For book and bookstore fans: "Bloomsbury Girls" probes the inner workings of a 1950 London bookshop

I can see why a few members of the Historical Fiction Book Lovers Facebook group wrote “DNF” when discussion rolled around to “Bloomsbury Girls” by Natalie Jenner. It’s about books and bookstores. The time is 1950, a very boring year which launched a million Boomers me included. In London and all over the world, the war is over. Women are finding jobs but it’s a hard slog through male-dominated society. A few years earlier, these women were building ships and planes and tanks. Those warmaking items are no longer in demand so neither are working women. Bookshops in London’s better neighborhoods attract workers who love books and may even be writing one of their own, as happens in “Bloomsbury Girls.” Patrons come from all economic levels but tend to be well-educated with money to spend on books during a post-war period when necessities such as fuel and foodstuffs are still being rationed.

The book’s conflicts do not come from warfare and skullduggery and shady politics. Women try to claim their places in the working life and men stand in their way. It’s another form of warfare that the female characters in the book have to negotiate with skills equal to army strategists.

As the story progresses, Jenner features cameos of female literary figures of the era. Daphne Du Maurier, Ellen Doubleday, Sonia Blair (widow of George Orwell) and Peggy Guggenheim, one-time lover of Samuel Beckett who also shows up at the bookshop just as he finished writing his new play, “Waiting for Godot.”

There is a bit of a Wyoming connection. Ellen Doubleday was mother to the late Neltje Blanchan Doubleday whom we in Wyoming know as Neltje of Banner, Wyo., artist and arts patron. Neltje founded the Jentel Artist Residency Program along Lower Piney Creek and adjacent to her homestead and studio. She endowed writing fellowships in the names of her grandparents. She willed millions to the University of Wyoming for its arts and culture programs.

I have undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and read lots of books. I am a writer. I once worked in a chain bookstore in a dying mall. Barbara Cartland sold better than James Michener and Irwin Shaw. We sold more romances than any other category. Classic literature gathered dust on the shelves, although an occasional high school kid might wander in looking for “Catcher in the Rye.” I loved it when patrons bought books I loved so we could conduct a book discussion right there at the cash register.

I have fond memories of those days. But the daily workings of the Paperback Booksmith were not high drama. Somehow, Natalie Jenner turns the proceedings of a London book shop into a series of interpersonal dramas. In good hands, any situation can be exciting.

Jenner also is the author of “The Jane Austen Book Club.” Book clubs? Kill me now! It’s not always a soul-stirring topic although World War II dramas have hung on the concept. I’m thinking about you, “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.”

I have been reading a lot of books on my Kindle. Not this one. I found it in my local Albertson’s Grocery Store while waiting for prescriptions. A small book bin is located nearby. Bins for discontinued items are located through the store. This one features lots of children’s books. I recently picked up “Pop, Flip, Cook!” for $5, a nifty interactive tutorial on cooking including a cardboard slice of toast and knife to spread jam with. It’s almost like if you have a book, you don’t even need a computer.

I found “Bloomsbury Girls” in the same bin for $3.99. The enticing cover features three young women – the book’s main characters – strolling down a street in what must be London, bookshop in the background. Big problem: the characters are decapitated. I have begun to notice cover art with headless characters. Sometimes, they are shown from the rear so faces are hidden. Members of the Historical Fiction group say the publishers do this so as not to spoil the characters’ image we have in our imaginations. I get it. Publishers must have no faith in readers’ imaginations. Stop this trend immediately. It reminds me of the ridiculous trend on house-flipping TV shows to show bookshelves with pages showing but spine hidden. I am told that this is an attempt by realtors to not prejudice a sale when you see when you see a row of books about Trump. What kind of idiot lives here? They must be hiding something. Check the basement for bodies!

One thing about bargain bin books. Authors make nothing from the sale. At one point, the books were sold new and the writer ended up with a few pennies. The book supply chain is a long and weird one. Get your bargains when you can so you can go to Cheyenne’s new bookstore, Bonsai Books, and buy a new book at full price and begin reading it while sipping a latte in an easy chair. Bonsai Books debuts the same week as the new Barnes & Noble opens in the space that once housed Natural Grocers which now is in the original Barnes & Noble building on Dell Range.  

On rewatching "Band of Brothers" and viewing "The Pacific" for the first time

Here’s how I used to think about World War 2. It was our father’s and mother’s war. My father joined up early in ’42 and served as a radioman in the ETO with the U.S. Army Signal Corps until 1946. My mother trained on the U.S. Navy nurse program and would have served when she graduated in ’46 but the war was over. They were my heroes, members of what Tom Brokaw labeled The Greatest Generation. Time marched on. We forgot about the war. The fascists had been licked and would never return. The Boomers got old and complacent. 

Next thing we know, the fascists are back, at home and abroad. The fiction of conspiracy novels became the facts of 2023.

So, again, I think a lot about World War 2. The Nasties of 1939 Germany, Italy, and Japan are back except they are right here in our neighborhoods. Trump is Il Duce. Storm troopers rampage at the U.S. Capitol. Chinese militarists plot mischief in the Pacific. Hungary elects a right-wing strongman beloved by the MAGA crowd..

I was glad to see that Netflix returned “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.” I’ve watched the first one several times and was impressed. So I watched it again and was struck by the sacrifices made by Easy Company as they fought the Nazis across Europe. The Nazis were our enemy and they and their fascist ideology needed to die.

