Passing the torch

Normally when I get published, I’m very excited. And I’ve just been published in the Penn Stater, which is a particular Blue-and-White thrill. However, this time any pleasure I feel is somewhat dimmed. A few months ago my dad told me that the Penn Stater was looking for submissions for “first day” stories. He and I both attended PSU-Altoona and we both loved it. He said he’d write his, I could write mine, and we’d submit both. After I read his, I wrote mine, dovetailing the two stories. And I didn’t show it to him because I wanted him to have the pleasure of reading it first in print (if we were selected).

Well, Dad died two weeks ago. And the Penn Stater just came out and they chose my piece but not his. I have no argument with the magazine—I certainly know editorial procedures and it could have been for any number of reasons. But seeing my piece in there, and not his, just reminds me he’s gone.

So here—complete—are both his and my work. Thanks, Dad.

The Beginning of a Life-Long Love

I remember my first day at what is now called Penn State–Altoona very well. I really didn’t want to be there. On that September morning in 1951, I walked the two miles from my house in Juniata to the Altoona Undergraduate Center of Penn State (AUC). It was on the grounds of what had been Ivyside (amusement) Park. The largest concrete swimming pool in the world was now the parking lot, the bathhouse converted into classrooms, the shooting gallery now the chemistry lab, and the skating rink the Student Union. I had desperately wanted to go away to school but family finances wouldn’t allow it. I envied those who went to real colleges—like Juniata, Indiana, and St. Francis. They would be living the “La Vie Collegian” while I was stuck at home.

The 200+ incoming freshmen gathered in one of the larger rooms in the bathhouse where we were welcomed by the director and various members of the staff. Most were graduates of area high schools. Quite a few ex-GIs and a smattering of other older students–very few girls. The last speaker of the morning was the music instructor. He talked about the friendliness of AUC and practically demanded that we say “Hello” to anyone we meet on campus. We were then dismissed for lunch.

As we walked to the Student Union, we awkwardly greeted everyone we passed. At first it seemed weird to greet strangers but, by the end of an afternoon of filling out forms, meeting with advisors, and learning the Penn State Fight Song, we became a cohesive bunch. I had met people who would become life-long friends, ate lunch with faculty members who talked about real life—baseball, movies, and cars. After the session was over, I got a ride home with another student from Juniata.

At supper that evening, I got the inevitable question, “How did you like AUC?”

I replied, “It was better than I expected.”

It was a rough beginning for a romance that has lasted to the present day.

                                                                                            —John E. Boyd, AUC ‘51

“Ahh, Altoona.” That’s all I heard growing up. This “Altoona” was, according to my father, the most wonderful place in the world to go to college. I didn’t believe him. After all, I saw the town every time we visited my grandparents—with its railroad tracks and hilly streets it didn’t look at all like the college towns I saw on TV. Occasionally on those visits my dad would stop the car at the edge of the tiny campus and go on and on about “Bathhouse U” while all the kids squirmed and said, “Can we go home now?”

Fast-forward. In September 1975 I packed up for college. Where was I going? I had not exactly been ambitious in either grades or college applications, so unlike my two sisters I was not headed for University Park. My father was—for once—delighted with my procrastination and uttered one word: “Altoona!” The only reason I didn’t argue was the short drive to State College, so I thought I’d spend my weekends in a “real” college town.

My procrastination also meant off-campus housing. My parents helped me move into a house I would share with three other freshman girls and a landlady. After I unpacked, my father tried his best to persuade me to walk around the campus so he could “show me around.” All I could think was I wasn’t going to be seen on any campus for the first time with my parents! I quickly ushered them to the door. I still remember the look on their faces as they said goodbye. I was eager to start college life; my parents were watching their last daughter leave home.

And it was better than I expected. Just as it did for my father, Penn State Altoona brought many wonderful memories and friends I cherish to this day.

                                                                                    —Therese Boyd, ’79 (Altoona ’77)

 

Agonies of Authorship

(Or “writing isn’t the only way we can suffer . . . “)

I am often annoyed by the fictionalized versions of a writer’s life—so often it’s made to look easy, as though we write a few things and ta-da, people are lining up around the block to buy our book.  Well, if you’re at all considering this career, I can tell you, in the words of a certain rockstar, “it isn’t gonna be that way.”

