The Greatest Show

My father didn't go to the circus

2012-01-21T14:40:00.000-08:00

Edw. H. Downs, Age 3

On the day of the fire, July 6, 1944, Ed Downs (then calledNed) was three years old and his parents were already separated and on theirway to divorce. My grandfather came by the house to pick up my father, planningan afternoon at the circus. He and my grandmother argued. Who knows the reason. You’re not taking himanywhere! she said.

Hundreds of people did go, though. One hundred sixty-eightdied. Ned stayed home, missed out, survived, thank God.

Years later, my Irish great aunts would make the sign of thecross during family gatherings. They’d say, “Thank God that Ned didn’t go tothe circus that day.”

That’s the family story. Perhaps the story is apocryphal.When last I mentioned it to my father, he said he didn’t remember hearing it.But I did hear it, years ago. He might have told me. Or maybe his brother did.

Someone must have told me that story. Because the story isthe reason I made the main character in TheGreatest Show a three-year-old boy when he and his mother go to the circus.That’s the age my father would have been had he gone. In my head, I sentanother three-year-old boy in my father’s place. A famous writer I’ve heardspeak has often instructed, “Don’t write about what happened in your family.Write about what you fear might have happened.” So when I sat down to writeabout the circus fire, I created a little boy named Teddy.

…[S]uddenly he’s toppling off the bleachers, falling throughair, a little boy in summer shorts and shoes with laces knotted twice,plummeting through heat and the rush of air, too young even to imagine thatthere is something called death. On the ground his body won’t work anymore.Bits of straw tickle his nose. He can’t move. Heat like the most savage coldweighs on him, and the weight eats away his clothes, invades his skin and theskin under his skin. What’s worse is the fear, his trembling heart, theemerging awareness that his mother is not the world, and that the world hateshim.

Ned Downs never made it to that circus. So I sent Teddyinstead.

Bóg dał, Bóg wziął

2011-12-29T08:47:00.000-08:00

Bóg dał, Bógwziął. That’s a Polish proverb, included on the dedication page for House of Good Hope, just beneath mygrandparents’ names. It means “God gives, God takes.” Walt and Helen Petry bothwere dead by the time the book was published in 2007. Thus.

The phrase came to mind the day before Christmas when House of Good Hope’s publisher returnedpublication rights to me. This means the book is out of print and the publisherwill make it no more. Theirs was a business decision I understood. It took fouryears to sell the first print run–a slow unraveling. The press offered to keepthe book available in a single e-edition (via Barnes and Noble). I asked themto commit to full publication or give me back the rights, per our contract. Thepublisher’s terse reply arrived amidst a few holiday cards. “This letter willserve as official notice...” etc. I was disappointed that it had not begun,“Dear Michael.”

So now, HOGH has gone out of print just as The Greatest Show is poised to come intothe world. Sad irony, that.

After I read the letter, I poured a nip of Scotch andtoasted the book. Then I wandered room to room, as if the mail had brought newsof the death of an old friend I once knew well but hadn’t talked with in a fewyears.

House of Good Hopewas a necessary book for me to write. It wasn’t cut out to be a big seller,that I knew, but without it, I’d never have gotten my current job as aprofessor teaching creative writing. More importantly, I’d never have hadfriendships with the men who are the book’s primary characters. I made the bookwith the hope that it would honor the memory of my grandparents and give myfamily an historical record. Likewise, I wanted to create something Hiram,Eric, Derrick, Joshua, and Harvey could give their children to say, “This wasyour father once.” I wanted to write something that praised Hartford as a placeworth our attention. I wanted to better understand why we leave places we loveand what price is paid when we do.

All of that sounds like a eulogy, but it isn’t, because HOGHisn’t dead. The book has come home, its rights mine again to do with as Iplease. My literary agent encouraged this path. He mentioned the ease ofcreating a Kindle edition, how simple it is to create a print-on-demand copy. Hisagency could help. Why let the book languish?

So now, House of GoodHope is out of print and poised to return if I so choose. I can revise itif I want, or not, or update it, or not. Or maybe years from now anotherpublisher will ask for it. Maybe it will just sit for a while, not languishing,but waiting, because how God givesand takes, and in what order, and how often, is always a mystery, and who knowswhat comes next?

The Greatest Show, on film

2011-10-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

Annabelle

I dreamed of clowns reading sentences from my book. Thesedreams were visual with no sound or narrative coherence. As with all dreams, theyfelt perfect and unrealized. The clowns all looked happy and friendly, and theyrecited sad sentences about the Hartford circus fire. Ah. Irony.

Months later, hundreds ofmiles from home, I squatted in the hallway of an old factory, holding adry-erase board where I had written, “It’s all pain, right?” and a clown namedAnnabelle recited that line as my friend Brian filmed her and recorded thesound.

“So how does a littleclowning make anything worse?”

“Let’s do another one closer,”Brian said.

I’m no filmmaker. To realizemy dream of clowns and sad sentences, I telephoned my friend, Brian McDermott.Brian lives in Massachussets and teaches videography and journalism atUMass-Amherst. We met when he was a student in classes I taught at theUniversity of Montana. But he’s a talented photographer and writer who didn’tneed to be taught anything, really. He always knew what to do with a photographor a video or a story.

Writers don’t have manyopportunities for artistic collaboration. There’s only one chair at most desks,and that’s where we work. But ever since a stint at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, I’ve thought more and more about collaboration. While at VCCA, Ispent lots of time talking with visual artists and composers, and their ideasabout art were exciting and in many ways, for me, new. Later, I noted how Ron Tanner, a writer and friend, put together a book trailer for which he did theanimation, gathered friends to read different parts, and asked another friend, who is a marvelous composer, to write an accompanying music score. What Ron did was something new — literarybut also a different art altogether. It was, I suppose, that most collaborativeof arts: a film.

That’s what I wanted for myhappy clowns reciting sad sentences.

And that’s how I found myselfholding onto a dry erase board and saying, “Maybe a little slower this time?”

Chris Oakley

As the dream unfolded, ittook on the idiosyncracies of those other dreammakers. Once, I’d imagined anarray of clowns soberly and in normal voices reading my sentences. But NettieLane, aka Annabelle, had her own ideas and Annabelle had her own voice. She hadread the entire stories from which her lines came, and she gave them nuancesand subtle and strange, delightful intepretations I’d never have been able toimagine. Brian had recommended using performers other than clowns, and had even found the circus studio to provide them. So that afternoonwe also worked with a trapeze artist and a contortionist. The trapeze artistsuggested she recite while hanging upside down.

And Brian? Brian’s mind neverstopped working. He suggested we vary the backgrounds (“There’s a spot with asign that reads, ‘Not an Exit,’ “ he said), and in every case he chose well. Hewanted to shoot B-roll of the performers performing to edit into the readings.He directed them to face light. From behind the camera, he laughed andencouraged.

Two hours later, we weredone.

Then it was Brian’s turn tosit alone at the desk. He combed the internet for royalty-free music. He editedwith care. He sent me several versions to approve. I began to notice how hemarried images to words, how he used images as transitions. I saw my script andmy unrealized dream of clowns become something else – and that something oftencontradicted my own visions. But it was far better than anything I could haveimagined on my own.

Born from my book, butsomething else entirely. Something new. It is a trailer, and so it is amarketing tool in service to The GreatestShow. But it stands alone, too, I think, as the collaboration of fiveartists, thrilling and disturbing in its own ways.

Here it is.

The View from My Keyboard

2011-09-29T14:46:00.000-07:00

Here is where I play with my imaginary friends

My good pal Patty McNair has put a great spin on the idea of a writer's blog by featuring writers' workspaces. She calls it View from the Keyboard, and in it she includes pictures and short essays featuring the spaces where writers put together their words. I'm glad that she invited me to contribute. She says some nice things about me, too, and if any one of them proves to be true, I'm super grateful.

While you're checking out my workspace at her blog, you might also take a look at her new short story collection, The Temple of Air. It got a great review from Booklist, the American Library Association's magazine, and it's on my list of must-reads.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Boys and Girls! It's a cover!

2011-09-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

Many, many thanks to Laura Gleason, the design and production manager at LSU Press, for this stunning work.

Here's a nifty, sad thing.

2011-09-04T04:27:00.000-07:00

A fellow named Curtis Eller, whocalls himself a banjo-playing punk yodeller, or something like that, released asong a few years back about the Hartford Circus Fire. I’m late to the party,but that’s because I only just got my invite. Curtis the Man hisself sent an e-mail tothose of us in a Facebook group dedicated to the circus fire.

An angry yodelling banjo player

On Curtis’s website, someunidentified scribbler writes in first person that Eller’s band American Circus“plays more waltzes than any band I know, though no one ever feels likedancing.” That’s probably because the songs are all grim and sad, having to dowith John Wilkes Booth and Richard Nixon and the Triangle Shirt Factory fireand a burning circus tent.

I love sad walzes.

My favorite part of Curtis’s circus-fire song is the line about how “the ashes still stick to our shoes.” That’s some goodgritty realism.

And except for the nightmares and the coughing

It’s like the circus never passed through

Enjoy your own sad turn…

<p><p><a href="http://curtiseller.bandcamp.com/track/hartford-circus-fire-1944">Hartford Circus Fire, 1944 by Curtis Eller</a></p></p>

Introducing our new CFO and mascot

2011-07-21T13:32:00.000-07:00

This is Big Top Monkey.
   My wife found him at a local craft store. We were looking for an ink stamp that I could use to gussy up my letter press broadsides (see previous blog post). I like Big Top Monkey so much that I might use him to stamp copies of the book when I'm asked to sign it. So, we've all got that to look forward to.
   He's also my new computer desktop wallpaper and my Facebook profile pic.
   Give him a warm round of applause, will you?

Hot type

2011-06-29T05:50:00.000-07:00

A typo. Can you catch it?

   I don’t text.
   Which reason would you like? There are so many. How about these: all those thumbs, all thos misspeled words. LOL. :) I compulsively edit my Facebook status reports. How could I bear to text?
   There are other reasons.

Yet texting is like typing, you say. You build words and sentences a letter at a time.

No, I say, it is not like typing. I learned to type a long time ago. I use all eight fingers and both thumbs. It’s easy to delete a line and write a new one.

I don’t text, but I thought a lot about that the other day, when I built a paragraph of 172 words out of metal, letter by letter.

The type drawer

Let me start again.

***

For all of June, I was fortunate enough to be a writer-in-residence at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. This meant that I lived with four other artists and writers in a big house, ca. 1914, ate dinner prepared nightly by a chef, and worked to revise a novel. I wrote every day, missed my wife and dogs, and once went into town to see the world’s largest boot.

You can read more about the Anderson Center here. It has a compelling history, and it has made a real difference for the arts in Minnesota, nationally, and internationally. The grounds of the center also include an alternative high school and a small independent publisher called Red Dragonfly Press.

Scott King runs Red Dragonfly. He publishes mostly poetry, and quite a few of the books are done in the modern way: designed and typeset on computers. But equally important to the operation are his 19th-century printing technologies. In the old way, Scott casts letters out of metal, arranges them as words and poems, and then applies ink to press them into elegant, old-style pages and books. This is, in the old parlance, hot type. (Current publishing uses cold computer type).

Scott was kind enough to instruct me in this traditional fashion of typesetting and then let me have at it. With his help, I assembled 959 characters of Dante font, 12-point type, with spaces, one tiny piece of metal at a time. It took me 2½ hours just to build the paragraph.

“That’s pretty fast for a first time,” he said. “You might be a natural.”

Isn’t this like texting?

Sort of not.

***

Scott positions the hot type on the press

Back in another life, when I was first learning the newspaper trade, we were taught to count headlines. We were allowed so many spaces in a column, and that count changed depending on the size (points) of the letters. So, a capital W (huge width) was worth two points. A lower case i was worth a half. You wrote your headline, then added up the count to see if your words would fit.

This practice was a remnant from the days of using hot type. Letters and words do have physical properties: widths, heights, and, in hot type, even weights. In composing my paragraph metal letter by metal letter, I was reminded of this.

Hours later...

