Q&A with Dena Moes

Dena Moes is the author of the new memoir The Buddha Sat Right Here: A Family Odyssey Through India and Nepal. She is a certified nurse-midwife, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Midwifery Today and Minerva Rising. She lives in Chico, California. 

Q: What were some of the reasons your family decided to travel in India and Nepal?

A: I had dreamed of going to India since I was a young woman. As a Jewish American who had studied both Buddhism and hatha yoga for 18 years, I longed to visit places where the Buddha actually taught, to trek in the Himalayas where yogis live in caves, and to spend time Kerala where Hinduism is vibrant and pervasive.

I wanted to connect to the physical places where my spiritual practices came from. I wanted to take a pilgrimage and step away from the ordinary routines of my life, to make space for deeper understanding about reality, and life’s meaning, to come through.

My husband Adam spent a year in India in his 20s. He considered that year the most important, transformative year of his life. He came home from his time in India a devout practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. (North India has large communities of Tibetan refugees living there.) We had talked about going to India together when we first fell in love, but babies, houses, businesses postponed our plans.

My sister lived in New Delhi, India, where she worked as a foreign correspondent. When she had a baby, I popped over for a quick trip to stay with her and the baby, and see a few sights. When I returned home, I could not sleep. The colors and vibrant energy of India consumed me – I told people that India was a fire in my blood.

Once our children were old enough to carry their own backpacks, I realized I did not want to wait until the children were grown to make this trip– there are no guarantees about the future anyway.

I wanted my daughters to get outside of our California bubble and gain new perspectives about being a citizen of our beautiful planet. The only way human life will thrive in the next generations, is if humans cooperate across borders and cultures – as a global family.

And to be honest, the lonely working mother-hamster wheel lifestyle was eroding my sanity. The clutter and busyness of American family life was overwhelming me. So we rented out the house, shuttered our businesses, and went, following my adventurous dream right in the middle of raising our children.

Q: At what point did you decide to write this book about your experiences?

A: I did not take the trip with the intention of writing a book!

I love to write when I travel, though. My whole mindset becomes poetic and imaginative when I am in unfamiliar lands, navigating my way through places that are fresh and new to me.

I journal religiously, to document not just the locations, but the feelings, and incredible moments, that happen when one is on an adventure, outside the usual routines. I want to be able to look back later and remember the details of things, and how it felt to be there.

When we returned from our eight-month sojourn in India and Nepal, and were back in our cozy California college town, people kept asking me, “How was India?”

I answered, “Great. Amazing.” Then I felt ridiculous, because how can those words possibly do justice to the gorgeous, fascinating, challenging time we had? I thought, I can only answer that question by writing a book. It felt almost selfish to have taken such a profound journey, and then keep all that I learned to myself. So I started writing, and the writing become a journey of its own.

Q: What impact do you think the trip had on you and on your family?

A: The trip was transformative for all of us. Our girls were at an age where they were starting to disappear into the realm of their peers. This trip gave us one extra year to have their time and attention.

There are so many facets to our trip’s impact – Let me describe one: The degree of togetherness that living in India requires. India does not have the same understanding of, or capacity for, personal space that we have in the West. We all slept in one room for most of the eight months, three in a big bed and one on a mat on the floor. We spent many nights on night trains, sleeping on narrow berths stacked three high.

And when we arrived at our destinations, we all four would pile into an auto-rickshaw–the girls sitting on Adam and me, our backpacks on top of them. This is the norm in India – where you might see six people riding one motorcycle, no problem,. For us, it was a grand adventure and chance to re-invent the meaning of “togetherness.”

In many of the places we stayed, spirituality infuses life, and people have been making pilgrimage to these places daily, for thousands of years in an unbroken stream. It is hard for an American to imagine what that kind of devotion and reverence feels like.

Instead of amusements, attractions, and parks, we went to the ghats of the Ganges in Varanasi, the tree where the Buddha awakened to enlightenment, and the ashram of Amma, the Divine Mother. We met His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and lived among Tibetan refugees for six weeks in Dharamsala.

