Roy Miller's Blog, page 183
May 22, 2017
Don’t Give Up On Your Writing Dream: 5 Tips When Self-Publishing Your Book
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 22 May 2017 | 4:00 pm.
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It is hard to believe that, at 57 years old, I am on the other side of the book launch for my historical fiction novel, THE WAIT. Standing in front of more than 100 people talking about a lifelong dream I have been pursuing for over 25 years was, in a word, surreal! A week before that, I was in front of Landmark Booksellers in Franklin, Tennessee where 100,000-plus people passed by during the Franklin Main Street Festival and where many stopped for information on my upcoming book. I cannot even keep up with the doors that are opening for me.
This guest post is by Lisa Kaye Presley. Presley was born in Alabama but has called Nashville, TN, home since 1982. An avid backpacker and photographer, she gets a great deal of inspiration from being out in nature. Presley has had the fortune to work with some of Nashville’s most prominent families and has had the opportunity to learn from folks who watched the city grow to become one of the most popular cities in the world. She quickly found that Nashvillians love to share memories of their beloved city. She has been published in The Tennessean and Banner newspapers, has published a children’s book titled The Orphans, and had great success with a short story titled The Judgment, which will soon be a full-length novel. Born from her love of the city, and her love of history, especially the World War II era, THE WAIT tells a rich story which weaves its way through three decades of Tennessee history. Order The Wait here!
How did I get here? Well, just as I have read in so many of the articles and blogs in Writer’s Digest and so many other articles from other authors who are fulfilling their dreams, I am now sitting here writing about my dream coming true. I am not going to tell you I got lucky (believe me, luck had nothing to do with it), or that I got the right agent, or that a publishing company signed me. No, I’m not going to tell you any of that because I self-published. Mine is a story in which the protagonist (me) and the antagonist (life) have been at odds since the very beginning of my journey. Hard work and prayer got me here on the other side of a book launch holding my book in my hands, filling orders from my website as fast as I can, and watching my sales on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. (all while working full-time).
Here’s a quick back flap blurb about me. I am no scholar. I dropped out of school at 17; got married (didn’t have to); got a G.E.D.; got pregnant; got abandoned; raised a child on my own for eight years; finally got married; got divorced at 43; got laid off three times within 15 years, then finally worked my way up to my dream job—an assistant to a nationally-known attorney making more money than I ever thought possible—all on a G.E.D. and all the while writing. Always. It was the one thing that kept my feet on the ground and my head out of a gas oven! I tell you all of this so that you will know if I can do it, anyone can.
This does not happen overnight, my friends. First, you have to be sincere about your writing. If I had to do it over again, I would have concentrated more on the rules of writing and grammar. I knew my stories were good, but I also knew the mechanics of my writing were what was keeping me from success.
[The 7 Rules of Dialogue All Writers Should Know]
When I finally had my manuscript professionally edited, I realized the agents I had submitted to over the years probably got two sentences into my query letters and stopped because of bad grammar and mistakes. Take your craft seriously! Treat it just as if you are writing a letter to the President of the United States of America. Would you turn in a letter to the Prez with punctuation errors? (Don’t answer that.)
Here are some tips from my journey:
1. Learn your craft.
Go to classes, download podcasts, participate in online seminars, and go to conferences. Writing correctly is just as important as having a good story. Learn about point of view and correct formatting. You will save yourself a lot of time if you format correctly BEFORE you start writing. On that note, let me say one thing. Don’t get overwhelmed by hard and fast rules. I let that happen to me to the point that I quit writing, and I quit writing for years. I thought, I’ll never be able to compete with these writers who have all of these titles after their names. Why should I ever bother? Hear me now: DO NOT get swallowed up in that negativity. Self-doubt will be your biggest enemy. When it comes, stand in its face and say, “I CAN do this. Maybe not tomorrow, but I can do this!”
2. Set up a professional-looking website and blog, blog, blog!
Be proficient in your writing. Don’t think that it is just a blog. You never know who may be reading it. Do the same with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Goodreads, etc. In today’s market, it’s a must.
3. Proofread, proofread, and proofread some more!
As I mentioned earlier, I am not well-trained when it comes to grammar and punctuation. I am self-taught and know my weakness is my technical skill, so I always have one or two people proof everything I write. Believe me, the grammar geeks are out there, and they will bust you. I cannot tell you how many times people have commented on my Facebook page when they have seen a glaring mistake a writer has made whether it was on a website blog, a Facebook post or Twitter. Once you lose a reader, they are lost forever.