As for “The Pacific,” that series bowled me over. Saddened me too, for all of those young men who died on islands they never knew existed growing up in small-town America. The savagery of the marine battles for Guadalcanal and Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, were recreated in gory detail. Men who were there wrote memoirs about their experiences that they couldn’t get out of their souls. The Japanese militarists had to be defeated, their twisted philosophy had to die, for the world to have a semblance of peace.

We’ve been told over the years that there was nothing like the scope of World War 2 and the world would never see its like again. The U.S. wasted its treasure and young lives in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. Such a waste. It left a vacuum that China aches to fill over the next centuries. They think in terms of centuries while we measure our lives in microseconds. We must think in longer intervals to survive what’s coming.

When you see glowing footprints on the night beach, it means I was there

When I moved away from Daytona Beach, Florida, the beachside still had sand dunes and you could drive the entire World's Most Famous Beach. I drove the packed sand many times. At night, I drove and then parked between high-tide-line and dunes to discuss the state of the world and Catholic doctrine with my girlfriend. Sometimes, the whitewater was lit up with a bioluminescence provided by nature. Sometimes I was the one who was lit up.

The Florida I loved has become joke fodder for late-night comedians. I will give you this: the governor is a joke as are his right-wing minions in the legislature. 

I've been reading interviews with people who have moved to Florida from other places. They are asked whether they are fine with the decision or regret the choice. Some love the Florida they discovered during a family vacation and vowed to return for some old people fun in retirement. Some have had it up to here with the likes of killer hurricanes, retiree-chomping alligators, and nitwit politicians. They are decamping to other warm-weather beachside communities in the Redneck Riviera, Texas, or the Carolinas, both the North one and the real one in the South. 

I just read an online article on Max My Money with this header: “Boomers – Florida Doesn’t Want You” 10 Places In Florida Where You Won’t Survive On Social Security. Gosh, it’s tough the be unwanted. These 10 snobbish Florida locales include Miami, Naples, Palm Beach, and Sarasota, none of which have surf. I grew up surfing in Florida and that's how we graded the livability of any place. Key West is on the list. It also has no surf but it does have Hemingway’s house and Tom McGuane used to hang out there when writing “92 in the Shade.” In 1982, Christine and I honeymooned in the Conch Republic following our May wedding at St. Brendan the Navigator Catholic Church and the Ormond Beach Knights of Columbus Hall. In Key West, we drank at Sloppy Joe’s, counted the toes on Hem’s cats, snorkeled offshore. Tourists! 

My Florida is a large triangle from Daytona to Gainesville to Orlando and back to Daytona. That’s the Florida I know best. When this Baby Boomer retired from my 25-year career with the Wyoming Arts Council, Chris and I looked at retiring in Florida. Too expensive. Not enough choice in dwellings. Crackpot governor. We stayed put and watched from afar Florida’s human comedy.

My youthful encounters with Florida retirees were from a distance. We surfers gathered at Hartford Approach and watch them walk the beach. You could tell the long-termers by their leathery skin and hip bathing suits. Many were daily walkers, on the beach early like surfers. Better rested than most surfers, up until 2 a.m. and jolted out of bed at 6 a.m. by friends shouting through the window to get your ass up. We knew a lot of these old-timers, men and women both. New Yorkers under Yankee caps, Canadian accents. 

Then there were the sojourners in town for a weekend of a week or maybe the entire winter. They were in couples or groups, mostly kept to themselves. They yelled at us when we drifted out of the surfing area. 

Those seniors of the 1960s and 1970s are all gone now, every single one. Their footprints live on. You can see them glowing late at night on the beach. Their memories of what lured them to Florida.

The lateness of my cherry tomatoes and other Wyoming gardening tales

On May 29, I wrote about Eudora Welty’s garden in Mississippi, prompted by a post from another Mississippian and musician Jason Burge. In May, hope is in the air and in the ground. My daffodils and tulips were fading away, replaced by a mass of asters that took it upon themselves to reseed my front garden. Asters are tough. I’ve been deadheading them all summer, taking care not to grab a blossom currently occupied by a bee. Bees love my asters, whether purple, blue or pink. Such a beautiful little flower from such a spindly stem. They’re a wildflower and you can find them out on the prairie. Wonder how much of our locally-produced honey can be credited to astrum which is the Latin name for star. They are shaped like stars in the sky and they are stars of my garden. Aster is in the sunflower family, Asteraceae. Sunflowers also grow wild in Wyoming. I planted a variety of sunflower in my big flower pot, now surrounded by transplanted petunias. My sunflowers have not yet flowered and they probably shouldn’t be in a pot but at least I know what they are. I took tons of Plant ID photos and had it identified as everything from knotweed to a large variety of poison ivy. At one point, they were identified as Jerusalem artichokes. I dug some out by the roots hoping to find a Jerusalem artichoke that is neither an artichoke or from Jerusalem. I just found a tangled mass of roots that were wrapped into a batch of petunias which also came out of the pot. Petunias, of course, are the workhorses of a garden, blooming all summer, attracting bees and the first hummingbird moth I had ever seen. Such a creature. It buzzed me and sounded exactly like a passing hummingbird. I have grown tons of pink four-o’clocks or I should say that the four o’clocks grew themselves. I had them in a pot last summer and when they died with the frosts, I took the twigs and stuck them in the ground. There was no sign of them for awhile and then boom, there they were and the plants are about three-feet high and festooned with pink. Also sprouting nearby were three deer tongue plants which are odd grasses and sprout sprays of tiny flowers. The sprouts actually look like corn. No surprise, corn is also the grass, Zea mays. Deer tongue are considered an invasive species which I can see because they are propagating themselves. One final word on my 2023 garden. I planted only one veggie this year -- a red cherry tomato whose name I can’t recall. I grew them from Seed Library seeds and they got a late start that curtailed pollination and led to some late-appearing cherries that may not have time to ripen on the vine. My bad. I usually get plantlings about four- to five-inches along. They need the head start.  They didn’t get that this year. Frost will be here within the next couple weeks. Lesson learned.

