In praise of Large Print books: "Seeing is Believing"

Wichita, 1962. I read Tom Swift and Hardy Boys books in bed with my Boy Scout flashlight. It was after the parents’ call for “lights out” and a brighter light might have awakened my brother who would want to talk about trains. He spent many hours with his model trains, vowing that one day he would pilot locomotives across the prairie. Instead, he learned the air traffic controller trade in the USAF and spent his career assisting pilots through the crowded skies.

I am about to turn 75 and I need more than a Boy Scout flashlight to read at night or any other time. Kindle, you might say, with its lit screen and adjustable type. Done and done. I love my Kindle. I’ve read some smashing books on it. Big ones, too. In 2022, I read “The Dark Forest” by Cixun Liu, the second book in the “Three-Body Problem” series. A long one at 528 pages. It was a slog sometimes, but the highs outnumbered the lows. Made me watch the first part of the Netflix series and make sense of it. Part Two coming up! 

I always miss holding an actual book. Something magical about sliding a book from a library shelf and opening it to that first page. The feel of it, the smell, the look. Lately I’ve been exploring the Large Print section at the Ormond Beach Public Library. It features lobby racks of new LP books in a section dedicated to donors. In the stacks, the library features aisle after aisle of LP books and CD books for the audible (and Audible) oriented. LP can stand for large print and also LP as in Long-Playing records. LP, record, or album – all terms we used for our 1970s purchases from Peaches. We played those Zeppelin disks long and often and appreciated their albums of songs which live in our bones. We annoyed our children by singing them badly and loudly on car trips. For them, LP might mean Loud Pops.

During my many decades at libraries, I paid little attention to the Large Print sections. They’ve grown as Americans age, especially our large cohort of Baby Boomers. Us. Me.

In the Ormond Beach Public Library’s “Miscellaneous Large Print” section, I saw a red trade paperback that outshone the others and plucked it out. It was “These Precious Days,” a collection of essays by Ann Patchett. I recently read (on Kindle) my first Patchett novel, “The Dutch House” and loved it. Beautiful writing, compelling characters, and a story I wasn’t sure about sometimes. But by the end, I was impressed with the tale of the Conroy family and their creaky old house outside Philadelphia. The writer made me pay attention to the characters as the story unwound and that takes skill. I will read more.

I just did. I checked out Patchett’s essays and read them. With an essay collection, the reader can pick and choose.  “A Talk to the Association of Graduate School Deans in the Humanities” was not my first choice. A bit dry, perhaps, nothing like “The Paris Tattoo” or “Eudora Welty: An Introduction,” Welty one of my favorite writers.

When I got to it, her talk to the humanities deans grabbed me. She wrote about her days as a grad student at the Iowa Writers Workshop. It was around the same time I went to the grad school MFA program at Colorado State University in the last half of the 1980s. There was a generational difference (she 22, me 37) and a gender one. But our experiences were similar in several ways. She had some great teachers and mentors but also some not-so-good ones. She scrambled to make ends meet and so did I. Her fellow students could be annoying but you put a bunch of creatives in cramped quarters and you get conflict. She sums it up: “My MFA showed me the importance of community.” That was my reason to do it and I did find community.

Patchett’s essays are marvelous, as marvelous as her novels (see my comments on “The Dutch House”). I was impressed by the cover art, a painting of the author’s dog Sparky by artist Sooki Raphael. The title essay is about Patchett’s friendship with the artist. It’s long, as essays go (88 pages), but it’s the heart of the book. Feel free to cry.

I was pleased to see that Patchett’s essay collection was issued by Harper Large Print, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Harper Large Print had a farewell message for me and other LP readers:

“Light and easy to read, Harper Large Print paperbacks are for the book lovers who want to see what they are reading without strain. For a full listing of titles and new releases to come, please visit our website: www.hc.com.”

This final thought in all caps: “SEEING IS BELIEVING!”

Read a presidential book on NO KINGS DAY 2025

My presidential bookcase, No Kings Day

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

How to choose art for the bare walls of a new house

It began with a June 19 Facebook post by artist Linda Anne Lopez of Winchester, Virginia. Linda and I met several times over the years. She's married to diehard reader and biker Ben Lopez, a longtime friend of my late brother Dan and his wife Nancy. They met in Santa Barbara while going to UCSB. Turns out they all moved to Florida for work and kids and riding motorcycles year-round. 

Ben is the most voracious reader I know and we trade book titles on FB. His most recent: a biography of Rudyard Kipling. My most recent is a novel The Sleeping Car Porter by Canadian author Suzette Mayr. I am now hip-deep in Carl Hiaasen's newest, Fever Beach. Ben sticks mainly to non-fiction and I'm a creature of fiction as that is what I write. And, sometimes, like these crazy times right now, who can tell the difference?

Linda got serious about her art after retirement. Photography was her thing. Along the way she discovered encaustic mixed media and that's what you're seeing here. 

Linda is  a bird-and-flower person which carries a lot of weight with me, a hummingbird admirer and gardener. She describes her specialty as Encaustic Mixed Media. She combines her love of photography with the ancient arts of encaustic. See further explanation below. Find out more at Lindalopezartist.com

And I spent most of my professional career in the art world, mostly in the realm of state arts agencies (SAAs), local arts funding, a stint at the National Endowment for the Arts, and dabs in arts and literary criticism. All of these worlds are being decimated by Trump and his goons but I will leave my political critiques to other posts on Hummingbirdminds and other rabble-rousing sites.

Linda got my attention with this FB post on June 19:

Hummingbird and flowers, encaustic mixed media, 8-by-8 inches, Linda Lopez

It got my attention because it is beautiful and because it features a hummingbird and flowers. I must have it, I told my PC, and contacted Linda. It was for sale and she also had a companion piece, shown in this June 25 FB post by Linda: 

Encaustic mixed media, Linda Lopez, work at left is 9-by-17 inches.