[10 Meaningful Practices for Every Writer]
4. Network, network, and network some more.
You cannot make too many friends. Join a writers’ meetup, a hiking club, a book club. Whatever you have to do, you HAVE to create a network of people before you ever think about putting a book out into the world. It is a matter of concentric circles. Create an inner circle, and all of the people in that circle each have a sphere of influence on other circles of people and friends, and those people have their circle of friends, and this goes on and on. This was probably the best thing I have done over the years. I have a huge group of friends, mostly people I have met hiking and with whom I work, who are loyal and want to see me succeed. (By the way, if you have an acquaintance who seems always to send negativity your way—run! Your friends will offer constructive criticism, not knock you down every time they get the chance.)
I am not afraid of chatting someone up in the elevator, at the grocery store, post office, etc. I had a save-the-date card made, and mailed them to everyone I know all over the country. I have handed them out at the grocery store. I have gone to bookstores and given them a stack to sit by the register. You HAVE to be willing to do your own marketing whether you are being published traditionally or self-publishing. I call it shameless self-promotion, and I have gotten pretty good at it!
5. Have your manuscript professionally edited.
Do your research. If you are writing non-fiction, look for someone who has worked in the field of your subject, or edits that sort of book. If you are writing fiction, make sure you don’t hire someone who mostly edits non-fiction. Be smart. Investigate them. Find out what they have edited Find the right fit, and no matter what the cost, it will be the best money you will ever spend during your quest. I did, and I will forever be grateful to Michael Garrett for making me a better writer.
Look, I’m learning about all this business too. I, by no means, am an expert, but I’m happy to share what I have learned with you because that is how I learned; by reading about the successes of others and how they did it. It’s all about passing on the love, folks. This is not a race; it’s a journey. I hope your journey takes you to great heights and successes.
One last thing, take the time to get out and enjoy life. Take a walk or a hike. Do whatever it is that brings you peace and inspiration. Without peace and inspiration, what’s the point in writing?
If you’re looking to master everything from dialogue to different
styles of grammar, you’ll get the best tools available for writing
fiction in this Write Great Fiction Collection of 12 great writing resources.
Click here to buy it now.
Thanks for visiting The Writer’s Dig blog. For more great writing advice, click here.
Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.
Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianKlems
Sign up for Brian’s free Writer’s Digest eNewsletter: WD Newsletter
Listen to Brian on: The Writer’s Market Podcast
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The post Don’t Give Up On Your Writing Dream: 5 Tips When Self-Publishing Your Book appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Andrea Petersen on Living With, and Studying, Anxiety
This content was originally published by JOHN WILLIAMS on 21 May 2017 | 9:12 pm.
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Andrea Petersen
Credit
Marc Goldberg
Toward the end of 1989, Andrea Petersen, then a sophomore at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, was “transformed from a slightly silly sorority girl to a terrorized shut-in in just a few weeks’ time.” That’s how she describes the onset of panic attacks and their confusing aftermath in “On Edge,” her new memoir about having what was eventually diagnosed as several forms of anxiety. The book also looks back at the history of our understanding of the various disorders under the umbrella of anxiety, and surveys the latest attempts to combat them. Below, Petersen, a contributing writer at The Wall Street Journal, tells how she overcame worries about disclosing her experiences, what’s changed (and what hasn’t) in treatment, and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
I’ve been dealing with anxiety since I was a child, so I guess you could say I’ve been gathering material for it for most of my life. But I got the idea to write about it around a decade ago. I started writing more mental health stories, and realized it’s a really exciting time in anxiety research. And there’s been a perplexing rise in the diagnosis among young people, mostly college students. So I realized there was a good journalistic story there as well as my own.
For a while, I was too worried about what would happen to me professionally if I outed myself as having mental illness. Not that I was worried about being fired or demoted, but just that people would feel like they needed to tiptoe around me. As I started writing about college mental health, I spent time with young advocates, and I was blown away by their willingness to let me use their photographs and details about their mental issues in the paper. I thought it’s time to do my part to help chip away at the stigma. I wanted to provide insight for those who suffer from it, and for the people who love them. It can be difficult for those who don’t have it to understand how impairing it can be.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing “On Edge”?
