Susan Klopfer

There's a Book

in You

Contents

Part I Discovering the Books in Me

Part II Finding the Books in You

Thanks for stopping by. In addition to this ebook, I've been collecting more materials to help you on your journey. So when you have some time, take a look at More About Self Publishing where I've posted lots of new tips and articles and SusanKlopfer.com where you can see examples of the books I've written.

You are also invited to visit the Author's Bookstore to learn about some of the best resources for self-publishers.  

Now, let's get started . . . 

Part I Discovering the

Books in Me

Introduction

Thank You for requesting this e-book. I hope that you get as much out of reading it as I have in writing it for you. I'd like to begin by telling you how I discovered the books in me. (And then we'll move on to the most important part, discovering your book and how to make it happen.)

First, I must admit that I really don't love to write. It's hard for me to write even though I've been doing it for a long time. The truth is that my mother, who is a talented writer, made me take up this craft one year when I was home for college and in need of a job.

She took me by the hand down to the local newspaper office (where they loved her) and explained that I needed work. At first, I was given the old fashioned task of "paste up" but that didn't last very long because my hands shook and got sweaty.

Elizabeth Orr, my mom

So the editor decided to show me some methods of approaching news writing. It worked. I liked my new job and stayed for six whole months!

After returning to college, I took several journalism classes, got married, and started finding jobs on small town newspapers as we moved from Texas to Oregon, Indiana, Missouri, Nevada and Mississippi.

While in Indiana, I had the opportunity to work as an editor for Prentice Hall's computer books division where I wrote and edited books, including a fun book on a popular computer operating system, DOS, that became a Book of the Month alternate selection.

Years later, in Branson, Missouri I had a great job as the city reporter where I met and interviewed all sorts of creative people like Mel Tillis, Andy Williams, Charley Pride, and Tony Orlando.

While there, I became fascinated with Branson's growth and development, so much that I researched and wrote a small, self-published book on How Branson Got Started.

 * * * * *

Writing is not an impossible task. Some people, like my mom, are natural writers. And they write beautiful fiction and nonfiction articles and books with seemingly little effort. The rest of us have to work harder.

Over the years, I've found that writing simply requires that you are interested in SOMETHING and then take the time to learn more about your interest and stay focused. (At times, it has helped me to be desperate!)

The writing part takes practice. If you can tell a good story, then nothing should stop you from writing it down (in a notebook or typing it on a computer screen).

There are some good journalism books that can help you through the learning curve. Two that I recommend are The Associated Press Style Book (great resource and "rule" book) and Telling True Stories (good meat and potatos for how to write nonfiction in an interesting way).

When I became interested in working at home, I found other people who were doing this successfully and so I wrote  a book on unique home-based businesses.

Another time, I'd met a unique couple who had performed as Russian circus stars and then defected to the United States. We wrote a Russian cookbook together -- the husband sketched images of their life in Russia and his wife came up with the recipes she learned to cook while traveling as a performer.

* * * * *

IN OUR MID 50s, my husband, Fred, and I moved from Nevada to the Mississippi Delta. We had no real idea where we were going geographically and no sense of the region’s history when we first arrived. But this shift away from our familiar West Coast turned into a fascinating adventure that even birthed two books.

Fred was hired by a private company to serve as chief psychologist for Mississippi’s prisons, a job that provided housing on the grounds of Parchman Penitentiary.

“You’re kidding me, you’re going to live AT Parchman Prison? ON the grounds? Parchman’s infamous!” a friend was saying as I packed dishes for the moving van. Charlie, a musician who’d moved to Elko by way of Memphis, Tenn., seemed amused that I didn’t seem to know much about where Fred and I were heading.

 “Well, Parchman’s famous for the blues,” he said.

• Driving into Parchman Penitentiary, the front gate

          Fred and I assumed we’d be moving to the southern part of Mississippi where the mighty river empties into the Gulf of Mexico but we quickly learned the Delta refers to Mississippi’s region of flat farming lands, reaching approximately from Memphis to Vicksburg, a unique expanse of great wealth and greater poverty.

Geographically, the entire Mississippi delta is massive. Stretching north into Canada and south to the Gulf of Mexico, east to New York and west to New Mexico, the total delta of the great Mississippi River covers 41 percent of the continental United States. But the much smaller Yazoo-Mississippi Delta (The Delta) is one of the region’s many smaller basins.

• ..land of cotton

           Once called The most Southern place on Earth, by Memphis historian James C. Cobb, because of its cotton-rich history and defined culture, The Delta consists of flat triangle of fertile land in northwestern Mississippi, about two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, covering 7,110 square miles.

On a map, the Delta looks like half a football with its western edge following along the mighty Mississippi River’s path, but it was a mean spirited ballgame that was once played on this field. With a reputation for harboring a sweltering summer heat, the Delta became an endless supplier of cheap black labor beginning in the 1800s, before the Civil War, enabling thousands of white families to become rich and forcing generations of black families to work their entire lives for nothing, to live and die in poverty, illness and despair.

• The football-shaped Delta in northwestern Mississippi.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     TODAY'S DELTA COUNTRYSIDE is dotted with white one-room churches -- many still active -- houses of worship that once served poor sharecroppers as their schools, sometimes morphing into freedom schools, NAACP meeting halls or during the 1950s and 1960s, unsafe quarters for "outside agitators" who wanted to help people of color exercise their right to vote and live in peace.

• A country church in Bolivar County, next to Cleveland

Along most back roads near these small churches or near the edges of cotton fields are occasional, small run-down sharecropper houses, mostly abandoned but some still inhabited by poor families. Nearby are family and church cemeteries, some lost to the unyielding kudzu vines while others still neatly tended.

