Small Town Author Finds Success in Paris-Interview with Janet Skeslien Charles

Posted on November 19, 2024 by Debbie Burke

Janet Skeslien Charles
Photo credit: Eddie Charles

Every time I think I must know or have heard of every Montana author, I meet a new one. This summer, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Paris-based author Janet Skeslien Charles, who wrote the international bestseller The Paris Library, and her new book, Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade.

Turns out Janet grew up in the little town of Shelby, Montana, population 3200+.

The streets of Shelby must have seemed empty the day of her talk because a number of residents made the three-plus hour trip to Kalispell to see her.

They’re understandably proud of their hometown author who is probably Shelby’s biggest sensation since the heavyweight boxing championship there in 1923 between Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons.

Janet and her charming French husband Eddie live in Paris where she immerses herself in history and culture from World War I and II when her books are set. She visits cemeteries where the dead from those wars are buried. Her meticulous research was evident in her slide show with many black and white photos and historic documents from those eras.

Since many TKZers read and write historical fiction, I thought Janet’s insights and experiences would be helpful to learn about and she graciously agreed to be interviewed.

Please welcome Janet to the Zone.

Debbie Burke: Congratulations on the success of your books! Please share how a small-town Montana girl wound up in Paris.

Janet Skeslien Charles: Thank you, Debbie! As you noted, I grew up in a small town near the Canadian border. Glimpses of the outside world came from my neighbor, a war bride from France, as well from my grandmother’s jigsaw puzzles with their images of French castles. Each week, my mother drove my grandmother, who’d never learned to drive, to the grocery store and the library. From these treks, I understood that books were as nourishing as food, and that the library was a window to the world. These influences inspired me to study French in high school and college, then apply for a teaching job in France. I first worked in eastern France, in Mulhouse, then in the suburbs of Paris.

Anne Morgan

DB: Your books are fiction yet are based on real life women who lived in Paris in the early 1900s, notably Anne Morgan, daughter of millionaire banker J.P. Morgan, and Jessie Carson, a NYC librarian. How did you learn about them and their humanitarian missions?

JSC: In 2010, while researching Dorothy Reeder, the librarian who stood up to the Nazis during World War II in The Paris Library, I discovered that during the Great War, an American librarian named Jessie “Kit” Carson traveled to France, where she created something that did not yet exist here – children’s libraries. After the war, she transformed ambulances into bookmobiles. I’d lived in France for over a decade and had never heard of Carson or the organization that hired her – the American Committee for Devastated France. (In French, the group was called Le Comité américain pour les régions dévastées, or CARD. Members called themselves Cards.) Several Cards received the War Cross medal for courage under fire. I knew I had to write the story.

In 2019, I traveled to the Morgan Library and the New York Public Library to learn more about Anne Morgan and Jessie Carson. There is a lot of information about Anne Morgan, but very little about Jessie Carson. Luckily, the Cards wrote many letters and kept journals, so was able to find more material about Carson.

DB: Why do you think your books resonate so much with readers?

JSC: My readers love libraries and know how important reading is to people of all ages. They enjoy learning about women’s war efforts that sadly have been left out of history books. Jessie Carson was a children’s librarian who changed the literary landscape of France by creating libraries with open stacks and children’s sections. She also paved the way for a library school to train the first French female librarians. Yet both in France and the US, she is unknown. I hope that my readers and I will change that.

DB: Please describe some of your research. How did you blend actual history with the fictional tale?

JSC: I read books about World War I and memoirs by volunteers such as Mary Breckinridge, who went on to create the first comprehensive healthcare system in America. Breckinridge also wrote letters home, and described the situation and her surroundings very well. I read works by French civilians who described the brutal occupation of German soldiers. (Before reaching this book, I had no idea that northern France had been occupied during World War I. According to a CARD report, French children had “skin disease due to malnutrition or practical starvation… and curvature of the spine due to the fact that the Germans made them work in the fields and abandoned trenches.” ) Correspondence between Anne Morgan and her longtime love, Anne Murray Dike, helped me understand the Cards’ personalities.

Bombs destroyed schools and homes. Of course, at that time, there was no radio or television. Books were really the only form of entertainment. So Jessie Carson’s libraries were vital to the community. These children needed to learn how to laugh and play. They needed the enjoyment and escape that only reading could bring. Photos of the children through the years show a progression as they gained weight and learned how to smile again.

Reading the letters and memoirs helped me create the vocabulary and personalities of the volunteers. Documents about how women would be good at library work because they could “type reports and dust the books” underlined the challenges and contemptuous attitudes that the women faced. It is hard to describe the process of blending fact and fiction. Though I invented the dialogue, I used the women’s words from their diaries, letters, and memoirs. I had to tighten timelines and could not write about all the amazing Cards. So perhaps fictionalizing is about making these kinds of choices.

