Washington Square On-Air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review, Lansing Community College's literary journal. Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing.

Hey there. This is Melissa Ford Luckin, editor for the Washington Square Review. I'm here today with John R. Frame, whose story Dorothy is in our Summer 25 issue. Hey there, John.

Hi, Melissa.

So give us a little description of your short story.

So the story Dorothy is about an older woman who takes a liking to a middle aged man. They live across the street from one another and she gets more and more infatuated with him to the point that she eventually kind of becomes obsessed and it becomes a bit of a nightmare for the. For the man.

What inspired you to write this?

It's based on actual events. So I lived in Columbus, Ohio, and I had this older neighbor and I used to help her out. So she was a retired woman. Her husband had died, her family had moved away, and so she didn't have many people kind of helping her out. And I would get her, you know, the occasional thing that she needed, groceries, you know, kind of things that she wanted. And then she, she kind of built on that and kept coming over to the house and then she would kind of invite me over. And first I went over and then it was, it was becoming obvious that she was a little bit infatuated. The story in real life didn't end the way the story ends. Her family started to intervene and my then girlfriend, my wife Rama, she also intervened. And then eventually I moved away. In the actual events, she's an African American woman. And as a result, I kind of had a lot of sympathy for her. She basically lived in that neighborhood for most of her life and had seen a lot of things happen, a lot of changes, and I was less inclined to kind of be rude to her because I knew that she had gone through a lot. And then I changed that for the story because I thought that might have added maybe a little too much for the reader to take. So I kind of took the racial aspect of it.

How did it feel to write the story since as you said, it was kind of, it came from some real events, but you made decisions to switch things up and change it. How did it feel to take your experience that actually happened and then move it around?

For me, it felt like this was a story I was always going to write. And so it was kind of liberating to get it out of my system. My wife really liked the story because she knew all about it and she was kind of involved. I didn't include the story. So I'm in this writers group in Tacoma, Washington, and I submitted it to them for critique, and they. They didn't know it was based on the true story. And they kept asking, well, why does this person, you know, the protagonist, why does he never stand up for himself? He seems to keep just getting more and more kind of reeled in by this woman. So that made me feel as if maybe I should have, you know, done something more. But I think what really kind of struck me in writing it is how it could have ended up. And fortunately it didn't. But there were occasions where I was in her house, in her bedroom, in her basement, where I was thinking, why. Why am I. Why am I doing this?

Did you ever figure out why you were doing it?

I felt bad for her. You know, she was older. She clearly had, you know, there was some senility or possibly undiagnosed dementia. Again, the fact that she had gone through a lot. And also, she wrote me this note one time and left it on my car. And it was clear that she was under educated, so I would say barely literate. So. So there were a lot of things that made me sympathetic towards her and that made me want to help her. And maybe I'm just a sucker.

Yeah. Being a kind person is a good thing, even though it can kind of get you into situations sometimes.

Well, you have to draw a line, though, for your own safety.

Yeah. Did it give you a sense of closure?

Yes, actually, yes. A couple of things give me a sense of closure. One was writing it and putting it into some kind of order because it happened over a period of years. And I thought, you know, story itself, you know, you can read in 10 or 15 minutes. The other thing that gave me a sense of closure was coming back to the neighborhood and seeing my house and seeing the neighborhood itself and how it's changed. So I moved away from Ohio in 2016 and moved back to New York, which is where I lived before. And so coming back, I think it was just this year when I came back from West Africa and went to my old neighborhood. I don't know if she's still alive, but it made me realize I wasn't nostalgic for. For that particular relationship. But. But going back to it, I did kind of, you know, realize that I was thankful that it was all over.

Why did you go back to the neighborhood?

I just wanted to see what my old house looked like. Her neighborhood had changed, which it has considerably.

That can be a weird experience. To be in a place where you had existed on a daily basis for years and then you leave it and you come back and you have changed and the place has changed.

I lived there for about 13 years. I bought the house and did a lot of renovations on it. And so in Columbus there's, you know, i70, had been built all the way through this neighborhood. It was traditionally an African American neighborhood. And because of kind of, I guess, gentrification, for want of a better word, the neighborhood has become less and less concentrated in terms of its racial identity and has diversified a bit and, you know, it's completely changed.

It can be an unsettling experience. Yeah, changes like that. How does this story fit into your other creative writing? Similar. Different.

