Interview with Nona Footz: A Mansion of Her Own

A Mansion of Her Own: The Mysterious Life of Heiress Alice Delamar – Nona Footz with Audrey Clare Farley – Grand Central Publishing – 9781538772072 – 272 pages – $32.50 – October 8, 2026 – ebook versions available at lower prices

It was impossible for me to resist a story about a reclusive heiress who lived only a few miles from where I grew up and lived in southwestern Connecticut. The towns there now are mostly well-to-do suburban enclaves, and best known for their wealth and well-known residents. But when I was growing up there, and earlier in the twentieth century, much of Fairfield County was quite rural. In those times, the area attracted many artists, writers, dancers and Bohemian types who found it a respite from the urban travails of nearby New York City. Only an hour by train or car (on roads with far less traffic than today), it was attractive to a wide range of people, some of whom were quite well off.

One of those very rich people was a secretive heiress, Alice DeLamar. In 1918 at age twenty-three, she inherited her mining magnate father’s massive wealth, making her the richest woman in America. She immediately became the target of the press, who wanted to know all about her, especially whom she would marry (of course).

Alice was not the kind of person who enjoyed this attention. She found a piece of land in then rural Weston, Connecticut, and built an estate, where she spent time with an amazing array of interesting people, most of whom were in the arts and many of whom either were then or who are now, quite well-known. She sponsored the children’s writer Ludwig Bemelmans (Madeleine was created there), the actress and producer Eva LeGallienne (with whom she had a lengthy romantic relationship), hosted Vladimir Nabokov, Salvador Dali, George Balanchine (who also lived in Weston), Dave Brubeck, and many others at social gatherings and soirees.

While she kept her apartment in New York City, and eventually had another large home in Palm Beach and a townhouse in Paris too, Weston was always the center of her multifaceted and mostly unknown and undocumented life.

HR executive Nona Footz also lived in Weston for a number of years. She only accidentally learned about Alice Delamar after reading a biography of Eva Le Gallienne by Helen Sheehy. Nona found herself drawn to Alice, and became dedicated to finding out more about this reclusive, highly secretive woman. She spent a decade tracking down anyone she could find who had known Alice, interviewing them and researching her life, all the while in search of Alice’s original papers, including a memoir Alice was rumored to have written, all of which had disappeared upon Alice’s death in 1983.

Nona’s book is not only a mystery story, it is also a memoir as well, in which she recounts her own saga of trying to understand and uncover the true life and times of a remarkable woman. It’s a great story and it was really special for me to have the opportunity to speak with Nona about Alice and this book. I am certain you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did. It is a great story. Don’t miss it!

“A journey through the bedrooms and drawing rooms of the twentieth-century art world where luminaries expressed forbidden sexual desires and found inspiration for much of the art they created. The book is so good, I picked it up and barely breathed until I was finished.” -Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women

Nona Footz is currently an executive and board recruiter and has been a freelance writer for the magazines VENU and for Art New England. A native of Canada, Footz is an adjunct faculty member at New York University. This is her first book.

Co-author Audrey Clare Farley is the author of The Unfit Heiress and Girls and Their Monsters, which won the Michigan Notable Book Award and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

Some interesting notes: a portion of what was the Delamar property is now the 21-acre Stonebridge Waterfowl Preserve in Weston, which she donated in 1969.

On her estate, Alice had a pool built that includes a tunnel leading from the basement. It is rumored that this was so she could swim in the nude without fear of being seen (or to walk outside).

Delamar funded the Civic Repertory Theatre established by Le Gallienne in New York City.

When she passed away, most of her estate went to Harvard, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins, per her father’s original will.

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Publishing Talks Interview: Luke Palder of MemoirGhostWriting.com

I discovered the very interesting Luke Palder by accident one day when I saw an ad he ran for his memoir writing and publishing business, MemoirGhostWriting.com. It sounded really interesting, and similar enough to some of my own work that I wanted to find out more about his work.

Luke is a serial entrepreneur in book publishing and production – he is the founder and CEO of ProofreadingServices.com, MemoirGhostwriting.com, TranslationServices.com, and TranscriptionServices.com. As he says about himself – “I’m committed to enhancing communication—whether it’s through the written word, across different languages, or from audio to text. My passion lies in empowering writers to share their stories, assisting businesses to overcome language barriers, and enabling individuals to immortalize their spoken words in written form. Leading these companies, my goal is to maintain the highest standards of service, treating every project with meticulous attention to detail.”

