Roy Miller's Blog, page 229
April 1, 2017
‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches’ by Matsuo Bashō
This content was originally published by on 31 March 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Earlier this month, I flew to West Texas and spent the better part of nine days backpacking and camping in Big Bend National Park with my brothers, father, and a family friend. My father had spent much of his youth backpacking in the park, which was only a little over 20 years old at the time. And while it was the first time my brothers and I had ever visited, for my father, who is close to 70, it will likely be his last. Wanting to document the trip in some way, I turned to the writings of one of Japan's greatest poets, Matsuo Bashō.
Bashō, widely considered a master of the hokku, or haiku, is equally renowned as a writer of a form called haibun, which combines haiku with prose. In fact, Bashō coined the term in a letter to his student, Kyorai, in 1690. Toward the end of his life, Bashō was a restless traveler, and the bulk of Bashō's haibun are accounts of his journeys. The most famous, Oku no Hosomichi, is alternately translated as Narrow Road to the Interior and Narrow Road to the Deep North—the latter translation being the inspiration for the title of Richard Flanagan's Man Booker Prize–winning novel of the same name.
As both a poet and journalist, I found the idea of a form that wedded poetry and nonfiction to be particularly suitable, and I picked up a Penguin Classics edition of the work and a few of its fellows, called The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches and translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, for inspiration. What I found was a rich, patient, and detailed work as sublimely moving in its poetics as it was observant in its travel writing.
I found that the book also served as a handy inverse. While Bashō's travels were to what were, during his time—Japan's Edo period—the furthest, most remote reaches of his homeland, I left my Brooklyn apartment for the southmost wilds of my father's youth, now visited by more than 300,000 people yearly and a prime target for President Donald Trump's proposed border wall.
Big Bend is a scorched, reddened, dusty landscape filled with prickly pear cacti and creosote bushes and waxy candelilla and thorny ocotillo, the "devil's walking stick." The book's descriptions of the frozen north of Japan could not be more different than the desert with which I was surrounded, but sitting atop the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains gazing south toward the Rio Grande and Mexico's Guadalupe range, it didn't matter. It was all beauty, as worth relishing as it is worth saving.
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Weekly Round-Up: April, Agents, and Almost Missed You
This content was originally published by Karen Krumpak on 1 April 2017 | 1:00 pm.
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Every week our editors publish somewhere between 10 and 15 blog posts—but it can be hard to keep up amidst the busyness of everyday life. To make sure you never miss another post, we’ve created a new weekly round-up series. Each Saturday, find the previous week’s posts all in one place.
Antagonists and Antiheroes
Who do you think is the best book villain of all time? Vote now in Arch Villain Madness: The Fatal Four.
Do you find yourself thinking that many protagonists are just too good? Try writing a character whose morality is a bit more questionable. Here’s how to craft the perfect antihero.
Prepare Yourself
When it comes time to actually sit at your desk and start writing, what’s the first thing you do? Maybe the first step is changing the focus of your attention. Read Preparing Your Mind for Writing: How to Make the Shift for more.
Before you sit down to write, you need to prepare yourself by finding some inspiration: Find the Right Writing Inspiration for Your Life.
Agents and Attention
This week’s new literary agent alert is for Kortney Price of Holloway Literary. She is looking for middle-grade fiction, young adult thrillers, and contemporary new adult fiction.
For your book to find its readers, you have to make sure it captures their attention. Here are 10 Ways to Make Your Submission Stand Out in the Slush Pile. Even after publication, there’s still work to do. Read How to Develop a Street Team for Your Book, and learn about working with others to ensure your book gets that attention.
Poetic Asides
The beginning of April (that’s today!) heralds National Poetry Month and our 10th Annual April PAD Challenge. Find out more about the challenge and check out 3 Tips for Navigating the April PAD Challenge.
For this week’s Wednesday Poetry Prompt, write a poem using a music genre as the title.
Not enough for you? Here are 10 Short Poetic Forms for you to try.
If you haven’t been keeping up with the new Poetry Spotlights feature, make sure you check out Robert Lee Brewer’s 10 Things in the World of Poetry I Love.
For Your Shelf
Editorial director Jessica Strawser’s debut novel came out this week! Make sure you check out Almost Missed You, available now.
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How Reagan and the New Right Resuscitated the G.O.P.
This content was originally published by ROMESH RATNESAR on 31 March 2017 | 11:00 am.
