Reading the Past is one of my favorite blogs about historical fiction. Sarah Johnson (@readingthepast) is a reference librarian at Eastern Illinois University and has written two guides to the genre. Her most recent post examines covers too–the difference between hardcover and trade paperback designs on several books written by men, including Brooklyn by Colm Toibin and A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. With each one, the figure of a woman has been added to the paperback design. Johnson wonders if this makes women readers more likely to buy . . .

Beyond the Covers is the blog for the California company The Book Designers. Here we get to see the evolution of a cover design through all the versions before the final cover is chosen. Check out all the ideas for Janet Gurtler’s The Weight of Bones. My favorite is this one, but the final cover is tbd.

Come on–tell the truth. Have you ever bought a book for its cover?

This will be my third time at Pawleys, and it’s wonderful. There are pelicans and blue crab and a ghost called the Gray Man who warns residents about coming hurricanes. When the tide goes out, you can find sharks’ teeth in the sand. And, if you’re there at the right time of the summer, sea turtles lay their eggs on the beach at night.

But here’s what I like best about Pawleys–it’s not just a place but a setting. The people shape and are shaped by the terrain and climate and ecology and history. Pawleys is unique. It’s not a could-be-anywhere strip mall or resort. And a setting cries out for a story.

Yesterday a bookseller from @AaronsBooks in PA suggested I read The Richest Season by Maryann McFadden on the trip, since it is set on Pawleys, and there’s nothing like a beach read about the beach you’re sitting on. And yet, for some writers (and readers), setting doesn’t matter very much at all. My guess (and I could be wrong) is that they avoid anchoring their story to any particular place because they don’t want to limit its reach. I heartily disagree. Give me place!

Besides Willa Cather, whom we have lovingly discussed, who do you love to read when you want a sense of place? Or, alternatively, what place do you love as seen through the eyes of a writer?

Here are some of my favorites:

• Laurie Colwin and Julia Glass’s New York City (and its angsty suburbs via Richard Yates)
• John Irving’s Vienna
• Kent Haruf’s fictional small town, Holt, Colorado

You get the idea–now, tell me yours!

These were designed around 1937 by Elmer C. Carlson, whose work was influenced by the Century of Progress Chicago fair in 1933. (The original developer of this place, in the late 1800s, was from upstate NY and a Washington Irving fan. There is even a restaurant called Ichabod’s.)

Other great South Haven memories are ice cream at Captain Nemo’s, local-blueberry pancakes at a bed & breakfast I can picture but can’t name, and lots of walks on the beach to look for Petoskey stones. Most of all, the symbol of South Haven, for me, is the wonderful red lighthouse and pier.

That lighthouse is now for sale! As the article explains, the Coast Guard no longer needs lighthouses now that they have GPS. I suppose that makes sense, but I have to say that there is absolutely nothing romantic about the sickly green glow of an electronic device. A lighthouse, on the other hand . . . well, it certainly seems like a wonderful place to set a story.

Since I probably won’t be able to buy it (in addition to the purchase price, it needs hundreds of thousands or more in repairs), the least we can do is invent a story about what could happen to it, if the lighthouse were in a novel. What sort of person would buy it, do you think? What’s her (or his) story?

Give me your ideas. Maybe we can send the best ones to the South Haven Tribune.

Wonders & Marvels

Ready to lose a half hour? This is a blog for history and historical fiction lovers. W&M is a treasure trove of tales, including posts by Daniel Okrent (former public editor of the New York Times and, incidentally, a fellow UM grad) about whether Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger, Marla Miller, about the real Betsy Ross, Donald Haase, about the reevaluation of Grimms’ fairy tales, and much, much more.

Help for Writers

My friend and fellow writer Lara Zielin dreamed of becoming a writer, and then she did it. Now she wants to help other people just starting out on the long and winding road to publication. Lara offers affordable services like manuscript evaluations and help with the dreaded query letter. Go Lara!

Little House on the Southern Prairie

I’ve talked about her before, and I’m just going to keep on talking, because former Chicago Tribune reporter Emily Harris’s blog about her adventures in voluntary simplicity, not to mention life with her new baby Tabitha, is a gem. You might recall Tabitha’s impeccable taste in books:

Now I need your help: What links should I feature next?

As president of the Chicago Writers Association, I’m sure you’ve thought a lot about how a community of writers can help each other. What do you see as the most important goals for any writers association? Have these goals changed over time?

