Philip Lee Williams

Another blog for Philip Lee Williams

2011-01-04T13:41:00.000-05:00

Hello all. In anticipation of my new book--a 1,000-page novel that will be out in October--I've started a new blog that's named after the book: The Divine Comics. Just started, but come and have a look: http://thedivinecomics.blogspot.com/.

Thanks to everyone

2010-11-22T08:45:00.000-05:00

After nearly 27 years, I have now retired as a public figure. That means I will no longer be doing readings, autographings, or any of the other many events surrounding writing.

It's been fun, but it's time to move on to something else and let someone else have the stage. I am very much looking forward to having more time to write and do other things.

I want to say thanks to all of you who have been so supportive since my first book, The Heart of a Distant Forest, came out in the spring of 1984. I do intend to keep writing and I will publish occasionally, but my days of being out with new books or attending festivals or events are now over.

So fare thee well and good luck. I'll leave the blog up for a few days and then take it down. Hope the holidays and the coming new year are fine for you all.

Philip Lee Williams

The Last Waltz

2010-11-02T14:31:00.000-04:00

I'll be at the Barnes & Noble on the Atlanta Highway in Athens on Thursday evening, Nov. 18, at 7 for an autographing for The Flower Seeker.

I've been a public figure for almost 27 years, and it's time to let someone else have the stage. So this will be my last public event as a writer (except for one long-planned event in Savannah next February). Thanks to all of you who have supported me over the years.

I will continue to write and publish, but I just won't be out on the road anymore. Happy trails!

2010-10-19T08:44:00.000-04:00

Going to be at the Georgia Literary Festival in Statesboro this Friday night and through noon on Saturday. This is a terrific traveling event (in a different town each year) and many thanks to the sponsors.

Only a handful more events left for The Flower Seeker, and then I'm going to be hanging up my literary traveling shoes. More on that later.

Kudos to the Georgia Review for its great festival for Raymond Andrews here in Athens last week.

Ray

2010-10-11T13:06:00.000-04:00

Lord, Lord.

That was a phrase my dear friend Ray Andrews used in his books, his letters, and in person. He was an astonishing man, and I loved him dearly. That he will have been gone from us for 20 years in November 2011 seems impossible.

Fortunately, The Georgia Review is sponsoring a two-day event on Ray and his work and the new issue of the Review that focuses on this important Georgia author.

Here's a terrific story from Flagpole in Athens:

http://flagpole.com/Weekly/Features/RaymondAndrews-6Oct10

I'm part of the festivities (a small part) and it will be a joy to focus on Ray and what his work has meant to so many. There will also be a screening of Jesse Freeman's terrific hour-long film on Ray.

Here's info from the Georgia Review website:

On Wednesday, October 13, at Ciné (234 West Hancock Avenue in Athens), The Georgia Review will host an opening reception from 6 to 7 p.m., followed by the Freeman film from 7 to 8 and a panel discussion of Raymond Andrews’ work and life from 8 to 9. The panelists will be Gildner, Shirley Andrews Lowrie (Raymond’s sister), Judy Long, and Philip Lee Williams, with Georgia Review editor Stephen Corey moderating.

On Thursday, October 14, from 4 to 5:15 p.m. in room 250 of UGA’s Miller Learning Center (48 Baxter St. at South Lumpkin St.), attendees will be treated to a panel discussion titled “Preserving Literary History: The Raymond Andrews Papers at Emory University.” The participants will be Gildner, Randall Burkett (curator of African American Collections for the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory), and Randy Latimer (nephew of Raymond Andrews and co-executor of the author’s estate). Douglas Carlson, an assistant editor of The Georgia Review, will serve as moderator.

Back at Ciné on the evening of the 14^th, beginning at 7 p.m., Gary Gildner will read from his Georgia Review essay “Remembering Raymond Andrews,” and then Reginald McKnight and Natasha Trethewey will read selections from Andrews’ work.

Come Wednesday and Thursday night to celebrate Ray and The Georgia Review.

OCAF event

2010-09-28T08:07:00.001-04:00

Last Friday night, the Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation in Watkinsville, Ga., put on one of the best events I've ever attended. It was a celebration in honor of my new book, The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram, and my friend and colleague Dorinda Dallmeyer's companion volume, Darwin's Living Legacy. I was there along with Dorinda, and so was the brilliant landscape artist Philip Juras, whose work is in both books and ties them together.

It's been a long time since I've felt so warmly received for a book. Blessings to Joe Ruiz, Cindy Farley, and Charles Warnock of OCAF for a magnificent evening.

For readers in the Macon, Ga., area, I'll be reading at the Sidney Lanier House on Tuesday, Oct. 12, in an event starting with a reception at 5:30 p.m. And later that same week I'll be part of a two-day event celebrating the life and work of my dear friend, novelist Raymond Andrews sponsored by The Georgia Review. More on that event soon.

Finally, I'll be signing copies of The Flower Seeker at Barnes & Noble in Athens on Thursday, Nov. 18, at 7 p.m. No one has supported me better or more over the years than Barnes & Noble. Hope you can come.

Photo: William Bartram

Comments

2010-09-22T07:22:00.000-04:00

Sorry to everyone who has commented only to see your comments not posted here (like you, Tim!). My settings were arranged to keep out spam--and there was a lot coming through. In Japanese. And keeping an eye on it and deleting it was a pain. But clearly the settings I have don't work. Despite the fact that the admittedly mediocre Blogger says the comments I "mediate" are being published, they aren't. So I've turned off all filters. Let's see how it works, Japanese porn links and all.

I know, I know

2010-09-20T09:15:00.000-04:00

To say I haven't been keeping up this blog would be an understatement. Wish I could say I'd look after it more in the future, but it's probably not going to happen, alas. Hope everyone else has more ambition than I do.

Finally here

2010-08-23T07:58:00.002-04:00

It's been an insanely busy time for me and our family--getting our wonderful daughter off to college and my seeing the first copies of The Flower Seeker.

Quite frankly, I was stunned by both the hardcover and paperback editions of the book. With gorgeous non-scratch matte finish, deckle edges, and French flaps on the paperback, the books are physically breathtaking. I haven't yet seen the limited edition, which I will be going to Macon soon to sign and number. There are less than 100 of these last ones, so they are going to be quite valuable some day.

Note: At Amazon, the three editions are a bit confusing, but if you scroll down, you will find out what's what. In general, of course, the limited edition costs the most, the hardback is second, and the paperback is the least expensive.

Mercer University Press has always published some fine titles, but with my book and its companion volume, Bartram's Living Legacy, Mercer is rapidly rising up the list of university presses doing among the best work in the field of publishing.

Be sure to check my website for my latest appearances this fall.

Books arriving

2010-08-10T12:51:00.002-04:00

Just got an email from Marc Jolley at Mercer University Press that all three editions of The Flower Seeker have arrived at the Press warehouse!

I will have to drive to Macon and sign the 100 copies of the limited edition--that will be a joy, I assure you.

No glimmers yet that this hideous summer may be drawing to a close, but at least public school has started and universities begin soon.

Flower Seeker CD

2010-07-19T09:21:00.003-04:00

One of the most intriguing parts of preparing The Flower Seeker for publication has been the CD that will go in the back of the hardcover and limited, signed editions of the book.

This is the first time I've had a CD with a book of mine, and it's been fun but difficult. It wouldn't have happened at all without the help of my brother Mark, archaeologist, blues master, and polymath supreme. Mark was the one who volunteered to engineer the audio tracks and get them ready for copying, and it's been a mammoth job of learning at his home recording studio.

There are four tracks. First is the only extant recording of the now-lost Keowee River in northwestern South Carolina, buried beneath the waters of a dam(n) for a nuclear power plant. Our father made a field recording of the river in 1967 at the shoals where Bartram crossed many times while he was on the Cherokee/mountains part of his travels across the South. Sure, it sounds like any running stream, but it isn't. It's an artifact of history and a reminder of the tragic destruction of the river and the valley.

The second track is the river and an orchestral composition of mine I call the Bartram Suite. This composition, like all my work, has a fully written-out orchestral score and was recorded using sampled sounds and computer generated effects. The sound is terrific. I hope everyone likes all the tracks.

Track 3 is the river, the music, and me reading Canto 24 of The Flower Seeker. The fourth track is the music alone.

Those who buy the paperback version (formally on sale September 1) won't be getting the CD. And there's no getting around the fact that the hardback of The Flower Seeker is expensive. But the entire experience of owning the hardback and the CD will, I believe, be worth it. (The books are already for sale online but won't be delivered until after Sept. 1.)

Mark's work on the CD was essential. Without him, it never would have happened at all. Last Friday, when we ran into some serious problems with the CD we'd prepared to be copied, it was Mark who spent most of the day on and off the phone and finally sending the wave files by FTP to the company that makes the copies.

Without his engineering skills and his knowledge of recording and music, I'd be up the proverbial creek. People think that when a book comes out, it's the writer who did all the work, but that's never true. The people at Mercer University Press are wonderful and are always working on my books.

It's nice to have friends (and brothers) who know how to help out when the going gets tough.

No excuses

2010-07-07T09:18:00.002-04:00

Wish I had a better excuse than sheer laziness for not keeping up with my blog, but it's summer, and with a book coming out in September, I'm using the down time to take it a bit easy in terms of events and to concentrate on writing a novel that won't be published until 2017!

Supposed to be 100 degrees or over today and tomorrow. It's really beyond my comprehension that so many people proclaim how much they love summer. It's my least-favorite season by so far that the other three don't even rank. A sluggish, unbearable, and putrid time of the year.

I'll start posting more regularly as we near the pub date for The Flower Seeker.

Lost

2010-06-22T08:27:00.005-04:00

Well, I'm supposed to be with the good folks from LOST Magazine at the KGB Bar at 85 E. 4th St. in Manhattan tonight, generally to celebrate the summer issue of the journal, if not get mildly rowdy. See http://kgbbar.com/ to find out about KGB. Alas, I won't make it, but I'll be there in spirit(s).

I was fortunate enough to have an essay in LOST a while back. Check out this terrific online journal at http://www.lostmag.com/. Here's my essay, of which I was quite proud: http://www.lostmag.com/issue3/mornings.php.

I came to be a part of that magazine through editor John Parsley, whom I got to know when he was at St. Martin's, and I published my novel A Distant Flame there a few years back. John's now at Little, Brown, but the journal just keeps getting better and better. There's nothing else quite like it.

Summer, ick, but good things

2010-06-21T08:37:00.008-04:00

I hate summer. Just HATE it. Of course, I have a reason, having lived in Georgia all my life, but I find it unbearable. Still, the early morning and very late afternoon are lovely, and so I try to go out then. All this past week, we've been haunted by a huge family of great-horned owls--four or five of them--in the trees right around out house. Linda thinks the adults are teaching teenagers how to hunt, and she may be right. The largest one is HUGE--I'd guess two and a half feet sitting on a limb with a chest a foot thick. Lovely to watch.

I was named Georgia Author of the Year in Fiction Saturday night in ceremonies at Kennesaw State University. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go, but it was nice anyway. This is the third time I've been named a GAYA, first for my novel The Song of Daniel in 1991 and also for my book of nature essays, In the Morning: Reflections from First Light, in 2006. This time it's for The Campfire Boys, my novel that came out last fall.

Finally, last week was probably the best week of my writing life. Mercer University Press has agreed to publish 8 of my books over the next 7 years, starting with my 1000-page rewriting of Dante called The Divine Comics, which will be out in the fall of 2011.

In the meantime, The Flower Seeker is right around the corner.

The Hours

2010-06-14T08:52:00.004-04:00

A few things:

1. I've been invited to read at the annual national meeting of the American Academy of Religion in October. Obviously, I'm delighted.

2. I have a poem coming out in Spiritus, the journal of said society, in their 10th anniversary issue this fall. I've also had an essay accepted by The Georgia Review, the best literary journal in the country.

3. I will be having extensive appearances for The Flower Seeker, but I probably won't be going to many of the book festivals for it or for any books in the future, for that matter. Two major excepts are the wonderful Decatur Book Festival, and the Georgia Literary Festival, where I am listed as a featured writer.

4. I've long thought I was just being hopelessly parochial about soccer. After watching some of the World Cup, though, I've come to the opinion that it's an idiotic, laughable sport where men run up and down a field and do pretty much nothing for three hours and 0-0 scores are not uncommon. Also, the constant roar of plastic trumpets at the venue in Johannesburg makes the 1996 Bubba Games in Atlanta look like breakfast at Tiffany's. It's a disaster for soccer and Johannesburg. I wasn't parochial, after all.

5. My publisher, Mercer University Press, is becoming a major player in literary publishing in the South. Credit goes to Marc Jolley, the brilliant, prescient director of the Press, and one of the best men I've ever known in my life.

I'll try to write more here during the summer and plan to write a lot when TFS comes out, even if neither of you reads it!

Image: 1986 issue of The Georgia Review.

The Flower Seeker on Amazon

2010-05-17T09:23:00.006-04:00

Even though it won't be out until September 1, my epic poem, The Flower Seeker, is already on Amazon.com, and I'm tremendously excited by it.

That gorgeous cover is a detail from a painting by noted landscape artist Philip Juras of the now-dead Keowee River valley in NW South Carolina--it's now under a hundred feet of a lake.

Obviously, I'll be writing a lot more as pub date nears for my 15th book, but for now, here's the link:

http://www.amazon.com/Flower-Seeker-Epic-William-Bartram/dp/0881462217/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274102758&sr=1-1

Stay tuned!

Slow Going

2010-05-02T09:32:00.001-04:00

I'm not blogging much these days because there are millions of writer blogs and websites, and I have very little evidence anyone is visiting either of mine. So it goes! I will be updating this blog occasionally, but not on a regular basis.

Although Of Course

2010-04-20T07:35:00.004-04:00

I still remember the first time I saw Infinite Jest at a bookstore, read the jacket copy, and headed with it straight for the check-out counter. When I got home, I became more of a recluse than I usually am and spent about three weeks reading the 1,000-page novel, getting happily lost in David Foster Wallace's lapidary insanity.

Most people now know the sad story of Wallace's suicide, following a lifetime of deep problems with depression and mood disorders. Very few things in the literary world saddened me more in the past 25 years, and I was able to share my grief with my friend Richard Powers, the great novelist who knew Wallace.

Now, there comes a book that makes me even sadder that Wallace is gone: Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky. It's the transcript of many audio tape recordings that Lipsky made near the end of Wallace's author tour for Infinite Jest. If you like DFW at all, buy it. If you want to know what a book tour is like, buy it. Just buy it.

I read it in two days. Wallace comes off as being a sweet, generous, kind, brilliant, damaged, and altogether wonderful human being, which apparently he was on all scores. Lipsky comes across as a very good interviewer and in some sense plays the bad guy to DFW's good guy. (Well, not really. Lipsky's a very accomplished writer, too, and his insight shows on every page.)

The tapes were made for a planned story on DFW in Rolling Stone that never happened. Very few writers ever have happen to them what happened to DFW--wild, universal critical and popular respect and support at age 34 when Infinite Jest came out.

I remember a conversation in New York many years ago when a woman asked me what I liked to read, and without thinking I mentioned Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, the book I still believe is the greatest American novel of the 20th century. She turned on me.

"Gravity's Rainbow! You gotta be kidding me! All that intellectual bullshit?"

Well, yes. Taste can't be explained, only lied about. Except I just said what I was thinking, and the more I thought about it, the more I began to understand why I loved GR so much. The same gears in my head were working when I read Infinite Jest. When I finished, I had gone on a seriously demented journey with a great, great writer, and I knew it.

What a terrible shame to lose him at the age of 46. There will be many biographies to come, of course. But this book is a good place to start, and at the end I felt the terrible sickness that I'd lost a friend.

Just buy it.

(Photo: David Foster Wallace)

Dog Ear Books; Web Site

2010-04-16T05:35:00.003-04:00

A reminder to readers that I will be signing books at Dog Ear Books in Madison, Ga., tomorrow (Saturday) from 1:30-3 p.m. It will be a genuine pleasure to be back in my hometown and seeing old friends and new ones.

