We're IN-DEMAND! We were invited by Indiegogo to re-open this campaign, because it was successful last year. Therefore, we can accept contributions and offer perks again to help make this book happen. I have completed the edit of the rough draft and - as promised below - now that final draft is complete - I will have a draft completion party here in NYC in the New Year! If you have already contributed, you will be invited and if you'd like to be invited but haven't contributed, you still can. You can also pick from all the lovely perks.

Any help you can offer at this stage is most welcome. I have spent the past five years working on this book and full time since this campaign began except for teaching last autumn and again now. The time offered me by you who have already contributed has been invaluable, and the book will be done no matter what. However, if you'd like to help me on the road to completion, I would be wildly grateful. I will only be teaching one class next semester and am on the agent and publisher hunt now, which - once discovered - will lead to the need for further revisions. 

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** REMINDER:  An added perk if we reach the goal of $10,000 is an invitation to All Donors to a 'draft completion party' in NYC!  The book will happen no matter what, but if we reach the goal, it'll happen sooner and I'd love to share this part of the journey with you all!**

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SUMMARY:

The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick and Jani  traces the lives of my grandmothers, both born during WWI (before women had the right to vote), but who cut two very different paths through their lives.  Dick was on the surface a one-dimensional, frustrated housewife (who was anything but), whereas Jani rebelled loudly against the conventions of marriage and motherhood, yet never stopped trying to find love, even after she crashed out of her third marriage on her way to becoming a feminist teacher in the 1970s. 

Dick and Jani's voices and experience offer a fresh perspective on the 20th Century.  Their lives as women who were neither famous nor infamous were restricted, but their witness is no less valuable for that.  Their choices - as women born into modest circumstances but who had outsized dreams - could not have been more different.  Their story is a study in contrasts, between the soul-crushing cost of conformity paid by Dick and the price of Jani's very flamboyant rebellion against the role she was told she should play. 

In other words, their perspectives offer a micro-history* of the time in which they lived and their experience is valuable as a mirror into our own time.  I have come to realize that without hearing and understanding our grandmothers' stories, we are impoverished for lack of deep knowledge of our own history.  This book is a humble attempt to begin to redress that balance.

I am requesting your help to complete this project now, because after three years of working on the book (which has included extensive research), which I've done between other commitments and employment, the final stage of research and drafting of this book requires my entire focus without other distractions to complete. Any help you can give will be gratefully received, whether it's $1 or $1,000, will be used solely to fund the writing of this book. 

SO WHAT'S YOUR STORY?

My background professionally and academically is in writing and directing theater and its relationship to philosophy.  I have won awards and had my plays published and produced internationally.  I have spent most of my adult life in NYC, except for 8 years living and working in London from 2003- 2011.  In 2010, having just completed a Ph.D. while running Apocryphal Theatre, my father had a massive heart attack in Sacramento, California.  I arrived a day before he died, just in time to say goodbye to someone I barely knew.  

Who's Dick?

In the week following my father's death, I was sorting through his storage locker when I came upon old pictures of my grandmother (Betty aka 'Dick'). I discovered in these photos and documents - beginning with her baby photo and including such items as War Ration stamps and my father's baby book - a woman and a time I had never known.  I had only known her as Nana - a frustrated woman who kept her house and heart like an Ethan Allen furniture showroom and seemed eternally disappointed in life and my mild-mannered grandfather - who was saddled with taking care of me as a young child and again as a young teen when my father or mother could not.  These photographs of her as a happy teenager and young woman showed me a life before the many losses of her life took their toll, beginning with the death of her dream of being an artist when the art classes in her high school were cut during the Depression and, to help her struggling family, she went to work in a rubber factory in her hometown of Seymour, Connecticut.  

I never thought I would write about Dick, because she and I had a difficult relationship, which was intimately entwined with my chaotic childhood and her fear and loathing of disorder.  However, as I began to pore through her old photos, including news clippings from youthful triumphs in plays and fashion shows, I learned more about her background, including my grandfather's need to change the family name from Bukoski to Barclay because his boss told him his name sounded 'too Red' when he was working as an Executive Secretary on the Manhattan Project.  I began to understand that her story was one of the many untold stories of the 20th Century.  However, in any book or movie, she would appear - if at all - as a joke, a footnote, a brief unpleasantness - she would never be viewed as a whole person.  I realized her story needed to be deeply heard and understood for a more full accounting of our own history.  Unlocking her history unlocked the true shape of this book.

