State of the Union

I started late, but watched most of the State of the Union speech last night. I tried to keep up my cynical front, but in the end I was bowled over by President Obama’s confidence, his insistence on economic fairness, and also by the enthusiasm on the floor.
You forget, reading the papers, watching professional actors and models, how ordinary most of us are in appearance: chubby women (like me!) in red skirt suits, Gabby Giffords looking fragile, the people in Michelle Obama’s box: Giffords’ bald husband what’s-his-name the astronaut, Warren Buffet’s secretary, someone who represented people who got job help and was all happy and cheerful. Much of the audience, Democrats but some others too, seemed to enjoy getting caught up and carried away, feeling patriotic and virtuous. At some level, I guess that’s what they’re about, patriotism, sentimentality, along with the deal making and schmoozing and eating corn dogs and barbecue. I thought of my one-time NYU SCPS student who seems very decent, Steve Israel of Long Island who is moving up fast in the Democratic ranks in the House.
So there is some goodness out there, not all a hateful circus like the Republican debates– anyhow, I gave over for the moment, moved by the President's eloquence, by Congressman John Lewis’s good old battered face, by the three women Justice, by Olympia Snowe clapping more than a Republican was supposed to.
I felt included last night, in spite of Obama sounding a big supporter of fracking and boasting about what it was like being in the Situation Room when we finally got Osama bin Laden.
I felt like an American for a moment.

PIPA SOPA Blackouts and more

I didn't black out my website yesterday, but I'm opposing SOPA and PIPA. If you haven't been following these proposed congressional bills that threaten to limit free speech on the Internet in the name of property rights, you might take a look at this NYTimes piece by Rebecca McKinnon or go to Wikipedia's explanation of their Black Out,

According to today's papers, a lot of congresspeople pulled way back on this-- not, of course, because of me, but because of Web terror. Probably because they saw the Googles and Wikipedias as Even Bigger Business than the Chamber of Commerce and Walt ("75 more years") Disney.

The question is, are they right? Or is this actually something bigger? Was it the New Corporations versus the Old Ones, or the millions of us who want the Web open?

At Last! My Name is Up In Lights!

January, 2012, and my name is... in plastic letters, anyhow!

Workshops with eighth graders in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey...

and a talk at the Ethical Culture Society in Maplewood....

Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 148

January 16, 2012

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Elmore Leonard Wilkie Collins Archibald Grimké Angelina Weld Grimké Francis Grimké,

In this Issue:

Announcements and News

Phyllis Wilson Moore on Belle, the Last Mule at Gee's Bend

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I'm just coming out of a month of family visits and cooking and digesting big meals. Our weather here in the garden state has been dry and cold with no snow, so while there are still greens and lettuce under plastic in the garden, it's hard to get them out of the frozen ground.

Anyhow, it's my favorite time for Victorian novels and other story-centric books. I read a newish Elmore Leonard called DJIBOUTI that I borrowed from the library for Kindle, and I read THE MOONSTONE by Wilkie Collins, free for the Kindle. THE MOONSTONE is often called the first modern mystery, and it has a detective and a lot of hokey scientific deducing and evidence collecting, but the mystery and detecting are the least of the fun.. Collins tells the story by having characters give their own versions of events then handing off to someone else in a series of reports plus and journal entries. The book has several interesting and quirky characters: Mr. Betteredge, an old family retainer, uses Robinson Crusoe as others use the Bible– he opens the book and lets his hand fall on an answer or prediction. Miss Clack, a spinster committee woman whose religion is not a bore because she is so absurdly self-righteous. Wherever she goes, she leaves a scattering of leaflets and religious tracts.

Miss Clack is a stereotype, but she also has a typical vigor that Collins gives to his women characters. All his women are active: The heroine Rachel kisses her beloved before he kisses her, and has to be warned to behave properly. Also, although the gentle folk have the lead roles, Collins seems admirably comfortable with intelligent working class people. Betteredge, for example, has the first point of view, so we get the "downstairs" perspective before the upstairs. His bright and lively daughter Penelope, who is not a point-of-view character, gives lots of opinions and hypotheses about the missing jewel, and even the ill-fated Rosanna Spearman, who was previously incarcerated for thievery, turns out to be capable of writing long, expressive letters. Collins manages to present her fate as moving and tragic without being sentimental, as Dickens certainly would have. The person who makes the final discoveries solving the mystery is a clever street kid. If you haven't read it, don't miss it.

I have a theory that Elmore Leonard came up with the idea for DJIBOUTI from a combination of headlines (piracy off the coast of east Africa) and a interview in which movie actor Morgan Freeman (image right) complained that he gets lots of work, but never gets to have sex in his movies. He has played Nelson Mandela, the corner man in MILLION DOLLAR BABY, not to mention God a couple of times- -all pretty much asexual. So my little scenario is that Leonard, who always has his eye on the movies, wrote the character of seventy-ish Xavier in DJIBOUTI for Freeman. Just a thought.

