FREE EBOOK! On Writing: Garn Author Interviews PDF

ON WRITING GARN AUTHOR INTERVIEWS A FR E E E B O O K F RO M G A RN P RE SS

G ARN PRESS 2018 G A R N PRESS NEW YO RK, NY

Copyright Š 2018 by Garn Press

Published by Garn Press, LLC New York, NY www.garnpress.com

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Book and cover design by Benjamin J. Taylor/Garn Press Cover Image by Bryan Apen/Unsplash First Edition, 2018 Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data Name: Garn Press.

Title: On Writing: Garn Author Interviews / Garn Press.

Description: First edition. | New York : Garn Press, 2018 Subjects: LCSH: Anthologies. | Biography. | Autobiographies. | BISAC: Fiction / General. | Fiction / Biographical. | Fiction / Anthologies (multiple authors). | Biography & Autobiography / General.

Classification: LCC PN6010-PN6065 (ebook) | DDC 109.5--dc23.

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 7 AUTHOR STEVEN SINGER 8 About Steven Singer About Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform Purchase Information Interview with Steven Singer AUTHOR MONICA TAYLOR 17 About Monica Taylor About Playhouse: Optimistic Stories of Real Hope for Families with Little Children Purchase Information Interview with Monica Taylor AUTHOR P. L. THOMAS 25 About P.L. Thomas About Beware The Roadbuilders: Literature As Resistance Purchase Information About Trumplandia: Unmasking Post-Truth America Purchase Information Interview with P.L. Thomas AUTHOR DAVID JOSEPH KOLB 32 About David Joseph Kolb About Devil Knows: A Tale of Murder and Madness in America’s First Century Purchase Information Interview with David Joseph Kolb AUTHOR DENNY TAYLOR 38 About Denny Taylor About Rosie’s Umbrella Purchase Information About Split Second Solution Purchase Information Interview with Denny Taylor AUTHOR CAROLYN WALKER 48

About Carolyn Walker About Every Least Sparrow Purchase Information Interview with Carolyn Walker AUTHOR KEN GOODMAN 56 About Ken Goodman About What’s Whole in Whole Language in the 21st Century?

Purchase Information About The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale Purchase Information Interview with Ken Goodman AUTHOR GEOFF WARD 61 About Geoff Ward About You’re Not Dead: The Midnight Books (Volume 1) Purchase Information Interview with Geoff Ward AUTHOR RUSS WALSH 68 About Russ Walsh About A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century Purchase Information Interview with Russ Walsh AUTHOR MARTIN E. LEE 74 About Martin E. Lee About Bloody Lane Purchase Information Interview with Martin E. Lee AUTHOR MATTHEW C. FLEURY 78 About Matthew C. Fleury About Bloody Lane Purchase Information Interview with Matthew Fleury AUTHOR ESTHER SOKOLOV FINE 81 About Esther Sokolov Fine About Raising Peacemakers Purchase Information Interview with Esther Sokolov Fine AUTHOR RUTH FINNEGAN 86

About Ruth Finnegan About Black Inked Pearl: A Girl’s Quest Purchase Information Interview with Ruth Finnegan AUTHOR RICK MEYER 90 About Rick Meyer About Flush: The Exaggerated Memoir of a Fourth Grade Scaredy-Cat Super-Hero Purchase Information Interview with Rick Meyer ILLUSTRATOR RACHEL BACKSHALL 101 About Rachel Backshall About Toodle-oo Ruby Blue!

Purchase Information Interview with Rachel Backshall AUTHOR NANCY RANKIE SHELTON 106 About Nancy Rankie Shelton About 5-13: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Survival Purchase Information Interview with Rankie Shelton AUTHOR JAMES PAUL GEE 112 About James Paul Gee About Blowing Out The Candles: A Poetry Trilogy Purchase Information James Paul Gee on Writing Poetry

INTRODUCTION In this Garn Press free eBook authors and readers have an opportunity to meet Garn authors and learn more about the writing process. Hear directly from Garn authors on topics including influential authors and their books; writing as part of daily life; the role of the writer in society; and early reading and writing experiences.

There has never been a more exciting time to be a writer. The very foundation of human communication is changing and writers are right in the middle of all the chaos and confusion trying to sort it all out. And yet, whatever the platform, when it comes right down to it, writing is still a creative process of unparalleled possibilities. Every human emotion can be described and every act of kindness, every demonic act.

Sublime or dastardly it can be represented on the page, and this knowledge unites writers in strange and mysterious ways.

“Most of all we find company, companionship,” Anthony Cody says, talking about writing and thanking Garn, “for putting our words in print, and for gathering this ad hoc family of kindred spirits – fanciful imaginers, polemicists, and windmill tilters – now connected in person, experience, and by sharing our words.”

That sums it up – writers are fanciful imaginers, polemicists, and windmill tilters – and at Garn we are convinced something good will come of the work we do. Every book that Garn has published, whether non-fiction or fiction, delves deep into the nature of human behavior and the ways in which we inhabit the planet. We share ethical concerns as well as literary interests and between us we have the capacity to share original ideas – imaginary, provocative, and practical – with the reading public through the books we write and publish.

These connections provide a foundation on which we can support each other in getting the great books Garn authors write into the hands of readers.

In this age of multiple platform communication – blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat – there is an opportunity for everyone to be a writer. And so, we are publishing this free eBook on writing for you.

If you’re interested in purchasing Garn Books all of our books are available from books sellers including: Amazon, Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, Indigo Books, Waterstones (UK) or order through your local bookstore, check IndieBound for local bookstore locations.

Garn Press, New York, 2018

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AUTHOR STEVEN SINGER

ABOUT STEVEN SINGER Steven Singer is an 8th grade Language Arts teacher in western Pennsylvania. He is a National Board Certified Teacher and has an MAT from the University of Pittsburgh. He is Director of the Research and Blogging Committee for the Badass Teachers Association, and is co-founder of the Pennsylvania-based education budget advocacy group T.E.A.C.H. (Tell Everyone All Cuts Hurt). He ran a successful campaign through Moveon.org against the since repealed Voter ID law in the Keystone State. He joined United Opt Out as an administrator in 2016. He is a member of the Education Bloggers Network. His writing on education and civil rights issues has appeared in the Washington Post, Education Week, the LA Progressive, Commondreams.org, Portside Navigator and has been featured on Diane Ravitch’s site. He blogs at gadflyonthewallblog.

ABOUT GADFLY ON THE WALL: A PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER SPEAKS OUT ON RACISM AND REFORM Talk, talk, talk. There’s an awful lot of talk about public education in America today. Have you ever wondered if even half of it is true? For example, have you ever wondered if our public schools are really failing or if they might actually be some of the best in the world? Have you ever wondered if “School Choice” was actually about giving someone else more options and reducing freedom for you and your children? Ever wondered about the relationship between standardized testing and Nazi eugenics? How about if teachers unions should be doing more to fight for students’ civil rights? And now that we’re talking about it, why do white people sometimes snicker at black names? And how can you protect your children from toxic testing? Why does Common Core still exist? What’s it mean to be racist in America today? And why do the rich need racists? If so, then you’re cordially invited on a fantastic journey where few have gone before: into the mind of a public school teacher. Become a fly on the wall in our public school system. See what few non-professionals have seen before. It’s an eye-opening experience guaranteed to ruffle a few feathers, but you’ve been warned: this is the work of a gadfly.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform Author: Steven Singer 8

ISBN: 978-1-942146-67-4 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon (available for Kindle Unlimited Reading)

INTERVIEW WITH STEVEN SINGER Garn Press: Do you have a favorite author?

Steve Singer: I have so many! Where to begin? Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch, James Baldwin, Paulo Freire! I could go on – Garn Press: Please do!

Steven Singer: Okay. Tony Morrison, Dostoyevsky, Jorge Luis Borges, W. E. B. Dubois, John Dewey, Margaret Atwood, Nietzsche, Edgar Allan Poe, Iain M. Banks, Kurt Vonnegut and so many more.

Garn Press: What about bloggers?

Steven Singer: I’m glad you asked. We often get overlooked when discussing writers and writing. Here I am, an education blogger, and I was about to overlook us! There are just so many fantastic people out there in the field – either at the college or classroom level, or even parents and students – who are doing some amazing work. If you’re twisting my arm, and I think you are, some of my favorites would be Peter Greene, Paul Thomas, Russ Walsh, Mercedes Schneider, Jennifer Berkshire, Nancy Bailey, Nancy Flanagan, Anthony Cody, and I know I’m forgetting so many more. That’s just off the top of my head.

Garn Press: Is there one author who has influenced your writing more than any others?

Steven Singer: I suppose when it comes to education and teaching, the one book I find absolutely indispensable is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. There are so many great books on the school dynamic and best practices, but for me nothing gets more at the heart of what it means to be a teacher than Freire.

Oh! And James Baldwin. Really anything by Baldwin. He wasn’t exactly focused on teaching, but he so clearly understood what it means to be an American and the interrelation between race, class and morality.

Garn Press: Do you think the relationships between authors and readers are changing?

Steven Singer: In a way, yes. Authors are more accessible. When I was growing up, if you wanted to communicate with your favorite author, you had to write him or her a fan letter. And I did. Many, many times. Sometimes you’d get back a glossy signed photo. Rarely a personalized letter. But now you can just shout out to them on Twitter or comment on their Facebook pages. And they often respond back. It’s a democratization of the author-reader relationship. Readers expect authors to defend and explain their work. In one way, that means the work is no longer expected to stand on its own quite as much, but on another it allows the reader to be more invested in the process.

Garn Press: Have you noticed any difference in your own relationships with your readers?

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Steven Singer: My readers are a part of my work. To an extent, I write for them and need a response back.

If I write something and no one responds, I feel the piece is a failure. I need that feedback – both positive and negative. I need to know if something I write has an impact, and my readers don’t disappoint. They’ll tell me if I’m totally off base or if I’m right on target. They’re not shy. They’ll offer me suggestions of where to go next and what I may have missed or what I should reconsider. And sometimes they’ll tell me to go to Hell. But it’s all part of the process.

Garn Press: When do you write? Do you have a routine?

Steven Singer: No real routine. I write when the urge strikes – which is often.

Garn Press: How do you begin a writing project?

Steven Singer: It depends. Sometimes I know a topic I want to research and I take a week or two reading, writing and polishing it up. At other times I sit down at my computer and just pound it out in a few hours.

Garn Press: Do you keep notebooks? Use special paper?

Steven Singer: Almost all of my writing is done at a computer. When I had my first heart attack, I was in the hospital and all I had was my cell phone. Somehow I wrote a complete article thumbing it onto the screen. That felt really awkward but it would have been worse not to write.

Garn Press: Do you listen to music when you write?

Steven Singer: Yes. Constantly. The music usually fits my mood or the mood I’m striving for in the piece.

Sometimes if I want to be cool and logical, I listen to Mozart or Bach. At others I listen to loud punk rock – Anti-flag or Against Me or something. And if I’m writing about racism or prejudice, I often turn to rap or jazz – Common or Wynton Marsalis or something.

Garn Press: Do you share your writing while you are still writing or wait until you have a draft?

Steven Singer: I rarely show my drafts to anyone. I just write and publish. But sometimes – if I’m uncomfortable about a piece or wonder how it hits an audience – I ask trusted friends to read it first. When I first started writing articles that centered on racism, I showed it to some of my friends in the African American community. After all, what do I know about racism? I haven’t lived it. I’ve just observed it. But they gave me the courage to keep at it, sometimes suggesting I change this or that, but they were very supportive.

I could never have written anything about racism without them. And that’s not to shift the blame. I’m responsible for anything I write. But sometimes you need a trusted friend to believe in you before you have the courage to put yourself out there.

Garn Press: How does your “day job” influence your writing?

Steven Singer: My writing springs from my work as an educator. I’m in the public school classroom all day. Sometimes what happens there sparks the need to write an article. A few times I noticed my students were being treated unfairly by the system and was compelled to tell their story – minus their names and altering unimportant details to preserve their privacy, of course. At others, I was compelled by injustices I or my colleagues were suffering. I guess I’m kind of like Batman. I see something wrong or get the Bat 10

signal and I race to write the wrong – only I use my words, not my fists and expensive toys.

Garn Press: What about ideas for books – do they percolate for years before you write, or do you work it out as your write, or perhaps a combination of both?

Steven Singer: Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform is my first book. Before this, any ideas to write something longer or outside of my blog were merely fantasies. We’ll see what happens going forward. I could have twenty more ideas for additional texts. Or this could be my only book. Who knows?

Garn Press: What book or chapter of a book are you most proud of writing?

Steven Singer: That’s impossible to answer. Whatever I’m writing at the moment is the best thing I’ve ever written. Then I publish it, and suddenly it sucks. It’s only later that I get any clear view of it. And most of that is based on how it’s received. I suppose if you page through my book, Gadfly on the Wall, you’ll get a peek at some of my most enduring favorites. These are the articles that I think made a difference or that make me smile or that I hope my daughter reads someday long after I’m gone if she ever wonders what I thought about this or that.

Garn Press: What does it mean to be a writer in troubled times?

Steven Singer: I’m not so sure if it’s the times that matter so much as our perception of them. The U.S. has been circling the drain for a long time now. It’s just that more of us seem to notice it and want to do something about it now. I guess my role as a writer is to try to wake everyone else up to the realities around us. It’s my job to say, “This isn’t right. This isn’t normal,” and “We can do better.” That feeling is what compelled me to write in the first place. It’s why I call my blog and this first book Gadfly on the Wall.

I want to sting and bite people to action using the privileged point of view of a public school teacher – a veritable fly on the wall of a system most people only dimly remember as adults long after they’ve left the classroom. Most authors don’t want their readers to get angry or upset, but that’s sometimes what I’m going for. You read the article, now get off your ass and DO SOMETHING! Garn Press: What worries you about today?

Steven Singer: Fascism, racism, capitalism and an increasing lack of empathy for our fellow travelers along the way. People haven’t changed, but what we consider acceptable has. It used to be that you knew certain opinions were simply too odious to bring out in polite company. Now we just spray that mental diarrhea all over whoever will listen and act shocked if they object to being subjected to the most hideous bile of our stunted souls. I don’ know. Maybe that’s healthy. Maybe we have to get all that out in the open before we can really heal – you know – as a people. I hope so. Otherwise, we’re just exposing exactly how unrepentantly ugly the face of America truly is. Dr. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I truly want to believe that, but I don’t think it’s so simple. From where we stand, all we can see is the arc of the universe bending across the horizon. We don’t see where it’s ultimately going. I hope with all my heart it’s all going in a positive direction, but none of us will ever truly know.

Not ultimately.

Garn Press: What keeps you awake at night?

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Steven Singer: What kind of world are we leaving to our kids? It’s that question really. I wonder what my daughter will have to endure when she grows up. She’s only 8 – full of optimism and a sense of what’s fair and just. I know the world will inevitably crush some of that. It always happens. It happened to me.

But will it be even more difficult for her. I also wonder about my middle school students. They’re further along the path than my daughter is, but they’re not that far along. What’s waiting for them just around the corner? And will they understand how much I tried to stop the monsters from getting them? And will anything I’m doing here really matter? Those are the questions that keep me up at night.

Garn Press: Can you talk a bit about how your writing is connected to present day events?

Steven Singer: Absolutely. At least half of what I write is a scream of rage and frustration at what’s happening out there. Charter and voucher schools, the murder of unarmed people of color by the police, standardized testing, racial and sexual double standards, absurd value-added teacher evaluations, continued segregation, Teach for America temps, government corruption, and the ongoing co-option of progressive politics. My writing is both a reaction to what’s happened and a warning against what I see lurking in the shadows getting ready to pounce.

Garn Press: If you wrote a book about the future -- the way you imagine it will be -- what kind of book would you write?

Steven Singer: I don’t think I’d want to write at length about what I think the future will be like. Those sorts of books are out of date a month or two after publication. Things change so quickly and go in directions no one could have imagined. If I was to write about the future, I’d write about what I hoped it would be like, what I thought we should do with the chances and opportunities we have available to us. Not a prediction, a prescription. Something to cut through the pessimism and light the way to a better world.

Garn Press: What would your future be like?

Steven Singer: It would be a world of love and understanding. Accepting people for who they are. Valuing children and innocence. Nothing about futuristic gadgets or living on Mars. Just how we learned to live with each other and turned away from self-destruction. I know that sounds corny, but that’s really me at heart – a big ol’ cornball hippy – a John Lennon who doesn’t mind pretending to be Iggy Pop to get your attention.

Garn Press: Let’s go back to when you were a child. What are your earliest memories of words?

Steven Singer: I don’t know. I remember being read to. My grandparents reading me bedtime stories. I remember I was really into dinosaurs, and we had these gorgeous picture books about dinosaurs. I used to page through them constantly and somehow – maybe they’d been read to me so much – after a while I was able to read them myself.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first books?

Steven Singer: Other than what I just mentioned, I remember this book from my elementary school library.

It was full of scary stories with text that rhymed. And it was illustrated with these terrifying black and white pictures kind of like woodcuts. It scared the heck out of me, but I kept checking it out of the library. I was tantalized by it. I remember there was one poem about a banshee with a picture of this ghostly woman 12

standing right over a child’s bed – and the kid’s got all the covers up to his chin like it could somehow protect him. And there was another one about these cartoonish monsters who came into a classroom and ate up all the kids, but the kids didn’t die, they were locked in the monsters’ stomachs and crying. Just terrible stuff I don’t know if we’d really give to little kids these days. But they were so vivid! I wish I knew what it was called or who wrote it. I’d love to see it again. I wonder if it would have the same effect or if it was really as terrifying as I remember.

Garn Press: What about your earliest memories of someone reading to you?

Steven Singer: I remember my grandmother reading me bedtime stories from a big book. Adventure stories and fantasies. I remember being told all the Old Testament Bible stories and being almost as captivated and terrified as I was by that book of horror stories from my elementary school. The story where Abraham was going to sacrifice his son, Isaac, was particularly powerful. That and the one where Abraham broke all the idols in his father’s shop. Jacob and Moses and all that stuff. I asked so many questions about them. I was fascinated. Today I’m an atheist, but there’s probably an alternative universe where I’m a deeply religious person, perhaps even a clergyman. It’s amazing, isn’t it? All the things that make up a human psyche!

Garn Press: What did you like about reading?

Steven Singer: Everything. You could be anywhere, see anything, talk to anyone. I read an awful lot as a kid. Still do today.

Garn Press: What did you dislike about reading?

Steven Singer: Nothing. Maybe not having enough time to read everything I wanted to read.

Garn Press: Did you have a favorite author when you were a young child?

Steven Singer: I read a lot of Stephen King. Then Douglas Adams. I rarely went in for books written for children. I had no interest in those. I wanted to get as far away from childhood as possible. There was something condescending about the whole genre. Now people market adult books to children and they’re generally pretty good.

Garn Press: Did you read book series as a child?

Steven Singer: Sure. I read all the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books several times. I loved those so much. They gave me such comfort. The world is crazy and illogical and that’s okay.

Garn Press: Can you remember doing research for a project in school?

Steven Singer: Yes. It was so much different back then. You had to go to the library and know the Dewey Decimal System and how to use the card catalogue. Kids today can just go online and at least get a start on almost any topic they can imagine. I remember writing notes on note cards and organizing them before even starting to write my paper. It’s a lost art. No one seems to do it that way anymore. If something’s not online, it’s often overlooked. But at the same time it’s cheap and less trustworthy. I guess that’s why it’s important to me that at least some of my writing will be available in book form. It will be out there in the world in a physical form. Maybe someone will even write down all the essentials and put them down on 13

a card in a dusty card catalogue somewhere!

Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of writing at home?

Steven Singer: I always wrote. Wrote and drew. My daughter’s the same way. I used to love watching those old Universal monster movies on Saturday afternoon TV, and then I’d turn them into picture books. At some point I started adding text. As I got older they turned into comic books and then full text short stories, poems and essays.

Garn Press: Did you like to draw?

Steven Singer: I do, but I know my artistic limitations. My style is very cartoonish. I’m good with black and white pen illustrations but terrible with color. It also takes me a long time to finish a drawing. I’m much quicker and more nimble with text. I drew several comic books and did one of the student comics for the Pitt News when I was in college at the University of Pittsburgh. It was called Panther Hollow. But once again the text started to take over until the pictures were almost an afterthought. I haven’t drawn much lately. Sometimes my daughter gets me to draw with her, but it’s tough for me to find an idea I really want to commit to. When I sign my student’s yearbooks, I usually add a cartoon image of a chicken, and they’re like, “Whoa! Mr. Singer can draw!”

Garn Press: Did you paint as a child?

Steven Singer: A little but I was more of a pen and ink man.

Garn Press: Do you still have any of your early writing, drawings, or paintings?

Steven Singer: Yes. My grandmother kept a lot from when I was really young and I have a lot of my teenage and college stuff. I have drawers full of comics, stories, essays and old newspaper article from my days as a journalist. Much has been lost, but if I went looking, I could find reams of older works. I rarely look at them, though. The person who created them is gone. I’m someone else – someone related to that older version, but not really him anymore.

Garn Press: Can you remember being taught to write at school?

Steven Singer: I remember in many of my classes in middle school we’d get a vocabulary unit and have an assignment to use each of those words in a story. I always wrote much more than was required. I’d write dramatic horror stories, soap operas, sci-fi epics, comedy pieces, satire – almost everything. We’d always have a chance to read what we wrote and I remember the other kids in my classes would often enjoy listening to my stories. If I didn’t want to read, they’d egg me on. I remember once I lampooned some of our teachers in one of these stories and was interrupted and told to please sit down before I could finish reading it aloud. I was so embarrassed because I hadn’t even realized I’d gone too far, but the other kids loved it. I lived off the rep from that moment for years.

Garn Press: Do you remember if writing and penmanship were muddled? They often are.

Steven Singer: I have terrible penmanship. I’m also a weak speller. The word processor unleashed my writing ability from a steady spray in elementary to a torrent in secondary and college.

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Garn Press: Do you have memories of learning to write an essay, a story, or a poem?

Steven Singer: No one had to teach me how to write a story or a poem. I read so many of them, I could just do it. I remember Ms. Robb taught me how to organize an essay in high school. It was tremendously helpful. I had so many ideas and now here was a way to make them intelligible. Some teachers say they hate organization because it’s confining. But I knew even then that it was only a guideline. You had to use it in a way that worked for you to get your meaning across. I found it freeing and I try to get that across to my students. They seem to feel the same way most of the time.

Garn Press: What about taking tests – can you remember taking them?

Steven Singer: Yes. I remember tests, even standardized test. There was very little pressure. We’d take them and then move on. That’s worlds away from what we do today in our schools. There’s so much pressure to test prep the Hell out of kids and judge and sort them based on the results. I feel really bad for what this generation has to endure. They don’t even know what they’re missing and their parents rarely know what’s being done to them.

Garn Press: Did you have to fill in bubbles on multiple-choice tests?

Steven Singer: Yes. That existed. But it was once every few years. And no one really cared about the results.

We got them and moved on. Much more emphasis was put on your class grades. And why wouldn’t it be?

Those are based on 180 days of work, not one or two or three.

Garn Press: Can you remember if you had other sorts of tests? Short answers? Essays?

Steven Singer: I remember an essay I wrote for a standardized test in high school. The question was something like – describe your earliest memory. I wrote about what it was like to be in the womb. I didn’t really remember that, but it’s what I wanted to write about. I really liked the end result and wanted it back after the test, but no one would give it back to me. It was disappointing that what I wrote was no longer mine, but I must have done okay on the test because no one held me back or put me in remediation for it.

Garn Press: What advice would you give teachers if they asked you how they could create opportunities for their students to become enthusiastic readers and writers?

Steven Singer: Have them read and write as much as possible. Make it an almost everyday activity. And give them books and topics that they want to read and write about. If you can make it real, you’re halfway there. In my class, we have lots of self-selected readings and discussions. And don’t get hung up on the whole formal-lesson plan nonsense. Discourse can be purely verbal or involve writing first or even be purely written and never shared aloud. Once students get the bug that they want to have an opinion and want to hear what others have to say, writing and reading become very natural and enthusiastic. Just allow kids the space and the permission to be themselves and not someone else’s idea of what a student should be.

Garn Press: Even you, the teacher?

Steven Singer: Especially you. Sometimes the best thing to do is knowing when to step aside. And sometimes it’s not. Knowing the difference between the two is what makes a really outstanding teacher. Because – think about it – you’re not going to always be there. Even if you’re Super Teacher – and I’m not - there 15

will come a day when your students will graduate – to the next class or the next school or whatever. The goal is to help them grow into the kind of learners who don’t need you anymore. You’re kind of like Winnie the Pooh if he ever tried to teach Christopher Robin to do without him. It’s sad and it’s contradictory and it’s the ultimate expression of care from teacher to student.

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AUTHOR MONICA TAYLOR

ABOUT MONICA TAYLOR Monica Taylor is an urban teacher educator, social justice advocate, and parent activist. She is currently a professor and deputy chair of the Department of Secondary and Special Education at Montclair State University. Over the past 27 years, she has taught in an alternative middle school in NYC, worked with adolescent women Crips as they negotiated their multiple identities, parented two sons, and more recently co-led the math/science cohort of the Newark Montclair Urban Teacher Residency. She is co-PI of the Wipro Science Education Fellows grant which supports science teacher leaders in five districts in New Jersey.

She has several publications on teaching for social justice, urban teacher education, and the self-study of teacher education practices. Her most recent book, co-written with Emily J. Klein, is A year in the life of a third space urban teacher residency: Using inquiry to re-invent teacher education. Her commitments to social justice manifest in all aspects of her life. She advocates for her own children as well as New Jersey students as an organizer for Save Our Schools NJ. She also deeply values the work of the many teachers with whom she is in contact.

ABOUT PLAYHOUSE: OPTIMISTIC STORIES OF REAL HOPE FOR FAMILIES WITH LITTLE CHILDREN Pete Seeger once said: “The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.” In many ways, writing a book about my family’s experiences at Playhouse, a cooperative pre-school founded in 1951, is in fact telling an optimistic story that has the potential to inspire others, early childhood teachers and parents alike, to search for, create, or contribute to progressive learning environments for their own children and students.

Playhouse serves as more than just a school for children. It is a learning community for parents, where they can learn and embrace progressive models of education. This type of parental education is more important now than ever before, especially in the face of parental opt out movements and objections to standardized testing and curriculum like the common core standards.

Parents and early childhood teachers need to educate themselves about the tenets of democratic and progressive schooling, and there is very little written for them. Early childhood teachers often graduate with certification but are unsure of how to implement this progressive pedagogy in their classrooms or how even to find schools where these types of practices are encouraged. They may have been prepared to teach in a progressive way but are unsure of how to apply these ideas in the classroom with 15 or more 17

little ones in front of them.

Finally, with the Core Curriculum Standards and their aligned standardized tests dictating the curriculum and teaching in public schools, parents and early childhood educators need a platform to innovate schools for their children/students. This optimistic telling serves as a reminder for us all that even in this tumultuous storm of standards and testing, progressive preschools with deep commitments to social justice exist, are thriving, and are available.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Playhouse: Optimistic Stories Of Real Hope For Families With Little Children Author: Monica Taylor ISBN: 978-1-942146-66-7 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon (available for Kindle Unlimited Reading)

INTERVIEW WITH MONICA TAYLOR AUTHORS AND THEIR BOOKS Garn Press: Do you have a favorite author?

