​With so many labor-saving devices to help around the house, it’s odd how cleaning and cooking can fill up a day. Blame twentieth-century advertising. New housekeeping technology such as the vacuum cleaner, once invented, needed a market. Rather than showing women freed up for creative arts or other pleasures, advertisers depicted them joyfully using new products to keep ever more sparkling homes.

“Because housewives are engaged in an unsupervised job, which increasingly has produced order and cleanliness rather than useful, material products, their daily compulsion to do the work must be internalized,” sociologist Bonnie Fox concluded from studying ads in the Ladies Home Journal back to 1909-10. The glorification of housework attracted women who in an earlier generation might have contributed to household income by keeping chickens or taking in laundry, sewing, or boarders. Not until the 1970s, when middle-class women took on more paid work outside home, did the hours they spent keeping house begin to decline.

If cleaning and cooking bring you joy, great. If not, a simple way to thumb your nose at corporate advertising is to lower your standards. Your comfort with doing less may increase from knowing that modern expectations of housekeeping arose to boost profits.

After years immersed in Tudor-Stuart England, I’m embarrassed to admit trouble keeping track of Queen Elizabeth I’s court. Sage counselor William Cecil, dashing courtier Robert Dudley, dour spymaster Francis Walsingham: Though I can match their names and portraits, they only came to life for me lately through Fiona Buckley’s mystery novels. Memorable, vivid detail is a gift of well-researched imaginative portrayals, whether in fiction, film, or the presentation of Elizabeth’s nobles at the Bristol Renaissance Faire last weekend.

The risk, for me, is to mistake the character brought to life for the character who lived. What novelists and screenwriters can’t know, they are free to make up. Unlike historians, they don’t have to break the flow with terms like “probably” or “perhaps.” Did Elizabeth and Dudley, her favorite, consummate their relationship? My opinion: She was too savvy and self-controlled to risk outright scandal or a child out of wedlock, even for her “sweet Robin.” But no one can know for sure. In the case of fictionalized accounts, readers and viewers who care will have to insert “probably” or “perhaps” for themselves.

Faced with the unprecedented challenge of sending people into space in the 1960s, NASA asked researcher George Land to predict which engineers were most adept at thinking outside the box. His simple tool predicted so well, Land tried it on 1,600 four- and five-year-olds, and later the same group as they grew. His results:
            Age        Percent scoring “creative genius”
            4-5          98%
            10            30%
            15             12%
            Adult        2%

We don’t lose creative ability so much as we learn to hold it in check. To prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood, we develop essential skills at judgment and decision-making. The prefrontal cortex isn’t fully formed until age 25. Land says when we try to generate and evaluate ideas at the same time, imagination loses. Adults who show childlike creativity are those who separate generation and evaluation into two separate stages, letting the mind run free before weighing the pros and cons.

Today’s favorite scapegoats for lost creativity are standardized testing and a school system designed to provide compliant industrial workers. I don’t buy it. Land did his research long before standardized tests became prevalent, and I’ve seen no evidence people were more inventive before the Industrial Revolution. If anything, children were pushed into adulthood even younger than today. What may be different now, due to rapid technological change, is an increasing need for creative imagination in meeting the challenges of adult everyday life.

“You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate . . .”
            - Oscar Hammerstein, South Pacific, 1949

Peanuts creator Charles Schulz showed new kid Franklin in a schoolroom with white kids in 1968. Fred Rogers shared a foot bath with Officer Francois Clemmons in 1969. Hammerstein, Schulz, and Rogers withstood pushback for messages on race that were daring for their times. Having grown up on “You’ve got to be taught,” I’ve been jolted to read of research suggesting infants a few months old prefer their own race.

Is bias innate or does it have to be taught? I’d guess preference for people who look familiar is innate, especially those who resemble one’s primary caregivers. Pale-skinned babies raised by pale-skinned parents prefer pale skin. Babies raised primarily by mothers prefer women. My infant long ago, in a household of nearsighted adults, was fretful around people who didn’t wear glasses.

​Some babies are more timid by temperament, others more drawn to novelty. While I no longer believe humans are born a blank slate, it matters what they’re taught. We can encourage safe exploration to cultivate curiosity and stretch tolerance for the unfamiliar. We can expose children to safe people of various shapes and colors, with and without glasses. 

I’m reading my way through Fiona Buckley’s historical mysteries featuring Ursula Blanchard, fictitious half-sister to Queen Elizabeth I. Ursula strives to save her Protestant queen from Catholic threats to seize control and resume burning heretics, as happened under Elizabeth’s Catholic real half-sister Queen Mary.

