Category:

Grape and Canister

2/2/2017

One of the things that makes historical fiction difficult for middle grade readers is the vocabulary. Tweens and young teens are often perplexed by words that don't make any sense to them.

Take, for instance, grape. Once, while teaching about the Civil War, I had a 7th grader ask me what was so scary about having grapes shot at you. She honestly believed that cannoneers loaded their guns with the same kind of grapes that make their way into jelly and jam. While this would lead to a sticky situation, and perhaps some stained uniforms, it likely wouldn't lead to many fatalities.

By Geni - Photo by user:geni, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11925339

Grape, when referring to 18th and 19th Century war, is just a shortened form of the word grapeshot. Neither grape or grapeshot refer to shooting people with grapes. Rather, it refers to how small metal balls, or shot, were bundled together before being loaded into the gun. When the gun fired, the bag disintegrated and the shot spread out from the muzzle, much like shot from a shotgun.

My students understand this concept better when I ask if any of their parents are hunters. Usually they know the purpose of buck shot (for shooting deer) and birdshot (smaller pellets, for shooting pigeons.)

Students who are involved in track and field suddenly realized that the shot they put in shot put is related to grapeshot, especially when I haul out the one piece of grapeshot I own and we compare them with the team's shot.

Grapeshot was especially effective against amassed infantry movements, such as Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. But by the Civil War, grapeshot was already becoming a thing of the past, replaced by canister.

By Minnesota Historical Society [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Canister, which is sometimes known as case shot, involved small metal balls similar to the ones used in grapeshot. Instead of being encased in muslin, they were packed into a tin or brass container, the front of which blew out, scattering the balls into the oncoming enemy.

Canister is a word that is unfamiliar to many middle grade readers, because they are too young to know what a film canister is. They do, however, know what a can is, and can readily accept that can is short for canister.

Jennifer Bohnhoff teaches New Mexico History to 7th grade students in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her middle grade novel, The Bent Reed, is set at the Battle of Gettysburg. Her next novel, Valverde, is set in New Mexico during the Civil War and is due out this spring.

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The use of kennings in Beowulf: Wealtheow the Peaceweaver

7/31/2016

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One of the literary features of Old English poetry is the use of kennings, or compound words that evoke vivid pictures. Beowulf, an epic written sometime before 750 a.d. and arguably the greatest literary work of Anglo-Saxon culture, is liberally sprinkled with kennings.

For instance, Anglo-Saxon scops, or storytellers, compared the bubbles and foam that form around the prow of a ship as it cuts through the water to a necklace on a woman's throat. They knew that the course which a ship took through the water could also be traversed by swans or whales. Therefore, when the hero takes a boat from the land of the Geats to Denmark, the poet uses kennings and says that Beowulf's foamy-throated ship goes over the swan- road to reach the tide-beaten land.

This Anglo-Saxon love of kennings has persisted in the Germanic propensity to form compound words.

The kenning freodwebbe, or peace-weaver is used to describe Wealtheow, the Queen of the Danes, wife of Hrothgar, and mistress of the great hall Heorot. This term refers to a woman married from one tribe into another in order to secure peace between the two groups. While it is obvious that the Danes are one of the groups Wealtheow's marriage was to unite, we know very little of her original family or clan. In line 620, the poet calls Wealtheow "the Helming woman," but the Helmings are not a tribe that can be historically identified. They show up in no other work of Anglo-Saxon literature. I wonder if they even existed by the the time the Beowulf poem was being written down, or had they succumbed to warfare or disease.

Wealtheow's name further confuses those who want to understand her background. Wealtheow is a compound, a combination of wealh, which means Celt, foreigner or slave, and theow, which means in bondage, service, or not free. Although she moves freely through Heorot, Wealtheow's name suggests that she is not there of her own accord. Several researchers explain that there is not a clear distinction in Anglo-Saxon law between a woman being offered by her tribe as a pledge of good faith between tribes and a woman being taken from her tribe as a hostage. Other precious items such as jewelry and battle gear were exchanged as seals of good faith between tribes, demonstrating that women were treated as commodities in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Although she is a queen, Wealtheow is in a difficult position. She is isolated within a society that may not accept her as one of their own. Stripped of the protection of her own family, she lives among people she may not like or trust because they have, in essence, kidnapped her. Her goal, to weave peace among two peoples, is ultimately in the hands of the men who surround her, and who have already proven themselves warlike in the very act of taking her.

