Some Days . . .

Tags

Aging, books, reading, Slant of Light

Some days being a writer is just plain fun. That was the case on Tuesday, when I visited with some residents of the Bethesda Hawthorne Place assisted living facility in Oakland, Mo., just outside St. Louis. Their book group had been reading Slant of Light, and indeed to help some of the residents with reading difficulties some of the staff members had read the book aloud to them, chapter by chapter. So this was a well-informed bunch!

We had a delightful conversation that went on longer than I had expected, and we covered all kinds of topics, book-related and not. During a discussion of nineteenth-century utopian communities, one resident stepped out of the room. I thought she had just tired of the discussion, or perhaps needed to rest, but a few minutes later she came back with a magazine article on Nauvoo that she had been reminded of by the conversation. Some of the folks had memory issues, and others did not; but everyone got something out of the visit, especially myself.

I was reminded of how lucky I am to be a writer, and to have books that a wide variety of people can enjoy, and to have readers who are so engaged and attentive. And yes, they took me to task over certain plot twists that occur toward the end of the book, and which I will not go into here for fear of spoiling the story for future readers.

Those who underestimate old people do so to their own detriment.

 

Favorite Ozarks Books – 12

Tags

books, Brian Walter, Donald Harington, essays, reviews, University of Arkansas Press

The Guestroom Novelist: A Donald Harington Miscellany, ed. Brian Walter

This review first appeared in OzarksWatch magazine, Series 2, Vol 8 No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2019).

Just about anyone who loves Ozarks writing has encountered the novels of Donald Harington, whether through The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (perhaps his best-known work), With (my favorite), or any other of his fourteen novels, characterized by Harington’s audacious story structure, inventive style, and interconnected references to his other novels. Now comes The Guestroom Novelist, a collection of nonfiction work by and about Harington, edited by Brian Walter, professor of English at the St. Louis College of Pharmacy.

Harington was first and essentially a novelist; Walter recalls an early moment in their friendship when he asked him, “What kind of projects are you working on now?” Harington swiftly replied, “’Projects!’ I don’t do ‘projects.’ I write novels!” Thus one might wonder what can be gained from reading a collection of nonfiction from someone who didn’t expend much of his own mental capital in the genre.

It’s a reasonable question, and one not easily answered. The book is divided into three parts: “Essays, Articles, and Speeches”; “Reviews”; and “Interviews,” with the interview section taking up two-thirds of the book. And the largest part of that largest part consists of interviews that the editor himself conducted with Harington in 2006 and 2007.

The first section includes the title essay of the book, “The Guestroom Novelist in America,” which was first delivered as a lecture in 1990, and which appears in print for the first time here. Strictly speaking, it’s not about Harington’s own work, but about other writers, the kind of writers whose novels never quite achieve the level of recognition and sales they deserve, and are consigned to the shelf in the guest room where they sit, neglected and only occasionally read and rediscovered. But Harington considered himself the “epitome” of guestroom novelists, so the essay provides insight into his self-regard, anxieties, and view of the publishing marketplace. A recurrent note in the book is Harington’s somewhat self-justifying complaints about the vagaries of publishers and agents. Other essays don’t age as well, serving as artifacts of Harington’s concerns at a particular point in his career without offering retrospective insight into his literary contributions.

Likewise with the reviews, which were mostly written for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette between 1996 and 2006. Harington appears to have written them mainly to supplement his income, and some have a tossed-off feel while others are more considered.

But for the fan of Harington’s novels, the treasure of this book is the interviews. Harington was deaf from childhood, so interviewers had to submit questions in writing. As a result, his answers have a more considered quality than many transcribed oral interviews. One lengthy set of “interviews” goes even further. A section titled “The Linda Hughes and Larry Vonalt Interviews” is presented as a transcript of a series of television interviews conducted in May 1979 with two literature professors at the University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri University of Science and Technology). Walter tells us these interviews “turned up unexpectedly in a search of Harington’s hard drive,” but whether the documents are actually TV interview transcripts is extremely doubtful. It seems more likely that Harington created the “interviews” as a way of discussing his early novels during a visiting professorship at Rolla, basing it on conversations with the two professors, or possibly wrote them later (Walter points out that the interview files use a less-than-common technology for the 1970s). In any event, they provide considerable insight into Harington’s creative preoccupations.