It’s good, sometimes, to get back to the beginnings of things. I took up hunting to learn what it meant to kill, gut, skin and butcher an animal before eating it. It seemed an important thing to understand if I continued to pull shiny packages of meat off grocery store shelves. Likewise, I know photographers who believe it is important to learn the practices of a darkroom, even in these days of point-shoot-Flickr.

I would like my creative writing students to one day build their sentences out of metal. I want them to understand the weight of letters and words. They would learn which words are ~~truly~~ extraneous. They would come to value use over utilize. They would learn that to build your words from metal, you must love them.

SALT Publishing announces Scott Prize winners

2011-05-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

Congrats to winners of the Scott Prize from the UK's SALT Publishing. Of the ten shortlisted books, including The Greatest Show, at least five will be published in the next eighteen months, including three with SALT, one with Black Lawrence Press, and mine with LSU Press. In these times, when it is more and more difficult to publish short story collections, it's good to know there are still presses out there willing to support the form. Kudos to Jen Hamilton-Emery, fiction editor at SALT, for putting together such a great short list.

And while I'm at it, let me put in a plug for my favorite SALT book of the moment: Eduardo Chirinos' Reasons for Writing Poetry. Eduardo is one of Peru's premier poets, a writer I met when we were on the faculty at the University of Montana (he's still there). I've heard him read poems in Spanish and listened to the same poems in English, and I could listen todos los dias to them in either language. Thanks to G.J. Racz for the exquisite translations. Now all of us who don't read Spanish can enjoy Eduardo's art.

Dateline: Maple Avenue

2011-05-01T04:32:00.000-07:00

For the first time since 1993, I’ve got a byline in the Hartford Courant. You can read my op-ed here. It’s prompted by what I saw in the video below, which shows Hartford police investigating a shooting on a Maple Avenue sidewalk in the city's South End, a few doors down from where my grandparents used to live. Not much happens, but watching the video put me in mind of themes I wrote about in House of Good Hope, ideas about how neighborhoods are perceived. So I typed, sent a few sentences to the Courant, and there you go …

My thanks to Peter Pach, who was a columnist during my few years at the paper and is now an editor for the editorial section. It was a treat to work with him.

Book!

2011-04-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to announce that Louisiana State University Press has decided to publish my story collection The Greatest Show as the Spring 2012 book in its Yellow Shoe fiction series.

Why Yellow Shoe? As editor Rand Dotson tells me, the name is from someone misunderstanding LSU fiction as "Yellow Shoe" fiction. I like a press with a sense of humor. Thanks to the good folks at LSU, and especially to Michael Griffith, the series editor, for choosing my manuscript.

Should I read Water for Elephants? Or not?

2011-03-20T17:08:00.000-07:00

Circus literature in the news:

1. Water for Elephants, the mega-historical-hit novel, is about to be released as a mega-historical-hit movie.

2. Death-Defying Acts, a poetry collection of testimonies from circus performers, is a finalist for a national award given to books from independent publishers.

Which am I more likely to read? The novel? Or the poetry?

The poetry.

I’d very much like to read the poetry. The publisher, Wordfarm, is a fine young press that first made an impression in my home when my wife brought home a book called Bright Shoots of Everlastingness. It had a stunning cover and essays that included one that had appeared in Best American Religious Writing. Since then, Wordfarm has also published Alan Michael Parker’s funny, tender novel Whale Man.

Why I’m less likely to read Water for Elephants I can’t exactly say. Something about my reluctance feels like insecurity. The book is a big hit. It’s fiction about a circus. I’ve written fiction about a circus. Why compare? When I was working on House of Good Hope, I one day saw another book that put a cold lump in my gut. The Pact was, like HOGH, about city kids making a promise to return to the broken city they love. Their city was Newark; I wrote Hartford. In The Pact, the young men all return home and become medical professionals. It’s a true story, but it seems to me less true to life than the more complicated ending of HOGH. But The Pact has sold better. Much better. It may well be a better book than HOGH, but I haven’t read it.

I tell myself I need to read The Pact. I tell myself to read Water for Elephants. A friend once gave me a novel called The Aerialist. It’s about a circus. My friend recommended it. I should read that one, too. After all, the guy who designs Chevy’s mini-vans must look at Ford’s.

But then I tell myself: chill. Competition in the writing world might follow a different model. Sprinters on a track and field team don’t watch each other. The other runners are a distraction. Instead, runners focus on their own form. They rely on their strengths and try to mitigate their weaknesses. They study and practice and study and practice and when the gun goes off go like hell.

And I do study. All the time I read stories that inspire awe, stories about a serial killer called The Misfit, or a shell-shocked soldier in Italy, or an Irish woman who wants to write about Chekhov and oysters. Those gold-medal stories make me want to clear my desk, open the laptop and aspire.

Still, I wonder. What do other writers do? Read the contemporary books that are like theirs? Or not?

The shortlist for the Scott Prize

2011-03-03T20:11:00.000-08:00

Here's some great good news. My short story collection manuscript, The Greatest Show, is on the shortlist for The Scott Prize, an award that carries publication with the fine independent press, SALT Publishing.

SALT is an international publisher, headquartered in the U.K., with a bunch of great books and writers in its catalogue. Congrats to all those who made the shortlist. I've checked you all out, and I’m feeling lucky to have my manuscript among yours.

The Greatest Show came out of my unending fascination with my hometown, Hartford, Connecticut, and its history. On July 6, 1944, a fire erupted during a matinee performance inside a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus tent, killing more than 160 people and injuring hundreds more. My father would have been inside the tent that day had his divorced parents not argued and his mother kept him from an outing with his dad. Years later, when I was an adult, the fire still haunted Hartford's cultural consciousness. My stories grow out of that haunting.

My gratitude goes to the folks at SALT.

Back inside the tent

2011-03-03T19:36:00.000-08:00

from Charlie Chaplin's movie, The Circus

This blog started as an experiment, a high-wire walk with no practice and no net. What did I know of blogging? Nada. But I stepped out there and fell and climbed back up and learned something. Then, I pulled the curtains.

It was time for a new show. For more than two years my blogging mojo has gone into HimPlus17, where my wife and I chat about our age difference (I’m 17 years younger).

But I’ve kept this blog in reserve, mostly for the title. It’s the same as a short story collection I’ve been dreaming up. Someday, I thought, I might need a venue for news about the manuscript as it became a book.

Not quite there yet. But that collection is finished ... and I’m hopeful, especially now. Why?

Here’s a hint.

Whitehead, remembered

2009-08-25T05:52:00.000-07:00

Had I but world enough and time, I’d leave Baltimore in a couple of weeks and trek to Fayetteville, Arkansas where a little store called Nightbird Books will host “A Celebration of Jim Whitehead: Readings from his Works.”

Jim died in 2003. A fierce, loving man, he was a fine poet and novelist, an offensive lineman, a co-founder of the graduate creative writing program at the University of Arkansas and one of my mentors there. Also, he was a dear friend, and I love him still. This celebration, scheduled for Sept. 9 from 7-9 p.m., marks the release of a book honoring him. For, From, About James T. Whitehead: Poems, Stories, Photographs, and Recollections, is edited by Michael Burns, another former student of Jim’s (there are thousands of us), and is the second book with Jim’s name to be published posthumously. The other, also put together with editing by Michael Burns, is called The Panther: Posthumous Poems. Whitehead was fascinated by the possibility that a Roman Centurion known as Pantera

was the historical father of the historical Jesus, a possibility that has also been studied by the scholar James Tabor, who wrote an introduction for the book.

Jim pushed for work that was both local and universal, and what he saw that combined the two was grace. "All right," he said in an interview a few decades past,

“we do fall apart and then we feel terrible guilt because we fall apart, from time to time. Our bodies and our souls are broken. But we mend, we mend. And I think one of the terrible things about so much contemporary literature is that it’s in this wretched, Freudian bag, with its negative view. It has no place for grace–this is not religious grace in any sense of traditional metaphysics or Christianity, but there is grace in the world. We all know there is grace. And yet, people have tried to convince us that there isn’t.”

Jim made it his life’s work to show readers and students where grace resides. My gratitude continues.

Nightbird Books is at 205 W. Dickson, in Fayetteville.

Kindling the flames of suppression

2009-07-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

So, Jeff Bezos apologized after Amazon sucked copies of 1984 and Animal Farm away from Kindle owners without their permission. So maybe those copies shouldn’t have been available in the first place, but the point remains that

Amazon showed how with Kindle, your library isn’t your library: it belongs to Amazon. Turns out that Kindle's like a super fancy library card.

Slate magazine’s Farhad Manjoo has an insightful and frightening piece about the implications of how our libraries really aren’t our when we sign a terms of service agreement with Amazon for devices such as Kindle. The result is that corporate and government Big Brother-wanna bees get to decide what can stay in what we used to think of as our personal libraries and what can’t.

So let’s conflate time a moment. Here’s a story from a few years back, before Kindle. It was scary then, but it is scarier when considered in context of a Kindle-world.

In the late 1990s, a writer named Susan Perabo published Who I Was Supposed to Be, a short story collection that included a parody in which Batman is a slovenly drunk. Perabo’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, and DC Comics were owned by the same company, and after DC discovered the Batman-as-Drunk story its reps complained to S&S and BAM! POW! ZIP! Perabo’s Batman story disappeared from subsequent editions of the book.

There was no copyright infringement; the Batman parody could easily have been argued as fair use (I know this because of research on this suppression for an article called "Holy Parody, Batman!" that I published in The Writer's Chronicle). This was corporate back-scratching, because a few suits at DC worried that a little short story would harm their brand.

I own a hard copy of what Perabo now calls “The Bat Edition” of her book. But imagine this same thing happening in the Kindle era. What’s different? DC and Simon and Schuster put pressure on Amazon to replace “Bat Editions” with a new Bat-less edition on everyone’s Kindle. Perabo’s story vanishes. You bought the book because you wanted to read the Batman story, but now it’s gone. No trace. Because Amazon and DC said so.

Ironically, Simon & Schuster has published Who I Was Supposed To Be as an e-book.

"The world must be shrink-wrapped."

2009-07-15T16:03:00.000-07:00

That’s what a poet friend wrote me after she learned the details of the following story, which involves dogs in Baltimore (where we live) and traditional Irish music in Montana (which we visit in the summer). It’s a story of serendipity and the awesome smallness of the world. And it’s about one rockin’ button accordion.

We’ll start at Double Rock Park in Parkville, a neighborhood in Baltimore County about a mile from where we live. It’s where we take our dog, Kaimin, most mornings of the week for her run-around-crazy-off-the-leash time. Early on we met a friendly fellow at Double Rock. He was talkative and often wore a little Irish driving cap and his manner suggested that he takes life as it comes. On the back of his car was a bumper sticker about folk music, and he told us where to find some in our neighborhood. We still see him in the park, often say hi, but our dogs don’t get along so swell (Kaimin’s fault) so we don’t chat too often.

Some months later, we’re in Montana planning to attend the National Folk Festival in Butte. This is a big three-day affair that takes over most of uptown Butte and draws acts from all over the country, including (I noted as I read the program) a traditional Irish band called The Pride of New York. And this is not just any traditional Irish band. This is a traditional Irish superband. It’s like the piano player is the Jerry Lee Lewis of Irish piano. And the button accordion player is the Eric Clapton of button accordion players. And they all got together for the first time, for one album.

“We should hear these guys,” I said to my wyf. “The guy from Baltimore plays button accordion. I think I heard him interviewed on the radio one night. The station played his music. It’s good.”

“If he’s in Baltimore,” said the wyf, “we can hear him there.”

Which was a good practical argument, but you see where this is going. At the folk festival I’m perusing the tent where CDs are on sale, and there’s the Pride of New York, and dang … there’s a familiar face holding a button accordion.

“You know that guy who walks his dog at Double Rock?” I said to my wyf.

To make certain, we sat about twenty rows back from the stage.

And yes, it turns out our fellow Double-Rock-Park-in-Parkville-Maryland dog walker is probably the best Irish traditional button accordion player in these United States if not the world.

And we could only learn that by traveling to Butte, Montana.

Awesome smallness. Shrink-wrapped, as my friend says.

