Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

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Jan 10 2015

A Martyr of Selma: Viola Liuzzo

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IMG_0819Just off the 50 mile stretch of road between Selma and Montgomery, at a slightly raised spot behind wrought iron to protect it from vandals, two memorials for the same woman sit side by side. There is no larger sign to announce the place just on the south side of the four-lane highway; look for mile marker number 111. That’s how we found it in fall of 2014, on the way back from crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge into Selma, Alabama.

I don’t remember exactly when I first heard of Viola Liuzzo. Her murder was a brief scene in a movie I watched on television, maybe the 1990 retelling of the story of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, Murder in Mississippi. Bullets fired from a car with four Ku Klux Klan members riding inside killed the 39-year-old woman who’d come Mississippi after seeing the brutal beating of marchers during the first Selma-to-Montgomery march. She died instantly after being shot in the face, the same day she ferried participants who’d taken part in the third walk from Selma to Montgomery in March of 1965. Her one passenger, Leroy Moton, pretended to be dead and survived.

There are many, many martyrs to the cause of civil rights in the 1960s. I saw the reminders of their sacrifices on this trip to the south, a combination Civil War/Civil Rights “tour” for almost two weeks. The trip took us to the powerful Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel, where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. As a native of the south, where family trees branch through documents of the sale of other human beings, we traveled to where my husband’s great-great grandfather fought for the Confederacy at Stone Creek Battlefield just outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee. After a few other stops, including a trip to the Civil Rights memorial in Montgomery, we found ourselves on Highway 80.

Viola Liuzzo Memorial 2The trip, in part, was a pilgrimage to find Viola’s memorial along the road after seeing her name etched into the curved black granite monument created by Maya Lin in front of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. I wondered about this woman not quite 40 years old when she was so moved by the beating of protestors on the Edmund Pettis Bridge that she felt the call to leave her family behind and make a dangerous pilgrimage “to change the world.” Among many who sacrificed, she became the only white female protestor to be killed during the civil rights period in the 1960s.
When she saw the beatings on television, Viola told her husband: “It’s everybody’s fight.” I was too young for that fight, and I wonder what I would have done if I had been an adult during those times. Until 8th grade, I held to the same prejudices as my family, as those who murdered her. By the time I reached high school, I tried to leave those prejudices behind to travel a new road. If I’d been 20, 25, 30 in the 1960s, would I have had to courage to be drawn to the center of that struggle for human rights? Hard to know. I might have believed that my white skin, my being female would have protected me. I won’t say that Viola believed the same, but I can tell that she embraced a mission to join those who’d suffered greatly to work toward their emancipation, and probably knew at some level that there would be risk in doing so.

Viola LiuzzoI look forward to seeing the movie, Selma, in spite of some of the controversies. Those are not important. The film moved John Lewis, a hero of that struggle, brutally beaten on that bridge during the march that caused Viola Liuzzo to act. It’s one way to honor those who gave up so much—by immersing ourselves in their stories. And among those stories is a woman who deserves to be remembered, along with many others who lived their courage.

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Written by Kim · Categorized: Civil Rights, Featured · Tagged: Selma, Viola Liuzzo

Nov 27 2014

Why Can’t a Girl be Peter Pan?

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Peter Pan Live! - Season 2014I wanted to fly. I wanted adventures. I wanted to take to the night skies, skirting clouds under the full moon.

When I was a child, I wanted to be Peter Pan.

As news spread about the upcoming “Peter Pan Live” production by NBC , there have been a lot of tweets and comments questioning the decision to have Peter Pan played by a female; in this production Allison Williams of HBO’s “Girls” is Peter. For some children, especially girls of a certain age, Peter Pan has always been a girl, starting with Mary Martin in 1954.

Historically, from the beginning of Barrie’s play, females were cast in the role of Peter for practical reasons related to the theater of the time. (Aisha Harris in Slate Magazine wrote about this in an article, “Why is Peter Pan played by a woman?”)

The same children who grew up with Mary Martin also grew up with a boy Peter Pan in the classic Disney film.  Still, I have to admit that when Robin Williams appeared as a live action male Peter Pan in the movie Hook, it seemed a little odd to me. The only other boy Peter Pan before him had been a cartoon.The years after Hook have featured Kathy Rigby in what seems to be a never-ending traveling production of a female Peter Pan on stage while Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s boy Peter Pan is a popular character for young children for the last decade in the Peter and the Starcatchers series.

