fiction
The Women of BEYOND THIS WICKED REALM
My novel, for which I am seeking representation, is titled BEYOND THIS WICKED REALM.
In 1970s, Portland Oregon, when stagflation met disco-mania, Portlanders seeking liberation from urban blight, lights out orders and ambushed pipe dreams turned to sexploitation. Mary’s Club, which features prominently in my newly completed novel, and other strip joints packed in customers. X-rated theaters and bookstores of the ADULT sort exploded around the city. To learn more about the background, please read my previous post titled, Mama Told Me Not To Come.
Below is a brief glimpse into the brave women in the story.
In 1972, Portland Oregon, four women—a Holocaust survivor, a mobster’s daughter, a drug dealer’s abused girlfriend, and a lady-scholar turned drifter—form an unlikely sisterhood in a fight for survival against Portland’s illicit porn and drug trades.
In Portland Oregon, our protagonist, Etta Broussard, has stopped taking her decades-long prescribed Valium drugs. Etta, a forty-five-year-old Holocaust survivor who views the evil in her world through the prism of The Lord of The Rings––suffers greatly from past trauma.
When Etta discovers that her neighbor is a pornographer and an inhuman monster, like Tolkien’s Orcs and Wargs in the concentration camps of her youth, she is dragged back into her nightmares. She vows to stop him from doing what the Nazi’s did to her. Her fervent mission launches the story.
Etta is a devotee of Tolkien’s work, sharing its message like a missionary on fire. She inspires these abused women to discover shieldmaiden-like courage in a battle with the criminal underworld.
When Etta meets fifty-year-old Ireland Ó Luain in a downtown Portland park, they become fast friends and form an unlikely sistership. Ireland becomes a big sister to Etta. Once a professor of women’s studies at Portland State, erudite and wise, Ireland now appears to be living rough on the streets of Portland. She pushes a grocery cart of her belongings around town and dispenses hard-earned wisdom.
Ireland considers herself as Persephone, sent to the underworld–a mental institution–for accusing a powerful man of rape. The commitment of a troublesome woman was acceptable in a city controlled by wealthy men. Cast into darkness, she now seeks to find her way back into the light.
Etta and her husband own a neighborhood bar. Two young friends, Maxie and Neva, are regulars. They offer Etta a bitter-sweet glimpse into the life of a normal twenty-something woman, laughing with friends, beautiful and confident. The life that was taken from her when she was sent to a concentration camp at fourteen. She adores them like daughters she never had.
One of the beautiful young women is Maxwell, ‘Maxie’ McGee, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of Portland’s most notorious gangster. Victim of her father’s increasing alcohol and drug-fueled rage, she longs to escape his wicked world and have a life without goons, corruption and murder. But she is terrified to go against him. She and Etta develop a sacred bond; Etta is the only person Maxie has found who knew her mysteriously disappeared mother. Maxie loves Etta as a symbol of her beloved mother, who she believes was murdered by her father.
One day, while sitting in the park, Etta and Ireland meet young Cleo Dubois. Cleo is a sixteen-year-old unwanted child, and now unwitting girlfriend of a violent drug dealer who works for Maxie’s mobster father. Etta saw darkness like these men in the camps: the SS had those dark souls—the most malevolent Nazgûl. They vow to save Cleo no matter what it takes.
After Etta makes a dreadful sacrifice, Ireland rescues Cleo. She hides Cleo away from her abuser and ushers her into a life Cleo never dared dream: family, friends, and a home of her own. Ireland mentors Cleo about surviving the darkness, then embracing life as it is, and thriving. And that thriving means fighting back, embracing her innermost shieldmaiden as Etta taught them. While mentoring and saving Cleo, Ireland finds redemption.
After Etta’s shocking brave sacrifice, Maxie ruminates on her many illuminating Tolkien-esque conversations with Etta and decides to embrace her inner shieldmaiden. She takes action to end her father’s wicked dominion over the city through drugs, pornography, and more.
****
Next time, I’ll share a brief glimpse at the men in BEYOND THIS WICKED REALM: a mobster and his brutal, devoted lieutenant, a truth-seeking reporter (and love interest), and a mortician with a strong sense of justice.
Thanks for reading. Please LIKE and share.
And if you’re an agent who is interested in BEYOND THIS WICKED REALM, please contact me.
