The Pleasure Of Agency Submissions--Research, Research, Research

Now that I'm submitting my novel, The Color of Safety, to literary agents, and I have begun to enjoy the process. This is because for me, the process if all about research. And I love research.

When I find a book I love, something that is similar to my own, it's fascinating to read other books represented by the same agent, to try to feel if there's a template, an area of interest, or style, and even to understand how widely flung their tastes might be.




This is also a wonderful way to stumble across books that I might not otherwise have picked up. It's almost as though the agent that I am working as become a trusted literary friend, referring me to the very books that I should be reading right now.

Yes, I know this is Martha Gelhorn. I just love the photo.

Then there's the human aspect of the research. Agents, like the rest of us, have lives pasts, ancestors, history. Their parents held different jobs, sometimes in different countries. They have spent time developing interests, and in many cases, passions. As the managing editor of a small press put it to our wonderful master class, "You should be out there stalking these editors and agents before you submit your work to them."

We have so many tools these days, so many ways to learn about people we do not know. Of course, there are interviews in literary places, but even more fun, I find, are old articles about community activism, "How We Mets," in the New York Times, blogs, and twitter feed. In one case, I found two thought-provoking academic pieces by an agent's assistant, (who is likely to become a terrific agent herself), academic writing that was fresh, interesting and funny.

Through this research, those who seemed Powerful Other have become people to me. Fascinating people. I find that far from wanting to get "an" agent, I care deeply about getting this particular agent. I want to have them in my corner for very specific reasons, but I also want to have lunch with them someday, and get to know them more.

And if any particular agent doesn't work out, well, I'll be very disappointed--I always give myself permission to be disappointed by a loss or a failure--but I'll still be richer for all I've read and learned.

What's the submission process like for you? What other tips do you have for submitting a novel to agents? My is literary historical fiction. What's yours?

Why Anna Leonowens was offered a "Small Brick House Adjacent To the Palace."

Well, talk about jumping the gun on research. Here I was writing snidely about why anybody would want a brick house in Siam in the 1860's, in a super hot and humid climate, and I forgot all about the "white ants," that is to say termites. Apparently, if a house is not built completely of teak, they will eat it up very quickly, so a brick house necessary.

Also, Bangkok was built on marsh and river, with houses on built up platforms or built up land, so that going anywhere meant having a boat and boat man. It would have been much more expensive for King Monghut to have Anna Leonowens living off site, because she would have had to have both boat and servant handy at all times.

The Grand Palace in Bangkok

I should maybe shut my mouth until I have done voluminous research to make certain I make no more mistakes, but I am so excited about this research and hope to find people who know more about this area.

Research Quandaries, Biographer Battles and Anna Leonowens--which one is right?

Love that hair!

So, I'm reading two biographies of Anna Leonowens. Recent ones. And in many places, they flat-out contradict one another.

One is called Bombay Anna, The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess p. 2008 by Susan Morgan. (Distinguished professor of English at University of Miami.) Morgan's writing is fun (so far) In this book, Morgan presents a reasonable view of Anna's life and choices, beginning with upward-rising ancestors, proof of her grandmother's marriage, and a wild, free-range childhood where she her voracious intellect was able to inhale several languages beyond the ones she would have learned at home. She manages to make




The other is: Masked, The Life of Anna Leonowens, Schoolmistress at the court of Siam, by Alfred Habegger, a professor emeritus, again of English, at the University of Kansas, and biographer of Henry James Sr. and Emily Dickinson. Habegger really dislikes his heroine, who he explains with great disdain,  falsified things she wrote about her own past (at a time of such bigotry against being a "half-caste," or in Anna's case, one quarter East-Indian, that it was like being a quadroon (one quarter African) while living as white in high society 1850's New Orleans.