I was excited for my first few book signings but the luster was soon replaced with disappointment, then frustration, and finally plain old boredom. Although a really fun read (just read the reviews!), my book was overpriced for the market. Very few were sold at book signings, despite my best author-patter (but the entire first print run did sell in a good amount of time and the publisher reprinted).

So when my friend Marion Winik came to town for her own signing for her latest book, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, of course I went to support her. The Borders staff was incredibly friendly and helpful. The table was placed in a good area. Marion’s a well-known, phenomenal writer (read her!). And still nobody came.

At one point I wandered around while Marion talked to someone. I was surprised to find one copy of my own book. I also discovered that my publisher has once again raised the price. (Guess they like keeping that second printing in their warehouse!)

Finally, just as we were about to pack it in, a man came by and bought a copy for a friend (and I found out he knows my neighbors). So we ended on a good note. But she’s got three of these events left in the next two weeks. I don’t envy her.

(P.S.: For the record, last night I beat her [and my husband] at Scrabble. )

 

October 5, 2008

It’s not often that I have more than one thing to do (socially, I mean—that’s never a problem on the work side!). Weeks ago my friend Marion Winik invited me to join her for her reading/signing at the York Women’s Fair for her latest book, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. Afterwards we were to have dinner with two other friends of hers. I’m working long hours right now, but that’s the kind of invitation I never pass up.

Then my sister emailed me a few days ago and said, “Wanna see Bruce?” She’s working very hard for Barack Obama and so got “preferred” tickets to his set in Philadelphia yesterday. I had to say, “can’t go!”

So I told Marion that I blew off Bruce Springsteen for her. I’m glad I did. I’ve had some difficult places to do readings, but nothing like the challenge she had: A large, very noisy room full of vendor booths. Tons of people, but not many that interested in hearing her read, and a less than robust sound system. But she did a great job. This woman is really gifted—she writes with a fearlessness I can only wish for. (Buy her books!) Of course, I bought some and had them signed.

Then we had a lively dinner at the Left Bank in York with Beth and Kim. Crabcake over butternut squash risotto with asparagus—perfect. Once the conversation turned to Sarah Palin, I’m surprised we didn’t get (at the very least) shushed for the strong (and mutual) feelings around the table. It was wild and funny.

They left for a concert, and I drove home, calling my sister on the way to find out how her day went. She says I would have loved the show and I’m sure she’s right, but I made the right choice. No regrets!

 

Book review: Marianne Gingher, A Girl’s Life

There was a time when only the famous had their autobiographies published. But, these days, you don’t have to be Charles Lindbergh or Jimmy Carter to have your life story in print. Writing autobiography is a national trend. Many people—both famous and unknown—are taking time to write down their lives. Courses are available for those who don’t know how to start (I’ve taught one for three years); self-discovery books overwhelm bookstore shelves. People want to express themselves and tell stories about their lives. 

So when I was given Marianne Gingher’s memoir, A Girl’s Life: Horses, Boys, Weddings, and Luck, to review, I wondered what it was about her life that made her write it down. I was deceived at first. The book jacket speaks of a “functional family,” the back cover is effusive with praise. Oh no! I thought. This is going to be sickening, especially to those of us who grew up on the dysfunctional side of the tracks. It’s going to be sugar-coated, syrupy fictions of life, masquerading as real. 

But I’m wrong. Happily wrong. Instead of lies, it is the truth. Gingher tells her own story with honesty, her writing clear and beautiful. She spins thoughts into sentences, observations into pictures. She tells the bad along with the good, but casts no blame for the events of her life. The back cover reviews are right; as Fred Chappell says, this book is “utterly charming.” 

Marianne Gingher grew up in Greensboro in the 1950s and ‘60s, with two younger brothers (one named Knothead!), a physician father and a stay-at-home mother. No big lottery winnings, no leaps to stardom, no bid for Miss America—an ordinary, comfortable, unremarkable existence. And yet, reading her life on paper makes it somehow remarkable. Interesting. She tells stories of her youth: trying to freeze her brother to death on a cold winter day, riding her horse in a local parade in costume, trying to outdo her father with a Christmas gift to her mother. She tells stories most of us have lived in some form or other. And she tells them beautifully. 

