Even as We Breathe, A Novel: Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

Even as We Breathe, A Novel – Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle – 9781950564064 – University Press of Kentucky – Hardcover – 240 pages – September 2020 – $24.95 – ebook versions available for sale at lower prices

This has been a good year to read fiction, and I am really pleased to have discovered this author. She is a fine writer whose storytelling is powerful, yet restrained.

While this novel has some elements of a mystery, it is really a very personal story about family, love and growing up into the world of western North Carolina during World War II. The book’s main character is nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah, who has grown up in the woods of Cherokee land, raised mostly by his grandmother. The novel is set between the upscale Grove Park Inn, an Asheville resort serving as an internment camp for diplomat prisoners of war and their families.

The Inn provides Cherokee men and women with employment off their reservation, and this is Cowney’s first real time away from home. At the core of the story, Cowley is accused of being involved in the disappearance of a diplomat’s daughter and must move back and forth to home as he attempts to understand the basis of the the unfair accusations, and prove his innocence while at the same time wrestling with his newfound love for another young Cherokee, Essie Stamper, and figuring out his complex family history.

There is alot going on in this subtle and quietly told novel! And a number of surprises are in store for the reader that bring the story to a remarkable and rewarding close.

Even As We Breathe is filled with details and moments that identify the Cherokee tribe and its homeland. The story gives Annette the opportunity to express the meanings of the Cherokee culture as it has survived into the modern world, sometimes still with the values of its people in conflict with the world of white people.

A secret room in the Grove Park Inn becomes a place where Cowney and Essie can escape the white world and try to imagine their futures independent of outsider influences. For awhile, it can feel to them that they have a place of their own. But racism and prejudice are constantly present, and both Cowney and Essie must face disappointment, and struggle to define their identities as Cherokees within a complicated environment that does not give them the space they truly need to be themselves.

Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), graduated from Yale University and has a masters from the College of William and Mary. Her unpublished novel, Going to Water won the Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. After serving as Executive Director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, Annette (National Board Certified since 2012) returned to teaching English and Cherokee Studies at Swain County High School. She is the former co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies and serves on the Board of Trustees for the North Carolina Writers Network.

“Debut writer Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle lifts the curtain to show us a South we don’t know, revealed through the struggles of Cowney Sequoyah, a young man growing up within the Cherokee Nation of far Western North Carolina, and yet another surprise setting when he takes a job at Asheville’s fabled Grove Park Inn while it is being used by the US military as a place of internment for Axis prisoners of war during World War II. Even As We Breathe is a wonderful novel, complicated as life itself — thrilling, mysterious, and finally, a revelation!” — Lee Smith, New York Times bestselling author of Blue Marlin

This novel was impossible for me to put down and is one of my favorite books I have read this year. It was a deep pleasure for me to speak with Annette about this book and her writing.

I believe you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Purchase Even as We Breathe from Bookshop.org to support independent bookselling.

Author’s website here.

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American Gospel, A Novel: Lin Enger

American Gospel, A Novel – Lin Enger – 978-1-5179-1054-9 – University of Minnesota Press – Hardcover – 248 pages – October 27, 2020 – $24.95 – ebook versions available for sale at lower prices

I read Lin Enger’s last novel, High Divide, a few years ago and was really taken with his writing and the mythic fictional structures he loves to tell. Storytelling is certainly humanity’s oldest art form. We use stories to explain ourselves to ourselves. Lin seems to breathe storytelling like air. His new novel is very different than his earlier books, at least that it is set more or less in modern times and in northern Minnesota, a place that Lin is completely familiar and comfortable with.

American Gospel begins in 1974 while the rest of the country is fixated on the Watergate scandal, on a north woods Minnesota farm, where Enoch Bywater, a self-styled preacher has had a vision of the Rapture. It is all so real for him, he believes that the end of the world is about to be upon us. His millennial dream is shared by his followers, and then as word spreads about the impending end of the world, his Last Days Ranch attracts a polyglot of dreamers and believers in a completely American quest for emergence.