We heard half a dozen amazing performances that day, and a few more on the radio the day after. The Pride of New York, featuring Billy McComiskey who walks his dog at Double Rock Park on button accordion, topped them all. “Sian le Maigh,” a mournful tune featuring the penny whistle, drew the first heartfelt standing ovation we’d seen that day. “I hear all of Ireland’s suffering in that song,” said the wyf. This from a Dutch woman! Whose Calvinist people made their kids wear orange on St. Patrick’s Day!

So. Now you also know about The Pride of New York and Billy McComiskey. And you didn’t even have to go to Butte. But you should, anyway. Butte is Evel Knievel’s hometown and has a 1700-feet deep Superfund site that sells postcards. In such places, you might be surprised by the high trill of life’s most serendipitous melodies.

The last word, which was 'honor'

2009-07-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1992, my wife and I were not yet married but living together in a cabin on the banks of the Delaware River. Each morning, we walked a mile or so on a dirt road to the town of Cochecton, N.Y., to buy a copy of The New York Times. The morning of July 4th was no different. Except that day the Times dedicated a full page to a reprint of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was not an advertising gimmick, not sponsored, nor did it even boast “brought to you by The New York Times.” It was the Declaration with no trappings. That afternoon, sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of the cabin, Sheri and I read the Declaration out loud. We took turns, a few paragraphs for her, a few for me..

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …”

“… He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. …”

“… these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States …”

And by the last word, which was “honor,” we were changed.

On every Independence Day since, we’ve read the Declaration out loud. Sometimes it has just been the two of us. Often it is with friends after a breakfast of pancakes, eggs and bacon.

If you take a moment between the grilling and the fireworks to read the Declaration aloud, particularly if you read it with friends, I hope you will note the vivacity of the prose, the incisiveness of the reasoning, the passion and certainty and confidence of the spirit. Moreover, recognize that you are reading one of the first documents of a people struggling to find a new way of living that moves beyond monarchy and respects the rights of the individual. It is not perfect – its description of American’s Native peoples is shameful, and we must never forget that while declaring independence because all men were equal, some of the signatories owned slaves. Nevertheless, given the standards of the time, the fact of the document is a marvel. Add its evident power and literary grace, and it is no wonder it has become a kind of secular scripture, our Genesis.

You’ll find your own copy to read here.

Who was ours?

2009-06-26T08:28:00.000-07:00

My wife has the sense that famous people die in clumps of three. Nothing proves her idea, but here come Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Ed McMahon to suggest again its possibility. Much has been made in the media over Farrah and The King of Pop having been so iconic for my generation, the generation that followed the baby boomers and came of age in the mid-1970s through the 1980s.

Add David Carradine of Kung Fu fame to that bunch, and you have a trio of recently departed celebrities who influenced a generation. What do they have in common? Television. Farrah on Charlie's Angels, Michael Jackson and his Thriller videos. When I realized that TV was the common denominator, I felt a little sad and a little stupid. The generation before mine had lots of literary writers as icons: Sylvia Plath, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac. These writers influenced people's ideas, put phrases and characters into the collective consciousness. So I wondered, which writers truly influenced my generation? Which writers would our generation call iconic?

And none came to mind.

Who influenced my generation's culture? Was it only the producers of movies and TV and music, Spielberg and Lucas and Aaron Spelling and Quincy Jones? Is that how our culture was shaped?

Who did I read? Lot of writers from other generations. I read the writers who influenced the boomers. Also I read comic books. Frank Miller's Dark Knight. And lots of genre writing.

But who did we read? I could come up with only a few names. Stephen King was one. From Carrie through Salem's Lot, he was the most literary popular writer we read. But who else? Jay McInerney got lots of acclaim, but in the end had little influence. Toni Morrison? Doesn't she belong more to the boomers? Raymond Carver?

Readers of this blog, I'd like to hear your answers. In the late 1970s through the 1980s, who did people read? What writers will that generation mourn one day saying, yes, she was ours. Yes, he was ours.

What your T-shirt says about you ...

2009-05-26T09:03:00.000-07:00

... sometimes depends on where you wear it. Yesterday, while visiting a friend in D.C., I noticed a fellow waiting in line to tour Ford's Theatre where John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in 1864. On the man's T-shirt: "I know violence isn't the answer, but I misunderstood the question."

Ka-pow!

Sun setting

2009-04-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

A fitting metaphor: When I stepped outdoors tonight to bring in our American flag for the evening, I noticed litter on my sidewalk. When I fetched it, I discovered it was the sort of plastic sleeve that usually holds an edition of the morning newspaper. Except this sleeve was empty.

A sad, sad day. The Baltimore Sun management laid of nearly a third of its newsroom staff today in what is already being called a massacre. Early reports suggest that security escorted editors out of the building. The Sun even laid off employees who were out covering an Orioles game.

To think this city once supported three major daily newspapers! If the laid off employees somehow start their own newspaper, I'll sign up for a subscription. Or two. We deserve their good work and they deserve better.

Monty Cook, the editor of the Sun, is a villain for overseeing these layoffs. I agree with David Simon, who created The Wire and used to work for the Sun, who reportedly wrote that Cook should have resigned before overseeing this bloodbath.

As for Sam Zell, the head of the Tribune Co. that owns the Sun, he's worse.

The Tucson Citizen publishes "day-to-day." The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is online only. The Detroit papers have reduced their daily delivery. And the Rocky Mountain News has folded. This grim recitation doesn't count the many other news organizations -- from small-circulation weeklies to the New York Times -- that have reduced operations, laid off jouranlists or closed up shop.

Yes, the news industry is in trouble. Yes, advertising revenue is shrinking. But if greedy fools like Zell hadn't driven up stock prices for newspapers in the 1990s and into the 21st century by taking out loans to pay for the privilege of ownership, many newspapers would be hampered now, but surviving. The Sun's layoffs, and the collapse of daily news journalism in the United States, is less about an industry failing to adequately change its business model to suit new technology than it is the greed of people who believed that newspapers would be cash cows for decades and were willing to overpay for the chance to milk.

What is there to do? Cancel our subscription? That will only hasten the end. But how else does a reader protest that the newspaper isn't offering enough to read?

The best coverage of the Sun massacre is at the blog The Real Muck. Read the details there.

Gumbo and the Maryland Writers' Association

2009-04-30T12:11:00.001-07:00

No, not the soupy food spiced New Orleans style.

I mean the wet, soupy, slippery clay that makes the meaniest, knobbiest, most macho truck tires spin. I'm using that sort of gumbo as a metaphor when I speak Saturday, May 9, at 9 a.m. at the Maryland Writers' Association annual conference in Linthicum Heights, Maryland. The conference is a whole day affair that will include good writing advice from folks as talented as young adult novelist Elissa Brent Weissman and screenwriter David Warfield and general all-around lit-champion Gregg Wilhelm of City Lit in Baltimore.

My talk is called "Four-Wheel Drive Writing: Overcoming Writer's Block."

Excuse me, now, while I go write the thing.

The Sporting Pages

2009-04-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

The newest issue of The Writer's Chronicle includes an essay I wrote about how sports work in literature. My examples range from "The Funeral Games of Patroclus" in The Iliad to the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Deirdre McNamer’s lovely novel, One Sweet Quarrel. Here’s an essay excerpt:

"Beauty, danger, stress, action, character revelation. Literature and sports are natural siblings. I’m always troubled that some smart, literary people (readers and writers) don’t see that relationship and disdain sports, whether in real life or on the page. A risk writers face in choosing sports as a subject is that a reader will prejudge such work as silly or slight. Some readers, I’m sure, passed over this article the moment they noticed “sport” in the title. I have met fellow literary travelers who proclaim sports to be confusing, a waste of time, and something to deride; these are often people who resent the adulation associated with sports and the money that follows, who see sports as celebrating body over mind (“Why don’t thousands of cheering fans show up for readings?”). I’m no longer surprised by this attitude, but I still don’t understand it. There exist curious readers and writers who will delight in arcanum gathered from a Paul Theroux travelogue, or in the mysteries of glove making revealed in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, who will immediately turn from a book that has a football on the cover. Don’t they understand, I cry out to the ghosts of Shoeless Joe and Pistol Pete and the Four Horsemen (no, no, the other four horsemen), that the games we play and watch and write about are complicated dramatic works with protagonists, antagonists, rising action, climax and denouement, in which acts are periods or quarters or halves, and in which characters don’t know the script, scripts that are often tragic because athletes fail more often than they succeed?"

The Writer’s Chronicle is difficult to find on newsstands, as it is mostly a benefit of belonging to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, aka AWP. But hey, maybe you should join?

Libby, Mont., and the 27s

2009-04-16T19:47:00.000-07:00

Recently, two fine writers and journalists who studied in classes I taught at the University of Montana have found their way onto National Public Radio Programs. Tristan Scott (Journalism 270, Beginning Reporting) is a reporter for the Missoulian newspaper in Missoula, Mont. He spoke on All Things Considered about a trial he’s covering in which prosecutors seek some form of justice for the people of Libby, Mont. More than a few people in Libby have died or suffered from exposure to asbestos that was a byproduct of a local mining operation run by an out-of-state company (Maryland’s W.R. Grace Co.).

Meanwhile, Eric Segalstad (Graduate Reporting) has co-authored a book about the 27s, the club no one wants to belong to. Its members are all music stars, mostly rockers with a bluesman or two thrown in, who died at age 27. Among the roster: Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. Segalstad was interviewed on All Things Considered about the book, which also got a mention on the Washington Post’s blog about death, “Post Mortem,” though you have to scroll down to find that one.

HimPlus17 and the Art of Blogging

2009-04-11T04:32:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have read this blog regularly know that there is no such thing as reading this blog regularly. My posts are irregular, sometimes frequent and sometimes not. There's neither rhyme nor reason to what I post here. I just write whatever strikes my fancy whenever my fancy is struck.

It's no way to run a blog. I know this.

I'm doing much better on a new effort over at http:himplus17.blogspot.com

HimPlus17 is a blog I'm writing jointly with my wife, Sheri Venema. She's 17 years older than me. Always has been (except for a couple of months each year when she's only 16 years older). And we've been married nearly 16 years. We're trying to do a much better job with that blog than I've done with The Greatest Show. We post at least once a week, and we try to invite readers to participate now and then as good blogs do.

But mostly, we're writing about the phenomenon of the Older Woman/Younger Man dynamic, the truths and falsehoods behind the Cougar craze, and what it's like for an Older Woman/Younger Man to age together. We're revealing things we sometimes haven't even told each other. Some day, we plan to explore these ideas and scenes and experiences even more fully in essays, and maybe (no promises) put them in a book.

In the meantime, though you're invited to peek into our marriage. Follow us. Leave a message in the comments.

And don't think I'm giving up on The Greatest Show. It will remain the same idiosyncratic mix of information, musings and confusions, posted at irregular intervals ...

Uranium, Diamonds, Tom Zoellner and The Daily Show

2009-03-28T05:02:00.001-07:00

Readers of this blog (both of you; Hi Mom!) might remember that last spring I mentioned a book called The Heartless Stone, by Tom Zoellner, which chronicles the social, geologic and political history of diamonds with plenty of details about marketing, violence, marriage and hip hop. Tom visited a class of mine at Towson University and gave a great reading from his book. He's a helluva reporter and storyteller, and his new book, Uranium, is generating lots of attention.

That attention includes an appearance for Tom on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He's scheduled for this Thursday, April 2. I'll bet he fares better than Jim Cramer did.

Cities as Unreliable Narrators

2009-03-13T06:52:00.000-07:00

What follows is the presentation I made at the 2009 conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Chicago. The panel was called "Alive and Coarse and Strong and Cunning" after a line from Carl Sandberg's poem about Chicago, and the panel's subject was how great works of nonfiction have turned cities into characters. For my presentation, I discussed how cities can be considered unreliable narrators, a concept that in fiction usually applies to first-person characters, but in nonfiction can help transform cities into characters. I used Odessa, Texas as depicted in Buzz Bissinger's classic book Friday Night Lights.

Cities tell their own stories. When I lived in Hartford, Conn., my hometown, the story was an Eeyore-like tale: “We’re halfway between Boston and New York, and we’re not as good as either place; nobody loves us.” And that story wasn’t true.

