Why Bayberry Island,

you may ask?

Well, because, bayberry. It's all over the east coast. It's on a lot of islands. And I wanted my island for the Summerhood Island series to be an island that could be anywhere, or at least more places than specifically off the coast of southeastern MA that could be seen from Aquinnah if you put a quarter in the binoculars at the edge of the cliffs and looked to your right.

Yeah. That island. Only a little broader in scope. 

So that's why I chose Bayberry out of all the names suggested to me for Jessie's island. And here's  a little discourse on the bayberry plant. You don't have to read the whole thing. You may skim. You have my permission.

Waxing eloquent on wax myrtle

·         Thursday, October 2, 2014

The Narrow-leaved Candleberry Myrtle 

One of the most popular (and prolific) trees in the Lowcountry is the wax myrtle (Myrica cerifera). This aromatic shrub grows everywhere – behind the dunes line on beaches, in woods along the marsh edges and in the natural thickets that often surround our shopping centers and building lots. Since it is unusually hardy and will take salt, wind and heat, the wax myrtle has become an extremely popular landscaping ornamental. There is hardly a landscaping plan that omits the versatile myrtle, especially for high-abuse places such as parking lot entrances and along roadways.

The wax myrtle has as many names as it has uses, and a remarkable historical record. It is variously known as Sweet Myrtle, Sweet Bay, Bayberry, Waxberry, Wild Tea, Tea Box, Tallow Bush, Merkle, Mucklebush, Mickleberry and, last but not least, the Candleberry Tree. For centuries, Lowcountry cooks have been using the slender, pungently “sweet bay” leaves to flavor stews and broths.

Yet, if we lived a century or two ago, the myrtle would have a far greater significance to us than mere food flavoring. It was not given the name “wax” myrtle for nought. The tree’s berries provided the wax to make the bayberry candles so popular for their aroma.

If you get up close and personal to a wax myrtle right now, you’ll find that it is chock-filled with clumps of small, round, greyish-blue berries. It was from these berries, harvested in the fall, that the wax was made for candles. The berries were placed in boiling vats, and as the wax rose to the top, it was skimmed off and strained. This process was repeated again and again until a cake of bayberry wax was formed. Enormous amounts of bayberries were required to produce a single pound of wax.

In 1732, English naturalist Mark Catesby described the annual fall ritual of harvesting bayberries and making wax from the bush he named the “Narrow-leaved Candleberry Myrtle.”

Wrote Catesby, “In November and December, at which time the berries are mature, a man with his family will remove from his home to some island or sandbanks near the sea, where these trees most abound, taking with him kettles to boil the berries in. He builds a hut with palmetto leaves, for the shelter of himself and family while they stay, which is commonly three or four weeks.

“The man cuts down the trees, while the children strip off the berries into a porridge pot; and having put water to them, they boil them until the oil floats, which is skimmed off into another vessel. This is repeated until there remains no more oil. This, when cold, hardens to the consistency of wax, and is of a dirty green color. They then boil it again, and clarify it in kettles which gives it a transparent greenness.”

In olden times, candles were generally made from two types of material, tallow and beeswax. Those made from natural beeswax burned with a more pleasant odor and generally gave off a more stable light. Tallow candles were usually made from fat extracted from beef and mutton but had a lower melting point and burned faster. Bayberry candles were considered better than those made of tallow and were probably the most familiar type of candle used in colonial America.

English explorer John Lawson praised them, writing in 1700, “the Berry yields a wax that makes candles the most lasting and of the sweetest smell imaginable. Some mix half Tallow with this Wax, others use it without mixture; and these are fit for a Lady’s Chamber.”

The wax myrtle was also esteemed for its medicinal properties. Root bark from the tree was collected in fall and boiled in water, producing an astringent and stimulant thought to be both a headache remedy and a curative for scrofula, jaundice, diarrhea and dysentery. A tea made from the leaves was thought to relieve a backache and would also “clean out the kidneys” and “overcome chills.”

