Colleen Mondor's Blog, page 26

Paper Theater....

Via the September issue of O, the amazing papercraft work of Elly MacKay. Looks like she has two picture books due out next year as well!

My father died for his country

A few weeks ago I listened to Washington State poet laureate Kathleen Flenniken in conversation about her work at the Mazama Book Festival. Although I was unfamiliar with her poetry prior to that morning, Flenniken quickly captured my attention as she talked about the poems of domesticity in her first collection Famous. There was a lot of laughter and knowing nods as she led us through the story of her transition from harried stay-at-home mother to poetry writing classes and ultimately publication. Then interviewer Lauren Cerand turned the conversation to discussion of Flenniken's second book Plume. This collection is an exploration of life in the shadow of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Hanford is now the most contaminated nuclear site in the world and location of the country's biggest environmental cleanup. As someone who grew up in the nearby town of Richland and worked for three years at Hanford, Flenniken knows it all too well but it was the radiation-induced illness and death of her friend Carolyn's father that prompted her to take the site on as a literary subject. The first poem she wrote, "Bedroom Community" was for Carolyn:

We were all bedded down

in our nightcaps, curtains drawn

as swamp coolers and sprinklers

hissed every brown summer hour, or in winter

sagebrush hardened in the cold. It was still dark

as our fathers rose, dressed and boarded

blue buses that pulled away, and men

in milk trucks came collecting bottled urine

from our doorsteps.

I was scheduled to speak an hour after Flenniken and listening to her recite poems from Plume I felt a sudden and unexpected panic. While my book is mostly about flying in Alaska, it also includes a few passages about my father's death in 1999. He lost his battle with cancer after working his entire life for the Department of Defense and retiring four years earlier as Wastewater Treatment Plant Supervisor at an air force base in Florida. Although his job does not sound dangerous, my brother and I knew different.

In the mystery that was my father's job there was the Red Sox game playing on his office radio, crossword puzzles for solitary nights and a list of chemicals we could not pronounce that he handled on a daily basis. For nearly forty years he did the work they asked him to and then he retired and then he was diagnosed and then, one week after his sixtieth birthday, he was gone. "Sometimes these things happen," said his doctor, but we knew better; we all knew how and why.�

Beyond the shelter belt

of Russian olive trees, cargo trains shuffled past

at 8:00, and the wide

Columbia rolled by, silent with walleye

and steelhead. We pulled up our covers

while our overburdened fathers

dragged home to fix a drink,

and some of them grew sick --

What I planned to talk about in Mazama were the friends I worked with at an airline I called the Company and the big lies hidden by the glory stories that everyone wants to hear (and tell). I didn't expect to be thinking about my father that morning. But as Kathleen Flenniken spoke about Hanford, as she read us lines about a "whole-body counter" in the schoolyard and the almost casual exposure to radiation suffered by so many fathers, I remembered in a rush my father's steel-toe boots and Stanley thermos, the skilcraft pens that littered our dining room table. I listened to Flenniken talk about men from another place, another job, another lie and I thought of how I tell people about my father.

He worked for the government I say, revolving shifts, never taking a sick day, never going on vacation. When the storms came in off the Atlantic he kept the pumps running and the runways clear so the planes could fly away; he was one of the last to follow the evacuation route home. Everyday, my father filtered the water and cleaned up the messes with the chemicals they gave him and he never questioned what spilled on his hands or what he inhaled or what he tasted on his tongue hours later.

He did the jobs you don't think about, I want to say, the ones you take for granted. He did everything he was asked to do and as thanks the job killed him. And nobody knows, nobody but all the others who worked there and died as well from prostate cancer and stomach cancer and colon cancer and on and on and on. Only their sons and their daughters, only all of us. We are the only ones who know.

Carolyn, your father's marrow

testified. Whistles from the train,

the buses came, our fathers left.

Oh Carolyn--while the rest of us slept.

And Kathleen Flenniken. At Mazama I learned that somehow she knows too.

Ned Vizzini does some role playing game fun

From The Other Normals* by Ned Vizzini (author of It's Kind of a Funny Story). This is an exchange between protagonist Perry and his new friend Sam who are bonding over an RPG called Creatures & Caverns. It's a perfect example of keeping perspective when life gets you down.

