Hello! My name is Amanda Grace Shu, and I’m Larksong Writers Place’s new intern, working remotely from Boston, Massachusetts. This is the first in a series of blog posts about each of the Larksong board members, their hopes for the organization, and—of course—their writing. This week, I had a chat with Karen Gettert Shoemaker, author of The Meaning of Names and Larksong’s founder.
“I think writing is a lonely craft, but like most people, writers don’t like to be lonely,” Karen told me. “When I traveled all over the state, especially the rural areas, for One Book, One Nebraska programs (Karen’s novel The Meaning of Names was chosen for the state-wide reading program in 2016), one of the questions I was most often asked, beyond those particular to the novel was, ‘How do I find other writers?’ I realized there was a need that wasn’t being met.” Larksong was created to fill that need, building a community of writers who support and encourage one another. Karen also wanted to expand Nebraska’s presence in the wider literary world: “I wanted people to get to know Nebraska writers, to remind them that there’s always something happening in the literary scene in Nebraska.”
The first step on the journey toward creating Larksong, Karen said, was “finding the confidence to believe I have the right to do it.” Coming from a big Catholic family in a small town, she wrestled with the self-doubt she had internalized growing up. “When you got out of your lane, the ‘Who do you think you are?’ question came up, explicitly or implicitly,” she said. “I had to learn to believe I could do it before I could actually do it.” She ended up surprising herself with her own success after creating and running the first “Write on the River” retreat: “I remember lying on the upper deck of the River Inn the night it was over and looking at the sky and laughing. I couldn’t believe I had pulled this off!” That success led to other efforts that eventually led to forming the Larksong nonprofit organization.
Although the initial plan was to set up Larksong Writers Place in a physical location in Lincoln, the COVID-19 pandemic has delayed that search. However, it has also provided Larksong with new opportunities in the form of Zoom classes, transforming Larksong from a regional to an interstate and even international community. Writers from from Los Angeles to Boston, and even Canada and Portugal, have been able to virtually attend Larksong’s classes. “The silver lining of COVID for Larksong is that it gave people a space to go and stay creative,” Karen said. “It’s a tremendous service to help people deal with difficult times.”
A newfound sense of community rising from a pandemic is not a new theme for Karen, whose novel The Meaning of Names takes place during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. Even before the days of COVID-19, Karen was struck by the similarities between WWI America and the climate of the early 2000s. In fact, the original title of The Meaning of Names was This Is Now. When I asked if her research into the past pandemic gave her any insight or advice into the current one, she laughed, still not sure she had any wisdom to offer, then reflected on “the ways in which ordinary people become heroes, and simple actions become heroic . . . Each of us had to help everybody else, in some way. [I see in both eras] the necessity of individuals to help other individuals.” That certainly sounds like wisdom and insight to me.
“The pandemic is what pushed this dream [of Larksong Writers Place] into being,” she said. “The 1918 pandemic thrust me into spotlight, then Larksong sprang to life because of the next one.”
Hopefully, we won’t have to wait for another pandemic to bring Karen’s next great idea to life. In the meantime, Larksong continues to expand and strengthen the community of writers, in Nebraska and beyond.