The publisher, producer, editor, and executive director Daren Wang has done great things for writers and writing. The link on his name above will provide you with his biography in detail. He started the first audio literary magazine VERB, has produced hundreds of recorded interviews with important authors, most recently as producer of the radio show “Spoken Word”, and he is also the Executive Director of The Decatur Book Festival. (This year’s dates are 8.29.08-08.31.08).

Each quarter a new VERB is released. Volume 2 Issue 2 is presently out and the last three issues are available on the University of Georgia Press site. The issues are also available as a download on audible.com. I know what it takes to produce two audio books containing two CD’s of original writing, performance, and music. Daren Wang is putting out four audio books like this a year and the quality is high. This new issue has a music piece performed by Hem and composed by Dan Meese from the album “Funeral Cloud” that is beautiful and haunting.

The writing is consistently good. I am a raving perfectionist (ask my recording engineer if you want details) and I am usually holding my breath whenever an author reads his own work. There is just usually so much “telling” or “acting” in the voice, or worse, a kind of holding back: both of which make listeners aware of the distance between themselves and the material. I am happy to say that every piece in this new release is extremely well presented.

There is no honest writer alive who can read or listen to an entire literary magazine and claim that all of the material worked for them. Writers are not like that: they are editors also. But frankly, I will say that the fiction is of the highest quality and it is stunning. I listened to the R.T. Smith piece about John Wilkes Booth four times. It’s great. Joseph Rogers did a fine job reading his story and it felt right and true, despite my resistance to pieces that have ghosts who drink beer. Betsy Boyd is not just a reader, but an actress .She did a great job. The fiction is consistently superb.

The poetry is also done well. I would like to see the poetry selections balanced a little more in the next issue. There was a sameness in the tone of these selections for me. The poems were as modern as they get, and I understand what these poets are doing and why it is important, but I would like to hear other voices also. Different music. But this is a minor complaint. This issue is very fine and thoughtful and well-produced. We need to support this work. Download it, buy it, pass the word on. Do all you can to support Daren Wang and his crew. This is important work and it deserves our attention.

I finally finished the re-write of the manuscript of short stories adapted from “Hold Me Fast” and “Wayside Cross”. It is called “Maine Beauty” and is being looked over by editors I trust. I hope to have it ready to send out for consideration to publishers this month. It was a long process. The manuscript wrestled me to the end: wiry and stronger than it looked.

The “Wayside Cross” CD is now in the final stages of production and work copies will go out to reviewers soon. I am glad to have a little time now to write this note and talk about an important book I read recently.

I highly recommend the biography of Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888) by Paul Horgan. “Lamy of Sante Fe” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and is one of the great standards of American non-fiction. I was drawn to the book because I came across Paul Horgan’s short stories in a number of fiction anthologies. >>>>Read more…

A recent survey concluded that Americans read books for a reason, that is, that even readers of romance fiction or mystery fiction report that they read to learn about things like foreign locales, police procedures, etc. Okay, then.

The following paragraph is from the short story “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad. It is in the anthology “Short Story Masterpieces” edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine. It has 36 tremendous stories and cost me a dollar used on amazon.com.

This paragraph comes late in the story. Two white men working for a British corporation at a trading station in Africa find that their assistant Makola has sold their workers and families into slavery in order to obtain the ivory the corporation seeks. The paragraph is describing what happened the day after they confronted Makola, but have done nothing to rescue the newly enslaved workers or to report the kidnappings. The ivory, after all, means that the men have been successful. The two men are named Kayerts and Carlier. Gobila is the leader of the village nearest to the outpost.

“At midday they made a hearty meal. Kayerts sighed from time to time. Whenever they mentioned Makola’s name they always added to it an opprobrious epithet. It eased their conscience. Makola gave himself a half-holiday, and bathed his children in the river. No one from Gobila’s village came near the station that day. No one came the next day, and the next, nor for a whole week. Gobila’s people might have been dead and buried for any sign of life they gave. But they were only mourning for those they had lost by the witchcraft of the white men, who had brought wicked people into their country. The wicked people were gone, but fear remained. Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; >>>>Read more…

The first day of class Mr. Elkin had walked in limping and sat down behind the front desk. He was uncomfortable in the chair. He introduced himself and then said, “I joined the Army when I was much older than your usual recruit.” He eyeballed the class. I had seen him read his fiction so I knew he was a tremendous performer. I thought, “Uh-oh, a tough guy, we’re gonna get blasted.” Then he said, “It was the biggest mistake of my life.” >>>>Read more…

Last week we recorded and edited the last short story for the new audio collection “Wayside Cross” – one year after we recorded the first voice for the project. We now have to add the final effects, record the music, and mix. The covers and inserts will be completed and then the master will go to the manufacturing house. If everything goes well with that and their shipping department gets it back to us okay, we will be done. It will be time for the release party and time to forget about how we got it done. Time to welcome the amnesia.

