Category: writing

Remember high school? OMG who doesn’t, complete with what Steven Goldman terms its “acceptable level of abuse” of anyone who was “different.”

I talked recently with Goldman, the Jamaica Plain-based author of Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film About The Grapes of Wrath. The book is a young adult novel, a genre that probably exists specifically because it’s not easy being in high school. Not now and not in 1980’s North Carolina.

“The world has changed from when I grew up in a very conservative part of the Bible Belt,” says Goldman, He recalls that , as one of very few Jews in his community, he felt that abuse, alongside the people who embodied the other two taboos of differentness–being gay and being black. Those memories led him to write a book in which an 11th-grader reacts to finding out that his best friend is gay.

“It’s about how the world changes for the straight person. Mitchell (the protagonist) is narcissistic. He doesn’t get it that it’s not all about him.”

“I was interested in how it might be different today compared with the way it was for someone being gay in North Carolina in the ’80s,” says Goldman. He says his own children, growing up in such a different time and place, couldn’t understand, during the public discussions around legalizing same sex marriage, that someone might not want their friends’ parents to marry.

“The book is about how groups accept and reject people. My interest is in how that happens . I like to inhabit a character and see it from that perspective.”

Despite the serious underlying circumstance, the book is disarmingly funny, filled with the nerdy dialogue and deadpan interior musings of adolescent boys trying to sort out their place in the world. For example, Mitchell, who, at 17 considers himself “the single biggest loser on the face of the planet,” admits that, aside from going on one date, his “entire romantic life has consisted of kissing exactly two females who are unrelated to me.

“(T)he two kisses occurred at a party in seventh grade. The two females in question kissed practically everyone at the party. It was some sort of dare thing. My active involvement was basically happening to stand in the right room. Given the speed of the lip action, I was lucky to escape unbruised.”

Goldman had not set out to write a young adult–or YA–novel. After teaching middle school, he assumed that younger age group would be his target audience. But, while studying for a master’s in creative writing at Emerson (College, he found himself drawn to the YA.

“I was writing a novel that just happens to be for that age group,” he says. “There was a lot of emotional resonance with that time period in my life. I tried to ground it in some emotional experience I understand. This is a novel I’d like to have had to read when I was that age. Younger kids are capable of reading the book, but it’s not necessarily geared to them.”

Which brings us to the big YA problem.

“I didn’t read Salinger until around my late 20s,” says Goldman, who spent his teen years reading more challenging adult books. “By that time, I was kind of late for it.

“When I was 17 I wouldn’t have been caught dead reading a YA novel,” he admits. And he knows he’s not alone, especially here in the Athens of America and beyond where credential-gathering and what looks good on a college application are often the criteria for selecting reading material.

Goldman makes the case that YA novels speak directly to their readers’ experience. He puts in a good word for reading–in the emotional sense–at grade level. Sure, high school students can read War and Peace just as parents can tuck their children in with Shakespearean sonnets, but, in books as in many other things, there is a time that’s right.

And this is the time to say this is my final column for City Weekly. For the past seven years it has been fun to think about who might be turning to this page on a Sunday morning. To everyone who read my words, to everyone who shared their thoughts with me and my readers, and to the editors who helped me get those words right, my thanks.

Mortgage foreclosures, banks in trouble, raging unemployment, and vanishing fortunes. The economic times they are precarious and the country’s been here before. Back in the 1930s the stimulus plan included funding projects like roads and bridges and dams…and art. Then, as now, there were those who protested spending money on what they called a “frill,” but some of the most memorable work to come out of New Deal projects was in the arts.

Susan Quinn and I met recently over coffee to talk about art and the economy. Quinn is the author of Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times. With the current crisis prompting thoughts of the New Deal programs, her book is a timely reminder of what is valued when values are shaken to the core. Quinn is also the author of biographies of Marie Curie and Karen Horney and of Human Trial), which chronicles the development of a new drug.

We talk about how hard it can be to find money to support art when basic necessities are at risk.

“It’s a hot button issue,” Quinn admits. But she tells me that during the New Deal, Harry Hopkins, who headed FDR’s Works Progress Administration, argued the importance of arts funding. His Federal Theatre Project, which she discusses in her book, was one part of a project that also supported writing, visual arts, and music programs.

“Hopkins said that artists add to the wealth of the nation and the nation is enriched by their talent.

“The Federal Theatre Project was so courageous–art is always risky,”she says, making the point that the impact far exceeded the expenditure. “It was only a tiny part of the WPA budget–just one-tenth of one percent.” The project supported the production of both new plays and classics. It brought racially-integrated theater companies to racially-integrated audiences at a time when public events were often segregated. It also created a form, the living newspaper, that offered no-holds-barred explorations of charged issues like syphilis, slums, and public versus private ownership of utilities.