Publishing Talks has given me the opportunity to meet and talk to so many smart people in the book business. I really enjoy sharing the boundless creativity that motivates so many of us in the book business. Luke exemplifies those qualities and what this series of conversations is about. It was a pleasure to get to speak with him about his work and I am sure you will find this conversation of interest. We had a great conversation about his work, the book business and the importance of storytelling, among other subjects. His passionate commitment to people and their stories is visible in everything he does.

Luke is a Yale College graduate who also studied at Yale Law School, the Yale School of Management (SOM), Cambridge University, and Peking University. He is the founder of ProofreadingServices.com, serving more than 25,000 clients globally over 13 years. And he rode a bicycle across the United States, covering more than 4,000 miles in 63 days. He lives and works in North Carolina.

MemoirGhostWriting.com

ProofreadingServices.com

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Nikkya Hargrove: Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found

Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found — Nikkya Hargrove — Algonquin Books — 9781643751580 — Hardcover – 240 pages — October 15, 2024 — $29.00, ebook versions available at lower prices

“The book is deeply moving and shows how one woman managed to differentiate herself from her mom, find queer love, and discover her voice. I loved it.”–Katie Couric Media, “14 Best New Books Out This Fall, According to a Bookfluencer”

I’m fortunate to live in the same mid-sized Connecticut town as Nikkya, where she has founded a much-needed independent bookstore called Obodo Serendipity. Along with her wife and kids, she is working hard to build a literary community for readers of all kinds, especially kids. Her store has  become a place where I like to hang out. Oddly, Connecticut has very few good bookstores, which seems strange for a state with a relatively well educated book reading population. But I suppose that is indicative of the state of books and also of retailing and our culture generally – people don’t seem to spend very much time in communal spaces anymore. That is one good reason to welcome and support a bookstore (and happily I note the success of a very busy tearoom and a locally owned coffee shop as well, suggesting that people really are in search of human connection in reaction to the overwhelming flattening engendered by the internet…but that is a subject for a different episode).

Nikkya is a thoroughly engaging and impressive person. Mama is a remarkably clear eyed and honest memoir about her life. It may be trite to call it uplifting, but it really is an inspiring story. Anytime I feel that things are difficult in my daily life, it is helpful to remind myself of the challenges Nikkya faced and overcame — it’s always a good restorative, and very humbling too.

Nikkya was born very prematurely to a mother whose life had been taken over by drugs, and the fact she even survived her infancy is remarkable. She was raised mostly by other family members, as her mother struggled with drug addiction and the resulting bad life choices. But Nikkya and her mom always maintained their bond. Her mother unexpectedly had another child much later in her life, and then passed away, leaving her infant son without a parent. Nikkya, by then a young adult, made the life-changing decision to take responsibility for raising her half-brother.

Mama is the story of Nikkya’s mother, but it is also the story of Nikkya becoming a mother, finding her soulmate partner, together creating a new and very personal family, with her son, and now her twin daughters. Besides being an incredibly strong, warm-hearted and loving person, Nikkya is also a strong writer who tells her story brilliantly in this book. It is impossible to read this memoir and not be deeply affected and indeed, changed by Nikkya’s life story.

As Sonya Huber says in her blurb about the book: “Hargrove offers a deep and stirring view of the impacts of addiction and the criminal justice system on Black women, offering an account of hope, heartbreak, faith, courage, joy, and the comfort and care of extended and chosen families.”

It is an honor for me to have her as a guest on this podcast, and also to be able to be her friend (and dedicated supporter of her bookstore). And if you buy her book, which I hope you will do from the link below, Bookshop.org will give Odobo Serendipity a part of the proceeds.

Nikkya graduated from Bard College and currently serves as a member of the school’s Board of Governors and chair of the alumni/ae Diversity Committee. She was a LAMBDA Literary Nonfiction Fellow, and has written about adoption, marriage, motherhood, and the prison system for The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, Scary Mommy, and Shondaland. Nikkya now operates the independent bookstore, Obodo Serendipity Books and lives with her wife and three children in Stratford, Connecticut.