Gingher has such a gift for observation that I can’t help but think she must constantly make notes of her thoughts. How else would she remember everything and make it ring so true? She can view her life with the clarity of an adult but she doesn’t forget what it feels like to be a child. When she was threatened with “impeachment” as fifth-grade class president, she was embarrassed and thought that meant she had lost her “peachiness.” We all have had times when things didn’t go the way we thought they should, times when the world confused us. She describes them well. 

The book is divided into three parts, “Sanctuary,” “Truths and Grit,” “Metaphors and Pies,” which doesn’t tell the reader anything, but after reading the book, I can see how it makes sense. It’s almost chronological—the first part is about childhood and the last about parenthood—but it’s not that strictly ordered. Nothing about this book is that strict, nor should it be. 

Gingher’s life has not been perfect, but there is no self-pity in her words. When writing about her adult life she discusses her divorce honestly, marvels at her sons’ development, and takes us through the university hiring process as she considers a move out of Greensboro. Again, we can relate. 

One paragraph, to me, represented the entire book and illustrates best Gingher’s ability to paint a scene and imbue it with beauty and emotion: “This is the first time I’ve seen our house in snow, and all I can think of is how much we would be missing if we didn’t live there. Like a bright planet the snowstorm bore to earth, the house has a new gravitational pull on me. I forgive its drippings and crookedness, its warped window casements and crazed plaster ceiling. To stand outside it in the cold whirring darkness, to imagine the warm life that awaits me back inside, I feel more spy than inhabiter, a visitor to a place where someone, perhaps a grandmother, is indoors stirring soup. It’s as if what’s valuable has to be sneaked up on, relished at a distance, withheld, imagined from the point of view of an outsider, to be fully appreciated. I would like very much to live in that house, I think; but, of course, I already do.” 

I want to read more. I want to know whatever happened to Knothead. And how her own sons are doing. And whatever else—both unremarkable and well observed—happens in her life. I have no doubt we’ll be hearing from her again. 

Originally published in the Greensboro (NC) News-Record.

 

Book review: Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate

The rows of brightly wrapped candy bars stacked neatly on store shelves give no hint of what it took to get them there. And most shoppers would never pause to consider why their favorite bar–most likely made by Hershey or Mars–is at eye level, or even at the cash register. 

The universe that the two biggest chocolate manufacturers inhabit–while extraordinary–is also secretive and, until now, impenetrable. Milton Hershey and Frank Mars started companies that by the end of the twentieth century would control 75 percent of the candy racks in a $14-billion candy market. From similar beginnings the two men worked, sometimes in cooperation with each other, to build two world-renowned corporations, now in all-out competition with each other. 

Journalist Joel Glenn Brenner was assigned to write about Mars, Inc., for the Washington Post in 1989. The year it took her to convince Mars to allow her access to the company and the subsequent two years of research about Mars and the candy business inspired her to explore Hershey as thoroughly. The result is a fascinating account of two men, two corporations, and the world of chocolate. 

Born into a poor Mennonite family in central Pennsylvania in the mid 1800s, Milton Hershey was apprenticed to a confectioner before beginning his own successful caramel-making business. By the turn of the century he was experimenting with chocolate. In the early 1900s Hershey finally conquered the problems in creating milk chocolate and the nickel Hershey bar became part of American history. 

Frank Mars also came from poverty and began in the candy business while a young man. He started Mars, Inc., in 1922. After a family falling out, his son Forrest moved to Europe to begin his own candymaking company by studying chocolate in Switzerland. With the advent of World War II Forrest came back to the United States and eventually took control of his late father’s company. 

And that is where the similarities end. Milton Hershey planned and built a community for his employees, now Hershey, Pa., where snow and garbage removal were free, rents were cheap, and mortgages easy to get. Among other things, he built a park, a swimming pool, and a restaurant. And he opened a school for poor, orphaned boys, now the richest orphanage in the world. 