The Wealtheow who appears in my novel The Last Song of the Swan is a quiet and dignified woman who carefully works to keep peace within her household, appease her guests and please her husband. She is resigned to her fate, but if one looks, one can see the shadow of distant and violent events long past in her eyes.

Jennifer Bohnhoff writes historical and contemporary fiction for middle school through adult readers. You can learn more about her at her website.

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Real Characters

4/29/2016

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Where Duty Calls, the Middle Grade Civil War Novel set in New Mexico Territory that I published through Kinkajou Press last summer, is populated with a mix of fictitious and real people. All of the important events and dates are historical, the information gleaned from diaries, newspapers, and secondary sources. If I could have found real people who were always in the middle of the action, I would have made them my main characters. Since I couldn’t, I created Jemmy and Raul. The small, personal scenes depicting their family life are entirely made up. But when my sources described a scene I wanted to include in my novel, I often added the writer of the account into my novel.

Some of the real people whose diaries, letters and sources I used proved to be real characters, with wonderful stories of their own. One of these is Frederick S. Wade, who left the teaching profession to enlist as a private in the Army of New Mexico, the force Major General Henry Hopkins Sibley organized in Texas for the purpose of taking New Mexico Territory for the Confederacy.

Frederick Wade in his later years

Wade’s obituary,in the June 27, 1925 edition of the San Antonio Express says that he was the one who told Abraham Lincoln that Texas would secede from the Union. Born in Ontario, Canada, Wade was raised in Illinois, then moved to Texas in 1857. In 1860, he was visiting his parents in Illinois when Lincoln asked him about Texan opinion. The obituary states that Lincoln tried to get Wade to tour Texas and urge it to remain with the Union. Wade declined, and Texas joined the Confederacy. Wade then joined the Confederate brigade being formed by Tom Green. He continued to serve under Green until he became a prisoner of war in 1862.

While in prison camp, Wade helped a friend escape. His friend had contracted smallpox and was in the hospital. One day, Wade found him sitting in a coffin with a white sheet around him. Wade sprinkled the man’s face and hands with flour, then sealed the coffin and made sure it was loaded on the top of the other coffins in the dead wagon. After the wagon had left the prison, the man raised the lid of the coffin and called “Come to judgement” in his spookiest voice. The frightened driver ran away yelling “Ghosties! Ghosties!” Wade’s friend then stole one of the horses and escaped to Canada. You can read this story, plus some other remembrances here.

Who needs to make up characters when people like this already exist?

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former middle grade teacher. Where Duty Calls is the first book in a trilogy entitled Rebels Along the Rio Grande. Book 2, The Worst Enemy, will be published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing, in August, 2023.

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Quirky Ideas from the WWI History Museum

7/6/2015

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The reflecting pool at the museum's entrance.

When I went to the National World War I Museum in Kansas City last May, I was delighted by quirky artifacts that really got me thinking. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them make it into a future novel, because they would add great depth and detail to a narrative.

Here are a few of my favorites:

This projectile from a from a French 58 mm trench mortar was nicknamed the "Flying Pig" because of what it looked like in the air.

The Flying Pig was used by French, Belgian, and U.S. troops and had a range of 490 yards.

The video below isn't of a Flying Pig, but of an Australian trench mortar.

If I ever write a novel set in the trenches of World War I, I have GOT to have a Flying Pig in it!

This Austrian helmet was sent home as a souvenir by an American. Back then, I guess the postal service had less restrictions than now, because no box or packaging was required to get this helmet from Europe to the U.S. The soldier (I'm assuming it was a soldier. It could have been a sailor or a relief worker for all I know.) Simply attached a tag with his mother's (girlfriend's? sisters?) Kansas City address and stuck stamps directly to the helmet. I hope I find a character with enough spunk and creativity to think about sending home souvenirs like this!

This is an Imperial German Border sign. Made of painted cast iron, a series of these marked the border between Germany and France.

In August of 1914, an elite French strike force penetrated the border on the southern flank of the engagement, capturing many of these border signs.

Can you imagine a young Frenchman bringing this home to his maman?

Am I planning to write a book set in World War I? Not at present. Right now, I'm finishing a final edit on a young adult novel that has two concurrent settings: Swan Song switches back and forth between a modern high school girl and a girl living in Europe during the Ice Age. I'm also researching a book which will be set in New Mexico during the Civil War. But I'm always musing what comes next, especially when I see something quirky that brings the period to life!

