Emily Dickinson could not stop for death but could for poetry

How did the Dominican sisters think I could understand an Emily Dickinson poem, "I could not stop for death?"

Sister Miriam Catherine: What is this poem about Mr. Shay?

16-year-old Me: Death, sister.

Sr. MC: What about death?

Me: She could not stop for it.

Sr. MC: Anything else?

Me: There's a carriage.

Sr. MC: Are you a dunderhead, Mr. Shay?

Me: Yes, Sister. Please don't smite me.

There was no smiting on that day. 

I am now smitten with Ms. Dickinson's poetry. I did not, would not, could not understand its full meaning then. I was a kid. She began writing as a youngster but her lifetime of creativity was enormous and almost unknown at the time of her death.

I turn my attention to the poet who became "The Belle of Amherst" on stage but was anything but. Since her death in 1886, Dickinson's reputation has been battled over by family, friends, and biographers. Lyndall Gordon tried to make sense of it all in his biography, "Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds." And Jerome Charyn writes of Dickinson in his 2010 W.W. Norton historical novel, "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson." You guess that this is a different kind of look at a literary legend because the cover shows Dickinson's bloomers illuminated by candlelight under her hoop skirt.

I'm only through Charyn's first section but know this is a different look at an American poet who bored high schoolers and even college English majors. 

I now know that I didn't get it when I was young. Why does knowledge come so late in life? 

It's a dangerous time to be woke to literature. Liberal arts majors are being threatened in the U.S., maybe no more so than in Florida where I came of age as a writer. If I can identify a fellowship of dunderheads, it rests in the Florida governor's office. He aims to gut everything I treasure at the University of Florida: The College of Liberal Arts, English majors, arts programs, "wokeness" in general, and the Independent Florida Alligator. As a movie hero of mine once said, "This will not stand, man."

Back to Emily Dickinson. Charyn notes in his intro that he is obsessed with her poetry and has been for decades. His first sentence in the author's note: "She was the first poet I had ever read, and I was hooked and hypnotized from the start, because in her writing she broke every rule."

I returned to her poetry and I know what I was missing. I read and reread "I could not stop for death." I couldn't get enough. I went to the Emily Dickinson Museum web site. I read about her and more of her poetry. 

I laughed when I read this on the museum's online Q&A (thanks AI): 

"Q: Is Amherst close to Boston? A: No, Amherst is not close to Boston. It is located in the western part of Massachusetts, about a 90-minute drive from Boston, which is a significant distance for a quick trip. The two locations are in different regions of the state, with Amherst being further west in Pioneer Valley."

I laughed because when I lived in Boston 1972-73, my woman friend and I hitched regularly to Storrs, Conn., to see friends. The two of us had logged some 7,000 miles the summer of '72 by thumb, ending up in her hometown of Boston. My pal Tommy and I hitched from Boston to Putney, Vt., passing just minutes from Amherst, on our way to get high with friends among the colorful foliage. I spent my career driving Wyoming and Colorado. Significant distance, indeed.

I wish I had gone. I still could. For now, I will finish Charyn's novel and read more Dickinson. I live in memory and imagination. 

Read more about Dickinson's "Secret Life" in upcoming posts.

 

A Writer Orders a Birthday Cake

She’s pretty but doesn’t know it yet or maybe she does, maybe her new spouse told her that this morning before she hustled off to a new job. But she’s still in college, I think, summer break from FSU, a job making and decorating cakes. Could be worse, with her skin, working out in the Florida sun in June. A head taller than the slight Indian woman in a sari she helps. The woman wants a birthday greeting on a whipped cream cake. She spells out her granddaughter’s name and the clerk writes it down, says that’s a pretty name and then admires the women’s shiny hoop bracelets. The clerk tries to write on whipped cream but it’s not going well and she summons the head baker, a white-clad bearded guy old enough to be her father. I think they would like to tell the customer that she might try another cake, you know, one of those solid bar cakes or maybe a sheet cake with buttercream frosting, the ones you can write on. They come up with a solution, placing a plastic oval over the cake and writing on that. A bald Indian man rolls by on his store scooter that matches the one I ride on. He speaks brusquely and then rolls past the doughnuts and disappears down an aisle. Minutes later he returns but the woman from India is patient and keeps at it. He rolls away again. The Indian man is about my age, maybe even younger. I want to be a watcher at the counter, quiet, as I wait to order my cake. The woman customer turns to me. She is beautiful and tells me that it’s her granddaughter’s birthday and she is 10. Happy birthday to her, I say, and she smiles. The baker and the clerk finish their work and I draw close to admire it. Pink greeting on clear plastic over a white cake. High art. She turns and leaves. I order a sheet cake for my siblings’ birthday. A quarter sheet? Enough for 25? The clerk isn’t sure, looks for the baker and he’s in the back and she fetches a cake from the cooler and shows it to me. I know it is not the size I want and I think she knows it too but then consults with the baker and he comes out and tells me it feeds 20 when you cut 2-inch-by-2-inch pieces. If it’s not enough, you can grab some of our cupcakes. He points to a table piled high with them. I like that solution. I order my cake, the clerk writes down the birthday greeting, and I leave them for the day, a day that will lead to other days and other stories. I pass the Indian woman on the cereal aisle. She smiles, raises the cake in a salute, and peers down the rows of Cheerios and Fruity Pebbles, looking for the bald man in the scooter.

Drive-by photos of a closed Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home

 

Photos of the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home Museum in Savannah (building in center). It was closed to visitors on the day we were there. Built like a brick fort, sturdy and tall. Savannah's early residents built tall so they could fire down on their enemies, whoever they might be: warriors from local tribes, the King of England's soldiers, Yankees, The Misfit, or any rabble who might storm the gates. This makes it almost impossible for this fallen-away Catholic to access the place in my e-scooter. The backyard garden might be accessible but it was closed tight on Wednesday but open Friday-Sunday. It's the meeting place for the Peacock Guild writing group. Members are critiquing and polishing their work for a June reading. As the story goes, the young O'Connor taught her chicken to walk backward in the garden. Read my 2023 blog: "In Flannery O'Connor's Garden of Life, chickens walk backward"

The biopsy van stops here

Crash

Grief clouded my sight and

I rear-ended the van bearing biopsies

Bound for the cancer lab, one of them snipped

From my wife. The rear door flew open

I expected an avalanche of plastic bags, little slips

Of skin, viscous liquids, knobby tumors. But

nothing. And then a blooming flower, pink and white, on

a long green stem grows through the open door.

Out of the open door amidships

More blooms, others bright with purples and white

And oranges, many colors, fanciful shapes.

I knew then everything would be all right, there

Were no ugly lab-bound surprises, just a field of

Flowers at their peak, gloriously and forever alive.