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Author, Storyteller, Poet, Instructor
Mama Told Me Not To Come
Yesterday, while writing in a coffee shop, a stranger decided to join me. Despite my suggestive glance at the room full of unoccupied tables, she plopped down at mine. “You’re a writer,” she said. And then she proceeded to interview me about the who, what, when, and where that inspired my newly completed (not yet published) novel…. I got over my annoyance and had an interesting conversation, which ultimately inspired this blog post and future posts. I explained to my curious new friend ….
In 1970s, Portland, Oregon, when stagflation met disco-mania, Portlanders seeking liberation from urban blight, lights out orders, and ambushed pipe dreams turned to sexploitation. Mary’s Club, which features prominently in my newly completed novel, and other strip joints packed in customers. X-rated theaters and bookstores of the ADULT sort exploded around the city.
It was a boom era fueled by relaxed obscenity regulations that led to porn palaces and live performances that ruled the neon landscape. Ultimately, The Oregonian Newspaper, where my grandfather worked, named Portland “the pornography capital of the West Coast.”
Religious cults, Vietnam protesters, and abortion rights activists heralded signs on every street.
The day before my fifteenth birthday, Grandpa pulled me aside at the Oregonian. “A lot of things aren’t making it into the paper,” he said in a solemn tone. “We got crooked cops, racketeers, editors on the take,” he whispered. “Pretty girls like you are in danger.”
He explained in one wide-ranging account how girls my age were easy prey, often collateral damage in a metropolis run by the mob. And how Portland’s corrupt politicians had earned a new moniker for The City of Roses; the vice capital of the northwest. Police corruption extended further than pacifying Teamsters on the docks; it was citywide. The thriving narcotics trade enticed officers to look the other way while their palms were greased and young girls vanished from the streets.
Grandpa never spoke to me about such shocking (to my naive sensibilities) issues. So, I listened.
Planted deep within grandpa’s warning that day were the seeds of my novel, Beyond This Wicked Realm to follow some fifty years later. For which I am seeking representation.
Grandpa made sure I had a bus pass, a library card, and books; the classics on which he expected a verbal book report. In his way, he was making sure his teenage granddaughter was too busy to go looking for trouble. Nonetheless, trouble was around every corner looking for her.
After school, a couple of days a week I worked for my dad in downtown Portland, just a few blocks from the Oregonian. I rode the bus into the city past businesses with handwritten signs in dark windows (victims of the governor’s lights-out orders), gas stations with NO GAS signs at the curb, hippies sleeping on park benches, and the yeasty smell of the Henry Weinhard Brewery that permeated everything. I leaned my head against the bus window and studied the girls walking up and down Broadway and Burnside. Some were my age, even younger; black fishnet stockings, black raccoon eyes, and faux fur cropped sweaters, sashaying down the streets, unsteady on their platform shoes. At ten in the morning, they already looked like they had been out partying and drinking all night. Maybe they had. I didn’t know. My grandma called them the lost girls. All I knew was that I never wanted to get lost.
One day when I got off the bus, as I hurried through a group of shouting Vietnam War protestors, a man grabbed me. He had an Afro the size of a beach ball, wore a long black leather coat, and dark glasses. He towered over me. At first, I thought he was one of the Black Panthers, though they normally weren’t in that part of the city. I was terrified. I didn’t speak.
Then he let go of my arm and said, “Hey foxy mama, you a stone fox.” He looked me up and down.
My eyes burned with tears, but I stood paralyzed.
“We could make some moolah,” he said, rubbing his fingers together.
But then, a woman who looked to be my mom’s age slammed his head with her protest sign and shouted, “PIMP! Leave that child alone.” When she did that, a group of protesters ran over to us, shouting, “Police … PIMP!”
That woman turned to me and said, “Honey, you should run now.”
Like Forest Gump, I bolted and ran all the way from 3rd and Washington to 11th, without looking back or stopping for traffic. People honked and shouted, but I didn’t care. I ran to the safety of my dad’s shoe repair shop on 11th. I never told Dad why I was out of breath and crying that day. He gave me a cup of tea and suggested I go read my book in the back of the shop for a while. He no doubt figured it was ‘that time of the month.’ It wasn’t.