 

A buried cold case comes to light in Icelandic crime thriller "Reykjavik"

The closest I’ve been to Iceland is the Maine coast. No recent volcano eruptions in Maine. Maine weather can be cold but Iceland has it beat. If you speak Icelandic as do 330,000 of the island’s inhabitants, you may be really good with languages but have few people to converse with in Portland or Kennebunkport. Both places offer great seafood and rugged terrain. They share another facet of life: fiction, mainly atmospheric thrillers. Maine claims Stephen King. Iceland claims Ragnar Jonasson.

If you watch Netflix, “The Valhalla Murders” may have popped up on your much-watch streaming series list. Valhalla is Norse heaven or their version of it. A majority of Icelanders share Viking DNA and Iceland was once part of Norway. But the Valhalla in the series written by Thordur Palsson -is, to paraphrase one former resident, “a living hell.” It’s a facility for troublesome youth. It’s also home to predatory adults. You won’t be surprised to find out that one of its youthful residents is now an adult and bent on revenge for beatings and torture and rape by staffers. It takes eight episodes for the police to get their culprit. Along the way, you get many views of snowbound landscapes and slate-gray skies; frigid small towns and one big gray city, Reykjavik.

You don’t need me to tell you that the countries of Scandinavia have a reputation for gloom and doom. Norway claimed Iceland until 1944. Vikings were bloodthirsty conquerors (great sailors though). Icelandic sagas feature much bloodshed. You’ve seen Ingmar Bergman movies. There are also the bizarre worlds of Lasse Hallstrom in “My Life as a Dog” with a 12-year-old’s ruminations on a dying Soviet dog in space and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” with its Iowa teen protagonist as caretaker of his intellectually disabled brother and morbidly obese mother. Also, Sweden is known for the graphic violence of Stieg Larsson, author of three posthumously published novels that begins with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” It gave rise to films in Sweden and the U.S. that were not designed for family popcorn night.

The latest energetic crime thriller from Iceland is “Reykjavik” by Ragnar Jonasson and Katrin Jakobsdottir. The title is important as the 1986 scene for most of the narrative. It also is the setting for the city’s 200^th anniversary bash and the famous summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikeal Gorbachev. Murder happens against this dramatic backdrop along with the investigation of a 30-year-old cold case. On the way, we meet a terrific roster of characters and a plot that kept me guessing.

“Reykjavik” was translated by Victoria Cribb. Hats off to her for keeping the author’s pace and vision. Also, all the Icelandic names of people and locations. We get lots of details of everyday life which includes lots of coffee drinking. This story of death hums with life and makes it an enjoyable read. I have a feeling a filmed version is in the works for the streaming services. The author creates scenes that cry out for the cinema. We shall see what transpires.

One more thing: the co-author of Reykjavik holds a master’s degree in Icelandic literature. She wrote her master’s thesis on another Icelandic crime fiction author, Arnaldur Indridason. She now is prime minister of Iceland and previously was the Minister of Education. So there’s that…

Kudos for the books authors and editors who include a pronunciation guide to the characters’ names and also placenames. I’d like to see more of that in translated works.

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.

A big thank you to President Biden and a big raspberry to Sen. Romney and other GOP skinflints

I received the following email from President Biden or someone on his staff and signed by Joe. It was in response to a thank you email I wrote to him following my student loan being forgiven through a program initiated by his administration. Here's Biden's letter:

September 6, 2023

Dear Mr. Shay,

Thank you for your support for our shared values, particularly on the issue of student loan debt relief. 

We are facing an inflection point in history, and the decisions we make today are going to decide the course of this Nation for decades to come.  We still have a lot of work to do, but I know there is nothing we can’t do if we do it together.  

I have never been more optimistic about America’s future than I am today.  Keep the faith!

Sincerely,

Joe Biden

I blogged about the loan forgiveness here. I admire the fact that President Biden is optimistic about America's future. I shall try to follow in his example although Republicans make that a challenge.

This came from a recent post from the office of U.S. Senator and multimillionaire Mitt Romney of Utah:

The Administration’s new student loan rule would worsen inflation and add to our $32 trillion national debt. Proud to join my colleagues on this resolution to overturn this irresponsible and unfair student loan scheme.

Reminder to Romney: Much of that national debt can be traced back to the tax cut for millionaires and billionaires pushed through Congress by the GOP under Rich Guy President Donald Trump. But Mitt would rather make life difficult for the 4,000-some Utahans (according to the Deseret News) who could qualify for loan forgiveness under Biden's new plan. We aren't as numerous in Wyoming. yet there are plenty of student-loan debtors working low-paying full-time jobs or two even lower-paying part-time jobs. Give them a break. Give us all a break.

After watching Oppenheimer in Missile City, WYO

After watching Oppenheimer with my daughter Annie

Storm clouds on the Wyoming horizon looked like giant mushrooms. No surprise as movie scenes roll through our minds. We recall Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad Gita “now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Backdrop for the morality play spread before us, a prairie of missiles perched below ground each with a hundred times the killing power of Fat Man and Little Boy sculpted not far from here on a tableland at the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. The statistics don’t really matter but I have lived my whole life in the Nuclear Age and so has Annie. The Strontium-90 in my bones will always reveal my origins, child of The Bomb, fallout drifted east to Colorado from desert tests, accidents at Rocky Flats and Hanford, a thousand tiny mistakes. Dr. Oppenheimer, I don’t cheer you as did the delirious nuke workers after Trinity. I don’t curse you. I can’t, father, I simply cannot.

