The Feedsack Dress

Celebrating the fall with a pie supper

When I attended a one-room rural school in the 1940s and 1950s, our big fall event was a pie supper.

The name was misleading, a holdover from the days when girls and young women baked pies and brought them to sell—anonymously—at an auction. Boys and young men bid on the pie baked by the apple of their eye. Before that, I’ve heard, young women brought full meals—a picnic supper—for the auction. That reflected the old saying of the way to a man’s heart being through his stomach—and the lack of opportunity for courting.

Each of the girls in my school, including the first graders, brought a box of candy purchased in town. Girls outnumbered boys, so often our fathers or grandparents ended up buying the boxes and we simply took them home. 

The real excitement for the kids came from the program we prepared for the jammed schoolhouse. We rehearsed for it for a long time, probably a couple of weeks. The day of the pie supper we pushed the teacher’s desk to one side, put curtains onto wires strung across the front of the school, and created a stage. We recited poems, sang songs (solos, duets, the whole school), played piano and violin uke solos, performed a short play, and played a song or two as a rhythm band. The musicians —every kid in school—played percussion instruments, including a drum, a triangle, several sets of sticks, and sandpaper blocks. We made the latter, covering small blocks of wood with sandpaper and playing them by brushing them together in an up-and-down motion. The teacher played the piano, or sometimes we provided the melody with kazoos or a black plastic one-octave flute called a Tonette. The violin uke fell apart long ago, but I still have my Tonette. 

The pie supper served as a fundraiser, so in addition to auctioning off the boxes of candy, we always had a cakewalk. The mothers and other women in the community baked the cakes (from scratch, of course) for this event. We wrote numbers on pieces of paper and taped them in a circle on the “stage.” Anyone who wanted to take part paid a fee (a dime?) and stepped onto a number. The teacher or a student played the piano as the people stepped from number to number. When the music stopped, someone drew a number from a hat. The person standing on that number won a cake. 

The whole community came to the pie suppers. The kids were the stars, or thought they were, but everyone had a great time.

—Carolyn Mulford

Polishing your prose

Writing is a multistage process.

First, think about what you want to write and who your readers will be.

Second, prepare to write. For both fiction and nonfiction, that usually means doing some research. For me, it also means organizing my thoughts, usually in an informal outline. The method I use depends on what I’m writing. For short articles (400 to 600 words), writing a headline may be all I need. Book-length nonfiction (such as my biography of Elizabeth Dole) requires a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline. A novel requires different elements (including character sketches and descriptions of settings) and a much sketchier outline that undergoes far more changes than that for a nonfiction book.

Third, type words on a screen. I start at the beginning and proceed to the end. In most cases, whether I’m writing an article or a novel, deciding where to begin takes more thought than anything else.

Fourth, revise. In general, the less time and thought that goes into planning and preparation and the faster you write, the more time and thought you’ll need for revision. A basic rule: Find the big problems and correct them first. While you’re doing that, you solve a lot of the small problems. You’re last effort goes to polishing your work—finding stronger verbs, more precise nouns, more effective modifiers, more evocative details, more rhythmic sentence structure. During this process you cut out unnecessary words. I go back and forth between screen and paper in this process.

Finding problems in your own writing is difficult. I’ll explain a visual assessment system that gives writers an objective way to polish their own prose at

 

The Write Direction 2008

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Stephens College

Columbia, Missouri

 

The Columbia Chapter of the Missouri Writers Guild and the Stephens College English/Creative Writing Department present this annual conference. For more information, go to http://columbiawrites.coin.org.

Every writer works a little differently, but almost all follow these four steps.

—Carolyn Mulford

Talking to Friends of the Library

Like most writers, I’ve loved losing myself in books since a few months after I learned to read. To me, libraries are magical places, filled with limitless possibilities.

It gives me special pleasure, then, to speak to book lovers in my hometown, Kirksville, Missouri, about writing The Feedsack Dress.

 

The details:

Friends of the Adair County Public Library

6 p.m., Thursday, October 16, 2008

First United Methodist Church, 300 East Washington Street

 

To find the meeting room, follow the aroma of homemade pies.

 

 —Carolyn Mulford

Taking piano lessons

Today kids rush from one activity to the other—after-school programs, team sports, music and dance classes, tutoring, video games with friends, volunteering, etc.

In the late 1940s country kids walked home from school to do chores—gather eggs, drive the milk cows from the pasture to the barn, carry in wood or coal for the stove, etc. Our most common special activities were 4-H projects (see my post of May 31, 2008) and piano lessons.

The prosperity that followed World War II allowed my family, along with many others, to buy a secondhand upright piano that held a place of honor in the living room for many years. My older sister and I started taking lessons at the home of a local college student majoring in music. We practiced playing from simple books and performed for her once a week as her metronome relentlessly beat out the proper rhythm. I think my parents paid $1 for a thirty-minute lesson, a sum that forced us to take the investment seriously. 

At first I hated losing play time to practice, but later playing the piano became a way for me to get away from anything unpleasant and to think without being interrrupted. By the third year that I took lessons, I was practicing an hour a day. I particularly like the fortissimo pieces.

My mother told me to practice only when she and my father were at the barn milking the cows.

That struck me as reasonable. After all, I was playing the same scales and pieces over and over. I also knew that I played for my own enjoyment, not for others’ pleasure. That’s still true.

My five years of lessons didn’t turn me into a musician, but those years instilled in me a love of music. Every child should be so fortunate.

 —Carolyn Mulford