Tag: Stories Grandma Never Told

Finding Old Friends at the Thrift Shop

Hey, those are my books! The familiar covers stood out among the new arrivals at the humane society’s Pick of the Litter thrift store in Newport. Stories Grandma Never Told and Childless by Marriage, the two books I’m most proud of, now sat among the other titles discarded for one reason or another. They didn’t look as if anyone had read them. Did the people who had them before not even bother to look inside? Were the books brought in by family members after a loved one died? Did they somehow gravitate from the local bookstore that closed without paying me for the books it had on consignment? 

Once $18.95 and $15.95, they could now be had for $1.50 each. In perfect condition. Ouch. Maybe I should buy them and sell them again. On the other hand, maybe someone who couldn’t afford them before will buy them now. Maybe I should sneak in an autograph. Or would that be too pitiful?

Our books are our babies. We spend years writing them, and then someone reads them in a day. Or doesn’t read them at all. Once your manuscript is published, you cannot control how it is received.You aim as carefully as possible, but an unseen wind may blow them to someone who doesn’t want them, someone who takes them to Goodwill or the thrift store or, God forbid, throws them in the trash. Some people don’t even read books. The Pew Research Center says roughly a quarter of Americans have not read a book in the past year. That’s hard for me to imagine, but it’s true.

Getting people, even avid readers, to read your book is a challenge. More than one million books are published every year in the United States alone. Why should they read yours? The trick is making sure someone hears about your book and knows where to get a copy. Which is why it sometimes feels as if we spend a little time writing and a lot of time marketing.

Pre-Covid, I spent many hours at tables and booths hawking my books. Sometimes I sold quite a few copies, but sometimes sales were slow. Sometimes people stood there for 20 minutes reading parts of a book, then set it down and walked away.

But maybe when they got home they thought, shoot, I should have bought that book. Maybe they told a friend, hey, I saw this book the other day I think you would like.  

What’s the secret to book sales? Being famous helps. When Tom Hanks spoke in Portland a few years ago, the audience bought hundreds of copies of his book of short stories, Uncommon Type. I never saw so many copies of one book in one place, and they rapidly disappeared because the author was Tom Hanks. It’s a good book, but even if it wasn’t, they were buying it because he was a famous movie star. 

If you’re not Tom Hanks, you tell as many people as you can about your book, hope they spread the word, and let it go. Yes, it hurts to spend years writing a book and have people reject it with barely a glance or to find it among the books at Pick of the Litter. But you know what? Every famous author’s books eventually wind up at a secondhand store priced at almost nothing. I have purchased many a beloved book cheap that I might not have bought when they were new. They might have been a little wrinkled, but they were still good. It’s the story that counts.

I can take comfort in my recent trip to the Nye Beach Book House where I was piling up used books by John Grisham and Maeve Binchy when a man said, “Hey, that’s you.” I whipped around to see he was holding a copy of my novel, Up Beaver Creek, looking from the photo on the back cover to me.

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“What’s it about?”

I told him. The bookstore owner overheard us and started raving about my book. The man, visiting from Alaska, bought that copy of my book and took it home. 

I remember being thrilled to find my books on Portuguese Americans in the New Bedford, Massachusetts library when we visited there. And I was surprised when an excerpt from Stories Grandma Never Told was translated into Portuguese and published in a magazine from Portugal. I know people in Australia, India and the UK have purchased copies of my books. And people right here in Newport will buy them at Pick of the Litter.

You can’t control where the physical book will go once you send it out into the world. So I pat my books at Pick of the Litter, say, “Good luck, friends,” and move on to see what other treasures are there for me to buy. 

If you’re local and get to Pick of the Litter soon enough, you may be able to get these books cheap. If you really want them, I’ll give you copies for free. I just want my babies to find good homes. 

Do you buy used books? After you have read them, do you donate books to thrift stores or pass them around to your friends? Do you think less of a book when you find it on sale at a secondhand store or do you think hooray, I have always meant to read this? 