He is also given to saying, with high dudgeon, that none of the other white people dealing with King Monghut thought he was highhanded with them, while neglecting to notice that none of the other people he's mentioning are women, and when he mentions Anna's son, Louis, who was with her in Thailand, writing of his fears of King Monghut, Habegger decides not that there might be a reason for fear in an absolute monarchy where opposition is suppressed, but that his mother's "paranoia" must have affected him. 

And he speaks in the simplest psychologicaleese, something that, in general, irritates the heck out of me. Very few things are that simple. Certainly not Anna Leonowens, King Monghut, or the politics of Siam or America or Britain during the years about which he writes. 

But he seems to have done a tremendous amount of detailed detective work and research, as does Susan Morgan. 

So what do I do when they disagree? 

And would anybody know anything about the Bombay Education Society's School during the years of, say, 1840 to 1855? If you do, I'd love to hear from you.

Would you have any idea of whether or how much an Anglo-Indian East India Army brat might encounter Mohommedans, Parsis--(Zoroastrians originally from Persia) Marathis, thugs (a tribe or gang of criminals known as thuggees, believe it or not) Nautch girls, Turban folders, gold-thread weavers, road sweepers, Brahmins and every cast between, cow patty makers, (or did Anna herself make cow patties to line the walls, burn for fuel, etc?) 

Did Anna join her mother with a group of women washing laundry in the river or lake? 

How the heck can I learn about these things? Even if I could afford to travel to India, Australia, Indonesia and Thailand, I couldn't get to 1840 Poona, a now-destroyed Australian outpost, or the brick house outside the palace from that time. 

Though why anybody who had grown up in the heat of India, lived in Australia's dry heat, and Indonesia's humidity, think that a brick house would make sense for living in in Thailand? 

Any ideas? 

How Did He Who Must Not Be Named (Voldemort) Wind Up In Star Wars? (warning-spoiler alerts ahead)

I've just returned from seeing the new Star Wars film, watching the plot go gehunky-hunky-hunking along like one of the films many lumbering two-legged robots. Suddenly, mid-film, appears He Who Must Not Be Named. Giant-sized, and gone missing from the Harry Potter movies. What the heck is he doing in Star Wars? Do the villains of long-running film series hop from franchise to franchise? Or do they just all have to have no noses?

Afterwards, my family and the two clerks at the Walgreen's counter were trying to figure out the gaping holes in the plot, particularly those having to do with young Snape (Adam Driver). I can find the answers on-line, and even ideas of how future plots will run, but I can't quite figure out how He Who Must Not Be Named (called Snoke in this iteration, a combination of Snape and Smoke?) saves his protege mini-Snape from the total collapse of a planet not to mention falling into a pit of lava after getting shot with a compound bow and taking several hits with a light saber than can take down trees.

And by the way, foresters of the world, unite in protest! Those were pretty big trees they were chopping down like firewood.

Oh, wait, I forgot. After that, the whole planet goes up in fire and smoke.

The King and I vs. The Internet and I--Anna Leonowens and Rachel Dolezal part 2.

Last time, I wrote some about Anna Leonowens, of the King and I fame and the challenges that she fought against to create an exceptionally adventurous and productive life.

Now, we come to Rachel Dolezal, the brown-skinned ex-leader of the Coure D'alene NAACP, 

who turned out to be a blonde, fair-freckled, straight-haired woman from an ultra-Christian background. I have learned from sources--not Ms. Dolezal--that she was homeschooled in isolation using a curriculum provided by Christian Liberty Academy Satellite School, (CLASS) which comes with Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) membership and a copy of "To Train A Child." Both are red-flags for child abuse--To Train A Child advocates "blanket training" infants (i.e., put one on a blanket, and if they so much as put a limb off the blanket, spank them) and suggests flexible plumbing pipe and running around a tree all night as discipline tools for older children. (All of which sound like "discipline" Anna Leonowens might have encountered at the Military Asylum run by the Bombay Education Society in 1841.) In the mid-1990's, these parents began to adopt black babies, which is a way for evangelicals to "save souls for Christ," beginning at home. I did not know about this culture before I researched Dolezal's family, but have spent some time researching it since, as well as inter-racial adoptions within this community.