“It brought life to complex ideas. “ Quinn laughs. “ We could do a great one now: ’Bail-out!’”

Then, as now, urgent needs competed for available dollars, and politicians often questioned giving some of those dollars to arts programs. In the book, Quinn quotes Brooks Atkinson, who served as the New York Times’ theater critic from 1925 to 1960, who wrote, “Art seems like boondoggling to a Congressman who is looking for a club with which to belabor the administration and there is always something in the Federal Theatre that can be blown up into a scandal. But as for a socially useful achievement it would be hard among the relief projects to beat the Federal Theatre, which has brought art and ideas within the range of millions of people all over the country and proved that the potential theater audience is inexhaustible.”

Those theater productions, along with the other WPA-sponsored artistic works, lifted the spirits, engaged the imagination, and enlarged the understanding of a nation in desperate circumstances. In a recent Newsweek article, Jeremy McCarter wrote of how American art of various kinds from the blues to Angels in America, to Huck Finn, have all gone into shaping our sense of who we are as Americans. So even as state and local officials vie to proclaim the shovel-readiness of their wish lists, there is a hunger, too, for what can be audience-ready. And even with the unarguable competing needs that exist, Quinn feels optimistic about funding for the arts.

“Our new president embodies the artistic imagination of the country in its largest and most generous sense. And we are a creative people.”

Catherine Sasanov was stunned. It was 2005 and she had just come across, in some old family papers, a will written in 1857 by her great-great-great-grandfather that contained an astounding revelation. Among the possessions he was leaving to his sons and daughters were nine slaves.

It was inevitable that Sasanov, a poet who lives in Jamaica Plain, would ultimately write about this. The result is “Tara,” a chapbook published recently by Cervena Barva Press of Somerville.

In poetry, as in most things, one size does not fit all. A poem can stretch out for the length of a whole book, or be a bite-sized couplet. And a poetry collection can be a hefty “new and selected” weighing in at several hundred pages or the more typical length of roughly between 60 and 100 pages. The less familiar chapbook, is generally a bite-size 40 pages or less and it typically deals with a single subject.

“I didn’t set out to write a chapbook,” says Sasanov, who is the author of two full-length collections, one previous chapbook, and a libretto. But the discovery of slave ownership in her family was all-consuming and she knew she would not be able to write about anything else until she had dug deeply into it.

“It took a day or two to sort out my feelings. I knew this wasn’t going away.” So Sasanov started a journey of research and reflection that became “Tara.”

Central to her thinking about it was her acknowledgment that this was not her story to tell and that the telling itself once again claimed an ownership she was not entitled to. The final lines of the poem, “His Personal Property: Inventory and Appraisal Sheet, 1860,” read, “Owned by the blood that owned you once/ what right do I have to track you down?”

And yet, without her words, at least part of the story would remain untold. She has dedicated “Tara” to the memory of the slaves, Flora, Ben Eliza, George, Henry, Henderson, Edmund, Alex, and Easter, “and all the others related to them/ by blood, marriage, and bondage–How is it I could have come so close/to never knowing that you existed?”

Although Sasanov plans that the poems in “Tara” will become part of a full-length manuscript called “Had Slaves,” she feels that the chapbook format is ideal for the “Tara” poems. She is very interested how a poem looks on the page, how white space can enhance its meaning, and how it can be presented it a way that guides the reader to “hear” it as she intends. A chapbook often allows more freedom for a non-traditional presentation.

The opening poem, for example, is a spare 20 words, but they spread in a single line across three pages and gather power as much from the blank space as from the words: “Here, even the fragments must be pieced together/ so let me follow you to the paper’s edge until/you disappear.”

As Sasanov notes, a chapbook is small and very portable, In a work like “Tara” it can be poetry boiled down to its most concentrated essence.

Book sections look thinner these days and poetry collections don’t always make the cut. So how do poet and audience find each other? I thought I’d help a little by giving three poets the chance to introduce you to their latest books

Sam Cornish is the author of six poetry collections and currently serves as Boston’s first Poet Laureate:

An Apron Full of Beans (Cavankerry Press) is an African-American sequel to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Written in the voices and with the lyrics of the blues, the spiritual and the language of writers such as Langston Hughes and Margaret Walker, the poems grow out of the historical and personal reminiscences of those artists and their traditions. The poems are both biographical and autobiographical as they revisit American history through the art forms of film noir, science fiction, the blues, jazz and other aspects of American history and popular culture.