Naomi Hirahara weaves a murder mystery into a 1940s historical novel and it's swell

Just when I think I’ve read every World War Two-era novel….

“Clark and Division” by Naomi Hirahara brings us into the life of Aki Ito. She’s a spirited young woman, smart and attractive and a bit self-conscious living in her talented older sister’s shadow. She yearns for just the right job and boyfriend, likes to hang around with friends, and knows how to dance the Lindy Hop.

So, she’s just like any other Southern California teen. But you add in the setting conjured by Hirahara and things get serious. Aki is Nisei, born in the U.S. of Japan-born parents. In 1942, her entire family is shipped to Manzanar internment camp, leaving behind their home and property and all-American dreams. Aki spends two years at Manzanar and, at 20, lucks out when selected for the government resettlement program which allows Nisei to move to middle America away from the coasts and start new lives. Aki chooses Chicago because that’s where her sister Rose has resettled. Before Aki and her parents can get off the train, her sister is dead, ostensibly by suicide. She allegedly jumped head-on into an El train and is killed instantly. Nobody knows why. Aki is crushed.

A great set-up for a mystery. Aki is still in shock when she discovers the secret behind Rose’s death and realizes she seems to be the only one interested in figuring out what really happened. She plods along at first but then discovers the strength to take the risks that will solve the case. Along the way, we meet the Nisei of the Clark and Division neighborhood. She has to hide her quest from her very traditional Issei parents. Along the way, we learn about Japanese-American lives, the foods they eat, their jobs, their dreams and fears. The most charming thing about this book are life’s daily details. Hirahara writes the Japanese terms for food, clothes, and many other things. I felt the crushing heat of a Chicago summer. I know how people got around in the city. Some especially good details about riding the El or Elevated Train. I got to see the workings of the famous Newberry Library. I know, the details of a library aren’t exactly high drama. But maybe they are. All this makes the book so down-to-earth and thrilling.

The ending is heartbreaking but also guides Aki into the future. And into the just-published sequel, “Evergreen.” In it, Aki has become a nurse’s aide and returns to southern California where she and other Japanese-Americans have to start from scratch – again. There’s also a murder, of course. While the book is listed under mystery, I’m sure it’s filled with the cultural and location detail that also makes for great historical fiction. Hirahara now has a series on her hands which she’s done before with her earlier books: Mas Arai and Leila Santiago. "Evergreen" is now the second book in the Japantown Series. I’ve ordered a copy. You should too.

What's really in that Paris apartment, and why is it so important?

“The Paris Apartment” by Kelly Bowen is the second book recommended on the Historical Fiction Book Lovers Facebook site to take me back to France in World War II. “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah was the first. They both impressed me with the sacrifices made by women behind the lines. They are well-trained operatives such as Sophie in “Paris,” or small-town young women such as Vianne and her sister Isabelle in “Nightingale,” women who lose husbands to the war or best friends to Nazi death-camp roundups. They all did the right thing when they resisted the Nazi onslaught. Some paid with their lives. Others emerged from the experience forever altered.

I’m a bit of a newcomer to the category of historical fiction and I’m particularly impressed by women’s stories. My childhood reading about the war were books by men about men. I read first-hand accounts such as “Guadalcanal Diary” by Richard Tregaskis and “Brave Men,” Ernie Pyle’s accounts of men in combat in Europe. I read war novels and watched war TV (“Combat”). I watched war-era black-and-white war movies, many of them featuring John Wayne. Most were hokey, not that I cared about that when I was 12. A great one is “They Were Expendable” about PT Boats fighting the good fight against the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. My father told war stories which were mostly unwarlike. He carried a rifle for four years but more importantly, he was in charge of the radio, his unit’s link with the rest of the army.  

Meanwhile, brave women fought the good fight. It was “The Good War,” as Studs Terkel labeled it, because the enemies were so evil and we were so good. The Nazis were cruel fascists and the Japanese cruel militarists (also, they were a different shade of people). Even Donald Duck hated these guys.

But it’s not the global issues that motivated these fictional women. Sophie was not waving the flag for democracy. She was getting even for Ptior, her new husband killed at her side when the Nazis terror-bombed a Polish village in 1939. Estelle Allard’s best friend, a Jew, was rounded up by French collaborators and shipped to Auschwitz. They join the fight for personal reasons but find themselves enlisting in a righteous cause. It’s always personal. This time, the women tell the story. One compelling aspect of this book is the two time periods that move the story forward. One if the war itself, with Sophie and Estelle, the other is told from the POV of Estelle’s granddaughter who inherits the abandoned apartment. She thinks she is getting a luxury apartment in the City of Light. What she’s really getting is a history lesson. Lots of art history, too, as one of the main story lines of the book has to do with the massive art thievery by the Nazis.

The books mentioned above aren’t the only ones. The group site takes the big view of historical fiction. For more targeted lists, go to this group site: “BOOKS - 𝘽𝘼𝙎𝙀𝘿 𝙊𝙉 𝙏𝙍𝙐𝙀 𝙎𝙏𝙊𝙍𝙄𝙀𝙎: About Women, By Women Authors.” You’ll sometimes find yourself in the midst of discussions about what is true historical fiction and what is not. It is great to argue about books instead of politics, although that sometimes enters the fray. Have at it. You’ll discover some great books in the process. 

Sallie Kincaid finds her inner moonshiner in Jeanette Wells' "Hang the Moon"

I participate in the Historical Fiction Book Lovers site on Facebook. I have discovered some real gems set in the 1920s suggested by members of the group. A few clunkers, too. But one I did see was "Hang the Moon" by Jeanette Wells. You may recognize her name from her memoir, "The Glass Castle," in which she recounts her wild family life and her success at transcending it. I recently watched the movie on one of the streaming services. Woody Harrelson is very good as the father with a million dreams that never pan out. It leaves a mark on Wells and her siblings.

The setting of "Hang the Moon" is one reason I chose the book. I'm writing a series of novels set in post-war Colorado, the first in 1919 and the second in 1922. I read books from that era to absorb the atmosphere but also the process of driving a Ford Model T. The moonshine world of the South is fascinating and violent. Prohibition brought new opportunities for those who lived in the hills. But making whiskey was going on before 1920 due to the South's blue laws and other restrictions on getting schnockered. That tradition continued after prohibition was repealed due to the same Bible-Thumpers who proposed it in the first place. Many of the first racers on the NASCAR circuit learned how to drive avoiding revenooers on the twisty roads of the Appalachians. One of my early memories was "Thunder Road" and Robert Mitchum hotrodding down winding roads to get the hooch to market.

