Want to schmooze with real-live writers? Go no further than Casper & Cheyenne & Laramie

I'm a writer who, in my middle-class youth, never met a living breathing writer until I went off to college at University of South Carolina, met James Dickey at a campus gathering, and said, "Who are you?"

That was after his National Book Award and his stint as poet-in-residence at the U.S. Library of Congress but a few years before "Deliverance."

Pam Houston

Now I'm a writer who works in the arts. I learn something every time a writer speaks. I'm always amazed when people don't take advantage of meeting and hearing from real live writers. Great talents such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Pam Houston, David Madden, Margaret Coel, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Craig Johnson, Mark Spragg, etc.

Next weekend in Casper, you can schmooze with some of these cool writers for free and take some workshops with them for a nominal fee. Here are some details:

You're invited to a free reading by Wyoming Arts Council creative writing fellowship winners on Saturday, Sept. 24, 2-4 p.m., in the lobby of the Goodstein Foundation Library at Casper College. This is part of the three-day Casper College Literary Conference.

The event gets underway at 2 p.m. Saturday with a presentation by WAC fellowship judge Pam Houston, "A Reading and Conversation about Places and Moving Among Therm." Pam knows a lot about moving among places. Two days before she flies into Casper, she'll be returning from a trip to Hungary. After the conference, she goes off to Colorado and then California. Pam is author of two short-story collections, including "Cowboys are My Weakness." Her new novel, "Contents May Have Shifted," will be out in 2012. 

At 3 p.m., Pam will join me at the podium to introduce fellowship winners Sam Western, Sheridan; Kathy Bjornestad, Sundance; and Stefani Farris, Lander. They will be reading from their award-winning fiction submissions.

At 4 p.m. in the lobby, Kristen Elias Rowley of the University of Nebraska Press will talk about "Book Business: Publishing with a University Press."

At 5 p.m., there will be a free public reception in the library. Everyone is invited to stick around for food and beverages provided by Casper College President Dr. Walt Nolte.

At 9 p.m., the literary conference hosts its closing session -- a raucous open reading and poetry slam at Metro Coffee Company, 241 S. David in downtown Casper. Poet George Vlastos will serve as emcee. Bring your prose and poetry. Musicians are also invited to get up on stage.

There may be slots remaining in some of the workshops. For more info on workshops, contact Jill Hughes at 307-268-2383 orjhughes@caspercollege.edu. For general questions, contact Terry Rasmussen at trasmuss@caspercollege.edu or call 307-268-2480.

For full schedule, go to http://www.caspercollege.edu/events/lit

To RSVP, go to event Facebook page.

If you're in Cheyenne and can't get up to Casper, you will have three fine writers coming to town Sept. 30-Oct. 1 at Laramie County Community College. Margaret Coel, Lee Ann Roripaugh and Ben Mikaelsen will lead a free writing workshop on Friday at LCCC. They will lead a series of paid presentations on Saturday (lunch included). Book singing to follow.

LCCC's Literary Connection got its start a decade ago when faculty member Leif Swanson arranged an appearance by Robert Bly who, in Red-State Wyoming, had a few choice things to say in public about Dark Lord Dick Cheney, wars of convenience and reactionary dimwits in the Republican Party, among other things. Never shy, Robert Bly. He also led a writing workshop for a small group of 300 souls.

Ain't public funding of the arts a glorious thing?

Ed Roberson

Here are a few other upcoming Wyoming events that feature real live writers:

On September 19, at 5 p.m., the UW MFA program in creative writing in Laramie will host a reception welcoming poet Ed Roberson to campus, followed by a reading by Roberson at 5:30 p.m.  The reception and reading will be held at the UW Art Museum. This event is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a book-signing. Tonight, Roberson is giving a reading in Jackson sponsored by the Teton County Public Library. In February, Roberson’s residency will be followed by that of nonfiction writer John D’Agata. D’Agata’s non-fiction book, “About a Mountain,” was one of the best books I’ve read in the past ten years. FMI: Visit the MFA website at www.uwyo.edu/creativewriting or contact Gwynn Lemler at cw@uwyo.edu or 766-6453.

The Laramie County Public Library Foundation’s annual Booklovers’ Bash will be host to mystery writer Craig Johnson. The Bash, to be held on Friday, October 28 at Little America and includes dinner and silent and live auctions. For a preview of Johnson’s books, please visit his web site at craigallenjohnson.com. Craig also will be featured at the Central Wyoming College Library Open House in Riverton on Nov. 2, 4 p.m.

I have enough experience as an arts administrator and arts presenter and writer to know that you can't make people attend arts events.