On another matter, I'd like to apologize for my website being inadvertently down for the past couple of days. We're shifting it to another server and encountered some unforeseen problems. We hope to have it back up shortly.

A Distant Flame

2010-04-12T08:32:00.003-04:00

My Civil War novel A Distant Flame, which came out in 2004 from St. Martin's, was about a young man in the South who came from a Unionist family and yet found himself in the war anyway. It was about moral choices, the evils of slavery, and the mass psychology that can convince hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their common humanity without a second thought.

St. Martin's brought the book out in 2005 as a trade paperback, and by last year, both of those editions were out of print.

Now, I'm delighted to let readers know that an entirely new edition will be coming out in April 2011 from the University of Georgia Press. Its publication will be on the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the war.

In a side note, the utterly incomprehensible decision that the governor of Virginia made to name April Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery boggles the mind. What year is it in Virginia? 1923? I suppose we should feel angry, but it just makes me sad that this kind of denial is still in place in 2010. I spent 12 years doing research and writing A Distant Flame and The Campfire Boys, and mentioning the Civil War without mentioning slavery is like mentioning Germany in World War II without mentioning the Holocaust. I will hasten to say the two aren't equal, but the point is the same. You can't gloss over moral bankruptcy without participating in it.

At the same time, we cannot know who we are if we don't know where we came from. We've come a long way, but clearly we have a long way yet to go.

Townsend Prize Shortlist

2010-04-08T08:13:00.004-04:00

I'm delighted to report that my novel The Campfire Boys has been named to the shortlist for the 2010 Townsend Prize for Fiction.

The prize will be given in ceremonies at the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta on Thursday, April 22, beginning with a reception at 6 p.m. The event is open free to the public.

Here is a press release with the full story:
http://www.gpc.edu/pubrel/news/press_details.php3?press=338

The competition is mind-boggling, but it's always an honor just to be nominated for this prize. I mean that, too. It's an award I won in 1986 for The Heart of a Distant Forest and which really jump-started my literary career.

I don't yet know most of the nominees personally, but I did have the pleasure to be part of a group gig with Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, last December. She seemed very nice indeed.

I'm also delighted to say that my publisher nominated The Campfire Boys and my poetry volume Elegies for the Water for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Awards.

Awaiting galleys on The Flower Seeker any day!

Shown: Alice Walker, who won the Townsend Prize for The Color Purple just prior to my award for The Heart of a Distant Forest.

Dog Ear Books

2010-04-06T07:57:00.002-04:00

A note to readers that I will be at Dog Ear Books in Madison, Ga., on Saturday, April 17, from 1:30-3 p.m. I will be there to sign copies of The Campfire Boys and, I believe, Elegies for the Water.

I'm having a fine time right now reading a book I've agreed to blurb: Clyde Bolton's Hadacol Days: A Southern Boyhood. It won't be out until June (that's the plan right now, I think), but if you love warm, funny, and unpretentious memories of southern life, especially in the Forties and Fifties, this delightful book is one you will want to get when it comes out.

Clyde was a newspaperman as I was, and he remembers the world in much the way I did, though I'm a bit younger than he is. Look up his entire body of work--he's been an amazing southern writer!

Post replies; Deborah Blum

2010-03-29T07:59:00.001-04:00

My apologies to several of my blog followers. I had started to get a fair amount of spam and didn't realize I had set my filter so I now have to moderate and post comments as they come in. I think everything is now up to date below.

*

If you're in the north Georgia area, you MUST come to UGA's Miller Learning Center tomorrow, Tuesday, March 30, to room 171 at 4 p.m. My friend Deborah Blum (shown) will be there to talk about her brilliant new volume, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.

Blum, who grew up in Athens and is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is one of the best writers in the country and one of the best science writers, I believe, in history. This book lives up to its title and more. I couldn't put it down, and you won't be able to, either.

I know I'll be there with bells on!

Hall of Fame

2010-03-26T07:54:00.000-04:00

I will always remember Tuesday, March 23, 2010. On that day I was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Of course the honor is important to me. Joining Flannery O'Connor as part of anything is an honor. But the best part was being surrounded by family and friends.

I sometimes wonder if the public has any idea of what it takes to have a literary career--of the sheer work--the mental, emotional, and physical labor. A few writers are lucky enough to write full time from beginnings of their careers, but most of them write commercial fiction, which I can't and probably wouldn't if I could.

I have written and published 14 books and dozens of things in magazines and journals while holding a full-time job all my life. It meant getting up well before dawn to write and hone my craft and art. I have only recently partly retired, and the change in my life is amazing. But I still get up at 4 a.m. to write because it's the great passion of all my days.

My family and friends knew the sacrifice I've made. And the fact that they came to honor it and my books made the day one I will never forget.

My thanks to the University of Georgia Libraries for making this such a special occasion for me.

Now it's on to the most exciting time of my writing life--the publication this fall of The Flower Seeker!

Hall of Fame

2010-03-22T04:20:00.001-04:00

Alas, a migraine kept me away from being at Dahlonega last week, though I sent a statement to be read.

Now I'm back in the pink and very much looking forward to my induction, with my friend Judith Ortiz Cofer, into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in ceremonies today and especially tomorrow. I have no idea if I deserve the honor or not, but I'm delighted to be invited to the party.

Tuesday at 10:30 in the fourth floor rotunda of the Miller Learning Center on the University of Georgia campus--I do hope you can come be with us.

I'm back

2010-03-18T04:26:00.000-04:00

Hello, everyone, and thanks for your patience while I've been away. I've been enjoying my time off, but my busy schedule is catching back up with me!

Tomorrow, Friday, I will be in Dahlonega, Ga., as part of a panel on north Georgia writer Byron Herbert Reece. (The panel is part of the 33rd Appalachian Studies Conference.) I'll be joining a number of people on the panel, including my friends Coleman Barks and Hugh Ruppersburg. The panel is being moderated by Jim Clark, a poet and songwriter who, afterward, will be singing a group of new songs based on poems of Reece.

Next Tuesday, March 23, I will be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in ceremonies on the University of Georgia campus. The ceremony is open to the public and in the Miller Learning Center. The event starts at 10:30 a.m., and I'll be going into the hall with my friend Judith Ortiz Cofer and two African-American writers from the past, Georgia Johnson and Walter White.

Drop by if you can. I'd love to see you!

Taking a break

2010-02-17T07:20:00.001-05:00

I will be retiring from full-time work at the University of Georgia on Feb. 26. This is after almost 25 years at UGA and 38 years working full-time. In early April, I'll return to UGA to work two days a week for some time to come, but it will be a major change, for sure.

I'm looking forward to having much more time to write and relax. Because of this upcoming change in my life, I'm going to be taking a longish break from my blog, but I promise I'll be back in the not-too-distant future.

In the meantime, I want to remind you of two things:

1. My induction into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame on March 23 at the Miller Learning Center on the UGA campus. I'm very grateful for this honor, and if you are in the neighborhood, come celebrate with me and the other inductees.

2. The Flower Seeker, my epic poem on the 18th century naturalist and artist William Bartram will be out Sept. 1. This will be my magnum opus so far, and I can't wait to get it before the public. So keep a watch out for when the book starts getting in bookstores and in online venues, probably some time in August.

Bless you all for your kindness to me over the years.

(Image: Oenothera grandiflora, painted by William Bartram)

English teachers redux

2010-02-15T08:09:00.000-05:00

Alas, my appearance before the Georgia Council of Teachers of English was not to be. A snowstorm made it impossible for me to take the three-hour drive to Callaway Gardens. Maybe next year.

But I'm grateful they invited me and sorry it didn't work.

More soon.

Georgia English teachers

2010-02-08T07:55:00.001-05:00

It is my great honor to be addressing the meeting of the Georgia Council of Teachers of English this Friday at Callaway Gardens.

No one admires this particular group of people more than I do. It will be a complete joy to be among such accomplished people. Great English teachers helped me understand the literature to which I'd been introduced at home starting as a child.

I still fondly remember Mrs. Florence Wagnon, my senior English teacher in high school and a very influential person in my life. She had a brilliant intellect and was, simply, the greatest of teachers. I'm sure there are so many like her in Georgia. Can't wait to talk to this wonderful group!

On another note, I had a fine time at the Savannah Book Festival over the weekend. They know how to run an event in one of my favorite cities!

(Image: Painting recently identified as probably being William Shakespeare.)

Happy JoyceDay!

2010-02-02T07:38:00.000-05:00

Sure, it's Groundhog Day and James Dickey's birthday, but neither plump rodents nor drunken poets (and he was much more) are as important today as the fact that it's James Joyce's birthday!

I celebrated this morning by reading, as I always do, the first sentence of the greatest novel ever written:

"Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."

I've lost count of how many times I've read Ulysses, but if I could take only one book to the moon, it would be an easy choice. Celebrate !

A hero gone

2010-02-01T07:52:00.000-05:00

A writer hero of mine died last week. No, it wasn't J.D. Salinger. I read The Catcher in the Rye once decades ago and thought it was good. That was it. Not great, not life-changing, not Earth-shattering. Good.

No, I'm not talking about Salinger. I'm talking about Howard Zinn. He was a historian who wrote a book that was and has remained hugely influential to me, A People's History of the United States. Unlike my friend Ed Tant, himself a brilliantly talented writer, I never knew Zinn, though I shook his hand once here in Athens.

Two books absolutely changed the way I see the world. The first was Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which I've probably read 25 times. I never met Dee, either, though we did correspond and he did blurb a book of mine years ago. The second was A People's History. A great many historians objected mightily to Zinn even calling himself a historian, and of course it's easy to see why. He was a great objector, a high polemicist and someone who argued from a position of lofty rage. But for many of us, suspicious of standard narratives of history and society, the book exploded like a grenade in our hands.

I don't think I'm particularly naive. And I'm sure the other side has been having fun tearing into the book over the past week. (I'm thinking of people like George Will, though I have to admit I've also corresponded with him and find his columns on family and baseball some of the best things written in America in the past 50 years, though I can't think of anything political I agree with him on.)

Anyway, I'm sorry Salinger is gone. His book is an immovable object to millions. But I'm much more sorry to lose Howard Zinn. May his words go marching on.

The Flower Seeker

2010-01-27T08:19:00.000-05:00

Just a brief note to say that things are starting to gear up for the release in September of my epic poem, The Flower Seeker, based on the life and travels of the 18th century naturalist William Bartram.

My friend Dorinda Dallmeyer's new edition of Bartram's Travels along with first-rate essays by the South's best nature writers will come out roughly at the same time, both by Mercer University Press. These two books are, in my humble estimation, going to be a major publishing event for 2010.

The Flower Seeker will come out in a spectacular hardback and regular trade paperback editions at the same time, something that I've never done before. I will be writing much more about this book, about Bartram, and about my tour, but please keep it in mind.

And I look forward to seeing readers in Savannah on Feb. 5-6 for the Savannah Book Festival!

(Portrait: William Bartram)

Robert B. Parker

2010-01-21T09:08:00.000-05:00

I remember something my dear friend the late Jim Kilgo once told me. Jim had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and many well-meaning friends said encouraging things to him to cheer him up.

"But you know, just once I wish somebody had come up to me and just said, `Well, shit.' I think that would have been about right."

So when I heard that the Boston novelist Robert B. Parker had died, the first words out of my mouth were, "Well, shit."

My friend Lee Shearer first turned me on to Parker in the late 1970s, and after I read Parker's first Spenser detective novel, The Godwulf Manuscript, I was hooked. I have to admit I haven't read all Parker's Spenser books, much less his other many titles. But many, many of Parker's books have stayed with me over the years, and when I feel down, I re-read them. They are an eternal tonic.

I can't begin to mention all those books but the ones I re-read are Early Autumn, God Save the Child, Ceremony, and above all, Looking for Rachel Wallace, which I am re-reading right now in honor of the man.

When I was really sick in the hospital following open heart surgery for valve replacement many years ago, Lee came to see me and brought a grocery sake full of mysteries, including several Parkers I hadn't read. I was touched beyond words and have never forgotten that moment.

Friends and fiction can do that. They can change dark days into light ones. They can make us laugh and cry, distract us from more pressing things, and save us from the pervasive fear that haunts us all.

No more Spenser books? No more Robert B. Parker?

Well, shit.

(Photo by John Earle)

Political mess

2010-01-20T09:13:00.000-05:00

Why people are so surprised at Scott Brown's victory over Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts senate race completely baffles me. The New York Times' headline is G.O.P. Victory Stuns Democrats, which made me laugh out loud.

Almost from the moment of President Obama's swearing-in a year ago, the Democratic Party and the President have resembled a large, rudderless ship swaying wildly in a stormy sea. Mr. Obama has been a greater disappointment to me than any president in my memory from either party. I have no real idea what things he has been doing, but leading the country hasn't been one of them. He managed to run the health care issue about as disastrously (politically) as any one could have done if he or she had set out to destroy it from the inside. Lyndon Johnson must be rolling over in his grave.

Why O why do Democrats always self-destruct? Well, for one thing, Harry Reid is just sad. He's not a leader. I'm not even sure he's capable of being a follower. But in the larger picture, the coming ruin belongs to the whole party. The Republican Party is a repugnant joke to me, but the Democratic Party is only slightly better. (Fox News is a dangerous, repugnant joke, but its putative opponent, CNN, is just embarrassing, period.)

But most of all I blame the lack of leadership coming from the White House. All last year, I kept thinking (and saying to my wife), "When is this man going to take the tiller?"

My old friend, the late Phil Sanderlin, was a Libertarian who didn't like Republicans or Democrats. He often said, "A liberal is someone too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument." That describes the current Democratic Party perfectly.

Coakley was a laughably bad candidate. I'm not sure she even cared if she won. But the problems are much bigger than that.

It's not too late for progressives, but the sun may soon set on the Democratic Party if the Congress and the President don't start understanding this is all about one four-letter word: jobs.

Savannah Book Festival

2010-01-14T07:58:00.001-05:00

I'm delighted to tell readers that I will be one of the authors appearing at this year's Savannah Book Festival Feb. 5-7. It's going to be an amazing event with a spectacular lineup of writers and singer-songwriters, including the always wonderful Mary-Chapin Carpenter (right).

I'll be doing a reading on Saturday, Feb. 6, at 12 noon in the sanctuary of Trinity Church on President Street. An autographing will follow immediately after.

I have a long history with Savannah and an incredible affection for the town. As I'm sure all of you know, Savannah is dotted with gorgeous parks or "squares," and when I was 21 and dating Linda, I wrote her a poem called "Orleans Square" when I was in Savannah with the UGA Men's Glee Club as part of a huge group singing Beethoven's Ninth. Orleans Square, where I wrote the poem, is two blocks from my venue at Trinity! This year, we will celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary.

How strange. Some 39 years ago I was first trying to be a writer there, and here I am all these years later reading from my 14th published book.

There's a ton of information on the Festival's website at http://www.savannahbookfestival.org/.

The concert with Mary-Chapin Carpenter and several other well-known singer-songwriters will be held Saturday night at the same venue where I will be speaking earlier in the day.

Presented in collaboration with the Savannah Music Festival, this addition to the Festival schedule will feature original songs chosen specifically for and inspired by the literary legacy of Mississippi writer Eudora Welty, whose 100th birthday would have been April 13th, 2009. The concert, which debuted at the centennial celebration for Welty earlier this year, received rave reviews.

Obsessions

2010-01-11T08:17:00.000-05:00

All writers have their obsessions. Most people do, but writers are especially prone to hero-worship of other writers, though it's usually private.

I've gone through lot of periods in my life where I obsess over other writers. Hemingway lasted for several years. I think I've read everything the man every wrote, most of it several times, have taught his stories at the university level, and have read every biography ever written. That's True Obsession.

Thomas Mann was another one. I still re-read The Magic Mountain every three or four years just to touch the hem of his garment, as it were. And of course there are dozens of others. But none has exerted on me a more powerful pull than William Faulkner.

