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This past month, I became a formal part of the University of North Carolina’s Southern History Program. I guess I’m that old, and if you want to know more about my life before becoming a writer, this is it! Since 1973, the Southern Oral History Program has worked to preserve the voices of the southern past, collecting more than 5,000 interviews with people from all walks of life—from mill workers to civil rights leaders to future presidents of the United States. Almost 400 of those interviews focused on the history of the University of North Carolina and created source materials for study by future generations. There were four students working on the project for the past semester, focusing on the history of feminist activism at UNC:Samantha Gregg, a senior History and English double major; Liz Kennedy, a sophomore at Duke University studying History, Environmental Science and Policy, and Women’s Studies; Holly Plouff, a freshman Anthropology major; and Bryan Smith, a senior with a Linguistics and Women’s & Gender Studies double major. Bryan interviewed me. Women for this study were chosen from the Mary Turner Lane Award winners. The award, established in 1986, is named to honor Mary Turner Lane, founding director of the Curriculum in Women’s Studies. Mary Turner (in the South, women are frequently called by both their first and middle names) was a friend of mine, and she was a formidable woman who served as a role model and mentor for many women faculty. The award is given each year to a woman judged to have made an outstanding contribution to the lives of women on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, and I was profoundly honored to be given this award a number of years ago. Samantha, Liz, Holly, and Bryan presented the culmination of their semester’s work via a mixed media presentation, following feminist activism at UNC from the 1960s to the early 2000s. The presentation was quite simple in its concept: with visuals behind them, the students took turns reading quotes from the interviews, standing behind placards with the names of the women being quoted. The quotations drew a temporal picture of life as a woman at UNC, the challenges, the defeats and the successes. When I arrived at the UNC School of Medicine, only 4% of the 700+ faculty were female full professors and only 13% were female assistant professors. There was no maternity leave, paternity leave, proximate day care, faculty associations for women to support them in their careers, formal mentoring programs, or elder care leave. Among the things I was involved in were the founding of the Association of Professional Women in Science and Medicine, the establishment of maternity and paternity leave policies, the creation of the Carolina Women’s Center, the development of a policy to stop the tenure clock for a year to allow faculty to deal with family/personal issues, and the founding of BRIDGES, a professional development program for women in any aspect of higher education. Since 1993, over 750 women have completed the annual BRIDGES programs, and I am proud to have been part of its establishment. We even had a small informal group of senior women who met to discuss life at UNC over drinks and dinner. I named it “The Ladies Knitting and Terrorist Society!” The conclusion of the students’ program was basically “We’ve come a long way, baby” but that we have a way to go, now mostly dealing with the subtleties of gender bias. I love the idea that I will be around as part of UNC’s feminist history.   0 0

I was honored to be asked by Joanne Guidoccio to participate in her Second Act Series. My contribution: From Human Anatomy to the Anatomy of a Murder, was posted today and can be found at: http://joanneguidoccio.com/2015/05/08/ So if anyone out there is wondering more about my life (so exciting, so riveting!), read on! And my thanks to Joanne for asking me. 0 0