Enoch’s son, estranged both from his father, and from Minnesota, is an aspiring reporter with his own dreams and ambitions who is attracted back home by the potential for a big story – and the possibility of reconnecting with his high school love who is now a Hollywood star, the biggest thing to ever happen to their small rural town.

And there is still more intrigue involving other characters with their own complex agendas, and the backdrop of the denouement of the Nixon saga.

Lin Enger enjoys telling stories that involve men and their fathers. And he is taken with mythological, almost Jungian figures. In this book we have father figures of all kinds – God, the president, the preacher, and even his son. The psychic wounds of America are on full display and the resonance with our current time is unmistakable.

Enger is a compassionate and perceptive writer whose prose is clean and clear. He plainly loves to shed light on who we are and what we must do in order to live together as humans in a complex, disparate modern world. American Gospel is a quietly brilliant novel that I hope will find a large audience.

Lin Enger grew up in Minnesota and now lives in Moorhead, where he teaches English at Minnesota State University. He’s won many awards for his fiction, which include the novels, The High Divide (2014) and Undiscovered Country (2008). During the 1990s Lin and his brother, the novelist Leif Enger collaborated (as L. L. Enger) on a series of mystery novels for Pocket Books.

I always enjoy speaking with Lin. We had a terrific conversation about this book, and much more for this podcast episode. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Author’s website is here.

You can buy American Gospel from Bookshop.org.

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The Vanishing Sky (A Novel) by L. Annette Binder

The Vanishing Sky (A Novel) – L. Annette Binder – 9781635574678 – Bloomsbury Publishing – Hardcover – 288 pages – July 21, 2020 – $27.00 – ebook versions for sale at lower prices

I did not know what to expect when I started reading The Vanishing Sky. Initially, I was looking forward to reading a book that did not focus on the victims of Nazi Germany, but on Germans themselves. Yet I found that it was much more difficult for me to get into than I anticipated. I am not sure why, but I resisted the book and almost set it aside. I wanted to not like the characters. I wanted to not be sympathetic to them, or their situation, my deep-seated antipathy toward mid-century Germany and its people emerging from my psyche.

The Vanishing Sky is about a family struggling to survive at a time when World War II is coming to an end. The focus of the book is on Etta Huber, a hausfrau in a small town, whose eldest son had joined the army and gone to fight in the east, now coming home a broken man, and whose younger son, is dreamier and unmilitaristic child-like, and struggles with the country’s expectations for a German male. At the same time, Etta’s husband is a difficult, quite traditional German man, a veteran of WWI, but who does not know how to act in his stage of life during wartime.

Binder is a fine writer who builds a slow burning fire from a few tiny sparks and I found myself fully engaged with her characters, and immersed in their lives as I continued reading this book. The story and the characters bring us face to face with uncomfortable realities. These are humans struggling to find their identities in horrible circumstances, where there is nothing approaching normality. And of course, as it is set in Germany in the very final months of World War II, it is not a typical war novel. The book is about the people on the home front and it becomes impossible to not feel an uncomfortable resonance to our own time.

It was truly a pleasure to speak with Annette about this remarkable novel and I will be looking forward to reading her next book.

The Vanishing Sky quietly sneaks up on the reader and makes us confront our understanding of ourselves with carefully wrought details and a surprising story line. It’s a rewarding novel that requires attention from the reader that is fully rewarded in the end.

“The Vanishing Sky reveals the German home front as I’ve never seen it in fiction… Binder tells her story patiently, like an artist placing tiny pieces into a mosaic; this literary novel isn’t one to race through. But I find it gripping, powerful, and a brave narrative, unsparing in its honesty.” — Larry Zuckerman, Historical Novels Review

Annette Binder was born in Germany and grew up in Colorado. The Vanishing Sky is her first novel, inspired by her family’s experiences in World War II Germany. Her collection of short stories, Rise, received the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Literature. Annette has degrees from Harvard, UC Berkeley and the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. She lives in New England.

Author’s website here.

Buy the book at Bookshop.org.