I just finished reading again Jay Parini's Faulkner biography One Matchless Time. I can't say it's my favorite Faulkner bio--that will always be Joseph Blotner's magisterial two-volume bio that I bought 25 years ago at our beloved McGuire's bookshop in Atlanta's Virginia-Highland neighborhood. (Everybody loves VA-HI, and that store was SO wonderful. I ran into Frank recently and had a chance to tell him so. Alas, it's been gone for years as have most great independent bookstores. I even loved that area so much I set one of my books there, a slight and funny mystery called Slow Dance in Autumn. Ahem.) And yet Parini does a very good job of putting Faulkner's life together and especially in summarizing the critical response to his books.

It's delightful to see, for instance, Parini writing wonderful things about the work of my friend Tom McHaney, a great writer and Faulkner scholar.

But I want to talk about about Faulkner, not Parini. Why do we obsess about this man? For myself, there's the South, of course. And of course there's Faulkner's mythical world, modeled, he admitted many time, on Balzac's. And there is the mythology developed around his life which just endlessly mesmerizes me. But most of all and enduringly so, it's the books.

The Sound and the Fury, Absalom! Absalom!, Light in August, Go Down, Moses.

Good God. When I read those books, I am lost to a world of confusion, narrative displacement, and endless admiration. I've read TSATF probably five or six times, and each I read it, I find a wildly different book because a wildly different me is reading it. For a long time, Light in August was my favorite Faulkner novel, but I'd have to say now it's Absalom! Absalom!

A few years back I had the chance to visit Faulkner's house and grave in Oxford, and I've never gotten over it and I never will. When I saw the outline for A Fable in his hand on the wall of his study, I just fell apart.

Obsessions are what keep literature going, I think. I've obsessed about Shakespeare sonnets. I spent years and years and years being obsessed with Ezra Pound. (I finally met his daughter and had dinner with her and got her to sign my copy of Pound's Cantos, as well as her own books.) People I know are obsessed with Jane Austen or Eudora Welty.

The other night I even told my wife that Faulkner and I shared the same French publisher, Gallimard.

"That means I'm as good as him," I said. She looked over her glasses at me like she does. She knew I was joking, but her unspoken and well-deserved pie in the face was salutary.

So heaven bless all healthy obsessions. And I have a feeling I'm going to be turning yet again into Philip Lee Snopes in the next couple of years. I'd never make it as a Compson.

Long live the king

2010-01-08T09:01:00.000-05:00

No, not Elvis. Today's his 75th birthday, if you can believe it. Let's say the king for today is Gustav Mahler, who's more a king to me than Elvis can ever be. This photo is of the young Mahler. He died at the same age that Raymond Carver did, which make Mahler's achievement look ever better.

We got only a couple of flurries and sleet pellets at our house--completely missed the "snowstorm" that's shut half of Georgia. I always feel cheated when snow misses our house. Maybe next time.

Have a good weekend and listen to some Mahler. Thank you very much.

Raymond Carver

2010-01-07T07:32:00.000-05:00

I bought myself for Christmas a copy of Carol Sklenica's new biography Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. It's an absolutely marvelous book, and if you enjoy biographies of 20th century writers, get it immediately. Beautifully written and organized, it's the best literary life I've read in a long time.

And that's passing odd, I will have to admit, because I've never been much of a fan of Raymond Carver. In his dark, airless, lightless, hopeless, minimalist world, all but the last breathable air seems sucked out of everything. And yet there's no doubt that he is easily the most influential stylist, at least in short stories, in the U.S. over the past 40 years. And there's also no doubt that many of his stories are pure genius. Make no mistake. Carver was a fine writer. But is he the center of some kind of canon?

I think a great deal of all this goes to what I'll call white-collar guilt, especially among men. People who love the arts, at least in the U.S. and at least in the 20th century, often feel that it's somehow "unmanly" to write or read poetry, short stories, or fiction. Or to be involved in art at all. The Grandfather of this gender paranoia is, of course, Ernest Hemingway. His macho bravura has led to all kind of idiotic theories, including one that because Hemingway's mother dressed him as a girl in childhood, he had lifelong gender issues. Poppycock. Everybody did it for a time in the U.S. as a matter of fashion. Franklin Roosevelt even had his time with long hair and dresses.

But there is among men a deep-seated fear of being "unmanly," and it's led to a preoccupation with blue collar woes, broken lives, hideous violence, and so forth. At least Carver came by his roots honestly. He was an alcoholic who didn't have a steady job until his late 30s, despite having a faithful wife and two kids. In the end, he smoked himself to death at age 50. He was poor, came from poverty, and so he knew what he was writing about.

But that, or his craft, in my mind, is a distant second place to the real reason for Carver's place in the canon. The real reason is that he's easy to imitate (badly) in MFA writing programs, and it's easier to finish a thesis of flash fiction or poetry than it is long-form fiction. That's pretty cold, but I think it many ways it's true. I'm about the millionth person to take notice of this; it's not an original insight. But was Carver good enough to get this kind of great biography?

Maybe. He certainly was, by all accounts, a wonderful man most of the time. His students revered him. He was as great a literary lion as one can be near the end of his life. His best stories knock the breath out of you. But I remain convinced that he is famous more for collateral reasons than simply his work, and the truth is that may be an overlooked fact in how we learn and teach literature. (The author does a good job of unraveling the extent to which Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, was involved in shaping Carver's stories.)

Starting with the New Critics 60 years ago and later with the French critics, there has been a move to focus only on the text and to ignore the writer completely. And yet I wonder. Would we think The Great Gatsby is quite so great without knowing about F. Scott Fitzgerald? If he'd been an accountant who lived to age 81, out of the public life and private, would we care so much? Would we read Hemingway in the same way we do? Or, good grief, Tolstoy?

Carver's life is part of his work. Maybe the critics have gone the wrong way in trying to kill off the author. I have never thought criticism was the art and the writer's job is just to supply texts for critics. I suspect that in later years, cultural historians will find the whole idea amusing.

I will say one thing. This is an absolutely wonderful biography. I like and feel sorry for Carver a lot more than I did before I read it. And I will try to read his stories in the new light of his suffering.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-05T07:15:00.001-05:00

Thanks to all my readers and blog-followers for letting me have some time off for the holidays.

Now I'm back, and 2010 looks like it may well be the best of my writing career. I'm extremely excited about what the months ahead hold, and I have many events already set, so I hope to see you on the road.

My wonderful editor at Mercer University Press, Marc Jolley, took the snap at the right of my poetry book Elegies for the Water in the Barnes & Noble store in Lincoln Center in Manhattan over the holidays.

Smart people, New Yorkers!

Happy Holidays

2009-12-14T13:02:00.000-05:00

I'm going to be taking a break from the blog until after the first of the year, but I wanted to wish everyone a merry Christmas and happy holidays, with lots of warmth and good memories for you and yours.

Two symphonies

2009-12-09T07:36:00.000-05:00

I'm delighted to announce that we have added two symphonies of mine to my main web site page at www.philipleewilliams.com.

They are my Symphony No. 17, "Tenabrae," and Symphony No. 18, "For the Civil Rights Martyrs."

These were both composed over the past few years, though No. 18 was finished at least a couple of years ago, and I've written much new music since then.

I started my life as a composer of concert music and actually began college as a music major, though for many reasons, that didn't last long. I composed for years, hearing it mostly in my head or in piano reductions I made. Then, with the improvements in computers starting in the 80s, one could actually load a score program on a PC, put on the notes, and then listen to them play using synthesized instrument sounds. Now, however, with the advent of sampled sounds from real orchestral instruments, one can create full orchestral scores, print them, and make CDs of the finished works.

I've composed dozens of works, including a Requiem Mass, a full, three-hour opera called Emma Devlin (for which I also wrote the libretto), along with many concerti and much chamber music.

My Holocaust Symphony, which is not a numbered one, has been on my web site for quite awhile now, and has been picked up by MP3 sites and spread worldwide. So it's with a lot of pleasure that we post these two new symphonies.

Hope you enjoy them.

Image: original manuscript, Beethoven, "Ghost" Trio.

Event at Borders in Athens

2009-12-08T08:30:00.000-05:00

I'll be signing copies of The Campfire Boys and Elegies for the Water at the Border's bookstore on Alps Road in Athens this Thursday evening, Dec. 10, beginning at 7 p.m.

Please come out and enjoy the evening with me!

I get tired of people who think "fine weather" only means hot and dry. I happen to love a cold, rainy day, and I've talked to others who do, too. The photo here is the kind of day on which I am happiest.

Singing and Signing

2009-12-07T08:02:00.000-05:00

For those in north Georgia, I'd like to invite you to a special event that will be held at the Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation at 34 School Street in Watkinsville on Wednesday, December 16.

Called "Singing and Signing," it will feature children's choirs singing holiday fare and six authors reading "The Night Before Christmas" and signing their books. I'll be there, along with my dear friends Julie Cannon, Terry Kay, Donny Seagraves, Gail Karwoski (shown here) and Grady Thrasher.

The event is from 6-8 p.m. and should be a lot of fun. It's an honor to be with such fine writers and good friends.

For more info, check with OCAF at 706/769-4565 or by e-mail at info@ocaf.com.

Generosity

2009-12-03T07:54:00.000-05:00

I may well be the biggest Richard Powers fan alive. Well, okay, I can't be sure that's true. While I have taught him at the college level (The Goldbug Variations), read everything he's ever written (some of his books several times), and think he could win the Nobel some day, there are probably others writing doctoral theses or reading the Complete Works for the tenth time.

Having said that, I will take second place to no one when it comes to admiring this great, great, American author. And after reading his latest novel, Generosity, I'm more convinced than ever that Powers is two things: a genius, and one of the greatest novelists America has produced. I don't have to prove it; I'm not a critic and never have been, so my bonafides are simply from being a fellow writer who has an inkling of how hard it is to do what he has done.

Here is what I believe is the publisher's description of the book, from Amazon, for Generosity:

"When Chicagoan Russell Stone finds himself teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, he encounters a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence. Thassadit Amzwar’s blissful exuberance both entrances and puzzles the melancholic Russell. How can this refugee from perpetual terror be so happy? Won’t someone so open and alive come to serious harm? Wondering how to protect her, Russell researches her war-torn country and skims through popular happiness manuals. Might her condition be hyperthymia? Hypomania? Russell’s amateur inquiries lead him to college counselor Candace Weld, who also falls under Thassa’s spell. Dubbed Miss Generosity by her classmates, Thassa’s joyful personality comes to the attention of the notorious geneticist and advocate for genomic enhancement, Thomas Kurton, whose research leads him to announce the genotype for happiness.

"Russell and Candace, now lovers, fail to protect Thassa from the growing media circus. Thassa’s congenital optimism is soon severely tested. Devoured by the public as a living prophecy, her genetic secret will transform both Russell and Kurton, as well as the country at large.

"What will happen to life when science identifies the genetic basis of happiness? Who will own the patent? Do we dare revise our own temperaments? Funny, fast, and finally magical, Generosity celebrates both science and the freed imagination. In his most exuberant book yet, Richard Powers asks us to consider the big questions facing humankind as we begin to rewrite our own existence."

Yes, that's the scaffolding. But as with all Powers novels, he delves deeply into science and the nature of humanity, and he does it with breathtaking insight, staggering virtuosity as a novelist, and wisdom that can be (and has been to me), life-altering. His Thassa is one of the great characters in recent fiction. I have known two or three people like her in my life, and when I ask others about these people, they say they have "old souls" or, more simply, are just people whose very presence is addictive.

I know Rick slightly. We had him on campus a few years back, and I spent a good deal of time with him, trying not to be a sycophant while letting him know that I knew all of his work and believed then (and believe now) that he is a great, great writer. Rick and I have emailed a bit, and in person, he is kind, thoughtful, generous, and unbelievably intelligent. I know many, many writers, but I've never been around one in whose presence I felt less worthy. That sounds, I fear, rather pathetic, but I don't mean it that way. I'm just trying to say how important this man is.

Generosity is at once very much like his earlier books and quite different, too. It deals with science, of course, something that attracts me powerfully, since I've been a professional science writer at UGA for a quarter century. But the book is also his most human, in the sense that he is willing to take on a subject from which most writers flee screaming: the nature and origin of happiness.

If there is one subject most serious writers avoid at all costs, it's happiness. (I don't include commercial writers in this; they, God bless them, are writing to make money.) But serious writers seem to believe that anyone who professes to be happy can only be one of two things: stupid or ignorant. And Powers, to be sure, has published his share of dark books. But I believe the very reason he chose this point in his career to write Generosity (and he's still an unbelievably young 52) is that he has earned the moral authority to do so.

Oh hell. I could write for days about his work. But please do yourself a favor and just go buy good copies of all his books. All of them. Buy multiple copies of them. And for God's sake buy Generosity. Here's the Amazon Richard Powers page:

http://www.amazon.com/Richard-Powers/e/B000APP5PK/ref=sr_tc_2_0

What a joy to be alive at the same time as this genius.

Dana's new book

2009-11-30T07:53:00.000-05:00

A brief note that the literary press MotesBooks will publish the environmental memoir of my friend Dana Wildsmith next year. Dana's a brilliant and much-published poet who is now making prose part of her amazing creative life.

More on her book as time unfolds. Here is her wonderful website:

http://www.danawildsmith.com/

And the site for MotesBooks is here:

http://www.motesbooks.com/

Thanksgiving

2009-11-23T07:36:00.001-05:00

The photo at left was taken at my family Thanksgiving dinner on Wildcat Ridge last year. That's me in the dress and bonnet about to serve bouillabaisse to a visiting group of Indians from the Generic Tribe.

After a cordial meal, the Indians ate the Patriarch in the middle who was giving a speech on why health care costs too much in the Colonies and shouldn't be subsidized by the government.

In the distance is the golf course we hope to have ready by this Thanksgiving.

May everyone have a joyful holiday and be as nutty as the occasion allows.

Generosity

2009-11-20T08:41:00.000-05:00

I'm reading the great Richard Powers's new novel, Generosity, and it's just utterly staggering. For my money, he's best novelist now writing in English. I'll write a lengthy review when I finish--which may take a long time, since I wallow in his work.

In the meantime, if you don't know his work, go online or to your favorite bookstore and buy all of his books. Not one or two. ALL of them. Now. That's an order! We are living in the age of a literary giant.

. . . and have a great weekend.

Riding the Elephant

2009-11-17T07:39:00.001-05:00

I spent several wonderful years in an office in New College on the University of Georgia campus next door to a woman named Sarah Baines. (Well, she was Sarah Simpson until she married Chris!) Sarah and I were great friends, and she told me about her aunt, Diane Porter Goff (shown here), who was working hard to be a writer and starting with a non-fiction book about her family's work in caring for her mother (and Sarah's grandmother) during several years of Alzheimer's.

Now the book is out and it's called Riding the Elephant: An Alzheimer's Journey. And it is brilliant and heartbreaking, hilarious, and profoundly human. My heavens, can this woman write.

I want to tell you about it, but before I do, visit Diane's website at http://www.ridingtheelephantmemoir.com/

She has tons of background there about herself and this strong and powerful book.

Here's how it begins:

"Her fragile little body sits upright in the water, legs stuck straight out like a child's. Mama has always liked her baths hot, and now, with old age sitting in her bones, she likes them even hotter. Steam rises . . .

"We begin with her hair. She holds a blue washcloth over her closed eyes with both hands while I palm on the shampoo and lather up her short haircut into soft peaks like meringue on a pie . . .

" . . . The stream [of water] runs down over Mama's back--the slightly hunched shoulders, the pearl string of the spine--and down over her front . . ."

She had me hooked from that brilliant opening and never let me go.

My friend Sarah is a character is this agonizing and yet redemptive true story about strength and dignity and the emotional exhaustion that comes from caring for a parent with Alzheimer's. There's no flinching. The honesty is absolutely searing.

And yet, in the end, one feels not depressed but genuinely ennobled for having taken this journey with Diane and her mother. (And it was a journey she hardly took alone; many others helped greatly with her mother's care during this time.)

