Anti-Nuclear, Creative Non-Fiction, Historical Memoir, Memoir

Author2Author interview

William Kenower, talk show host of Author2Author recently interviewed me about Open Borders and how it came to be. I invite you to listen to this 30 minute show, after which you might browse his other author interviews to see if one of your favorite authors has something to say about their work.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/author-magazine/2019/01/15/author2author-with-betsy-bell

Bill curates an archive of talks with Northwest authors. I’ve know Bill as a supportive teacher of memoir and an author in his own right.

Anti-Nuclear, Buy Open Borders, Historical Memoir, Memoir, Political Activist, Travel

INF Treaty under threat

Today nine nations possess nuclear weapons. At least two heads of state are unpredictable and have sole authority over the use of these weapons.
I believe ordinary citizens, you, Dear Reader, have powerful influence on the world stage and can change this reality.

The US accuses Russia of breaking a treaty that bans Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, INF, and our president decides to trash the treaty. He hints that he may not authorize talks for a new START treaty when the terms of the old one expire.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

As the NATO-USSR deployed intermediate range nuclear SS-20 missile facing off between East and West Europe in the 1970s, thousands of citizens in England and Europe protested and marched. In Central Park, New York City, throngs of people created the largest anti-arms race peace rally in the history of the modern world. Within a few years—1987—the INF treaty was signed ending this madness. By 1989, the borders between East and West opened.

We can do this again.

My husband, Don Bell, led a group of people in Seattle who challenge the government’s Peace Through Strength approach. Forty-five thousand people in the Puget Sound area educated themselves about less dangerous ways of preventing conflict.

The first Trident submarine steamed into Puget Sound in 1982. Now there are eight nuclear subs just twenty miles from downtown Seattle. They have the fire power to destroy the Earth and life as we know it. Nothing can survive a nuclear war.

Open Borders, the newly published memoir about my small role in the Seattle based movement tells the story of delivering a love letter to people in the USSR, in particular to people in our sister city, Tashkent in Uzbekistan. Thirty-three ordinary people from Seattle handed out the letters, three-thousand copies of them, each with ten signatures, to people on the streets asking them to join us in preventing nuclear war.

Our government wasn’t happy with the people in Seattle or our friendship with our “enemies”. Edward Rowney, Reagan’s ambassador to the START treaty negotiations, came out to speak at one of our educational events. Afterward, he and Don’s co-chair, Virginia, were in conversation at a private dinner party. Rowney said,

“The reason I agreed to come here was to find out what you people are thinking.”
She told him she appreciated that. After a pause, he asked expansively,
“What shall I tell the President when I return to Washington?”
“Tell the President that there are thousands of people here who are enraged by the threat of nuclear war.”
The General literally jumped in his chair and responded, “I couldn’t possibly tell the President that!”
“Why not?” Virginia remembers asking.
“Look, you don’t have to worry about that. I am working very hard on all this. I will save you!”
“What if I don’t believe you?”
“Then you aren’t worth saving.”
That comment was so outrageous—as much to Rowney as to Virginia—that they both just laughed. p. 47 Open Borders

When we are all done laughing at the absurdity of our situation—then and now—we mostly sink into denial convincing ourselves that no person would ever fire a nuclear weapon. “It won’t happen,” we tell ourselves, flooded with emotion.

Instead of nightmares, how about waking up with a commitment to change our present situation?

Our trip to the USSR was followed by dozens of friendship trips, back and forth, doctors, chefs, dancers, singers, artists, musicians (Pink Cadillac played Moscow), teachers, professor exchanges.

Want to travel to Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, China, Russian? Organize a tour with a company that specializes in this sort of trip. Let those people meet ordinary Americans. Get with others who are crafting legislation to limit presidential powers, to prevent new Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles from being built by cutting the budget, to incite a massive public outcry against this threat.

We were terrified in 1983. Our children were practicing “duck and cover” in our schools. Our buildings downtown sported large yellow bomb shelter signs. We were terrified.

We bought airplane tickets and went to meet the enemy as friends. Open Borders tells our story. Read it and be inspired to find one little thing to do to change the future.

Did we make a difference? Who knows. But, coincidentally, after our trip the Berlin Wall came down. The INF treaty got signed. As a result of that Treaty, the United States and the Soviet Union destroyed a total of 2,692 short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missiles by the treaty’s implementation deadline of June 1, 1991.

To find out who is doing what in the Puget Sound area (or wherever you are), go to PSR.org and find the chapter nearest you. Together we can turn this around.

Anti-Nuclear, Buy Open Borders, Historical Memoir, Inspiration, Memoir, Political Activist

Open Borders Book Launch

Thirty excited and curious people turned up last Tuesday, Oct. 23rd, 2018 at the University of Washington bookstore in the U District to hear Betsy Bell talk about her family’s experience during the final decade of the Cold War, 1980-1990 as written in her memoir, Open Borders: a personal story of love, loss and anti-war activism.

