Bastille Day By Joanna Biggar When J.J., the narrator of That Paris Year, departed after finishing her exams, she left in June, too early to catch the extravaganza that is le quatorze juillet in Paris. But she knew about the legendary festivities she had missed in her adopted city: fireworks, parades, the laying of wreaths for the heroic dead—, with “le grand Charles” de Gaulle himself saluting from a grandstand. J.J. already had her own, American-flavored July 4th sensibility, as she remembered lighting sparklers and pinwheels while eating home-made peach ice cream in … [Read more...]
Earth Day Reflections: To See for the First Time (from a speech first delivered at an award ceremony for Bay Nature Magazine) By Linda Watanabe McFerrin There is a writer whose work I greatly admire, an ethnobotanist. His name is Wade Davis and if you haven't read any of his work, you are missing something wonderful. In One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest Davis follows in the footsteps of Harvard biologist Richard Evans Schultes who spent years in the Amazon cataloging thousands of plant species and discovering hundreds more while … [Read more...]
Fiddlin' Around in Ireland a Travel Essay by Linda Watanabe McFerrin We were at Maggie’s, a pub on Kiernan Street in Kilkenny, and the devil was panting at Anthony Macauley's elbow, for the Irish lads were dueling it out with the musicians from Cornwall and the fiddles were smoking. The four musicians from Cornwall had their backs to the dark plank wall. Portraits of Yeats and Shaw frowned down on them. "I'm going to have to number these tunes," muttered the Cornish fiddler. "There's no point; you can't count," taunted one of the Irish lads. And so it went with the fiddles … [Read more...]
The World of Yesterday (Armistice Day, 2018) An Essay by James J Patterson From the forthcoming collection Junk Shop Window My father always said that his first memory was of standing on the couch in his parent’s living room, small hands on the back cushion, peering out a picture widow at a neighborhood street in Bend, Oregon. There is a slow-moving line of cars and horse-drawn carriages inching its way down the lane. The line of cars is there every day, and every day he stands there and watches. His street is a long one and at the end of it is the cemetery. He … [Read more...]
Fact or Fiction By Joanna Biggar As a fiction writer, it is not uncommon to be asked: “Is that real, or did you make it up?” This was certainly true for my first novel, That Paris Year, based on my own experiences as a young woman attending the Sorbonne in the 1960s. It was assumed that the narrator, whose name, J.J., includes the same initials as my name, are one and the same person. And if that is true, the thinking goes, everything else in the book must be “real,” too. One French reader even wanted to know how my French grandmother was getting along and was shocked to learn that I … [Read more...]
Love is a Fool Star I am guilty of interjecting (constantly interjecting) quotations and metaphors into conversations. More than a few friends will confirm this. Here’s one from the internationally celebrated saxophonist-composer-bandleader-poet And playwright Archie Shepp . I think it captures both my inner (you know, the mill where poems often struggle to find their way to the end of the assembly line) and outer lives perfectly. “I passed through the insipid panorama of Americana with an enormous romanticism. It has never left me.” If I could fit that on a headstone, baby- I would. My … [Read more...]
Henry Miller and NEXUS, the American Author Reconsidered By James J. Patterson Henry Miller is the missing link to a holistic understanding of the American literary tradition, argues Dr. James M. Decker, author of Henry Miller: New Perspectives and mastermind behind Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal. “Once you have given up the ghost, everything falls into place with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos,” opens Henry Miller’s third book, The Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Anyone who has ever really hit bottom, and survived, knows the truth and wisdom packed … [Read more...]
Poetry Can Save Your Life By Richard Peabody I started out as a fiction writer, a storyteller, a mimic. A derivative time travel piece for our middle school literary magazine was rejected and it took me eons to get back in the saddle. By freshman year of college, a quasi-Hemingway hunting story was brewing. By junior year, I was writing song lyrics to go with my bad guitar-hack noise. A poet friend told me my lyrics sucked but might possibly turn into some decent poems. Poems? What the hell? But everybody seemed to hate my mostly autobiographical stories (particularly my girlfriends) so I … [Read more...]
The Real Author By Grace Cavalieri There’s a real author and an implied author behind every book. The real author of Other Voices, Other Lives is just me, in Annapolis, with my cat, sitting in p.j.s watching trash TV. The implied author is a feminist, creator of women’s stories, somewhat irreverent, sassy, sexy, restorer of characters in history, experimenter with language and form, and mythmaker. It’s so great to have a front (wo)man writing for me. But every piece is, of course, informed by the life lived by the real author I worried to a friend: “But readers will think this book is too … [Read more...]
Waiting for Maxwell's Demon by Elizabeth Hazen My father is a geophysicist. As a child, I spent many hours on road trips to remote quarries where we would hike to an outcrop and spend hours splitting rocks, searching for fossils. While in retrospect I am grateful for these unique experiences, my younger self – and particularly my teenage self – rejected all things scientific. That was my dad’s realm, and I was going to be my own person. Perhaps because of my willful rejection of science-related material in my formative years, in my adult life I have returned to science with intense curiosity. … [Read more...]
Finding Myth By Rose Solari As a child, I distrusted mythology, as I did any literature that adults seemed to think was especially well-suited to kids. Tales of Mount Olympus, of Zeus and Hera and their many disruptive children, seemed to me to be just stories about people who never existed performing feats that were clearly impossible, not unlike Santa Claus. I much preferred, for example, the work of Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Bronte. In Little Women and Jane Eyre, I found believable tales that I could both enjoy and learn from, stories that helped me to grow up. I found my way … [Read more...]
We believe that there is no reason a small press can't publish books that compete on the shelf with the best that the big houses have to offer. Welcome to Good Books, Well Made James J. Patterson, Co-Founder, ASP. I suppose the last straw for me was when Eric Foner’s masterpiece, Tom Paine, and Revolutionary America, fell apart in my hands mid-way through reading it. I say last straw because — and every voracious reader has suffered this — books have been falling apart on me for decades. I’ll confess, I’m a bit rough on my books. I break the spines, I scribble in the margins, I … [Read more...]
Gabbing With O'Reilly From Bermuda Shorts by James J. Patterson Gabbing With O'Reilly, at the opening of another NFL training camp, a 42 year season ticket holder looks back one last time at the Redskins and RFK Stadium. When O'Reilly was at last awarded his seat at RFK stadium, I had already been sitting in the one next to it for eleven years. He arrived at his first game carrying a seat cushion and blanket, though it was a warm September afternoon. He was in his fifties, if my memory serves, but ruddy-faced and as excited as a little kid. How long he had been on the waiting list for his … [Read more...]