Monica Taylor: Just one. I have so many depending on the mood I am in. Some of my favorites are A.S. Byatt, Haruki Murakami, Patti Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri. I mostly like women authors.

Garn Press: Is there one author who has influenced your writing more than any others?

Monica Taylor: Lately it has been Patti Smith. I just loved Just Kids and then M Train. She knows just how to combine the esoteric with the everyday. She is so well read and she subtly incorporates references to other work - not in a pretentious way but in an honest and appropriate way. I hear her words in my head.

They evoke emotions.

Garn Press: Do you think the relationships between authors and readers are changing?

Monica Taylor: I do think they are changing but not for the worse. I think it is for the better. I think readers have more access to writers now – and to their lives – and they feel more human and real.

Garn Press: Have you noticed any differences in your own relationships with your readers?

Monica Taylor: I think similar to what I said above. With social media, I feel much more accessible and 18

part of the global world.

Garn Press: If you could express one thought to all your readers what would it be?

Monica Taylor: Do not be afraid to feel in your body. Feelings are medicine that guide us. Also good writing should transport and inspire you.

Garn Press: Do you have a favorite word?

Monica Taylor: Ha – my students would say problematize. I would say complex.

Garn Press: What about a memorable sentence?

Monica Taylor: Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line. Patti Smith.

WRITING AS PART OF DAILY LIFE Garn Press: When do you write? Do you have a routine?

Monica Taylor: So I definitely have a pattern but it is not the routine that most people talk about. I cannot write every day at the same time in the same space. It is not my way. I write in spurts and starts. I have to feel ready to write – and when I do I can write for hours on end. I won’t eat, sleep, or want to be interrupted. Although to be honest I am interrupted all of the time. I am a mother – people rely on me.

So I have found that I often write in the cracks and that works for me.

I have some funny routines. I usually need to be physically in my body before I start writing – either walking, dancing, bar method, or even cleaning the house. I had the cleanest bathroom when I was writing my dissertation.

Garn Press: How do you begin a writing project?

Monica Taylor: Usually I am inspired by something I have read, experienced, or heard. This could be a text, live music, a film, or even a conversation.

Garn Press: Do you keep notebooks? Use special paper?

Monica Taylor: No - at this point I do everything on the computer. It is what I know.

Garn Press: What about pens and pencils? Are they important?

Monica Taylor: Not anymore.

Garn Press: Do you mix up writing instruments? (Oliver Sacks never wrote on a computer. He started with handwritten notes and wrote on a typewriter.)

Monica Taylor: Just a computer.

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Garn Press: Do you listen to music when you write?

Monica Taylor: Sometimes- it depends on what I am writing. Writing feels physical to me - so sometimes music will help it along.

Garn Press: Do you share your writing while you are still writing or wait until you have a draft?

Monica Taylor: I am getting better at sharing my writing but this has taken a lot of time to come to. I feel very vulnerable when I share my writing so it has to be someone I trust. But I have learned a lot from my collaborators – like Emily Klein who often pushes me to let go of a piece. She has said to me on occasion: “It’s good enough” and that really helps.

Garn Press: How does your “day job” (academic, journalist etc.) influence your writing?

Monica Taylor: My day job and my life are intertwined. I don’t separate them. So how I see and interact in the world is from my socially just feminist stance which developed in my personal/professional life. My interactions with students and colleagues emerge in my writing and my parenting emerges in my teaching.

My life is messy with few boundaries and therefore all of these things seep into my writing.

Garn Press: What about ideas for books – do they percolate for years before you write, or do you work it out as your write, or perhaps a combination of both?

Monica Taylor: It depends on the book. Some percolate for years and others feel like they write themselves. It depends on the topic, with whom I am writing, what the purpose is, the genre, etc.. Sometimes the most personal books are the hardest for me to let go of.

Garn Press: What book or chapter of a book are you most proud of writing?

Monica Taylor: I recently had a chapter come out that I co-wrote with Lesley Coia about how Donald Schön is a poststructural feminist. It was a lot of fun to write and we used his metaphor of the swamplands.

THE ROLE OF THE WRITER IN SOCIETY Garn Press: What does it mean to be a writer in troubled times?

Monica Taylor: I really think Nina Simone explains this so well. She says artists, and I would include writers, have a responsibility in troubled times – to document what is happening in the world and provide avenues of hope and possibility. Or as Maxine Greene would say, we have to radically imagine to make change in the world.

Garn Press: What keeps you awake at night?

Monica Taylor: The future of our children – the ways in which people’s rights are being taken away if you are at all other in society. I am worried about black and brown children. I am worried about LGBTQ and gender creative youth. I am worried that marginalized youth will lose the limited space they have.

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Garn Press: Is your writing connected to present day events?

Monica Taylor: I think my writing attempts to document what is happening but also provides examples of what could be – finding optimism in schools with young people and amazing teachers.

Garn Press: If you wrote a book about the future – the way you imagine it will be – what kind of book would you write?

Monica Taylor: It’s funny because this is not something that I would do. I like living in the present – in the day to day.

EARLY READING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of words?

Monica Taylor: I would say being with my grandparents who never stopped talking to me – there was a running narrative of everything that we did together – and everything seemed exciting and interesting.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first books?

Monica Taylor: Absolutely. My grandmother was a kindergarten teacher so she had tons of picture books that we would read together. She also had a little portable record player, and many of the books we read were on record so if she were busy, I could listen myself. Some of my favorites were: - Bread and Jam for Frances - Make Way for Ducklings - Tikki Tikki Tembo - Madeline - The Story of Ferdinand - Caps for Sale - Frog and Toad Garn Press: What about your earliest memories of someone reading to you?

Monica Taylor: It was definitely my grandmother. She read to me all of the time.

Garn Press: Was there a moment when you first knew you could read?

Monica Taylor: I think I was 3 when I started reading and I know I was delighted by it. My mom and grandparents were always reading and I wanted to be like them.

Garn Press: What did you like about reading?

Monica Taylor: I loved escaping into another world and feeling what the characters felt. I loved thinking about how they resolved problems. And when I got older and life got more complicated at home, I read 21

to escape and be somewhere else. Or when I was lonely I read for company. I think that I still do this. It is my absolute favorite thing to do. I read fiction after a long day of academic reading or writing.

Garn Press: What did you dislike about reading?

Monica Taylor: Nothing.

Garn Press: Did you have a favorite author when you were a young child?

Monica Taylor: I was such an avid reader. I loved Frances in the Hobans’ books. I loved Frog and Toad.

Garn Press: Did you read book series as a child?

Monica Taylor: Definitely- I loved the Little House on the Prairie Books, the Little Women series, and the Bronte novels. I also loved Daphne du Maurier.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first reading lessons when you went to school?

Monica Taylor: Not at all. I think I learned so much with my grandmother that school was not memorable. Also I went to a bilingual French/English school until 2nd grade so there was a lot of learning in French – and traditional French school culture is quite rigid and strict.

Garn Press: Can you remember doing research for a project in school?

Monica Taylor: I have wonderful memories of writing for the school newspaper in 9th grade. I loved it and the advisor was a pretty hip young woman who would let us write pieces about any topic. In those days, in NYC, we were going to parties at clubs like Studio 54. She allowed me to interview Baird Jones who was a party promoter. I felt so cool and grown up and I still have the article.

Garn Press: Did you study for exams – if so how?

Monica Taylor: Oh yes. In high school, I had my rituals. I would sit on the floor in my room with music blaring. I would copy my notes and memorize. It was miserable.

EARLY WRITING/DRAWING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of writing at home?

Monica Taylor: So there was a picture of Charlie Brown on the closet door in my grandmother’s kitchen that I drew at 21/2 and I wrote a few invented spelling words.

Garn Press: Did you like to draw?

Monica Taylor: I did but I was never very good at it.

Garn Press: Did you paint as a child?

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Monica Taylor: I did but again I always thought that I wasn’t very good. In high school I took it up again and really enjoyed it.

Garn Press: Do you still have any of your early writing, drawings, or paintings?

Monica Taylor: A few remnants of my childhood yes!

Garn Press: Can you remember being taught to write at school?

Monica Taylor: Again I feel like I learned how to write with my grandmother.

Garn Press: Do you remember if writing and penmanship were muddled? They often are.

Monica Taylor: Oh yes – and at Fleming, the French school, there were a lot of rules about penmanship.

And being left handed made it even more difficult.

Garn Press: Was drawing linked with writing?

Monica Taylor: At home but not so much in school.

Garn Press: Do you have memories of learning to write an essay, a story, or a poem?

Monica Taylor: I think some of my best writing teachers were in high school. I was living in Texas for my junior and senior year and we had trimesters. We studied some of the most interesting themes – poetry, children’s lit, journey, semantics – I just loved those classes. And we wrote genres to replicate what we wrote. In order to separate mechanics from content, the whole school had a writing guide that had codes for different sorts of errors. The entire school used it and although it was a bit tortuous to experience I really think it helped me as a writer.

Garn Press: What about taking tests – can you remember taking them?

Monica Taylor: Yes – I hated any tests where I had to memorize anything. And believe it or not I was a great math student in high school until calculus, when I was one of 3 girls in a class of all boys and the teacher refused to help me.

Garn Press: Did you have to fill in bubbles on multiple-choice tests?

Monica Taylor: A bit yes – I think there was always a multiple choice section on tests.

Garn Press: Can you remember if you had other sorts of tests? Short answers? Essays?

Monica Taylor: There were always sections for essays – especially in history and English.

Garn Press: What advice would you give teachers if they asked you how they could create opportunities for their students to become enthusiastic readers and writers?

Monica Taylor: Invite students to read things in which they are interested and write things for authentic purposes.

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VISIT GARNPRESS.COM TO GET THE LATEST NEWS AND EDITORIAL FEATURES ON GARN AUTHORS AND GARN BOOKS.

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AUTHOR P. L. THOMAS

ABOUT P.L. THOMAS Winner of NCTE’s George Orwell Award for speaking truth to power and nominated by Garn Press for a Pulitzer Prize for Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance, Paul Thomas has been called by Diane Ravitch “the conscience of American education” and teachers’ “North Star”. Paul Thomas engages the reader in some of the most profound and controversial topics of our day. His writing and voice connects with readers in a way that is reminiscent of David Foster Wallace, while his existential framing of the terrifying truths of the times in which we live reminds us so often of Maxine Greene. Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance is a tour de force not to be missed.

ABOUT BEWARE THE ROADBUILDERS: LITERATURE AS RESISTANCE Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance was born out of blogging as an act of social justice. Over a period of about two years, many posts built the case against market-based education reform and for a critical re-imagining of public education. This book presents a coordinated series of essays based on that work, using a wide range of written and visual texts to call for the universal public education we have failed to achieve.

The central image and warning of the book—“beware the roadbuilders”—is drawn from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The book presents a compelling argument that billionaires, politicians, and self-professed education reformers are doing more harm than good—despite their public messages. The public and our students are being crushed beneath their reforms.

In the wake of Ferguson and the growing list of sacrificed young black men—Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner—the essays in this book gain an even wider resonance, seeking to examine both the larger world of inequity as well as the continued failure of educational inequity. While each chapter stands as a separate reading, the book as a whole produces a cohesive theme and argument about the power of critical literacy to read and re-read the world, and to write and re-rewrite the world (Paulo Freire).

Supporting that larger message are several key ideas and questions: What are the confrontational texts we should be inviting students to read, that anyone should read? Instead of reducing texts to the narrow expectations of New Criticism or “close reading,” how do we expand those texts into how they inform living in a free society and engaging in activism? How do traditional assumptions about what texts matter and what texts reveal support the status quo of power? And how can texts of all types assist in the ongoing pursuit of equity among free people?

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PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance Author: P.L. Thomas ISBN: 978-1-942146-07-0 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon

ABOUT TRUMPLANDIA: UNMASKING POST-TRUTH AMERICA In a series of brilliantly written essays Trumplandia: Unmasking Post-Truth America by P.L. Thomas examines how a reality TV star as president represents post-truth America as a failed democracy and as a country still deeply poisoned by racism, classism, sexism, and xenophobia. Running throughout as well is an implicit question: How can we resist Trumplandia and truly become a democracy?

Thomas makes speed-of-light connections that are both dazzling and understandably dismaying. To wit, his conception of Trumplandia is admittedly and justifiably bleak (think Kafka on a bad day), a landscape characterized by racism, misogyny, exploitation, homophobia, and intolerance. Even though his contempt for Trump is obvious, Thomas focuses on arguments not personalities–arguments used by Trump and his followers to misleadingly frighten and confuse people. The world we are consequently inhabiting is indeed a “post-truth” one, to borrow Thomas’s phrase. The otherwise Stygian gloom of Trumplandia is periodically eased by well-known visitors–James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Barbara Kingsolver, and Kurt Vonnegut (among others), whose insights Thomas cites as a way to highlight a different and much preferable conception of humanity and human/humane relationships. Given the light that these and other authors can shine on perfidy, it should come as no surprise that Trump doesn’t read books–but anyone interested in opposing his actions and ideas should read Trumplandia: Unmasking Post-Truth America by P.L. Thomas.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Trumplandia: Unmasking Post-Truth America Author: P.L. Thomas ISBN: 9781942146551 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon (available for Kindle Unlimited Reading)

INTERVIEW WITH P.L. THOMAS 26

AUTHORS AND THEIR BOOKS Garn Press: Do you have a favorite author?

P.L. Thomas: Although this is like choosing a favorite child or student, I do have a foundational and enduring love for Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood and then a more recent but blossoming love for Haruki Murakami.

Garn Press: Is there one author who has influenced your writing more than any others?

P.L. Thomas: Poetry would be e.e. Cummings, James Dickey, and Emily Dickinson. My prose is profoundly and initially influenced by J.D. Salinger and William Faulkner, followed later by a powerful influence of Vonnegut.

Garn Press: Do you think the relationships between authors and readers are changing?

P.L. Thomas: Now that I am a daily blogger, yes. There is more immediacy, more dialogue. The writer life is certainly more organic.

Garn Press: Have you noticed any difference in your own relationships with your readers?

P.L. Thomas: My online presence has allowed me to be better aware that I do have readers. For the insecure (all writers), that is a blessing.

Garn Press: If you could express one thought to all your readers what would it be?

P.L. Thomas: Kindness and basic human dignity must never be undervalued.

WRITING AS PART OF DAILY LIFE Garn Press: When do you write? Do you have a routine?

P.L. Thomas: No real routine, but I am compelled to write, and thus, am always writing. But I typically am a morning writer, preferably alone at home but in my office also.

Garn Press: How do you begin a writing project?

P.L. Thomas: Most writing of mine (public/blogging, poetry, scholarly) simply comes to me since I have a writer’s mind (always thinking about what would be a good piece to write). Most ideas, I think, come out of my reader life as well as my teaching (interacting with students).

Garn Press: Do you keep notebooks? Use special paper?

P.L. Thomas: No, although I tried in my early years. All my writing now is at the keyboard also. For a long time, my poetry started as longhand with pen and scraps of paper, but everything is electronic now.

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Garn Press: What about pens and pencils? Are they important?

P.L. Thomas: Not any more. I have terrible handwriting so that was always an issue with longhand.

Garn Press: Do you listen to music when you write?

P.L. Thomas: I adore silence.

Garn Press: Do you share your writing while you are still writing or wait until you have a draft?

P.L. Thomas: Everything is a draft, and I am a compulsive over-sharer.

Garn Press: How does your “day job” (academic, journalist etc.) influence your writing?

P.L. Thomas: Being a professor has been the greatest element in fully living the life of being a writer. I have the time, space, and support for being a writer that other professions would not afford, and would likely impede.

Garn Press: What about ideas for books – do they percolate for years before you write, or do you work it out as you write, or perhaps a combination of both?

P.L. Thomas: Since I write daily (blog), that often serves as the initial drafts for my longer works. I have always quilted as a writer, pulling pieces together that develop a longer idea.

Garn Press: What book or chapter of a book are you most proud of writing?

P.L. Thomas: My Garn book is very special since it grew out of my literature-based blogging about education and equity. Many of the literature-based essays, I think, are me at my best as a writer who is also a teacher.

THE ROLE OF THE WRITER IN SOCIETY Garn Press: What does it mean to be a writer in troubled times?

P.L. Thomas: Writing is an act of the conscience—troubled times always need a conscience.

Garn Press: What worries you about today?

P.L. Thomas: Consumer culture has most of us living a frantic life, unable to pause long enough to recognize the corrosive nature of that culture. We are too busy to recognize and practice our humanity.

Garn Press: What keeps you awake at night?

P.L. Thomas: I am a lifelong non-sleeper, sadly, so that answer is “my brain.”

Garn Press: Is your writing connected to present day events?

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P.L. Thomas: Yes, my writing is primarily driven by what is happening now, as well as what matters now.

Garn Press: If you wrote a book about the future -- the way you imagine it will be -- what kind of book would you write?

P.L. Thomas: Dystopian science fiction, in the tradition of Atwood and Vonnegut.

EARLY READING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of words?

P.L. Thomas: My mother and Dr. Seuss Garn Press: Do you remember your first books?

P.L. Thomas: Go, Dog, Go!, Green Eggs and Ham (still have them, my mother kept them) Garn Press: What about your earliest memories of someone reading to you?

P.L. Thomas: My mother reading to my sister and me Garn Press: Was there a moment when you first knew you could read?

P.L. Thomas: It seems that was always true; I have no memory before words, reading.

Garn Press: What did you like about reading?

P.L. Thomas: I think it was/is both sound and how words approach the possible.

Garn Press: What did you dislike about reading?

P.L. Thomas: Not a fan of reading (or writing) anything assigned.

Garn Press: Did you have a favorite author when you were a young child?

P.L. Thomas: Dr. Seuss, E.B. White Garn Press: Did you read book series as a child?

P.L. Thomas: As a teen, I began reading compulsively everything by single authors, such as Arthur C. Clarke Garn Press: Do you remember your first reading lessons when you went to school?

P.L. Thomas: Had to be Ms. Lanford, who I recall very fondly, but not the actual lessons Garn Press: Can you remember doing research for a project in school?

P.L. Thomas: Only the clunky and awful “research papers� in high school.

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Garn Press: Did you study for exams -- if so how?

P.L. Thomas: I am very visual. I wrote out notes in heavy black ink. Could easily “see” it all during tests.

EARLY WRITING/DRAWING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of writing at home?

P.L. Thomas: My childhood was filled with play—my mom and dad played with us. I can’t distinguish between the games and the learning; that was what was special.

Garn Press: Did you like to draw?

P.L. Thomas: Began drawing superhero comics from my comic book collection during my 9th grade and throughout high school Garn Press: Did you paint as a child?

P.L. Thomas: Again as part of the play yes Garn Press: Do you still have any of your early writing, drawings, or paintings?

P.L. Thomas: I have all my artwork from my teen years Garn Press: Can you remember being taught to write at school?

P.L. Thomas: My schooling was grammar and sentence diagramming until sophomore year, when Mr. Harrill had us write. He continued having us writing my junior year. Those two years were huge for my development as a writer, and reader.

Garn Press: Do you remember if writing and penmanship were muddled? They often are.

P.L. Thomas: Elementary school was all about penmanship, yes.

Garn Press: Was drawing linked with writing?

P.L. Thomas: Not in school, no.

Garn Press: Do you have memories of learning to write an essay, a story, or a poem?

P.L. Thomas: I wrote a parody short story for Mr. Harrill in high school. I think it was my first real purposeful writing.

Garn Press: What about taking tests – can you remember taking them?

P.L. Thomas: Yes, standardized tests were easy for me. I finished early, worried I had done poorly and then was always in the top percentiles. The advantages of privilege.

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Garn Press: Can you remember if you had other sorts of tests? Short answers? Essays?

P.L. Thomas: Classroom tests were mostly selected answer types (MC, matching) but some short answer, very little essay.

Garn Press: What advice would you give teachers if they asked you how they could create opportunities for their students to become enthusiastic readers and writers?

P.L. Thomas: Very simple: Choice. Make the classroom a literacy-rich environment that encourages and supports children/teens as readers and writers by choice.

VISIT GARNPRESS.COM TO GET THE LATEST NEWS AND EDITORIAL FEATURES ON GARN AUTHORS AND GARN BOOKS.

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AUTHOR DAVID JOSEPH KOLB

ABOUT DAVID JOSEPH KOLB David Joseph Kolb is a journalist and author. Born in New York City, he has lived mostly in the Midwest, serving as editorial page editor, city hall reporter and police reporter for newspapers there for more than a quarter-century. Devil Knows: A Tale of Murder and Madness in America’s First Century is a mysteryin-the-archives thriller written with great charm and cinematic flair. David was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Devil Knows and the novel was a finalist in the USA Best Book Awards in the Historical Fiction category.

ABOUT DEVIL KNOWS: A TALE OF MURDER AND MADNESS IN AMERICA’S FIRST CENTURY In the dead of night at the height of the 1692 Salem mania, a dying smallpox victim collapses in prison while visiting a witch condemned to hang – Mary Bradbury, the great ancestor of famed writer Ray Bradbury.

A delirious old man, Hopestill Foster, is brought before the Rev. Cotton Mather, the infamous witchhunter and the most powerful man in ancient Boston, for a very private interrogation. Mather is desperate for answers about Foster’s past because he knows it ties into his own. Better had he not asked. Over the course of the prisoner telling his story to the cleric, 60 years of a terrible history unfolds, at the heart of which is a monstrous secret about Mather’s family that must not be allowed to escape the room where Foster is being held.

Hopestill Foster, the novel’s protagonist, a man inured to a lifetime of suffering and one to whom a great wrong was done by him and to him in his youth, ultimately has to decide. Pass on, leaving the wreckage of his life behind, or accept a final deadly mission to make things right. For Hopestill Foster, there is only one choice.

David Joseph Kolb’s Devil Knows: A Tale of Murder and Madness in America’s First Century, a thrilling historical adventure in the grand storytelling tradition ofNorthwest Passage and Drums Along the Mohawk, breaks new literary ground about the very first American century – a nearly forgotten post-Pilgrim past when intolerance, misogyny and ignorance culminated in horrifying outrages against ordinary people.

Yet it rediscovers, too, that hope was never lost, and that heroes were always among us.

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PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Devil Knows: A Tale of Murder and Madness in America’s First Century Author: David Joseph Kolb ISBN: 978-1942146223 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon

INTERVIEW WITH DAVID JOSEPH KOLB Garn Press: You have written a labyrinthine historical novel spanning three-quarters of “America’s first century,” as you have termed it, from roughly 1620-1697. What was the genesis of Devil Knows?

David Joseph Kolb: The novel emerged from a short story I wrote about the Quaker persecutions of the middle of that century, specifically the vile, brutal torture of three women by Puritan authorities in 1662 and their incredible rescue by an almost forgotten hero of that time, Robert Pike.

Garn Press: So very little has been written about that particular episode.

David Joseph Kolb: I had never read about it. I was actually compiling research for an historical novel set a century later when I came across an account of their ordeal in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, a most invaluable resource. From there, it was a short walk to the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier, and his classic “How the Women Went From Dover,” which was my inspiration and touchstone for the original story work, which has been incorporated into the larger novel.

Garn Press: So you saw the Quaker episode as the gateway into the larger narrative?

David Joseph Kolb: Absolutely. From the seeds of post-Pilgrim Puritanism in the 1630s, to the relentless Puritan persecution of the Quakers in the 1660s, arose the shoots of the subsequent Salem witchcraft madness some thirty years after. The trick for me, as a novelist, was to paint out to the edges of that century’s canvas, so to speak, and in doing, to create a storyline that would carry the reader through that journey.

Garn Press: And yet, this is your first published work of fiction. How were you able to master that “trick,” as you term it?

David Joseph Kolb: It’s my first published fiction, of course, but I have been writing for decades, practicing my craft while banging my head against the wall of the unpublished writer’s prison for a long time now. It’s a very tough prison to break out of, as many authors might attest, as your inability to publish is the ever-heavier stone weighing you down in the eyes of would-be publishers, who look at your history and pass on your submissions. Being passed over never bothered me much, though. I enjoy writing, I enjoy story-telling and as a career journalist, reporter, editor and columnist, I’ve had ample opportunities to tell non-fiction stories in unique and interesting ways.

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Garn Press: Such as …?

David Joseph Kolb: Just one example, early in my career, an arsonist was torching houses in a rough, inner-city neighborhood and terrorizing its residents. I spent several nights with a family in that area, recounting their fears and anxieties, and the editors let me write a long account of that time - “When Night Comes to Williams Street,” I believe it was headlined. So, journalism has been satisfying in the sense of being interesting as well as a way to help people, it’s been an outlet for my creativity, and it has put food on the table for my family. Yet I was always determined to publish a work of fiction, moral fiction, especially, as John Gardner would have described it. I’ve taken up the pen many times, and have written many stories, and frankly, many of them were terrible. A few have been pretty good, though.

Garn Press: Did you have any mentors to guide you in the craft?

David Joseph Kolb: Not per se. As all writers fall under the spell of other writers whose work they admire, I emulated the style with some success without much understanding of the craft that lay behind it, beginning with Mickey Spillane and on to Hemingway in my youth. I remember Walter Tevis, a wonderful man from whom I studied creative writing in college, taking apart my efforts during a casual one-on-one lunch critique. His helpful mentoring I found very discouraging and it was a long time before I was able to draw the appropriate wisdom from what he was trying to inject through the hard shell of my youthful ego.

Garn Press: One would think that when a writer of the stature of Walter Tevis spoke, one would take great heed.

David Joseph Kolb: One might, indeed, but that someone wasn’t me. All I could take away from that waterfall of wisdom was that I was right and he was wrong, and that I was a talented genius whom this great writer was determined to crush. Nuts, I was. Mr. Tevis was so painfully correct, it hurts even to recall his words. You see, I could write these little vignettes, these little moments-of-time pieces that appear to have captured a unique insight, but these were worthless as soap bubbles. Mr. Tevis was trying to drum into my numb skull that it was the story that counted. The story. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not about how well you can describe the smell of popcorn.

Garn Press: You mentioned John Gardner earlier. Was he among your muses in the literary field?

David Joseph Kolb: The late John Gardner, the author of Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues and October Light, was the absolute giant in my literary life. His masterpieces helped switch a light on in my head about the complexity of craft that lies behind the real discipline of writing fiction. I remember writing out in long-hand pages and pages of Gardner’s prose just to try to acquire the feel of what he was doing and how he was doing it, the magic, I mean, of getting inside a character’s head or understanding the set-ups to the action that follows. Gardner, to me, made every word count. It saddens me to see how his books have largely disappeared from the shelves. But then again, those shelves have been disappearing, too.

Garn Press: Let’s get back to Devil Knows. How long did it take you to write it?