Leonard himself is now in his mid eighties, an inspiration to all of us for his continuing fecundity. This book has a pretty slow start (when you're in your eighties and totally bankable in publishing and the movies, you can fool around if you want to). There are a few too many long scenes where Xavier and his boss filmmaker Dara look at video rushes and comment on (a) action that was not dramatized in the main line of the novel and (b) how to make a movie of what's happening in the novel, which is what they're filming. The reviewer in THE GUARDIAN, Giles Fodens says, "Leonard's participle-rich prose style builds action round dialogue in an intriguing way, coming off like the bastard child of Hemingway and Virginia Woolf."

Well put, although Fodens seems to take the book's stylistic pretensions a little too seriously. In the second half, Leonard gets over his meta stuff, seems to catch a wave, and things move along briskly, especially the material following an American ex-con and ex-jihadist who is one of Leonard's entertaining stone cold killers. This character, Jama, doesn't seem to differentiate between his living and murdered relationships-- he misses a particular woman, hardly seems to remember why she isn't available to him anymore. A couple of other colorful characters are let drop a little too soon, but I figure Leonard will bring them back in his next book. Basically, once he goes back to following his own famous Ten Rules of Writing and puts his focus on killers, grifters, and a few goodish guys in an exotic setting, it was pretty good.

The final book I want to speak about-- and recommend highly-- is a nonfiction family history of the Grimkés, LIFT UP THY VOICE: THE GRIMKÉ FAMILY'S JOURNEY FROM SLAVEHOLDERS TO CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS by Mark Perry. The book starts by covering a lot of the same material as the biography of Sarah and Angelina by Catherine Birney that I wrote about in Issue $ 147 (http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/bfrarchive146-150.html#issue147). He adds some interesting conflicts: how Angelina Grimké's withdrawal from public view was probably a result of "female problems," that there was a likely unconsummated– of course!– love affair for the elder abolitionist sister Sarah Grimké.

Then Perry moves on to the story of the abolitionist sisters' nephews, Archibald and Francis, who were the enslaved sons of their brother– and the sisters never knew of their nephews' existence till after the Civil War, and which point they helped educated them. The book summarizes the Civil War as Archibald and Francis Grimké experienced it, then Reconstruction, and finally the long struggle after Reconstruction was undermined to create a civil rights movement. This part of the book is about a whole professional black class including the Grimké brothers and their contemporaries Booker T. Washington and W.E. B. Dubois. The book gives special attention to the Great Debate between those two latter, in which the Grimké brothers were deeply involved: should the Negro concentrate on industrial arts and agriculture or demand higher education and full civil rights?

Archibald Grimké at one point was the U.S. consul to the Dominican Republic; Francis Grimké was the minister of a major African-American church n Washington D.C. The final generation in the story is the daughter of Archibald Grimké and his estranged white wife. The daughter, Angelina Weld Grimké, was a poet known as a pre-cursor of the Harlem Renaissance. All of this is fascinating stuff: the old abolitionist movement through the war through reconstruction and the horrors of anti-black rioting and lynching that followed, plus the struggle over the direction of the Negro political movement and the founding of institutions like the NAACP. And the Grimkés were part if it all.

My heart especially went out to the less famous people: Angelina Weld Grimké the poet had several moments of fame, but ended in silence as a reported recluse in a little house in Brooklyn, no longer writing. The third Grimké brother, John, who did not get an education, rejected the help of the white aunts and others and went to Florida and essentially disappeared. A derelict? A drunk? Just a guy who didn't want any part of public life? Apparently unknown. The other silent ones were the mothers: Nancy Weston Grimké, the enslaved woman who was mother to the three Grimké men with her legal master, Henry Grimké, brother of Sarah and the first Angelina.

And finally, Sarah Stanley, a white woman, who married Archibald Grimké, gave birth to Angelina Weld Grimké, and eventually left her husband and eventually sent her daughter back to him. What was going on here– what racism? What pain?

I love history and biography. But it never satisfies the way imaginative writing can.

-- Meredith Sue Willis

LAURA BENTLEY ON THE HUNGER GAMES AND DISTRICT 12

The following note came from Laura Bentley after I mentioned reading THE HUNGER GAMES in Issue 147. In my brief mention of the popular novel, I forgot to comment on how the Dystopian world of the novel is organized is by "districts." The heroine is from a poor mining region – District 12– which is essentially coextensive with Appalachia.

Laura wrote, "I, too, read THE HUNGER GAMES and was very pleasantly surprised. Because it was a YA book and had received so much hype, I was prepared to dislike it, but it was a fascinating read and made me proud to be from District 12."