Writing books is a crazy way to earn a living, but I keep doing it. A sequel to Up Beaver Creek is coming soon. Meanwhile, visit https://www.suelick.com to see a list of my published books and download my Blue Hydrangea Productions catalog.

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

I’ve Got the Ring But Not the Story

It’s funny how a little thing can send you off on a tangent. This being National Poetry Month, I followed a prompt to write a poem about something precious to me. Seven pages and some online research later, I had no poem but a lengthy meditation on my grandmother’s engagement ring.

It’s a beautiful ring, which I never noticed before my father found it in an envelope in my mother’s nightstand after she died in 2002. In her perfect handwriting, Mom had written “For Sue.” The ring, which my research shows comes from the 1920s Art Deco style, has a large European cut diamond surrounded by sapphire “baguettes” mounted on filigreed white gold. The band was well worn, one of the sapphires was missing, and the ring didn’t fit my fat finger, so Fred and I took it to Diamonds by the Sea in Newport to have it resized and refurbished. I wear it when I dress up, always afraid I’ll lose it or damage it. Now that I have done some research, I’m going to be even more careful. Rings like the one pictured above sell for $4,000-$5,000 these days.

Holy cow. I have never owned any jewelry worth that much. Most of my jewels are cheap and quirky and won’t last much longer than I will. My engagement ring for my first marriage had such a small diamond you needed a magnifying glass to see it. When I married Fred, I said all I wanted was a gold band. There’s a story behind our matching rings, just as there is behind Grandma’s ring.

I’m bothered that I never noticed my grandmother’s ring when she was wearing it. Now I scour old photos trying to see her ring finger. I remember her dark eyes, her blue and black dresses, her thick elastic stockings, her flat shoes, and her voice—high pitched for children, low for adults, often lapsing into Portuguese—but I don’t remember that ring.

I want to know the story. Anna Souza and Albert Avina were both children of immigrants from the Azores Islands. Both lost their fathers when they were young. Both left school after eighth grade to go to work. I don’t know how they met, probably through one of Anna’s brothers or the cannery where Al worked, where all the women did stints cutting apricots and other fruit. They weren’t rich people. How could Grandpa possibly afford such a ring? Nobody had credit cards back in the 1920s when they were married. Did he make payments at the jewelry store in San Jose?

Was there a romantic proposal? Did they go on dates alone or with a chaperone, as was the old-country custom?

I have no memory of my grandparents kissing, holding hands, or even agreeing on anything, but I was child, a child who didn’t think much about such things. My own parents were visibly affectionate, but not my grandparents. Of course, they seemed old to me, and old people didn’t do that sort of thing. Actually, when Grandpa died at 66, he and Grandma were both younger than I am now.

As a child, I didn’t think about rings. My own small hands were usually stained with paint, ink, Playdough, food, or mud. For dress-up, we 1950s females wore white gloves. Was Grandma’s ring hidden under her glove? Did she wear it while cooking spaghetti or frosting chocolate cakes? Did the ring flash when she gave us a palmada—a slap—when we were being brats?

If only I could go back. I have so many questions. I wrote a whole book titled Stories Grandma Never Told. I don’t have many stories from my own grandmother. Now all the relatives from her generation are gone. A decade after she died in 1982, I took my questions to other Portuguese women, writing their stories and urging everyone to ask questions of their elders before it’s too late.

I don’t have children or grandchildren. If I did have a daughter, I’d like to think I would sit her on my lap and tell her the stories of my jewelry. See this ring? It belonged to Grandma Anna Avina, born Souza. Her husband, your Great-Grandpa Al, gave it to her when they got engaged to be married. They were poor, but he found a way to buy it.

Both of their families came from the Azores, beautiful islands in the Atlantic Ocean full of green fields, black and white cows, lava rocks and blue hydrangeas. It was hard to make much money, so people left for America to create a better life for you and me . . .

I wouldn’t tell just that story. I would move on to my parents’ stories and my own, down to my husband Fred’s romantic proposal and our life together. I would want my children to know I was not just “Mom” but a person named Sue who had a whole life of my own. Just as Grandma was a person named Anne who slipped this ring onto her finger and agreed to marry a tall curly-haired man named Al.