Being immersed in such communities definitely shifted things for us all. The message of all these teachers, and all these holy places, is that love and compassion are at the heart of everything. And money, fancy cars, and possessions are not what lead you to there. Your own openness and presence does.

Lastly, I must also mention that the great disparities in the world between those with wealth and those in poverty is starkly obvious throughout India. We all gained a deep appreciation for the privilege we have of living in abundance in the U.S. and take much less for granted since our trip.

Q: What do your family members think of the book?

A: My family is proud of me. My daughters have each said, “Wow Mom, you set out to write a book and you did it!” They have read portions of the book, and of course, some of their diary entries are in the book.

My husband, as always, has been supportive of this latest wild scheme of mine. He has not read the whole thing, but he has read most of it. He has vetted all the parts in which I wrote about our marital conflicts. Those bits, he has read over and over. It is a balancing act to write about marriage problems and keep the marriage!

The writing, and now publishing of the book had been a journey unto itself. The book was a joy to write. In many places, the narrative just flowed through me – I felt more like a conduit than a writer. I love writing, revising, then shaping and reworking the text until it sings.

The publishing has not been as easy – it was a rocky road. I landed a top-flight NYC agent, who then could not sell it due to my lack of a “platform.” That took an entire frustrating year. After she gave up, I refused to throw the manuscript into the back of my closet and forget about it. So I pitched to small independent publishers, and got picked up by my intrepid, wonderful publisher Brooke Warner at She Writes Press.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Now I am working personal essays to publish in conjunction with the publication of this book. I am busy working on the publicity and promotion. I am going on a book tour to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. The tour is up on my website.

Additionally, I am doing radio and podcast interviews, and generally hustling as best I can to help my book find its readers.

I have a second memoir gestating, about my career as a home birth midwife. I have an early draft of the proposal, and am tentatively calling it Rebel Midwife. But that’s another story for another day.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: People may wonder if this book is for Buddhists only. The answer to that is “no.” My book is for anyone who dreams of travel, for parents who thirst for adventure, and for people who are open to seeking meaning in their lives beyond the acquisition of material things.

What I learned about Buddhism is woven through the memoir, but the themes of love, compassion, and peace are universally relevant.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Donna J. Stoltzfus

Donna J. Stoltzfus is the author of Captive, a new middle grade historical novel for kids. She also wrote the picture book In the Trunk of Grandma's Car. She lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Q: You note that the inspiration for Captive came from your grandfather's experiences with German POWs during World War II. How did you come up with your fictional characters?

A: The character Reuben was inspired by my grandfather, who shared that name. There were some details in the experiences of Hans —a German POW in the novel— that were similar to a POW named Karl, who worked with my grandfather and had kept in touch with my grandparents after the war.

The other characters were products of my imagination. Their voices came to me as I began to write. I knew I wanted two young teenagers in the story, and that there would be tension as they would have different views on religion and war, but I also wanted respect and friendship to develop.

I felt it was important to represent the political differences between the POWs themselves, which influenced additional characters in the novel.    

Q: What did you see as the right blend between the historical and fictional aspects of the novel?

A: That was often tricky. I had historical details I wanted to work into the novel that I found fascinating, but I obviously didn’t want it to seem as though I was adding superfluous scenes to add in historical facts. I tried to write through the lens of the question, “Does this take the reader out of the story or does this make the story richer?”

I liked to include historical details that were unusual. For example, even though it may have seemed strange that a German POW would learn calligraphy in a prison camp and sit in an office on a farm writing family names in Bibles, this happened to Karl. I felt it added an interesting dynamic to the story.

The role of art in the novel began to come to me as I discovered a book of paintings done by combat artists during the war, and when my uncle passed on to me a poem penned in Old English calligraphy, written by Karl at a prison camp in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1945.  

Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?

A: My research was a combination of family stories and photos, first-person interviews with people who had memories of POWs or had been POWs themselves, books and newspaper archives.  