The copy on the back of the book tells what this slender but in no way small book reveals: "[the book] takes the reader deep into a landscape where no one goes by choice, yet a place where 5 million Americans reside. A memoir that traces the steps of two sisters [Diane and Sarah's mother, Beverly] and their families as they accompany their mother into uncharted territory, it is a story filled with pathos, humor, unforgettable characters, and a glimpse into the transformational power of the human heart . . ."

It is all that and much more. Riding the Elephant is a book about the cost of love and its true value. It is about our capacity for goodness in the bleakest circumstances.

It is a lasting contribution.

Cover to Cover interview

2009-11-16T13:00:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note on a gorgeous Monday in north Georgia:

The interview with me that aired statewide on Georgia Public Broadcasting's "Cover to Cover" show is now online as a podcast:

http://covertocover.podbean.com/2009/11/15/philip-lee-williams-the-campfire-boys/

More soon!

Rest in peace, David Lloyd

2009-11-13T07:06:00.000-05:00

I note with great sorrow this morning the passing of David Lloyd (right), one of my favorite sitcom writers, and the man who wrote the legendary "Chuckles Bites the Dust" episode of the old Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I remember that episode like it was yesterday. I was young and not long married, and broadcast TV (long before cable) was the only entertainment we could afford. Mary's show was one no one missed (we never did), and at the end of that episode, I turned to Linda and said, "My god, that was brilliant."

And it was. It won a well-deserved Emmy. Here's how today's New York Times describes that famous episode:

'His [Lloyd's] enduring reputation was made relatively early in his career, two years into his tenure at “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” on Oct. 25, 1975, when "Chuckles Bites the Dust" was broadcast. The series, which was set in a television newsroom in Minneapolis, starred Ms. Moore as Mary Richards, an earnest news producer; Edward Asner as her boss, Lou Grant; Ted Knight as the self-admiring nitwit of a news anchor, Ted Baxter; and Gavin MacLeod as the news writer, Murray Slaughter.

"In the episode, Ted is invited to be the grand marshal of a circus parade, but Lou forbids it as undignified. Ted’s replacement is Chuckles the Clown, the host of a children’s show on the same television station. But on the day of the parade, Lou rushes into the newsroom, stunned, and explains that Chuckles, who attended the parade dressed as one of his characters, Peter Peanut, had been crushed to death. As Lou explains it, “a rogue elephant tried to shell him.”

"For the remainder of the episode the newsroom denizens deal with the shock of the death by joking about it. Mary finds this distasteful, but at the funeral, when the priest leading the service lists Chuckles’s silly-sounding characters (Mr. Fe Fi Fo was one) and recites his catchphrase, “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants,” Mary can’t keep herself from guffawing.

"At the height of her embarrassment, the priest tells her to let it all out, that Chuckles would have approved of her laughter. At that point Mary bursts into tears.

"The hilarity derived from Mary’s discomfort (and Ms. Moore’s boffo rendering of a woman in full squirm), but the power of the episode was Mr. Lloyd’s exploration of how people deal with shock over a death, by deflecting it with humor or stifling it with somberness.

"The episode won Mr. Lloyd an Emmy Award, became legendary among Hollywood script writers and was named by TV Guide this year as the third-best episode of any show in television history. (The Top 2 came from “Seinfeld” and “The Sopranos.”)"

What joy David Lloyd brought to us. Rest in peace.

River Jordan

2009-11-12T07:22:00.000-05:00

The Dahlonega Literary Festival in the mountains of north Georgia was nice last weekend, if very sparsely attended. Alas, a lot goes on in the mountains in the fall, so the competition for everyone's time is fierce. The nice group who put the event on, though, was wonderful to spend a day with, though.

The most fortunate part for me was meeting the marvelously talented Tennessee writer River Jordan (shown here) and her husband Owen. We wound up sharing a gorgeous farmhouse in a valley north of Dahlonega. When I say farmhouse, I mean it literally. Cows came almost right up to the door. She and Owen arrived a day before I did, so they got to enjoy it more. The view was incomparable, especially Sunday morning, when the valley was filled like a bowl with icy mist.

I'd known about River for a long time but I was delighted to meet her and buy some of her books, which I'll read soon. (I had a great time talking football with Owen, but that's a story for another day.)

For someone who's last name is Williams (and I wear it with pride), a name like River Jordan seems too wonderful to be true, and it is her real name. But she wears it well, and what I've read of her work so far shows a master of wordcraft.

Check out her website at http://www.riverjordan.us/cgi-bin/index.cgi and buy some of her work. She's really worth getting to know!

Cover to Cover redux

2009-11-06T06:57:00.000-05:00

I should have noted that while the Georgia Public Broadcasting Program on which I will be a guest Sunday is heard statewide at 8 p.m., it comes on WUGA in Athens at 6 p.m.

Have a happy and safe weekend, everyone.

In Dahlonega

2009-11-05T07:26:00.000-05:00

I'll be a guest at the Dahlonega (Ga.) Literary Festival this weekend, and I'm so much looking forward to it! Go online and Google it and you'll find the entire schedule.

Begun in 2004 by Kate Quigley McElliott, the Dahlonega Literary Festival celebrates books, writers, literacy, storytelling, and literary performance art. Late in December, 2003, Kate called together a group of interested community and university people to begin The Dahlonega Literary Festival & Writer’s Conference. This year is the sixth installment, and with 14 writers present, it should be a lot of fun.

I'm too rushed today to cut and paste the entire schedule, but as I said it's easy to find online. Come out and see me!

PLW on "Cover to Cover" Sunday evening

2009-11-04T07:33:00.000-05:00

Pardon the press release, but I'm going to be featured statewide on Georgia Public Broadcasting Sunday evening, and I wanted you to know about it:

ATHENS, Ga. – Noted Georgia writer Philip Lee Williams will be the guest on Georgia Public Broadcasting’s “Cover to Cover” program on Sunday evening, Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. The show will be heard on GPB’s statewide network of stations and can be heard as well in a streaming audio format on GPB’s website at http://www.gpb.org/radio.

Williams will talk about his latest novel The Campfire Boys, which is about camp entertainers in the American Civil War and southerners who were against the South’s position in the war.

“This is a special book to me, since it’s a large-scale comic novel set in a time of great horror and tragedy,” said Williams, who is assistant dean for public information in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia. He is also an adjunct professor of creative writing at UGA. “It’s about three brothers who were very good entertainers but very bad soldiers. I think of it as sort of `the USO for the Blue and Gray.’”

The 30-minute program focuses on The Campfire Boys, the 14^th book in Williams’s career, but it also touches on many other aspects of the writing life. Williams will join such luminaries as Flannery O’Connor, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Dickey as a member of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in March.

Interviewing Williams is Jesse Freeman, who grew up in Madison, Ga., as Williams did, and where he wrote for the hometown weekly, The Madisonian. He received a B. A. in English from Georgia State University in 2002, where he also studied film and video production. Since then, Freeman has worked as a freelance journalist and video producer in the Atlanta area. He is also a GPB-TV correspondent for Lawmakers and Prep Sports Plus. Documentary work on the late author Raymond Andrews landed him a speaking appearance at the 19th Annual Southern Writers’ Symposium in Fayetteville, N.C.

“Cover To Cover” is the anchor program for GPB’s literary coverage. After nearly a decade as a monthly, hour-long call-in program, it is now a 30-minute interview program airing each Sunday night at 8 p.m. “Cover To Cover” features a collection of distinctive Southern voices interviewing Georgia writers, Southern writers and writers dealing with the South. The program provides a weekly glimpse of fiction, non-fiction, history, poetry and more.

To find out more about Philip Lee Williams, visit his website at www.philipleewilliams.com.

Georgia Center for the Book

2009-10-28T09:10:00.000-04:00

My good friend Terry Kay (right) and I will be the Decatur Library, in Decatur, Ga., on Monday evening Nov. 2 at 7 p.m in an event sponsored by the Georgia Center for the Book.

We will have a conversation about books, writing, and the larger subject of literature, but we hope the audience will be a part of the evening as well.

Many people might not be aware of just how much the Georgia Center for the Book does, but you should know more. The wonderful Bill Starr is in charge of it, and few organizations have ever done more for books, readers, or writers in the state.

Come on out and visit with us!

On the radio and in Dahlonega

2009-10-21T07:35:00.000-04:00

Hello all & I apologize for being such a sloggy blogger lately.

I continue to be extremely busy with The Campfire Boys. This morning I'll be taping an episode of "Cover to Cover," the Georgia Public Broadcasting book program on which I've been a guest a number of times in the past. I'll let you know when it's going to air.

Next up is the Dahlonega Book Festival, where I will be Nov. 6-8, doing readings, panel discussions and autographings. Dahlonega is one of my favorite towns in north Georgia, and if you're near, come over--lots of other authors and fun things to do. (Photo at right is of Dahlonega.)

I'll be at the Barnes & Noble in Athens on Nov. 29, the day after the Georgia Bulldogs defeat Georgia Tech in football.

Many other venues upcoming, and I'll keep you appraised of those. In the meantime, I'm happy to note that I'm being inducted into the UGA chapter of Phi Kappa Phi, the national honor society, on Nov. 16 at the Chapel on North Campus. It's always nice to be honored by one's alma mater.

Rainy days and Mondays

2009-10-12T09:09:00.000-04:00

It's pouring and cool here this morning and I flat love it.

I had a fine time in Nashville over the weekend at the Southern Festival of Books. The weather there was horrible for a mostly outdoor event--almost cold and misty. And I didn't know until five minutes before my panel that the other writer who was to have shared the stage wasn't coming.

Still, the crowd was good. I also managed to catch Buzz Aldrin's speech earlier, though it was so disorganized I found it impossible to follow. Still, who cared? I would have gone to hear him read from the phone book. He will turn 80 next year and still looks trim enough to fly a jet.

Nice to see Winterville writer Donny Seagraves and her daughter there. I also spent some time with the great southern writer Ron Rash.

My next event will be the Dahlonega Literary Festival and Writer's Conference in November. Here's the URL for the event: http://www.literaryfestival.org/.

Peace

2009-10-09T08:18:00.000-04:00

I find it amusing that so many "analysts" (and I use that term with great amusement) are howling and stamping their feet this morning about President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Are they kidding? Under Bush-Cheney, the U.S. was the most hated country in the world, and the more the country was hated, the more the Neocons felt victory was in their grasp. Now, we are seen once more as the country Emma Lazarus wrote about on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. We are once again a country selling hope.

All the analysts are howling about the fact that Mr. Obama "hasn't done anything yet." I beg to differ. His election and his very presence attest that we have set out on a new course as the world's only super-power. He may be emblematic, but emblems are powerful, important, and real. He will ultimately be judged on what he achieves in his term(s), but for now, he is a powerful presence for what I believe in.

He faces hard choices in the future, but so far he has, it seems to me, combined cold pragmatism with a dream for the kind of world we deserve but often do not have.

I could not be more pleased at this stunning turn of events. Giving people hope is no small matter.

I've never written about the Nobel Prizes before and now I've done it on two straight days. But these have been two happy days in which the Nobel committees, I believe, got it right.

Nobels are ringing

2009-10-08T08:41:00.000-04:00

Each year when the Nobel Prize for Literature is announced, I get ready to learn about someone I've never heard of before.

So it is with today's winner, Herta Müller. Lots of people think that relatively unknown writers (at least in the States) winning somehow demeans the award. I'm not among those. In fact, I find it exciting every year to learn about new winners of whom I haven't heard.

I'm especially delighted the winner this year is a woman. I look forward to learning more about her work.

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Looking forward to being in Nashville this weekend for the Southern Festival of Books!

Georgia Gwinnett College appearance

2009-10-05T08:07:00.000-04:00

My apologies to readers in the Gwinnett County area for not having one date on my tour agenda, but I will be at the Cisco Auditorium at Georgia Gwinnett College tomorrow night, Tuesday, Oct. 6, at 7 p.m. for a reading and book-signing.

Here's the website: http://www.ggc.usg.edu/.

The college is right off Ga. 316 and seems to be a growing and happening place. I'm delighted to be there and look forward to seeing students, faculty, and people from the community. Obviously, I'll be reading from The Campfire Boys and taking questions.

Come on out--love to see you all.

National Treasures

2009-10-02T08:41:00.001-04:00

After watching Ken Burns's new PBS documentary on the National Parks this week (the last episode is tonight), I am wondering if perhaps we should start thinking of taking him somewhere and putting him under 24-hour protection as a national monument himself.

There is only one way to say this: the man is a genius and is essential to who we are as a people. I have watched the new series with rapt attention, often through tears, and have realized again the narrative and visual brilliance that make his work so important now and for decades and probably centuries to come. I am well aware that some more avant-garde filmmakers consider his work middlebrow and sometimes sentimental, but they are wrong. O heavens, are they wrong.

I cannot imagine anything replacing The Civil War as my favorite Burns film. In fact, I believe that is the single greatest documentary film ever made--by a comfortable margin. I have loved most other films made by Burns and his very talented brother Rick, but The National Parks is very, very close to The Civil War in the complexity of its narrative, it its use of voices from past and present, and in its dazzling film work.

There is also a sea change at PBS about how it is making these films available online. Now, each morning after an installment of The National Parks airs on TV, it's online, and that's where I've been watching each episode--early the morning after, not in the evening on TV.

I have taught nature writing at the University of Georgia, and the natural world has figured in much of my writing, going back to my very first novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest, from 25 years ago. I know many of the voices in the new Burns film, from John Muir and John Burroughs in the past, to the absolutely remarkable Terry Tempest Williams of today. (Her book Refuge is permanent; it will be around as long as we have books.)

I have also visited many of our National Parks. I know the Great Smoky Mountains NP best, of course, because it's closest, and I have been going there since I was a boy. But I've also been to the Rocky Mountains National Park, to the Everglades, and to the amazing Mammoth Cave. I plan to visit many more before I die, with luck.

Ken Burns has a remarkable team, of course. The new film was written by Dayton Duncan and written beautifully at that. Peter Coyote is one of my favorite voice-over actors and does a marvelous job as narrator, though the standard set by David McCullough in The Civil War isn't, to my mind, really approachable. The credits at the end of each episode show a large number of talented people involved, but every frame has the genius of Ken Burns. His DNA pulses through each segment and each episode.

There are a small number of people that seem to me utterly indispensible, and I am so happy to have lived at the same time as they have. Ken Burns is one of those people. Maybe it's going too far to protect him as a national treasure, but I cannot imagine my life without his work.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Bolano's 2666

2009-09-28T07:52:00.000-04:00

I usually have one huge book that I read steadily while taking time off to nibble on smaller volumes, just to keep my interest high. This past summer, that book was the late Roberto Bolano's 2666, a 900-page contemplation on the nature of violence, the meaning of authorship, and the nihilism of dislocation, among other things.

I want to say at the outset that I admire this book greatly, as much for Bolano's ambition as what the book says. The ambition is clear as a mountain stream. But what he says is more like a glacier, pulling along unseen debris in what may or may not be a discernible pattern. The message is by turns chilling and clear and murky and oblique. And in the last part of the novel, "The Part About Archimboldi," he pulls out of his literary hat the hoariest deus ex machina ending I've read in decades. It's almost as if, sitting at his writing desk, he starting thinking, gee, I've written 850 pages--maybe I ought to tack on an ending that makes all this seem like one story, one novel.

The premise that this is, in fact, a single novel, is thin in the extreme. In fact, I had the feeling more than once that calling it an epic was a marketing decision rather than an artistic one.

That said, the quality of the writing is stunning, perhaps even staggering in places. This is clearly one of the most talented writers around in the past 25 years. That Bolano didn't live to see it published is a shame.

The book ostensibly has two tracks. One is about a reclusive European writer named Benno von Archimboldi, who is possibly a candidate for the Nobel Prize but who has vanished, like Salinger or Pynchon. The other, more central part, is about the killing of women in northern Mexico. The tie between the two stories is, to say the least, unconvincing. And the section called "The Part About the Crimes" is a nearly unreadable essay on the banality of evil, and it goes on and on and on for nearly 250 tightly packed pages, recounting page after page of violence against women until the senses are dulled to it. What he does here is effective, but it is also heavy-handed and interminable.

