlelight / In your eyes; / It’s funny how we hunger / For some inspiration, / And everything else / That money just won’t buy.