Ban these books!

Happy Banned Books Week, everyone! I just looked at a list of "most commonly challenged" books in the U.S. and see some great work I've read over the years, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Young Huck uses the "n" word about 200 times, which irritated me on second reading--but the kid's voice was that of the 1850s and bore no malice. We need to read this book to help us understand how far our great country has come.

Also on the list is Bless Me, Ultima by Rodolfo Anaya, which I'd never heard of until I moved to the southwest. The eponymous Ultima may or may not be a witch, which apparently had some readers' knickers in a twist. So what? It's a touching story.

Then there are To Kill a Mockingbird, a beautiful book that's only objectionable to people who hate justice; Lady Chatterly's Lover, of which I avidly read select passages as a teenager; the likes of Hemingway, King, Angelou, Sinclair, Capote, Morrison--so many scurrilous scribes--little wonder I have grown up to be so depraved.

Perhaps it's the combined influence of all these bounders that influenced my writing a banned book of my own. Did you know that When Pigs Fly was banned in Alamogordo, New Mexico, the same city that burned Harry Potter and other un-Christian books in 2000? In '07 the city's Friends of the Library first invited me to do a reading, then disinvited me because my antagonist (you know, the bad guy) lacked moral character.

In one of my frequently recurring daydreams, enemies of iniquity light a bonfire made exclusively of copies of When Pigs Fly and Getting Lucky--all having been purchased at list price, of course.

Blind but Now I See

Nonfiction
Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson 

368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson
368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... “Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson
368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... “Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson
368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... “

Barefoot in Baghdad

Nonfiction
If only

BAREFOOT IN BAGHDAD:
A Story of Identity—My Own and What it Means to Be a Woman in Chaos
By Manal M. Omar
237 pp. Sourcebooks $14.99

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

She speaks American English, but she also wears a headscarf, is fluent in Arabic and can quote the Koran. It’s right after the 2003 American invasion, and she says she’s in Iraq on a humanitarian mission. Neither side trusts her.

But she’s not a spy, a journalist, nor an agent of the CIA. Manal Omar is a Palestinian-American, who comes to Baghdad after the U. S. invasion as regional coordinator of Women for Women International, an organization struggling for women’s rights. Her memoirs from this period, 2003 to 2005, shed considerable light on our nation’s problems in Iraq.

Fearing she might be seen as a tool of the American occupation, Omar at first refuses to enter the Green Zone or attend meetings run by the military. Thus pro-war Iraqis are suspicious of her. Because her headscarf bespeaks religious conservatism, Baghdad women accuse Omar of being Iranian and insidiously bent on rolling back the freedoms they have won. They deny there are pockets of poverty in the city and irately reject any idea Iraqi women need help. She finds it difficult to add a woman to her staff, because educated women are loath to go into the poor areas, as she does.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have entered the country have little clue about what’s needed. Because Omar has the courage—and the contacts—to talk to all classes of Iraqi women, she is able to persuade representatives of other NGOs that the basic needs—food, shelter, health care, electricity—must be met before they can think about larger issues like women’s rights and teaching money-making skills to women.

Initially, Iraqis welcomed the allied armies and celebrated the end of Hussein’s rule. But as time goes on, slowness in meeting those needs alienates the people from the temporary government of the occupiers. The situation sours—aid money goes to crooked contractors who deliver shoddy work and pocket huge profits. Powerful clans resent loss of their power and property and turn to murder. Civil strife erupts.

Omar’s friend Fern Holland expressed this pessimism:

...the window of opportunities to create a new Iraq was rapidly closing...the people to pay the price were going to be the women of Iraq...These women are unbelievably strong. And I am afraid we are setting them up for failure. We are giving them nothing but bricks and fancy equipment.

In an epilogue, Omar says,

I have worked in other war-torn countries, but my time in Iraq haunts me more than any place I have been... It maddens me that so many of the mistakes that pushed Iraq into chaos were avoidable. From the outset of the U.S. invasion, those in power repeatedly betrayed the people of Iraq by standing on the sidelines as the society crumbled and making promises they could not keep.

Because she still adheres to her culture’s family values, “The decision to go to Iraq was not mine alone. It was a family affair. ” The author had worked for the UN, Oxfam, and then for World Bank, and her Arabic-American family couldn’t understand why she would leave an enviable job to go into a dangerous situation. Omar felt she had a perspective few others did—she was right—and after a long campaign received her father’s permission.

For my Palestinian family, the Iraq war hit a raw nerve. It was a reminder of what had happened to the Palestinians in 1948...another humiliation of the Arab world at the hands of the West. And as far as they could tell, I wanted to be part of it — and I was on the wrong side.

