CURTAIN CALL

Michael and Lynda Leamy taught for some four decades. Michael taught, among other subjects, creative writing and drama. It is no wonder that those two should merge in his writing process. In theater, characters perform a series of scenes that present the story. The interactions of the characters weave details against the backdrop of scenery, drawing the audience into the tension of the tale.

While some authors plaster storyboards on the wall above the desk that enslaves them, or fill notebooks with character profiles, Michael does not. He goes to the theater of his mind. He does his period research, discovering events and historic people of the era where his story is to be set, imagines characters, and has them take their places on the stage of imagination. He gives them one stage instruction: IMPROVISE. In theater, improv is a fun and fascinating exercise. The story develops as the characters follow the lead of the others.

In this writing method, Michael simply tries to keep up with the story as it rolls out like an ancient scroll. He employs only enough description to lend authenticity, and leaves it to the reader to imagine the characters with minimal detail included on the pages. His stories are carried by dialog, and the reader is drawn into the action and emotion of the written drama. The author is as surprised as the reader at the conclusion of the account...and as satisfied.

SOLD!

The Age of Discovery brought a wider knowledge of the world and led to the Age of Colonization. Colonization was accomplished through conquest. The lands conquered had to be populated in order to exploit them. The rich and powerful preyed upon the weak to supply needed laborers. With the defeat of the Spanish Armada, England became the foremost seller of souls.

The monarch of England gave vast tracts of land in the American colonies to favored nobles and rich supporters of the Crown. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, changes in the economic structure in England further separated the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots.’ The Enclosure Act deprived the poor of the Common Lands where they had traditionally grazed their animals. Tenant farmers were driven from the large estates by increased rents. They gathered in cities, hoping to find employment. With no skills, they became beggars.

Poverty was criminalized. The poor were transported to Australia, to the cane fields of the Caribbean, and to the tobacco plantations of the American colonies as indentured servants, bound to work the fields for a period of time, usually three to seven years, without pay.

The system deteriorated, and became a virtual slave trade. Merchants on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean worked the indenture trade for maximum profit. Those in England used deceit and kidnapping to fill ships with human cargo. A child of twelve was viewed as an adult capable of working in the fields. Those in the American colonies profited most from those who arrived without signed indentures, since those could be committed to longer terms of servitude, bringing more profit. Ship captains worked both sides of the ocean for maximum profit.

In the sixteen hundreds, the ‘Great Proctector’, Oliver Cromwell, marched his forces into Ireland, declaring the Irish peasants could go to ‘Hell or to Connacht.’ The poor of Ireland were driven from productive lands, hounded ‘beyond the pale,’ and relocated to the poor lands of west and southwest Ireland. The better lands were then given to English noblemen. By sixteen eighty, over eighty percent of the Irish poor had been killed, starved, or relocated as indentured servants to labor in lands beyond the Atlantic. Kidnapping was rampant.

In The Bride Price, Annie O’Hara represents a multitude of transported Irish. Follow her journey down a road scarred by trial and pain, but paved with God’s lavish grace.

(The Bride Price, by Michael J Leamy, is available on Amazon)

JOURNEY INTO FICTION

The sign on the door said FICTION. I figured the door must have been recently replaced, because it had no panels of antiquity, but seemed hollow. It had no keyhole for me to peek through. I hesitated to open it, since the foul odor oozing through the crack under the thing indicated that the material within had lost quality.

I tried the knob, and discovered it turned freely, but the door did not budge. It seemed that it was braced from within. Indeed, the accumulated filth yielded only slowly, as the bulldozer blade of the door plowed it back. Darkness filled the room. My flashlight glittered off of broken fragments of the light bulb that were scattered in the center of the room. Dark slime hung in sheets below shelves of books, some volumes covered in cloth and some in paper.

Across the room, I spotted a shelf labeled CLEAN AND WHOLESOME. Few books rested there, and that shelf also dangled sheets of the same obnoxious slime. It appeared every category had deterioriated, either through explicit filth or through inuendo. Values had corroded, and boundaries had been torn down.

I whispered, “Blasphemy!”

Bubbles of offensive gases burst through the slime.

My whisper became a shout, and the bubbles burst into lightless flame, invisible, yet able to utterly destroy. I pulled on the doorknob, and the room was again closed.

A writer, my creative mind took a Quixotic turn. With my pen, I would not joust at windmills, but I would drag the inky nib across white paper, soiling it with tinted words that would not seep slowly to the floor, waiting to foul the footsteps of those who wandered the paths that wound through the canyons of my mind. The light of the Word would illumine the lives of the characters who played out their stories in the theater of the mind. I would write fiction. I would label my shelf Historic Romance. It would be clean and wholesome. I would not be an historic revisionist, and I would not open the bedroom door.

Pick an era. Search out the events and people who shaped that age. Insert fictional characters, and have them interact with the real folks and events they encounter. Place all of the characters on stage, and have them improvise. Change scenes and groupings of characters. Insert challenges. This is the stuff of fiction.

The result is a novel set on the Oregon Trail, from flood-ravaged Ohio to the Willamette Valley. To make it more challenging, the main character undertakes a solo journey, a quest in response to a message from the Oregon Territory. No spoilers here, folks. Look on Amazon for Unintended Journey, Unintended Bride. Let the folks between the covers take their places, and act out the story. A word of caution: The writer needed to keep a hanky handy. Enjoy.