David Joseph Kolb: I began the research for it in 2009, six years ago. Since then it has undergone four major rewrites and four title changes. The novel itself didn’t take six years to write. The research, though, took quite a long time, plus the book went unpublished for several years and I soldiered on in other ways, writing stories, starting a political newsletter, and beginning a second novel, which is now half-finished.

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Garn Press: Why did you begin with a work of historical fiction? Moreover, a work of literary historical fiction?

David Joseph Kolb: When I began to think about what I wanted to achieve, which was publication, and when I reckoned the difficulty of achieving that ambition, I understood that I should work within the bounds of what I was most comfortable with, which was history and literature. My favorite reading growing up were adventure stories by Kenneth Roberts and his 20th century contemporaries, very popular at one time but now occupying only a niche spot among modern reader preferences. Some wonderful authors, like the late, great Patrick O’Brian in his remarkable Aubrey-Maturin series, and Bernard Cornwell with his brilliant Warlord Chronicles have been able to bridge that divide by merging history and literature and I wanted to follow the trail they blazed.

Garn Press: Writers since Hawthorne have come at the Salem story in so many different ways, including this year’s The Witches by Stacy Schiff. There seems to be no end to their re-telling.

David Joseph Kolb: Salem is indeed a rich vein for authors, both fiction and non-fiction, because in that first American century the disturbing themes that continue to bedevil us were laid down in our origins as a people who later became a nation. I did want the story of Devil Knows to provide readers with a greater understanding of those times and the circumstances under which such insanity as the witch hunts could flourish. At the same time, I knew I could write an exciting adventure that spoke not only to the villainy of that era, but to its heroism.

Garn Press: Is there one author who has influenced your writing more than any others?

David Joseph Kolb: This would have to be the late John Gardner, author of The Sunlight Dialogues and October Light, among many others. A great writer and a great mind. A literary giant.

Garn Press: Do you think the relationships between authors and readers are changing?

David Joseph Kolb: Absolutely! The attention of readers is increasingly being fragmented and diverted to other, more visual, distractions. As a result, they are unwilling to commit to longer, more intricate narratives unless they are assured of a smashing payoff. Hence, the presence of so many sequels and “build-on” novels.

Garn Press: When do you write? Do you have a routine?

David Joseph Kolb: I treat my writing day as I would a regular job. It’s breakfast, work, break, and then back to work after lunch until roughly late afternoon. Much of the morning is devoted to re-reading, fixing or changing my story or chapter of the previous sessions. I try to leave off at the end of the day at a place I want to return to in the morning. I rarely work at night but sometimes I do.

Garn Press: What about ideas for books – do they percolate for years before you write, or do you work it out as your write, or perhaps a combination of both?

David Joseph Kolb: I start out with an idea for a book – a broad, full-brush plan, so to speak – and plot it out for a few chapters. Then I write those out to see if it “works.” If it does, I stop and plan it out to the end, concentrating on where I want the action to lead. At a midpoint in the book, I stop again for a 35

much lengthier consideration. During this pause, I draw in the details with a much finer brush until I am satisfied that the story as it is being told has merit. Then I go back to the beginning and re-work the “front end” to make sure it is properly aligned with where I intend to be taking things. Only then do I resume. It’s a much longer and time-consuming process than it sounds.

Garn Press: If you wrote a book about the future -- the way you imagine it will be -- what kind of book would you write?

David Joseph Kolb: I would like to think it would be an optimistic story. I know pessimism sells, and the future is always shaped within some post-apocalyptic nightmare, but we, as writers, must search out the light as well as the night.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first books?

David Joseph Kolb: We had a little library in my first grammar school, but what really got me interested in reading were the weekly visits to my neighborhood of the “bookmobile” – a library on wheels within a monster truck. Whoever was selecting the books for display had an uncanny knack for targeting my young interest zone. I always took out stacks every week.

Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of words?

David Joseph Kolb: Oddly enough, I wasn’t especially crazy about being read to. I wanted to turn the pages and get to the end faster than the reader! We had stacks of interesting magazines around like Life and the Saturday Evening Post that I was always looking at. And at least three daily papers a day to look forward to.

Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of writing at home?

David Joseph Kolb: Other than homework assignments, I was pretty much a reader until my high school years, when I joined the literary magazine and wrote my first short story. But I was always weighing possible short stories and potential novels in my mind as I was determined to write one or two some day.

Garn Press: Do you have memories of learning to write an essay, a story, or a poem?

David Joseph Kolb: Yes, and these came easy to me since I was an avid, dedicated reader of newspapers, comic books, novels and magazines – anything I could lay my hands on. I devoured the printed word. I always excelled in English classes. Math, not so much!

Garn Press: Did you like to draw? Did you paint as a child?

David Joseph Kolb: Yes, but my artwork was terrible. Stick figures and the like.

Garn Press: What advice would you give teachers if they asked you how they could create opportunities for their students to become enthusiastic readers and writers?

David Joseph Kolb: Impress upon the parents the necessity to read to young children and to encourage an interest in books as early in life as possible. Parents should take their children to the library as often as possible, and liven it up with a treat after the visit!

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AUTHOR DENNY TAYLOR

ABOUT DENNY TAYLOR Denny Taylor has organized more than 30 international scholars forums. She speaks to diverse national and international audiences on a broad range of issues, especially the interconnections between the rapid acceleration in climate change and the dismantling of US public schools, which are not widely recognized.

Taylor is particularly interested in bringing to the attention of the public what many parents and teachers already know, which is that in the US, children are being taught to work for the corporations that are using up Earth’s resources, contaminating the planet, and causing the climate system to adversely change, making Earth and unsafe place for our kids to be.

In 1983, Taylor published Family Literacy, which is regarded a classic in the field; Growing Up Literate received the MLA Shaughnessy award in 1988; and Toxic Literacies, published in 1996, was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 2004, Taylor was inducted into the IRA’s Reading Hall of Fame. She is Professor Emerita of Literacy Studies at Hofstra University, and the co-founder and CEO of Garn Press.

Her most recent books are Split Second Solution, Nineteen Clues: Great Transformations Can Be Achieved Through Collective Action, Save Our Children, Save Our School, Rosie’s Umbrella, Rat-a-tat-tat! I’ve Lost My Cat!, Toodle-oo Ruby Blue!, Great Women Scholars, Teaching Without Testing, The Children of Sandy Hook v. The US Congress and Gun Violence in America, and From Family Literacy to Earth System Science: Denny Taylor’s Research on Making the Planet a Child Safe Zone.

ABOUT ROSIE’S UMBRELLA This new 2017 edition includes two additional chapters – “Reflections on Rosie’s Umbrella” written by Jack David Eller, University of Northern Colorado, and Richard C. Owen, Founder and CEO, Richard C. Owen Publishers; and “Epilogue: Writing Rosie’s Umbrella” written by author Denny Taylor, as well as additional front matter.

“She died within seconds of falling. She could see the shadows that went with the echoes of screams from up above, but the patterns of light and the fading sounds were nothing more than that. There was not time to think about them, to name them or to say, ‘There’s lovely’, but that is how she felt in those last moments of her life.”

Rosie’s Umbrella is about love and loss, forgetting and remembering, losing one’s self and becoming someone you never knew or imagined being.

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We meet 14-year-old Rosie Llywelyn in Boston in 1995 at the moment her life is changed forever by a tragedy that occurred in a coalmining village in Wales in 1955.

From the very first page the reader experiences the emotional turmoil Rosie feels as she tries to find out what has happened to her Aunt Sarah and why her parents won’t tell her why they have had Sarah committed to a psychiatric unit in a nearby hospital.

As Taylor engages the reader in Rosie’s tragic family story of guilt and forgiveness, she falls into her own family history, and the reader falls with her – as she exposes the cruelty of governments, the wounds of being lumpen, the exploitation of poor families and children, and the trauma of the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of miners and their families from the Welsh coal mining valleys in the first half of the twentieth century.

As Rosie struggles to find her own truth with the support of her teacher and friends in school, she realizes another family tragedy is about to happen. Falling faster now through the pages, Taylor makes sure readers stay on the page with Rosie and her friends through their political awakening to the devastation that power and privilege has on poor people, and to their own vision for the future. Until, filled with love, laughter, and the will to survive, they are ready for the struggle that they know lies ahead.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Rosie’s Umbrella Author: Denny Taylor ISBN: 978-1942146636 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon (available for Kindle Unlimited Reading)

ABOUT SPLIT SECOND SOLUTION Bio-punk. Weird literature. A sci-fi fantasy that is frighteningly real. Split Second Solution is a dystopian urban novel set in New York City in 2022 that predicted the rise of Trump (the Ginger Tom) and anticipates his fall.

Here’s a review: “From the opening scene I felt I was reading something like a Miyazaki masterpiece. The descriptions are so vivid that only his genius talent for animation could capture them. Just as Howl’s Moving Castle takes you on a journey with both darkness and light, here there is palpable evil and fragile heroism in non-clichéd plot twists and turns. Required reading for our times.”

At the beginning of Split, the Sick Reapers and A.I. have seized power and captured Word. To escape being 39

raped and killed, Word jumps into the Hudson River and Death splits the last second of her life to save her. And, it is in the last split second of Word’s life that the entire story is told.

The evil antagonists are: Ginger Tom: Seized power before the novel begins; consumed by idolatry of self; protected by personal militia and Super Recognizers; gaslights the public; orders purges of people and books; hunts Word because she is the Last Truth Keeper.

Lunatic Eight: Includes the Freaky Geek and Posh Boy; ultra-rich predatory power mongers; destroy the infrastructure of society; lose control.

Super Recognizers: Controlled by Ginger Tom and the Lunatic Eight; known as “Sick Reapers”; by 2022 Sick Reapers are in power; psychopathic obsession with capturing Word.

A.I.:Artificial intelligence hostile to biological intelligence; global surveillance machines; collude with Sick Reapers in vicious endgame; can hack consciousness; hack X-it; obsessed by capturing Word.

The brave protagonists are: Word: Born 2000; French/North African; Last Truth Keeper; ancient texts tattooed on her body hold keys to the future; hunted by Super Recognizers; mother killed when she was eight.

X-it: Born 2000; French Creole heritage; super intelligent; father an astrophysicist; loves Word.

Death: Counter to all human stereotypes; hates people dying; trans; other personas include Cat, Bat, Bowie and Gaga.

Eternity: Extra-terrestrial observer; pure energy; not time bound; appears as the Old Crone and Botticelli’s Venus.

Grann: Creole wise woman; ancient Truth Seeker; ready to die to protect Word.

All lives are in jeopardy. No one is safe. The age of women begins.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Split Second Solution Author: Denny Taylor ISBN: 978-1-942146-45-2 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon (available for Kindle Unlimited Reading)

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INTERVIEW WITH DENNY TAYLOR Garn Press: What freaks you out?

Denny Taylor: To write a scene and then find I am living it.

Garn Press: For instance?

Denny Taylor: I wrote a children’s story in the 1980’s called Katrina’s Children in which something terrible happened and children were separated from their parents and they walked in long lines and were put on buses and sent away.

I was told it would never happen, that we would never treat children this way. But I was a first responder following Hurricane Katrina and I spent time in a shelter that had 5,000 people who had lost their homes in the big storm sleeping on cots not knowing what was going to happen to them. There were many children in the shelter who were separated from their parents, and there were walls covered in small pieces of paper on which was written “I’m looking for . . .” and “Have you seen . . ? ” messages.

And buses were arriving to take people away from the storm-devastated region. People including children were being put on buses not knowing where the buses were taking them.

“Do you realize you have written this?” David said when I spoke with him on the phone from Louisiana.

“Written what?” I asked, so caught up in the moment that the question seemed like a non sequitur.

Katrina’s Children, he said. “You wrote it.”

Garn Press: A coincidence?

Denny Taylor: Possibly. In some instances I think it is possible that to observe as intensely as an ethnographer does can lead to insights into future events that a casual onlooker might not see -- so not so much coincidence as the anticipation of events based on close observation.

Garn Press: That’s all?

Denny Taylor: Not exactly. Some scenes that I have written are more difficult to explain in this way.

Garn Press: Can you give an example?

Denny Taylor: Yes. In my novel Split Second Solution, which is set in Louisiana and New York City in 2022, there are many scenes that I would say are based on close observation and anticipate events that could possibly take place. What I hadn’t anticipated is the rapidity of the occurrence of the events I had written about actually taking place. One reader asked me when I had written the novel, because the events in it were taking place as he was reading it. He called it “eerie”.

Garn Press: Be specific.

Denny Taylor: In Split the Lunatic Eight have taken power – billionaires who answer to the Ginger Tom, 41

who seized power when the democratic system of government I the U.S. disintegrated. The creation of the fictional Ginger Tom character precedes the rise of Donald Trump. Trump is a close facsimile.

The Ginger Tom has the backing of militias who are controlled by the Super Recognizers. The people call the Super Recognizers “Sick Reapers”.

About a week ago I saw a NY Special Unit in black riot gear with sub-machine guns at the 72nd Street subway station, which was surreal given there is a scene in Split in which the main protagonists are being hunted by the Super Recognizers who are known as the Sick Reapers – right there by the 72nd Street subway.

We have reached a time in U.S. society when corporations backed by the authorities can employ militias and use ferocious dogs – as they do in Split – to attack unarmed people, many of whom are indigenous, trying to protect their sacred land, as they are at Standing Rock.

Garn Press: One of the reviewers calls Split is a futuristic urban fantasy that supposes a very different world albeit less than a decade away, but one that’s all too frighteningly plausible considering today’s culture. But your futuristic fantasy seems to be speeding up. The militias at Standing Rock are armed and dangerous, and the authorities are behaving like Sick Reapers strip-searching the Earth protectors – do you really think this could happen in New York City?

Denny Taylor: I do. We are in denial of how dangerous the path we are on has become.

Garn Press: Okay. But let’s go back. You didn’t answer the question. You are often ahead of “common knowledge” because of a lifetime of close observation, but there is nothing strange about this. Many people have this capability. The question is are there scenes in Split that cannot be so easily explained?

Denny Taylor: Many people anticipate events based on close observation. And we’ve all had those moments when we say to ourselves, “Of course! That was bound to happen!” But I think many of us also have inexplicable moments when we “see” something that actually occurs in the future.

Garn Press: You’re skirting around the question. In your writing are there such moments that you cannot explain?

Humor me for a moment. Here’s what you wrote in your piece on not voting for Trump: Ian Fleming’s “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action” has been bothersome of late.

The Goldfinger quote has become attached to the question: Can fiction foretell the future?” More terrifying: Does Split Second Solution foretell what is going to happen to us?

Denny Taylor: (Laughing) I shouldn’t have written that! But it’s an interesting question! I was writing about an unexplainable scene in Split and used it as one of many “freaking” reasons I couldn’t vote for Trump.

Garn Press: Okay. What’s the scene?

Denny Taylor: The scene takes place in 2022 in Central Park near the ruins of Columbus Circle. The Ginger Tom -- who is one of the Lunatic Eight – arrives by helicopter with his militia controlled by the Super Recognizers, otherwise known as the Sick Reapers.

“We’re with you Ginger Tom!” people cry, crowding around him.

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Then a baby cries.

Garn Press: Do you want to read what happens next?

Denny Taylor: Okay. Just so everyone knows – Word is one of the main characters in the novel. She is the last Truth Keeper. Death also has a leading role. Death, who often appears as Cat and is totally neurotic about people dying, splits the last second of Word’s life after she jumps into the Hudson River to get away from the Sick Reapers who are going to rape then kill her. The entire novel takes place in that split second as she recounts the story and the other characters, including Death (Cat) try to figure out how to save her.

Let’s see. I’ll pick up the story here. Word is recounting a scene in which the Ginger Tom appears: “In the crowd people shouted, ‘We’re with you Ginger Tom!’” Word said, shaking her head. “I’ve no idea why he liked the people calling him that, but he smiled and waved, and taking a baby from her mother’s arms he held her up and the crowd clapped and someone said, ‘Isn’t he great!’ as he gave the baby to one of the militia and said something to him. In full riot gear the militia man took the baby back to her mother who was holding her arms out but instead of giving the baby back to her mother he grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the crowd and took her off.”

Garn Press: Go on.

Denny Taylor: I wrote the scene before the Primaries. It was months later that David called and said, “Watch the video I just sent you.” The video is chilling. Trump’s actions when a baby cries follows the storyline of the Ginger Tom with his apparent kindness masking his malevolence towards the mother and the baby. Trump is talking about China. You can insert the transcript if you like: “I have the biggest bank in the world as a tenant of mine.”

A baby cries.

“Don’t worry about that baby. I love babies, so – “I love babies. I hear that baby crying. I like it. I like it! What a baby. What a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry.”

Trump mimics the mom.

“The mom’s running around like –” Trump’s facial expressions and hand movements conveying the mother is flustered.

“Don’t worry about it, you know. It’s young and beautiful and healthy and that’s what we want – “Okay. We have a piggy bank. They have ripped us to shreds.”

The baby is still crying.

“Ripped us absolutely to shreds – “Actually I was only kidding. You can get that baby out of here.

“That’s alright. Don’t worry.

“I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I am speaking.

“People don’t understand. That’s okay.”

Denny Taylor: Freaky happenstance? Possibly. Coincidence? I’d say so. But it does happen more frequently than I’d like.

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Garn Press: Let’s pick up on the predictions in Split that are based on close observation.

Denny Taylor: There are many aspects of this time that are unnerving that are very much a part of Split.

One is that we are creating a world that is beyond our biological destiny – which is certainly played out in Split.

Garn Press: What do you mean by “biological destiny”?

Denny Taylor: We have reached the end of “evolution” as Charles Darwin knew it. First, without thought for the consequences we are strutting our technological prowess by making life forms in petri dishes, cloning animals, and mixing biological life with machines. Second, to fulfill our irrational desires we’re orchestrating the extinction of many biological life forms to such a degree, that we have entered the sixth age of extinction – with so many life forms dying out, the planet is on the brink of ecological collapse.

Garn Press: And in Split you have created a world beyond our biological destiny?

Denny Taylor: Yes (laughs) in 200 pages! Seriously, while Split is filled with our astounding human capacity to rise up against tyrants and injustice, it also exposes the impact that such tyrants – the Lunatic Eight -- are having on people and the planet.

Garn Press: Okay. So we have three ideas crashing into each other – “biological destiny” “tyrants and injustice” and “people rising up” – do you want to say something about that?

Denny Taylor: Okay. Let’s switch them around: first, tyrants and injustice; second, interfering with our biological destiny; and third, people rising up. And let’s complicate the question by bringing us back to the idea that Split predicts a possible future that all of a sudden is actually taking place.

Garn Press: You’ve got so many ideas in the air – Denny Taylor: That’s the fun isn’t it? Rejecting linear explanations, challenging dualities. In Western Culture we are addicted to the linear and often can’t see beyond the dualities that we create.

Garn Press: Stick to the task: first tyrants and injustice.

Denny Taylor: Mmm one response would be that tyrants have used linear explanations to establish and perpetuate dualities.

Garn Press: Stick to the question.

Denny Taylor: Okay, tyrants and injustice.

In Split the government that exacerbated the deep divisions in U.S. society has fallen – although this is implied and the readers understanding emerges as they get deeper into the novel.

The government has been replaced by the Lunatic Eight – first working in collaboration with the government and then replacing them. Here I will use the Koch brothers – who are NOT in the novel – as examples of billionaires who wield huge power and have a tight grip on Washington.

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One of the Lunatic Eight is the Ginger Tom – a 2012 character who I admit now seems very much like Donald Trump. Few would argue against the idea that Trump has hijacked the political process and that he is challenging the Republican Party in ways that neither Democrats nor the people have ever been able to do.

In Split the political establishment has crumbled. Literally, the political system has fallen without a coup.

The enormous wealth and power of the Lunatic Eight – if you’ll excuse me for saying – trumps the establishment and annihilates them.

In Split each of the Lunatic Eight has power over different aspects of the lives of people in society. One of the Lunatic Eight is the Freaky Geek, who could be any one of so many billionaire technology giants who use their enormous wealth to thwart the people and destroy what’s left of U.S. Democracy.

Garn Press: Which brings us to the ways in which tyrants in Split – and in real life – are interfering with our biological destiny?

Denny Taylor: It does. And this is where the whole scenario gets interesting. Few of us would challenge the idea that the billionaires in society have enormous power and they are shattering the underlying principles on which US democracy is founded. Similarly, few would argue that the political elites are not compromised or that they are not on the brink of demise.

Garn Press: In Split you leap from the fall of the government and the rise of the Lunatic Eight to – Denny Taylor: The take over by technological life forms.

Garn Press: Not happening. Isn’t that just too far fetched?

Denny Taylor: Not at all. It’s happening. Have you listened to Stephen Hawking lately? I’ve been studying existential risks for about 20 years, although I would not have used that term until about 5 years ago.

The TED I just recorded addresses some of the existential risks that young people will face. The astrophysicist Martin Rees has an editorial in a 2013 edition of Science in which he asks why there is a denial of catastrophic risks and the imminence of a cataclysmic event from which humanity might not recover.

Garn Press: And you worry about this?

Denny Taylor: I must admit this is a question that bothers me a lot. I think I am driven by it. We are in denial of the future we are leaving for our children. It is callous and reprehensible.

Garn Press: We know about climate change and that the kind of response needed by society is disastrously absent. But you’re saying – writing about – other risks, the misapplication of technologies.

Denny Taylor: Rees calls the risk of Artificial Intelligence running amok as “disquietingly real” and he writes, of AI events that “if they occurred once, (would) cause worldwide devastation.”

Garn Press: And that’s what has happened in Split. The political elites have lost power because fanatical oligarchs –the Lunatic Eight – have ousted them.

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Denny Taylor: Trumped them. Yes. Narcissism, greed, and the illusion of political power have corrupted the democratic process and the government has handed over power without a bang or a whimper. Pathetic.

Garn Press: And in Split, the oligarchs – the Lunatic Eight -- have been done in by the technological life forms they created – the Super Recognizers who you call the Sick Reapers.

Denny Taylor: That’s about it.

Garn Press: Couldn’t happen.

Denny Taylor: Wake up! It’s happening! We’re in denial. Humanity is facing unimaginable existential risks. Martin Rees with Nick Bostrom (who coined the term “existential risk”) and Jaan Tallin (founder of Skype) are all associated with the Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk, and they present powerful reasons why we should all be concerned about the rapid development and use of AI without transparency and global agreements and regulations.

These researchers all speak and write about the possibility that this is our species last century, but (and here is where alarm bells should be going off ) that is not the position of the political or corporate elites or the oligarchs who make their money from the application of military developed technology.

For them the emphasis is on AI opening up new markets and new opportunities for “progress” – which includes advanced technological weaponry that can self actuate. While regulation is in its infancy the US has been using AI in weapon systems for decades, which is supposed to result in “safer” and “more humane military operations”.

Garn Press: And you’re saying -Denny Taylor: AI will/is already directly impact our children -- if you remember the Rice/Klein report on public education and national security there can be no doubt that some of the curricular changes mandated in public schools are driven by the massive advancement in AI. Garn Press: And you are saying all of this is in Split?

Denny Taylor: All of this was ever present when I wrote Split Second Solution. It might seem like a fantasy and some of the characters clearly fall in that category but the role of AI is frighteningly real and is based on my research on AI. Garn Press: And you’re trying to get the message across in a novel?

Denny Taylor: I know it’s a bit far fetched. Write a novel to entertain and warn the world. But isn’t that what writers have always done? I’ve no idea where to put all this stuff except in a novel. We all live our lives small in the global arena of AI and existential risks, but it is imperative that we try to participate nevertheless – and anticipate.

Garn Press: -- which is the reason for the Chomsky quote, “It’s not that there are no alternatives. The alternatives just aren’t being taken. That’s dangerous. So if you ask what the world is going to look like, it’s not a pretty picture. Unless people do something about it. We always can.”

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Denny Taylor: Exactly.

Garn Press: Let’s change topics.

Denny Taylor: Let’s not! Let’s leave it here and perhaps you can ask me some more questions later.

Garn Press: Okay. We can pick up later – perhaps explore the ideas in the letters to the reader at the beginning and end of Split – and how we’ve been misled.

Denny Taylor: Sure. I’ll look forward to it.

VISIT GARNPRESS.COM TO GET THE LATEST NEWS AND EDITORIAL FEATURES ON GARN AUTHORS AND GARN BOOKS.

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AUTHOR CAROLYN WALKER

ABOUT CAROLYN WALKER Carolyn Walker is a memoirist, essayist, poet, and creative writing instructor. After working twenty-five years as a journalist, she returned to graduate school and earned her MFA in Writing degree from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2004. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Hunger Mountain, The Writer’s Chronicle, Gravity Pulls You In: Parenting Children on the Autism Spectrum, and many other publications Her essay “Christian Become a Blur” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and reprinted in the 50th anniversary edition of Crazyhorse. In 2013, she was made a Kresge Fellow in the Literary Arts by the Kresge Foundation. She is a lifelong Michigan resident and the married mother of three grown children.

ABOUT EVERY LEAST SPARROW Every Least Sparrow is simultaneously heartbreaking and delightful in revealing the story of Jennifer Walker, a girl born with Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome, a rare and confounding condition that affects mental and physical development. Nearly every one of Jennifer’s body functions is adversely affected by this disorder, creating enormous challenges. Rubinstein-Taybi, however, cannot lay claim to Jennifer’s spirit, or her mother’s determination that her daughter live a full and happy life. With the support of Jennifer’s father and siblings, and devoted pediatrician, they set forth on a quest to find the “normal” that every child deserves, and every parent hopes for. Their quest takes them from fear through desperation, to true enlightenment — a profound understanding of what it means to be human. Ultimately, all involved, and especially the mother, realize the gifts of Rubinstein-Taybi: enduring love, and even envy for the accepting and joyous life that is Jennifer’s.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Every Least Sparrow Author: Carlyn Walker ISBN: 978-1942146506 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon (available for Kindle Unlimited Reading)

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INTERVIEW WITH CAROLYN WALKER Garn Press: Do you have a favorite author?

Carolyn Walker: My favorite author is Truman Capote. I discovered him as a young person through his holiday books The Thanksgiving Visitor and A Christmas Memory, and immediately fell in love with his style. I’ve read most of his work. I enjoy his writing because of his gorgeous use of language. It’s music on the page, as far as I’m concerned. His ideas are also unusual and interesting.

Garn Press: Is there one author who has influenced your writing more than any others?

Carolyn Walker: Capote has influenced me more than any other writer, but I am also influenced by the beautiful writing of Toni Morrison. When I’m “stuck” I often get their work out and read a few passages to get going again. The lyricism of their prose is contagious.

Garn Press: Do you think the relationships between authors and readers are changing?

That is a good question, and a hard one. I think the answer is both yes and no. I think people who love books, who love to hold and read them, are probably the same as such readers have always been. Book lovers, pure and simple, who maybe have their favorite go-to authors or genres. I think readers probably maintain their expectations about any given author and his or her work, regardless of format. But I also think that the e-books and deluge of reading opportunities on the Internet -- and by this I mean e-magazines, news sources, and so on — create a kind of “hurry,” “aloofness,” and “distance” between writer and reader that might translate to book author/reader relationships sometimes. Reading on the Internet, at least to me, is much less personal than something I can hold in my hands and savor. As a reader myself, I have, and love, a Kindle for its convenience - but I think that, while handy, that’s less personal too. And, I have a certain devotion to my favorite authors, and consistent expectations of them. I imagine many readers are like me in those regards. I wonder how many people read thousand-page books these days?