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Finding a treasure Trove

1/3/2015

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The author with John Pierucki

I never expected to open a treasure trove last fall when I sat behind a table at a church craft fair.

I expected to sell a few books. Nothing more.

But then John Pierucki stopped in front of my table. He looked down at Code: Elephants on the Moon and his brow wrinkled as he asked what my book was about. When I told him that it was about World War II, he frowned a little more deeply and told me that he worked with codes during World War II, and this wasn't one of the codes.

Yes it was, I said. It was one that the Free French broadcast from London over the BBC to members of the Resistance in France. This was a code used just before D-Day.

John's eyebrows shot up. He told me that his ship had gone down on D-Day. Although he wasn't there - he had been left back in Italy - he'd lost many friends on that day.

That was it for me. I picked up a pen and signed a book to John, thanking him for his service. No one has ever done so much to earn a free book.

I met with John yesterday for lunch. He's packed a lot of life into his 90 years, and he has a lot of stories to tell. Some of them are real doozies. John served his country for 30 years as a translator and cryptographer, and he's been a lot of places and talked with a lot of interesting people.

Talking with John was like opening a treasure chest of story ideas. I'm hoping to open that chest a lot this year and run my fingers through the contents.

There's a lot of gold and precious gems in what he has to say.

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The little Depot that witnessed history

12/16/2014

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President Street Station, Baltimore

Last weekend I went to Baltimore for the Army Navy Game, a football game that has enough history to make it worth a blog post of its own.

As the taxi pulled up to my hotel on President Street, I was intrigued by this little building which was across the street. It was dwarfed by the high-rises surrounding it, and looked very out of place.

The building now houses the Baltimore Civil War Museum, a one room exhibit that is a mix of educational panels and curio cabinets filled with items - some identified and some not. But before it was a museum, this building was the President Street Station of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad. Built in 1851, it was the first railroad station to have a barrel vault roof or incorporate a Howe truss, a support system more commonly used in bridge design.

But what really made this building special was not its architecture so much as the historical events that happened in it. The President Street Station was witness to a lot of Civil War history.

"Passage Through Baltimore" Adalbert J. Volck, 1863

On February 23, 1861 Abraham Lincoln came through Baltimore on his way to his innauguation.

Originally Lincoln had planned to stop and give a speech. However, warned by the Pinkerton Dectective Agency of an assassination plot, he slipped through town in the pre-dawn hours wearing a cap rather than his recognizable stove-pipe hat.

If Lincoln had chosen to brave the gangs of pro-secessionists who intended to prevent his safe passage to the capital, President-elect Lincoln might never have lived to become President.

lithograph by Samuel Rowse, 1850

Lincoln wasn't the only person to hide himself in the President Street Station. Henry "Box" Brown arranged to have himself packed into a wooden crate marked "direct express to Philadelphia," and thereby escaped north to freedom from slavery. Frederick Douglas also used the PW&B line to escape, leaping onto a train as it pulled away from the President Street Station, which remains a site on the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

"Massachusetts militia passing through Baltimore," oil on Canvas (1861).

The event that the President Street Station is best remembered for happened two months after Lincoln's secretive trip through Baltimore.

Most people consider the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 as the beginning of the Civil War, but the first blood was spilled on April 19, 1861, when the 6th Massachusetts Infantry, debarking at the President Street Station enroute to Washington D.C. were accosted by southern sympathizers who blocked their path and pelted the soliders with rocks and bricks. By the end of what became known at the Pratt Street Riots, four soldiers and nine civilians lay dead in the streets.

For a first hand account of the Pratt Street Riot, click here.

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Judging a Book by its cover: Part Two

11/20/2014

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L.M. Elliott's Under a War-Torn Sky is one of my favorite novels. It is a fast-paced read that really excites middle school boys who are otherwise reluctant readers. I used it several times when I was a reading intervention teacher, both as a class read and as an individual recommendation, and I've never had a boy not enjoy it.

The story is about Henry Forester, a young man flying a B-24 in World War II. When his plane is shot down and he is trapped behind enemy lines, kind French citizens, some who are members of the Resistance and some who are just sympathetic to a frightened young man, help him to escape and return home via Switzerland and a treacherous route over the Pyrennes.