In Missoula, Mont., where I lived for a while, the city’s self-told story could be summed up as “We’re a diverse and tolerant community!” which also wasn’t quite true, except in the kind of diversity that exists in a community that’s 95 percent white (Columbia fleece or North Face?)
In Baltimore, where I now live, there are benches with lovely, dark stained, laquered wood, and each marked along one backslat with white decal letters proclaiming: “Baltimore: The Greatest City in America.”

You know and I know that Baltimore is no such thing. Fun and quirky and violent? Yes. But the Greatest City in America?

Which means, I think, that Baltimore, Missoula, and Hartford can all be understood as unreliable narrators.

Which also means each is a setting behaving in a way we’ve come to expect of characters.
Many years ago, I heard a writer talk about the qualities of a good character in literary nonfiction. Number one, he said, the character has to be a talker. A storyteller. Someone who says interesting things in interesting ways. This made sense to me. When I was a newspaper sports writer, we used to call such people “quote monsters.”

Likewise, when a writer considers whether to treat a city as a character, the writer needs to know whether the city has something interesting to say, and then note whether the city tells its interesting thing – or somehow expresses it – in an interesting way. Oftentimes what a city expresses is a narrative that explains what the city is and who its people are or want to be. That narrative, the story people agree to live to become part of a community, lies at the heart of the city’s character.

This relationship of story, city and character becomes clear reading Buzz Bissinger’s contemporary classic, Friday Night Lights. First published in 1990, the book brought high school football in Texas – and more specifically high school football in the city of Odessa – into the national consciousness. Bissinger examines the story Odessa tells about itself, finds the city’s narrative to be unreliable, then explores the contradictions and tensions inherent in any story that’s told by an unreliable narrator. All the questions that come into play with an unreliable narrator apply to Odessa: What can we believe? What should we doubt? What’s the story the character – the city – knows but keeps secret? What story does the character – the city – fear people will learn? What aspects of its own story is the character unable to see? What parts can’t fit into the narrative, so are ignored?

The story Odessa tells about itself is simple and shows how the city identifies with its scrappy high school football team. “They were a classic bunch of overachievers,” Bissinger writes. “What made those boys great on the football field had made the fans great as well. Just as the boys had produced against all odds, so they” [the people of Odessa] “had produced in the oil field against all odds, not with brains and fancy talk but with brawn and muscle and endurance and self-sacrifice.” (p. 103)

Bissinger, a Pulitzer-Prize winning literary journalist, knows to doubt that story. A character – like a bench in Baltimore – might say “Greatest City in America” but the boarded-up tenement nearby suggests “A city that needs help.” A character – like a real person -- might say, “Yes, we’d love it if you stay,” but mean “for God’s sake go home now,” or a character might say “I love Lolita” and hope that it’s not heard as “I raped an adolescent orphan girl” as Humbert Humbert does in Lolita. And, characters, like real people, sometimes reveal more through body language and actions than they do through words. Likewise, a city has its official narrative – often told by people in power – but the city can’t help itself; it always reveals more than the official line. The nonfiction writer needs to recognize both lines of a city’s story: the one intentionally told and the one told without intention. The conflict between the two, in a work of literary nonfiction, is a helpful source of dramatic tension.

How does a city tell its story?

With great variety. Let’s start with a lesson offered in the Gospels of both Luke and Matthew: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Money. Few actions reveal the character of a community better than its spending. I’m talking official expenditures made through government agencies, but also what people buy. Tom Wolfe points us toward this, too, encouraging writers to study a character’s “status life,” though his observations are sometimes criticized for applying socio-economic demographics in place of character.

Bissinger doesn’t do that. In Friday Night Lights, he reveals that Odessa’s economy is wounded, perhaps mortally, because west Texas can’t compete against OPEC nations in the oil market. Nevertheless, Odessa’s school district paid twenty thousand dollars for charter flights to send its high school football team to away games. The school district built a $5.6 million stadium “with seating for 19,032, and a full-time caretaker who lived in a house on the premises” (p. 42). Bissinger also tells us that at the high school the cost for boy’s medical supplies “was $6,750.” For teaching materials in the English department, the school spent nearly two grand less. The salary for an English teacher with twenty years experience and a master’s degree was $32,000, while the football coach, who taught no classes, earned $48,000 plus the use of a “new Taurus sedan each year.” (p. 145). As for household purchases, some folk in Odessa bought black toilet seats because the team’s color was black.

What else? Bissinger lets Odessa tell its story through at least five other forms of self-expression:

• its history
• anecdotes about its people
• recorded or observed facts
• statistics other than spending
and
• Testimony and witness

Taken one a time:
ONE -- History: In the city library, the book that records the history of Odessa football is thicker than the one that records the history of Odessa itself. Also, a Wall of Fame in the high school honoring the best school boy football players depicts all white kids but one until 1982. After the Odessa schools were desegregated, the faces of African-American athletes appeared on the wall with greater regularity. Meanwhile, white Odessa worked hard to pretend desegregation never happened.

TWO -- Anecdotes about people: Bissinger tells of a player’s day at school, where he’s confronted with such headscratchers as a question about what should be listed first on a menu: shrimp cocktail or Jell-O salad (p. 130). In another anecdote, Bissinger tells of a former player whose body was never big enough for football, and how years later “he felt it during the mornings when he couldn’t bend over to tie his shoes” (p. 281).

THREE -- Recorded or observed facts: Police escort the team bus to home games with lights flashing so the bus won’t have to stop at stoplights. Another: after a loss, the football coach finds “For Sale” signs punched into his front lawn. (p. 238).

FOUR -- Other statistics: In Friday Night Lights, these include unemployment rates, SAT scores, attendance at games, the numbers of victories each year, soaring rental vacancy rates, plunging oil prices, and population demographics.

FIVE – Testimony and witness: Among those who believe the city’s narrative is a 17-year-old football player who looks around his city and observes, “We got two things in Odessa. Oil and football. And oil’s gone. But we still got football, so fuck the rest of you.” But an Odessa native in exile as a lawyer in Houston, notes that “Odessa has an unspeakable ability to bullshit itself.”
In the end, we’re left with a sense that the story Odessa tells about itself – that it succeeds against all odds, not with brains and fancy talk but with brawn and endurance and self-sacrifice – allows it to ignore its own failings including underperforming students, virulent racism, an inability to judge itself by any standard except football, and a murder rate that for years placed it among the worst cities in America. But Odessa is a character, after all, obsessed, complicated, not easy to pin down, and Bissinger reminds us that the narrative – the myth renewed in the seasonal rituals of football – has been necessary. In the book’s climax, as Odessa’s team is pitted against a more talented team from Dallas in the semifinals of the state playoffs, Bissinger lets the reader in on his understanding of this character called Odessa. Yes, the city has built an elaborate lie about itself and about its football team, and yes, Odessa sacrifices more than seems reasonable for the construction of this lie. But right now, Odessa’s boys can win with a touchdown, and the reader, just like the fans, players and coaches, wants Odessa to score that touchdown. The reader grabs hold of the thing that unites Odessa’s people behind their narrative, the one feeling that enables them to live in a place so terrible and somehow keep on with the business of living. In the stands, Bissinger writes,

Fingers were crossed. Eyes were raised to the dull gray sky. In the cavernous stadium, the cheers seemed distant, tinny. But there was hope, because there had to be.
That was the very point of it all. (p. 326)

Ozark: Requiescat in pace

2009-03-10T18:15:00.001-07:00

Joy. Hope. Renewal.

2009-01-20T06:15:00.000-08:00

BWC 17: The Condor meets Bart Simpson

2008-10-28T05:09:00.000-07:00

This year I'm fortunate to help organize the 17th annual Baltimore Writers' Conference, a daylong gathering where writers who have published and writers who haven't drift around like bees in a garden of words, cross pollinating every which way. This is how amazing the conference can be: We've got the author of Six Days of the Condor, and a novelist who spent four years writing scripts for The Simpsons, and a short story writer who has won two of the major awards given solely to short story collections.

I'm eager to hear Bruce Jacobs, who wrote Race Manners and Race Manners for the 21st Century. In his book, first published in the 1990s, he described ways in which race can be discussed with candor and generosity of spirit. I've heard him speak before, and he's smart and kind. Another highlight will be sitting next to Lia Purpura as we run a panel about creative nonfiction. Lia is a poet and essayist, and she comes at creative nonfiction as a lyricist. As a nonfiction writer with a journalism background, I love reading and listening to the nonfiction writers who approach the genre from a lyrical, poetic stance. The workmanlike moth astonished by the butterfly, that sort of thing.

The whole shebang starts early in the morning on Saturday, Nov. 8, at Towson University. Be you moth or butterfly or bee, if you'd care to register, visit the BWC Web site.

An Apple for Mr. Hall!

2008-10-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

If you read House of Good Hope, you remember Joshua Hall, the young man (pictured right, from his senior high school yearbook) who grew up to live out his promise to live in Hartford and help the city by any means necessary. Joshua, a smart, passionate young man, became Mr. Hall, a smart, passionate social studies teacher at Weaver High School. He's been doing great work at the school, and his efforts are being rewarded by the good women of Iota Phi Lamba sorority, who will honor Joshua at their annual "Apple for the Teacher" award luncheon on November 15 at the Chowder Pot restaurant on Hartford's Brainard Road. Joshua will be among eight teachers recognized for contributions that have been significant to "educating children and making schools better."

You can read more about Joshua since his appearance in House of Good Hope here.

I've seen Joshua at work in the classroom. He is disciplined in his mission to teach students important lessons about America and life. He's a role model in the best sense, and I'm delighted that he is being recognized for his good work.

"It's Really Odd Being the Minister's Wife."

2008-10-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

My students tittered. Some shook their heads as if no words could explain how weird the world is. I’d just told them that I’m an ordained minister and that I was off for a weekend to officiate at a wedding in Montana. Their looks said, “You’re making this up, right?”

I was not. I explained how a friend had asked me to officiate at her Montana wedding; all I’d need, she said, is ordination, which I could get via the Universal Life Church and its Web site, and like water to wine I’d be legal to solemnize the union of Courtney Lowery and Jacob Cowgill. Once I agreed, Courtney made jokes about me being a fake minister, called me “Reverend” and “Rev.” But I knew she was serious, too, and that my responsibility was to be sincere.

The idea of me as Man of God flustered me. I am not devotedly religious. At best, I can be described as a lapsed Roman Catholic. As a teacher, I hesitate to preach so as not to seem too much the scold. As a writer, I explore sin and human failing more than virtue and piousness. Moreover, my heart beats in a medieval, superstitious way. I’ve read Dante, and as a former altar boy who once served the Papists, I understand fully the punishment priests said awaits the blasphemer, the price of worshipping outside the doctrines that accompanied my baptism. When I joked with students about my trepidations, a nice fellow from the back row, with a broad face and an Irish last name, made it clear he understood, too. He said:

“You are so going to Hell.”

Maybe. But first I had plane tickets to Montana.

Courtney and Jacob chose for their wedding a lovely Montana site: an old ranch, with a red-board and stone barn (see picture), half a mile from fenced off black hills of coal and sky-high smoke stacks. Nothing says Montana quite like rural Romanticism mixed with rapacious industry.

Much of my work as minister had already happened, which was to help Courtney and Jacob write and edit the ceremony. We’d met, we’d talked, we’d even discussed how much God to include. Courtney and Jacob aren’t atheists, but their beliefs are perhaps as vague and ill-defined as my own. But, yes, they wanted God. So I took their ideas to my laptop and spent more than a few mornings mulling over marriage, Montana, and the love Courtney and Jacob shared. What I’d written comprised the bulk of the ceremony.

The wedding spot was a little plot of land by Prickly Pear Creek, south of the state capital at Helena, where cottonwoods broke up the sunlight into jewels that alighted on people’s faces. The wedding day started cloudy, but miraculously(!) the clouds gave way just as Courtney began her bridal march, her farmer father alongside in crisp blue jeans, bolo tie and Western vest, an image even more iconic than Clint Eastwood’s cowboys, because Clyde Lowery is the real deal. He walked with his daughter, and she came to Jacob in sunlight, and in sunlight they made their union. Many guests – my wife, Sheri, among them -- filled more than a dozen rows, and I nearly shouted the words so I could be heard in back. Because I shouted, because I concentrated to recite the words correctly and in the right order, I felt less an agent of something numinous than I did an emcee, a movie’s director, an enforcer of decorum and solemnity, whose role was to make certain people stood where they must stand, that the rings were safe, that players knew their roles. Soon, when the ceremony ended, I would become a bureaucrat, gathering the signatures of witnesses to make legal the license.