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Ronald Reagan
REAGAN RISING
The Decisive Years, 1976-1980
By Craig Shirley
409 pp. Broadside Books/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.
Forty years ago, the Republican Party was at a nadir. Gerald Ford had lost the presidency to a Democratic outsider named Jimmy Carter. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. The stench of Watergate hung over the G.O.P. establishment. (It didn’t help that the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee operated out of a converted men’s room in the Russell Senate Office Building.) The party’s most popular national figure, Ronald Reagan, later said he was open to changing the party’s name. An analysis in The New York Times pronounced the Republicans “closer to extinction than ever before.”
They only looked dead. Within four years, the G.O.P. picked up 49 seats in the House of Representatives and gained a majority in the Senate for the first time since 1955. In the 1980 presidential election, Reagan defeated Carter by 440 electoral votes, the worst loss ever for a sitting president.
What happened? In “Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years, 1976-1980,” Craig Shirley chronicles the Republicans’ emergence from the wilderness. The story goes like this: After Ford’s defeat, a guerrilla movement of conservative operatives staged an assault on the traditional economic orthodoxy of the G.O.P. Their goal was to “get rid of excessive regulations, tear down trade barriers, get government out of the business of managing the economy and most important, slash taxes to the bone.” Republican leaders soon grasped the political appeal of the insurgents’ agenda, particularly to middle-class suburban voters. The party became “more pluralistic, less interested in rank and more interested in new ideas.”
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An assortment of long-forgotten figures receive credit for this transformation, notably Bill Brock, the former Tennessee senator who took over the Republican National Committee in 1977 and ignited its fund-raising machine. Reagan’s role was less direct. When he announced his candidacy in 1979, Reagan was the prohibitive favorite for the Republican nomination, but he had done little to cultivate the grass roots, spending more time giving speeches to trade associations and business groups. To conserve Reagan’s energy, John Sears, Reagan’s campaign manager, insisted on keeping the 68-year-old former governor on ice, which fueled concerns about Reagan’s age and keyed George H.W. Bush’s upset victory in the Iowa caucuses.
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Reagan quickly recovered in New Hampshire (“I’m paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!”), fired Sears and coasted to the Republican nomination. Reagan’s genius was to sell supply-side economics in a gauzy package of optimism, nostalgia and patriotic renewal. “Our country is a living, breathing presence, unimpressed by what others say is impossible,” he said. Reagan didn’t start the conservative revolution. But it’s hard to see how it would have triumphed without him.
Shirley, the author of books on Reagan’s 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns, is a sure-footed and entertaining observer of the hurly-burly of national politics. He has a weakness for poll numbers, horse-race punditry and clichés: “The Democratic Party was to make even more headlines. And not in a good way.” Shirley doesn’t hide his contempt for Carter or the ’70s, which he depicts as a time of near-unimaginable lassitude. The Washington establishment was “intertwined, inbred, crossbred”; the American people “had not only been mugged, but also shot, beaten, raped and left for dead by their own government.”
“Reagan Rising” doesn’t deal with the negative impact of supply-side economics on the federal budget deficit and on the poor. But that’s for another book. It’s all too easy to forget that the 1980 election took place against the backdrop of recession, double-digit inflation, gasoline shortages, an intensifying arms race with the Soviets and the hostage crisis in Tehran. The country really was in trouble. A small-minded and demagogic politician might have exploited Americans’ anxieties and appealed to their worst instincts. Accepting the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Detroit, Reagan said, “Can we doubt that only a divine providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely: Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain, the boat people of Southeast Asia, of Cuba and Haiti, the victims of drought and famine in Africa, the freedom fighters of Afghanistan and our own countrymen held in savage captivity.”
It’s enough to make you weep. And not in a good way.
Continue reading the main story
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PW Picks: Books of the Week, April 3, 2017
This content was originally published by on 31 March 2017 | 4:00 am.
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This week: an absorbingly creepy debut novel set in a decaying old mansion, plus Mary Gaitskill's excellent essay collection.
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The “April Fools’ Headlines for Writers” Contest – Join in & Win Prizes!
This content was originally published by Brian A. Klems on 1 April 2017 | 4:45 pm.