Many things surprised me as I researched the book. I knew POWs had worked on farms in the United States, but I had no idea of the scope of their contribution.

One thing that made an impression on me was the tension between the German POWs themselves, based on their politics, and the violence that sometimes happened in the camps to those who were less militant.

I was also struck by how the U.S. strictly followed the Geneva Convention, and made an effort to provide an atmosphere where prisoners not only had their physical needs met but could also participate in a wide range of activities after their work day.

POWs could engage in sports, music, drama and religious services, as well as choose from a variety of classes—even earning college credit. The U.S. government wanted to show POWs the benefits of a strong democracy and hoped U.S. prisoners would be treated fairly while in captivity abroad.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

A: I hope readers gain some knowledge about a part of U.S. history that I feel shouldn’t be forgotten.

Human kindness, even small gestures, can change someone’s life and give them hope. Sitting at the same table and sharing a meal can be significant. And sometimes showing kindness takes courage.

Everyone has their own story. War is complex, with many layers. I tried to capture a glimpse of the effects of the war on a range of people—from Mennonite pacifists to German POWs to an American soldier returned home from the war—who end up interacting on a farm in Pennsylvania.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m in the very early stages of research for another historical fiction novel.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I’ve been going to retirement homes to give a presentation and have book signings, and there are always a couple of attendees who approach me with stories about POWs who worked on their family farm.

“My mother didn’t think she was allowed to feed them, but she always filled a basket with food and put it at the end of the lane after a work day for them to pick up. She thought the men were too skinny.”

Or this one: “One time they brought SS officers to work at our farm. My uncle told the guard we don’t want those men here. Don’t bring them back.”

Those stories are out there and it’s intriguing to hear what people remember.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

April 3

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
April 3, 1783: Washington Irving born.

Q&A with Heath Hardage Lee

Heath Hardage Lee is the author of the new book The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took On the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home from Vietnam. She also has written Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause. She has worked in museum education, and she lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

Q: How did you learn about the women you wrote about in The League of Wives, and at what point did you decide to write this book?

A: Phyllis Galanti, the blond woman in the center of the cover, was a good friend of my mother’s. I knew her growing up, but didn’t know much about her. My first book was about Civil War women. I thought, I should talk to Phyllis about her activism in the Vietnam War, and then she died unexpectedly in 2015.

I was on a book tour about the first book, speaking at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. I’m always looking for hidden history about women. They said there’s something you need to see—Phyllis had donated her papers.

She had left [what was like] a treasure map. She was important, but Sybil Stockdale was where everything emanated from. Phyllis’s papers led me to Sybil Stockdale, and to the West Coast. I met with Sybil just before she passed away. Her sons were with us. I got permission to see her diary.

Between Phyllis’s papers, Sybil’s diary, and Jane Denton in Virginia Beach—her family gave me her diary and it led me to dozens of women who gave me papers, diaries, clothes for an exhibit [on the same topic as the book].

I’m a curator, also, and I thought, I’ve got to do something with this. I decided to do a book and an exhibit at the same time! It worked out, and we got through it. One person would lead to another. It took almost five years to do it.

Q: You focus on various women in the book, but the two major figures are Sybil Stockdale and Jane Denton. Why did you focus on them, and what do you see as their legacies today?

A: [It was important] to have a West Coast and an East Coast person. With naval bases, they tend to be on the coasts. There’s been so much wrong information about this group of women. The myth is that multiple people founded the National League of Families. It was Sybil Stockdale.

Sybil is probably my favorite character in the book. She’s such a strong character, so smart and capable. She would have been a great president. In another era, she could have been a rock star politician or diplomat. In this era, she was just as important, heading up the movement to [free] the POWs.

Jane Denton was the opposite of Sybil. She was a traditional, rule-bound person who had to fight hard to throw off the conventions of a military wife. She was more of a Southern woman taught to toe the line. Sybil was a New Englander, speaking out. It worked well to have people like Sybil and like Jane, who was more diplomatic and would smooth things over.