Wells has seen rural poverty first-hand and puts that background to good use when she writes about growing up in Prohibition America. It's a gritty historical novel. I ran into a couple of slow stretches in the narrative and thought of quitting but it was a good story so I kept on and glad I did.

In it, a young woman named Sallie Kincaid bucks the odds and becomes the only woman rumrunner in Virginia during Prohibition. Haven't read many books with this story line. It takes the author a long time to get to the rumrunning. Sallie Kincaid likes fast cars. She has a derring-do spirit. I would have liked to see more action during what must have been a harrowing profession. She takes us along the first time the drivers risk capture to take five cars filled with shine to Roanoke. An excellent chase scene. There's also a showdown at a rural hospital between the rumrunners and the thug sheriff brought in to stop it.

It took awhile to get a fully-formed picture of Sallie. Her Aunt Mattie is rough on her but we don't get a good look inside her to see her motivation. Why does Sallie stick around her large small-town family when she has other options including marriage or just moving to a new place to make a fresh start? I'm being grumpy, I know, but the book left me wanting more. Cover art shows a young woman in a dress working under a 1920s-era automobile. But the author doesn't get her under (and into) that car for a couple hundred pages. 

The novel really picks up its tempo when Sallie takes over the family businesses and finds her inner moonshiner. She's almost as ruthless as her daddy but we do see her conscience at work throughout. There are some key revelations as the novel approaches the end. It was a worthy read. I checked it out at the Libby site. I was pleasantly surprised to find it there.

Making, transporting and drinking whiskey were boys' clubs -- no girls allowed. That's what makes Sallie Kincaid so special and so exciting. Her Hatfield/McCoy-style battles with the gritty Bond brothers has a bigger impact when a mere slip of a girl threatens the status quo. She finds new and interesting ways to wage war on the Bonds. A few of them borrow tactics pioneered in the Great War. Tom, her friend who’s been to war, melts down with shell-shock when the gunplay starts.

The Great War changed everything.

Kristin Hannah's historical novel features the brave women of the French Resistance

I’m reading “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah. It’s the story of two sisters in a small French village occupied by the Nazis. The elder sister, Vianne, has a child and a husband captured during the Nazi blitzkrieg. The younger one, Isabelle, is the rebel of the family, kicked out of a number of boarding schools and now working for the French Resistance. The sisters live very different lives. They share a hatred of the Nazis and possess strong wills to survive the war. The more compelling story is of the Resistance. The author has said that the novel is a tribute to these brave women. They faced dying during guerrilla raids or arrest which also meant death or a trip to a Nazi extermination camp. I just finished a chapter where Isabelle with her Basque guide takes four downed RAF pilots from Paris over the Pyrenees to the British embassy in neutral Spain.

Imagine traveling undercover to Jackson in a train jammed with Nazis and then hiking over the Tetons to Driggs in late October, struggling up talus slopes and crossing waterways, all the while dodging Nazis on one side of the border or Franco’s fascists on the other side. Or maybe it’s a postapocalyptic jaunt where the bad guys are some of the right-wing goons who invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Well-armed and stupid. Rain and snow will fall as you travel. It will be cold and you’re wearing running shoes and a light jacket.

You get the picture. These people were braver than brave. Their country had been overrun. Friends and family members had been killed by the Nazis. They must pay.

I don’t know what I would do. I’ve hiked Wyoming and Colorado mountains in all kinds of weather but I am always prepared. I am in my 20s (used to be), dressed for the climate and wearing good boots. I have five days of food in my pack and one of those tiny stoves. Good topo maps. Pretend I have a loaded Glock at my side, prepared for attacks by Bloaters (“The Last of Us,” episode 5).

Just think about it. The French Resistance had so much less and did so much more.

I’m looking forward to the film version of “The Nightingale.” Dakota and Elle fanning play the sisters. I hope the creators do it justice. You can see a teaser here.

Jane Campbell explores the "persecution of remembering" in her Cat Brushing story collection

The cover of Jane Campbell's story collection, "Cat Brushing," shows a ringed hand sweeping across the fur of what must be a very large cat or maybe the gorgeous gray locks of one of the author's elderly women characters. It could be both as you will discover reading her 13 wonderful stories in the POV of women in their 70s and beyond. This is her first book, published in her 80th year, as it says on the book jacket. I'm nine years younger than her which puts us, approximately, in the same age cohort.  

These tales are quite personal, erotic in spots. Am I surprised that women of a certain age have erotic thoughts and sometimes more than thoughts? No, but as a person in this age group, I am impressed by the directness of the stories. It challenges the idea that women of a certain age must be handled carefully lest they fall and break a hip or leave a pot burning on the stove. It's the "I've fallen and I can't get up" woman sprawled on the kitchen floor who would be lost without her handy Medic-Alert bracelet and her male rescuers. Old and helpless.

Fuck that.

In "The Question," the narrator gulps down a dose of morphine and describes the rush that results. I figured she was a goner, in the last stages of cancer, but she's actually a feisty woman who chased after her cat on a winter night and fell on her porch's icy steps. The idea that she likes the buzz of the morphine helps us get to know this woman in a rehab center who has no intention of staying abed. Tests surprisingly reveal she has no broken bones and only sustained a few bumps and bruises. When released, she asks her male nurse if she can have a to-go portion of the opioid. He genially refuses but as we read the interaction between patient and nurse, we find that she knew him in the past and knows his dark secret. 

The writer has a sure touch in turning tales on their head. In "Kiskadee," a woman lies by a pool in Bermuda and hears the melodious song of the Kiskadee, a predatory tropical bird with a big beak designed for killing. Interspersed are memories of her "special relationship" with her father. She recalls years of touching and cuddling, sleeping together, syrupy words from the father. Story's end has a horrible twist which I won't spoil here.

Most of these women recount loves gained and loves lost. The memories are clear and immediate, no brain fog here.

I reread Campbell's second story, "The Scratch."  Nell wonders how she scratched herself, a cut that bled profusely. 

What drawers had she opened carelessly, perhaps knives rearranged, had she handled scissors?

She forgets about phone calls with her grown children. She forgets things even though she writes everything in her diary.

But it's not the forgetting that concerns her most. 

The old barriers behind which she could once shelter... they all tumble down as the years pass. Just as running upstairs becomes a lost art and skipping down becomes impossible, so the capacity to forget is lost. There is a persecution of remembering. Remembering so much. Those midnight hours, dark nights of the soul, where remorse bites hard and the past presses against you.

Nell, in her 70s, forgets how to forget. 

I too, in my 70s, have forgotten how to forget. Memories become crisp and clear, even those I want to forget. This hit me so hard. Since retirement, I've been wondering why old memories come flooding back to me. As an old person, aren't I suppose to forget things instead of them rushing back to me with incredible force? It's not like I'm bored, lazing about in a tepid pool of nostalgia. 

