Ann Patchett pulls me into the lives of "The Dutch House"

Ann Patchett's novel "The Dutch House" was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. First place went to Colson Whitehead's "The Nickel Boys." I have yet to read Whitehead's novel but did read his amazing "The Underground Railroad." 

"The Dutch House" was my first Patchett novel. I don't know what took me so long. She's an amazing writer and owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville. Novelist and bookstore owner -- two full-time jobs. I read Patchett's novel via Kindle from Amazon as I require large-print books or enlargeable print e-books for my clunky eyesight. In the future, I will acquire my print books at indies such as Parnassus. I can get e-books at Libby and a large assortment of large-print books at the Ormond Beach Public Library. It's crucial in these dark times to keep alive the light of good literature and the nonprofit literary world. The fact that Tom Hanks narrates the "The Dutch House" audiobook is enough for me to get it just to hear what Hanks does to the first-person voice of the narrator.

"The Dutch House" follows the lives of a family and their house from the title. The house was built by a Dutch family in Elkins Park just north of Philadelphia. It's ornate and weird, inhabited by others after the aging Dutch wife died with no heirs. Buyer was Cyril Conroy, a World War II veteran and man of seemingly modest means. He loves the place. His young wife hates it. And his children, Maeve and Danny, grow up obsessed with it after their father's second wife throws them out. The tale is told by Danny.

It has a Dickensian flavor to it. Both the house and the characters loom large. A  bit like the painting of Maeve on the cover of the book's first edition (painting by Noah Saterstrom). The setting isn't the gritty hovels of 1840s London but the polite environs of  Philadelphia and New York City. I was caught up in their lives and was heartbroken at the end. I loved the characters so much I didn't want to see them go. That takes skill, bringing a cast to life so we are bereft when they exit the final page. I don't want a sequel but do want them to hang around for a spell like the ghosts who inhabit the house. 

The book ends with the lingering feeling that we all live parallel lives in the houses we have inhabited. How many times have you driven by "the old place" and been hit with a sense of longing?

That's "The Dutch House." 

One final note: I downloaded a "Kindle Unlimited" post-apocalyptic novel to read following Padgett. I read all kinds of books. But this one was all action and style. I won't name the book because it's a book and there's a writer who worked hard on it and I don't want to hurt feelings. I've written many novels, all unpublished, and it is a lot of work. So, as I cast around for my next read, I won't settle. 

Wake up and smell the coffee you probable Trump voters!

I’ve read several articles about the typical Trump supporter’s frame of mind. As is the case with us Trumpbusters (We ain’t 'fraid of no Donald!), I don’t fathom the Trump-lovers mind. I mean, every poll shows a 33-35 percent approval rate for 45. New polls show Biden leading Trump 50%-45% in Pennsylvania. Really? Who makes up these 45 percent? Cretins? Gun nuts? Evangelical and Catholic anti-abortion voters? Groundhogs who spend too much time in their burrows playing ultra-violent video games? Ghost of Confederate soldiers killed at Gettysburg. 

And what about that 5% in the undecided column? What are they waiting for, Christmas? (too late!)

My Pennsylvania experiences have been mostly just traveling through. My wife Chris was born in a Harrisburg orphanage, so I thank the state for that. On Labor Day weekend 1993, my eight-year-old son Kevin, our dog and I drove a rental truck hauling our worldly goods to a house in Rockville, Maryland. In a week. I was starting a job at the National Endowment for the Arts, located in the deepest darkest region of The Swamp that Trump swore he was draining. I worked for two years on the seventh floor of the Old Post Office. It's now the seventh floor of the Trump Grand Hotel and Swamp Thing Aerie. 

We hit a Penn Turnpike rest stop for a bio break. As Kevin walked the dog, I went over to a booth sponsored by the local Kiwanis and got a free cup of coffee and a doughnut. A middle-aged man behind the counter asked where I was from. I said Wyoming and he asked if that was Wyoming, PA, and I said, no, that’s WY USA, that big square state north of CO. I told him I was traveling to a temporary assignment with the Feds in D.C. 

