BLOG #46, SERIES #3
WEDNESDAYS WITH DR. JOE
OUR 79TH BOOK
BLUEGRASS GIRL AND OTHER HORSE STORIES FOR GIRLS
November 14, 2012
We’ve just received copies of Bluegrass Girl, the second book published by eChristian’s Mission Books. Turns out it’s everything we hoped it would be—and the evocative cover alone should sell a lot of books.
Last week, in the blog centering on Showdown, and Other Sports Stories for Boys, I referenced a life-changing discussion I had last December with Focus on the Family’s Editorial Director Larry Weeden and then Focus Bookstore manager, Bill Flandermeyer; life-changing because it changed the course of my publishing career. But it was equally significant in terms of what came next in our discussion of what the current critical publishing needs were perceived to be:
“What about girls—are we meeting their book-related needs?” “Well, partly. Girls are into sports too, just not quite to the extent that boys are. But one thing there is that is almost a universal with girls: Between the ages of eight and fourteen, girls tend to go through a horse-crazy period. They devour fictional stories and full-length books about horses. Walter Farley’s books come alive again for every generation of girls….so what do you have for them?
I answered that my anthology, Wildfire and Other Great Horse Stories included a number of girl-related horse stories, but that didn’t satisfy them, for they weren’t stories geared “just for girls.”
And thus was born Bluegrass Girl, when the opoportunity arose in our strategizing session with the publisher of eChristian, Dan Balow; his associate, Dave Veerman; and our agent, Greg Johnson.
When you give one to the girl in your life—keeping in mind the fact that girls don’t forget their love of horses just because they’ve discovered boys, horses just aren’t the priority they were earlier; but almost invariably that love for horses returns again during their adult years, thus Bluegrass Girl ought to appeal to all girls, regardless of their chronological age—, here is what they’ll find:
• “A Bluegrass Girl” (the title story), by William H. Woods
• “Oatsey Remembers,” by L. R. Davis
• “Emily Geiger,” by Nina N. Selivanova
• “Little Rhody,” by Charles Newton Hood
• “Rich but Not Gaudy,” by Ruth Orendorff
• “A Satisfactory Investment,” by Eveline W. Brainerd
• “The East End Road,” by George C. Lane
• “River Ranch,” by Aline Havard”
• “The Lone Stallion,” by Gil Close
• “In the Toils of Fate,” by Virginia Mitchell Wheat
• “Betsy’s Horse Show Ribbon,” by Lavinia R. Davis
• “Rusty Takes a Short Cut,” by Paul Ellsworth Triem.
Ordinarily, each book in this Mission Book series contains twelve stories, however, this one brings the total to thirteen; but unlike all the other stories, this is a story poem rather than prose, a genre I love but rarely feature in my prose books. In my Appendix introduction, here is what I wrote about it:
MY MOTHER’S LOVE FOR “KENTUCKY BELLE”
Joseph Leininger Wheeler
It is impossible to think of my dearly beloved mother, Barbara Leininger Wheeler, without also thinking about her love for story and poetry—and she loved most those that combined both, a synthesis we call “story poems.” Mother was an elocutionist, a stage performer who had memorized thousands of pages of stories and poems. But out of all of them [a number, such as Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman,” Bayard Taylor’s “Bedouin Love Song,” and Frank Desprez’s “Lasca,” had to do with horses], none did she love to recite—or we children to hear—more than Constance Fennimore Woolson’s “Kentucky Belle.”
As I read the poem today, the cold print blurs because the words—the lines—are, in memory, watered by my mother’s tears. For she could not recite this poem without crying. Because of this, because reciting it drained her so, she was always limp at the end—as were we. Yet, because of those poetic-line-induced tears, or in spite of them, it remained our constant request, “Mom, please recite “Kentucky Belle.”
Back during those growing-up years, I knew little about that bloodiest of all American wars, the Civil War (a war that was anything but civil). Nevertheless, in a very strange way, the poem so dominated my childhood that it almost predestined my career in literature, history, and biography.
It would not be possible to write “Kentucky Belle” today; only someone who had lived through that gut-wrenching conflict that pitted brother against brother, and ripped families apart. Constance Fenimore Woolson, niece of that great frontier novelist, James Fenimore Cooper (author of books such as Last of the Mohikans), was born in March of 1840, thus she was 21 when the Civil War began and 25 when it ended. She died in 1894 at the young age of 54. She was a prolific author, but is remembered today mainly because she penned one of the most emotive and deeply moving poems in the English language, “Kentucky Belle.” Of all the great Civil War poems that have lasted until our time, none captures more completely the torment of both sides than this. Nor is there another that so captures a girl-woman’s heartbreak at losing the most beloved horse she would ever know.
In order to better understand this poem, we must step back in time to an age where few Americans traveled far from the place where they were born, thus they knew and loved their land with an intensity that is all but lost today. That is why this poem is such a celebration of a meandering strip of blue called the Tennessee River (the principal tributary of the Ohio, that is the principal eastern tributary of the Mississippi). It is born in the Appalachians near Knoxville, Tennessee, and flows southwest to Chattanooga, west through the Cumberland Plateau to northern Alabama, turns north as the boundary between Alabama and Mississippi, continuing across Tennessee and Kentucky, where it merges with the Ohio at Paducah. All the land watered by this 652-mile-long river is known as “the Tennessee.” Only as we are aware of this can we fully understand this poem’s poignancy to the generations of Americans who have loved both this country and the river that gives the heart of it its name.
But all this is merely a preamble to the poem itself, and the horse it immortalizes.
The horse in the poem is also a metaphor for the all-consuming love a girl-woman had long ago for the Tennessee, and the Kentucky Bluegrass Country. And even today, when the subject of Kentucky is brought up, immediately images of the horse and the Kentucky Derby come to mind. The state and the horse are so intertwined that they are inextricable.
My mother loved Kentucky Belle the horse so much she was a living thing to her, as real and three-dimensional to her as were her three children. And the rhythm of Woolson’s lines gallops like hoof-beats through the minds of everyone who experiences the poem performed out loud by a master elocutionist such as my mother.
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Details: Publisher: Mission Books/eChristian
Publishing Date: 2012
Price: $12.98
Shipping: $5.00 first book; $1.00 for each additional book. You may secure them through us. Let us know if you wish them inscribed; and if so, to whom. Provide your mailing address. You may email us at: mountainauthor@gmail.com.
Wednesdays with Dr. Joe 