The new home this refers to is mine in Ormond Beach, Florida. They will be the first works of art to go up in our new home in a woodsy place called Groveside at Ormond Station. I plan to turn these bare walls into a gallery of sorts, one that will feature groups of pieces celebrating my wife Chris and me. These two pieces will hang above our dining room table which, strangely enough, matches the color schemes of the art. It will feature work by Florida and Wyoming artists with a Virginia and Colorado artist in the ranks. 

You might ask: Hey Mike, what, exactly, is encaustic? I will let Linda answer that:

Explanation and History of Encaustic 

Encaustic is a wax-based paint (composed of beeswax, damar resin, and pigment), which is kept molten on a heated palette. It is applied to an absorbent surface and then reheated to fuse the paint.  The word ‘encaustic’ comes from the Greek word enkaiein, meaning to burn in, referring to the process of fusing the paint.  

 

Encaustic painting was practiced by Greek artists as far back as the 5th century B.C. The Fayum portraits are the best-known encaustic works. These funeral portraits were painted in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. by Greek painters in Egypt. 

 

Modern encaustic painting was made possible by the invention of portable electric heating implements and the availability of commercial encaustic paint and popularized by its usage among many prominent artists. Encaustic paintings do not need varnishing or protection with glass. Beeswax is impervious to moisture, which is one of the major causes of deterioration in a paint film. Wax resists moisture far more than resin varnish or oil. Buffing encaustic will give luster and saturation to color in just the same way resin varnish does. 

 

Encaustic can be used as a traditional painting medium, but it can also be used to create sculptures, with photography (transfers and prints), drawing, and printmaking (monotypes). Painting with encaustic is a multi-step process. First, the paint must be melted. Then the molten paint is applied to a porous surface. The wax is then fused into the working surface, allowing it to form a bond. As a final option, the cooled paint can be buffed to bring up the luster of the wax and resin. Every layer of encaustic wax must be fused. 

Finding a home for Grant’s tome

I’m having a hard time deciding which books to keep and which ones to give away. Why this comprehensive shelf-cleaning now? Is it time for the retirement home and everything must go because the young ones are not interested in any of our treasures? Not exactly. Chris and I are moving and selling our house. It is filled with 18 years of accumulating. I have bought and traded for many books in this time. I would put the count in the hundreds but Chris puts it in the thousands because that’s what it seems like to her.

Some might say I have book clutter. Chris is a reader (she just finished the second Abraham Verghese novel which is even longer than the first). So books are not the problem but their arrangement in the household is up for debate. I have swept clean three bookshelves, keeping only those volumes dear to me. We have moved out most of the bookshelves so the books have nowhere to go except out. Hey, I’m doing my best..

The other day, I filled a plastic bin with the section of the presidential library my father willed me in 2002. In the bin behind me, I see titles about JFK (“One Brief Shining Moment” by William Manchester, FDR (“Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants & Their War” by Eric Larrabee, and USG (“Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: Volume 1”) with Ulysses S. Grant holding the 1885 copyright and published by the Press of J.J. Little & Co., NY, NY. I also have the trade paperback on Grant’s memoirs (volumes 1 and 2) printed in 1952 by Da Capo Press. 

Buried among these was my slim paperback “JFK: Boyhood to the White House” (Crest Publishing, 50 cents). JFK and this book meant a lot to me. I was 10 at his inauguration and 12 almost 13 when he was assassinated. I had a tween crush on JFK and the whole Kennedy clan. It’s still sad to remember those times.

I am taking the presidents with me. It’s a darn heavy bin because nobody writes a slim biography of a U.S. president. Most are hardcovers which weigh in heavier than paperbacks. It will take a strong back or someone with a hand truck to carry this to our moving trailer. I estimate I will have ten of these monsters to take with me cross-country. My son will drive and I will be on one of those flying machines, you know, the ones with the extremely comfortable and spacious seats. 

I love to fly.

In Florida, I will reveal my presidential cache to family members with the hope they will put them on their shelves because I won’t have room in my new place. They are a legacy, after all, and deserve a place of honor and it will be up to my siblings’ children or grandchildren to decide where they go next. That’s the plan anyway.

I discover Donald Westlake's novels and reminisce about John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee

I found Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books and they are fantastic. Always a caper going on. Always sharp dialogue and lots of humor. Westlake passed away in 2008 but I can see he's in the same school as Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, Janet Evanovich and Jerome Charyn. Maybe a dash of Don DeLillo too. So far I've read two of the volumes, "The Road to Ruin" and the first Dortmunder novel, "The Hot Rock." It was published in 1970. I didn't look that up until I finished but there were clues placed throughout. The cars they drive, the characters' language, ubiquitous phone booths, no personal computers. Its throwback quality didn't bother me. He had a skillful way of incorporating all of that into the narrative.  

What other crime-adjacent novels of that era would show such wit? I thought of John D. MacDonald, for instance, and his Travis McGee character. McGee probably had too much machismo for these times. He could be funny and ironic. He called himself a "salvage consultant" and lived on his "Busted Flush" houseboat docked at the Bahia Mar Marina. McGee's erstwhile sidekick is Meyer, an economist always ready for a McGee caper. He dwells on a neighboring boat named for his hero, John Maynard Keynes.

I worked at a Florida bookstore in the '70s and I brought MacDonald's novels to my mother Anna Shay (R.I.P Mom) and she devoured them. Me too. Travis and his Busted Flush houseboat. I could always see McGee's houseboat through MacDonald's imagination. Back in the '80s, my brother Dan and I visited Bahia Mar and stopped at Slip F-18. We thought about the McGee we knew from the books. Slip F-18 was declared a literary landmark in 1987, a year after the author's death. 