It was the first time I was ‘approached’ by a pimp, but it wouldn’t be the last. They were on every corner trying to recruit girls for strip clubs, and worse, much worse. One day, when I left the Multnomah Library on 10th street, carrying my homework books, a man in a black car at the curb offered me three hundred dollars––in today’s money that’s over $2000.00–– to dance in a cage that would be hanging from a ceiling in a local nightclub. I backed away, turned, and ran like that protestor woman told me to do. I wasn’t going to freeze and cry again. I ran.
Being a teenage girl in 1970s Portland was like being a gazelle pursued on an open tundra to the soundtrack of Three Dog Night’s, Mama Told Me (Not to Come). I learned to run, hide, seek shelter, and NEVER talk to men in parked cars at the curb.
I had a few safe havens, good people around me, shelter, and some good sense handed to me by my family. I survived, but many didn’t.
I wrote this novel for them, the lost girls, those who didn’t make it out and those who did make it through the darkness to the other side.
This is the environment for my current novel, titled Beyond This Wicked Realm–In 1973, four women—a Holocaust survivor, a mobster’s daughter, a drug dealer’s abused girlfriend, and a lady-scholar turned drifter—form an unlikely sisterhood in a fight for survival against Portland’s illicit porn and drug trades.
That highlights some of the backdrop for my novel. In an upcoming post I will share my characters, women I’ve grown to love, mentors I wish I’d had, and lost girls I knew.
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Pain Is A Great Teacher
I haven’t blogged in one year. WOW! As a long-time blogger, that’s a huge break.
In January I had a devastating fall in my home. I broke my shoulder, damaged the ulnar nerve in my elbow, sustained a concussion, bruises from head to toe, sprained and fractured my wrist, lost all use of my right arm and hand––of course I’m right-handed. Of course! ––and was bedridden for over 3 months. It was a traumatic injury that I am still, and as of writing this on September 1st 2024, going to physical therapy twice a week to regain full use of my hand. It’s painful, but worth it.
During my bedridden days, my husband had to feed me. I HATED being a helpless burden.
Anyways … I couldn’t even hold my phone, imagine that! I was very upset about losing writing time. And though the prospect of working on my full-length novel projects was too overwhelming for my concussed brain, I had to do something. Also, at that point, I could only use my forefinger on my bruised left hand to press a button, or anything else. My right hand was completely useless and in pain. The picture here shows how my arm swelled up and had black bruises from shoulder to fingertips. It looks more like an elephant trunk than a human arm. But human it was, and it was mine.
I was getting a bit depressed (pain meds didn’t help) about not writing, which I also realized was projecting my fear of having just almost died, onto the writing that would never be finished. My fate was linked with my trauma and created a profoundly sad state of mind. And trust me, that’s not a good foundation for healing––but only I could lift my spirits.
Unable to use my right hand––any movement reduced me to agony and tears––I managed to prop my phone on a pillow next to me and turn on my voice technology. I spoke into the phone and texted myself bits and pieces of story ideas and poems, trying to reawaken and spark my groggy brain cells. Though some days I could only work this way for 5-10 minutes without dropping into complete exhaustion, it saved me. I felt a sense of purpose and was able to stay in touch with my writing spirit, which is everything. Feeling a sense of purpose is vital in healing from anything.
During those months I managed to write several poems. I sent them to my e-mail (via text) to edit and format later when I was sure I would be able to type again. Later came five months later in early June. I formatted them and organized a manuscript of poetry, along with professional art, and voila! A small book of poetry was born from my trauma and a desperate desire to heal—heart, body, mind, and soul.
I am now querying that book to publishers. I am pleased to say that one poem has just been published in the Penn Journal of Arts and Sciences Literary journal.
Please give it a read, my poem is titled, Maiden, Mother, Crone https://www.upennjournalarts.org/writing/maiden-mother-crone-c44gn-nwrbj
They also did a lovely interview with me, take a look at my featured profile Mindy Halleck — Penn Journal of Arts and Sciences (upennjournalarts.org)
Another poem titled, Unraveling was published in the Edmonds News, Poet’s Corner: Unraveling – My Edmonds News Though that poem was written before my fall.
What has this taught me about life? Well, pain is one of the greatest teachers we have. We learn a lot about ourselves, our resolve, our desire to heal, and mental as well as physical fortitude. I’ve lived through cancer, and had numerous other things happen to me but this injury has been the most traumatic, soul shaking experience. What it did was focus me in a way I had not been focused since my brothers died two years ago. It reminded me that time is of the essence and if I wanted to get anything done before I too, check out, I’d better get busy.