So Peter started out as a flying girl and became a flying boy and in the upcoming movie, Pan, he’s a boy again. Why does it matter? Look at the great photo of Allison Williams dressed as Pan and you know what the character means to girls as well as boys. Girls want to fly like boys, to have adventures, to live perpetually as a child.  Just as boys want to swashbuckle and fly and live perpetually in those early years of wonder. Or maybe both males and females just don’t want to let go of that essence of childhood.

So let’s put our hands together and clap, to bring back to life the idea that any child of any sex can inhabit the character who does all the things he or she wants to do. If we just believe…

You can own a copy of a modern re-imagining of the story of Peter Pan and Wendy Darling. Click here to find out more about The Island of Lost Children.

 

 

 

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Written by Kim · Categorized: Featured, Peter Pan

Oct 06 2014

Road’s End in the Texas Hill Country

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Hill Country Graveyard

“Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking.
Traveler, the path is your tracks. And nothing more.”
XXIX, Antonio Machado

We made the drive in September, the beginning of the season when day slips early into dark. My husband Ron says that fall is the time when the older folks in the Texas Hill Country pass away, and the death in autumn of his father, two uncles, and an aunt lent support to that belief.

We’ve taken the route dozens of times over the past 20 years, through small west Texas towns, skirting farm and ranch land now stressed by drought. This time, instead of our usual visit to family, we made our way to say goodbye to Ron’s mother, Alta Wilhelm.

Over the years, the road and the destination helped my mind birth stories. The rolling hills covered with cedar inspired Guadalupe of the Angels, a novel set in the turn of the 20th century about the friendship of two farm girls, one Mexican and one white, one the daughter of landowners, the other of sharecroppers. Along with travels through East Texas, the landscape of the countryside about an hour north and west of San Antonio easily places me in a world of 100 years before.

As we approached our final destination, the weight of sadness fell slowly, a vague feeling in the quaint German town of Fredericksburg that thickened the closer we got to Kerrville, the town where my husband Ron was born and where his mother had died just a few days before. Mundane places along the road—grocery stores, diners–melded into recollections of the past and acted as reminders of what would never be again.

My mother-in-law, Alta, the epitome of a homebody, set out in the 1940s for Washington, DC., and as part of the Women’s Army Corps, was posted in the US capital. There, Alta served as a cryptographic technician, a decoder stationed in the Pentagon. Her work along with the fragmented decoding of other pieces of a message were compiled in another place. One of those messages revealed information on the dropping of the atomic bomb. To have left at a young age to travel to an unfamiliar place must have been a disconcerting trip for a girl from a small town in Texas.

A few weeks before her death, Alta made the same journey to the Pentagon at 92 years old, this time in a wheelchair, and visited the Tomb of the Unknowns and the World War II memorial. In the 70 years between the two trips, she preferred to stay close to home, to be surrounded by the familiar. The path throughout her life was often short and safe. Her son  took a different route–we have traveled to Chile, Guatemala, Peru, Paris, Spain, England, with plans to travel more and often. Each journey has changed us because we want to be changed by them. Alta was more comfortable with the safety and security of what she knew, which makes that decision to set out for an experience thousands of miles away even more amazing to me.

We will make the Hill Country trip again, leave north Texas for the southwest of the state via Highway 67, but it will not be the exact same road. The regular stops will not be the exact same ones. The stories to be revealed will be new ones.

“By walking you make a path,
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again.”

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Written by Kim · Categorized: Featured, Imagination, Inspiration, Writing · Tagged: Death, Hill Country, Kerrville, Texas, Women's Army Corps

May 17 2014

Vicki Caroline Cheatwood, Playwright

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Vicki CheatwoodVicki Caroline Cheatwood is an award winning playwright and screenwriter with seven full-length plays and several shorter plays to her credit, in addition to screenwriting projects that include one recognized at Cannes. In 2002, her screenplay Air (Escopa Films) won the Special Jury Gold Award at Worldfest Film Festival, and in 2005, the dark comedy feature 10:10 was a finalist in the Austin Film Festival. She has been a finalist for several national play writing honors, including the Heideman Award (The Risen Chris, Actors Theater of Louisville), The Julie Harris Playwright Award (An Hour South), and the Eileen Heckart Drama Award (Manicures & Monuments). 