How I felt, of course, didn’t matter. I had to trust that the love and grace I had known when writing the ceremony still existed in the words, that the words I’d chosen and ordered carried their own spiritual heft, and that Courtney and Jacob, if no one else, would feel their power. I wanted them to have that gift. I hoped they would.

Here is the gift they gave me.

They had written their own vows, which I hadn’t read. They memorized their words, and spoke them, not profaning the words and sentiments by lifting their voices. They spoke clearly, beautifully. Jacob started, and when Courtney cried to hear him it was all I could do to stand in witness. Courtney’s words followed, and as Jacob teared up, so did I. What thing in any church could be more holy. Few guests could hear as Courtney and Jacob spoke, but I hope they felt, as I did, all the grace of love and joy and patience that radiated from the man and woman we’d gathered to celebrate.

That moment cleared away all doubts and confusions about my performing the role of reverend. If now I stand accused in the eyes of any true believer of a blasphemy, let it be so. If by being an accomplice to such joy, I have sinned, I am the happiest of sinners.

At the reception, we ate in the barn from bounty raised by Jacob at the farm where he works. Sheri and I square danced following the directions of a retired school teacher who had taught Courtney in elementary school. We talked with old friends, and with new ones, but mostly we wandered about, a little off balance. Sheri had said to me the night before, at the rehearsal dinner, “It’s odd being the minister’s wife,” and this from a woman who has known Courtney as well and as long as I have. What Sheri meant was that we were participating in a wedding in a way we never had, and that it was strange to be unaligned with family, not to be old college pals in the wedding party, nor casual friends who show for the ceremony, sit in the back, offer congratulations, eat and leave. We -- or I -- had played a necessary and important role, but also stood strangely outside the life of the wedding. Sensing this, we left early each night, quietly stepping into the backround, leaving the hardcore revelry to others, which seems to me the final kindness and final burden of all our solemn celebrants.

Mark Twain might laugh, bitterly ..

2008-09-19T06:37:00.000-07:00

at the news that his house, long an icon in Hartford, is in dire financial trouble and in danger of shutting its doors. Or maybe he wouldn't. It's hard to say, because Twain was such a complicated fellow. He loved the his Victorian Gingerbread Tiffany-filled house with its trick doors and solarium and children's wing where his daughters played. But he also was the keenest American observer of our own human follies and hubris. He nearly bankrupted himself in that house, and he'd appreciate the parallel irony that the house has almost bankrupted other people who love it. The Twain House management apparently overreached a bit in a grand plan to modernize the grounds, adding a lovely gallery and cafeteria and shop, among other things like administrative offices. Read it about it in this article from the New York Times.

Still, Hartford needs the house, and American literary culture needs the house, and if the administrators overreached they did so for the right reasons. That's why authors from throughout the region are gathering this coming week for a reading in support of the house. Please, if you are nearby, go. If you are not and can afford to send a little money, do that, too. Twain was, according to Hemingway, the first true American writer. He was the first writer to put the American vernacular to artistic use in the novel. Let's not wait around for the Federal Reserve to bail out the house and preserve Twain's legacy. Because it won't. It's up to us.

Ralph Nader, Wally Lamb and Moi

2008-08-31T06:49:00.000-07:00

House of Good Hope is a finalist for the Connecticut Book Awards in the Biography and Memoir category. Other finalists are Ralph Nader's memoir about growing up Winsted, Connecticut, and a collection of essays written by women in prison edited by Wally Lamb. I won't be able to attend the awards ceremony to hang out with the likes of Stewart O'Nan, a finalist for his rich gem of a novel Last Night at the Lobster, but I'm missing the ceremony for the very best of reasons. Friends Courtney Lowery and Jacob Cowgill are getting married in Montana, and I've been granted the privilege of officiating at their ceremony and pronouncing them husband and wife.

But if any of y'all would like to go to the Connecticut Book Awards or reception to follow, the good news is you can! Here's the info you need:

When? Sept. 21, 2 p.m.
Where? The atrium of the Hartford Public Library on Main Street in downtown Hartford
How much? FREE!
Free? Really? Well, the awards ceremony is. A reception and book signing to follow is $40. Get tickets by calling 860.695.6320 by September 15.

Truck No. 3915

2008-08-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

Today I finished after two months -- yes, two months -- I finished reading Don DeLillo's book Underworld, which is a tremendous book, a really great American novel, a category of book that is good to have because though there will never be a single great American novel there are many, and because we have the category we can name them and include Roth's American Pastoral and Melville's Moby Dick and Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and Morrison's Song of Solomon and others I'm forgetting. Underworld is a great book, but what matters today is that as I read the last pages, I heard a roar outside and a clang and there were the City of Baltimore sanitation workers in their orange Tees, one driving and two riding, house by house emptying the cans we'd left out for them all up and down Sefton Ave. They rode Truck No. 3915 and they picked up the garbage that all of us had placed in bags and tied off at the tops and placed the bags in the rubber barrels that we call cans, a holdover from when there were trash cans made of metal, and the men in orange Tees took those bags and threw them all together into the back of a truck with the bags from other streets. Those bags held torn credit card slips and used condoms and weeds pulled out from between rose bushes and DVDs that didn't work anymore, and warrantees for items that didn't work anymore and love letters and religious bulletins from Methodist churches and Catholic churches but not Unitarian churches because those bulletins are placed in the recycling and this was the garbage I'm talking about here, this was our lives and that's why reading Underworld has been a very good thing, and why, even though it seems a coincidence, it is worth mentioning that as I finished the book the City of Baltimore sanitation workers cruised our street, loud and shouting, as if at a party, to take our lives, our histories, away.

High Five in Nonfiction

2008-07-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

Want to know my favorite nonfiction books? Want to know why I like 'em?

Check out the summer issue of JMWW, an exciting online literary journal published out of Baltimore by a writer who also happens to be a grad of Towson University's Professional Writing Program. Many thanks to Jen Michalski for running the site and inviting my contribution.

Featured books:
Hiroshima; The Heartless Stone; The Way to Rainy Mountain; The Year of Magical Thinking; Brothers and Keepers.

Enjoy!

Fire up above

2008-07-15T06:31:00.000-07:00

Something odd about hiking a mountain in the morning, then watching it burn in the evening. That's what happened a few days ago here in Missoula to many, many people, including me. For us, it was a hike Sheri and I took with friends Dave and Grace Kreulen, in from Michigan. We started to the south and east, in a place called Crazy Canyon, then walked until he we were on the front of Mount Sentinel, a grass-covered slope that sits and watches over the city of Missoula. We crossed the front of the mountain along a fire road to the famous white-washed, concrete M, and hiked down from there. All in all, about 2 1/2 hours to log 6 miles and some change.

While walking the fire road, I mentioned to our guests that in a few weeks people wouldn't be hiking Mount Sentinel anymore. Likely the city will close the mountain, I said, because the fire danger will be too high. These grasses dry out, and if you're up here when they're on fire it can be pretty spooky.

We parted for the afternoon, our friends back to their camper and us to our home. They arrived again for dinner around 7 p.m., and I met them at the door.

"The mountain's on fire!" said they.

And it was. We watched with binoculars as fire raced across the mountain, and sometimes just sat there and burned, as a helicopter flew over head dropping water, as men in yellow shirts dug trenches to stop that flames' advance, as the flame itself stopped when it reached the road we had hiked. A few acres less than 400 when it was done.

I wish I could say what strikes me about hiking a mountain, commenting on it burning, then watching it burn. I'm not sure, exactly. What I do know is that I'm disturbed by more than the coincidence of the events. The hike/burn/watch has something to do with the power we all had when we were children, the ability to imagine something, watch it happen, and then feel responsibility for it. "I wish Barry would break a bone" and then he does and you yourself broke the bone! Magical thinking. When the mountain burned, in a strange way, I felt suddenly tapped into a larger universe, even if I didn't understand it, even if I didn't believe in it. It existed despite me, and that's a little scary, a little exhilarating.

Read more about it at New West, my favorite Rocky Mountain news source.

And the war of 1812 was fought when?

2008-07-15T06:18:00.000-07:00

And also, what group of people were kept from coming to the United States by the Chinese Exclusionary Act?

Toughies, yes? The title question is a joke. The opener to this blog entry is a joke, too, but only in the "sad facts of life" category. To wit:

A young friend reported yesterday about a history class he's taking in summer school. A debilitating sickness knocked him out of school last semester, and he needs to get American history credits that he'd dropped.

Turns out the summer history class is less about America's past than it is about passing. The course is self taught along these lines:

1. Read a chapter
2. Complete fill-in-the-blank exercises (while looking at the chapter for the answers)
3. In class, receive a study sheet with those same fill-in-the-blanks and the correct answers (in case you couldn't find them yourself); take a half hour to review
4. Take a sheet of notes as you study the correct fill-in-the-blank answers.
5. Take the test.

This is worse than memorization. And to believe it will fulfill credits in high school American history in any school district in America is a travesty. Moreover, the test itself is my newest "sad fact of life." You might ask, What was the first question on the very first test?

What group of people were kept from coming to the United States by the Chinese Exclusionary Act?

My young friend wrote the question on a separate sheet of paper so he wouldn't forget it. He's smart enough to know that this question, given its context, has more to teach him than the answer.

A P.T. Barnum moment

2008-05-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

Self-promotion here, folks. Dan D'Ambrosio of the Hartford Advocate published a story this week about HOUSE OF GOOD HOPE. Read it here.

Full disclosure: Dan was a graduate student in journalism while I taught at the University of Montana's School of Journalism, and I worked as a reader on his thesis committee. I'm pleased with the job he's done as a journalist, and I'm especially thrilled that at least one person I helped educate regarding journalism (and Dan didn't need a lot of help) ended up reporting from my hometown, doing the good work necessary so Connecticut residents better understand their capital city, its successes and failures, its people and their lives.

I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony

2008-04-24T05:22:00.001-07:00

Once, in a small idyllic town in the Rocky Mountains, I built a mini-mountain of Coca-Cola cans in the office where I worked. The Co’ Cola mountain, three cans high, filled a book shelf. Once the mountain grew too large, I’d collapse the cans, then bag them for recycling. You like Coke? students often asked, ironically, and the answer, of course, was that I did. I drank two or more cans a day. Sucked in those high-fructose-corn-syrup calories as if without them the sky would go gray, the hems of my pants would unravel, my spine would curve under every one of life’s burdens.

Hyperbolic, sure, but as a child I learned to love Coca-Cola. Via marketing, I was weaned on the idea that to give the world a Coke was to give the world peace. That famous ad campaign inspired an impressionable altar boy with a tendency toward sentimental utopian ideals. And even if as an adult I no longer believed in or even yearned for utopias, or thought much about the relationship between Coca-Cola and world peace, I was already hooked on the good feelings I got from inside that little twelve ounce can.

Sparkles. Taste. Caffeine. Harmony. Sugar. Peace.

Meanwhile, a few students on campus at the University of Montana were arguing – with gusto – that the university’s administration ought to abandon an exclusive contract that made Coca-Cola UM’s go-to soft-drink provider. The reason? Intimations that Coca-Cola had something to do with the violent repression (possibly including murder) of union organizers in Colombia. At the time, I was teaching a course in which we explored Colombia’s recent and doleful history, and I could find nothing that showed a direct link between my drinking Coke and the deaths of Colombian union workers. In fact, much of what the students had to say seemed fuzzy, loose with facts. Moreover, Colombia is a complicated country; there is blood-guilt to be shared among all who tote guns, be they leftist guerillas or rightwing paramilitaries or government forces funded in part by the United States under Clinton or Bush. In truth, my responsibility for Colombian violence has more to do with my taxes than my Coca-Cola habit.

But I gave up Coke eventually, for health reasons. High fructose corn syrup, the primary sweetener in Coke, is like long-term poison for diabetics, and given that diabetes runs in my family, and that I have blood-sugar problems already, it seemed wise to abandon Coca-Cola. So I did. About that same time, Coca-Cola came out with a new product, Coke Zero, which has no sugar, no high fructose corn syrup, no nothing. I think, basically, that it tastes like watered down Coke. My red castle of cans became a black castle of cans.

