On the Road with Mary Oliver

Helene Atwan began her career in publishing at Random House in 1976; she worked at A.A.Knopf, Viking Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Simon and Schuster, before being named director of Beacon Press in 1995. She served for eight years on the board of PEN-New England and is the Administrator of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Several weeks ago, in the midst of National Poetry Month, I made an impulsive decision to drive out from Boston to Syracuse, New York, for a poetry reading. Mary Oliver was scheduled to fly from Logan for that reading, but I thought if I offered to intercept her on the connection from Provincetown and drive, it would give us some precious hours to talk and allow me the rare treat of hearing Mary read—an opportunity one should never pass up. Mary graciously accepted the offer of a ride and, as luck almost never has it, it was a beautiful early spring day when we set out for our five hour road trip.

Photo by Helene Atwan.

As we approached the border of New York State, Mary interrupted our conversation to point out that we were coming up to the road to Austerlitz, a road she had driven so many times on her way to Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay for 25 years and then of her sister, Norma Millay Ellis. I knew that Mary had lived there too, on and off for more than half-a-dozen years after she finished high school and while she attended Vassar. The day was fine and we were making very good time, so I turned to her to ask if we should stop, and she instantly replied Yes!

What We Talk About When We Talk about Nature

by David Gessner

David Gessner is the author of six books of literary nonfiction, including Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond and The Prophet of Dry Hill: Lessons From a Life in Nature. He is the editor of Ecotone, the literary journal of place. 

It is bad form to refer to one's own work and worse to quote oneself.  But here goes.

In 1999, well before Drs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger pronounced environmentalism dead, I diagnosed the field of nature writing as a terminal case in an essay and, three years later, a book called Sick of Nature.

The essay came about when, after throwing a book against a wall in which the author had droned on serenely about "being the present moment" and "living in the natural woods," I went for a walk on my unnatural beach carrying my unnatural micro-cassette recorder, into which I spoke the beginnings of an essay. When the essay was later published it began exactly the way I spoke it that day as I tramped along the beach:

      I am sick of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean. 

Of course I wasn't really sick of the natural world, just of the way some writers chose to portray it. I was sick of the hushed voice, sick of the saintliness, sick of the easy notions of the perfectibility of man, sick of the apocalyptic robes, sick of the scolding.  But most of all I was sick of the certainty that seemed to ooze out of the words. Writers certain that they knew what would happen in the world and certain that they knew how to be in that world and certain that they should tell us these things. The odd thing was that, for all their certainty, the world they described didn't sound much at all like the world I happened to live in.

Sharing the Story of the Boston Italians

by Stephen Puleo

Stephen Puleo's latest book is The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day. His previous books include Due to Enemy Action: The True World War II Story of the USS Eagle 56, and Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, a critically-acclaimed Boston-area bestseller.

As the paperback edition of The Boston Italians is released this month, I wanted to make a few observations about readers' reactions to the book since the hardcover’s debut a year ago. I have received hundreds of e-mails and spoken to nearly two thousand people at presentations throughout the Boston area; the response has been overwhelmingly positive and heartwarming – from Italian-Americans and others – and has fallen into two main categories.

First, there is the resounding opinion that the book was long overdue; that it's simply about time Boston’s second largest ethnic group was the subject of a "non-Mob" book. That the real story – one of Italian immigrants overcoming enormous odds and paving the way for their children and grandchildren to achieve remarkable success – needed to be told.

Poetry Month: Prayer Poems for Troubling Times

by Joan Murray

No matter what we believe, we seem to share a human inclination to speak to someone or something greater than ourselves--someone we like to think is in control of things. Prayers arrive like a spiritual emergency kit in times of need. "Oh, God, help them," we say when we pass an accident scene. Even if we haven't prayed for years.

Some of us feel lucky to know God. And we stay on regular speaking-terms with him--sometimes in ways that might seem petty to the creator of billions of solar systems. (What must he have thought of all my adolescent prayers for boyfriends and basketball victories?) But whether we pray every day, or only in times of need, where do we find the words? One surprising source is poetry.

Poets have always talked to God--and they're happy if we listen in. In fact, some prayer poems are best said out loud--like "O Sweet Irrational Worship" by Thomas Merton, with these beautiful lines: "By ceasing to question the sun / I have become light." Another to recite under the sky is "Eagle Poem" by Native American Joy Harjo, which begins: "To pray you open your whole self / To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon, / To one whole voice that is you / And know there is more."

From the Director: Notable Fiction Honored by PEN

by Helene Atwan

I have the honor to serve as the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award administrator for PEN-NE (please visit the web site if you don’t know this wonderful organization, devoted to the causes of literacy and freedom of expression). Last Sunday was the day that the award was conferred, this year to novelist Joshua Ferris for Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown), a remarkably witty and deeply affecting book about the world of work in an era of downsizing. The Hemingway is for a first work of fiction, and the judges also named two finalists, Rebecca Curtis for Twenty Grand (Harper Perennial) and Ravi Howard for Like Trees, Walking (Amistad). In the same ceremony, at the magisterial John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Mass., PEN-NE handed out the L.L.Winship Award for fiction to Rishi Reddi for Karma and Other Stories (Harper Perennial), in Poetry to Ann Killough for Beloved Idea (Alice James Books), and in nonfiction to Kristin Laine for American Band (Gotham Books).

Making it a Movie

by Martin Moran

I write from the edge of Washington, DC, on a freezing day. I'm here performing a one-man play, The Tricky Part, which was developed from my memoir of the same title. There's an Obama event going on at a Virginia high school some blocks from here. A massive motorcade -- cycles, black sedans, police cars -- is streaming past my apartment window. It is the picture of momentum itself: wheels and steel and flashing lights, the gathering force of change, a traffic nightmare, a future president? The high school they’re headed to, T.C. Williams, was the subject of a feature film some years ago starring Denzel Washington as the coach of the school's football team, the Titans.

I'm watching all this, here at my computer, while struggling to write a script, a film adaptation of my book and play. The autobiographical tale is sensitive and complex and I am finding the task of transforming the material into yet another genre daunting if not impossible. This accounts for all the looking out the window.

Let me lay out the essentials. When I was twelve, a camp counselor molested me. Our illicit sex went on for three years. I grew taller and older while holding the boy inside me hostage because I blamed him for being bad, for doing wrong, for succumbing to desire. I couldn’t help it and it was agonizing. I got even older and started writing about what happened, became obsessed with remembering, with using language to seek meaning in the story. A day would arrive when I stood to face a pasty old man crumpled in his wheelchair, the counselor who'd wronged me when I was a child. The one who ignited my aching sense of complicity. I looked at that man, at his stained pajamas; his puffy cheeks and I felt my heart break. For the fragile human in front of me, but more so for the boy I once was. And somewhere in that breaking was the beginning of forgiveness. Somehow, because I'd spent so much time piecing together the narrative of my own life, I was able to see, to feel, how that boy was blameless and how forgiveness was the gift I must give to myself.

Dispatch from the Sundance Film Festival

by Thomas N. DeWolf

The snow is falling outside the home several of us have rented in Park City, Utah, to attend the Sundance Film Festival in support of our cousin Katrina Browne’s film Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. It is 19 degrees outside, which is warmer than it has been. The cold and the white stuff haven’t diminished the size of the audiences in the films I’ve seen so far.

I’ve not been to this or any other film festival outside my hometown before. I doubt that I ever would have were it not for the high honor of having Sundance select for competition the film that features our family struggling with the legacy of slavery by exposing New England’s—and our own ancestors’—complicity in the slave trade.