I did my usual Google search for Travis McGee and came up with an article by Kris Hundley on the Visit Florida site (couldn't find a pub date). The second paragraph about the Bahia Mar Marina set the tone for the story:

There's little room left for a boat bum like Travis McGee. 

She described present-day Bahia Mar in gritty detail.

Bahia Mar touts its ability to accommodate yachts up to 300 feet, even squeezing in a 312-footer recently for a month-long stay. The marina's 3,000-foot dock along the Intracoastal sports one mega-yacht after another. flawlessly polished hulls gleaming, white communications domes looming 50-feet overhead, docked so closely together that the uber-rich could step from one vessel to another without ever touching the ground. Not an inch of precious real estate is wasted.

Bahia Mar must have considered the literary landmark plaque dedicated to MacDonald as "wasted space." It now sits in the marina's office. Hundley wraps up the piece this way: 

A boat bum might seem forgotten among such glitz. But inside the marina office, the woman behind the desk said that not a week goes by that someone doesn't wander in, looking for the slip once occupied by Travis McGee. She is not sure what the fuss is about: she's never read the books. 

Made me want to bang my head against the desk. MacDonald and McGee would have had a few things to say about the wretched excess of 21st century Florida. As a self-described "salvage consultant," McGee usually was coming to the aid of a trusting soul who had been ripped by someone who would own a 312-foot mega-yacht. His price was always half of the recovered loot. When the client objected, his usual response was "half of something is better that nothing." MacDonald also wrote the best-selling "Condominium" which tore into the thoughtless development going on in coastal Florida which has not abated in the 46 years since the novel's original publication. 

During his lifetime, MacDonald got great reviews from the likes of Hiaasen and Kurt Vonnegut. Here's what Vonnegut said about MacDonald's work:

“To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen."

I feel a need to reread Travis McGee, see how he holds up in these fast-moving and confusing times.

Mike Miller posted an updated article on Travis McGee on Jan. 28. It was on the Florida Back Roads Travel site. In it, he writes about how he first came upon MacDonald's character when his father visited him in Florida in 1964 and gave him a copy of "The Deep Blue Good-by." His father was reading the latest novel, "Nightmare in Pink." Miller read "Deep Blue" and was hooked. He's read the entire series, some of them twice, and is a devoted fan. Read Miller's essay to understand what makes McGee tick, and why his books are still in print. 

My mother died too young in 1986, a McGee fan to the end. Mike Miller's father died in a St. Cloud, Fla., nursing home in 1986, the same year MacDonald died. Miller Senior's dying message to his son was "Nightmare in Pink." 

Now that's a fan.

Almost as much fun discovering new novels as it is reading them

My sisters sent my wife Chris some Barnes & Noble gift cards to ease her path through chemotherapy. I went right to B&N Online and ordered three novels. Chris requested "Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald," a NYT bestseller by Theresa Anne Fowler. It sounds fascinating. The book apparently was the inspiration for the streaming series "Z: The Beginning of Everything." I watched it and was a bit disappointed and I can't really say why. I can read the novel (the book is always better!) when Chris finishes.

The story of the Fitzgeralds is high drama by which I mean terribly sad. I wrote a prose poem, "Rockets Over Fitzgerald," after watching Fourth of July fireworks from St. Mary's Churchyard in Rockville, Maryland. It was published in Poetry Hotel. 

I remembered another author with the last name Fowler as I was browsing. Connie May Fowler is a Florida native who writes beautifully, about people and about Florida, about everything really. After meeting Connie at Literary Connection in Cheyenne, I read her excellent novel, "The Problem with Murmur Lee." I ordered for Chris "How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly." I lost track of time as I read its opening section at the B&N site. It takes me back to summer solstice days in central Florida when the temp is 92 degrees at 7 a.m. and rising. 

The best batch of stories I've read in a long time is "Florida" by Lauren Groff. My favorite may be "Dogs Go Wolf" published in the New Yorker and available on audio at online when you go to the August 21, 2017, issue (I listened for free for some unknown reason). The story is about two little girls who get stranded on on an island and the creative ways they find to survive. Groff's style is captivating. What a story. I look forward to talking to Chris about it, see what she thinks of it. 

A salute to those books that taught me humor, satire, and the absurdity of being human

All this book-banning makes me think of all of those books I read that might meet disapproval now from the GOP Know Nothings. 

When I was in the fourth grade, my father told me I could read any book in his library. I tackled the war books, first, Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis, Brave Men by Ernie Pyle and Up Front by Bill Mauldin, which included his Willie and Joe cartoons. He had some boys' adventure books from his childhood, Treasure Island and Ivanhoe. But I was more interested in the WWII books, as my father had been a radioman with an infantry unit in France, Belgium, and Germany. They seemed like boys' adventures to me. I read all of the Life magazines that my grandparents had saved for my dad while he was overseas. I watched war movies with my dad, as did my younger brother. We played war with our friends. 

None of my teachers ever assigned books on 20th century wars. They reached into the heroic past. The Revolutionary War had spawned books such as Johnny Tremayne and tales of Paul Revere and George Washington. The Civil War was acceptable reading as we all grew up knowing that the Yankees were the good guys and the Rebs the bad guys. This was way before we moved to the South and heard the term War of Northern Aggression. So many of the books I read as an English major and later were by writers of the American South. Their Southern Gothic tales owed their existence to the region's tortured history which included the Civil War, whatever you want to call it.

Now in my 70s, I look back on my reading as nostalgic. I also know more about the workings of the world. War can be heroic. It's also nasty, brutish, and final. Soldiers carry their experiences into old age, if they make it that far. There are brilliant antiwar books told from the warrior's POV. And books by observers, such as Red Badge of Courage and Dispatches, Michael Herr's wild book about life among the grunts in Vietnam (Herr got writing credits for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket). 