Forrest Mars Sr. concentrated solely on business. He developed a flat organizational system, still in use today, where every employee has the same size desk, everyone answers the phone personally, and everyone receives a 10 percent bonus for punctuality. Paychecks are tied to the company’s earnings; if profits go up, salaries go up, but if profits go down, so do salaries. 

At the same time, though, employees were subject to Forrest’s personal tirades, including screaming, cursing, and public humiliation. A financial officer tells how Forrest once dumped his in-box on the floor because it wasn’t neat enough. Yet a woman who manufactures Starburst Fruit Chews for Mars says, “There isn’t another company that would treat me this well.” 

Hershey and Mars are forever linked in history in some surprising ways. When the Mars company was producing Milky Ways, Snickers, and Three Musketeers in the 1930s, Frank Mars was buying his chocolate coating from Hershey. And when Forrest Mars Sr. needed a partner for his M&Ms in the 1940s he hired Bruce Murrie, the son of William Murrie, president of the Hershey Chocolate Company. 

Since 1988 and the acquisition of the Peter Paul candy brand, Hershey has been seen as the American candy leader. Still family-owned by Forrest’s children, John, Forrest Jr., and Jackie, Mars is more successful in the international market. Brenner traces the modern market for both companies, including their noncandy lines. Mars owns Uncle Ben’s rice and Pedigree and Whiskas pet foods. For a time, Hershey owned the Friendly’s restaurants. 

The survival for smaller candy companies in the shadow of these giants seems bleak. Nestle remains a strong presence, having recently acquired both England’s Rowntree and Italy’s Perugina chocolate companies. While there are now over 300 candy firms, it is estimated that through acquisition there will be fewer than 150 left by the year 2010.  

Throughout the book Brenner skillfully weaves world history, empire-building, and eccentric personalities together, binding them with numerous confections. (Even the book pages are sprinkled with M&Ms and Hershey Kisses.)  

This is an engaging read, not merely for people in the business world, but for anyone who wants to know how M&Ms get printed, or what the environmental impact is from harvesting cocoa, or why a product is introduced and then disappears so quickly (it is not always sales). The only way this book would be better would be if samples—I suggest a Snickers and a Hershey bar with almonds—were provided.

Originally appeared in the Greensboro (NC) News-Record.

 

Book review: Lynne Barrett, The Secret Names of Women

My job as an editor has been very stressful lately—too many tight deadlines and cranky authors. So I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel picking up Lynne Barrett’s The Secret Names of Women. Although this is a slim volume, sometimes short-story collections can be a struggle to get through. 

Not this time. As soon as I began the first story, I relaxed. Barrett has a gift for making the reader feel right at home, giving enough information to make three-dimensional people the reader can care about. She could have been sitting in my kitchen, having coffee, telling stories on her friends, her family, herself. 

Annie O’Malley, the Hollywood landscaper in “Hush Money,” says something that could be straight out of Barrett’s mouth: “I tell myself that I want the truth to be known someday, that I’m interested in justice, but mostly I just need to spill the beans.” 

Spill them she does. Relationships wind their way through her tales. The beauty-cream demonstrator having an affair with the salesman. The drummer in an all-female garage band who can’t let go of her last lover, now a big star known as Kid Orchid. And Star, who marries an Estonian looking for residency and finds love with his immigration attorney. 

Barrett enlightens the reader through descriptions that seem to sneak onto the page. A story moves along, quietly, interestingly, and suddenly words give a situation a deeper meaning. In “Twentieth Century Design,” fifteen-year-old Elizabeth studies her grandmother’s habits and rituals, not understanding them but trying to. When her grandfather runs away with a bank teller, Elizabeth looks for signs of a breakdown. But “Grandma sits up slim and straight, wearing a beige linen dress and an organdy apron. What a thing to wear when you’re packing up because your life has fallen apart. She nibbles her sandwich.” It is a very clear picture. 

It is also a picture without judgment. Some writers put their characters in bad situations and then criticize their every move. But when Lee the fat-Elvis impersonator mixes pills and alcohol to disastrous effect, Barrett doesn’t comment. She simply lets him live his life while she tells his story. 

