Birthday Musings - 4th Decade

This was the decade of pregnancy and diapers. Audrey was born, hated when anyone laughed, and had a personal mission to scale the mantel in the fraction of a minute my back would be turned. Next came Lottie - with nearly continuous ear infections and an imperial nature that refused to be separated from her bottle after Colin was born. He didn't walk until just weeks before Alice was born 18 months his junior. The whole time I was pregnant with her I struggled before the Lord: "I know I have room in my heart for another child but I don't think I have room in my hands....." She was born with allergies, a jaw that would not stay in place, and struggled to grow. I hemorrhaged and had a difficult time recovering from that birth. She could not nurse and three months later as I spent multiple mornings throwing up I said to the Lord - "I sure hope I have the flu" knowing it was Roger and I perceived Him - the Lord- replying in a verse: "This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in my eyes." I could believe the first part of the verse but the second - that was the challenge of the pregnancy - it was NOT "marvelous" in my eyes. But, all along, since that first failed pregnancy in late 1976 until I conceived Roger, I knew that we did not have everyone yet. It was the only answer to the many people, friends who had invitation to criticize me and strangers who took it upon themselves to judge without any invitation, who assumed that we were being careless, thoughtless, and unfair to the children we already had to get another and another and I would not trade any of them for anything! And how do you do it? Well, they are not all three years old at the same time. There is grace and it takes work and total commitment..... And we moved to St. Louis to a large house on a large lot in Dogtown and I homeschooled, barefoot and pregnant, producing a massive garden with so many Oriental poppies followed by iris and peonies interspersed with vegetables and berries and I was miserable in a marriage that had failed at its inception but continued and the garden was a place of peace and prayer and the first verse the babies learned was "God says, 'No, No. Stay OUT of the garden!". God saw that Leah was unloved so He opened her womb. But I didn't recognize emotional pain any better than I could tell when I was in true labor and you would have thought I would have had that down pat.

Birthday Musings - Third Decade

Perhaps everyone has to learn to navigate disappointment, dashed dreams, and ruined hopes. This was the decade of discontent tempered by a deepening consecration and awareness of the One who does not disappoint. The decade opened with me finishing my junior year at Washington University in St. Louis where I majored in sociology - was doing a major independent study on changes in the role of the individual in Japan following World War II as it manifested in changes in the Japanese educational system. I was also taking Japanese, French, and Spanish. And then I got engaged and married in August. One miscarriage later I was pregnant with Esther and bed-ridden for the last six weeks until she was born at home attended by a neighbor not by design but because the doctor did not believe I was in true labor and did not arrive as planned. We lived in Hillsboro, attended and found a spiritual community at a small unaccredited Bible school and my degree was postponed for four years until after we returned to Missouri after spending time not achieving our goal in southern California. By the end of the decade, three miscarriages later, Nancy was born in Danville, Illinois, which is where I had my first significant job serving a nonprofit organization as the children's program coordinator for a battered woman's shelter. In that role I also traveled the state as the chairman of the children's committee of the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence to conduct the first survey of children's program standards in state funded women's shelters. This job is where I learned that very dark Mary Kay foundation turns white arms brown but does not easily wash away - a key experience that I used with the main character in my novel,  Pastor's Ex-Wife - available for too little money right now on Amazon Kindle. The job ended when premature labor threatened to end this pregnancy and once again I was put to bed. Nancy was born during the 1984 Summer Olympics in the Danville hospital- thankfully our friends took Esther and forced their father to stop watching whatever competition was on at the moment.