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Are you ready to have a little fun? It’s April Fools Day, which means it’s time for our #AprilFools4Writers contest! Here’s how it works: Create entertaining, clever and witty headlines that would appear in an Onion-style newspaper for writers about anything writing related (grammar, authors, books, etc.) and post it in any of the ways mentioned below. That’s it! That’s all you have to do. To make it extra special, I’ll up the ante: I’m giving away two prizes, a copy of the 2017 Guide to Literary Agents and a copy of Author in Progress. Here’s how to win one of them:
Enter this competition in any of the four ways below. Also, spread the word of it by mentioning this blog post anywhere you can and I’ll give you a second chance to win. I’ll pick the winners at random.
Here are my first two:
Infinitives to Split – Attempt at Reconciliation By Editor Fails #AprilFools4Writers
— Brian A. Klems (@BrianKlems) April 1, 2017
"The Letter Y Dispels Rumors That It Swings Both Ways" – #AprilFools4Writers
— Brian A. Klems (@BrianKlems) April 1, 2017
How to be entered for a chance to win:
1. Post your headline in any one of these ways:
2. Share this post on your social media sites–Twitter, FB, your blog.
If you post on Twitter, include my handle so I can track it. If you post on FB or post on your blog, include the link below in the comments section (don’t panic if your comment doesn’t show up right away, sometimes it takes a day to work through our SPAM filter). Here’s a sample that you can use anywhere:
Like April Fool’s Day? Enter the @WritersDigest #AprilFools4Writers contest. It’s free! Details: http://ow.ly/WdKp30atbDY (via @BrianKlems) [Click here to Tweet this]
If you want to be eligible for prizes, you have to do both. Deadline is Tuesday, April 4, 2014 at noon EDT. (So you have several days to participate!) I will announce the winners and post some of my favorite entries next Monday, April 7 right here on this blog. Remember, enter because it’s fun—as a bonus, you could walk away with one of these:
P.S. Want to win even bigger prizes and receive prestigious awards? Check out other Writer’s Digest writing contests.
Thanks for visiting The Writer’s Dig blog. For more great writing advice, click here.
Brian A. Klems is the 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
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It’s a Brave New World for Teachers and Librarians
This content was originally published by on 31 March 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The political tensions of the 2016 presidential campaign have not abated since the election in November. A steady stream of falsehoods, rumors, and so-called fake news is complicating journalists’ efforts to chronicle the often-unprecedented actions of the new administration. In light of this complex situation and its effects on young people’s ability to decipher current events, we asked teachers and librarians to weigh in on the following questions: How are you using books to explain what is going on in the world right now? What kinds of queries have you been receiving from students this school year regarding current events, and how are you addressing them with books and other resources? What have been your best practices and strategies?
Allison Tran
Senior librarian for children’s services
Mission Viejo Library
Mission Viejo, Calif.
I haven’t had many specific queries about current events from my library patrons, which is surprising to me—but I’m working to anticipate the need for information by putting books on display that relate to topics in the news, such as climate change, women’s rights, LGBT rights, and how our government works. I’m also being more intentional than ever about displaying books featuring people of color, or people from a variety of cultures. Because some of these topics are now politically charged, I wonder if patrons may shy away from asking direct questions about them—so I’m trying to answer the unasked questions, or perhaps spark inquiry and encourage deeper learning on these topics.
I’m also highlighting information-literacy concepts more often these days, both in one-on-one interactions on the reference desk and when we have school tours. I’ve always been passionate about empowering students to become savvy researchers, and with the rise of fake news, it’s even more important to make sure even very young elementary school students are introduced to the basic concepts of evaluating authorship, timeliness, and bias.
Joanna Schofield
Youth programming coordinator
Cuyahoga County Public Library
Cuyahoga County, Ohio
This past January, the Association for Library Services to Children hosted a mini-institute before ALA Midwinter. At this mini-institute, librarians, authors, illustrators, and other individuals passionate about library service to children discussed our current political climate and strategized ways to best support youth during this time. The most important idea I took away from this event is the desperate need to provide all library customers with literary windows and mirrors.
People of all ages need to not only be able to find characters who look, think, feel, or act like them in books, but all people should be exposed to high-quality literature filled with cultures and ideas different from their own. I have shared a wide range of diverse titles and tried to focus on many different types of diversity—racial, economic, cultural, gender, and others—including titles such as Flying Lessons and Other Stories edited by Ellen Oh, Ed Young’s The Cat from Hunger Mountain, Jason Reynolds’s Ghost, F. Isabel Campoy’s Make Something Beautiful: How Art Transformed a Neighborhood, and Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda.