Similarly, in the long interviews Walter conducted with Harington, entitled “The Stay More Interviews” after the name of the fictional community where most of Harington’s books are centered, Harington goes into great length about his characters, plots, and literary goals. Authors are rarely the best guides to their own work, operating more by instinct than by system and over- or under-estimating their achievements; but these interviews provide sensitive readers with excellent insight into what Harington thought he was doing in his novels, which can then be tested against the readers’ own perceptions.

Donald Harington is often described as the Ozarks’ greatest novelist, a description that is hard to dispute. This book is a useful contribution to his thoughts and opinions, but it will appeal more to the dedicated Harington fan than to the uninitiated. Those folks should begin with some of his novels and see if they catch the bug, then return to this book if they crave a deeper dive.

 

 

 

Favorite Ozarks Books – 11

Tags

books, Down Along the Piney, John Mort, short stories, University of Notre Dame Press

This article first appeared in Issue 8 of Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozarks Studies.

John Mort has quietly been assembling a significant body of work in novels and short stories that go back more than thirty years. A resident of Springfield, Mort has written fiction encompassing a wide range of subjects and locations, from Vietnam, where he served with the First Cavalry Division, to the American West, to the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks. That stream of work reached an important milestone in September with the release of Down Along the Piney, a collection of short stories that was the winner of the 2018 Sullivan Prize from the University of Notre Dame. This prize recognizes a collection of short stories from a writer who has previously published at least one collection.

Down Along the Piney is a collection of thirteen stories, mostly but not entirely set in the Ozarks. It follows in the path Mort set down in The Walnut King and Other Stories, his 1990 short story collection, and Goat Boy of the Ozarks, his 2011 novel that takes the premise of the short story “The Walnut King” and expands it into a novel-length fiction. (Readers who first encountered Mort through his 2013 novel The Illegal will find it interesting to read the story “The Hog Whisperer” in Down Along the Piney, as the story of “The Hog Whisperer” is retold in The Illegal from the opposite point of view.) Taken together, all these works develop a distinctive and engaging portrait of today’s Ozarkers.

The characters in Down Along the Piney often find themselves in desperate situations – not necessarily physically, but emotionally or spiritually. A poignant story entitled “Mission to Mars” focuses on a young man named Brad Naylor, once the “smartest kid in high school” in a small Missouri town, whose life could be measured by its lapses. Mort writes, deep into Brad’s consciousness:

Surely, if a kid worked hard enough and could think fast enough, he’d succeed. But a kid couldn’t think at all, and story of his life, Brad tripped himself up. He got a scared little Christian girl pregnant. She was cute. Wore those short skirts. They set themselves up in a rented trailer, and saved for a house, and tried, and tried, and tried, to join the middle class.

But Brad’s talent for self-sabotage exerts itself again a few years later when he steals from his employer, the local bank, to make some missed mortgage payments. The theft is discovered, and forgiven, as is often the case in small towns; but something in Brad’s nature doesn’t allow him to accept a life of predictability and limitation. As the story opens, we see him arriving in Florida, having run away from home and family, starting a new life as a short-order cook in a run-down diner. Brad is a fugitive, but not from the law. He is a fugitive from himself.

Pressed by their circumstances, the characters experience loss and longing. This longing may be for an actual place, or for an imaginary place, or for some quality that they sense – intuitively – is missing from their lives. “The Hog Whisperer,” one of the most significant stories in Down Along the Piney, portrays Carrie Kreider, a physically and socially awkward woman, whose oddities alienate her from the people around her although they prove surprisingly useful in her job at an immense hog operation in west Texas. But Carrie’s longing for meaningful human contact pushes her into decisions that most people would call foolhardy. Another story in the collection, “Red Rock Valley,” focuses on Donald Stone, an aging gay man who has lost his longtime partner. He is called home from Chicago to the Ozarks when his father is near death:

He checked in at the nurses station and saw the doctor—a tall, grave Kenyan he could barely understand—the one time he would. “Alvin does not like the catheter. He fights, and he is a very old man.”

