reading

Shepherd: A Memoir named 2015 Ohioana Book Award Finalist

June 9, 2015 | 20 Comments

The Ohioana Library Association has just announced that Shepherd: A Memoir is one of five finalists for the 2015 Ohioana Book Award in Nonfiction. I was and remain surprised and grateful. The north doesn’t get behind its books, not the way the south does, but the Ohioana Library Association has always been a shining exception to that feeling.

The association established its awards in 1942 for fiction, nonfiction, books about Ohio or an Ohioan, poetry, and juvenile literature. Even if your book is not eventually nominated for an award, the good folks at Ohioana will note it in their Ohioana Quarterly if you or your book touches on the Buckeye State. When I was marketing manager at Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, I sent Ohioana a boatload of books. Our authors received thoughtful reviews in return.

I treasure Shepherd’s review in Ohioana Quarterly last October, especially its phrase, “The ups and downs of Gilbert’s farm projects coincide with a deeper reflection on the poignant dilemmas common to all humankind.” Above all, a memoirist likes being told he’s not narcissistic after all.

The Ohioana honor caps a season of firsts for me and Shepherd. This struck me in May, driving into northern Ohio to give a reading. After months of looking at gray-brown bark, my eyes lingered on the soft new buds adorning the roadside trees. I was bound for my book’s ultimate venue: Mainstreet Books, in Mansfield, Ohio. Mansfield’s most famous native son, Louis Bromfield, was a hero to me as I grew up in Satellite Beach, Florida.

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Tiny libraries

May 6, 2015 | 6 Comments

Margret Aldrich loves books, and she loves to share them—so much so that she wrote a book about it: The Little Free Library Book: Take a Book, Return a Book. This volume tells the inspiring tale of a growing movement to unite people through the sharing of books in neighborhoods. The motto: “Always a gift. Never for Sale.”

The Little Free Library (LFL) concept was the brainchild of Todd Bol of Minneapolis, who explained in a 2013 TED Talk how he and cofounder Rick Brooks began this program in 2009. Editor/writer Margaret Aldrich was taken by the idea, so she “planted” her own LFL in front of her Minneapolis home.

Aldrich’s new book probes the how and why of this program, with chapters about community building, literacy, creativity, overcoming challenges, the humanitarian “good deed” characteristics, global reach, and even yarn bombing—with a Foreword written by Bol. Aldrich enlarges these basic concepts with headings such as “Come Together,” “Celebrate Reading,” “Kickstart Creativity,” and “Pay It Forward.” She includes interviews with a selection of LFL stewards.

NooX, an ongoing study begun in 2012 by Canadian researchers, examines how neighborhood book exchanges relate to theories of information practices. Investigators identified four main goals in 2014—neighborhood destinations, interactive spaces, gathering spaces, and sharing books—emphasizing the wide divergence in these goals from steward to steward.

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Excavating the margins

February 16, 2015 | 8 Comments

Ander Monson has written a book that’s still got me contemplating. He’s an intriguing thinker and he displays his pondering prowess to good effect in his latest work, Letters to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries.

In this collection of literary essays, Monson frames books as repositories of both past and future history—not via their printed content but rather through the traces of former readers and librarians left within when they interacted with the volumes. Much like an excited archaeologist embarking on a dig, Monson gleefully examines even the most minute scribblings and materials deposited by past lovers of the books he encounters in various libraries.

As he inspects, he uses each occasion as a springboard for his thoughts—one minute he’s deep into a soliloquy about a note he found written in a book margin and before you know it, he’s segued almost imperceptibly into human loss of a heartbreaking magnitude. Monson fuses Vladimir Nabokov, Walter Benjamin, Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, or Julio Cortázar into his musings with the same ease as he brings in gaming consoles such as Atari Jaguar, TI–99/4A, or Vectrex Arcade System.

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The wiser narrator

February 4, 2015 | 11 Comments

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read Name All the Animals, by Alison Smith, one of my favorite memoirs. I reviewed it four years ago, and this semester I’m teaching it to a class of honors freshmen students under a coming-of-age memoirs theme. At the time of my review, one of the story’s most striking aspects to me was its scenic quality. I wrote, “There isn’t much authorial distance: narrated by a bereft girl, with scant mature perspective, the story has a poignant immediacy.”

