From Kate’s
Writing Crate…
As
a reader, I always love finding books that appeal to me. As a writer, I am
twice as pleased when the authors also provide masterclasses within their
books.
Masterclasses
take place when performance artists and musicians work one-on-one with
students. Writers don’t generally have this option, but I have found some books
to be masterclasses for characters, backstories, plots, settings, voice and/or
creativity.
The April masterclass post seemed
perfect for a review of Rain: A Natural
and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett. This book caught my eye for two
reasons: I love rain and the cover is beautifully clever. On a white
background, tiny silver raindrops fall from top to bottom except for the two
inch wide by six inch long space in the center under a black umbrella where the
title and author’s name appear.
I expected to learn many facts and
figures about rain and I did in this fun read. Fun? Yes, especially for writers
as you will see.
Here are some of the facts:
Amid the worst drought in California history, the enormous concrete
storm gutters of Los Angeles still shunt an estimated 520,000 acre-feet of
rainfall to the Pacific Ocean each year—enough to supply water to half a
million families. (page 11)
Rain is sex for the
exquisite orchid Acampe rigida…When
raindrops splash inside, they flip off the tiny cap that protects the
pollen…[then] they bounce the pollen precisely into the cavity where it must
land to consummate fertilization. (page 16)
In medieval Europe, the 1300s marked the beginning of a
five-century climate shift known as the Little Ice Age…The second decade of the
1300s was the rainiest in a thousand years. (page 39)
In his 1615 memoir of the native people of Mexico, the
historian Fray Juan de Torquemada described an ingenious local skill, one his men
wished they could take home to Spain. The natives knew how to make rainproof
garments. (page 96)
The history of the waterproof mackintosh [coat] in Europe (patented
in 1822) begins on page 98.
Along the Mississippi, in the third-largest river basin in
the world, the same federal government that doled out 160-acre homestead plots
to small farmers in a land too dry for corn built levees promised to withstand
floodwaters in a land too wet for cities or cotton. (page 144)
In the early twentieth century, Eugene Willis Gudger, an
ichthyologist with the American Museum of Natural History and editor of the
museum’s Bibliography of Fishes,
reported he had authenticated seventy-one accounts of fish rain, spanning A.D.
300 through the 1920s. (page 249)
Villages Cherrapunji and Mawsynram in India vie for the
world’s rainiest place receiving close to 470 inches a year…the rainiest metro
area in the US is Mobile, Alabama [which] pulls in 65 inches annually. (page
278)
What I did not expect was for so many
writers and authors to be referenced and quoted including in order of
appearance: Ray Bradbury, Keats, Isaac Asimov, John Burroughs, William Carlos
Williams, Victor Hugo, Charles Darwin, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, Aristotle,
Evangelista Torricelli, Douglas Adams, Jonathan Swift, William Faulkner, Kurt
Vonnegut, Helen Keller, Thomas Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Alexander
Frater among many more. Rain, mighty storms, and their consequences make for
good copy.
An author even changed people’s customs on rainy days:
The disdain of the Europeans for umbrellas is noted on page
103.
“Surely that weather watcher Daniel Defoe and his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe also helped
popularize—and defeminize—the umbrella.” (page 105)
Although, the history of the umbrella goes back 3,000 years
notes the art writer Julia Meech. (page 106)
In fact, Chapter Nine is entitled “Writers on the Storm”
which discusses how rain plays a major part in the lives and works of Steven
Patrick Morrissey, Charles Dickens, George Sand, Isak Dinesen, Emily Dickinson,
Dante, Thomas Hardy, Longfellow, Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston,
James Joyce, Woody Allen, Mark Twain, and others.
In 1816, Mary Shelley might not have written her classic tale
if not for the Little Ice Age.
…The eruption of Mount Tambora the year before dimmed the sun…It
was the coldest summer ever recorded in Europe. Shelley and her poet companions
[husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron] had to stay holed up in their villa,
huddled over a constantly burning fire. Lord Byron suggested they each write a
ghost story. Frankenstein was hers. (page
200)
Many writers find rainy days good writing days.
The Seattle-based writer Timothy Egan…did his own informal study
of book authors to figure out if they accomplished their best work in the murk of
the dark months. (page 203)
…Seattle transplant Jennie Shortridge said she took seven
years to finish her first novel in Denver, with three hundred days of annual
sunshine. “When I moved to the Northwest, I wrote the next novel in fifteen
months, and subsequent books every two years,” she told Egan “The dark and
chill keeps me at my desk.” (page 203)
One writer decided rain was essential to his work.
In the late nineteenth century, a western poet named Joaquin
Miller, living in the mountains overlooking Oakland, California, loved rain so
much that he created his own personal rain machine to make water roar down on
his roof. Anytime he needed some writing inspiration, he could twist a spigot
inside his house to summon a shower outside. (page 275)
I wish I had a personal rain machine
as well since rainy days inspire me to write. After I read this book, rainy days now also
inspire awe.
