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"Hey, Sherri," people ask me, "how did you come up with the idea for Flygirl?" I chuckle and say, "Voices in my head told me to do it." Those voices were actually part of a Radio Diaries story about the WASP that played one evening on National Public Radio. I was sitting in the gleam of another Los Angeles rush hour, taillights facing the ocean, headlights going nowhere, jamming the buttons on my radio for some good entertainment or at least a traffic update. I've got two NPR stations programmed into my car radio, KCRW and KPCC. I believe I ended up on the former when, with a burst of bugles and some old-timey songs, the WASP story came on.

To give a little background, I had just finished my second novel, Sparrow, and was casting about for what to do next. Then this story bursts into life and I was sat at rapt attention (to the radio, not the traffic, I'm sorry to say...but we were at a standstill...really.). And then one of the WASP, Ethel Meyer Finley, says, "And here are all these women from different walks of life, millionaire heiresses like Florsheim Shoes, Upjohn Drug Company, and then you had poor kids like me from the farm. And everybody was in the same boat, had the same ill-fitting clothes." Just like that, I was hooked. I loved it. Slobs and snobs, studs and scrubs all in the same drab olive green boat. It was romantic, it was terrifying and exhilarating. I went to work the next day and my friend, Karen, said "Did you hear that piece about the WASP last night? I think that's your next book." She was right. I went online and ordered a tape of the story, then I did my mea culpa and actually renewed my lapsed subscription to public radio. (Confession: I let it lapse again, then renewed when I sold the book. You have to pay the piper if you want to dance!)

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I have a preoccupation with food. I like to eat it. My characters like to eat it. I like to cook it, so my characters do, too. Unfortunately, World War II brought about the rationing of many things I like to eat-butter and sugar to name two. In spite of the cutbacks, FLYGIRL has food aplenty in the preparation of simple meals between mother and daughter. Ida Mae snaps the ends off the string beans; her mother washes mustard greens in the sink. Biscuits are baked (with margarine, not butter!) and when Ida's little brother, Abel, finagles some cream out of the neighbor, strawberry shortcakes enter the picture.

World War II brought about a lot of changes in the kitchen. SPAM, for one thing, became a staple in many households, and the invention of the frozen dinner followed on the heels of all those women leaving the kitchen to fly airplanes and work in factories. Rosie the Riveter is in many ways the mother (or, at least the grateful older sister) of Betty Crocker and Sara Lee. Even after the war, in the 1950s when women returned to the hearth and a nuclear family lifestyle was idealized, the concept of convenience in cooking swept the nation. The first microwave, invented in 1947 by Raytheon, relied on wartime technology according to their website. Sure, it was the size of a refrigerator, but by the mid-50s it was available in a home-sized model and thus unleashed thousands of women from the damnable fate of sweating over a hot stove all day.

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I recently did an interview in which I was asked if I had flown any of the planes in Flygirl. I still chuckle to think of it. I’m a writer, not a pilot. Now, it’s true that California is dotted with small airfields offering a chance to fly in a real World War II bomber or other vintage plane—I know someone who did it for their birthday. It’s just not me. I’m kind of a scaredy-cat when it comes to small planes, or anything with the word “vintage” in front of it that’s supposed to hold me up in the air. I have flown in a little Cessna with nothing but me, some frozen halibut, a pilot and a co-pilot in the sky, but those other two people are the minimum mandatory personnel I need to get me into the air. (The fish is optional.) Peanuts and a movie for me, I say. So then, how did I convincingly capture the joy of flight and the skills of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP)? Research, my friends, lots and lots of research.

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I have just returned from an amazing two-week writer's residency at Hedgebrook, a retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island in Washington's Puget Sound, and I owe it all to my latest novel, Flygirl.  It was the first chapter of Flygirl that won me my much coveted spot (only 48 writers chosen out of 400+ applicants!) at Hedgebrook.  Needless to say the book and its heroine, Miss Ida Mae Jones, have been on my mind because of it.

My flight left at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and I spent the previous several days packing and making lists of what not to forget.  My husband dropped me off at the airport, and I ran into check-in desk with my giant rolling suitcase and my laptop on my back, ready and determined to write the good write.  I had butterflies in my stomach-traffic and rain had made me late for my flight.   (Rain is practically a national disaster in Los Angeles, to be approached with 10-mile-an-hour caution on the freeways unless it's nighttime, and then nothing below 80 mph seems to do.)  I made it, but just barely.  Sitting in my aisle seat, uncomfortably sweaty from running through the terminal, stomach still wobbling, I thought about Ida Mae and how she must have felt boarding a bus to Texas to start her training with the WASP.

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Sherri L. Smith is our guest blogger during the week of March 9th. If you have any questions for Sherri L. Smith add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information about Flygirl:

Ida Mae Jones dreams of fl ight. Her daddy was a pilot and being black didn't stop him from fulfilling his dreams. But her daddy's gone now, and being a woman, and being black, are two strikes against her.

When America enters the war with Germany and Japan, the Army creates the WASP, the Women's Airforce Service Pilots-and Ida suddenly sees a way to fl y as well as do something signifi cant to help her brother stationed in the Pacific. But even the WASP won't accept her as a black woman, forcing Ida Mae to make a difficult choice of "passing," of pretending to be white to be accepted into the program. Hiding one's racial heritage, denying one's family, denying one's self is a heavy burden. And while Ida Mae chases her dream, she must also decide who it is she really wants to be.