But now I’ve been reading about the Chinese government’s response to protests in and about occupied Tibet, how the Chinese recently tried to trade weapons with Robert Mugabe’s violent and illegitimate government in Zimbabwe. And I know how China has generally worked to support the government in Sudan, which continues to allow the genocide of people in Darfur. And the Chinese government is about to stage the Olympic games. And Coca-Cola is the top sponsor of the Olympic Games in Beijing.

I’m troubled by these connections. At the same time, I’m impressed by the protest of a Japanese manufacturer of iron shots, who will not allow his work to be used in the shot put event at these Olympics. It is a small protest, really, his, but a worthwhile one.

Coca-Cola argues in an op-ed piece published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that its role in sponsoring the Olympics is legitimate, that the Olympics ought to be immune from politics, that we all ought to take a chill pill and stop worrying about people dying or being unjustly imprisoned until after the games. Coca-Cola argues that we ought to stop worrying about its role as a sponsor for these Olympics and concentrate on the company’s good works intended to make the world a better place, to bring that perfect harmony a bunch of baby boomers on a hilltop sang about in 1971, and which a six-year-old boy listened to, believing.

But if I still believe in the hope of perfect harmony, of friendship, my course is clear. I’m not buying Coca-Cola’s arguments, and I’m not buying Coke Zero. Mine is a small protest, one that means far less than that of the Japanese manufacturer of shot puts. I’ve no illusions that one person’s boycott of Coca-Cola products changes anything. But I’m going ahead with it anyway.

I think, as the song says, it’s what the world wants today.

Today is for Ryan

2008-04-09T07:00:00.001-07:00

Today is the birthday of my nephew, Ryan. Ryan is nine-years old. He's a good guy. His dog, Dylan, thinks so, and so does his Aunt Sheri. Aunt Sheri is taller than Ryan. So is the dog Dylan. Dylan is a Great Dane like Scooby Doo. He is also as brave as Scooby Doo, which is to say he is not very brave. Ryan's other dog is Jordan, who is smaller and older and mostly deaf, though sometimes Jordan seems to be faking being deaf to get out of having to do things around the house. Like, when Ryan's mom tells Jordan to help her out by vacuuming the living room, Jordan pretends to be deaf so he can keep watching Jimmy Neutron. When you get old, you get smart in these ways.

Ryan is getting smarter every day. He reads a lot, and he likes reading. He spells very well and nose that correkt speling madders. He studies Tae Kwan Do and is becoming a super hero. You can tell from the picture that he is a super hero, a force for good. In the picture, he is the one without the skull face. Ryan is better looking than the skull-faced man, but so is Dylan the Great Dane. Ryan is a super hero and also a guitar hero, but not as much a guitar hero as his Dad who can beat Slash. Rock on, Dad!

Because Ryan is my favorite nephew, I thought the world should know about him, so I put this up on the Internet. Now, Ryan is no longer a secret. Everyone knows.

The Heart behind "The Heartless Stone": April 16, 6:30 p.m.

2008-04-07T18:35:00.000-07:00

A few months back I received an e-mail with the subject line "hello michael" that began "There is no way in hell you would ever remember this ..."

You might expect an e-mail beginning that way to contain a blackmail threat. This one didn't. Instead, it took me back to a winter evening in Tucson, Arizona twenty-something years ago and a high school basketball game (I imagine Bubba Martin was playing; a helluva guard). At the time I was an aspiring sports reporter, a little older than Tom Zoellner who was also an aspiring sports reporter. The newspaper where I worked had assigned us to the same game so I could show Tom the basics.

All this time later, Tom had found me via an entry on the books page of NewWest.net and thought he'd give me a hello.

Turns out we'd both gone on to newspaper reporting careers and then took up writing. We'd even both lived a while in Missoula, Montana, Now he was in New York City; I'm in Baltimore.

Moreover, he's done great work. His 2006 book ""The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire", won plaudits from reviewers around the country. I'm in the midst of it, stunned by the reporting and writing. It's a compelling book that Zoellner reported from ten countries including three in Africa. That same year "An Ordinary Man," was released, which is the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, the heroic hotel manager depicted in Hotel Rwanda, a book co-authored by Zoellner.

Wednesday, April 16, Tom will read from "The Heartless Stone" here in Baltimore at Towson University as part of our English Department Reading Series. The first page turns around 6:30 p.m., in the Towson Room of the Cook Library. I'm thrilled to see Tom again and eager to hear him read. We have no plans to cover any high school sports.

Bookish Baltimore: April 19, 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.

2008-04-07T18:09:00.000-07:00

Such a Saturday! April 19 in this, the Cruelest Month, there's a little kindness -- and it's free!

The fun begins early at the dowtown branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library with City Lit Festival V. I'm sure to be there at 1 p.m. for the panel featuring Dan Fesperman, Laura Lippman and Manil Suri.

The last time I attended a 510 reading at the Minas Gallery, I feared the second-story floorboards would give way, there was such a crowd. Maybe we'll get lucky and bring down the building on April 19, when I'll be reading alongside novelists Maud Casey and Michael Kimball (think of them as the heavyweights; I'm the undercard).

The 510 Readings start at 5 p.m., 815 W. 36th Street in Baltimore. I'll read a short story that first appeared in the Missouri Review's summer 2006 issue, featured to the right.

I'll order oysters and cancel the ersters ...

2008-03-16T08:21:00.000-07:00

I haven’t blogged for a while now since the wyf moved back to Baltimore. Not that I’m blaming her. I’m not blaming her. But the classes I’m teaching this semester have kept me busy, and the wyf and I have had some excitement to deal with, which excitement is known to the general public as Ikea.

Ikea. I-K-E-A. That is correct.

And with that transition we come to The Baltimore Bee, a spelling adventure for kids grades 3-to-8, cosponsored by my employer, Towson University, along with a tutoring program called Educate Online and the charitable foundation set up by a player with the Baltimore Ravens named Daniel Wilcox.

I volunteered to be a judge, not knowing what that would mean. I figured I’d listen to words spelled and say “yes, correct,” or “no, incorrect.” Turns out I was going to pronounce words. As the wyf will tell you, I don’t always pronounce words correctly. In childhood I read the word “invalid” and thought it was pronounced “in VAL id” as in “not valid.” My tongue has been tied ever since. So imagine my terror when asked to pronounce words for a spelling bee. I know how these things go. Volunteers do the work, irate parents do the complaining. I prepared for the worst.

And indeed, I apparently screwed up. Mispronounced chutney. Mine was not quite Chooo-tney but not ch-uh-tney either. Something in-between. The innocent left to spell the word took the two Os option. A player with the Baltimore Ravens rang a bell that meant “wrong” and said, “That spelling is incorrect.”

A teacher challenged my mistake during our lunch break, but too late for the kid. The rules say mispronunciations must be challenged before the next round begins.

Every time I woke up the night following the Bee, I thought of chutney. The dog kicks its legs, I awake, and I think: chutney. The wyf tells me I snore, I think: chutney. Some kids stop their car at 2:30 a.m. on the street outside so a girl can get out of the backseat and puke on the pavement, I think chutney.

Imagine how this would go over in Stalin’s Russia. You mispronounce chutney at the Spelling Bee and Little Josef misses the word and suddenly you, Comrade Pronouncer, are off to the Gulag. In Baltimore, the kid might be the son of an Avon Barksdale type from “The Wire” fame. The next day some guys in black SUVs park in front of the house. Some nice pictures of you end up in a file folder at the homicide division of Baltimore's finest.

More likely, I just created a reason for the kid to never like Towson University. He’ll grow up to attend Frostburg State because Towson is careless enough to hire English professors who can’t pronounce chutney.

This sort of thing creates a powerful memory in a boy. My pinewood racer was leading the Cub Scout derby until it hit a seam in the track and bounced off course. No car racing in that lane won the pinewood derby that night at my elementary school in Glastonbury, Connecticut. No, the scout leaders told me, we couldn’t redo the race. No, we couldn’t take into account the bad lane. Go, little Cub Scout, and follow the law of the pack.

Which law says: sometimes you get the guy who mispronounces chutney.

And he apologizes.

2008-01-22T07:51:00.000-08:00

Baltimore writers Michael Kimball and Jen Michalski have put together a reading series in the city called 5ive:ten readings. The series is dedicated solely to fiction (a novel idea, pardon the pun). Out of town, I missed the first episode, but I plan to make the rest, every third Saturday of the month at 5 p.m. in the Minas Gallery, 815 W. 36th Street. I'm fortunate to be reading in the series on April 19, joining all-stars Michael Kimball and Maud Casey. All evenings are supposed to last about an hour, so you'll get quick bites of fiction ... No recitations of War And Peace here.

If you're in Charm City, check out the series. And if you're in D.C. or Philly or points between, make the drive.

City Pages and the West

2007-12-30T12:28:00.000-08:00

I have almost always lived in cities, either in the Rocky Mountain West or on the eastern seaboard. Tucson and Missoula to the left of the map. Hartford and, now, Baltimore to the right. I find much great nonfiction literature in which the eastern seaboard cities are a primary focus, even, to some extent, characters. But when it comes to literary narrative nonfiction about the urban American West, there is next to nothing. Why is that?

The answers are myriad, as you’ll find if you read Jenny Shank’s recent entry in the books section of newwest.net, one of my favorite sites for news and chat about the Rocky Mountain west. A question I asked Jenny started a discussion between us on this search for nonfiction narrative literature of the American West. In the comments section on Jenny’s page, you’ll find more than a few thoughts on the subject. One thought – mine – muses on whether this lack of urban Western literature means that years after Zane Grey the American West is still romanticized in literature.

“Wait a minute,” you say. “Romanticism in Western literature died out with Buffalo Bill, Louis L’Amour, and the singing cowboys of film. Wallace Stegner helped kill it, and so did Richard Hugo, and Terry Tempest Williams and James Welch and Annie Proulx. Now we have hard core realist Western portrayals. People get mauled by grizzlies. Mine waste poisons rivers. Cowboys gets dirty. Sometimes, they even have sex on Brokeback Mountain and then get beaten to death for their troubles. That’s realism, baby. Hard core realism.”

Yes, it is. What I wonder, though, is if the return to the same settings over and over results in a general romanticism in spite of all that realism. Maybe an accumulation of so much literature about fly fishing and ranching and horses and mountains creates a new Western Romanticism. Such a romanticism is not that of Albert Bierstadt (see the attached Western portrait), nor is it the romanticism of Manifest Destiny. But it is romanticism because it suggests that experience in the West is not valuable unless it is pastoral, or rural, that experience matters in the West only if it happens in conjunction with or in proximity to landscapes or a rural place. If you imagine this statement to be false, consider this: would “Brokeback Mountain” have been as successful if it hasn’t been set in a pretty landscape with guys in cowboy hats? Would it have been so successful if it were about two macho truck drivers who met annually at a Flying J outside Casper, Wyoming? By subverting the romantic ideal of the West (the macho cowboy), the story and the film actually stoked the romantic ideal.

I suspect that until the urban West matters as much as the rural West to writers and publishers, western literature will remain romantic, no matter how far it has come since the “Riders of the Purple Sage.”

The Journalist's Burden

2007-12-15T06:36:00.000-08:00

Kevin Abourezk, a journalist I respect and a man I admire (and pictured to the right), recently covered the shooting deaths at an Omaha Mall. He wrote about his experiences that day for reznet, an online newssite by and about Native Americans. I’m grateful for his blog entry. In it, he meditated on the difficulties of covering such a story. It’s important that journalists remind each other how difficult the job can be, how emotionally taxing. Sometimes the job can make us feel less than human. But in particular, I’m struck by this portion of his entry:

“Every time a group emerged, the media would swarm. I had mixed feelings about being part of that. / I've always believed journalism serves a vital democratic function in our society, documenting each day's events in order to provide citizens the information they need to improve their lives and that of their fellow men and women. / But standing there with video cameras rolling in witnesses' faces, I couldn't help but wonder if there was a better way. That day, I couldn't think of one.”

