"I Will Not Leave"

First, the new issue of Bookslut is up and includes my column on biographies (and biographical essays) for teens. Lots of good stuff in there on Yoko Ono, the Carter Family, the Brontes (talk about tragic!), some good scientists trying to save the wild horse population, and more. All highly recommended, of course.

For aviation types, I have a short post up at Alaska Dispatch on new flight time standards in the wake of the Colgan Air Crash in 2009.

Also, King Lear in Gwich'in!!!! This is so made of awesome I don't know where to begin.

And now, what I read recently and can't stop thinking about:

I am a big fan of magazines and long form journalism in general. I highly recommend Garden & Gun, Orion, Smithsonian and National Geographic, all fabulous in different ways. But my heart belongs very much to Yankee, a magazine my father subscribed to forever (really) and always reminds me of my Rhode Island side of the family. (An item on my dream writing list is to be published in Yankee.)

In the current issue, Howard Mansfield has two pieces, "My Roots Are Deeper Than Your Pockets" and "I Will Not Leave: Eminent Domain in Ascuteny, Vermont". Both deal with sense of place, with the attachment to and affection for the land and both are quintessential Mansfield. I've been a fan of his for a very long time - for the exceedingly authentic New England flavor to his writing and for the eloquence in which he captures the lives of people he meets and places he visits. Here's a bit of "I Will Not Leave" about Romaine Tenney and his tragic battle in the 1960s not to have to sell his farm due to progress:

Romaine's story stands as a regret. Romaine stands as the lost and the last; he's the lost authentic life, the unrecoverable past. He's as vanished as the road under our wheels at 65mph. We know that "all is change"--yet we don't know that. It's the truth we don't want to acknowledge. We want Romaine to be there on his farm forever. He is the Vermont we want to believe in. As his niece Gerri wrote, "He not only ... represented what Vermont stood for, but also unwittingly took so many of us to task to do the same." We want the old life, accessible, and we want the new things. Why do we have to give up one for the other? Regret is the literature of progress.

I return to Mansfield's collection Bones of the Earth every couple of years. It is a lesson in the best way to capture sense of place in your writing and quite enjoyable, interesting writing to boot. (It's an obvious win for New Englanders but anyone interested in historical preservation is going to like it.)

I was quite pleased to see these Yankee pieces online - it's a chance for folks new to Mansfield to get a taste of his writing (and also to get fired up about the struggle to keep your land). Mansfield is a writer who is criminally overlooked in my opinion; anything I can do to shine a light on his work is time well spent.

More on all of Mansfield's books at his website; he has a new title, Dwelling in Possibility, due out this fall.