Jean Zimmerman

September 10, 2015 · 1:38 pm

Domestic Manners

After my novel draft failed at the box office, I sat with my feet up – or my foot up, as I was recovering from bone spur surgery – and thought about my options. Soon enough my mind lit on a subject like a bee on a coneflower: the life of Fanny Trollope, whom I’d always admired for her intrepitude and forthrightness.

I had first read Fanny’s book Domestic Manners of the Americans in college. It was an instant bestseller in 1832, now mostly forgotten. Trollope set out from England, middle-aged, broke, in search of riches through a harebrained scheme of building a department store in Cincinnati. Her colossal failure set the stage for her trek through Jacksonian America (three children in tow), where she chronicled everything she saw through the lens of domestic life.

Domestic Manners was devoured by American and English readers alike. Fanny got rich. People didn’t always find her likeable, but that was because she was so bracingly smart in her commentary. I wanted to write a book that would bring Trollope to the fore, to show her incredible spirit to the world. And I think I secretly wanted to emulate her.

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September 9, 2015 · 4:21 pm

Suddenly Last Summer

Just about a year ago I finished a new novel. It took place during Revolutionary War era New York City, and told the story of a young woman named Lisette as she made her way through the terrors and excitement of that time and place. The book was the best thing since sliced bread. In fact it was sliced bread, a hunk of a chewy brown loaf with a crackly crust that was so good you wanted to gobble the whole thing up in one sitting. At least that’s how it seemed to me.

Lizzy was real to me, as real as the girl in this 18th c. portrait, gazing off into her world, waiting for our world to discover her. I thought everyone would want to read about her exploits. The only thing was… my editor, the smart and genial fellow who had published my last two historical novels, didn’t agree. Or the people who had to approve his adoption of my Lizzy didn’t agree. It was a shock, the moreso when the editors who saw the mss. subsequently loved the writing but felt they couldn’t publish the book. How to digest this news? What was a writer to do?

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September 8, 2015 · 7:19 pm

The Root of It All

Today I found myself gazing at a root. At a fringe of roots actually, fine strands that hung in the soil below the trunk bottom like a mustache. A sidewalk was being ripped up so that a new one could be installed, and that meant that the Platunux x Acerfolia (London Plane Tree) had its vital organs exposed to the air for the first time in a very long time. My job was to be the tree’s guardian, to make sure that no harm came to those precious roots. I am an Arborist.

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October 3, 2014 · 6:03 pm

Cowlin’ for You

I ventured out today. After two and a half weeks in a foot cast, I was ready. The sky was an egg, the fall breeze fresh, the sun silky on my arm propped up at the passenger window of the car. There was sushi, at our local place not usually the best, but which tasted great today. There were errands, to the grocery, to the library. I admit, I stayed in my seat and let Gil do the honors, crutches not being my strong suit.

But I did make it out of the vehicle and into my neighborhood knit shop in Tarrytown, New York, on my sticks.

There I got the largest needles in the world, a different kind of sticks, in a size 50.

On Ravelry, the site for knitting devotees, I’d found a pattern for an Outlander cowl, oversize, chunky and earthy. Based on one Claire wears in the Starz series.

The yarn I found is virgin wool and acrylic, charcoal, heather grey, black and a tinge of blue. Colors one might find worn in the Scottish Highlands 300 years back? I really don’t know, but I like to imagine it.

According to one patron of the shop, Flying Fingers, whose friend is crafting a similar cowl, the Outlander look is a craze that’s catapulting across the knitways of our nation.

I may be consigned to the couch for the near future, but I’m glad to be part of a larger purpose, fitting us all out in history-inspired gigantic wool neckpieces for the first cold snap.

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September 28, 2014 · 3:58 pm

The Exquisite Realism of Pleats

Hiatus. Mine was a long one, at least in the terms of this daily blog. I took off in the spring to research my new novel, then to write the novel, then to take a break after writing the novel, then putting the novel on the market. Now, with my foot up after a third time under the knife (yes, I have three feet), I’m back.

The daffodils came and went, the waves crashed at the beach, but I feel I’ve been inside these months much more than outside. Inside my cranium. The seasons have changed largely without me, and now along comes Fall.

I don’t work at night. The Cabin resides in a quiet, still, isolated pocket of land at the edge of an insect-buzzing marsh. We’re cloistered in the middle of nowhere. Or at least it feels like that, which is remarkable since we’re less than an hour from the lights of New York City. My point is, there’s not a lot of hubbub around, not a lot of human distractions. So after dinner, with Oliver keeping a lookout out at our feet, we either read or consume a fair dose of high-concept binge fare.

We visit different worlds.

It’s hard to get history right on tv. Often it’s too cheesy to watch, whether because of the dialogue, scenery, fashions or some combination that makes you say, I know it wasn’t like that. And turn it off. Go read some good historical fiction instead!