Just about every book I ever read could be fodder for the book banners. My non-authorized reading at my Catholic high school included three oft-banned novels that influenced me more than anything I read in class: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. They are now considered classics and are read in some high school classrooms when Know Nothings are not disappearing books like Dunbar. They were telling me a truth that I barely knew at 18, that the world is a strange and terrifying place. 

Humor, satire, and sci-fi are great vehicles for getting at the truth. I passed Catch-22 along to my Class of '69 pals and we laughed at the absurdities. The dead man in Yossarian's tent. Major Major Major's name. Orr's pastime of ditching his bomber into the ocean to practice for his escape from war. Hilarious. We only felt a small tremor of the earthquake beneath. We could have watched the absurdity of televised military reports from Vietnam. Body count, Vietnamization, destroy the village in order to save it. It was all right there in front of us but we didn't know. 

Reading good books gave us a bit of a head start on adulthood. Still, you have to live it to really know. You can be an absurdist and still be an engaged human. You can love satire but also fall in love. Humor makes the ride fun even when it's challenging. 

I'd have none of that without the reading.

Book banning in Gillette: A Wyoming story

The American Library Association wrapped up Banned Books Week and now there are no banned books in the land.

Wishful thinking. Know Nothings keep intruding into our book-reading lives. The most recent and newsworthy attempt comes from Gillette in Campbell County. The first salvo came when a few crackpots decided that the library should disinvite an LGBTQ author slated to give a children's workshop. The library received threats. The author received threats. For safety's sake, the author cancelled her appearance and the library moved on to other things. That included fielding challenges for various books, most with LGBTQ subject matter. As staff sorted through the complaints from a cabal of Christian Nationalist zealots, they celebrated Banned Books Week. The county commission held a hearing in which the following exchange occurred (as noted in an Oct. 4 Casper Star-Trib article):

On Sept. 27, during a meeting between the library board and commissioners, Commissioner Del Shelstad suggested cutting the library’s funding.

He said the library shouldn’t come asking the county for more money because in his opinion, “we shouldn’t fund you at all.”

Commissioner D.G. Reardon, who had called into the meeting, asked if he’d heard Shelstad correctly, and if Shelstad meant he wanted to close down the library.

Shelstad said he wanted to cut funding to the library, and ”if that means closing it, then we close it.”

Shelstad received a salvo of complaints and a few days later he back-tracked, sort of:

“I didn’t mean 100% of their funding,” he said. “I said cut their funding. That comes in a lot of shapes and sizes.”

A threat is a threat. He obviously supports and/or is threatened by the naysayers in the county. We know who those people are. Trumpsters. People who go to extremes to “own the libs.” The see any diversity initiative as a threat to their ignorance, which it is. There is a voting bloc of these people and their influence is felt every day at the library, in the media, county commission meetings, and at the polls.

Gillette parent Matt Heath, who spoke up for the library at the commission meeting, summed it up: "hypocrites and bullies need to be stood up against."

Amen, brother. These dogged bullies have always been with us. Trump unleashed them. It is too much to hope they go back into their hidey-holes. We must out-vote and out-talk them. Support your local library. Read a banned book today. And vote, as our complacency as people who value democratic principles have allowed this to happen. Far-right politicians and legislative bodies continue to suppress voting rights and gerrymander the hell out of our states. Misinformation spreads freely.

So get out there, go do that voodoo that you do so well. 

No road trip for me

I decided to cancel my Aug. 3 appearance at ARTCORE'S Music & Poetry Series in Casper. I was on a double bill with musician Lauren Podjun. Writer Gayle Irwin will replace me. I met Gayle through Wyoming Writers, Inc, our statewide writing group.

Why did I cancel? Covid-19. Knowing ARTCORE Director Carolyn Deuel as I do, I am sure that the Bourgeois Pig venue would be as virus-safe as possible. ARTCORE is one of the first local arts agencies in Wyoming. Carolyn has been at its helm for most of that time.

That said, there is one overriding problem. I am a high-risk human during this pandemic. I am 69 and a cardiac patient since 2013. I experienced a widowmaker heart attack and, because I delayed getting help, now walk around with an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator or ICD in my chest. This makes me a prime target for the coronavirus. From the beginning, the top three riskiest groups are the elderly, cardiac patients and diabetics. I'm in the first two categories and Chris is one and three. Young, healthy people have caught the virus and died. Often, they also have pre-existing conditions. Any complication can be a deadly one. Young people like to gather and when they do, they pass along COVID-19 and being it home to older parents and other family members.

This doesn't have to be. Wear a mask. Practice social distancing and, if possible, stay home. And wash your hands. Sanitize kitchen and bathroom surfaces.

Wyoming Governor Gordon conducts COVID-19 briefings and has issued a series of orders. Those policies never included a mandatory mask policy which puts us in the company of such Coronavirus success stories as Florida and Texas. In March, the Governor did issue some strict policies that closed many businesses, performing venues, restaurants and coffee shops. He has gradually loosened the restrictions although he had to extend the latest one from July 31 to Aug. 15 due to a spike in infections that put us on the New York Times and Johns Hopkins COVID site hot zone charts. Today, Idaho is on the list due to rising cases. Tomorrow, it may be your state.

When I do get out of my bunker to the grocery store, I note that many people do not wear masks. I do. Employees do. Others don't. We've all seen mask-shaming and no-mask-shaming incidents online. I don't tell people what to do and that's the prevailing attitude in Wyoming. But the science is clear -- masks help protect you and those around you. Social-distancing does too, and that has been suggested to businesses around the state but not required. Grocery stores guide you with floor signs which keep us separated in line. Arrows point out directions for carts to travel, although that's violated regularly. No head-on casualties thus far, as far as I know.