No one understands writers like other writers. We’ve all felt the sting of rejection. We all know how painful the crippling effects of writer’s block can be. On the flip side, we also know how good it feels when those writing juices flow. And we know the satisfaction that comes when you write something that really sings. Of course the act of writing is an insular one. All of these joys and pains we usually experience alone. I think the primary purpose of a writers association is to have a place where writers can feel comfortable to share all of these ups and downs with others who have experienced the same feelings and emotions.  On the Chicago Writers Association’s website, we state our purpose right up front, and that is to share information, experiences, and encouragement with those of us for whom written expression is an integral part of life. To me, that pretty well sums up the organization’s most important goals, and I would think that would be true for any writers association.

Have these goals changed over time? I don’t really think so, and I don’t think they ever will change because the insular nature of writing is a constant. The tools writers use will continue to change but the actual act of writing hasn’t changed since Shakespeare put ink to paper. As long as that act of writing remains the same there will always be writers searching for a community of like-minded people to share information, experiences and encouragement.

What are the particular challenges for writers living in Chicago? What are the particular benefits?

The most obvious challenge is that Chicago is not New York City or Los Angeles. It’s traditionally been said that if you want to make it as a novelist, you have to live in the Big Apple, and that if you want to make it as a screenwriter, you have to move to the City of Angels. Obviously that’s not entirely true as there are many exceptions to the rule (Scott Turow seems to have done just fine and still calls Chicago home). But the reality is that most of the titans of the publishing industry are in NYC and the studios that make up the Hollywood dream machine are in LA. So if you want to get your manuscript or screenplay in the right hands, well, then NYC or LA is the place to be.

The less obvious challenge is navigating your way around the Chicago writing community. Chicago’s writing community has historically been a bit fractured. There are lots of little parts scattered in various places, which can be overwhelming to some, especially if you’re new to the city’s literary scene and trying to find your place in it.

Although there are challenges for writers living in Chicago, there are benefits as well. Chicago is starting to prove false the old theory that you have to live in NYC or LA to make it as a writer. Chicago has become a hotbed of emerging and established writers. Some of the best literary talents are coming out of the City of Big Shoulders. Aleksandar Hemon. Joe Meno. Elizabeth Berg. Stuart Dybek. Audrey Niffenegger. Luis Alberto Urrea.

Chicago has a great tradition of crime writers that is hotter than ever. Sean Chercover. Marcus Sakey. Michael Harvey. Chicago’s poetry scene might outrank any other. It’s the home of Poetry magazine, Louder than a Bomb (the largest youth poetry festival in the world) and the birthplace of the poetry slam. And the 2^nd City is staking its claim as home to some of the best comics and graphic novel talents in the country. Chris Ware. Alex Ross. Jeffrey Brown. While everything in NYC or LA is big, small is thriving in Chicago. There’s an abundance of zines, journals and comics coming out of Chicago. There’s also an incredibly warm and welcoming literary community in Chicago that throws its arms around the little guys. Visit Twilight Tales, Danny’s Reading Series, The Chicago Underground Library, Reading Under the Influence, Essay Fiesta! or Windy City Story Slam.  Finally, that fractured literary community has begun to show signs of coming together, as evidenced by some of the changes we saw this year at the Printers Row Lit Fest where a number of the popular reading series were invited to show off their talents. And I think our own organization has played a significant role with the development of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

The CWA has had an exciting year in terms of new projects. Tell us what’s been going on.

It has been an exciting year and it keeps getting more exciting as the year goes on. Most notable is the aforementioned Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, which has already had two big fundraising events this year featuring some of the city’s biggest literary talents and the announcement at the most recent event of the inaugural six inductees: Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry and Saul Bellow. We just announced that the historic Cliff Dwellers Club will serve as home to the Hall of Fame and that the induction of the first class will take place November 20 at Northeastern Illinois University. In addition to the Hall project, the CWA launched a successful Speakers Bureau that brought many of our members into area libraries and about a year and a half ago we started an online mentoring program for teen writers in conjunction with the Teen Writers and Artists Project (TWAAP).

Imagine for a moment that someone croaked and bequeathed a million dollars to the CWA. How would you want to use it?

Boy, you’ve been eavesdropping on my dreams. That would make my life as president of the CWA a whole lot easier. As it is now we have to scrape by for every little thing we get and we lean on my own mom to do a lot of the graphic arts work for us, which she does voluntarily without compensation other than the presents I buy for her out of my own pocket. There’s a long wish list of things I’d like to see happen if we didn’t have to worry about spending more than we have, which isn’t much. But probably first and foremost I’d love for the CWA to have its own physical space in Chicago with a paid executive director and staff to do a lot of the work that I and the other board members now do. Sort of my dream is a place that could serve as home to the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame and also incorporate the administrative offices of the CWA, a meeting room, and a library that would be a place for our members to come to read or write. Can I get all of that for a million dollars?

