Research & Writing

Unknown Women supplied by Dr. W

In addition to research, I'm also continually working on my writing of history. I have a different writing professor this year, Dr. W, and I think I'm going to enjoy her. She doesn't want us to come in with pre-written stories, everything has to be new. Additionally, she assigns a variety of writing exercises and assignments.

To get me back into writing on the blog again, I thought it might be interesting to map out how Dr. W promotes historical fiction writing. The first exercise is to list and describe images, people or situations that "haunt me". They make me questions "how, why, when... did something happen?". As you've seen from our archives, I have many question about why people moved, what did they do, etc...

The first assignment is character study of a photograph. I had to chose one from her selections (see left), but its a methodology that I can and will apply to a few of our own Callaway photographs as well.

This is a writing course geared towards fiction writing, not creative non fiction, so it allows me to explore different historical possibilities in the writing. I guess this is my way putting out a disclaimer that everything I write may not be supported by exact evidence.

Update & Anecdote

I'm leaving this weekend to go visit my grandmother and aunt. While I'm with them we're going to go through my Aunt Jewel's files of letters, notes and other papers. I'll be scanning them as well so look for a future post them. Once they're sorted and scanned, they'll be added to the archive for you to look through.

On another note, I've had some success identifying some of the pictures. I made a contact through www.findagrave.com  with Brenda Harris who is a Callaway+Underwood connection. She had posted a picture that I had an original to, so I was able to immediately identify the people. I shared with her the Callaway album which she then shared with her mother. The result was identifying this little girl here as Brenda's grandmother, Willie Lucille Callaway.

Isn't that great! Now Brenda and her mother are able to download the pictures. This is why I do this, for and for me.