Bob enjoys a cup of good black coffee, so over coffee in my kitchen, I pried some answers out of him about his background, writing career, and his plans for his next book. Oh what the heck, I brought out some cinnamon rolls, too.    Where did you grow up, Bob? On a sheep farm in North Carolina. My father was a civil engineer, but ran the family farm. No one around had sheep, but he very much liked the idea of living the life of a country squire, so by the great horn spoon, he got some sheep and learned how to raise them. He was moderately successful at it, but it was a lot of work. Watching him do that when other folks around were not doing anything with sheep was very instructive. It’s possibly where I got my stubborn streak and my determination to make my work completely my own, rather than copying other styles.  Why did you start writing? The first writing I did was at about 8 years old on my dad’s old 1947 Woodstock typewriter, pounding out little James Bond short stories because I had these ideas I thought were better than those in the movies. Little did I know, of course, how much there was to learn.  How long have you been writing? That would be … uhh … over 50 years. Gosh, I now officially feel old. What sparked the idea for your book (The Fur, Fish, Flea and Beagle Club)? It was originally a short story about the two boys working in the saw mill that I expanded into the book. I was working on a piece that was much too long for my head to hold without exploding so I decided to drop that one for a while in favor of a nice little short book. I limited myself to the time period of the summer of 1936 in order to keep it short and sweet. The joke was on me, as the book ended up being 180,000 words, though I’m told it is a fast read.  Which character, if any, has a personality that most closely resembles yours? That is a very difficult question, because all the characters have elements of me. Jamie is a romantic who is good with his hands, Ned more of a mystic who feels the most alive surrounded by nature, the fly-fishing and philosophy of Sabastian, the woodworking of Tom Parsons and so on. All of them are me.  Which character was the hardest to write and why? I think perhaps the women, because I’m not a woman. To write them I just held in my head that women are just as strong, just as silly and just as intelligent as men with the same feet of clay, and let their characters write themselves.  What’s your next project? It’s a light-hearted romantic mystery set in 1936 on the coast of North Carolina. The working title is at present ‘Suzy and Dodge’ and it has a set of quaint and quirky characters that entertain me every time I enter their world. Hopefully they will be as entertaining to my readers.  Is there one place where you find writing the easiest? In the early morning just as the world turns from black to charcoal, at the beach whilst it’s quiet.  Do you prefer e-books, hardcovers or paperbacks to read? I prefer the actual book in my hands, whether hardcover or paperback. I do read e-books whilst I’m traveling or waiting in line for take-out at the local Asian restaurant.  Whom do you admire and why? This is a tough one. As writers, I admire Mark Twain for his expression of the optimism of the young and his feeling and grasp of mirth. I admire J. D. Salinger for the cleanliness of his prose. The third writer I admire was a remarkable woman by the name of Beryl Markham who was a famous aviatrix. She was the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean the hard way, against the head winds. She wrote not only of her experiences flying in the classic West with the Night, but her experiences as a horse trainer in Africa (she was a contemporary of and knew Isak Dinesen of Out of Africa fame) bore fruit as well, in a collection of some of the best short stories I’ve ever read, called The Splendid Outcast.  Where can readers find out more about you and your work? Right now on my blog, Byrdwords.wordpress.com, and on Amazon and Goodreads. I’m working hard on the new book and hope there will be much more for my readers to follow later in the year. Thanks so much for reading; I do deeply appreciate it. *** Thanks to Bob for the interview and the excuse to eat a cinnamon roll. You can find his first book, The Fur, Fish, Flea and Beagle Club on Amazon at: Check out Bob’s blog: https://byrdwords.wordpress.com/  For the A-Z challenge, he posted about all things nautical, so if you like the sailing and/or the ocean, stop by. He covered everything from grog to pirates.   0 0