Another part about a black reporter named Fate and his involvement with boxing and then the murders is, to me, strong writing but it also has the most tenuous connection to the rest of the book.

By part the best parts are the first section, "The Part About the Critics," and the last, "The Part about Archimboldi," which for all the world look like one novel broken in two so that the entire book will appear to have a cohesive narrative integrity.

Having said all this, I think 2666 is, in many ways, some of them barely definable, a masterpiece. An intelligent reader of fiction in 2009 cannot miss reading it. Some of the writing is shout-out-loud miraculous. Some of it is crude in the extreme and some of it seems to be Bad Porn written more to titillate the writer than to affect the plot. And yet, in this huge, sloppy world, there is Truth and Ambition. I am guessing that this is a book that will last.

It doesn't remotely have the tight art and willed logic of similar huge books, such as Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest. And yet it has essential qualities both of those works of genius simply miss. The sense of mystery and hidden knowledge just beneath the surface is as strong here as in those two great books. But its organization is thin, and I remain unsure that calling this a single book makes much sense.

Still, it's a book you must read. And, really, you must own it. So buy it and settle in. The book will horrify and infuriate you. Sometimes it will bore you. But in the end, it's essential. And for that, we cannot thank Roberto Bolano's uneasy ghost enough.

Texting in the mist

2009-09-24T07:46:00.000-04:00

So I was driving north on U.S. 441 at dusk yesterday after visiting my father in Madison, Ga., when I saw a girl with long brown hair riding a horse bareback in a pasture. It was a lovely sight, to be sure, and since there was almost no traffic, I slowed to watch as she rode.

She wasn't quite in silhouette but almost, and it was clear she was relaxed and having a lovely time at one of the most beautiful times of the day. Then, when I came alongside her, I was stunned to see that she was sitting on the slowly plodding horse and texting! The light on her phone/Blackberry/whatever was glowing like the eye of a monster. She rode on without looking up at the field before her.

I'm feeling and sounding very old-fashioned. And I had a flash of hope that she was chatting with a boyfriend or best friend, exchanging happiness and hope. Yet it made me rather sad to know that the natural world was just another background, just another place to be, not a scene and moment of transcendence as it can be.

Very strange, and I'm not yet sure how I feel about it.

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I'll be in upstate South Carolina for the Southern Independent Book Association meeting Friday night and look forward to meeting other writers and booksellers there. Thanks so much to SIBA for inviting me yet again to an event I've been attending for some 25 years.

Back in the saddle

2009-09-17T12:27:00.000-04:00

So to speak.

I was sick early in the week (not flu, just a cold) and completely out of touch with the lit world and most readers for a couple of days.

All goes well with The Campfire Boys, and I will be on the road considerably promoting it in the next few weeks. I'll list events completely in the near future, in addition to what's on my website.

Deeply saddened to hear of the death of Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary. I well remember when I was a kid and my father bought the 45 rpm of "Puff, the Magic Dragon." Though the usual right-wing nitwits said it was about drugs, it was, in fact, just a small story about dreams.

One of the things not remembered enough is that songs at the tail end of the folk era could be played and sung by anyone who knew three chords on a guitar. So we played and sang them, as did millions of others. I remember sitting with a group of friends and listening to a Simon and Garfunkel song and having utterly no idea what Paul Simon was doing in his gorgeous and elaborate compositions. We couldn't play them by listening to them. Something had changed in our world. And that change was wonderful, to be sure, but there was something to the lovely simplicity of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and especially to her gorgeous warm voice. She will be missed.

Good weekend

2009-09-11T09:46:00.000-04:00

Hope everyone has a lovely late-summer, or, more hopefully, early autumn weekend. Fall is an especially gorgeous time here in north Georgia, a season that is always wonderful.

Last night's party for The Campfire Boys was a delight, and it was a pleasure to see friends coming out to celebrate with me the publication of my 14th book and 10th novel.

I have many events upcoming around the South and I'll be talking about them in depth soon. I'm especially pleased that I will be on a panel of the Appalachian Studies Association about north Georgia poet and novelist Byron Herbert Reece. Details soon.

Tonight

2009-09-10T12:19:00.000-04:00

If you are in the Athens area, drop by the Lumpkin Cafe tonight from 7-9 for the publication party for The Campfire Boys. Love to see you.

Decatur Book Festival

2009-09-08T08:32:00.000-04:00

Last weekend's Decatur Book Festival was an absolute delight, and I thoroughly enjoyed my appearance there. My panel had a huge group of readers at the Decatur Presbyterian Church Sunday at noon, with an enthusiastic autographing afterward.

Just a reminder to everyone that the publication party for The Campfire Boys will be this Thursday night, Sept. 10, from 7-9 p.m. at the Lumpkin Cafe in Five Points in Athens. Hope all who can will stop by.

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Deeply saddened by the news, just out, that Fred Mills, an incredible musician and wonderful man here at the University of Georgia, died following a single-car accident here last night. So, so sad.

Headlight vent

2009-09-04T08:49:00.000-04:00

Okay, okay, it's Friday and we should all be happy, but I want to vent about something that eternally annoys me: car headlights.

With the advent of halogen headlights and giant trucks and SUVs that have what are essentially even four or six headlights, driving in the dark has become a nightmare for many people, including me.

The standard line is that these headlights make it easier for the drivers to see on dark roads. Na duh. So would Hollywood klieg lights. What these selfish fools never consider is that they are blinding many people, some of whom, like me, have a health problem that's made much worse by them.

I have glare-and flash-induced migraines and migraine auras. Whenever I'm assaulted (there's no other word for it) by halogen lights or the four- or six-headlight array. I do two things:

1. I shade my eyes with my left hand as I drive.
2. I put my own car lights on bright in self-defense.

Of course, the latter move infuriates these road lizards, who think I have a lot of nerve giving them my brights, utterly oblivious to the fact that my brights are dimmer than their "dim" setting. I have lately been wearing polarized dark glasses in the dark just to be able to get from point A to point B.

The 80s were know as the "me" generation because of the perceived general selfishness of Yuppies (that's a word from the past!) and the upwardly mobile who rolled right over anyone who got in their way. It was the crowd Tom Wolfe called Masters of the Universe (at least in their own minds.)

But they had nothing on the idiots on the road blinding any and everyone simply so THEY can see a little better. As Joseph Welch famously asked of Joe McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

For many nighttime drivers, the answer is no.

Okay, back to books.

Events for The Campfire Boys

2009-08-31T07:33:00.000-04:00

I have two events upcoming for The Campfire Boys that I want to remind everyone about.

1. Decatur Book Festival. I will be there this weekend for one of the country's biggest book fairs and will be appearing on Sunday, Sept. 6, from12 noon-12:45 on a panel called "Divine Southern Stories" and also featuring Jack Riggs and Brian Ray. The session will be at the Decatur Presbyterian Church in downtown Decatur, followed by an autographing. This will be the first public event for The Campfire Boys, and I hope to see readers there.

2. Publication Party. This will be on Thursday, Sept. 10, from 7-9 p.m. at the Lumpkin Cafe at 1700 S. Lumpkin St. in Athens, Ga. There will be a reading and a general mix and mingle, so please come out and say hello.

I'll be keeping everyone up to speed on appearances as the season progresses.

The Last Lion

2009-08-28T08:14:00.000-04:00

I've been a supporter of progressive causes most of my life, which has made me something of an oddball here in the heart of the South. In the small town where I grew up, people knew about my politics and usually just blessed my heart or patted me on the shoulder as if comforting someone with an illness. Never once did they make me feel ill at ease, even--they just knew I was different and let it go.

That ability to find common ground with good cheer was what made Ted Kennedy the Lion of the Senate for the past 47 years, and his passing grieves me. No need to mention his flaws--they were outsized, as he was. And yet what he gave to his country makes most of us look very small indeed.

I met him only once. Linda and I had only been married for a bit more than a year and were living in Athens when we heard that he would be speaking to Law Day on the University of Georgia campus. So we came over and hung out around the library, hoping we might at least get a glimpse of him after the event was over.

I brought a book to read: The Modern Library edition of Best Russian Short Stories, compiled and edited by Thomas Seltzer and published by Boni and Liveright in their Modern Library edition. It was published in 1917, and a few years after that, looking for cash to support his womanizing and high-living ways, Horace Liveright sold the whole Modern Library to Bennett Cerf, who with his partner Donald Klopfer, had started a press called Random House. The ML went on to make Random House a fortune, and Liveright died not long after, a "broken man," as they say.

I can barely remember the days when I had time just to hang out for hours waiting to see someone I admired, but we were determined at least to get a glimpse. Remember, this was less than 11 years after JFK had been killed in Dallas and only six years after Bobby Kennedy died.

Finally, we both looked up, and there, larger than life, was Ted Kennedy and his entourage, walking quite alone away from the UGA Law School Building. He was still young in those days, trim and vigorous. And it was clear they were going to walk within a few feet of us. As I recall, virtually no one else was around. Linda, me, Ted Kennedy, and his small entourage.

"Senator Kennedy, could you give us an autograph?" I heard myself saying. I couldn't believe I'd said it, and Linda just stared at me. He grinned that famous Kennedy grin and came walking toward us, to the obvious discomfort of his staff, because they were clearly in a hurry. I realized immediately I'd asked for an autograph and had nothing for him to sign. So I did the only thing that came to mind: I opened Best Russian Short Stories to its blank front page and thrust it at him. He took out a felt-tip pen and wrote "Ted Kennedy" there, shook our hands, and was gone. When I got home, I wrote under it, so I would remember: May 4, 1974, Athens, Ga.

He must have signed tens of thousands of autographs in his life. But I'm guessing every one means as much today to their owners as mine does to me.

His family gave so much, lost so much in the process. I do hope he rests in peace.

A champion gone

2009-08-27T10:26:00.001-04:00

As if the death of Ted Kennedy weren't enough, today I'm grieving the passing of the man responsible for my entire literary career, Bill Emerson.

Bill died Tuesday in Atlanta at the age of 86, and in all ways he was a larger-than-life figure. A pioneer in the Civil Rights movement, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, he was also, for a time, editor in chief at Peachtree Publishers in Atlanta.

He was there in 1982, when I dropped him a note saying I'd finished a novel and wondered if he'd like to see it. Peachtree had only published one novel and was a small press, but I had no idea where to start. He was kind and asked to see it.

I was surprised a couple of weeks later when this gruff, hearty voice came on my phone.

"Well, good God, it's a fine piece of work, of course, but we just aren't publishing that much fiction and hell, let me tell you about my old friend Otto Friedrich."

Turned out Otto was a well-known writer and editor himself in New York, and Otto had a daughter named Molly who was a relatively new literary agent looking for clients.

"I was, ah, just wondering if you'd mind it if I sent it on to her? I mean, I'm enjoying being here in the twilight of a failed career, but she could do more for you!" What a presence he was!

Molly read the manuscript, loved it, but had serious doubts it was commercial enough for New York, yet W. W. Norton bought it and published it, and I was off.

Over the years, Bill and I would talk on the phone about one thing or another, but alas, we met only once, at some meeting or another in Atlanta or Savannah or Charleston or somewhere--I can't recall. I also kept up with Bill by occasional chats with his writer son Bo, of the AJC, where he has done great work himself.

I'm so delighted The New York Times had a major obit for Bill today, on the same day that Ted Kennedy and Dominick Dunne appear in the obit column. The piece notes that while at the Post, Bill commissioned articles by writers such as Joan Didion and helped personally oversee that legendary magazine's coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

He had no reason to help me, a complete stranger to him. But without him, I'm not sure I would have ever published books, and with my 14th just out, I realize the full depth of my gratitude toward him.

He was always uproarious and hilarious on the phone, filled with more life than 10 men, and with more talent that one in million. Please take time to go to the Times and read his obituary--I won't add a link because it's easy enough to find.

I've tried hard to match his generosity in my dealings with younger writers, but there's no way to match the gift he gave me.

A damn good man is gone. His life mattered and will continue to matter for a long time to come.

Good weekend

2009-08-21T09:38:00.000-04:00

Planning for the fall tour for The Campfire Boys is roaring ahead, but I wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a good weekend--some leisure, a good book, and a cool place to settle for awhile.

In the meantime, anyone wishing to book an event for me should contact my publicist, Judy Long, at long.byhalia@gmail.com.

Another ghastly summer is limping to its sorry end, and blessed fall is not too far off. Better days ahead!

Campfire Boys publication party

2009-08-17T10:25:00.000-04:00

Good Monday morning, everyone. Is that an oxymoron?

Just a quick note to let you know that we will be having a humdinger of a publication party for my new novel The Campfire Boys, on Thursday, Sept. 10, at the Lumpkin Cafe in Athens, Ga.

Details to come, but I do hope that readers will mark that day on their calendars and come by and visit. More information soon!

I'm halfway through reading the late Roberto Bolano's staggering novel 2666, and it's been a long time since I've read anything with so much talent and ambition. I wish I could read it in the original Spanish, but I can't read Spanish, alas. Natasha Wimmer's translation is art in itself, though. I'll write a full assessment when I finish, but so far it's dazzling.

The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone

2009-08-10T07:19:00.000-04:00

One of the best proofs of the existence of God is that Carl Barks lived to be 99 years old.

Who was Carl Barks, you ask? He was a man who made the world laugh, who made it happy, and who had a profound and lasting effect on my life.

Yesterday, my brother Mark gave me something he'd bought online--one for each of us. It was a original, 1955 copy of The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone, a Scrooge McDuck comic with which we grew up. It's no exaggeration to say that comic book--written and drawn by Carl Barks--was the foundation of many of my life's interests.

I'm hardly the first. Steven Spielberg, among others, has long lauded the lasting influence of the work of Carl Barks. The indispensable Wikipedia says this about the influence of Barks:

"For the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have acknowledged the rolling boulder booby trap was inspired by the 1954 Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge adventure the Seven Cities of Cibola (Uncle Scrooge #7). Lucas and Spielberg have also made comments that some of Barks' stories regarding space travel and the depiction of aliens had an influence on them. Lucas wrote the foreword to the 1982 Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times. In it he calls Barks’ stories "cinematic" and "a priceless part of our literary heritage."

The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone was certainly priceless to my brother and me way back in the 1950s. It gave us an early sense of the adventure of history and archaeology, of the price of greed, and of the fact that stealing artifacts is looting. But for me it was much more. It planted in my head a love of caves and labyrinths that found its culmination in my novel Blue Crystal, which was set in the Kentucky cave country, which I love. I still remember the day I first went into Mammoth Cave--it was like being inside that comic book.

Carl Barks gave us many cartoon characters that boys and girls my age grew up with: Uncle Scrooge, his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Gyro Gearloose, and the laughable criminals, the Beagle Boys. He also gave us the Junior Woodchuck Club, the Boy Scouts in a parallel universe where the Club's manual was always right about everything.

I recall a sense of the world opening before me with The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone, and it was the first time I understood the intersection of myth and history that drives much art. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade seems to have been taken almost whole cloth from Barks, as good an homage as he might have wished.

I can't imagine how many times as a child I read that comic book--hundreds. So getting a fine copy of the original is almost like finding the Holy Grail. I sat last night holding it in wonder, dazzled by how much of my life can be explained by its colorful panels and its story.

The whole comic is online, though you should buy the real thing--it was reprinted several times and can be found for sale online at a number of sites. And the Wikipedia entry on Carl Barks is beautifully done and clearly written by people who loved the man and his work.

He lived to be almost 100 but didn't quite make it. No matter. His work is going to last forever. We should all be so lucky to be able to create something that spreads as much excitement, knowledge, and sheer joy as the work of Carl Barks did.

And my brother Mark? He's an archaeologist. A coincidence? I don't think so.

Book festivals

2009-08-06T09:59:00.000-04:00

More about this later, but I'm booked in the following book festivals/meetings and look forward to meeting fans and readers:

*Southern Independent Booksellers Association meeting, Greenville, S.C.
*Decatur Book Festival
*Launch party for The Campfire Boys, Lyndon House in Athens, Ga.
*UGA authors reception
*Southern Festival of Books in Nashville
*Savannah Book Festival
*Southern Kentucky Book Festival

Stay tuned for details and complete tour agenda!