Oh, and by the way, CLASS curriculum is linked to White Supremicist home schoolers, and HSLDA is ignoring several scandals involving sexual abuse linked to its leader and those he supports. To Train Up A Child explains that reasons an adopted child may not look a new parent in the face or may accuses someone of sexual abuse is because they suffer from an attachment disorder. The solution is corporal punishment or banishment to a Christian-linked camp that uses even more corporal punishment. Three of the Dolezal's four adopted children are no longer on speaking terms with them. And witnesses report the Dolezal's "practicing" infant spanking in public in the church parking lot. If they did that there, I can only imagine what they did at home.

Rachel Dolezal fled this environment. Interestingly enough, she headed to a traditionally black college, and what she studied was not religion, but art. She married an African-American man, had a child with him, and took on the responsibility of raising her adopted brother when he was legally emancipated from his parents. She also switched her hair, darkened her skin, and worked for the betterment of a people she adopted, despite the documented hostility, and worse, that people of color routinely faces. Unfortunately for her, she did so in the era of the internet, viral videos and instant research. Anna Leonowens would never have been able to succeed in her life-long masquerade had she done so now. Rachel Dolezal could have disappeared into an African-American world without anyone batting an eyelash had she done so then.

Anna Leonowens and her choices are complicated. It's not possible to sneer at her, to say, "she did this for her own betterment." She had few choices. In fact, the choice she took didn't even exist before she created it.

And she always showed a profound empathy for women of color, especially Asian women, and did so openly. She was a passionate suffragette and life a life of tremendous adventure and vision. And yet, once she crossed the line, she had to defend a racist system in order to remain safe, and to have her two surviving children and her grandchildren remain safe.

Dolezal, too, is complicated. The stories of her finding a noose outside her house are questionable, though a neighbor did admit to dressing a deer in a tree near her house, and leaving the rope hanging. She stepped up for her brother, and for her younger sister, too, who had claimed sexual abuse by Rachel's biological older brother--an examination that was dropped after the parents outed Dolezal. I hope that Dolezal has half of Anna Leonowen's fighting spirit. I'd love to see her transform her experience into something that changes the world, at least in small ways, as, indeed, Leonowens did, to some degree, in 1850's Siam, among early suffragettes in Canada, and in pre-revolutionary Russia. Go for it, Rachel.

Mixed Race Dutch/Indonesian Girls c. 1925-1930.

Lack-of-Doubt Envy

This week, as I dropped off one of my children at school, I heard a mom speaking to her son, a terrific little boy in my child's class. 

“I will work hard today and make sure that my mouth speaks only kindness,” the mother chanted. He repeated it after her. 

She took his chin, stared him in the face, and told him to say it louder and really mean it. Then, she said the next part of the chant, “For I know all things are possible within the love of Christ.” 

This is a little brown boy, single brown mother. He is always on the lookout to help and support in the classroom. In fact, I had just mentioned that to his teacher. How kind he is, how ready to interfere for good. 

After he went in, I told the mother what I had just told the teacher. (It is a family value we teach to try to tell people good things when we can.) 

Then, I headed back into the classroom to give my child another hug. As I went, I admit I felt a bit of envy that I do not have this mother's kind of a faith. I know, in fact, the opposite-- that all things are not possible, no matter who believes in what God. Very bad things can happen to very good people. Anxiety can cripple. Even the most religious can be pushed by depression to commit suicide. Babies can be born with cancer and die within the month. Whole peoples can be wiped out through intensive campaigns, millions within a matter of years. 

But I still envied this mother that certainty. I wished to be able to take my own child's chin and say, "Anything is possible with faith in God." 

Instead, I said my usual, "Be kind, and make sure to ask good questions."  

