Happy Diamond Jubilee, WPA Guides - Starting in Idaho

This week 75 years ago, amid the Great Depression, the first in a series of quirky travel guides to America came out. Idaho: A Guide in Word and Picture was not the debut for the American Guides that federal officials had planned. Idaho had less than half a million residents and few people were planning to go there. But Vardis Fisher, a novelist and unemployed professor who had taken the reins of the tiny Idaho Writers’ Project, was a most unusual travel editor. He had big ambitions for his novels and their epic sweep of life in the Rockies, and this government-sponsored foray into nonfiction travel writing -- to keep his family alive during a terrible economy – was also ambitious.
    Fisher shows two elements of writing about a place. First, consider it the center of the universe. Even if nobody else considered Idaho the center of anything, Fisher wrote with conviction and humor of its odd shape and its mountains and conveyed the feeling that in Idaho, you found the universal human condition. Second, bring it alive through the stories of people who live and struggle there.
    In the same way, a young Richard Wright, working as a WPA writer in Chicago in January 1937 when the Idaho book came out, was discovering through his research in Illinois the idea that Black America – marginalized culturally and economically – was the heart and test of the American dream. Zora Neale Hurston held the same conviction about the folk culture of the Florida Gulf Coast, and was about to publish her novel putting a black woman literally at the center of the storm, with Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Janie’s struggle with men and the hurricane.
    The WPA guide to Idaho became a critical success. “An almost unalloyed triumph,” one reviewer called it. And as Fisher had hoped, it helped to create a national audience for his fiction. His next book was Children of God, the historical novel about Idaho pioneers that would be his bestselling book.
    As the 75th-anniversaries of the WPA guides unfold, writers intrigued by place and history are continuing their legacy. Use the new tools now available – for oral history, for online research that delves into local landmarks and documents (many found in the appendix to Soul of a People) – to push toward new discoveries at the center of the universe.

Bound for Tulsa

The NY Times editorial about Oklahoma finally embracing its rambling son, Woody Guthrie, with a study center for his archives didn't mention his fellow exiled Oklahoman friend Jim Thompson, or Bound for Glory. But it did note the currency and poignancy of his songs like "Deportee" and that they could be heard recently on the lips of Occupy protesters. As the archive will reveal, there's more to Guthrie than folk songs, even though that's plenty.
    Guthrie is featured in the Smithsonian documentary by Spark Media, Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways, which I happily worked on.

Give an Author this Holiday - Action Dolls?

As featured this week on NPR's quiz show Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me, Uneek Dolls gives Etsy shoppers a chance to give their favorite author for the holidays. As a homemade doll.
    The craft shop stocks nearly 40 writer dolls, including Mark Twain (source of Soul of a People's title), WPA enthusiast John Steinbeck, and Carson McCullers (good friend of Richard Wright, whose glowing review of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter appeared soon after his own novel Native Son had been a smash).
    In the limerick clue, the show's own writers joked the dolls might not fulfill every child's dreams of dancing sugar plums: I'll be watching toy-making elves a bit tighter/ Plath and Kafka won't make Christmas brighter/ I'll have to recall this strange line of dolls/ What kid wants to play with a writer?

Griots for a Global Village

This year marks the 100th birthday of Romare Bearden, and yesterday's article by Holland Cotter (with a slideshow) noted several ongoing celebrations of his work. Bringing together several themes in this blog, Cotter's article is titled "Griot for a Global Village." Bearden's visual storytelling adapts rhythms and motifs from traditional forms and makes them new, as did several other Harlem artists of the 1930s. Jacob Lawrence spoke of the interwoven fabric of visual and narrative art that emerged in that period, when he explored writing and Ralph Ellison studied sculpture.
    Bearden's Foundation shows the broad sweep of that vision in his case, and how it continues to influence the way we see stories. There you find the statement about his influence by the griot of American 20th century theater, August Wilson: "What I saw was Black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness."

Blurb is a Verb: Your Book Trailer as Calling Card: A Success Story

Guest post on Sarah Pinneo's helpful book publicity blog.

WPA Stories Caught the Quiet Before Pearl Harbor

On the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, it's hard to imagine a time when that name didn't sound shadowed by a surprise strike. But just two years before the 1941 attack, family members spoke sunnily of their loved ones stationed in the faraway port in the South Pacific.
    The WPA life histories, lost in storehouses for decades, are now safe and searchable on the Library of Congress website.
   "By a strange coincidence, this boy, the pride of my life, is a soldier of Uncle Sam," Eliza Brady of Fernandina Florida says of her son Anthony. She tells WPA writer Rose Shepherd proudly that he "is Lieutenant-Commander of the aerial squadron in Pearl Harbor at Honolulu, Hawaii."
    Ernest Gerber, a Swiss-American farmer in Marietta Georgia, recalled his stint in Pearl Harbor during an earlier world war. "
    "In September 1917 they sent me to the hospital at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii," he told A.G. Barie. "I was assigned to repair room and ward duties," but he spent his off-duty hours exploring the island with photography, often by boat. He told his interviewer of a rare surprise during his stay:
   "A man who was preparing material for a book embracing a story concerning the eruption of a volcano had come to the island for inspiration, and he asked me if I would be willing to take a party to Launa Los. I had been planning a trip there myself so we got a party together and sailed over. One of the men was a camera man for Fox Films." As they approached the volcano from the beach, "suddenly it seemed as if the earth itself was about to go to pieces. After a short sharp rumble a mass of smoke and fire shot up into the air hundreds of feet and a stream of lava rushed through an opening in the crater walls... This was the eruption of 1918, which furnished headlines for the newspapers, and stories for some of the magazines."

Touring the Occupied Lands

Last week a visit to the Occupy DC movement in McPherson Square revealed an impressive level of awareness and a sense of settling in, as many braced for colder weather.
    Then I was in Providence, RI over the weekend for a conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), on the role of the arts and humanities in a democracy. The hotel was right across the street from the Occupy Providence forces, where tv crews did standup reports as commuters waited for their buses at the edge of the square. Impressive that some young people handling the protest's media tent could get college credit for their activism. Also impressive how seriously some in colleges and universities are about making education connect with the world in new ways, and with the arts to foster the empathy that many Occupiers yearn for. A good discussion after the screening of Soul of a People.
    Finally, passing back down from New England, I passed the half dozen tents that marked Occupy Poughkeepsie.
    In yesterday’s paper, Thomas Friedman drew the parallels and contrasts between the Occupiers and protesters in India: “Both countries are witnessing grass-roots movements against corruption and excess. The difference is that Indians are protesting what is illegal… And Americans are protesting what is legal – a system of Supreme Court-sanctioned bribery in the form of campaign donations that have enabled the financial-services industry to effectively buy the U.S. Congress… I think that repairing our respective dysfunctional democracies … is for our generation what the independence movement in India and the civil rights movement in America were for our parents’ generation.”