It was in this most Southern place on earth where I began to learn about some of our country’s most critical early and modern civil rights history, events from an unforgiving past that runs into the present; history that is even richer than the darkest soil of the Delta’s most fertile riverbed lands.

Intrigued, I started visiting small cafes, libraries and beauty parlors asking questions and then writing nonstop. I was hooked.     

“The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.”

Cohn’s description was so good that nineteen years later Mississippi’s famed author William Faulkner offered the same quote with a twist, as his own

“(The Delta) begins in the Lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.”

With Cobb's and Cohen’s books under my reading belt, I began driving around the Delta to visit its spotted small towns and villages. I would leave Parchman each morning and come back at night, sometimes quite late, after a full day of wandering and picture taking.

Lots of good stuff caught my eye – old cotton gins and former railroad stations entwined in vines of kudzu, bayous with thick-rooted Cyprus trees growing from the murky water and people cat-fishing on the banks.

• Once a thriving Delta gas station and store .. 

In the Delta, early morning mists float across broad fields smelling of the unusually deep and rich top soil. Even with a century of clearing, cultivating, draining and land leveling, the Delta’s earthy beauty stands out at sunset when the sun’s burnt orange rays press into murky waters of swamps.

• A sunset in the Delta 

We had moved to the Delta in June and when summer ended, fall’s cotton fields blanketed the Delta like soft snow bringing a beauty that’s hard to describe.

The Delta’s current agricultural mixture of cotton, wheat, rice and sorghum crops are sometimes separated by large and very shallow catfish farm ponds outlined by flocks of dinner-seeking and protected snow-white egrets.

The handsome birds once imported to the Delta for their perfect hat feathers, now irritate catfish pond owners with their “pound-a-day” fish-eating habits. Nonetheless, Mississippi is still the largest catfish producing state.

My travels around this region allowed me to learn more about the Delta’s unfathomable past and present; but it was still hard to imagine the intensity of past sins of racial brutality, this history intermixing with miles of vine-covered, abandoned railroad tracks and across the small rural bridges spanning innumerable muddy rivers and streams, small lakes, cane breaks and mossy tree-silhouetted bayous.

For nearly two years as Fred worked with Mississippi prisoners, I kept visiting more of the region’s small towns where I met a variety of Delta people, some who readily answered my questions about the region’s people, and the civil rights history I’d never learned in school.

I drank their thick coffee and consumed their catfish, greens and buttermilk pie; visited quaint stores and shops, researched in local and regional libraries, consumed in antique and junk stores, sat in beauty parlors, bars or jukes and frequented gas stations for the Delta’s home-cooked chicken livers and gizzards, all while learning more and more of this region’s hidden tales of grace and gore.

As their stories surrounded me, I could not escape the Delta’s ghosts and my obsession with digging up Mississippi’s history only increased. Most Mississippi Delta stories are buried into crumbling red bricks that once gave structure to legally segregated stores, cafes, movie houses, Masonic halls, churches, schools and hospitals.

As I learned of the countless murders of black teachers, ministers, lawyers, children and so many others, I began to feel responsible for passing on their tales; the Mississippi ghosts I'd met deserved to be remembered.

When it comes to historical digging, the Delta – like everywhere else on the planet– has its dedicated gatekeepers. Some represent old-line aristocratic families who are pressed to keep their spin on the past; others – from university deans and librarians to shopkeepers – believe that hiding embarrassing Mississippi moments is their inherent responsibility, and good for the states economics or tourism.

One Delta blues historian told me how he was paid to prepare a brochure on the history of the Drew Blues Tradition, but then instructed to remove a pivotal story involving a 24-hour long gunfight in the town’s blues alley after World War I that influenced the movement of prominent bluesmen to Chicago (thus starting the Chicago Blues tradition).

At one small Delta library, “someone lost all of the oral history tapes” when I asked to see them. At another, “the librarian locked up the Emmett Till scrapbook in the safe” a library aid said, and at still another reading spot could be found two shelves of dated “Old South” classics, but only one copy of the Delta’s civil rights veteran Fannie Lou Hamer’s biography was available (and it was checked out).

Historical markers were not much help, either. Around the Delta, most of these signs give travelers insight into the “white” Delta, but none describe the horrors of slavery or the cruelty shown to kidnapped African Americans and their children – even in Natchez, a major home to early slave markets.

Black history museums are rare. Exhibits in the “Cottonlandia” museum in Leflore County are remarkable for their lack of mention to African American contributions to the entire agricultural cycle and culture.

Enslaved Africans, often using farming techniques from their homelands, not only planted, grew and harvested the crops, but also were also responsible for clearing land and for nearly all farming-related activity. White settlers were their “overseers.”

Despite the difficulty in finding the region’s formal history, I found people with stories to tell. I found them in small cafes, in parks, at the antique stores, and in the colleges and at newspaper offices.

It seemed they had been saving their stories just for me! I found old newspaper articles to read, some wonderful books, as well.

I spoke to historians, authors, teachers, bankers, sociologists, ministers, old civil rights volunteers and after 23 months, the book, Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited --literally, the biggest book I've ever written -- was completed.

WRR features:

--A Nine-page Selected Bibliography/Citations: 73 Books; 3 Dissertations; 47 Articles; 32 Collections, Interviews, Oral Histories

--Twenty-pages/Lists of Dead/References 900+ names and information of African Americans lynched and murdered in Mississippi from 1870 to 1970 (references Southern Law & Poverty Center, NAACP, Tuskegee Institute, individual family and friends, personal research)