The Fur, Fish, Flea and Beagle Club is a fantastic first book by R. M. Byrd, who writes with evident affection about two boys, Jamie Gareth and Ned Custis, spending a hot summer on a hardscrabble farm in North Carolina in the late 1930s. Jamie’s father is opening a saw mill to supply wood to the US Army, and Jamie has been looking forward to working with his father. When Ned Custis, a boy he barely knows from school, is brought by his father to work at the mill, too, Jamie is none too happy. It doesn’t help that Ned has no experience in doing farm chores and that Jamie’s dog, Toby, takes a shine to Ned. The book is richly populated with wonderful characters: Jamie’s parents and his bossy sister Goria, who Jamie is convinced gets special treatment; Gramma the cow; Nathan Ichabod Hindmarsh Norris, the mailman and a Peeping Tom at the widow Morrison’s house; Sebastian Wood, a WWI vet nicknamed the Ghost because he’s seldom seen and doesn’t speak; and the Right Reverend Costigan Analicious Cramphorne, the pompous, self-righteous and greedy minister of the church the Gareth family attends. The hard working men who populate the saw mill are equally memorable, among them: Snow, the black man Grant Gareth chooses as his foreman; Cyrus Conner, a Native American and ex-shaman from the Northwest; and Eueas Canfield, a nasty man who makes Gareth’s stomach crawl but who has papers to prove he was a vet and gets hired. Eueas becomes Jamie’s and Ned’s sworn enemy when he takes a swipe at Toby with a sickle. Each character has a fully developed and fascinating backstory, and through them the boys confront good and evil for first time. Both get into all sorts of mischief, the kind you can imagine in a rural setting before the digital era. Hint: think skunk in a mailbox. Jamie also gets to experience love when he meets the daughter of an Irish migrant worker. The period is described in perfect detail, and Mr. Byrd’s writing has a wonderful, lyrical quality. There were many places that were laugh out loud funny and others that made me cry. There’s a Tom Sawyer sense to the book, with elements of To Kill a Mockingbird, but this book stands uniquely in its own right. A great book for adults, teens, and a one to read to your children. Tomorrow, I’ll post an interview with the author. This is an excerpt from a chapter called Holiday, which I think you’ll enjoy. Fourth of July meant a day off at the mill. Except for Jamie and Ned. “This was supposed to be a day off?” Jamie heard Ned mumble behind him as he drove the bucksaw through another slab. Jamie smiled at him. “Only if we want to eat. We gotta grill the hot dogs and all those hamburgers Momma was patting out last night somehow.” “You grill hot dogs?” Ned lifted another slab up onto the crossbuck. “Mom boils ours.” “Yuck.” As he set the bucksaw on another piece of wood, Jamie watched his father and Snow set up a section of iron grating on top of support bricks outside the office cabin near the well. They laid in a fire underneath the back side and set out a couple of garden hoes to push and rake the coals around underneath. The two men had no sooner nodded at each other in self-congratulation on their grill when Jamie’s mother drove in. She was in full brigadier general mode. Jamie studiously applied the bucksaw to the slab as he watched the soundless faraway pantomime of his mother pointing with full extended arm at his father and Snow, directing them to set up tables against the cabin with sawhorses and broad sawn boards. Between sawing strokes his heart wanted to grin as he saw someone else at the business end of her pointing finger. She paced right along behind his father and Snow, mouth in motion, as they unloaded the cardboard boxes of hot dogs and hamburgers from the back of the car. “Saw faster.” Ned’s voice under his breath as he heaved another slab up onto the sawbucks. “What?” “If we don’t look busy she’ll have us over there quick as Beauregard said ‘Boo.’ ” “Already there.” # A little before noon Marshall rolled in in his pickup, followed closely by the flatbed migrant truck chock full of laughing folks bouncing up against the sideboards. The men helped their wives get down out of the back, and then carried to the tables their pot-luck dishes of green beans, baked beans, cornbread, Cole slaw and buckets of mashed potatoes with gravy and butter. Mrs. Lowery, Lowell’s wife, got Marshall to help heft down two huge pots that turned out to be lemonade. Out of the back of Marshall’s truck came four washtubs with blocks of ice covered in hay for the hand-crank ice cream freezers. Jamie remembered the smell of the cream and the peaches and ingredients his mother had gotten together last night. He could almost taste it already. Also out of the back of Marshall’s truck came Dancin’ Charlie. He eased down, glancing back and forth, a huge watermelon in his arms and a huge grin on his face. Jamie felt his father’s hand press on his shoulder and heard his father’s voice deep in his ear. “You two stay away from Charlie’s watermelon, you hear me?” “How come?” “Because he’s got a smile on his face. That’s all you need to know.” “Yessir.” “We got enough firewood for now, so why don’t you two go get a half-dozen five-gallon buckets from the storage shed. Fill half of them with water and the other half with sand and put them over there next to the grill.” “Yessir.” As Jamie watched his father walk back to the grill, he heard Ned’s voice in his ear. “I’ll bet you ten ways to Tuesday Charlie’s got that melon spiked with moonshine.

I received a wide range of guesses about what sites of the ones in my A-Z Challenge I would visit this summer. No one hit the nail on the head, but Alex Hurst came the closest when she guessed something ON the water. The places I plan to visit are: the Kennebec Arsenal (a rather creepy site and history  – it could be a good place to have in my fourth or fifth book) and Eastern Egg Rock, to see the puffins. Since Alex guessed somewhere on the water, and Eastern Egg Rock and its puffin colony are on the water and I have to take a boat to get there, she wins! Alex, send me your address (sailingawayng@gmail.com) and your book is on the way! And thanks to everyone else for their guesses. 0 0

My thanks to everyone who visited me during the A-Z Challenge! I made some new friends this past month, and even though it really was a challenge, I had way too much fun writing about Maine. I’ve only had two guesses on where I might go this summer when I’m in Maine. So c’mon people! Take a chance, give me some guesses. There’s an autographed book hanging out here, waiting for an owner. 0 0

Congratulations to everyone for making it through our Challenges. Don’t forget to give me your best guesses as to which two I will visit of all the places I posted about – a free book is the prize! The Zebulon Smith House was built in 1832, by silversmith, jeweler and watchmaker Zebulon Smith. It is one of the earliest known temple style Greek Revival houses in Maine. The style, inspired by ancient Greek architecture, gained popularity in the late 18th century in England and spread to the United States in the early 19th century. It peaked in Maine from the 1830s to the 1860s. The architect of this house is unknown. I found an aerial view of the house, and it is currently nestled among parking lots and car dealerships, businesses and the waterfront park, a final vestige and reminder that in downtown Bangor there were residential streets near the waterfront. This sole remaining house embodies the neighborhood’s gracious past. The house has four bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, two sitting rooms and a small kitchen in the ell. There are nine fireplaces, with slate mantels downstairs and wooden mantels in the bedrooms. The house looks much as it did in photographs from the early 20th century. The portico retains its original lunette (half moon) window, and the Ionic pillars still stand. It has been painted red for many years, a curiously inappropriate color for a house inspired by Greek temples. The current owners suspect it was originally white. I searched for quite a while to find other pictures of this house but was stymied! James and Elizabeth Buckley bought the house in 1919 and it has been lived in by their descendants ever since, despite the fact the neighborhood was changing, with stately homes on the block either turned into apartments or demolished to make way for businesses. The father of the current owner, Eugenia Franco, held out, and after he died, her mother had no desire to move. Mrs. Franco and her husband consider themselves the keepers of the home, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. I’m giving a huge sigh of relief, along with a little sadness, at having come to the end of this year’s A-Z Challenge. I hope anyone who visited my blog enjoyed posts about Maine as much as I liked writing them! 0 0