DB: When you visited historic sites, which one made the most meaningful impression on you and why?

Bierancourt
Photo provided by Janet Skeslien Charles

JSC: I was very happy to travel to northern France to visit CARD headquarters in Blérancourt. During the war, the chateau was in ruins. Now, it houses the world’s first and only Franco-American museum, with a large exhibit about the Cards. It was humbling to see how this group of 350 women rebuilt this part of France during and after World War I. Many aid groups left right after the war in 1918, but CARD remained to train French teachers, nurses, and librarians before leaving in 1924. This is the centennial of the Cards handing over the reins to Frenchwomen.

DB: Do you have favorite tips for writers doing historical research?

JSC: Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and call people. I called every Breckinridge on the East Coast in order to find the descendants of Mary Breckinridge. We are so lucky to live in an age where information is digitized. The CARD reports were all available on line, as were Anne Morgan’s letters to her mother. It is easy to contact museums, historical societies, and libraries to get the information you need. Don’t wait!

DB: What are you working on now?

JSC: I’m waiting to get the copy editor’s notes on my latest novel, THE PARISIAN CHAPTER. It follows a young woman from Montana who lands a job in the American Library in Paris, where she writes her own Parisian chapter.

Lily Jacobsen and her best friend Mary Louise are determined to establish themselves as artists – Lily, a novelist, and Mary Louise, a painter. They share a tiny sixth-floor walkup and survive on brie and baguette.

When Mary Louise abruptly moves out, Lily feels alone in the City of Light for the first time, and is in need of rent money. As the programs manager, Lily is honored to follow in the footsteps of her French neighbor Odile, who infused her childhood with tales of heroic World War II librarians. Here in the storied halls of the ALP, Lily meets an incredible cast of characters – her favorite author, quirky coworkers, broke students, and high society trustees – each with their own stories… and agendas.

The story will come out as an audiobook and features eleven different voices, offering a panoramic view of a real historic institution, and revisiting characters from both of my novels set in France. Lily’s story is a love letter to the artist’s life, the importance of friendship, and leaving home only to find it again. I can’t wait to share it with readers!

Debbie, thank you again for taking the time to interview me!

~~~

Janet, thanks for taking us on a journey to historic Paris. I love your line, “I understood that books were as nourishing as food, and that the library was a window to the world.”

Website: jskesliencharles.com

Sales links for The Paris Library:

Sales links for Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade:

Instagram: jskesliencharles

Substack newsletter: https://jskesliencharles.substack.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jskesliencharles

~~~

TKZers: Did Janet’s experiences spark fresh ideas for your own research? When you read historical fiction, what qualities make it come alive for you?

80th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor

Posted on December 7, 2021 by Debbie Burke

by Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

Arizona Memorial Pearl Harbor
Photo credit nps.gov

Today is December 7^th, 2021, the 80^th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor that launched the US into World War II in 1941.

Few people are alive today who remember “a date which will live in infamy” (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt).

Fewer still are people who survived the attack that morning in Pearl Harbor. The last ones are in their late 90s to 100+ years.

The closest that we in 2021 can come to learning about that day are stories collected and recorded at this link.

December 7, 1941 was a pivotal date that changed the history of the entire world.

Our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents could all tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing on that day.

Long before tattoos became a fashion statement, many young sailors had “Remember Pearl Harbor” permanently inked on their arms.

Battleship Row Pearl Harbor
Photo credit – US govt.

On December 7, 1941, my husband’s grandfather was serving on the USS Tennessee docked on Battleship Row. During the attack, his duty was to grab burning sailors who were being handed up to him from below decks. He then had to throw them over the side of the battleship, far enough out that they didn’t strike the anti-torpedo blister, in order to extinguish the flames consuming their clothes and bodies.

Anti-torpedo blister
Photo credit – Wikipedia

When the USS Arizona blew up, his back was toward the explosion. He was horribly burned but, after a year in the hospital, he returned to duty through the end of the war. His back was forever scarred like a topographic relief map.

About ten years ago at a gym, my husband was talking with an older man on an adjacent treadmill about World War II and specifically Pearl Harbor. A young man about 20 who overheard their conversation approached. He was a junior in college, polite, well-spoken, articulate, and appeared to be a curious, conscientious student.

He asked my husband, “Excuse me, sir, can you tell me what Pearl Harbor is?”

Apparently the “date which will live in infamy” was no longer taught in school.