James Smethurst of UMass Amherst says, in his introduction, “In An Apron Full of Beans, Sam Cornish describes his artistic journey as “from Beat to African American.” In many poems the reader encounters a profound engagement with history that is almost Brechtian as Cornish … takes up iconic figures such as Paul Robeson, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass. The historical figures mix with filmic characters played by Jim Brown, Louis Beavers, Dorothy Dandridge, and Robert De Niro as well as fictional figures such as Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas and Chester Himes’s Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones.”

Kathleen Aguero is the author of three previous poetry collections and editor of three anthologies:

The poems in Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth (Cervena Barva press) investigate, critique, and update the character of Nancy Drew, a role model for me and for many other women when we were young. In addition to wondering what Nancy would be like had she reached contemporary middle-age, while rereading the books I was taken aback by the ethnic and class biases the original series contained and had to consider how those assumptions influenced my own views as a young reader. These poems also gave me a voice in which to write about events in my life that I’d had trouble addressing previously. The poems in this chapbook are, I hope, entertaining but with a serious edge. “For Nancy on Her 50th Birthday,” is virtually a found poem composed of titles from the mystery series.

To Nancy Drew on Her 50th Birthday

What secret does the old clock hold now?
Where does the hidden staircase lead?
It’s time to mount the 99 steps,
accept the secret in the old attic.
The clues have been there all along
in your diary, in the old album,
in the velvet mask you struggle
to remove. You need to answer the invitation
to the golden pavilion, read the mysterious letter
of your own blood, lean against
the crumbling wall and listen
to the mystery of the tolling bell.
Although you wish you’d never started on this quest
for the missing map, now you have
it in your hand, you must follow it
to the message in the hollow oak, cross
the haunted bridge to face the wooden lady
and the statue whispering what you do not
want to hear.

John Hildebidle, the author two previous books, one poetry, one prose; teaches English at MIT:

My book, Signs, Translations (Salmon Publishing), takes its title from a line by a poet-colleague, Ed Barrett: “All around us are signs. Some of them even have translations.” Once, asked to give a talk to a student group on the subject “Where do poems come from,” I realized I faced a true mystery. The legends of the Muses seemed hopelessly archaic, so I did some Googling, and found that a number of first-rank poets (including Denise Levertov, a great personal favorite) argued that poems arise from paying close attention even to the apparently trivial and ephemeral. The poems in this book undertake that work – focusing on graffiti, birds, and that master observer Henry David Thoreau. If the book has a goal, it is to urge the reader to look more closely — and appreciatively — at what they pass, day-to-day.

After the historic election this month, the visions dancing in my head are of a post-patchwork America where race, gender, and other dividing lines fade away and people are judged, as Martin Luther King dreamed, by the content of their character. And this hopeful moment comes just as I am thinking about a conversation I had recently with Judith Nies about her new book, “The Girl I Left Behind: A Narrative History of the Sixties.”

Gender equality is the issue in this book. Talk about the personal being political: Nies has written a fascinating account of her own personal experience interwoven with her observations of a pivotal decade of political and social history.

Given that women doctors, tenured professors, Supreme Court justices–and, yes, candidates for national office–no longer surprise us with the very fact of their existence, it is a little shocking to realize how recently that has come to be. The ‘60s Nies remembers, as I do, was a time when the celebrated peace activists were often men who still expected the women to be making the coffee. It was an era when smart women were shunted into low level jobs for, as Nies quotes one job recruiter, “a year or two before you get married.” This is a story about a time when it was taken for granted that the person in charge would be a man. A white man.

Nies’s story is about political and personal awakening. The spark for the book came in a 2003 speech by President George W. Bush in which he promised “the women of the Middle East” that “your day of freedom is coming.” Nies heard that and thought, instead, of the men who, just a few years before, had not rushed to guarantee that freedom to America’s women.

“I remembered that most members of his Cabinet and of his Administration had voted and worked against us,” Nies says. “I was interested in looking at how history affects individual choices and behaviors.”

The decade’s most notable markers are all in the book, and Nies’s readers often tell her how much of what she has written resonates for them, too. There are the countless slights and oversights that resulted in the “click of recognition”–that double-take moment of suddenly seeing how women were excluded from serious conversation and for consideration for serious work. There is the remembrance of gratuitous comments that constantly told women their value was decorative, supportive.

