A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Wallace Stegner
Belated Happy Birthdays: Wallace Stegner and Toni Morrison
In case anyone was paying attention, I wasn’t… I missed Wednesday, February 17ths doubleheader: the birthdays of Wallace Stegner and Toni Morrison. To miss the birthday of either one is bad. To miss both is deplorable. My apologies to both. Toni Morrison’s hometown of Lorain, Ohio is covered in A Journey Through Literary America. An old African proverb, often trotted out, goes: “It takes a village to raise a child.” Hillary Rodham Clinton, our Secretary of State and the wife of the man whom Toni Morrison famously called “the first black president,” even used it as the title of a book. In the case of Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford, the “village” that raised her is the black community in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town on the shores of Lake Erie. With their support and encouragement, she left Lorain after high school for Howard University to make her way in the larger world. “If black people are going to succeed in this culture,” she said in a 1979 interview, “they must always leave. There’s a terrible price to pay.” But, she went on to say, her departure did not take away her power to “savor” that village she left. It [...] Read More »
Days 1 and 2
We finally left Santa Monica on the eastward journey (on the Christopher Columbus transcontinental highway) as the rain started falling on the windshield of the Dodge Grand Caravan. The storm was coming from the north and I expected we would pass through it by the time we reached the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles, which stretch on and on until they finally subside into barren desert. But instead, the rain stayed with us almost to Barstow. Near Barstow we passed the hotel in whose parking lot my friend Richard and I and my cat Xerox slept on my journey from the East Coast to the West Coast more than a decade ago. We had planned to stop in Las Vegas then, after a grueling trip from New Mexico. But the rodeo was in town and there was no room in Vegas. At least not any that we could, in our weariness and ignorance, find. This time, Rika and I were prepared, and had already booked a room at the Excalibur (going almost solely on price, not on the aesthetic appeal of its legoland like turrets and battlements). It was a good choice. Though the bed left something to be desired [...] Read More »
15 days and counting
Herd to believe,but in 15 days the booksigning at Santa Barbara’s Chaucer’s Books will be behind us and we (my wife, my son, and I) will be taking to the open road on our way to the East Coast. Our first stop will be Las Vegas. Why? Because it’s there. Though it certainly does have a certain literary and cinematic allusiveness, to boot. I hope that, unlike Hunter S. Thompson, I won’t see giant bats flying at the windshield as we get close. The second stop will be Salt Lake City–city that Wallace Stegner came to consider home, and home to one of my major clients as a printer: Gibbs Smith, Publisher. We will definitely stop in at Gibbs Smith, Publisher, where I want to introduce my son to Marty Lee- Vice President of Production and a fine human being. Gibbs Smith, Publisher grew from very small publisher to one of the powerhouses of the Western United States. Below, some of their history (lifted from their website) The Beginning Gibbs M. Smith always wanted to be a history professor. But while in pursuit of his master’s degree, Smith wrote a dissertation on Joe Hill–American labor martyr, proletarian folk hero, and [...] Read More »
Memory believes before knowing remembers. (Faulkner)
I am now reading a book I picked up many years ago called New Burlington. It caught my eye because I am from a Burlington—Burlington, Vermont. But this book was about New Burlington, Ohio, a town that has been soaking under the Caesar Creek Reservoir waters for over thirty years. The author, John Baskin, a reporter for a city paper, came to New Burlington in the early 1970’s, was told that it had been condemned for the purposes of making a reservoir, and decided to move in to record the town’s last year. “I have come to live in New Burlington’s last farm house, surrounded by white brick and clean silence. I have come here to understand its death, my life. Nothing is revealed.” New Burlington was like a lot of other villages. It had been settled by people pushing west. Its original buildings were solid mortise and tenon construction. Built so they wouldn’t blow down. There were town characters. And the stories of those characters were handed down from one generation to the next for edification and enjoyment. When New Burlington was settled, it was possible to walk from there to Chicago without ever leaving the forest. Electricity came [...] Read More »
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