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Writerscast: David Wilk interviews Roger Angell

A couple years ago, in the process of researching the mostly unknown and under-appreciated New Yorker writer Robert M. Coates, I reached out to Roger Angell, who knew Coates during his many years of writing for and working at The New Yorker (and whose mother, Katharine Sergeant Angell White, and stepfather, E.B. White, knew Coates well from the earliest days of the magazine in New York and elsewhere). I wanted to learn as much as I could about Coates, and in the process, had the distinct pleasure of talking to one of the greatest writers of our time.

After telling me some interesting first-hand remembrances of Coates, Roger was kind enough to sit or an in-person interview with me in his apartment in New York along with his wife Peggy Moorman. It’s my honor to publish this interview now to celebrate Roger Angell’s 100th birthday. His prodigious, meticulous, and far-ranging memory is a match for his remarkable abilities as a writer.

Roger has always lived in New York City, and spent summers in Brooklin, Maine. He graduated from Pomfret School and Harvard University, served in the Air Force in World War II, first as an instructor in machine guns and power turrets, and then, in the Pacific, as an editor and reporter for the GI magazine Brief.

In 2014 Roger was inducted into the writers’ section of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and then in 2015 he was deservedly elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

It is impossible to speak about and with Roger Angell without mentioning his writing about baseball, for which he is best known, including the classic books, The Summer Game and Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion, as well as a number of great shorter pieces that appeared first in the The New Yorker.

Angell’s earliest published works of short fiction and personal narratives. Several of these pieces were collected in early books, The Stone Arbor and Other Stories (1960) and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell (1970).

Roger first contributed to the The New Yorker in March 1944. He began writing about baseball in 1962, when William Shawn, then the editor of The New Yorker sent him to Florida to write about spring training and over the course of several decades produced some of the best baseball books ever written, inspiring countless readers with his brilliant descriptions of baseball games and players, and of course, fans of the game.

In a review of Once More Around the Park for the Journal of Sport History, Richard C. Crepeau wrote that “Gone for Good”, Angell’s essay on the career of Steve Blass,”may be the best piece that anyone has ever written on baseball or any other sport”.

While Angell has been praised fulsomely for his baseball writing, I’d prefer to think of him as simply one of the better literary stylists of our time. Listening to Roger Angell talk about books, writers and his writing life was one of the great pleasures of my own literary life, which I am pleased to share with you here.

Roger turned 100 on September 19, 2020. Happy Birthday Roger! And thank you and Peggy, for giving me the opportunity to speak with one of my literary heroes.

“Angell writes about baseball the way M.F.K. Fisher did about food, as a metaphor for life’s complexities of desire, defeat, utility and beauty.” — Phillip Lopate

This article in The New Yorker by David Remnick – “Roger Angell Turns 100” – is a must-read piece.

7 Must-Read Roger Angell Books: Legendary essays on baseball, reflections on aging, and so much more. Stephen Lovely, The Archive.

List of Roger Angell’s Books

A Day in the Life of Roger Angell
Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion
Game Time
Late Innings
Let Me Finish
This Old Man: All in Pieces
Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader
A Pitcher’s Story: Innings with David Cone
Season Ticket
Selected Shorts: Baseball, a Celebration of the Short Story
The Summer Game

Roger Angell Day – Celebrating Roger Angell – a 100th birthday celebration was held at the Friend Memorial Public Library in Brooklin, Maine, August 8, 2020                                                   Photo by Bill Ray

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Helen Zuman: Mating in Captivity [A Memoir]

Mating in Captivity: A Memoir – Helen Zuman – 9781631523373 – She Writes Press – paperback – 248 pages – May 8, 2018 – $16.95 – ebook versions for sale at lower prices

When I was in my younger hippie Whole Earth Catalog reading period of life, I became intensely interested in communes and alternative social structures, what are now often called “Intentional Communities.” Such utopian constructs have been in existence in America for many years (think about the Shakers in the 19th century) and the dream of a better way of living together than nuclear families persists to this day. I spent a couple summers on a working farm commune in Oregon, and over the years have studied and thought about the challenges and rewards of these communal work and living communities. Given the stresses that modern corporate capitalism places on individuals and families, it makes sense for us to explore different structures, despite the complexities of living together after the common experience of growing up in much narrower family units.