Personal reflections on the student loan forgiveness policy

I got some very good news last week. An email was tagged: “Your student loans have been forgiven.” First I thought it was fake and then I checked it out and yessiree, no more student loan payments. I have been paying off $20,000 in grad school loans since 1993. Successfully, at first, and then as our financial situation experienced some serious ups and downs, I worked with my student loan provider, one of the businesses that the government contracts to provide this service. I would get them down to a payment I could afford and then they would suddenly, as if some invisible switch was pulled, jack it up to a higher level I couldn’t pay. I then would request a forbearance for six months or a year and that would expire, the company added in all of the unpaid interest, and my payments would be higher than ever. Or I would sign on to a payment plan and suddenly my company shuffled me over to another and I had to start all over again. When my wife's coffee shop/art gallery business failed (she was ahead of her time) 20 years ago, we declared bankruptcy which I thought would include my student loans. I neglected to read the fine print.

I consolidated my loans in 2012 when they reached the $102,000 mark and worked out payments with Nelnet and the amount with accrued interest and fees reached $165,000. Interesting to note that the federal government paid off the student loan servicer and it, conceivably, was very happy to have the money and scratch me off their to-do list. Not such a great deal for the feds and my fellow taxpayers. But, as a taxpayer, I was also supporting the government to contract with this servicer which didn’t seem to give a damn about me and millions of others in debt for attending college. One of the worst servicers is FedLoan Servicing, an arm of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, a company co-owned by Betsy DeVos, Trump’s “secretary of education.” The PHEAA was, for a short while, my loan servicer. DeVos made millions while arguing forcefully against student loan forgiveness. She now is back under the rock she came out from under. A very fancy rock to be sure.

But, in good faith, I was paying off my debt. All I asked is that the servicer find me a level I can afford and I will pay it until its paid off or Doomsday arrives, whichever comes first. We all got a reprieve when Covid hit and payments were suspended. According to Mohela, a new loan servicer that picked up my account under President Biden’s watch, when my future payments resumed, I would be billed $1,963 a month. My Social Security deposit (I am 72 and retired) each month is $1,940, slightly above the average Social Security check of $1,701. My wife, who volunteered to go on this journey with me, gets $1,240 a month, below the national average because her working years were spent with childbearing and childcaring and household management, none of which enhanced her Social Security benefits. I am disabled and my wife in a Type 1 diabetic and breast cancer survivor. It’s ludicrous to think that a retiree should remit his Social Security check to the government which deposits it into his credit union account every month. But there you have it. Then again, we have GOPers who believe that Americans should not be allowed to retire at 65 or should never retire and, if they do, don’t deserve the funds that came from their paychecks for 40 years.

The Supreme Court aided by GOPers such as Wyoming's entire Congressional delegation and Governor Gordon, stymied Biden’s forgiveness plan so he found new and interesting ways to relieve the burden of millions, many of whom are senior citizens. Because I made a certain number of payments and loans older than 20-25 years were considered time enough to pay, I was forgiven. My loans were 30 years old. I also worked in public service so I was credited with monthly payments I made which go toward forgiveness. All of Biden’s positive ideas to solve this crippling debt were fought by Republicans because CRUELTY is their middle name. Also, they despite higher education, education of any kind – witness the New College fiasco and GOP-mandated public education requirements in Florida. GOPers, even Harvard-educated ones such as DeSantis, have used the loan forgiveness issue as another cudgel for the MAGA crowd to use against the so-called elites.

I send thanks to Pres. Joe Biden and his allies. 

Remember that the Loan Forgiveness Program could be reversed if the wrong people take control of governance in 2024. 

In the good ol' summertime, we hear about The Great War and Scott Joplin ragtime

Last time I was in Casper, I could walk on my own. August 21, 2017, the total solar eclipse cut across a swath of Wyoming that ran from Jackson, across Casper, and on to Torrington and a slice of Nebraska and into Kansas and beyond. My first total eclipse and maybe my last as they rarely take the same path. On April 8, 2024, you’ll have to travel to Dallas for totality. In 2033, a slice of Alaska will have totality, and in 2044, it’s northern Montana. On Aug. 12, 2045, your best bet will be Colorado Springs or somewhere in central Utah. In 2045 I will be 94. I may not see it in person although my spirit will be floating around the Rocky Mountains.  

Casper staged a big downtown party with vendors, food trucks, and live music. My wife Chris and I drove up to `stay with our friend Lori. We watched the eclipse from Lori’s backyard, looking through special glasses you could buy anywhere that summer. It was magnificent. I blogged about it here. 

Monday night, my daughter Annie and I traveled to Casper for Poetry & Music, a summer series sponsored by Artcore that features music interspersed with a writer’s reading. I was the writer that night. Music and writing share some commonalities but some obvious differences. Both stir our souls, when done well, and that’s always the case.

The setting is the Bluebird Café at the Historic Cheese Barrel. The brick building dates from post-World War 1 with first the Bluebird Mercantile and then the Bluebird Grocery. The latter served as one of Casper’s corner groceries, of which there were many but only one remains as a grocer. The Cheese Barrel was a restaurant serving fantastic breakfasts and lunches. I ate there many times. The breakfasts, when you could get a seat, were divine. Catered lunches made their way to many Casper College events such as the annual literary conference that I helped organize. 