Still, the memories flow. 

As you climb toward retirement, friends and family urge you to be busy when work ceases and you have all the time in the world. People get bored, get sick, get careless. But that's not it at all. Memories can overwhelm your present if you are not busy making more memories. They don't tell you about the "persecution of remembering." We have to leave that up to Campbell and her fictional characters. 

Fiction welcomes us into strange new worlds

Lisa See's latest novel, The Island of Sea Women, could have been set on a distant world. On a little known volcanic island , women have been harvesting their food from the sea for generations. They are called haenyeo. They go into the ocean year-round but only when the shaman says so. These women practice rituals for the sea goddess. They float out to likely spots, breathe deeply, and dive to the sea bed for edible sea creatures. They eat some of the catch but keep most for family and to sell at the market. Many have been lost to wicked currents or injury. They persevere through genocide and famine and family feuds.

Otherworldy, right? Reminds me of the Fremen of  Arrakis harvesting spice and fighting off sand worms. 

But the island of sea women is a volcanic island named Jeju south of the Korean mainland. The women are real and have been diving for generations. See bases her excellent novel on these women.

“Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back. In this world, the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life."

The story opens with the main character, Young-sook. We experience the culture through her life, from a child during Japan's World War II Korean occupation to 2008 as to old lady who still dives.  Her life is a series of challenges within her haenyeo clan, her family, other islanders, and invaders from Japan (World War II) and the U.S. (Korean War). See's story time travels, jumping from a present-day setting with Young-sook as a clan elder all the way back to her turbulent youth. Jeju now is a tourist hot spot with the usual assortment of clueless visitors. One of them is the granddaughter of her childhood friend Mi-Ja. Now the fully Americanized granddaughter butts into Young-sook's life and wants the real story about the conflict that shattered a friendship and sent Mi-ja off to America. The island people are survivors. Young-sook may be the most stubborn member of her clan. She resents the young woman but ends up opening up her life to her. And to us. 

Think about your image of 21st century Koreans. BTS, BlackPink and K-Pop. The bustling modern city of Seoul. The new Korean cinema, films such as Train to Busan and the Squid Game series, and comedies like Kim's Convenience about a Canadian-Korean family's convenience store. The Korean-made Korean War film Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War, may be an even more in-your-face war film than Saving Private Ryan. There is also the hermit authoritarian kingdom of North Korea which, to many Koreans, seems like another world. And is. Witness some wonderful novels about the North. My favorite thus far is The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson. It's illuminating how Americans are seen through the eyes of others. Those who know their history would not be surprised. 

The imaginary world helps us see the world in all its glory and horror. 

Sunday morning round-up: Legislature weirdness, online publishing, and "The War on Powder River"

Russia invaded Ukraine this week. Putin does not want a democracy on its border. The Ukrainians are fighting back. The U.S. knows what joining the fight would bring. So we work with sanctions and what’s left of our free press. We also send war materiel to help Ukrainians fight the despot’s hordes. Any student of warfare knows a declaration of war would bring disaster. So what do we do?

I hope to have the print edition of my book of stories up on Amazon this week. The e-book is already on the site. Working with Kindle Direct Publishing can be a challenge. A traditional press would do most of this work. Formatting the text, deciding on a book cover, overseeing the printing process, sending out proofs, publicity. It’s all up to me now. Not sure if I’m going to put my second book of stories on KDP. I just want to have books in hand instead of taking up space in the Cloud. This blog is more of a journal than a publishing platform. Wish me luck.

The Wyoming State Legislature is in town. They will do plenty of damage in 20 days. We now experience first-hand what gerrymandering and voter suppression can do. Also Trump. And right-wing social media and TV. The nuts are out in force to suppress mask mandates, UW’s gender studies curriculum, American racism discussions in K-12 classrooms, gender equity, party-switching at election primaries, voting access, and any talk about Medicaid expansion for the state’s working poor. I’m sure more ridiculous proposals will emerge from the muck in the next two weeks. Wyoming voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 and 2020. We now live in a Trumpist fiefdom.

I did not expect a nonfiction account of the Johnson County War to be shot through with irreverent humor. But that's what I got when I picked up Helena Huntington Smith's “The War on Powder River: The History of an Insurrection.” The book was published in 1966 as a Bison Books imprint from the University of Nebraska Press. This 1890s event is often referred to as the Johnson County War. It pitted the rich owners of large cattle herds against the little guy who owned a few head or a few hundred. The cattle cabal wanted to keep the open range in WYO. The little guys wanted to keep the maverick cattle that they found, stragglers from massive herds brought to Powder River Country by rich Easterners and Brits with the hope of amassing beef fortunes. Smith did an amazing job at taking a jaundiced view of an 1890s event that many people outside of Wyoming know little about. Smith’s research is impressive although this non-historian cannot vouch for all of the details. She cracks wise when describing the gentry founded ranches in Powder River Country which they enjoy in summer and desert once the first snow flies. Cowboys remain behind to watch the herds. While the winters of 1884-86 were balmy by WYO standards, the winter and spring of 1986-87 was a whopper. Many thousands of cattle froze to death on the overcrowded prairie. When the beef barons returned from the south of France, they left the round-up of strays to cowboys and got pissed off when small landholders rustled a few cattle. They got their payback in 1892, and also their comeuppance. It is easy to see the hubris of 1892 in Wyoming’s present.

Smith was an Easterner who spent some time in WYO. The TA Ranch south of Buffalo has named one of its dude ranch accommodations for Smith. The TA has the last surviving structures from the range war. Smith was a combat correspondent for Crowell-Collier magazines (Collier’s, Victory, Woman’s Home Companion) during World War II. In 1957, American Heritage magazine republished her account of the Battle of the Bulge. She recounts the breakout of Panzer divisions and how rear echelon soldiers, mechanics and engineers, were issued bazookas and ordered to stop Nazi tanks. Some of them were surprisingly successful and earned medals. Smith’s account has all the battlefield dark humor one finds in a good soldier’s memoirs. She brought that same humor to her account of the Johnson County War. I couldn’t find a full bio online but discovered she was a Smith College grad and wrote for magazines and wrote several books. The UW Heritage Center and State Archives probably has some good info on her. She obviously loved a good story.

Joan Didion and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

I was a bit shocked to find out that the Saturday Evening Post was still alive and celebrating its 200th anniversary. I know the Post from my youth, when it arrived in the mail with a new Norman Rockwell cover. My grandparents has copies of the Post and Life and Reader's Digest all over their houses. Required reading, and encouraging in an all-American sort of way. In 2021, for $15 a year, you can get six issues of the print magazine, a digital subscription and access to the online archive. I'd love to dig into the online archives -- that alone is worth the price. I will recognize many of the covers from the 1950s and 1960s. Display ads tout cigarettes, appliances, and shiny big cars made in Detroit.