He shot me a stern look and asked, “You ain’t one of those Clinton fellas, are you?” 

I said yes, I guess I am. 

He nodded and gave me a look that said I wish I could take back my coffee and eat that doughnut myself. He then moved off to serve another caffeine-deprived motorist. 

One of them Clinton fellas? I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I guess I was. At least one Pennsylvania resident dedicated to highway safety was not fond of this Clinton fella or anyone who worked for him. 

Kevin ran over with the dog. The man served him a doughnut and some juice and didn’t ask if he also was a Clinton fella. I could have told him that Kevin was a dedicated Bush fella, a supporter of George H.W. Bush who said that President Bush had been a big influence on him and asked us to take him to Cheyenne GOP HQ to watch the returns with fellow travelers. Chris and I left him in the hands of strangers and went across town to the Democrats’ reception that soon turned into a celebration. 

When we picked up Kevin, he drank juice and munched a sandwich while he and a smattering of disappointed GOPers watched the TV screen. Kevin later said that the people at the watch party had treated him with kindness. That was back when “kind” could be found in the Repub lexicon. 

I have no beef with Pennsylvanians. But I will if they give Trump the presidency for another four years. Wake up and smell the free roadside coffee, you voters of the Quaker State!

We take a look at coal-fired arts projects

Coal has been on my mind lately. Not in my mind, but I wouldn't be surprised if our Republican geniuses in Congress plan to replace our precious bodily fluids with coal dust. That should open up a new market for a dying industry.

Coal mining has a long tradition in Wyoming. I don't want to see it disappear. I would like to see some creativity applied to the issue instead of fear-mongering. The state has been home to coal mines since its settlement by white folks. Many families have been sustained by miners hacking rock out of underground mines or scooping it up in strip mines. Many communities owe their existence to coal. Some of our museums celebrate what you could call the coal culture. Rock Springs just added a coal mural to the side of a building in its flourishing downtown.

Coal mural in downtown Rock Springs. Artist is Dan Toro.

Underground Rock Springs is honeycombed with old mines. Mines and miners' unions made this city. It's good to see it acknowledged on a mural, and there is probably more to come. The main building at Western Wyoming College celebrates coal, too, with its large exhibit of the dinosaurs that once roamed the area, Consider dinos pre-coal, before the earth swallowed them up, applied heat and pressure, and then surrendered it to men with picks and shovels. I've always been crazy about dinosaurs and wonder why they are not more celebrated in Wyoming.

For 25 years, I was tasked with helping arts projects get off the ground. I was paid to be creative. I was also paid to fill out a lot of paperwork and read hundreds of grants. It taught me about this state of the arts. Lots of creativity and creative people. You could call them creatives as Richard Florida most famously did. Creatives, however, rarely are seen in the wild and seem to thrive only in urban enclaves, places such as Willaimsburg in Brooklyn and RiNo in Denver. It's a surprise to many coasters when they find pockets of creativity in small places that have no catchy nicknames.

I was pleased to hear a story on Wyoming Public Radio about another very creative person in an out-of-the way place. Mosaic artist Rachel Sager returned to her hometown in western Pennsylvania mining country. She wanted to practice her art and help her town recover from doldrums caused by closing of its mines. So she did what any other creative person would do -- she bought a defunct coal mine and turned it into an arts destination. Actually, she bought a swath of property that also was the site of an abandoned coal operation. She reclaimed the walls of the ruins from decades of vines and weeds and thought that it  would be a great place to show off her mosaics. She also thought it was a great way to show off the work of other like-minded artists from around the world and, in the process, give her tiny town of Whitsett and economic shot in the arm. She called it The Ruins Project. Sager dubs herself "the forager mosaicist" for her love of using found materials in her artwork. She is classically trained in the techniques of andamento, so also teaches classes and invites other visiting artists to do the same. Summer is an especially lively time at The Ruins Project.