No travel for me. No reading from my new book. That means I have to stay home to rewrite and revise, a major part of any writing enterprise.

So, in a time when getting out of the house is a blessing, I am not getting out of the house. I have lots of books and know where to get more without leaving home.

P.S.: U.S. COVID-19 death toll passed 150,000 today.

Boomers and Millennials live in different worlds when it comes to books

A university professor complained on Facebook that her upper division literature students don't know the name Gerard Manley Hopkins. Never heard of him, never read any of his work.

These youngsters have also never read Gwendolyn Brooks. They don't know Gwendolyn, they also don't know the greatest spoken word poem of all time.

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We
Left School. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Ms. Brooks recited that poem in a room in the CSU student union one night in 1990. It's hard to find more meaning in 24 simple words. Kind of like the poet herself -- so much talent in a tiny frame. Nobel Prize winner.

Some English majors have never heard of her. Take heart, youngsters. It took me awhile to discover our Ms. Brooks. I had to read up on her as I planned her trip from Chicago to Fort Collins. I'd never encountered her work in any of my undergrad or grad courses. I discovered her by meeting her when I was 39, a late-blooming M.F.A. student.

Better late than never. Probably won't see that over-used phrase in any good poem. And what if you did? At least you'd be reading. That seems to be the problem. Kids are reading but only certain things. Sci-fi and fantasy. Harry Potter. Superheroes. Graphic novels. Zines. Manga. Etc.

Lest I be another Baby Boomer ranting about Millennials, let me say this: "I'm not." I am glad that Millennials continue to read. Some of their reading is online and on smart phones but it's still reading.

Millennials complain about Baby Boomers, those aging humans that are parents and grandparents to new generations. Millennials are tired of Boomers asking for computer advice. Much like the techs in BBC's "The IT Crowd," many are basement dwellers surrounded by high-tech gizmos, When we call them for help, they advise us, "Have you tried turning it off and then back on?" Even worse, sometimes we call them from land lines which youngsters regard as quaint items from another century, which they are.

Other things that annoy Millennials are our tendency to accumulate things, especially old china sets and fine silver. Chris and I have three sets of china gifted to us by various relatives. Chris has art and figurines from Japan, Ethiopia, and German, parents where there army family was based. Should Antiques Roadshow ever come to Wyoming, Chris is ready to haul her treasures to the stage and rake in some cash. Our kids hope she does as they do not want to deal with them when we pass into the other realm. I am told that businesses have cropped up aimed expressly at disposing of all the collectibles Boomers leave behind. 

Books are my treasures. Many of them are in boxes in the basement. My basement-dwelling daughter occasionally brings me a box to go through, saying she will be happy to take the castoffs to the library bookstore. I open the box and cull the castoffs. Unfortunately, I often find an old favorite
or one signed by a writer friend. I insist on going through these thoroughly lest some classic should slip through my fingers. Annie comes along hours later and is flummoxed that I have added just a few volumes to the library pile while  the box remains nearly full. Often I am in my easy chair, reading a book I enjoyed decades ago. She feigns anger, vowing to wait until I die to get rid of all the books. Who cares, I say, I will be in the great library in the sky. All the universe's books will be at my fingertips. I will be able to read them in any language, including Tralfamadorian. That would be heaven.

Hell would be TrumpWorld with no books. We already live in that hell.

Strong mind, strong body -- take your pick

Just added to my reading list: "Blue Dreams: The science and the story of the drugs that changed our minds" by Lauren Slater. I will tackle it once I finish "Lincoln in the Bardo" by George Saunders.

"Blue Dreams" is a non-fiction account of psychiatric drugs and their effects by someone who is both a patient and a psychologist.

"Lincoln in the Bardo" is a novel that explores something that seems a lot like severe depression and PTSD in Abraham Lincoln, who is mourning the death of his 11-year-old son, Willie, in 1862.

Would Lincoln have benefited from a regimen of Prozac or other SSRIs? Perhaps. Maybe he would have recovered from his dark moods more quickly with a couple hits of Molly or LSD.

We'll never know. But psychedlics figure into Slater's book. Party drug MDMA (Molly) has been tested on those with PTSD. It has shown some remarkable and lasting results. As Slater recently described it on NPR's "Fresh Air:" those who take Molly and relive their trauma are able to shift that experience into another section of the brain, possibly the prefrontal cortex, helping remove it from the "fight or flight" amygdala. They can then get a handle on a horrible memory without degenerating into bouts of anxiety or self-harm, even suicide.

Slater wonders if this experimentation may lead to another golden age of drug therapy. The previous golden age brought on by lithium and Prozac may be nearing its end. Slater testifies that medications have helped her stay sane, raise a family and write books. They also have shortened her life.

That's the trade-off. So goes the old witticism: "Sound mind. Sound body. Take your pick." After five stays in psychiatric facilities between the ages of 13 to 24, Slater's doctors discovered Prozac. In a rush of Seratonin-laced good will, she finsihed finished her education, married, had two children and embarked on a writing career.

Then came trouble, in the form of the return of depression  and the start of her use of Zyprexa, which caused her to gain weight and lose her libido.

We patients are guinea pigs. Researcher still don't know the inner workings of these drugs. And their long-term effects. If you are in the midst of a severe depression, you want immediate help. Doesn't happen. Prozac or Zoloft may alleviate the symptoms eventually. Studies have shown that two-thirds  of those with depression would recover just as well with a placebo. That's depressing enough. Add side-effects into the mix and you have to wonder what in the hell we are doing.

I have been taking antidepressants for almost 30 years. I feel better, go off them, and crash. One of my psychiatrists once lectured me: "You have to stay on these the rest of your life. You have depression."