How I disagree now with my (slightly) younger self! Though Smith is a scenic and subtle writer whose story breathes on the page, and is deeply embedded in her teenage life, there’s no pretense that a high school girl wrote this. Smith’s voice palpably changes at times (as when she fills us in on her parents’ early lives), and there are even more overt cues, including the standby “writer-at-her-desk now” move, “I remember.”

Why did I not see this? I suppose I got lost in the story, plus at the time I was trying to enhance the scenic quality of my own Shepherd: A Memoir. One’s response to a book is, to a large degree, a selfie. You, now. Which is why and how I learned not to teach certain great memoirs to undergraduates. They have to find a book’s characters relatable. Maybe one of the few advantages of age is that we can relate to a wider swath of humanity.

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Hinterlands man

September 18, 2014 | 13 Comments

Michael Perry is what so many people are trying to be. Not a writer, though he’s that—many times over—too. He’s a local. A local boy who went off and came back and made it big by putting down roots and celebrating his people and his place. But he’s not exactly your garden-variety local because he writes. And because his work has high literary merit and aspirations.

Perry self-published four books before he got an agent. Then, writing about his hometown through the lens of his work as a first-responder, he found his deepest material. Swinging for the fence, he produced Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, published first in hardback in 2002.

“You have to write something every day, even if it’s junk, to keep those gears turning,” said Perry, now the author of nine trade books, to a group I’m affiliated with, Hospice of Central Ohio. He was the keynote speaker last Thursday for our annual conference, held in the depressed middling-size Ohio city of Newark.

In Population: 485, here’s how Perry says he tells aspiring writers the secret of his success: “Stubbornness and blind luck, I want to say, but they’re looking for something tangible, so I tell them I discovered the secret years ago while cleaning my father’s calf pens. That is, you just keep shoveling until you’ve got a pile so big, someone has to notice.”

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A salute to sentences

July 2, 2014 | 15 Comments

Jenny Davidson loves to read. In fact, she’s spent her entire life immersed in words as a professional reader. A professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Davidson has written four novels and two academic works. Her blog is called “Light Reading.”

In a new book, Reading Style: A Life in Sentences, she explores literature while weaving together vignettes from her two worlds of reader and critic. She likens the reading habit to a compulsion or an addiction. For fellow reading addicts, she suggests keeping a field notebook, as an ornithologist might on bird sightings, to record those sentences that “glimmer.”

Davidson debunks the “self-improvement” motive to read, calling reading “a form of intellectual play” rather than a lesson. She boils it down to the “details of language” and states firmly: “All sentences are not created equal.” She labels sentences “verbal artifacts,” believing style is everything. A person’s temperament can be discerned by sentences written, she says, adding, “a sentence is the key to the heart.” She confesses she was a “word child.”

While weighing the merits of a comma versus a colon or semicolon, she champions the comma for being less judgmental—but loathes the Oxford comma.

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Among the poets

June 25, 2014 | 17 Comments

Rebecca McClanahan began our nonfiction workshop at Kenyon College each morning last week by reciting to us a poem from memory. This was impressive and inspiring. To say the least, it set a tone around yea olde oaken table.

One thing a genius does is to offer us art that’s made, in part, from our own cast-off thoughts. Or from showcasing our better impulses, often youthful, which she’s never stopped acting upon. Like memorizing poetry. I’m not smart enough myself to call Rebecca a genius. But I do know one thing. Hers is the finest literary mind I’ve ever dwelt steadily in the presence of.

(How I wished I might have run my memoir manuscript through that sensibility.)

The author of nine books, a writer of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, Rebecca led nine of us in a seminar in Literary Nonfiction, a moniker she preferred over the more commonly used Creative Nonfiction because “creative” brings up that ugly specter of truth vs. lies and bogs everyone down in what the morass means.

This can be a messy genre, nonfiction. Itself hard to define. But so fertile and varied and forgiving—part of Rebecca’s message all week. She loved Nemerov’s line about form saving the writer from his own stupidity, mentioning it more than once in the course of our exhilarating week with her. One of her own sayings also pointed to the writer’s imperative to transcend, with form, mere lived experience:

“You cannot start a fire with one stick. You need two things for the text to move forward.”

The challenging and transformative aspect of the conference at Kenyon is that it’s generative. You don’t send ahead a manuscript or bring one with you. You create new work right there, from prompts given in the workshops themselves. You share it with your classmates, and at some point you read your best piece to everyone

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