Who's Jani?

I had always known I wanted to write about my other, more glamorous grandmother, the one who crashed out of three violent marriages, got pregnant and married as a teenager to a Harvard drop-out Merchant Marine, Russell - her ticket out of Toledo, Ohio to a more cosmopolitan Bostonian family - but who she divorced when he left on one more spree.  She then married a reporter - Bob, my grandfather, right before WWII began.  She lived and worked in post-War Vienna with my him until he decided to marry his lovely Viennese secretary. Reeling from that loss, she grasped onto her final, ill-fated third marriage to a Southern engineer named Earl during which she fell into a pill-induced haze of 1950s housewifery, which she clawed herself out of by getting a college education and teacher's degree in 1966. I met her for the first time I remember in the 1970s, when she was single, a teacher in the Milwaukee public school system, an active feminist and wore mini-skirts, white go-go boots and smoked cigars.  What's not to love?  

However, I never lived with Jani (which is the name by which I knew her).  She was a mythical figure who careened through our lives from time to time - who frankly scared me - until the summer of 1979, which we spent together in Peaks Island, Maine, when she was 63 and  dying of lung cancer, and I was 16 and taking care of her: 

That summer she showed me some of her photos from her girlhood and we reconciled over arguments we had had about the fact I wanted to be an artist rather than a physicist (her idea), when she confessed she, too, had wanted to go to NYC to study theater, but her parents had said no.  

When I began my research in earnest for this book in 2011, I traveled to my mother's and cousin's homes to read Jani's letters and writing that were in their possession.  I was confronted with aspects of her life that I had not suspected.  She had been my feminist super-hero, but what I was reading was disillusioning - in both a good and bad way.  In place of hero-worship, there is now an understanding of her as a human being.  I am almost done with reading her copious amounts of writing - correspondence, poems, published articles, stories, book drafts, legislation (she was instrumental in getting the rape laws changed in Wisconsin after someone made the mistake of trying to rape her in 1974) - and sorting through the legacy of this deeply complex and intriguing person.  She was a self-mythologizer who was an extremely effective organizer, an excellent op-ed writer who aspired to publish her fiction, a very strong woman who wanted nothing more at times than to be held, who was both tireless and exhausted.  She died too young of lung cancer, and was mourned by many, including her inner-city students in Milwaukee when she died.  

Why Dick and Jani?

As I began to piece together all the photos and documents for both women, I began to understand that their story was more than I had suspected, not only because no one's life is as simple as it may appear on the outside, especially to a child, but because they had lived through and participated in so many aspects of the 20th Century, but not from the traditional point of view we hear about it in our history books (WWII is about the battles and the homecoming of the men, not the women working as reporters or organizing army wives in Chicago - like Jani - or - in the case of Dick - being the wife of a man too physically small to fight who's beloved brother died in the Pacific; the Depression is seen from the point of view of the adults rather than the teenagers whose dreams must be deferred; the Women's Movement in the 1970s is usually the story of young women, not newly liberated grandmothers in their fifties).

I am writing the book from their points of view, because I want you to hear their voices and see through their eyes.  This is where my theater training comes in handy, because as a writer and a director, I am used to perceiving life from multiple points of view.  I am using Dick and Jani's own words from letters and documents, memories of them (mine and others') and my imagination.  As anyone knows who has ever tried to research their own family history, there is mythology (and sometimes outright lies of omission and commission) built into every story, so if these two women were here today to tell their stories, those stories' would be unreliable - in the same way my own autobiography would be, because we see ourselves through convenient scrims.  While, of course, my view, too, is ultimately subjective, I have been doing years of research - of their own writing, photos and the history surrounding them, their husbands, parents and grandparents, great-grandparents and so on - in order to understand as well as humanly possible how these astonishing women understood their own lives.

WHERE DOES MY MONEY GO? 

What I am asking for in this campaign is simple: money to pay for time.  Time to complete the research and a draft of this book, which, given the work I have done so far over the past three years, and assuming I raise enough funds to focus on this project over the summer, I should be able to complete by the autumn. 

I will then submit the work to an agent who has expressed interest in reading it and go from there. If I cannot find a traditional publisher for the book, I will publish the book independently.  Therefore, you can be assured, if you donate to this campaign, the book will indeed materialize. 