JFK Lincoln Continental – photo credit Wikimedia

November 22, 1963 was the defining date of infamy for my generation of Baby Boomers. We can all tell you exactly where we were and what we were doing when we learned the news that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

Again, the world shifted on its axis and events that occurred after that date were forever stained by it.

About five years ago, my husband and I were chatting with a young woman working her way through college as a server in a restaurant. We mentioned John F. Kennedy. She said, “Kennedy? Wasn’t he a president that was killed in a car crash?”

Apparently, my generation’s date in infamy is now a barely-remembered blip in history.

Two years from now will mark the 60^th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Oh my, that makes me feel old.

World Trade Center – photo credit Wikimedia CC BY-SA 2.0

September 11, 2001 again changed the entire world. Generations born after that date have never known air travel without the TSA, body scanners, pat-downs, luggage X-rays and searches.

2020 doesn’t have one specific date when the entire globe changed. But just the mention of “2020” is enough to provoke a sigh, a grimace, or an eye roll in every person of the age of cognizance who’s alive today.

2020 is part of our collective consciousness, as December 7, November 22, and September 11 were part of the collective consciousness of earlier generations.

Last week, a friend came to visit with her 18-month-old baby who was born in 2020. We were contemplating what Aubrey’s future might look like. Because of pandemic restrictions, she hadn’t encountered many people outside her close family and almost no one around her age.

Recently, they had gone to a playground where Aubrey saw other toddlers for the first time and reacted with amazement and curiosity. She approached a little boy and touched him.

The boy’s mother immediately swooped in and picked up the child, scolding, “We don’t touch.”

People born after December 7, 1941 never knew a world that wasn’t profoundly influenced by World War II. That was their frame of reference, their concept of “normal.”

Same for people born after November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001. They never knew what the world was like before JFK’s assassination or before planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

What will school be like for Aubrey in a few years? We don’t know. But, whatever the circumstances are, that will be “normal” to her because it’s the only frame of reference she knows.

The generation born in 2020 or later will never fully realize the world was once a different place.

Aubrey won’t know that parents once thought it was perfectly normal socialization for children to play, touch, push, hug, and watch each other’s reactions.

What does all this have to do with writing?

Nothing and everything.

As writers, we record the world we live in, or research, or make up. We also contrast our story worlds with other locales, other cultures, other periods in history, and even imaginary journeys into the future.

Throughout time, writers have chronicled the collective consciousness of different generations.

No matter the genre—crime, romance, history, fantasy, horror, nonfiction, etc.—we capture the zeitgeist, which Merriam-Webster defines that as “the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.”

That’s an awesome, daunting responsibility.

~~~

Eighty years later, is Pearl Harbor relevant in today’s world?

A handful of remembrance ceremonies will be held today but, in a few more generations, there won’t even be ceremonies.

The date will fade into obscurity like April 14, 1865.

What happened on that date?

Back then, every American could probably tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they learned Abraham Lincoln had been shot that night and died the following morning.

Time marches forward. Younger generations replace older ones who have been the keepers of the memories. Old memories are forgotten and new ones take their places.

If future generations find our stories on the dusty shelves of cyberspace, they may smile or scoff at quaint, outdated references.

But I hope they will also recognize human truths we wrote about that transcend time.

Dates like December 7, 1941 are still worth remembering and worth writing about because of the people in Pearl Harbor who made history.

~~~

Today is my last post in 2021 before TKZ goes on annual hiatus.

I’m grateful for your friendship and interest. Except for the written word, we probably wouldn’t have met. So glad we did!