It also made me focus on my intentions, for example, what do I want to say in my work? I am concentrating on writing about the lives of women—ordinary and extraordinary alike—and the choices they make. I desire to delve into stories and poems that are instructional from my Crone-age perspective and encouraging for younger generations, passing on the wisdom of this old female warrior who has gone before. Pain has taught me to embrace my unique voice on these topics. Afterall, no one else has my lived experience or my voice.
I’m back to life now, gardening (short stints), and back to writing and querying. Oh, and smiling, I am definitely back to smiling.
Don’t wait for pain to be your teacher. What are you writing, why are you writing, and how can you tap into your unique voice?
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Meet Mindy (Halleck) Meyers
Sometimes we open a wound not to watch it bleed, but to allow it to heal.
I just returned from a writer’s retreat wherein I was asked why I don’t write about the story seeds of the novel I’m currently crafting. That question opened a wound I didn’t realize I had. Bear with me ….
First, I’ll start with why I will now write under a pen name, a Nom de plume, or literary double, however you coin the term, it’s my new/old name. I’ll be writing under my mother’s name, Meyers, for many reasons. But the one HUGE reason is to honor my grandfather Frank Meyers who wanted to be a published author but never was. And the other, to honor my Jewish roots, denied to us because in the 1930s grandpa (non-religious) moved my mom and her siblings from the south to the west coast and immediately put them in Catholic schools. He also allowed my Irish/Scottish grandma to take them to Baptist churches: determined that his children would not experience the discrimination he did. His own father was murdered in front of him in New York, simply for his name. Meyers. So, I staunchly take the moniker and move it forward, in a time when our country seems to want to move backward.
Why does this matter now? The holocaust should never be forgotten. I’ve just completed one novel with a holocaust survivor as a protagonist and am now working on my next novel which––though not a war or holocaust story––is populated with holocaust survivor stories. Clearly, the holocaust may not be my story to tell, but I had a ringside seat to its aftermath. And it is in that 1950s and 1960s aftermath where my story seeds took root.
Last week at that writer’s retreat, a New York agent questioned my name, and then asked if I was a non-Jewish author writing unauthentically about the Jewish experience. I explained that though I grew up in a Christian household, my biological father was Jewish, and my mother’s father (Grandpa Frank’s) mother and father were Jewish. She asked what their family name was. I told her, and she exclaimed, I can sell a Mindy Meyers writing stories about victims of the holocaust. It rhymes, and it suits the stories you’re telling. Besides you have genealogy.
At first, I recoiled at the idea of a marketing platform based on something I thought I wasn’t. And deeper yet, genealogy is a wound of mine. Being born under the shadow of scandal, the feeling of being ‘illegitimate’ has always bloodied the waters. So, that night, I returned to my hotel room and cried, deeply, irrationally, as if mourning the departed or resurrecting a scarred over wound.
Then, about 3:00 am I realized the reverse was true; Mindy Meyers is who I’ve been all along. It was the first name on my birth certificate, before dad rushed in and married mom to give me legitimacy.
Heck, even at the Oregonian Newspaper in the 1950s, where grandpa worked, I had a name tag that read, Mindy ‘Minnie Mouse’ Meyers––Minnie Mouse was my very official nickname. So, making a LONG story short, Minnie Mouse is reclaiming her identity. Mindy Meyers is now my Nom de plume.
That was the first step toward telling my long-held stories. I’ll be blogging about them in the coming months. For now, I’ll share that in the early 1960s, when I was nine years old, I worked with my dad at his shoe repair shop in northwest Portland. I stood on a milk cate at the 1940s cash register, took in money and gave change. I was the official greeter, purveyor of cookies and tea for ladies who waited for dad’s popular 5-minute-heels, and I held down the fort when dad took a smoke break.
Dad’s shoe repair was in a building long rumored to be haunted. To nine-year-old me, it was a place of magic and mystical beings. At that time PDX was very international, multi-cultural, and filled with politics and fear of strangers, Nazis hiding in the shadows. There were Hasidic Jews with long black side curls called Payos, thick black beards and black hats, such a contrast to my ex-Air Force dad with his short hair and clean shaved face. There were palm-reading Gypsies, and the infamous King of the Gypsies who walked about the city with two large men behind him (bodyguards). He’d bring dad a cigar and have a laugh while those men waited at the door, keeping anyone else from entering. And then, the very cranky Rabbi who liked arguing with Dad about politics. And SO many other colorful people.