The reader doesn’t have to go far to see these people as real. It is not hard to believe that life on the road is not easy. Or that a man would choose his girlfriend’s acquaintance for his next affair. Or even that a mother of the 1960s would sew outfits for her daughter’s Barbie dolls, even after the daughter had lost interest. 

At first I hesitated at the number of pop culture references. Not only Elvis but also Marilyn Monroe appear in stories. I’ve gotten rather tired of my-generation-as-cliché, and didn’t want to hear more “I knew Elvis” or “. . . Norma Jean” stories. But, as with so many of her stories, Barrett takes a different turn. I had never considered the origin of Marilyn’s voice, which Barrett treats almost as a character itself.  

Some of these stories have appeared in anthologies or popular magazines. Barrett has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts as well as an Edgar Award for mystery writing. Based on this volume, I expect she will continue to be recognized for her work, and deservedly so. 

On the back cover, writer Fred Chappell makes reference to Barrett’s previous book, The Land of Go. He says, “Knowledge, the kind of knowledge that comes from observation both wide and acute, is Lynne Barrett’s forte.” She has not lost that gift in this volume. I look forward to reading more of her work. 

Originally published in the Greensboro (NC) News-Record. 

 

Book review: Wendy Salinger, Listen: A Memoir

For many reasons people are driven to record their experiences, to put their lives on paper. They may have an audience in mind—family or public—or they may just write for themselves. Many an “autobiographical” piece has been written merely for profit, not always even by the subject, such as those ghostwritten for celebrities. Sometimes people who normally wouldn’t write, but who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, will write about it. But many professional writers, too, feel a strong desire to entertain, to explain, to confess, and to validate through their memoirs.

The audience for these books reads them to connect with the writer in a personal way, to learn from the writer’s experience, and to better understand the human condition. We read about unflinching poverty in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, the heartbreak of racism in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and close and loving families in Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood and Tim Russert’s Big Russ and Me. 

Which brings us to Listen: A Memoir. Wendy Salinger and her two sisters spent most of the 1950s and 1960s in North Carolina, daughters of a college professor and a faculty secretary. Like her father, Wendy grew up to become a poet, spinning stacks of words into works. Her first published book, Folly River, won the National Poetry Series contest.  She also works in education as director of the Schools Project at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City.

Listen, Salinger’s first (mainly) prose work, is autobiographical. In this dark, complex, and cryptic book, she shows us her childhood with an abusive father and an enabling mother. He rails at his wife and daughters about their incompetencies (all, it seems, related to being female). She makes excuses, never really acknowledging what she probably knew was going on. Victor (as the author calls him as often as she does “Daddy”) was molesting his middle daughter, Wendy. Throughout the book, those events color everything else.

Surely there aren’t many subjects more difficult to write about. Instead of taking a traditional narrative route, with chapters and a chronology, in Listen Salinger relates conversations, events, what seem to be pieces of memories. Poet that she is, she writes sparingly, never florid, never effusive. The book jumps back and forth in time from Victor’s illnesses to Wendy’s youth and ahead to her adulthood. Sometimes the prose is interspersed with poetry as though even full sentences are too much to convey what she wants to say.

The book is divided into two sections, “Life Before Death” (Victor’s) and “Life After Death,” with subheads that show no more than that the time and place and speaker will change. The reader doesn’t really need more direction than that. The entire book is fractured, each piece as reflective as a broken mirror.

The text is also unconventional in that the author doesn’t always use quotation marks. Salinger does, however, reproduce her parents’ conversations and arguments very realistically. Sometimes it is a little difficult to figure out who is speaking, the author or one of the parents, but eventually it becomes clear based on what is being said. The prologue especially was confusing because although it’s a memoir, it starts with her mother’s voice.

In the twenty-first century we have become so used to accusation, to confession and resolution, that the reader may expect the same in Listen. But it never happens. The reader never gets the awful details. There is no “Montel moment” when everything comes out in a screaming torrent. No confrontation. Ever. Wendy is by his hospital bedside when he dies. Afterwards she never turns on her mother either. While it appears her mother alludes to what happened, she never acknowledges it outright. So is the book titled Listen for us or for her mother? 