Warmest holiday wishes to you and your loved ones.

~~~

Special holiday prices for all Tawny Lindholm Thrillers with Passion through the end of the year. A great gift for your reading friends…or yourself!

Digital Self-Publishing Saves a World War II Memoir

Posted on November 19, 2017 by James Scott Bell

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Gather ’round, children, and let me tell you a story about self-publishing back in the olden days.

Now, I know you kids think it’s always been easy. You just hit “upload” and … Johnny, put down that iPad! I’m telling you about real self-publishing, back when a writer had to have guts and grit! The days when self-publishing meant you paid for an honest-to-goodness print run and … Yes, Jenny? … no, print run was not a 5k. It meant shelling out money for printed, bound books made with pages made of actual paper! And let me tell you, that was not cheap! And at the end of it all, you know what you’d get? A bunch of boxes of unsold books in your garage!

You see, there has always been self-publishing in America. Thomas Paine, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman dabbled in it. Heck, Whitman may have been the first sock puppet, writing a glowing anonymous “review” of Leaves of Grass and buying space for it in a literary journal.

But it was in the 1970s and a man named Bill Henderson that modern self-publishing went wide. Henderson’s The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook started a small but growing movement of ex-hippies and frustrated wannabes designing and printing their own work. (This is not to be confused with “vanity publishing,” wherein a company took a whole lot of money from you to produce a print run of books that would, well, remain in boxes in your garage.)

In 1979 Dan Poynter published the first of several editions of his Self-Publishing Manual, bringing a much-needed business sense to the movement.

Which was around the time my dad, L.A. attorney Art Bell, decided to write a memoir of his service in World War II and publish it himself.

Raised in Hollywood, Dad was a star football and baseball player at Hollywood High School. He went on to play catcher for the UCLA baseball team, where his teammate was one Jackie Robinson.

Ensign Art Bell

In college he joined the Navy ROTC program and saw action throughout World War II. He was captain of three ships: the destroyers USS Dallas and USS Kinzer, and his first command and first love, the PC 477.

PCs were 173-foot, steel-hulled submarine fighters. Uncle Sam had thousands of seamen on hundreds of PCs convoying and patrolling in WWII. They were introduced in the desperate days of early 1942, when the waters off America’s Atlantic coast were a graveyard of torpedoed ships. They performed essential, hazardous, and sometimes spectacular missions, yet the PCs were scarcely known at all outside the service.

The Navy didn’t even dignify PCs with names. But the crew of the PC 477 did. They called her “Peter Charlie.”

Which became the title of Dad’s book. It was a true labor of love, and brought him back in contact with many of his shipmates. He collected letters and stories and photos, and organized a couple of reunions.

Dad was already self-publishing a digest on California search and seizure law, which had become the go-to resource in the state, so he had one of his graphics people do the layout of Peter Charlie, which he had typed himself on an IBM Selectric. He then paid a local printing outfit a princely sum for a beautiful hardback edition, with dust jacket and all. I can’t recall how many he had printed up. Maybe 2,000. He sold them himself out of his law office and it found popularity among many ex-Navy men all over the country.

Dad died in 1988 and I took over his practice. And I am proud to report that by 1999 or so, the entire print run had sold out. The book even returned a bit of a profit!

And that might have been the end of things were it not for the most recent iteration of the self-publishing movement: digital. I wanted Dad’s book to live on, and a few weeks ago I set out to make that happen.

First, I had to get the print text scanned. A writer friend recommended BlueLeaf Book Scanning. Per their instructions, I sent them one copy of the hardcover and chose their “destructive” option. That means they take the pages out of the binding for scanning, and you don’t get them back. The entire job cost $37.17. What I got were two Word docs (formatted and unformatted text), two PDFs (one large size, one small), and a JPEG of the dust jacket cover formatted for ebook use.

The scanning job was amazingly good. There was only one minor issue I found and took care of that with a quick find/replace.

Next, I opened up a Vellum project. Vellum is a Mac program for formatting ebooks (and, now, print as well). It is easy to use and creates gorgeous interiors. It will import a docx Word file and create most of the book that way. I went through the formatted Word doc and used cut-and-paste to put it into Vellum. Since there were a lot of block quotes and lists my dad used, this was the best way for me to check the transitions. Once again, Vellum makes the process easy.

I was also able to include photographs from the PDF scan. I copied the photos and saved them as JPEGs, then inserted them into the Vellum file.

Once that was all done, I generated the .mobi file and sent that to my own Kindle so I could go over it on the device and pick up any last formatting issues. I fixed those in Vellum and generated the final .mobi that I used for publication under my imprint, Compendium Press.

The entire project—from the time I shipped BlueLeaf the book to the official pub date—took six weeks.

And so Peter Charlie lives on. My hope is that those who had parents or grandparents who served in World War II and … yes, Billy? … Yes, we won … and anyone interested in a first-hand report of what life was like aboard a naval vessel at that time, will be both edified and educated by this account (I must add a slight language warning here, for the first captain of Peter Charlie was not averse to using God’s name to get the attention of his junior officers, Dad included). It is full of funny stories, historical data, some rare photos, and lots of interesting details.

