Julia Park Tracey

December 1, 2022December 1, 2022

Announcement!

Publisher’s Weekly Shelf Awareness (Dec 1, 2022)

(https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=4370#m58402)

Four women with extensive book world experience have launched Sibylline Press, which will focus on publishing “the brilliant works of women authors over the age of 50,” including memoirs, narrative nonfiction and fiction. Sibylline Press will release six books in fall 2023 and six in spring 2024 and will be distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West. The company also has an unusual publishing model, which involves Sibylline authors being deeply involved in the promotion of their books and other Sibylline titles.

Sibylline Press takes its name from the ancient Sibyls, older women whose oracular utterances contained wisdom captured in scrolls that Roman leaders often consulted. The press is, it said, “founded on the concept of collaboration illustrated by our Sibylline math, in which 1 x 1 = 100. Not one Sibyl, but many, are formidable. We have carried that metaphor into every aspect of the business, engaging our authors in daily, weekly, and monthly communications, in setting up our promotional strategy, and in developing a collaborative approach to promotion.”

The Sibylline founders are:

Publisher Vicki DeArmon, who has a publishing, bookselling and entrepreneurial background that includes founding Foghorn Press at age 25. (Foghorn was distributed by PGW.) After 13 years, she sold Foghorn to Avalon Books, now part of Hachette Book Group. She was also marketing and events director of Copperfield’s Books in Northern California for eight years, and has consulted to California independent bookstores, creating the “Everyone Gets a Book” holiday program that is still used by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance (CALIBA).

Executive editor Julia Park Tracey, a journalist who has headed city magazines and music, literary, and regional alt-news tabloids as well as the book publishing imprint of Stellar Media Group. She’s also a social media maven, conducting training and audits for groups such as the former Northern California Independent Booksellers Association and the Women’s National Book Association.

Rights and special sales director Anna Termine, who has worked in both trade and academic publishing for more than 30 years, specializing in rights and licensing. Termine and DeArmon established the Independent Travel Publishers Association together 35 years ago.

Design director Alicia Feltman, who is a web designer for the American Booksellers Association’s IndieCommerce platform and CALIBA as well as for Copperfield’s, where she worked with DeArmon on various projects.

Under the Sibylline publishing model, authors of all of a season’s titles will participate in shared tours, advertising and a promotional strategy that “celebrates the brilliance of women over 50.” Authors will contribute to the marketing budget and receive a generous royalty until their contribution is paid back at which time the royalty returns to a traditional one.

DeArmon commented: “We are a traditional publisher. But even as a traditional publisher, we’re pushing against some long-held lines, giving our authors unheard of support and access. We believe that the better an author understands the industry, the better she can work within it and with us to achieve success for her book.”

Sibylline Press’s Fall list includes three memoirs and two works of historical fiction and one mystery series:

These Broken Roads: Scammed and Vindicated: One Woman’s Story by Donna Hayes, the memoir of a Jamaican immigrant who gets scammed and robbed of her life’s savings by the “love of her life” met on an online dating site, but overcomes hardships to find success.

Becoming Maeve: Coming Out in Corporate America by Maeve DuVally, the memoir of coming out transgender in one of the most high-profile financial institutions in the U.S.

Reading Jane by Susannah Kennedy. After the suicide of her domineering mother, the author discovers diaries spanning 45 years that challenge and upend long-held truths in this memoir.

The Bereaved by Julia Park Tracey. In 1859, after her husband’s death, a grieving mother tries to support her children in New York City, losing them to the Home of the Friendless and the Orphan Train, then sets out to reclaim them. Based on the author’s family experience.

The Pocket Book by Patricia Reis. In this work of historical fiction, upon the death of her cold father, a suppressed 50-year-old woman begins an ancestral quest in Ohio in the 1800s, awakening secrets and herself.

The Rotting Whale: A Hugo Sandoval Eco Mystery, the first in a new mystery series by Jann Eyrich. Steeped in the noir of The City, the old-school inspector with his trademark Borsalino fedora, is a media darling, reluctant bachelor, and people’s hero fighting the good fight in a modern era that attempts to eclipse the old San Francisco Sandoval loves. In his first case in the series, he must find his sea legs before he can solve the mystery of how a 90-ton blue whale became stranded twice in a remote inlet off the North Coast.

November 13, 2022November 13, 2022

Forthcoming from Sibylline Press Fall 2023

Excited to announce that I have signed a contract and my historical novel, The Bereaved, will be in bookstores in fall 2023. Prepare yourself for nattering and humblebrags with a side of shameless self promotion.

I hope you will love the story of Martha and her Orphan Train children, based on the true story of my fourth great grandmother and her four scattered children. Writing this story was one way I grieved the loss of our son. Martha and her lost boy are so much a part of me. Literally in my DNA.