Since I began working with youth more than 10 years ago, I have found that all children are looking for their voice and for opportunities to express themselves. In our current political environment, it is so important for all educators, librarians, and other youth-focused professionals to provide opportunities for children and young adults to form and express their ideas.
I have engaged in numerous conversations with youth of all ages in the last six months, in which the students have expressed unease or fear and have shared with me incorrect facts or ideas that they have heard from someone else. Children as young as kindergarten have asked about President Trump’s wall and if they will be able to go to the doctor, because their families do not have enough money to pay the doctor. As a librarian, it is my responsibility to listen to these ideas and help young people find correct and balanced information so they can form their own opinions and beliefs. Through information-literacy education, marketing a balanced and diverse collection, active listening, and striving to always provide a welcoming and safe physical space, libraries and librarians can support all customers in today’s world.
Cindy Dobrez
Librarian
Harbor Lights and Macatawa Bay Middle Schools
Holland, Mich.
The day after the November election my schedule included historical fiction book talks for eighth-grade students in my very diverse middle school. Our county votes strongly Republican but also includes a large migrant-worker population, due to our agriculture industry, and many immigrants from Mexico, Vietnam, Laos, and other countries. The hallways that morning were full of emotion. Chants of “Trump Train” contrasted with students crying in small huddled groups. Eight years earlier, there were very diverse reactions to the election as well.
As a librarian, the ALA Bill of Rights requires me to provide some comfort to those who were frightened or sad while others celebrated. Historical fiction provided a perfect vehicle. I highlighted the strengths of the genre, that our country’s history and the history of other countries is full of sad, scary, and difficult times but that many of these stories also show how people, especially children and teens, coped with or worked to change what they didn’t like. The power of story can be a great comfort.
Lorena Germán
High school English teacher
Headwaters School
Austin, Tex.
My students—at a predominantly white institution—have been feeling overwhelmed about what they see and hear in the news and around us in Texas. As a result, many conversations have been going on in my classrooms. Instead of ignoring these and keeping politics out, I’ve embraced these questions and conversations because otherwise there will be more misinformation.
So, the texts we have been reading are all connected to the issues we are discussing. For example, in our freshman course we are currently reading Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. We are using this text to study all of the basic literary devices, and we are learning about the Asian-American experience in the U.S., stereotypes, microaggressions, the model-minority myth, and more. It is my job to go beyond literary and academic preparation and equip my students to be loving, intelligent, critical thinkers in our world.
I’ve allowed my students the space to discuss, explore, and learn about what’s going on. If there is no space in my classroom, they probably won’t have another space to really understand current events. I intentionally create a diverse curriculum both in the form of the texts we consume and the work the students produce. This ensures that all students’ strengths will be welcomed and celebrated. I take the time to listen to students and show them how to deal with conflicts. If I need to end class five minutes early in order to sit two students down and hash out tension, then that is what I’ll do. It communicates to the larger class that I’m aware of the tension and in tune with their concerns.
I stay active in my professional development by listening to speakers, reading books on methods of teaching that are culturally sustaining, and staying connected to other teachers that invigorate and challenge me. All of this produces the confidence and patience that I need, because I’m paying attention to the forest and not just the trees.
Andy Plemmons
School library specialist
David C. Barrow Elementary School
Athens, Ga.
As I’m working with kids in grades pre-K to five, I think it is important to continue to highlight how we are stronger by recognizing the diversity in the world, and how even though we may be different in many ways, we are also connected to one another as humans. As I’m purchasing books, I’m considering the current topics of debate and finding books that speak to those topics. For example, as immigration bans are being considered, I’m adding books of immigrant stories so that students can better understand the immigrant and refugee experience. Some of these include I’m New Here by Anne Sibley O’Brien, The Journey by Francesca Sanna, and Their Great Gift by John Coy.
I think that kids need to know that even at the youngest of ages, they matter in the world and can make a difference, so I’ve tried to highlight books about activism and being a change maker, such as It’s Your World by Chelsea Clinton, Be a Changemaker by Laurie Ann Thompson, A Is for Activist by Innosanto Nagara, and Can We Help? by George Ancona.
During Black History Month, we featured a variety of African-American biographies as well as authors and illustrators on our morning broadcast. During Women’s History Month, we were doing the same and also hosting a reading challenge for students to read three biographies about women, two books by women, and two books illustrated by women.
In April, we will take the Reading Without Walls challenge created by National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Gene Luen Yang. In this challenge, readers read one book about a character who doesn’t look like them or live like them, one book about a topic they don’t know much about, and one book in a format they don’t normally read.
