and the new exhibit opens!

The introductory panel

The first large panel and one of the timelines.
I designed and created all of the graphics myself this time.

No one had kept a yard sign stowed away for seventeen years
(the election was in 1995), so I created one.

Another large vinyl panel with wood in the background.
The water tower photo is one I took.

The first display case. I had very few artifacts to work with.
These are documents used during the cityhood campaign.

The large panel is an artifact.
The smaller text panels are quotations from the interviews I did
with the people who were involved in the cityhood campaign.

The second exhibit case, which is a bit more interesting,
with a couple of T-shirts and campaign buttons,
and the insert about the celebration that was
in the local paper,and a copy of the voter's pamphlet.


The third vinyl panel, and one of the six timelines.
The timelines were designed with Lakewood symbolism
in mind -- water and bark and acorns -- and the
city colors as a stripe down the middle.

The only photos I had to work with
were of the cityhood celebration, and so
were heavily weighted towards the end of the exhibit.

The exhibit was controversial enough that I had a very
difficult time finding people who were both anti-incorporation
and willing to be interviewed (one fellow even hung up
on me). So presenting an unbiased viewpoint was almost
impossible. This was our compromise, which hangs above a
corkboard with a supply of pushpins and index cards.
You can see the bark I used as a background for some
of the text panels more clearly here, too.

I wish I could show you more of what the exhibit was actually about, but the size of the photos makes that very difficult.

I have to say that this was my very first attempt at designing graphics from scratch (the museum used a graphic designer for the first exhibit), and I'm pretty proud of them. I used InDesign, mostly, but the introductory panel was adapted from the one for the first exhibit, for continuity's sake, and used Illustrator because that's what my predecessor had used. The rest of it's all me, though [g].

And now I am welcoming Meg Mims to my blog, in return for her gracious hosting of me.  She has written a terrific little essay on the importance of research in historical fiction.  I found it a hoot, but then I was a librarian for sixteen years...

Getting the Research Details Right


How easy is it to research? If you’re a diehard librarian or bookworm, it’s easy. Trawl the shelves, pore over bibliographies for even more sources—especially original sources such as diaries, letters, or books written in the past century. As a last resort, do a Google search for any details you may have missed.

What if the idea of research is a four-letter word to you? What if you hate all that extra hard work? What if you think your readers won’t know the difference?

Think again.

Readers nowadays (and in the past, for that matter) are savvy. They’ve watched PBS series such as Sherlock Holmes, Downton Abby and Upstairs, Downstairs, Ken Burns’ Civil War series and other documentaries, plus they’ve read an extensive amount. They also have an uncanny ability to “sense” when something’s ‘hinky’ – and that will throw them out of the story in two seconds flat. Sorry about the cliché, but it’s true. And the truth sometimes hurts.

It hurts authors in reviews, for one thing. Call me crazy, but I would rather have a reader or review criticize me on wanting more romance than mystery than some minor detail like “they didn’t have modern plumbing on trains back in 1869.” And no, they didn’t. Trust me on that—I researched that before I started writing my western-set historical. Travelers lifted the commode lid and saw the train tracks flashing beneath, so no wonder railroad tracks were so unhygienic after a few decades! Ugh.

Me? I love research. Give me a stack of books or photo-studded websites and I’m there with bells on! I can’t explain that wonderful “Aha!” feeling when I stumble over a really fabulous and authentic detail I can utilize in my books. Call me crazy. Call me an old-fashioned library hound. But I can usually make a call on spotting a research detail problem in a book—from a modern phrase to an inaccurate setting or the wrong costume for a character. Why? Because I’ve made those mistakes too. And learned from it.

And learned from them. That’s the key, to know better and take the time to do the hard work rather than take the easy way out. The devil is in the details, after all.

Ms. Mims's new books are

and

They are available for purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Astraea Press. 
Her website is http://www.megmims.com/.

Thank you for visiting, my fellow Meg!

another stop on the blog tour

Just a note to say that I am visiting another blog today -- the inimitable Meg Mims has asked me some interesting questions, and I have endeavored to answer them:

http://www.megmims.com/blog/author-spotlight/wednesday-spotlight-meg-justus

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed working with her.

it occurred to me today

That a curator update might be called for, since I haven't written one in a while.