It's a lot different. It's. It's probably more personal. Most of my creative writing relates somewhat to my experience as a historian, as a history teacher and a researcher. I have many novels in various stages of repair. So what, what I've recently finished is a novel about the whiskey distilling industry. And that's kind of partly based on my experiences as a researcher from a callan de stores in Scotland. And it's a sequel to another novel called A Wee Drama, which is about kind of a rags to riches story about somebody who kind of builds a whiskey distilling empire. And then the sequel, A Rough Wooing, is about his daughter, his. The early 20th century. And that novel is about being a, a woman in a predominantly male, almost entirely male industry in the early 20th century in Scotland. Largely. My fiction is, is mostly historical and so Dorothy is, is something different from that.

Well, it was kind of, it was kind of historical.

It is, it is, I suppose now, yes, again, it took place over a period of years and it seems like a long time ago, I mean, coming back to the US and.

Right, but it was part of your.

History in the neighborhood. Yes, exactly. Yeah. But it just, it just seems like so long ago. Even though in the grand scheme of things it's only, you know, 10, 12 years. Yeah.

I was interested in what you were saying about the whiskey industry and that you had done some other research. What was that?

Right after I finished my PhD, I was hired by Macallan Distillers, which is, I don't know if you're familiar with Scotch whiskey, but it's one of the bigger kind of names in Scotch whiskey. And they're located in a place called Craig Ellachy, which is in the Speyside Valley. And when I was hired, they wanted me to research their history because they Expected there to be a lot of intrigue and romance and, I don't know, salacious gossip. But their archives, they didn't really have archives. They just had a bunch of ledgers and books and papers scattered all over the place. And so I had to travel around and try and kind of put all this together. And nobody had really done it before, but they realized there was a kind of marketing opportunity and, and this was in the kind of the early days of the Internet, so the kind of late 90s. And so they essentially wanted to build a website and put interesting facts about their company on their website. Right. But because it's a relatively successful company that had, you know, subsequently, it was originally family owned and subsequently bought by various conglomerates to the point that I think at the time I was writing it was owned by a, a Japanese drinks company. Because of his success, the story, the history of it didn't have that many kind of salacious or kind of intriguing stories. And so I found what I could, but it actually inspired me to write the novel I was referring to earlier, a wee drama where I just added. So I just made up some of the.

You filled in what they wanted to be there.

Exactly. Obviously changed, you know, changed all the names, changed the name of the company, but it's essentially, it's essentially about the setting and, you know, some of the characters and the story itself is somewhat based on Macallan, but the research I did for them was a fairly kind of massive amount of amount. I was there for about a year on and off, doing research in various archives in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London. I even interviewed one of the family members, is a guy called Alan Skia, who's. He's a screenwriter. If you've ever heard of the Queen's Gambit. He's the guy who wrote the screenplay for that Don't Look Now. He was famously kind of collaborated with a guy called Nick Rogue. So there's a movie called Don't look now, which is, I think it has Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie and there's a. There's a famous sex scene in the film that he wrote into the film, but he also wrote in that they had to include a bottle of Macallan. So he said that every time he watches the film, even though it's kind of a famous sex scene between a husband and wife. And so it's very kind of intimate and very realistic, you know, for the 1970s, which is fairly unusual. But he said that every time he watches it, he focuses on the fact, on his company, which is on the, the bedside table. So we had to go interview him about his kind of connections with the family. So he, he has an office in Piccadilly Circus. So I went there and interviewed him for it. And so I played to amass all this material and then I think more or less, as soon as I finished the job, emigrated to the United States. So I never really knew what they did with it. I know that some of it went into the website. There is essentially a kind of book that I put together, but it was never published or anything. So they have since designed or built and designed a visitor center which is quite popular for its kind in the region. Early features famous and when they kind of said goodbye to me, they gave me a portal of 30 year old single mall which is pretty impressive. And I, I still have it or my parents actually have it. I never opened it. I was going to, but I looked up on ebay and it was, it was worth about £7,000 for you know, roughly kind of 9 or $10,000. And. And that was about 10 years ago. So it's probably worth a lot more now.