Photo
Credit
Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
The main treatments for anxiety have pretty much stayed the same for the last 50 years, and that’s a problem. The two main evidence-based treatments are cognitive behavioral therapy [C.B.T.] and antidepressive medications, generally S.S.R.I.s [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a class of antidepressant]. About half the people with anxiety disorders who do a course of C.B.T. — about 12 to 15 sessions with a therapist — get clinically significant relief. About a third of people with anxiety disorders don’t respond to S.S.R.I.s, and there are others who can’t tolerate the side effects. So we need new treatments. Part of it is a lack of funding. One scientist at Harvard told me anxiety hasn’t been taken as seriously partly because it’s a normative emotion: We all experience it. So that may have influenced this idea that it’s not a big deal. But researchers are also finding that anxiety disorders are thought of as gateway illnesses. They can lead to depression, substance-use disorders and suicide.
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The post Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Andrea Petersen on Living With, and Studying, Anxiety appeared first on Art of Conversation.
May 21, 2017
‘Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession’ By Alison Weir : NPR
This content was originally published by Jean Zimmerman on 21 May 2017 | 11:00 am.
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Is our hunger for the intrigues of the English Tudors never to be sated? A cursory search for books on Henry VIII yields over 9,000 titles. The cottage industry has outgrown its cottage and is on its way to filling up a castle. What’s a determined author to do? Alison Weir’s answer is to forge new approaches to time-worn situations by focusing on the women of the period. Her new historical novel, Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession, represents a persuasive attempt to restore the humanity of a tragic, misrepresented figure, one of history’s original nasty women.
We all know how the story ends, so it’s a neat trick to draw drama out of such a familiar material. Anne Boleyn ruled England alongside her husband Henry VIII for only three years, from 1533 to 1536. But the couple had a famously bumpy six-year courtship before that, an extended, aphrodisiacal game of hide-and-seek.
Weir reconstructs Anne’s youth as a child in the wealthy household of Sir Thomas Boleyn, who was dubbed “Esquire of the Body of the Monarch,” and her mother, the great beauty Elizabeth Howard. But this quite ordinary, not very pretty girl from a rich household is educated at the courts of a series of outstanding women. In the household of Madame Marguerite, the king of France’s sister, Boleyn discovers brilliant, progressive minds — not only Erasmus, the leading intellectual of the day, but also the work of pioneering feminist Christine de Pizan. Anne’s epiphany? Women “are not born just to be subordinate to men.” She learns to lean forward.
Weir’s fictional Anne is ferociously smart and guilty of nothing but craving the power that’s rightfully hers to claim. She disdains the dalliances of court life. Her trial and conviction for fornicating with five men — including her brother — amounts to a spurious campaign of lies, a particularly lethal instance of slut shaming.
Embedded in a court rife with romantic intrigue, Anne asks herself “why becoming queen mattered so much, when the chance of true love was hers for the seizing. And she always came back to the argument that the crown was hers for the seizing too.” That is the crux of her ongoing dilemma, and she solves it, according to Weir, by talking herself into having feelings for her husband Henry. They conceive a child, Elizabeth, as well as three boys who don’t survive. Her girl baby only serves as a reminder only of Anne’s inability to produce an heir, and she relates to the future queen primarily through bequests of fabulous clothing.
“It seemed that she was always fighting her demons,” Weir writes. People hate her. She can’t leave the confines of her Greenwich palace without hearing shouts on the street of “burn the whore” and “kill the whore.” Yet she chooses “The Most Happy” for her motto as queen. She is that strong, that impervious.
Weir’s fictional Anne is ferociously smart and guilty of nothing but craving the power that’s rightfully hers to claim.
Weir, the author of fiction and nonfiction books on the English royals that come out at nearly an annual pace, ends her tale by describing the already decapitated queen’s last moments. She has leaned forward for one last time, and the specially imported French swordsman has performed his bloody task. But Anne doesn’t die, not right away. She “felt her head, horribly light now, hit the scaffold with a painful thud and the blindfold fall away,” revealing her own “crumpled” body beside her. (Experts Weir consulted claimed it would be physically possible for a person to remain fully conscious for 20-30 seconds even after being decollated.)
In literature on the Tudors, no detail is too small. The tiny extra nail on the little finger of Anne’s right hand has often been extrapolated into a whole extra digit. Weir treats it as a source of private shame for the queen throughout her life, and a reason for her preference for long flowing sleeves. Was it finally a mark of Cain that helped get her killed? There are more than a few of them, les reines sans tête: Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette, Catherine Howard, Mary Queen of Scots. Weir leads us to believe that beheading might be the price to pay for having a mind of one’s own.
Jean Zimmerman’s latest novel, Savage Girl, is out now in paperback. She posts daily at Blog Cabin.
The post ‘Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession’ By Alison Weir : NPR appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Jeremy Mulford obituary | Books
This content was originally published by Matthew Barton on 21 May 2017 | 5:18 pm.