Nikkya’s website.

Buy Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found

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Oliver Radclyffe: Frighten the Horse (A Memoir)

Frighten the Horses – Oliver Radclyffe – Roxane Gay Books – 978-0-8021-6315-8 – Hardcover – 352 pages – $28.00 – September 17, 2024 – ebook versions available at lower prices

This is flat out a remarkable story told by a remarkable person. We live in a time when people are so often simply categorized into identities, as if the naming of a version of self somehow explains who a person is. Labels do not tell stories: gay, straight, queer, trans. All are too reductive to have any meaning whatsoever. Every person is a complicated being, and most of us contain multiple versions of ourselves. Sometimes those versions simply do not make sense.

Oliver Radclyffe started out life as a relatively protected and very privileged girl in England, who married a man and had four children, moved to a wealthy Connecticut suburb and had what seemed to be a perfect life. But his inner life was far from resolved and the tensions of an emerging self could not be reconciled until he eventually came out as a lesbian, risking a great deal in order to establish an identity that reflected his inner being.

But that turned out to be a way station on his ultimate journey. There was still more work he had to do before his ultimate transformation to being a man, one who is also an active parent, still learning from his children, still in the process of becoming. As we all should be.

Aside from this being an incredibly engaging story that takes place in the same town I grew up in, the courageously deep and honest sharing of his story was for me a journey toward understanding, both for the writer and for me, the reader. By exposing so much of his story and his struggles to become himself, Oliver has created what is truly an essential guide to understanding the trans experience. Even for the many of us who believe in the multitude of human identity and being need to understand as fully as possible what it actually means to be a trans person. If you are fortunate enough to have a trans person in your life, this book should be the next book you pick up.

While I am certain that every person’s story is unique and that Oliver is not a stand in for every gay or trans person, female or male, knowing so much about his ongoing journey to becoming his authentic self is incredibly valuable for others, whether we are ourselves gay, straight, trans or something else.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Go read it right now. Let me know what you think of it.

This review blurb says it all for me: “The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read. It’s a terrific, expansive story because the focus of this warm-hearted man always returns to his children. He’s simply a wonderful parent, and that’s what keeps the reader turning the pages.”—Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw

Author website
Buy the book

Author photo by Lev Rose Water

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Sarah Neidhardt: Twenty Acres A Seventies Childhood in the Woods

Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods – Sarah Neidhardt – University of Arkansas Press – Paperback – 320 pages – 9781682262276 – $29.95 – Published March 7, 2023. Audiobook and ebook versions available at varying prices.

Twenty Acres is a wonderful, rewarding family memoir that will resonate both for elder veterans of the sixties and seventies “back to the land” counter culture but most especially for their now adult children, of which author Neidhardt is one. She was just a baby when her quite intelligent, middle class, young, naive parents left Colorado Springs to move to an extremely isolated part of the Arkansas Ozarks, where despite being woefully unprepared and underfunded, they managed to build a cabin and set out to live their lives and raise their children away from the materialist world they came from.

Their idealism was quickly met with the harsh realities of country life, of course. Sarah Neidhardt’s early life with her struggling parents and her siblings was not easy, and the crushing poverty and difficulties they endured as a family are reconstructed by Neidhardt as a way to understand her early life in deeply rural Arkansas. Still, the book is filled with many joyful and humorous moments – it’s not an altogether dark story, but a complex one that is filled with the ambiguities and complexities of family life in any time or place.

This story is similar to other back to the land adventures I’ve read that did not end well, or ended with the participants deflated by the rigors of a life they were never prepared for, though it is different from some because of the relatively extreme isolation the Neidhardt family experienced. Communards had it better in some ways than those who set out on their own in places where the culture was so deeply foreign to their generally urban or suburban backgrounds and counter culture values. But the underlying conflicts of culture, education, expectations, and the challenges of rural life really are common for so many of the children of the counter culture, unwilling participants in what was generally a short-lived socio-political explosion that had long lasting ramifications for its youngest and most innocent participants (even as that era’s most deeply held values and beliefs have survived and become entwined in modern culture in so many important ways).