For that matter, I wonder how many authors write them!

Garn Press: Have you noticed any difference in your own relationships with your readers?

Carolyn Walker: Well, the truth is that as I’ve become a better writer over the years, with more exposure, reader enthusiasm has increased. That’s a good thing! And I’m so grateful!!

Garn Press: If you could express one thought to all your readers what would it be?

Carolyn Walker: Appreciate all life.

WRITING AS PART OF DAILY LIFE Garn Press: When do you write? Do you have a routine?

Carolyn Walker: I have no routine (and don’t want one). I can write just about any time and any place.

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I first learned to do this when I was a busy journalist. I’ve also had to train myself to do this because of my on-the-go lifestyle. I have two adult children who don’t drive and I sometimes find myself writing in the car while I wait for them, parked out in a field or dim-lit lot some place. One thing about writing, it’s portable! However, I prefer to write in the morning, when I’m fresh, on my laptop, while reclining on the bed with a cup of coffee. I do try to write daily. I love it when I really get into what I’m writing and don’t notice the passage of time. When this happens I can write all day.

Garn Press: How do you begin a writing project?

Carolyn Walker: I spend what seems like a lot of time mulling any given project. Once I sit down to write, I try to begin with the most beautiful line I can to get me going. And then I follow the threads I’m given.

I’m a nonlinear writer, which means my writing can go off in all sorts of directions. I like that, though. It is almost impossible for me to write in a linear way. Being nonlinear, I write as it comes.

Garn Press: Do you keep notebooks? Use special paper?

Carolyn Walker: No, I don’t keep a notebook or journal. I used to but I wasn’t very faithful about it so I quit. I keep a list of ideas, quotes, scenes, and so on, in a computer file. When I need to, I dip into them.

I also have zillions of artifacts I can turn to — pictures and old letters, and so on. If an idea comes to me when I’m out and about, I email it to myself for later, so I don’t forget it.

Also, since I began my professional writing career as a journalist I of necessity wrote on a computer. That became a habit. I never write using paper anymore, although once I’ve gotten something completed, I print it out to read it in paper form. I do feel like I have to experience any given piece on paper. To hold it in my hands.

Garn Press: What about pens and pencils? Are they important?

Carolyn Walker: No, not at all. Half the time I can’t find one!

Garn Press: Do you mix up writing instruments? (Oliver Sacks never wrote on a computer. He started with handwritten notes and wrote on a typewriter.)

Carolyn Walker: Ha! I only go from one Apple product to another.

Garn Press: Do you listen to music when you write?

Carolyn Walker: Sometimes. I find that music evokes certain moods in me, and I like that when I’m trying to write something emotionally compelling, usually sad or pensive. A particular favorite piece is The Lark Ascending, by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I don’t find that music helps when I want to write work that is happy, excited, or funny. Music with lyrics usually distracts me because the words of the song invade my own words. So no, “She loves you, yea, yea yea” or “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog” for me when I’m writing!

Garn Press: Do you share your writing while you are still writing or wait until you have a draft?

Carolyn Walker: Usually, I do not share my writing until I have a complete first draft. And then, only with a select few writers that I trust as reader-critics. Never with family or friends.

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Garn Press: How does your “day job” influence your writing?

Carolyn Walker: Hmm. My day job these days is teaching writing to mostly novice writers online. While I enjoy these people (and do remember that I was once a novice), their work sometimes has the unfortunate effect of frying my brain (all that bad grammar), and I worry that it infects my own writing. I have to be on guard not to let students inform my work. On the other hand, I have discovered that the best way to learn to write is to critique the work of others. That’s a great lesson!

Garn Press: What about ideas for books – do they percolate for years before you write, or do you work it out as your write, or perhaps a combination of both?

Carolyn Walker: For me, it’s a bit of both. Ideas are forced to percolate because mostly there’s never enough time in a day. But I do find that I work the writing out as I go. I call it “following threads.” Writing, for me, is exploration on the page. That and I love surprises. I like that I don’t know where my stories are going, necessarily - even if they’re autobiographical (that seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it?). To me, it is an advantage to let them unfold and to find the connections between events. One has epiphanies in this way.

Garn Press: What book or chapter of a book are you most proud of writing?

Carolyn Walker: I think I’m most proud of the passage I wrote about seeing my disabled daughter, Jennifer, for the first time. That was a moment that was fraught with almost every emotion imaginable. As I wrote, I allowed myself to relax into that simultaneously frightening and loving memory, and tried to evoke her human beauty. I think I was successful in that attempt. The passage always makes me cry.

THE ROLE OF THE WRITER IN SOCIETY Garn Press: What does it mean to be a writer in troubled times?

Carolyn Walker: Writers play a vitally important role in society (although I suspect they always have). To coin a phrase, “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Writers are both provocateurs and healers. And they keep people honest. I can’t imagine what the world would be like without them.

Garn Press: What worries you about today?

Carolyn Walker: : Like most people, I am worried about the directions things are going and about the lack of peace in our world. Peace seems so elusive in a society where we see differences and want control, rather than embrace what we share in common, as humans. I wish we could see the humanity in everyone, and successfully teach this to our children. I worry for our planet, and for the generations to come.

Garn Press: What keeps you awake at night?

Carolyn Walker: I am unable to turn off my mind at night, and therefore I lay in bed and think about everything from the people I love, to my goals, to my fears, to the meaning of my life. I also get songs stuck in my head that make drifting off next to impossible. That, and my dog takes her half out of the middle of the bed.

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Garn Press: Is your writing connected to present day events?

Carolyn Walker: Yes, in the sense that my memoirs represent people within the context of modern society and culture. Sometimes they are people living on the margins in one way or another.

Garn Press: If you wrote a book about the future -- the way you imagine it will be -- what kind of book would you write?

Carolyn Walker: I would write a wild science fiction book, crazy with magic.

EARLY READING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of words?

Carolyn Walker: I remember Dick and Jane. And I remember my mother taking me to the library and forcing me to check out Charlotte’s Web. I think I was somewhere around 7 or 8. Then sitting on the couch next to me and forcing me to read it to her, until the book was finished. I was quite miffed about it at the time, but by the end I was emotionally hooked. I loved the outdoors, and was a tomboy, and I found reading to be a boring activity - until I discovered Nancy Drew, that is. She was a girl I could identify with.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first books?

Carolyn Walker: As I ponder this question, I find that I remember quite a few of my first books. One in particular is a book of children’s fairytales. There are giants and fairies and all sorts of interesting characters. What makes this book unique is its long, slender shape. I still have that book somewhere.

I also still have my favorite, by Ruth Dixon. It’s called Three Little Bunnies, and features photographs of live bunnies dressed in clothes, and in one case spectacles. I must have been about 4 or 5 when I got the book and I was quite amazed by those clothed bunnies. How did they dress those bunnies, I wondered.

How did they get their paws (and tails) into pant legs and sleeves? My favorite photograph is one of Mr. Bunny White Ears, wearing a sort of suit and pink eyeglasses. I remember wondering how they got the rabbits to cooperate. I also note that I wrote my first name in the book, using the awkward penmanship of a girl just learning to print her name.

I also remember my collection of Nancy Drew books. I remember them in part because I used to trade them with my friend, Sandy. At one point in time I had read all of them. And I remember my mother taking me to the department store to buy them, after a long day of clothes shopping. The buying of books was saved as a treat for last. We’d ride the elevator down to the basement floor, and the scent of all those wonderful books would greet us. Getting books was an exciting tactile experience.

Another early memory is of reading the poetry of Eugene Fields. I had a very old book that was my mother’s when she was a child, with the most wonderful, amazing pictures. Some of his poems broke my heart.

I still have all the books mentioned.

Garn Press: What about your earliest memories of someone reading to you?

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Carolyn Walker: I remember grade school teachers reading to our class. Little House on the Prairie, for one. I’m sure my parents must have read to me, but I do not remember it. What I remember is my father standing in the door of the bedroom I shared with my sister, and singing Good Night Ladies. That, and my mother forcing Charlotte’s Web on me.

Garn Press: Was there a moment when you first knew you could read?

Carolyn Walker: I don’t remember a moment when I first knew I could read. But I remember the moment I wanted to read well. We used to read out loud in the first grade, Dick and Jane, probably. A new girl came into the class (the aforementioned Sandy). She was interesting and fun and smart and immediately popular, and she was a fantastic reader. I wanted to be like her. After that, I started to work a lot harder on my reading, and I remember my teacher wondering what was going on. Why the burst of energy and the sudden improvement?

Garn Press: What did you like about reading?

Carolyn Walker: I liked the peace of reading, settling down in the evening with a book, in the dim yellow glow of a lamp in the room, the quiet household making me feel safe. And I liked reading about Nancy Drew’s adventures. I didn’t start to really love reading, though, until I was in junior high and read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. After that, I was hooked by stories and people, and places, of all types.

Garn Press: What did you dislike about reading?

Carolyn Walker: The boring part: having to sit still when I could have been climbing trees.

Did you have a favorite author when you were a young child?

Carolyn Walker: No, I didn’t.

Garn Press: Did you read book series as a child?

Carolyn Walker: Yes, Nancy Drew, and some of the Hardy Boys and Cherry Ames. At one point in time, I had read all the Nancy Drew books. I remember that they didn’t allow them in the library at school because they weren’t “educational” or “literary” enough. Not knowing this, I asked the librarian if there was one I could check out one day, and she basically told me Nancy Drew was “beneath” the quality of library books and the school didn’t have any. I was personally affronted and insulted. The very thought still irritates me.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first reading lessons when you went to school?

Carolyn Walker: Yes. I remember Dick and Jane and that oral reading, and feeling very self-conscious when it was my turn.

Garn Press: Can you remember doing research for a project in school?

Carolyn Walker: I remember doing a science project in junior high, and researching the planets, and building a mini-solar system out of Styrofoam balls.

Garn Press: Did you study for exams -- if so how?

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Carolyn Walker: I didn’t study like I should have. I was bored by schoolwork, and content to “get by”. As long as I passed, I didn’t care and was good to go. Hence, I sort of crammed as much information in at the last minute as possible, and hoped for the best. Actually, strangely, I somehow expected the best out of that kind of behavior.

EARLY WRITING/DRAWING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of writing at home?

Carolyn Walker: I wrote my first piece, a poem, “My Auntie’s Garden,” when I was about six or seven years old. Then I didn’t write again until I was in high school, during which time I took up writing silly poems and limericks. I have been writing ever since, almost, but not quite, non-stop. I took drawing lessons when I was 10, making the branches of trees bigger at the tips rather than tapered. The instructor informed me that’s not how trees are drawn, and I never picked up a pencil, crayon or brush for another 40 years. I now draw and paint frequently.

Garn Press: Did you like to draw?

Carolyn Walker: Yes, still do.

Garn Press: Did you paint as a child?

Carolyn Walker: Yes, some. Paint by Number. I had a wood burning set, also. It was lots of fun to “draw and paint” with that!

Garn Press: Do you still have any of your early writing, drawings, or paintings?

Carolyn Walker: My mother saved everything. I have the poems I wrote in high school and college, as well as “My Auntie’s Garden.” And a few drawings from my early years as a grade schooler – not the hapless tree limbs, however.

Garn Press: Can you remember being taught to write at school?

Carolyn Walker: I don’t remember being taught to write creatively (as opposed to penmanship). But I remember that from an early age, my teachers saw potential in my writing, and encouraged me. As did my mother.

Garn Press: Do you remember if writing and penmanship were muddled? They often are.

Carolyn Walker: No, I don’t remember that being the case. I can remember being taught to write in cursive - the goal being to get good enough that the teacher would allow the students to use fountain pens.

I was so happy when I got that first fountain pen! It was turquoise. A real beauty. But I do not remember being taught to write content.

Garn Press: Was drawing linked with writing?

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Carolyn Walker: Not for me.

Garn Press: Do you have memories of learning to write an essay, a story, or a poem?

Carolyn Walker: I have a memory of sitting on the living room floor with a piece of lined paper and a pencil and writing the poem called “My Auntie’s Garden.” I was a young child, and my aunt’s beautiful garden left an impression on me. The penmanship of the poem went all over the place, however.

Garn Press: What about taking tests – can you remember taking them?

Carolyn Walker: I remember hating them, mostly. I remember taking a standardized test in junior high school. I scored highest in mechanical reasoning, although I have no idea why.

Garn Press: Did you have to fill in bubbles on multiple-choice tests?

Carolyn Walker: Yes. I always did better on tests that involved essay writing, as opposed to answering questions.

Garn Press: Can you remember if you had other sorts of tests? Short answers? Essays?

Carolyn Walker: Yes, I had all of these. I remember our spelling tests, and spelling bees. We lined up in the classroom, kids on both sides, and competed with one another. I do not recall that there was a prize.

Garn Press: What advice would you give teachers if they asked you how they could create opportunities for their students to become enthusiastic readers and writers?

Carolyn Walker: Encourage, encourage, encourage, and back off the criticism. When students are writing, permit their creativity its freedom, and don’t micro-manage penmanship, spelling, grammar or quality of ideas. A mind needs its freedom when it’s writing creatively, especially for a first draft. I believe strongly in creative writing in the classroom, and don’t think they have enough of it. Opportunities for reading and writing should be plentiful. And don’t judge. It’s not necessary to judge to teach. Students should be lifted up and made to feel excited and empowered about their writing. They should fall in love with writing.

And who ever fell in love with someone breathing down their neck?

Additionally, based on my own school experience, as well as the experiences of college students I taught, it’s best to let students choose what they want to read. People seem to balk when they’re forced to read a particular book, just as I did with Charlotte’s Web. I also feel that teachers should not judge the quality of books, like the librarian did at my junior high school. That kind of thing is subjective, anyway. If a student wants to read - let him or her read!

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AUTHOR KEN GOODMAN

ABOUT KEN GOODMAN In 1986, Ken Goodman published a small book with the simple title: What’s Whole in Whole Language?

Garn Press has now published a new edition of What’s Whole that includes the never before published 1992-3 interviews with renowned 20th century researchers in the field of reading, as well as renowned scholars of today who have a lot to say about the education reform movement that has had a negative impact on the teaching of reading in US public schools. Here are some of the questions I asked Ken during the production of the book.

ABOUT WHAT’S WHOLE IN WHOLE LANGUAGE IN THE 21ST CENTURY? What’s Whole in Whole Language in the 21st Century? includes a new introduction by Ken Goodman, commentary by Michael Rosen, and excerpts from a series of never published interviews conducted in 1992-1993 by Denny Taylor of renowned reading scholars who knew Ken and Yetta Goodman, and who spoke freely about their lives together as well as their research and teaching.

The insights of these scholars, who include Frank Smith and Jeanne Chall, are profound. They shift the political discourse of reading research and teaching young children to read. Ousting the propaganda, they shed light on what really happened to progressive educators and whole language teachers at the end of the 20th century.

The original version of Goodman’s best-selling book sold two hundred and fifty thousand copies, became a worldwide phenomenon, and was translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese.

It became the handbook for the revolution for equality and justice for all children that occurred in classrooms around the world. Teachers were inspired to put aside commercial materials that were based on very limited understandings of reading and writing, and instead placed children and their very natural curiosity about language and learning at the center of classroom activity.

In the 1990’s, the agenda for public education shifted away from developmentally appropriate teaching and learning and prominently featured the goals of curriculum standardization, test-based accountability, and a reward-and-punish policy toward school performance. Although conservative ideology and the thirst for profit were factors at play, the real motive was to ensure that U.S. corporations would remain competitive in the 21st century global market. They would achieve this by turning schools into “workforce development systems” that would produce future workers with very narrowly defined literacy proficiencies and a predilection for passivity and compliance. This is the experience of most public school children today, whose lives and academic development are so negatively impacted by the Common Core.

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There has never been a more critical time for teachers to read What’s Whole in Whole Language in the 21st Century? It is as prescient today as it was when Goodman first wrote it.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: What’s Whole in Whole Language in the 21st Century?

Author:Ken Goodman ISBN: 978-1942146568 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon

ABOUT THE SMART ONE: A GRANDFATHER’S TALE The future is often foretold in stories of the past. As families flee the Debaltseve in Eastern Ukraine in 2015, Ken Goodman’s The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale takes us back to families fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe at the turn of the Twentieth Century. It is a compelling story of Jewish migration to America, which begins in Smorgon, now in Belarus, a former Soviet Republic, but at the time Smorgon was in Vilnius, a district of Lithuania, and a part of the Russian Empire. The book is beautifully illustrated throughout with fine line drawings by Ray Martens.

The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale begins in 1901 and ends in 1906 and is told to us by little Duvid Mendel Gutman, who was Ken Goodman’s father. The story is filled with conflict over the political changes taking place, as well as the love and generosity of the people Duvid encounters, including the gypsies and Jews who live in the woods with their dancing bears to protect them. With Duvid to guide us we participate with his family in Sukkos, Shabbos, Chanukah, Purim, Passover and the High Holidays. By his side we witness the strike for a 12 hour day on May Day 1904 and the Revolution in Smorgon in 1905, and we feel with him and his family the heart wrenching distress at what happened to members of his family who participated in the workers’ resistance movement to the social injustice they were forced to endure.

“To understand who we are as Americans,” Ken Goodman writes, “we need to understand who we were and where we have been.” The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale does just that. It is a book to be read aloud at Chanukah and Passover, and at Yom Kippur, but also at other times by families of different religious and cultural traditions, who share with Duvid Mendel Gutman and his family an indomitable human spirit and hope for the future.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: The Smart One: A Grandfather’s Tale Author:Ken Goodman

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ISBN: 978-1-942146-10-0 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon

INTERVIEW WITH KEN GOODMAN Garn Press: Why do you think What’s Whole in Whole Language? became such a highly influential book?

Ken: It is a straightforward presentation of the principles of whole language and it was influential in two respects.

The first influence came from sale of the 250,000 copies in 5 languages -- English , French, Spanish , Chinese and Japanese – most unusual for a professional book. It brought courage to the large number of teachers already using whole language concepts, and served as an introduction to whole language for teachers eager for a response to mind-stifling basal readers.

And the second influence was the reaction to the book’s success from the multinational publishers who control school publishing and testing, and the reaction of politicians right up to Congress and the White House.

Garn Press: What made the book so controversial?

Ken: Teachers who read the book told their administrators that they didn’t need the texts and tests the publishers were selling them. They were ready to take control of their classrooms and could teach reading with environmental print and real children’s literature. Thousands of teachers taking control of their own classrooms was dangerous for the profiteers, and also for politicians who see universal free public education as a danger to their whole industrial system.

Garn Press: Why did education and the way young children are taught to read become such an issue?

Ken: Karl Rove, Margaret Spelling, and the other Texans who helped to bring George W. Bush to the White House decided to make “reading reform” the major focus of his presidency. They would reframe whole language as the unscientific nonsense of “gurus” like me, and offer instead simplistic phonics reframed as “scientifically based reading instruction”.

Garn Press: How did they make this happen?

Ken: It was done with the help of the publishers through their control not only of textbooks and tests, but also news magazines, newspapers, TV and radio. Six billion dollars of federal funds were spent on “No Child Left Behind” and a campaign to promote NCLB and discredit me, and to undermine the research on which the book was based.

NCLB rejected whole language blaming it for illiteracy. The law mandated simplistic phonics --reframed as “scientifically based reading research” -- with the promise that by 2014 our nation’s schools would all be 58

producing outstanding readers. Now it is clear that the $6 billion dollars spent on NCLB not only didn’t deliver on its promise, but left the teaching of reading in a shambles.

Garn Press: It seems so far fetched. Why go to all this trouble?

Ken: If you compare this small book with the language of NCLB, it is clear that the law was worded to frame whole language as the cause of illiteracy, and phonics as the true path to universal literacy.

Garn Press: And it gets stranger and stranger. On the morning of September 11, 2001, President Bush was in an elementary school classroom to read a phonics book and promote NCLB. And Reid Lyon, of NICHHD, was on C-Span, to promote NCLB. Ken: And I read in a book about the Bush White House by Kessler that they were also talking about me at that time. According to Kessler, Margaret Spelling who later became the Education Secretary said, “I don’t know why Ken Goodman is on this planet but I don’t think it’s to teach kids to read.”

Garn Press: It’s an incredible story – how one reading researcher became the focus of attention at the White House at such a critical moment. Did NCLB succeed?

Ken: No. 2014 was the target year for NCLB to make every child an outstanding reader. Its failure is widely acknowledged.

Garn Press: Now teachers are dealing with the failure of NCLB and the double whammy of the Common Core and high stakes tests.

Ken: This new edition of What’s Whole in Whole Language for the 21st Century? responds to the renewed interest by teachers in a holistic view of reading development, based on new evidence that reading is easy to learn when it is functional and useful to the learners. A generation of digitally literate children is coming to school already literate through the use of digital devices. This is whole language in action.

Knowledgeable teachers are finding that this new edition helps them to build on what children are commonly learning on their own.

Ken Goodman described the kindergartens spawned by NCLB as “sweat shop kindergartens”. The term went viral after Valerie Strauss published it in her Washington Post blog.

It is perhaps ironic that NCLB is widely recognized as a multi-billion dollar failure, and the Common Core and high stakes tests are quickly following suit, while the research presented by Ken in this straightforward short book on reading is now widely accepted by researchers and teachers alike. Today, many researchers in the reading field regard Ken Goodman to be the pre-eminent reading scholar of the 20th Century.

Close to a thousand miscue analysis research studies have been conducted in multiple languages and in multiple sign-systems that support the findings of Ken Goodman’s research on the reading process and how young children learn to read (and write).

Ken Goodman’s research on the reading process and on young children learning to read is supported by many child psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as researchers who study child development and early childhood educators. All agree that the social environments in which children are educated are of critical 59

importance, and that children should be immersed in projects and activities that encourage the use of language, both oral and written, in developmentally appropriate ways.

There is great concern that the educational reforms taking place are developmentally inappropriate. The lack of interest by the corporate reformers of public schools in the role that language plays in children’s social, emotional, and physical development is seriously problematic. There is now clear and undeniable evidence that the academic stressors of the education reform movement on young children are damaging to their health and well-being, as well as their academic development.

But whole language remains so politically stigmatized most teachers do not realize that the research on teaching and learning documented in this book provides an antidote to the Common Core, high-stakes testing, and the corporatization of US public education.

Michael Rosen, the eminent British scholar and social activist, states in the introduction to the new edition, “We need to be well-informed” about the corporatization of public education. Rosen writes, “In the American phrase that I’ve learned to love, “we need to wise up”. He states, “What’s Whole in Whole Language in the 21st Century? helps us do just that.”

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AUTHOR GEOFF WARD John Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, writes: “Geoff Ward's glitteringly funny and scary novel sends his hero Miles on a wild pursuit, through this world and the next, of one of only three known copies of the rarest book in existence. Like the object of his obsessive quest, You're Not Dead is both supreme fiction and grail, a one-off exemplar of a lost original.”

You're Not Dead is the first volume of The Midnight Books. Geoff Ward has written the second in the series and is presently working on the third. Each is a complete original and the description of the first volume

by John Ashbery as “supreme fiction and grail” is an apt description. The novels are totally original and we expect great things for them and for Geoff Ward, who is a gifted storyteller whose writing is linguistically exuberant and a pleasure to read.

ABOUT GEOFF WARD Geoff Ward is the author of the fantasy novel You’re Not Dead, the first in the trilogy The Midnight Books.

He is known more formally as Professor Geoffrey Ward, the renowned literary critic and Principal of Homerton College at the University of Cambridge.

Geoff Ward has taught and published on English and American literature in Europe, the USA and Japan.

He has written the first study of the New York School of Poets, Statutes of Liberty (1993/2001) among other books and essays.

A Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, he has written and presented documentaries on American writers for BBC Radio, and has published several collections of poetry, including Worry Dream (2013).

He is currently Principal of Homerton College, University of Cambridge.

You’re Not Dead is his first novel, and the first in a series. It builds on a lifetime’s enthusiasm for fantasy and other forms of genre fiction, explored with the aim to entertain, but also to raise serious questions about time, memory and whether what we see – in life, as well as in the mirror – is what is really there.

ABOUT YOU’RE NOT DEAD: THE MIDNIGHT BOOKS (VOLUME 1) You’re Not Dead is a darkly comic fantasy, with elements of romance. The hero Miles Proctor is a young college lecturer, on the trail of the last remaining copy of a notorious Victorian book. Transmutations: The Book of Magic is an occult treatise, which claims to be not merely about Magic, but about how to 61

perform spells and become adept at enchantment.

A series of hilarious accidents takes Miles to New York, California and Death Valley before he finally locates it. By this time he has begun a romance with Becky Morrell, bookseller and co-traveller. On reading the book Miles finds that it has the property of appearing to change its words, each time it is read.

He develops his own occult skills, including the ability to alter events, and to travel to the destinations pictured in photographs by focussing on the photograph.

However a presence from beyond, a murderous (if comic) Glaswegian gangster trapped in limbo, begins to invade his consciousness in search of the book as a means to escaping his own twilight zone. Miles’ adventures lead him back into the past and the mysteries of his father’s double life. Miles has joined a coven of magicians in London who discover that he is working more for himself than for the benefit of their capers, which include the quest for an ancient amulet with the power to buy time, but even as they attempt revenge the group comes explosively apart. Weighing in on Miles’ side are a number of supernatural presences, including the ghost of legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, but the story still has many surprises in store. Things are not always what they seem, in the worlds of either white or black magic – especially when Miles’ magic manual starts to work in unexpected ways.

You’re Not Dead is the first of the Midnight Books, in which magic, dreams, romance and crime are the ingredients in the fictional spell.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: You’re Not Dead: The Midnight Books (Volume 1) Author: Geoff Ward ISBN: 978-1942146292 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon (available for Kindle Unlimited Reading)

INTERVIEW WITH GEOFF WARD AUTHORS AND THEIR BOOKS Garn Press: Who is ‘You’, in the title of your new novel, You’re Not Dead?

Geoff Ward: It could be you. Or me. Or any of us wandering souls who get trapped for a while in our own personal limbo, but seek a way back to the world and to each other. In a plot sense, it refers to an undead killer with a very dark past, searching for a way to either come back to life, or to find his last resting place. Like my protagonist Miles, a young academic turned psychic sleuth, he is on a quest to find 62

a book with… unusual properties. He has the ability to inhabit Miles’ consciousness. More generally, the novel is concerned with memory and time. It’s an occult thriller with splashes of dark romantic comedy.

Garn Press: Do you have a favorite author?

Geoff Ward: Picture me if you will in a rather grim Grammar School for boys in the North of England.