When she is introduced to her staff—all men, she is shocked to discover—she gets a chilly reception. It takes some time for her to find out what the problem is: having been told they would have a female American boss, they had entertained visions of the blond, blue-eyed Barbie starlet type they had seen on television. They were crushed to find they would be working for a scarf-wearing Arabic woman instead.

The author makes many of her points anecdotally, recounting the stories of individual women she helped—or was unable to help. Patriarchal customs hampered her time and again, and U. S. military rules often imposed other obstacles.

She makes good friends in Iraq and finds a husband—but they are forced to flee by extremists. One of her staff is murdered. Some of the others flee to the U. S. But Muna, the woman Omar recruited to her staff, courageously remained in Iraq carrying forward the work of Women for Women, pushing the program to help the most vulnerable.

Despite the retrogression in Iraqi life in the past six years, Omar remains optimistic that the strength and resilience of the Iraqi people will win out and make the country the great nation it could be. If only. 

The self-publishing experiment, part 2

The self-publishing experiment with CreateSpace worked out nicely, with the second chapbook going through without a hitch. Here is the front cover of the second one. The artwork is by the terrific El Paso artist Maritza Jáuregui-Neely. My co-editor and I asked her to capture the flavor of El Paso, and she certainly did:

About a Mountain

Nonfiction
A Noble Miss

By John D’Agata
236 pp. W.W. Norton $23.95

Reviewed by Tim Elhajj

In 2002, John D’Agata helped his mother move to Las Vegas and found himself following the ongoing controversy to relocate and store radioactive waste material from all over the country nearby. He then volunteered for a local community suicide prevention help line, and that same summer sixteen-year-old Levi Presley jumped from the roof of a hotel to his death. In About A Mountain, John D’Agata takes these disparate threads of his experience and weaves them into a meditation on bureaucracy and corrupt politics, the self-destructive impulses of individuals and nations, and the limits of language over time.

For over twenty years Yucca Mountain has been at the heart of a plan to dispose of waste from every nuclear power plant or weapon development site across the United States. The government plans to store this material inside the mountain until it no longer poses a threat to human life. But as D’Agata unpacks the decisions that led to this course of action, it becomes clear that the threat to humanity isn’t what’s driving the policy.

There are politics at play at almost every level of the process, from the assessment of risk—does the threat of transporting nuclear waste outweigh the threat of storing it in multiple locations?—to adopting Yucca Mountain as the central storage facility. Will anyone be surprised to learn that Congress selected this mountain, which may not be the most suitable location for a variety of geological reasons, because its state and federal representatives were among the weakest and least able to protect their constituents from harm?

Fortunately D’Agata has his sights set higher. He isn’t primarily concerned with rabble-rousing against corrupt politicians, but wants us to consider instead the act of self-destruction itself. We consider it literally as he traces Levi Presley’s last hours. We consider it figuratively as we reflect on how long the toxicity of the radioactive waste we’re creating will last, compared to the length of the longest-known civilizations and cultures, or the efficacy of language itself.

D’Agata gets high marks for the scope and breadth of this work. He reaches for and imagines descriptions of everything from Edvard Munch contemplating the world as he paints The Scream to the few hours prior to Presley’s leap from the tower at the Stratosphere. I really wanted to enjoy this book, and for the most part I did, but somehow, something about its execution left me cold.

D’Agata has a penchant for lists. He includes lists of contradictory facts, lists of the exact types of devastation that might occur in a traffic accident involving a truck with a payload of nuclear waste, lists that include everything that would be contaminated in such an accident from rusted bolts to light bulbs, lists of the accumulation of cosmic sums of interest that accrue over vast periods of time. One or two these lists seems fine, a good idea—this is, after all, a book about the existential grief of modern life. What better way to present this than by asking the reader to wade through this sort of data? But I am the type of reader who wants to drink in every word, and I feel cheated when I am tempted—no, invited is a better word—to scan so many lists by the author.

Worse, D’Agata has chosen to bring into the story his own experience, and his tale of moving his mother to Vegas is incredibly inconsequential and dull. Mom and son look for somewhere to live. Mom and son march in a small parade. He describes a visit to the proposed site at Yucca Mountain, which isn’t as trite. And his work on the suicide prevention hot line allows him to segue more easily into the material about poor Levi. But there is little self-revelation here. The material from his life is simply a way to frame the text, lacking any sort of urgency or depth. Why bother?