That made an impression. Unfortunately, I don't always listen. I went off my Zoloft six years ago and the walls came crashing down. I was out of work for a month. My psychiatrist at the time, who fled Wyoming for Hawaii one winter and never came back, tried a return to Zoloft and then several other meds. We finally went back to Prozac with a nighttime dose of Remeron. Several months later, I felt better but also was back exercising on a regular basis and eating right, which helped. Also, I was in talk therapy with a therapist and regularly saw my psychiatrist. Still, that summer I was still experiencing bouts of depression interspersed with anxiety. It probably took a good six months for my moods to stabilize.

Six months later, on Jan. 2, 2013, I had a heart attack. I recovered quicker from a "widow maker" than I did from depression. Got more help, too. Add an inept mental health care system to the fact that the docs know so little about the drugs and the human mind. That makes for a killer cocktail of ignorance. At least I have both Medicare and private insurance which enables me to navigate the system without going broke.

But I am not only here to complain. I am here to critique books. "Lincoln in the Bardo" is a wild ride and I'm only on page 98. This is how an award-winning short story writer writes a novel. Truly unique. I am a short story writer working on a novel. I find encouragement in Saunders work.

I have ordered Slater's book. I, too, would like to know what happens with long-term use of these drugs. My life depends on it.

Catching up on my reading -- D.H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers"

The most recent book I've read by D.H. Lawrence is "Sons and Lovers."

It's the only Lawrence novel I've read. Ever.

Not sure how I missed them. Although he published this and two other books prior to The Great War, his reputation was mostly made in the 1920s. He was in the midst of the "Lost Generation" of writers shaped by the war. He and his German-born wife, Frieda, were booted out of Cornwall in England for allegedly signalling German submarines. Lawrence is is mainly known in the U.S. for his time with Georgia O'Keefe and Mabel Dodge Luhan and writers such as Aldous Huxley in a ranch near Taos, N.M. He is the author of "Lady Chatterley's Lover," banned in the U.S. and U.K. in 1928. The first unexpurgated edition came out in 1960, 30 years after Lawrence's death from TB.

As spawn of the 1960s, I am surprised that I never read -- or tried to read -- "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Wasn't on the shelves in any of my K-12 schools, public or Catholic. It may have been in the public library but librarians of the day were on the lookout for impressionable teens attempting to check out smutty books. Guardians of the Book Galaxy.

Published in 1913, "Sons and L:overs" tells the story of Paul Morel as he comes of age in the Nottinghamshire coal-mining district. That's what initially attracted me to the book -- the coal-mining setting. But, unlike the film "How Green Was My Valley" (saw it on TCM last week) very little time is spent on the coal miners and their daily grind. Instead, we are absorbed in Paul's tale, almost absorbed as Paul is in his young life. Nothing new for a coming-of-age tale. But Paul's mother has a smothering presence. She's not evil but has transferred her attentions from her nogoodnik husband to her sons. When eldest son William dies, Paul is left holding the bag. He is talented, too, a young man who loves to paint and who knows his poetry. He is not destined for the mines, but something greater, and his mother intends to help him along the way.

That's the "sons" part of the tale. The "lovers" are Paul's, the innocent Miriam and the worldly Clara. You'd think an artistic chap such as Paul would have fled his one-horse town for life in London or Paris. But his mother keeps him close to home into his twenties.

I admire Lawrence's skill as a novelist. It's as plain a plot as any in literature. Will the guy flee his mother? Will he get the girl? I admit that the first 100 pages were hard-going. The pace of a 104-year-old novel is slower, as were the times. Lawrence takes his time noticing his home town of Eastwood, renamed Bestwood in the book. The flowers of summer, dazzling sunsets, people's feelings. We get inside Paul's head as he tries to determine the course of his life. Sensual -- but not sexual -- scenes power the novel. And leads me to rethink my own writing, more influenced by Raymond Carver than Henry James. Minimalist. Funny thing is, Lawrence was shocking in his time. His books were banned and so were the paintings, which were labeled as part of the daring Expressionist movement.

One of these best sensual sequences is when Paul accompanies Clara to the theatre. She wears a daring frock (daring for the time, anyway). "The firmness and softness of her upright body could almost be felt as he looked at her." (page 360).

'And he was to sit all evening beside her beautiful naked arm, watching the strong throat rise from the strong chest, watching the breasts under the green stuff, the curve of her limbs in the tight dress."

Something is going on on the stage but Paul hardly noticed. Clara and her parts "were all that existed."

The priggish Paul is enraptured. The foreplay goes on for quite a few pages until Paul and Clara finally get together in her bed. Sort of.

It's instructive to notice the shift in perception from 1907 rural England to 2017. Today, foreplay takes many fewer than 200 pages. Two-hundred characters, sometimes.

I did not find any graphic sex scenes in the edition I read, issued by Barnes & Noble Classics. It was published in 2003, so the scenes initially cut from the novel and returned in 1993, should be in there. Just for kicks,

This brings us the issue of censorship. That novel you are reading -- what edition is it? Was it cut up into a more acceptable shape before being published? To return to Carver, I've read varying versions of his stories. Apparently, his editor Gordon Lish had his own vision of Carver's stories. In our modern era, how much editing should authors allow? How much should they do?

I have found a few of Lawrence's public domain stories on the Internet. I will read some, especially those written during and after the war. One of my motives for reading Lawrence is to get a feel of the era, which is the setting of my novel. I've read quite a bit of nonfiction about The Great War and its aftermath. In some ways, fiction can do a better job of recreating the era. Good examples abound. "All Quiet on the Western Front." "The Good Soldier Schweik." "Farewell to Arms." And there are the British war poets who had a great influence on how the war was perceived by other generations. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. "Dulce et Decorum Est.."