Bay leaves were also thought to be an excellent insect repellant. Leaves were placed under and over beef at slaughtering time to keep flies away. Branches were strewn around houses, chicken coops and in beds to repel fleas. Rich in tannin, they were also used for tanning leather during the Civil War.

All in all, the wax myrtle is a simply wonderful shrub. It grows in sand; it will take both sun or shade. It looks wonderful when it is pruned ornamentally and just as good when it is left to its own abandon. Birds love the tree, both for nesting and for its berries. It even smells good.

Of all the wonderful natural abundance we have here on our coast, the wax myrtle is right up at the top in my estimation.

Next time you smell the alluring scent of a bayberry candle, give the valiant wax myrtle an appreciative nod. It has been doing good duty to both man and nature for a long time.

Suzannah Smith Miles is a writer and Lowcountry and Civil War historian.

Has anyone . . .

reading this ever suffered from re-writer's block?

I mean, I have this swell studio

in this really swell place

with some absolutely swell people.

ok, so the pictures have been altered a bit for privacy purposes

All the hard work has been done. The book has been written. It has a title:

The Ghost/Thief

(shameless self-promotion)

If it is any good my publisher will probably take it. I don't want to sound too positive because my grandmother always told me that to boast is to bring down the evil eye on yourself.

But here I am, procrastinating, taking pictures, writing this blog . . .

Hey, it's all art, right?

Stay tuned-

And now . . .

I'm off to Virginia Center for Creative Arts (hereafter referred to as VCCA) for a two week writing residency.

ok, that's an easel, yes. but behind the easel is the barn where the studios are.

The purpose of the above heretofore mentioned residency is to attempt, nay, to Succeed in finishing, completing, concluding and drawing to a close book the second in the greatly beforementioned Summerhood Island series.

note Summerhood Island in script under title

Why, you may wonder to yourself, (or even out loud) is she writing in this peculiar, unusual, nay, even abnormal and irregular way?

Mostly because I can. And right soon now I am going to have to get serious, buckle down and put my nose to the grindstone (ouch)

and write at a middle reader level.

Please, all of you who are just about to make some clever retort to that last remark; hold your respective tongues. Or hold another's tongue, if one happens to be within reach . Ick

Anyway, once you have gathered up all the extraneous words in this post and thrown them out the back door you will be left with this:

I'm outta here for a while. To come back with my new book

2nd in the Summerhood Island series -
Summer of the Ghost/Thief

 
or on it. 

I shall send you juicy tidbits from the  reading and writing world so you won't forget me.

Until I return, I remain
yr hmble and obdnt srvnt

Back to the story . . .

When last we left our heroine, she was waiting-

To keep from going crazy that first week I sketched a rough outline of changes that needed to be made in books two and three.

The second week I swore off writing altogether and read thrillers, 

 took long walks with the dogs,

 and pretended to be social. I hadn’t gone anywhere or seen anyone for more than a brief hello for the past month.

Except, of course, for my sacred Wednesday clamming date with one of the Paul’s or with Arnie. I freely admit it, I am a clam slut.

 I will with go to Nashweena pond any Wednesday with anyone who has a boat and is willing to go at low tide, whether it be 6 a.m. on a foggy cold June morning or a scorching noon in August.

But I digress. I digressed a great deal during those weeks.

I made lists of other publishers who might look at the book without an agent.

I made lists of people I knew who might know agents who might look at the book.

I made lists of things to be done once I got back to Virginia. And lists of dog breeds I liked, and old friends I hoped to see again.

Books I wanted to read. Sheet and towel colors.

I read more thrillers, and worked on the second book in the series.

Finally, what seemed like thousands of years later

but was actually about three weeks, ( I can digress a tremendous amount in three weeks), I received a reply.

Brandylane would like to see the rest of the manuscript.

I think it took me four minutes to attach the book and send it back.(three and a half minutes were spent jumping up and down.)

I won’t make you wait again. They accepted Coyote Summer for publication.

