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| Kathy Bennett, me, & Lisa Wingate |
PANAMA CITY — Most of Lisa Wingate’s novels develop
as she discovers an untold story that piques her imagination. Her new novel,
“The Sea Keeper’s Daughters,” began with a tale related by a reader.
“A woman was traveling with her father, driving
through the mountains of Appalachia, and she saw these doorways in the sides of
the mountains,” Lisa said. “He told her that, during the Depression when
families would lose their farms, they would move into the caves and scrap the
house for doors and other things to outfit the caves.”
Intrigued, Lisa started looking for documentation
about the anecdote, but she found something else instead: The Federal Writers
Project, an all but forgotten Depression-era program in which some 5,600 people
produced 300,000 documents — millions of pages of poetry, essays, novels and
journalism.
Created in 1935 as part of the U.S. Work Progress
Administration, the project provided employment for historians, teachers,
writers, librarians and other white-collar workers. The original purpose was to
produce a series of sectional guide books focusing on the nation’s scenic,
historical, cultural and economic resources.
However, most of it was filed away in vaults during
the Red Scare, and stayed there for 80 years. Recently, the Library of Congress
began putting the documents online. (Link to the documents here<<)
“There’s an unpublished play by Zora Neale Hurston,
slave narratives — I could read them all day,” Lisa said. “I’ve been to school,
you know, been in the business a long time — this is my 25th novel — and I had
never heard of it. It’s sort of sad. ... It’s amazing to me all of this exists
and no one knows about it.”
According to her online bio at LisaWingate.com, Lisa
was inspired to become a writer by a first-grade teacher who said she expected
to see Lisa’s name in a magazine one day. She also entertained childhood dreams
of being an Olympic gymnast and winning the National Finals Rodeo “but was
stalled by a mental block against backflips on the balance beam and by parents
who stubbornly refused to finance a rodeo career.”
A born storyteller, Lisa equated the hidden stories
of Depression-era America to the untold tales of families. It’s an important
link to her, as her first novel was inspired by life stories her grandmother
told. The tales changed her opinion of her grandmother, who she had regarded as
a hard-edged woman.
“Sometimes there are things you don’t like about
someone, but it’s because you don’t understand where they’re coming from,” Lisa
said. “Ordinary stories can teach you, inform your life.”
That first mainstream novel, “Tending Roses,” is
still in print after 15 years, and Lisa still hears from readers who were
inspired by it. Most of them tell her they wish they had gotten their
grandparents to open up and tell their stories. That’s why she shares
“ice-breaking” techniques when she meets with readers, such as her visits this
week to the St. Andrews Coffee House & Bistro on Tuesday and the Blountstown
Library on Wednesday.
(You can also find a great list of story catalysts
and interview techniques at her website under the heading “Storytelling forFamilies.”)
“People get intimidated. There needs to be a
catalyst to get the stories flowing,” she said. “I worry sometimes where the
next storytellers will come from.”
Probably, they will be inspired by storytellers like
her.
Peace.
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