US Soldiers greet Russians soldiers as the allies declare victory of Germany in April 1945
If you missed this program, come to St. Mark’s Cathedral Shop, 12:15, Nov. 11th
Or
Homestreet Bank, SW Alaska branch in West Seattle, 6 – 7:30, Nov. 14th

Presentations and book signing.

 

Professor Eric Johnson began the program with a talk anchoring the historic context of Open Borders within the larger frame: the end of WWII to the arrival of the first nuclear submarine in Puget Sound.

Lack of trust and mutual understanding of how nations should be governed –communism or capitalism — divided the West from the Socialist Soviet Republics within months of the Allied forces defeat of the Axis powers.

Russia detonated an Atomic Bomb and the arms race was on. It was September, 1949.NATO on the west and the Warsaw Pact on the east. Intercontinental Ballistic Missile bases, US Naval fleets, Strategic Air Command and the building of the Berlin wall in 1961 divided the world.

 

Even those of us who lived through these frightening developments appreciated the historic overview. The younger people in the audience had only learned of these events in their high school world history classes.

Betsy took the mike to describe the response of Seattle citizens, friends and fellow parents, teachers, lawyers, doctors, ordinary people who are the characters in her memoir. (May I speak of myself in the third person for the purposes of this post?)

The reader of Open Borders travels with the band of tourists who venture behind the Iron Curtain to greet hosts in Moscow and Seattle’s Sister City, Tashkent. Our trip in 1983 unleashed a plethora of friendship exchanges between the USSR and Seattle. Dr. Rosh Doan was on hand to speak of his family’s residential stay in Tashkent, Seattle’s Sister City in 1985 as part of the medical exchange.

It was a wonderful evening, rich with discussion about what can be done; indeed, what a new group of people must do now to reverse this new and more threatening Cold War. We must end nuclear weapons as a military option.

Do good work,

Betsy

Please share this post with your friends around the country. I hope to take this book on the road.

Anti-Nuclear, Historical Memoir, Memoir, Political Activist

Getting a book published

Book Launch Plans underway

 

Exciting news!  Open Borders will be available for purchase one month from today: Oct. 16th.

Hard to believe this long process of getting a book published is coming to a climax. Birthing Open Borders has been far more challenging than producing four daughters. The father of those daughters hasn’t been physically available to support the gestation of the story in which he is a central figure. He might have remembered a few aspects of the 1980s anti-war activities differently. But this is my story about him and me, our team efforts and our struggles. In the end, Don Bell dies and I am left with a huge question about many things. What of all we did together in our thirty five years was mine? Who was I in the process of building a legacy of political activism.
Getting the story line right depended on two things simultaneously: the world stage events that gave rise to Target Seattle and Citizen Diplomacy, and the personal events that shape-shifted our marriage from a traditional fifties relationship to a partnership of equals.
As I moved toward publication, I missed Don’s partnership. He was the one who picked up the phone and made the calls to people and to venues. He came up with program topics by working in committee. My second husband, Chuck Finney, also brainstormed ideas, reached out to people and supported me as I stepped out in leadership roles. Without these two men (Chuck died ten years ago), I found myself unsure, tentative, awkward (true confessions).
Who would host a book launch and signing party? Where would my friends come to hear me? What would I say about the book?
Epicenter Press in Kenmore is, of course, my team. Why I didn’t recognize that sooner, I can’t tell you. The publisher and staff met with me and went over the Author’s Flight Plan. I am now in full-on planning mode, making calls, lining up venues and asking possible reviewers for their pre-launch comments.
This process has given me one more opportunity to “with or without him, … stand strong.”
from the last line in my story.
Betsy

To order Open Borders, go to Amazon, Barnes and Nobel or Indiebound.org and ask for ISBN-10: 1941890210, Price: $16.95

 

Please share with others who are concerned about the nuclear threat we face today, which is far worse than we faced in 1980, the time period of the OpenBorders story.
Creative Non-Fiction, Historical Memoir, Memoir

Is the memoir trust worthy?

I  recently met with members of the history department at the University of Washington, professors who are interested in the Cold War. One, Professor Elena Campbell, born and raised in Russia’s closed military city where their nuclear submarines were manufactured, has memories of the Space Bridge contact between KING 5 TV and Glastelradio in 1985. She watched with the fascination of a young girl and worried that her city was the primary target of our NIKE missiles. Dr. Campbell is interested in oral history as one major source for her research and writing.

Our conversation turned to how much the historian can rely on oral history or written memoir for assembling the factual content of written history. These professors teach their students to beware of assuming a memoirist has the historic “truth” in their pages.

Professor Eric Johnson followed up on our conversation by sending me two articles that analyzed the problem of taking memoir as history. The first, and you can read it by clicking on this link. hudgins_autobiographers_lies-1, is a scrutiny by Andrew Hudgins of his own memoir, The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood. His article, printed in The American Scholar in 1996, is titled An Autobiographer’s Lies.

I commend it to you as you contemplate memoir. The byline of my blog comes from Ernest Hemmingway who said about his last work, the memoir of his early years in Paris The Moveable Feast, “all memoir is fiction”.  My Life as Fiction. The truth as best I can remember, yes. But…..

Enjoy, Betsy