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My friend Jeremy Mulford, who has died aged 79, was a poet, publisher and editor who founded Falling Wall Press in the early 1970s as a way of disseminating radical pamphlets on education and the women’s movement by authors such as Harold Rosen and Sheila Rowbotham.
As the venture thrived he also published books such as Worktown People, a collection of Humphrey Spender’s photographs from northern England, Eleanor Rathbone’s The Disinherited Family and the widely read Nella Last’s War, the second world war diaries of a housewife.
By the mid-80s Jeremy had also founded Loxwood Stoneleigh, an imprint of Falling Wall Press that published poetry, playscripts, artworks and fiction, including material by Julia Ball, Catherine Byron, John Downie, Leah Fritz, Sarah Lawson and Wendy Mulford, his first wife.
A highly regarded editor of the old school, Jeremy’s resistance to all things digital sometimes made my collaboration with him on a Bristol poetry magazine, Raceme, a little challenging, and involved to-ing and fro-ing with memory sticks before he relented and dipped his toe into the murky waters of email. I remember his delight at finding, in conversation with the poet Dennis O’Driscoll, that the latter shared his disinclination.
Jeremy was born in Slough, Berkshire, to Ernest, a paintmaker, and his wife Ivy (nee Plumridge). After King Edward VI grammar school in Birmingham and Cambridge University, which he adored for the opportunity to study literature and for its atmosphere of intellectual creativity, he became an outstanding and innovative primary school teacher.
A school inspector was initially sceptical to find him reading to one small group of pupils while two other unsupervised groups were variously absorbed with inspecting slugs in the garden and working on a play in the gym. But the inspector was won round when he saw that they were all engaged and empowered by their learning. Later Jeremy became an educational adviser.
That he was seriously playful is witnessed in a book of his own inventive poems, Fictions Autobiographical, with its fine balance of poignancy and humour. He leaves a house crammed with books and a large sofa down which – a running joke between the two of us – items essential to the production of our magazine were likely mislaid.
A generous man, Jeremy could invariably be found in warm conversation with someone – often on a literary or political theme, or else on his other great love, cricket, at which he had excelled in his days at Cambridge.
He married twice: first to Wendy (nee Rawlinson), who later remarried but kept his name, and then to Suzie Fleming. They were separated but remained close friends. He is survived by Suzie and their children, Rachel and Joe.
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In ‘Margot Sanchez,’ A Teen Grows Up And Learns To Love The Bronx : NPR
This content was originally published by Lulu Garcia-Navarro on 21 May 2017 | 11:11 am.
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Margot Sanchez has big dreams of fitting in at the new, expensive prep school her family has sacrificed to send her to. But it’s summer and instead of going to the Hamptons with her rich, white friends, she’s stuck working at her family’s business in the Bronx.
Margot is the protagonist of Lilliam Rivera’s new young adult novel, The Education of Margot Sanchez. Rivera explains that Margot is “being punished because she stole her father’s credit card to charge some pants and clothes for herself, and her punishment is to work off her debts at her father’s supermarket.”
Needless to say, she isn’t happy about it. But it turns out to be a summer of revelation for Margot. “She’s going to realize that there are things that she is going to love about the Bronx,” Rivera says.
Interview Highlights
On Margot’s efforts to erase her ethnicity
I think there’s moments when you’re young that you’re just trying to put on different masks. And for Margot her mask right at this moment is just to really follow what her prep school friends are doing. And if they’re into Taylor Swift, then she’s gonna do that. And they’re not listening to Reggaeton or any kind of, like, old school music that she used to like. She so desperately wants to fit in that she’s willing to, you know, straighten those curls out and really just deny those things that maybe made her unique.
On growing up in the Bronx
I grew up on 183rd and Webster Avenue in the Twin Parks West housing projects. There’s five of us all together, a Puerto Rican family, really huge family, and they still live in the South Bronx, now just at like 149th. So growing up there was definitely a lot of love and just trying to maintain, you know. We lived in the housing projects when they first opened up, so there was a lot of hope when we moved in there. And I remember just looking out the window and seeing fireflies and just playing in the playground and everything was great. And then, you know, things change and shift, and things became a little bit harder living there and not as safe.
On the inspiration for Margot’s story
It was a little bit personal in the sense that, you know, my first job, I worked with my father. He worked at a private hospital in Manhattan. … I was 14 and I … loved my father so much — like, he could do no wrong. … And although we didn’t work at the same department, I was able to see him in a totally different light and it was very humbling work that he was doing. He worked as a nurse’s aide, and it was the first time I saw him take care of people that weren’t family. And it was the first time I saw someone telling him what to do. And all of that just sort of shifted the way I saw him.