Birthday Musings - Second Decade

I remember being overjoyed when I turned two numbers old - ten years old. I loved thinking that it would take more than my likely life time to make another digit. It was a complicated decade starting in 1966 - we moved out of the high rises and into a row house with a postage stamp front yard adorned with a large forsythia to which we added a Japanese split maple tree. After sixth grade I left the little Lutheran school I had attended since kindergarten for a girls' preparatory school in Brooklyn and learned to navigate the daily commute via two subway trains and about a half mile walk on either end. The academics were advanced but the social life dwindled because of the distance I lived away but I fell in love with theater, started directing plays, spent two summers in Vermont where my uncle ran a summer stock theater and where I got to be the gopher, substitute stage manager and general grunt. Girl Scouting was an important part of my life and for a brief time I was on the junior editorial board of the American Girl Magazine but that never made my resume. Maybe it should have. I found myself running from the Hound of Heaven until I was 17 and an exchange student in England, engaged-not any more to an American who was about to enter seminary. Fully aware that to become a Christian in the full born-again, no turning back sense of that word, would cost me everything (and it did but it also made everything good about who I am today possible) I stumbled snotty and exhausted into His kingdom a few months before entering college in St. Louis where I gained more understanding of God and His ways thanks to classmates, a former nun, now deceased named Barbara Ann Chase, and a few amazing mentors - Bob Canfield, Kathy Woodard, Diane and Jack Binnington. Urbana '73 was pivotal - I met Elizabeth Elliott and there connected my destiny with the nations of the earth. Following that - and my passion for languages, I thoroughly enjoyed attending the Summer Institute of  Linguistics in 1975 thinking that I would join Wycliff as a Bible Translator. But that goal post moved when I got married in 1976 - six months prior to the end of my second decade.

Birthday Musings - First Decade

The birthday I remember anticipating with the most delight was 1966 when I turned two numbers old. One decade lived and now I am entering a seventh. Hence I reflect back starting with the first- including Eisenhower as president, JFK's assassination, air raid drills at my New York City elementary school, and a generally pleasant childhood with my younger sisters spent in high rise apartment buildings, black-topped play grounds, Saturday trips with my father to the butcher's and the liquor store where we got licorice and lollipops while the men visited, and frequent trips to my grand-father's dairy farm in Vermont where women and girls were not allowed in the barn but where I was allowed to help dig a sewage trench with the men. The summer before I entered kindergarten we vacationed on the beach in Maine and I was allowed to go alone only as far as the life-guard chair. After a few weeks we drove to San Francisco and I remember pulling a hair out of the ranger's horse's tail in Colorado, seeing sand dunes in a big desert, visiting a jail in a ghost town and watching my father give an Indian boy who was about my size a quarter after he did a dance. I also remember liquid yellow dramamine that tasted like what it looked like but did seem to mitigate the constant motion sickness that would not be willed away.

Perhaps the most important adults in my life in this earliest decade were my maternal grandmother who kept me many weekends at her flat in Brooklyn, and my Uncle Ted who romped with me and gave me books for birthdays and asked me to be the ring bearer at his wedding. I loved school, generally found it too easy and boring, except for third grade which I hated and apparently misbehaved routinely during class.

I wanted to be an author then or a doctor and escaped most of my free time into books - no matter the genre. I gobbled up the Nancy Drews, Cherry Ames, and Hardy Boys but hated the Borrowers and the Bobbsy Twins. For several weeks during fourth grade, I hurried home from school to get to my radio in time to hear the next section read aloud of the newly published Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I memorized a lot of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson but was terrified to finish reading Kidnapped - nearly as frightened as I was to watch The Wizard of Oz.  In fact, I did not like watching movies because the images wouldn't fade out of my mind and came back to haunt me at night. The only book that I could not comprehend when I first picked it up was Gibbons' Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. I found it on an uncle's bookshelf when it was too hot to be outside and the grown-ups obviously did not want us around whatever they were doing.

I am told that, when taken by my grandmother to Sunday School for the first time, I did not know the words to the song, "Jesus loves me," so I sang "Old MacDonald" really loudly. I seem to remember being in a dress with a puffy skirt and the scratchy netting under-skirt and sitting on a back-less bench in the first row at a church basement with lots of children I did not know next to me and in rows behind me.

