Writing in a lovely room at the historic Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, I’m feeling lucky to be here at Spalding University to workshop the adaptation of my novel, Sewing Holes, with Rachel Harper and Sam Zalutsky. This morning, Charlie Schulman critiqued my entire first draft, and I feel so energized and empowered to complete the second draft, which I feel confident will be much improved.
What: The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center in Maitland invites the community to its annual commemoration of Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass”. The event will be Sunday, November 6 with performances at 2 and 4 PM, and will be held in the exhibition hall of the Holocaust Center, 851 N. Maitland Avenue.
Info:
The program this year features the premiere of a new play, Two Regimes, which is drawn entirely from the words of Teodora Verbitskya, a woman who chronicled her experiences in Stalinist USSR. Teodora’s words are coupled with a striking backdrop – memory paintings of her daughter, Nadia Werbitzky, who later became an artist. Created decades apart, these works reunite to tell the story of these women who became witnesses to war – caught between Hitler and Stalin.
Kristallnacht commemorates the night of November 9 and 10, 1938, when Nazi soldiers, police officers and citizens began a pogrom of looting, burning, arrests and death. According to Pam Kancher, Executive Director of the Holocaust Center, the importance of Kristallnacht is not just the destruction of property and loss of lives. It was, she said, the time “when the whole world could see what was happening, and chose to turn away.”
“We can never forget the toll on humanity caused by hatred and indifference,“ she said. “It is our obligation to remember, to educate, and to stand up for the targets of intolerance.”
Who: The roles of Teodora and Dimitri Verbitskya will be played by by Christy Duffer and Ben Ludwig with narration by Mark Davids and Jackie Levine.
When: Sunday, Nov. 6, 2016
Performances at 2 and 4 pm
Media with Pam Kancher, Executive Director of the Holocaust Center, are available beginning at 1:00 p.m.
Where: Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida
851 N. Maitland Ave.
Maitland, FL 32751
For More Info
Contact: Terrance Hunter, thunter@holocaustedu.org
Program Coordinator, Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center
Office: (407) 628-0555 x225
Cell: (321) 301-2493
At least a decade ago, I sat in the 16th floor ballroom of the historic Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, and listened to a group of fellow Spalding MFA students read from their works in progress. Many were passable; a few were darn good. And then Bren McClain stood up and read what would become the first chapter of One Good Mama Bone. About three sentences in, I leaned forward in my chair, transfixed. Soon, I forgot to breathe. When McClain finished her piece, there was the kind of hush that fills a room when no one wants the reading to be over. Then the applause began, and we leapt to our feet.
For ten years, I’ve been waiting to hear what happens next. And this novel does not disappoint. If you are a mother; if you have or had a mother; heck, if you love Mother Nature, buy this book. (Available for preorder now.) I promise you’ll never forget Sarah Creamer and her son, nor Mama Red and hers.
Published by Pat Conroy’s Story River Books imprint at the University of South Caroline Press, with a forward by Mary Alice Monroe, One Good Mama Bone is Southern Gothic fiction at its finest.
When Tupelo Honey Lee opens the King James version of the Holy Bible to Matthew 7:7, she finds, in the beautiful red letters that tells her they are the words of Jesus, this promise: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
On the back of a prayer card at Our Lady of the Sea, Honey reads this quote from Saint Joan of Arc: “Work, and God will work also.”
Although as Honey grows up through the pages of Sewing Holes, she learns that God is not an ATM, and Jesus doesn’t run a fast-food restaurant where you place an order at the counter and get handed a bag full of wishes moments later, she does find, by the end of the book, that believing in something bigger than yourself matters; that hope outlives despair; and that the love we give away to others is the only miracle we ever really need.
If you know me at all, you know that the publication of my novel was a dream that came true after years of struggle, and with the involvement of just the right people at just the right time. Now I’ve been given a new dream, and have been quietly working behind the scenes to learn the necessary skills and meet the right people to make the adaptation of Honey’s story into a feature film a reality.
The first draft of the screenplay is complete. I know it has flaws, and will workshop it with an amazing screenwriter/professor in mid-November. Rewrites come after that, and then the search for the perfect producer and director begins in earnest, although I already have my heart set on a couple of successful indie-filmmakers right here in Orlando whose work I truly admire.
Come take this journey with me – one step at a time – as I ask, seek, knock – and work.
One day, in the not-too-distant future, we’ll all sit together in a local theater as the lights go down, the music swells, and Honey’s voice-over begins: “Memories are colored by perception, and the truth is pocked with holes. This is the way, after almost half a century, I’ve stitched those holes together….”