It’s a Kindle Unlimited title, available here.

So … does anyone else remember the grand old days of self-publishing—before digital and print-on-demand? Anybody got a garage with boxes of unsolds?

Honor Thy Fiction

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Joe Moore

James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

On December 20, 1943, a 22-year-old bomber pilot named Charlie Brown was in trouble over Germany. He and his newly formed unit were returning from their first mission, a successful one that took out a munitions factory in the heart of enemy territory. But before they got away, German planes strafed Brown’s B-17, tearing it up and wounding several of the crew.

Brown himself was knocked out and recovered only at the last moment to prevent a fatal nose dive.

Now desperate to get his limping plane back to England, Brown looked to his right and, to his horror, saw a German Messerschmitt tracking right with him.

What Brown didn’t know at the time was that the German pilot was Franz Stigler, an ace, who was one kill short of number 23. That would have garnered him the Knight’s Cross, the highest honor for a German soldier in World War II.

Here’s something else Brown did not know. Stigler had been schooled in the old warrior code that you fight with honor. He was told by his commanding officer never to shoot at an enemy in distress, like a flyer going down with a parachute. The reason? “You follow the rules of war for you, not for your enemy. You fight by the rules to keep your humanity.” (This was not Nazi doctrine, of course. But there were many soldiers who fought for the “Fatherland” more than for Hitler, and who had religious roots. Stigler himself was a Catholic).

Stigler had seen that the B-17 had no tail guns blinking, no stabilizer, and a blown away tail-gun compartment. He also saw a terrified tail gunner behind guns streaked with icicles of blood.

Charlie Brown thought the German would open fire, but instead saw the pilot vigorously pointing to the ground. Brown took that a signal to land in Germany. Brown shook his head. He and his crew all wanted to try for England.

Stigler yelled out “Sweden!” to Brown, but Brown didn’t understand. Now he was sure the German would open fire. So he ordered his gunner to take aim. When Stigler saw what was about to happen, he saluted Brown and said, “Good luck. You’re in God’s hands now.”

The stunned American pilot saw no more of the Messerschmitt. He and his crew barely made it back to England, but make it they did, with their incredible story. Only it was a story the American brass kept under wraps. They did not want to humanize the Germans!

Stigler kept quiet about it, too, because what he had done would have been considered an act of treason for the Nazis. He knew that if he’d been seen escorting the wounded Americans, and his plane number identified, he could have been executed.

After the war, Stigler emigrated to Vancouver. Brown continued his Air Force career for another twenty years.

In 1990, Brown decided to try and find out who that German pilot was. It was a long shot, of course. They were almost half a century removed from the events. But Brown gambled with an ad in a newsletter for veteran fighter pilots, stating that he was looking for the one who “saved my life on Dec. 20, 1943.” He held back a key piece of information to test whoever answered the ad.

Stigler saw the ad in Vancouver. He yelled to his wife. “This is him!” He wrote a letter to Brown. Brown called Stigler on the phone and without even being asked, Stigler gave Brown the secret information.

The two men, both in tears, arranged to meet. They became “special brothers” for the rest of their lives and died six months apart in 2008. Stigler was 92, Brown was 87.

Their story is told in a new book, A Higher Call. You can read more about the men here.

Honor is a thread that runs deep through the human spirit. It is what has built civilizations. It is what prevents us from being a mere sub-section of the animal kingdom. And it takes a special kind of cynicism or pathology to snuff that out.

In my view, it is the storytellers who have the power to keep honor and nobility and sacrifice (and thus civilization itself) alive. It has always been so, from the ancient myths to Greek drama to the morality plays to world literature. I often deliver a keynote address to conferences called “Storytellers Save the World,” because in this sense, they do.

Think of the honor shown by characters as diverse as Atticus Finch and Harry Potter. It is a character of surpassing honor that keeps the Hunger Games trilogy from finishing up in a nihilistic, dystopian darkness.

Honor is the missing ingredient in much current, and ultimately forgettable, fiction. As the noted novelist and writing teacher, John Gardner, once put it, “The good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life . . . that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it’s fashionable, into the dark abyss.”

Honor may be the very lifeline that keeps us from falling into that dark abyss. We are a people in need of honor, for our collective soul. And if we don’t keep that we won’t just be reading about dystopian worlds. We’ll be living in one.

Honor thy fiction. Champion the sentiments that hold us together. This is especially important now, two days removed from the awful events in Newtown, Connecticut. Like so many of you, I spent much of the day Friday in tears. I would hear more reports, think of the children, and weep again.

My wife told me about one little boy. He was with about fourteen other classmates and a teacher, holed up in a bathroom. He said he knew karate. “It’s OK,” he told the teacher. “I’ll lead the way out.”

That’s honor and self-sacrifice in seedling form. That is the hope for our future.

A future we can also affect with the stories we choose to tell.

Choose well.

Killzoneblog.com

Category Archives: World War II

Small Town Author Finds Success in Paris-Interview with Janet Skeslien Charles

80th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor

Digital Self-Publishing Saves a World War II Memoir

Honor Thy Fiction