Craig Johnson

But there is one thing you can do. You can keep creating and arranging and planning. Doing is in the doing, ya'll. The audience does eventually arrive. When that prize-winning poet from Georgia walks in the door to talk about his craft, you might ask, "Who are you?"

He just might answer: "Sit yourself down. Open your mind. You might learn something tonight."

Read a few of Dickey’s best poems at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/james-l-dickey

"Freedom Riders" asks: Would you put your life on the line?

An amazing documentary. My wife and I saw it on WY Public TV several weeks ago. Donate to Truthout and get a fee copy. 

Happy 75th anniversary, "Gone with the Wind"

Poster issued for the 1936 release of the book (Hutton Archive/Getty Images)

Happy 75th anniversary to the publication of Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind."

I have no great love for the book. I read it only once. But my Grandfather Shay made an effort to read it every year. It's the only book that I remember seeing him read. Unlike Pat Conroy, who wrote a nice "fellow Southern writer" tribute on NPR Online for the novel's anniversary, Grandpa had no roots in the South. And he was no writer. He did like Civil War history -- I inherited his 1885 edition of "Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant." He also had a fondness for Scarlett O'Hara's pluckiness. He married a plucky woman, my grandmother, who did have some South of the Mason-Dixon roots from Maryland and Virginia. Family stories link us to Robert E. Lee via my great-grandmother, a Lee from Virginia. Nobody in my family has been able to establish a link. We may eventually have to do some DNA testing. There undoubtedly is a cottage industry in the South devoted to proving Lee lineage.

My grandfather went to war with the Iowa National Guard, first to the Mexican border against those pesky Pancho Villa insurgents and later to France with the American Expeditionary Force. He was born a few decades after the Civil War ended and would have known some veterans of that war growing up in rural Iowa. Grandpa was a young lad when more Iowans went off to fight the Spanish-American War in 1898. His turn came a few years later.

"Gone with the Wind" was the only book written by Margaret Mitchell. She wrote it at a tiny desk in a tiny apartment in Atlanta. She was bit embarrassed by all the attention generated by the book's success and the blockbuster 1939 film. She was hit by a car and died at the young age of 48.

Shortly thereafter, her secretary and custodian of the apartment building, burned the book's manuscript, apparently on orders from Mitchell. Only a few pages survive. 

Happy birthday to a writing mentor

Happy birthday to Harry Crews. He was one of my writing mentors during my time in Hogtown. He helped me look at fiction in new ways, and introduced me to many of the Southern writers I had overlooked in my youth (or those that the nuns in high school overlooked for me). Harry said that he learned to write by copying those stories and novel passages that he especially liked. Not sure how many of those he did. I tried it and it helped me get to the bottom of phraseology and rhythms. Also a great way to grok a story's dialogue. He wrote, as he tells it, a "roomful of stories," but most weren't published at the time. He did publish a slew of books.

Harry's novels (Feast of Snakes, Car, Karate is a Thing of the Spirit) explore the wild side of life in the South. He also wrote fine pieces for big mags such as Playboy and Esquire. His Esquire column, Grits, was a must-read for me every month. He wrote about encountering some rough customers while hiking the Appalachian Trail, a part of the trail that passes through the place where they hanged the circus elephant. I guess you can "see the elephant" down South, too. His most chilling piece (for Playboy, if I remember correctly) was "The Button-Down Terror of David Duke." It was a chilling piece because KKK Grand Wizard David Duke had learned what his forebears had not, that late-20th-century marketing required a smile, a suit and speaking in complete sentences. The message was the same but the messenger had grown slicker and more menacing.

Crews could talk to people like Duke because he grew up in southern Georgia swamp country. He knew these people. They were family. He imagined people like them and put them in his books. They were sometimes large and startling figures. No surprise that Harry has this quote from another Georgia native on his web site:

"When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures." — Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer & His Country" 

Happy birthday, Harry. Thanks for everything.

Tea Party Slim is not so civil about The Civil War

Tea Party Slim and I were on the back porch discussing the American Civil War. We would have been on the front porch but the Wyoming west wind was blowing too damn hard. Under shelter, we sipped iced tea festooned with sprigs of mint.

“You mean The War Between the States, don’t you?” said Slim.

“The Civil War is what I’m talking about,” I replied. “It was 1861-1865. It started with the South seceding from the Union and firing on a military fort in Charleston Harbor.”

“That’s the one I’m talking about – The War of Northern Aggression. The South just wanted to live in peace…”

“…with their slaves.”

Slim held up his hand. “Not all Southerners had slaves. In fact, 85 percent of them did not.”

