Frankenstein's Maker

Two hundred years ago, the novel Frankenstein was published.

Its author was Mary Shelley, at the time living under the shadow of her famous poet husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was also the child of the forerunner of the women's liberation movement, Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792 (it is said Jane Austen read this and it influenced her portrayal of strong female characters).

Mary Shelley's life was almost impossibly dramatic and tragic, the kind that makes you say the truth is stranger than fiction. She married Shelley after his first wife committed suicide, he turned his extramarital attentions to her half-sister, she suffered incredible losses with her children and then Shelley.

As immortalized in the 1986 movie Gothic, Mary was part of a literary ghost-telling evening with her husband and Byron. Her nightmare that night led to the first pages of Frankenstein.

My intent in writing this blog post is to talk about a historical novel that tells Mary's story, from her girlhood to the end. From making love on her mother's grave to her husband's drowning death to her own burial with the exhumed bodies of her parents, this novel covers it all in beautiful prose and with an empathetic heart for Mary's brilliance throughout her woes. The book is New York Times bestselling author Antoinette May's The Determined Heart.

I absolutely loved this book and highly recommend it. Now's the perfect time to read it and contemplate the life of this extraordinary author of 200 years ago, Mary Shelley.

Fun fact: It is only through Antoinette that I know Bysshe is pronounced "bish." Looks more posh than it sounds.

Antoinette is the founder of a writing conference now going into its 13th year, the Gold Rush Writers Conference. There are still spots available; one of the keynote speakers this year is Karen Joy Fowler, author of the Booker finalist We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves and the popular Jane Austen Book Club (see? I got to mention Jane twice in this post! Happy me). The other keynote speaker is Ace Antonio Hall.

The conference takes place May 4, 5 and 6 in Mokelumne Hill, California, truly Gold Rush country. I'll be presenting on "Balancing Plot and Theme: How to Make a Novel Resonate." This conference is focused only on the craft of writing in all forms (poetry, screenwriting, nonfiction, fiction) without the sometimes stressful addition of agents and editors. If you want to truly write, meet other friendly folks and relax (as much as one can relax in a haunted hotel), this is the conference for you. Visit this site for more information.

And don't forget to check out The Determined Heart!


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Angels Camp

Mural in town, showing Twain holding a frog

This small Gold Rush town in northern California is also known as Frogtown, because Mark Twain based his short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," on a story heard here in 1865. The hotel where he heard it still stands. PETA members, please don't read this story.

Each May, Angels Camp hosts a jumping frog contest, and a plaque gets laid in the sidewalk for each year's winner.

I think this is the biggest jump I saw, at 19'11"

This one is a wink-wink, based on the story

The town is sweet to wander through and straddles a beautiful creek.

It has an arts center.

And of course it has to have a saloon.

And not too far away, a Barrel of Monkeys, described as "If you were given $5,000 and told to open your own version of John's Incredible Pizza":

Built on a hill, Angels Camp has many staircases that link parallel streets:

And statues throughout town celebrate the froglike history.

It's worth a visit! The jumping frog jubilee is always the third weekend in May; here's a link. The Mark Twain story is also reprinted in its entirety at that site.

Fun fact: the town isn't angelic; it's named for early founder Henry Angell (no one could spell in the 1800s).
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Your presence is hereby requested at the Gold Rush Writers Conference

Me, Mark Wiederanders and Antoinette May

For the last few years, I've attended the Gold Rush Writers Conference. Registration is now open for this year, and I want to let people know about what a laid-back, welcoming conference this is. Often, conferences can feel competitive or there's a sense of panic about those agent pitch sessions...this conference doesn't include agents, so that stressor is completely off the table. Gold Rush is a weekend of hanging out with sweet people who love to write and want to be with other writers. Period. I don't know how author Antoinette May has managed to create a veritable ambiance of kindness—but she has.

Exterior of the Hotel Leger, showing entrance to its saloon

Last year, I presented on poetry, including doing an "Exquisite Corpse" group-writing exercise and looking at Isabella Gardner's "Summers Ago" and did a separate presentation on historical fiction, I think. I just glanced back at my website events page to double-check, and all the events since 2011 have been deleted somehow. Sighhhhh. This year, I'm going to be talking about social media. The headliners this year are James Ragan and Donna Levin. Last year I was the brunch headliner and Mark Wiederanders was the after-dinner speaker.