Mosaic by Rachel Sager from The Ruins Project

I don't know if Sager has ever visited Wyoming, but she certainly has found some influences there, as shown in the following:

"American Jackelope" by Rachel Sager

Not sure if I have ever seen a mosaic jackelope. I have seen them in the wild, of course, on nights when the full moon shines on the North Platte River Valley.

To bring this story back to Wyoming, I wonder about other coal-inspired projects. Do you know of any? Certainly there are some in Gillette. Hard to imagine creating an arts project out of an abandoned open-pit mine. But who knows? Wyoming artists have been tasked with tough jobs before, such as surviving as an artist. Who knows what brilliant coal-inspired things could happen.

Beer drinking around the world -- and close to home

Watching The Sound of Music Monday night, the 1965 version with Julie Andrews, I grew curious about the setting. Supposedly Salzburg, Austria, pre- and post-anschluss (1938). The action takes place during the summer which must be extremely long in Salzburg, as the anschluss happened in early March 1938 and before the Nazis made their move on the Austrians, Maria was scampering with the Von Trapp kids in lush high meadows and boating with them on an ice-free lake. She fled to the convent, then returned, the Captain fell hard for her, gave the baroness the bum's rush, Cap and Maria got married, took a long honeymoon, and when they returned, the anschluss was over, Nazi flags were draped all over creation and it was still summer.

That's Hollywood.

So I looked up Salzburg's web site. The first link under "Things to do" was "Beer." I immediately fell in love with the place. There are cities in the world known for its beer: Munich, Fort Collins, Colo., St. Louis, Philadelphia. Yet only one of these bergs feature beer prominently on its official web site. Muenchen.de -- Das offizielle Stadtportal, is proud of its Octoberfest and even gives visitors the dates for 2014.

I'm obviously living in the wrong country.

Or the wrong part of the right country.

In November, as I was trying to find my way through the maze of the Philadelphia Airport, I chanced across a display of the city's historic beers. Yuengling ("America's Oldest Brewery" at 180-plus years) figured prominently -- a pretty good beer popular up and down the East Coast. There were beer bottles dating back to Colonial times and cool new craft beers for contemporary tipplers. Given time, I would have settled into a concourses pub and tried some. I'll have to wait for a longer layover.

Another neat exhibit at the airport featured Philadelphia's writers. There was a whole wall of them. Owen Wister was one, a well-to-do native of the city who went to Wyoming for a time and later found fame and fortune with his best-seller, The Virginian: Horseman of the Plains. It may be the first cowboy novel. Wister and Ernest Hemingway went fishing once, although there was nothing about that in Wister's airport bio. Wister wrote The Virginian in the library of The swanky Philadelphia Club, where he was a member, and dedicated it to Theodore Roosevelt, his classmate at Harvard. Other writers from Philadelphia: Sci-fi writer Ben Bova, poet and fiction writer (and physician) William Carlos Williams, legal eagle and thriller writer Lisa Scottoline, one-time U.S. Poet Laureate Maxine Kumin, linguist and author Noam Chomsky and novelist Pearl S. Buck. Pretty good list -- and that's only a few. The author exhibit was very near the beer exhibit, which is only fitting.

Why write about beer? Craft breweries are booming, sprouting in the most unlikely places. Ten Sleep Brewing Company is the newest addition to sleepy Ten Sleep, Wyo., pop. 257. I plan on checking it out next time I'm up that way, most likely summertime, when the living is easy in the Big Horn Basin. Meanwhile, check it out on its Facebook page.

Craft breweries are cool because its founders tend to be young and adventurous, and its products are homegrown. This is the age of "local" and crafters fill the bill. Not all of them can walk out their back doors and harvest a batch of hops and grain for the brewing process. But they make the beer on site, and almost every one has at least a modest-sized tasting room. Snake River Brewing in Jackson is the old man of Wyoming breweries, a place that serves amazing beer (Pako's!), good food and even takes on interns from the nation's craft brewing college programs. They have art displays, such as the unique one last year that displayed hand-crafted bicycles. Hand-crafted beer and hand-crafted bikes.