"I believe in something. Whatever else I do during the day, I always make sure to remember, 'Nobody knows how the pyramids were built.' You know? You go through life worrying about your little assignments from school, trying to be smart, playing the game, and meanwhile nobody can explain how the pyramids exist. Two-point-five to fifteen tons, each block. Five thousand years ago."

"Who do you think built them? Aliens?"

"It doesn't matter. Aliens, magic....Until someone explains the pyramids to me, how'm I gonna take life serious? You want to start a new game?"

*My original plan was to include it in my November column but I think because of it's paranormal turn it will fit better in December. I'll keep you posted.

**September's column should be up shortly - all NF titles focused on science and scientists. Great stuff!

Ned Vizzini does some role playing game fun

From The Other Normals* by Ned Vizzini (author of It's Kind of a Funny Story). This is an exchange between protagonist Perry and his new friend Sam who are bonding over an RPG called Creatures & Caverns. It's a perfect example of keeping perspective when life gets you down.

"I believe in something. Whatever else I do during the day, I always make sure to remember, 'Nobody knows how the pyramids were built.' You know? You go through life worrying about your little assignments from school, trying to be smart, playing the game, and meanwhile nobody can explain how the pyramids exist. Two-point-five to fifteen tons, each block. Five thousand years ago."

"Who do you think built them? Aliens?"

"It doesn't matter. Aliens, magic....Until someone explains the pyramids to me, how'm I gonna take life serious? You want to start a new game?"

*My original plan was to include it in my November column but I think because of it's paranormal turn it will fit better in December. I'll keep you posted.

**September's column should be up shortly - all NF titles focused on science and scientists. Great stuff!

I've always had a soft spot for plastic pink flamingos

"The Tacky History of the Pink Flamingo" from Smithsonian Magazine:

First designed in 1957, the fake birds are natives not of Florida but of Leominster, Massachusetts, which bills itself as the Plastics Capital of the World. At a nearby art school, sculptor Don Featherstone was hired by the plastics company Union Products, where his second assignment was to sculpt a pink flamingo. No live models presented themselves, so he unearthed a National Geographic photo spread. It took about two weeks to model both halves of the bird, brought into the third dimension by then-revolutionary injection-mold technology.

A flamingo-friendly trend was the sameness of post-World War II construction. Units in new subdivisions sometimes looked virtually identical. "You had to mark your house somehow," Featherstone says. "A woman could pick up a flamingo at the store and come home with a piece of tropical elegance under her arm to change her humdrum house." Also, "people just thought it was pretty," adds Featherstone's wife, Nancy.

For more reading, Jennifer Price has a great essay collection* about nature and American culture that includes a piece on plastic pink flamingos, Flight Maps. There's a Q&A with her on the subject here. You can also read a non-flamingo piece she wrote for The Believer, (full text!) a few years ago, "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA".

*I've got in on my shelf!

New Shaun Tan!

The Bird King, due February 2013 from Arthur Levine (Scholastic): The Bird King is a collection of various sketches: random jottings, preliminary designs for book, film and theatre projects, sketchbook pages and drawings from life. Each of these represent some aspect of a working process, whereby stories generally evolve from visual research and free-wheeling doodles. They are also 'unfinished' pieces created in a single sitting, not originally intended for publication, and for that reason perhaps more revealing of a personal style (and particular obsessions) than other more polished artwork.

128 pages long, and in a format that emulates my actual sketchbooks, The Bird King includes some written thoughts on the practice of drawing and explanatory notes for each image.

See more at Shaun Tan's website.

Report from the literary trenches

The Mazama Book Festival was amazing - everything an author hopes a book fest will be and everything a reader dreams a literary weekend could be. Truly first class and smart and fun and I highly recommend all you Pacific NW types to attend next year. I'll also be reviewing the books written by some of the authors in upcoming columns and blogging a bit about them here, so you will hear more.

I have had company. Again. Company is wonderful and great and important but not very conducive to getting writing done. At all. So while the September column is done and the house-book feature is written and submitted and I got the Booklist reviews written in the car (I'm not kidding), there is still so much more to do! I'm cramming on my October column and actually have two books read for November that require reviews as well but what I need to be doing is writing my book.

BIG time.

This summer has put me months behind which is frustrating and annoying and I can't help but think about how frustrated and annoyed I am by all I need to do. (Plus I need to clean my refrigerator. REALLY bad.) So right now, from where I'm at, the world is full of notes and writing and ideas. I hope you will humor me while I'm knee deep in all this. I'm not taking a blog break - I'm just trying to keep my head above water on all I need to do. (Plus - the Company!!!!!) My routine should return by next weekend when the house is empty again. My goal is to have the reviews written for Oct and Nov for books I've read so I can access where I'm at and some more writing on the the WIP to be accomplished.