"Wintry Peacock" is a malevolent short story by Lawrence. While some of the wording is dated, its theme of betrayal is as current as today's headlines. Here was a writer not Flannery O'Connor who featured peacocks in a story. Lawrence portrays the peacocks as dumb as stumps, more dim than the Morel family, which is experiencing a drama of its own making.  His style reminds me of that of his friend, E.M. Forster. See "The Other Side of the Hedge."

That is what aging provides, some perspective of what came before. I had good schooling. I have been filling in its blanks for 50 years. Maybe that's one of the positive aspects of the love of books and reading and writing. University liberal arts majors are belittled and, at some schools, discontinued. But my knowledge of books powered a career and sustains me in my retirement. I continue to discover treasures of other ages.

I just started "Three Soldiers" by John Dos Passos, yet another complicated writer of the Lost Generation. The writer was an ambulance driver in the war. I bought a slightly-used 1921 edition of the book for four bucks at an estate sale of a veteran of another war. The book still has the sleeve that housed the borrowers' card at the Merced (Calif.) Free Library. A date stamp on the title page reads March 21, 1922.

I hold history in my hands. I read.

During spring cleaning, the bell tolls for booklovers

What do I keep? What do I recycle? What do I throw away?

The questions of spring cleaning.

Over the weekend, I vowed to clean up my writing room. Spring cleaning fever hit us on Saturday as we helped our daughter move to a new place in Fort Collins. We tackled her room first, which she hadn't lived in for 18 months. Because it was vacant, I used it as a storage room for the stuff overflowing from my office. The jig was up. She's at home, searching for stuff for the move. So I had to comb through the boxes of receipts and old checkbooks and manuscripts and books.

I tackled the books first. The difficulty is that I want to read parts of a book to decide if it's a keeper. Got stuck on a Brad Leithauser poem, "The Odd Last Thing She Did" by his collection of the same title. It's about a suicidal young woman who disappears after leaving her car running on a cliff overlooking the ocean. "The car/Is Empty. A Friday, the first week/Of June. Nineteen fifty-three." A mystery is at the heart of this poem. Could be the setting for a 250-page hard-boiled mystery novel, a case for Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. But it's a four-page poem, long for a poem, short for a novel. The summer night is lovely with "the stars easing through the blue,/Engine and ocean breathing together." She could have been abducted, but that's not what the poem implies. She threw herself off the cliff. A suicide. A pretty, 23-year-old, and one with a car. But she didn't want to live.

"What are you doing?" Chris asks

I look up. "Reading," I say.

"That's not spring cleaning."

"Yes, but..." I want to say that this poem is wonderful and filled with mystery. It's why we read. But realize that I have been caught in the act.

Now my daughter is looking at me. She writes poetry. "C'mon, Dad," she says, hauling another box of rejected books out to the car trunk. She will take three boxes of books to the library today.

Caught in the act. I close Brad's book and put it into a box labeled "Mike books." Our rooms and basement have many such boxes as the bookshelves are full. In some circles, I would be labeled a hoarder. But among booklovers? Also in the box is "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy, which I keep pledging to finally read; "The Voice of America," stories by Rick DeMarinis, which doesn't have my fave DeMarinis story ("Under the Wheat") but does have "The Voice of America" and "Aliens;" and a 1968 Fawcett Crest Book edition of Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" or, if you prefer the German, "Im Westen Nichts Neues." I have been tempted lately to reread the latter book as I am working on a novel set in the years after The Great War. But I have other research to do and may never get to it.

Therein lies the bookie's dilemma. What to keep, what to send to the library? I cannot bear to throw away a book as it seems too much like burning a book. Someone, somewhere wants to read the book that I don't want. Just as I want to read a book that someone else doesn't want, which is why I stop at garage sales.

I am 66 with grown children who are both readers. What will I make of all of this when I am gone? My accountant father painstakingly put the division of his library in his will. He read history and presidential biographies and autobiographies. I got everything from Lincoln to Kennedy, including a beat-up 1885 edition of the "Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Volume 1." Not sure which of my four brothers got the other volumes, if there were any. But I also got a trade paperback of the Grant memoirs which is comprehensive but not nearly as compelling as the original.

Technology is changing reading and collecting habits. Old books fall apart. Indie bookstores die along with their proprietors and aging customers. Good news, though -- it appears that this trend may be reversing. Our kids read books but spend a lot of time on Kindle and online reading.

I am tempted to bring up all these issues with my family. But I am in a losing battle against time. Nobody will care for these books as I do. Some will be claimed by my heirs but most will end up in library second-hand sales or in paperback bookstores or on the curb in garage sales. I will get rid of those that I can now and let time take its toll on the rest. John Donne said it well, and I don't have a single Donne book, not even holdovers from my undergrad and grad school English courses.

Here's the quote, which you may recognize:

"... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Before those bells start tolling, I need to tackle these books. Wish me luck.

Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone anthology reading tonight in Laramie

Some fantastic writers will be reading tonight in Laramie. I won't be one of them, as I am here in Denver helping my daughter Annie. As you see from the list, I was originally scheduled to read from this new anthology but family called. See you next time. Meanwhile, anthology editor Lori Howe sends this announcement:

This gala opening from 6-7:30 p.m. at Night Heron Books & Coffeehouse, 107 E. Ivinson in downtown Laramie, features readings by Alyson Hagy, Erik Molvar, Art Elser, Mike Shay, Sunnie Gaylord, Jason Deiss, Birgit Burke, Autumn Bernhardt, Celeste Colgan, Edith Cook, and many others. The reading is upstairs, and will be followed by a book signing. Refreshments served; free and open to the public. A generous percentage of profits from this anthology go to support writing conference scholarships in Wyoming. Come down and join us, and support the arts in Wyoming! 

Refreshments! Night Heron has some great ones, as well as scads of books.