If I had to wear anything with elastic at the ankles or wrists I was miserable and bit or cut the cloth to make it bearable. At the little Italian restaurant on 63rd Drive where we often ate, I remember loving the calamari. My father always took me- just me- to one day of the US Open Tennis Tournament in September and I would wear my new school clothes for the occasion and try to match his responses to the players' moves. I remember running my gloved fingers over chains and banisters around the city, watching them turn black and then sucking the soot off of them while my mother scolded me to get my hands out of my mouth.I am glad that we girls no longer have to wear white gloves and dresses to go out in public, by the way.

What is this post all about and how does it connect with who I am today as a writer and person of faith? Soon I will be entering my seventh decade which is causing me to reflect back on the first six.... Perhaps it is a selfish indulgence but it seems important to me. You can follow the next few posts if it interests you.

Dorothy Sayers on Writing and the Trinity

My eighth grade English teacher introduced me to Shakespeare, E.E. Cummings, and essays by writers on writing. I still read them all. Currently I am enjoying a piece of non-fiction - a theological analogy by the murder mystery writer, Dorothy L. Sayers, on how the structure of a creative (author's) mind is a reflection of the Christian Trinity. She discusses the book as at one and the same time an Idea, an Energy, and a Power. The "Book as Thought" is analogous to God the Father; the "Book as Written" compares to God the Son, and the "Book as Read" is for God the Holy Spirit. Throughout the piece she uses her own experience as the author of the Peter Whimsy books to illustrate her claims. They make sense to me as an author as well. I think that this book should be the basis for the meditations of a Christian writers' retreat. I think I will try to make that happen.

It's public today - my decision to resign after more than six years as the executive director of the Bolduc House Museum. Writing has occupied much of my time at the museum. I created Zuts the Bolduc House Museum Squirrel and developed his voice on Facebook, the website and a quarterly article in the museum newsletter which I also wrote. The bolduchouse.org website content was written by me even though the squirrel takes credit for it except where his pages have been hacked by some cats.... Manuals, interpretive panels, exhibits, brochures, grant requests - the whole experience has been a huge honor and a challenge. I'm so proud of what I have done.

But I am a writer through and through. And my new adventure will allow me to focus on much more specifically on my writing. So watch me.

Coming Soon - the first in a series

In time for Christmas I plan to publish the first in what will be a series of Short Meditations on Hymns and Carols. The first volume will contain thirteen very short meditations on the Christmas carol, "The 12 Days of Christmas." Legend has it that each of the gifts represents a different aspect of the Catholic catechism so that British children could be reminded of the tenets of their faith at a time when it was illegal to practice Catholicism in England. So, after a first Christmas Eve meditation on the giver, the True Love, this devotional will feature one of the gifts each day through the evening of Epiphany, Twelfth Night. The meditations are short enough to be used for family devotions, for group meditations, and for individual devotions. A suggested prayer in response to the devotion and a list of Bible verses that connect to the meditation are included. You can expect this to be available for the Amazon Kindle in time for Christmas.

 

First steps towards seriously marketing my books....

Finally! It's been more than five years since I published my novel, Pastor's Ex-Wife, on Amazon as a Kindle download. So today, I added a author page on amazon.com.

Actually there already was an author page for the St. Louis Gateway Rail - the 1970's book which was published in 2006 by Arcadia and that I wrote as a tribute to my father-in-law. He took the photographs as research for his very comprehensive collection of HO-scale models depicting the history of rail in St. Louis from 1900-1990. That collection is on display at the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. I am proud of having had the honor to hear my father-in-law's heart as he shared his life through his images - each connecting to an in-tact memory - and then to have been the vehicle to communicate his life's work to the community through both the collection and this book. But, railroad is not my expertise and I very much doubt that, other than for a children's book in process called Stand Back!, I will ever write another book about trains.

I drastically reduced the price on Pastor's Ex-Wife to $0.99 in order to boost its potential to attract readers. I NEED readers who will purchase the book, download it to their kindle, read it and then write an honest review. The link to buy it is found at: http://www.amazon.com/Pastors-Ex-Wife-Lesley-Barker-ebook/dp/B004NNUXBQ. That book should propagate to my author's page by Saturday 12/5/15.

