Category Archives: writing & Such

More Mysterious Quakers & More Quaker Mysteries

CEF: Besides all this mystery writing, you’re clerk of Amesbury Friends Meeting, which is historic as heck, poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s home. Tell us about your Quaker pilgrimage. I’m particularly interested in hearing about Friends — present and past — who may have been particularly meaningful for you.

EM: Yes, I am clerk. I love our historic meetinghouse, which John Greenleaf Whittier helped design – he was on the building committee. I’ve been a member for twenty-six years, and until three years ago I drove from neighboring towns to Amesbury. Now I walk to Meeting on Sunday mornings, musing every single time about other Friends walking to the same Meetinghouse over the centuries. I first went to Meeting for worship in Bloomington, Indiana, and realized I’d found my spiritual home. Now Amesbury Friends are my second family.
CEF: I see that poet Whittier at least makes a cameo in your upcoming mystery, “Delivering The Truth” about Rose Carroll, a Quaker midwife in Amesbury in 1888. (Can’t wait to read that one!) Will he be back in future Rose Carroll stories?

EM: Whittier is indeed a friend and mentor to Rose, and he’s in every book.

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A Continuing Quaker Thumbprint on Japanese (& World) History

She had done teaching and library work when, in 1946, she was selected to be an American tutor to crown prince Akihito of the Japanese imperial family; one of the stated requirements for the position was that the tutor be “a Christian, but not a fanatic.” When Vining quotes this description later, one can see the sly grin; she spent nearly four years in this assignment. . . . Why her? A scholar says: “the religious denomination of the new tutor was, in fact, one of the major factors that led to the imperial household’s decision to hire Vining. According to Maeda Yōichi, son of Maeda Tamon and the crown prince’s French tutor, a Quaker woman was considered most ideal because Quakers are pacifistic but not self-righteous or preachy.” (Well, maybe not ALL of them.)

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Looking Back at a Unique Woman Author — “Go Set a Watchman”: My Review

Surrounded by her former peers, the painfully uncomfortable Jean Louise is peppered with questions about her life in New York City, which to many of them might as well be on Mars: how can she stand it? All those people, including “Negroes,” on the loose. The noise, the constant hubbub, the rudeness and ugly accents. Not to mention the fact that she’s (still, at 26!) single there, and working.

Jean Louise speaks up tepidly for her urban existence, but thinks to herself more candidly about its pluses and minuses.

In truth, she often resents the patronizing attitudes of many New Yorkers toward other, benighted regions, especially the South. She bridles at how so many of them, with the smug assurance of big-city liberals that hasn’t changed much since Lee wrote in the 1950s, feel they know all the answers for problems there, even if their nostrums are no more than bien-pensant slogans, based on little or no knowledge or experience.

Yet she puts up with this annoyance because New York offers her a compensation she has to have, and can’t hope to find in her hometown: anonymity, and the space created by the indifference of the mass, in which to continue seeking her identity and destiny.
If that sounds pompous, the clumsiness of expression is mine, not Lee’s; but that’s what it was. Later, after the shattering confrontations with Atticus and ex-beau Henry, there seems no way forward for Jean Louise but to climb on the train and head back up north, alone. This reader was relieved that she had somewhere to go for refuge, someplace where she could at least breathe, and be herself, even as a stranger in a sea of strangers.

In Manhattan she could bask in being ignored, free of family and community expectations, no longer carry the stigma as the renegade runaway daughter who abandoned a “good family,” and get on with the long work of becoming a writer.

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