I remember when I was 14 and my parents came to pick me up from overnight camp. My counselor had to physically pry me apart from my new best friends. That’s what I felt like leaving the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop on Sunday.

The three-day writing seminar brought together 27 advanced children’s writers from Austin. We assembled at the home of YA authors Cynthia and Greg Leitich-Smith to build community and critique manuscripts.

Cyn did a masterful job leading 40-minute critique sessions. The first portion of each critique was devoted to helping the writer understand what he or she did well. As our fearless leader rightfully pointed out, this is often as useful to a writer as hearing areas for improvement. I couldn’t agree more!

It was clear from the level of discussion that everyone in attendance had spent hours poring over each manuscript, analyzing it, and writing up helpful suggestions to help the writer revise. I especially loved the end of each session when Cyn shared her gems related to the particular genre we had just explored. And she often suggested useful exercises such as rewriting a scene from the point-of-view of the antagonist to help us understand our characters better, or rewriting a chapter using only dialogue to help discover what’s essential and what can be cut.

In addition to all that we learned about writing, I think everyone came away with an intense sense of community. I’ve never been on a football team, but I imagine this is the bond I’d feel with my buddies after my team won the State Championship. Given the fact that writing is often a solitary sport, the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop was really something to cheer about!

A thousand thanks to everyone who came out for the launch party!

To Mandy, Topher, Madeline, Will and the whole amazing crew at BookPeople, who ran one smooth operation.

To The Blues Specialists, Mel and Clarence, who dazzled us with their authentic Delta Blues on harmonica and electric guitar.

And to all the family, friends, teachers, writers, and librarians who bought the book to read or donate: at the end of the night our box to deliver to an Austin area school was full.

You are the best! I’m bowled over by your support. It was a better night than I could have imagined.

Today my book A Thousand Never Evers, whose title is a tribute to civil rights leader Medgar Evers, will be released in bookstores nationwide. And tomorrow night, just after midnight, is the forty-fifth anniversary of Medgar Evers’s murder by a racist assassin.

In the first chapter of my book, Addie Ann Pickett, the twelve-year-old African American protagonist, can’t understand why her older brother and mother are so shook up by Medgar Evers’s death. “If he ain’t a friend and he don’t owe you money, what’s a matter?” she asks her brother.

What Addie Ann will come to learn is that her community—and the world—lost a hero. Medgar Evers was the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi from 1954 to June 12, 1963, when he was shot and killed in the driveway of his home.

Every single day, he knew his life was at risk. Just weeks before his murder, a bomb had been thrown into the carport of his home. His three kids slept on mattresses on the floor, below the level of their bedroom windows through which bullets had flown. There was no street number on the house to make it harder for his persecutors find.

But Medgar Evers lived by this motto: “The things that I don’t like I will try to change.”

And living as a black man in the South, there were a lot of things Medgar Evers didn’t like: When he was a young boy, he did not like walking twelve miles each way to the Negro high school, when there was a perfectly good school closer by. He did not like that after he fought for the U.S. in World War II, he came back to Mississippi and couldn’t sit down and order a hamburger in a restaurant. He did not like that most of his Negro friends and neighbors were prevented from voting by discriminatory tools, such as the poll taxes and unfair voter registration tests. He did not like that blacks were being lynched and people stood silent.

Medgar Evers spearheaded voter registration drives. He pressed for integration in the schools. And he documented civil rights abuses, pushed for justice, and exposed the horrors of the segregated South to the media and the world.

The lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 is now considered to be a landmark event in the fight for civil rights. What many people don’t know is that Medgar Evers went undercover as a regular field hand to talk to residents of the Delta and uncover the true facts of the case. In 1968, NAACP Field Organizer Howard Spence said:

Had it not been for Medgar Evers, who was NAACP secretary at the time…it would have just been another ‘case’ that’s been forgot….The Emmett Till case was the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott. It was the beginning of a lot of incidents in the South that began to make the Negro aware of the fact that he would have to get out and expose himself to these racists—to these people that were gonna kill him.

Today, as I think about Medgar Evers, I think about these words he once said at a dinner to honor the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that eventually led to the end of legal segregation in the public schools:

The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what we do here.

Resources:

While writing my book, I often took advice from Minnie White Watson, Curator of the Medgar Evers House and Museum, and an old family friend of the Evers’s. I had the privilege of interviewing her for my website too. You can read her comments here.

To get a first-hand look at the work of Medgar Evers, check out The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches, edited by Myrlie Evers-Williams & Manning Marable.

The box of books arrived just before dinner Wednesday. It took me a good hour to get up the guts to open it and another twenty four to start reading. Would my vision for the story hold up in reality?

Although I’ve probably read the manuscript through from start to finish ten times this year alone, I knew this time would be completely different. After all, it was no longer a manuscript.

It was a book!

After I got into bed, I let myself go straight to Kuckachoo, the fictional town in the Mississippi Delta where A Thousand Never Evers takes place. I no longer had to worry about whether Reverend Walker’s sermon is convincing, whether Addie Ann should say “gonna” or “going to,” whether Elmira would really burn sage to ward off bad luck.

Even in the advance reader copy that I got in October, I was always on the hunt for tiny mistakes and couldn’t fully enter the parallel universe of the story. But this time I just snuggled under the covers and got lost in reading a real book that happened to be mine. At 2am, halfway through, I drifted off to sleep with a smile on my face.

After that, it took about forty-eight more hours before I summoned the courage to finish it. Could the climax be as gripping as I had imagined in the movie in my mind? A couple days later, around midnight, I closed the back cover, thrilled that I finally told the story I’ve been wanting to tell for eight years.

Okay, I know I said I was going to blog about writing and civil rights. But as I’m learning to accept, sometimes life gives us unexpected turns. That’s what happened today.

Picture this: My husband and I are just minding our business, driving down Burnet Road, when out the window we spot a red British telephone booth sitting on the grass in front of a consignment shop. We chuckle. (The unofficial slogan for this city is “Keep Austin Weird” for a reason.)

But then just minutes later, I spy a white shack sitting in the parking lot of a used car dealership. On the shack is a sign that says, “Sista’s Shaved Ice.” Since it’s 103 degrees out, the word “ice” draws us into the parking lot like a magnet.

What we find there is nothing short of remarkable, especially for me, an East Coast girl under the complete misconception that the snow cone is a close relative of the 7-Eleven Slurpee.

Not so!

The true Southern snow cone and Slurpee are as connected in both flavor and attitude as Barack O’Bama and Dick Cheney.

And speaking of flavor, Sista’s Shaved Ice offers more than 75, including cotton candy, wedding cake, dreamsicle, coconut kiss, and pina colada. (Sadly, for undisclosed reasons, the Bat Man flavor is crossed off the list.)

Owner Beverly Lewis won’t give you one of those New England flat-top cones either. Each and every one comes with a perfect dome on the top. And the shaved ice feels just like snowflakes, the kind you caught on your tongue back when you were six years old.

If you’re anywhere within a 300-mile radius, I suggest you check it out.

Sista’s Shaved Ice is on Burnet between Anderson and 2222. Heading South, it will be on your left.