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My presidential bookcase, No Kings Day |
Michael Shay's Hummingbirdminds
Hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson once described people like him with ADHD as having "hummingbird minds."
Saturday, October 18, 2025
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
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.
Saturday, October 11, 2025
My father, standing in a field in France, Feb. 13, 1945
Tuesday, October 07, 2025
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.”
Thursday, October 02, 2025
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
Saturday, September 27, 2025
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.”
Sunday, September 21, 2025
If androids dream of electric sheep, why are there no sheep in my dreams?
I discovered Philip K. Dick and his mind-blowing novels at just the right time. In November 1975 I was a non-trad student at the University of Florida. Non-trad because many in my 1969 high school graduating class had claimed their diplomas and were now looking for work in all the wrong places. Meanwhile, we laggards and slow-learners were on campus with a younger crowd and a passel of Vietnam veterans. And the Krishnas -- can't forget them and the Krishna lunch.
I spent many of my waking hours at the library where I gobbled up novels I missed reading in high school and copies of Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New Yorker, and any other pub that featured great writers -- Hunter S. Thompson and Joe Eszterhas among them -- and Esquire carried Harry Crews' Grits column and its annual dubious achievement awards. I learned snark from the witty DA awards and writing through Crews in print and in person in his creative writing class.
A profile of PK Dick arrived in the Nov. 6, 1975 Stone. Great graphics by G.K. Bellows showed the author, book in hand, with an alien invader coming through his window. The header: "The True Stories of Philip K. Dick: Burgling the most brilliant sci-fi mind on Earth -- it is Earth isn't it?" Paul Williams wrote the piece. Was this the same Paul Williams from TV and film? No, it was Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy, who RS called "the first rock critic" and who died in 2013. He also loved sci-fi.
So I had to look up the RS piece. I printed it out and the type was too small for these tired eyes. So I enlarged the e-piece and read the whole thing. I remembered most of it from '75. I found as many PK Dick books as I could, in libraries and second-hand bookstores, and wrapped "Ubik" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" into the folds of my brain that also held Shakespeare in Elizabethan English, Chaucer in Middle English, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's dreamscapes, all from my UF classes. All in books.
Williams notes in his final paragraph that some PK Dick movies were being discussed. "Blade Runner" came out in 1982, just a few weeks after PK Dick died. It blew our minds. It wasn't Dick's novel but it was beautiful. There now is a Director's Cut and a Final Cut as well as sequels. And many movies based on other novels.
What is PK Dick thinking out in the Bardo? You may have to go to Colorado to get an inkling of that. Dick's ashes were interred in a Fort Morgan, Colo., cemetery next to the grave of his twin sister who died at six weeks. She is the basis of the "phantom twin," a recurrent theme of his. Fort Morgan was in the middle of the Dust Bowl in 1928 so I assumed the worst about the sister's fate. Go to Fort Morgan on a winter's day in January. Stand outside in the winter gales and think of the many things that could doom an infant in 1928-29.
Dick, who lived most of his life in California, including mystical Marin County, is buried on the prairie. Only 112 miles from my one-time home of Cheyenne, Wyo., the setting of Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy," an alternate history of World War II (the Allies win!) in "The Man in the High Castle." Dick had the mountains and prairie in his bones which made the Rocky Mountains the best place for the opposition to the Japanese and German conquerors on the coasts.
Dig up that '75 Stone article and find out about the author's situation in a tumultuous year, 1971. There's a mystery at the story's center: why did someone burgle Philip K. Dick's house in San Rafael, blow up his 1,100-pound asbestos-and-steel safe, home to his precious manuscripts, and flood the floor with water and asbestos? All sorts of wild things were going on in 1970s California. Dick posits possibilities and Williams follows leads to no avail.
The answer is out there somewhere.