Owner Jacquie Anderson has rehabbed the place to look like the grocery store of the 1940s and it is charming. Tables are scattered through the main room. For the Artcore series, Jacquie and her staff line up 50-some chairs facing a small stage. There’s a lights-and-sound tech on hand to make it cozy. This was especially important Monday. On my way in, I noticed the Primrose Retirement Center van. “My people,” I joked with Annie. Sure enough, the place was packed with people my age. This is a challenge for me – acting my age. I can’t quite get that I’m 72 and disabled. My spiffy red rollator walker reminds me daily as does my drop left foot and back pain. Neuropathy tingles my hands and feet. My mind is active as ever although I sometimes can’t remember an actor’s name in an old movie and have to dredge the info up from the Internet.

The reading went well. Some acknowledged they also had grandparents from that time, some of them serving overseas during WWI. One was a retired nurse. People our age really seem to like historical fiction maybe because they’ve lived through so much history and it connects to their past. Wasn’t sure how all of these white folks would take to the relationship between Frannie and African-American character Joe Junior or the sex references but they seemed to take them in stride. They laughed in the right places. We took an intermission right before Frannie goes up for her speech, one woman even asking me to give a clue about it but I just said, “Cake first.” Annie says I should read before more people of an advanced age because they connect with it in different ways than some of the younger folks in the room. Carolyn Deuel and Artcore, sponsors of the event, said her grandmother’s card-playing club volunteered on the home front during WWI and even rolled bandages for the soldiers overseas. All these people from previous generations are gone now and people our age may be the last generation that actually knew the grandparents with connections of The Great War.

The night’s bill began with a classical music performance by woodwinds quartet Rara Avis. In then read the first section. Then came the cake break (the chocolate was chocolicious). I then read the second part of the story and took a few questions. Rara Avis closed the night with performances of some American classics such as Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and “In the Good Ol’ Summertime.”

Keep in mind that all events like this take a lot of time and energy to set up. Funding, too, as writers and performers get paid. Supporting the arts has never been more important. Writing, in particular, has been under fire by the MAGA-inspired Moms for Liberty who attack books and librarians. They are fascists and must be stymied in their bid to transform us into bobblehead dolls.

I will let you know when my book is ready to be read and/or banned.

On stage in Casper: Historical fiction and woodwinds with a Baroque emphasis

So excited to be featured at the Artcore Music & Poetry Series on Monday, Aug. 14, 7:30 p.m., at The Bluebird at the Historic Cheese Barrel, 544 S. Center St., Casper. I'll be on stage with Rara Avis, a quartet of musicians that "explores music for woodwinds with an emphasis on the Baroque." I will be reading a chapter from my newly completed novel, "Zeppelins Over Denver" that explores life in post-World-War-1 Colorado. Here's a bit of a teaser:

Nurse Lee Speaks to the Garden Club

Nurse Frannie Lee clutched the pages of her speech as she sat at a round table with her mother and two sisters at The Old Line State Garden Club in Baltimore. Her mother had talked her into this. As March 1919 stretched into April and then into May, Frannie’s home-bound boredom was showing. As the spring days grew longer, she saw no end in sight for her ennui.  The Army had mustered out its civilian wartime nurses and now she didn’t know what came next. One day her mother suggested a speech to “the girls” at the garden club. This struck Frannie as hilarious since most of the club’s members hadn’t been girls for decades. She and her sisters once referred to them as The Stale Old Ladies Gabbing Club. Now her married sisters both were members.

To be continued...

For info and tickets ($8): https://artcorewy.com/mec-events/music-poetry-rara-avis-michael-shay/

Elmore Leonard: great stories, memorable characters, and snappy banter

There’s magic in Elmore Leonard’s writing. In his novels, he tells a whopping good story and entrances the reader with the banter among characters. I can’t get through one of his books without laughs and a few sighs. Audiobooks do justice to his work and I’ve passed a few engaging hours with “Out of Sight” and “Tishomingo Blues,” among others that I’ve listened to driving through miles of Wyoming sagebrush. The wide-open spaces figure in Leonard’s early writing, when he wrote westerns as stories (“3:10 to Yuma”) and novels (“Hombre”). I’ve seen the movies, too. “Out of Sight,” “Get Shorty,” and Tarantino's “Jackie Brown” (based on “Rum Punch”) were delightful.

Just finished “Cuba Libre,” a bit different from most of his work. Cuba during the Spanish-American War is the setting. Just a snippet of Cuba’s long and violent history. I sometimes forget that Havana was capital of Spain’s New World Empire going back to the 1500s. It was a thriving city while Seminoles ruled the Florida Glades and panthers roamed the forests. Air conditioning was just a distant dream. Leonard sets some of his books (“Maximum Bob,” “Be Cool,” "Pronto" which led the “Justified” series) in South Florida. And why not – kooky characters and Florida are a match made in heaven and/or hell, depending on your POV.

“Cuba Libre” begins in 1898 with one of the main characters surveying the wreckage of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. I won’t tell you how it ends – it’s a wild ride, and worth reading. Intriguing characters encounter one another and all hell breaks loose. There’s an American cowboy escaping a shady past, a young marine from Arizona who survives the Maine sinking, a rich American expatriate, bad guys from Spain, barefoot Cuban revolutionaries, a hotel filled with U.S. reporters trying to drum up a war, many horses, and many, many guns.

