I have been up to my elbows in alligators keeping up with If Not the Whole Truth as it flies out into the world, and I promise a better blog post soon in the near future, but meanwhile, I thought you'd like to read the article about the book launch, Burning Convictions, that ran in today's Indiana Daily Student. Take a look too at the book-themed images that ran during the event at the end of the article

Bloomington authors celebrate publication of their novels

Claire Arbogast (left) and Shana Ritter (right) answer questions about their novels Sept. 15, 2024, at Backspace Gallery in Bonne Fête. The books feature resilient women in times of pivotal societal change. Photo by Natalia Nelson / The Indiana Daily Student

By Natalia Nelson
Sep 17, 2024

IU alumna Claire Arbogast and former IU staff member Shana Ritter read at a double book release party for their novels, “If Not the Whole Truth” and “In the Time of Leaving,” on Sunday at the Backspace Gallery in Bonne Fete.

Arbogast graduated from IU in 1980 with a degree in journalism despite being a single parent while in school. Before attending university, she had been a line cook.

“My whole life changed because of my journalism degree,” Arbogast said. “I had a work-study job [at IU]... my daughter came to work with me all the time. She roller skated up and down the hallways of Ernie Pyle Hall.”

She later worked in marketing and advertising, but said her degree gave her the “ability to hunt and find the story and to seek out the truth behind things,” which influenced her later writing career.

“It stayed with me all of those years,” she said.

Her new novel, released Sept. 10, is set in the late 1960s and features Connie Borders, a strong-willed woman who leaves her hometown to protest the Vietnam War and is taken on whirlwind adventures as she tries to find her place while pushing for societal change. The book has been eight years in the making and blossomed when she realized today's social unrest mirrored that of the ’60s.

“It was like the ‘60s, in some ways, was the Pandora’s box that opened unvetted information and the obligation that people feel to call out other people,” Arbogast said. “I started researching all of that… this isn’t something that just happened in the ‘60s. It’s something that’s happened over and over and over again.”

She said it was a repeating cycle, stating that today’s protests and those in her novel retained similarities to the movements for women’s suffrage and birth control.

Ritter, whose novel reflected on the plight of a Jewish mother and daughter forced to either leave or convert to Catholicism during Spain’s 1492 Edict of Expulsion, added that the past had to be understood for society to be able to move forward.

“Until you explore as an individual, as a movement, as a nation, until you explore from many angles, not just those written down, what the past is, and how that past has influenced the way we think now,” Ritter said. “We can’t free ourselves from repeating, again and again, the same places where we trip.”  

Arbogast and Ritter knew each other from sharing writing groups over the years, and Arbogast invited Ritter to read at her book release to celebrate Ritter’s new edition of “In the Time of Leaving,” which was originally published in 2019. Arbogast’s next reading of “If Not the Whole Truth” will be at Morgenstern’s Bookstore on Sept. 30. They will both attend the first-ever Writer’s Guild Local Authors Book Fair, along with several other Bloomington writers, at the Monroe County History Center on Nov. 2.

The cheerful slant of spring sunlight is coming through the kitchen window. It plays across the covered mound of bread dough rising in my well-scratched, old Pyrex glass mixing bowl. The rest of the afternoon will be punctuated with kneading, punching down, and patiently waiting for rises. By oiled black cast iron pans. The aroma of baking bread will fill the house as the sun sets.

This sudden bout of bread making follows a week of industry. Painting, mending, cleaning, pruning, and weeding with great determination and gusto.

​Now I’m trying to resuscitate my blog.

You might think it’s corona virus hunkering.

But it’s not. This is my emergence. Not hunkering at all. The tackling of chores put off after months of hunkering to do another rewrite of my new book. This version, 3.5, required eight months of hunkering.
 
Since I started this novel in June of 2015 (a month before Leave the Dogs at Home was published by IU Press, a year before I had surgery and radiation for breast cancer) there have been several manuscript hunkerings.

The first draft was finished in a daze from a concussion after being knocked silly by a distracted driver in a left-turning car bowled me over as I was crossing the street on an October evening in 2016. I thought that draft was magnificent, at least while I was writing it. Later I realized, thanks to some honest readers, that it was anything but. Still, all but one reader thought idea had merit; it was worth the slash and burn of total revision. Worth the hunkering.

I have loved the book. Hated it. I have put it aside. Gave up writing all together for a bit.
 
I have taken travel breaks. To Istanbul and Athens. To Russia, China, and Europe. To Paris twice with my daughter. Paused to help my sister when she had a couple of strokes. Sagged while saying goodbye to my dogs Lila and Diggity, my cat Cirrus.

Put my all of the rest of my life aside to work on it. Gave up all of my other writing to write it. Papered my office with diagrams of the story arc and post-it note character pathways. Lived with winding stacks of books and thick files. Renewed subscriptions to newspaper archives many times.

I’m not complaining. I like myself best when I’m writing. When I’m a crazy woman up until three in the morning, wandering, writing, researching, muttering, rewriting. My head full of the story, the images, the music, the passion. Dreaming about it. Eating it. Breathing it. Writing it.
 
My new book is a story about the time that made this time.