From PHYLLIS WILSON MOORE

A well done picture book, BELLE, THE LAST MULE AT GEE'S BEND, illustrated by Clarksburg, WV native John Holyfield and written by Calvin Alexander Ramsey and Bettye Sroud, is based on the true story of two mules from a little Alabama town named Gee's Ben and their role in history.

Martin Luther King had visited Gee's Bend to encouraged the residents to vote. Of course, trouble followed. They managed to vote anyway.

When the Benders (as they call themselves) took the ferry to vote, the county stopped the ferry from running. The guy in charge said, "We didn't stop the ferry because they are black. We stopped it because they forgot they are black." I think I have the quote right. Gee's Bend had about 300 residents and is on a portion of a piece of land jutting out into a river. At that time there was one dirt road in and off the jut. The only other route was to go up river and back down and many of them had no transportation. They did it anyway.

When King was murdered, the town was asked to supply two mules to pull a farm wagon carrying King's casket in the funeral procession. This met opposition from local law enforcement but the town prevailed and the mules became part of history. The state police tried to prevent the mules from crossing the Alabama state line and it took high level calls to the governors of Georgia and Alabama to achieve their trip's destination.

Somehow, I missed this fact when watching the funeral.

This book tells the story without being morbid, and the illustrations are warm and loving.

MORE RECOMMENDATIONS

NancyKay Shapiro says: "Have you seen Lynda Barry's book about writing/creativity/letting it out? It's called WHAT IT IS. It's gorgeous, and magical and full of great stuff about her struggles to become an artist, and very hands-on encouragement to do art RIGHT NOW. Here's a link to it on amazon: http://amzn.to/yw6R6L "

ONLINE AND ON THE AIR

Here is a wonderful story about the beginning of a war and some of its unbloody but still painful repercussions: "We Are At War" by John Birch: http://www.johnbirchlive.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-are-at-war.html

Suzanne McConnell has a wonderful article on Kurt Vonnegut at http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/12/fiction/kurt-vonnegut-at-the-writers-workshop

ANNOUNCEMENTS, NEWS, CONTESTS, WORKSHOPS, READINGS ETC.

Miles Klee's debut novel IVYLAND is just out from OR Press. Take a look at http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/ivyland/ . The NEW YORK OBSERVER says of the book, http://www.observer.com/2011/08/awl-pal-miles-klee-sells-novel/

Lots of good reviews for Leora Skolkin-Smith's new novel Hystera such as this one: "Leora Skolkin-Smith's new novel... provides a very vivid sense of being in the head of someone having a psychotic breakdown, and is a powerfully useful reference book for dealing with the mental-health system. It also pungently evokes the gritty New York of the '70s."
—Robert Whitcomb, reviewer "The Providence Journal;" excerpts featured recently at http://readysteadybook.com; and an interview at WBAI: http://www.catradiocafe.

Julia Kaminsky has a new story up at .decompmagazine.com .

Cheryl Denise has a new poetry CD. Preview it at www.cdbaby.com/cd/cheryldenise . She reads 13 of her own poems, and a musician friend plays some mandolin and guitar music in between. The poems are from her two collection, I SAW GOD DANCING and her upcoming February 2012 WHAT'S IN THE BLOOD, by Cascadia Publishing House.

Barbara Crooker did a two-part interview with Erika Funke at WVIA (public radio, Scranton), available at their website: http://www.wvia.org/radio/wvia-fm-programs/artscene . The broadcast dates were January 5 & 6, 2012.

DON'T FORGET...

... Poem-a-day – it's nice to get them in the email everyday, whether you read them or not. Sign up at http://www.poets.org/poemADay.php

Paperback Book Swap: get rid of your good quality paperback books and get new ones for the price of postage by swapping at The Paperback Book Swap: http://www.paperbackswap.com/home.php

Cool and Dry and Beautiful

More cool, dry, sunny weather-- I love this weather-- no bugs, no sweating. You can see much farther than in summer, too, because the leaves are gone, trees are down to their beautiful bare stretches of branch. I don't really get going South for the winter. Okay, it's been an easy one so far, and yes, I get tired of shoveling snow, and yes I hate anxiety about travel.

But days like this, so pink and blue and multiple grays and blacks-- what a gift.

Scott's Pizza Tours!

Back from the day in New York– Scott’s Pizza tour: this was super fun, holiday gift from Joel and Sarah. A cold sunny day with guide Scott Wiener who took us first to Lombardi’s, oldest Neopolitan/New York style pizza– (a margherita from the coal fired anthracite) ovens, then across town to a slice place, Joe’s on Bleecker and Sixth Avenue– a classic walk-in place with wonderful stretchy orange droopy tipped slices-- just what I remember from the street shops my first years in NYC, and finally John’s, also on Bleecker almost to Seventh with a long line to get in, and they brought it out to us, again coal fired, this time with whole milk mozzarella, great plain tomatoes and crust-- Sarah’s favorite, and I agree it was wonderful, but I’ll get a slice again at Joe’s when I'm in town to teach at NYU.