What famous writer said he hated writing, but loved having written? Producing is like that.

There is a line that is repeated in the movie “Shakespeare In Love.” The stage manager/producer is being threatened by his creditors. He assures them he will have the money to pay them when the show goes on stage. But the thugs know that the playwright is missing and the actors have no script. The stage manager says, the show will open as planned. When they ask him, how? He says, I don’t know.

It’s not that producing or directing a performance that involves actors and technicians is especially courageous. >>>>Read more…

The first Graham Greene novel I read was the suspenseful “The Third Man”. (Greene worked as a spy for his government and drew on this experience for his thrillers.)The second book of his that I read was the comic spy masterpiece “Our Man In Havana”. These books were terrific reads, but there was a depth in the shadows that I wanted more of. I sought out other Greene novels and basically, got knocked flat. The next three novels of his that I read devastated me.

I later learned that Greene wrote novels that he intended to be popular. He called these novels his “entertainments” and he wrote a good number of them. Greene used his facility for description and dialogue and structural plotting to create some of the best novels of this sort ever written. His political sensibility, that is, his concern for the poor and oppressed, can be experienced in these popular novels, but it is tempered by his need to move the plot to a satisfying conclusion.

It was in reading his serious novels “Brighton Rock” (1938), “The Power and The Glory” (1940), “The Heart of The Matter”(1948), and “The End Of The Affair” (1951) that I experienced spiritual, and often physically violent, nighttime descents into city and jungle canyons I wasn’t exactly ready to take. Journeys I could never have prepared for.

(Penguin Classics has reissued “The Power…” and “The Heart…” in trade size paperbacks. I’ve seen them for sale in airport bookstores. God bless Penguin.)

These intense novels are great literature and I will tell you that reading them most certainly has a cost. >>>>Read more…

I have a friend who is a prep chef in a nice restaurant with a view of the harbor in Camden, Maine. He is a hard working guy who likes to eat and drink. We kept running into each other at live concerts and became friends. One day he asked if I would please lend him a copy of “Hold Me Fast”. I do not carry copies around with me so I didn’t have one to give him. He thought this was a major promotional defect on my part and every time I saw him he would nag me about the CD. I told him that it was available in the library (which we were standing in front of at the time) but that did not satisfy him. So I put the audio book in my car and drove to the restaurant and made it a point to leave the CD for him at the bar.

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A guy is swimming towards me. Gray hair, gray goatee. I am in the shallow end of an indoor pool. My six-year-old son is in my arms. My thirteen-year-old son is standing on the concrete behind me. The man says, “Where did you drive in from?:

Whenever someone is speaking to me in a language that I can determine is some form of English, but I cannot understand what they are saying, I have what my son’s Karate Instructor calls a muscle memory. But instead of recalling something like a perfect spin kick, I recall sliding across asphalt toward a roadside ditch with my boots still tangled in a motorcycle knowing that I have not yet hit the ground, but will soon. Because when I did impact, the concussion made understanding English difficult for more than a few weeks. Fortunately, no one noticed.

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New York Magazine recently asked 60 literary critics to name one novel of the last decade that they thought was important, but overlooked and forgotten. It is a compelling list. There are so many great writers and little time to read them. I felt overwhelmed after reading the list and a memory came to me.

A few years ago I drove to Jackson, New Hampshire to hear my friend singer songwriter Peter Gallway open for Jesse Winchester in the tavern of what is now called The Inn At Thorn Hill. As I approached the front desk to register I saw that the wall behind it was a fifteen foot high bookcase stuffed with hardcover books. The wall was at least forty feet wide. After I registered and headed toward the dining room, I passed another long and high bookcase full of hardcovers. The dining room itself was also lined with cases. Every wall in every room in the common areas of this hundred-year-old-plus creaky inn was a full bookcase. There was a sign on the case that ascended up the stairway that lead to the rooms: “TAKE WHAT YOU LIKE, RETURN IT BEFORE CHECK OUT.” I felt dizzy, because I had been scanning the books and had not recognized one title.

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Four years ago I got up early on Memorial Day and decided that breakfast out was a good idea. I drove to the only place I thought might be open. It’s a small grocery store and diner called “Fraternity Village” in Searsmont, Maine. I sat down at a table at the open front window and drank coffee and ate fat pancakes with a friend. We were about halfway through the meal when a siren sounded and drums pounded and a parade marched past the window. It was led by five men holding flags and carrying wooden rifles. Their uniforms were white shirts with gold emblems, gold roping here and there, black sneakers, and blue berets. I am sure it was not a United Nations color guard, but it any case, the men had a peace time appearance. They were followed by a marching band made up of kids blowing brass horns, other kids pretending to blow brass, a line of snare drummers, and a boy hitting a bass drum strapped to his chest with such passion it looked like he might knock himself over. They were followed by fire trucks from every town within forty miles.

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