Dear friends, ask for the stories. Tell your own. Tell the stories of the rings.

***

Speaking of stories, remember last week when I had trouble with the apple pie? A few days later, I decided to make the cookies from the recipe on the back of the whole wheat flour bag. Somehow, I mixed up my measurements. I was supposed use 1 3/4 cup flour and 3/4 cup brown sugar, but I put in 1 3/4 cup brown sugar, way too much. I didn’t realize it until I was about to mix in the flour. Now what could I do? You can’t unmix the sugar from the eggs and butter. I was out of butter so I couldn’t double the recipe.

Knowing I’d probably have to throw the whole mess away, I added more flour and another egg, shaped the dough into circles and baked them. Guess what? The cookies were delicious. A miracle.

Stay tuned for further misadventures in the kitchen.

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

As a Writer, Who are My People?

Novelist Ayad Akhtar, interviewed in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers, was asked about being expected, as a Pakistani writer, to speak for “his people.” He replied that for him, it’s a mixed bag of all his experiences, including being Pakistani.

I think it has to be that way for all of us. We are not just any one thing. Any one box would leave a lot out.

I think of myself as representing the working class, people who come from families of construction workers, janitors, retail employees, etc., people who didn’t go to college, or if they did, it was community college or a state university. Princeton? Yale? Not in our wildest dreams. Fraternities? Too busy working. Trips to Europe? I didn’t even go to Girl Scout camp.

Our family didn’t fly to Hawaii; we went trailer camping at Seacliff or Donner Lake. We didn’t go to the opera or the ballet; we went to CB “coffee breaks” with barbecue, country music, and raffles of CB radio gear. My dad only wore a suit to weddings and funerals. He drank beer, not martinis. But he was a VIP to me.

Suddenly I remember a song, “Working Class Blues,” that I wrote when I was editor of the Saratoga News back in California and found myself hanging out with a whole different class of people, people who owned million-dollar houses when a million dollars meant something. I remember thinking none of my shoes were good enough.

The chorus: “We’re working class, just ordinary folks./We’ll never be rich, but we’re not exactly broke./We’re salt of the earth, and if nothing else is true,/look out snobs ‘cause there’s more of us than you.”

Simply put, if I lived at Downton Abbey, I’d be downstairs with the workers, not upstairs with the lords and ladies. And I’m cool with that.

I also represent people of a certain age with certain memories and experiences: The Beatles, Vietnam, wearing pantyhose and mini-skirts to high school, typewriters, phones attached to the wall, TV antennas on the roof. My first car was a blue VW bug, for which I paid $500, earned tutoring and giving guitar lessons. My parents did not give me a car for graduation; they gave me a sewing machine because girls were expected to be housewives and do lots of needlework.

Then there’s the ethnic part. I’m half Portuguese, on my mother’s side. On the other side, I’ve got some Spanish, Mexican, Basque, German, and a smidge of Scottish. A recent article in the Portuguese-American Journal cited a New York Times article that referred to Portuguese Americans as non-white. Really? That’s a surprise to me. I always thought we were Caucasian.

When writing my book Stories Never Told: Portuguese Women in California, many of my interviewees told of being harassed for being black or brown when they knew they were as white as any of their harassers. Were they wrong? Does it matter? If you add my Portuguese and Latin influences, can I accurately call myself a “person of color?” That’s fine, but what about the rest of me? Am I “mixed-ish” like on the TV show? Does it matter? If you go back far enough in history, we’re all a mixture.

Setting DNA aside, I’m a typical California blend of the various nationalities that settled there. I have black hair, brown eyes, and olive skin. So what? That’s just genetics. Sure, we tossed around some Portuguese and Spanish words at my house, but I never attended a Portuguese event until I decided to write my book about Portuguese women. Three generations in, my experiences were vastly different from those of recent immigrants.

So who are my people? Working class, part Hispanic, baby boomer women who never had children or grandchildren; widows; people who live alone; left-handed, ice tea-drinking, Honda-driving, guitar-playing, dog-loving, poem-writing, left-leaning, Netflix-watching Oregonians who came from California.