“But 15 percent did. And they were the merchants and land barons and politicians that forced the issue. People like Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Scarlett O’Hara’s pa, Mary Custis, etc.”

“You mean Mary Custis, granddaughter of Gen. George Washington, slaveholder?”

“One and the same.”

“Or Thomas Jefferson, slave owner and well, you know… He liked his female slaves.” Slim was trying to be delicate.

“Sally Hemmings – we all know the story,” I said. “And I’m sure there are hundreds like it all across the South. The Massa had all the power and when he came calling, well, how could a girl turn him down?”

“O.K., O.K., enough of that,” said Slim. “People make mistakes.”

“Rape is merely a mistake?”

“Let’s get back to the politics. This stuff makes me sick.”

“Rape is politics.” I had to get in one more jab. “But we were talking about The Civil War. Ken Burns called it that on PBS.”

“Don’t get me started on PBS.”

I dearly wanted to get him started on PBS, one of the Tea Party’s favorite targets, but held my tongue. “Shelby Foote is interviewed on the show. He’s a Southerner and he calls it The Civil War.”

“He has to do that on TV.”

I disappeared inside and brought back Shelby Foote’s massive three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative. “Shelby Foote called it The Civil War.”

“His publisher made him do it,” said Slim. “The War of Northern Aggression: A Narrative wouldn’t be welcomed in those New York literary circles.”

“Foote was from Mississippi, land of great writers” I added. “You can borrow the books if you want.”

“No thanks,” he said. “I’ve read all I need to about The Civ… I mean, The War Between the States.”

I held the books in my lap. They weighed a ton. I wondered if I should tell Slim that I’d only read half of the first volume.

“That’s the problem – the victor gets to tell the story,” said Slim. “The North won. The North tells their side of the story.”

“I told you that Foote is a Mississippian,” I said. “Did you watch him on the PBS series? He spoke very kindly about the South and Southerners and said some harsh words about the North. The Union generals stunk, for one thing.”

Slim smiled. “They did, didn’t they? McClellan was the worst.”

“It’s hard to say who the worst was,” I replied. “So much competition. But they did find a leader in Grant. And Sherman is credited with creating the “total war” concept with his march through the South.”

“Talk about rape and pillaging.”

“And burning crops and houses and generally laying waste to the countryside.”

“The War of Northern Aggression – like I said.”

“The Civil War – like me and Shelby Foote and Ken Burns and millions of others said. You can look it up.”

We sat in silence. I could tell we had reached an impasse. Slim was looking a bit glum. I decided that the day needed some new energy. “I’m surprised, slim, that you didn’t once mention the magic words.”

He looked at me. “Magic words?”

“States’ rights,” I said.

His eyes bulged. Steam poured out of his ears. The glass shattered in his hand. “States’ rights,” he bellowed. “That’s what it was all about. No matter what you call the war, it was about the rights of a state or group of states over the rights of a federal government. Why just look at what’s happened since. We got the feds telling us what to do, from what crops we grow to the kind of cars we drive. Half of Wyoming is owned by the feds and we should take it back, we should….”

As Slim went on and on, I sat back in my chair and sipped my mint tea. The history of The Civil War weighed heavily on my lap and in my mind.

Photo: Tea Party uber-patriot. Photo by Don Jenkins, The Daily News

Warning to Governors: Don't use publicly-employed Guard troops to quash dissent by public employees

I've had sidebar links for both Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and its older brother, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) for years. I am not a veteran but support them and their causes.

This time, they're standing with their fellow public employees. This sums it up:

We believe military service members are public employees too. It is dishonorable to suggest that military personnel should be deployed against teachers, health care providers, firefighters, police officers, and other government employees, many of whom are themselves serving in the National Guard.

It's true that U.S. Army and National Guard troops have sometimes been deployed to quash dissent. This happened regularly during the Vietnam War protests in the sixties and early seventies. I was a ROTC student at University of South Carolina in the spring of 1970 when the Guard was called out to police the campus after Kent State protests erupted. Some of the Guard guys were Carolina students, which made it strange. To my knowledge, none of them beat the crap out of their fellow students. It was a different matter with S.C. Highway Patrol troopers, who swarmed into dorms and beat up any longhairs they could find.

The Guard has been deployed by Governors to carry out racist and anti-union policies. In September 1957, Gov. Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to make sure that African-American students didn't enter the state university.

Arkansas National Guard commander blocks black students from entering their taxpayer-supported
university 

Only after Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Guard and sent in the 101st Airborne, did these brave students (Little Rock Nine) get to attend the university that their tax dollars supported.