I wanted to write about that moment when young people see their parents in a new way, in a realistic way …
And I wanted to write about that moment when young people see their parents in a new way, in a realistic way; when they see them with their dreams, and maybe their desires are unfulfilled. … I really wanted to capture that moment because I think that’s that moment when you’re sort of growing up, you know. That’s that moment when you’re like, Oh, this is the real world and these are my parents and they’re not just punishing me for stealing a credit card. There are actually way more things going on that I am not seeing.
On deciding to throw her book launch party in the Bronx, a bookstore desert
The library was the only place that you could get books, you know, and that’s where I spent most of my time. So when I was thinking of a launch party for this book, I knew for sure I wanted it to be in the Bronx. I mean, definitely. But, you know, there were no bookstores, so finding a location for it became quite challenging for us. And I was able to find Noëlle Santos, who’s trying to build a bookstore in the Bronx, and she ended up pairing with us and she sold my book at my launch party. And that was such a big deal for me to just have it in the Bronx, to be able to, like, celebrate a book about the Bronx, set in the Bronx, with the people that would read it. … But it was a challenge, and I was just like: I can’t have a launch party in the city. It’s just — that’s crazy. It didn’t make sense to me, especially when this book was so tied to my home.
Radio producer Sarah Handel, editor Sarah Oliver and digital producer Nicole Cohen contributed to this report.
The post In ‘Margot Sanchez,’ A Teen Grows Up And Learns To Love The Bronx : NPR appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Writes About His Friendship With Coach Wooden
This content was originally published by on 21 May 2017 | 11:13 am.
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NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks to writer and sports legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar about his book, Coach Wooden and Me, about his 50-year relationship with his UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.
The post Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Writes About His Friendship With Coach Wooden appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Ferrante Casting Call in Naples Lets Children Dream, if for a Day
This content was originally published by JASON HOROWITZ on 18 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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With only months before filming starts, the project’s producers — Lorenzo Mieli of Wildside and Domenico Procacci of Fandango — were eager to find the show’s stars.
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“Anxiety, yes. Desperation, not yet,” Mr. Procacci said (with a hint of desperation).
After her interview, and still a long way from a role in the production, Maria Rosaria bounded out, boasting: “I won the part. I’ll get on television.”
Her neighbor Enzo Valinotti — a 57-year-old shoemaker who reminisced about the days, nearly a century ago, when Totò, one of Italy’s most iconic actors, lived in the neighborhood — leaned out his ground-floor window and said of the children flooding the street, “They are all so happy.”
Not all of them, though.
A quick brush with show business reduced one boy to tears. “They didn’t interview me,” he whimpered as neighborhood women swooped in to console him.
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“Amore, amore,” they said, “they are going into all the schools of Naples. If they interviewed everyone it would take forever.”
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Some mothers appreciated that the audition got their children off the streets for an afternoon and gave them something to remember. Others dreamed big.
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“Look at my son. He is so beautiful,” said Anna Arrivolo, 43, who grabbed her child’s pudgy face and stroked his gelled hair. “He didn’t want to do it. I wanted him to.”
(“You know ‘Bellissima’?” Mr. Costanzo said, referring to Luchino Visconti’s classic film about a striving stage mother who does everything to get her daughter into the movies. “This is a bit like that.”)
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More time passed and more children auditioned. Under a sign that read “Beauty,” Marta had made it up into the stairwell, where she interrogated the other children walking down. “Oh, Francesco! What happened inside?” she asked a boy, who smiled and said, “Nothing, just an interview.”
Rumors spread (“They chose Benedetta!”) and none of them noticed when Mr. Costanzo’s girlfriend, the acclaimed Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher, walked past in a long yellow skirt.
A member of the production team declared, “Silenzio!” and then called the next 10 numbers up.
“Guys, good luck!” Marta shouted. Then she grabbed her friend Fabiana Colantonio, 9, looked up at the ceiling and implored, “Jesus, let them pick me.”
A few minutes later, the two girls lined up with the others, standing shoulder to shoulder, reminiscent of Lila and Lenù in the book. Mr. Costanza and Ms. Muccino again conferred in whispers.
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Ms. Muccino then walked over to the line and tapped Fabiana on the shoulder, but not Marta, who first looked confused, then swallowed hard.
At 6:30 in the evening, the production team called it quits. While he didn’t find any candidates for his female leads, Mr. Costanzo said he had seen some of the mournful eyes that he hoped would “build the soul” of the imaginary neighborhood he intended to create.