What one person can speak for all that? We are all mixed bags of histories, ethnicities, experiences, and feelings. I’m going to just write, and if it speaks for “my people,” whoever they are, I’m glad. I suppose if I get famous enough, the critics will decide who “my people” are. And they’ll probably get it wrong.

What do you think? Who are “your people?” Do you worry about representing them in whatever you do?

Don’t Forget Your Hat and White Gloves

mckees,souzas 1960

Times have certainly changed. Check out this photo from 1960. I found it while going through my parents’ old photo albums—black and white shots attached to black pages with sticky fasteners on the corners. It was taken at my Uncle Bob Avina’s wedding reception at St. Lucy’s Church in Campbell, California.

I was eight years old, awed by all the glamour of the gowns and tuxedos that day. Somewhere in that church hall, I sat primly with my parents, wearing a dress, hat, and buckled-on shoes with lacy white socks. My little brother, with his spiky crew cut, black slacks and white shirt, would have been looking for trouble with the younger male cousins. To me, the older people were just . . . old people. My grandmother was one of seven siblings, so there were a lot of aunts and uncles, plus their spouses and their offspring, who also seemed old to me.

Pictured here in the front row are, from left to right, Uncle Ollie and Aunt Nellie (Souza) McKee, Aunt Mamie and Uncle Ted Souza, and Aunt Edna Souza. That’s probably Uncle Tony next to her. In the back row, I can see my mother’s cousin Lorraine and her sister Addie.

I note Uncle Ted’s happy-to-pose expression and Aunt Mamie’s I-do-not-like-having-my-picture-taken face. But I’m especially impressed by the way they’re dressed. When we think of the ’60s, we think of love beads and mini-skirts, but in 1960, the grownups, at least the working class Portuguese American ones I grew up around, dressed up like this. Ladies always wore modest dresses, girdles and nylons, and high-heeled dress shoes. In this case, the shoes all have a little opening for the toes. Those were bloody uncomfortable, I can testify.

White gloves were a necessary accessory, along with the clutch purse. All the women wore hats. We weren’t allowed to walk into a Catholic church without one. Aunt Nellie, the youngest and most stylish of the Souza siblings, went big with her hat, and, if you look closely, on her lap, she’s got a mink stole, which if I remember correctly, had little heads and feet attached. Gross!

In most cases, the curly hair came from a home perm. Anybody remember the Toni home perm?  What a stinky mess. Between perms, I wore curlers to bed every night until I rebelled in my teens. Somehow curly hair was good; straight hair was bad.

I am sure some of the aunts needed glasses but wouldn’t be caught dead wearing them in public. Ah, vanity. Many years later, when I married my first husband at St. Martin’s in San Jose, I handed my glasses to Aunt Nellie at the last minute before the ceremony. I had a heck of a time getting them back from her afterward. She didn’t understand that it was more important to me to see than to look good.

You can’t see it in the photo, but I’m sure the air was rich with the women’s perfume and the men’s aftershave. One didn’t go out unscented in those days. Now everyone, including me, screams “allergies!”

Do you wear perfume or cologne?

Except for the little girl whose barrette you can see in the center of the back row, everyone in that photo has passed away. Aunt Edna on the right made it to 100 years old. Like me, she was a widow for a long time, and she never had children. I wish I had gotten to know all of them better, but back then, they were old people, and I was a child. If only I could assemble the crowd at that wedding and talk to them grownup-to-grownup. I did interview Aunt Nellie and Aunt Edna for my book about Portuguese women, Stories Grandma Never Told, but I know so much more about life now.

If the wedding were taking place today, we’d see women in slacks or maybe in dresses but with no girdles, no stockings, no gloves, no hats, no home perms, and no real fur stoles. The older men would drag out their suits, but the younger ones might not bother. In fact, there might be people of both genders wearing jeans. We’re more inclined to comfort these days, but back in the olden days when we dressed up, we DRESSED UP.

Please share your thoughts and memories in the comments.