As one might expect, there are several plot elements in common between Under a War-Torn Sky and Code: Elephants on the Moon. My French girl, Eponine, has a very different life from the French girl who helps Elliott's Henry, but the both share some of the same opinions about the callow young aviators they help rescue.

Some of the questions I was asked when it came time for me to commision the cover for Code: Elephants on the Moon was if there were any other books whose subject or theme were like mine. Could I suggest any covers that looked like what I wanted my own cover to look like?

I immediately thought of Under a War-Torn Sky. I googled it to find cover images and was surprised to find not just the one I was familiar with, but three covers.

I

I sent all three of these images to the artist who created my cover. As you can tell, mine came out very different than any of these. This isn't surprising, since the focus of the two books is different. My aviator plays just a small part in my plot, while he is the main character in Elliott's.

I'm curious: which of these covers attracts your attention? Based on the very sketchy synopsis I've given you, which one best expresses the story? Would you buy any of these three books?

Knowing how you think might influence me when it's time to commission my next cover!

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Resurrecting Ghosts

10/13/2014

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Last week a teaching colleage and I visited several places of historical interest in New Mexico. Among them were Fort Craig, outside of which a Civil War battle happened, and Fort Selden, a fort used during the Indian Wars.

Time and disuse had ravaged both places, reducing them to fragments of shattered walls and long, low mounds that had once been ramparts. The adobe walls had melted back into the desert soils from which they had been formed.

We visited the one on a Thursday and the other on a Friday, and each time we had the run of the place to ourselves. The only sounds were the whistling of the wind over the broken stones, the chirp of crickets and the crunch of gravel beneath our feet. It was hard to believe that both sites had once bustled with life.

But it had been. I know this because I'd just recently finished reading Hampton Sides' Blood and Thunder, a biography of Kit Carson. One chapter told about Carson's time at Fort Craig, when he was serving as a Colonel in the First New Mexico Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. Carson led his men against Confederate troops in the Battle of Valverde, which was fought just north of the fort. Sides includes in his narrative the tramp of drilling men, the neighing of horses, the cacaphony of parade bands, the thunder of artillery and the crackle of small arms. Mr. Sides breathed life into the scene. He made the Old West come alive again in my imagination.

As I stood among the dry and silent ruins, I remembered Sides' vivid descriptions. I considered how the parade grounds would have looked when the marching boots of seventeen companies of men kept the weeds at bay, how the air would have smelled when filled with the tang of horse dung and kitchen smoke and gunpowder.

Good history and good historical ficiton can breath life into events long past. It can resurrect people long dead and places that have mouIdered into dust. It can make that which has faded away become vivid again.

I don't know how much will be left of the old western forts in another decade or two. Perhaps there will be nothing for my grandchildren to see when they are old enough to care about what happened in New Mexico in the nineteenth century. But my hope is that those who follow will be able to resurrect the forts and the people who occupied them through the power of the written word.

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Code Name: Cover

7/21/2014

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Everyone knows the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover." Everyone also knows that everyone does exactly that. Mark Coker, the guy behind Smashwords, one of the premier sites for self-pubed ebooks, says "your cover image is the first impression you make on a prospective reader. A great cover image makes a promise to the reader. It tells the reader, “I’m the book you’re looking for.”

So how do you decide what images will make readers decide that your book is the one they're looking for? Tricky question.

Just how tricky this question is to answer becomes obvious when you look at the five different covers that have graced Elizabeth Wein's new YA historical fiction Code Name Verity. Wein's novel is about what happens to two women whose plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France in 1943, and it's told in first person through the writings of the two women. The cover on the left pictures a plane trailing blood-red smoke as it goes down, a dark silhouette of a woman, and a rose, and I can say without giving too much away that all three images are appropriate, although I am not enough of an airplane enthusiast to tell you if the plane on the cover is the right kind or not. The next cover shows two women's arms bound together, and while it does show how the two characters are emotionally bound to one another, I first wondered if this novel was about lesbian lovers or bondage rituals. The middle cover shows two old bicycles against a stone wall, with bombers in the background and is, like the first cover, appropriate although not as mysterious or dark as the first cover. The remaining two covers have women's faces and the suggestion of imprisonment: one with high strung barbed wire and the other with the shadow of fencing. One features a red gash across the woman's face; the other, the bombers again. Two of the women seem to have dark hair and eyes. The third looks like a blue-eyed blonde, which is what the woman whose code name was Verity was.