When Helen Zuman graduated from Harvard, searching for a better way to live, she too wanted to learn about and explore alternative intentional communities. After considering a variety of options, and getting a fellowship to study alternative structures, she moved to the North Carolina-based Zendik Farm in 1999. Initially she was unsure of whether it would be the right place for her, but it did not take her long to feel that she belonged. She gave the commune all her money and made the commitment to become a full time, permanent member of what she believed was a meaningful alternative to what the members called “dealthculture” – meaning anyone outside of the group itself. For her, as a inexperienced social being, the Zendik experience, based on sharing work, love, life and sex, made sense. But it turned out that the lived experience of the farm commune was not quite what it seemed, and without realizing it, Helen had become a member of a personal cult run by Arol, the Farm’s matriarch, who manipulated and controlled the members to meet her own needs at the expense of all else. Mating in Captivity is an illuminating and compellingly personal story of how a person can become a member of a cult, so simple, and then how one can escape, so difficult.

It’s ironic that the widespread desire for redefining social structures created by the tensions of modern capitalism has so often led to such fraught and misshapen group think. But Helen’s story is actually an optimistic one, as she was able to come through this experience and to make a life for herself that is, in fact, meaningful and defining outside the narrow structures laid down for us by the imperatives of industrial life.

This is Helen Zuman’s raw and honest confession and exploration of how a cult works and what it takes for an individual to escape one, and become her truer self. Mating in Captivity shows how cults work and both why people join and how they must escape in order to grow into fully functioning beings. I really admired her honesty throughout, and her storytelling is adept and strong. It’s a terrific memoir and one that readers of all kinds will appreciate.

Despite the ways in which things go off the tracks for us all too often, we can and must hope that a meaningful form of communalism is possible. If humans are going to live sustainably on this planet, it is likely a necessary adaptation for us to make.

“Just as the Zendik community, a cult, pulled Helen Zuman in and held her, her account of her time there will pull you in and hold you. Her clear-eyed observations of her fellow idealists—and of herself—are honest, compelling, and sophisticated.”
–Daniel Menaker, author of My Mistake: A Memoir

“How timely, how telling this story of an inexperienced young woman who fell prey to a cult because of the abuse to which she’d been subjected by male strangers. Only within the fold, where there were rules protecting the women, did she feel safe enough to explore her sexuality and learn to love. So she surrendered her possessions, her will, her youth. Read Mating in Captivity as a cautionary tale, one I hope will spark a desire to create a better world for our daughters.”
–Leah Lax, author of Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home

Mating in Captivity, which she calls “a cult memoir for smart people” is Helen’s first book. It was named a Kirkus Best Indie Memoir of 2018, was a finalist in Creative Nonfiction for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses’ 2019 Firecracker Award, and was both first runner-up in memoir and a finalist for First Horizon and Grand Prize honors in the 2020 Eric Hoffer Awards. Other work has appeared in The New Farmers Almanac, in Communities and Livelihood magazines, and on the Foundation for Intentional Community’s website. She was born in London and raised in Brooklyn, and with her husband, Helen currently homesteads near the Hudson River in Beacon, New York.

Helen and I had a terrific and broad ranging conversation. I also recommend reading her post, linked above at the Foundation for Intentional Community site.

Author website here.

Buy the book on Bookshop.org and support independent bookstores!

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Blackwood: A Novel by Michael Farris Smith

Blackwood: A Novel – Michael Farris Smith – 9780316529815 – Little Brown – Hardcover – 256 pages – March 3, 2020 – $27.00 – ebook versions for sale at lower prices

This is pretty much a stunningly written book. I discovered the writing of Michael Farris Smith serendipitously through the southern culture magazine, Garden & Gun. I read a short piece they published called “How a Steadfast Pup Helped an Author Find His Voice,” which is just a fantastic work of personal memoir. That one essay prompted me to learn about Smith and to get a copy of his latest book. Yes, this is how literary discovery works today. There are so many good writers in the world, and we are blessed with a plethora of books to read. But at the same time, how do we find out about them? I had not heard of Michael Farris Smith before. Blackwood is his fifth book, and his work has been well reviewed and praised by writers whose opinions I respect. I was surprised I had never run across his work before, and pleased I did.