What Kevin and the other reporters did is necessary, and I think there doesn’t need to be a better way. When journalists record such moments of raw grief, they serve a valuable purpose, likely as valuable (if not more so) than helping inform readers in advance of an election. They help people make sense of the world. By listening as people speak of their suffering, journalists provide them an opportunity to give shape to their grief. By carrying that grief and passing it on, journalists help others begin to understand a world that shocks and confuses. As a conduit of grief, the journalist connects the sufferers to the sympathetic, helps create a solidarity that we need in the horrible moments, such as in Omaha, more than at any other time. James Baldwin wrote in his classic short story “Sonny’s Blues” that though “the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.” Carrying such news is a burden, one no one should relish; I see no way any reporter can feel comfortable carrying the weight, but I’m grateful that Kevin, and so many others, do.

Apologize to the dogs

2007-11-19T16:53:00.000-08:00

Michael Vick of the Atlanta Falcons, who has spent the last few years participating in the torture of dogs for fun, is trying to avoid lengthy prison time with as much effort as he once exercised avoiding linebackers.

On Nov. 19, Vick turned himself in early to start serving his federal sentence for animal cruelty. The sentence itself hasn't been handed down, but his willingness to serve, Vick and his lawyer seem to hope, will show to the court that he is contrite and deserving of a lesser sentence than the max five years and perhaps even less than the expected 12 to 18 months. Writes his lawyer, as quoted at washingtonpost.com: "From the beginning, Mr. Vick has accepted responsibility for his actions, and his self-surrender further demonstrates that acceptance. ... Michael wants to again apologize to everyone who has been hurt in this matter ..."

Vick's first efforts weren't to accept responsibility. In fact, he denied his involvement and initially pleaded not guilty. The plea changed to guilty only after Vick's buddies offered to give him up to prosecutors. And who is the "everyone" hurt by his actions? Talk about self-aggrandizement. Vick shouldn't apologize to "everyone." He should apologize to the dogs he helped kill.

A sidenote: I'd probably not have written this post had the Washington Post's reporters pointed out that the lawyer's statement was wrong regarding Vick's acceptance of responsibility. Publishing his statement without a challenge to its false underpinnings strikes me as a significant lapse.

Dear Jed Gottlieb ...

2007-11-01T12:32:00.001-07:00

Dear Jed Gottlieb,

You were right. I needed to read books by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. I've just finished The Soccer War, and I hope to read more of Kapuscinski's work soon. His episodes -- told with wit, restrained grief, and a sharp sense of irony -- add up to so much more than a thousand press dispatches ever could. Thank you for being my teacher.

Downs

Fahrenheit 451: Subversion and the Qualities of Art

2007-09-30T14:41:00.000-07:00

The National Endowment for the Arts is sponsoring nationwide reading initiatives called "The Big Read" in which local communities encourage people to read great books. Towson University is pushing Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Rick Davis of the university's library asked me to give a lecture at Towson's opening event for its "Big Read." Below is the lecture in its entirety.

Fahrenheit 451 and The Big Read: A Writer’s Perspective

The first book I read -- all by myself -- was about a blue unicorn, or maybe a blue dragon. I don’t remember the subject or title or author. What I do remember is that I was in first grade, had just learned to read, and the book came from the town library. The day I started the book I didn’t finish it. I don’t know what interrupted; maybe Mom needed help with my sick little sister, or Dad chewed me out for saying a word that rhymes with gull spit. Whatever the reason, I went to bed not even halfway through with the book of the blue creature. But as I dreamed, those pages tugged at me, and early the next morning, when it was dark, before anyone else in the house was awake, I snuck into the living room, and switched on a single lamp.

And, while the world slept, I finished the first book I ever read all by myself.

I’ve read hundreds, perhaps thousands of books since. My parents encouraged me, took me to libraries, made Christmas and birthdays occasions to unwrap books. My dad bought me comics whenever I took sick. X-men. Batman. In those days I preferred comics to real books, because, I suppose, they had pictures. But it was not too long before comics led me to sci fi and fantasy novels. The Lord of the Rings. The War of the Worlds. Dragons. Time machines.

Turns out most of it wasn’t memorable. What stays with me instead of the books themselves is the discovery I made while reading them.

It was not new then to anyone but me, and it will not be new to you. What I learned is that there is a divide amidst books in that literary genre some people call sci-fi / fantasy / horror and others call speculative fiction. Some of the books are good, some even very good, and others, at best, so-so. The same is true of books in any genre, even literary books, supposedly the highest of the genres. The so-so books are so-so because they do nothing but fulfill the reader’s expectations. Opening to page one of such a fantasy or sci fi book, I already knew what was going to happen. Character, with sidekick or aged mentor or both, goes on quest, finds force of evil, dispatches force of evil with laser rifle or magic sword.
Whatever. Story over. Repeated again and again in thousands of books and, now, movies and video games. Those mediocre books distracted me from whatever was troubling me at that moment – geometry, acne, an argument with my girlfriend – but those books do not stay in my memory because they did not change me. They didn’t help me think new thoughts. They didn’t knock me off the place in the world that I found most comfortable. Though these books were about adventures, there was nothing adventurous about them.

Enter Robert Heinlein. And JRR Tolkien. Kurt Vonnegut. Ursula K. LeGuin. And, yes, Ray Bradbury. These writers wrote about fortress-castles and spaceships, dystopian futures and idyllic pasts as did other writers of speculative fiction. But in their books they did not just speculate on how dogs would one day be replaced by robots, or on the best spell to paralyze a troll.

They speculated about what it means to live, what it means to think, what it means to love. They asked big, spooky questions about the nature of good and evil, about the diversity of the universe, about the weakness and strength of the soul, be it human or alien or otherwise. And these authors offered no answers, because there are no answers to those questions. What we have instead of answers are stories, artfully told, and that’s what these writers created and why their books are still read today – in some cases decades after their first publication. In the case of Fahrenheit 451, it’s been more than 50 years since it first appeared in book stores.

So, these books – the good ones – surprised me. They got inside me. They mucked around in my head and in my heart and in my guts. In that way, they resembled books teachers forced us to read in high school, books such as Lord of the Flies, The Merchant of Venice, To Kill a Mockingbird. Memorable books -- whether sci fi, fantasy or the literary books I mostly read now -- change me from the inside out, turn me over. There’s a word that describes the effect these books have on me. They are subversive. I want to talk about that word. Subversive – and its root word subvert – comes from old Latin or French words meaning to “turn over” and “from below.” These days, we use “subversive” to describe anything or any action that helps undermine – or turn over from below -- an established institution or system. The institution could be a government or church or classroom. The system could be political or economic, or it could be personal: your own way of looking at the world, or the beliefs you’ve never questioned. A subversive book should disturb you, should – by making you uncomfortable -- create in you a rebellion of some sort; a revolution.

I was once among a group of students who met with an Irish writer named John McGahern, who is famous among Irish writers and whose work I highly recommend. He was a small man, a farmer as well as a writer, soft-spoken and generous, with little tufts of hair over his ears and very little atop his head. I don’t remember in what context McGahern said what I am about to tell you, but his words have stayed with me. He told us this: There is nothing more subversive than a person alone in a room reading a book.

Because he was Irish, I believed him. The Irish know about subversion after centuries of working it against the English government or the Roman Catholic church.

What does McGahern’s line about subversion have to do with Fahrenheit 451?

Fahrenheit 451 is about rebellion, about revolution, about subversion. And not just subversion against a government – or any institution -- that decides to burn or censor books. No, Montag, the main character, is a hero because he allows books to work their magic on him, to upset his life, to push him toward new thoughts, to turn him over, from below, and change how he lives in the world.

That’s the trick of good books. Their revolutions, their subversions, act on one reader at a time. You are the reader. The book gets inside you. Maybe you don’t understand at first, but there’s something in those pages that won’t let you go. The words, the story, muck around in your guts. The best books aren’t rarified or sacred, as it sometimes seems when English professors talk about them. Instead, they overflow with spit and blood, mud and grime. They are more the stuff of earth than of heaven. A great poet, also an Irishman, named William Butler Yeats, wrote in a poem that books begin with “a mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,” all clattering about in a place he called “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

“The foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

Which phrase, curiously, reminds me of what Faber, a one-time professor of English, explains to the main character, Montag, in Fahrenheit 451 about good books. Quality literature, he says, has “pores. It has features. It can go under the microscope.” Books are hated and feared, he says, “because they show the pores in the face of life.” “The comfortable people,” says Faber, “want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.” I read that and think suddenly of the covers of magazines like Elle or Seventeen or ESPN the magazine where everyone looks perfect, expressionless, their faces air brushed into wax moons. But I think Faber’s not just talking about doctored photographs. His wax moons are a metaphor for any entertainment that reassures people the world is just as they want. They read books that confirm their beliefs; they watch cable channels that pertain only to their interests. Such people turn away – in anger or in fear – from what disturbs them. Montag’s wife, Millie, is this way. After he shows her his books, after those books spill to the floor as husband and wife fight, Millie, writes Bradbury, “sagged away from him and slid down the wall and sat on the floor looking at the books. Her foot touched one and she saw this and pulled her foot away.”

Great writing doesn’t air brush reality. It doesn’t pull its foot away from troubling questions. Great writing, because it works through imagination and prods your memory, takes you deeper into that foul rag and bone shop than do video games or movies or TV shows, which overwhelm you with sound and sight but ignore smell, taste, touch.
Faber’s defintion can be taken, I think, as Bradbury’s advice to aspiring writers. Does Bradbury, then, in Fahrenheit 451, follow his character’s good counsel? I’d say yes. We smell the kerosene that splashes from firemen’s hoses onto their gloved hands. We feel the bright heat of a house aflame on our faces. We suffer the hollowness of a man’s stomach as he realizes a woman with whom he’s shared life is no longer alive in any meaningful way, and that she will abandon and betray him.
Does that sound rarified? Well, that’s the trick of good literature. By crawling around in that old rag and bone shop it somehow manages to elevate us. Turns over our earth and suddenly vegetables and flowers and even a few mighty trees take root. Some trick. I want to talk about that trick, and how Ray Bradbury executes it.

First off, he was a reader as are all good writers. You can tell what writers he’s read because you find in his longer paragraphs, filled as they are with metaphors and similes, echoes of 19th century giants such as Melville and Hawthorne and, of course, Baltimore’s own Edgar Allen Poe whose stories hurtle out of the rag and bone shop into a reader’s darkest places. And, as with those 19th-century writers, we can say this about Bradbury:

He knows how to spin a yarn.

Fahrenheit 451 is a thriller. The main character, Montag, is already in trouble on page one, already hiding contraband books from the authorities and from his wife. Chase scenes follow, and violence and explosions.
That Montag risks his life for books makes perfect sense. He himself is a writer. Or at least, though he’s never written a word, he sees the world as poets do, and we learn that on page one with the burning of a house containing books, a pasage written by Bradbury but filtered through Montag’s heart. The sentences sound so beautiful that someone who doesn’t understand English could listen and hear music.

"It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies."

As a writer, those are sentences I live to read.

Beautiful sentences. A thrilling plot. Still not enough to raise a book from mediocre to the subversive. The book still needs a beating heart. This one has it. Montag is a fireman with a poet’s soul, but we don’t learn that through his abstract thoughts about beauty and wisdom. We learn it through his five senses. The foul rag and bone shop stuff.

Here’s an example, as Montag, wandering through a wooded wilderness outside his city, comes upon a group of men sitting around a campfire. He is used to seeing fire as something destructive, so he’s surprised to find that fire can warm people, and this knowledge transforms him, teaches him that he is, as all of us are, an animal:
He hadn’t known fire could look this way. He had never thought in his life that it could give as well as take. Even its smell was different.

"How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground. He stood a long, long time, listening to the crackle of the flames.
There was a silence gathered all about that fire and the silence was in the men’s faces, and time was there, time enough to sit by this rusting track under the trees, and look at the world and turn it over with the eyes, as if it were held to the center of the bonfire, a piece of steel these men were all shaping. It was not only the fire that was different. It was the silence. Montag moved toward this special silence that was concerned with all of the world."