Then the real fun began.

When last we left our author . . .

She had just dusted off her old middle reader book manuscripts-

And was appalled to realize how badly they were written.  Passive in voice, boring verbs, and a severe lack of attention to detail. 

But the plot line was strong and the characters fairly well drawn.  There was some good stuff there, and the books were, I felt, worth saving.  Armed with my newfound knowledge in how to write decent prose, I immediately set about attempting to rewrite all three novels at once.

Right.  Well it seems like a good idea at the time,

continuity girl

 given that I was going to have to make changes in the first novel that would run through the other two.  And in theory it was a good idea.  It’s just impossible to rewrite three books at the same time and keep everything straight.  At least it was for me.  I either needed to go back to rewriting the novels one at a time, or hire a continuity girl.

There’s never a continuity girl around when you need one.

So I started with Coyote Summer, both because it was originally the first book in the series and because it felt the most complete. I’d played with switching the other two in the series around a bit, and even taken Hurricane Summer out of the series entirely and re-written it as a YA novel. They were going to need some major work.

I re-wrote Coyote Summer 

sentence by sentence. 

Literally.  I tightened and restructured, and moved my heroine's age up a year.  I’d read that kids liked to read books where the hero or heroine was at older than they were, and I intended this book for the 8-12 year old average age range. 

I then sent the book off to my editor for Cuttyhunk: Life On The Rock, and held my breath.

She liked it. Oh, she had many editorial suggestions, and I ended up paying her for a professional edit of the book.

I wanted Coyote Summer to be the strongest possible story when I sent it out this time around. I gave the professionally edited manuscript to  my partner Deborah, and waited rather breathlessly for her opinion. 

It had been quite a while since she’d seen the book.

Her comment? “The end is too rushed. You need two more chapters.”

Surprisingly, this proved to be very easy. I think I must have had the same thought brewing in the back of my mind for some time.

Finally, it was as done as it was going to be. I had researched publishers who would look at this sort of book without an agent, and made a small list. First on the list was a publisher whose work I’d seen at the VA Festival of the Book when I read there the previous year. I’d taken a copy of his catalog, and Coyote Summer seemed a good fit.

I composed an appropriate introductory letter and sent off the first three chapters.

to be continued . . .

I've been very busy

Not writing this blog, as you may have noticed. Or, perhaps not. Either way, it has been not happening here, right under your collective noses.

I have been writing postcard poems, instead. One a day, for the 31 days of August. And haikus, some of which you've seen on my facebook page, if you read that sort of thing. 
And trying to master social media to promote Coyote Summer. 

I did begin to write the story of how the Summerhood novels came about, but it's kind of a long and twisted tale. So I am taking a page from those young upstarts Dickens and Twain and serializing it. 

Here we go- Part the !st.

I first started what has now become the Summerhood Island trilogy (Coyote Summer, Summer of the Ghost/Thief, Hurricane Summer) more than fifteen years ago.  I had been away from Cuttyhunk Island just long enough that I could begin to think about using it as the background for a story. 

I’m not sure why now that I decided to write what was then called a “middle reader.”  Perhaps it was just an age I felt most comfortable with, that period just on the cusp of adulthood, those last few moments when you are convinced that anything is possible if you try hard enough, if you want it enough.  That brief moment when you’ve got full control of your body, 

before the judgments and restrictions of adulthood begin to settle on your shoulders.

As I began to write, I quickly realized that my heroine was largely the girlchild I wish I had been; the child I believe I could have been had I been allowed that freedom.  I actually reined my character in somewhat, as I wanted her life to be  more believable than my imagination.

After I had written the three books in the trilogy I began to shop them around, and quickly discovered there was no market for books like mine at the time.  The bottom had fallen out of the children’s book market, although there was still a small market for picture books.  No one was taking chapter books and the concept of a young adult market was still on the horizon.  Even the classics, the Newberry winners, the Caldecott medalists, were dropping in sales.  