I will stay in touch with all contributors to this campaign to let you know how things are going up to when the book is published and in regard to any perks you claimed.  What gave me the courage to reach out for funding in this way was a friend of my mother's who spontaneously gave me money to help my research for the book, because she wanted to feel a part of it, which of course now she is.  I want anyone who donates to this campaign, no matter what the amount, to feel a part of it, because you will be.  No writer creates alone.  There are people who support us without whom we would simply vanish.  Anyone who says different is lying.

If I do not receive the full amount I am seeking, I will use the amount received to work on the book, so your donation will not go to waste. If I reach my goal or - even better - surpass it - the quicker the book will be completed, because I will have the unimpeded time to do so, but no matter what, the book will be completed.

I have a history of completing large and seemingly impossible projects, so you can have confidence that I will complete this one.  I have run two, critically acclaimed independent theater companies in NYC and London (getting funding for both and doctoral research as an American in the UK); led multi-year theater laboratories; and written, produced and directed complex productions since the 1980s.  Most of my plays are published in anthologies and online at Indie Theater Now.  I received a Ph.D. in 2009 from University of Northampton in the UK arguing that theater can be an act of philosophy and my BA with High Honors in Theater in 1986 from Wesleyan University in the US. 

My blog Somewhere in Transition, begun in 2011, traces the many shifts in my life that followed upon the disbanding of my company in London and includes a lot of information about the process of researching and writing this book.  

WHAT DO I GET IN RETURN?

Besides my undying gratitude and a special place in heaven for those who give to crowd-source funding campaigns, below are the perks on offer at various contribution levels, including ways of starting a micro-history project by telling your own grandmother/s stories.

At any level of giving, you receive: my eternal thanks and acknowledgement in the book when it comes out and on my blog (unless you choose to remain anonymous).

$1-up - My eternal thanks & acknowledgement in the book and on my blog. You will be also be invited to receive my periodic updates on the project.

$25-up - My eternal thanks, all the above plus an electronic version of the book.

$50-up - My eternal thanks, all the above plus a print version of the book.

$100-up - My eternal thanks, all the above plus a signed copy of the book (hardcover if available).

$250-up - My eternal thanks, all the above plus you can send me a picture of your grandmother/s (or great-grandmother/s) to be included on a website on which I will be curating a micro-history* of grandmothers.  This picture should include a few sentences describing your grandmother/s.

$500-up - My eternal thanks, all the above plus you can send me a longer description of your grandmother/s, which will be included on the site.  We can also talk for a half-hour in person or on Skype about your grandmother/s, to see if there is a longer story you would like to tell about them.

$1,000-up - My eternal thanks, all the above plus you can send me a short story about one or both of your grandmother/s that I will work with you to shape for publication on the website.  As a professional writing teacher, mentor and writer, I can give you valuable feedback to develop this story. You can give this gift to a loved one or use it yourself.

$2,500-up - My eternal thanks, all the above plus you can send me a longer story about one or both of your grandmother/s that I will work with you to shape for publication on the website.  You can give this gift to a loved one or use it yourself.

$5,000-up - My eternal thanks, all the above plus two hours of coaching, including a tour of my grandmothers' archives, and a discussion about how to research and create a book from this type of material.   You can give this gift to a loved one or use it yourself.

** If you want to contact me about perks at any level, but especially the ones that include working with me, please feel free to email me at julialeebarclay@yahoo.com **

ANY OTHER WAY I CAN SUPPORT YOU?

Even if you can't donate, you can help by sharing the campaign: using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or ye olde email.  However, you do it, please tell people!  The more interest in the project, the better!  If you use Indiegogo's share tools, that shows interest in the campaign in their algorithm, which in turn makes it visible to more people, so all of these actions are incredibly helpful.  

*[note for geeks like me who like this kind of thing:] I first heard the term micro-history thanks to the historian Jill Lepore, who wrote about it in her article Historians Who Love Too Much.  This term is used as distinct from biography in that it signifies writing about people who are usually not so famous or exceptional, but whose lives are therefore more indicative of the social and political landscape of the time in which they lived.  Lepore herself wrote an astonishing miscro-history recently about Jane Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's less well-known, but nevertheless extraordinary sister.  From Jane's perspective, we see and experience the American Revolution from ground-level, which makes the experience far more interesting - and informative - than any history book I've ever read.  The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick and Jani  is an attempt to pull this off for the 20th Century from the point of view of my grandmothers.