Yeah, you're probably not ever drinking that. You're like, thanks for this bottle that I will never be able to drink. Much appreciated. One of the reasons why I asked the question about the research that you did on the whiskey, because I know from looking at your resume you have a pretty, pretty hefty historical background. You've taught a lot of history and you're a history scholar. So when you write your fiction and your other creative works, there's a lot of history that goes in. So what I'm wondering is how do you, what do you pull from the history? Is it facts, is it human condition, circumstances, emotion? What do you think transfers over, like what compels you?

That's a good question. I think what it helps me to do is to have a structure in the sense that, yeah, the characters have to conform to how people would be during that particular time period. But the events that unfold in the background are often what I'm leading towards. So how the characters are interacting to certain events. So for, for example, in the first book I wrote about the whiskey industry, there are just various kind of political events that happen that necessarily impinge on how the characters are reacting to what's going on in the business world. So for example, there's scenes where the main character ends up lobbying in the British Parliament because of various kind of tax problems or things that are problematic for the whiskey industry. And in the second book, it's set during the First World War. And one of the characters goes off to war. And that has a huge effect on the protagonist. And what I wanted to write about in that book is Prohibition in the United States and how that affected the trade. So this woman inherits the business, and, you know, the First World War obviously has a huge effect on the business because essentially it means that the business has to stop. And then almost immediately afterwards, Prohibition in the United States happens, which means a huge market for the. For the product is now out of reach. At the same time, my hometown, Wick, which is in Cape in the very north of Scotland, it also decided by vote to prohibit the sale of alcohol. So from around the end of the First World War until the Second World War, so longer than American Prohibition, my hometown was a dry town. And the distillery that I'm talking about that I based the story on is in the town. So they're producing whiskey, but they can't actually sell it the time. So those were the kind of markers I wanted to have within the novel, which essentially helped to structure the novel. How people interact is essentially kind of, you know, based on those events. Protagonist is a woman, and then her sister is another main character, and she's in favor of votes for women, so she's antagonizing for that. And also she's agitating for. For Prohibition, so for temperance. So she's a reformer, whereas her sister, the main character, is a businesswoman. So their interaction is what I really wanted to. That's the main conflict in the novel. So it's mostly about sibling rivalry, but also to kind of dive into the psychology of that relation and I guess the business world in general.

It sounds to me, like you said, you use the events as a of sort structure and then imagine what people would be like and how they would exist within the structure. Do you think that. Do you think that experience of thinking about people that way kind of translates back into your historical scholarship, the practice of imagining how people would be as real everyday people?

Yeah, I think that's one of the restricting problems of writing history is the inability to get into the psychology of people interact. My PhD thesis, there's a whole fair chunk of a chapter on an incident at the Singer sewing factory in Clyde bank in Glasgow in Scotland. They had a huge strike in 1911, and most of the factory, it was the biggest, I think, the biggest factory in Europe. And most of the workers were women. And part of the story of that is that they kind of came together basically to organize without kind of major union involvement. And so it's kind of this kind of grassroots movement that was helped by a American style union and then this kind of American style socialist organization that is informing how to organize unorganized people. It was unskilled labor because they were making needles for sewing machines. And so just found that fascinating and very interesting. It was one of the biggest strikes of the early 20th century in, in Europe. And it also shows how, you know, capital and labor sort of interact on an international scale because Singer just was able to move its production to Elizabeth, New Jersey and somewhere else in Russia. And they kind of mitigated the, the problem of the, the strike by, you know, by producing elsewhere. And then you, then you look at labor and how, you know, you could, you could potentially have had organizations that were, you know, internationally based. Unfortunately, I was looking at it from a kind of macro scale, although there were kind of certainly day by day details within the, the research. But it was hard to get into the heads of people because.

Right.

Generally people don't write, you know, they don't leave diaries. There's some letters. But a lot of the letters that I was looking at were, were company letters. It was, you know, it was more to smash the union than how the workers were organizing themselves. And all the archives, the Singer archives for that were in Madison, Wisconsin. So that, that's actually kind of what brought me to the US to begin with, was kind of researching that particular part of the PhD and then various other things. But I spent a month in Madison just looking at the Singer archives, which helped me kind of write that part. But I mean, ideally it would be nice to be able to kind of maybe write about the other aspects of those women's lives and how they were navigating the world in this, this very kind of transnational era. And I suppose in terms of the fiction, certainly the history that I looked at has informed. Get into the mindset. But, but then to really expand on like maybe how people thought and interacted and spoke and what they read and had, you know, clothes they wore and so on. I think the history has certainly informed the, the fiction as far as that goes.