 

 

 

 

 

Revisiting Stories Grandma Never Told

Stories Grandma Never Told_justified text.pmdOnce upon a time there was a journalist with long curly hair, big glasses, and a penchant for blazers with padded shoulders who traveled around California interviewing Portuguese women. She carried a steno pad, a micro-cassette recorder, and a heavy Minolta Camera with extra lenses and a detachable flash. She used Tri-X black and white film. The women wondered why she might find them interesting, but they welcomed her into their kitchens, living rooms and shops. The result was a book, Stories Grandma Never Told, published by Heyday Books in 1998.

The day the book came out was the day this young journalist felt like a real author. It was released at the annual Dia de Portugal festival held at the San Jose Historical Museum. As Portuguese music played, young queens in white paraded, and crowds feasted on Azorean pastries and linguica, she sold book after book after book. Women bought them for their mothers, sisters and daughters. People featured in the book came to have their pictures taken with the famous author. Her whole family was there. It was heaven.

That was my third book but the first one that was my idea, my words, my pictures, me on the page. I had gotten the idea while writing The Iberian Americans, an overview of Portuguese, Spanish and Basque immigrants. Very little had been written about Portuguese women. I could see how I was a direct product of my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and beyond. I had never asked for their stories, but now I dove in, starting with everything “Portuguese” listed in the telephone book. It was a long process, and I had a hard time finding a publisher. I was about to give up when Malcolm Margolin at Heyday offered me a contract.

Sue interviewing MarieBalshorThe book came out 21 years ago. Heyday did a great job producing and promoting it, but they decided after eight years and three printings to let it go. I republished it under my own Blue Hydrangea imprint. Decades later, it’s still selling better than my other books. To increase distribution, I am republishing it this month with Ingram, the company that supplies most bookstores. This means that if you request this book at any bookstore, they should be able to order it for you. Amazon.com will not be the only place to get it.

To bring “Grandma” up to date, I have been looking up the women I interviewed. A lot has changed. Many of the older women I interviewed have died. I’m grateful that I was able to capture their stories. Otherwise, they’d be gone. Some of them documented their lives for their children and grandchildren, but others never thought it was important and the kids didn’t ask, just as I didn’t until I started working on my book.

Finding people is a lot easier these days. I didn’t have Google or Facebook back in the 1990s. I collected my interviewees by word of mouth—“you should interview so-and-so”—by showing up at events, and by many hours taking notes by hand in various libraries.

So many of these women became friends. They felt like family. We exchanged letters, Christmas cards, and phone calls. We met every year at the Dia de Portugal, where they’d wear their Azorean costumes with full skirts and white blouses as they peddled food or marched in the parade. It’s hard to lose them. I already knew about many of them, including my Aunt Nellie, Aunt Edna, my mother, and my college mentor Dolores Spurgeon. I mourned the loss of my buddy Marie Gambrel. Now I know that Virginia Silveira, Edith Mattos Walter, Bea Costa, Pauline Correia Stonehill, Doris Machado Van Scoy, Maree Simas Schlenker are also gone.

But I also know that former student Krista Harper is now a college professor, that Katherine Vaz got married and lives in New York, and that former Sacramento news anchor Cristina Mendonsa now broadcasts across the United States. It has been a long time, but many of the younger women are still celebrating their heritage the way they used to.

Books on Portuguese Americans occupy a lot more shelf space than they used to as a younger generation of immigrants go all-out to tell their stories. Portuguese Heritage Publications of California and the University of Massachusetts Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture have both put out numerous books about the Portuguese. But Stories Grandma Never Told was one of the first.

I’m proud of that young curly-headed woman who pushed through her natural shyness to make the phone calls, take the trips, and ask the questions that resulted in Stories Grandma Never Told and of the stubborn older woman I am today who refuses to let those stories disappear.

The new Ingram edition, with a return to my favorite cover, will be out on my birthday, March 9. You can still buy Stories Grandma Never Told in print or as an ebook at Amazon.com, too. That version will soon be updated, too.

God bless my Portuguese ladies.