“He was never in a hospital. Will he get through this?”

The doctor shrugged almost contemptuously and then caught himself, as if, in the past, he’d been criticized for his insensitivity. He shook his head. “What we can, we do.”

So, Donald thought. My father is a dead man, and that is why I am here.

But in this atmosphere of double loss, Donald seeks reconciliation with his uncomprehending family and healing for his psychic wounds.

Another story in Down Along the Piney places this sense of loss right in the title: “Home Place.” Another strayed son, Wayne Dietrich, comes home to Texas County to review his relationship with his deceased parents and to try to make a new start in life. Fixing up the old home place, he reminisces:

In winter, late at night after Henry and Louise had gone to bed, he liked to prop his bare feet on the oven door, shifting them as they toasted. He read Jack London’s Klondike stories here, as the wind howled out of the woods and slapped snow against the kitchen windows, and the imperfectly dried slab wood his father bought from the sawmill shrilled with escaping steam. He heated cocoa, solved his algebra problems, and fretted whether girls named Susan and Miranda and Meg would go out with him.

“Where are they now?” he murmured, sipping soup as if it would restore life. He visualized each teenaged girl even though they all were in their thirties now, married and divorced and married again. The smart ones, the pretty ones, all left for the city and never returned. You couldn’t make a living in Texas County.

This sense of loss puts the characters into motion, sometimes in irrational or foolish ways, and puts them at odds with the prevailing desires of the people around them. They flee the real or imagined bonds that hold them down. They lash out at those who care for them, or retreat into stubborn insensibility. And occasionally, although this is rare in Mort’s stories, they engage in violence. In “Take the Man Out and Shoot Him” in Down Along the Piney, probably the closest we get in any of Mort’s stories to the hillbilly-noir gothic sensibility we see in other Ozark writers or narratives set in the Ozarks, a young man named Birdy, a former meth user from Shannon County, becomes involved with a right-wing Christian theme park called New Jerusalem near Eureka Springs.

Birdy had learned about Jesus and being saved long before, at the Granderson Treatment Center. If you went on about religion there, they treated you better, and he came to think of Jesus as his ace in the hole. Sometimes, he forgot about it, but down deep still believed he could be redeemed. He said, “I’d rather burn in hell than go back to Shannon County.”

As one can envision from this quotation, things do not go well for Birdy.

Two additional thematic tendencies deserve note. First, many of these stories can be read in terms of their religious imagery. Never didactic or overt, the stories nevertheless bring us characters who are experiencing conflict between what one must call their spiritual and their worldly selves. Some of these characters are specifically thinking about God; others are more generally contesting short-term desires with more abstract aspirations.

Another characteristic is that Mort’s work expands the cast of characters in Ozarks fiction. Not all of his stories in Down Along the Piney are set in the Ozarks, or include Ozark characters; but of those that do, there’s a rich range of characters: poor, uneducated country boys; those same country boys, grown into an aching middle age; the mid-level inhabitants of small town – firefighters, deputies, bureaucrats; fundamentalist preachers and members of their flocks; retired military men, fighting off with varying degrees of success the ghosts of the wars they fought; and to my mind the most significant, expatriates. As we know from our rural sociology, or from our literature, the longing for an absent homeland is an immensely powerful emotion. And in these stories we encounter many characters in economic or self-imposed exile from the farm or small town where they grew up. The sense of longing I mentioned earlier is particularly intense in these stories, even if the characters are sometimes unaware of what they are longing for. The Ozarks means something to these characters, living in Chicago and St. Louis, Georgia or Florida, and an important part of their story comes through their working out that meaning.