It is 1968, and I am 14. An unusually intrepid teacher of French has just given his class two poems by Baudelaire and told us, with no other instruction or background, to spend the next hour translating one of them. I read the poem “Harmonie du Soir” (Evening Harmony, 1857), fail to understand the half of it, but am so beguiled and blown away by its intricate, dream-drenched chant that I remember feeling, if this is Poetry, I want this more than anything I have ever wanted. Whether I wanted to write it, write about it, or just read Poetry was less clear to me at that point. Did Baudelaire have any influence on my first novel, You’re Not Dead? Perhaps not directly, but reading Baudelaire led me to the whole Symbolist and then Surrealist traditions in which the idea of a magic book, a book which confers special powers, a book which may be dangerous, recurs. One of the main characters in You’re Not Dead is not a person, but a book whose words keep changing. Plus without Baudelaire I might not have found my way to a great poet, John Ashbery, who has kindly put some words on the jacket of my novel.

Garn Press: Is there one author who has influenced your fiction more than any others?

Geoff Ward: I only just realized the answer to this one, rereading Ray Bradbury’s novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. I read it first when I was very young, and can now see that something crept into my mind and stayed there that would have to wait fifty years before it bore fruit. Surrealist poetry and painting are also an influence on my fiction. In 1977 the English Surrealist poet David Gascoyne told me with great certainty, ‘You have read the Surrealists, and you are a Surrealist!’ This was about the same time I hear another Surrealist, Hugh Sykes Davies, improvising poems while playing the accordion, in Cambridge.

These things stick with you.

Garn Press: Do you think the relationships between authors and readers are changing?

Geoff Ward: The mystique of authorship and the supposed passivity of reading are both crumbling, fast.

My reader is my co-creator, and I would wish to be very attentive to her suggestions.

Garn Press: Are there any novelists working today that you particularly admire?

Geoff Ward: Among the Brits, Jonathan Coe, and I just read a novel by David Mitchell, Slade House, which I thought was terrific - fantasy writing at its most powerful. But I think I enjoy them as a reader rather than a writer. The American fantasy writer Tim Powers strikes me as terribly on, then off – though even that can be very suggestive as it implies to me some powerful signal from outside that’s fading, then reappearing in his work – but the eggshell armada in The Anubis Gates, the first half of Emergency Weather or the whole of Three Days to Never are very much in my zone.

Garn Press: If you could express one thought to all your readers what would it be?

Geoff Ward: A thought of what can only be said about the steeply, deeply Real, by recourse to the images and vocabulary of Magic. On reflection, ‘thought’ is too definite – it’s either an inchoate intuition or a life’s journey, and my trilogy The Midnight Books, of which You’re Not Dead is Volume One, is my way of 63

finding out.

Garn Press: Your hero Miles encounters magic, and becomes proficient in it. Have magical events or encounters occurred in your own life?

Geoff Ward: Yes. Garn Press: Have you practiced Magic?

Geoff Ward: I’m a writer, not a wizard. Plus I value my sanity, and unlike some of my characters, I suspect I sit rather stonily on the non-credulous side of things. But I think many of us have experiences that will never quite resolve themselves either as wholly and rationally explicable, or as a prompt from somewhere deeper inside a world of hidden correspondences, or as coming from some complete other-where. My characters and I focus intently on this borderline.

WRITING AS PART OF DAILY LIFE Garn Press: When do you write? Do you have a routine?

Geoff Ward: No fixed routine, and it’s been different for each novel (I’m now working on my third). The first one started writing itself while I was in Los Angeles in 2009, ostensibly conducting research. I finished a first draft on trains back in England, then gave it a fairly radical rewrite a year ago while in my current role as Principal of Homerton College, University of Cambridge. This last set of activities is in one sense uniquely demanding, a night as well as day-job, but for some reason the fact that it is a role, allows me to conduct a mental conversation with some other parts of myself while doing it. This private conversation I then make public by committing it to the computer screen, divided among characters who start to jostle and fight over it, and then I just revise, endlessly. I’ve trained myself to love the revision and treat it like a form of yoga, rather than getting dulled by the clerical aspect.

Garn Press: How do you begin a writing project?

Geoff Ward: You’re Not Dead began life in Death Valley, California, as an attempt to simply get down on paper some of the utter strangeness of Zabriskie Point, and the power of the desert. The light, the forever shifting dunes, and that extraordinary silence. But then people crept into the writing and started talking to each other without deferring to me – the first an undead Glaswegian gangster with some serious issues.

Garn Press: Do you keep notebooks? Use special paper?

Geoff Ward: Impossible. Can’t read my own handwriting.

Garn Press: What about pens and pencils? Are they important?

Geoff Ward: I have a confession. I steal pens, inadvertently, unconsciously. I’m stealing your pen now, as you read. Sent on a residential course for senior managers where all delegates were provided with a pen, I came home with five. But I don’t tend to write with them – I keep them on my desk in a capacious and rather strange cup I found in Egypt. This is the cup with ambiguous hieroglyphs around its lip brought 64

back from Luxor by the mysterious Librarian in You’re Not Dead.

Garn Press: Do you mix up writing instruments? (Oliver Sacks never wrote on a computer. He started with handwritten notes and wrote on a typewriter.)

Geoff Ward: Just a Mac. Not very good at it. But I have to be able to redraft, and change words in midflow, in mid-word. The Underwood has gone now, like the unfiltered Camels, the lumberjack shirt and the big black telephone that had a real, clear signal.

Garn Press: Do you listen to music when you write?

Geoff Ward: No. Music is time-based. Writing stops time.

Garn Press: Do you share your writing while you are still writing or wait until you have a draft?

Geoff Ward: With the exception of a few people, mainly miracle-workers at Garn Press plus one spouse, I have waited until publication before sharing.

Garn Press: How does your “day job” (academic, journalist etc.) influence your writing?

Geoff Ward: Given a lifetime in universities I certainly have a campus novel, or several, in me. Parts of You’re Not Dead? fit that genre, just as other parts fit horror, romance, or social satire. But universities tend to be rather dead spaces, dramatically. The real work that’s done there is often iceberg-like, invisible, even in a photogenic bubble like Cambridge. Especially there, perhaps. So I prefer settings like New York, Los Angeles and Death Valley because they are more immediately dramatic, but also necessitate a real descriptive and down-to-earth precision. I am easily seduced by fantastic ideas and formulations, which are only half the story. I need that ballast of place. When I’ve read from the novel people have asked me once or twice about ‘magic realism’. It’s certainly not been an influence in that I have only read one novel

by Marquez, and that was years ago. But if we interpret that phrase absolutely literally – that I write about magic, but that I use realism, and that it’s the spark between that piques your and my interest, then that might be right.

Garn Press: What about ideas for books – do they percolate for years before you write, or do you work it out as your write, or perhaps a combination of both?

Geoff Ward: The books are improvisations, but, as I’ve been on the planet for a fair amount of time, they go back to forage over considerable geographical, psychic and clock-terrain in order to find themselves.

Garn Press: What book or chapter of a book are you most proud of writing?

Geoff Ward: Any of the bits that were solid and unremitting hard work, where I knew I needed the scene, but had no ideas or evident triggers to get the characters acting and talking and gesticulating. Then you just write, and revise, and delete, and polish, until there’s something warm and breathing there. Sometimes there are quick fixes – in film screenwriting, they call it The Pope in the Pool. You have to have some exposition, and you need to make it interesting. So rather than have the protagonist, the Pope, just go on and on at length, you have him jump fully clothed into the biggest swimming pool in Rome and you imbibe the exposition while he’s swimming and you’re gawping. But it’s harder in written fiction. Plus, I 65

do everything the wrong way round. I have no idea at the start of a chapter how it’s going to end. None whatsoever. So I improvise and things come to me, but it’s like building a house and only putting the foundations in at the finish. It leads to ludicrous continuity errors. On one page the mirror is in the hall and on the next page it’s moved upstairs. I left one or two of them in deliberately. Memory is often most interesting when it fails its own tests.

THE ROLE OF THE WRITER IN SOCIETY Garn Press: What does it mean to be a writer in troubled times?

Geoff Ward: Haven’t they all been troubled?

Garn Press: What worries you about today?

Geoff Ward: Worldwide, fundamentalism and the rising contempt for democracy. In the West, disheveled governments regurgitating yesterday’s mantras.

Garn Press: What keeps you awake at night?

Geoff Ward: I come back late and can’t switch off.

Garn Press: Is your writing connected to present day events?

Geoff Ward: Yes, but in the most purposefully unfaithful way. So You’re Not Dead? is set on the eve of the Millennium, but mobile phones have yet to be invented. In the next novel, set during the crash, people commit real crimes with real consequences, while sleeping or dreaming. That hasn’t happened yet in reality, apart from in investment banking, but it will shortly.

Garn Press: If you wrote a book about the future -- the way you imagine it will be -- what kind of book would you write?

Geoff Ward: I would almost certainly go back to the future – which I do a little, in some of my more recent writing - in order to go forward into the past, with future knowledge. It’s the loop that’s interesting. I have a weakness for steampunk. I’m a big fan of the latter-day Doctor Who scripts – the madder the better – and on David Tennant’s watch the series became not only the UK’s national epic, but also the apotheosis of steampunk, its insinuation into our self-understanding as a nation. Or circus of nations. Queen Victoria is now a werewolf, and that’s that.

EARLY READING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: Do you remember your first books?

Geoff Ward: Yes, but the memories are vivid and confusing. I thought that books could change the colors of their covers and that I saw this happen once. I felt compelled to throw a favorite book on an open fire 66

while my mother stood by me.

Garn Press: What about your earliest memories of someone reading to you?

Geoff Ward: My mother, again. Nursery rhymes, stories, that classic Cold War, warm heart, curled-up feeling.

Garn Press: Did you have a favorite author when you were a young child?

Geoff Ward: I was an almost ludicrously bookish child, straight out of the nineteenth century. Undiagnosed spinal and other problems made sport and the company of my peers enervating. So, from age 7 to 11, Poe, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Stoker, Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer. The Doctor Syn novels by Russell Thorndike. Then adolescence took me straight into Beckett, Anna Kavan, Burroughs, Joyce, Ann Quin.

I’m still there with all those writers. I might have finished with Sax Rohmer.

Garn Press: Did you read book series as a child?

Geoff Ward: Yes, and that must be why I want to write them now. Cycles, and genre fiction, were thought second rate. This has changed.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first reading lessons when you went to school?

Geoff Ward: I found school baffling. For some reason my mother had taught me how to write fluently in capital letters but she kept quiet about the small ones.

Garn Press: Did you study for exams -- if so how?

Geoff Ward: Excessively and under duress. We test children to destruction. I would abolish homework.

Garn Press: What advice would you give teachers if they asked you how they could create opportunities for their students to become enthusiastic readers and writers?

Geoff Ward: I grew up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. I was told firmly that the books and TV and music I liked were second rate, which was immensely hurtful and destructive, then that my hair was too long, that I was too ambitious, not ambitious enough, etc. Teaching seemed mostly aimed at stopping you from getting any ideas above your station. I guess that doesn’t happen in the same way, but I sense that social media has taken over some of those roles of policing and perfectionism. I would hope that the teacher’s role could be to surprise and excite, but mainly to create a protected time-space for young souls to browse and dream and then, best of all but this is coming under threat, really run with something, uninterrupted.

Our students are what the future has sent to teach us.

VISIT GARNPRESS.COM TO GET THE LATEST NEWS AND EDITORIAL FEATURES ON GARN AUTHORS AND GARN BOOKS.

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AUTHOR RUSS WALSH

ABOUT RUSS WALSH Russ Walsh has had a forty-five year career in public education as a teacher, literacy specialist, curriculum supervisor and college instructor. He is currently the Coordinator of College Reading at Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ. After beginning his career as a secondary history teacher, Russ switched gears and earned a degree in literacy and then worked for much of his career in the literacy field, including stints as an elementary reading specialist, a Reading Recovery teacher and a literacy supervisor. He has taught at every level of education from kindergarten through graduate school. His major academic interests have been in reading fluency, content literacy, instructional practice and parental involvement in education.

Russ was active for many years with the International Literacy Association (ILA) and was a member of that organization’s Parents and Reading Committee, as well as the co-founder and chair of the Parents and Reading Special Interest Group for ILA. In those roles, Russ helped organize and deliver parent programs as a part of ILA’s yearly international conference. He has presented hundreds of workshops and papers for parents and teachers at local, regional, national and international conferences. Russ blogs on public education, literacy instruction and teaching practice at Russ on Reading. He lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with his wife, Cindy Mershon, and their three cocker spaniels.

ABOUT A PARENT’S GUIDE TO PUBLIC EDUCATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY What is a parent to make of the current narrative about public education in the United States? We hear that our public schools are mediocre at best and dysfunctional and unsafe at worst. We hear politicians and pundits arguing that the country will fall behind economic competitors like China and Japan, if our schools do not improve. We hear education reformers, well-funded by corporate lions like Bill Gates and the Walton family, suggesting a smorgasbord of solutions from school choice to more rigorous standards and from increased standardized tests to test-based teacher accountability. What is education reform and how will it impact schools, children and parents? What are charter schools and should I send my child to one? What is the impact of standardized testing on my child? Should I opt my child out of standardized testing? How can I make sure my child gets a good teacher? What does good reading and writing instruction look like? How should technology be used in the schools and at home? A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century is written to answer these questions and help today’s parents sort through the weeds of educational reform to make informed decisions designed to get the best possible education for their children. The book starts from the point of view that public education is a vital institution, central to our democracy and economic independence, and then suggests ways that parents can not only get the best of education for their own children, but also support policies that will make the institution of public education stronger for future generations.

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PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: A Parent’s Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century Author: Russ Walsh ISBN: 978-1942146339 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon (available for Kindle Unlimited Reading)

INTERVIEW WITH RUSS WALSH Russ Walsh’s book for parents and teachers is a bridge over troubled waters that will make a difference in the lives of children, parents, and teachers.

Carol Corbett Burris, who is the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education, writes “When a parent walks their kindergartener through a schoolhouse door for the first time, their heart goes with them. They want to feel secure that they are entrusting their child to a learning environment in which they will thrive. As they listen to sensational reports about ‘failing schools’, it is no wonder that many parents feel doubt,” she continues. “That is why Russ Walsh’s Parent’s Guide is a must read for any parent who is trying to make the best educational decision for their children.”

She writes that Russ Walsh’s book is “a clear, thoughtful response that will give parents wisdom, confidence and ease,” and concludes, “A Parent’s Guide is the best guide for anyone who cares about public schools.”

And so Garn Press has interviewed Russ Walsh, who is a lifelong educator, so that Garn readers will know how he came to write his Parent’s Guide to Public Education.

Garn Press: Do you have a favorite author?

Russ Walsh: As a teenager I discovered the books of John Steinbeck. I loved his graceful, well-crafted sentences and his themes of social justice for the working man.

Garn Press: Is there one author who has influenced your writing more than any others?

Russ Walsh: Most of my writing influences, while they may not show up much in my non-fiction, have been comic writers like Richard Armour and Shel Silverstein. I also have been influenced by The New Yorker School of Writers, especially E. B. White and William Maxwell.

Garn Press: If you could express one thought to all your readers what would it be?

Russ Walsh: That maintaining a vital, well-resourced, professionally staffed and run system of public education free from corporate influence is a is a battle worth fighting and a war we must win.

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THE ROLE OF THE WRITER IN SOCIETY Garn Press: What does it mean to be a writer in troubled times?

Russ Walsh: It means giving needed voice to issues of social justice. It means fighting the good fight with the very best words you can muster. It means staying in the game, even when the game seems to be moving away from you.

Garn Press: What worries you about today?

Russ Walsh: More than anything else I worry about the de-professionalization of the teaching profession and the Orwellian takeover of the public schools.

Garn Press: Is your writing connected to present day events?

Russ Walsh: My writing is a combination of past, present and a hoped for future. Topics tend to come to me from the current educational headlines, but I draw on my prior experience of 45 years as an educator and on my hopes for the future in crafting a message.

Garn Press: If you wrote a book about the future -- the way you imagine it will be -- what kind of book would you write?

Russ Walsh: A utopian fantasy full of loved and valued children taught by creative, well informed, autonomous educators.

WRITING AS PART OF DAILY LIFE Garn Press: When do you write? Do you have a routine?

Russ Walsh: I like to write in the morning, usually from about eight to noon and I try to emulate my hero Steinbeck by writing “1,000 useful words a day.�

Garn Press: How do you begin a writing project?

Russ Walsh: My ideas come from my reading. Topics fly at me from the newspapers, books, magazines and blogs that I read. Often I will blog on a topic and then several topics seem to come together into a book idea.

Garn Press: Do you keep notebooks? Use special paper?

Russ Walsh: I keep an informal leather bound journal that is mostly just brief sketches of ideas. Other than that I write almost exclusively on my laptop.

Garn Press: Do you listen to music when you write?

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Russ Walsh: No. I find music distracting when I am writing, although I love all kinds of music. My one requirement is a window to look out on the world while I write.

Garn Press: Do you share your writing while you are still writing or wait until you have a draft?

Russ Walsh: I share along the way to get feedback and to guide my thinking and rethinking.

Garn Press: How does your “day job” influence your writing?

Russ Walsh: My day job as a teacher enriches my writing with real life stories to draw from to illustrate some point or another I am trying to make.

Garn Press: What about ideas for books – do they percolate for years before you write, or do you work it out as you write, or perhaps a combination of both?

Russ Walsh: Ideas tend to percolate for years. My own ideas tend not to be very commercial, so I sometimes find my ideas being subsumed into a more marketable form.

Garn Press: What book or chapter of a book are you most proud of writing?

Russ Walsh: The latest one. My favorite is always the one I have just completed.

EARLY READING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: Do you remember your first books?

Russ Walsh: My first books were from The Little Golden Books Series. My favorite was the Pokey Little Puppy.

Garn Press: What about your earliest memories of someone reading to you?

Russ Walsh: My earliest memories of someone reading to me was sitting on the couch next to my mother while she read Little Golden Books to me. The couch was big, red and warm and I felt loved and treasured.

Garn Press: Was there a moment when you first knew you could read?

Russ Walsh: I got a book in the mail with my name on the brown paper wrapper, “Master Russell Walsh.”

Inside was a book based on a Disney documentary, Our Living Desert. The book was challenging for me, but by late that first evening I had finished it. I knew then I was a reader and forever after eagerly anticipated the books I received each month in the mail.

Garn Press: What did you like about reading?

Russ Walsh: I loved learning about new things. Even as a young child I read mostly nonfiction. I loved accumulating facts and then showing off my new knowledge to family and friends.

Garn Press: What did you dislike about reading?

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Russ Walsh: I thought of myself as a slow reader, so I did not enjoy long reading assignments.

Garn Press: Did you read book series as a child?

Russ Walsh: Yes. I enjoyed Tom Swift and The Hardy Boys Series.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first reading lessons when you went to school?

Russ Walsh: It seemed to me we were always doing piles of worksheets and circling pictures and letters and words. I was good at it, so I didn’t mind, but it all seemed kind of silly compared to actually reading.

Garn Press: Can you remember doing research for a project in school?

Russ Walsh: Yep. In sixth grade I was assigned to do a research project on Paraguay for our unit on South America. I remember that the library didn’t have much information on Paraguay (the lucky kids who were assigned Brazil or Argentina found tons of information). This was in pre-Google days, so I had to rely on the books available. World Book saved me. I still remember that Paraguay is the only landlocked country in South America and that it was a favorite haven for escaping Nazis after World War II. Garn Press: Did you study for exams -- if so how?

Russ Walsh: Rarely. Tests were never very challenging, and they were certainly not able to distract me from the baseball field or basketball court, so I would usually wing it with mixed results.

EARLY WRITING/DRAWING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of writing at home?

Russ Walsh: As a young child, I enjoyed writing little poems to entertain my mother. She treasured them and still has some of them. Later, I enjoyed writing parodies of historical events in the style of Richard Armour.

Garn Press: Did you like to draw?

Russ Walsh: Somehow, I got the idea I was not good at drawing, so I rarely did it. My hope for all children is that teachers will encourage their attempts at drawing and painting no matter what the child’s ability.

Garn Press: Can you remember being taught to write at school?

Russ Walsh: Not really. I remember all kinds of assignments related to writing, but never being taught to write. Mostly writing was assigned and graded, not taught. I taught myself to write through reading favorite authors.

Garn Press: Do you remember if writing and penmanship were muddled? They often are.

Russ Walsh: I certainly remember long, laborious penmanship exercises in elementary school. I also remember that I was no good at the exercises, which seemed silly to me. To this day my penmanship stinks.

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Garn Press: What about taking tests – can you remember taking them?

Russ Walsh: I have a vivid memory of a second grade intelligence test that had all sorts of pictures on it and you had to answer questions about which hand or foot was being shown. I don’t know why I remember that one so well. Later standardized tests seemed to me to be word puzzles to solve more than anything else and since I was pretty good at word puzzles, I didn’t worry about them much.

Garn Press: Did you have to fill in bubbles on multiple-choice tests?

Russ Walsh: Yes. I remember my biggest worry was not having the right No. 2 pencil or losing my place in the long line of bubbles.

Garn Press: Can you remember if you had other sorts of tests? Short answers? Essays?

Russ Walsh: Short answer and essays were rare in any of the standardized tests I took, or in most of the tests I ever took in school until I got to college.

Garn Press: What advice would you give teachers if they asked you how they could create opportunities for their students to become enthusiastic readers and writers?

- Read aloud to the children daily.

- Give lots of time for self-selected in class reading.

- Listen to children read and engage them in conversation about what they are reading.

- Give lots of time for students to actually write.

- Provide supportive and pointed feedback focusing on the message the child is crafting and de-emphasizing absolute correctness.

- Show the children that you love to read and write, by reading and writing.

VISIT GARNPRESS.COM TO GET THE LATEST NEWS AND EDITORIAL FEATURES ON GARN AUTHORS AND GARN BOOKS.

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AUTHOR MARTIN E. LEE

ABOUT MARTIN E. LEE Martin Lee grew up in New York City. His degrees are in American History and Education. After teaching in New York City and in Arizona, he returned to New York, where, for thirty years, he has been working as a full-time freelance educational writer. He has authored more than fifty books for children and young adults, many of which, like Paul Revere and The Seminoles, reflect his interest in American history. He has been a long-time, avid student of the Civil War period and a regular visitor to Civil War battlefields.

It was during one such visit, when he encountered a pair of ragged, “hard core” re-enactors in threadbare Confederate uniforms, that the idea for Bloody Lane came to him. It is his first novel and first collaboration with Matthew Fleury, his longtime friend, whom he met while attending Binghamton University. Martin lives in Manhattan with his wife, Marcia Miller, and their dog, Gracie.

ABOUT BLOODY LANE Felix Allaben is a haunted man. Haunted by the memory of his wife, gunned down in a mugging gone awry.

Haunted by his responsibilities as a single father of a teenage girl. And, as Bloody Lane opens, haunted by the murder of Curtis Gwynn, an ex-cop whom Allaben had known when both served in the Baltimore Police Department. Gwynn is found dressed in the uniform of a Civil War re-enactor on the hallowed grounds of the Antietam battlefield—shot through the head.

Allaben is a special investigator with the Department of Justice. He has been summoned by a shadowy official in Washington to get to the bottom of the crime. Working in tandem with the local sheriff, Felix weaves his way through a maze of leads, lies, and dead ends in his effort to make sense of this first death and of others that unexpectedly follow. In so doing, he comes up against an armed, active, neo-Confederate hate group operating out of a local gun club and bent on domestic terrorism.

The suspects are many. Among them are an unstable realtor with whom Gwynn was having an affair; her alcoholic, hot-headed husband; their son, a Civil War enthusiast who’s been upset by the unsavory lifestyles of his parents; her brother, a rising politician, and a retired Navy contractor, as well as other members of the aforementioned militia.

Bloody Lane is set in and around Frederick, Maryland, a small city with an intriguing past. The infamous Civil War battle of Antietam, fought nearby, yielded the single bloodiest day in American history. The conclusion is both violent and unsettling.

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PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Bloody Lane Author: Martin E. Lee ISBN: 978-1942146254 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon

INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN E. LEE Marty Lee and Matt Fleury have been friends for more than forty years. Both are writers but this is the first novel that they have written together. Their collaboration has been remarkably successful. Bloody Lane is a literary crime novel that is a heart stopping, five-star, page-turner that will appeal to crime novel aficionados but also readers of historical novels who imagine the possible repercussions of historical events on our lives today.

Following the interview you will find a brief essay by Marty about Bloody Lane.

Garn Press: Do you have a favorite author?

Martin Lee: Bloody Lane is a work of crime fiction. As far as writers of this genre go, I like best those whose books classify as hard-boiled literary efforts. Writers such as Jim Thompson, James Cain, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Perry, Charles Willeford, Colin Dexter, and Lawrence Block come to mind. That said, the refined mysteries of writers such as Dorothy Sayers, P.D. James, and Patricia Highsmith always draw me in.

Garn Press: How do you begin a writing project? Do you keep notebooks?

Martin Lee: I am a note-taker, a scribbler. I always keep a pad at the ready for fear of forgetting an idea or a kernel of one whenever it unexpectedly comes to mind. I also keep notebooks that I fill with rough but more detailed story ideas.

Garn Press: When do you write?

Martin Lee: I try to write when I am at my best – which, for some reason, is either early in the morning or late afternoon. I stop when I see that I’m tiring and spinning my wheels.

Garn Press: What about ideas for books – do they percolate for years before you write, or do you work it out as you write, or perhaps a combination of both?

Martin Lee: Like most writers, I imagine, I’ve ended many a writing day at an impasse, stumped by a problem or problems I’d been unable to solve to my satisfaction. Upon occasion, when I awake in the morning or even when I’m near to dozing off at night, a possible answer emerges. So, yes, I rely on ideas 75

percolating, in the short-term at least.

I don’t put fingers to keys until I have the whole story essentially worked out; I surround the fort, so to speak, breaking down a story into large chunks at first, then sections, chapters, and scenes, until I am confident enough to begin. I do indeed use color-coding as an organization strategy. Then as I write— which I do from outlines I create—I find myself changing my mind, coming up with new ideas, dropping others, making changes as I go. I also find that it’s important, when writing a mystery, to not get ahead of myself, as a mistake early on can be costly.

Garn Press: Do you share your writing while you are still writing or wait until you have a draft?

Martin Lee: I’ll often show what I’ve written, even in the early stages of a work, to my wife as well as to a couple of friends for comments. Then I ignore what they say.

Garn Press: Did you have a favorite author when you were a young child? Did you read book series as a child?

Martin Lee: I recall reading Ian Fleming’s James Bond books as boy and discovering while inhaling them that reading could be way more fun than watching TV. Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of writing at home? Did you like to draw? Did you paint as a child?

Martin Lee: I wrote short stories when I was a boy, like many kids did, I suppose. But I preferred drawing and painting. Yet I never followed up with study and practice as I grew.

My “claim to fame” as a young artist was when a landscape of mine won a NYC-wide contest and was on display at a gallery in Manhattan. My fourth grade class took a field trip to see it. A photo showing me pointing to the painting as my mother, teacher, and classmates looked on appeared in the NY Daily Mirror, a now long-defunct newspaper.