 

Author profile: Sandra Bowen

Author and retired college professor Sandra E. Bowen describes the way she talks as “a checkerboard.” In conversation she can jump from subject to subject easily. Her lilting voice gives away her North Carolina roots as she moves effortlessly from discussing her animals (horses and dogs are just the beginning) to Shakespeare or Tibet or segregation 

Growing up in Winston-Salem, this daughter of a former Buffalo soldier always loved books. “I was crazy about Shakespeare. My best friend and I lived in the library–the segregated library. I read a lot of black books.” One of her biggest regrets is that she didn’t spend more of her childhood learning from those who lived before her. “We had some old slaves in my neighborhood. They were fourteen or fifteen at the end of slavery. I didn’t talk to them enough. I didn’t talk to my grandmother enough; she was born the year after Emancipation.”   

Bowen began writing poetry when she was a child. “Writing is almost as good as eating. It’s so satisfying,” she says with a laugh. When she was in high school, she remembers, books were being banned in Boston. In a typical adolescent fantasy, she decided “I’m going to write a book and Boston’s going to ban me.” Unlike so many teenage dreamers, though, Bowen succeeded and had 125 manuscript pages of what would become her first novel written by the time she finished high school.  

As it always does, life intervened. Bowen graduated from A&T State University in Greensboro and started her career teaching English at her alma mater. She earned her master’s at New York University, married, and had a daughter. But she kept writing and going to school. After she retired from her last teaching post at City University of New York, she could devote more time to her first love. 

Bowen’s first novel, This Day’s Madness (the title referencing the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám), was published in 2000 (iUniverse). She has now completed a second book, The Cul-lud Sch-oool Teachu-ur (Seaburn Publishing) and is working on the third book is this “sort of a trilogy,” as she calls it, titled Looking for Mammy.

 

For all three books Bowen has created the fictional town of Granston, N.C. She says, “Don’t write about anything you don’t know about and I know about North Carolina.” She sets The Cul-lud Sch-oool Teachu-ur in the late 1940s, a time Bowen herself experienced, with segregation, teaching, and marriage as themes. She refers to African Americans as “colored” because it was the practice of the day: “There was a time when colored school teachers were revered by practically everybody in their communities, both white and colored. Being a colored teacher was a kind of a status. . . . They were choice ladies sought after and targeted martially by a coterie of colored men.” Today she says she can’t imagine marrying a teacher as a life goal, but then it was not unusual.

In the late 1940s Johnnye Jamison comes to Granston looking for work as a teacher and leaves a lasting impression: “head so high that she appeared to be looking upward, shoulders erect, chewing gum defiantly.” What the townspeople don’t suspect is that Johnnye has come to town with a rather sinister plan–she poisons husbands for the inheritance. It may sound very harsh, but then the reader meets Joe Cephus Divine, one of her future husbands, and may not feel so sympathetic. Dorothy, “daughter of Granston’s first colored lawyer,” returns home when her first marriage fails and moves into her parents’ house with her own daughter.

The plotline is full of twists and turns. Bowen describes her characters thoroughly; we can always see exactly what they look like. The author admits that the story has some adult themes, but she doesn’t believe in graphic writing: “Some things you can just imagine.”

The Cul-lud Sch-oool Teachu-ur has won honorable mention in both the 2007 New York Book Festival and the 2007 Hollywood Book Festival.

Bowen has not spent her entire retirement writing. Another of her adolescent dreams, she says, was “I’m going to find Shangril-la, I’m going to find the yeti.” Three years ago she went to Tibet. She’s also been to “China twice and India, Israel, West Africa, Russia, and all over Europe.”

Now Bowen makes her home in Phoenix, Arizona, with her horses and her four dogs (the most recent named Oliver for Oliver Twist because he was an abandoned puppy), and the rest of her menagerie. She will be appearing four book-signing events in the Greensboro area.

Written August 8, 2007, and first published in the Greensboro (NC) News-Record.