But I’ve been watching a show that manages to have a little cheese and a fair amount of heart at the same time, along with exquisite attention to detail. The premise is time travel, my favorite subject.The Outlander series takes a young English woman just after World War One (she’s a battlefield nurse) and sends her through a witchy wormhole (actually a Stonehenge-like circle of obelisks) back to 1740s Scotland. Adventures and romance ensue. What interests me is the devotion to detail on the part of the producers, down to the beautiful and so carefully sewn pleats in the wedding gown of the protagonist, Claire. Apparantly they are entirely consistent with the real McCoy. There are plenty of people out there waiting to pounce on you if you don’t do it right, but so far a war hasn’t broken out between the pleats and the pin tucks, so we’re okay.

As a writer of historical fiction, I know that you must constantly make choices about where to nail the absolute fact and when you can fudge. In fact, sometimes you must fudge, because the absolute fact would be unpalatable for contemporary readers. It fascinates me to hear about the choices made by the costume designer for Outlander, Terry Dresbach. (How’s that for a fitting name?)

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August 10, 2014 · 10:18 am

Slowdown Saturday

A knuckle-sized frog hopped straight by the woodpile.

A butterfly lit on a thistle.

Chickadees flocked around the bird feeder, making off with safflower seeds.

A long day, reading a long novel.

Excitement: Oliver thundering from the porch toward the rabbit he’ll never catch.

It grew cool, deep shadows stretched across the grass.

Then there were dinner pancakes, made with fresh-laid eggs from the good neighbor’s coop and local blueberries, soaked in a friend’s home-tapped maple syrup.

“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon,” said Henry James. “To me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

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August 5, 2014 · 4:04 pm

Sand Between the Toes

I’ll tell you something about Jones Beach. It’s a democratic place. Anyone can put up a flashy pink umbrella.

I saw one today.

Anyone who’s in New York can go to Jones. And everyone does. In August, before the jellyfish descend, the water is superbly cold and the waves fantastic for diving through. Surfers can be seen far off shore, catching small waves. It’s hard to get to Maui, after all.

Children play at the water’s edge shoveling holes in the endless strand, all un-helicoptered by any adult, and sitting on your towel you have absolutely no responsibility for them. Just enjoy their blissful ways from a distance, a dumbshow of babyhood. (In fact there were helicopters, real ones, Blackhawks that made a low pass along the shore.)

There’s the smell of the surf, as primal as that of cut grass. I measure my mood by my receptivity to these aromas. Throw open the windows – what is that that smells so good? Oh, it’s the smell of the ground after it rains, everyone’s favorite. There was actually a poll. But the briny air at Jones Beach came in a close second.

Fifteen-year-old girls make their way by like flamingo offspring, ducking their heads, so shy.

The man carrying a cooler full of ice cream: Chipwich! Frozen fruit bars! Dry ice makes the treats hard as concrete. He smiles though the sand must be a carpet of hot coals under his bare feet. His favorite places when he gets off? A bowling alley. A cave. He loves to wear shoes.

But what I like best is the sight of the old couples, the well-worn lovers, brown as belt leather and greasy with lotion, sitting silently side by side in their low chairs. They never speak. They go everywhere together. As one, they stay still, confronting the sun.

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July 31, 2014 · 7:26 pm

Leafy Air and Cheese

I can breathe again. I took a trip to Michigan and Wisconsin, the Great North Woods, which has leafy air worthy of inhaling.

Also, sweet black cherries worthy of devouring. They sell them, washed, plump and juicy, from little stands at gas stations.

I experienced a hailstorm that hit just as our sailboat anchored in that lovely private lagoon a ways into Lake Superior. Just enough to put every wet person on board in stitches.

I can breathe again because I turned in the manuscript of my new novel and my editor said he likes it. A lot. That’s an outsize sigh of relief. It made me open to everything around me.

I found that lying in bed on the shore of Lake Michigan, I could feel every delicious cotton fiber with my toes.

I saw the sights, hugged family, brought home souvenirs from people who had made them with their hands.

There was rye flour from the farmer who grew it, at Maple Hill Farm in Washburn, Wisconsin.

And fingerless gloves knitted by his wife. She sewed a pad of suede on the palm for good gripping.

The Northland is kind, even its rusty old trucks.

The region loves its fish. Smoked, fried or souped.

It offers a hundred different moccasins.

Thrives on pop (drive-in menu, top right). Known to us North Easterners as soda.

Then, of course, there is the cheese. I tasted a Michigan dairy’s Colby-style specimen, bright orange and moist, that was produced from a 1915 recipe.

Did I mention that my editor liked it? The novel, I mean, not the cheese.

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May 30, 2014 · 4:29 pm

Finding Rosebud

I told myself I would have it done by the time the roses bloomed.

My new novel, that is.

I do that sometimes, set an arbitrary time of year – not a date, never a date – when I will finish a book. It gives me something to shoot for. When the trees turn red. When the first snow falls. A seasonal moment which my project will match with its completion.

When the roses bloom.

I have been working for some time on a manuscript that shows some signs that it wants to be finished. But I still have chapters to revise before I can call it done. Yet it’s Spring, high rose season.