#fallbooks #bookstagram #booksofinstagram #historicalfiction #civilwar #suicidelosssurvivor

October 22, 2022October 27, 2022

Merry Land

We owned property in Virginia and we owned property in Maryland, and unfree people were part of that chattel property at the time. There is very little left of the actual plantations in the state of Maryland, but surprisingly, there is a fairly large influence left behind. Our Bailey, Upshaw and Hillary ancestors lived in Maryland in the 1700s and claimed land plats that were very large in comparison to the quarter sections of land in the Southern states. We visited the Largo and Marlboro areas in Maryland to find traces of the former Largo, Meadows, and Beall’s Pleasure, and found essentially nothing like avenues of trees, brick houses or swanky pillars. Instead, we found parking lots, freeway onramps, and a toxic waste disposal unit. But the neighborhoods have traces everywhere, to wit—

Maryland is lousy with Beales and Upshers, with Largos and Marlboros and so on. The very scope of their plantations is astonishing—how much land they must have had in cultivation. Maybe it just seems big, under the parking lots, onramps, and Lowe’s shopping centers. But these plantations were veritable villages. They sprawled. And the markers today, the length of Old Largo Road, for example — it just keeps reappearing on the map. According to my measurements (and Google maps), the Old Largo Road, which was there before the newer Route 202 Largo Road, is more than six miles long. How much of that was within or alongside Largo itself? How large was Largo? I clearly have more exploration to do, but as one of the landowners in the area, Thomas Beall or Beale (Bailey) would have owned a piece or pieces of land that today would be worth millions. Many millions.

Meanwhile, history is underfoot in Maryland in other ways. How do you get to Baltimore from Burtonsville? You take the Old Baltimore Road.

You want a sandwich? Stop at the Sisters Sandwiches & Such, which used to be the Higgins Tavern, built in 1823, or go hiking in the Blue Mash , where the enslaved used to hide from their captors but now you can do some nice jogging or birdwatching. You can trip over history, traces of the past, if you’re not looking, and it’s everywhere, once you start to pay attention.

The plantations in Maryland were underneath parking lots, and in one case, a toxic waste drop-off facility, so you can no longer see what used to be. But then there’s the Three Sisters Plantation, which has become a housing development, and the main house has been clad in vinyl siding. It’s still there, but not. The Beale houses are gone but their neighbor’s place survived, from 1700s era—Darnall’s Chance was their closest neighbor, and that house remains.

Largo Plantation, in the forgotten corner of a highway

I wish I knew what to say beyond, “This is weird, can you believe it? Look at this!” I joke with people about how they owe me back rent, as if I ever had a thing to do with that era, the ownership of these places, or the captives they enslaved.

But I grew up in houses that my parents owned, and my four siblings and I all went to college. We all went to Cotillion (ballroom dance and comportment classes) and learned to dance the foxtrot and waltz, how to sit and stand and wear gloves and greet our elders. We know how to be courteous in any social situation and which fork to use. We’ve been to the symphony, opera, and ballet, and know how to eat in a restaurant. We have books in our homes, and we enjoy learning. There’s a certain class awareness as well as race awareness in how we live our lives, some more than others. I believe these attitudes are inherited, taught along the way. My great-grandmother sneering at people who worked with their hands ripples down. We worry what people think of us. We don’t want to let down the side.

The privilege is real. I don’t know any other way. I don’t feel guilty about the life I live. I do feel that acknowledgement is vital. We got here because someone else did the work so we didn’t have to. We got here because someone else paid the true cost. It’s deeper than that, but I’m still thinking it over.

Middle aged white woman wearing glasses and a thick orange sweater used her phone, while seated on a moving train, in sunlight. — Thinking it over.

October 20, 2022October 21, 2022

Thoughts on Remembering

We have been in Virginia for some days now, heading first to Accomack County, and thence to Chincoteague, where we had two days of beach, birds, and a boat. I posted a few videos and counted birds. Seeing the bald eagles made my day, and more views of cardinals, Carolina wrens and chickadees, and the black vulture, plus seabirds, added to my pleasure. We had meant to go to Williamsburg and see the homes and buildings but we ended up going to the Jamestown archaeological site instead, which was less about reproducing the past and more about revealing it. Let’s just say I didn’t realize they had resorted to cannibalism. They did.

We went on to Shackleford’s, an unincorporated area near West Point and the top of the York River, past a smelly paper pulp company. The Shacklefords were a family that married into the Bailey family about 5 generations ago. Wealth follows wealth, and Frances brought her family’s slaving wealth to the Baileys. The area is farming land, with fields planted with winter wheat, oil-seed radish and other covering crops

The area formerly known as the Shacklefords plantation.

