David Oates

A couple of years ago, David Oates showed up in Stehekin looking for some quiet space in which to finish up his most recent book, What We Love Will Save Us. He’d arranged to stay in a small cabin near the river, but that wasn’t to be. Mid-visit the river rose with spring snowmelt and he ended up bunking on high ground at our place for a few days while we were out of town. Upon return, I joined him as he ventured out through the muddy slough to collect the gear he’d left in the riverside cabin. Here he is on that day, testing the waters, in his hip waders.

It’s a fitting image for David’s work. His long and prolific career, as a poet and essayist, has often taken him into turbulent waters. Whether challenging wilderness philosophy in Paradise Wild or lobbying for the crucial character of urban spaces in City Limits: Walking Portland’s Boundary (to which I contributed the short essay “A View from Teensy Town”) or always – in the forefront of his work or the not-so-distant background – telling his own story of coming out as a gay man in a strict Baptist household, his voice is courageous and steady, empathetic, and original.

What We Love Will Save Us is a collection of mostly very short essays that cover all of that terrain and more, wading into the contentious politics of the last decade – war, torture, scandal, and the rest -- and coming to the conclusion of the fabulous title: What We Love Will Save Us. “Our job is to work on what we love,” he writes. “Daily. With precision and determination.”

You can check out the title essay as it appeared originally in High Country News:
www.hcn.org/issues/332/16642

And you can read more about the book here:
http://www.whatwelovewillsaveus.com/

Jerry Gabriel

As promised I'm planning to spend the weeks before Test Ride appears discussing lesser-known writers I admire.

This week I start with Jerry Gabriel. His first book represents the culmination of more than ten years of work. And it paid off. Not only did Drowned Boy win the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books, the book has also been chosen a Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection and is 2010 Barnes & Noble Discover Award finalist.

What I most admire about these fabulous linked stories set in rural southeast Ohio is the seamless way that landscape and longing and community combine in prose that’s honed, spare, and often, astonishingly, funny. The dialogue between the two main characters, Nate and Donnie Holland, brothers as different as day and night, is wry and affectionate, snappy and original.

In the title story, a grief-struck teenager considers geological history: “The idea that a river might change direction had captivated Samantha at a time when almost nothing sparked any real interest in her.” In “Marauders,” a whole slew of old-timers latch onto the local elementary school basketball team like rock star groupies: “We traveled like gypsies to these little towns—places called Mudsock and Comersville and just plain Water.”

You read a lot these days about a “sense of place” in writing, usually it means extra-lyrical prose about extra-pristine landscapes. (Yep, guilty as charged.) These stories evoke place plainly, and therefore elegantly. They show how places – pristine and, especially, not-so-pristine – mold us irrevocably, then shift unexpectedly. In the closing story “Reagan’s Army in Retreat,” Nate goes looking for Donnie only to stumble upon a house fire after which all that remains is a talking robot trivia game on eight track tapes stuck in the snow, a game that had once belonged to the boys. If there’s a more poignant image of loss, I can’t conjure it. And if a better book of short stories comes out this year, I’ll be surprised.

Foot dragged into the future .. uh, the now

So I started a facebook fan page. http://www.facebook.com/business/dashboard/#/pages/Ana-Maria-Spagna/359334945433

And as an antidote to all this embarrassing self-promotion, starting soon, I plan to dedicate this space to some of my favorite lesser known writers. Stay tuned!

Never say never

There are some topics I never figured I'd write about. Christmas is one. But things change. Here's "Christmas Naked" from the current issue of Mountain Gazette. It's not nearly as risque as it sounds. And I'm forever grateful to John Fayhee, the brilliant curmudgeonly editor at MG, who keeps throwing these unlikely topics my way.

http://www.mountaingazette.com/news/mountain_notebook/christmas_naked/

"Spawning in Mud," meanwhile, is a title that Laurie gets full credit for. An oldie of sorts, about the 2003 flood that changed things a lot in Stehekin, it appears in the current issue of Watershed journal from Brown U

Fast words, slow words

For several years now, ever since we got our satellite Internet connection, I’ve been thinking about how many words I spit out each day – in emails, student critiques, press releases—and whether any of that counts as writing. The answer is sort of. But not really. It’s kind of like the difference between fast food and real food.