It’s been more than fifty years since the era of the hippies, and books like this one will help set down and explain the history of that brief period of time, when so many young people thought we could change the world for the better. Talking to Sarah about her book, her family, and the process of writing their story was rewarding for me and I hope for all who listen to our conversation.

Sarah Neidhardt has worked as a bookseller, secretary, paralegal, copyeditor, and stay-at-home mother. She grew up in Arkansas and Northern California and now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and teenage son.

“Disillusioned with the modern world and idealistic about living closer to nature, Sarah Neidhardt’s parents packed up from Colorado–a place that some other back-to-landers would seek out–and moved to small, isolated Fox, Arkansas to attempt living completely self-sufficiently and off-the-grid. In this memoir, Neidhardt examines her memories from that time, and also pinpoints one of the most particularly problematic parts of the back-to-the-land movement, which is that many of its participants were anchored in privilege. … A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry.”—–Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature

Author website here.
Buy the book here.

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Baron Wormser: The Road Washes Out in Spring

The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid – Baron Wormser – Brandeis University Press – 9781684581603 – 214 pages – paperback – $24.95 – March 7, 2023 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Baron Wormser is a poet and prose writer whose work I have been familiar with for many years. Back in the 1970s, he and his wife Janet, moved to rural Maine as part of the “back to the land” wave that had been inspired by hippies and the Stewart Brand’s influential Whole Earth Catalog and especially the writings of the now almost mythic Helen and Scott Nearing, vegetarians who pioneered simple living in the 1930s and 40s.

His memoir of that time was originally published almost twenty years ago and now there is a new edition of this meditative, almost poetic narrative of simple living.

Baron and his family lived in a house they built in Maine with no electricity or running water. Much like the Nearings, they raised (and canned) much of their own food, carried water from their well, and read through the long winter nights by the light of kerosene lamps.

As Wormser states early in this book, living off the grid was not meant to be a statement of anything. In fact, as complete novices to the life they set out to live, it turned out that they had built their house in a place that there was no electricity and initially they could not afford to pay to have power lines run to their house. As time went on, they embraced the simplicity of their rural lives and learned from their experienced neighbors, for whom life was not a choice and “lifestyle” would have been a meaningless term.

Wormser refuses any simple understanding or explanation for the lives he and his wife chose for the twenty five year period during which they raised their children and became integral to the local community. He writes about nature and the simple life without sentimentalizing anything, appreciates the good and faces the difficulties head on without failing to note the complexity of everything we prefer to think of as simple. He is a careful thinker and writer, and his poetic self is a presence at all times.  Here is a lovely excerpt from the book:

If there is such a thing as a mutable eternity, it is snow falling in the woods. I am thinking of a windless, steady plummeting. Nothing is moving except for snowflakes. You can hear the snow faintly ticking on the pine needle branches. You can hear it descending—a soft sift of air. You are held in the hand of something enormous yet gentle, something extraordinary yet calming, something evanescent yet quite palpable (from a Latin word meaning “to touch gently”). Every surface receives the snow in its way. A large, fallen, curled maple leaf collects the snow in its center. A boulder”s stored heat resists the snow at first. Then its surface turns wet as if it were raining. Then with un-boulder-like delicacy a thin frizz accumulates. On top of the garden gate a fragile white skein begins to perch. Little, almost derby-like hats grow on the garden fence posts. The mown grass around the house fills in gradually. The stiff, frozen blades seem like little heights. Then the snow, as it mounts, receives itself. Another landscape is created and for months we live in that landscape.

When I was in my twenties, I shared the impulse to “head for the country,” where I tried and failed to make a go of living on the land. I greatly admire and appreciate what the commitment that Baron and his family made to live in Maine for a quarter century. And it was a deep pleasure to read this memoir of that time.

In 2000 Baron was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine by Governor Angus King. He currently resides in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife. In 2009 he joined the Fairfield University MFA program. He works in schools with both students and teachers. Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2000 he was writer in residence at the University of South Dakota. Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar. His most recent book of poetry is The History Hotel, published by CavanKerry Press.

In other rooms and beyond those rooms
So much was occurring that went on happily
And unhappily, indifferent to protocols,
Brimming with anemones, half-heard melodies,
Averted glances. 