It is pretty country (once the living areas of the Rappahannock tribe), with clear fields, cleared by someone who was likely not a Shackleford, and pretty houses, the oldest most certainly built by enslaved humans. I try to imagine what it was like back then. This part of the country is so forested, there are hundreds of thick trees in every direction, except where it has been cleared — I cannot imagine clearing so many trees to make a tobacco field, a cornfield, a wheat field. All by hand, using hand tools and elbow grease. Long days, Sundays off, perhaps, maybe. I have no idea what it was like to be enslaved, nor to enslave others. It boggles the mind.

We went on to the next site, on our way to Norfolk, to an industrial town called Newport News. I should say under the town, because where there are docks and cranes and container ships, there was once the plantation called St. Marie’s Mount, and enough enslaved workers to make it tun: tobacco and food crops for the family, farm animals to fill the table. Daniel Gookin owned the property (taken or bought from the Nansemond and Kecoughtan). He was the administrator of American Indian affairs, or whatever it was called in 1680-ish, the first in American history, for better or worse. He held the land on the Chesapeake Bay at the mouth of the James River. The soil is sandy and the fishing is very good, but I don’t now how it was to farm there. His son took land across the Bay at Nansemond between the Nansemond River and Chuckatuck Creek, and so they moved along, as they sought fertile soils and better/different/more land. I couldn’t get close enough to stand on St. Marie’s Mount land so I got as close as I could on public land—the King-Lincoln Park fishing pier.

I read off the names of those enslaved by our family in Virginia, and collected some sand and razor clamshells.

I have been thinking about our great-grandmother, Willie Doris (Upshaw) Bailey, that elegant, Southern, snooty lady, who fished in hat and gloves and swore her sons would never work with their hands. She couldn’t abide the song, “Marching Through Georgia.” I have thought her weak and silly and overdramatic, and dismissed her feelings with the wave of a hand. But as we were driving along the backroads of Virginia, my sister said something like she was glad we went one way and not the other because there were more birds to see, “and birding trumps family history.”

As soon as she said the T-word, I flinched. “God, don’t say that word,” I said, “I hate that name.” And then I got it. And I felt—a kinship. I understood the feeling. I know what she meant with her visceral reaction. The South is complicated. So is family. I’m still wondering and searching.

October 17, 2022October 27, 2022

Chesapeake! and Ghosts

“On your left, hidden almost totally by the trees, is Warwick, whose oldest section is believed to date back to the 17th century. In 1749, the house’s mistress, Rachel Revell Upshur, was bitten by a rabid fox and developed rabies. Her servants smothered her in her feather bed to end her suffering. There are tales of ghostly visitations by Rachel, and when it rains, it is said, her blood still appears on the doorstep of Warwick, left there when she was carried into the house after the fox attack.” — Washington Post, March 31, 1989

So we went here yesterday. It was a little off the beaten path but worth the venture. I thought it was a ruin or a shell, abandoned, but it turned out that someone still lived there. But as we drove in the dirt lane (clearly marked as a public street, but what used to be the grand entrance to the 4000 acre Warwick plantation), there were signs of life. A child’s play structure, curtains, a mowed lawn at the smaller residence on the right… and on the left? A graveyard. An old cemetery, for family.

But the NO TRESPASSING signs everywhere made us reluctant to get out and explore. It’s private property. People have guns. The haunted house legend has attracted lookyloos. They are annoyed. I will write to the local historical society and see if I can determine who is buried there. But one thing I’m betting: it will be White folks, not the enslaved. Not out front where everyone could see.

I really just wanted to see the ruins but it turned out not to be a ruin, so I was unable to explore or do more than snap some quick photos from the car, and take a soil sample for memento. People get techy about their property, with good reason.

We left there, and drove farther up the peninsula. At another point we crossed the Mattapoony River and that is where another Upsher had several thousand acres and of course a lot of enslaved workers to do his bidding.

“Take the oyster-shell road to the left and drive for six-tenths of a mile, until you reach an attractive mansion, Brownsville. John Upshur built Brownsville in 1806, adding the wooden portions three years later when visiting relatives made the main house too cramped for him. President Grover Cleveland is said to have stayed here during his fishing trips to the barrier islands. The mansion and grounds are owned today by the Virginia Coastal Reserve, which makes its headquarters there.” — Washington Post, March 31, 1989

We were unable to get to that spot, Brownsville. Time is flying and we have been on the move constantly. I have been trying to keep track of all that takes place, and am grateful for my phone. The sheer number of photos is overwhelming. We stopped for two nights in Chincoteague, to rest and see birds, wild ponies, and take a pontoon boat out to see the islands and water. We saw dolphins out in the open water, and so many seabirds. It was truly magical. Excellent seafood and a picnic on the beach. I named the enslaved people who had lived in Virginia while I stood on the beach, the great Atlantic behind me. See my Facebook page for that video.

Tomorrow we head toward Newport News (a former family plantation), and then to Richmond, stopping at Shackelfords along the way — more family heritage there. And more after that. Thanks for reading along.