Fragments: Then & Now
By Mary Ann Lindley
Reflections from a Florida newspaper columnist and author with a front-row seat of history, culture, and the nature of things.
Book Launch Countdown...
There is no Event
From then, to now...
On Oct. 3, 2024, I met with Mary Jane Ryals, managing editor of The Apalachee Press of Florida about the book I’ve been working on since Sept., 2023. It’s a cultural memoir I’m calling “Fragments: Then & Now.” We are planning to launch the book in November of 2025. A brief synopsis of “Fragments” follows.
Because I’ve written hundreds of newspaper columns for some 40 years, I’ve saved far too much material to think about a collection of columns. Yet as I sorted through 16 files boxes of my columns and other writing from the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s and up through 2011, I started exiling duplicates (and duds), and finding myself mentally organizing those I especially liked into types of commentary. What I began to enjoy time and again, however, was how just a sentence or two, or a few paragraphs, seemed to say it all.
These fragments seemed to sum up a spirit of times and particles of history in Florida, but also of our culture at large. After all, much of my writing was about episodes and observations well beyond our county line. I discovered ideas and curiosities I thought worthy of commenting upon again, from my perspective years later.
I sorted the fragments into eight sections, pulling out some whole columns that seem timeless, which I would like to publish in their entirety under those eight sections.
- Florida: Its sun, clouds, and politics;
- Notes from my younger self;
- Technology: If we knew then what know now;
- Home, family and seasons;
- The more things change the more they stay the same;
- The news biz;
- This place, these people;
- The nature of things: This is who we are.
So that's then...
“And now” is new, reflections after each datelined “Then” fragment. Noticing how much has transpired with the passage of time (and my own maturity), I needed to update those fragments, oftten researching issues and even the lives of people I once wrote about to keep current and accurate.
With this book, I’ve tried to create an original sense of lived history, one which is easily accessible – bowing just a bit to today’s short attention span!
Thus, this memoir is designed with airy pages, some light illustrations and an overall respect for the beauty and necessity of language that invites reflection and engagement.