One of her more recent plays is the powerful, Ruth, a beautiful re-imagining of the Hebrew/Old Testament story of Ruth and Naomi, set in contemporary America and focusing on the issue of immigration and displacement. 

While we talk, Vicki and I are sitting on the terrace of this beautiful home on Lake Como in Italy drinking frothy glasses of San Pellagrino and enjoying slices of a wonderful pie.

For those of you in the Dallas, Texas area, Vicki’s play “Manicures & Monuments” opened June 2014 at WaterTower Theatre in Addison.

 

KB: Vicki, talk a little about your work. What are the projects you’re most proud of?

VC: Right off the bat, PUP Fest comes to mind. It’s the annual young playwrights festival produced by Kitchen Dog Theater and Junior Players of Dallas. I’ve been involved with PUP Fest since the beginning, something like 13 years now. It’s amazing to think of how many young artists – writers and actors – who have been positively impacted by the program. Very cool!

KB: I like to focus on imagination and inspiration in our storytelling. What’s the most unusual thing that’s ever inspired you?

VC: Road trips have always been a big source of inspiration for me. My play “Manicures & Monuments” began as a “Hey, what if…?” question to my husband, as we were driving down the highway in his red Ford Ranger.

On another road trip – probably in that same little pickup – headed east from Dallas on some little two-lane highway, Mark was driving and I was looking out the window. We passed this little house situated right off the highway, a little old farm house, and there was a man sitting on the porch, a farmer, dressed in his work clothes, but he had a cane. We were going 60, 70 miles an hour, so it was just a flash of this image, but it really hit me. This old man, still getting up and putting on his overalls, hat, boots, jacket – but he’s not able to work anymore. I started thinking about all the other porches, and all the other people who sat on them, sidelined, unable to participate in their own lives anymore. I jotted down some notes, and went off and wrote a play about life, death and religion: “Fits & Starts: The Sacred Heart.” It ran on Off-Off-Broadway, and was reviewed in Variety. It bombed, but hey, it was reviewed in Variety!

KB:Wow! Off, off broadway and a review in Variety. That’s more than cool.

I’m intrigued to know more about your screenwriting projects. I’ve heard of Cannes. Never been there. Have you met George Clooney? Sorry, I digress.

VC: It’s one of the biggest honors of my life thus far, to say that I had a film that was screened at the Cannes Independent Film Festival. The producer/co-director of the film, Keith Oncale and Shawn Washburn, the other co-director, did fly to France for the screening of our film “break.” There was no way that I could go. Even if I’d had the money, my husband was very ill and in treatment for throat cancer. The day of the screening, I walked around at work struck by this odd, vague depression of having something so huge happening, and being so disconnected from it. I finally told one of my coworkers, “Hey I wrote a movie, and it’s screening at Cannes in France today.” She said something like “Wow, really?” and then we went on with our work.

That whole period of time seems like someone else’s very bad dream. And damnit, I didn’t get to meet George Clooney!

KB: I didn’t realize that this was all going on during that very difficult time in your life. That has to have been very tough–having something that you would have celebrated come right in the middle of that bad dream.

I originally had an interest in screenwriting, but it seems so dog-eat-dog-steal-idea business, something I don’t worry so much about when writing fiction. What’s your take having been closer to that business?

VC: I like writing screenplays, but I don’t think I’m a screenwriter. I like the challenge of writing pictures, visuals, but my gift is writing dialogue. As far as the business goes, other than my two produced short films, I’ve had very limited success in screenwriting. I have two feature-length screenplays that got circulated around and got great feedback, but that’s as far as it went. I was a finalist one year in the Austin Film Festival, which gave me close access to some big name producers, writers, actors and agents, a couple of whom seemed interested in my work…and that’s as far as I got. My friend Stephen Dyer, a producer and screenwriter who’s had good success, likes to say, “Hollywood is the only place where you can die of encouragement.” He didn’t originate that quote, but he’s sure lived it. As have my other friends who have done very well in films and television.

Probably the best advice about screenwriting that I’ve had as a writer came from the very fine actor Donal Logue, who brought a film that he’d directed to the AFF that same year that I was there. He told me to play to my strengths, to keep writing plays, and that they – meaning Hollywood –would come looking for me. And he was right, to a point. After the Austin festival, they did. Nothing came of it, so far, but I’ve had a couple of thrilling phone conversations. There’s not much more exciting and strange than taking a call from big-name producer, while you’re at work crouched behind a counter, wearing a zoo uniform and praying that nobody comes in.