I've added a little more about this book to my web page on Code: Elephants on the Moon, in the for further reading section.

I first came across this novel when I was looking specifically for cover ideas for Code: Elephants on the Moon, and at that point the only cover I saw was the center one. I liked the bombers and, since bombers also feature in my novel, I decided to include them in my cover design.

So what do you think? If you had to judge Code Name Verity by its cover, which would you choose?

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Killing the Gatekeepers

7/7/2014

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When I first began submitting manuscripts to editors nearly twenty years ago, the editors were the gatekeepers. They were the people who stood between a would-be author and publication, making sure that the books that were published were worthy of publication. The only way around these gatekeepers was using a vanity press, which was both expensive and, as the name suggests, a way for the vain but not erudite, to get published.

Back then, home computers were still rare and the internet was in its infancy. The submission process involved printing out one's manuscript and a cover letter on a dot matrix printer, using a long, accordion-folded paper that had to be ripped apart along perforations to produce pages. These were stuffed, along with a SASE, or stamped, self-addressed envelope, into a large manila envelope. Then the waiting began. My recollection was that the wait averaged anywhere from two weeks to three months. The fastest I ever got a manuscript back was one day, when I managed to fold up the envelope TO the editor and stick it IN the SASE with the other materials. The longest I ever waited was a year and a half, at the end of which I received a letter from a widow apologizing that her husband the editor had died and it had taken her some time to deal with the pile of papers he left behind. But in those early years I always did get some kind of response. One was a scrawled "No Thnx" on the bottom of my query. Some were standard form rejections, photocopied until they were pale and listless. But many were personal, encouraging and helpful.

But then the industry started to change. As home computers became more common, so did the number of people who thought they had produced the great American novel. Overwhelmed editors began putting up barricades to stem the barrage: gatekeepers for the gatekeepers. First houses that had welcomed manuscripts now wanted only queries, then only queries from writers who had membership in a professional organization such as SCBWI. Then I began seeing stipulations that houses were only accepting manuscripts from authors with agents, followed by agents who only wanted manuscripts from people they had met at conferences. The gatekeepers seemed to be proliferating; the distance between manuscript and publication more daunting. And perhaps even worse, many houses and agents changed their policy so that they only time they contacted you was if they were interested. Instead of waiting a month or six months for a rejection, one now waited forever for a rejection that would never come at all. It's now been years since I received a personal, encouraging or helpful rejection. That's a long time to stand at a door and wait.

Some of the gatekeepers out there are not really gatekeepers at all, but hucksters trying to take money from desperate writers. They stand at the gate and pronounce that they have the key, and they will share it with you for only $199, or $250, or $1,000. They tell you that if you let them send out your queries or write your business plan, or edit your manuscripts: if you attend their conferences or webinars, join their clubs, follow them on Twitter, you will be successful. And maybe you will. But maybe you will just be poorer.

Yet, at the same time that getting through the ever-lengthening line of gatekeepers seemed more and more like running a dispiriting and expensive gauntlet, other doors were opening. Print on demand and e publication joined vanity presses as a way to put one's writing out to the public. Years ago a friend and I talked about this. She encouraged me to give it a try. I didn't. I wasn't ready to rattle the knobs on any of those other doors.

The reason I wasn't ready is because I was still waiting for a gatekeeper to allow me to pass. I wanted someone - an agent or editor - to tell me that I was good enough - that my manuscript was good enough. I wanted a gatekeeper to assure me that I wasn't being vain in believing that I had a story to tell. I wanted validation. It didn't seem to matter what friends and critique buddies had said.

Then suddenly this spring, something happened. I don't know what it was, really. I just suddenly knew that I didn't need to wait for the validation of a gatekeeper to get published. I could open a door myself, without their approval.
Because really, it wasn't an editor or an agent who was keeping me from being published. They weren't the true gatekeeper. Fear was. And I wasn't going to let my fear stop me anymore.

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<<Previous

Forward>>

Grape and Canister

The use of kennings in Beowulf: Wealtheow the Peaceweaver

Real Characters

Quirky Ideas from the WWI History Museum

Finding a treasure Trove

The little Depot that witnessed history

Judging a Book by its cover: Part Two

Tell me what you think about these covers

Resurrecting Ghosts

Code Name: Cover

Judging Code Name Verity's cover

Killing the Gatekeepers

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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