Besides readers and reviewers, I need people who will recommend this book to their friends and acquaintances. By browsing through this blog you will be able to learn about why the book was written and what I hope that it will accomplish - and why it is in fictional form. I think you will find it a compelling read.

Reviews needed to boost sales of Pastor's Ex-Wife on Amazon Kindle

I spent the weekend reading and writing because writing is my first passion and I intend for it to succeed as a means of personal support. 

Yesterday I worked on a revision of my book about Auguste Chouteau - a short historical novel for youth readers. It is set in the 18th century French Illinois Country across the river from the Bolduc House Museum for which I have served as executive director since 2009. Having lived and breathed and handled the artifacts and archives every day for the past six years I am much more prepared to make the story come alive with authentic details. I'm glad I waited to publish this book until now. Like my other fiction, The Curse of Kaskaskia is about what happens to faith in dysfunctional families when inauthentic or spiritually abusive churchianity is operating. This time the story is about 14 year old Auguste's fears that the church will restore his mother to his abusive father should that man ever return to New Orleans to claim her. It also deals with the anger that is the way to masquerade his fear. The French colonial community at Kaskaskia was filled with diversity - the story involves the Jewish high holy days of Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, African slaves, Indian slaves, an Osage man and a Taensas woman, Jesuit priests and secular enforcers of the order that evicted the Jesuits from New France. Each culture brings its own wisdom as the parallel story between a teenaged boy and a much older woman unfolds. I realized today that there is another character who would certainly have been involved in the story but who would have lived across the river in Ste. Genevieve. Most of my work on this story has been to strengthen it by the inclusion of my newly gained expertise in the period and its material culture. Next I will weave in Marguerite Valle's perspective and the required scalp dance after the death of Nukonska....

Today, I read about writing and publishing shorter kindle books. I decided to begin a series of short devotionals to self publish on the kindle platform. It is called "Short Meditations on Hymns and Carols". The first book will be based on the legend that the Christmas carol, "The Twelve Days of Christmas" was really a song with a hidden message for Catholic children growing up in England between 1559 and 1829 when it was illegal to be Catholic. It is comprised of 13 short devotionals, one for each day from Christmas Eve through Twelfth Night. I plan to launch it for $0.99 per copy by December 17.  It will make a perfect Christmas gift for families as well as for individuals.

 Today I also decided to do some other marketing activities in the next two weeks. These will be to complete my author's page on Amazon, work on building a following for my new author's page on Facebook and drastically lower the price of Pastor's Ex-Wife on Kindle. It is very important to me that that book rise in the ratings and become more widely known and read. For that to happen, I need readers who will write honest reviews about it. If you are willing to read and write an honest review for the Pastor's Ex-Wife sale page on Amazon, I am willing to send you a free download of the book. So if you want one, email me at teamlesley@gmail.com and I'll reply with a pdf version of the book.

Religion: Not Yet, Not Here, Not Necessarily Available because It is Not for Now....

My fiction pushes against religiosity by exposing the wounds and the questions that result from being hurt by the church and accused by religious leaders who have become bullies instead of good news brokers. In his book, Kingdom Principles: Preparing for Kingdom Experience and Expansion, Miles Munroe distinguishes between religion and a kingdom-mindset. By unpicking how kings exercise dominion as well as lord over domains, Munroe challenges people, no matter their religious affiliation, to take Jesus' reply to Pontius Pilate at face value: "I was born a king." Munroe claims that "religion postpones the Kingdom to a future experience." When religion is focused on the attainment of something not yet, not here, not necessarily available because it is not for now, there is a space and a potential need created in our minds for some more enlightened guru without whom we might not be able to get to there then, who, if said guru is operating against us out of some impure agenda as a bully, competes against the Holy Spirit for our trust. This mismatch often twists how we understand and lean on God. My book, Pastor's Ex-Wife, is the story of one such victim's journey back to a place of vulnerability after having been bullied away from trust, overtaken by too much fear and chained up by so much religiosity. It takes her on a romp through inner city schools as well as to an assortment of Protestant churches until she finds enough courage to confront and disallow her abuser-pastor-ex-husband any additional power over her life and emotions. Although fiction, it is anything but imagined.