Leonard keeps the story moving. Along the way, he violates all the rules that seemed important in MFA writing workshops. That’s something I’ve been learning reading historical fiction. Keep the story moving. No Proustian monologues. No settings in academia. I had just come from reading Ann Beattie’s stories featured over the decades in The New Yorker. Way too much academia. I liked the early stories better. They were leaner and meaner and more fun. Maybe they had the caring attention of a good editor? I did like the one story I read from her new collection which all center on the Covid-19 Emergency. I want to read the rest of those. Lauren Groff teaches writing at my alma mater UF yet writes amazing stories of Floridians in wild places. Check out her collection "Florida" that features a panther as cover art.

Look, I have an MFA in Creative Writing. I wanted nothing more than a career in the academy but that wasn’t in the cards. I still love teaching but take my writing cues from other sources, other lands, other time periods. The most fun I had recently was watching “White Noise,” a send-up of academia as well as American life. Don DeLillo – that guy can write and the folks who did the movie like it too. Hitler Studies! Airborne Toxic Event!

Go read Elmore Leonard. Plenty to choose from at your local library. Better get them before Moms for Liberty get their grubby mitts on them for the big book burning. 

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. 

It's a perfect day for Bananafish, until it isn't

Just one more thing about Jerome Charyn and J.D. Salinger...

In "Sergeant Salinger," the author stresses Salinger's "battle fatigue" (PTSD) which is a major part of the story. But not all. Charyn writes that some of the signs were there as a youth. An unusual boy with loads of imagination and talent. He struggled in school. First he was in a NYC public school that he liked and then went to a private academy when his father started being successful and moved to Park Avenue. He struggled here. His parents pulled him out, enrolled him in a military school in Pennsylvania where he thrived. The discipline and routine was good for him. It appears he had the makings of a soldier at an early age. And he was a good soldier in the war although a bit unorthodox. His teen years also gave signs of genius and mental health challenges. 

I bring this up because some experts have traced many cases to PTSD to a soldier's early life. Maybe they had trouble learning or maybe they were just a bit off-kilter. What would he have been like without his war experiences? Who knows? But he did and he was a recluse and very careful with his privacy and reputation. Not everything he wrote later in life was as good as "Nine Stories" and "Catcher in the Rye." He joins a long line of writers who hit it big early on and then not so much. Jerome Charyn, on the other hand, just keeps getting better at 86. 

I have no first-hand knowledge of military service and combat. But good books and movies can impart some of that experience. Charyn does it in this novel. Vietnam vet writers such as Tim O'Brien and Larry Heinemann and Bill Ehrhart and Yusef Komunyakaa do it in print. It took flyer Joseph Heller 17 years to write and then publish "Catch-22." It took Kurt Vonnegut even longer to serve up the Dresden firebombing in "Slaughterhouse Five." Silent movie film director W.S. Murnau took his years as a World War I German combat pilot and created a monstrous creature in "Nosferatu." J.R.R. Tolkien transferred the horror of the trenches into a blighted netherworld called Mordor with its pitched battles and fiery pits and humans adrift in murky holes -- you know, The Somme, July 1916. 

"No soldier ever really survives a war" -- Audie Murphy

Make that two more things...

In a chapter near the end of "Sargeant Salinger," Sonny Salinger and his sister Doris vacation at the Plaza Hotel in Daytona Beach, Fla. The Plaza was a post-war vacation destination for Northerners. It was best known for the tunnel motorists blasted through to get to "The World's Most Famous Beach," back when you could drive freely on it. That was my introduction to the Atlantic Ocean when our father drove us through it on our first day in Daytona. 

In the novel, Sonny breaks away from his sister's watchful eye and joins some kids making sandcastles on the beach. The kids eye him suspiciously as he joins in, shows them some techniques he perfected during family trips to Daytona. A concerned mother fetches her kids and eventually Doris fetches her brother. Nothing is mentioned about bananafish but you can see the beginnings of the short story. 

This became my beach in the late 60s, from the Plaza down to Hartford approach where we surfed. The only thing I knew about Salinger then is that I had to read "Catcher in the Rye" for English class. We chatted up girls, played frisbee and made sandcastles when the surf was flat, as we used to say. We eventually headed home and off to our night jobs at restaurants and hotels. My mind was mostly on surf and girls, getting enough pay for gas so we could find surf when none was to be found in Daytona.

Next time I visit Daytona to see family and friends, I'm going to the beach in front of the Plaza and try to see what Salinger saw. I know now that writers see things others don't. I may spot a bananafish struggling to get out of a hole in the ocean because it got too fat eating underwater bananas.

It's official -- Happy Moon Landing Day, Wyoming

California-based filmmaker Steven Barber wants to put up a memorial to the Apollo 11 astronauts. He wants to place it in Wyoming because it's the only state in the U.S. to celebrate Moon Landing Day. State Senator Affie Ellis of Cheyenne brought this bill to the Legislature over the winter and now it's official. Nobody gets the day off and nobody is touting a Moon Landing Day Mattress Sale. But at least we remember a historic first. And in Wyoming. Barber wants to build a replica of the memorial at the Kennedy Space Center which features the three Apollo astronauts. It was created by Loveland, Colorado, artist George Lundeen. You can read more about it on Cowboy State Daily. 

Barber estimates he will need $750,000 for the monument:

“I’m going to do a replica there. Period,” he told the Daily. “This is real simple. I find a billionaire, he writes a check and I build it.”

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 4

Fate had other ideas. We couldn’t sell our house in a down market as hundreds of other Apollo pioneers were trying to do. My father reported that he hated Cincinnati. He took a job with NASA which still needed space accountants and returned to Daytona just in time for the new school year. School chums asked me to return their going-away present but my dog had chewed up the nice Frisbee they gifted me. I made the varsity in my junior year and started dating a girl who drove a Canary-yellow GTO but she liked driving my rusted little car so we switched up often.