Compare D’Agata’s use of memoir here with something like Nick Flynn’s sublime memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, where Flynn, a soon-to-be father, uses his book to examine his fears of fatherhood and intimacy and, as the Abu Ghraib scandal breaks in the news, his growing obsession with torture and pain. Under Flynn’s deft hand, the connections between his own personal fears, American fears of terrorist attack, and the fears of torturer and tortured alike seem plain enough, but each is made all the more urgent by the immediacy of the prison scandal or the infant growing in its mother’s womb. This is how to use personal experience to inform a political issue. D’Agata presents some intriguing ideas, but his text misses on some important marks. It’s a noble miss, but a miss all the same. 

A self-publisher's progress

Today I submitted a 64-page chapbook to CreateSpace on behalf of Mesilla Valley Writers (MVW), which is here in New Mexico. It's my first such endeavor, and writers considering self-publishing might want to see how it goes. I'll be publishing a second chapbook very soon, and if all goes smoothly, a novel in the fall.

In previous years, MVW has published using a local print shop. We'd print a set number for a set price, and would always have unsold copies languishing in someone's garage. We decided to experiment with an online company this year because we avoid the upfront printing costs and we can buy exactly the quantity we want.

My first inclination was to go with Lulu.com, but they have an 84-page minimum; neither this chapbook nor the next one will meet that criterion. CreateSpace doesn't have that requirement, and their association with Amazon gave me the confidence to try them.

My software includes Word 2007 and Corel Paint Shop Pro X. No doubt other software would do just as well. Formatting the layout and page size in Word was straightforward, just changing it to the 6" x 9" dimensions planned for the book. The page count has to be a multiple of four for any printed book, so I arranged my material and illustrations accordingly. Of course, a few blank pages at the end would be no problem, but you do need to plan for it.

With CreateSpace and probably other such outfits, you have to upload your book in two separate PDFs, one for the contents and one for the cover. Word 2007 allows you to create a PDF of a word processing file, which you can then look at in Adobe. (If you don't have it, download the free Adobe 9 reader. You'll need it.) This is a good time to inspect the entire file for any formatting errors. Then you can upload the PDF to CreateSpace on their website. It's quite straightforward--you get a template into which you upload the file.

After that, I turned to the cover, which was a little more intimidating for me. My front cover graphic had to be 300 dpi and sized at 6 x 9. This was a little tricky getting just right, but mainly because of my inexperience. But it wasn't too bad. The CreateSpace instructions said to export the graphic into PDF. The trouble was, I couldn't see a way to do that using Paint Shop Pro. Maybe I just missed something.

But no matter. A number of free PDF-creating tools exist on the Web. I used

http://www.freepdfconvert.com/, which worked beautifully. I just uploaded my graphic, and got a PDF in return. Very nice. Then it was a matter of uploading that into the cover template. You'll also need to create a back cover and the spine, which of course varies in thickness by page count. They

have a book tour video that shows the process. This is what took me the most time in the submission process, because it requires close attention to detail--and for me, a bit of trial and error. Here is the result:

That red border is not part of the cover; it's the trim area. Anything extending into the trim area will not be part of the cover. The yellow rectangle on the back cover is an area reserved for the ISBN, which CreateSpace puts in automatically.

And wouldn't you know it? After submitting, I realized I needed to make a small change in text. It turns out that all you have to do is resubmit the corrected file.

I'll post more about my experiences as time goes on. Hopefully, they may help someone.

First the good news...

Lots of good things are going on with me lately, along with one rather nasty one. Today I finished the August issue of the Internet Review of Books. Lots of people have a hand in it, of course, but I actually put the web page up on the 15th of every month. Check it out! You'll like it.

More good news is that I'll be publishing chapbooks for the El Paso Writers' League and Mesilla Valley Writers this week. They're lots of work and fun, collaborating with friends to get the jobs completed. They'll both be published through Amazon's CreateSpace. More about them later this week.

And finally, When Pigs Fly has received a dandy new review on Amazon.

Coachmen Santara

2009-2010

R.I.P.

Now the bad—cringe along with me, please—our Coachmen RV has bitten the dust, declared both unusable and unfixable by Camping World. The issue, we're told, is frame fatigue, meaning we could lose the entire back end of the vehicle—it could break off and kill someone—if we continue to use it. When we bought the vehicle it had 4,000 miles on it, and we have added another 16,000, which hardly should be enough to wear it out. There is a lot more detail, but we're going to Camping World tomorrow to remove our belongings from it, and then we're calling our insurance company. It's very distressing, because we love RV travel.

