Steinbeck Festival Honors Voices of Change

... including Woody Guthrie's song, "Deportee." Read more at the Living New Deal:
http://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu/newsletter/may-2012/#post-1749

Hitting the Road with WPA Audio Tours

In a new twist on the WPA guide tours, Ohio Public Radio has launched a series of downloadable audio tours, following routes mapped out in the 1940 WPA Guide to Ohio. It just started the 23-part series, which will continue through the summer - each week a new tour. Read the whole story here. Then download the series here. Way to go, Ohio.

Modeling the WPA Experience in an Online Game

Filament Games, based in Madison, WI, has been working with Spark Media on a concept for a cross-platform game to put young people in the shoes of the 1930s WPA writers as they went from joblessness to national service, putting American life into a series of  guidebooks. To start, the designers have crafted in Soul of a Place a slice of the WPA experience documenting life along the Lincoln Highway, the interstate precursor to Route 66, as it goes through Pennsylvania. There WPA workers contended with hostile locals, legal threats (one town didn’t like how it was portrayed in the WPA guide and the city council planned a lawsuit) and the difficulties of depicting a massive teapot diner roadside attraction in Bedford, PA.

    Not far to the south of Bedford, incidentally, stood the town of Chaneysville, already a ghost town by the 1930s and later immortalized in David Bradley’s prize-winning novel, The Chaneysville Incident. It tells the story of a black historian in the Bedford area who uses the historical detective tools employed by the WPA writers to uncover an incident involving his father’s death, racial tensions and a deeper mystery.
    In another part of the game prototype, users have the task of assembling a newsreel about the Chicago World’s Fair.
    Stay tuned.

A Chance Find in a Bookstore in Istanbul

Amid the shelves of Simurg Bookstore in the Beyoglu section of Istanbul, Kiran finds the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City with illuminating traces of Muslims' lives and history in America. Read the full post on the Islamicana blog here.

When America Faced the Sea

Thanks to Ken Ackerman, the brains behind Viral History, for letting me post about another era of national crisis, and a new group portrait of everyday Americans doing extraordinary things during the War of 1812. Check out the post featuring Long Islander Joshua Penny here. The new book comes out next week!

Characters in the Neighborhood

See my guest post about neighborhood profiles and a new workshop, on The Writer's Center blog at First Person Plural.

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.