Progress and interesting views in the discovery process on Emmett Wilson’s life.
For three weeks, I’ve been working through a set of microfilm generously on loan to me from the University of West Florida, specifically, the Pensacola Evening News for 1912. I just finished the last reel this afternoon, and my library will send the film back to UWF tomorrow. This set […]
I haven’t posted all that often this month; just a lot going on in and around the writing cave. I’ve been writing a lot on the book. It feels like I’m making progress, but it is really going S-L-O-W-L-Y. The writing process that has always worked for me is to […]
Have you seen this? The letter is from Kurt Vonnegut to a class of high school students in 2006. The student’s assignment was to write to different authors, comment on the author’s writing, and then ask for advice about the writing life. Several authors were queried. Only one — […]
Just curious. What would you classify The Magic School Bus series? Fact? Fiction? Creative non-fiction? If you haven’t seen The Magic School Bus yet, it is a great series of books (and show on PBS) that teaches science to children in way that is completely accessible. My kids love this […]
The central issue that I still struggle with — two years into this research — is this: Can I write a credible biography with only secondary sources? This bothers me, because, well, you know. I want to do the best job I can with Emmett’s story. It isn’t impossible to […]
It is a kind of poetic justice that I would find a trove of information for Emmett’s book in a town bearing his name. I surely did not see that one coming. Emmitsburg, Maryland, is a small college town 10 miles south of Gettysburg, near the state line. What brought […]
A few weeks ago, I found out that Emmett decided to pull up stakes and relocate from Marianna, Florida to Sterling, Illinois in January, 1906. This just seemed odd to me: Why would someone up and leave his home, family, business and professional contacts, and budding political network to relocate […]
So, what do Emmett Wilson, Richard Nixon, and a bronze terrapin named Testudo all have in common? You can find all of three (in some format or the other!) at the National Archives II, located at the University of Maryland, College Park! I spent the afternoon on campus, and met […]
Yesterday, I ventured inside The Oracle, also known as the National Archives, located at 701 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. Oracle? Hell yeah. It was one of the best days of my life in the world of Emmett Wilson research. In the 25 years that I’ve lived in the DC area (15 […]
It has taken about a month to go through every single file I’ve downloaded from microfilm, online newspapers, and other sources to confirm that I have (or have not) the actual image that matches my notes/transcriptions. It’s not a bad thing to do. It was just tedious, and took away […]
Tell my story. 