When writers have ADD

Some blogger I am, not posting for three weeks. Lots of writing-related activity has been going on, though, which seems to be an excuse both for not blogging much and for gaining no traction whatsoever on my next novel. In fact, will there ever be another brand-new novel from my keyboard? Certainly not for a while, as one project after another pops up its alluring little head and gives me that come-hither look. A very good writer friend once described himself as a literary roundheels, by which he meant that every appealing idea that occurred to him made him want to stop what he was doing and cavort with something new. It was a self-effacing comment for someone who has published 10 mysteries with St. Martin's Press, but I understand his sentiment. Active projects on my plate include writing book reviews, maintaining the Internet Review of Books (IRB), participating in three writers' groups (president of one, chapbook editor for two, admin for an online group), flirting with writing poetry, finding and working with web development techies to develop a new and improved IRB website, eagerly searching for typos in other people's work, and putting together some short pieces for a writing contest, all while frequently stopping to check email and too infrequently checking other people's blogs. It's all fun at least 90 percent of the time, or I wouldn't do it. The trouble is that novel writing requires a long-term commitment that's inconsistent with this fragmentation of time, this self-imposed ADD.

There will be another novel, but it's already written, sitting on my hard drive since the previous millennium, when an agent was unable to place it. An artist will create a cover, and then off the novel will go to publication, probably through Lulu. It's serious, though, and most of my fiction in the last few years has been fairly light.

What about you? If you're writing a novel, do you clear the decks of distractions? Do you block out time, plunk your butt in the chair, and just write? That's the way to do it. Once upon a time, that used to be me. No longer, but I'm not complaining.

Writing like Stephen King, but not getting paid like him

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

—Or so the I Write Like website says, based on its analysis of chapter one of One Must Die, to be published in 2011. Check out your writing at http://iwl.me. Is it accurate? Who cares? If you like the results, as I do, go with 'em.

When Pigs Fly available on Kindle

I'm pleased to announce that When Pigs Fly is available on Kindle at http://tinyurl.com/whenpigsfly-kindle.

It’s a rollicking road trip, a comic crime caper, and one man’s quest to do the right thing. The Alamogordo, New Mexico, Friends of the Library refused to let me do a reading because of immorality of the bad guys—what better recommendation could I ask for?

For six bucks, you can’t go wrong. You don’t even need to buy a Kindle reader. You can download Kindle for PC for free.

Redwood forests and London Bridge

We're approaching the halfway point in our4,000-mile, month-long RV trip to the West Coast. The main highlight was seeing our son in the San Francisco area for three days, but almost every day adds to the catalog of delights: petroglyphs where we never expected to see them; London Bridge in the middle of what should be nowhere; trees turned to stone; Victorian Painted Ladies; a town consisting entirely of a general store and a gas pump; thriving redwoods that were already giants when Columbus was but lust in his father's loins. Yesterday I walked in a redwood forest--actually, we're staying in an RV park that sits in the middle of one--and examined an old trunk that had fallen sometime in the distant past. Its diameter might have been seven or eight feet, and one end was hollow. I stood inside, imagining being a hiker who sought shelter from a sudden downpour--the inside of the old giant would have been perfect for a half dozen hikers. On its outside, however, the bark was covered by clover, ferns, lichen, and moss, thousands of small roots extending from the top of the mass. It's going to take a long time for Nature to wipe all traces of the tree's existence, but she is patient. She will do it.

My new card reader doesn't work, though it was fine at first, so I haven't been able to upload photos from my camera for a few days. But perhaps because Man trumps Nature (in his own mind), a highway will lead me today out of this ancient glory and north to a Radio Shack. So by the end of the day I should be able to upload more photos.

Here, at least, is London Bridge, carried stone by stone across the Pond in the 1970s and reassembled in Arizona. Oddly, it looks at home.

Book covers

Here are a couple of book covers I designed for a friend, Dr. Judy Hilbert. She's published both titles on Lulu.com. Desert Blooms is her chapbook consisting mainly of writing by members of her local writing group, who are all seniors living in Las Cruces. The red blossoms are a detail from a photo I took this spring in a neighbor's yard.

This one is from last year. Our fiction critique group meets at a restaurant in Mesilla, so Judy and I set up some shots in the parking lot. She brought along a teddy bear that was germane to her story, and she placed it in the remains of an old, broken-down wagon.

ebook ups and downs

A while back, iUniverse approached me with an offer to turn my novels into ebooks in the epub format for an introductory price of $79. After some dithering, I said yes to creating an ebook for When Pigs Fly about three weeks ago. If it worked out well, I thought, I would go back to do other titles.

Well, I followed up yesterday and learned that they'd forgotten to place my order. So today they've corrected that, and their rep saw that I got the service for free. Meanwhile, the price for future ebooks has gone up from $79 to $249. Yikes! Now I am strongly tempted to just figure out how to do it myself. The ebook won't be ready for about another six weeks.