Rocking the Book Table in Newport

Did you write all this? Which book is your newest? What are you working on now? Behind the book table again at yesterday’s  Celebration of Women in Newport, I felt like the old veteran as I watched people pick up my books, study the covers, and put them back dofbbc5-dscn2584wn—or sometimes even buy them. I have been doing this since Stories Grandma Never Told came out in 1998.

I have sat at book tables all over Oregon and California, including many stints at the annual Dia de Portugal in San Jose, bookstore signings, book fairs in the rain in Lincoln City, and street fairs in Stockton where the only person who bought a book was the fellow author sitting next to me. All too often, sales are sparse, the only purchasers being the other authors.  The truth is, if the event is not specifically about books or about the subject of your books, most of the people attending are not looking to buy books. They’re going to spend their money on food, carnival rides, and souvenirs. The writers are just a roadblock on the way to the fun.

Because I have published three books about Portuguese Americans, my books sold like linguica sandwiches—hundreds—at the Portuguese festival. At the Lincoln County Fair, not so much. Yesterday? Two.

So why go? Exposure. People see you and your book, maybe they’ll take a flyer or postcard, and maybe later they’ll think, hey, I should buy that book by what’s her name. Maybe you get a little free publicity in the newspaper. Plus it’s fun to hang out with other authors, people who understand what you do and can exchange information on how to do it.

Yesterday, I sat between Lee Lynch, author of more than a dozen novels and longtime booktable partner, and Lori Tobias, whose first book, Wander, just came out. Lee and I traded war stories while Lori gathered information and advice and vented about how this was not as much fun as she expected. No, but it could have been worse. We were warm, dry, and the wind wasn’t blowing. At the fair in Medford where the photo above was taken, it was 35 degrees inside and snowing outside. Nobody came.

You learn things over the years. Don’t bring every copy of every book. You only need a few. Have something for people to take: cards, bookmarks, candy, or trinkets related to your topic. Get a cart or a strong person to help you carry the books because they are heavy. Get there early so you don’t get the table least likely to be seen. Bring sunscreen and a hat if it’s outside. Don’t hog your space. Bring dollar bills and coins for change. Keep your book money separate from your personal money. Acknowledge every person who approaches with a greeting and a smile. Resist the urge to read or stare at your cell phone, even if nothing seems to be happening. Wear comfortable clothes; nobody cares what you’re wearing. Etc.

Lori kept saying she’d rather be writing. I was content at the table. It was Sunday afternoon. I had played three Masses at Sacred Heart Saturday night and Sunday morning, so I was too tired to do anything useful anyway. I was among friends.  There was music, wine and chocolate. You learn to ride the writer waves of private time and public time.

Besides, I had new editions of two of my books on their virgin outing. Stories Grandma Never Told, that book about Portuguese women that launched my book table career, has been updated, with a new cover and, for the first time, an e-book version. Azorean Dreams, my Portuguese American romance novel, also has a new look. What’s next? Another novel, a memoir, and perhaps a poetry book. Got to keep adding new merchandise to the table. Also, I’m going to move into the 21st century and start taking credit cards at in-person events for those customers who wind up emptying their purses and pockets to come up with enough nickels and wrinkled dollar bills for a book because they don’t carry cash.

Next time you see somebody sitting at a table with books, walk up and say hello. We’ll be glad for the company and delirious if you buy a book.

Portuguese-American novel lives again

AD new cover 6816 bigSummer 2016 is becoming the summer of revisiting and revising past writing projects. First I did a new edition of Stories Grandma Never Told: Portuguese Women in California. Now I have a new edition of my Portuguese-American novel Azorean Dreams. This is the novel I wrote while I was still trying to sell the Grandma book. One of the women I interviewed, who had published her own book, convinced me that a novel would sell better than nonfiction. I no longer believe that’s true, but since nothing was happening with “Grandma,” I started writing a novel. Some of the people, places and events came directly from my experiences researching Stories Grandma Never Told. Others stem from things that were happening in the late 1990s in San Jose, California. And a lot of it is from my imagination.