I would point to the final two stories in Down Along the Piney as examples of the importance of this impulse. In “Mariposas,” the main character is a fifteen-year-old girl named Portia, born in Arkansas to Mexican parents, who must return to Mexico when the father is fired from his job at a meat-processing plant for being too old and slow. Portia is not someone we would ordinarily think of as an Ozarks character; but she is just as Ozarks as the rest of us, nowadays, and her unhappiness in Mexico is a compound of alienation from the country most of us would describe as her “homeland” and a longing to return to the familiar surroundings of Dardanelle, Arkansas. Ironically, she sees the local girls in Angangueo as “hillbillies,” applying the familiar term of dismissal in the opposite direction of its typical use.

Angangueo, the “hometown” her parents return to, is the terminus of the monarch butterfly migration (thus the story’s title). And so one morning Portia accompanies her father as he guides a group of these tourists, Americans like herself though they would never recognize her as such, into the mountains to see the butterflies. The story’s ending is a gentle recognition of the central metaphor suggested by the title, that Portia and her family are themselves mariposas, migrating in perpetual circulation between their Mexican nesting grounds and their northern reaches for reasons that are unfathomable but impelling. The Ozarks are far from Angangueo, and yet they are not.

The final story, “The Hidden Kingdom,” follows a young man named Eddie, who is for all practical purposes wasting his life in a factory job in Georgia, until by a mere chance he wins the lottery. There is a fantastical quality to this story as Eddie sets out from Valdosta toward an unclear destination. He doesn’t seem to know where he’s going, and as he travels, everywhere seems to be the same: “McDonald’s, Papa John’s, Pet Palace, Walmart, Manny’s Chiquita, Paesano’s, Mattress Land, Home Depot, Kroger, Walmart, Baptist Church, Culver’s, Bank of America, Verizon, Checkers, Target, Comfort Inn, Wendy’s, Jack in the Box, Dickey’s.” But his direction is west and north, and finally he reaches a place where the chain stores end. A tiny town on the Piney River, sort of a rustic utopia with a winery, a canoe rental, a dulcimer shop, and of course a drug treatment center. Eddie the Ozark Odysseus has come home, and as he says near the end of the story, “Maybe you came to this woebegone, dreamy place before entering Heaven. You walked through the deserted town and topped a hill. You looked back and couldn’t remember where you parked. You walked on, free at last, toward the singing.”

            Down Along the Piney is an admirable addition to any bookshelf of Ozarks writing, with stories that are sad and sweet in roughly equal measure.

John Mort, reading from his work at the University of Notre Dame bookstore.

A Good Year in Ozarks Writing – Already

Tags

books, Brooks Blevins, history, literature, Ozarks, Phil Howerton, University of Arkansas Press, University of Illinois Press

2019 has barely begun, and I can already tell that it’s going to be a banner year for writing about the Ozarks.

I’ve been working my way through the first volume of Brooks Blevins’ A History of the Ozarks, entitled The Old Ozarks, and it’s a grand piece of work. Richly sourced, comprehensive, and adroitly written, it is the history we’ve all been waiting for. I’m eagerly waiting for the second and third volumes to appear so I can snatch them up, too. If you are interested in the Ozarks, or interested in history, you must get this book – or at least make sure your library has a copy.

And then next month, another landmark book will hit the shelves: The Literature of the Ozarks, a comprehensive anthology edited by Phil Howerton of Missouri State – West Plains. It’s been a long time since anyone attempted an Ozarks literary anthology, and I can’t remember if anyone has ever put together one of this magnitude, stretching from the early 19th century to the present day. It’s being published by the University of Arkansas Press, and although I haven’t seen a physical copy yet, I’ve seen the table of contents, and it’s magnificent. I say this with a blush, since a selection from one of my books is included. I’m thrilled to be among the company.

Two days into the new year, and already a memorable one. I’m eager to see what other reading treats await.

Thoreau

Tags

American literature, biography, books, literature, nature, Thoreau, Walden

Henry David Thoreau was my first literary hero. We had a hammock in our yard, and in summers I would lie in the hammock and read my ninety-five-cent copy of Walden and Other Writings (yes, that’s an image of it, now some forty-plus years old, complete with duct tape holding it together). In the winters I would move inside and read it while I perched over the furnace grate, the waves of superheated air wafting up around me as I readied myself for the inevitable farmhouse chill once we had shut our bedroom doors.