Occasionally it was my job to deliver shoes to a few of the customers who lived across the street in the (then) Nortonia Hotel. One was a woman who I thought was very shy. I’d knock on the door, listen as she unlocked seven locks, then crack the door open to where I could see only her eye and half her face. “Who are you?” she asked every time. “Oskar’s daughter,” I’d hold up the brown paper bag. “I have your shoes.” She’d quickly shut the door. I’d wait. She’d return with a fresh baked raspberry Rugelach cookie. To this day my favorite. She’d hand me the cookie that smelled of sweet burnt sugar and warm raspberry––through the narrow passage of the barely opened door. And then she’d say, “Sit, child eats’ das cookie while I inspect das shoes.” I would slide down the wall, sit on the floor and eat my cookie. She never looked at the shoes. Instead, she smiled the saddest smile I’d ever seen, while she watched me eat. When I finished, she handed me a napkin, “Vwipe face. Now hurry child, go to your papa, tell him all is goot. Do not talks to das strangers. Go now, hurry.” I’d rush down the hall while behind me the sounds of a bolting door, clanking chains, and the locking of seven locks echoed against my fleeing footsteps.
There were five women, holocaust survivors who lived in those apartments. My dad explained to nine-year-old me, that someone had hurt them in the war, and now they were a little frightened of people, and that they were lonely, so to spend time with them. Be kind, he’d said. Listen to their stories. So, I did.
As a child I grew to believe that like dad’s building, these people were haunted.
Now that hotel is the lovely Mark Spencer Hotel where I stay when I’m in Portland. To me, it’s a sacred place. I feel these women there. And I am comforted by their presence. I always grab a Rugalach at a local bakery to take to my room where despite the beautiful furnishings, I sit on the floor leaning against a wall, eating and remembering. Who’s haunted now ….
In the coming stories, blog posts, and novels, I honor these people who imprinted so deeply on nine through seventeen-year-old me, that they have become my ghosts, the spirits who walk with me. I’m honored to create stories around the essence of who they were to this child now woman who aches with their sorrow, and yet smiles when remembering their unique humor. In bringing them out of the shadows, I’m giving them an identity, while at the same time, reclaiming mine. In honoring them, through my storytelling, I am healing an old wound, mine and theirs.
Structuring Short Stories
Regardless whether you’re a Plantser (an Outliner) or a Pantser (one who writes by the seat of their pants)—I’m a combo, a PLAN-ANTSER…HA! Did I just coin a term?—Anyway, no matter how you approach your short (or long) story, I recommend a basic story structure, like the classic, 3-Act. Aristotle wrote that a tragedy, (a type of plot) should be divided into parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. He also believed that the events of the 3-part-plot must somehow relate to one another as being either necessary or credible. And so, we have the 3-Act-Structure.
The 3-Act Story Structure (Thank you Aristotle)
TIP: Before you design your structure consider first, what is the profound change you want your character to experience by the end? Why? Because the answer to that question should fuel your story through all 3-acts, delivering theme, character arc, and a satisfying resolution.
Act 1: BEGINNING – Set up. Introduce your characters; establish the story world, theme and tone. Here, your protagonist should be called to action, due to some sort of crisis point (inciting incident) that shakes up their ordinary world and launches them into a new one.
Act 2: MIDDLE – Conflict. Avoid saggy middles by plunging the protagonist and allies deeper into even more difficulties and obstacles. Often things get worse and they need to re-group and get back on their feet, before things can get better.
Act 3: END – Resolution. This is where your main character(s) figures things out, and actually develops the courage, or a plan to face their demons, slay their dragons, and solve their problems. As a writer, you should always write towards a satisfying ending. That’s why I started with the TIP of knowing what you want your character to experience, their ARC, by the story’s end.
This is a typical story structure is a good starting point if you want to write short stories. I also do this for novel length stories as well. Smart guy, that Aristotle, he sure knew what he was talking about.
And here’s a little you tube (6 minutes) with additional ideas on structuring short stories, starting with Anne Lamont’s acronym ABDCE
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Mindy Meyers-Halleck 
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