Cheyenne is relatively new to craft brewing. A brewpub cropped up in the late 1990s downtown but went out of business. We now have Freedom's Edge Brewing Company and Shadows, both housed in historic downtown buildings. Freedom's Edge is bottling its beer, even creating some limited edition brews in fancy bottles. FEBC is expanding into the beer nirvana in 2014:

We will be opening in the historic Antlers Hotel building at 224 Linden St. [in Fort Collins] with a target opening of late February 2014. This new location will be a true small batch craft brewery that will serve as our pilot brewery, so lots and lots of experimentation! We will also be heavily involved with the home brewing community allowing local brewers to come in and brew along side of us.

FoCo already boasts a dozen breweries, including two of the best in the U.S.: New Belgium and Odell. Their customer base down there is appreciably larger than it is in Cheyenne, still predominately a Budweiser city.

The state's liquor laws don't help either. I don't want to get into details, but all the beer, booze and wine in the state is regulated by the Wyoming Liquor Division. All the beer on liquor store shelves has to be vetted by the WLC. So, when you wonder why you aren't seeing the newest and coolest and most experimental brews on the shelves at Town & Country and Uncle Charlie's, you know why. I'm a statie myself, so know better than to blame the WLC people for their outmoded rules and regs. The fact is, the craft brewing industry is moving at lightning speed while governmental agencies move at a snail's pace.

So you can do a couple different things. Do your beer drinking at Wyoming's excellent brewpubs, taking home the good stuff in growlers for later consumption. Or you can do all of your drinking in Fort Collins and Longmont or Denver, and your store shopping at Supermarket Liquor's on Mulberry in FoCo, which is what Town and Country could be if it was located eight miles south on the Greeley Highway on the Colorado side of the border.

But Wyoming will catch up. It has to.

"Writing Away the Stigma" with true stories

Pittsburgh's Lee Gutkind is a fine writer. He specializes in health topics and is the author of Stuck in Time: The Tragedy of Childhood Mental Illness and Many Sleepless Nights. 

Lee is the fine editor of Creative Nonfiction magazine and numerous anthologies.

Lee also is an accomplished leader of writing workshops. He's conducted quite a few of them in Wyoming, a state he first explored by motorcycle when researching his first book, Bike Fever. I've attended workshops by Lee at the Casper College Literary Conference, at the Big Red Barn at the Ucross Foundation, and at the Writers' Summit that used to be held at the old church retreat complex on Harriman Road between Cheyenne and Laramie. This guy can inspire you to new heights in your writing.

His latest project is an intriguing one: "Writing Away the Sigma: With True Stories Well Told." Here's the plan:

Each year, 1 in 4 American adults will endure the trials of a mental health condition. But while many Americans have experienced a mental illness--either firsthand or through a family member or friend--the stigma of mental illness remains. In an effort to help correct this situation, the Creative Nonfiction and Staunton Farm Foundations have partnered to offer residents of Southwestern Pennsylvania a unique opportunity to tell their stories.

Writing Away the Stigma: With True Stories Well Told will provide support for 12 individuals to study, free of charge, with the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction magazine, Lee Gutkind, recognized by Vanity Fair as "the Godfather behind creative nonfiction." Selected writing fellows will attend five weekly workshops led by Lee, which will cover the entire writing process from idea to final product.

All 12 participants will conceive their stories, learn the creative nonfiction craft, and write first and follow-up drafts. The final session will focus on how to get published.

The catch is that you have to be a resident of one of 10 southwestern Pennsylvania counties. That's not to say we can't one day lure Lee West to lead a similar workshop.

As is the case with thousands of my fellow Wyomingites, I'm a consumer of mental health services. I also have plenty of company when it comes to dealing with mental health issues faced by family members. Due to our status as a rural state, it's tough to find help. When you do find it, it's a long way away. Some of that is being addressed by electronics. My Cheyenne psychiatrist has a gigantic view screen in his office that connects him via a Skype-like system with patients in Lusk and Big Piney and other far-flung locales. It's almost as good as being there. Almost. 

The stigma wanes but never disappears.