Looking for a courageous editorial team for such a time as this

Over the past week I have been revisiting my files where I have kept the writing I have done since the early 1970's. There is a large body of work in many genres most of which deals with topics and issues of faith. It is time to push some of these works forth where they can accomplish the purposes for which I labored over them. Some, like a book about leading preschoolers to intentionally encounter, experience, and engage with God, have been in the works since I was a new mother. Now, a grandmother, I feel qualified to finish it. Other pieces have been researched and are waiting to be turned into books of meditations - one on Ecclesiastes, one on the Old Testament enemies, Ammon, Philistia, Moab....for example. Others are fiction - plays, short stories, children's books, novels, a murder mystery - some in draft form, some, like Pastor's Ex-Wife, are finished and available on Amazon as a Kindle book-this one could probably turn into a movie. Of course there are the published books - St. Louis Gateway Rail - the 1970's published by Arcadia, the Eye Can Too! Read series of e-books that provide graded activities for homeschoolers that improve learning-related vision skills and was originally published by Home School Inc. and has now reverted to me, the Prayerwalk St. Louis Guidebook, and a group Bible study guide: Strategic Prayer Guide.

Writing has been a consistent priority since I was in about the second grade. It has always been my goal and passion as well as how I process my emotions, my faith, and my thoughts. There are poems and articles written, sold and waiting. There is another body of academic work. Some essays could be published as smaller pieces. I am writing a PhD dissertation for a doctorate in museum studies through the British University of Leicester that will be finished by February 2016. This is a challenging look at the interpretation of past intercultural interactions at American Historic House Museums that I hope will become a very useful tool for these museums.

So now, I am looking for an editor, publisher, distributor who can provide me the space to write enough to produce an income stream for the imminent retirement years (turning 60 in 4 months....)

This makes me happy

Feathers, flowers, flavors, textures
Birds, butterflies, cows and other creatures
Even bugs armored and glistening in the grass
When the sun strikes and iridescence replies
These
Accompanied by thrumming and the drumming beat
Of beak against tree supporting
Song bird melodies
Pierced by staccato bark moo shriek
Wind wafted fragrances cedar and sea salts
Wrapping wind releasing rainbow skies
This
Makes
Me
Happy

c. 2015 - By Lesley Barker

Oh where, oh where has this writer been?

Work happens to the best of us sometimes. Hopefully the next several months will be less grueling and I'll have time to myself to finish "Stuck in the Mud" and write "Isabel" - which is based on a series of letters written to Isabel Woods by Ben Edwards in the 1890s. Meanwhile, don't think I have not been writing! It's a main component of my work as director of the Bolduc House Museum in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. It just doesn't get included here. Sorry. More to come in the next few days because if I do not get these items finished and if I do not manage to market what I have already written there is no retirement plan for me other than what I have threatened for the past 14 years: to live with the richest kid.

When Art Succeeds by Lesley Barker

When Art Succeeds

You see me

framed

in bone and skin

hanging

in this time

this where

Not so

I'm swirling in some distant space

The entrance is 

This word

That picture

By Lesley Barker

7/27/2012

I need more energy at the end of every day to progress on Stuck in the Mud. But sometimes, poems just happen.

Purple Prompt

Our writer's club met yesterday evening. We shared prompts for 10 minute writing exercises. I wrote this in response to the prompt: "Write about something that makes you think of purple."

Three year old purple mischief on foot, Audrey, able to scale the cherry wood mantel in the 30 seconds it takes me to check the bread in the oven and return to the living room. Even her flip-flops are purple as is every shirt, skirt, and accessory. Why then did she, ten years later, dye her hair green, and twenty years later, live in a yellow house? When she is old will she again wear purple?

Are you looking for prompts to motivate you to write spontaneously? Check out this blog.

Talley Ho!