My protagonist, Chelsea Faust, is a newspaper reporter working for a local weekly but with ambitions to move up in the business. She’ll do anything to prove herself as a great reporter. Although her mother’s side of the family is Portuguese, with roots in the Azores Islands, she doesn’t know or care much about her heritage. Then an assignment sends her into Little Portugal, and she meets the handsome Simão Freitas, who has not been in the U.S. very long. Romance blooms, but they disagree on many things, plus an incident from Simão’s past threatens to ruin everything.

I never imagined anyone real could have the name Chelsea Faust, but there is a real Chelsea Faust, with whom I connected online. She’s okay with her name being in the book. I have not met a real Simão (sim-OW) Freitas, but there probably are several men with that name because it’s pretty common.

Anyway, my Portuguese-American mother got a chance to read Azorean Dreams before she passed away, and she loved it. For that alone, I’m glad I published it when I did. The first time, I went through a company called iUniverse, that offers “print-on-demand” publishing, meaning when an order comes in, they print a book. There are not boxes of printed books sitting around somewhere. You pay for the service and—here’s the catch with these companies—you pay for copies of your own book. Their designers decide what the book will look like. They also determine the retail price.

To be honest, I never liked the look, the size or the price of the iUniverse version. I have seen the same cover art photo used in advertisements for several products. The background is not even the Azores. I’m pretty sure it’s Italy. The print inside is huge, making the book itself huge. And they charged $20.95 a copy. Who would pay that much for a paperback novel by an unknown writer? Judging by my sales, almost nobody. But I had signed a contract and thought I couldn’t get out of it. I was wrong. As of last month, I am free from iUniverse. They’re not all bad, but it didn’t work for me.

A few years ago, I revised Azorean Dreams a bit and published it as a Kindle e-book. Same stupid cover. But now I have a new cover for both the e-book ($2.99) and the new paperback version. I used Amazon.com’s CreateSpace program, which allowed me to design the whole book myself, so now I love the way it looks. It’s a more reasonable size and price, $14.95. I feel so much better about it, and maybe a few new readers will take a look.

Now I’m immersed in another project that I will tell you about soon. Happy summer, everyone. Get some books and start reading.

 

Portuguese grandma book lives on and on

Stories_Grandma_Neve_Cover_for_KindleStories Grandma Never Told was conceived one day more than 25 years ago when I was hiding out in my parents’ vacation trailer making random notes in the wake of publishing my first book, The Iberian Americans. That book was an overview of the experiences of immigrants from Portugal, Spain and the Basque Country. My roots lead back to all of those places.

What about the Portuguese women, I asked myself. What has been passed down from my great grandmother to my grandmother to my mother to me that makes me who I am? The eyes, the nose, the body, yes, but what else? Who were these women? The few books about Portuguese immigrants that I had found focused on the men, as if the women didn’t come at all. There were stories to be shared.

The result was my next published book, Stories Grandma Never Told: Portuguese Women in California. The title is slightly misleading because the book does not include my grandmother’s stories. I never heard them. Instead, I looked up “Portuguese” in the phone book (pre-Google) and started interviewing women: family, friends, people who were active in the Portuguese community and the people they insisted I speak to. I had never been exposed to much of the Portuguese culture. A few words, a few foods, but not much more. My parents’ generation insisted on being as American as possible. Forget the old country. But I got involved, I learned, and I wrote.

It took almost a decade to get this book published. We had already moved to Oregon when I finally got the letter (pre-email!) from Malcolm Margolin of Heyday Books offering to publish Stories Grandma Never Told. It was released at The Dia de Portugal celebration in San Jose in June 1998. That was one of the best days of my life. My family was there, and the books sold like crazy.

