Spite Mounds, Canals, and a Roman named Kevin
Writing historical fiction with kids
Last week was the week of realizing the obvious. Here’s an example: I love writing historical fiction, but only last week did I ever decide to teach a lesson on it. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier, but here we are.
It started when I came into my daughter’s school to present about some big engineering projects of the early 20th century that shaped Seattle. Her school is studying Seattle history, and I’m a really big nerd about it all. The focus, or outlet, of that nerdiness was a novel I wrote in the 2010’s about the daughter of one of the engineers, the family tragedy the projects caused, and her recklessness and loyalty and tumultuous interracial marriage to a man from India.
There were so many fun historical research rabbit holes for that novel: 1920’s underwear and make-up, speakeasies and jazz dancing, chicken aspics, immigration law, conceptions of whiteness and how that has changed over time, the Indian independence movement and its ties with the Wobblies and labor organizing in logging camps of the Pacific Northwest, queerness in the early 20th century, the Seattle General Strike, the lengthy and colorful list of 1920’s euphemisms for “drunk,” etc. But one of the things I got the most obsessed with was the enormous projects to remake the land that is Seattle, including tearing Denny Hill down with water cannons to fill in the tide flats that are now SoDo, and the building of the Montlake Cut and how that lowered Lake Washington and dried up the Black River.
What I became obsessed with was how the costs of these projects did not seem to be reckoned with. How the people whose houses were on hills that got torn down didn’t have any choice about it. How the chaos that the Black River drying up caused the Duwamish people centered there is still not accounted for in their fight for federal recognition as a tribe, for instance. How the things that were lost when the tidelands were filled (an estuary full of herring and salmon) weren’t weighed in full against what was gained (stadiums, industrial neighborhoods). It felt to me like the decision-makers didn’t care about the costs because they didn’t feel like they would pay them. In my novel, I imagined what might happen if they did pay.
Anyway, I had a great time showing historical photos to my kid’s class, and then sharing how one photo had inspired a scene in my novel. Here is the photo:
And here is the scene:
Seattle is built on the hills between Lake Washington and the Puget Sound. It surrounds Lake Union. When the big men of the city decided to connect the three bodies of water, they dug a ship canal between Puget Sound and Lake Union with a nice set of locks to keep the salt water out. Then my father and his crew dug another canal between the lakes at a place called the Montlake Cut and dropped Lake Washington ten feet because they were too cheap to stick in a second pair of locks. Ships could come in from the sea then, all the way to sheltered boatyards on the lakes. Coal from the Renton coalfields would no longer have to make eleven transfers to get to an oceangoing vessel. Progress was prosperity. They did not think about the costs. They thought they would not be the ones to pay them.
They opened the gates in late August, 1916. I was seventeen, Lou nineteen. Teddy was nine. It was a day of pomp and ceremony, photographers with their tripods in position, and crowds like the sideline of a parade. We stood on the shore. The men broke the final barrier and out rushed the lake in a torrent of white turbidity. What had been a thin stream with no more water than could float a log became a seething coffee-colored mass. It churned down the canal and everyone cheered.
That day, my father was more ebullient than either Lou or I had ever seen him. No fish or mountain had ever brought him that sun-limbed joy. He strode over to us from where he had been supervising the release. His jacket was cast aside and his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows. He clapped Lou and me on the shoulders as if we were colleagues, then caught Teddy’s head with his elbow and pulled him to his chest. “Gentlemen,” he said to us, “we have ourselves a canal.”
Teddy beamed. “Can we sail my boat in it, Papa?”
“Sail your boat? We’ll sail an armada! Perhaps Sunday.”
Then someone called to him and he was off, striding through the crowd, commanding with a wave of his arm as if nothing terrible could happen.
We talked about how I distilled a lot of research (shown to the kids through a series of photos) into a paragraph laying out the changes. Then, entering the scene, I tried to put into words what I knew from the photograph, but adding my invented characters. We noticed how the characters were both there in the historical moment, and in their own petty lives, losing their jackets, wanting their dad’s attention, not realizing tragedy awaited. (Spoiler: Teddy dies of pneumonia after falling in the muddy remains of the Black River later that fall.)
Then I had the kids pick a moment they knew from history. Could be any moment, even one from family history. They invented a character, and put them in that moment, and wrote a scene.
I encouraged them to imagine both the big historical event and the little things their character was thinking about. What kind of sandwich did they have for lunch? Did they need to pee? Were they mad at their brother?
It was so fun! The kids brought to life so many different things. (Lots of kids got excited about writing from the point of view of residents of spite mounds, a feature of the regrades.
We also got a fabulous story-in-journals from a real-life polar exploration, Japanese internment camps in World War Two, a love story set in Stonewall Bar just as the police raid happens, an Oregon trail story, a story drawn from the writer’s grandfather’s experience marching with Martin Luther King, and a story about a Roman gladiator named Kevin.
Turns out there are LOTS of little history nerds out there, just waiting for their moment. Also lots of kids whose sense of history is vaaaaague. Unless Kevin is an ancient Roman name?
History teachers, we need you.
But what better way to get kids excited about history, and imagining it with empathy and detail, than to have write a story set there. I mean, I sure think it’s fun myself.