I started reading Blackwood without knowing very much about this writer or his past work, or the kinds of stories he tells. There is no doubt that Blackwood can be pretty dark at times – funnily, it reminded me of the great Netflix series, Stranger Things – though much more powerful in the way that only fiction can convey mystery. It can be scary at times, and there are characters in this book who are just terrible, dangerous figures. I don’t think you have to be a southerner or to have lived in the south at all to appreciate this book, or the kinds of people who inhabit the fictional Red Bluff, Mississippi, but it helps, I am sure, as the landscape and the mysteries Smith explores are very much “of the South” and the pain and suffering that resides in its countryside. That suffering is an integral element of the history of the people and the land that is palpable in this novel. The collection of characters is interestingly diverse, combining a bit of Faulkner with a touch of Stephen King, it seems.

I tend to think of this book as a novel of magical realism that taps into a mysterious darkness that inhabits the land itself. It is chthonic – almost literally. There is a part of this novel that is mythic, subliminal, deeply psychic in a wounded way, and the people who live in this strange place have become part of the mystery and part of the land as well. I wondered at times if Smith is telling a story that even he may not fully understand, almost like a Druid priest channeling voices from another reality. The book is very powerful, and that power makes it difficult sometimes to get your bearings, as a reader, you can feel outside the realm of your own experience enough that you must allow Smith’s language to transport you to this other place, and dream alongside and almost within the author’s psyche.

Some of the words used by reviewers come to mind – “brutal,” “supernatural,” “startling,”. All are accurate. I felt the pain of this novel deeply. And yes, it is a southern novel, but that should not ever be considered a limitation. This is just a great novel that happens to be set in the south.

I am really pleased that I discovered Blackwood and the work of this compelling writer, Michael Farris Smith. I’d like to especially thank the magazine Garden & Gun for doing what they do so well — exploring and expounding on modern southern culture. And thanks to Michael Farris Smith for taking the risk to write this difficult book, and for talking to me about it. We had a great conversation together.

“Lurking over Blackwood is a family of itinerant grifters—a version of Faulkner’s Snopes clan, forces of chaos, human kudzu except for the youngest of them, a mysterious boy in whom Colburn sees his young self. As in the best noir, A soul-strangling inevitability hangs over Red Bluff, yet somehow Smith gives his doomed characters a dignity in the face of forces well beyond their control.” Booklist (starred review)

Michael Farris Smith website.

Buy the book at RJ Julia Booksellers.

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Crooked Hallelujah: Kelli Jo Ford

Crooked Hallelujah – Kelli Jo Ford – 978-0-8021-4912-1 – Grove Press – Hardcover – 304 pages – July 14, 2020 – $26.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

Kelli Jo Ford’s novel is a deeply rewarding read. Comparisons to the work of Louise Erdrich are inevitable and unavoidable (and Kelli Jo mentioned Louise in our conversation as one of her most important influences.) This is a novel of relationships and family told through the voices of four generations of Cherokee women and to a lesser extent, the men who come in and out of their lives. The narrative weaves together strands of familial cloth into what emerges as a beautiful and compelling pattern that we experience fully as the story is told.

At the outset of the book, we are in 1974 in the Cherokee Nation, eastern Oklahoma, where fifteen-year-old Justine is growing up in a family dominated by women – her mother, Lula, and her mother’s mother, Granny. We follow Justine, and her daughter, Reney, through a series of challenges in Oklahoma and Texas and back to Oklahoma, where family and roots call out to her.