And then, I hugged my child and gave a kiss on top of the head, did the same to the two best friends in class (I have asked permission long before to do this) Then, I found the affectionate little boy who this year is clearly going through some horrible crises at home. (He is glum, his face so sad this year. He says, "I was up all night last night," and frankly, if a child can fall asleep during morning circle time, you know he is sleepy.) 

"Who's my very favorite boy?" I said, and gave him a hug. He put his hand on top of his head, his eyes wide, and said, "Wow. You kissed my head." 

"Yup," I said, "You said that I could. And I love you. You know that, right?" 

It's the best I can do. 

Anna Leonowens vs. Rachel Dolezal Part 1.

Look at the Victorian woman in this photo, sitting there with her parted hair and her the barrel-hooped petticoats under her skirts. She seems comfortable with the various Indian young women around her, some likely Hindu, some Muslim, some Parsee (descended from Persian Zoroastrians who immigrated to India in previous generations) some perhaps untouchable. The white woman is probably a British missionary or perhaps a Headmistress of a school. All the girls grouped around her are very young. The only older Indian woman is the one on our right looking at the others rather than at the camera. Notice how the Indian women sit around the white woman as though she were a queen.

This photo was taken around the era in which Anna Leonowens grew up, like this photo, in British Colonial India. Though she presented herself as the red-headed Welsh widow of a British officer, descended from British gentry, Harriet Anna Leonowens was born in India, her great-great, grandfather a saddler, her great-grandfather a Brimstone-preaching Methodist in the days when Methodism was an outrageous new sect that preached--astonishingly--that all men are equal, her grandfather then barely a "gentleman."

Even more astonishingly, Anna's grandmother, about whom we know next to nothing, was a girl very similar to the young woman of this photo, more than likely a mistress or "concubine," of her grandfather.

Her mother, in what was the very best option for the time for a "half-caste" girl was married at fourteen to a much older enlisted man, Anna's father, who died a few months before Anna was born.  With few other options, a six-month pension and no funds, Mary Ann married again, an Irish blacksmith turned Sapper/Miner in the British Army (the people who dug tunnels and set explosions to bring down walled cities during military campaigns.) Mary Ann, already the mother of three  including Anna, gave this Donohoe nine other children, while living in cramped, close quarters, and providing the British military with yet another tool as she aided her husband in his work. In fact, according to Anna's later stories, Mary Ann risked her life to protect the payroll that her husband was assigned to guard. (Of course, Mary Ann was also risking her life to save her husband's career.)

In this narrow world, the fact of Anna's mixed race meant most doors were closed to her. Her best option was to be removed from her family and sent to a school for mixed-race girls like herself. She, her sister and a cousin attended such a school which sounds a lot worse than Jane Eyre's boarding school and more like Tribal Boarding schools in the U.S. harsh goals designed to remove the girls from "chee-chee," culture and train them to be, like their mother, useful helpmates to British enlisted men.

When they reached the age of fourteen or fifteen, they were kitted out with a small dowry. On a regular basis, older, steady enlisted men visited the school and sat in a parlor where they were given a choice among them such girls for a wife.  Anna's other sister,  Mary Anne, married such a steady older man--twenty-some years older.

Anna refused to do so. Instead, she married a fiery young Anglo-Irishman, and headed off with him to Australia and the beginning of a life of struggle, loss, gain and adventure. She cut all ties with her mixed-race family, claimed her complexion had been forever darkened by her years under the Asian sun, and used the tale of her governessing for the King of Siam as a launching point into American society, where, as a supposedly very proper British woman of very high pedigree, she lectured about how British ideals saved Siam from slavery. Her spine straightened by whalebone, her discipline hardened by a mother raised, as she was, in a harsh British boarding school, her mind forever questioning, Anna broke free of the mold and became the very model of British upper-class uprightness, providing a living for herself and propelling her daughter, Avis, into the Canadian upper class.

Anna And the King of Siam--The reinvented helping to reinvent.