(This has to be the most boring blog post ever. I'm sure I'm breaking every rule of how to keep readers coming back to your blog with this post.)

I would tell you what I'm reading but the stack is huge. I have the attention span of a gnat lately. It has been one crazy literary summer.

Edith Wharton to Tevi Gevinson - it's a roundup post

First be sure to check out Molly Danger over at Kickstarter - this sounds like a project totally worth supporting and spreading the word on.

Edith Wharton by Annie Liebovitz! (I love Vogue for doing this.) (via Bookshelves of Doom)

Outstanding interview with teen blogger Tavi Gevinson at BUST. This is a really interesting piece as aside from the pop culture status Gevinson has attained she is just a fascinating person. I'm happy to see it in BUST but I wish it was in Seventeen or Teen Vogue although I imagine Gevinson's fans will find her wherever she is. It's the girls who don't know about her already that I'd like to reach though; it would have been life altering for me to have known of someone like this when I was 15.

This Vanity Fair piece on Microsoft losing its mojo is fascinating and really needs to be read even by folks not interested in business. It's about how a group of people can lose track of what matters not just in a corporate setting but personally. Really amazing.

Over at OUTSIDE this month, there is a column on gear made in America that is both heartening and smart - nice to see the tide turning and for solid economic reasons. Also, the current issue of BRICK has a searing piece by Jaspreet Singh on the November 1984 government sanctioned genocide against Sikhs in India. You can read Part I of it here and Part 2 here.

I am writing about the discovery of a mountain pass in 1927 and thinking a lot about men and mountains. I wish I knew what George Mallory was thinking when he climbed Everest but I suspect it was much more prosaic then most people imagine. Tonight I write a review for Booklist and work on the piece about house building books but through it all I will be thinking about Mallory and everyone else who went into the cold looking to get closer to the sun.

Edith Wharton to Tevi Gevinson - it's a roundup post

First be sure to check out Molly Danger over at Kickstarter - this sounds like a project totally worth supporting and spreading the word on.

Edith Wharton by Annie Liebovitz! (I love Vogue for doing this.) (via Bookshelves of Doom)

Outstanding interview with teen blogger Tavi Gevinson at BUST. This is a really interesting piece as aside from the pop culture status Gevinson has attained she is just a fascinating person. I'm happy to see it in BUST but I wish it was in Seventeen or Teen Vogue although I imagine Gevinson's fans will find her wherever she is. It's the girls who don't know about her already that I'd like to reach though; it would have been life altering for me to have known of someone like this when I was 15.

This Vanity Fair piece on Microsoft losing its mojo is fascinating and really needs to be read even by folks not interested in business. It's about how a group of people can lose track of what matters not just in a corporate setting but personally. Really amazing.

If you can get your hands on OUTSIDE this month (not online), there is a column on gear made in America that is both heartening and smart - nice to see the tide turning and for solid economic reasons. Also, the current issue of BRICK has a searing piece by Jaspreet Singh on the November 1984 government sanctioned genocide against Sikhs in India. You can read Part I of it here and Part 2 here.

I am writing about the discovery of a mountain pass in 1927 and thinking a lot about men and mountains. I wish I knew what George Mallory was thinking when he climbed Everest but I suspect it was much more prosaic then most people imagine. Tonight I write a review for Booklist and work on the piece about house building books but through it all I will be thinking about Mallory and everyone else who went into the cold looking to get closer to the sun.

A brilliant young woman born before her time

"On one of these outings, Genevieve found an intricate nest that neither Nelson [her father] nor Howard [her brother] could identify. She searched her father's extensive library to discover the bird that had built it, only to learn that no one had yet written a book on the nest and eggs of American birds. Gennie remarked that surely someone would have created a book to help people differentiate one nest from another. Howard casually offered to gather the nests and eggs for such a project if Gennie, who enjoyed painting and drawing, wanted to illustrate them. For many years as Nelson, Gennie and Howard furthered their study of American ornithology, the subject of the need for such a book came up during family conversations."

And they did it - more on America's Other Audubon and the heartbreaking story of Genevieve Jones can be found here. The book will be reviewed in my September column.