Does this seem crazy? I was six years old and don't really remember it. But I look back on it and am astonished that this happened in my country.

Here's another photo pitting soldiers against workers from the IVAW web site.

And, finally, a quote from the IVAW web site:

Troops have been called out in the past against worker strikes, campus protests, and urban uprisings. However, recent events in Egypt and numerous examples from U.S. history have shown that service members have the power to side with the people and refuse to use violence against their fellow citizens. Troops activated for duty in Madison, WI will have to decide if public sector workers are really the enemy. IVAW says they are not and that troops should support workers fighting for decent jobs, wages, and benefits.

Extremism goes mainstream in Wyoming politics

Lead article in this morning's Wyoming Tribune-Eagle by Josh Mitchell:

Extremism in Wyoming: Neo-Nazis are here. So is the KKK. A white supremacist group thinks this could be a great place to thrive. But when it comes to extremism in Wyoming, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

It's an interesting piece, but the reporting only goes so far. The Southern Poverty Law Center does great work investigating traditional right-wing extremist groups. It earned its chops fighting groups such as the KKK and the John Birch Society that were battling civil rights legislation in the fifties and sixties. Sure, these groups still spout hate and actively recruit new members. The Cheyenne KKK chapter came to the Capitol a decade ago to stage a protest against an issue that I can't recall. There are Birchers in Wyoming, says Bill Hahn, PR guy for JBS national HQ in Wisconsin. He's named in the WTE article, and says he won't give out membership info for Wyoming.

Sorry SPLC, but I don't fear these groups. I fear the mainstreaming of their ideas. The Tea Party is a contemporary offshoot of the John Birch Society. For the past two years, conservative candidates have been falling all over each other to curry favor with the Tea Party. At least one Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2010 spoke at a Tea Party rally in Cheyenne. That was Ron Micheli of notoriously conservative Uinta County. He said what a lot of Wyomingites wanted to hear in 2010 and came within a gnat's eyelash of winning his party's nomination. This was stymied by sensible Republicans and a horde of cross-over Dem voters in the primaries.

If you scoff at the idea that KKK and Bircher nonsense is now mainstream, you didn't pay attention to the recently completed session of the Wyoming Legislature. Gays, lesbians, immigrants, union members, teachers and public employees were all targeted by proposed bills. Very few made it into law. But this is just the beginning. As hate and discrimination goes mainstream, fueled by the Tea Party, with its "strains of extremism," and 24/7 Fox and right-wing radio, more and more legislators with these agendas will be elected. This is especially true in the rural areas of the state, where Democrats are rare but satellite antennae grow like prairie weeds.

This legislation will be supported (as it is now) by lobbyists from conservative think tanks and large corporate interests. Progressive and moderate Wyomingites will have their hands full working against discriminatory bills. We have passion but little money. We are fortunate that there are Republican legislators such as Cale Case who continue the state's strains of moderation. But their days may be numbered as they are targeted as RINOs (Republican in Name Only) by right-wing activists backed by outside funding.

The WTE article is worth reading. It adds to our understanding about the right-wing weirdness that has entered politics in the Equality State.

For the full SLPC report, "U.S. Hate Groups top 1,000," go to http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/us-hate-groups-top-1000

Wyoming Women's Foundation wants stories by women struggling to reach economic self-sufficiency

I was talking to a part-time coworker a few days before Christmas. Her full-time job is as a waitress at a restaurant that we shall call ApplebeesPerkinsChilisTexasRoadhouseOutback, etc. She makes $2.13 an hour and looks to make more -- much more -- in tips. On the last day she worked during the “Season of Giving,” she made a buck in tips during the entire shift. For her eight hours, she made $17. This will pay for a half tank of gas, if current prices hold steady..

Tipped workers have their work cut out for them. Sure, on good nights they make more than the $7.25/hour federal minimum wage. If they don’t, their employer is supposed to make up the difference. Most don’t, because there is no enforcement.

Wyoming's legislatively-mandated minimum wage is $5.15/hour. We are tied with Georgia as the state with the lowest minimum wage. Good to see that Wyoming is trying to keep up with the Georgians. Or vice versa. At least Wyorgia has a minimum wage requirement. Five Southern states have none. They include Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina and Louisiana. The Feds can’t mandate that states adhere to a minimum wage. They would be told “it’s none of your cotton-pickin’ business what we pay our slaves employees.”

Such good company we keep.

The Wyoming Women’s Foundation is looking for stories from women struggling to make ends meet. Here’s the announcement:

The Wyoming Women’s Foundation announces the launch of a new project designed to help raise awareness of the barriers women face in achieving economic self-sufficiency in Wyoming.