Over the next two years, I attended my first rock concerts in Jacksonville and in December 1968, my buddy Rick and I took our military draft physicals downtown and his lifer Chief dad arranged for us to spend the night aboard his ship. In March of ‘69, our b-ball team went to the state tournament in the Jacksonville Coliseum where we lost in the semis. Thus ended my basketball career.

In July 1969, as I pondered an uncertain future, our family huddled around the TV watching Neil Armstrong on the moon. The day before, my girlfriend and I were making out on the beach in my little car. The rain came down as the news came on: “The Eagle has landed.”

Two weeks later, when the Apollo astronauts were back in the U.S., our house burned down. No casualties except... 

As the day faded into history, my mother went to work as a nurse and my father got a job crunching numbers with the State of Florida and commuted to the Jacksonville office. Dad still didn’t know how to swim but the rest of us did. We were water people, for now.

Bio: Michael Shay did some of his growing up in Florida but now lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with his wife and two grown children. He graduated from Daytona’s Father Lopez High School in 1969, Daytona Beach Community College in 1974 and University of Florida in 1976. He applied for reporter jobs at every newspaper in Florida but none would hire him so, like Huck Finn, he lit out for the territories. He gets to Florida as often as he can to visit family and friends. His story collection, “The Weight of a Body,” is available on Amazon. His novel, “Zeppelins over Denver,” is due out later this year.

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 3

Hurricane Dora hit a couple weeks into the new school year. The lead story in that morning’s News-Journal featured an illustration of a swirling Hurricane Dora with an arrow pointed right at Daytona. Still, our parents sent us to school. Midway through the day, the nuns made us pray for Dora to hit somewhere other than Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church/School/Shrine/Nunnery. They finally sent us home. 

My father evacuated us to the mainland. We went as far as a motel along U.S. 1. I spent the night listening to WROD 1340 on my transistor radio and tracing Dora’s progress on the tracking map I ripped out of the morning paper. At the window, I watched the gusts batter the palms.

The storm brushed by Daytona and moved on to St. Augustine and Jacksonville. We returned to our modest house in an Ormond Beach community designed for middle-class vacationers and now was temporary home to the migrating hordes of engineers, technicians, and accountants planning the moonshot. The hurricane had turned our house into a white cinder-block island surrounded by murky water. We turned our picnic table upside down to make a raft and poled across the backyard.

During the next couple years, we bought a house in Daytona and stayed put. The ninth kid was born. We visited the Jacksonville zoo and marveled at the city’s new shopping mall. In January 1967, right in the middle of Father Lopez Green Wave basketball season, my father announced that the need for accountants on the Apollo Moon Mission was coming to an end, at least in Florida. He could stay with G.E. but only if he agreed to be transferred to Cincinnati. He had a big family to feed. Other G.E. employees who declined to move to Cincinnati or Schenectady or Boston now were pumping gas or checking in Georgia tourists at beachside motels. 

The good news about him leaving is that he didn’t want to drive his 1960 Renault Dauphine to Ohio during the winter. Since I had conveniently passed my driving test in December, he was leaving me his car and chauffeuring duties for the ten people remaining at our Hartford Avenue house which was going up for sale on Monday.

Next: Cincinnati or bust?

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 2

I stepped off the plane at the old Jacksonville airport expecting the worst. It was after dark and August’s heat and humidity wrapped me in its stifling embrace. I herded my mother and brothers and sisters down the airplane stairs, across the tarmac, and into the terminal. I greeted my Dad and complained about the heat. “You get used to it,” he said.

We loaded kids and luggage into our Ford Falcon station wagon and headed to a motel as it was getting late and the babies were crying and the rest of us were cranky. We drove by a car and its window was wide open and the guy driving was not wearing a shirt. Seems ridiculous to remember that decades later but in Colorado or anywhere else in the West I had never seen a guy driving without a shirt. We landed at a motel and my brother Dan and I saw a family swimming in the pool. Swimming at night? My God, this was a different sort of universe. We bugged our Dad to let us go swimming and he did, probably because he’d been on his own for a couple months and had forgotten how many unruly children he had spawned and wanted to get rid of a few of them. The pool felt great after a day spent on planes and in airports.

The next day, we drove to our new home in Volusia County. Every bridge we crossed had at least one person fishing on it. It was a workday in the middle of the week and everyone seemed to be fishing. We breezed into town, crossed the Intercoastal Waterway, drove through a tunnel under a big hotel and right onto the beach. I had seen the Pacific during our vacation trip to the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 (we lived in Washington State then) but I had never actually been in an ocean. And so many girls in bikinis.

The next day, we all went to the beach. The water was kind of rough but being in the ocean was so cool. Mom made us wear shirts when not in the water to cover skin vulnerable to the sun like any other Irish-American kids who’d spent their youth in snow country. Mom came in the water with us but Dad watched from the beach because he never learned how to swim. Hurricane Cleo was coming up the coast and passed through Daytona the next day, stirring up the surf on its way to St. Augustine. It dumped plenty of rain, more than I’d ever seen in one storm.

Next: Trial by hurricane

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 1

Over 400,000 people worked on the Apollo Program. – From the end credits of Richard Linklater’s Netflix film “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood”

My father was one of them. Unlike’s Linklater’s Houston-based father, mine worked closer to Cape Canaveral, in an office in Daytona Beach, Fla. Thousands joined the Moon Mission, most of them answering JFK’s call although he was no longer around to cajole and promise. Lyndon Johnson would be president when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969 after being launched from the Cape on July 16. Johnson was glad for a bit of good news after the battles of the 1960s which weren’t over yet. Camelot a distant memory. On this hot July day in Florida, hundreds of thousands of space-age lunarnauts and millions more around the world rooted for U-S-A!