As to the tour and tour guide: this young guy Scott is a wild man: totally entertaining and personable and funny but also totally serious about pizza and beyond knowledgeable.

He provided little favor bags with notebooks and spices and candy to cleanse the palate between slices. He talked about history and the temperature of anthracite coal fires versus gas ovens, about the chemistry of wet and dry, part-skim and whole milk mozzarella. We got to look at Lombardi’s oven, and we visited a restaurant supply place on the Bowery that sells the gas ovens. We learned a lot. Joel and Sarah and Andy were all big winners on Scott’s questions. What a great tour.

That was Scott’s Pizza tour: but just be sure you get the genuine Scott. It's all built around his personality and his obsession.

Photos of Aunt Ninnie

I scanned in some old pictures my mother gave me of my Aunt Virginia. The first one is a school picture, in 1929.

Next is when she was married to my much older Uncle Fred. They wanted to be country gentry, judging from the photo.





The next one is of her after Uncle Fred died, in 1953 taking the Queen Elizabeth to Europe.

Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 147

December 10, 2011

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Read at http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/booksforreaders.html

This Issue:

Johnny Sundstrom's new novel

An Anthology recommended by Ed Davis

Phyllis Wilson Moore on Walter Dean Myers and Yankee at the Seder

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Dear Friends: It's holiday giving season– please consider for your last-minute gifts some of the small press books on my gift books page and/or some of the books mentioned below.

First up today, a stunning and powerful book from the small press Hamilton Stone Editions by Jane Lazarre (THE WHITENESS OF WHITE, SOME PLACE QUITE UNKNOWN). Lazarre's new novel, INHERITANCE, is a meditation on race and the racial and ethnic history of the United States. Its central, germinal story is what happened to a young white woman named Louise and her beloved Samuel in the years leading up to the Civil War. Samuel and his mother are enslaved, and Louisa discovers she is the sister of a slave and becomes the mother of a slave. What happens when her pregnancy is discovered, and then the color of the baby, is harrowing and horrible. The rest of the novel circles around and expands out of these events into many generations.

The mutilation-murder of Samuel is careful and respectfully narrated without any of the pornographic violence that a lot of American writers seem to delight in. Lazarre's focus is on transformation as people deepen their understanding of race and history. One of the most interesting parts is how Louisa survives mentally by changing her consciousness.

Characters in the framing stories have similarly complex deepening of their consciousnesses, especially women struggling with their whiteness and their relationships with people of color. All of the main point of view characters are articulate and exhibit many layered thinking. Among them are the teenaged daughter of a white Jewish mother and Black father (whose own mother is an Italian-American novelist). There is also an adult writer descended from Louisa and Samuel; there is early twentieth century Jewish Hannah (great grandmother of the teenager above) who falls into a passionate non-physical relationship with the third Samuel. All the characters have the sensibilities and intellectual seriousness of a writer or other artist.

The genealogies are complex and the issues of whiteness and Blackness are dealt with in detail. The story of the nineteenth century white girl's lonely effort to understand and survive is especially wonderful, as are the scenes on Long Island Sound, such as the one where the housewife Hannah Sokolow, unhappy in her marriage and life, eats an oyster pulled directly from the Sound and offered to her in friendship by the third Samuel--a transgression of the rabbinical laws as well as the formal and informal race laws of her day.

It is an ambitious and powerful book that teases out where we cannot reach across the abysses of race and history– and also where we can.

A book of poetry with a serious message from a small press is AZRAEL ON THE MOUNTAIN by Victor Depta. Betty Huff, managing editor of Blair Mountain Press, writes to say: "Ten years ago, in 2002, we at Blair Mountain Press published Dr. Victor Depta's AZRAEL ON THE MOUNTAIN, a book of poems protesting mountaintop removal coal mining. That method of coal extraction continues to this day, regardless of what the American public knows about global warming and what Appalachians suffer as a consequence of that mining practice. Azrael on the Mountain is the only Appalachian book in which every poem is a protest against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining. It has sold slowly but steadily in the past ten years, so much so that we have reprinted the book for the individual buyer and for the classroom...[order directly from] Blair Mountain Press ($10.00) or from Amazon." Blair Mountain Press is at 114 E Campbell St, Frankfort, KY 40601, phone 502-330-3707, or http://www.blairmtp.net .

A third small press book I want to mention is psychotherapist Penelope Young Andrade's brand-new, lively, and personable self-help book, EMOTIONAL MEDICINE RX. Her idea is that if we can learn to distinguish the stories we tell ourselves about our sufferings and unhappiness from our real emotions– if we can learn to experience fully and directly the big four– Mad, Sad, Scared, and Glad– we will begin to heal ourselves physically and mentally. The book is full of stories of how people have used her techniques to enrich their lives and heal their complaints. Learn more about Penelope, her strategies, and her book at http://www.emotionalmedicine.com.