We are seeking to learn about the life of workers who earn minimum wage in Wyoming. Are you earning minimum wage? (The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour).What kind of job do you have? Are you able to make ends meet with that wage? How? We will be asking how your wage impacts you life and that of your family.

We will also specifically be looking for information from Wyomingites who rely on tipped wages. Are your tipped wages enough to get you by and are you aware of the tipped offset? We encourage you to check the WYWF facebook page to share your story. If you would prefer your information remains anonymous and not posted publically, please email us at sarah@wywf.org or call 307-250-0479. Your information will be kept confidential, unless you agree to let us share your story.

Please join the conversation! We want to hear from you so that we can maximize the number of women in Wyoming that have achieved economic self-sufficiency!

More Atlanta public art

"The Rites of Spring" by Eliot Weinberg. Cold day in Atlanta. It is warmer (I hear) back in Cheyenne. Wes Moore speaking at Mental Health conference luncheon.

Montana and Wyoming fiction writers give freaks a pass

“Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana. And you, my friend, are a blue-ribbon, bull-goose freak.”

That’s a line from Thomas McGuane’s new novel, “Driving on the Rim,” Maile Meloy reviewed the novel (mostly favorably) and referred to those lines as her favorites. I like them too.

I haven’t read a McGuane novel since “92 in the Shade.” And that was decades ago. More recently I’ve read McGuane’s essay collection, “A Sporting Chance.” Practically everything I know about cutting horses I know from this fine book. McGuane raises and trains cutting horses in Montana. As a youth, I was chronically allergic to horse hair and hay and weeds and almost everything else you can find on a ranch. Fortunately, I was a city boy and not a farmer’s son out on the prairie.

I have since been on horseback five or six times without collapsing with an asthma attack. But my sensibilities are totally non-horse and horses know it.

Maybe that’s why I’m so taken with McGuane’s facility with horses. Horses and language. As Meloy points out in the NYT review, McGuane’s novels are a little baggy while his essays are succinct works of art. She also points out some factual inconsistencies regarding some of the book’s characters.

But she’s willing to give McGuane a pass on this. Just as the attorney in the book in willing to give a Montana-style pass to the main character. Meloy gives McGuane a pass because he’s such a damn fine writer and he’s written a good book.

I sometimes get a bit suspicious when a fictional character’s freakishness is called out. It’s almost as if the author, who’s spent thousands of words portraying his character’s quirkiness, must now actually say the word “freak!” Just in case you missed all the clues.

But there’s something a bit deeper here. Have the quirky characters of the Rocky Mountain West become a bit of a stereotype? Quirky people live here, denizens of the Great Wide Open. They often have fled the more settled places of the East and South and Coastal West. They are tough individualists drawn to the live-and-let-live Code of the West. It’s not a code, exactly, more like guidelines. But you know what I mean.

Used to be all the freaky characters came from the minds of writers of the South – William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Barry Hannah, Harry Crews, etc. Along came Annie Proulx, Lee K. Abbott, John Nichols, Rick DeMaranis, Ron Carlson, Alyson Hagy, etc. These writers of the West wrote great stories and novels about freakish people driven by a search for solitude or personal freedom or some undefined crucial core value. Southern characters, on he other hand, were driven more by ghosts of the so-called glorious past and the constraints of their old-time religion.

I love freaky characters. I often try to invent some for my stories. But just because you live in a freakish place, such as Montana or Wyoming, that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook when it comes to creating believable characters.

Name the freakiest place you know. If you’re a button-down Midwesterner, Boulder, Colorado’s Pearl Street Mall might test your sensibilities. If you’re a hipster from Boulder, a trip to Sun City, Ariz., might cause you to come unglued.

Wyoming is pretty freaky, I must admit. Bill Sniffin’s Sunday newspaper column was devoted to the antics of the former Miss Wyoming-World, Joyce McKinney. McKinney is the focus of Errol Morris’s latest documentary, “Tabloid.” In 1977 in London, she kidnapped a former boyfriend, a young LDS missionary, and forced him to have sex for three days. The British tabloids had a field day with this woman who committed rape on a man. That’s the focus of Morris’s film.

Sniffin of Lander also recalled that McKinney surfaced a few years in Tennessee, paying a man to burglarize a house “to pay for an artificial leg for a three-legged horse.”

As Playlist says about Morris’s story: “Intoxicatingly entertaining and outrageously wild, Hollywood’s top writers could never have dreamed this up.”

Hollywood writers? No. But Mountain West writers – of course.