Some of the more unusual items I have cataloged recently in my textile cataloging gig:

1)  A B-17 bomber pilot outfit, consisting of what made me think of nothing so much as a pair of ski bibs and jacket.  Except, of course, for being made of leather lined with sheepskin and weighing what seemed like 500 pounds.

2) A pennant from the U.S.S. Arizona, dated 1924, commemorating a cruise to the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal.

3) An assortment of souvenir hankies from the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle in 1909.

4) And today, a 1940 leather football helmet from the local high school, and the jersey that went with it -- both obviously well-worn and used.  The blue paint? dye? was peeling and cracking on the helmet, and the jersey was, among other things, missing a chunk at the back hem I estimate at about 5x7 inches.  Or a good handful [g]. 

I love this job.

Oh, and my other gig, the Lakewood Cityhood exhibit, will be opening in two weeks.  I have been creating graphics all week (well, taking the templates I created earlier and filling in the photos and text), and I'm just about ready to go to the printer tomorrow.  Hallelujah.

If you happen to be in Pierce County, Washington, on on Saturday, February 25th (or thereafter, until next February), come take a gander!  It's at the Lakewood History Museum.

Montana museums

On my next stop on my blog tour, Velda Brotherton has hosted my article about visiting museums and archives in Montana and in Yellowstone while researching Repeating History.

I have to say that museums are one of the best idea founts on the planet.  I hope you enjoy the article.

my first blog interview!

Over the weekend, I was interviewed by L. Lee Scott, a fellow author I met through Women Writing the West, an organization I belong to.   It was a fascinating experience, and she asked me a number of good questions that really made me think about Repeating History and about the writing process. 

If you would like to read it, the interview is here.  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed being interviewed.

The Mt. Rainier shooting, national parks, and sacred space

Yesterday, on New Years Day 2012, Park Ranger Margaret Anderson was shot and killed in Mt. Rainier National Park during a routine traffic stop, by a man headed to the wilderness to hide after having shot four people in Seattle at a New Years Eve party the night before. Which makes one wonder why, if he was trying to hide, he chose one of the few parts of the thousands of square miles of wilderness in this part of the world that is as well patrolled and protected as Mt. Rainier is to hide in, but that's another question altogether.

For me, as I suspect it is for many other people, the question right now is, how safe should we feel in a national park?

It's not that we don't expect danger in national parks. Heck, I know of at least two books on the subject -- Death in Yellowstone, and Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite. We expect natural danger, like wildlife and cliffs and boiling springs. But we do not expect to need to be wary of our fellow man there, especially since this is the first time something like this has happened at Mt. Rainier in its entire history.

I find myself in the odd position of suddenly understanding why people resent the knowledge that the public library is not a safe place to leave one's children alone for an hour or two. As a reference librarian for sixteen years, I was often confronted with parents who refused to believe that the public library is not the safest place to let their children roam unescorted. It isn't, unfortunately. Anyone can enter the library, from flashers to kidnappers. Things can and do happen there, admittedly not often, that should not from any rational point of view, no matter what the library staff does to try to keep them from happening.

But libraries are sacred. Therefore they must be safe. I often watched people struggle to figure out a way to make that argument even as they sadly realized they could not.

And that's how I feel about national parks. Yes, I expect to have to be careful when I visit them, to not overestimate my abilities, to watch my step, to stay a safe distance from grizzly bears and geysers and the edges of cliffs. To carry an emergency kit. To not drive in weather conditions my car and I cannot handle.

But I do not expect to need to protect myself from deranged gunmen at Mt. Rainier or, for that matter, in any other national park. 

Perhaps that makes me naïve. Perhaps that makes me like those parents who want to feel safe dropping their children off at the library for an hour or two while the parent goes shopping or to a dentist's appointment.  But while I don't think this is going to change my habit of visiting Mt. Rainier or other national parks on my own, or of taking short solo hikes as I've been doing for decades, I do think it will make me even more careful when I do so, and maybe that's a good thing.

National parks are sacred. Only the kind of people who appreciate our natural wonders, who want to see them and share them with others, who want to learn about nature and science and history, to explore and climb and wander, visit our national parks. Right?

Yesterday, a great many of us learned that this is not the case. And now, like it or not, I understand why those parents resented me disillusioning them about libraries. Because I feel exactly the same way.

ETA:  The body of the shooter was found today (1.2.12) in deep snow not far from the site of the shooting.  He was wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and one shoe.  He apparently died from exposure.