In addition to being the president of the CWA, you’re a writer. Tell us about your own work. Any new projects on the horizon?

I joined CWA for the same reason a lot of our members joined it and it certainly wasn’t with the goal of becoming its president. When I joined, CWA was a Yahoo! email group, started by Diana Laskaris, who, like me, is a lawyer. That was in 2005 and I had just come out with my first book, Lost in the Ivy, and I was a lot like my protagonist, somewhat lost and looking for direction. CWA helped me find my way and I became more involved and started pushing for it to be more than what it was. A steering committee was formed and from that it was decided that we’d form as a nonprofit, which we did in late 2006. Diana asked me to take the reins as president, a position that I’ve now held for three-plus years. This position has opened up doors and introduced me to people that I’d otherwise never have met. It led me to become involved in the publishing of Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year, an anthology to which I also contributed. But my involvement with CWA has somewhat ironically taken away some of that precious time I used to have for writing. That’s not to say that I’m not writing at all. I am working on a second novel with the help of a critique group that was started through CWA. It’s more than half complete but it has taken four years for me to get that far. I’m at a point in my life where I am not in a rush to get to the end. I don’t consider myself a professional writer. I’ve got a paying job and it’s not as a writer. I write for the joy of it, and, at least for now, I’m content with that.

Her rose tattoos peeked out from her ample cleavage as she playfully pulled out a copy of Grilling for Dummies and winked knowingly at her common-law husband.

<trumpet sounds> Thank you to everyone who entered. The English language may never recover.

Now, how am I going to divide the prize four ways? Hrm.

(You can see all the entries here!)

“For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”

This sentence, penned by Molly Ringle, is the winner of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, otherwise known as the prize for worst sentence of the year. (I learned of this contest via the always informative @GalleyCat.) Obviously the judges did their job, because this sentence is pretty bad. And congrats to Molly, because writing something this bad is harder than it seems.

The Bulwer-Lytton Award isn’t exactly well publicized, and I’m sure many of you are disappointed to know submissions have already closed. So . . . I hereby announce a new competition, The Worst of More Bad Sentences of 2010! (Even the name is an inspiration!)

Rules: You must compose the sentence yourself, and it must be terrible. Trying to sneak in luminous and/or breathtaking prose will be cause for immediate disqualification.

Prize: Winner, to be chosen in a completely subjective process by me, will receive one signed copy of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott.

June 29, 2010

Anna Davlantes
Fox 32 news Chicago
WFLD – TV
205 N. Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60601
Dear Ms. Davlantes:

I am astounded at the lack of understanding of public libraries that your Monday evening story, Are Libraries Necessary, or a Waste of Tax Money? revealed. Public libraries are more relevant and heavily used today than ever before, and public libraries are one of the better uses of the taxpayers’ dollars. Let me speak about the Chicago Public Library which serves 12 million visitors per year. No other cultural, educational, entertainment or athletic organization in Chicago can make that claim. Those 12 million visitors come to our libraries for free access to books, journals, research materials, online information and computers, reference assistance from trained librarians, early literacy programs, English as a second language assistance, job search assistance, after school homework help from librarians and certified teachers, best sellers in multiple formats (print, audio, downloadable and e-book), movies, music, author events, book clubs, story times, summer reading programs, financial literacy programs or simply a place to learn, dream and reflect.

The Chicago Public Library, through its 74 locations, serves every neighborhood of our city, is open 7 days per week at its three largest locations, 6 days per week at 71 branch libraries and 24/7 on its website which is filled with online research collections, downloadable content, reference help, and access to vast arrays of the Library’s holdings and information.

Last year, Chicagoans checked out nearly 10 million items from the Chicago Public Library’s 74 locations and the majority of those items were books. (Your ‘undercover cameras” shots were taken in a series of stacks devoted to bound periodicals used for reference. Next time, try looking at the circulating collections throughout the building.) Especially in times of economic downturn, smart people turn to the public library as their free resource for books, information and entertainment in multiple formats – print, online, in person.

And yes, we proudly provide free access to the internet because so much information today is found online, something you should know from your own work. In fact, the Chicago Public Library provided 3.8 million free one hour Internet sessions to the people of Chicago in 2009. The Internet has made public libraries more relevant, not less as your story suggests. There continues to exist in this country a vast digital divide. It exists along lines of race and class and is only bridged consistently and equitably through the free access provided by the Chicago Public Library and all public libraries in this nation. Some 60 percent of the individuals who use public computers a Chicago’s libraries are searching for and applying for jobs. We’re proud to continue to be able to use our resources to help them do so.