A great new book

2009-08-04T07:01:00.000-04:00

As readers of my work will know, I've had an interest in the American Civil War from the point of view of southern Unionists. My novel A Distant Flame (2004) explored that subject as will my new book, The Campfire Boys, which will be out shortly.

That's why I'm delighted to recommend a brilliant new book that everyone interested in the Civil War must own. It's called The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta by Marc Wortman, and to my mind it is one of the most important books on the war published in years. It certainly is the definitive book on the burning of Atlanta and the background of that conflagration. Best of all, it shows both sides clearly--the die-hard Confederates and the faithful Unionists--as they co-existed in a fragile dance that is somehow a paradigm for the New South that followed.

I want to say it up front: Buy this book. Buy multiple copies of this book and give it as a gift to any relative or friend interested in the subject. But better, buy it for yourself and prepare to luxuriate in gorgeous prose, first-rate scholarship, and to discover page by page why Atlanta became the city it is today. Here's the link from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Bonfire-Siege-Burning-Atlanta/dp/1586484826/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249384144&sr=8-1

Most people know at least part of the story of the burning of Atlanta. They know that Confederate troops burned ordinance and much else when they abandoned the city and that Sherman finished the rest of it after he'd evacuated the populace. And yet the background leading up to that cataclysm is anything but well known.

Much pioneering work on Unionists was done by my friend Thomas Dyer in his path-breaking book Secret Yankees. In it, Dyer told fully for the first time the story of a little-known circle of Unionists in Atlanta who operated throughout the entire war. Wortman, to his credit, uses Dyer's scholarship and much, much more to build a convincing case that Atlanta was never a bastion of Confederate unity. In fact, a great many people felt the entire premise of the Civil War was immoral and illegal, and that slavery was utterly, completely, and eternally indefensible. Of course we all feel that way now, but it's amazing how many contortions "leading" southerners went through to defend the Peculiar Institution.

We learn much that hasn't been clear in other histories. Sherman, for example, was a relentless and in many ways a great general, but he was also a racist who had no use for African-Americans or, later, American Indians. Some slaves operated almost as independent businessmen in Atlanta and several got quite rich doing it.

The future of the United States of America was all that was riding on the Battle of Atlanta. And Wortman goes deep into economics and sociology to demonstrate just how different Atlanta was and why its rapid rise after the war as the "capital" of the New South was pre-ordained by what it was before the war.

I know about the Atlanta Campaign. I spent a decade on research about it for A Distant Flame, and I'm proud to say that the history in my novel is, I believe, correct. And yet I'm not a historian, and Wortman's grasp of the big picture is astounding. Starting in days when Native Americans owned and lived on the land, he creates a stunning new narrative of Atlanta and Georgia--who they are and from where they came.

Best of all to me is the quality of the writing, which is simply magnificent. His original research--honed by many, many trips to the area from his home in New Haven, Conn.--is always original and selected perfectly. But his writing is dramatic without being sensationalized and rich and fluid without being self-consciously arty.

I began reading and essentially stopped my life for three days as I read with increasing disbelief that he could pull off the history of this campaign that I've waited my whole life to read. And yet he did it and did it magnificently.

This is one of the most important Civil War books in years. It certainly is a book that anyone who wants to understand the war or current-day Georgia or Atlanta simply must own.

Published and edited beautifully by PublicAffairs Press in New York, The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta, is an epic journey, a deeply insightful story, and--how else to say it?--a masterpiece.

After living with ghosts of the false Old South for a century, it's time for the truth to set us free.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Marc Wortman will be appearing in Atlanta:

Atlanta History Center
130 West Paces Ferry Road
Atlanta, GA 30305

PHONE: 404.814.4000
FAX: 404.814.2041

Aiken Lecture: Marc Wortman

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 8:00 PM

The only American city to have been besieged and destroyed, Atlanta’s destruction during the Civil War is an iconic moment in American history. Award-winning journalist Marc Wortman depicts its siege and fall in The Bonfire, an absorbing narrative history told through the eyes of key participants both Confederate and Union.

Marc Wortman is an award-winning freelance journalist and independent scholar. His articles and essays on history, science and architecture have appeared in many national magazines. He is the author of The Millionaires’ Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys Who Fought the Great War and Invented American Air Power, which is in development as a feature motion picture.

Admission for all lectures is $5 for members and $10 for nonmembers, unless otherwise noted.

Putrid CBS, putrid Buick Open

2009-08-03T07:39:00.000-04:00

Before I get over my fit of pique entirely, I want to say what an utter joke, what a pathetic excuse for a program CBS-TV put on yesterday (Sunday) for the Buick Open. There was no golf tournament televised, despite the fact that Tiger Woods was going for his 69th tour win. Instead, there were three minutes of commercials after virtually every swing Woods made. "Disgraceful" would be giving CBS too much credit.

Maybe they're making up for the horror of having to wait a full inning for ads when they telecast baseball. Or, horror of horrors, until a change of possession or a "TV timeout" in football.

It's no surprise anymore, of course, what a bucket of swill network TV has become. But to destroy the last Buick Open and turn it into a cheap-looking advertising channel is disgusting.

I know programs have to be supported. That's why PBS essentially goes off the air for a third of the year. (They're off the air as far as I'm concerned during their endless fund-a-thons.) But the sheer volume of ads during the Buick Open showed that the network of Cronkite is now the network of accountants who couldn't care less what their viewers think.

I'll watch Tiger Woods in any tournament in which he plays until he retires or I die. He's a hero to me and one of the things that make life worth living. But I'm sick to my soul of being treated like trash by network TV. No, I don't have to watch. Yes, I can turn the channel. But sometimes there's something I really want to see, and I want to be treated on this score at least fairly, not with contempt.

And contempt was the only thing visible for viewers of the Buick Open Sunday.

Gone from These Woods

2009-07-29T08:39:00.000-04:00

It's always a pleasure to promote a new book from a friend, but it's a special pleasure for me to tell you about a wonderful new book called Gone from These Woods by my friend Donny Seagraves, who lives near Athens in the small town of Winterville.

I've known Donny for nearly 30 years and was her first editor at the old Athens Observer, back when it was an award-winning progressive newspaper and not the sad sack it became in the last few years before it folded. Donny one day out of the blue brought me some editorial columns to consider, and they were wonderful, and we published them.

During the decades after that, she has been a consistent and vocal supporter of my work, so it's a joy to tell you about her own very first book, just out from Delacorte Press (a division of Random House) in New York.

The book is for middle-school-age readers and just above, though anyone, including adults, can read it with pleasure and profit. The plot surrounds the events that occur after a tragic hunting accident and the effect it has on a family in a small town. That might sound fairly simple, but in Donny's hands, it's anything but an easy situation to write about. I read every page, and I just loved it.

She delves deeply into the moral complexities of guilt and family love, and she does it with subtlety and intelligence, and with a command of language that is admirable. Frankly, I can't imagine anything harder than writing for this specific audience, because many of them are confused, a bit edgy, and afraid to venture far from received ideas.

Donny does a masterful job of creating characters, especially young Daniel Sartain and his grieving family. She understands grief from the inside, but even more impressive, she understands how adolescents struggle with self-identity and how they need loving adults to help them steer the way to adulthood.

Perhaps most important, she has a level-headed and pragmatic position on hunting that gives the narrative a moral weight. It would have been easy for her to condemn the whole "sport," as a dwindling piece of American history with no place in the here and now. But she doesn't do that. She understands the deep nexus of associations that hunting holds among many fine people and why it is something fathers and mothers still pass down to sons and daughters.

To have written a book of such moral weight and complexity and to teach without being preachy are magnificent achievements.

Go buy this book. Give it to a family with youngsters or without. This book, took will be a gift that will passed from parents to children and on and on for generations.

The writing life

2009-07-28T08:37:00.001-04:00

Question: What is a typical day like in your writing life?

Answer: I'm an early-riser, one of those people who awakens like a dog, shakes once, and is wide awake. (For anyone who knows me and wants to extend the dog analogy, please resist!) I get up around 3:45 most days, wide awake and ready to go.

The first thing I do is feed three ravenous cats, one of which (Boston) is unruly and just wants to have fun. I put on the kettle to boil, make myself a cup of Cafe Francais (go ahead and mock me, Francophobes and coffee connoisseurs, but I like it, have for years. Sue me.) and then head upstairs to my study.

My brain is fully awake by then, but as an old news-hound, I'm not remotely ready yet, so I quickly scan through The New York Times, The Athens Banner-Herald, the AJC, USA Today, the Huffington Post, and several other sites. I once also scanned The Washington Post, but it has become such a right-wing rag that I deleted it from my bookmarks. Sad. And okay, I sometimes check my Amazon rankings.

Then it's time to get down to work. The day before, I always stop where I know what happens next, whether it's poetry or fiction. This is something I learned from Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, still one of my favorite books. (If you didn't recently read A.E. Hotchner's essay in the NYT about why the new edition of the book about to come out makes no sense, go find it.)

I left out one thing: Radioio. This online music service is simply the best. Radioio Classical is music from the Romantic Period onward, with a heavy dose of 20th and 21st century music and is my dream station. If you love classical music and don't know about Radioio, shame on you. Go to their website and check it out. They have free commercial streams, but I'm a Soundpass member, and so for a ridiculously small amount I can listen commercial free. I hate ads.

So then I write. It takes focus, because I usually have no more than an hour a day to write. But as a journalist and writer for all my life, I know focus and speed and sometimes can put them together. Sometimes Boston wanders in an annoys me.

Some people would call this getting up at night to write, since it's still dark when I finish around 5:15 or so. But to me it's morning. Late in the day when I get home, I might tinker with what I've done, but it's minor fiddling, not requiring the concentration of earlier. I also spend at least two hours a day here and there dealing with the business of writing and things like my blogs and website.

I'm also working on setting up a fall/winter tour for The Campfire Boys, and just added an event at the Decatur Book Festival near Atlanta on Sept. 6. That's a Sunday. Details soon.

Anyway, that's my writing day. And of course I read every spare minute.

Hall of Fame, etc.

2009-07-23T09:46:00.000-04:00

Word has been trickling out, but I'm glad to confirm that I will be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in March.

It's a rather select and small group and includes such luminaries as Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, Carson McCullers, and Harry Crews. Needless to say, I'm honored to be in their company. I'll be posting more about the event as it gets nearer.

Last weekend I had a splendid time at the Harriett Austin Writers Conference in Athens and met a number of interesting and delightful people at my sessions and after. I also had a wonderful time with a book club from Clarkesville, Ga., in a phone hookup Sunday night. They had read A Distant Flame.

Late yesterday afternoon I got the first copies of The Campfire Boys, and it's a flat-out gorgeous book. Kudos to Mercer University Press and their designers, Burt & Burt, both in Macon, Ga.

Almost August!

Photo: Flannery O'Connor

Slow days

2009-07-14T13:59:00.000-04:00

Summer's a slug in molasses in this American South. I loathe it. Have I said that before? Only about ten thousand times. I'm feeling a stirring of excitement about The Campfire Boys, though, and I should have copies shortly. We're going to be doing a lot of touring for it, and I hope to get out and see readers in many places.

So sad to hear of the death of Paul Hemphill, the wonderful Atlanta writer. I didn't know Paul well, but did know him, and I was delighted to see that he got a huge obit in the New York Times--and one worthy of his talent and accomplishments. I'd run across Paul and lit events for much of the past 25 years, and we always had something to talk about. A wonderful storyteller. Dead of cancer at 73--much too early. Rest well, Paul.

The picture is apropos of nothing except a desire for this season to end. It's the Swift River in New Hampshire.

I'll be doing two sessions at the Harriette Austin Writers Conference here in Athens this weekend and look forward to seeing colleagues and new writers. A note to the latter: We're all new writers. On Sunday evening, I'm doing a phone hookup with a reading club that's just read A Distant Flame. I'm looking forward to that, too.

I'll blog more as we get out of summer--to me it's always like Bogie and Kate getting out of the swamp just before they hit the lake in The African Queen.

Back

2009-07-08T07:04:00.000-04:00

Hey, y'all. After a week off to write, paint, and compose, I'm back in the saddle and getting ready for the Harriette Austin Writers Conference to beheld here in Athens July 18-18. Should be fun. In the meantime, The Campfire Boys, which won't be out until September, is already for early sale on Amazon and B&N.com.

Happy Fourth

2009-06-30T07:02:00.001-04:00

I'm taking a week away from being an author and will be spending it being a writer. Hope everyone has a dandy holiday and that we can get this hideous summer behind us soon. Come on, autumn!

Well, s**t

2009-06-29T08:20:00.001-04:00

Some years ago, a dear friend of mine found out that his cancer had spread, was inoperable, and that his days were numbered. We talked, and he was almost wistfully amused at people's reactions.

"Oh, they're all nice and whatnot," he said. "But I wish, just once, someone would come up to me and just say, `Well, shit." I laughed and knew what he meant. Sometimes a quiet curse on the fickleness of life is about all there is left.

He died a few months after that, and since then, I've often used his epithet.

Last week was certainly a "Well, shit" week if there ever was one. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, and Gale Storm.

Gale who? Those not of a, ahem, certain age wouldn't know Ms. Storm, but oh how well I recall her from her '50s TV series "My Little Margie." With its Art Deco sets, with old pros like Charles Farrell as her father Vern Albright, the marvelous Clarence Kolb as Mr. Honeywell, along with Gertrude Hoffman as the neighbor Mrs. Odets, "My Little Margie" was so wonderful.

It only ran for 64 episodes from 1952-55, and I was very young when it went off the air, but in re-runs and in Gale Storm's next series, "Oh, Susanna!" I came to love that effervescent young woman.

I liked Ed McMahon a lot--who didn't? Farrah wasn't much to me but a pretty face, but oh she was that to a giddy degree. I was never much of a Michael Jackson fan, though I saw the Motown 25 live when he sang "Billie Jean" and did the moonwalk. I leaped off the sofa and cried, "My God, he's not human!" I didn't know the moonwalk had been around for quite awhile by then, that Marcel Marceau used it for decades and even James Brown used it before Michael. Still, it was one of the two or three most exciting performances I'd ever seen. I still have my LP of Thriller. Gad, what a great album. Billy Mays was (I'm sorry) sort of annoying and yet there was something winning about someone who embraced his minor talent with such brio and enthusiasm.

Still, the loss that hits me hardest is Gale Storm's, who passed away at 87. She was a bright part of my childhood, a woman who always made me happy with her TV characters, and who brought joy and a lot of talent to millions.

Godspeed, Gale Storm.

Donny's upcoming book

2009-06-26T08:48:00.000-04:00

I'm now reading a novel from another friend, Donny Seagraves, who lives in nearby Winterville. She's been a friend for years and has a book coming out in August from Delacorte called Gone from These Woods. It's a joyous time for a lovely woman and a fine writer. It's already for order on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/These-Woods-Donny-Bailey-Seagraves/dp/0385736290/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246020475&sr=1-1

I'll write more about it when I finish reading the advanced reader copy that Random House (parent company of Delacorte) sent me. Good luck, Donny!

Marly's masterpiece

2009-06-25T08:39:00.000-04:00

One my best writer friends is a brilliant woman named Marly Youmans who lives with her family in Cooperstown, NY. Marly has published a number of first-rate books, including Catherwood, Little Jordan, The Curse of the Raven Mocker, and the winner of the Michael Shaara Prize, The Wolf Pit. She also wrote a ravishing collection of poetry published by LSU and has more magnificent work marinating and waiting its turn for publication. Now Marly had published, in two stunning limited editions from Britain's PS press, a simple, beautiful, even brilliant book called Val/Orson. Here is the synopsis of this incredible story:

Inspired by the French medieval tale Valentine and Orson, this moving, insightful novella from award-winning author Marly Youmans reclaims a 500-year-old epic for contemporary readers.

Through the dazzling double-story of a stolen twin and the secrets of an ancient forest, Youmans roams also among the sweet spirits of Shakespeare’s romance plays.