Garn Press asked Marty Lee, “What is Bloody Lane?” Here is Marty’s response: If it were not for the unprecedented flow of blood on the 17th day of September of 1862—23,000 missing, wounded, or killed—most of us would never have heard of Antietam Creek or the hamlet of Sharpsburg, Maryland, by which it flows before emptying into the Potomac.

The slaughter began at first light in a cornfield. Thousands fell in minutes, and the battle of Antietam was underway. By mid-morning, the carnage moved south to where rising pasture land met a sunken farm road. Row upon row of Federal soldiers, two divisions, filled the field and came steadily on, straight for that road. Most were newbies who had never seen battle; all were terrified. None were thinking about freeing slaves or cementing the union; they just didn’t want to die. Awaiting them, behind hastily built breastworks, a division of Confederate troops was hunkered down, ordered to hold that ground at all cost.

Hungry, filthy, shoeless, and ragged, they watched in horror as the fight steadily came their way. Like their counterparts, these battle-hardened veterans were not at that moment defending slavery or states’ rights.

Not at all. Nor were they there to protect their lands, as this murderous fight was not on southern soil.

They, too, were fighting simply to stay alive.

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When the assaulting troops got within about 80 yards of the road, its defenders opened fire. The Federal troops staggered, laid down, came on, fell back, came on again and again. There was no cover. Cannon thundered, musket balls whizzed by, shot and shell rained down and exploded. The noise was continual and deafening, as loud as any of the men had ever heard. Soldiers screamed, howled, cried in desperation, shrieked in terror. Despite the morning’s bright sunshine, rising clouds of dirt and smoke obscured their views. They could scarcely see their foe, but could make out officers’ riderless horses, and could see that the field was being carpeted in blue.

Eventually, the well-positioned but outnumbered Rebels were outflanked and forced to hastily abandon their shelter, which now became a slaughter pen. Those who were able to clambered out, dragging out the wounded, stepping over the dead. They were met in enfilade as they escaped, and were shot to pieces.

Upwards of five thousand men—blue and gray—fell by the sunken farm road before the firing eventually petered out and the fighting on that part of the battlefield abated. The day’s ravenous killing, however, did not end. It just moved further south to where a stone bridge gracefully arched Antietam Creek.

By then, the furrowed path for farm wagons, which on that September day had been a silent witness to unspeakable carnage, had earned the name by which we now know it: Bloody Lane. To experience this hallowed ground today, simply look for the tall, stone watchtower standing vigil above it. Then take a deep breath and walk in.

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AUTHOR MATTHEW C. FLEURY

ABOUT MATTHEW C. FLEURY Matthew Fleury grew up in northern New York State. He attended Binghamton University, where he metMartin Lee, his life-long friend and co-writer of Bloody Lane. After graduating with a degree in English literature, Matthew moved to New York. He started his career in publishing at the Village Voice, then wrote and edited for two filmmaking publications.

As a freelance writer for a literary magazine, Fleury contributed stories, essays, and an interview in Italy with Nobel Laureate Dario Fo, who at the time was barred from the United States. He has also written plays and adapted stories for the theater.

Matthew has enjoyed a career of over 25 years in educational publishing, specializing in English language arts, and has served as Editor in Chief and as Director of Research and Development. He lives with his wife in New York City. Bloody Lane is his first novel.

ABOUT BLOODY LANE Felix Allaben is a haunted man. Haunted by the memory of his wife, gunned down in a mugging gone awry.

Haunted by his responsibilities as a single father of a teenage girl. And, as Bloody Lane opens, haunted by the murder of Curtis Gwynn, an ex-cop whom Allaben had known when both served in the Baltimore Police Department. Gwynn is found dressed in the uniform of a Civil War re-enactor on the hallowed grounds of the Antietam battlefield—shot through the head.

Allaben is a special investigator with the Department of Justice. He has been summoned by a shadowy official in Washington to get to the bottom of the crime. Working in tandem with the local sheriff, Felix weaves his way through a maze of leads, lies, and dead ends in his effort to make sense of this first death and of others that unexpectedly follow. In so doing, he comes up against an armed, active, neo-Confederate hate group operating out of a local gun club and bent on domestic terrorism.

The suspects are many. Among them are an unstable realtor with whom Gwynn was having an affair; her alcoholic, hot-headed husband; their son, a Civil War enthusiast who’s been upset by the unsavory lifestyles of his parents; her brother, a rising politician, and a retired Navy contractor, as well as other members of the aforementioned militia.

Bloody Lane is set in and around Frederick, Maryland, a small city with an intriguing past. The infamous Civil War battle of Antietam, fought nearby, yielded the single bloodiest day in American history. The 78

conclusion is both violent and unsettling.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Bloody Lane Author: Matthew C. Fleury ISBN: 978-1942146254 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon

INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW FLEURY Garn Press: Why Bloody Lane?

Matthew Fleury: When Marty and I first started talking about Bloody Lane (which then had a different working title), I was especially intrigued by the prospect of weaving Civil War history into a contemporary work of fiction, the more so as the passions that so violently stirred the two sides then, North and South, have not only persisted but are often—too often—still on display.

I also have a familial interest in the Civil War. A great-great-grandfather served as an officer in the Union army and was wounded in battle (though not at Antietam).

Garn Press: What writers of crime or mystery novels have influenced you?

Matthew Fleury: I’m a very careful and deliberate reader, which means I have to be pretty choosy about what I read. My tastes are eclectic: canonical literature; modern and contemporary fiction, including a wide range of crime and mystery authors; history and philosophy. I read a lot of periodical literature as well.

Of authors in the crime field and in related genres, Conan Doyle, Edgar Poe, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Georges Simenon, John le Carré come to mind as exemplary story-tellers, prose stylists, and masters of atmosphere and mood. And I like as much as the next fellow the English who-done-its that end with a forensic dissection of a train schedule.

I am in debt to my wife, too, for her discriminating recommendations over the years. It’s thanks to her, for example, that I’ve become acquainted with and thoroughly enjoyed the work of such accomplished, if diverse, practitioners of the art as Rex Stout and Andrea Camilleri.

Garn Press: Do you have a writing routine or habits? How did they effect the composition of Bloody Lane?

Matthew Fleury: My part in bringing Bloody Lane to life meant sitting at my desk every night, whether I felt like it or not, and on weekends; usually I managed to wring out a page or so in a sitting. Or I’d review and comment on material that Marty had drafted. We got together from time to time to compare notes 79

and to work out the story or talk about characters. The writing of Bloody Lane took quite a long time— Marty and I worked on it for years—in part because we were both also making ends meet professionally and in part because the composition was a collaborative, and therefore reiterative, process. Also, I’m an inveterate reviser.

I keep a notebook or write loose notes for each project I’m working on. I usually have at least two in the hopper, and I switch back and forth between them as inspiration or frustration dictates. I’ve trained myself to write directly into Word but invariably print out and mark up a manuscript with hand-written corrections, revisions, rewrites, and notes to self.

Garn Press: Do you have anything in the works?

Matthew Fleury: Yes, I’m now working on a new novel and plotting out a couple more.

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AUTHOR ESTHER SOKOLOV FINE

ABOUT ESTHER SOKOLOV FINE Esther Sokolov Fine is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University, in Toronto, Canada, where she has taught since 1991. Before coming to York, she was an elementary teacher with the Toronto Board of Education. There, she taught in downtown public housing communities and alternative programs, including four years at the Downtown Alternative School (DAS). The book Children as Peacemakers (1995), which she co-authored with teachers Ann Lacey and Joan Baer, presents a history of the Downtown Alternative School and tells about the early years of peacemaking.

Reflecting on her own early life, Esther writes: “The best part of school was when librarian Mrs. Barnes and some of our homeroom teachers read aloud from wonderful books. The worst part was the long walk home from school, crossing the vacant lot by myself on a narrow path that led to Lilac Street.”

Since 1993 Esther has been engaged in video research with the same group of students, teachers and parents. In this research (largely funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada—SSHRC) she and filmmaker Roberta King have watched these children grow up and filmed and interviewed many of them, their families, and their teachers across this 20+ year period. Details and edited film from this work can be seen at www.childrenaspeacemakers.ca. A feature documentary, Life at School: the DAS Tapes, was launched in 2001.

Esther teaches pre-service and graduate courses in creative writing, literacy, adolescent and children’s literature, critical pedagogy, and models (alternative models) of education. She was born in Detroit and attended the University of Michigan where, in 1968, she won a Hopwood Award for fiction. Esther completed her doctoral studies in 1990 at the University of Toronto (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) and her MFA in creative writing in 2003 at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Esther has lived in Toronto since the 1960s. She has an adult daughter, Keira, who possesses outstanding social skills and makes her mother proud and grateful every day.

ABOUT RAISING PEACEMAKERS Raising Peacemakers by Esther Sokolov Fine tells a twenty-two year story of kids growing up with peacemaking as their foundation. At Downtown Alternative School (DAS), a small public elementary school in Toronto, child-to-child conflicts were understood as opportunities. Children and adults worked hard to create a warm inclusive community where differing viewpoints and disagreements could be handled fairly and safely.

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While the book includes documentation and transcripts, it’s a narrative rather than an academic text.

It’s the author’s story and many stories. It’s a trail of re-thinking, negotiating and re-negotiating, solving and re-solving (occasionally resolving) teaching and learning dilemmas. It’s a tale of one school’s brave and optimistic effort to create and sustain healthy, safe, equitable, and academically relevant conditions for and with people whose lives were and are at stake in public education. It’s about children and adults growing together as they discover more about what it means (and what it takes) to become responsible citizens who care about each other, about their community, and about the world.

Between their many inevitable conflicts, encouraged by adults, DAS children established their own rituals. They would double-cross their arms and clasp fingers in a group handshake to mark the conclusion of “a peacemaking.” They would wipe away tears, giggle, move on to other things, or resume their play.

They were learning to express themselves, listen, and include. The adults learned to hold back, hover, and accept what for the children constituted resolution, even when they (the adults) did not always fully get it.

The DAS community was dedicated to the serious work, and to the joy, of respectful relationships and power sharing. This book invites you to step back more than twenty years to learn about how this began and what keeps it alive to this day.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Raising Peacemakers Author: Esther Sokolov Fine ISBN: 978-1-942146-12-4 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon

INTERVIEW WITH ESTHER SOKOLOV FINE ON EARLY READING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of words and books?

Esther Sokolov Fine: I spent many hours of my early life bound by the gray-blue walls of our modest Detroit house. Scattered on the living room rug were library books and a few treasured first editions that belonged to me; some I still have. My nostrils would widen with expectation when I cracked open their spines. Even now, I can almost catch the fresh aroma that filled the air. Luscious words seeped into my brain and leapt to my tongue. The oldest texts may have lost their newness but not their zest.

Garn Press: Did you have a favorite author when you were a young child?

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Esther Sokolov Fine: Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem My Shadow still follows me. Wanda Gag’s The Funny Thing and Nothing at All have stayed with me. Marjorie Flack’s Walter the Lazy Mouse gave me existential questions that I still ponder, while A. A. Milne continues to tease me with rhyme, with rhythm, with notions of rebellion and liberty. I enjoy the challenges of social struggle and negotiation. I adore the poetry of teaching and learning. I relish spaces in between genres and worlds, where multiple possibilities intersect and spark imagination.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first books?

Esther Sokolov Fine: Milne’s poem Halfway Down with its drawing of a child sitting mid-staircase uttering the final four lines of the poem, got me to thinking at an early age.

It isn’t really Anywhere!

It’s somewhere else Instead!

This deceptively simple poem from Milne’s collection, When We Were Very Young (1925), was the head of my trail of imagination to the outside world. As a young child, I counted the stairs in our home on Lilac Street, counted them carefully, so that I could sit at the halfway place and be fully and completely elsewhere. It wasn’t I who disliked the house on Lilac; it was my mother. It wasn’t the house I wanted to escape; it was other things, the tension, the silences, the noises. It was from that stair, that halfway place that I first began to consider my life, contemplate my options, and strategize next steps. “Come down,” my mother would say, “It’s time for lunch.”

“I can’t,” was my answer, “I’m not here.”

“Where are you?” she would call.

“I’m somewhere else.”

ON EARLY WRITING/DRAWING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: Do you have memories of learning to write an essay, a story, or a poem?

Esther Sokolov Fine: I entered a poetry competition when I was in about the 4th grade. I entered because my “almost cousin” Judy had entered the same competition, and I thought (for the very first time) why not write a poem. I didn’t win, but it got me started. To this day, writing poetry helps me synthesize and understand some of the more complex material of life. It helps me get started.

Garn Press: Did you like to draw? Did you paint as a child?

Esther Sokolov Fine: Failure, humiliation, punishment by the art teacher – 4th or 5th grade - who banished me from the art room for trying to draw a picture of her, which she saw as mockery and I saw as trying to draw a portrait. Sad. She was paranoid. I was not an artist. A double failure, I guess.

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ON TESTING EXPERIENCES IN SCHOOL Garn Press: What about taking tests – can you remember taking them?

Esther Sokolov Fine: Tests were never beneficial for me. They were timed, and I always found alternative ways of interpreting the questions. If I tried to talk about my thoughts during the test or ask a question – do they mean this? Or this? Or this? Time would be up. Tests work for certain kids. Certainly not for all. They do not help adults understand children’s thinking or appreciate what and how they learn. Tests are probably more “effective” with those fast superficial readers I spoke of earlier. What do they actually measure? I think they measure the value systems of the cultures that design, fund, mandate, grade, and use them to stratify a population.

ON AUTHORS AND THEIR BOOKS Garn Press: Do you have a favorite author?

Esther Sokolov Fine: Four favorite writers whose prose techniques woven into story have had a strong influence on me: Henry James, E. B. White, Alice Munro, Carolyn Coman – and of course many others.

Garn Press: If you could express one thought to all your readers what would it be?

Esther Sokolov Fine: One thought for readers: Slow down and read more than the story line. Notice the technique of the writer and how it resonates with the content. I think that many people mistake reading quickly as accomplishment and impose that view on children, to their detriment.

ON WRITING AS PART OF DAILY LIFE Garn Press: What does it mean to be a writer in troubled times?

Esther Sokolov Fine: I think my writing is often connected to present day events. Things occur. The morning, the noon, the evening, the night. In each moment there are infinite whispers from the past that intersect with the present to trigger memories and inspire narrative and dialogue – what was said, what might have been said, what could still be said. My head is always writing Garn Press: When do you write? Do you have a routine?

Esther Sokolov Fine: Often, my best writing happens early in the morning, on those rare and special occasions when I awaken from a dream with a finished idea for a piece in my head.

Garn Press: Do you mix up writing instruments? (Oliver Sacks never wrote on a computer. He started with hand written notes and wrote on a typewriter.)

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Esther Sokolov Fine: I write it fast on the computer to get it all down, and then I spend many hours editing to shape and refine and re-think what it is that my dream is trying to tell me to try to write for myself and others.

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AUTHOR RUTH FINNEGAN

ABOUT RUTH FINNEGAN Ruth Finnegan, OBE, author of Black Inked Pearl: A Girl’s Quest, is a renowned scholar and celebrated writer who is Emeritus Professor, the Open University, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College Oxford. She was born and reared in Ulster and sent to a Quaker school filled with biblical texts and music, which are reflected in the novel. First-class Oxford degrees in classics and philosophy were followed by African fieldwork, which Ruth describes as “totally inspiring for my life and work.” She returned to Oxford for a doctorate in anthropology before university teaching in Africa and briefly in Fiji, and finally the Open University in the U.K. She has three wonderful daughters and five grandchildren, and she lives with her husband and two cairn terriers in Old Bletchley, Buckinghamshire.

ABOUT BLACK INKED PEARL: A GIRL’S QUEST An epic romance about the naive Irish girl Kate and her mysterious lover, whom she rejects in panic and then spends her life seeking. After the opening rejection, Kate recalls her Irish upbringing, her convent education, and her coolly-controlled professional success, before her tsunami-like realisation beside an African river of the emotions she had concealed from herself and that she passionately and consumingly loved the man she had rejected.

Searching for him she visits the kingdom of beasts, a London restaurant, an old people’s home, back to the misty Donegal Sea, the heavenly archives, Eden, and hell, where at agonising cost she saves her dying love. They walk together toward heaven, but at the gates he walks past leaving her behind in the dust. The gates close behind him. He in turn searches for her and at last finds her in the dust, but to his fury (and renewed hurt) he is not ecstatically recognised and thanked. And the gates are still shut.

On a secret back way to heaven guided by a little beetle, Kate repeatedly saves her still scornful love, but at the very last, despite Kate’s fatal inability with numbers and through an ultimate sacrifice, he saves her from the precipice and they reach heaven. Kate finally realises that although her quest for her love was not vain, in the end she had to find herself – the unexpected pearl.

The novel, born in dreams, is interlaced with the ambiguity between this world and another, and increasingly becomes more poetic, riddling and dreamlike as the story unfolds. The epilogue alludes to the key themes of the novel – the eternity of love and the ambiguity between dream and reality.

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PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Black Inked Pearl: A Girl’s Quest Author: Ruth Finnegan ISBN: 978-1942146179 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon

INTERVIEW WITH RUTH FINNEGAN Garn Press: Do you have a favorite author?

Ruth Finnegan: Rumi, only recently discovered, can you believe! Blake and Homer, forever.

Garn Press: Is there one author who has influenced your writing more than any others?

Ruth Finnegan: Homer and the Bible, through the biblical texts I had to learn and recite aloud at my Quaker school. Also African story telling, oral, like Homer again.

Garn Press: Do you think the relationships between authors and readers are changing?

Ruth Finnegan: Yes in some ways. Electronic versions and even more open access, with more opportunity for reader feedback and revision, with the result that the famous-infamous self-regarding and vastly over-rated ‘peer review process’ is transferred from before publication to after it, and more effective too.

Still love the multi sensory and enduring qualities, and the poetries and insights, of books.

Garn Press: If you could express one thought to all your readers what would it be?

Ruth Finnegan: The love that unavoidably comes through greater understanding and from the precious awareness of ignorance, and from Aeschylus – to ‘pathei mathein’ – that is, learning through experience and suffering.

WRITING AS PART OF DAILY LIFE Garn Press: When do you write? Do you have a routine?

Ruth Finnegan: For academic books, daytime usually, nowadays on computer. But Black Inked Pearl arrived in dreams. First, as single visual tableaux, then half-waking as words gathering round the edges of my mind or falling like select stars into it. Then written as – mostly speech-style – text and as if from dictation, on the next day, or as soon as I could - after which I totally forgot all but the broad outlines.

Apart from some minor fiddling it all happened in 6 weeks, a chapter a night. Yes, I know - impossible, 87

but it happened.

Garn Press: Do you listen to music when you write?

Ruth Finnegan: The nighttime dreams and visions of my novel were often steeped in music – the deepest, I think, most heavenly and most eternal of human arts and experiences.

Garn Press: What about ideas for books – do they percolate for years before you write, or do you work it out as your write, or perhaps a combination of both?

Ruth Finnegan: Academic books – years. Novel – 6 weeks – except it is of and from my whole experience.

I am 81.

Garn Press: What does it mean to be a writer in troubled times?

Ruth Finnegan: Dunno – just get on with it as best I can or as I am inspired, among other things by my parents’ brave attempts at reconciling across the fateful divisions, and their subsequent exile, in the troubled years of Northern Ireland in the last century. ‘Troubled times’ are not just ‘now’!

Garn Press: What worries you about today?

Ruth Finnegan: Oh lots! Not to mention – self-regarding ever – my arthritic knees! But mostly I see the precious seeds of idealistic youth. It is still so now as in the past – young men, women too, with visions, and the old with our dreams and our enduring loves. Is not the created world an ‘ever-pearl’ to be cherished and worshipped?

Garn Press: If you wrote a book about the future -- the way you imagine it will be -- what kind of book would you write?

Ruth Finnegan: Heaven perhaps - but it is already there, in the searched into pearl of my garnered novel.

EARLY READING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: Do you remember your first books?

Ruth Finnegan: Yes at age 7 – my mother, wise, refused to let me read before that – some totally unmemorable primers, then Homer, Homer, Homer, starting with Odysseus and the Cyclops, Odyssey Book 9, in Victorian old-fashioned bible-like language – wonderful! Then Lady Gregory’s rather similar versions of Irish myths, with me all my life. Later in Homer’s Greek, then, irresistibly, how could I help it in periods of emotion, what are similes for? – in Black Inked Pearl.

Garn Press: Did you read book series as a child?

Ruth Finnegan: Yes all the Walter Scott novels – I still treasure my father’s leather-bound India paper collection – between ages about 11 and 13 – my school was flummoxed!

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Garn Press: Did you like to draw?

Ruth Finnegan: No - useless, still am Garn Press: Can you remember being taught to write at school?

Ruth Finnegan: Yes, the beautiful Irish script with pen-dipped in inkwell at my little Donegal, school – magic!

Garn Press: What advice would you give teachers if they asked you how they could create opportunities for their students to become enthusiastic readers and writers?

Ruth Finnegan: Listen! Listen! Listen! No kidding. It is in and through the sound of words that they find their existence, their soul. And listen again! And above all, listen to the silences of language – that is the heaven that is among us.

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AUTHOR RICK MEYER

ABOUT RICK MEYER Rick Meyer has been a writer for as long as he can remember. He loves to play with language in ways that inspire readers to consider ideas that he thinks are neglected. Rick typically does this through his teaching at the University of New Mexico or in the professional articles and books that he writes.

But in his novels and poetry, he challenges readers to notice the subtle everyday things that we often take for granted. He writes about the flabby part of his teacher’s arm that extends from her elbow to her shoulder and is amazed at the way it wobbles as she writes on the board. Or the aroma of rice cooking with tomato paste, which can serve as an alarm for a pending dinner of doom that has the taste of every leftover from the refrigerator.

Woven through those subtleties, he brings to light the difficult parts of being a boy, such as dealing with a bully, convincing a friend not to murder a beautiful fish, and understanding the complicated relationship between a boy and his father.

ABOUT FLUSH: THE EXAGGERATED MEMOIR OF A FOURTH GRADE SCAREDY-CAT SUPER-HERO When fourth grade ends, Ricky is on his own for the summer because his parents have jobs and his sisters are, well, they’re sisters so he’s not interested in them. The summer begins on a high note as he begins gathering items left at people’s curbsides, things like lawn mowers, baby strollers, old lamps, and appliances.

His plans to build a vehicle go well, and then he starts building a robot. But his plans are interrupted as he rides around the neighborhood one morning and gets jumped by Mike. Mike beats up Ricky, leaving him bloody and his bike in ruins. Fearing his father’s reaction to the wrecked bike and his mother’s reaction to his torn and bloody clothing, Ricky hides both and secretly works on repairing his bike.

His relationship with his father is confusing for Ricky as he tries to please him but just cannot seem to do so. Ricky’s father is equally confused by their relationship. The summer meanders through other adventures, including a recurring nightmare in which Ricky, a skinny kid, is flushed down the toilet. Catastrophe follows disaster as Ricky works to keep his summer secrets from his parents, fearing they will get a babysitter to keep watch over him if they know some of the many things that have been going on.

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PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Flush: The Exaggerated Memoir of a Fourth Grade Scaredy-Cat Super-Hero Author: Rick Meyer ISBN: 978-1942146391 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon (available for Kindle Unlimited Reading)

INTERVIEW WITH RICK MEYER Rick Meyer is a celebrated scholar and a well-known social justice activist who has devoted his life to the support of teachers and children. He is also a much-loved teacher, but many might not know that he is also a great storyteller.

If this is news to you or if you are already a fan of Rick’s storytelling, Flush: The Exaggerated Memoir of a Fourth Grade Scaredy-Cat Super-Hero, is bound to be at the top of your summer reading list. Flush is one of those wonderful books that can be enjoyed at any age. Fourth graders will love it and so will their parents and grandparents.

Rick’s voice rings true – Flush is great storytelling written down – honest, without affectation, it is a simple tale brilliantly written. Here’s the scoop: When fourth grade ends, Ricky is on his own for the summer because his parents have jobs and his sisters are sisters so he’s not interested in them. The summer begins on a high note as he rides his bike on adventures that include gathering old lawn mowers, baby strollers, lamps, appliances, and other things left by the side of the road.

Summer joy changes to a roller coaster ride of catastrophes and disasters when he is beaten up and his bike is destroyed not once, but twice. The summer meanders through other adventures, including a recurring nightmare in which Ricky is flushed down the toilet. Catastrophe follows disaster as Ricky works to keep his summer secrets from his parents, fearing they will get a babysitter to keep watch over him if they know some of the many things that have been going on.

AUTHORS AND THEIR BOOKS Garn Press: Do you have a favorite author?

Rick Meyer: When I was growing up, reading served two purposes. First, I did it in school in order to answer the never-ending stream of teachers’ questions about what was in a book. I found myself wanting to say, ‘You’ve got a copy of the book. Why don’t you just find the answer yourself.’

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The other purpose was studying Jewish history, at first once a week in Sunday school, but then three times a week that involved walking to the temple two days a week after school and going to Sunday school as well. The weekdays were for Hebrew lessons, but there was a lot of history to study, too -- over 5000 years’ worth.

This all taught me to hate reading until I found Stan Lee and other comic book writers. That’s probably why I’m drawn to current-day graphic novels, although when I was a kid, graphic novels were graphic in ways that made us KNOW that our parents could never see that we were reading them.

All that changed when I became a second grade teacher and a librarian at our school told me to read to my students. When she gave me Charlotte’s Web, my life changed. I hadn’t read it before and this was long before there was a movie version.

That book engaged my students and me as we questioned so many things about it. I was teaching in a rural farming community and the kids knew a lot more about the book that I did. They knew the smell of a rotten goose egg. They knew about spider webs in barns and how rats were selfish survivors and connivers. Every important lesson (or at least many of them) in life is in Charlotte’s Web. Friendship, family, dedication, hope, possibility, survival, generations, doubt, and more are themes that saturate the pages of that book. I decided that EB White was a genius and that book remains a favorite. I read it once a year.

All these years later, I find myself reading Chaim Potok and Elie Wiesel because I resonate with the wisdom in their works. When my father died, I found a book of short stories by Sholem Aleichem in a bookcase that my dad made. I found the stories comforting during this intense time and believe that sometimes, I need to read a Jewish author. Their way of seeing the world is comforting because they help me feel less alone. I can hear their voices as I read.

Garn Press: Is there one author who has influenced your writing more than any others?

Rick Meyer: No. Isn’t that odd? I’ve always felt the author within me quite strongly. I found myself narrating different stories for my own life at a very young age. We’d drive home from my Aunt Sadie’s house along Grand Central Parkway in New York, and I’d watch the trees go by and think about living in the woods and growing my own food. When we went to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, I imagined myself in the future quite differently as I visited different exhibits there.

I think I had an author’s voice early in life, but school squished that in so many painful ways. It wasn’t until graduate school at the University of Arizona that I felt myself reading to think and thinking to read and then using all of that to be a writer, but it turned out that those experiences led to my scholarly voice more than the one I use in novels and poetry. Every poet I see perform influences me by saying to me, ‘You can push yourself in so many ways. Just be honest and you’ll find what you’re looking for in your writing.’