One of the sessions in the ballroom

For each timeslot during the weekend, there are four or five options—and as is often the case, I want to attend more than one. For instance, here's Sunday morning's lineup:

• James Ragan - Celebrating the Writer and the Poem course description
• Lucy Sanna - Winning Strategies for Getting an Agent course description
• Antoinette May - The Novel You Were Born to Sell course description - limited
• Sally Kaplan - The Power of Filmic Technique in Fiction Writing - part 2 course description (limited to part 1 participants)

The conference is for screenwriters, poets and novelists. I've also run into memoirists and creative nonfiction writers at this conference before.

Mark's speech

 

My speech

My speech: this basically shows how small and intimate the conference is

After 11 years of hosting the conference, Antoinette May has found success in linking people together. The Friday night picnic, hosted around her beautiful grotto pool in a Victorian garden, is always a wonderful evening of people reconnecting and greeting new attendees.

My bedroom at the Hotel Leger

The second story balcony overlooking the main street in Mokelumne Hill

The conference takes place in the Hotel Leger, dating to 1879 (but on the site of an 1851 hotel). The hotel itself is worth the drive to Mokelumne Hill: each bedroom has its own charming Victorian furnishings, and due to its vintage, some rooms have bathrooms while others require you to go down the hall. But that's okay! Everyone's nice and it gives you a taste of what it would've been like a hundred years ago when Mok Hill was a Gold Rush boomtown. The hotel has a wonderful restaurant onsite, the Whitewater Grill, which caters the conference. There's also an authentic old saloon with the long wooden bar and I once had a basil martini here that blew my mind. If all that isn't fantastic enough: the place is reputed to be haunted. Just ask Antoinette: she spent the night here alone once.

Okay, yes, we stayed in Room #13. You get chills just looking at this, I know

I had youngsters in my room with me, nervous about the talk of ghosts. We put a strip
of toilet paper at the door to stop ghosts in their tracks. It worked!

Hope to see you next month! Feel free to email me if you have questions about the conference or tweet me @ErikaMailman.

Silliness in the saloon with, from left, Genevieve Beltran, Kathy Boyd Fellure and me.

We might've had a couple already

Details:

The Gold Rush Writers Conference takes place this year May 5, 6, and 7 in Mokelumne Hill, a few hours easterly-southerly from Sacramento. The cost of $185 includes:

Price Includes:

• Your selection of four workshops out of sixteen. Several are limited so register early (first-come, first-served).
• Informal supper in a Victorian garden Friday night
• Open mic poetry readings
• Sit-down dinner in an historic Gold Rush hotel with speaker Mark Wiederanders
• Sit-down pool-side brunch Sunday with speaker Erika Mailman
• Plus lectures, demonstrations
  
  To learn more, visit the conference website at www.goldrushwriters.com.
  
  
  
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Preston Castle

Officially termed the Preston School of Industry, Preston Castle is a boys' reform school established in 1894 in Ione, California. I had the good fortune to go tour it this weekend.

The first thing you notice upon entering is that this place is falling apart. At one point, the plan was to demolish the behemoth and its roof was taken off. Years of rain damaged the interior until a new roof was put on. It's on the National Register of Historic Places.

What many of the floors look like

The wards of Preston were boys as young as 8 and as old as 16, we were told. They were there as juvenile delinquents, including for the "crime" of being homeless. The entire building radiates sadness. The site is really very remote and was likely more so at the turn of (that) century.

Hallway upon entering

Upstairs boys dormitory

We were taken upstairs to the boys dormitory, where 50 beds once nestled close together. The ceiling is really quite extraordinary, with criss-crossed wooden beams. Boys had carved their names up there in the rafters. I wondered if the gorgeous ceiling must have been covered with a dropped ceiling back in the day, to make the room easier to heat or cool. As we left the room, a vintage photograph did indeed make it look like the ceiling was dropped and mundane.

Pigeon-stained rafters with carved names

The dormitory with beds & dropped ceiling

The adult guardian's bathroom in the dormitory

I'm not sure if that plunging method works

We visited the staff dining room. I'm kind of in love with the asylum-green paint color there.

Maybe the one pretty thing there?

Next, we went to the infirmary. Very uncomfortable-looking metal bed frames and the hint of illness still circulating...

Original wicker wheelchair

Next to it was the operating room. The docents have a clear sense of humor, as evidenced by the skeleton in the chair. I'm always sensitive about this stuff...but I don't think it was respectful. Scared boys shaped by tough circumstances came here for a chance to be clothed, sheltered, fed and instructed.