York is an historic town near the southern tip of the state. It includes the villages of York Village, York Beach, and Cape Neddick. Its year round population is 12,529, but this number swells in the summer because of York’s reputation as a resort. Several famous American authors have been known to spend their summer months in York, including Mark Twain. York’s history is nothing if not confusing. Hopefully I can clear it up. It was first settled in 1624 and was originally called Agamenticus, the Abenaki term for the York River. British settlers changed the name to Bristol in 1638, after Bristol, England, from which they had come. But even this name didn’t stick. Sir Fernando Gorges, as a member of the Plymouth Council for New England, became the Lord Proprietor of Maine. He envisioned Bristol as the capital of his province and named it Gorgeana. But wait, the name changing not over yet! After Gorges’ death, the Massachusetts Bay Colony (now the Boston area) claimed Gorgeana, and in 1652, York, Massachusetts (there was no intervening state of New Hampshire between Massachusetts and Maine at that time) was incorporated from a portion of Gorgeana. The incorporated town was then named York, for York, England. Imagine the problems a postman would have had trying to deliver mail during this time! York was burned to the ground in January of 1692, during King William’s War, the first of six colonial wars fought between New France and New England along with their respective Native allies. One hundred English settlers were killed, and another 80 taken hostage. There’s a link to my home town of Plymouth here, because after the hostages were forced to walk to the French colony of Canada, they were ransomed by Captain John Alden, Jr., son of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins of the Plymouth Colony. The final Indian attack on York occurred at Cape Neddick during Dummer’s War 1723, a series of battles between New England and the Wabanaki Confederacy (see W= Wabanaki), allies of New France. Hostilities finally ceased when France ceded all of its remaining mainland territories in North America to England with the 1763 Treaty of Paris. York prospered during the colonial era, as a shipping center, the provincial capital and the site of the Royal Jail. Wharves and warehouses contained sugar and molasses from the West Indies which were received in exchange for agricultural products and lumber. One of the York merchants was John Hancock. Following the American Revolution, however, the Embargo Act of 1807 crippled trade and York would not be prosperous again until after the Civil War when its colonial charm, sea and sand began to attract tourists. Old York, the historic town center, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and contains six preserved historic buildings, including the Gaol (Jail), the Old Schoolhouse, the 1834 Remick Barn, and Jefferd’s Tavern, a true colonial tavern dating back to 1750.   Like Bar Harbor and Newport, Rhode Island, York became a fashionable summer resort in the so-called Gilded Age (the late 19th century, from the 1870s to about 1900; term coined by writer Mark Twain to mean a time of serious social problems masked by a veneer of gold). It retains many distinctive examples of the architecture of that time, particularly in the Shingle Style. Rhe Brewster’s interest in architecture would have her in seventh heaven in York! 0 0