They all were worried their husbands could be harmed if they spoke out. They were all wary of speaking to the press. They said at the end that we are going to do whatever it takes, even speaking with peace activists.

Q: What were some of the surprises you found in your research?

A: Of course the coding of secret letters [they would write] was so cool. With the Stockdales, there are real details in her diary. I tried to give generalities—some in that generation are upset when you talk about specifics. I never knew any of that.

Some of the facts of the war, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, were such a farce. They were used by Johnson to get into the war. I was born in ’69 and was never conscious of it. Our government under Johnson, what a total disaster. Johnson was a piece of work, but I didn’t know how much of one, how much of a disaster the planning and execution of the war were.

And that these women, none of them considered themselves feminists. It was considered a dirty word associated with communism and the left. They considered themselves human rights activists. 

But then it seeps in as they have more power. I wouldn’t say they evolve into feminists, but they became powerful independent women. It was not a question to them that they knew how to handle things, but they borrowed things from the [feminist] movement and from the civil rights movement.

You can’t project what you think. You’re the tour guide as a historian. I want them to be feminists and they aren’t—it was something I learned that’s more about myself, not to project your stuff on other people.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

A: I would like these women to be in the history books. They were so important and have never gotten credit. Even some of their husbands didn’t understand that they went over and above to get them out.

The fact that they organized a national group and had so much power—organizing as a group instead of as individual voices is effective. They got stationery, a bank account, and that legitimized them.

And giving them credit for the amazing thing they did, how their husbands would have died or wouldn’t have been rescued for a long time had the women not gone forward.

A lot of government officials are still trying to take credit for this. They have the point of view that the government did this. The government gave them a platform, but the women did this.

It changed the image of military wives—they’re not just passive, hosting parties. They’re powerful and smart and got things done.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: It’s always going to be about women. This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of these stories. There are tons of them. The next time is the ‘20s—something with World War I as the backdrop. It will have flappers and suffragists. I’m still working on it.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: The movie with Reese Witherspoon! It’s been optioned by Hello Sunshine and Fox 2000, and I’m an executive producer. We’re moving forward pretty quickly with that. It’s great to bring the story to another audience.

The exhibit opened March 1 in Richmond, Virginia, at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. It will be there until September and then it’s going to West Coast venues including the Nixon Library. It’s important to have multiple platforms. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This Q&A also appears on www.hauntinglegacy.com.

Q&A with Lydia Fitzpatrick

Lydia Fitzpatrick, photo by Grainger David

Lydia Fitzpatrick is the author of the new novel Lights All Night Long, which focuses on a Russian exchange student in Louisiana. Fitzpatrick's work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Mystery Stories. She lives in Los Angeles.

Q: You note that your protagonist Ilya was originally supposed to be a minor character in the novel. Why did you end up making him the focus of the book?

A: Sadie was the protagonist of the novel’s first few incarnations (there have been many!), and Ilya was a minor character meant to capture her attention briefly.

I’m generally resistant to the mystification of the writing process (maybe the muse was more apt to sing pre-Internet?), but the moment Ilya appeared on the page did feel charged.

I normally write exposition long and scenes short, but the scene when he and Sadie met went on and on, it became unwieldy and awkward, because, I realized, I didn’t want Ilya to leave the story. I wanted to know what had brought him from Russia to Louisiana, who he’d left behind, and in exploring his past, I found the novel’s final incarnation.

Q: You already had some familiarity with Russia, but did you need to do much research to write the book?

A: I read extensively about Russia in the ‘90s and 2000s. Svetlana Alexievich’s oral histories and Arkady Babchanko’s One Soldier’s War were invaluable in giving a sense of the varied Russian experience of these years. I also use photos as a way to sink into my fictional worlds—and Donald Weber’s photos, especially the ones shot in Vorkuta, were my favorite portals.

I’ve visited Russia twice—in the mid ‘90s with my family, and in 2008 on a research trip—but the street view function on Google Maps was also an amazingly useful way to “visit” when I couldn’t actually afford to get myself to Russia.