I only got about half of it, of course. A kid of fifteen will miss most of the dry humor, skip through much of the close and precise description, and fail to appreciate the vast range of references that are dropped into every paragraph with such ease. But I did get Thoreau’s immense and uncompromising individualism and his insistence on the primacy of his own conscience. Over the years, I’ve returned to Thoreau again and again, understanding him a little bit more each time, appreciating his formidable intellect and powers of observation. People look at me in disbelief when I say Thoreau is a funny author, but honestly, I always get a laugh when I read Walden.

So I was eager to read Laura Dassow Walls’ new biography of Thoreau, and it did not disappoint. Walls’ biography is subtitled “A Life,” and it does indeed focus on the life of Thoreau, rather than his philosophy or literary work, although those intellectual matters do figure into the book since they were central to Thoreau’s life. But we are constantly reminded of Thoreau as a living person, an individual with friends, detractors, passions, and faults, and reminded that far from being the solitary hermit of Walden Pond familiar from popular myth, Thoreau lived a vibrant and engaged life, full of aspiration and struggle. He loved many people and was loved by many.

Thoreau remains one of my literary heroes. The bicentennial of his birth was last month, and it’s hard to think of many other American writers who remain so essential and relevant, or who will remain so two hundred years after their birth.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 10

Tags

anthologies, books, Don West, Donald Harington, Eugene Doty, Harry Minetree, Jack Butler, Jean Bell Mosely, Jim Bogan, Jim Hamilton, Langston Hughes, Leonard Hall, Miller Williams, Ozark Ozark, Paul Johnson, Roy Reed, Speer Morgan, Thomza Zimmerman, University of Missouri, Vance Randolph, Walter Bargen, Ward Dorrance

I’ve been thinking about Ozark anthologies lately, and have been re-reading a couple. Ozark, Ozark, edited by Miller Williams, came out in 1981. I have a vague recollection of being an intern at the University of Missouri Press when this book was in production, but I don’t believe I worked on any of it, except perhaps for helping to proofread the Acknowledgements page or something equally forgettable. That’s too bad, because I would like to be able to claim some small amount of credit for this very memorable anthology.

Williams employed a sort-of chronological approach in this anthology, organizing by author birthdate starting in 1869 and ending in 1949. Like all structures, this approach both confines and provides framing; there’s no Schoolcraft or Turnbo, but the early- to mid-part of the century is well represented. Vance Randolph is in there, along with Ward Dorrance and Donald Harington. But I’m more taken by the less-familiar names in the collection, authors I hadn’t known before: Don West, Jack Butler. Some people I’ve known personally are welcome inhJabitants of these pages: Speer Morgan, Eugene Warren (who writes as Eugene Doty nowadays), Jim Bogan, Paul Johnson, Walter Bargen. An occasional ringer fills out the pages as well, like Langston Hughes, who yes was born in Joplin, making him an Ozarker by birth, but who high-tailed it for Mexico, Europe, and New York as quick as he got the chance.

I particularly like the inclusion of some accomplished newspaper columnists in the anthology. The newspaper column is a demanding craft, with strict word counts and unforgiving deadlines, and it’s easy to become a hack at it. Even the best columnists occasionally write a bad one, but the good ones somehow manage to find grace or insight in the everyday rhythms of life. The Jean Bell Mosely/Thomza Zimmerman alternating column, “From Dawn to Dusk,” which appeared in Cape Girardeau newspapers and was syndicated regionally for 21 years, was such a column. So too were the columns of Jim Hamilton, the longtime editor of the Buffalo Reflex, who later collected some of his best ones in a book entitled River of Used to Be, which is one of the prizes on my shelf. We don’t have selections from either of those in this anthology, but we do have columns from Leonard Hall and Roy Reed, and a short magazine piece from Harry Minetree.

The anthology is a reflection of its time, overwhelmingly male and white, and that’s a weakness. I also spotted a few errors in the introduction and notes, but despite those difficulties, Ozark Ozark: A Hillside Reader is still a pleasure to dip into. It’s out of print, as far as I can tell, but used copies can be found for not too outrageous a price.