I won't always recognize the articles. That was clear to me when Joan Didion's piece "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" appeared on Facebook with the news of Joan Didion's passing. It was a variety of journalism known as the long feature. She was among the coterie of American writers known for "new journalism" which blended reporting with fiction techniques. Some of you may know it as creative nonfiction or, in the case of Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalism. 

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem" was published during Didion's prime in June 1967 and republished by the Post in 2017. Didion dropped into the Haight-Ashbury scene on the cusp of the Summer of Love. The famous Human Be-in had been held in January at Golden Gate Park with lots of acid, hip speakers, and bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Dead. Word about this Hippie Utopia spread and by summer, school was out and thousands of young people crowded into the city. Media, too, even Saturday Evening Post.

Didion, of course, was no TV talking head who dropped in to marvel and possibly be shocked at the ribald behavior. She was an incisive reporter who dug into the culture and found it wanting. She sets her tone with a quote from W.B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming." Yeats' poem is much-admired for its stark symbols. It is also much abused. It employs Biblical Revelations-style symbols to warn humankind of what becomes of society's upheavals. He specifically addressed the Irish "Rising" of 1916 and its after-effects, which included a revolution and a civil war that involved much bloodshed. 

Didion's "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" records what she sees. Reading it now, I thank my Lucy in the Ski with Diamonds that I didn't bug out and go to the Haight. Sure, there was drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll, but also addiction, STDs, and poverty. Lots of teen runaways looking for adventure and a place to call home. I was 16, the age of some of the girls in Didion's piece. If I had read "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" in the summer of '67, it would have seemed as if it was happening in another world, which it was. My summer was spent in Daytona Beach. I surfed as much as I could. I worked evenings at the Village Inn Pancake House and KFC outlet. But I also had to help Mom with my eight brothers and sisters. My father was working at GE in Cincinnati. We thought we were going to follow him and move there as soon as we sold our house. My Father Lopez High School classmates even gave me and two of my peers a going-away party. They moved. I did not. We couldn't sell our house in a down market so Dad decided to accept a job at NASA in Daytona and forget about Cincinnati. Such good news. 

But what about the hippies and The Summer of Love? I thought the music was cool but was much more interested in the Motown sound. It was beach music, music to dance to at sock hops. I was keen on dating tourist girls from Kentucky and Georgia down in Daytona on family vacations, just itching to break away from Ma and Pa and meet some of the local hunks, or so we thought. The Catholic Church had ruled that underage sex was taboo and Catholic School girls were the first to take the edict seriously. But we boys didn't know anything either. That mutual ignorance was not a good thing. 

In Didion's essay, a five-year-old girl is high on acid. An older guy is turning a teen girl into addict and sex slave. Everyone is high. I've been on both sides of LSD, the experiencing and the observing. Have you ever been the only non-high person in a room full of acid heads? The experiencing can be fun. The observing, not so much. You might get the idea that this is cool and join them. Didion observed the scene and with a keen and sober eye described it to the world. She wasn't judgmental. She was known to have a good sense of chaos and what she saw was the "rough beast" that lurked within the frivolity. 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity.

Conservative institutions, such as the Catholic Church, along with cultural critics of the Right, blame the '60s for this blood-dimmed tide. There's a kernel of truth in that. 

I watched "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold" last night on Netflix. A fine 2017 documentary by her nephew, director Griffin Dunne. I went to bed pondering what it takes to be a writer. Didion knew early on that's what she wanted to do. After college, she moved to NYC, worked for Vogue Magazine, met her future husband, also a writer, and spent her life illuminating the universal through the personal. She left a template that many writers have followed, some better than others.  

The story of the dead sculptor's homecoming in Sand City, Kansas

Great article in the Nov. 12 edition of Flatwater Free Press: How a 101-year-old linked to Willa Cather altered a small town's future. Talks about Antonette "Toni" Willa Skupa Turner, a resident of Bladen, Nebraska, just down the road from Red Cloud. Toni Turner died at 101 in August. She was the granddaughter of Anna Pavelka, the real-life inspiration for Willa Cather's "My Antonia." Turner spent her life talking up Pavelka and Cather, a dynamo who helped turn Red Cloud into one of the most vibrant locations dedicated to any American author. More than 10,000 Cather fans journey to Red Cloud annually. Turner was the local literary celebrity everyone from Cather scholars to rabid readers wanted to meet. Cather based so many of her books and stories on Red Cloud and its people. Cavelka, a Czech immigrant, and Cather, intelligent girl of the town doctor, were from different worlds but forged a friendship that gave birth to a famous novel. 

My interest in Cather goes back to high school when I read "The Sculptor's Funeral" for American literature class. It was on of the classics in the typical 1960s lit anthology with all of the usual suspects: Hawthorne, Twain, Dickinson, Hemingway, Faulkner. Nary a writer of color in the batch. But Cather's story spoke to me. I couldn't pin a name to it. A famous sculptor's body is transported back to his Kansas small town on Sand City. Turns out the sculptor was a weird kid who got the hell out as soon as he could. He died young from TB and his final arrival causes much talk among the populace, most of it negative. Jim Laird, Harvey Merrick's childhood friend who is drunk, hears their snarky comments and confronts them:

Harvey Merrick wouldn't have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together, and you know it.

Laird leaves in a huff. The final paragraph wraps things up:

The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had loved must have gone underground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it never spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the Colorado mountains to defend one of Phelps's sons, who had got into trouble out there by cutting government timber.

It's a sad story. Lots of sadness in Cather's work and moments of triumph. She draws distinctive characters and it's hard not to be moved. When I read the story at 16, I knew something significant had happened but didn't exactly know what. Artists are different -- everybody knows that! -- and Merrick's differences made him an oddball in Sand City. Jim was an educated guy, a good guy who died helping out one of the town's worthless sons.

Why are all of these stories so damn sad? Cather's sculptor, Hemingway's soldier home from the war or the old man and his fish,  Algren's young punk who just wants a bottle of milk for mother, Dorothy Parker's big blonde. I thought I knew what sadness was but did not. I do now. I write sad stories because life is sad. The story is in the telling of the sadness lightened up with wit.

Cather changed her identity when she went off to the University of Nebraska. She dressed in men's clothes and went by Willie. She excelled in writing and journalism and worked her way out of Nebraska. But she escaped the sculptor's fate. She is celebrated in the town that inspired so much of her work. Not everyone is a fan. Her struggles with sexual identity make some Nebraskans nervous, even some of those in Red Cloud who reap economic benefits from the writer's legacy. 