July 20 always brings footage from the lunar event. It seems like yesterday that I watched it in black-and-white telecasts beamed from the lunar lander. I am 72 and retired. I look through veils of nostalgia. I sometimes share my memories with my two 30-something children. They are mildly amused. At least they believe that we landed on the moon. I think they do but it’s difficult to know for sure. All of us carry different memory-loops through life and they change as time passes.

What do I remember from this time? Some things I know for sure. Others are a bit foggy so I conjure what seems closest to the truth. I have not made up anything that follows but I may remember it imperfectly. That’s life.

I was 13.67 years old in August 1964 when our family of 10 moved to Florida. I was not pleased to be moving to the third state I would live in during the past eight months. In January, I’d been yanked out of St. Francis Grade School in suburban Wichita in the midst of basketball season and the wooing of classmate Patty Finn. In February, I was walking to the bus stop in snowy Denver to attend the split session at a junior high packed with Boomer kids and the site of at least two knife fights and a teacher mugging during my short time there. In June, my father came home from work to announce his new job with G.E. and our Florida move. He had finished the task of hiding nuclear missiles among the sagebrush of the West. The space program needed his accounting skills and our family was going along for the ride. Dad moved immediately. We sold our house, packed our goods, said goodbye (again), and off we went.

Next: Night Swimming in the Sunshine State

"Sergeant Salinger" by Jerome Charyn will rip your heart out

I was gobsmacked by an historical novel written about a famous author’s experiences in World War II.

“Sergeant Salinger” by Jerome Charyn is about J.D. Salinger, the most reclusive of American authors. His war experiences and the PTSD that followed helps explain why he kept his distance from his fellow humans for most of his adult life.

But that’s not the whole story. We first meet Salinger as a young single on the make in New York City. He dates Oona O’Neil, the vampish daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, and hangs out at the Stork Club with the likes of Walter Winchell and famous people we recognize by their last names or nicknames. Papa “Hem” Hemingway is one of them. Salinger writes radio scripts and short stories and readers like them but they are nothing to write home about. The letters home come later when he has something to say.

Salinger gets drafted even though he’d been previously diagnosed with a heart murmur. It’s the spring of ’42 and Uncle Sam needs everybody, even “half-Jewish writers with heart murmurs.” You’d think that Salinger (he goes by the nickname Sonny) would land in a cushy stateside job writing press releases or speeches for generals. What happens is something horrific and unexpected, even for someone like me who knows Salinger’s stories of PTSD veterans (“For Esme with Love and Squalor” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”). Salinger told these stories from the inside out. The author’s “Nine Stories” broke my heart when I first read them all in my 20s. Another heartbreaking story about returning vets is “Hemingway’s “A Soldier’s Story.” In “Sergeant Salinger,” there’s a scene when a jaded Hem visits Salinger in a Nuremberg psych ward and calls his own story “amateurish.” Hem groused that everything was behind him. He published “The Old Man and the Sea” in 1952 and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and Nobel Prize in 1954.

Lest you think Charyn has employed his magnificent storytelling skills to make it all up, think again. I did too. Until Part One: Slapton Sands, the section that follows Prelude: Oona. Salinger is a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) NCO, who accompanies invading troops to interview prisoners and others who might spill the beans on Nazi war plans. He speaks German. He’s been drilled in all the tricks of the interrogator’s trade. While preparing for the D-Day landings, he’s witness to one of the army’s biggest tragedies. In a practice run for Normandy on Lyme Bay on the Channel side of England, a live-fire exercise goes astray and German’s Kriegsmarine speedboats sneak in an torpedo LSTs, spilling overloaded troops into the ocean. There are 749 casualties, some interred in mass graves, and Charyn documents it.

I told myself this couldn’t possibly happen. I looked it up. It happened. That’s when I knew we were off on a wild ride. We go to Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Salinger is in the thick of it with the Fourth Division. They get into hedgerow battles with dug-in German troops and 82^nd Airborne “sky soldiers” (paratroopers) who are keen to even the score with Nazis who shot their comrades out of the sky when they dropped into the wrong spot. I looked that up too and it was much more gruesome than featured in “The Longest Day,” book or movie. Anywhere, for that matter.

Kudos to Charyn for doing his homework. He is a brilliant writer, one I’ve liked since getting hooked on his Inspector Isaac Sidel novels. We are in the shit with Salinger all the way through occupation duty in Germany. And he comes home which we all know. Salinger humped his “Catcher in the Rye” manuscript through Europe and wrote until he couldn’t write any more. The novel ends with the manuscript in his tiny retreat on Sleepy Hollow Lane, a street that Salinger invents because of its locale near the setting of the famous Washington Irving story. Nobody but family can find him there. Until he finishes his war-battered manuscript and it becomes a best seller. "Catcher in the Rye" still makes waves. 

Publisher is Bellevue Literary Press of New York, a small press with origins at Bellevue Hospital, noted for its Psychiatric Unit (the Ghostbusters were interned there, briefly) and the medical offices where Dr. Lewis Thomas wrote the best-selling “Lives of a Cell.” I haven’t read most of its authors who write, Bellevue notes, “at the intersection of the arts and sciences.” They’ve also published other books by Charyn, including his latest “Ravage & Son,” a “vintage noir” set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the turn of the last century. I have pre-ordered it. Charyn has other historicals. Look them up at his web site at jeromecharyn.com