Notes on recent Kindle reading:

I also have some notes on various other things I've been reading– the Kindle selections, in particular, have a lot of serendipity, as I've been borrowing what was available through the library's Kindle collection and from the vast pool of available free books, many of which I was unlikely to have read in the past.. For example, after finishing INHERITANCE, I "bought" two free books related to the Grimké Sisters, footnoted in Jane Lazarre's INHERITANCE. First, I read an old 1885 biography (that would almost certainly not have been available to me without an elaborate university library search) of the Grimké Sisters. I also read Angelina Grimké's first pamphlet publication, a powerful call to Southern women to turn against slavery. The dual biography by Caherine H. Birney is called THE GRIMKÉ SISTERS SARAH AND ANGELINA THE FIRST AMERICAN WOMEN ADVOCATES OF ABOLITION AND WOMAN"S RIGHTS. It is one of those old-fashioned hagiographic biographies that somehow manages (like Mrs. Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë) to tell a really good story in spite of skipping a lot of the juicy parts.

This one also assumes that all the readers share a Protestant Christian world view, but it's still a good short book. I especially enjoyed the selections of diary entries and excerpts from letters. Angelina, the much-younger of the sisters, was apparently a wonderful public speaker, the first American woman to address "promiscuous" crowds– that is, mixed with men and women. In her thirties, she married Theodore Weld and set up housekeeping with him and Sarah, the older Grimké sister. Something happened, not specified in this book, that kept her out of the public eye, possibly a a breakdown or maybe just a lot of childbirth and babies. The sisters and Weld, however, continued to teach and write, and had that admirable Protestant sense that serving is equally important in public or in private, large or small.

Their final great drama was the discovery late in their lives that one of their beloved brothers, Henry, had taken an enslaved lover with whom he had three boys. He never freed his family, and his legitimate heir continued to enslave them. When they discovered this, after the war, Angelina and Sarah helped the young men in their careers: one became a well known Presbyterian minister and the other a Harvard educated lawyer whose daughter was a poet in the Harlem Renaissance.

A Kindle library borrowing was COMPOSED by Roseanne Cash– this just attracted me at the moment and was lots of fun with its scenes backstage in a musical celebrity family. Roseanne Cash's persona is likeable, and she is a highly accomplished song writer, musician and performer, but it cannot pass notice, either, that Roseanne got a LOT of help along the way– her father supporter her financially through a decade of experimentation, and gave her introductions and chances in the music business that no one else would ever have had. This is not said to denigrate Cash, but to remind us all that talent is precious but far from uncommon-- ask anyone who has ever worked with the arts with children. The next step, success, especially commercial success, requires a whole other set of skills and nurturing and luck. Imagine thus a potentially brilliant pianist who grows up undernourished and ends up a teenage addict and eventually in jail. This is the thesis of Virginia Woolf's famous essay about Shakespeare's imaginary sister Judith who had all the talent and none of the other requirements to succeed.

But I liked the book– and I liked Roseanne Cash too for her honesty and directness.

IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS: LOVE, TERROR, AND AN AMERICAN FAMILY IN HITLER'S BERLIN was recommended to me by a writer friend as an excellent example of an accurate and highly entertaining nonfiction book built out of letters and diaries. It is about the American ambassador to German and his adult daughter and their attempts to be upbeat about the brand new Chancellor Hitler and his regime and their gradual disillusionment and horror with the Nazis. Hitler et alia in he early years is interesting-- especially how the Nazi's squabbled with and killed each other-- but more interesting the cultural anti-Semitism and general ignorance of the Americans.

Finally, moving away from under-reported and under-read, I took a look at the wildly popular young adult novel HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins. For this one I paid $4.69, which I absolutely think was worth it. I liked it a lot– a real trip. I admired how she managed to make the heroine at once believably tough and really disinclined to kill people,which is what she will have to do to triumph-- and survive-- the Games. In the end, she succeeds most by teaming up. Least interesting to me was the love stuff, not sure why. It felt whipped up to me. I would like to have seen it end cleaner. But this was partly done to lead into two more books of the Trilogy. I was not as totally into it as I was into Fire and Ice, but Fire and Ice is a much larger world.

And finally finally one non-Kindle actual hardcover novel, WHEREVER YOU GO, by Joan Leegant. This is highly recommended, full of interesting Israelis and Americans in Israel: a man who discovers Judaism, goes orthodox, then pulls out of it; strong-jawed, laconic Shin Bet operatives, a crazy American kid who decides to kill some Arabs and is given support by the crazy right-wing This Land Is Mine guys. It functions neatly as a primer on a whole set of attitudes and issues towards and in Israel. And I couldn't' stop reading.

More small press books below in the announcements section.