Val/Orson opens with Val long saddened at the loss of his stolen twin brother. He has grown up in the California forest, climbing mysterious redwoods and finding his greatest pleasure in a landscape that seems alive. And sorrow for his lost sibling—his double—haunts his walks.

From boyhood, he has worked with all his intelligence and strength to save the ancient trees. Now Val's world is increasingly populated by environmentalists, sometimes dangerously radical, sometimes merely idealistic, and further shaded in connection with the disappearance of a particularly bewitching tree-sitter--a woman who has both captivated and confused him.

“I fear seeing a luminous being crouched by the hearth, ready to swing its intense light-drenched gaze toward me. I fear that I’ll never grasp the terms of my own damnation or what happened to the woman I knew only by the name of Diamond . . .”

Did she die in her wanderings? Is she still in the deep forest with her lover, mocking Val? As he searches for his lost twin, he must find out.

The sequoia groves are the stage where a company of figures worthy of a Renaissance “winter’s tale” (Fergus, the Sherwood band of tree-sitters, grief-shaded Bella with her wild inheritance, Clere, and mysterious others who seem close by, half-hidden in trees) engage, entertain, and challenge Val.

As their stories mesh and unwind, they lure Val deeper into the rich complexity of their narratives and toward revelation. And as the mystery in Marly Youmans’ magical world intensifies, Val moves from revelation to a stunning transformation as son, brother, lover, and steward of the wildwood.

Critical response from fine writers has been rapturous. Writer Theodora Goss said this:

"What a gorgeous tale! I'm always delighted to read a new work by Marly Youmans, and Val/Orson both enchants and satisfies: it is a combination of myth, Shakespeare, and modern environmentalism, with not a little magic thrown into the mixture, written in prose as lush as it is precise. A treat for anyone who loves fantasy or just a tale well told."

I love limited editions, and this one came in two forms and mine was the hardcover one, signed by Marly and the writer of the book's introduction Catherynne M. Valente. In an edition of 100, I got number 87. PS also published an edition of 500 in softcover signed by Marly. Check it out online at Amazon or B&N.com

Marly and I were supposed to be on a panel together at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in 2001, and I hurt my back and couldn't go. And yet we instantly became pen pals and dear friends, and we have written each other for the past eight years--finally meeting this spring for the first time.

I can't begin to tell you what a glory Val/Orson is. No one writes like Marly--she is one of those people who seem incapable of anything meretricious and whose every word seems born for its spot on the page.

I hope my readers will check out her oeuvre and especially go to her website, www.marlyyoumans.com. She has a blog that puts mine to shame--with a huge and lively following. Brava, Marly. And thank you for this incandescent tale--one that will stay with me for the rest of my days.

P.S. Check out Marly's ordering advice in the comments section!

Atlanta Writers Club

2009-06-22T13:47:00.000-04:00

I had a fine time indeed Saturday at the Atlanta Writers Club meeting at Georgia Perimeter College. Although the roads were torn up and signs bad--I actually got lost and had to call for help--the event was wonderful, with a large and eager crowd.

It's always a pleasure to get out and talk to fellow writers and readers. Many of those in this group have published a great deal, and they were a pleasure to meet.

We're working on this fall's tour for The Campfire Boys and will include more information on dates soon.

I'm also going to blog this week on the spectacularly wonderful book just published by my good friend and writing colleague Marly Youmans. Stay tuned.

Five Movies I Never Tire of Seeing

2009-06-17T07:49:00.000-04:00

Movies--I love them and have since I was a kid. I know people who see a film once and to them that's it--why would they bother seeing again what they've already seen? I've never understood that, since there are dozens of movies I never tire of seeing.

Of course, there ARE films that, over time, get taken off my re-watch list. Anyway, here are five films I will be watching over and over for the rest of my life, always finding something new.

1. The Grapes of Wrath (1940). John Ford's masterpiece, with cinematography by the great Gregg Toland, a certified American genius. Where in the world can one start in praising this towering work? Well, Henry Fonda, of course, in his signature role as Tom Joad--a performance without a single false note. And there's John Carradine as Casy--a great, great performance. The screenplay by Nunnally Johnson is overwhelming and manages to draw from John Steinbeck's novel the heart and soul while having to leave out the shattering final scene when Rosasharon offers the milk in her breast to a starving man. But for me the film will always be Jane Darwell's as Ma Joad--one of the single best performances ever captured on film. Look at her eyes! Listen to the authenticity in her tone and accent. One of highlights of world cinema. An unforgettable film I will love forever.

2. Sullivan's Travels (1941). Many people think of Joel McCrea as one our greatest Western actors, and he was that. But before he became an iconic presence in that genre, he was simply brilliant at the kind of light comedy featured in this film, arguably director Preston Sturges's masterpiece. McCrea and Veronica Lake team up to explore a completely different aspect of the Depression from what Ford did in The Grapes of Wrath. In this utterly winning and completely hilarious film, McCrea plays Hollywood director John "Sully" Sullivan who has made too much fluff and wants to make a film about the real suffering of common folk--to be called O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Yes, the Coen Brothers stole the title as a gleeful homage.) So he sets out with a dime in his pocket and, of course, things go wrong. I've seen this film probably 10 times and every viewing is a joy. As much as I love It Happened One Night, I'd take Sullivan's Travels over it if I had to choose one or the other.

3. Tender Mercies (1983). Oh heavens, where can one start? Robert Duvall is the greatest living American actor. End of story. We're watching the remastered and letterboxed version of Lonesome Dove on TV right now, and of course he and the film are unforgettable. But Tender Mercies is a work of simplicity and overwhelming power. Failed country singer Mac Sledge gets a second chance at love with a young woman named Rosa Lee, who runs a down-at-heels motel in south Texas. Horton Foote wrote this great, great screenplay, and Duvall's manifest genius takes it to the level of art, with a brilliant supporting cast. A lot of people didn't get it when Australian Bruce Beresford was hired to direct this, but he did a marvelous job, and I got to meet him later on the set of Driving Miss Daisy in Atlanta.

4. Manhattan (1979). I admit it: I love Woody Allen films. But this glorious valentine to NYC, with one of Woody's best scripts, with top-flight performances at every spot, and with marvelous black-and-white photography by Gordon Willis, is pure joy. Look at that cast: Woody, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, and the luminous Mariel Hemingway--it doesn't get much better. It even has cameos by black-comedy genius Michael O'Donoghue and future star Karen Allen. And it has one of the most perfect endings of any romantic comedy ever written or played: "Not everyone gets corrupted. . . you have to have a little faith in people." This one goes with me to the moon.

5. Saving Private Ryan (1998). I thought about this for a long time, and in truth, I wanted to put Schindler's List, but that great film has a few slack parts narratively, and the shower scene at the concentration camp always so destroys me emotionally I can't function for hours. I do love war films, and Saving Private Ryan is easily one of the best ever made. Actually, let's go all the way: It's the best war film ever made. It's not that Steven Spielberg avoids the standard cliches. In fact, he wallows in them. And despite that clear choice, he shows that even commonplace narrative structures can be made incandescent in the hands of a master storyteller. Of course it's Tom Hanks's film, but it really belongs to Spielberg. The D-Day scenes, photographed with staggering virtuosity by Janusz Kaminiski, represent film-making at its very best. The ensemble work by Hanks's company is brilliant. The ending is enough to make the hardest man who ever lived dissolve into helpless tears. I always cry. Always:

Old James Ryan: [addressing Capt. Miller’s grave] My family is with me today. They wanted to come with me. To be honest with you, I wasn't sure how I'd feel coming back here. Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I tried to live my life the best that I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that, at least in your eyes, I've earned what all of you have done for me.
Ryan's Wife: James?
[looking at headstone]
Ryan's Wife: Captain John H. Miller.
Old James Ryan: Tell me I have led a good life.
Ryan's Wife: What?
Old James Ryan: Tell me I'm a good man.
Ryan's Wife: You are.
[walks away]
Old James Ryan: [stands back and salutes]

It's just shattering and ennobling at the same time. There are probably 50 or more films I never tire of seeing, but these five are always near the top.

Busy summer ahead

2009-06-03T08:44:00.000-04:00

Hello all. After time a bit of time away from blogging I'm back, hoping to share some of the building excitement about publication of my new novel The Campfire Boys and the continuing success of my poetry volume Elegies for the Water. First of all, I'm happy to say that Elegies has almost sold out its first printing and will be going back to press soon. In fact, I'm proud that it made the national poetry bestseller list for a week--which is something, considering most of the poets on the list (such as Mary Oliver) are huge sellers and very well known. I'm even more delighted that I've now seen the cover for The Campfire Boys, and it's a flat knockout. Mercer University Press has the good fortune to work with one of the best design firms in the country, Burt & Burt, of Macon, Ga. They're extravagantly talented in every way. The book should be for sale on Amazon and B&N.com by early August at the latest, and we are planning a major kickoff party in Athens. I'm also pleased to share here for the first time the book's blurbs, which humble me greatly:

Early praise for The Campfire Boys

“Philip Lee Williams’ new novel The Campfire Boys is an enchanting read, full of rich Civil War detail and intriguing characters that illuminate both that specific era and the timeless human heart with a complex mix of the serious and the humorous. This is a splendid novel that deserves a wide readership.”—Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

"The Campfire Boys is a perfect blend of history and imagination, of the tragic and the comic. Philip Lee Williams is a writer I've long admired, and this remarkable book is further confirmation that he is one of the South's best novelists."—Ron Rash, author of Serena and Chemistry and Other Stories, finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

“A splendid novel! Funny, moving, wise, and beautifully written, this is historical fiction at its very best.”—Alden R. Carter, author of Bright Starry Banner.

Obviously, I couldn't be more pleased with this praise from my colleagues. All three are marvelous writers, and if you have somehow missed their work, get busy buying it.

In the meantime, I'm writing and reading as always. I dislike summer intensely--by a large margin, it's my least-favorite season of the year. And yet it has almost always been my favorite writing season. Go figure.

One book I'm reading with great pleasure right now is The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940. This first of a projected four volumes from Cambridge University Press is just wonderful. Oddly enough I have two minor connections to Beckett. The first is that my late friend Hugh Kenner was a great friend of his and told me all about Beckett. The second, somewhat hilariously, is that when I was a senior TV production major at the University of Georgia many years ago, my class-partner and I did, for our final project, the first act of Waiting for Godot. I guess it was a shot across the bow that neither of us planned to get into the commercial world of television. It was videotaped in black-and-white and must have been terrible. My friend and I acted the parts and "hired" another student to direct us. Hee. I'm sure it was taped over the next quarter, but it would be funny to see all these years later. One of my few acting jobs.

I'll try to blog more often as we move closer to pub date for The Campfire Boys.

(Photo: Samuel Beckett in a Paris cafe.)

Bit of a break

2009-05-14T08:21:00.000-04:00

Now that my events for Elegies for the Water have slowed a bit and the class of 2009 has safely graduated from the good old University of Georgia, I'm going to take a break from blogging for a bit. I won't be gone too long, and already things are warming up for the release of my new novel, The Campfire Boys, in September. (In October I'll be at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, for instance, doing a reading and participating in a panel.) But for now, I'll vanish for awhile. Bless you all.

One book note, though: I'm 450 pages into Blake Bailey's new biography of John Cheever, and it's one of the best literary biographies I've ever read. If you love such things, it's money WELL spent. I'll embark on the new O'Connor bio next.

Hiding Man

2009-05-07T07:15:00.000-04:00

Been slow blogging this week because of a vastly complicated schedule. Things are calming down on the readings for Elegies for the Water--at least for a while.

I do want to recommend a book: Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty. This wonderful book traces the life and career of on our America's most interesting short story writers in the second half of the 20th century.

Barthelme's name and books began to be obscured by the Raymond Carver deluge that swept American MFA programs starting in the 80s. Carver's short, bone-clean prose, with its elliptical meaning and, to me, ungenerous gifts, was perfect for creative writing programs. Barthelme's prose, which traveled around postmodernism, was self-referential, and often too cute to bear, was much different.

My guess is that Carver mania has been pushed past its sell-by date. (Not that many people in CW program write prose anyway.) Maybe Barthelme was more of his time than Carver was. After all, Carver was, to me, doing the same thing Hemingway did, along with a healthy boost, apparently, from editors who helped shape his essential voice.

All of that aside, you can't go wrong with Hiding Man--a terrific biography by an accomplished and established writer.

In Jefferson

2009-04-28T08:48:00.001-04:00

I'll be in Jefferson, Georgia, at the public library this Thursday night (April 30) at 7 p.m., reading from Elegies.

Two great events last week, and I always look forward to reading in Jefferson--a wonderful venue with friendly, welcoming people. We're adding tour dates but most of them are later in the year. It's been a busy spring so far.

All of us in Athens are reeling from the horror of the triple-murder last weekend. I knew one of the victims slightly. What a nightmare--keep all their loved ones in your thoughts and prayers.

At the Library

2009-04-23T09:09:00.000-04:00

Just wanted to remind everyone I'll be at the Oconee County Library in Watkinsville, Georgia, tonight (Thursday) to read from Elegies for the Water.

I'd also like to ask that you continue to support public libraries and to write your government representatives and tell them to keep the funding flowing generously. The web will never take the place of the library.

Come on out!

Nobels Are Ringing

2009-04-20T12:48:00.000-04:00

This insightful column (below) was in today's Washington Post. If you think she's kidding, Google the winners of the prize and see how many you know. Photo of Faulkner is here because I revere his work, and he is one of the Nobel winners who clearly deserved it.

By Marie Arana
Sunday, April 19, 2009

It took more than a century to get here, but last year finally made it obvious: It's time to throw out the Nobel Prize in literature.

In October, Horace Engdahl, a permanent member of the Swedish Academy, declared that Americans were "too insular" to participate in the "big dialogue" of world literature. "That ignorance is restraining," he sniffed.

For years, there'd been rumors that the Swedes saw America as a vast wilderness of provincialism, but with that pronouncement, the Academy's own narrow-mindedness came into display. The prejudices that have long governed the Nobel's deliberations are now as open and public as a festering sore.

I'm not proposing to eliminate the prize because one official branded Americans lumbering ignoramuses. I'm doing it because, since Alfred Nobel, the chemist who invented dynamite, founded his famous prize, the Nobel has shown a breathtaking proclivity for exalting minor literary talent. From first to last -- from the forgettable Sully Prudhomme (1901) to the erratic and treacly J.M.G. Le Clézio (2008) -- the choices have shown a lack of critical judgment and a surfeit of political zeal.

How could judges who profess to know literature shun Tolstoy, James Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Nabokov or Henry James? If the goal, as the original mandate proclaimed, was to identify those who have "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind," why extol the muddled pornography of Elfriede Jelinek? Or the unremarkable output of Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, former judges themselves?

Often, the Academy lionizes those in line with its own left-wing beliefs: Sinclair Lewis, Gunter Grass, Jose Saramago, Pablo Neruda or Jean-Paul Sartre. The native-born Americans who have wrested the laurels make for a motley crew: the merely average and flagrantly anti-capitalist John Steinbeck, for instance, and the mediocre but multiculturally earnest Pearl S. Buck.

After World War II, the judges did choose a few giants: Herman Hesse, Andre Gide, T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner. But what of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene or Jorge Luis Borges? Or E.M. Forster, Mikhail Bulgakov and Willa Cather? By my count, 15 of the 105 laureates deserved the prize. That's hardly an efficient way to recognize excellence. As George Bernard Shaw, himself a laureate, once said: Only a dynamiter or a fiend could have invented it.

Marie Arana, the former editor of The Washington Post's Book World, is the author of "Lima Nights."

Elegies on the Road

2009-04-13T09:18:00.001-04:00

Just want to remind everyone that on Tuesday, April 14, I'll be at the Decatur Public Library in Decatur, Ga., beginning at 7:15 p.m. I'll be doing a reading with fellow writer/musician Kodac Harrison, sponsored by the Georgia Center for the Book.

Decatur is one of my favorite places in the Atlanta area, and I've been knocking around it since 1970 when I met my future wife, Linda--whose family lived not far from the town center.