Garn Press: Do you think the relationships between authors and readers are changing?

Rick Meyer: Yes because authorship is changing so radically, which ultimately influences readers. Bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers, and all those other forms of social media are changing the landscape of what it means to compose. Everyone gets their voice out there and others are curious to read what they wrote.

So many students who say they are not readers or writers are so busy writing and reading in new media, 92

but also dismissing that as ‘not really reading and writing.’ It is.

And so the relationships are changing between readers and writers and more writers are reading and more readers are writing. It’s a busy literacy time that we’re in. Personally, I don’t care very much that you may have had Rice Krispies for breakfast, but knowing that you’re writing about it and sharing it sort of tickles me as a writer. You say you’re not a writer, but you’re so busy composing you don’t want to do your homework!

What, then, is truly good writing and truly important reading? I’m not sure, but it’s changing all the time.

Consider the amazing reading and writing that took place during Occupy Wall Street or the Egyptian Spring uprisings. These were intensely literate moments. Let’s hope that these new uses of reading and writing to challenge and interrogate the status quo continue.

Garn Press: Have you noticed any difference in your own relationships with your readers?

Rick Meyer: No one reads anything that I write so that’s difficult to answer -- OK, just kidding a bit. My mom read everything that I wrote and I’m sad that she’s not around to read my first novel that is getting published.

Some of my graduate students read my scholarly work. But what can I say about that relationship? To my face, they love my work, of course. I wonder what they say about me on Facebook?

Garn Press: If you could express one thought to all your readers what would it be?

Rick Meyer: One of my teachers was Jiddu Krishnamurti. I went to hear him speak at the Town Hall in New York City once. At the end of an inspiring talk, one of the members of the audience asked, “Can you explain, please, why some of what you said is not consistent with what is in your books?” Krishnamurti replied, “Don’t read my books. Go and write your own books.” People laughed, of course, but this is an important lesson from a master. He wanted us to find ourselves, write our stories, and lead better lives through our own narratives.

Interestingly, though, his books were for sale in the lobby. As I left that night and saw people buying them, I wanted to say, “Hey, listen to the master. Don’t buy his books.” But then I thought that perhaps he needed that money to get by and to be able to get to New York and other places to speak.

He wanted his thoughts out there and his thoughts were organic. That was his message. Thoughts change and that’s a good thing. A book captures thinking for and at a moment in time. Don’t get stuck there, because the author surely didn’t.

WRITING AS PART OF DAILY LIFE Garn Press: When do you write? Do you have a routine?

Rick Meyer: Could I, would I in a house? On a plane? On a rock? Would I could I with pen? Or a mac?

Or PC? 93

I’m one of those people that other people hate because I love to write. My job gets in the way of that.

Sometimes my family does -- but they make me see that’s a good thing.

I write whenever I can. I love to write on yellow pads because there’s less glare. I love a pen that’s comfortable to hold and doesn’t scratch at the page.

When I am into writing, I do it as much as I can. On a break between meetings. At night after dinner. I have a small flashlight next to my bed and a pen and paper. If I get an idea in the middle of the night, I put the flashlight in my mouth and shine it on the pad and write the idea.

I lose ideas if I don’t write them down -- in that sense, I have paper brains. Ideas that are well crafted don’t stay in my head so I have to write them down. Then I usually realize they’re not that well crafted and I revise.

You’ll hate this -- I love revision. I love to sit with a piece and massage it with different phrasing, words, sequences, points of view and more. This is my idea of fun. I know, it’s pathetic but it is true.

Garn Press: How do you begin a writing project?

Rick Meyer: I don’t. The project begins me. I was walking to the track where I work out one morning and I crossed a footbridge that goes over an arroyo, which is a stream that’s dry unless it rains. I’d crossed it hundreds of times in all the years I’ve lived in Albuquerque. But on that particular day, I imagined/saw a murder under the bridge. I got home and could not stop writing about it.

I wrote about that murder and everything that led up to and everything that happened after it for onemonth straight, every night, for three hours. I’d come home from work, eat, and then write. Before I knew it, it was time to go to bed. I used that flashlight and pad and pen a lot during that time. When it was all done, I thought it was simplistic and too predictable.

I haven’t done anything with it. But I had to write it. It found me and I owed it to…someone or something to get it down.

Also, I hate when people say what I just wrote. It makes it seem like writing is this special connection to some aetheric place and some people are connected and others are not. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that the flash of inspiration is something that comes and then I decide – write or don’t write. I’ve lost many pieces, both scholarly and more artsy, by enjoying the flash of inspiration and doing nothing about it. Shame on me, right? I know.

Garn Press: Do you keep notebooks? Use special paper?

Rick Meyer: I have poetry and short pieces I’ve written from high school. They’re awful.

When I began to write seriously as a scholar and now as more of an artist, I already had my first mac. I’ll start on yellow paper, but I can’t read my own writing too often. I also like that I can close my eyes and write on the computer. I haven’t moved into the voice to text programs yet and probably won’t. I like that it’s so quiet outside of my head when I’m so noisily writing inside and on the screen.

Garn Press: Do you listen to music when you write?

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Rick Meyer: No. I love quiet and solitude. That’s why I love that my wife has so many friends. She can go out with them while I write. Hmmm, now that I’ve written that I wonder if I should worry. Anyway, it’s so noisy in my mind when I write that music would distract me. I’d want to get up and lip sync or dance along.

Garn Press: Do you share your writing while you are still writing or wait until you have a draft?

Rick Meyer: All of my writing is a draft. It’s still a draft when it’s written. These responses are a draft.

Anyone reading them may tell me what they think and then I’ll probably want to change something to make it more clear or to disagree with myself. Mostly, when I ask someone to read a draft, I feel as though I’m asking them for their left kidney. It seems like a huge demand to make of someone. And, they have to know how to respond to a draft. That’s really difficult for most people to do.

Honesty isn’t easy and knowing how to respond to a piece isn’t easy either. Many people want to tell their own stories as response; they answer my story or piece with one of their own. I want to tell them, ‘Hey, go write it for yourself then. We’re talking about me, here, not you.’ So I really need a therapist as a first reader, I suppose. They’re paid to focus on me.

But then there’s Hanna -- my best friend who I’ve known since fourth grade. She lives in North Carolina and is supportive and loves me and knows my history so she knows how to respond with sensitivity, care, and honest. Brutal honesty, when I need it. That’s a true friend and a great draft reader. I never feel like I’m imposing a burden on her when I ask her to read. And she’s brilliant, in all meanings of the word.

That makes sending her a draft momentous because it’s so serious. I don’t want to send her something half-baked unless I am stuck. She helps me get unstuck.

With any reader who’s willing to read my draft, I must remember this -- and I hope others will heed this advice -- a reader only gets one virgin read. A virgin read is the first; it’s the first time the reader reads it, and that only happens once. After that, they know the other versions they’ve read and that influences their thinking.

Take the virgin read and reader seriously. I even tell my doctoral students when they submit a paper or dissertation for me to read, “Are you sure? You only get one virgin read. Is it really ready?” Don’t take virgin reads for granted. They make all the difference, especially if you’re lucky enough to have someone willing to read subsequent drafts.

Garn Press: How does your “day job” as an academic influence your writing?

Rick Meyer: It’s my writing. So is my artistic writing. I love to write academic pieces and doing the research that distills into those pieces. That said, sometimes my day job just gets in the way of the writing I want to do. I want the solitude in which to think, question, push, and so much more.

Garn Press: What about ideas for books? Do they percolate for years before you write, or do you work it out as your write, or perhaps a combination of both?

Rick Meyer: Once I start a piece, like Flush, it may percolate for years.

I wrote different parts at different times. Lillie’s poop was really Lillie’s shit -- a story about my mom’s cooking that I’ve been massaging in writers workshops for years. I was the director of a site of the National 95

Writing Project, so I had seven summers and the years in between to write about mom’s cooking. I love that I had so many audiences to read and share it with. I watched their reactions, made changes, moved things around -- and it was only a few pages long. But it was so much fun to move it from half to full baked with different groups of aspiring writers and teachers.

Garn Press: What book or chapter of a book are you most proud of writing?

Rick Meyer: There are three. Kathy Whitmore and I have co-edited three Reclaiming books. They focus on reading, writing, and early childhood literacies. The final chapters of each of those books are really powerful and we worked collaborative to craft them. We discovered the importance of joy, of listening, and of finding essential and true literacy learning spaces in those books. Get the books. The final chapters are worth the price of admission.

THE ROLE OF THE WRITER IN SOCIETY Garn Press: What does it mean to be a writer in troubled times?

Rick Meyer: Most writers are troubled. We probably contribute to times being troubled, as we should.

Because if we didn’t, how would things be questioned?

We owe it to our planet and its inhabitants to generate, name, and address trouble. We are part of the force that strives to advance consciousness -- that’s our moral and ethical duty. That includes consciousness about what we’re doing, what others are doing, and how we influence one another.

We’re increasingly objects of large corporations and we seem to exist to serve them. Our HMOs, large box stores, education corporations, and more work daily to limit our choices.

We are becoming a corporate feudal society and it terrifies me. We’re losing the diversities that sustain us, just as hybrids in nature have a better chance of survival.

These are the things that worry me and keep me up at night. The search for hope and possibilities must remain central in these times and that’s why some youth are so inspiring to me. They’re talking back and taking back in many ways, artistically, politically, economically, and more.

Garn Press: How is your writing connected to present day events?

Rick Meyer: Both my scholarly work and the creative work in which I engage are composed to name, unmask, expose, challenge, interrogate, and activate -- so that we keep our individual and unique senses of agency as we work to act upon the world.

Garn Press: If you wrote a book about the future -- the way you imagine it will be -- what kind of book would you write?

Rick Meyer: It would probably have to be a fantasy in which everyone listens to me!

Joking aside, my greatest fear is that we are heading for moments of intense and revolutionary change that 96

could lead to the destruction of life, as we know it.

I’d like to write something about what happens after that moment that doesn’t resonate with the Terminator movies in which the machines have risen up and are working to blot out all living human beings.

The scary premise of the movie is that humans are like a virus that will consume the body -- in this case, the planet -- so the machines rise up once they’ve achieved consciousness. The machines figured out that we are the problem.

It’s that old Pogo cartoon, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” We have a lot of self-reflection to engage in to face that we’re our enemy and to respond to that with infinite love and care and dedication to each other. Like I said, it’s a fantasy.

EARLY READING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of words?

Rick Meyer: I remember hearing, “NO!” a lot. I was kind of a daredevil, including such things as putting a towel around my neck so it looked like a cape and believing that I could fly off the kitchen table. When I regained consciousness, I remember my mother saying, “Don’t ever do that again.” I guess that meant not to try it off the roof of the garage, too.

My family was loud so I remember volume more than content. There were always arguments about everything: politics, religion, fertilizer for the grass, best route to take to someone’s home, and the list goes on and on. We argued about everything. My sisters and I still do. But it’s not fights, it’s arguments. We do love each other; and we did when we were younger. It’s just that the other person was always wrong and had to be told that. My parents modeled that very well, but they also held hands when they went grocery shopping.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first books?

Rick Meyer: I still have them. Three of those Golden Books with the gold and black tape along the edge and one called The Rabbit Brothers. The Rabbit Brothers is about two rabbits, both white. One loves everyone; the other hates black rabbits. It was published in 1947 and the issue of racism is loud and clear in it.

My mom always talked with us about issues of race, religion, gender, war, workers’ rights and more as she pushed us to interrogate the world for the justice to which she thought everyone was entitled.

She sent me from New York to my first rally in Washington DC when I was 14 years old. Alone. On a train.

Once I arrived in DC, I had directions to the park across from the White House.

Books were, for me, about issues that needed to be addressed. Even the Golden Book about the circus, which was simply a circus story, had issues worthy of concern, including should we even have such a thing as a circus? How fair was it to animals?

Garn Press: What about your earliest memories of someone reading to you?

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Rick Meyer: On those wonderful and rare occasions, my mom took our four books and piled my sisters and me into her lap and read to us. Then she’d switch to singing songs, then songs in Hebrew, then prayers, and as one of us fell asleep, she’d take that one to bed and continue with the other two. My older sister always made it to bed last. She was the most stubborn of us. I’m not sure she liked the singing, but she liked to stay up late.

When my mother died, my younger sister inherited that rocking chair. It’s still in her house. I can’t believe how small it looks and that we all fit into it. It still makes me smile when I sit it in.

Garn Press: Was there a moment when you first knew you could read?

Rick Meyer: There was a moment when I first knew I couldn’t. Mrs. M-, my second grade teacher, had a big meeting with my parents. They never went to school unless summoned and Mrs. M- had done just that.

She said I wasn’t paying attention and wasn’t learning to read and gave me a book to read at home. It was the same basal reader we used at school and it had awful stories about families and the dad always wore a suit, something my father did only twice a year during the High Holy Days. I hated the stories, found them dull and ridiculous, and rarely followed as I was supposed to. I then had to read them twice, once at home in preparation for school the next day, and then at school in my reading group. I was in the lowest group. My mother stressed a lot about this and asked me if I wanted to get into a good college. Pressure!

Garn Press: What did you like about reading?

Rick Meyer: I like when: I choose the piece, I have time to read, I can savor all the parts I want to savor, I can reread parts, I can study the text and really get to know it, and I can talk to someone about it. I don’t have enough time to do any of that and it makes me deeply sad. I mean, what am I waiting for? I’m old.

I better get back to doing that now, before…well…

Garn Press: What did you dislike about reading?

Rick Meyer: When I can’t do it the way I just said.

Garn Press: Did you have a favorite author when you were a young child?

Rick Meyer: Who wrote Mad Magazine? I loved Alfred E. Neuman -- I just googled how to spell that. I always thought it was Newman, like a New Man. I loved the irreverence and the in-your-face attitude.

Garn Press: Did you read book series as a child?

Rick Meyer: Does Mad Magazine count as a series? They came out pretty regularly.

Garn Press: Can you remember doing research for a project in school?

Rick Meyer: Read my book. The part about Georgia and Alabama is true. How sad that I reported on cotton and goobers but not on civil rights. Pathetic.

Garn Press: Did you study for exams -- if so how?

Rick Meyer: I was obsessive. I’d write notes, memorize, recite, write essays, look things up, and still get 98

a B-. No one ever told me about the importance of meaning. I was just trying to memorize. Even now I don’t know the dates of the War of 1812. I just can’t remember it.

EARLY WRITING/DRAWING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of writing at home?

Rick Meyer: I wrote many letters to get stuff for free. I did homework. For a while, I wrote about scientific experiments I was doing in the basement. I kept track of all the things I mixed together and what happened. Nothing happened. It got boring so I stopped.

Garn Press: Did you like to draw?

Rick Meyer: Nope. But I married an artist. Does that count?

Garn Press: Did you paint as a child?

Rick Meyer: Sure. The garage door -- with stripes. The kitchen cabinets. A few bedrooms. Those were chores during the summer when other kids were off at camp.

Garn Press: Do you still have any of your early writing, drawings, or paintings?

Rick Meyer: No but I have everything my younger daughter wrote from her first piece of writing through the end of second grade. Every single piece.

I neglected to save my older daughter’s work, but didn’t repeat that mistake. That incredible data set became the topic of my dissertation and I compared her school writing to what she wrote at home. It remains the longest dissertation ever written at the University of Arizona at almost 700 pages. It had to be bound in two volumes!

I loved writing that and my daughter was a collaborator on the work. I’d interview her and she was such a great informant. You can read parts of it in a book called Stories from the Heart, in which I write about the importance of writing to, from, and for your passions.

Garn Press: Can you remember being taught to write at school?

Rick Meyer: That’s in Flush, too. Rows of letters. Rows and rows. And then a word or two. Until 12th grade when Mark Letterway, an amazing high school teacher, told us the truth about why people write and encouraged us to live the lives of writers. Some of us did. I did.

He was so supportive and accepting. He even had us use magazines to compose visual texts and that was in 1968! He let me be goofy; I cut out pictures of people and replaced their heads with vegetables and fruit. He worked so hard to find meaning in the work and I ultimately just told him the truth, “I think these people look better with fruit and vegetable heads.” He was disappointed, but didn’t give up on me.

When we got to the poetry unit, I flourished and he loved seeing that happen. He was a great teacher. I 99

hope he’s still alive and not senile. If you’re reading this, Mark, you’re the man! I love what you did for me and appreciate it.

Garn Press: What about taking tests – can you remember taking them?

Rick Meyer: Remember all that studying I did? I’d get to class and hear my pulse in my ears, need to pee, be afraid to ask to leave the room, and do lousy. Math, English, Chemistry, etc., it didn’t matter. I panicked at all of them.

Garn Press: Did you have to fill in bubbles on multiple-choice tests?

Rick Meyer: Yes. Still panicked. Still did lousy.

Garn Press: Can you remember if you had other sorts of tests? Short answers? Essays?

Rick Meyer: All these questions are feeling like a test! So, now, as an adult, I’ve learned to respond by saying it’s ok for me to say, “We’re done here.” So, “We’re done here,” except for the little bit more, below, because it’s so important.

Garn Press: What advice would you give teachers if they asked you how they could create opportunities for their students to become enthusiastic readers and writers?

Rick Meyer: Write yourself. Live the life of a real writer. That’ll flip your instructional world upside down.

VISIT GARNPRESS.COM TO GET THE LATEST NEWS AND EDITORIAL FEATURES ON GARN AUTHORS AND GARN BOOKS.

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ILLUSTRATOR RACHEL BACKSHALL

ABOUT RACHEL BACKSHALL Rachel Backshall, BA Oxon, is a UK artist and illustrator recently graduated from Oxford University. She has exhibited her highly acclaimed silk paintings in London, Oxford and Liverpool – many of which are inspired by her research into specific archaeological sites during her degree.

Her illustrations are inspired by the natural world and focus in particular on the wild and wonderful animals that appear both in reality, and in children’s imaginations. She is particularly interested in the concept of imaginative play, looking at the way children visualise and develop games and stories. Acknowledging that human imagination plays such a vital part to all stages of our lives, Rachel hopes to capture some of these moments within her illustrations, and in particular to relate to the magical way that children bring their toys and games to life.

Rachel has recently illustrated the prize winning Pearl of the Seas and Kris and Kate Build a Boat – The Magical Adventure for Garn Press author Ruth Finnegan, and has since been extremely honoured to work with Denny Taylor on Toodle-oo Ruby Blue as part of the Ruby Blue Series. She is currently working with both authors on future projects.

ABOUT TOODLE-OO RUBY BLUE! Toodle-oo is a touching story about two little girls – Ruby Blue and Lilly Wu – saying goodbye to each other.

Part poem, part song – the words rhyme as Ruby Blue and Lilly Wu remember playing together: Toodle-oo Ruby Blue!

I had fun playing with you.

I was really worried when I saw your tiger – But it was very funny when you tried to hide her!

In the vibrant illustrations the tiger is a small soft toy that grows to be a larger than life real tiger, which almost leaps from the page in Rachel Backshall’s brilliant illustrations.

Destined to be a beloved classic, Toodle-oo is highly predictable and easy to read. Both children and adults already love it.

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NOMINATIONS Nominated: “Most Distinguished American Picture Book for Children” – 2018 Randolph Caldecott Medal Nominated: “Most Distinguished Contribution to American Literature for Children” – 2018 John Newbery Medal

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Toodle-oo Ruby Blue!

Author: Rachel Backshall ISBN: 978-1942146612 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon (available for Kindle Unlimited Reading)

INTERVIEW WITH RACHEL BACKSHALL Rachel Backshall is the totally brilliant archaeologist and artist who illustrated Toodle-oo Ruby Blue. At Garn Press we are unabashed fans of Rachel’s art and we are totally convinced that she will be as well known as Beatrix Potter one day. Best of all Rachel is always kind and generous and she lifts everyone’s spirits when you talk to her – which you can do in September because she is flying from Scotland to New York City to visit with children in schools and to participate with Garn Press at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Here’s Rachel: Garn Press: Do you have a favourite author?

Rachel Backshall: I have a few authors that I really admire, mostly older ‘classics’, particularly Daphne du Maurier and her Jamaica Inn and Rebecca, but I also enjoy a good Peter May or Terry Pratchett. I have also proof read a number of manuscripts for friends and family, Ruth Finnegan’s Black Inked Pearl, which was absolutely astounding.

Garn Press: What do you like about reading?

Rachel Backshall: The escapism. I love being transported to new places, living different lives in different worlds and in different periods. I suppose Freud would have something to say about that, but I think it is good to escape from your life for a time, in order to look at it anew when you come back. A book is a cheaper form of holiday!

Garn Press: What do you dislike about reading?

Rachel Backshall: I do struggle with my eyesight if I have been illustrating all day, and I find my eyes are 102

too tired to read. This is one of the reasons I am so fond of audio books.

Garn Press: Is there one artist who has influenced your illustrations more than any others?

Rachel Backshall: I find Mairi Hedderwick extremely inspirational - both her drawings and writing in her Katie Morag series paint such a gorgeous image of life in one of the most remote locations in the UK. She makes each page busy and full of life, with humorous additions that really make the books, and her characters, lovable. She also focuses her stories upon the family life, community and environment - all topics, which I feel very strongly about.

I also find Rudyard Kipling and Paul Jouve’s illustrations and field sketches of wild animals absolutely beautiful, especially their works in black and white ink.

Garn Press: Do you think the relationships between authors and readers are changing?

Rachel Backshall: I think readers still consistently want new and challenging material to read, but authors are struggling to get their work out to the public due to the difficulties of this time, for authors and publishers alike. That is why I think Garn Press is so important; they get important, relevant and different manuscripts published and make them available for everyone.

Garn Press: If you could express one thought to all your readers what would it be?

Rachel Backshall: I suppose I would want to stress how important I feel it is to encourage children to appreciate the natural world, and understand how precious and fragile it is. Moving to the Scottish Highlands has only made this more plain to me, that without our beautiful natural world and the creatures that live in it, we would have nothing. It is a responsibility that our children need to be aware of.

Garn Press: When do you draw? Do you have a routine?

Rachel Backshall: Yes, I am definitely a creature of routine. Three days a week I start work at 8:30 and finish at 6:30, trying to keep the illustrating similar to a normal working day. I also work part time at an archaeological centre, so those days I usually paint well into the evenings.

I first check my emails, refill all my water pots, get clean blotting paper, and work till 10.30, then a quick coffee break, then work until lunch at 1:00. I go for a walk down to the loch and our small beach around 3:30 to get some fresh air and look down towards the mountains. It helps to come back from a walk and take a fresh look at the pictures.

Garn Press: How do you begin an illustration project?

Rachel Backshall: I start by taking the new manuscript, and reading it through a few times, making notes and scribbling down the images that the words create in my mind. I then start to create a storyboard, picking out the most imaginative and visual parts of the text, and trying to form a continuous flow of sketches. When I am happy with this, I can start work on the actual drawings.

Garn Press: Do you keep notebooks? Use special paper?

Rachel Backshall: I keep a lot of notebooks - half a bookcase full in fact, and often manage to forget exactly 103

which book I recorded something in. However, if I don’t have a notebook to hand, any paper will do! I often find myself scribbling ideas onto the back of receipts, the inside of book covers, on cafe serviettes, and even in tiny sketches on train tickets.

Garn Press: Do you listen to music when you draw?

Rachel Backshall: Occasionally, either classical or current, but I prefer to listen to audiobooks - I am currently working my way through a wide ranging list of novels, from Austen to Bram Stoker, Winston Graham to Pratchett. It keeps my mind occupied when I’m drawing, without the distraction of a screen.

Garn Press: Do you share your drawings while you are still writing or wait until you have a draft?

Rachel Backshall: I will show my sketches to the people most close to me, checking what they think about the composition and colours etc, and I often send sketch updates to the authors. It can really help to have a new pair of critical eyes, however, if there is no-one available I find that holding the painting up in a mirror really helps for a quick composition check.

Garn Press: How does your “day job” influence your illustrations?

Rachel Backshall: I work at an archaeological centre in the highlands, and I find that the education side of the centre helps me understand how children think about the world around them and their place within it. They are often, in fact, more realistic and logical than the adults, and I definitely consider this when I start a new series of illustrations. Living by the loch also inspires me; I try to include a lot of nature, wildlife and other creatures in my work, and it helps to live with a swallows’ nest above the window, red deer on the drive to work, and hares in the field below.

Garn Press: What worries you about today?

Rachel Backshall: The speed with which our society is developing worries me, especially the consumerist nature of most of our technological advances. This has such a big impact, not only on the natural world, but also on the morality and culture of people, creating the existence of the live-fast, google-now, thinklater generation. We need to pause and consider ourselves as a part of the wider world, and to reassess our values, against that which stands in our way, such as money, power and success. It is an issue which I think about daily, and have my own struggles with, but I try my best to be aware and to make choices rather than to ignore.

Garn Press: Are your illustrations connected to present day events?

Rachel Backshall: I would like it to be more so. I try to make my illustrations in some way topical; either in terms of the people or the issues depicted. In my most recent children’s book that I am working on, I use a wide variety of UK saltwater fish, both endangered and common. Over-fishing is a big issue which we face today, and also the UK fishing industry is struggling to compete against more globalised markets. I think it is important to recognise what rich abundance we have in our water, and then to make an educated decision as to how we protect this, which is especially prevalent in the wake of Brexit and the US election.

Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of words?

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Rachel Backshall: I very vividly remember the Postman Pat theme song that my Uncle used to sing to me. That’s about as far back as I go. I’m not even sure how old I was!

Garn Press: What about your earliest memories of someone reading to you?

Rachel Backshall: I know my mum used to read to me very often, but I don’t actually remember that.

What I do remember is my grandma sitting with me when my parents went out for dinner and telling me stories about my family and the old family in Wales. I must have been about 6 or 7. We used to call them ‘funny stories’ and I have some written down somewhere, but they just aren’t the same on the page.

Garn Press: Did you have a favourite author when you were a young child?

Rachel Backshall: I used to absolutely love the ‘Milly Molly Mandy’ stories by Joyce Lankester Brisley, and ‘Uncle Stories’ by J.P.Martin. Not only did I love the stories, but the illustrations as well, they are fantastic.

Garn Press: Did you read a book series as a child?

Rachel Backshall: Yes, I used to collect the Just William series, and the St.Clare’s series by Enid Blyton. I really loved the slightly old fashioned romance of the writing and having ‘ginger beer and midnight feasts’!

Garn Press: Can you remember doing research for a project in school?

Rachel Backshall: I remember lying in a field in Cornwall on my summer holidays from Primary school, drawing pictures of Egyptian gods for a research project on ancient Egypt. It is the first real project I remember, I think I was about 9 years old.

Garn Press: Did you study for exams -- if so how?

Rachel Backshall: I studied hard for my exams, and I always used the same technique since high school. I condense and re-condense all my notes until I can fit a full topic on a small card. I find that using trigger words is the best way for me to do my best in exams, and it definitely helped me through Oxford final exams.