(from “Elegy for the Poet Adam Zagajewski”)

Author website

Buy The Road Washes Out in Spring

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Cornelia Maude Spelman: Missing: A Memoir

Missing: A Memoir – Cornelia Maude Spelman – Jackleg Press – 9781737513445 – Paperback – 176 pages – $17.00 – July 15, 2022 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Cornelia Maude Spelman is best known as a children’s book author. This memoir of her family was spurred by her meeting with and friendship with the late New Yorker editor William Maxwell (himself an extraordinary writer as well), who knew her parents in the 1920s when they were at the University of Illinois together.

Cornelia plainly admired and enjoyed the company of Maxwell, but also was fascinated that he knew her parents before they had children, before their lives went in different directions than Maxwell’s. At one of her meetings with him, she suggests that her parents’ lives were not successful in the terms they had hoped for. Maxwell gently tells her that “in a good novel one doesn’t look for a success story, but for a story that moves one with its human drama and richness of experience.”

It was Maxwell who prompted Cornelia to explore and tell the story of her parents. This memoir tells that story. Spelman spent years exploring the history of her family. It’s a wonderful exploration, full of side trips and thoughtful reflections, and much that anyone interested in the mysteries of their family members will appreciate. Superman was luckier than most of us, in that she was able to meet with people who knew her parents when they were young. Most of us get interested in these stories far too late in our own lives to be able to talk to people who actually knew our older family members, or who, if still around, can remember anything meaningful to tell us.

Spelman’s research is extensive too. She goes to Iowa and Illinois to track down places and information details of her family history and to find people who know something about her parents and their parents. She recounts letters and interviews, even finding medical records and telegrams to help fill out stories that would otherwise be invisible or lost. Importantly Spelman is able to reconstructs her mother’s life and death, as well as that of her long lost brother. Cornelia’s writing is excellent and her storytelling compelling, so that even though we are not connected to the people about whom she writes, we can feel how she feels about them and about herself as she searches out and tells these “missing” family stories.

Cornelia is always honest with us about her disappointments, as well as what she learns that brings her joy and closure as well. This book is warm, profound, and honest. At the end, we know there is still much that will always be missing, but so much more that has been found.

Cornelia Maude Spelman, MSW, was a family therapist before she became a writer and artist. She’s written eleven books for children that help them manage emotions and difficult life situations. Her The Way I Feel series of books for young children has sold several million copies and been translated into Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, German, Arabic, Turkish, Danish, and Russian. Cornelia has earned awards from the Illinois Arts Council and was awarded the Bernard De Voto Fellowship in Nonfiction at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. This is her first book for adult readers.

It was truly a pleasure to speak with her about this book and her journey to write it.

Author website
Buy the book

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Sarah Vogel: The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm

The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm – Sarah Vogel – Bloomsbury – 9781635575262 – 432 pages – hardcover – $28 – ebook edition available at lower prices – November 2, 2021

Many Americans think of North Dakota and the other prairie states as being conservative culturally and equally unprogressive politically. But that view of these predominantly farming states neglects their long histories of progressive populism that goes back over 100 years. That’s true of North Dakota where the Nonpartisan League was active and strong from the 1920s onward (and into the present, where it still exists as the Democratic NPL — much like the Democratic Farm Labor party in Minnesota that Hubert Humphrey represented.

That history provides the backdrop for Sarah Vogel’s true story in The Farmer’s Lawyer, which tells of a seemingly impossible-to-win legal battle, ironically against the US government agency that was established during the Depression to help family farmers, which by the 1970s was helping to destroy them. At the outset of the Reagan administration (Reagan was helped to be elected, ironically, by the support of midwestern farmers), family farmers of all sizes all across the country were experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Land prices, the backbone of farm economics, had gone down, while farm operating costs were up. and interest rates had skyrocketed. At the same time, in many areas, bad weather severely affected crop output.

Because of policies implemented by the Reagan administration, and growing bureaucracy in the Farmers Home Loan administration, many family farmers were being threatened with foreclosure.

At that time, Sarah Vogel, the daughter of a well known Nonpartisan League supporter and lawyer, was herself a young lawyer and single mother was in the process of leaving Washington, D.C., where she had been working for a government agency. Contacted by some desperate farmers from North Dakota who were on the verge of losing their farms, and inspired by her belief in the importance of family farms to American life, she agreed to represent these struggling clients who couldn’t afford to pay her.