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As he, his crew and his girlfriend left the building and walked off the street, Fabiana Scasserra, 9, stood on the ground-floor porch opposite the center and watched them go. She had long, dark hair, wiry limbs and big, watchful eyes.
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The post Ferrante Casting Call in Naples Lets Children Dream, if for a Day appeared first on Art of Conversation.
The Civil Rights Stories We Need to Remember
This content was originally published by TIMOTHY B. TYSON on 19 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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Defeated in the Albany campaign of 1962, the commander King recoups and in the spring of 1963 wins the Battle of Birmingham. The soldiers of Freedom Summer soon invade Mississippi; they incur losses but seize the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1965, King’s troops suffer on the Selma bridge to win the Voting Rights Act. The following year, renegades begin chanting “Black Power,” and the South — all but Memphis, that is — sinks into the ocean, its descent illuminated by cities aflame North and West. Amid the confusion, James Earl Ray stars as John Wilkes Booth and the Great Leader falls. King’s crucifixion sounds a new birth of freedom; the white republic forsakes its obsession with the color of our skin and fixes instead upon the content of our character.
Like many grand theories, this panorama works everywhere except where you actually know what happened. The bigger the frame, the farther actual history floats away, unless local specifics stake it to earth. And neither the “master narrative” nor subsequent attempts to reframe it work in Bessemer, as the historian Bass’s tale well-told reveals. Bass, the author of “Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’” examines the death penalty conviction of a black youth in the 1957 killing of a white police officer, and the 44-year legal saga that followed.
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On July 12, 1957, the 17-year-old Caliph Washington drove home from a double date in Bessemer, a poverty-forged caldron of corruption, vice, violence and racism. Officer James (Cowboy) Clark, fishing for illegal whiskey runners, almost rammed Washington’s two-tone Chevy from behind and then pursued the youth without using his siren or flashing light, firing his pistol at the fleeing car.
In terror of white vigilantes, Washington sped up, ducked into a black neighborhood, tried to elude his pursuer but skidded his car into a tree. Stepping out, he saw Clark’s squad car; no comfort since Washington had recently survived a severe pistol-whipping by the police. When the angry white cop drew close with his pistol drawn, they struggled over the gun, which discharged, killing Clark. There was physical evidence — according to defense lawyers, “almost to a mathematical certainty” — that the fatal shot was not aimed at Clark but instead ricocheted off the car. “You better get from out of that car,” a neighbor yelled. “These white folks will kill you.” The young man took the cop’s fancy pistol and fled into the woods.
Photo
Martin Luther King during the Montgomery bus boycott.
Credit
Gene Herrick/Associated Press
“In the minds of most whites,” Bass writes, “crime was not the most serious threat to law and order in Alabama; it was the prospect of black political and social equality and the loss of white status and power.” In 1954, the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision threw Southern segregationists into political apoplexy. The Montgomery bus boycott ended after 381 days when the court struck down the segregation laws; Klan terrorists bombed Dr. King’s house and the homes of other boycott leaders. On Christmas Day in 1956, someone also dynamited the home of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham. “The echo of shots and dynamite blasts,” the editors of The Southern Patriot wrote in 1957, “has been almost continuous throughout the South.”
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In this atmosphere of war, Bessemer police unleashed a vicious house-by-house search for Caliph Washington. They shot livestock and citizens, beating and arresting anyone who knew Washington. They pounded an elderly woman with a rifle butt, killing her. They murdered a youth they thought looked like Washington. The deputies finally accosted someone who knew that Washington had absconded from Alabama to Mississippi and boarded a bus. When they snatched him off the Greyhound, Washington had a paper sack holding Cowboy Clark’s pearl-handled six-shooter.
Telling Washington that they had arrested his parents and would not release them until he confessed, Bessemer police grilled the youth, threatening to kill him. Not advised of his rights, Washington signed a confession. An all-white jury quickly convicted him and sentenced him to “ride the lightning” in “Big Yellow Mama,” Alabama’s electric chair. After a failed appeal in 1959 put him back on Death Row, Gov. George Wallace, the racist demagogue who was oddly queasy about capital punishment, stayed his execution 13 times, a cruel mercy that led to the overthrow of the sentence. A third jury handed down a guilty verdict as well, but, after years of appeals, a judge in 1971 ordered him released. The state of Alabama let him go but declined to dismiss his conviction and the possibility of incarceration hung over his head until he died in 2001, leaving behind an adoring family and three decades of exemplary ministry in Bessemer.