Time was there. Time enough to look at the world and turn it over with his eyes. And silence, a silence concerned with all the world. Time and silence. What every writer wants, what every reader craves. I read those words, and I’m reminded of those thrilling moments when my sister slept, and my brother slept, and my parents, too, and I sat up with one lamp against the darkness, a book in my lap. How powerful I was then. And that’s what John McGahern was talking about when he spoke of the most subversive thing. A person alone in a room reading a book. With time. With silence. Revolutions begin in such places. Rebellions. The greatest of all changes.

So, in the spirit of Fahrenheit 451, I urge you to start a revolution. Rebel against your own ideas of what is best to read, of what is most fun to do. Pick up a book that’s strange to you. You can do far worse than to start with this one.

13.5 miles for literature

2007-09-20T04:38:00.000-07:00

One of my colleagues at Towson will be running a half marathon soon to raise money for Towson University's English Department reading series. Carol Quinn directs the reading series, and greater love hath no director for her project than to pound Baltimore pavement on its behalf. Why am I not running, too? If you know me, you know I only run when there's a basketball to chase. But I am supporting Carol's efforts with cash, and you can, too. Call 443-691-9530 to help.

And here's a Web site so you can schedule your life around the upcoming readings. I have the pleasure of reading Oct. 3, along with poet Clarinda Harriss. Her latest mini-collection, Dirty Blue Voice, just came out from Half Moon Editions in Atlanta.

If you happen to be at the Corn Palace ...

2007-09-09T07:52:00.000-07:00

South Dakota Public Television will broadcast a June reading I gave from "House of Good Hope" at the American Indian Journalism Institute where I've been fortunate to teach the last three summers. AIJI is a terrific program that helps college students -- and particularly Native students -- to find careers in journalism. At last summer's institute I gave a reading from "House of Good Hope" and then answered questions. You can catch it on SDPB on Sunday, Sept. 16, 3 p.m. CST.

Montana Festival of the Book

2007-08-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

I served as a volunteer for the inaugural Montana Festival of the Book back in 1999, and I'm delighted now to be invited to participate as a panelist and reader. The festival runs Sept. 13-15 in downtown Missoula, and it kicks off with Mayor John Engen leading a vocabulary game of some sort. If Hizzoner is involved, it'll be a good show. Look for me as a reader at 11 a.m. on Friday where I'll join Danell Jones
and Michael Fitzgerald. Then, on Saturday at 11 a.m., I serve on a panel called "The Reporter's Eye, the Writer's Ear" alongside Larry Watson,
Jeff Hull, Kirby Larson, and Deirdre McNamer. Sherry Devlin, my once-colleague and now editor of the Missoulian, will moderate.

Other panels I won't miss include Jeff Hull's reading (1 p.m. Saturday) and the gala reading where Dee McNamer will read from her new novel Red Rover, which earned a starred review from Publisher's Weekly.

Here's the full sked: Montana Bookfest 2007

Running with Scissors on Towson's campus

2007-08-12T11:01:00.000-07:00

I'm starting a new job at Towson University, teaching creative writing, including creative non-fiction, and this semester the university has invited a special guest in the world of memoir: Augusten Burroughs, author of "Running with Scissors." Consequently, I read his book. Praised for its humor and candor, the book tells of Burrough's throroughly insane childhood: the fracturing of his family; his years living with the perverted, stupid and cruel family of his mother's shrink; and incidences of sexual abuse that masquerade as loving sex with an older man.

Overall, I found the book dull: its humor was overly dependent on cultural references; the writing was verbose. Scenes in the book did trouble me, not for their brutal emotional and physical realities, but because I didn't believe them. The book's claims seemed to me so ridiculous I began to think that "Running with Scissors" was itself a clever satire of our recent spate of "woe-is-me" childhood memoirs. Time and time again, I found myself thinking, "well, this is made up." Turns out I'm late to that debate. Read here for Buzz Bissinger's excellent account in Vanity Fair about the shrink's family and the lawsuit they filed against Burroughs and his publisher for defamation. The Boston Globe has also reported on the troubling question of how memoirists treat their subjects. You'll note that Burroughs claims his book is accurate, and that the parties involved settled their lawsuit out of court.

As a former journalist, I'm all for memoirs that are accurate. I appreciate that emotional truth -- or literary truth -- can be different from fact. But emotional truths can be realized through literary techniques that do not trample on reality or on the lives of others (see the work of hundreds of other memoirists). Every effort must be given to treat the subjects of the memoir fairly. Burroughs goes so far as to have his mother-character accuse the psychiatrist-character of rape. Maybe his real mother did that, and yes the psychiatrist is dead, but why traffic in rumor and hearsay regarding such a serious crime? Read Bissinger, a Pulitzer-Prize winner and the author of "Friday Night Lights," and you might well see Burroughs as cruel rather than fair. I don't know who is more aggrieved: the boy who grew up with insanity or the family he depicted years later. But I do know that I'm weary of reading the woe-is-me memoir and wish someone would write a satire that might give us all some perspective on -- and perhaps relief from -- this genre.

Augusten Burroughs speaks at Towson University on Oct. 18.

so Missoula

2007-07-11T16:51:00.000-07:00

Near midnight the other day, I startled two teenage girls as they vandalized my neighbor's car, covering it in crushed eggs and two other goopy substances I didn't recognize. The girls fled into the dark night and later, as I spray-cleaned my neighbor's car with a garden hose, I discovered empty bottles tucked near his tires. "Beer bottles," I thought, but no, not in Missoula. These were the empties that had once held the goopy stuff I was now cleaning off the car windows. What could it be? Motor oil? Ink?

No.

Only in Missoula would teenage girls commit vandalism with ORGANIC molasses and RAW, UNFILTERED honey.

The eggs probably came from steroid-free chickens.

What a place.

It is our right; it is our duty

2007-07-04T06:08:00.001-07:00

This morning, as on every July 4, I raised the American flag outside my front door. It's a beautiful piece of material, representing a country whose people I admire, a nation that rests on many principles I hold dear. I cherish the First Amendment, habeus corpus, our protections from unreasonable search and seizure; I love that we are a nation structured so that people of varied faiths and ethnicities live together in a relative peace. I'm grateful and aware that I was born into a country blessed with economic prosperity. But I raise the flag today with a heart full of anger and fury with the administration that currently governs the United States. This government spends billions of dollars on private contractors in Iraq, but fails to spend enough so that the poorest Americans have proper housing. This government takes unprecedented measures to keep secret its work on behalf of the people, thereby holding in contempt the very population that elected it. This government tortures people without any determination whether its victims have committed a crime, holds others in prison without trial, but commutes the sentence of its friend and ally found guilty through proper trial because "he has suffered enough."

The people of this country -- in New Orleans, in Hartford, in Lodge Grass, in Baghdad -- have all suffered enough.

Would that I could commute this administration's time in office.

This morning, with friends, I will read aloud the Declaration of Independence as I have every July 4 since 1991. It is a solemn reading of a remarkable document, and, as every year, I will be moved. But I will also be reminded that the government of the United States is our government, and that when a government's "long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce (a people) under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

It is our right; it is our duty.

Love Under the Big Sky

2007-05-29T06:20:00.000-07:00

Mermaids flirting with New Englanders at a Tiki Bar? The Loneliest Man in America? Immaculate conception? This is what Brian McDermott discovered while working on his graduate journalism project about Montana Love. He found a lot more than that, too, and I recommend you check out his site -- Montana Love -- to discover fine, multimedia storytelling (with the emphasis on the word storytelling). These are some of his photos (copyrighted) to entice you.

McDermott is now an out-of-work former grad student, so if you're a smart editor somewhere on the East Coast who'd like someone who can write, photograph, and work in audio, I'd recommend you chat with Brian.

Thin Ice

2007-05-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

My wife is a writer of lovely prose. I don't mind saying so, because I know her recent essay in the book "Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Grand Rapids" proves me right. I just returned home from Grand Rapids where Sheri was among nine or so writers reading excerpts of their essays during a fun show at the Grand Rapids Public Library. Sheri's piece has as its springboard the true and peculiar family tale of Sheri's twin aunts, born premature, who spent their first days as part of the sideshow at a Grand Rapids amusement park where people paid to see the "preemies."

Our particular disappointment about the reading? Even though he has a piece in the book, the Rev. Al Green couldn't find his way north from Memphis (yes, that Al Green. He grew up in Grand Rapids) to join his fellow authors.

How can anyone mend our broken heart?

Faith and the famous

2007-05-16T14:00:00.000-07:00

What a delight to find Cathleen Falsani's face on the front page of the May 16 USA TODAY, teasing a story about journalists who cover religion. Cathleen's book, "The God Factor" is a dynamite collection of her interviews with folks from Bono to Dusty Baker to Seamus Heaney asking them about their faith. The Christian Science Monitor named Falsani's book one of the best nonfiction books of 2006, and it has just been released in paperback. Falsani has long covered religion for the Chicago Sun-Times with freshness, candor and wit. Cathleen's husband is the inestimable Maurice Possley, kick-ass investigative reporter at the Chicago Trib, who once gave a semester to the University of Montana's School of Journalism as its T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor.

The God Factor isn't theology to give Aquinas a run, but it is thoughtful people thinking about what matters to their spiritual lives.

The Greatest Show says "Check it out."

Q&A on HOGH

2007-05-08T09:28:00.000-07:00

Brianne Burrowes, a talented former student of mine, interviewed me for articles she planned to write about House of Good Hope. You can read the transcribed interview (okay, full disclosure: I edited it) at the University of Nebraska's blog:

Read the interview

For newspapers, books aren't -- apparently -- local

2007-04-26T09:35:00.000-07:00

The new wave in newspaper journalism is what's called "hyper-local" coverage. The hope is that newspapers will keep readers by concentrating on what's happening in neighborhoods and towns and cities rather than paying attention to national and international affairs.

Okay. I don't agree with that, but newspaper managers and editors seem to. So, given the popularity of hyper-local, wouldn't editors want coverage of local book scenes? You'd think so, but in my town the Missoulian does very little coverage of the local book scene, which is robust and has long helped define the community, and instead uses lots of wire copy about the national scene. Local authors are often ignored. Along those same lines, we learn that the Atlanta Journal Constitution has just eliminated the position of books editor. The paper is likely to fill its book page with wire copy instead.

While in Missoula, we seem to have given up any hope that our paper will change, there's a rebellion against what's happening in Atlanta. You can join the fight.

Read about it here:

Journal Constitution closes book on editor

And sign a petition here:

Petition

House of Good Hope, New England Tour, 2007

2007-04-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

1. On the plane ride from Minneapolis to Hartford a woman sang a Christmas carol to me in Polish

2. Warning: at the Maple Ave. Giant Grinder shop in Hartford, Conn. what looks like a single piece of lasagna is actually a half piece.

3. On a rainy afternoon in Hartford's troubled Frog Hollow neighborhood, a man backed his yellow Nissan X-Terra into my rented PT Cruiser. Later, our problems resolved, he gave me a bottle of Poland Springs water and called me a "nice Irish man."

4. A wild turkey with an attitude ruffled himself up and beak-pecked at the basement window in my friends' Glastonbury house as we watched. No damage to the window.

5. The fierce Nor' Easter that hit Connecticut so flooded the Connecticut River that the riverside park disappeared beneath water, the only sign of it the occasional lampost along a sidewalk.

6. Rain kept falling, and my friend Mary used a carpet cleaner to suck water that had seeped through an unsettled door into the carpet in her home office.

7. Why we can't always trust bureaucratic documents: my cousin Peter Urbanik found one about his Catholic grandfather that called him "Hebrew."

8. My friend, Eric Shorter, who is featured in "House of Good Hope" as a man dreaming of building his own house with a jacuzzi, now owns a house with a jacuzzi. On the tub edge rest these large words carved from wood or shaped from metal: "Dream" and "Believe."

9. Joshua Hall Jr., the beautiful infant son of Joshua Hall (also featured in the book) gets to listen to XM Classical music while waiting for sleep to come.

10. When the bookstore RJ Julia offered me my choice of one book for having read in their store, I chose Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies."

Quilt Love

2007-04-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

If you'd like to know more about the quilt that covers "House of Good Hope," you can link to the home page of quilt artist Ed Johnetta Miller at her online gallery.

. If you'd like to learn more about African-American quilting in general, I'd recommend my fellow blogspotter:

blackthreads

Kyra Hicks keeps a wonderful blog, informative and dynamic. Enjoy!