I've read the novels but I keep returning to her stories especially the one about the dead sculptor coming home to a hometown that never knew him.  

Boring old college lecturer responds to "The Chair"

Watched the last episode of "The Chair" this week. I laughed, I cried. Various faculty and administrators and students pissed me off.  All in all, a good investment of six Netflix hours. 

I have never served time on a college faculty and I've been an adjunct at community colleges. I was an undergrad English major at one community college and a land-grant university in the Palm Tree South and a grad student at a land-grant university in the Rocky Mountain West. I never got within spitting distance of a small liberal arts college such as Pembroke. 

But Pembroke's people seemed familiar. As a grad student T.A., I experienced some of the same frustrations of Pembroke faculty, those f*cking f*cks referenced in The Chair's (F*cker In Charge) desk sign. Some faculty members were old and stuck in their ways. The Literature, Composition and ESL faculty didn't like creative writing faculty and vice versa. The administration was always targeting the English Department for cuts due to the fact that we all speak English so why in the f*cking f*ck do we need an English Department? Shouldn't it be the  'Merican Department since we all speak 'Merican here? 

All an MFA grad student could do was teach our two sections of comp, keep our heads down and write a lot. We had regular classes to attend on top of writing workshops. And, in my case and some others, I had a family to support. 

One of my favorite aspects of "The Chair" are insights into faculty's families. Dr. Ji-Joon Kim has a daughter who is as argumentative as faculty ("You're not my real mom"). Dobson's wife died and his only daughter went off to college. No matter he gets stoned before and after class, and sometimes doesn't show up at all. Dr. Joan Hambling gave up her personal life and career advancement to prop of the fragile egos of male colleagues. She is working on a relationship with a college IT guy who is as much as a wise-ass as she is. Dr. Rentz (Bob Balaban) chats with his wife before a college event and we find out that she gave up her academic career to raise three kids. "Someone had to cook dinner," she says as she urges her aging husband to wear his Depends.

My daughter, an English major, is watching "The Chair" but I don't think she's finished. After a couple episodes she was angry at the students, which I thought was interesting since she is a student and a Millennial. I was angry at the students too but possibly for a different reason. They didn't want to learn Chaucer and Melville? I fondly recall my red-haired prof at UF who taught us Chaucer in Middle English. She spoke it like a native and there were times I imagined her as The Wyf of Bathe. 

The Pembroke students just didn't want to learn it the old-fashioned boring Boomer lecture way. They liked the way Moby Dick was taught by Dr. Yaz, a Millennial who approached it in a new way. By the end of the final episode, I was depressed about the state of academia. No surprise -- I was a boring old lecturer and probably still am. Back in my day, etc., etc., and so on. 

La Petite Fadette: the novel by George Sand and the silent movie with Mary Pickford

"La Petite Fadette" is a novel by George Sand published in 1849. I'm reading it now after watching a 1915 silent film, "Fanchon, the Cricket," loosely based on the book. I'm a fan of the silents shown on TCM on Sunday night. In "Fanchon," Mary Pickford plays the lead. She was a darling of Hollywood at the time and in 1919 formed United Artists with D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin. She plays Cricket, named for her small stature and hyperactive nature. Some people in the village consider her a witch because that's how the villagers saw her grandmother. Fadette and her little brother Grasshopper live with her in a tumbledown cottage out in the woods.

The cinematic Fanchon falls in love with the local hottie named Landry and scandal erupts because he is from a "good" family and she is not. Common plot line for many books and films. In the end, romance prevails and the two are married. The end.

As the credits rolled, I noticed that it was based on Sand's book. Wonder what the book is like? Despite my time as an English major, I never read any of Sand's numerous works. She's not really a part of the canon, at least when I was in grad school. Women authors were a few in the 1980s version of the big list. An oversight, as she was a woman author when that was very rare, author of many novels (one of my grad school mentors had the 28-volume English language set in his library). Sand was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin and called Aurore by friends and family. She lived the bohemian life in Paris, wore men's clothing, smoked, and had numerous affairs with the literati and some musicians, Chopin, for one. Victor Hugo liked her work. Sand spent time on the barricades during the 1849 revolution. 

No surprise but "La Petite Fadette" is quite different from the Pickford film. In the novel, Fadette is small and describes herself as ugly, obviously no Mary Pickford, although Fadette is not always reliable in describing herself. She is dirty and wears tattered clothes. Still, she exerts a strong presence. Landry protects her during the village's feast day and even dances the bouree with her, which scandalizes the bourgeoisie. I was taken with the character. She's more outspoken than I expected, less a victim than a young woman trying to find her way in the world. Like her grandmother, she is endowed with mysterious healing powers, which she utilizes late in the novel with Landry's twin brother, Sylvinet. 

The prose is a overwrought, keeping with the style of the era. Long passages of dialogue and description. The author inserts her own opinions. She obviously wrote at a brisk pace which left little time for editing. Chapter 20 seemed to go on forever as Fadette and Landry critiqued each other. By that point, I was attached to the main characters and into the story.  

I am a strong advocate of editing and revising. But sometimes we lose some of the sloppy humanity that's a part of all good books. Think about Dickens and Tolstoy. Dickens was paid by the installment as his work appeared serially over weeks and months. Tolstoy, well, if you've read "War and Peace," you are familiar with endless descriptions of formal balls, philosophical discussions, and Napoleon's very, very long siege of Moscow. It also was first published serially in The Russian Messenger. W&P is wordy and unwieldy. Tolstoy didn't even call it a novel, saying that "Anna Karenina" was his first novel. What can I say -- I see it as a novel.  

George Sand wrote 59 novels and 13 plays. The Russians, especially Dostoevsky, were crazy about Sand's work during her lifetime. She's been featured in at least four Hollywood movies. "A Song to Remember" with Merle Oberon as Sand and Cornel Wilde as Chopin. I can't say I'll read more of her books, although not all are available in English. I have read one, which should please my English professors. It pleases me, too. Oh, and I saw the movie.

Reading and writing about Florida women

After reading Kristen Arnett's recent New York Times essay, "Florida women are no joke. I should know," I wanted to go out and buy or borrow all the books she referenced. There are a lot of them. Our excellent library stocks two of them: Arnett's novel "Mostly Dead Things" and Lauren Groff's "Florida." I read Groff's stories about Gainesville and environs and its inhabitants. "Dogs Go Wolf" is a wondrous story about two young sisters (four and seven) stranded on an island. Spooky but funny, too, told with great wit. Arnett mentions this story in her NYT piece because her subject is not just Florida but its women.