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Bass unearths the heretofore undocumented story of Caliph Washington and his trek through the depths of Jim Crow justice. The complex lives that populate his jailhouse journey from segregation through civil rights braid the movement’s gains and limitations into a red thread tracing the current crisis of race and criminal justice. The civil rights movement in these pages sputters while it marches into yet another new South and charts progress that fails to change the fundamental shape of power. As James Baldwin instructs, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” “He Calls Me by Lightning” insists that we face the cost of lives that don’t matter to a persistent racial caste system. It reminds us that human endurance and irrepressible love outlast the glacial pace of change, and proves how much we do not yet know about our history.
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A Personal Foray Into the Long-Lost Pynchon Tapes
This content was originally published by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN on 19 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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“Mason & Dixon” attenuated its own complexities with a humanity apparent to anyone patient enough to take the long walk into Pynchonland. Michiko Kakutani called it “the most emotional and affecting work in his oeuvre to date,” as cerebral as his 1973 masterpiece “Gravity’s Rainbow” but more accessible, its fever-dream history lessons tempered by the buddy-movie premise, two English gents thoroughly unsuited to each other fending off advances from a robotic duck, hanging out with a stoned George Washington, pushing “into the Continental Unknown.”
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Last summer, as Donald J. Trump advanced on Washington, D.C., I suddenly had an intense urge to read “Mason & Dixon” again. Only this time, I’d listen to it. Tugged by the demands of parenthood, journalism and Twitter, I now did much of my reading through earbuds, as I washed dishes, prepared lunches and washed more dishes. In the pre-digital age, I had thought of audiobooks as fussy and unserious, the equivalent of plastic-covered furniture. The ease of listening to a book on an iPhone, through the Audible app, changed that. The plastic came off the chair, which turned out to be an Eames.
But even Audible has its limits. In lieu of Pynchon’s frontier fantasy, my search results were topped by “Mason: Remington Ranch, Book 1,” a romance whose cover featured a chiseled young man in sagging leather chaps. There was also a book about the Yakuza.
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A recording of “Mason & Dixon” does exist, produced by Books on Tape in 1997. I asked Penguin, which publishes Pynchon, why it wasn’t available for download. A publicist said that while most of Penguin’s archives have been digitized, “this one was unfortunately never resurfaced.” I was forced to conduct a salvage operation that would take me to the lightless depths of the analog age.
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Maybe that’s a tad dramatic. A search on WorldCat, the online library catalog, revealed 13 copies of the “Mason & Dixon” audiobook in American libraries. I chose as the object of my attention the Crowell Public Library in San Marino, Calif. Pynchon became famous, after all, for writing about the Southland in “The Crying of Lot 49,” his 1965 novel about the region’s aerospace industry (and a conspiracy involving the Pony Express). Oh, and the comedian Rob Schneider once lived nearby. The possibility, however remote, that the man who played Deuce Bigalow, male gigolo, had once held the “Mason & Dixon” tapes in his hand was simply too much to resist.
Thus it was that in late December, the package arrived from the Crowell Public Library. Inside were two containers of molded white plastic; inside each container were 10 cassettes, fixed upright between dividers like soldiers in formation. Together, they constituted the 30-hour recording of “Mason & Dixon.” A prominent “Discarded” sticker suggested they were mine to keep. Major score.
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Much has recently been made of returning to analog pleasures, a yearning so strong that one of the few cassette-making companies in the United States is thriving, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, apparently boosted by the nostalgia of musicians longing to return to the raw authenticity of Whitesnake’s 1987 power ballad “Is This Love.” I’ll bet anything those Bushwick rockers never tried listening to a 30-hour postmodern novel on a Jensen cassette player, which I bought after the Walkman decided to render “Mason & Dixon” into a protracted whine. Then the Jensen malfunctioned, the narration slowing to an ominous lowing, Jonathan Reese replaced by Darth Vader. There was an Aiwa CSD-TD51, which obviously bore an antipathy to contemporary American fiction, for it refused to function altogether. A Lyss CP601 “Super Mini” turned out to be neither super nor mini.
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Shuffling between malfunctioning players and misplaced cassettes, I was as lost in “Mason & Dixon” as Mason and Dixon were in the wilds of North America.
The format wasn’t entirely to blame. Returning to “Mason & Dixon” nearly 15 years after I had first stuffed it into my messenger bag was like encountering an old flame and wondering where the flame had gone. The novel thrums with genius, but I was more frequently impressed than entertained. I was even less frequently jolted with the kind of truths about our intractable nation I wanted — no, needed — to hear in this time of political tumult. Returns on investment should have been higher. It’s a crass way of putting it, but we live in a crass age.