Eighteen years later, the book is still selling, but not in the same way. After nine years doing a fantastic job with my book through three printings, the people at Heyday decided it wasn’t selling enough to be worth doing another printing. But it was still selling, and I wasn’t ready to let it go, so I started my own publishing company, Blue Hydrangea Productions, hooked up with a local printshop, Lazerquick in Newport, and produced my own edition with a gorgeous new cover photo of my grandmother, Anne Avina, on her wedding day.Stories Grandma Never Told_justified text.pmd

That first Blue Hydrangea edition kept selling. I went through three printings, and I’m still getting orders. I’m out of envelopes and almost out of books, but Stories Grandma Never Told lives on. I am releasing a new edition this month through Amazon’s CreateSpace print-on-demand program. You can order it online right now. Again, we have a new cover. This one features my great grandmother, Anna Souza. Why go through Amazon this time? Cost and efficiency. It costs me nothing, saving me a big printing bill and allowing me to charge less for the book. I can also offer it as a Kindle ebook for the first time ever. Plus, since most of my orders come from Amazon, they won’t have to get the books from me, meaning readers can get copies more quickly. I will still get paid and should make more money than before.

Why self-publish? These days, it’s a big question in publishing. It’s so hard to get accepted by traditional publishers, although I have done it several times and expect to do it again. Some self-published books are poorly written and badly edited, but many respected authors are taking control of their own careers by publishing their own books. We have the technology now sitting on our desks. Why depend on someone else?

“Grandma” was originally edited and formatted by the best at Heyday Books. I’m just keeping their work going. Why? Because the readers still want the book, and they don’t care how it came to be. I marvel at this, that I wrote something people want to buy and share with their mothers, daughters and friends. How could I let it die?

Grandma Souza, who died in 1954, would be shocked to find her face on the front of a book. She never learned to read in either Portuguese or English. But here she is, digitized in 2016 and being written about in a “blog.” As she might have said, “Ay, Jesus.”

 

 

This is my kind of tea party

IMG_20150131_150700963[1]An ocean of hot tea, plates of itty-bitty sandwiches, sugar cookies shaped like teapots, and sorbet eaten with doll-sized spoons, plus books–what’s not to like? Saturday I was one of the guest authors at the annual Samaritan House tea in Newport Oregon. The tea raises funds to support our local homeless shelter. The ladies who organize it go all out, and it shows. The tables and walls were decorated with books and antique tea cups. The programs, thick with ribbons and more teacup images, included recipes and bookmarks to use on our next reading adventures. The beautifully crafted treats included cucumber sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, orange lavender polenta cakes, black olive and rainbow chard bars, and little teapot figures created with green grapes and frosting.

IMG_20150131_152111126[1]Held at First Presbyterian Church, the tea sells out early every year. Middle-aged and old ladies and young moms bringing their little girls jam the fellowship hall. They doll up in flouncy dresses and big hats decorated with feathers, flowers, and lace. It’s a scene right out of Great Gatsby–if it was cast with our friends and neighbors. The atmosphere is loud, giddy with too much sugar and caffeine, and generous. In addition to the tickets, the tea-goers bid on a silent auction, buy the books and teacups decorating their tables, and donate cash to the cause.

The theme varies. This year as part of “Tea and Tomes,” six authors were invited to display and sell their books and give brief talks about their work. We shared a table and swapped stories from our publishing adventures. It was fun getting to know each other and showing off our books. Besides me, the authors included: M.C. Arvanitis, author of middle grade and young adult fiction; Patsy Brookshire, author of the novels Threads and Scandal at the Willamina Quilt Show; Deborah Lincoln, author of the historical novel Agnes Canon’s War; Deborah H. Trusty, author of The Kid from Valsetz, a biography of former Newport city manager Don Davis; and Karleene Morrow, who wrote a novel titled Destiny and How to Write a Novel. Morrow passed away recently, but her friends brought her books and told her story.

Many of the people at the tea knew me only as the girl behind the piano at  Sacred Heart Church, which was where I had to go right after the tea, to play for the 5:30 Mass. They were surprised to see how many books I have published. I had five at the table, Childless by Marriage, Shoes Full of Sand, Stories Grandma Never Told, Azorean Dreams, and Freelancing for Newspapers. Info on all of them at http://www.suelick.com/Products.html.

For those who think I’m amazingly talented, I tripped over the microphone cord after my talk. I also dropped one of my little sandwiches face down on the carpet. Nobody’s perfect.

The photo above shows me on the right and my friend Pat Stern in her fancy hat.

Have a cup of tea and read a book. It feels good.

%d bloggers like this: