At sea level, remembering making mile-high muffins

Mile High Muffins

Muffix mix, two eggs, two-thirds cup water and canola oil, mix well and add blueberries from a can. May need to add more water and a dash of flour. Mix again. Spoon into muffin pan and cook at 400 for time stated on package plus four or five more minutes. It’s science, this Wyoming cooking. Takes longer for water to boil for tea. The oxygen is thinner so sea-level cooks may need to sit-a-spell while the muffins bake. It gives the cook time to look out the kitchen window, see the quaking aspens and their gold leaves, the sheen of frost on the browning lawn. Apples hang from the old fruit tree that’s missing a major limb. The fire hedge blazes. The muffins bake. I stand on an ancient sea.

 

Read a presidential book on NO KINGS DAY 2025

My presidential bookcase, No Kings Day

In the Soup: Retired CSU professor John Calderazzo reads in the library

Poetry books arrived this week. The first was “In the Soup,” the second book of poetry by John Calderazzo. John lives in the foothills outside the tiny town of Bellevue, Colorado just north of Fort Collins and Colorado State University. John taught literary nonfiction during his time in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at CSU. He was one of my faculty mentors and I enlisted his expertise as a literary fellowship juror during my time at the Wyoming Arts Council. He still writes and teaches in that genre but explores poetry in retirement.

John writes of many topics but travel is a big one. He is a world traveler so writes about trips to Peru and other overseas locations. His U.S.-based poems are set on Flattop Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park, Elk Mountain in Wyoming, and Santa Cruz Island in California.  He dedicates some to friends and colleagues. “Kraken” is dedicated to Richard Jacobi, whom I knew in Casper, Wyo. John hears from Richard and his wife, retired University of Wyoming professor Vicki Lindner, about recent falls which, at a certain age, leads to complications, something this person of a certain age knows only too well. After watching a video of his Peru nephew’s toddler son falling over as he tried to walk, John  writes: “I sense what’s reaching out for him—gravity, the Kraken,/tentacled monster of the deep—already taking/his measure.”

The natural world has always featured heavily in John’s writing. In “Gathering Voltage,” he’s in the mountains again, this time in a summer lightning storm. He and his brother-in-law crouch as a bolt hits nearby and he feels “the fatal breath of the sky.” On another day, he rides his mountain bike in a storm: “Shivering as I fly, I sense a lightning/bolt moving into position, gathering/voltage, checking its GPS, its terrible/book of names.”

The author is not always in the wilderness. Sometimes, “The Retired Professor Reads in the Library.” He’s researching a travel essay and is in the aisle with his books and “old-time reporter’s notebooks.” He moves aside to let a student pass and wonders if the young man just sees “Him again—the old guy.” Thing is, he’s “as happy as I was at 10, freed from class to roam the school library.” I know the feeling, the old guy with his walker, crowding the aisle, as he reads a book pulled from the shelves but not sitting instead at one of the tables reserved for the elderly. If asked, I might tell you that some of the glory in the library is being there in the crowded aisle with my friends, the books.

"The Darker Moods of My Father" took me back to my own youth in the 1960s and '70s. He contemplates his father's "darker moods" and his rants on Vietnam and antiwar protesters and "priests drunk on holy water." Meanwhile, the writer remembers "this thing/that wanted to cannon me into jungle mud/since I'd turned eighteen." The poem ends with a revelation about his parents, about how his mother cautioned her husband about going too far with his his diatribes and the father looks sheepish, "knowing he'd gone too far, back in those days/when it was still possible to go too far." Suddenly we're back in 2025, when every day is a lesson on going too far.

John’s book is published by Middle Creek Publishing and Audio: The Literature of Human Ecology. A fine-looking book, printed in a large and very readable sans-serif type. The publisher is based in Pueblo Mountain Road in Beulah, Colorado, which is located between Pueblo and the mountains. I mention this because there are many fine small publishers tucked into many small places. My old friend Nancy Curtis runs High Plains Press from her ranch near Glendo, Wyoming, just a few miles off I-25 down a rutted dirt road that can turn into gumbo during a heavy rain. Anhinga Press has two co-directors in Tallahassee but founder Rick Campbell supervises from his windswept outpost on the Gulf of Mexico (MEXICO!).

One more thing. Some small presses receive support through their local and state arts agencies or some get National Endowment for the Arts publishing grants. I should say they used to get grants but not anymore from the battered NEA and not anymore in Florida where the Governor is on a scorched-earth campaign against the arts and the liberal arts education.

A sad state of affairs. My career was based on connecting local arts groups and publishers to government funding which they had to match 1-to-1. Most of the time, the government dollar was matched many times over. The U.S. government is now in the hands of a wrecking crew that wants to demolish poetry and prose, arts and education. They want to destroy everything I hold dear.

John Calderazzo writes about everything I want to preserve and protect.

My father, standing in a field in France, Feb. 13, 1945

My father, 21, standing out in a field in France, February 1945. He writes a caption to the photo: “I hadn’t had a haircut in three months. I should have worn a hat.” He lives in a tent, a GI far from his home in Denver covered in Colorado snow. His war will be over in three months but he won’t return home for another year. He stands in a French field that's browned by winter, farm house in the distance. He writes that his hair is too long, that maybe he should have had a haircut before turning over the small camera to a buddy whose shadow lingers in the foreground. He takes my father's photo that will end up 82 years later in his eldest son’s desk drawer in Ormond Beach, Florida. You were right, Dad. You should have worn a hat. That hair of yours is curly, too curly, too youthful for a soldier who spent Christmas in the frozen Ardennes, in The Bulge, on the radio. He relays artillery coordinates, asks HQ where a young man might get a haircut for a future photo of him standing in a French field looking lonely, unshorn, very much alive.

John Fabian Witt’s new book asks if the American Experiment can be saved

Beginning Oct. 16, I will be reading John Fabian Witt’s book “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.” I ordered the book after reading his guest essay in Monday’s New York Times, “How to Save the American Experiment.” The graphics caught my eye, a drawing of a big red hand pushing down on a platform and a group of people pushing from below. The Big Red Hand looked like it belonged to a marble statue or a giant, ponderous and huge. During other times, the resisters might be labeled “the people” or “the masses,” The Masses being one of the leftist mags of the 19-teens (later New Masses).

In any case, Witt’s essay grabbed my attention. How do we save the American experiment? I’ve been asking that very question since Trump took office for the second time. I have good days and bad. This essay gave me some hope.

Witt captured me when he talked about how a messy war and a pandemic bred a decade of strife that ended in a failed economy and then to a surprising resurgence.

Yes, the 1920s. A time of race riots and red-baiting and the Insurrection Act. Unions pushed workers to organize and the workers protested and were clubbed by guys that acted a lot like 2025 ICE Storm Troopers.

Hard times followed by harder times followed by a global war that birthed the U.S. as a global power. Until it lost its way.

I am obsessed with the 1920s. I just finished writing a historical novel set in 1919 Colorado. It will soon be published by Michigan’s Ridgeway Press. Its characters come to Colorado to start anew after war and sickness and failed dreams. They come to reinvent themselves. Colorado, Denver in particular, has always been a place for people to find themselves. Find gold, too, whether it be the actual metal or penny stocks or pot farms or the fresh powder of mountain ski slopes. As a native Denverite, I admire the magic but know the shortcomings. Historians such as the late David Halaas and Tom Noel have helped me delve into the past. I was a childhood fan of the Denver Public Library and spent many adult years in the Denver History Museum and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. A wonderful place. I don’t live there any more. Why? I’m, an American. I move on. It’s what we do. I’m now back to Florida. As you know from late-night comedians, Florida has its own problems.

Witt’s message is not so much “move on” but dig in, into those entities that make a difference. He writes about Charles Garland, a millionaire who used his fortune to fund the American Fund for Public Service or the Garland Fund. It was overseen by muckraking writer Upton Sinclair and ACLU founder Roger Baldwin. They funded entities that pushed for civil rights, a living wage, and, in the 1930s, Social Security. Woodrow Wilson’s presidency petered out and led to the totalitarian tendencies of Harding and then to rich-boy Democrat Roosevelt who surprised us all, both hard-right Wyoming ranchers and big-city liberal labor agitators.

America, the Arsenal of Democracy, helped win the war and reaped the fruits of its labor and good fortune to bring prosperity in the 1950s and its most annoying demographic cohort, the Boomers. Say what you will about us but we helped the good times roll and now, well, we face the same political shitstorm as our offspring.

So, I write scathing letters that seem to fall on deaf ears. I support organizations such as the ACLU and the Florida Democrats and Wikipedia which is now under attack by the MAGA crowd. I support the independent WyoFile in Wyoming and the Independent Florida Alligator at UF, my alma mater. They are all under attack and need us. Protests are great but pointless if you don’t act and then vote in 2026 and 2028.

As the actor astronauts in “Galaxy Quest say: “Never give up…and never surrender.”

Fiction writers bring new life to dusty historical figures

Last night I finished reading "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson" by Jerome Charyn. A beautiful novel, wonderful historical fiction. Charyn has made waves the past couple decades with his unorthodox takes on historical figures: Dickinson, the notorious Orson Welles/Rita Hayworth relationship, famous recluse J.D. Salinger, and Johnny One-Eye in the American Revolution. There are hundreds of other lives worth a second or even third look by someone of Charyn's skills. ,

Historical fiction is my new reason for living past 74. I've written two HF novels, the first will be out later this year from The Ridgeway Press in Michigan. I'm editing the second now. In the process, I've grabbed as many books off the HF shelf as I can muster. I was floored by "James" by Percival Everett, "Booth" by Karen Joy Fowler, "Horse," by Geraldine Brooks, "Gone, the Redeemer" by Scott Gates, and "Clark and Division" by Naomi Hirahara. 

All this innovative HF isn't without its detractors. Some traditionalists say that writers are playing fast and loose with the facts. Some say that facts are facts and that the timelines of history should be respected. They're valid points. Some HF writers are dogged with the facts. And so are some HF readers. Some writers also have hordes of researchers to help their work, as was the case with James Michener as his career progressed. He was so intent on research that he has a library named after him, the James Michener Library at University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. I've devoured Michener's novels most of my life, first "Hawaii," recommended by my mother, and onto "Centennial," the first novel I bought when I moved back to Colorado after college, and on to "Chesapeake" when I lived in Maryland.

But I also love the art of fiction and don't mind it being bent and twisted for a good yarn. I loved the real underground railroad in Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad" and I was totally caught up in Jim's journey in "James" even when the story veered away from Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" which, of course, was also fiction. 

This reminds me of arguments about creative nonfiction during my days as an M.F.A. student. Annie Dillard was taken to task for some inventions in "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." It led to a prize-winning book so I'm willing to forgive and forget. Others aren't. Remember that CNF stands for "creative" nonfiction.

It may be that I'm too old to care about literary minutiae. Or that I'm too pissed-off about MAGA savageries to mind when a writer invents something lovely to read.

A bit of both

Author Michael Connelly delves into Florida experience for next streaming series

Michael Connelly, best-selling author and UF and Independent Florida Alligator alum is now writing about his days as a reporter in Daytona Beach in the 1980s. He’s also writing about his time covering crime in Fort Lauderdale which includes forays into the South Florida cocaine wars.

I met Connelly in the first part of this century at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. I came to town for the Wyoming Arts Council to meet with colleagues at WESTAF, our regional arts organization. Now Creative West, it keeps track of the MAGA attacks on the arts funding world through its Action Center. 

I waited in a long line to meet Connelly at the L.A. Bookfest at UCLA and he signed two books because I wore my Gators cap. The Gator connection led him to take a book tour detour to Wyoming a few years later and many fans turned out.

The first Connelly novel I read was "The Poet" (1996) because it was a mystery about poetry (I thought) and it's set among the two Denver newspapers I once worked for. From 1978-82, I was writing in-depth articles about prep football, college hockey, and the Coors Classic cycling race. After that, I was managing editor and columnist for Up the Creek weekly which had its origins covering rec softball leagues and wet T-shirt contests at Glendale singles bars. I still have clips if you’re looking for something to read about the halcyon days of the 80s.  

In The Poet, Jack McEvoy is a crime reporter for The Rocky. When his twin brother Sean, a Denver homicide detective, is murdered. McEvoy pursues the story. He finds  his brother’s murder was staged, and uncovers a pedophile ring which leads to other murders committee by a serial killer known as The Poet because he features Poe in his killings. I was impressed. I read more and now have quite a collection. The book won 1997 awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. 

When I moved to Denver in 1978, the RMN and Post were battling for readers. The Post won the fight.  

When I met Connelly in L.A., I asked if he ever made it to Wyoming. His answer, as I suspected, was no. I asked if he might take a 100-mile detour from his next Denver book stop if we could find funding for a presentation, reading, and book signing in Cheyenne, Wyoming’s oft-neglected capital city. He put me in touch with his agent and the YMCA Writers Voice chapter wrote a grant and brought him to town. An SRO crowd came to the Y’s meeting room where an arts exhibit arranged by my wife Chris was on display. A great time was had by all. Barnes & Noble sold a lot of books.

That meeting room is now forever empty. The Cheyenne Family YMCA closed its doors for good yesterday. No more swimming pool. No more creaky weight machines. No more Writers Voice.

I send whatever I can to arts organizations in Wyoming, Florida, and elsewhere. I will report on some of those entities in the coming months. The anti-arts savagery shown by Trump and his minions have taken a big bite out of the creative industry. Not surprising since arts and arts education were prime targets of Project 2025.

I hear from poet and performer M.L. Liebler in Detroit that “all of our programs getting money from the NEA has collapsed.” Medical research funding has also been hit: “All research on cancer has been halted.”