It's story of a determined young woman finding personal truth in the upheaval of the hippie antiwar and counterculture movement. Years later in a 2022 America fraught with extreme social and political tension, her hard-learned stance puts her life on the line.

• Connie Borders sees the changes coming down in 1969 and refuses to let them pass her by. Rejecting her parents’ outdated lifestyle and the narrow path prescribed for her, Connie leaves Indianapolis for California to stop the Vietnam War and reshape the country into the Woodstock Nation. But her course veers when Carlos, an older university student who is a first-generation, Black Puerto Rican American, persuades her that radical Chicago is where it’s at. During a whirlwind of protests and an acid-laced rock concert, electricity runs between Connie and Carlos. But when she witnesses a shooting in the wake of Black Panther Fred Hampton’s murder, she is forced to leave Chicago. From the Midwest to Berkeley and back, Connie goes on a freewheeling search for her place in the fractured movement and life. Relying on inspiration from the writings of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger as a positive female revolutionary role model, she untangles her desire for Carlos and his risky passion for Puerto Rican independence. Connie learns she must trust her instincts to seek out the whole story—which may not be the whole truth—as she navigates the complexities of friendship and family, of unwanted pregnancy and illegal abortion, and of cultural and political divides. Fifty years later, when Connie is a pro-choice activist in Chicago, her convictions come under fire, and she’s put in more danger than ever before.

There were just a few short years when people truly believed they were going to change things for the better. Believed in their music as a social binder. Together they could stop the war, make abortions legal; pull communities out of poverty. bring real equality to our society. There was a real sense of optimism and hope that the country, the world, was on the cusp of a new system of love, trust, and brotherhood. We talked about eco systems, and you are what you eat.
 
But we all know that was a pipe dream. Life went on pretty much as it had before. A few things changed, but the big picture did not. The hippies cut their hair and got mortgages.

And today, we are so far, far away from the ideals of equality and peoplehood, from the Woodstock Nation. So polarized that we can’t even agree to hunker down together. 

It makes me want to hunker down. Except, that's exactly the wrong reaction. I'm going to get out there, and listen, and let my voice be heard where it can be heard, in my own town and neighborhood. It's like Fred Hampton once said, we have to deal "with what reality is, whether we like it or not."

My mind is full.

That’s why I can’t get around to revising my book manuscript.

Every time a little space opens I stuff it with something new.

Scan the minutes of the last Historic Preservation Commission and consider going to meetings. Brush up on my French, or learn Spanish beyond the most rudimentary level. Mend a sheet. Change my mind about saturated fats. Go to Athens and Istanbul. Have a cold and binge watch a Turkish soap opera. Wash and paint the front porch. Read one or three of the gazillion books stacked around the house and the National Geographics and New Yorkers too. Make garden revisions. Write a letter to city council members about granny flats. Get my bike going and take long rides. Go to the movies. Make mayonnaise. Plan next year's trip to Paris.

Write a blog post.

Anything but revise the manuscript.

It sits in a sturdy faux leather ring binder I bought on eBay years ago. All 82,782 words spread over 331 pages that have, according to Word, already been edited  232 hours and 34 minutes (and this is a second draft, so add to that the 122 hours and 33 minutes of the first draft). But I'm whining. That's only some 44 days of full-time work.

I tell myself that when the weather gets really hot then I will be able to sit in my chair in my air conditioned office for the long hours required to get this material up to snuff. Butt In Chair.

But the truth is, I’m in a rocky relationship with this book. Foremost, I love it passionately and that causes all kinds of problems. I never loved Leave the Dogs at Home, so I could brutally beat it up, slice and dice it, no problem. But because I love this book, it scares me. I worry that my beloved is no good. That my affections are ill spent. What if I open it again, and it is terrible?

And, unlike Leave the Dogs, this book, tentatively and poorly named Counter Groove, isn’t finding its own way yet through the world of publishing. Leave the Dogs, even in its worst, most discombobulated state, was loved. It attracted mentors and grants. I had to run to keep up with it. The Dogs had a destiny from the get-go. So far, this work is searching for its path. Still, it took five years of revisions for The Dogs to get there. And I can remember that agony, that madness. Do I want to succumb? Blot out almost everything else and submerge myself? Is there any other way to do it?

Earlier this week, I was thinking about getting a cat. My last two cats have lived about 20 years. If I live 20 years to age 88, I will have outlived generations of women in my family who have all expired between the ages of 83 and 86. Would the poor cat find herself ancient and alone?

Some say I’m healthier and will live longer. My annuity company doesn't think so. Online longevity calculators put me at 95. But they don't know about my long-gone rotten appendix and gall bladder. The nasty DCIS cells dug out and radiated last year.

All this longevity thinking led me to the familiar zone of pondering how I’m spending my ever-dwindling time and my ever degenerating memory. Twenty years is 7,305 days. What's 44 days? Less than 1%.

The thick binder of pages must be opened. The pencil must get busy. The revision must begin. the papers must be stuck on the wall. The madness must be welcomed. I cannot abandon my beloved because I’m afraid it won’t get a lift under its wings. I have to open the windows and doors, let the wind in.