Find out more about "Writing Away the Stigma" at https://www.creativenonfiction.org/study-lee-gutkind

Netroots Nation 2011: Waiting for Russ

Wisconsin's Russ Feingold

As we waited for Howard Dean and Russ Feingold, Pamela and I talked about Catholicism.

She grew up Catholic in Pittsburgh. She now lives and works in Arlington, Va.

I grew up Catholic in suburban Denver and rural Washington state and Wichita, Kan., and Daytona Beach, Fla. I now live and work in Cheyenne, Wyo.

Different backgrounds. Same era. And we share a common dilemma about Catholicism: do we stay or do we go?

She stayed. I went -- sort of. I called myself a Cultural Catholic, a term I've heard bandied about lately. She refers to herself as an Aesthetic and Cultural Catholic. She likes the ritual and tempo of the mass, the youthful memories of her incense-filled churches in the Irish and Slovak neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. She also stays actively Catholic because, when she travels, she can feel at home in churches around the globe.

All great reasons. I said that I don't go to any of the three Catholic churches in Cheyenne because they are too conservative. I grew tired of haranguing from the pulpit about abortion and Liberals, both equally evil in the eyes of narrow-minded 21st-century priests and deacons.

Pamela avoids going to mass in Arlington's Catholic churches for the same reason. She likes the D.C. churches, only a Metro ride away. I miss that about D.C.

She and I both wondered what happened to Democratic parishes and priests. She grew up surrounded by working people who were Democrats. The priests all seemed to be Democrats and only the bishops were mildly Republican so as to curry favor with politicians (churches pay no taxes and like it that way) and the well-to-do Catholic businessmen who might be Repubs.

I never knew whether my priests and fellow parishioners were D or R. And I liked it that way.

Another great thing about growing up Irish Catholic -- lively conversations with people who have red hair and Irish last names.

Pamela isn't a blogger. She volunteers and contributes to campaigns and causes. She heard about the conference and thought it sounded interesting. But she works for the government and doesn't think it's prudent to blast her opinions into the blogosphere. I've heard others say the same thing. Perfectly understandable, especially in this crazy era.

The lights went up on stage. Howard and Russ were on their way.

W.D. Ehrhart's "The Farmer" from Working Words

Poem by W.D. Ehrhart, Vietnam veteran, writer and high school teacher. This is included in "Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams" from Coffee House Press.

The Farmer

Each day I go into the fields
to see what is growing
and what remains to be done.
It is always the same thing: nothing
is growing; everything needs to be done.
Plow, harrow, disc, water, pray
till my bones ache and hands rub
blood-raw with honest labor—
all that grows is the slow
intransigent intensity of need.
I have sown my seed on soil
guaranteed by poverty to fail.
But I don't complain—except
to passersby who ask me why
I work such barren earth.
They would not understand me
if I stooped to lift a rock
and hold it like a child, or laughed,
or told them it is their poverty
I labor to relieve. For them,
I complain. A farmer of dreams
knows how to pretend. A farmer of dreams
knows what it means to be patient.
Each day I go into the fields.

This poem is currently published in Beautiful Wreckage, New & Selected Poems, Adastra Press, 1999 Copyright © 1984 by W. D. Ehrhart, The Outer Banks, Adastra Press, 1984

McCain stokes hatred and ignorance in the American Heartland

McCain supporters hateful and spiteful and mean-spirited? How could that be? Go to this YouTube video ("The Sidewalk to Nowhere") for the wit & wisdom of McCainiacs waiting in line for a rally in Bethlehem, Penn.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itEucdhf4Us

UPDATE LATER THE SAME DAY: Here's how Sen. Barack Obama responded to the hateful spewing by McCain and his minions:

"They can run misleading ads, they can pursue the politics of anything goes. It will not work. Not this time. I think that folks are looking for something different this time. It's easy to rile up a crowd, nothing's easier than riling up a crowd by stoking anger and division. But that's not what we need right now in the United States. The times are too serious," Obama said at a rally in Chillicothe, Ohio.