"The harder they come, the harder they fall" -- the novel

"Violence is as American as cherry pie."

Black Panther and SNCC activist H. Rap Brown said this is a 1960s speech in Maryland. His life, unfortunately, became a testament to those words.

I was thinking of that quote as I read "The Harder They Come," the terrific new novel by T.C. Boyle. It's about the American way of violence. But it's also a family story, a heartbreaker for those of us who have raised challenging children. Boyle is a master stylist, a writer equally adept with the novel and the short story. He's best known for his dark humor and satire. We get that in this novel. But also a big helping of tragedy.

For his epigraph, Boyle reaches further back than the 1960s for a quote from D.H. Lawrence: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."

If needed, you can immerse yourself in another dose of violence by watching the 1972 Jamaican crime film "The Harder They Come" and its Jimmy Cliff song of the same name. Despite reggae's "peace-and-love" rep, most of us boomers first encountered the music via a high body count.

I'm two-thirds of the way through Boyle's novel. So good and so horrifying, it's kept me up at night. It may do the same for you.

U/D 5/21/15: Finished the book. Glad I kept with it.

Mark Twain really liked Anne of "Anne of Green Gables" -- and so did I

Most people consider "Anne of Green Gables" a children's book, specifically, a book for girls.

As a child, I didn't read it. I read a lot. Sci-fi classic. Classics for boys, such as "Treasure Island" and "The Three Musketeers." The Hardy Boys mysteries. Tom Swift adventures.

But "Anne of Green Gables" or "Little Women" or "Little House on the Prairie?"

Not this cowboy.

My loss, as it turns out. Artificial barriers delineating what you should or shouldn't read does nobody any good.

I was charmed by the staged reading of "Anne of Green Gables" put on by the Next Step Performance Company this weekend at the LCCC Playhouse in Cheyenne. Small theatre, big cast. Next Step puts on productions that raises money for scholarships for students majoring the fine arts. Cast and crew are all volunteers, which allows ticket sales and auction proceeds to go to scholarships.

"Anne of Green Gables" by Lucy Maud Montgomery is a serious story. An aging duo, brother and sister Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, are getting too old to do all of the chores required by Prince Edward Island farmers in 1908. Matthew is in his 60s and Marilla in her 50s. Had automation come to the farm in 1908? Matthew has heart problems. His solution for cardiac arrhythmia is to get back to work. Marilla does all of the cooking and cleaning. Darns socks. Makes clothes. Bakes pies. On PEI, you have to make hay while the sun shines, which is does about the same length of time as it does in rural Wyoming.

They decide to adopt a 13-year-old male orphan to help out around the place. Orphans must have been a dime a dozen in 1908. Unfortunately, Matthew arrives in his buckboard at the Avonlea train station to find a scrawny 11-year-old girl waiting for him. The taciturn Matthew is kind of taken with the talkative Anne "Anne with an E" Shirley. The practical Marilla, not so much. "What good is a girl on a farm?" she asks. Anne must go. A neighbor says she will take Annie. The neighbor it bitchy Mrs.Blewitt, who has a zillion little kids and goes through hired help like there's no tomorrow. Marilla knows that Mrs. Blewitt probably will work Anne to death, which wouldn't have been much of a crime in an era of widespread child labor. She lets the lively Anne stay at Green Gables. Matthew is pleased. Anne gets into some minor-league scrapes. She stands up for herself with the town gossip, Rachel Lynde (played with aplomb by my one-time arts colleague, Rita Basom). Matthew spoils her with little gifts. Marilla gets on her case but you can see her attitude softening as time goes on.

Women readers know this story. I don't. No less a literary personage than Mark Twain thought that Anne was "the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice." The book has sold 50 million copies in 20 languages during the past 107 years. That's 500,000 copies annually, give or take. The author's home and the green gables farmhouse on PEI is a literary tourist stop, visited by scores of loyal readers from all over the globe. The town of Cavendish, the model for Avonlea, plays up its legacy. Nearby is a national park dedicated to Montgomery's works.

I didn't know any of this until I saw the staged reading and conducted a Google investigation of "Anne of Green Gables." Amazing story, really. We writers secretly yearn for our legacy to outlive us. I don't have much of a legacy. I visit those old homesteads and birthplaces of those who do. The best example I can think of is Nebraska's Willa Cather and her town of Red Cloud. The entire town is dedicated to Cather and her books and stories.A wonderful places to spend a warm spring day.

Living writers are learning how to enhance their local brand. Buffalo's Longmire Days celebrates the mystery novels and the TV series spawned by Craig Johnson's fiction. Carbon County celebrates  the fictional creations of native son C.J. Box. This is a trend that will only get bigger as the "local" craze grows. If you're a locavore, you should be devouring the creations of local writers, artists and performers.

Don't miss Wyoming author Mark Spragg this Friday at Booklovers' Bash

Plan to attend the Booklovers’ Bash, the primary annual fund-raiser for the Laramie County Library Foundation, on Friday, October 24, 6 p.m., at Little America Hotel & Resort in Cheyenne. Featured speaker this year will be well-known author Mark Spragg.

Mark Spragg grew up working on Wyoming’s oldest dude ranch just east of Yellowstone National Park and is a graduate of the University of Wyoming.  His memoir, Where Rivers Change Direction, won the Mountains & Plains Book award for nonfiction in 2000.  He is also the author of the novels The Fruit of Stone, An Unfinished Life and Bone Fire. All four were top-ten Book Sense selections and have been translated into fifteen languages. An Unfinished Life was made into a major motion picture starring Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez and Morgan Freeman in 2005. Spragg and his wife Virginia co-wrote the screenplay. The couple live in Cody, Wyoming.

There will be silent and live auction items.Tickets must be purchased in advance. Call 307.773.7221 for more information.