 

 

 

 

A Fine Collection That Will Leave You Touched

Tags

books, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, farming, rural life, short stories, To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts

If you’re a fan of short stories, especially ones with a modern rural base, you’ll like this book.

Not that the characters in these stories are all farmers; in fact, few are. Instead, many are that more common species, the offspring of farmers, women and men who went off to college or who have been squeezed out economically, and are now making a living in “the city” – Minneapolis/St. Paul or elsewhere – and feeling the loss and vague guilt that comes with being severed from those roots.

To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts is full of hard feelings. Siblings hold grudges; parents cling to unreasonable expectations; neighbors misunderstand and judge. But below these hard feelings is the longing to make things right. This is a lovely book of stories, in which the drama, unforgiven wounds, and generational misunderstandings of family members are balanced by their halting attempts to heal those wounds and slights. The characters are drawn with a quiet deftness that sometimes make you forget that they are characters at all, in prose that is likewise quiet, not showy, but always well targeted.

“Fish Eyes In Moonlight” was my personal favorite of the collection, a monologue from the point of view of an old man facing mortality, counting up his losses, mistakes, and moments of redemption. But all ten of the stories have a similar yearning for the moments of harmony that occasionally — but only occasionally — counterbalance our stubbornness and failing. A fine collection that will leave you touched.

Interview: Ed Protzel

Tags

books, Civil War, historical fiction, Missouri, mysteries, racism, reconstruction, writers, writing

My fellow historical novelist Ed Protzel has a new book out today. It’s called Honor Among Outcasts, and it follows his very successful The Lies That Bind. Ed and I have mined similar veins in our work (Missouri during the Civil War), although Ed also has a mystery/thriller coming out this year, also. So it was a real pleasure to visit with him recently about his new release. Here’s our interview:

SW: Thanks for joining me on my blog today, Ed! To start out, I wonder if you could tell us a little about your new book, HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS, and how it connects with your previous novel, THE LIES THAT BIND.

EP: Thanks for having me, Steve. In HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS, the second book in my DarkHorse Trilogy, a Southern abolitionist and a group of runaway slaves form a Union colored cavalry regiment in western Missouri, plunging into the most brutal guerilla war in U.S. history. When the abolitionist and his fiancée are accused of spying for the Confederacy, they must face a corrupt military justice system and other obstacles.

Book 1 of the trilogy, THE LIES THAT BIND, centers on the relationship between these men and their efforts to build their own egalitarian plantation in slavery-dominated Mississippi. HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS begins two years after the end of THE LIES THAT BIND, with the group working as contraband laborers attached to the Union army in Missouri. Both books work as stand-alone novels or, even better, in tandem.

SW: What drew you to this time period in the first place?

EP: I read a lot of history, including the Civil War. Being from Missouri, it felt natural to set HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS in that time and place. However, in my research, Missouri’s terrible neighbor-against-neighbor guerrilla war really caught my attention; it said much about the depths to which hatred could debase the most noble cause. Great material for compelling storytelling. Actually, the periods depicted in the three books — antebellum Mississippi, Civil War Missouri, and Reconstruction Mississippi — form an arc through this pivotal time in American history.

Additionally, all of the DarkHorse novels decry violence, with the main characters attempting to avoid being victims of it. With HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS set during a brutal war to resolve slavery, I didn’t want to resolve the myriad conflicts in the book through violence. Instead, I chose to play out the conflicts  through a courtroom, which tied the plots together very neatly. My characters are seeking justice, and what better place for justice to prevail than a courtroom?

SW: I see that you have a third novel on its way. Did you envision this series as a trilogy, or is that something that just happened along the way?

EP: Yes, I am now happily completing SOMETHING IN MADNESS, the final book in the trilogy. Actually, I imagined the “DarkHorse” concept as a trilogy originally, but had only written the first book (THE LIES THAT BIND). Still I pitched it to my agent as a trilogy, and she pitched the trilogy to the publisher (TouchPoint Press). It’s certainly been an adventure, and I’ll miss the characters once I’m finished, they’re so real to me after all these years.