-- Meredith Sue Willis

ANTHOLOGY RECOMMENDATION FROM ED DAVIS

A book that men as well as women will enjoy is THE MOMENT I KNEW: REFLECTIONS FROM WOMEN ON LIFE'S DEFINING MOMENTS ($14.95 from www.sugatipublications.com), a collection of brief essays and poems by women from six countries. I found it so compelling I read most of it in a weekend.

My friend Cyndi Pauwels' essay, "Powerful Eyes of Love," appears along with twenty-nine others in the second "Reflections from Women" series, founded by editor and psychotherapist Terri Spahr Nelson, who hopes to provide writers as well as readers the chance for self-examination, expression and healing. Writers from Granville, Ohio to Reading, England tackle topics ranging from relationships to pregnancy, family and children.

In Cyndi's essay, present meets past on a recent icy day following an eight-inch snowfall. She re-lives, in the span of a few minutes, the years between ages seven and seventeen when her step-father abused her for everything that went wrong in the household—just the way everything seems to be going wrong on this day. But in a shattering climax, Cyndi discovers she is not that abused, fearful child anymore.

Editor Nelson designed the Reflections of Women series to be a collaborative process. Cyndi said she never felt forced to accept Nelson's proffered editing, and contributors were allowed to vote on the book's cover photo as well as which women's charities the book would benefit. (Purchasing online from Sugati guarantees a greater percentage to these worthy organizations.) Such a democratic process is rare in the small press publishing world. Interested writers should visit the website to see topic areas for upcoming books in the series, along with deadlines. An interview with Cyndi Pauwels appears on my website: http://authoreddavis.blogspot.com.

TWO REVIEWS BY PHYLLIS WILSON MOORE

THE YANKEE AT THE SEDER

Have you ever wondered about the role Jewish Americans played in the Civil War? Do you know what a seder is and how it is celebrated, or how Passover traditions relate, sort of, to the 4th of July? THE YANKEE AT THE SEDER, a unique children's picture book by Elka Weber with illustrations by Adam Gustavson from Tricycle Press in Berkeley, CA, is an enjoyable and educational way for both children and adults to learn about Passover and freedom.

A Virginia Confederate Jewish family, reeling from the Yankee occupation of their town and word of Lee's surrender, prepares for Passover. Ten year old Jacob is especially unhappy; he will not get to be a solider. When his mother invites a stranger, a Yankee Jewish solider, to their seder and to spend the night, he is angry. This fictional version of an actual event includes end notes revealing the facts of the two families involved, the Yankee soldier, of Philadelphia, and the "enemy" family who befriended him. It is a heartwarming story, sensitively illustrated, of freedom and acceptance.

Found: A BAD BOY in the Library

What attracted me to this memoir was the title, BAD BOY [by Walter Dean Myers], written in large red letters on the dust cover. As a former high school teacher, I detest labels slapped on children. "Bad boy" and "no good" cause me to bristle.

Myers, once a young extremely bright "bad boy," tells the story of his painful growth to manhood. So fond of reading and writing he hid his library books in a brown paper bag, he became a high school drop-out eager for a fight.

How he survived adoption, a speech impediment, being overly tall, having a passion for poetry and reading, racism, poverty, fighting neighborhood gangs, teen-hood, the army, and menial jobs, makes a story most teens will tap into. How he became one of the nation's most "awarded" and respected authors of children's and youth books is a gripping story.

Myers appreciates the important roles reading and writing play in his life as did finding a community respectful of his talents. This book by a former "bad boy," has substance, sadness, and humor. It is suitable for teens and adults and as good as a memoir can get.

Myers [photo at right], born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, grew up in Harlem, New York.

MORE RECOMMENDATIONS

Joel Weinberger recommends THE BLIND SIDE, the book. "As is probably the case for many people, he writes, "I came to read THE BLIND SIDE after seeing the surprisingly good movie that was based on the book. When I mentioned to a friend that I enjoyed the movie, he pointed out that it was only half the story. While certainly the central story of the book is around the offensive lineman Michael Oher's journey, the other half is around the evolution of the game of football, strategically and economically, around the offensive line. Much like the movie MONEYBALL ,as compared to the book, the movie only tells one half of Michael Lewis's story, leaving the more quantitative half for readers. (For the record, I very much enjoyed MONEYBALL the movie as well as the book.)

"All of this is to say that THE BLIND SIDE has two distinct, but tightly wound, focuses. One is the now well known, but still incredible, story of Michael Oher's journey from a homeless teenager to one of the most incredible forces to ever play college football (and now in the NFL). In several incredible strokes of luck, Michael Oher is brought from the street to an almost entirely white high school, eventually meeting the Tuohy family, who guide him through the wealthy, white world he has found himself in. The family helps him take advantage of his natural, physical gifts, and become the most recruited football player in high school, as well as increase his grades as necessary to play NCAA football, despite the assumptions surrounding him that he isn't intelligent enough.

