Until I began editing for her, I had spent only a few
minutes with Helen Masson Copeland, at a writer's event a number of years
ago. But I never forgot her, because after discovering that I had young
children, she handed me a copy of her book This Snake Is Good to
take home to share with them. My children enjoyed her story about a clever
twelve-year-old who opposes bias against snakes (and a bully to boot),
and I appreciated her generosity toward creatures, children, and writers.
It was a privilege to edit this collection of her stories,
rife with fascinating characters. It was an even bigger privilege to come
to know Helen through the process. And just how, I wondered, did she become
a writer in the first place? "When I was about twelve I learned to
type," she told me. "With my mother's little typewriter and a
proper-fingering chart propped in front of me, I typed letters to friends
I met at summer camp and thank you notes to relatives who sent me presents
for my birthday and Christmas."
After four years at Wheaton College, in Norton, Massachusetts,
with a major in Zoology and "an interest in writing more than letters
to friends," Helen married a man named Herb Copeland and moved to
Charlotte, North Carolina. They had four children who, she says, turned
into great grownups. When Helen was thirty, she met Charleen Whisnant,
a "remarkably inspiring" teacher of creative writing at Queens
Evening College.
"Charlotte's advice to new writers was: write what
you know best and write it truly," Helen said. She did, and her first
publishing success was an article in the July 1961 issue of Redbook entitled
"How to Raise Children and Other Odd, Delightful Creatures."
It begins, "If he's scarcely two and he brings you a bug with a look
of purest joy on his face, you have a naturalist in the family. And you
have a choice. You can wheel him around by the wrist and have him drop
it out the back door or you can stare at it in wonder and find a jar to
put it in."
It was clear to me, from having read This Snake Is
Good, what choice Helen made. As I came to know her and her writing,
I discovered that she is someone who stares at much more than bugs and
snakes in wonder. She's interested in the full range of human-and animal-experience,
and her poems and stories are the jars into which she puts what she has
noticed.
She says it took her "many years of struggle"
to become an experienced, well published writer, and that along the way,
as she wrote and submitted many short stories, she received many rejection
slips. "It is persistence we have to develop," she tells people
when they ask her what it takes to be a writer. Helen has been persistent
and she may have struggled, but I'm certain that she enjoyed almost every
minute of the process. "Revision is fun for me," she told me.
"I love to write."
That passion for writing and pleasure in revision shows
in the short stories in this collection, whose characters, settings, and
plots Helen gathered from her life experiences the way she and her children
used to gather eggs from ponds and rivers. What followed, as described
in "How to Raise Children and Other Odd, Delightful Creatures,"
is similar to the experience of many writers: "After we have gathered
the eggs we bring them home… There follows a delightful period of
suspense-it is always a mystery what will hatch out of the eggs."
There are mysteries both solved and unsolved in these
stories that span from Prague to New Orleans, doctoring to play acting,
heroism to scandal. I hope you enjoy reading each of them as much as I
have.
Maureen Ryan Griffin