I'm still thinking about the discovery that our pale-skinned, red-haired vision of Anna Leonowens, born in Wales, daughter of a captain in the army, widow of a captain in the army, dreaming wistfully about "When the earth smelled of summer, and the sky was streaked with white, and the soft mist of England was sleeping on a hill," was really a fierce, imaginative, inventive, resilient mixed-race woman who was born in India, raised in India and Singapore, married a weak man and not only found a way to support herself throughout her life, but did so by so completely reinventing herself that she inspired the imaginations of millions of people around the world, in a story of "British civilization" taming a "barbarian." 

This is a woman who had never been to England, whose father was an enlisted man, her mother "Eurasian," in a time when that was social death, who may have grown up among the rest of the soldiers' brats, with what little schooling that entailed, and who reinvented herself not only to teach for five years, the children of the King of Siam, but later reinvented herself with a writing and speaking career, and built a far better world for her children--her daughter married well, and lived a life of leisure, probably never knowing that her great-grandmother was Indian and her mother was not from Wales. 

Anna Leonowens cut off her sister, Eliza Julia Edwards, when Eliza married James Millard, a mixed-race Sergeant-Major with the 4th Troop Artillery, Indian Army in Deesa, Banaskantha, Gujarat, India. In fact, Anna cut Eliza off so completely that she threatened to commit suicide when a family member tried to contact her. (Eliza herself died at age 

But her son, Louis Leonowens, the child of The King And I, who was educated for six years in Siam, was sent to Europe for his education, (after the Thais politely asked Anna to leave.) He returned to Thailand, and married Caroline Knox, the daughter of Sir George Thomas Knox and his wife, a Thai noblewoman--which must have been, in some ways, Anna Leonowen's greatest nightmare, that her son was marrying a woman of mixed race. 

What rich, fascinating characters, including King Monghut, who was no slouch at reinvention himself, who spoke 11 languages, was not raised to be King, was in fact, an intellectual, the successful head of a Buddhist monastery, creating a revolution in Thai Buddhism, and was a moving force in the modernization of Siam.

And then, there is Siam's acting prime minister at the time, Somdet Chao Phraya Si Suriyawong.

And Sir George Thomas Knox and his wife and children. 

And the first women doctors who came from many countries to study at the first medical school in the US to accept women. 

And. . .

Ah, research. 

Luke, I Am Your Father, Atticus. A First Family Changes Their Kid's Name

Okay. The first one has happened. Disturbed by the publication of Harper Lee's new/old novel, Go Set a Watchman, where the heroic, saintly Atticus Finch of To Kill A Mockingbird  joins the Klan, (briefly) and foments rebellion against integration and the NAACP, a couple from Colorado, David and Christen Epstein have changed their baby, Atticus' name to Lucas, Luke for short.

http://www.people.com/article/parents-change-son-atticus-name-go-set-watchman

David and Christen Epstein figure little Atticus--er--Luke--won't notice that his name went from three to two syllables. Big sister, Ayala, is already pretty confused, but they're hoping that will wash out with time.

I get this. I totally do. We adopted a dog once who we thought was named Tonto. That was going to have to change. (Turned out he wasn't named Tonto, but Rover, so we were okay, and Rover remains unconfused to this day.)

Harpo Marx was born Adolf, but changed his name to Arthur. And when one of my great-grandparents got super sick, her parents changed her name--so as to confuse the angel of death. (Angel flies down, looking for "Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary. . . Oh, that's Jane. Nope." And flies away.) It worked.

Still, really? Because there are two versions of a fictional character?

I used to wonder at all the little Atticus' running around. If the model for Atticus was really Amasa Coleman Lee, (Harper Lee's real father) why not name these kids Amasa?

Still, best of luck to little Lucas and his big sister, Ayala. Someday, I hope he meets both of his honorary fathers, from both Harper Lee books. And at least he's not named like the kids we met at the pool the other day, siblings named River, Ocean and Stream.