IMAGINATION -- by Jane Kelley

  

In this newspaper clipping dated May 5, 1939, my grandmother sits at her desk in front of a typewriter. She is 42 years old. Her fourth novel, Mrs. Pennington, is about to be published. The caption reads: "With the heating pipes above her head in the basement of her Whitefish Bay home, Katharine Carson concentrated on writing a novel of summer days at a Kansas Chautauqua Assembly in her grandmother's times." In 1880, Chautauquas were "a week when the first families of Ottawa, Kansas enjoyed a combined feast of reason, soul, music, patriotism, and society."

Those basement heating pipes "lent the feeling of a ship's deck," the reporter said. My grandmother could escape from the demands of two schoolgirls (my mother and her sister), and her mother-in-law, her sister, and her brother-in-law who also sometimes lived with them. It was the Depression Era. Families did what they could to help each other. 

Hopes were high for this novel, which the publisher called a "dark horse."

Just a few months after Mrs. Pennington "started her fight to be a best seller," a more frightening battle commenced. In fact, on the reverse side of the clipping, another article began:  "Once again, Europe is an armed camp . . . the rival forces are already drawn up in battle."

Germany invaded Poland a few months later. Few people wanted to read about "the wise little woman who invariably winds the blustering male around her finger." 

Imagination is a crucial part of being a writer. As my grandmother typed her pages, she imagined the world of her characters. The day when the novel would be in bookstores. That it sold more than her other novels. That she earned respect and money. That there wouldn't be another war. That the recent war really was the war to end all wars. That the teenage girls quarreling upstairs didn't need her to intervene.

But often she put aside all those worlds she imagined and climbed the stairs.

"My household always came first," she was quoted in the article. "There were many days when I did not write a line."

 JANE KELLEY is the great, great granddaughter of Kate Weston Powers Boltwood, who inspired the character of Mrs. Pennington.