A Midwest Family Saga

I never knew my dad’s mother. She died of breast cancer the year that I was born. It feels strange, to hold loss in your heart for someone you never knew—but, given the number of people who spend their adult lives searching for a mother or father who was absent from their childhood, perhaps it is not actually strange. The longing for kinship is a universal one.

Sometimes when we seek those ties, we come to dead ends. Sometimes, though, we find more than we ever would have dared to hope.

My grandmother was a writer. I did not know this until just a few years ago. Even then, I knew only that she had kept diaries, and that those diaries were in the care of my cousin, who was slowly transcribing them. At the time, I had begun self-publishing some of my own work. My mother and father, too, had been writing and self-publishing some of their work. We couldn’t claim to be the first in our family to do so, though; my mom’s father had self-published his World War II memoir while I was in high school.

When my dad asked my cousin for his mother’s writings, I was excited. Here was the connection I had never had; the grandmother I had never known, in her own words. This was no dead end.

“Well?” I asked my dad when he finally had the diaries in hand. “What kinds of things did she write about?”

“It’s not just diaries,” my dad said. “She wrote a book. There’s a whole book here.”

And so there was. My Grandma Mamie had written an entire book of essays, poetry, short stories and plays. She titled her collection I Could Write a Book—an ironic choice, since the phrase is typically used by someone who has a lot to say about a subject, but is in fact declining to say it. Mamie certainly did have a lot to say, about history and family, courage and industry, justice and cruelty, technology and nature, marriage and parenthood—but while she published a few pieces here and there, she never published her book in her lifetime. She had wanted to—she had tried. But she lacked the resources, in rural Indiana in the early twentieth century, to see her book through to completion.

I told my dad, “We’ll do it for her. We’ll publish her book, and then we’ll take her a copy.”

And we have done it. I say “we,” but in fact my dad did the lion’s share of the work. He put Mamie’s typewritten pages through a scanner and an OCR program. He went through the document, page by page, correcting what the OCR got wrong. He laid out the manuscript in Word and wrote an introduction. I came in late in the process, to complete one last round of editing and formatting, to consult on cover design, and to write a series introduction.

That’s right: a series introduction. With so many writers in the family, who have put their own lives onto the page, I saw an opportunity to do something that I do not think has been done before: to publish a multi-generation, first-person family chronicle. Beginning with Mamie and my maternal grandfather, Ray Clark, continuing through my father and my mother, and coming in the end to myself, we have a family history, written by the people who lived it, that reaches back as far as 1861 and continues to the present in an unbroken arc. We’ve titled the series Flyover Country: Four Generations of an American Family, and Mamie’s story is chronologically the first.

Mamie’s book should appeal to readers who enjoy early twentieth century family stories, like Betty Smith’s semi-autobiographical novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which covers some of the same time period and with which it shares many similarities, or Charles Allen Smart’s RFD, a memoir of life in rural Ohio in the 1930s. It should appeal to readers who enjoy other Indiana authors like Gene Stratton Porter (A Girl of the Limberlost and Freckles) and Scott Russell Sanders (The Paradise of Bombs).

This is my personal invitation to you, into a Midwest family saga. It begins here, with Mamie Morrison Boone, who really did write a book.