What is that machine? Many guessed it delivered electroshock therapy

Can you guess?

Another skeleton, in construction hat. Not sure why?

In the room where the skeleton pensively looks out the window, surgeries were performed on the floor. You've had enough time to think about the machine--post your guess in the comments?

I guess in some way I can't fault the impulse to position skeletons around; the place really does seem like a stereotypical Hollywood haunted reform school. And then we learned about the ghost.

The kitchen

We entered the kitchen, in which I immediately noticed the beautiful Hoosier cupboard. Apparently I am not a "sensitive" soul, because I was standing only feet away from where a violent murder occurred, and yet I didn't feel any echoes from that sad event.

We were told that the young cook came upon two boys in the kitchen, scolded them and told them to leave. As she went to climb the stairs up to her apartments, they pulled her back down and bludgeoned her to death. Or, well, the story goes that one of them did. He stood trial and benefited from a hung jury, in part because the other boy informant was known to be a big liar. The acquitted boy went on to later stand trial for two other murders.

The cook's body was stowed in a room off the kitchen, under the stairs.

So here's what's wierd. I tried to photograph the staircase she was pulled from. I couldn't. My cell phone's screen was black. I thought for a second the phone had turned off. I kept trying to get a picture of it, but blackness seemed to be seeping, exuding from the stairs. The best I could do was to capture the door frame of its entry. After the tour moved on, I remained, thinking that I could get a picture now that no one was standing in front of the room's window blocking the light. No. Still no light to illuminate that photograph. Here are my three tries:

A pool of blackness

Still can't get it

Much better now the room is empty, but still can't see the steps

I'll be the first to admit my cell cam is pretty crappy, but it was odd it just couldn't show me the steps. Now, the only reason I knew about Preston Castle was that I attended the book launch of Angelica Jackson, whose book Crow's Rest is in part set there. (I'm halfway through the book and totally, enthusiastically recommend it!) The night of our visit, I continued reading and came across mention of the main character's camera's failure to work properly at the castle. I got a little frisson of shock reading that.

The plunge

Across from the kitchen is the plunge, adorned with coffins (sigh). A plunge is an old-time word for swimming pool, and my opinion is that that's what it is. However, we were told it was once filled with lye and was used to decontaminate new boys, even down to the chilling detail that a long stick would hold you under until you swam the entire length. I'm a little dubious about a huge vat of lye devoted merely to registering new boys.

This place lends itself to disquieting photography.

Downstairs dormitory and door to freedom

In the basement was another dormitory, also said to hold 50 beds. When we heard the boys were housed in the basement, I felt a sharp disappointment that they would held in dank quarters when the whole structure was there for them! Yet the word basement was a bit misleading--it is really ground level, and there was actually a lot of windows and natural light flooding in. The door to freedom was the way boys exited when they aged out; a bus sat outside waiting to take them away. The superstition is that you can't ever look back, or you'll return for good. We learned the names of many notable wards of Preston, but the only one I remember or knew of beforehand was Merle Haggard. Apparently he doesn't talk about Preston. I'd like to read his autobiography.

"I will not bludgeon other students"

Also in the cellar was the schoolroom. The chalkboard displayed more macabre humor.

Ceiling showing light from floor above: not sure what room

In the schoolroom, I noticed slung netting covering portions of the ceiling. In that netting were some pretty big chunks of ceiling plaster. I'm glad the net was there to protect our heads. It wasn't until we exited the structure via the boys' dining hall that I looked back and saw this above the door:

Well, so that gave me pause.

Aesthetically pleasant exterior with curving ramp

Out in the courtyard, we were shown a metal ring and told bad boys would be chained there and beaten. I didn't photograph it because if it was true, I'd be a ghoul. But I don't think it's true. We saw three more of those rings out in front of the castle.

You'd like to think maybe this was a place of true rehabilitation, and that the boys were treated well and fed well. I'm fascinated and want to learn more. Preston closed in 1960, and so there are surely many boys still out there now men, with their stories.


. . . . .
P.S. Logging in the next day to say I hope I wasn't too hard on the docent and the volunteers that run Preston Castle. It's certainly worth discussion, the idea of how we talk about places where traumatic things happened. For instance, I was personally appalled to learn that the site of the Lizzie Borden murders is now a B&B... yet without its being preserved in such a way, the public wouldn't get a chance to go and look. What do you think? And I want to go on record as saying THANK YOU for the volunteers of the foundation who donate time and energy to keep Preston Castle open. It is a great gift.

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