Please visit THIS LINK.
I am grateful to have my work embraced. I am especially touched that Mr. Wolff saw that I was not merely stereotyping Isaac Stevens, though he certainly is amenable to stereotype. The difficulty is that the ideology of Manifest Destiny seems unbelievably crass (thus stereotypical) to educated moderns, yet it was believed and embodied by Stevens and most of his contemporaries. It is always easier to spot the holes in past ideologies. Our current perceived wisdom ought to provide future generations with a few good laughs.
How can one love an acronym? By what it stands for – the independent booksellers of the Pacific NW, who were kind enough to embrace BONES BENEATH OUR FEET at their annual convention this past Thursday. BOOKSELLERS & LIBRARIANS – I’m available for events! At PNBA, I did a talk at lunch to the biggest room full of booksellers and librarians I’ve ever seen, showed some historical slides, and gratefully received lots of positive response. Then I was on a panel featuring Molly Gloss, Jonathan Evison & Jim Lynch, to discuss NW Novels for NW Readers, and we discovered . . . [drum roll] . . . that we are on the cusp of a major Pacific NW literary renaissance. Well, that’s the topic for a whole separate blog entry, so stay tuned. & keep reading! Here’s my fave from the past week – Wild Life, by Molly Gloss.
Here’s the latest praise for BONES BENEATH OUR FEET from a discerning book blogger who shall remain anonymous until his actual review is posted. This is cribbed from an email to my publicist:
“Just wanted to write you to thank you for sending me Bones Beneath Our Feet. . . . I really enjoyed reading this. I mentioned this book in a Librarything discussion thread, saying it begs a small screen adaptation a la Deadwood (a movie wouldn’t do it justice). I’ve been checking out historical info about Washington Territory, since it piqued my interest. What a wonderful book. More people should read it. . . . This is top notch writing. Romance, war, trial scenes! The book has it all! (And I usually don’t get this excited or sound like a town booster with every book I read.)”
One should be wary of blogging after midnight. The dark hour of the soul . . . Tonight I heard Russell Banks read at the SPL. Wow, what a fine writer. And courageous – he doesn’t rest on laurels; instead, he uses his position in the literary world to push into new and controversial areas. His newest novel (Lost Memory of Skin) is told from the perspective of a sex offender. The excerpts he read were inspired. A master at the height of his powers. Ahh, fiction . . . Sometimes nothing is more true. This is not to glorify sex offenders. Rather, to humanize all beings. & to draw the distinction between the predatory serial rapist on the one hand, and the young boy who merely loves a girl a few years younger who is 17, or the drunk who is caught peeing in the park. There are differences in degrees of culpability that our Puritanism and fear has led us to overlook. These pariahs are not all created equal, says Banks, and he seems to make a good point. Before we burn too many more witches, we might want to stop and hear their stories. Some are reprehensible, incorrigible, from whom protection is needed. Others, not so much. All live under banishment from society, which can only make them into the monsters we feared.
Google BONES and what do you get? Not a forensic physician’s or anthropology site, and certainly not my novel BONES BENEATH OUR FEET, but the TV show BONES. Why am I not writing for TV? Leschi and his intrepid band of noble Natives, battling the evil, power-mad Governor and his sycophant, Colonel Blunt . . . In episode one, opening in Mother Damnable’s whorehouse, the Governor and the leading industrialists of the fledgling ‘burg of Seattle are enjoying a night’s carousing, when word arrives of an Injun plan for a sneak attack. Meanwhile, young, impressionable Ainsley McAllister courts her beau, to the dismay of her secret admirer – the Similkameen serving boy rescued by her father when he was staked to his master’s grave. And Lieutenant Slaughter and his Merry Pranksters slog around the wilderness, shooting one another in the rear, drinking moonshine, and singing Yankee Doodle. All are rescued or blown to smithereens by the good Sloop Decatur, but Leschi manages to slink off to fight another day as the Governor and his kitchen cabinet return for sloppy seconds. [Last part censored]. Cue the Viagra & car commercials, not to mention the audience of millions. Well, quality tops quantity. I’ll stick to the discerning readers whom I love love love . . . Please read & recommend the real BONES, my book!
I’m told that the former Seattle Bookfest returns in the guise of Northwest Bookfest, October 1 & 2, 2011, 10am – 6pm, Peter Kirk Park, 202 Third Street, Kirkland, WA. Their web address is www.northwestbookfest2011.com I’m even told I’ll be there – so of course, it must be so. I’ll be teaching the hysterical novel – check that, the HISTORICAL novel – from 4-5pm, Oct. 1st. FREE – can’t beat that! Please come join the fun & post & re-post to spread the word. It seems this event could benefit from some viral marketing . . .
How could you resist with a tittle like that [sic.]? So, my nearly 90-year-old mom decided to read my poem, breasts make the best pillows, at the open poetry mic at her assisted living home. (Please find a link to this published poem on my poetry page.) The folks in attendance, perhaps tired of pablum, gave it a standing O. So the organizer wanted to print it in the Ballard Landmark weekly newsletter, as he usually does with the most popular poem of the previous week.
Enter the corporate goon, who shall remain nameless. Apparently, it is necessary to protect our elders from the news that women have breasts (men too!). Censorship reared its ugly head.
My mom has now written (as far as I know) her very first poem, entitled censorship makes the worst pillow. I think she might read it at the open mic tomorrow night. I’m so going! Maybe we can all say some more “bad” words. Maybe we can levitate the place. Maybe we’ll all have fun. Sounds dangerous to me . . .
LiTFUSE is past, long live LiTFUSE! A gaggle of poets & musicians just scorchified Tieton pleasingly to the tongue // marvin bell was so cool we barely kneaded the bread of air condit ioning. You could be cool 2 at LiTFUSE 2012, which is SEPTEMBER 21-23.
LiTFUSE is an annual weekend-long poets’ workshop held in Tieton, WA (near Yakima), sponsored by Tieton Arts & Humanities, that is open to poets of all ages and styles. LiTFUSE combines writing, exploration, improvisation, meditation, camaraderie, natural beauty and readings to ignite your muse. In 2012, LiTFUSE will feature the wizard of EWU, Christopher Howell, joined by an amazing faculty that includes Alaska Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker, spoken-word artist Karen Finneyfrock, Jim Bertolino of Bellingham / Western fame, and Prairie Schooner book award winner Kathleen Flenniken. You can sign up for a mere $35 deposit on BROWN PAPER TICKETS – today!
The first in a several-part interview Jack Evans did of me, engineered by Barbara Evans, airs this THURSDAY – PoetsWest at KSER 90.7 FM Thursday, September 08 at 6:30 p.m. (PST). Also, it is PoetsWest #205, archived for streaming. Bring your ears, and all the stuff in between.
BONES reviews so far – mostly good, a few bad. But what, really, are we to make of it? For example, here’s a contemporary review of MOBY DICK:
This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed….
… The result is, at all events, a most provoking book, — neither so utterly extravagant as to be entirely comfortable, nor so instructively complete as to take place among documents on the subject of the Great Fish, his capabilities, his home and his capture. Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise….
We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book…. Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature — since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist. –Henry F. Chorley, in London Athenaeum, October 25 1851
I’ll defer to the Bard – “full of sound & fury, signifying nothing.”