There is the scene of arriving for a meeting and being stopped at the front door and directed, instead, to the “ladies’ entrance” in the back. And there is the dramatic moment when representatives of a grassroots movement of 50,000 women from across the country insisted on being heard by the Congressional committee considering what became the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Nies makes the point that change doesn’t just “happen,” how even talking about women being “given” the right to vote denies the years of struggle and sacrifice that went into making it happen. She tells about her own actions in arguing for women to be admitted to the House of Representatives’ visitors’ gallery instead of being segregated in a “ladies’ gallery,” and in helping open the Rhodes Scholarships to women.

It comes as a slight shock to realize that these changes happened only 40 years ago, just as it’s amazing to see this new president elected short decades after Emmett Till, the Birmingham church bombing, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge made nation-shaming headlines.

Just as I was back in a ‘60s state of mind, a friend phoned with this story: Her daughter had applied for a restaurant hostess job and was told that she could be given an interview only after submitting a photograph. Click!

It may be a new morning in America, but there’s work still to be done.

What’s with all those summer reading lists? You’d think no one ever picked up a book at any other time of year. Well, summer is gone in a blink around these parts and, besides, this isn’t exactly a beach-read kind of town. So here’s a radical idea–why not a list of great fall reads? Why not some books filled with spice and substance for curling up with on these first chilly days. Maybe even one to last until the first snowed-in day. For recommendations, I went to some of the people who put the City Weekly section together and they gave me an intriguing list. Not a beach read in the bunch: just what you’d expect here in the Athens of America.

Lesley Becker, City Weekly’s designer, says, “As a kid I made a decision to never reread a book — too many good ones out there to spend time repeating myself. And I’ve felt that way my whole life until I read “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin. Written in 1899, the book is shockingly ahead of its time and still relevant today. It’s the story of a woman’s intellectual, emotional and sexual awakening. Nothing (and I mean nothing) goes unquestioned in this book. Be prepared to be provoked. (I’m on my third reading.)”

Becker continues, ““Fans of Richard Russo’s “Empire Falls”, “The Risk Pool” and “Nobody’s Fool” who haven’t read “Straight Man” haven’t read his best work. It has all the small town color and family dramas of the other books, but this one is laugh-out-loud funny. Why it’s the only book of his that hasn’t been made into a movie is beyond me. I can clearly see Larry David as the protagonist William Henry Devereaux, Jr., a middle-aged English professor at a small, financially-strapped college in Pennsylvania who’s juggling family, work and personal (make that very personal) problems. And then there’s the thing about the duck, I mean goose. Well, you’ll see.”

Here’s one to last until winter. Danielle Dreilinger, who covers Somerville as a correspondent, recommends the late David Foster Wallace’s novel “Infinite Jest.” “At 1000-plus pages and probably five pounds, DFW’s comic masterpiece will take you through an entire season. It absorbed me through endless hours waiting for, on, and after dilatory Greek ferries. If you have trouble getting started, skip forward and read the Eschaton chapter first.”

Dean Inouye, a former City Weekly editor now at Globe South, recommends “Tears of Longing” by Christine R. Yano.

“Just as the American Western has its counterpart in samurai movies, country and western music has a Japanese analog in ‘enka’ songs. Though the prose sometimes betrays the book’s origin as a monograph, it’s the most substantial work in English on this genre of heartache, nostalgia, and heavy drinking. It combines the broad strokes of how the music reflects the national culture with such minute analysis as singers’ hand gestures and the most frequently used words in lyrics (number one is sake, the rice wine).”

Kimberly Sanfeliz, City Weekly’s editorial assistant, suggests Wally Lamb’s “I Know This Much Is True.” “This isn’t exactly a light read–the hardcover edition weighs in at 897 pages and tells the story of Dominick Birdsey and his schizophrenic twin, Thomas. Tracing the family’s history through flashbacks and a grandfather’s memoir, Lamb touches on AIDS, the Vietnam War, and mental illness. Though not easy breezy beach fare, the book is an ultimately redeeming story of a man who must confront his family’s past before building his own future.”

Kathleen Burge, reporter, recommends “Harbor,” by Lorraine Adams. “This is the heartbreaking story of an Algerian immigrant who arrives in Boston as a stowaway and soon gets tangled in an anti-terrorism investigation.This beautiful work of fiction is also remarkably well-informed by Adams’s years as a reporter for The Washington Post.”

And I have a s suggestion for you, too, a novel I recently finished. “The German Bride,” by Joanna Hershon is an imaginative take on the 19th-century American frontier story . I’m also about to dive into Fulcrum, the Cambridge-based literary annual whose latest issue, #6, features 730 pages of poetry and provocative essays including previously unpublished work by Samuel Beckett and Robert Frost.