In the midst of her own personal issues, but supported by her family and friends, Vogel brought a national class action lawsuit against the FHLA, which meant she would have to fight against the full force of the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice, in behalf of these family farmers’ Constitutional rights. As a young lawyer who had never privately practiced before, this was her first case!

This book tells the entire years-long saga in incredible detail, brought to life by Sarah Vogel’s writing skill and storytelling prowess. It’s difficult to imagine a true-to-life legal story that has nothing to do with murder or mayhem being a page-turner, but this book will keep you fully engaged throughout. And it will remind you of how difficult it is for “the little guys” to fight against entrenched bureaucracies, especially the Federal government. It is a heroic story for sure, and credits not only Sarah, but her father, and all the farmers she worked with, who would simply never quit, and whose stolidity made such a huge difference, not only to the outcome of their own case, but for many others that followed them.

This is a story about courage, justice, commitment, and belief in oneself. And it is important for us to be reminded that Americans can stand together for the good of all, especially now, when we can agree on virtually nothing. It is an inspiring journey I appreciated learning about. This is a terrific book, and I think we had a terrific conversation as well.

Sarah Vogel is an attorney and former politician whose career has focused on family farmers and ranchers. Vogel was the first woman in U.S. history to be elected as a state commissioner of agriculture. In 2006, the American Agricultural Law Association awarded her its Distinguished Service Award for contributions to the field of agriculture law, and Willie Nelson honored her at Farm Aid’s thirtieth anniversary in 2015 for her service to farmers. She is an advocate for Native American rights and lives in Bismarck, North Dakota.

“Sarah’s story, told in her unique voice, inspires me–and I’m sure it will inspire you–to fight for family farmers.” –Willie Nelson

Author website here.

Buy the book here.

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Susanne Paola Antonetta: The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here

The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here – Susanne Paola Antonetta – 978-0-8142-5780-7 – 248 pages – paperback – February, 2021 – Mad Creek Books – $22.95 – ebook editions available at lower prices

Sometimes one literally chances across a terrific book; it appears unbidden and takes over one’s complete attention. A surprise appearance in the daily maelstrom of life. This remarkable memoir by Susanne Paola Antonetta did just that for me, striking me like a lightning bolt out of the blue, and completely altering the trajectory of my thinking.

I’ve read alot of books and loved many of them. This book stopped me in my tracks. Reading it over the course of a few evenings, this author made me think and feel and understand another person’s experience, her deeply felt and beautifully described mind and being. That is quite an accomplishment and makes this a very special book indeed.

Antonetta brings us into her youth, the place of “Summerland” and her family’s life on the marshy border of the ocean in southern New Jersey. Like the descriptions of physics and astrophysics she intersperses between her memory pieces, her description of this place, the people in her family, and her own life are simultaneously dreamlike and definitive.

Her grandmother and mother are key figures throughout. And then she introduces her own experiences with bipolar disorder, drugs, and the trauma of electroshock treatment woven together with those brilliantly written descriptions of ideas in neuroscience and physics, and then there are her conversations with psychics and meditations on understanding their messages from inter-dimensional spaces. What a journey!

This is a memoir with great power and beauty, taking us into the past, the present and realms beyond, where ideas and perhaps the ground of being may or may not be found.

I won’t tell you much more about the book. I think you need to discover it for yourself. I loved it, and I really enjoyed speaking to Susanne as well. we had a terrific talk about this book and her writing.

This is a book I intend to re-read and work to understand more fully. Once is not enough.

“Antonetta tackles nothing less than consciousness and existence, employing an amalgam of science writing and mysticism. It’s hard to imagine another writer who could not only make such a project work but also make it seem natural and necessary.” —Robin Hemley, author of Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood.

Susanne Paola Antonetta is has written a number of books, including Make Me a Mother, Curious Atoms: A History with Physics, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World, a novella, and four books of poetry. Her work has been published in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Orion (one of my favorite magazines), the New Republic, and others. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.

Visit Susanne’s website for more information about her and her work.

You can buy the book from 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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