The Libraries vs. Schools or other public agencies funding argument posed by your story is a non-starter. The mission of the Chicago Public Library is and always has been to make available to all people from birth through senior citizenship, the resources they need to enjoy a good quality of life, to participate in lifelong learning, and to become and remain civically engaged. If information is power, then the public library is the source of that power,

We devote considerable effort and funding to providing early literacy books, programs , story times and training for parents, caregivers and preschool teachers of infants and toddlers so that those children start kindergarten ready to learn.

Chicago’s schools offer the shortest school day in the nation. As schools slash their budgets for school libraries and shorten their classroom teaching time, thousands of children flock to Chicago’s public libraries every day afterschool, in the evening and on weekends for homework assistance from our librarians and certified teachers hired by the public library.

In 2009, thanks to funding from the MacArthur Foundation, the Chicago Public Library unveiled a new 21st century learning space for teens called YOUmedia, that is heavily used 7 days a week by teens and has been hailed as a groundbreaking learning space that combines books and traditional library collections, digital media, mentors and librarians. YOUmedia fosters civic engagement, creativity, reading, writing, and collaborative learning by teens – and it takes place in the public library, not in a school.

We are at our busiest when schools are not in session. This summer, we will once again welcome some 50,000 children to our summer reading program. As in years past, they will read more than 1.2 million books thereby keeping their reading skills sharp while schools are closed, and this year, they will learn about the collections of the Art Institute and public art throughout our city simply by participating in this free program.

The Chicago Public Library is used heavily throughout the year by college and university students, people moving into second careers, adult learners, small business owners, lawyers and other professionals, and working adults and seniors who simply want to read the latest bestseller, hear an author talk, participate in a book club or in the One Book, One Chicago program, attend a financial literacy class, enjoy a free visit to one of Chicago’s museums or the Ravinia Music Festival, or learn how to use a computer. Last week, more than 650 people of all ages attended a lecture by author Anthony Bourdain at Harold Washington Library Center and that is the norm, not the exception.

The suggestion by one of your interviewees that people do not need or use libraries anymore because of the Internet is simply not true. The Internet is one of the many tools that people use to live productive lives, and that tool can be accessed for free, and with free training by our staff, at the public library.

Finally, let me address the argument by the gentleman from the taxpayers’ group, that public sector employees make higher salaries than those in the private sector and that Chicago’s investment in its public libraries ($120 million annually) ins too high. He is simply wrong. With that budget, we pay the salaries of 1150 employees; maintain and operate 74 buildings; purchase new library collections and refresh worn collections; maintain and update 3000 public access computers; provide free Wifi [sic] and 24/7 access to millions of dollars of online research collections via our website; operate a citywide distribution system that handles millions of items per year; serve as an essential resource to homeschoolers, public, parochial, charter and private schools, colleges, and universities; operate a Talking Book Center for the blind and a physically handicapped; engage in reciprocal borrowing of library materials with 192 other communities in the State of Illinois; provide free access for Library patrons to Chicago’s museums and cultural institutions; support Chicago’s businesses and entrepreneurs; support Chicago’s research community; and enhance quality of life and community in every neighborhood of Chicago.

The public library is supported by taxpayers for the common good of all the people of Chicago – just like public school. We don’t ask our schools to make profit. Neither should we ask it of the public library. As journalist Walter Cronkite once remarked, “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”

Finally, like thousands of our fellow City employees, the management of the Chicago Public Library is taking 24 unpaid holidays and furlough days this year to help close the budget gap and to keep city services, including libraries, operating for the public. Interestingly, I was on an unpaid furlough day when I watched your story last evening. And I had just returned from the annual library conference in Washington DC, a trip I paid for myself, not with taxpayer dollars.

Thank you for allowing me this opportunity to respond to the issues raised in your story.

Sincerely,

Mary A. Dempsey
Commissioner
Chicago Public Library

That part of the story is tragic, but what happened next is remarkable. Artist and resident Elizabeth Awalt found hundreds of pages from burned books flying around at the site of the fire, some of them only charred around the edges. This gave her an idea–well, two ideas: She imagined a way to use art to make sense of what happened to her town and a way to raise money to replace some of what was lost. The result is New Pages, an exhibition and auction of these recovered pages, now works of art. This event takes place tonight, but organizers are happy to accept donations from afar from those of us not lucky enough to live in this wonderful town.

Mister stumbled on this story via Bobulate, which linked to the post at My Dog-Eared Pages. Thanks to both of them for writing about this so that I could see it–hope we will continue to spread the word!

But why should you have to look at that?! You should be looking at something pretty. While this blog is on hold, take a gander at these beautiful book covers. Here are some of my favorites. What are yours?