Category: Blog

Quonnie: A State of Mind

In 1993, I received my first paid byline in the now defunct Tidings Magazine, a regional publication covering the shore areas of southern Rhode Island and southeastern Connecticut.

While I might change a few things if written more recently, I still love Quonnie: A State of Mind and its core themes of the enduring appeal of the ocean, beach and pond, the continuity of family, now over four generations, and the timeless nature of the experience.

Tidings Magazine, we miss you!

Click below to read a .pdf version of the piece. In your browser, click the button to rotate the article clockwise for easier reading, or print it out in hardcopy.

Quonnie – A State of Mind (1993)

The Journey of Researching and Writing The French Desk

I’ve been mulling over writing this story for a long time. I had many letters from 1944-1945 my mother had written home, so I knew I could use those as the outline of the story.  But some of the material was personal, like her love life, and did I want to splash all that over a book?

Sorbonne – Source: Family Photos

In the end, I decided I did because you can’t have a good novel about straight war work, even propaganda war work. There have to be a few problems and additional characters along the way. A few things, including all the names of the characters in the story, except for the people who worked at OWI, were changed.

I then asked myself if I thought my mother would want me to write this story. With her death in 2006, the opportunity to talk with her about the idea of a book was long gone. But, as we were going through their possessions after they had both passed away, we found my mother’s yearly date calendars. I looked through them casually, ready to discard them, until I caught an entry in the 1990 calendar. Continue reading “The Journey of Researching and Writing The French Desk”

The Paris Study Group – A Defining Year

Over the years, in explaining the backstory behind my book, The French Desk: A Brooklyn Gal’s Journey into Wartime Propaganda, I would mention that my mother had participated in the Paris Study Group to my friends, and they would invariably say, “What was that?”

Paris Study Group (1938) – Source: Family photos

The Paris Study Group (PSG) was a group of catholic college women (about 20 per year), who travelled to France for their junior year abroad, lived with a French family and studied at either the Sorbonne or the Catholic Institute of Paris. The students came from all over the world. The program ran between 1928 and 1940.

The PSG Founder and Director, Miss Erin Samson, was born to a French father and an Irish mother and grew up in in Washington, DC. As a young girl, Miss Samson traveled to France often to visit her father’s relatives and ended up attending college there, earning her French Baccalaureate at the Catholic Universite of Angers. Miss Samson also went on to study in England, earning advanced literature degrees at Oxford. Continue reading “The Paris Study Group – A Defining Year”

Good Things Are Worth Waiting For

About ten years ago, I embarked on a journey to write the story of my mother’s wartime experience when she worked as a civilian in the Office of War Information (OWI). I had many letters – maybe 65 or so – she had written home in 1944 and 1945, saved by my grandparents for some reason.

My mother – Alberta Conway Jones (early 1950s) – Source: Family Photos

When my grandparents sold their brownstone in Brooklyn way back in the late 1960’s, my mother took all those saved WW2 letters to our house and promptly stored them in our attic for thirty-five years. When we sold our parent’s house thirty years later, I took those loosely tethered letters to my home and finally had a chance to look through them carefully.

As I went through them, I knew there was a story to tell. The challenge was where to start and how to approach these large moments in history: Continue reading “Good Things Are Worth Waiting For”

From My Mother’s OWI Garret

In the house I grew up in, our attic was stacked with boxes. A decade could be retraced in an hour’s time.  Births, deaths, baptisms, confirmations and graduations and various ephemera littered the rafters. Frayed boxes bulged with old photographs and letters.

ACJ Letters home during WWI – Source: Family Photos

I was the youngest of my family and almost the youngest of my entire extended family. So much had transpired before I had attained an awareness of what was going on. In the attic, I was able to look back and recapture some sense of my family’s life before I came along. I found it captivating to think about where they had lived and to read about the details of their lives. And rich material there was. Continue reading “From My Mother’s OWI Garret”