"The other half of the story, which, as a quantitative man myself, I find even more fascinating, is the story of the evolution of football itself. The book explains *why* Michael Oher is so prized by college football programs and the NFL. Michael Lewis gives a brilliant account of the state of football in 1981, when Lawrence Taylor (L.T.), arguably the best linebacker of all time, makes his appearance in the league. L.T. completely alters the game of football, and especially the economics of how important it is to protect the quarterback. Michael Lewis discusses the implications of this defensive approach and how, in particular, it affected the offensive design of Bill Walsh, the coach of 49ers, who eventually led his teams to several Superbowl titles. In this context, Michael Lewis shows the transformation of the NFL from a place where many of the players are "interchangeable" and seen as equally important, to the rise of the importance of the left offensive tackle, who protects quarterbacks from linebackers. The economics that Michael Lewis brings to light are fascinating in a very similar way to MONEYBALL.

The book is not quite as deep as MONEY BALL, in many ways, and at times it seems Lewis has found himself drawn into his subject in such a way that it is not subjective (it terns out in the afterward that Sean Tuohy, one of the main subjects, is a childhood friend of Michael Lewis). For these reasons, I can't quite bring myself to give it a 5-star rating, but call it a sold 4.5. Without hesitation, I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the economics of sports, or just in for a touching story of a life saved.

ONLINE AND ON THE AIR

Laura Bentley and Marie Manilla interviewed on the radio: http://woub.org/2011/11/23/poetry-and-prose-talk-marie-manilla-and-laura-treacy-bentley

A successful self-publishing author: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204770404577082303350815824.html

Barbara Crooker on Your Daily Poem. See Barbara, right.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, NEWS, CONTESTS, WORKSHOPS, READINGS ETC.

Johnny Sundstrom's novel DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT is now available: In 1849 a wagon train was moving slowly along the parched Oregon Trail in the empty desolation that was to become known as southern Wyoming. Martha Bradford was told she must discard either her cast-iron cook stove or her pianola to lighten the burden for the oxen. She has them both unloaded and then refuses to go on any further: "She declared that if the only things that made her life worth living were being left behind, they'd just as well leave both the stove and the pianola, and her with them."

This novel is based on the next six generations of her family and the first ranch settled in that part of the country. Here are real cowboys and cowgirls, Indians of the past and present, a faith-challenged evangelist, a militant suffragette, newspaper owner, and many others, linked together by their hard work, rowdy pleasures, their spiritual beliefs or non-beliefs, and stitched into a panoramic story-quilt representing the dream of the Morning Star and its hopeful annunciation of a new day rising in the Old West.

JOHNNY SUNDSTROM has lived most of his life in the American West. His book is a tribute to this great region, its people and places, its history and its future. He is part-owner and manager of a livestock and forestland operation in western Oregon, a natural resources consultant, and high school track coach. For nearly 40 years, he has spent part of every summer visiting his relations in Wyoming. He graduated from Williams College with a degree in English Literature and has written extensively over the years, as well as having been involved in professional and amateur theater.

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts anthology is now available-- click here. Poets include Kelly Cherry, Halvard Johnson, Barbara Crooker, J.C. Todd, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Neil Shepherd, B.J. Ward, Colette Inez, and many, many more.

Larissa Shmailo has new e-book from Jeffrey Side's press, Argotist Ebook. It is a free download, so check it out:

Ardian Gill has three images in the PAI show at the Office of Borough President Scott Stringer, 1 Centre Street 19th Floor. Please bring ID. Exhibit open 9-5 PM Monday thru Friday.

PM Press has some excellent new books out including a reprint of a Marge Piercy novel and On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S.edited by Sean Stewart.

Abby Slovin's new book Letters in Cardboard Boxes has been called "a novel that you will want to keep with you for the rest of your life. A book that will remind people why they love to read.”

Deb C. Gaisford has a new story online at THE FEAR OF MONKEYS: "Love Letters from Vietnam,"

Burt Kimmelman's The Way We Live is now available from Dos Madres Press (click here) and Amazon (click here)."Burt Kimmelman is a poet who trusts what is: the continuous autonomy of two people in a close marriage, the unalterable passage of time, the lies the mirror tells us, the comfort of "simply living / among the objects of the day." Yet, like the inimitable domestic scenes painted by Pierre Bonnard, Kimmelman's quiet poems contain the luminescence of perception, its lure, its beauty, its Zen of breath, tracing beauty in the pulse of the extant." - Star Black

Leora Skolkin-Smith's new novel Hystera is about to launch. Early Praise includes: "Hystera is a haunting, mesmerizing story of madness, longing and identity, set against one of the most fascinating times in NYC history. Skolkin-Smith's alchemy is to inhabit her characters even as she crafts a riveting story that is nothing short of brilliant."-- Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of "Pictures of You", Reviewer.

Barry Wildorf's FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS won the Global E-Book award for best historical fiction!