After forty-two straight rejections of any or all of the books, I resigned them to the top drawer of an old file cabinet

where they languished from 2002 until 2012. Meanwhile, I went about my business, writing poetry, opening and closing restaurants, and in general, acting like the adult people told me I had become.  I didn't leave Cuttyhunk Island completely behind, however; I made island the subject of my first nonfiction work, a memoir about running an inn, cooking, and the great people who lived there.

Heartened by the significant if small in scope attention that this work engendered and by the upswing in interest of YA and ‘tween' novels (as middle readers are now called), I pulled my manuscripts out of their dusty file cabinet to see if they were worth saving.  I still remembered and cherished my main character, a strong girl named Jessie, and hoped she would have something to say to a new generation of young readers.

(to be continued . . .)

I am taking . .

a short, last-minute but wonderful residency at VCCA, (Virginia Center for Creative Arts) and I’m torn.  

I keep bouncing between islands.  That is, I’m trying to work on the second of the Summerhood island ‘tween novels (which is set on an island suspiciously resembling Cuttyhunk,) and at the same time  trying to rough out the next couple of Antarctic blogs.  Which also happened to focus on islands although these are slightly farther south and even less populated than Cuttyhunk in winter.  

Unless, of course, you count the penguins. 

The ornithologist on board ship told us they were seventeen species of penguins, but although not all were in Antarctica and the sub Arctic regions, all of them were in the southern hemisphere.  So there probably won’t ever be penguins on Cuttyhunk or an island suspiciously like it.  Then again, there probably won’t ever be people on most of these islands that we visited, so I guess we’ll call it even.

After the Falklands we spent a couple of days at sea, getting lectures on every possible subject from explorers to climate change, penguins and skua’s and albatross,  fur seals, elephant seals, whales (which my voice program insists on spelling  Wales,) even a lecture on krill.  With perfect timing, we were called from the Wale (sic) lecture up on deck by the captain to see pilot Wales and fin Wales swimming around the ship. 

I won’t anthropomorphize them by saying there were cavorting, but they certainly appeared to be having as good a time as I was even though they weren’t taking any pictures.  Apparently Wales have better memories than we do and don’t require seven thousand two hundred and forty-six pictures to remember that this large steel thing with some sort of mammalian forms leaning over its sides was staring at them and making odd gestures during dinner time.

Our first stop on South Georgia Island was at Salisbury plain. If I’d realized I’d see  this many penguins up close

 I don’t know that I would’ve taken as many pictures of faint penguin specks in the distance on the Falklands.

 

Here were our first king penguins and we saw them by the hundred thousands. 

Kings look just like emperors only smaller, which is good because emperor penguins reside deep inland on the Antarctic continent.  Just a few newly hatched chicks here,

but some kings sitting on eggs 

and a great many first-year chicks who were molting their downy brown feathers for that sleek, waterproof black and white coat that enables them to move like bullets in the water towards prey and away from predators. 

favorite photo bomb of all time

This is also the time of year that king penguins do their catastrophic molt.  Basically they stand still for a week and do nothing but lose feathers as a new coat comes in.

There were also tons (literally) of seals. 

Mostly fur seals of several generations,

 but a few elephant seals as well.  

And you know how cute and adorable and sweet those little fur seals are?

Not.  Well, maybe they are cute and adorable, but they are not sweet.  As Susana put it, they wake up cranky.  And it goes downhill from there. 

And here too, we found that neither birds nor animals obeyed the 15 feet/15 m rule about contact.  Which was fine with penguins,

but caused some interesting backpedaling from angry seals.  For some reason, as I guess is true in every culture around the world, the adolescents were by far the most pissed off.

I know it’s been ages since I gave a recipe, but this is an Antarctic blog.  If you’d like, after the next blog which deals with the excitement of a death march and a whaling station (oh be still my beating heart) wI ill give you a recipe from a book I read before I left entitled Hoosh.  Would you prefer penguin breast in port wine sauce or saddle of sea lion?