Ursula hates the Inquisition, not the papacy, making the series palatable for readers of any faith or none. Mysteries set a few centuries back can't disregard religious conflict, but they rarely take sides except against cruelty and fanaticism. Still, readers may look in vain for light fiction about a gentle Jesuit priest trying to avoid capture and execution by Queen Elizabeth’s minions. Catholic protagonists emerge in novels set a bit later in Ireland or the Scottish highlands, fighting to preserve their independence and traditions from heartless English conquerors.

I'd guess readers of historical fiction today, at least while they’re reading, don’t much care about theology or ecclesiastical politics or seeking martyrdom or saving immortal souls. We do care about human decency, safety, autonomy, heritage, success for the underdog, and the freedom to shape our own lives. For leisure reading, if your historical sympathies lean toward one religious party more than another, pick an era where that’s the party fighting for survival, independence, or other secular values that resonate today.

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
            - Orson Welles, screenplay for “The Big Brass Ring”

As any photographer might tell us, even the most representational art can change meaning with the placement of the frame. Picture a sweet, domestic snapshot of two children playing with a teddy bear on the bedroom floor. If you widen the frame to show the window with a stranger at the top of a ladder peering in, you hint at a far spookier story.

​Every story, fact or fiction, requires the storyteller to choose where to start and stop. Reality is never done; as my mother used to say, “This too shall pass.” The artist—or journalist, or historian, or documentarian—must set the frame. Life is full of successes and failures, joys and sorrows, interwoven and each leading to the next. Comedy? Tragedy? It depends where you stop your story.

It’s one of my favorite words, an antidote to perfectionism, envy, or feelings of inadequacy. There’s comfort in the mantra, “I have enough. I do enough. I am enough.”

Enough is deliciously versatile, equally expressive of satisfaction or impatience. “Enough already! That's enough!” It can emphasize the word it follows (“sure enough,” “fair enough”) or weaken it (“good enough but not great”).

Writers face questions of “enough” all the time. How much backstory is enough to give readers context without pulling them out of the action? How serious a flaw is enough to make a character relatable without losing readers’ sympathy? How many rounds of revision are enough before you send work off to a client, agent, or editor?

Enough said.

Fifty years ago this summer, the Cuyahoga River caught fire. Folks were still talking about it when I moved back to northern Ohio the following year. Oil slick from industrial Cleveland burned for twenty or thirty minutes, sending flames more than five stories high.

The 1969 blaze wasn’t the river’s first or worst. Of thirteen recorded times the Cuyahoga ignited from 1868 to 1969, the fire of 1912 was deadliest (five fatalities) and that of 1952 did the most property damage. What was different in 1969 was historical context. Concern was rising over the dangers of pollution from unchecked industrial growth. National shock over a river catching fire added momentum, leading in 1970 to the first Earth Day and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

How the river has changed! What I once knew as the epitome of pollution has transformed into a place of beauty. Habitat is restored, dams removed, wildlife protected. Bald eagles eat fish from the river. Cuyahoga Valley National Park is calling to me to come visit.

The photo is from the 1952 fire. The 1969 blaze was put out before anyone could take a photo.

In the 2011 film Midnight in Paris, a vacationing writer time-travels to the 1920s Paris of Hemingway et al. In that era, which he loves, he meets a young woman who longs for the golden age of the 1890s. Levels upon levels. How the past looks depends where you’re looking from.

A few years back, I undertook a retelling of Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 best-seller The Mysteries of Udolpho, set in southern France (Garonne, Languedoc) and northern Italy in the 1580s. Levels upon levels. Radcliffe’s novel abounds not only in anachronisms like coffee but in the tastes and values of her age. Antiquity, sensibility, and the sublime spoke distinctively to her generation and the next. Crumbling castles surely existed in the 1580s, but gothic, romantic fascination with them came later.

When I began trying to make Udolpho accessible to modern readers, I planned to replace twenty-page landscapes with paragraphs and let the protagonist have pensive moments without breaking out into lyric poetry. But the larger challenges turned out to involve attitudes and values, not just style. A character today needs more than virtue and piety. She needs agency to make decisions that affect what follows. She needs to wind up changed by her experience. These are the values of our time, not the 1790s or the 1580s. Levels upon levels.

​Browsing at an independent bookstore, having the author sign your copy at a launch, tearing the gift wrap off a new book at the holidays, settling into your favorite chair with a fresh hardcover in your hands. It doesn’t get much better than this.

That’s assuming the book is available. If it’s out of stock, late to ship, or up in price, it may be because the publisher can’t get enough paper. Two reasons for the current paper shortage are side effects of environmental progress, Forbes reported in June.

First, recycling has gotten easier and more pervasive. We can throw all recyclables in one bin and include most any kind of paper. The resulting fibers are dirtier, harder to turn into book- or magazine-quality paper. Second, commercial packaging has shifted away from plastic in favor of paper and cardboard. Mills that retool to meet this demand no longer make as much paper suitable for books.

Next time I relish a physical book, I’ll try not to take its pages for granted.