As a librarian, I’m always working to show students, teachers, and families how to use reliable sources, but lately, I’ve been stressing that we have to be extra critical when reading online today. It has been interesting to see so many students beginning to understand this idea in the current times. We’ve been referring them to our many databases for information rather than relying on Google searches. However, everyone googles, and we need to constantly consider and question our sources beginning in the earliest grades.
I’m currently planning a collaborative project with our art teacher, where we will take pictures of the diverse families within our schools, have a common set of interview questions to gather oral histories, and create an art installation that physically shows how even in our diverse representation of beliefs, ethnicities, and interests, we have many connections.
Anna Nielsen
Youth services librarian
Wellfleet Public Library
Wellfleet, Mass.
How am I using books? The simple answer is that I use them as I try to always do: by collecting the best-quality books I can find, with particular attention to local interests, the books that are getting the best reviews, international translated texts, diversity, and (it bears repeating) quality. The goal is to provide patrons with a chance to learn and grow, to be curious, to wonder, and to, as the saying goes, broaden horizons, about ourselves and people like us and different from us, locally and across the globe. The goal is to do nothing less than provide the world and all it is and all it can be, good and bad, through books, through the library.
In the current climate, it means I’ve increased nonfiction books about government and how it works, environmental issues and climate change, women’s rights, immigration and refugees, world politics and issues, economics and class, sciences, diversity, LGBQT issues, and history. There’s nothing like learning from history.
Since I am in a small coastal town in New England, I also collect heavily on areas concerning the local economy: the environment and climate change, especially the ocean, marine life, and aquaculture. I continue collecting the best and broadest picture books and fiction books I can find, the kind that represent the world and stand against hate.
I work for a public library, and as such I am devoted to the public project of social democracy. The library is a place where everyone, regardless of class, gender, color, or creed, is welcome. Rich or poor, everyone has the same access to information. I love this about my job. I love that I get to help people learn. I love that I’m meant to be an agent for providing information, not opinion.
But in this current climate, how can I not have an opinion? How can I not be agitated by a person who voted for someone who thinks his or her neighbor doesn’t deserve health insurance? And how can I run a story time for them both? So a question arises of how I balance this complicated current climate with professionalism.
I do the best I can. I collect books and collaborate on community programs. I do themed book displays and reading lists, with reviews. I do personalized reader’s advisory. I work on information literacy. I avoid political conversations and make sure all conversations that do occur in the children’s and teen rooms are civilized. I maintain both rooms as safe spaces for all.
My major premises are care, collection, community, and collaboration. I’m lucky enough to work in a great library with a great director in a great town. I’m a librarian on purpose, and I believe in what libraries do for the ideals of social democracy. I believe in books. I believe in knowledge. I believe in compassion. I believe in caring for our neighbors and acting like it. I believe in community. I believe in being the best we can be in the world. I believe in making the world a better place. I believe in being as a much of a light as possible, especially when darkness threatens. I believe libraries are an excellent place to start.
A version of this article appeared in the 04/03/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Brave New World
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Despite Upswing in Sales, Quarto Reports Loss in 2016
In reporting its financial results for 2016, the Quarto Group emphasized the strength of its publishing operations as the company continued to shed its non-publishing businesses.
Earlier this year, Quarto announced the sale of its Australian-based Books & Gifts Direct business and its Regent Publishing Services unit based in Hong Kong. While Regent added $1.6 million to Quarto’s earnings last year, BGD lost $9.8 million. In connection with the sale of BGD, Quarto took a $14.2 million impairment charge in 2016 which was the major factor in the company reporting a loss of $5.3 million in 2016 compared to earnings of $8.5 million in 2015. Sales were up 3% over 2015, to $188.4 million.
In releasing its results, Quarto CEO Marcus Leaver stressed that the sale of Regent and BDG will allow Quarto to focus on its publishing business. In 2016, publishing revenue rose 6% over 2015, to $154.6 million, and adjusted operating profit increased 17% to $21.7 million. Over the last five years publishing revenue increased 26% and operating profit 70%, Leaver added. “The headline is we are now focused on publishing books and it is something we do really really well,” Leaver said. "I am very happy to just be a publishing company
Quarto’s largest unit is Quarto Publishing Group USA, which had a 12% revenue increase to $81.2 million in 2016. The company benefited from its 2016 purchases of becker & mayer and Harvard Common Press, which added $11.4 million and $1.3 million to revenues, respectively, last year.