A personal essay on witnessing the final space launch by Melanie Vickers appeared on July 28, 2011 at http://www.dailymail.com/Opinion/Commentary/201107271141

Erik Corr's e-book THE WITCH AND THE SUNFLOWER GIRL is now available:
The subtitle is "A Halloween and Christmas Fairy Tale about Karma and Free Will," and the story only costs .99 cents! Also see Erik's Youtube about an open source novel he's writing: http://www.youtube.com/user/erikTT1

Mark De Foe's tenth chapbook of poems In the Tourist Cave is coming out this fall. Pre-publication orders are now being taken by Finishing Line Press of Georgetown, KY. Order online at finishinglinepress.com and click on "new releases:"http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm Click on the "New Releases and Forthcoming titles" link.

Cat Pleska has a piece about the terrors of planes at Airplane Reading: essays about airplanes. Check out her "Rock and Roll" at http://airplanereading.org/ .

New book from Halvard Johnson: Sonnets from the Basque & Other Poems.

PAPERBACK BOOK SWAP

Don't forget – get rid of your good quality paperback books and get new ones for the price of postage by swapping at The Paperback Book Swap: http://www.paperbackswap.com/home.php

Pre-Solstice Haiku

Mid-December day
Spills tremulous white-gold light,
Reaches for the dark

My Brother-in-Law: Jedi Master of the World Wide Web

My brother-in-law's talk at Berkeley earlier this week got a nice write-up in the New York Times-- the writer calls it "How the Internet is Destroying Everything," which is just about exactly the opposite of David (Weinberger)'s outlook: he thinks the web is the future and it's a good thing.

He (David) also has the cover article for the current issue of Scientific American and a new book coming out called Too Big to Know:. We call him a computer guru, which is sort of what he does-- he thinks about the world wide web and presently has a job at Harvard working on Digitalizing All the Books or something like that.

He got a PhD in philosophy (Heidegger specialist) at a time when there were-- literally-- no jobs. He began doing some writing for a computer company, and ended up-- Jedi Master of the World Wide Web!

Genre and Literary

Second go-through of a much-beloved genre novel is interestingly disappointing to me. My first reading, I could not slow down, I yearned to get back to it, woke in the morning thinking of it. This time, since I know how so much of the story comes out, the devices are more obvious, and sometimes creaky. Is it just that I know which characters will die? I notice interesting threads that seem to have been dropped.

This may be what it means to be a really tremendous writer of story and narrative: everything in the end is in service of momentum, so there is less available for the second reading. This, then, a tentative definition for literary: that there is still plenty there when you read it a second time.

Asbestos Bye-bye

The asbestos is really gone! We found out shortly after the six days' power outage that we needed a new boiler-- and before the boiler, the asbestos had to go, and before the asbestos-- the basement had to be cleared of rubbish. All of which is one of those famous blessings in disguise. As of today, the rubbish is largely gone-- and now the asbestos too! Three or four guys (trucks say "Renovation") working all day, and I don't know how they do it because I saw nothing, having no intention of going down there-- warning signs on the basement door-- but they cleaned that place up beyond belief: and painted the pipes white-- apparently part of the abatement.

I am again amazed by how someone somewhere can do anything: all those enormous tasks like rolling boulders uphill in my mind-- can be done by trained workers. Hail, Labor! Why don't Americans respect it?

Beaautiful weather

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and we're in a spate of really gorgeous weather-- up into the sixties Fahrenheit, and the sun absolutely glaring with most of the leaves gone. Had the trees been like this three weeks ago, there would have been no six days without power.

We had Thanksgiving at Andy's sister Ellen's in Clinton, Connecticut, also his brother David, wife Ann, and Leah, plus Ellen's boys Greg and Jonathan plus Bethany. Joel and Sara are still at her brother's wedding in Mexico; my mom in Ohio with her nephew's family.

I'm happy to be finishing off some projects-- a promised book review, a holiday letter. Everything low key, sunny, at least for another hour-- sunset will be coming at us very early

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Celebrations and Change

We're coming up fast on Thanksgiving, with various appointments aimed at getting the boiler fixed in the next two days. Meanwhile, Joel and Sarah made it safely to Mexico for her brother's "destination" wedding.
I had my Novel I class at NYU last night, and now I'm on the short vacation for five days.
I’m working on my holiday letter, short this year, having decided I’d rather use the space for some pictures– snowy branches the day before Halloween– the day the electricity went off! I’m still waking in the morning thrilled that we have heat (albeit, heat with the steam escaping through rust-vents in the aged boiler that we’re about to get replaced.
The good news about that particular debacle is that it has forced us to clear the basement and abate the asbestos.
And meanwhile, around the world: occupations, expressions of dissatisfaction and worse for the powers that rule us. Tahir Square again in Cairo, Berkeley and Davis. Change coming will he, nill he.