Last week a small package awaited me at the post office. It contained a book called The Prairie Remembers, Jan Brozik Cerney’s story about her grandparents who immigrated to South Dakota from Bohemia in 1902. Holding that book in my hands was exciting.
When I first met Jan about two years ago at a workshop I taught at the Black Hills Retreat Center, she knew she wanted to write about her grandparents for her immediate and extended family. It was going to be a simple project, she said, a short one that wouldn’t take too much time to accomplish.
A few months later she asked if I’d read the 30 something page story she’d written. It was all she could come up with, she explained. Her grandfather had died before she was born and her grandmother, when Jan was a teenager. Because her grandmother spoke Bohemian and Jan was not fluent in the language, she possessed more curiosity about their lives than solid information.
When I read the manuscript, I sensed a deeper story about these ancestors asked to be told through her grandmother’s eyes. I wanted to know more, so I suggested a few ways she might consider expanding the story. She said she’d think about it.
She did more than think. She began interviewing relatives and reading historical archives. She studied the art of plucking geese, digging wells and building sod houses. She chased down old family photographs and slowly she became a time traveler intimate with, not only pioneer life, but the minds and hearts of her forebears, as well.
The next batch of manuscript she sent expanded the original material. This time the form concerned her. As she told the story, imagined conversations emerged and fears and longings. Clearly this was no historical exercise. Was it fiction based in fact or fact that had been fictionalized? Even though she wrote motivations and conversations she could only imagine her grandmother having, Jan was coming closer to a deeper truth about the meaning of Marie Brozik’s life with each page. I advised her not to worry – to just keep writing.
When she wasn’t writing she researched the Dawes Act, Indian/pioneer relations in the Dakotas, old plows and the histories of the small settlements her grandparents had passed through on their way to their homestead. She drew on her own love of the land to capture its central role in her grandparents’ lives. Clearly this was more than a simple story and clearly, she needed to share it with a broader community than her family.
This spring, right around calving time, the book had taken its final form. It was time to stop eating, sleeping, breathing, living and writing it – time to move forward. She was sending it to the printer, she emailed me.
As I held The Prairie Remembers in my hands last week, I knew how a Lamaze coach must feel. I’d encouraged and goaded, asking the kinds of questions no writer wants to hear, but Jan alone was the one who had birthed this book. I was awed by her tenacity and her courage to trust the story to take the shape it needed.
To witness the small glimmer of an idea grow into a luminous book is to be reminded what writing is really about.
The Prairie Remembers by Janice Brozick Cerney is available for $12.95 plus $2.00 shipping and handling by writing to her at HCR01, Philip, SD 57567.
The grass that covers the prairies swells and ripples in the seemingly incessant wind, but it remains rooted. Those roots are what keep the soil from being carried to the western slope of the Rockies hundreds of miles away. Our human roots serve a similar purpose. Not only do they keep us grounded and nourished, they weave a protective net that preserves the meaning of our history.
Write a story that was passed down to you through the generations about an ancestor you never met. Spend an hour or two on the Internet or at the library researching the time in which the events occurred and the place where they occurred. Look at pictures of the area and of what people wore. (The People’s Chronology by James Trager; Holt Rinehart, Winston; 1979; is an excellent place to research popular history from 3 million B.C. forward). Sit with your story for a week or so, imagining what your ancestor thought and felt. Picture the scene in your mind as if you were watching a movie. Now write the story again filled with your new understanding of what it meant.