The company said it was pleased with results in the U.S., given the slowing sales of adult coloring books in the year, compared to 2015. In addition to the acquisitions, sales in the U.S. were helped by gains in Quarto's children’s business and the expansion of its retail channel. Quarto also added about 1,800 new accounts across a variety of its niche markets last year.
In the U.K., sales fell 6%, to $21.5 million, due to the negative impact of currency exchange. Additionally, the company acknowledged that the U.K. market was somewhat softer in 2016 than in 2015, due in part to uncertainty caused by Brexit.
The Quarto International Co-Editions Group posted a 4% increase in sales last year, to $51.9 million, which it attributed to good results in its children’s imprints. The “outstanding performance” by Ivy Press, which was acquired in 2015, was highlighted.
Leaver noted that sales in both the U.S. and U.K. slowed towards the end of 2016. He added that, given continued uncertainty in both the U.S. and U.K., he is planning cautiously for the early part of 2017. Without making any acquisitions, he said he is targeting a 2%-3% increase in operating profit over last year. Nonetheless, Leaver noted, another acquisition is possible in 2017 “if the right property comes along.”
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2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 1
Let’s get this poeming party started.
For today’s prompt, write a reminiscing poem. In my mind, this means a poem that remembers something (a moment, a relationship, etc.). The poem could be kind of nostalgic or sharing lessons learned. But for those new to these challenges, you should know that I consider these prompts open to interpretation–so if you have another take, go for it.
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Re-create Your Poetry!
Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!
In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.
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Here’s my attempt at a Reminiscing Poem:
“cigarette”
even though we both ran our long distance
races, she offered me a cigarette
at a party & while it made no sense
i took a drag because she was the best
girl in my eyes on that specific night
& i never smoked another again
though i’d date one who smoked Marlboro Lights
but to this day i hear the way my friend,
because she was a friend, urged me sweetly
to breathe in & hold it before i coughed
& like that the spell broke & i was free
to say thanks but that enough was enough
& i recall the way she smiled you bet
but mostly i think of her cigarette
*****
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). If an attractive person offers you drugs, whether tobacco, alcohol, or some other concoction, just say no, kids. Just say no.
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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Find more poetic posts here:
37 Common Poetry Terms.
Cywydd Llosgyrnach: Poetic Form.
Jaswinder Bolina: Poet Interview.
The post 2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 1 appeared first on WritersDigest.com.
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For George Takei, Beyond ‘Star Trek’ to a Graphic Novel
novel based on the actor’s life is to be published next year." data-mediaviewer-credit="Tony Cenicola/The New York Times" itemprop="url" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/... Takei, in 2015. A graphic novel based on the actor’s life is to be published next year.
Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
George Takei, who is perhaps best known for playing the helmsman Hikaru Sulu on the original “Star Trek” television and film series, is boldly going into a new arena: graphic novels.
The story of Mr. Takei’s life, particularly his time as a 5-year-old when he and his family were sent to live in government internment camps during World War II, will be published as a graphic novel by IDW next year.
“I have spoken publicly on numerous occasions during my life on the unjust internment,” he said in a statement on Friday, describing his “ongoing mission of spreading awareness of this disgraceful chapter of American history.”
In October 2015, the Broadway musical “Allegiance,” starring Mr. Takei, also told a version of his story. But the graphic novel would make it even more accessible, especially to younger readers, he said. Mr. Takei will narrate the graphic novel and guide readers through the family’s life under confinement and the aftermath as well as his rise to fame and activism. The as-yet-untitled graphic novel will be published in 2018 and scripted by Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott.
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March 31, 2017
The Gargoyle Hunters | Literary Hub
The following is from John Freeman Gill’s novel, The Gargoyle Hunters. Gill is the architecture and real estate editor of Avenue magazine. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Yale University, he received an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in New York City with his wife, three children, and a smattering of gargoyles.
Ghosts of New York
Why do we stay? Why do we members of this oddball tribe known as native New Yorkers stick around, decade upon decade, as so much of the city we love, the city that shaped us in all of our wiseacre, top-of-the-heap eccentricity, is razed and made unrecognizable around us? We are inured to so much bedlam here, so many exotic daily distractions, yet are somehow inexplicably surprised and pained every time a new wound opens up in the streetscape. We barely notice the shrieking ambulance whizzing past or the man in the octopus suit struggling to get all his arms through the turnstile, but let them tear down the Times Square Howard Johnson’s or the Cedar Tavern or Rizzoli, let them shutter H&H Bagels or CBGB or the Ziegfeld, and we wince as if our own limb has been severed.