There’s one town, especially, that served as an inspiration for Berlozhniki and that I virtually roamed for hours and hours. I know its statues and street signs, the coupons plastered in the grocery store windows, the sweeping steps of the Miner’s Palace of Culture, and that one road—my favorite—that passes an ancient izba and ends in a field.

Q: How was the novel's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: On the surface, the refinery lights are a symbol of hope—Ilya’s hope and the vast and varied hopes of Russians in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The lights are a bit of a mirage, though, and there’s heartbreak in that. The wealth, the glitz they signify is in Ilya’s backyard, but it couldn’t be further from his pocket.

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make changes along the way?

A: No, which is probably the origin of my bitterness towards the muse. I wrote several endings that did not work, and then I spent a good six months puzzling out the plot without actually writing a single word.

Not surprisingly, the origins of the issue with the ending were pretty far upstream, so once I did figure out how I wanted the novel to end, it took a lot of reworking in order to have that ending feel earned.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I actually just finished up a short story today; and writing it has been a sort of haven in the lead up to the novel’s publication. I’m also in the early stages of a second novel, but talking about novels in their incipient form is a bit like telling people what you want to name an unborn child—a bad idea. I will say, though, that the second novel is completely unrelated to Lights. 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Joe Kulka

Joe Kulka is the author and illustrator of the new children's picture book Undercover Ostrich. His other books include The Christmas Coal Man and My Crocodile Does Not Bite. He teaches at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for an ostrich attempting to go undercover?

A: I always have my sketchbook with me and one day just started drawing goofy looking birds. One kind of looked like an ostrich and I drew a fedora on him. It reminded me of a gumshoe detective from a bad 1940s crime movie, who of course works undercover.  

I immediately liked the idea and the way that sounded like a good book title. I went from there and played around with the silliness of something so large and obvious as an ostrich being able to blend into everyday surroundings.

Q: Did you work on the text first or the illustrations (or did you work on them simultaneously)?

A: It was a lot of back and forth. I drew a bunch of different birds that it would be fun to see the ostrich try to mimic. The text was the thread that helped me make sense of it all.

Q: How did you first get interested in writing and illustrating kids’ picture books?

A: I graduated from the University of the Arts in 1987 and had my portfolio geared towards medical/scientific illustration and editorial illustration.

As I was about a month away from graduation, Charles Santore came to visit our class and showed his work from his first foray into picture books, his version of Peter Rabbit. I was blown away and thought, “Well, too late to take a children’s illustration class now.”

Soon after graduation, I was lucky enough to get a job at a medical publisher’s filling in while one of their staff illustrators went on pregnancy leave. I was thrilled that someone was willing to pay me to draw but after my 11th spleen illustration I realized I didn’t want to do medical illustration forever.

I slowly began transitioning my portfolio from medical to children’s book illustration. It wasn’t until 2000 that I finally got my first children’s books to illustrate. I realized soon that I would like to write as well as illustrate. That took another seven years for that dream to come true when my first book as book author and illustrator, Wolf’s Coming!, was published.

Q: Who are some of your favorite picture book authors and illustrators?

A: Charles Santore is, in my opinion, the greatest living illustrator. How he has not won a Caldecott is beyond me. His work is gorgeous and he is an incredibly nice man. I love the work of David Weisner. Molly Idle is a fantastic illustrator and her Flora books are just a joy. Mark Pett’s work I greatly admire.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Currently I am illustrating a book about holiday cookies fighting over which one is the best cookie. I have a few dummies of my own that I am shopping around and hope to hear good news on them soon.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Yep. Only you can prevent wildfires! For the past 15 years, I have been working with the USDA Forest Service illustrating all sorts of materials featuring national icons Woodsy Owl and Smokey Bear, including posters, memorabilia, and picture books on both.

And that I teach in the illustration department at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, the nation’s only all-women’s art college.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

April 2

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
April 2, 1840: Emile Zola born.