There's a new writer's club in town that meets twice a month hosted by our museum so I attend every meeting. The first monthly meeting is for critiques. The second monthly meeting is for practice - where each of us brings a five minute writing challenge. Last week was for critiques so I read the first section of the first chapter of Stuck in the Mud and asked the others whether what they heard would make them want to keep reading. It did. The best thing about this is that it is motivating me to keep writing. Talley Ho!

Monkey in the Middle

Yesterday one of my sons called to tell me that the pastor of the church he has been attending with his girlfriend announced that he was stepping down because of a year-long affair. This man's messages have been the topic of many other conversations between us. My son has spent the past several years re-evaluating a faith in God damaged by the divorce his father and I experienced.

Yesterday I also learned that another pastor who recently stepped down from his senior pastor role is now a full time counselor. This man's message caused my other son to walk out of his father's church as a junior in high school when this pastor's sermon asserted that children of divorced parents will always become "statistics." Except for the occasional wedding, he has not attended church since that day. Now this son claims to believe in no God. When I advise him to pray about some challenge or other his response is, "Why should I pray - I don't believe there is a God!" "Good point, I forgot," is my typical retort.

Yesterday this same son posted a link on his Face Book wall to an article from chicagoist.com about the Wisconsin state senator, Glenn Grothman, whose new bill connects "nonmarital parents" i.e. single ones with child abuse and neglect. My son's comment, also on Face Book, is: "Well, that's offensive."

When God is the rope in a divorce tug of war the children end up at the frayed edges when the rope finally breaks. When God is the ball some "monkey in the middle" frequently keeps the kids from catching it.

Both of my books touch this wound - Terry's children, in Pastor's Ex-Wife, believed their father who demonized her. Much of the story deals with how Terry coped or caved with the absence or silence of her children. Stuck in the Mud, the one I am slowly not getting done now, is told from the point of view of a child whose disappointment with her father resulted in a faith-less life.

Hijacking the church

Sometimes the church is the victim. Even though my fiction is about spiritual abuse as it is expressed within the American Protestant context, I recognize that the church is not always to blame. Truth, integrity, and civil discourse are better than pride, personal agendas, and vindictiveness hijacking otherwise good motives. In my opinion we all default to sin whether we believe in God or not. So why am I so constantly surprised by the failings of our flawed fellow humans? ...churched or unchurched...Yesterday I attended an event at which bad motives twisted around a good purpose and ended up leaving a bad taste in everybody's mouths. The unfortunate target was a small-town's church.

There.....

On CNN this morning I saw an interview with a female Methodist pastor who has decided to become an atheist and has left the pastorate. She plugged some online support groups for clergy who are struggling with issues of faith as well as for laity who are leaving their faith. I understand the horrendous emotional and philosophic trauma that faith crises provoke - the more costly the stakes, the more isolated the struggle tends to be.

My fiction pushes the envelope for such struggles - when abusive Christians control and diminish other Christians in the name of God such struggles intensify with the twist being self-imposed by the victim due to her (largely it is a her) issues of conscience and naivete....

My fiction exposes what happens in the heart's inner space and behind closed doors and doctrinal confines.

My fiction demands huge levels of honesty and intellectual integrity and if it pushes someone to question the very foundations of their own faith, so be it.

God is big enough to defend His own faithfulness and as with the woman I heard on tv this morning, may He pursue us all in the midst of our storms and tantrums with His relentless mercy.

I find God where T.S. Eliot found Him: "at the still point of the still turning world...there the Dance is" ....

Business Comes First

Unfortunately it takes a certain amount of leisure - or at least breathing room - to write especially when writing takes up a chunk of ones everyday work day. Today, for example, I wrote two business letters, a speech for a member of my Board of Directors, several emails, and a proposal for a presentation I hope to be selected to do in November. But this week I became reacquainted with a woman whose career may provide key information for Stuck in the Mud so that's awesome. By the way, I just created an author page on librarything.com, a social network site that connects individuals by means of the books they list as being in their personal libraries. Check it out.