SW: On a similar note, are you someone who likes to plot your storylines out carefully in advance, or do you discover things as you’re writing? What’s your creative process like?

EP: Actually, I don’t plot out my storylines in advance. Usually, I come up with a strong concept that offers lots of possibilities and powerful themes, plus good main characters that fit the situation. I also come up with an idea for what I think would be a terrific ending, one which will reveal my themes, and I try to keep that ending in mind as I create the story.

As for the rest of it, once I set the story in motion, the characters and the plot take over—that’s the fun of it for me: the reader discovers as I discover. The novel usually morphs into complex plots that gain power as they go forward, with lots of twists and surprises along the way. THE LIES THAT BIND and another novel, futuristic, that was just picked up (THE ANTIQUITIES DEALER) were written like that. Interestingly however, with HONOR I didn’t have an ending in mind when I began, just a number of conflicts and historical events, all of which I had to tie together and resolve. HONOR is quite atypical for me in that respect.

SW: So, you’ve also got a futuristic thriller coming out. I think working on two such disparate genres would make my head spin! Do you see connections between the two types of writing, or do you keep those creative endeavors in separate compartments?

EP: Good question, Steve. Writing THE ANTIQUITIES DEALER was a nice break from writing historical fiction and refreshed me, cleaned out my head. Historical fiction has so many constraints, including language and character viewpoints that can’t be used because they’re too modern, they’d be anachronistic. No such problem with futuristic and sci-fi genres. Further, I wrote THE ANTIQUITIES DEALER first person, which was also liberating, letting me get into the main character’s head in his own words. Also the contemporary setting (St. Louis) is relatively familiar to the reader, mixed with exotic portions in Israel, and partially in Paris and London. And taking place in modern times, with sci-fi-like elements, I was able to really let go and come up with imaginative plot devices that the reader won’t guess. I really enjoyed this genre and have another, EARTH EXCURSIONS, laid out and ready to jump on when I finish SOMETHING IN MADNESS.

SW: Finally, and I know it’s always a little presumptuous asking authors to comment on “themes” and the like, but what are you hoping that readers will take away from HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS?

EP: I hope readers will see a parallel to today’s world and its own set of challenges. I want them to grasp how HONOR AMONG OUTCASTS illustrates that no matter how unjust society may be, love and friendship can enable men and women, regardless of color or class, to stand together and to prevail. And that evil deeds and the lies upon which they depend can and will eventually collapse of their own weight. Think of our country’s advances in civil rights and the women’s movements, gay rights, etc.

Call me an optimist, but history does bend toward justice over time.

Find Ed Protzel at:

Website: http://www.edprotzel

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/edprotzelauthor/?ref=settings

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Honor-Among-Outcasts-DarkHorse-Trilogy/dp/1946920312/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517584302&sr=1-1&keywords=ed+protzel

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14757802.Ed_Protzel

The Historical and the Utopian

Tags

books, historical fiction, T. C. Boyle, Terra Ziporyn, utopia

The visionary plan of the Koreshan settlement near Fort Myers, Florida.

The Historical Novels Review recently published a piece I wrote about historical novelists who write about utopian communities or similar subjects. I’m working on a longer article, but for HNR, I had a tight word limit, so I confined myself mainly to an interview with fellow novelist T. C. Boyle.

Here’s the article as it appeared in HNR. By the way, they also have a review of The Language of Trees, which you can read here.

The list of historical novels grows ever longer, as does the list of utopian (nowadays, more likely dystopian) novels. Yet few novels occupy places on both; the historical and the utopian seem to be antithetical impulses. Although utopias fascinate historians and sociologists, they pose narrative challenges that may help explain why few historical novelists have entered this territory.

The classic utopian/dystopian novel is set either in the future or in a geographically indeterminate present. For this reason alone, historical novelists would find this genre inhospitable. A few novels give fictional treatment of actual communities; Terra Ziporyn’s Time’s Fool (2001) portrays a child of the Oneida colony of New York who becomes a zealot for sexual hygiene, highlighting the oppressive potential of utopian idealism. My novels explore similar themes using a community based on the 19th-century Icarians.

