Mary Briggs: A Common Life

Ames Library Author Fair March 25, 2023 Saturday, I attended my first Author Fair after publishing A Common Life . It was a fun event with presentations on writing/publishing for authors and the general public and shmooze-time to talk about and sell/sign books. There were a couple dozen or so authors attending and we were an eclectic group! There was a teen author who had written his first book at 14-15 years old and was working on his second, a number of children's book authors, some seasoned authors with several books to their credit, and some like me with their first book at their first fair. I spoke with a number of people about my book and with other authors about theirs. It was a good day! I also attended one of the sessions on “Make Sense of Writing” presented by Michaeljulius Idani, a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Postgraduate Visiting Writer in Fiction and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa. It was an interesting presentation and I enjoyed the ...

To Write, or Not to Write One of the stories that came up while researching and writing A Common Life started with a single line in a diary entry from July 7, 1918: Three of the negro soldiers at C Dodge were found guilty and hung Friday morning. Oh these are terrible times. My initial reaction to reading the entry was, "Whaaaa?!?!?" There were no entries foreshadowing it and she never mentioned the event again. I researched enough to know what happened and why the 3 men were executed. But from the very first newspaper article I read about the hanging, I thought the details just didn't add up. I wrote about some of that for the book (World War I chapter) but I didn't dig more deeply into it because it was peripheral to the diary itself. For A Common Life , I couldn't justify the time to dig into the story behind the headlines and articles I read or I'd have never gotten the book published in 2022. But the story hasn't let me alone. I still find my self th...

Author Fair & Book Signing Event Saturday, March 25, 2023 at Ames Public Library (Ames, IA) The Ames Public Library is hosting a day of events to celebrate published and hope-to-publish authors. I will be there with copies of my book for sale 2:15pm - 4:15pm. Bring your own or buy a copy the 25th and I'll be happy to sign it for you. 1-2pm Presentation : “Make Sense of Writing” by Michaeljulius Idani, a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Postgraduate Visiting Writer in Fiction and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa. It will be located on the second floor in the Rotary Room. Open to  authors and the general public.   2:15-4:15pm Book sale and signing in the Auditorium : Each author will provide copies of their books to sell and facilitate sale of said books (cash, check, card, etc.). The Library will not be able to make change or facilitate the sale of books.      4:30-5:30pm Presentation: “After t...

 Culture Buzz Interview 25Jan23 My interview with John Busbee of KFMG's (98.9 FM in the Des Moines, IA area) "Culture Buzz" radio program airs today at 12:26pm. If you aren't near a radio or are out of the broadcast area, you can live stream it. After airing, the interview recording is available in the Culture Buzz archives . Below, is the blurb about the interview from his e-newsletter.

A Common Life Book Bits Some developments and news as A Common Life makes its way out into the world. Author Radio Interview January 25, 2023 In early November, I recorded an interview with John Busbee for his Culture Buzz program on KFMG (98.9 FM in the Des Moines IA area). I just found out it's scheduled to air on the January 25 show. The show airs 11am - 1pm. My 15 minutes of fame will be sometime within that range. Physical Places to Find the Book Beaverdale Books (Des Moines, IA) has A Common Life on its "Iowa Authors" shelf. Plans are in the works for an author's event at the store sometime this summer. Details to come... The Grimes Public Library and the Ames Public Library have purchased copies for their collections. Several other local libraries are considering purchase. Online Reviews As of this posting, Amazon shows one rating (5 Stars, 😊 ) and no reviews. Yet. Goodreads shows one person reading it; no reviews or ratings yet. If you have read the book, ...

The World Outside Mary's Farm This is very close to the title of one of the chapters in the book but the theme actually runs throughout the book in other chapters. One of the things that intrigued me in researching was the backdrop of what else was going on while Mary wrote about the harvest or visiting family or planting her garden. Long before I started writing the book, when I was still doing general research and trying to get the diary entries in their proper place, I explored events happening on the national or global stage. For much of the diary time period, I could find "year in review" articles in newspapers where they would recap their major stories of the year. A lot of these tended to be where one group was warring with another group, political leaders who died or were elected or deposed, celebrities who did something notable, etc. But they also included scientific discoveries, breakthroughs in medicine, records broken, or big news in human interest topics. I ...

Digging into the Past: Researching the Diary When I first started researching the diary entries, I had this idea to see how much information I could find without leaving my house or paying anything. With the internet, there is an amazing amount of info available but it didn't take me long to give up on my initial plan! So, how did I find the information I put into the book? Talking with Family I'm descended from Mary on my father's side. At the time I started researching (sometime in 2017), Dad was still alive. He was born in 1929, after Mary died in 1922, so he never knew her but he did know some of her children and their children and he attended many Mosher and Briggs family reunions. Sometimes I would be visiting him and we'd start talking about what I was digging into for the book. He would think back about something he remembered. Then he would call his first cousin, Eldon Stall, and the two of them would reminisce and compare memories on speaker phone while I took...