Listening to the book only magnified that frustration. There were times when Reese’s masterful narration had me standing with Pynchon’s heroes astride “the Boundary between the Settl’d and the Unpossess’d.” Yet there were also times when I pulled the earbuds out, wanting to sweep the mac and cheese from the kitchen floor in silence.
Technology dates when it is superseded by superior technology. But what dates a book is much harder to say. Nobody was reading Sinclair Lewis six months ago, but Trump’s victory brought renewed attention to his novel about American fascism, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, yet I have no doubt that Pynchon is the superior thinker and craftsman. In the discussions of germane novels for the Trump era, however, Pynchon has gone unmentioned.
This is true for the same reason that Mt. Everest doesn’t show up on a lot of lists of day hikes. Reading a novel like “Mason & Dixon” requires an intellectual self-immolation many are unwilling to undertake. In Pynchon’s league of extraordinary (and, it must be said, extraordinarily white) gentlemen belong William Gaddis, William Gass and Richard Powers. Together these novelists form a Himalayan Range of late-20th-century American fiction, intimidating and terrifying. Some will want to scale these peaks despite the privations involved, or maybe precisely because of those privations.
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But reading habits have changed in the 20 years since “Mason & Dixon” was published. Just as we’ve relegated the cassette to a cabinet of pre-digital curios, so has the overstuffed postmodern novel become a relic of an earlier epoch, when a novelist like Pynchon could be seen as a prophet issuing coded warnings about America’s past and future. “Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,” he writes in an oft-cited passage of “Mason & Dixon” that seems to anticipate the current political moment. It’s a reminder that if Pynchon’s style has been superseded, his ideas have only been confirmed. For all its allusions and tricks, “Mason & Dixon” argues against the subjective divisions we create between each other, whether by lines or by walls. I only hope the bit about cyborg waterfowl remains in the realm of fiction.
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May 20, 2017
Letters to the Editor – The New York Times
This content was originally published by on 19 May 2017 | 11:00 am.
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LARRY D. WOODS
NASHVILLE
The writer is a professor of criminal justice at Tennessee State University.
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Show and Tell
To the Editor:
Re “Your Writing Tools Aren’t Mine,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Critic’s Take, April 30): One promising development on the landscape of M.F.A. creative writing programs in recent decades has been the emergence of nonfiction concentrations at many schools. Students practice memoir, essay, biography, literary journalism and other fact-based forms in which show and tell may be the better rule, and “art” and life (“politics, history, theory, philosophy, ideology”) need not conflict. The result is new writing that is as diverse as students’ own experience, as wide-ranging in content as curiosity will allow. “Write what you know” expands to “write what you can find out” through research. Faculty across genres in M.F.A. programs these days seek to foster unique student expression, but nonfiction, with its profusion of forms, may be the genre in which many students can most naturally find and exercise their own voices in workshops less bound by tradition.
MEGAN MARSHALL
BELMONT, MASS.
The writer, who won the 2014 Pulitzer in biography and memoir, teaches nonfiction writing and archival research in the M.F.A. program at Emerson College.
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By the Numbers
To the Editor:
James Ryerson reviewed three new exciting books on the history and role of numbers in society (Ivory Tower, May 7), among them Keith Devlin’s “Finding Fibonacci.” Arguably, Fibonacci’s greatest contribution was helping to introduce Europeans to the Hindu-Arabic numerals. Going from Roman numerals to this system dramatically simplifies and extends arithmetic calculation. Fibonacci, as a boy, learned the new way to represent numbers and to calculate with them in North Africa, (present-day Algeria), where his father was serving as a trade representative.
KEN McALOON
SOUTH DENNIS, MASS.
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To the Editor:
James Ryerson’s discussion of the Amazonian Pirahã’s sense of number (Ivory Tower, May 7), in connection with his discussion of Caleb Everett’s “Numbers and the Making of Us,” is reminiscent of the cognitive psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget’s observation that children’s earliest mathematics is ultrametric — not quantified metrically, but rather derived from concepts of enclosure and topology. Mathematicians call this early mathematics p-adic mathematics, in which numbers do not quantify count or measure size in the usual sense, but instead label paths of a hierarchy tree. Some cognitive scientists consider p-adic mathematics the natural mathematics of cognition, evolutionarily developed to conceptualize large quantities of complex information.
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ROBERT PASTER
PROVINCETOWN, MASS.
The writer is author of “Digital Mind Math,” the story of p-adic cognition.
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