Just to see where things stood, how far behind I was, I thought I would pay a visit to the lovely grounds of Lyndhurst, the historic site near my house. This was the estate of the robber baron Jay Gould, and the old mansion is grey and gothic and not to my taste, though the huge specimen trees and plantings always astound. There is a fantastic heirloom rose garden there, one that I usually seem to get to too late to enjoy the blooms at their height.

This year the place was nearly deserted, and the circle of plants looked suspiciously green as I approached across the perfect lawn. There were two visiting matrons; one said, You must not miss the yellow blossoms on that bush, they smell like lemon.

And they did. But the lemon roses were one of only a few shrubs out of dozens there that were actually in bloom. Others offered wicked thorns.

Or buds so tightly sewn up it was hard to imagine them ever opening.

I’ve come across some thorns and some sewn-tight problems in the narrative I’m working on, so I could appreciate them. I wished I could have seen Lyndhurst’s roses, lush, exploded, lemon, yes, but also vanilla, musk and all the other scents that don’t have proper names imagined yet.

More than anything, though, I felt happy. Because the roses had not yet bloomed, and my novel will bloom when they do.

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April 28, 2014 · 7:24 pm

Stuck in the Middle of My Novel With You

I have been meaning to write and say that I’m taking a bit of a hiatus from writing this blog — but I guess that’s kind of obvious. Not that I don’t adore posting here, I do. And I have the greatest readers in the world. But I am stuck in the middle of novel-world, and my writing in the fictional format seems to be taking all of my mental energy. I’m telling the story of a teenage girl in Revolutionary-era NYC. She looks a bit like this, as I imagine her.

I have her portrait tacked up to my bulletin board. And now I have to get back to her.

I will still post here from time to time, and pretty soon I’ll dive back in to the real world, and my real blog, every day.

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April 18, 2014 · 2:55 pm

High-Energy Serendipities

At the National Arts Club the other night, before I gave my presentation, a very nice photographer named Bruce Allan took me by the hand and led me around from one atmospheric spot to the other to get just the right portrait of me.

Then, as I went on and on (as I often do) talking about Savage Girl and historical fiction and New York City, showing remarkable pictures of Manhattan during the Gilded Age, Bruce captured me again.

He also caught the musicians Henry Chapin (fiddle) and Mark Ettinger (accordion) playing music of the era. So infectious was their performance, they got people who were there only to listen up on their feet to dance. “I danced a reel!” one friend enthused afterward.

All in all, a high-energy event, filled with serendipities.

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April 15, 2014 · 7:13 pm

National Arts Club Talk Wednesday 8pm

I’m so looking forward to giving a presentation at the venerable National Arts Club on New York City’s Gramercy Park tomorrow night, April 16th at 8:00. The Club is housed in a beautiful old mansion, the perfect spot for time traveling back to the late nineteenth century. I will show pictures during my talk, sign books afterwards, and exhort guests to dance to our live musicians playing tunes from Savage Girl’s era. The celebration is free and open to the public. Please come if you’re in the neighborhood!

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April 12, 2014 · 1:44 pm

First Shoots

Someone said, Don’t.

Someone said, You’ll do too much.

Someone said You’ll re-injure your foot.

Someone said, Take a load off. Sit in the sun and read.

But a nice neighbor said, I noticed your garden. If you want some help raking it out, I’m here.

That set me off. My garden did indeed need raking, and when I dug under the dry, sun-baked surface of the leaves, I found things that made me glad to be up on my feet.

Forgotten carrots from last summer, baby nuggets that survived this harsh winter in all their delicacy.

A necklace of new strawberry plants I hadn’t noticed before, hidden as they were in the verdancy of the herb garden.

Spearmint. I won’t dignify the overgrown rascal with a photo, but got to give it props for its muscular thriving. Mint will inherit the earth when we’re gone, I’m sure of it.

And the pinks, fluffy and greening up with just a hint of silver.

I tousled their tops for luck, then leaned my rake against a stump and headed to the Cabin to rest my foot. I had accomplished half. The rest wasn’t going anywhere.

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April 11, 2014 · 7:17 pm

April Daffs

Is April really the cruellest month? Just because T.S. Eliot phrased it so beautifully in The Wasteland doesn’t necessarily make it so.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

I saw my first daffodils of the season today.

I’m in a mood. I can’t quite put my finger on why April is hateful, yet I know it to be true.

The birdsong I usually love strikes me as obnoxious.

The bright spring sun, scalding to the eyes. The alternative, sunglasses, too dark.

At the coffee place, I watch the barrista draw a cute foam face on the latte of the guy in front of me. Do you make funny faces for all the lattes? I ask. Just the special ones, he says.

I wait for my latte. Plain old plain old.

It’s that kind of day.

Alice James, that overlooked yet so wise diarist of the nineteenth century, said: “The ancient superstition as to spring and youth being the most joyous periods is pretty well exploded, don’t you think? The one is the most depressing moment of the year, so is the other the most difficult of life.”

Even the luscious yellow of the daffodils. Save it for later, will you? Tomorrow, April might be a peach of a month.