 KB:Maybe someday you can wear that zoo uniform to the Tonys when you accept your award for best play. It paints a great picture.

Since I’m currently working on my own Biblically-based novel, a re-imagining of the life of Mary (Maryam), the mother of Jesus, I’m most interested in how your play, Ruth, came to be. How was it originally conceived?

VC: The seeds of “Ruth” came from my participation in a Disciple, an intensive and brilliantly designed study course that looks at the Bible as literature and history, as well as theology. I had such a rudimentary understanding of the Bible before going through Disciple. The stories really came alive for me, especially Ruth’s.

KB: In addition to “Fits & Starts: The Sacred Heart,” have the Bible/religion or Biblical characters inspired you in other ways?

VC: I wrote a short play about Jonah, a vaudeville/comedy. I love Jonah. He’s so me. Pissed off at God, and constantly running off in the opposite direction. And the story of Jael, the housewife who drives a tent stake through her enemy’s head. That one really stuck with me. Pun intended.

KB:Ha! I must learn more about this Jael. I, too, sometimes feel like I’m being pulled dragging and screaming toward my own Nineveh.

Of all the plays ever produced, what play do you wish you’d written?

VC: A cash cow! One that runs forever, and ensures that even if my sons grow up to marry women who can’t stand me, I’ll never end up living in a government-funded nursing home.

Seriously – I wish I’d written “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Something that real, charming, funny, and grounded. And, fundable by the wife of a major celebrity.

KB: Finish the following: “I someday want to see a play of mine produced starring _________ and ______ .”

VC: Me and George Clooney, but of course.

Take a minute and sign up for my monthly newsletter. First issue starts in September 2014. See the sign-up at the right.

Gratuitous photo of George Clooney
Gratuitous photo of George Clooney
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Written by Kim · Categorized: Creativity, Featured, Imagination, Inspiration, Interview, Movies, Playwrighting, Playwrights, Writers, Writing · Tagged: Cannes, George Clooney

Mar 23 2014

I Want to Be a Writer in a Wes Anderson Movie

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Grand BudapestLast week, I saw the latest movie by Wes Anderson The Grand Budapest Hotel, and I enjoyed spending an hour and a half in another mythical place. I don’t know who wouldn’t want to live in a winter wonderland on the side of a mountain, riding toy-like funiculars up and down snowy hills, every need attended to by a French concierge and assorted bell hops as an odd murder mystery takes place safely in the background. I can easily put myself in the place of a writer seeking refuge in a hotel past its prime—writing under a man’s name until I rebel and change my name from Andre to Andrea—while recovering from a debilitating melancholia. The writer in the movie is played by two actors—Jude Law and Tom Wilkinson. The actors who will play in both phases of my life over two visits, Catherine Deneuve and Bjork.

Two years ago, I slipped into life in Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, and the family of Suzy Bishop who somewhat reminded me of myself at the age of 12 until she develops a relationship with the orphan Sam Shakusky, an escapee from Camp Ivanhoe. In my fantasy, there on the island of New Penzance, I will be an author writing under the name of Anastasia Duras and live in an isolated cottage working on the follow up to my cult blockbuster, A Life Remote. After a brief and intense affaire de coeurwith Captain Duffy Sharp, played by Bruce Willis, I will choose celibacy and a hobby rescuing small wildlife. I will ignore the wandering children, Suzi and Sam, acting out what one seemingly superior observer told me is a replay of Peter Pan and Wendy without the magic and flying. My part will be played by Tina Fey when Kate Blanchett declines.

Finally, in the movie The Royal Tenenbaums, I will join the family that I’ve always wanted to belong to. As Debbie Tenenbaum, I have three protégé siblings, one adopted, who struggle with an adulthood that doesn’t deliver on its early promise. Oh, to live in the house on Archer Avenue bought by my father Royal in the winter of his 35th year, have the noted author and anthropologist Etheline Tenenbaum as a mother, and enjoy the inspiration of two brothers and an adopted sister’s tumultuous lives. No one talks about Debbie, likely due to her lack of talent in her early years, her late teenage affair with neighbor Eli Cash, and the thinly veiled family saga she wrote that achieved limited success. Since Gwyneth Paltrow already filled the role of Margo, Debbie will be inhabited by Lena Dunham.

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Written by Kim · Categorized: Featured, Movies, News, Writers, Writing

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