Arnett writes about new books and TV series about Florida women. One of those is her debut novel,
“Mostly Dead Things, which I'm reading now:

The protagonist, Jessa-Lynn Morton, works in taxidermy, at a family business based in Central Florida. The story concerns grief and loss and love, but also how death and birth feel intrinsically linked in the Sunshine State. 

Here are three others that get right the "details and nuances" of being a woman in Florida.

Earlier this year came T Kira Madden’s memoir, “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls,” which takes a specific look at young queer girlhood in Boca Raton. Last year, in the story collection “Florida,” Lauren Groff wrote about a Central Florida that focuses more deeply on Ocala and Gainesville, places that have a deep tradition of life lived in the natural environment. Jaquira Diaz’s “Ordinary Girls,” a memoir of growing up in Miami and Puerto Rico, drops this fall.

Arnett also talks about the legacy of Zora Neale Hurston who grew up and wrote about Florida long before Disney arrived. Hurston grew up in the little town of Eatonville, now surrounded by housing developments. Hurston interviewed African-Americans around Florida when collecting traditional folk tales and slave narratives. Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is considered a classic.

My sister Eileen, who lives a few miles from Eatonville in Winter Park, sent me a copy of Hurston's "Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo.' " It's the author's account of interviewing Cudjo Lewis, the lone survivor of the slaver Clotilda, the last known slave ship to dock in the U.S. in 1860. A barracoon was a barracks where slaves were held on the African coast before shipment to America. Many died waiting, but Cudjo did not. Hurston, a writer, folklorist and anthropologist, tracked down Lewis in the 1920s and wrote the book about the experience. She couldn't find a publisher in her lifetime. The first edition was issued last year by the Amistad Imprint of HarperCollins.

Why does this writer who lives in Wyoming care about Florida? I spent my formative years in Central Florida. Our father moved us to Florida in 1964, when I was 13, and I moved to Denver in 1978, when I was 27. Fourteen years in one state gives me some perspective on the place. I lived there when all my senses and sensibilities were sharp. Lessons learned (or not) experience gained (or not) remain with me.

I go there now for funerals and weddings and reunions, as my six surviving siblings live there. The Florida in 2019 is vastly different from the Florida I moved to before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and the Disneyfication of Orlando. I spent hundreds of hours on Volusia County beaches and roamed the coast between St. Augustine and Cocoa. My high school basketball team played in every cracker town from Oviedo near Orlando to Callahan north of Jacksonville. I canoed lakes and creeks and springs and hiked the back country. In Florida, the back country is wooded areas away from settled places. Ocala National Forest, for instance, or the forests that used to crowd the Tomoka and Little Tomoka rivers back before the Florida boom that goes on and on and on....

On the relationship front, I dated Florida natives and recent arrivals from Massachusetts and Ohio. I married a woman from Ormond Beach whose parents came from Brooklyn and then traveled the world as an army family before landing in Florida. I have stories to tell about them all. I've published stories about Florida women. I have written from a woman's POV. I count on the women around me, including those in my writers' critique group, to let me know if I'm on the right track.

In my published book of short stories, four of the 12 stories are set in Florida. They feature Florida women who don't fit easily into the scrappy female survivors described by Arnett. One of my stories centers on just such a person, a young New Jersey woman who finds herself pregnant and isolated in Wyoming. The story, "The Problem with Mrs. P," was also included in the Coffee House Press anthology, "Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams."

I thought about Arnett's essay as I read "Mostly Dead Things." I also remembered a big debate I had during a Wyoming Arts Council board meeting about whether taxidermy is an art or a craft. I came down on the craft side while our board member from Ten Sleep described it as an art.

As I'm finding out in Arnett's book, we were both right -- taxidermy is an art and a craft. And if you are queasy about the details of taxidermy, you may not get past chapter one. I'm in chapter three and still reading.

Excuse me while I get back to the book.

Part VIII: The Way Mike Worked -- Saga of a Dying Mall

It's no news that suburban malls are dying. Young people avoid their manufactured atmospheres. Families may go into the multiplex to see a movie but venture no further. Elders, me included, walk circuits of the mall when the snow flies and the wind blows. Heart attack rehab, not shopping, is our goal.

In 1977-78, I worked part-time in a dying Florida mall, a trendsetter when it came to obsolescence. I clerked at a Paperback Booksmith Bookstore. Remember when all malls had bookstores? You had PB, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, Books A Million, Borders, Barnes & Noble. Our store, owned by a friend of a friend, was located strategically inside the mall's main entrance. Surrounding us were a women's clothing store, a cut-rate department store, a diner, an ice cream emporium, and a shoe store. If you ventured further, you could find the triplex movie theater that still showed first-run films but also midnight shows for stoners, Rocky Horror and Clockwork Orange among them. A karate studio was the lone store along one of the mall's corridors. It could be kind of spooky there at night, although the sensi, a U.S. Marine black belt, never seemed worried.

We all knew each other. How could we not? We were passengers on a sinking ship. Some nights were totally dead. Bored employees wandered the stores, trading gossip and making small bets on which place would close next. Matches happened. I dated one of the staff at the women's clothing store. Two college kids on our staff became an item. Customers sometimes interrupted them as they canoodled behind the counter.

My boss, Dave, was still smarting from his divorce but dated one of the part-time waitresses at the diner. His wife had come out as a lesbian and had moved with her lover to the other end of the state. They shared custody of their two kids. The duo had opened the bookstore in the early 1970s, when the future seemed bright for them and the Sunshine Mall.

We all knew books. I'd say that's a rarity now. It might be true at some of the Barnes & Noble stores still standing. It's usually the indies that have knowledgeable owners who hire knowledgeable staff. At our mall store, we sold a lot of best-sellers, romances, and mysteries. Magazines too. Not much demand for Tolstoy or Proust. My job was to man the register, gather up titles to be shipped back, stock the shelves with new books, and watch out for shoplifters. We stocked some skin mags, but the most-stolen were biker mags such as Easy Rider. The Daytona Beach area obviously was bigger on vroom-vroom than pulchritude.

When we returned paperbacks, we ripped off the covers and mailed them to save postage. We chucked the books. Sometimes I found one I liked and took it home. This was OK as long as I didn't try to sell it. I saved money that way but some bookstore somewhere was missing a five-bucks sale for a Conroy or an Irving. I took some to my family. There was always one of my siblings draped over a couch, reading. Mom and Dad were both big readers. None of them seemed to care that the covers were missing.