I was disappointed not to be at Holy Cross Lutheran Church for the premiere of my prelude Via Dolorosa on the evening of Good Friday, due to the eight thousand tornadoes skipping across the area. The show went on anyway, as it were, though I'm told the power went out. The piece will be performed again some time in the next couple of weeks, though, I hear.

Spring is sparkling around our home these days.

Writers Night at Walton High

2009-04-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

I had a marvelous time as the featured author at Atlanta's Walton High School last week. During what was an extremely sad week because of the tragic death of a student, the school came together around writers.

High schools are getting better at encouraging writing and at studying the rich heritage of Georgia writers. The faculty and students at Walton were marvelous, their work was insightful, and the audience was raucous and supportive.

It's been a long time since I've felt more encouraged about writing in the next generations of southern writers. Special thanks to the Walton English Department and my host there, Kelly Bryan.

Thanks to those of you have offered sympathy for my recent injury. I'm black and blue and undergoing physical therapy and being much more careful where I step. While I still can't raise my right arm, I hope to be slowly improving in the coming weeks.

I've got several upcoming events at which I hope to see writers, and the most immediate are:

1. Tuesday, April 14, Decatur Public Library in Decatur, Ga., 7:15 p.m. I'll be doing a reading with fellow writer/musician Kodac Harrison, sponsored by the Georgia Center for the Book. I've done a number of readings at the Decatur Library in the past--great venue.

2. Thursday, April 23, 7 p.m. Oconee County Public Library, Watkinsville, Ga. I love this place, and look forward to meeting readers. I grew up haunting libraries and have never stopped. I've told my wife more than once that if I begin to die, take me to a library. I don't plan on dying (yet), but I do plan on reading from Elegies for the Water.

3. Thursday, April 30, Jefferson Public Library, Jefferson, Ga. I can't lie: This is one of my all-time favorite venues--it feels more like home that almost any other place I regularly appear. The library's wonderful Amy Carlan always makes events fun.

I'm also doing an hour-long audio meeting with a book club in north Georgia next week that is reading my novel All the Western Stars. That will be fun, too.

Finally, I want to let music lovers in the Athens area know that an organ piece of mine will receive its premier this coming Friday evening during Good Friday services at Holy Cross Lutheran Church on Westlake Drive in Athens beginning at 7 p.m. The piece, Prelude: Via Dolorosa, was commissioned by the church's music director and organist, Dell Hitchcock. Hope you can come. If you do, remember--it's the prelude, so don't be late!

Shoulder (?) to the wheel

2009-04-02T07:34:00.000-04:00

I was walking at our creek Monday night when my feet suddenly and without warning slipped from under me. It was on some slick mud that had a layer of sand over it. I landed hard on an already bad right shoulder and have been something of a mess since. It's slowly getting better, but it's hard to type. I'll catch the blog up as soon as I'm not moving around like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein.

Ray

2009-03-25T13:11:00.000-04:00

I was fortunate yesterday to give the speech inducting my old and late friend Raymond Andrews into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame at the University of Georgia. Here is what I said:

I consider it one of the great honors of my life to induct my dear friend Raymond Andrews into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. I only regret that Ray isn’t here, because there was no one who enjoyed a party more.

Ray loved being a writer, but it never came easy to him. He’d spend mornings writing a page or so of text over and over in longhand, and then, in the afternoon, he’d type it. And yet in his too-brief life, Ray brought light to a world that the South often wanted to ignore: the world between or above race.

In his Muskhogean Trilogy, his novels Appalachee Red, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, and Baby Sweet’s, Ray brought a stunning new voice to southern fiction. I can tell you for a fact that Raymond Andrews would have seen his induction into this marvelous group of writers as the culmination and highlight of his creative life.

And he would have asked me, as he did so many times, “Are you buying the beer?”

Not very many people know it, but my wife Linda and I were the first ones to publish Ray’s fiction, in a small magazine we ran 34 years ago called Ataraxia. We did an entire issue on Ray’s noted brother Benny, one of America’s finest artists. We had met Benny in 1974 and published this issue in 1975. We did not meet Ray until 1976, but we immediately became the best of friends.

But then, everyone loved Ray. Everyone. He was the kindest of men, he loved writing, he loved sports, and he loved to talk. Mark Twain said, “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see,” and no one embodied that ideal more than Raymond Andrews.

Linda and I spent several days once at their apartment in Queens with Ray and his then-wife Heidi, and since both worked, they gave us the run of their home while we wandered around Manhattan, getting lost in Chinatown while trying to find some authentic Lapsang Souchong tea.

In those days, neither Ray nor I had published much. He had scored one huge success, an essay published in Sports Illustrated on the time when the game of football made it to the small Morgan County community where the Andrews family lived. I was a journalist who had published some poetry and co-edited a small magazine, and he worked in the city on a day-job. But both of us wanted, in the worst way, to be published authors.

Ray didn’t know any more about how to make that happen than I did. In 1962, when William Faulkner died, Ray assumed, as he said many times later, that “there would be an opening at Random House.” So he got his novel together, and he swore that there was a postman inside the mailbox who beat him back to his apartment with the returned manuscript.

Raymond Andrews was not the kind to give up when Random House said no. In fact, we had a chunk of Appalachee Red ready to publish in Ataraxia when, 1977, the phone rang one night, and it was Ray, telling us we couldn’t publish the excerpt.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because Dial Press just bought it,” he said. I let out a scream that brought my wife running to the phone. She must have thought someone had died.

I’m going to use some of the language about Ray from the New Georgia Encyclopedia here, but I think it’s not inappropriate since I wrote it.

Appalachee Red tells the story of a large, red-skinned black man who changes everything for African Americans in the small town of Appalachee, which is based on Madison, which is my home town and was of Ray, Benny, and all of the highly accomplished Andrews family. It’s a book that deals frankly with issues of race and repression, of police brutality, and also of hope.

It won the James Baldwin Prize for Fiction, an award that Ray received in Baldwin’s presence at the office of Dial Press in Manhattan. Suddenly, Ray was out of my league.

And yet you’d never know it. Nothing about the man changed, nothing. He still wanted to talk baseball and football, areas in which his knowledge was more than encyclopedic: it was downright scary. If you said “Top of the third, second game of the 1948 World Series,” he could give you the correct batting order and often the current batting averages of the players who came up to bat.

The next two books of the trilogy came out in 1980 and 1983 respectively, and by then Ray was being noticed nationally.

Ray and Heidi divorced, and, wanting to get out of the constant pressure of Manhattan, Ray moved to a house on Morton Road just outside Athens in the spring of 1984, as he often said, on pub day of my first novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest.

Ray immediately became a personality in Athens. There wasn’t much of a writer’s scene in those days, but it began to grow, and Ray was always in the center of it. You could usually find him at such downtown institutions as Gus Garcia’s, where fans and friends were eager to buy the beer.

By then, Linda and I had moved to Athens and we had a son, and Ray many, many times, came to our house and spent the weekend. I’d pick him up on Morton Road and take him to our house off the Jefferson Road. He and my brother Mark came to my house for every Super Bowl for a number of years.

In 1988, I had published a novel with Peachtree Publishers in Atlanta, and it was my good fortune to introduce Ray to the wonderful Margaret Quinlin, the editor and owner, who in 1990 brought out Ray’s memoir, The Last Radio Baby. This described his childhood years when his family lived on the same property with their black grandmother and white grandfather. Charles Kuralt called it, “one of the truest and best pieces of writing I’ve ever come across.” It was that.

The last book published in Ray’s lifetime, also by Peachtree, was Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire, consisting of two novellas about two powerful African American women.

Across America, critics took notice of the works of Raymond Andrews. The San Francisco Chronicle called Appalachee Red “an auspicious beginning for a fine talent.” Novelist Richard Bausch, who invited Ray several times to be writer in residence at George Mason University, said Ray’s writing has “a smiling generosity of spirit.”

Though Linda and I may have been his oldest “new” friends in the South, Ray made friends so fast that after his death, I found many, many people who described themselves as “Ray’s best friend.”

And they were. Every last one of them. Because Raymond Andrews only made best friends. To him, there was no other kind.

The last summer of Ray’s life, I was busy preparing for a new book and a new daughter, and we didn’t see each other much. In fact, the last time I saw Ray, oddly enough, was in New York City when I’d gone up for the American Booksellers Association convention.

I didn’t know then what a bad time Ray had been having, worried about his health and other things. Writing had become difficult for him. He was there to promote Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Clare, and I was there to promote a book and meet with my new publisher—Random House, which had finally found an opening for one of us.

The crowd of us from Peachtree Publishers had dinner in Manhattan and then walked back south to the Penta hotel across from Madison Square Garden, where many of us were staying. Ray tried, on the way back, to talk me into going for drinks to O’Reilly’s, an Irish pub in which we’d drunk too much more than once in the past. I should mention that Ray spent every summer back in New York during his Athens years.

But I told him I was exhausted, and I’d see him back in Athens in a few weeks. We shook hands on the sidewalk, and I had no idea I’d never see him again.

Though he meant it differently, I think often of something Dr. Martin Luther King once wrote. He said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

The silence of Ray’s loss has remained hard for all of us who loved him. Why this warmest and most talented of men took his life is one of those mysteries that, in the end, cannot be entirely understood.

But when all of Ray’s “best friends,” including me, think of his work and his life, we feel anything but sad. There is a kind of eternal grace in a life well-lived, I think, and for all of my days I will continue to love Raymond Andrews and the indelible body of work that has brought him to this prestigious place.

Ray’s life was not a sad one overall, and his accomplishments were magnificent. While his work eminently qualifies him to be among these great writers, he was an even better man.

Wendell Berry wrote, “I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief ... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

No one walked through his life with more grace or joy than Raymond Andrews. We miss him but are grateful for the books that have brought him here today.

It’s been a long journey, my friend. The race is over and now it’s won. Your work will last and so will your name. We all raise a toast in your honor and say it aloud with pride and joy: “Here’s to Raymond Andrews, member of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. May the hinges of friendship never rust, nor the wings of love lose a feather.” Welcome, home, from all your best friends.

Much happening

2009-03-18T10:05:00.001-04:00

I'm already getting great comments on my new website, which went up late yesterday afternoon. The site exceeded the previous number of hits for a single day by a stunning six times! My thanks to Brandon Williams, my son and my computer guru, who did the whole site. Gratitude also to my daughter Megan, who's become my official photographer. Family does it best.

I'd like to say what a fine time I had as emcee of the Georgia state finals for the national Poetry Out Loud contest. It was held Sunday in the studios of Georgia Public Broadcasting in Atlanta, and the 15 finalists were just marvelous. I'm so proud Georgia is part of this effort to bring memorizing and presenting poetry out loud. Some years ago, member of our education establishment decreed that memorizing things, especially poetry, had no place in modern teaching or learning. How wrong they were--about that and many other things.

The opening party for Elegies for the Water at the Athens Barnes & Noble was just marvelous. We had a standing-room-only crowd, and it was a joy to see so many readers and friends there. Bravo to B&N, which has, since it first opened its door, been the strongest supporter of writers in this area of any bookstore--by a long way.

More upcoming press is on the way for Elegies, and I'm busy with reporters and photographers and looking forward to my next event at Walton High School in a couple of weeks.

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I can't let the moment pass without saying how utterly sick to my stomach I am of AIG, just like everyone else in America and around the world. What they have done is so far beyond morality and, I hope, the law, that frankly I believe that some people belong in prison.

This is the apotheosis of deregulation and the absolute lack of oversight pushed over and over by Republicans and especially the late, nightmare administration of George W. Bush.

Frankly, it's time for the rest of us to tell The Rich they don't own us anymore. They can't do whatever the hell they feel like. And we will not tolerate this again.

Poetry/Tonight

2009-03-12T07:56:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I try to think of what my life would have been like without Art. Without Shakespeare or Beethoven, without Whitman or Van Gogh, without Wagner or Pollock, without Dickinson or Jean Toomer, without Elizabeth Bishop. It's inconceivable.

To many millions, art is a luxury they can't afford. And for those who have the time, space, and energy, bad times can make it seem secondary. But that's too narrow a definition of what art is and can be.

Poetry is a perfect example. I talk to people all the time who have nothing professionally to do with literature as I do, but when you mention poetry, the reaction, about 90 percent of the time, is misty-eyed reverence, if not outright love. There is something odd and magical about words artfully put on a page that look deep inside human experience.

Of course, poetry encompasses many worlds, and I like nearly all of them. I like poetry that nominally doesn't appear to mean anything. I like puzzles, clues, ambiguity, enriched hints. I also like the straightforward language of a William Carlos Williams or Frank O'Hara--the blunt directness of something that might be said in the course of any day, though of course never so well.

Thomas Jefferson said we love best that which we loved first. I've always known that to be true in my life. I love Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound and Jorie Graham and a thousand in between. But my first love was William Wordsworth. Like so few now, I grew up in the country and have now lived there for the past 18 years, on a small patch of land in the woods on a dirt road.

The term "nature poetry," of course isn't used as a compliment these days. Poetry, we are led to believe, is an urban occupation, because that's supposedly where all the energy and intelligence in the world resides. But it's just not true.

In the Seventies, there was a back-to-nature movement in this country, but it didn't last long, and by the Eighties, the idea of a cabin on the land, away from the crunch of the city, had slipped from the national dialog. And yet poetry has kept one foot in the natural world.

For me, writing about the natural world is not about making a point. Quite simply, it's what I know. I've been to NY and Los Angeles. I've done readings in Colorado. But what I know is the slow, contemplative life of rural days. I love agriculture. I love the woods and the streams. It's who I am.

I also know and love Pynchon and David Foster Wallace and have taught them. I love Penderecki and every avant-garde movement in art history. I love that edge. But trying to write about something you aren't is a sure way to fail as an artist.

My new book of poetry, Elegies for the Water, is about who I am and nothing else. No cool riffs on urban hangouts. Nothing slammed. Being true to yourself may not make you an artist, but it does make you honest.

I believe if there is some art and some honesty, it will come through.

These are terrible times, and some people say we should forget art until times are better. I say not. And I don't say this to sell books--I've never written for money much anyway. Certainly, nobody makes money off poetry, including me. But promise yourself at least to read something of value during these times. Don't fail to rise to the best that is in us, not now.

It's one of the things that makes life worth living.

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Tonight, March 12, 2009, 7 p.m.: Kickoff party for Elegies for the Water. Barnes & Noble, Athens, Ga.

Philip Lee Williams

Another blog for Philip Lee Williams

Thanks to everyone

The Last Waltz

Ray

OCAF event

Comments

I know, I know

Finally here

Books arriving

Flower Seeker CD

No excuses

Lost

Summer, ick, but good things

The Hours

The Flower Seeker on Amazon

Slow Going

Although Of Course

Dog Ear Books; Web Site

A Distant Flame

Townsend Prize Shortlist

Dog Ear Books

Post replies; Deborah Blum

Hall of Fame

Hall of Fame

I'm back

Taking a break

English teachers redux

Georgia English teachers

Happy JoyceDay!

A hero gone

The Flower Seeker

Robert B. Parker

Political mess

Savannah Book Festival

Obsessions

Long live the king

Raymond Carver

Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays

Two symphonies

Event at Borders in Athens

Singing and Signing

Generosity

Dana's new book

Thanksgiving

Generosity

Riding the Elephant

Cover to Cover interview

Rest in peace, David Lloyd

River Jordan

Cover to Cover redux

In Dahlonega

PLW on "Cover to Cover" Sunday evening

Georgia Center for the Book

On the radio and in Dahlonega

Rainy days and Mondays

Peace

Nobels are ringing

Georgia Gwinnett College appearance

National Treasures

Bolano's 2666

Texting in the mist

Back in the saddle

Good weekend

Tonight

Decatur Book Festival

Headlight vent

Events for The Campfire Boys

The Last Lion

A champion gone

Good weekend

Campfire Boys publication party

The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone

Book festivals

A great new book

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Aiken Lecture: Marc Wortman

Putrid CBS, putrid Buick Open

Gone from These Woods

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