When my first book, Now Go Home, came out a reporter asked me how long it took me to write an essay.
“About a year,” I said.
He nearly fell over laughing.
“Is it getting any easier for you?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure I wanted it to get any easier. The long process of writing, revising, then writing some more, was, I thought, the whole point. Every writer I knew and admired had spent years on a single essay or story. Maybe not every single essay or story, but still …

Truth is, five years later, the process is easier for me. Essays come faster. Sometimes in less than a week. But the books I love the most simmered for a long time. And the writers I admire the most are the ones who have stuck at it for years. They’re not necessarily bestselling authors, but they are real writers, who have what Michael Ventura calls the “Talent of the Room.”

http://www.michaelventura.org/writings/LA4.pdf

That is, I suppose, what I aspire to.

Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus cover art

So here's the cover for the book. The photo is from the Florida State Archives and is, actually, from the Tallahassee bus boycott. The rider whose face is most clear is Reverend C.K. Steele, the stalwart leader of the protest.

Of course, I would have loved for the cover to show an interracial pair, one black rider and one white, but that would have been far too dangerous for a photo op. In fact, in 1959, two years after my dad and his friends rode integrated, a group of student activists in Tallahassee planned another test ride. They decided that it would be safe for black riders to take seats in the front of the bus, though it happened rarely, but that white and black students riding together would only invite violence. They were right, of course. In 1961, when integrated Freedom Riders rode south on a Greyhound from Nashville, violence materialized at every turn, most famously on Mother's Day when an angry crowd in Anniston, Alabama threw gas-soaked rags through the bus windows screaming: "Fry the goddamn niggers." Most of the angry crowd, men and women, were still wearing church clothes.

One last footnote on the cover art: I heard a speaker on design this summer mention that orange is the second-worst color choice for a book cover, behind only purple. Then again orange does bring out that Sunnyland irony.

Know a good bookstore?

So here's the cover copy for Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus including the generous blurbs from two of my favorite memoirists, Kathleen Finnearan and Danielle Trussoni.

The info represents my makeshift press kit as I begin to scour the landscape for places that will invite me to come read from or talk about the book next year. I'm not picky. I'll visit a school, church, library, book group. If you can think of a venue, feel free to pass this stuff on, and/or to drop me a note about my schedule.

Of course independent bookstores are the best. When Now Go Home came out I was terrified to go out reading. Me from the boonies, on leave from trail crew. What should I wear? How should I act? From the minute Laurie and I walked into the first independent bookstore, I could tell it didn't matter a whit. Independent bookstore people were my tribe. They were kind and genuine, engaged and engaging, and always appreciative if occasionally quirky. I've been dismayed lately to find how many of those great little stores (and some big ones like Black Oak Books in Berkeley) have gone out of business in five years. Yikes!

Here's the info:

http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Test-Ride-on-the-Sunnyland-Bus,674635.aspx

Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus chronicles the story of an American family against the backdrop of one of the civil rights movement’s lesser-known stories. In January 1957, Joseph Spagna and five other young men waited to board a city bus called the Sunnyland in Tallahassee, Florida. Their plan was simple but dangerous: ride the bus together—three blacks and three whites—get arrested, and take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Fifty years later Ana Maria Spagna sets off on a journey to understand what happened and why.
Her journey complicated by the fact that her father never spoke of the Sunnyland experience and died unexpectedly when she was eleven, Spagna travels from her remote mountain home in the Pacific Northwest to contemporary Tallahassee, searching for the truth of the incident and her father’s involvement. She seeks out the other bus riders, now in their seventies, and tries to make sense of their conflicting stories. Her odyssey becomes further troubled by the sudden diagnosis of her mother’s terminal cancer.
Winner of the River Teeth Literary nonfiction prize, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus deftly weaves cultural and personal history, memoir and reportage, in this fascinating look at a family and a nation’s, past.

“Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus stands as a magnificent testament and tribute to the lives of many people— Ana Maria Spagna’s parents, the many patriots of the Civil Rights Movement, and the citizens of communities far and wide, large and small. Her surprising story renewed my awe in the interconnectedness of all of our lives and affirmed that the current championing of hope in our country is a hope deserving of all its fervor.”—Kathleen Finneran, author of The Tender Land: A Family Love Story

“Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus is an absorbing story of a daughter’s search to understand her father’s involvement in the civil rights movement. While Ana Maria Spagna’s ability to capture the nuances of her father’s life is impressive, it is the wonder and persistence she brings to her tale that make this such an engaging book. Any daughter who has puzzled over the mystery of her heritage will love Spagna from the get-go.”—Danielle Trussoni author of Falling Through the Earth