I lived with Carl, an old high school acquaintance. He was a mechanic at Ice Cold Auto Air, a very important place in steamy Florida. He fixed auto ACs at work, would roll back your odometer on the side. He offered several times to do mine but I doubted if anything would help my rusty Ford Torino. Carl was what you would call a player today. He dated lots of different women. A good-looking guy with a smooth southern accent, he could talk the talk and dance the dance, which was helpful in the dawn of the disco area. Carl blasted southern rock in his truck cassette player but, well, the chicks were digging KC and the Sunshine Band and the BeeGees and so was he. I sometimes accompanied Carl, figuring I could engage some of the women that gravitated to him like planets circling the sun. I was OK looking, but not much of a dancer and a better writer than conversationalist. I also discovered I could be an opportunist, if given half a chance.

I tired of working two jobs for peanuts and decided to move to a city where opportunities abounded. Choices were Denver, my birthplace and a city where I had family connections, and Atlanta, kind of a shining city of the South for young people. Like most Americans, I thought that the next big thing was just over the horizon. After being under-employed for a year, I was ready for a challenge.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, 1977, Carl and I hosted a party featuring five bushels of Apalachicola oysters and several kegs. It was a full house. One of Carl's coworkers fell into the half-barrel oyster fire; neither he or the oysters sustained permanent damage. One of our two toilets backed up. Cars overflowed our yard and onto our neighbor's driveway. W hen he came to complain, we invited our middle-aged neighbor to join us in beer-swilling. He graciously declined.

I met my future wife Chris when she arrived with Cathy, one of Carl's women friends. She thought she was a special friend until she discovered that Carl had many other special friends. Cathy tried to pull Chris out of the door and away from the party. But Chris and I had already developed a special friendship that would continue through four decades, all the way into the present. Turns out, she also was planning a move to New Jersey, where she  had lots of relatives, or Atlanta, where she had no relatives but ventured there often with friends. If we had made a Venn Diagram of our choices, ATL would have been the place we had in common. That would be the logical place to go.

So we moved to Denver.

Next: Rocky Mountain High

Partners in protest -- male writers support Wyoming Women's March organizers

My wife, Chris Shay, shows off her Women's March T-shirt.

I just finished reading thoughtful columns by two male residents of Wyoming -- one a blogger and one a columnist for the Wyofile online newspaper..

Both columns are excellent and I encourage you to read them. Go here:

Cowgirl up: It's time for a  broader perspective in politics, by Kerry Drake, Wyofile

Time to go to the streets, by Rodger McDaniel, Blowing in the Wyoming Wind blog

Both columnists invite their readers to attend the Wyoming Women's March in Cheyenne on Jan. 20. I did the same thing in blog posts here and here. We are the men behind the women who are organizing this event. Partners in protest.

A crew of women is organizing the Cheyenne march. I won't name them here because I might forget a crucial member. It takes a lot of work to stage a protest. Permits, security, speakers, equipment, food. The committee has been meeting weekly and this Sunday is our final tune-up before next weekend's march. If you're interested, the committee meets at 1 p.m. on Jan. 14, at 1 p.m., in the Laramie County Public Library's first-floor Willow Room.

Thus far, I can tell you these details. Marchers will assemble at 10 a.m. on the Depot Plaza downtown. Then we -- and our creative signs -- march to the deconstructed Capitol and march back again. Speakers will speak. We then convene for food inside the Depot. The event should wrap up by 1 p.m.

The theme for the march is Women's March Wyoming -- Hear Our Vote! It encourages women to register to vote, vote, and run for office. Why is this important? Trumpist Republican men from mostly rural areas of the state are making laws for all of us. Women are not in the legislature. Women are usually not heard in committee meetings. That leads to the absurdity of the Agriculture Committee holding hearings on two restrictive abortion laws. Drake writes about this in his Wyofile column. We all should be asking why. And then we should go out and vote for those who would better represent our needs for the 21st century.

See you at the Depot on Jan. 20.

Women's March Wyoming organizing update

The Women's March Wyoming is set for 10 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 20, in Cheyenne. Gather at the Depot Plaza, march to the State Capitol, where surprises await, and then march back to Depot Plaza for speakers. This year, organizers have arranged for a super-duper sound system that will allow you to hang on the words of every speaker -- and we have some great ones.

Starting at about 11:30 a.m., the WMW food committee will dish up hot and cold luncheon items, including desserts and beverages. We will have vegetarian items and possibly some gluten-free selections. Feel free to bring your favorite pot-luck food item. You can drop it off inside before the march. Food committee solicits crockpot items, such as chili, stew or soup, but keep in mind that our crockpot extravaganza at last year's march blew some circuits at the Depot. Pizza and sandwiches always welcome, as are casseroles in cloth food warmers, which can be pink or any other cool color. We also welcome brownies and cookies and other assorted desserts.

If you are interested in being a part of the organizing committee, feel free to attend the next meeting on Sunday, Jan. 7, 1 p.m., in the library's third-floor Sunflower Room.

If you are a crafty person and wish to make buttons and pussy hats to sell at the march, assemble from 5:30-8:30 p.m., on Wednesday, Jan. 3, at a location to be announced. Update: Location is Danielmark's Brewing downtown.  Go to the Facebook page for more info.

Wordsmiths are invited to the Wines & Signs March Prep Party on Friday, Jan. 19, at 5:30 p.m., at the UU Church in Cheyenne. BYOB or BYOW. Also, snacks.

Next Women's March on Wyoming set for Jan. 20 in Cheyenne

Last year, the day after the presidential inauguration was a lot more interesting than the inauguration itself.

The inaugural Women's March was held around the U.S. on Jan. 21, 2017. Cheyenne mustered a crowd of at least 1,200. Not bad for a community of some 64,000 souls. I was a food volunteer at the event -- and a marcher -- and I summarized my experience in this Jan. 22 post.

On that gorgeous January day, many of us marchers were still in shock from the election results. Trump was (and is) a sexist, misogynistic jerk who openly bragged about grabbing women's body parts. I couldn't believe that America would choose this guy over a much more qualified and intelligent woman. Hillary Clinton. I couldn't believe that we had a black president for eight years and had taken a few steps forward and now we were taking giant leaps backward. Events during the past 11 months have shown how bad things can get.

The Women's March did not derail Trump's nefarious plans. One thing we Baby Boomer activists have learned is that one march does not lead to immediate consequences. Wars do not end. Civil rights are not achieved. It takes many years and hundreds of marches and legal actions and elections to achieve the stated goal.

That's a tough lesson for Americans. We expect instant results. But it's hard-headed patience and persistence that wins the day.

See you at the next Women's March on Wyoming in Cheyenne on Jan. 20, 2018, 10 a.m., at the Historic Depot Plaza downtown. A potluck will follow. Get updated info at http://www.wywomensmarch.org. See today's WTE for an article about the march. The theme for this year is voting -- both GOTV tactics and getting women elected to public office. You can't expect progress when your state legislature is dominated by a cabal of Male Republican Know Nothings.