Works in Progress
Coming-of-age stories that haven’t come-of-age themselves … yet.
PUBLISHED WORK
Teaching Globally
My graduate school advisor, Dr. Yoo Kyung Sung, and I co-authored chapter eight of Teaching Globally (2016), “Sliding Glass Doors That Open South Korea for American Children.” It’s all about our collaboration creating a five-week cross-cultural study about South Korea for my third-grade students, which included communicating with same-age pen pals in Seoul. It was an ambitious project and the turning point in my relationship with Yoo Kyung—from mentor to friend. A friend who urged me to take my passion for writing seriously. Thank you, Yoo Kyung; I am.
COMPLETED MANUSCRIPT
Third and Forever
A high school star quarterback loses much more than a game when a real world “playcall” goes tragically wrong.
We never forget our first.
Third and Forever is a contemporary YA story about a star high school quarterback who unsuccessfully uses his social standing to protect a gay classmate from being bullied. It was my first finished manuscript.
I’ll be forever grateful to John Rudolph from Dystel, Goderich & Bourret for representing Third and Forever. His vote of confidence instilled in me the belief that I could be a Real Writer. The manuscript didn’t sell, and John doesn’t represent historical fiction, which I discovered I LOVE writing. I still pull out the contract I had with him sometimes, though. Just to remind myself: detours to publication are not the same as dead ends.
COMPLETED MANUSCRIPT
The Circus Hand
Seventeen-year-old Jennadean Olmstead is a seamstress apprentice who finagles work at a circus wintering camp in 1864 to save the family farm; but it costs her dearly when the elephants, Romeo and Juliet, also need saving.
Where do ideas for stories come from? Sometimes straight from the lake where we learned to swim.
In 1864, the U.S. Olympic Circus wintered in Delavan, Wisconsin on the north shore of Lake Delavan (where I started swimming a hundred and ten years later). Their famous elephant, Juliet, died of a bowel obstruction and because it would’ve been impossible to bury her in the frozen ground, they dragged her onto the frozen lake so she’d sink to her watery grave when the ice thawed.
At a family reunion several years ago, my cousins were comparing stories of how Grandma O. shared this bit of circus trivia with us when we were little, leaving many of us terrified we’d bump into a dead elephant when we were splashing around in Lake Delavan. I had forgotten all about that. But long after the laughter stopped, I couldn’t forget about Juliet. What had wintering quarters been like for her and the other circus elephant, Romeo? What had it been like for the circus and the town when the show was sold? What was it like being an elephant handler back then? Ask enough questions and soon the threads of a story appear. Make the protagonist a seamstress and you get even more threads.
WORK IN PROGRESS
When Bridges Burn
Best-friend-sisters Iris and Evaline Beckford are separated by their cruel father. When America’s deadliest wildfire razes their town and they both think the other has died, painful family secrets surface. Can bridges burned long ago ever be mended?
There was a fun campfire song I loved to belt out as a Girl Scout:
Late last night, when we were all in bed,
Old Mrs. Leary left a lantern in the shed,
and when the cow kicked it over,
she winked her eye and said,
It’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.
Fire! Fire! Fire!
It was a catchy tune.
And it blew my ten-year-old brain to learn that Catherine O’Leary had been a real person with a real cow that allegedly started the Great Chicago Fire on October 8, 1871.
Most people have heard about the Great Chicago Fire, even if they weren’t a Girl Scout. But did you know on that very same night another blaze swept through northern Wisconsin killing 1200 to 2000 people? The Peshtigo Fire burned over 1.2 million acres and is the deadliest wildfire recorded in US history.
And here’s what blew my 45-year-old brain when I learned about the Peshtigo Fire: It happened less than two hundred miles from where I grew up. And I had never heard of it.
My Great-Grandma Della ran a boardinghouse in Chicago when she emigrated from Ireland. In my imagination, I placed that boardinghouse in Peshtigo, Wisconsin and wrote my way into When Bridges Burn.
