Category Archives: General

I’ve been meaning to learn how to swear in German. Seriously. Yesterday I was stuck because I couldn’t remember where I had read a list of 19th century ethnic slurs against Germans (was it in Dickens’s American Notes? Still at a loss …), so I turned to Google. Some clicking led me to An Encyclopedia of Swearing: the social history of oaths, profanity, foul language, and ethnic slurs in the English-speaking world.

I tried to place a hold at the library, but it was a reference copy, so I hightailed it over there. It wasn’t on the shelf.

“Someone must have stolen it,” the librarian concluded. She’s calling around to other libraries to get me a copy. Meanwhile, I browsed about a yards-worth of reference books on slang and bawdy words, and if I didn’t have this deadline over my head, I could have spent many surreptitious hours.

As it was, I enjoyed a delicious moment with a book called Wicked Words: A Treasury of Curses, Insults, Put-Downs, and Other Formerly Unprintable Terms from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present (Rawson).

I cannot resist sharing Rawson’s note found under the discussion of the word Twat (female pudendum). “The T-word occupies a special niche in literary history, however, thanks to a horrible mistake by Robert Browning, who included it in ‘Pippa Passes’ (1841) without knowing its true meaning: ‘The owls and bats, / Cowls and twats, / Monks and nuns, / In a cloister’s moods.” Poor Robert! He had been misled into thinking the word meant ‘hat’ by its appearance in ‘Vanity of Vanities,’ a poem of 1660 containing the treacherous lines: ‘They talk’t of his having a Cardinalls Hat, / They’d send him as soon an old Nuns Twat.” (There is a lesson here about not using words unless one is very sure of their meaning.)”

Thank you, Rawson!

Here is a close up of the route (Freinsheim, Deutschland to Cleveland, Ohio) taken by my 15-year-old great-great-grandfather Michael Harm. According to letters the family received recommending the Le Havre, France port of departure, as well as noted debarkation points of the majority of emigrants from Freinsheim in the 1850s, he took the most common path.

From Kaiserslautern in the Western Palatinate, emigrants traveled by coach to the border town of Forbach, where they entered France. Letters from the time period indicate the French were careless about passcards and paperwork–happy to get the shipping business, the instructions of the customs officials were to look the other way. The coach stopped in Paris for fresh horses and then went on the final leg of the journey to Le Havre.

Though steamships were common by then, Michael Harm traveled on a regular packet ship, part of a fleet owned by a man named Whitlock. The sea crossing was long – over 40 days – until the Helvetia docked at Castle Garden on June 30, 1857.

From New York City, Michael proceeded north on the Hudson River to the Erie Canal, taking a canal boat to Buffalo, then riding by steamer down Lake Erie to Cleveland. His Uncle Johann and Aunt Katherina Rapparlie owned property just at an elbow of the Cuyahoga River by the Ohio Canal, near where the Hard Rock Cafe and the Terminal Tower stand today.

Here is the view I have during this MFA residency, when I find time to write. This is the lagoon out back of Captain Whidbey Inn. Every morning, the eagles chatter in the treetops as I hunker down to my pages. I’ve written a little bit on my thesis, but spent more time on my Saturday night reading, something we students are required to do once each ten-day session.

I’m in the Captain Whidbey Inn, editing the “final” print out, still finding changes to make. “Why does it take so long?” I complain to my laptop, and Stefon, who is sitting nearby.

“Your thesis?”

“Yeah, that, and also revising what I have to read on Saturday.”

“How many times have you read now?”

“I’ve been around for four residencies, so it’ll be my fifth.”

“It should be no problem then.”

“It’s not, except for the revising my reading to where I’m happy with it. I edit and revise and edit and revise.”

“Yeah,” Stefon says. “It should be called an MFA in Creative Rewriting.”

I’m close — my thesis first draft should be written by March. Time to reduce, rethink, and revise.

My January MFA Residency on Whidbey Island is underway. This afternoon we enjoyed a session on subject matter especially close to my heart–Eel Pie, Hoop Skirts, and Aeroplanes: Writing Historical Fiction with Kirby Larson. Her resources and enthusiasm for the genre are infectious — I hope I catch this kind of writing virus again and again.

Over the last month or so, I admit I’ve become impatient with my thesis. Some days I wish I could just gallop to the finish line and write “The End” already. I know where I’m headed — and I can hardly wait to get there. But as Kirby points out, I can wait, and some things are not to be hurried. Writers of historical fiction are treasure hunters for poignant, meaningful stories from the past; it takes research, and time. Regardless of the initial goal, we need to be open to what we come across. “Sometimes you don’t find what you’re looking for,” Kirby says, “you find something even better.”

One of Søren Kierkegaard’s well-known quotes goes something like this: “Life is to be understood backwards, but it is to be lived forwards.” According to a website called Kierkegaard Quotations, even this seemingly original thought is derivative.

Kierkegaard is alluding to Carl Daub, 1765-1836, professor of theology at Heidelberg university. This is what Daub says … : ‘The act of looking backward is, just like that of looking into the future, an act of divination; and if the prophet is well called an historian of the future, the historian is just as well called, or even better so, a prophet of the past, of the historical’. Kierkegaard repeats this thought of Daub, putting it together with the thought that life is “lived forward”. Life can be interpreted only after it has been experienced, but the past informs one’s understanding and grasp of the future.

Freinsheim

I’m planning a trip to Germany, to my great-great grandfather’s hometown of Freinsheim. In preparation, I am writing letters in German to relatives there. I remember my grandmother Emma sitting at her kitchen table, the German dictionary set beside her, to write letters to the German relatives of her generation. She was so precise about it she kept a ruler handy to write in perfectly straight lines.

My great-great grandfather was inspired to emigrate to Cleveland based on letters written by his grandfather and uncles already there. Today’s correspondence between my family and the families in Germany is an echo of the past, derivative of what has gone before us for many generations. It is also lighting the way forward.