Kelli Jo Ford is a fine writer, and manages her characters and their stories well. Her intergenerational story is complicated, and the multiple narrative voices take some concentration to follow, but her writing is warm and deft, and we are rewarded in the end by the beauty and depth of her characters and their lives. This family of strong Cherokee women continually face challenges with strength and wisdom. They make the necessary sacrifices for the people in their lives and go on living despite all the difficulties they face. They don’t always get along – these women are real people, not caricatures. They do not always succeed in understanding each other or overcoming the difficulties and challenges they face. There are conflicts over religion and individuality. But these women are bound by blood, heart, and a deeply felt love that carries them forward despite all. I came away from this book with an appreciation for the strength and perceptiveness of Cherokee women.

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing published by Harper in 2012. She now lives in Virginia with her husband, poet Scott Weaver.

My conversation with Kelli Jo was her first interview about Crooked Hallelujah. She is a new writer many of us will want to follow in the years to come.

Author website here.

Support local business. Buy the book from R.J. Julia Booksellers.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk Interviews Howard Junker about Zyzzyva

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. I’ve spent time talking with people in the book industry about how publishing is evolving in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

Some time back, this series broadened to include conversations that go beyond the future of publishing. In an effort to document the literary world, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and into the present.

One of my favorite lines of exploration for Publishing Talks has been a series of conversations with editors and publishers of independent presses and literary magazines. These enterprises are at the core of literary culture. They bring new voices to light, tap into the always changing literary culture, and bring it forward to readers and importantly, to other writers as well.

One of the most important literary magazines of the late twentieth and early twenty first century is Zyzzyva: The Journal of West Coast Writers & Artists, founded by Howard Junker in San Francisco as a purely West Coast platform in 1985. Howard and I knew each other in the eighties and nineties when I was involved in literary magazine and press distribution. I’ve always thought highly of Zyzzyva, its look and feel and the breadth and scope of its literary vision. Having a chance to talk for awhile with Howard about the magazine and his own literary output since leaving the magazine in 2010 was a welcome pleasure. He has a lot to say on alot of subjects. I truly enjoyed our conversation and hope you will find it as interesting and rewarding as I did.

Howard Junker was born in Port Washington, NY and grew up in Chappaqua, NY. He attended Amherst, Stanford, and the University of San Francisco. Junker has written for many magazines, including Architectural Digest, Art in America, Artforum, Esquire, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, The New Republic, New York, Newsweek, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and Vogue.

He has also worked as a documentary filmmaker, television producer, construction carpenter, junior high school science teacher, fondue cook, P.R. flack, and technical editor.

He founded Zyzzyva in 1985, and edited 90 issues before he retired at the end of 2010. He also edited five anthologies of work from the magazine, including AutoBioDiversity, as well as four Zyzzyva first novels and three Zyzzyva first collections of poems. There is much more about Howard to be found at his website here.

Photo above by Dennis Letbetter.

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Fenton Johnson – At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life – Fenton Johnson- 9780393608298 – W.W. Norton – Hardcover – 256 pages – March 10, 2020 – $26.95 – ebook versions available at lower prices

So much of the pleasure of conducting this podcast for all these years has been (and continues to be) the discovery of new writers and books, that so deeply nurture my inner being. Discovering Fenton Johnson’s writing during the pandemic, where I have been spending most of my time alone or with just my immediate family, has been both apt and especially rewarding. I want to thank my cousin, Fred Hertz, for introducing me to Fenton and his work. I am especially interested in this book, as it is about the inner lives if writers, artists and musicians, their thought processes and creative lives, Fenton Johnson’s perspective on creativity and the artistic journey should resonate with us now more than ever.

Fenton is an outstanding writer, whose prose flows like a slow moving brook through the woods. I am really surprised not to have known about his work before now. Now, having read this most recent very personal memoir, I am adding his other works of memoir, and his fiction to my long term reading list.

But back to this book. In At the Center of All Beauty, Fenton explores the lives and works of nearly a dozen writers, painters and singers, those he feels most close to in his own life and work. He calls them “solitaries,” and links them to members of his own family, friends he knew growing up, his life, his lovers, his loves.  He rightly questions the dominant cultural narrative we all absorb that coupling is the highest and best way to live. Of course there is a long and celebrated tradition in the West of creatives who must separate themselves from others in order to be themselves, and this clearly is a crucial story for anyone involved in trying to create.