Similarly, T. C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville (1993) finds the dark and ridiculous sides of another utopian project, John Harvey Kellogg’s sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, where the health-obsessed sought relief through Kellogg’s regimen of vegetarianism, abstinence, and “colonic irrigation.” The novel also sees the authoritarian shadow behind the utopian impulse, especially with a charismatic leader in charge.

I recently posed a few questions to Boyle about his work:

Wiegenstein: American history and literature seem populated by obsessives, cranks, and con-men. Does the American sensibility lend itself to this tendency?

Boyle: Because we are essentially an anti-authoritarian nation founded by and harboring utopian cultists, we are uniquely susceptible to the leader (con man?) who says, “Give yourselves over to me and my regime and I will purify and sanctify you.”  Examples in my work include The Women (about Frank Lloyd Wright), The Inner Circle (Alfred Kinsey) and The Terranauts (John Allen and the Biosphere II project), and that is only a partial list.

Wiegenstein: In The Road to Wellville, the characters’ preoccupation with diet seems to have contemporary resonance. Do you see a connection to the utopian impulse?

Boyle: Yes, even in the early 1990s when I was writing The Road to Wellville, I was inspired by the parallels between the early health-food advocates and the ones we see now, as well as their food and exercise fads.  Kellogg had splendid ideas–vegetarian diet, no alcohol or tobacco, regular exercise–but what made him ludicrous (and suspicious) in my eyes was his messianic and puritanical bent.  (Incidentally, I loved Alan Parker’s film version, with Anthony Hopkins in the ever-so-slightly menacing role of Dr. Kellogg.)  Further, I do see our obsession with purity of food as part of the utopian impulse, as you put it, and, as The Road to Wellville suggests, what does this have to with but the very saving of our souls (and corporeal beings too) through staving off death?

Wiegenstein: In writing The Road to Wellville, did you feel compelled to stay close to facts, or relatively free to invent?  How did you decide where to draw the line?

Boyle: Fiction has no compulsion to do anything but exist as art.  That said, in all my historical novels, I have been motivated by the oddness of actual events and their correspondence with today (how did we get here?), and so have given the history to you as I have received it.  All the facts of Kellogg’s life are accurate (so too with my portrayal of Frank Lloyd Wright in The Women and Alfred C. Kinsey in The Inner Circle)—I suppose I’d be a historian if I weren’t a novelist.  But the novelist can dig into the brains and p.o.v. of historical figures in the way historians can’t, and that is a great joy for me.  As for your final question regarding the line between invention and fact, my conscience is clear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Working on a New Talk

Tags

books, environment, humanities, lumber, mining, speaking, The Language of Trees

I delight in working up talks to give to libraries and civic groups, usually in connection with one of my books. I conduct a great deal of research as I work on a novel, and although that research is not especially systematic or scholarly, I learn a lot about an era and can condense it into an understandable presentation. With Slant of Light, I developed a talk about 19th-century utopian communities; with This Old World, on Missouri during the years after the Civil War.

My new book takes place during the late 1880s, when large commercial interests from the Eastern cities and from St. Louis used the recently-built railroads to extend their reach deep into the Ozarks and set up lumber mills and mines to extract these natural resources. The Ozarks had been logged and mined for centuries, of course, but the industrial scale of this enterprise was new, and the impact—cultural, economic, and environmental—was profound.

Men in a lumberyard near Winona around 1890 (source: National Archives)

So I’m working up a talk about the coming of industry to this hardscrabble, rural landscape, and the changes it wrought on the people. It’s an easy story to cast villains and heroes into, but I think it’s more complicated than that. Rural folk were often their own worst enemies, or willing collaborators, in their conflict with the lumber and mining companies, and those companies themselves were not always the rapacious beasts of our imagining. And the relationship between people and company was not merely conflict or exploitation.

I’ve given talks at so many places by now that I can hardly keep track of them all—libraries, historical societies, Rotary clubs, book clubs, you name it. Every group is a bit different, and no two talks are quite the same.