Egg Cups & Oil Wells
by Euna Hiersche Martin and Marla Martin Hanley
“A mother and daughter weave a small and personal story into the wide tapestry of rural women’s lives in the Twentieth Century…Together, the team shows how one ordinary life is, simply, much more.”
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My mother and I created a book together which my older daughter, Rae, helped us to self-publish in 2012. I loved the process: taping Mama’s stories, transcribing them, then editing them with a reader in mind but still keeping her own voice clear. Those chapters alternate with ones I wrote that put her life in a historical context: how the Indian and Oklahoma Territories became a state, the Great Depression, World War II, and what happened when great numbers of women entered the workforce in the 1960s. and 70s.
That type of writing was familiar to me but, working with my mother’s stories, I learned how a tale unfolds for a reader and how to capture a unique voice. That was the beginning of my new . novel, My Glass Eye. Immediately, I began to learn the difference between life and art. Though I stole Mama’s stories shamelessly and set the novel in central Oklahoma in the Twenties and Thirties, it is fiction. However, I think it was Sherman Alexie who said, “If it’s fiction, it better be true.”
Greenbough
I began a blog between December 2010 and March 2013 to make a space for my new writing life. When, for classes at The Attic, I needed to focus instead on narrative arcs, and building scenes, and character motivation, (and…and…), I discontinued it. I hope publish some of those posts one day in a collection of essays.
You can still access that blog here: Greenbough.
2nd Chapter 