The film premiered here, appropriately enough, on Monday, January 21: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We were honored by the presence of Congressman John Conyers, Jr., Chair of the House Judiciary Committee. On Monday morning, he participated on a panel dedicated to the message and mission of Traces of the Trade, and attended the film’s premiere that night. It was particularly significant to be with the man who introduced the legislation—four days after Dr. King’s assassination—that ultimately resulted in the establishment of the national holiday fifteen years later in 1983. Conyers has introduced legislation (H.R. 40) that would establish a commission to study the legacy of slavery and possible remedieseach session since 1989. It has never had a hearing until last month. As Chair of Judiciary, he is finally in a position to move this important legislation forward that has languished for so long.

Monday Link Roundup: Interfaith Heroes, Praise for Our World, Womb Outsourcing, and Vet Suicides

Read the Spirit, an ambitious and thoughtful site devoted to issues of spirituality and religion, is devoting a portion of their impressive energies to a month of Interfaith Heroes. Featured so far, brief, illuminating essays on the lives of such disparate voices for tolerance as Moses Maimonides, Jaluddin Muhammed Akbar, and Roger Williams.

(Incidentally, we also owe a word of thanks to Read the Spirit for their link to us and a very flattering mention for Beacon Press generally and the blog specifically.)

In other good reviews of work from Beacon, the L.A. Times ran a thoughtful and moving piece by Susan Salter Reynolds about Our World, a book that collects Molly Malone Cook's photographs with accompanying text by her life partner, the poet Mary Oliver.

The photographs Oliver has chosen reflect Cook's intuitive relationship with her subjects (even inanimate objects). The little girl on the stoop in New York City looks directly at the photographer, as does a kindly Robert Motherwell and a fierce, almost intimidating Walker Evans. Even though most of the photographs are dominated by a central person or object, there is a lot to look at in the margins, all part of the story. The stance of her subjects -- reading a book, looking through a telescope -- is always distinctive, creating the mood of the entire composition. The two photos of Oliver could have been taken only by someone who knew the subject well.

Marketplace ran a story over the holiday break that many, including Judith Warner on the New York Times opinion blogs, found troubling. The story highlighted the practice of "womb outsourcing," an increasingly popular surrogacy option involving hopeful parents from wealthy countries paying what amounts to "bargain rates" (when compared with the high cost of surrogacy in the U.S.) for surrogates in India. Amy Tiemann at MojoMom condemned the practice – "Is this what colonialism looks like in the 21st century?" – and invited Barbara Katz Rothman, author of Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption, to comment as well:

We women of the wealthy world profit from the exploitation of poor women, men and children with almost every shirt we put on our backs, almost every bite of food we take. We exploit people in poverty and never have to think about it. And now we can profit in our motherhood -- but unlike the shirt and the food, this time the product is going to grow up and demand an explanation. (Read more here)

And, to return to a topic  we discussed during Veterans Day Week last November, Penny Coleman, author of Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War, has been writing about the issue of veteran suicides regularly at Alternet. Her latest post is an account of her experience testifying before Congress alongside Mike and Kim Bowman, who lost their son to suicide after he returned from Iraq. In the piece she quotes Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida, who displayed a stunning lack of tact and understanding of the issue when he passed the buck to the Bowman family for their son's death:

"The building up of the self-esteem is the key," he said, "and the parents somehow have to convince him or her that everything is going to be all right, we're going to work through it. And in this case it didn't happen, and so, tragic and sad."

It is precisely because of this tendency to blame the victims that the work that Coleman and the Bowmans do is so important. The hearing ultimately resulted in a dressing down of the head of mental health at the VA by the chair of the Veterans Affairs Committee, Bob Filner, along with the appeal that the VA start listening to the stories of families who have lost loved ones to suicide. Excuses and passing the buck are not going to save any lives.

Remembering James Baldwin

by Kai Wright

Author and essayist James Baldwin died 20 years ago on Dec. 1.

Baldwin's biographer and close friend, David Leeming, called his essays "prophetic," as they articulated an eerily clear-eyed view of America's peril at the hands of what, in Baldwin's day, was politely called the "race problem."