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AUTHOR NANCY RANKIE SHELTON

ABOUT NANCY RANKIE SHELTON Nancy Rankie Shelton is a Professor of Education at UMBC in Baltimore, Maryland. She grew up in a remote area in New York State, the youngest of five children, and moved to Pass-A-Grille Beach, FL in 1976 after graduating from SUNY Albany with a BA in interdisciplinary social sciences at the age of 19.

She married her husband, Jack, in 1978 and they lived in Gainesville, Florida until 2003, when Nancy earned her PhD from the University of Florida. In June 2012, Jack died of metastatic lung cancer. Nancy has one son, Conrad Shelton, who still resides in Gainesville.

Nancy has worked with children since she was young. She held many positions, from babysitter and playgroup organizer, to teacher, and finally professor of education. She has always advocated for the children most in need. In her work as an educator, Nancy has 23 publications that appear in premier academic journals or with leading publishing companies that specialize in literacy research and/or education policy.

Reading and writing have been essential activities throughout Nancy’s life. One summer, she and her sister Carol read every Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery available in the Speculator, New York library. That summer, Nancy wrote her own mystery but she knew she could never publish it because she had stolen too many ideas from Franklin Dixon and she didn’t want to get caught. Now, more than forty years later, she finally has her own completely original story to share.

ABOUT 5-13: A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LOSS AND SURVIVAL In 5-13: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Survival, the realities of sharing life and death exemplify what it means to live and to love and will resonate with readers.

It’s two days after Christmas and seven days after Jack’s 58th birthday. Jack and his wife, Nancy, are enjoying their morning in their second home in Gainesville, Florida, when out of the blue Jack has a seizure.

That afternoon he’s diagnosed with stage four metastatic lung cancer. In the following weeks, the constant uncertainty and ever-changing diagnoses of his disease, his rapidly deteriorating health, and the stress and confusion of managing his treatment define their lives. After four emergency trips to the hospital that all result in lengthy stays, he fights back from everything, even partial paralysis, absolutely refusing to stay down.

By March, Jack is strong enough to return home to Maryland with Nancy, where he continues treatment while they try to pick up the pieces of their lives. He survives three more emergency admissions to the hospital, but the stays are much shorter and he experiences more outpatient than inpatient care. Though 106

Jack is able to return to work, Nancy is not – she spends her time and energy supporting Jack’s efforts to heal and providing care and encouragement for him. Jack’s health continues to fail. On June 9th he dies.

Cancer is not the sum total of their lives or this memoir. Reflections of the 35 years they were together are woven throughout the narrative. Jack’s childhood, their first date, the birth of their only child, their relationships with others that shaped both their personalities are all part of their story. Nancy’s identity as a wife, mother (and mother-in-law), sister, daughter and friend are all part of the experience.

In 5-13: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Survival Nancy Rankie Shelton encourages readers to overcome their fears of cancer, remain steadfast and loving, survive the death of a loved one, and continue living. 5-13 is a brave love story beautifully written.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: 5-13: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Survival Author: Nancy Rankie Shelton ISBN: 978-1942146353 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon (available for Kindle Unlimited Reading)

INTERVIEW WITH RANKIE SHELTON Nancy Rankie Shelton’s 5-13, A Memoir of Love, Loss and Survival is a breathtaking read. At Garn we consider 5-13 to be not only a work of great courage but also a literary triumph. Nancy has an extraordinary capacity to share with the reader this brave work of an enduring human spirit who is not frightened to love, face death, and then reimagine her life. In the post on the growing body of literature on living and dying well, 5-13 takes its place alongside the new classics in the field.

AUTHORS AND THEIR BOOKS Garn Press: Do you have a favorite author?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: I always have a favorite author, but that person changes over time. Typically once I have read one or two books by an author, if the book moves me, I read everything I can get my hands on until I am saturated in his/her work. Some of the authors who have changed my life are Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Hesse, Uris, Dickens, J.D. MacDonald, (I still dream of living on a houseboat) and so many more.

Garn Press: Is there one author who has influenced your writing more than any others?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: No, no single author. I like to think I draw from all the authors I have read.

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Garn Press: Do you think the relationships between authors and readers are changing?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: Yes. I believe that the globalization of our world in terms of digital texts has opened the relationship up so that all we need is a common language and we are able to access and share worlds that are quite distant and different. As a writer, I know that this change has made me more conscious of my physical location and its cultural implications, and how that can be explained to readers who may never have experienced anything similar to my life.

WRITING AS PART OF DAILY LIFE Garn Press: When do you write? Do you have a routine?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: It depends on the stage of writing I happen to be in at the time. When I first start a project, I read until my mind shifts and ideas start making “noise” in my brain and I can then set my reading aside to write. This happens at any time throughout the day that I am not engaged in my work as a professor. Once I am entrenched in a project, I typically write in the mornings until about lunchtime and then again after dinner.

Garn Press: How do you begin a writing project?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: I write in my brain for a long time before I write anything down on paper (or as it is now, type anything into a Word document on the computer). I have to have a visual image of a possible completed project before I feel I have really begun a “project”. I start by writing “short takes” or vignettes.

Sometimes these are just sentences, other times they are a stream of conscious documents, or they may be experiences or conversations I want to record. Eventually these short ramblings become longer and longer, and after a good deal of time, they take shape within a larger project.

Garn Press: Do you keep notebooks? Use special paper?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: I use a daybook in the way Don Murray always advocated. I also write reflections on my computer and keep files of emails and other communications I have written.

Garn Press: What about pens and pencils? Are they important?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: I use multiple pens, alternating colors when I write in my daybook. And yes, that part of my process is very important to me.

Garn Press: Do you listen to music when you write?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: Only classical. I cannot listen to anything with lyrics or the music distracts me.

Usually I prefer to hear sounds from nature and play music only when human noise intervenes with my peaceful environment.

Garn Press: Do you share your writing while you are still writing or wait until you have a draft?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: I share while writing. I find feedback from others helps me a great deal.

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Garn Press: How does your “day job” (academic, journalist etc.) influence your writing?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: It’s very hard for me to write during the semester. The workload from teaching occupies my mind and leaves little space for writing or thinking about writing.

Garn Press: What book or chapter of a book are you most proud of writing?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: My memoir is my first publication that is not written for an academic audience.

It is also the most important and most meaningful writing I have completed to date.

EARLY READING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of words?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: I don’t remember any experience with words. I remember experiences with books.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first books?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: The first book I know I loved is the Golden Book, Little Black Sambo. My eldest sister, Jeanne, read the book to me over and over again. I still have it, a treasure that I don’t handle often because it’s quite tattered. I realize now that this book offended many readers and was later banned, but as a child I didn’t understand the larger issues of stereotyping and racism that can be perpetuated in a book.

I connected with Sambo because I played in the woods (he played in the forest) and I absolutely loved, and still do, pancakes. Sambo was my friend who just happened to live in the pages of a book.

Garn Press: What about your earliest memories of someone reading to you?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: Other than Jeanne reading my little yellow Golden Book with those fierce but friendly-looking tigers chasing Sambo around the palm tree, my father used to read to my sisters and me when he put us to bed. I remember him reading Alcott’s Little Women, and not understanding much of it, but I was the youngest sister and the book was a good choice considering our family and our lives.

Garn Press: Was there a moment when you first knew you could read?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: I’m sure there was one but I don’t remember it. I do remember excruciatingly painful memories of round robin reading, especially in the second and third grades. Every single teacher in this nation should read the research on round robin reading and immediately remove it from his/her practice.

Garn Press: What did you like about reading?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: The peace that I get from curling up with a good book, a hot cup of tea, and an excitement to find out what the next series of words will unfold in my mind. I also enjoy discussing life through books with others who I know and love and who are reading or have read the same book as I. Garn Press: What did you dislike about reading?

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Nancy Rankie Shelton: I dislike it when an author disappoints me. I’ve read books that were engaging right up until the last chapter, and then in an attempt to shock the reader, the author creates a twist that is unbelievable. I am also disappointed when I wait for a book to develop into something meaningful in my life but it never does.

Garn Press: Did you have a favorite author when you were a young child?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: Not that I remember. But as an adolescent I did. Weldon Hill. My father and I would go to the library and check out his books and first my father would read it, and then he’d pass it to me. I never will forget reading Onionhead (Hill, 1957), knowing that my father had read it and handed it to me. It was the first time I read anything sexual in a novel. The whole experience was shockingly respectful on my father’s part and on Weldon Hill’s.

Garn Press: Did you read book series as a child?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: Yes, my sister and I read every single Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys Mysteries available in our village library.

Garn Press: Do you remember your first reading lessons when you went to school?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: I’m sure there were experiences before round robin, but they didn’t stay in my mind.

Garn Press: Can you remember doing research for a project in school?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: No. Garn Press: Did you study for exams – if so how?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: Not that I remember.

EARLY WRITING/DRAWING EXPERIENCES Garn Press: What are your earliest memories of writing at home?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: I have very few memories of writing, at home or in school. I know that at one point I took one of the mystery books I had enjoyed and copied it word for word except to change all the names from the characters in the book to names of my family members. I don’t know what happened to that horribly plagiarized work, but I hope it ended up in our fireplace.

Garn Press: Did you like to draw?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: No. And I still do not.

Garn Press: Did you paint as a child?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: At one point I remember being addicted to paint by numbers but it was a shortlived passion.

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Garn Press: Do you still have any of your early writing, drawings, or paintings?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: I have a die-cut self-portrait that I created in middle school art class that my eldest sister Jeanne somehow saved over the years and presented to me when I earned my PhD. It hangs on my home office wall.

Garn Press: Can you remember being taught to write at school?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: No. I remember diagramming sentences, which I loved, but I do not remember any composition.

Garn Press: Do you have memories of learning to write an essay, a story, or a poem?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: In fourth or fifth grade, I believe, I was forced to use an outline to write a research paper. I had no idea what a research paper was. I hated using an outline (and I still do not use one). I know my grade was low, but I can’t remember exactly what I scored. I don’t even remember the topic.

The most vivid of my memories from this experience is connected to another student’s work. One look at it and I knew she absolutely did not do the project herself. Her project was on Monkeys. It was clearly created by an older sibling or her parents. I was disgusted with both the teacher who bragged about its excellence and the student who performed so horribly in class but was not ashamed to present someone else’s work as her own.

Garn Press: What about taking tests – can you remember taking them?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: I took the ITBS as a child, never worried about the results, and I excelled at testing in high school, scoring very high in all the New York Regents Exams. I studied for the Regents Exams, and if my memory serves me correctly, I used the study books my brother John also used and passed down to me.

Garn Press: Did you have to fill in bubbles on multiple-choice tests?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: Yes, and I never took an essay test that I can remember until I was in graduate school at the University of Florida and had to prove I could write at a high school level. That was the first I’d heard of the “5-paragraph” format, and I wish it was the last, but unfortunately, with standardized writing tests heaped on my elementary students, I have had a great deal of experience with that very contrived format.

Garn Press: What advice would you give teachers if they asked you how they could create opportunities for their students to become enthusiastic readers and writers?

Nancy Rankie Shelton: This is my life. I have too much to say to put in this interview! If forced to reduce to one message, I would say that to teach reading and writing one must be a reader and writer. Children easily detect their teachers’ attitudes and those attitudes are one of the strongest forces in a classroom.

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AUTHOR JAMES PAUL GEE

ABOUT JAMES PAUL GEE James Paul Gee was born in San Jose, California in 1948. He was raised a devote Catholic and attended a seminary for 5 years, starting at the age of 13. He received his PhD in linguistics in 1975 from Stanford University. He has written and taught in a wide variety of areas, including syntactic theory, psycholinguistics, literary stylistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, literacy studies, ASL linguistics, deaf education, learning theory, and digital media, with an emphasis on video games and learning. He has taught and been tenured at six different colleges and held three endowed chairs. He is currently the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor at Arizona State University. He loves nature and birding, and abhors the disrespect we humans have shown our world and each other.

James Paul Gee writes poetry as the “spirit” moves him, not as an academic, but as an older human being who, like all old people, can see the face of death, the value of life, and the need to imagine and implement new and better worlds for all creatures, human and otherwise.

ABOUT BLOWING OUT THE CANDLES: A POETRY TRILOGY In an act of courage James Paul Gee takes his armor off, and brutally honest, he peals back the layers, until all contrivance has left him and he appears before us vulnerable on the page. Sometime cynical, sometime searing, at times gut wrenching, Gee’s poems are of heart, mind, soul. Filled with pathos and humor they have the power to turn us inside out and make us think about our own lives, about our relationships with each other, about our covenants with religion, and about our passivity in dealing with the government and bureaucracies.

These are poems not only for quiet contemplation, but also poems to be shared. There is enough in them to keep a conversation going in a class in the humanities or sciences for an entire semester, and the issues raised about the politics and ethics of representation, the demands of official ideologies, and the inexplicable human capacity for good and evil, are more than enough to keep us all conscious of the increasing dehumanization of the age in which we live.

PURCHASE INFORMATION Book: Blowing Out The Candles: A Poetry Trilogy 112

Author: James Paul Gee ISBN: 978-1-942146-04-9 Print Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Books-A-Million | Indigo Books Ebook: Amazon

JAMES PAUL GEE ON WRITING POETRY Originally Garn Press published Jim Gee’s poems in an ebook trilogy entitled Blowing Out the Candles.

The e-trilogy was Garn’s first ebook publication. We have since published the poems in a single paperback book. It was an extraordinary time filled with hope and possibility, and we “handled” the poems as if they were precious objects, ancient and fragile, but so powerful we did not want them to crumble and fly away.

Jim’s narrative about reading and writing poetry confirms for us how precious, how fragile, and how powerful these poems are. Here is a quote from the original introduction to Blowing Out the Candles followed by Jim’s essay about them: “These are poems not only for quiet contemplation, but also poems to be shared. There is enough in them to keep a conversation going in a class in the humanities or sciences for an entire semester, and the issues raised about the politics and ethics of representation, the demands of official ideologies, and the inexplicable human capacity for good and evil, are more than enough to keep us all conscious of the increasing dehumanization of the age in which we live.”

“POETRY COMES AND GOES” BY JAMES PAUL GEE I have had an odd relationship with poetry in my life.

I went to a Catholic elementary school where we read no poetry. We learned about Catholicism and had a textbook about Communism called The Evil Tree.

After 8th grade, I went to the seminary. An old monastery, with a large inner courtyard and a tall bell tower, it sat isolated atop a mountain, surrounded by a forest.

The seminary banned a great many books. Our library stopped in the early 19th century. One year I had a Jesuit priest friend smuggle in Jacques Maritain’s A Preface to Metaphysics. Maritain was the official theologian to the Pope. When the seminary censors found the book, they banned it.

We rarely left the seminary. We rose each morning at 5:55 and went to bed each night at 9:05. We ate bad food in a large dining hall, often in silence.

Each seminarian had a small room with a sink and a bed covered by a thin wool blanket on a straw mattress. We had a manual called The Young Seminarian. Among many other things, this manual told us that all women had “lust in their hearts” and should be avoided at all costs. Much later in life I found out that 113

a good many women did not have lust in their hearts, at least not for me.

There was in the seminary no television, magazines, newspapers, or radio. I was so uninformed that I learned about the Cuban Missile Crisis by accident when I found a stray piece of newspaper in the forest.

The page, out of date, said we faced nuclear disaster. I had no idea whether the rest of the world still existed. In vain I searched the grounds for a later page or two to see what had happened.

The day President Kennedy was shot is a flash-bulb memory for me, as for so many others. A student came rushing into study hall and said “The President has been shot”. I said, incredulously, “Who, for heaven’s sake, would want to shoot Father Giaquinto”? Father Giaquinto was our rector. Everyone else remembers Kennedy being shot. I remember Father Giaquinto not being shot.

I did take one class on literature. The class was taught by Father Bicker, a young Maryknoll priest. Maryknoll priests and bothers are missionaries, thus we assumed they were, unlike us, worldly. The Maryknoll seminary, an ancient Asian looking building, sat atop a small hill next to our seminary (we were a diocesan seminary, training parish priests). The Maryknoll seminarians came to our seminary for classes and sometimes one of their priests would teach a class to help out our regular faculty of Sulpician priests.

Father Bicker devoted his class to the poetry of T. S. Elliot. Father Bicker was young. He would take off his Roman collar and place it on top of his head like a halo as he recited The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.

We had never seen the likes of it. Here was a young, cool, worldly, and emotional priest, unlike the rest of our faculty. This was my first date with poetry. There would not be another for a long time.

I still remember how I would sneak out of the building at night into the cold metal stairwells to smoke cigarettes and recite The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Seminary allowed us, even as teenagers, to smoke at designated times and places. However, doing so in the stairwells at night while reciting poetry was absolutely against the rules. This made poetry a forbidden fruit. I was not the only one affected this way by Father Becker. He was not invited back to teach.

I eventually left the seminary. I went off to study philosophy, hoping to earn a PhD. I had become fascinated by philosophy when, in one of our classes, our teacher, as an aside, mentioned St. Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God. He said that the proof, though it had reappeared through the years, was long thought to be invalid.

It seemed really spiffy to me. I had then, like so many other teenage boys, a fondness for underdogs. Then and there I swore to personally resurrect the ontological argument.

So I hastened to our library to engage in research. Luckily St. Anselm lived in the 11th Century and was not banned. I discovered that the ontological argument fell under a branch of philosophy called “metaphysics”. I discovered, too, that people like Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel had worked in this area. Some of these philosophers had even offered their own versions of the ontological argument or their own aversions to it.

I discovered all this in a very old Catholic encyclopedia. The encyclopedia mentioned that some of these philosophers were on the index of banned books in the Vatican. And they were, all of them, banned in our library.

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I wrote and “published” in our seminary newsletter my own version of the ontological proof of God’s existence. It was my first publication. It is long lost to history.

When I left the seminary I knew nothing about how colleges worked having done high school and part of college at the seminary. All I knew is that I wanted to devote my life to metaphysics.

I went to the University of California at Santa Barbara because a former seminarian studying philosophy at the University of San Francisco (a Jesuit college) told me it was a good place to go for philosophy. He didn’t know much more than I did about how the world worked and I knew nothing.

It was 1967. When I moved from the seminary to the beach town of Isle Vista, the college town for UCSB, I showed up wearing a black suit and tie and sporting a crew cut. Everyone else was barely dressed, had long hair, and smoked dope when they weren’t surfing. Soon I had long hair. I knew so little about women and the world that I was a happy but dazed stranger in a strange land. Lots of things happened (I was gassed by the National Guard) and lots didn’t (sex).

I went to the chairman of the philosophy department and told him I had come to study metaphysics. He told me no one did that any more. What they did now, he said, was “analytical philosophy”. Analytic philosophy argued that philosophical problems are not about the world but about language and how it applies to the world. Most philosophical problems turn out, on this view, to be confusions about language.

So I became an analytical philosopher, sometimes also called a “linguistic philosopher”. I did well (that’s what happens when you do not know how to get a woman out on a date) and intended to continue for my PhD in philosophy at Santa Barbara.

However, the summer before going back to UCSB for graduate school I (finally) met a girl. The rest is history. I dropped out of school.

The girl got over me fairly quickly.

When I picked up the pieces, I decided it was silly to be a “linguistic philosopher” when you could devote yourself to the actual discipline that studied language “scientifically”, namely linguistics. This was the beginning of Noam Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics. By accidents too numerous to mention I ended up earning my PhD in linguistics at Stanford (which was just up the road from the seminary and thus was my “local college”, so to speak).

Chomsky studied language as an abstract system that served as the basis (the “core grammar”) of all the different human languages in the world despite their “superficial” differences. This abstract system (which constitutes a universal template for how languages can or cannot vary from each other) raised the study of so-called “theoretical linguistics” above the specific contexts of language in use and in cultures.

Being a Chomskian linguist in those early days was heady stuff. We were part of a new thing and a major change, one that attracted a lot of academic attention at the time. Everyone had read every piece of literature in the field, since the clock had started anew in the field only a few years before. Even undergraduates and beginning graduate students could publish and contribute, so much was left to discover, so little was retained from the past.

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After I earned my PhD I was lucky enough to get a job on the East Coast. That was where the action was in linguistics in those days, thanks to MIT (where Chomsky was) and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (which was second only to MIT and replete with good generative linguists). I took a job at Hampshire College in Amherst. Hampshire was next to, and part of, a five college system with UMASS Amherst.

Hampshire had opened as an experimental college in 1974 to encourage young wild-eyed 60’s activists not to go to the other four more traditional colleges: UMass, Amherst College, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith College. Hampshire was structured like a graduate school for undergraduates. The students did research and took exams at various levels. They did not have to attend any classes, unless they wished to.

I taught syntactic theory, the philosophy of language, and formal semantics. It turned out that Hampshire students were largely interested in the Humanities and did not flock to linguistic courses. In dire need of more students, I and my fellow linguists met to think about how we might entice Humanities students into formal linguistics.

I mentioned that I had heard, but knew nothing, about an area called “stylistics”. Stylistics studied how grammar was put to use to make poetry. Perhaps, a class on stylistics would draw the Humanities students in and arouse their latent interest in grammar. We all thought it was a promising idea. But which of us literary illiterate linguists would teach the class?

I finally volunteered to learn something and teach the class. I asked a friend what I could do to learn poetry fast. She suggested I read The Norton Anthology of Poetry. I did and I was utterly blown away.

I was stunned at how linguistically and emotionally inventive these poets I had never heard of were, poets like William Blake, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Keats, William Butler Yates, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins (a priest), Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath.

I read in no order. All the poets, from different times and places, stood in one place, because I cared nothing, at that point, about the history of poetry. I just cared about poems.

I learned later that this was how in the old days Americans like Whitman had learned poetry in school.

They used textbooks that just threw everything together in no order. That was why Whitman did not placidly line up to take his proper place in the European historical order of poetry. He invented poetry anew.

Perhaps because I was a generative linguist, I was fascinated by poetry as both system (grammatical/ semantic frameworks that lay beneath the diversity of different genres of poetry) and distinctive, unique, and innovative realizations of the system in “concrete universals” (in Eliot’s terms, not Hegel’s).

I saw poetry as what I thought of as “semantically saturated”. By that I meant that every part and piece of every aspect of the language of a poem (its sound, rhythm, syntax, word choice, parallelism, repetition, semantics, figurative language, and timing/spacing) was meaningful in some way, often in many ways.

Much later my exposure to the semantic saturation of poetry led me to see that when human beings are deeply pressed by harm, love, or confusion their ways with words—often in story form—become semantically saturated as well. We are all of us, then, when hurt or filled with joy, natural poets.

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It was this realization that led to my later work in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, when I eventually moved away from theoretical linguistics. And I moved away because, while formal linguistics taught me that system is important, poems as concrete universals taught me that the concrete is just as important.

Any good theory of meaning alive in the world has to simultaneously hold in mind both the concrete and the universal as one and the same thing looked at in two different ways, the way good poetry does.

When I began teaching Hampshire students about the wonders of poetry, they would moan each time I named the poem I wanted to talk about. I came to realize that they had “had” the poem in school and that school had turned them off to that poem and eventually to all poetry. They could not see the poem as strange and wonderful. Since I had no idea what they had heard in school, I introduced them to the poem as part and parcel of my intense excitement as a linguist in having discovered these strange marvels of language.

Each and every student eventually recovered their drive for poetry. This made me believe that poetry is an inborn instinctive drive or need for all of us. Sadly, though, this drive—like the drive for making art and for learning—is too often killed by school. It was then and there that I realized I had been granted a great gift. I had not read poetry in school.

Poetry led me to see that all human meaning making is semantically saturated when we humans are at fever pitch. Poetry also led me to see that school too often limits—not frees—meaning, joy, distinctiveness, invention, and humanity.

Reading poetry beyond T. S. Eliot for the first time led me, too, to see that I had always and everywhere in my Catholic upbringing been immersed in poetry. It was in Genesis, in the Psalms, in the Parables, in the Gregorian chant, in the words of the mystics like St. Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross, in the Deus Irae, in the Stations of the Cross, in the Gloria at Mass, in the Hallelujah at Easter, and much more.

And it was also in the deep silence in our dark and dank grotto on Good Friday, as I prayed in what I did not then know was poetry, alone, and saw God. So I got more out of the class than the students did. I enticed some of them to linguistics, though not many. But I enticed myself to a journey from syntactic theory to an immersion in language in the world and in hearts and souls. I did not give up system, structure, and universals, but I now went looking for them in the mud of life. Earlier I had missed the importance of the mud for the system. Many of my colleagues in the social sciences have, I believe, missed the importance of the system for the mud. That mud has structure and it conforms to “laws”. But that structure and those “laws” are made of mud.

And then things went on, as they always do, for years and years. As they went on, the state of the world seemed, to me, to grow worse and worse. I devoted my reading, more and more, to nonfiction rather than to novels and poetry. Reality seemed to me stranger and stronger than fiction, a fearsome and cruel thing for many people and—in the end—for all.

I have long written for my living. I am not an artist. At best I am a craftsman. I have sought clarity for myself and others. I view clarity—like cleanliness—as a minor, but, nonetheless, important virtue. And, God knows, it is hard to be clear and hard to stay clean, especially for me now, since I have moved to live on a farm.

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Years went by. The seminary and Hampshire receded into the long ago past. I got old. And then older.

I moved to Sedona Arizona for the final act of my academic career. Like all old people, I saw Death on the horizon, waiting patiently to take me from dust to dust.

I grew depressed, regretful, repentful. Life, career, academics, trying—all these came to seem meaningless.

The “autism” of my childhood—the desperate need to escape people and their suffering—returned with a vengeance. But added now was “survivor’s guilt”. Why had I gotten so much and so many others so little in the one and only one shot we get at life? It seems desperately, stupidly, wildly unfair.

Then things got worse. I got allergies.

Sedona is at just at the right elevation to host the largest juniper forest in the world. Like many others, I became wildly allergic to the junipers. Allergies can have many different symptoms. Mine, as they combined with my Dark Night of the Soul, were two: I felt my body decomposing like a corpse and I had an inescapable and inexplicable craving to write poetry, something I have never done or even so much as contemplated before in my life.

At any moment, day or night, sober or drunk, unbidden, the call to poetry came and I would take out a yellow legal pad and write poetry. I had not written on paper for decades. But the caller demanded pen and paper. Was the caller a muse?

The muse demanded that I write poetry, but gave me no new skills. I was still the plodding craftsman, doomed now to write poetry. I did not pour my heart and soul into it, rather my heart and soul poured into it, little aided or controlled by me, the muse’s servant at best, its dupe at worst.

I did not write for others. I did not write to be read. Having been judged all my life, as all of us are, I did not care about whether the poetry was good or bad or nothing. I did not care whether experts or inexperts liked it or not.

It came, then it went, in the interim it saved me.

It saved me to face death with aplomb. Well maybe. I don’t know.

It passed. Taken away as it came, unexpected, unbidden, un-understood.

Something else my bout with poetry did for me was this: It let me know I know and understand nothing (a paradox of sorts). Nothing. That is a hard message for an academic. But I live with it now on a farm, with animals, post poetry.

In my life poetry has come and gone. Its next coming for me will be Dies irae, dies illa.

Let Whitman—certainly not me—have the last word: I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.

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They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

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