“There are too goddamned many ghosts here for me,” my big sister, Quigley, told me last year when she’d finally had enough and decided to leave town for good. “I’d rather miss New York from somewhere else than miss it from here.”
So why do I, whose ghosts are at least as obstreperous as hers, stay on? Why is this maddening, heartbreaking, self-cannibalizing city the only place where I feel like I’m me?
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And what about you? If you’ve lived in New York long enough to resent some gleaming new condo that pulled a Godzilla vs. Bambi on a favorite restaurant or deli or bookstore, then this is your city, too, teeming with your own bespoke ghosts.
As for me and mine, most of the things I need to tell you about happened in the seventies. But it was in late 1965, when I was about to turn five, that I first sensed what it is to love a city that never loves you back.
* * * *
We were not even in New York at the time. We were in our VW Bug, taking a predawn road trip to a mystery destination my father refused to reveal. It was the sharp left turn at the slaughterhouse that awakened me, the momentum burrowing my head deeper into the ribbed warmth of his corduroy armpit. Out the window of our little car, in a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t pocket of yellow light, men in blood-smeared smocks hosed down the pavement, clouds of steam rising into the night. On a wide brick wall, our headlights gliding across it, the faded image of a grinning cartoon cow, its speech bubble saying, “Pleased to Meet You! Meat to Please You!”
We drove on another few minutes, the world still more dark than light. Mom and Quigley murmured groggily in the backseat. When we reached an enchanted point along the highway that looked exactly the same to me as every other part of the highway, Dad pulled off decisively and parked in a marshy softness. Another few cars, three or four, followed his lead, but Dad headed off on foot without hailing or waiting for the others. He preferred to make people keep up with him.
The marsh grasses were just the right height to keep hitting me in the face as we walked, and I didn’t much like the way the soggy ground sucked at my Keds. So Dad hoisted me up and let me doze on his shoulder, slobbering contentedly on the rise of muscle beneath his shirt. I was part of him, my whole limp body lifting and subsiding with his breaths. When I opened my eyes again, the darkness had thinned and we were moving through a shadow landscape strewn with hulking oblong shapes. They loomed all around us, tilting this way and that, one across the other like gargantuan pick-up sticks. The ground crunched beneath Dad’s feet as he picked his way carefully over the treacherous terrain, his broad hand flat against my back. The air smelled burnt.
Daylight was seeping into the sky now from the marsh’s edge, faster every moment, until at last the colossal tilted shadows around us resolved themselves into the grand ruined forms of classical columns, dozens of them, toppled and smashed and abandoned here in an empire of rubble. Dad put me down. We were standing amid the wreckage of some magnificent lost civilization—even I, the runt of the party, could see that. And we were going to have a picnic.
Dad set a wicker basket on the ground, and Mom pulled out a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, which she spread on a broken cylinder of stone, a column section only a bit higher than our round kitchen table back in the city. Their friends, the rest of our extended clan, were beginning to straggle up now, picking their way across the majestic junkyard, huge goofy smiles on their faces as they took in their surroundings.
There was a lot to see, crushed bricks and tortured iron railings and enormous fragments of pink-white stone carved in the shapes of leaves and scrolls. Here and there, the place was smoldering, ribbons of smoke curling skyward from the debris. Poking diagonally from a rubble pile, not far from Mom’s makeshift picnic table, was a woman’s white, intricately veined stone arm, its middle and ring fingers snapped off at the second knuckle.
It was a terrific party. Quig and a couple of other big kids ran around and hopped from column to column, their arms outstretched for balance. A lanky bearded guy plucked at a guitar with silver claws. Mom, dark-eyed and grinning, wearing a short white sweater-dress cinched at the waist with a yellow scarf, handed round mismatched cups—some old freebie Mets glasses from the Polo Grounds and a bunch of those little mugs her favorite mustard came in. At the center of it all was Dad, the unmistakable leader of the expedition, pouring out the red wine, slicing hunks of chorizo, tossing people astonishingly sweet figs he’d found in Little Italy.
It was really something being his little guy. I was the smallest one here by far, but I was the princeling, sitting right beside him, basking in his reflected glow and helping him open wine bottles with a corkscrew that looked like a man doing jumping jacks. Everyone looked our way, vied for his attention. People ruffled my hair.