Fenton devotes chapters to Thoreau at Walden Pond, Emily Dickinson in Amherst, the great Bill Cunningham photographing in the streets, Cézanne repeatedly painting Mont Sainte-Victoire and Zora Neale Hurston, Nina Simone, and several other exemplars of the creative solitary life. Each of these stories relate back to Fenton’s own journey, first growing up in Kentucky near the famous Gethsemane monastery (best known as home to Thomas Merton,) his father and mother, also both solitary souls despite their family lives, and then  later living in San Francisco in the time of AIDS, to now, where in late middle age, he finds himself solitary and at peace with all that it means to be both alone and completely connected to the world around him.

This book is full of wisdom, of beauty, and of language that helps us go beyond our daily perceptions into our own stories of self and meaning. You can read this book as a narrative or perhaps as well, use it as an inspirational spur to personal meditation on self and beauty.

It was truly a pleasure to read At the Center of All Beauty and also to have the opportunity to speak with Fenton about this book. To illustrate life during Covid-19, while we happened to both be in Tucson, Arizona this spring, Fenton delivered the book to me, both of us wearing masks, in the local post office parking lot, and we conducted the interview via Skype, despite being less than two miles apart from each other on the day we talked.

Aside from At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, Fenton Johnson is the author of three novels: The Man Who Loved Birds, Scissors, Paper, Rock, and Crossing the River, each of which have been reissued in new editions. He has also published two previous memoirs, Geography of the Heart: A Memoir and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks and an essay collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays.

Geography of the Heart received the American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best LGBT Creative Nonfiction, and Keeping Faith received a Lambda Literary and Kentucky Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction. He was recently featured on NPR’s Fresh Air and writes for Harper’s Magazine.

Fenton is professor emeritus at the University of Arizona and teaches creative writing workshops nationally. He is on the faculty of the low-residency creative writing program of Spalding University.

Support local booksellers! Buy At the Center of All Beauty from independent bookseller RJ Julia.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Mary Gannon of CLMP

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. As every media business continues to experience disruption and change, I’ve spent time talking with some of the people involved in our industry about how publishing might evolve as it is affected by technology and the larger context of culture and economics.

Some time back, this series broadened to include conversations that go beyond the future of publishing. In an effort to document the literary world, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and arts professionals who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and the present, and continue to explore the ebb and flow of writing, books, and publishing in all sorts of forms and formats, as change continues to be the one constant we can count on.

Mary Gannon is the Executive Director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, a now more than fifty-year-old nonprofit that is the primary organization in the US supporting the literary publishing community. There are hundreds of publications of all sizes that benefit from CLMP’s work, some well-established, others that are start-ups, and many others in various stages of growth and development. Some have institutional support, while the majority are supported only by the work of volunteers and readers.

Mary is herself a poet, and has worked in the literary community for many years. She well understands the struggles and needs of the community she serves. Before joining CLMP in 2018, she was the Associate Director and Director of Content for the Academy of American Poets, and before that she was the Editorial Director of Poets & Writers, the country’s largest nonprofit organization serving poets and literary writers.

Mary has published numerous articles about publishing and the literary field, as well as book reviews in a variety of journals. With her husband, Poets & Writers Magazine Editor-in-Chief Kevin Larimer, she wrote The Poets & Writers Complete Guide to Being a Writer, published by Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster April, 2020.

I’ve wanted to talk to Mary for some time about the state of the independent literary community. Now, with the COVID pandemic having such an impact, especially so on the arts (to the point of crisis for many) it’s an important time for a conversation about the current state and future prospects of literary publishing.

CLMP was founded in 1967 by writers and editors, including Russell Banks (whom I interviewed in 2018.) It offers a range of services and funding to magazines and literary publishers. Visit the CLMP website for more information or to make a donation in support of its vital work to support independent literary culture.

Disclosure: I am currently proud to be a member of the board of trustees of CLMP.

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