Perhaps Leeming has it right and Baldwin was a soothsayer. But a more plausible explanation is that Baldwin's work remains contemporary because America's racial caste system changed so little over the generations that his writing spans.

Baldwin considered race America's poison pill. And he deftly portrayed Americans of all colors struggling to concoct their own individual antidotes—solutions that are temporary at best and always crazy-making because, at root, the problem is structural not individual.

Today, we still have not reached Baldwin's understanding of race and racism. It remains a collective problem that we insist upon dealing with on an individual basis. As a result, even our greatest triumphs—the end of legal segregation, broadened opportunity for the slim black middle class—are undermined by broader forces.

Jewish Book Month recommended reading: Adrienne Rich

by Stephen Burt

You can find Adrienne Rich in anthologies of Jewish American poetry, but most of her many admirers do not think of her first (if at all) as a Jewish poet: they think of her as a feminist poet, as a political poet, as a GLBT activist, as a talented artificer in traditional metrical forms (during the 1950s) as a maker of  harshly original free verse (during the 1960s), as a woman who challenged herself to overcome "the fact of being separate" (as she put it in the early 1970s) in order to speak to and about other people's needs. Though Rich's father was Jewish (as was her late husband), she did not identify herself with any religion for most of her writing life: in high school, she recalled, "I am quite sure I was seen as Jewish (with a reassuringly gentile mother) in that double vision that bigotry allows." Her ambitious, assimilationist father, however, "did not give me the choice to be a Jew."

Rich's 1982 essay "Split at the Root," from which those sentences come, describes her long-delayed decision to call herself Jewish in print. If you read Rich's poem "Jerusalem" (1966) you will see her view religious heritage as an excuse for violence and a trap: "What I dream of the city," she writes, "is how hard it is to leave." An even earlier poem, "At the Jewish New Year," insisted on Rosh Hashanah that "this day is merely one/ Of thirty in September," and that "whatever we strain to forget/ Our memory must be long": "we" here means not Jews but assimilated Jews, Jews who want to distance themselves (but cannot distance themselves enough) from their shared religious past.

Rich's later poems, by contrast, show her reclaiming Judaism as something to which she says she might want to belong. These poems often address the Baltimore family in which she grew up. "Grandmothers" (1980), for example, pays belated tribute to Hattie Rice Rich, the poet's father's mother, whose "sweetness of soul was a mystery to me," but in Rich's youth "a convenience for everyone": "you rose with the birds and children, boiled your own egg," "took the street-car downtown shopping/ endlessly for your son's whims, the whims of genius," and "All through World War Two the forbidden word/ Jewish was barely uttered in your son's house."

Jewish Book Month recommended reading: Lion's Honey by David Grossman

by Danya Ruttenberg

I was asked to write a few words in honor of Jewish Book Month, which takes the Jewish world by storm every November.  It's a wonderful celebration of the written word and a reaffirmation that the People of the Book know how to push limits, challenge, surprise, teach, and delight us anew each year.

It's daunting to have to pick one title to celebrate when there are so many important classics—whether Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath or Maimonedes' Guide For the Perplexed—that all merit much time and attention.  And yet, if I had to think of one recent book that's really moved me, I'd have to mention David Grossman's Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson.

Grossman is one of Israel's most highly regarded living authors, known both for his fiction and essays.  Here, he strikes out into unfamiliar territory—an analysis of the Samson story from the Biblical Book of Judges—but with quite a payoff. His reading of the strange, four-chapter epic is incisive and quite brilliant, digging deep into the text for literary and psychological insights. He weaves together seemingly incongruous strands and the story's strangest, smallest details, somehow constructing a startlingly cohesive whole. In the end, Grossman paints the story of a Samson who is alienated from his parents and incapable of intimacy, desperate to connect and yet determined to seek out women who shatter his trust and repeatedly betray him.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

by Mary Oliver

Edna St. Vincent Millay's library at Steepletop. Photo by Molly Malone Cook from the book Our World.