Something important had been left behind in one of the cars, a casserole or a cooler. Mom headed back to get it. The silver-claw guy put down his guitar to go help. Someone started tossing around a Frisbee.
The grown-ups had a lot to talk about. They wandered among the ruins in groups of two or three, prodding half-buried objects with their shoe tips and venturing opinions. Dad was the only one who’d been here before. He led me and a married couple with matching curly hair along a road rutted with truck tracks, left and then right and then left, until he found what he was looking for: the biggest clockface I’d ever seen, jutting slantwise from a rubble heap like a crash-landed flying saucer. It was a great white disc with elegant black metal letters around its edge in the places the numbers should have been: the letter I mostly, with a few Vs and Xs mixed in. It had no hands.
Dad climbed up the rubble slope to the clock and took from his back pocket a vise grip, a pair of shiny locking pliers whose teeth always suggested to me the polished grin of an alligator. He adjusted its bite by turning a knob on one of the handles, then locked its teeth onto a letter I: the only one all by itself.
“See if you can’t snap that off to give to your mother,” he told me. “I can drill a hole in the top to run a chain through as a necklace.” Mom’s name was Ivy.
Half-buried along the flank of the rubble pile was what appeared to be the feathered stone wing of an eagle. Using its slant surface as a ramp, I clambered onto the clock, which was about twice my height. The clock had two black metal rings, one inside the other, running around the periphery of its face like a circular toy-train track. Suspended between these two tracks were the letters. They were cold and a little sharp in my palms, but they made pretty good handholds, so I climbed cautiously up the clock’s curved edge to the letter I on which Dad had clamped the vise grip. Up close, I could see that this I had been attached to the metal rings at top and bottom, until someone—Dad, surely, when he’d been here before—had sawed it loose at the top. All that was left to do was to wiggle the vise grip back and forth until the I snapped free at the bottom.
Holding the tool with both hands, I rotated my wrists, left-right, left-right, while Dad explained to the curly-haired couple just how tricky it had been to find this dumping ground here on the other side of the Hudson: something about how the railroad’s Jersey-based wreckers—“Lipsett’s guys,” he called them—were keeping the location on the down-low, for safety reasons. My wrists were starting to get awfully sore, and after a while I complained to Dad, who excused himself to come help me.
My hands inside his, Dad took hold of the vise grip and worked it vigorously back and forth, then pretended to get tired out so I could give it the triumphant final twist all by myself. Off popped that stubborn letter I, right into my palm. It was cool along most of its length but hot where it had just broken loose. I couldn’t wait to give it to Mom. I knew she’d love it.
Together Dad and I started making our way back, taking care not to trip over a felled black post marked track 3. But we’d gone so far, and everything was so wildly disordered here, that I wasn’t sure how we would find the right route. One junk pile looked like another, and the truck roads running every which way all looked alike, too, and all the heaped debris and stone columns made it hard to see more than ten or fifteen feet in front of us. Still, Dad looked as handsome and as sure of himself as ever, and I loved roaming this broken landscape with him, no one around but us, the world’s two greatest living explorers conquering the unknown side by side.
Snatches of sound came to us now and then, the squawking of seagulls and the distant rumble of machinery layered upon the crunch of our footfalls. Dad kept up a steady pace, his usual certainty of gait, until an unfamiliar hesitation in his step, somewhere between a hitch and a stumble, caused me to stop and look up at him, at his face, where I saw at once that something had changed. He wore a look of weakness, of panic almost, that I’d never seen before. I followed his gaze, stared at the same debris he was staring at, but saw nothing, nothing but a hill of scarred rubble and several long, shiny marble rectangles—the shoe-burnished steps of a grand staircase, maybe.
Then I saw it. Amid a contortion of brass that might once have been a banister, Mom’s yellow scarf had wrapped itself around a bent post. From somewhere behind it, how far away I couldn’t tell, I thought I heard her laughter, a gasping stifled giggle. It was a joyous sound, but self-strangled somehow, shushed. I watched a long moment, hoping to spot something I could understand, but saw only my mother’s scarf wavering in the breeze, delicate and almost see-through now that it was no longer bunched at her waist.
When I looked up, to learn from my father’s face how to feel, I discovered something new. My father was no longer beside me.
From THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS . Used with permission of Knopf. Copyright © 2017 by John Freeman Gill.
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