I simply could not find anything to see in Maine that begins with an X, other than Xavier Loop, a street in Augusta. So because I am passionate about history, I’ve taken the liberty of substituting Fort Webster. I had two other Ws: the Winslow Homer home and Wadsworth Longfellow House, but Fort Western had a rocking history and is linked to the Plymouth Pilgrims. In 1625, the Plimoth Colony Pilgrims sailed up the Kennebec River in a single masted, open hulled vessel called a shallop, named for Elizabeth Tilley. Elizabeth was one of the original passengers on the Mayflower and it was my privilege to portray her during one of the Pilgrim’s Progresses in Plymouth when I was a child. The Pilgrims wanted to establish a trading relationship with Native Americans in the area, since they were already operating a year-round trading post south of where Fort Western is now found. Fort Western was built in 1754 built by the Kennebec Proprietors, a Boston-based company seeking to settle the lands along the Kennebec River that had been granted to the Pilgrims more than a century earlier. It is America’s oldest surviving wooden fort – a reminder of a clash of cultures that dominated New England life 250 years ago.  This company, along with the Province of Massachusetts, wished to expand their interest in the area as part of the British and colonial effort to take political control of North American and sever the ties between the local Abenaki Indians and the French in Canada. The Fort was named for Thomas Western of Sussex, England, a friend of William Shirley, the longest-serving governor of the Province of Massachusetts (1741–1749 and 1753–1756). Crony capitalism in the 1700s. Fort Western served as a fortified storehouse to support Fort Halifax, 17 miles to the north. Supplies were shipped from Boston, unloaded there and then taken by a flat-bottomed boat upriver to Fort Halifax. Captain James Howard was the first permanent resident; he shipped alewives (a plentiful fish) down the Kennebec and his family operated a store within the fort. Since the fort was a secure location, it attracted trappers and other settlers. Benedict Arnold stayed at the Fort with his Quebec Expedition in September of 1775. Some of Arnold’s officers, including Daniel Morgan, Aaron Burr, and Henry Dearborn, lodged in the Fort’s main house. The Fort’s military role ended after that, although the Fort itself survived because of the trading post/store. Fort Western was never attacked directly. Protected by its four-pound cannon, the garrison spent most of its time doing routine duty, including boat repair, cooking, baking, brewing, and getting wood, in addition to helping re-supply Fort Halifax. The main building of the fort was eventually sold by the Howard family, and was converted into a tenement house. It was repurchased in Howard family descendants in 1919, and restored the following year. They oversaw the construction of two new blockhouses and a stockade, which was again rebuilt in 1960. The Fort’s main building is a little-altered example of an 18th-century trading post. The fort was declared a National Historical Landmark in 1973, and it and the store are maintained as a museum and are open to the public during the summer months. Don’t forget to guess, after “Z,” which two sites I will visit this summer when I am in Maine.  A copy of Death in a Dacron Sail is the prize for the right guess! 0 0

Wabanaki is roughly translated at “People of the First Light” and the Wabanaki Confederacy is a Native American confederation of five nations: the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki and Penobscot. The Wabanaki peoples are located in Maine, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and parts of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Quebec. (Note: I spell Mi’kmaq as Micmac, both here and in the Rhe Brewster Mystery series. It’s because I found Mi’kmaq too difficult to type in a hurry!) This confederacy united five of the Algonquian language-speaking Peoples and beginning in 1688, members of the Wabanaki Confederacy participated in six major wars on the side of the French. before the British defeated the French in North America. During this period, their population was radically decimated by the decades of warfare, famines and devastating epidemics. The Confederacy also played a key role in the American Revolution, as a result of the Treaty of Watertown signed in 1776. This treaty established a military alliance between the United States and the Micmac and Passamaquoddy nations, and warriors of both nations fought in the Revolution. Wabanaki soldiers from Canada are still permitted, due to this treaty, to join the US military, and have done so during the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. The Wabanaki Confederacy was forcibly disbanded in 1862, but in 1993 the confederacy meetings were revived and the first reconstituted confederacy conference was hosted by the Penobscots; the sacred Council fire was lit again, and embers from the fire have been kept burning continually since then. The Micmac (Mi’kmaq, L’nu, Mikmaw), who play a role in the second and third of the Rhe Brewster Mysteries, today live in Newfoundland and the northeastern region of Maine. The nation has a population of about 40,000, of whom nearly 11,000 speak their language. The name “Micmac” was first recorded in a memoir by Charles de La Chesnaye (1632 -1702), a French businessman active in Canada Before the English and French came to their part of North American, the Mi’kmaq lived a life of seasonal movement between dispersed interior winter camps and larger coastal communities during the summer. They harvested fish during spawning runs of smelt and herring in the spring, collected waterfowl eggs, and hunted geese. The coast offered abundant cod and shellfish, and ocean breeze brought relief from the biting black flies and mosquitoes (I can attest they are as large as birds!). In September they harvested American eels, then returned to their winter camps to hunt moose and caribou. Moose were the most important animal hunted by the Micmac and they used every part of the body: meat for food, skin for clothing, tendons and sinew for cordage, bones for carving and tools. The weapon they used most for hunting was the bow and arrow. In the 16th century, early European fishing camps for catching and dry-curing cod for shipment traded with Micmac fisherman and expanded the trade to include into furs. This led to fewer coastal camps of Micmacs, instead gathering them into centers of trade. I had a wonderful lunch with John Denis, a Micmac elder, in Caribou, Maine, last February. During the course of our conversation, I asked him a great deal about what had happened to the Micmac during the settlement of America by Europeans. When I mentioned I had read quite a bit about the effects of this settlement on Native Americans, he said, “Then you do not know the real truth of it because everything you read is written by white people.” 0 0