Edna St. Vincent Millay died on October 19, 1950; she was 58. It was a too short, turbulent, diligent life—a life of life, a life of work. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She was the chosen representative figure of the ’20s, beautiful, flamboyant, honorable to the spirits of love and of art, yet, in those early years, mischievous, even racy. In book after book, she wrote more deeply, more quietly, with a lyrical finery, a feminist stance, an affinity with the natural world, an understanding of the necessity in the world for kindness, for participation.

The Poet Goes to Fenway

Beacon's own beloved Mary Oliver has a poem in the Boston Globe about  baseball, more specifically about our own, beloved Red Sox. It seemed appropriate to send you all to read it today, as the office buzzes with anticipation/dread (in typical Sox fan fashion) over tonight's do-or-die game.

We are also buzzing about tomorrow's blog post, by Mary Oliver about Edna St. Vincent Millay, who died fifty-seven years ago tomorrow. Millay's house is one of many locales featured in the beautiful Our World, a collection of photos taken by the late Molly Malone Cook and accompanied with journal entries and essays by Oliver.

Use the comments field to share your own favorite sports poems, or just to say, "Go Sox!"

Banned Books Week begins tomorrow

Banned Books Week officially begins tomorrow, and Beacon Broadside has already begun our tribute to free speech with Chris Finan's discussion of censorship in America, Helene Atwan's interview with the oft-banned Lois Lowry, and a little nudge in the direction of something we're quite proud of around these parts: a fantastic page devoted to the publication of the Pentagon Papers over at our sister site. The page features a compelling panel discussion from last year's UU General Assembly, and Allison Trzop's Beacon Press and the Pentagon Papers, a master's thesis that's more gripping than that mass-market thriller you've been carrying in your bag.

Banned Books Week has us thinking about censorship and free speech, but the recent controversy over book banning in prisons also got us fired up (along with Chris W. over at Philocrites). Fortunately, the public outcry over this egregious violation of the First Amendment made the government back off for now. It just goes to show that in order to protect speech, you've got to speak up! Of course, there's still more to come on this story, so we'll keep an eye on any future developments.

We have more exciting things on deck for next week, including continued Banned Books Week coverage from Rick Ayers, co-author of Great Books for High School Kids, plus thoughts from Rabbi Arthur Waskow in advance of the Interfaith Fast on October 8. Be sure to add us to your RSS reader, or sign up to receive Beacon Broadside by email.

Banned Books Aren't Going Away

by Christopher M. Finan

Censorship is very American.

After all, the First Amendment was something of an afterthought.  The Founding Fathers did not plan to protect freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the Constitution.  The Bill of Rights was a concession to critics who argued that the Constitution did not provide adequate protection from government tyranny.

How right they were!  Only a few years later, one group of the Founding Fathers passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in an effort to silence another group of Founding Fathers.

One Dangerous Author: An Interview with Lois Lowry

In honor of banned book week, Beacon director Helene Atwan checked in with one of America's most beloved (and sometimes banned) authors, Lois Lowry. Lois and Helene became friends while serving together on the board of PEN New England, a branch of PEN, the oldest human rights organization in the world. PEN has been fighting for free speech and the rights of readers and writers for decades. If you're a Poet, Essayist, Editor, Novelist, Bookseller, Librarian, or passionate reader and you haven’t been to any of the PEN programs, you will definitely want to jump to those web sites as soon as you’ve finished reading today's Beacon Broadside.

Lowry is the acclaimed author of books for children, young adults, and readers of all ages, including the Anastasia Krupnik and Gooney Birds series. She is also the author of The Giver, which has sold over 5 million copies, won the American Library Association's Newbery Medal, and is currently being made into a motion picture by Warner Brothers. The Giver won another, more dubious honor from the ALA when it made its list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-1999, and the book continues to draw challenges around the country.