Well, that's, I think the magic of historical fiction is that, like you said, includes the clothing, the mindset, the, the dialogue just to live the moment as somebody else potentially could have lived it all those years ago. It's. Yeah. And I know that when you are doing scholarly work, there's not a lot of space for those kinds of emotions and thoughts. So they really, they. I was wondering if they could exist in your head As a help you form research questions and think about the people who. Even though what you probably would think about parts of it aren't going to end up in the scholarship.

Yeah, I mean, at the time, you know, I was much younger, I certainly. I didn't commit that to paper. I mean, I think I was probably thinking that because you can't help but put yourself into that kind of situation and you're kind of imagining it as if it's happening. But I never wrote down, oh, here's, here are the conversations that could have been. You know, a lot of it was things that were filtered through, you know, publications from, from socialist newspapers at the time or from local or national press. And so you're getting a distilled version of it, you know, really understanding what people are going through.

Right.

On an individual, personal basis. Except there are these letters from the executives and from the management that let you know what they were thinking. And so we. Which is fairly typical.

Yes. Yeah, very. Because anything that the others were thinking has been, you know, cleaned up, tidied, curated.

Yeah, I mean, there was an oral history done, interestingly. So there are recordings of people who kind of remember the factory. I can't remember when the factory closed, but there were certainly much later. You know, people had committed, you know, their thoughts to, to what it was like working there, but not from that time period. So I was never able to really kind of uncover exactly what ordinary people thought about it. But, you know, I had enough information based on some of the. So some of the organizers of the, the strike, they eventually went into a kind of more broader political arenas and kind of became fairly famous in left wing socialist circles in the Glasgow and so. And so. And some of them did write autobiographies or memoirs. So you do get kind of a sense of what they were like and their reflections on things. But like the woman in general didn't. Yeah, it's hard to tell even, you know, what happened to them.

And it's interesting to think about a person who is a political leader and is trying to, you know, change society as a different person than somebody who's simply showing up at the factory and making needles so that they can pay their bills. You know, they have two different life trajectories. So. Yeah, so you have these manuscripts. Are you revising them? Are you sending them out for publication? What are you doing with them?

So as I said, four, I think four different novels and I'm currently working on one, so I'm about halfway through that one, which is about my time In West Africa, the one that's kind of, I guess, closest to kind of sending out. Just recently finished having it critiqued by the writers group. They just finished looking all over, kind of chapter by chapter, over the course of the past year or so. And my intention is to send that out to agents and small presses.

All right, well, good luck with that. I was laughing a little bit because many people who are listening also have manuscripts in different states, myself included.

Yeah, that process is very laborious and thankless in particular because you almost get.

No feedback, you know, or, or you get contrasting feedback. One person loves this and thinks this is great. The other person thinks that's not good, you should take it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ultimately, you just have to laugh. You have to have a sense of humor about it. Otherwise.

Well, what I've been getting lately is publishers asking whether I could make the ending of this, of this particular book about the whiskey distilling industry, if I can make it more optimistic. A happier ending. You know, I'm told, you know, in these times, you know, people are looking for, you know, escape and, you know, a nice ending to things. And generally that's, that's not, you're just not feeling it. I mean, I'm not. The way the story unfolds, you know, is the way it unfolds. And so I'm not gonna change the ending just because.

Right.

I want the reader to feel better, but.

Right.

That wouldn't be true to the characters.

Yeah, I, I, I hear what you're saying. And not everyone needs a super tidy, happy ending at the end, especially when you're thinking about history and things that really happened in real life, things don't always just end up tidy and happy.

Right. I mean, Dorothy, the story is not a happy ending.

Right.

But in real life, it was a happy ending. Okay, did escape.

All right, so if people would like to stay in touch with you and follow you online, where can they find you?

So I have a website, which you can, you can look for me at jrframe and then on Blue Sky. I just recently started a Blue sky page, and so my website has those. And it also has articles and flash fiction and then synopses of all the novels.

Okay, beautiful. Well, I'll be sure to include those links in the show notes so that people can follow you and see what you're up to.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks a lot for coming on today.

Thanks for stopping by the audio town square of the Washington Square Review. Until next time, this has been the Washington Square On-Air from Lansing Community College. To find out more about our writers, community and literary journal, visit lcc.edu/wsl. Writing is messy, but do it anyway.