So it's a good news-bad news deal with iUniverse. On the one hand, they have always treated me fairly and honorably. On the other, they have not overwhelmed me with their competence.

Las Cruces author Jim Lindberg

Today I submitted a short profile to Southwest Senior, about local author Jim Lindberg. This gentleman has done a lot--earned a degree in physics, built rockets at White Sands, studied the atmosphere for the Army, took up gemology as a hobby, bought gems for cash from Mexican miners, earned a private pilot's license, worked as a police officer for ten years, once had dinner in Brazil with a woman who identified herself as Hitler's photographer, and has written two books. He is a member of Mesilla Valley Writers here in Las Cruces, and says he never has writer's block or runs out of ideas.

Whew. I'm tired just thinking about it all.

Here is a link to his two books: http://www.llumina.com/store/ShortStories.htm

An interview with Anne Hillerman

Anne Hillerman

This interview with Anne Hillerman, daughter of the late mystery writer Tony Hillerman, appeared in the May 2010 issue of Southwest Senior. Reprinted with permission.

You and your husband Don Strel have two new books out within six months of each other: Tony Hillerman’s Landscape last October and Gardens of Santa Fe this month. What were the challenges and the pleasures of these two projects?

Both books posed a similar challenge—how to condense the information and select among so many possible photos to give readers the best book possible. For Tony Hillerman's Landscape, photographer Don Strel and I both enjoyed traveling throughout the Four Corners area and the Navajo Nation, following the footsteps of Tony Hillerman's detectives, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. In Gardens of Santa Fe, we delighted in the opportunity to see such gorgeous gardens and meet the interesting people who created them.

Tell us about the origins of Tony Hillerman’s Landscape.

Each fall, I help present the Tony Hillerman Writer's Conference: Focus on Mystery. One year New Mexico mystery author Michael McGarrity was our keynote speaker, and Don Strel created a slide show of the places in southern and southwestern New Mexico McGarrity used for his latest book. Tony was in the audience and enjoyed McGarrity's illustrated talk. Afterward he said to Don "Why don't you do something like that for my books?"

Which of your dad’s Chee/Leaphorn novels is your favorite, and why?

Working on our Hillerman's Landscape book gave me a great excuse to re-read them all and I found something I'd forgotten and admired in each of them. I especially enjoyed the early books, Dance Hall of the Dead, Listening Woman, The Dark Wind. I hadn't read them for 25-30 years and they hold up over time very well.

Why do you think readers connected so well with his work?

Tony Hillerman was a wonderful storyteller, with a tremendous appreciation for the landscape in which his stories are set and for the characters who inhabit them. The plot resolutions leave the readers satisfied. The bad guys get what they deserve, Leaphorn and/or Chee solve the crime—and teach us something about the Navajo in the process.

How have his novels affected popular perceptions of the Southwest?

As Don and I have traveled throughout Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico on our book tour, we met many people who say Dad's novels provided their introduction to the Southwest. They liked what they read, came here to visit, and maybe even moved here. The books present American Indians—Navajos, Hopis, Zunis, Utes and other tribes—as real people, and as different from each other. His skill here has helped educate readers who haven't had much other exposure to Southwestern Indians.

Did your dad model any of his characters on real people? And how much Tony Hillerman is in Joe Leaphorn's character?

Yes, Dad often mentioned that he built Joe Leaphorn in part on a sherriff he came to know when he worked a reporter in his early days on the police beat in rural Texas. Other characters, including one memorable villain who spends his spare time trying to find the mother who abandoned him, came from his years in journalism. Sometimes, Dad would let non-profit groups auction off the chance to have a character in his next book named after the buyer. But, although the names are real those character don't necessarilly have anything in common with the real person.

Joe Leaphorn did remind me of Dad in some ways....his unflapability, his dogged anaylzing of problems until they were solved, his tremendous love for his wife and, of course, Leaphorn's appreciation for the beauty of the landscape of the Navajo Nation. Dad loved that country and was totally devoted to his wife, my Mom Marie.

Do you plan to write fiction some day?

Yes. If it will be good fiction remains to be seen. I think every person who enjoys playing with words and stories shares that fiction dream.

Tell me about his influence on your own writing.

Both of my parents always believed that I could do, and succeed at, whatever career I chose. I saw how much my Dad loved journalism, so that was my first career and it lead to books. I had some classes with Dad at UNM when he was teaching journalism and he gave me the same tough, honest criticism he gave everyone in the class. He encouraged me to keep at it, not to get lazy with my writing, and to always expect a little more of myself.

Finally, aren't you glad he didn't follow that agent's advice to get rid of the Indian stuff?

You bet!