The Middlewesterner

PROGRESS ON TRINITY ALBUM TOM'S BOOK PROMO PROCEEDS

Doc tells me

that he has the album mixed, Trinity's "Fairy Tales & Nonsense." He says we're not professionals, so the final product doesn't sound as if we were. Yet it sounds good for our stage of development - three ol' guys, high school classmates, two of whom played music together as a folk duo in high school, but not since - not until the Trinity Prep reunion last June. The third one of us - me - is a poet, not a musician, yet I invigled a position playing bass with them in Sioux City.

None of us have made music his life. We've all had other careers. Doc did put together an album previously. Dean and I, to this point, have been more amateur than that. Since we're "amateur" and don't do it for the money, we can do it for love, as our hearts dictate.

When we came together for the reunion in Sioux City, something clicked for us. I didn't know for sure that I could write lyrics for songs from fairy tales. I don't know that Dean was certain that he could write music for the twelve songs, but he was game to give it a try.

When I hear compliments about the words I've written for us, I have to say my lyrics are only "words" until they encounter the magic in the music Dean has written, in Doc's singing the words and music, in Dean's harmonies. Trinity is greater than the sum of its parts - that's the "magic."

*

Peter Pizzino and I started our promotion of Peter's Story last Saturday with a book signing at Book World in Beaver Dam this past Saturday, and we even sold a few copies. We will continue our work by appearing together tonight at the Northshore Library in Glendale, Wisconsin, this evening - which is where Peter and I met in fall of 2003 while I was teaching a class there in writing memoir. The rest, as they say, is history. I will present a short account of how Peter and I met and about how we collaborated on Peter's Story, and we'll answer questions. Then we will sign books.

The Northshore Library is a fitting place for us to sit together and take the book public, in the very place where it all started.

I will have another signing at the Book World in Fond du Lac on Friday, October 12, from 4:00-5:30 p.m., offering copies of my own collection, The Idea of the Local, as well as Peter's Story.

On Saturday I will read from my prose and poetry in Madison as part of the Wisconsin Book Festival's celebration, "Yes, Wisconsin, There Is a Poet Laureate," at the Wisconsin Historical Museum, 30 N. Carroll Street, from 4:00-5:45 p.m. The program features readings by Wisconsin's first two Poet Laureates, Ellen Kort and Denise Sweet, as well as readings by the three runners-up to date, Doug Flaherty, John Lehman, and myself, who are called "Commended Poets."

So, you guys, a little respect here. I'm a Commended Poet.

Which sounds not that much different than "Condemned Poet," I fear.

Come November 10, Peter and I will be signging books at Book World in Ripon from 10:00 a.m . to 2:00 p.m.

And we'll be making a presentation and doing a book signing at Schwartz Bookshop on Downer Avenue in Milwaukee at 7:00 p.m. on December 4.

*

Milwaukee Magazine will be running a feature-length excerpt from Peter's Story in its December issue, including the passage where Peter and his friends pick up the piano and piano bench in the Plankinton Arcade while a 19-year-old Liberace is performing. The boys move the piano and Liberace the entire circuit of the lobby there, Liberace saying, "Please, fellas," yet all the while continuing his act. This is an episode about Liberace you won't find recorded anywhere else. I know - I've looked.

*

And a little heads-up for Trinity fans out there: our second album is going to be made up entirely of original "train songs." I've got ten of them written already, and Dean says he has the music ready for them, "and send me some more lyrics to work with."

The adventure isn't likely to end soon.

Fortunately.

PRE-PUBLICATION CELEBRATION AT NORTH SHORE BANK WAS A GREAT SUCCESS

On Friday, August 31,

from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., Peter Pizzino and I signed copies of Peter's Story at the North Shore Bank in Fox Point, Wisconsin. Peter has banked at North Shore for forty years, and now that we have the book in hand, the bank offered to host a pre-publication celebration and book signing. And they know how to do it.

From left to right: Carol Bergen of North Shore Bank; Lucio Bonfiglio, who came to the United States from Italy in 1958; Peter Pizzino; and Tom Montag - at North Shore Bank's pre-publication celebration for Peter's Story. Notice the balloons in red, white, and green. Photo by Kate Knox/NSB.

From left to right, Marshall Dunkleman, Peter Pizzino, and Tom Montag. Photo by Kate Knox/NSB.

North Shore Bank's motto is "North of Expected," and let me tell you, this was Way North of Expected. Right off, the bank bought two copies of Peter's Story to give away as door prizes. Then on one table there was coffee and a pale pink lemonade the color of blush; on another table, Italian breadsticks with marinara sauce, and pizza - actually a total of three large pizzas, before all was said and done. And a platter of biscotti. In the cooler, containers of Italian ice in various flavors. The place was decorated with green, white, and red balloons, the colors of the Italian flag and the colors on the cover of Peter's book.

The crowd came early and stayed late. Some of them talked in Italian with Peter. Some bought books. Bank employees turned customers our way who didn't quite know what was going on, but they soon got into the spirit. Customers stood with us and talked. Sat with us and talked. Ate pizza and breadsticks with us and talked.

The North Shore Bank employees, Peter Pizzino, Tom Montag, and Peter's Story. Photo by Kate Knox/NSB.

It was a celebration, more than I ever could have expected. And when we wrapped up, all the employees grabbed a copy of Peter's book, and we got a photo for the company newsletter.

Thanks to Aaron, Carol, Kate, and all the other good people at North Shore Bank for making the celebration such a success!

PETER'S STORY AND IDEA OF THE LOCAL HAVE COME FROM THE PRINTER

I have been pretty scarce here

for a while, you may have noticed. For the past several months I have been finishing and revising Peter's Story and The Idea of the Local, and preparing them for the printer. Peter's Story came back from the printer about two weeks ago. The Idea of the Local was delivered on Friday.

When you publish a new book, first you feel exhiliration, then depression. Exhiliration because all the work has come to fruition, and you're holding the result in your hands. Depression because a book is never everything that you wanted it to be, and there is always some flaw that only becomes obvious when the book is actually in print. That's the way it always is, yet I still haven't grown used to the up and down of it.

The official publication date for both books is October 1, 2007, which means that's when we'd like reviews to appear and we'll start the hard work of promoting the books. Yet I have to tell you about them now, now that they're in my hands, so bear with me!

Part memoir and part social history, Peter's Story recollects Peter Pizzino's youth in Milwaukee and takes the reader to Milwaukee's Italian community in the Third Ward during the 1920s and 1930s. Peter was abandoned by his mother when he was three-and-a-half years old and was raised by a strict and sometimes violent father. He was leader of a bunch of young "Third Ward hoodlums," stole chickens to feed families in the neighborhood when he was eight years old, and worked at whatever he could find – cleaning horse stalls, making sausages, learning to cook. He collected envelopes for the padrones, hauled alcohol from Lafayette, Indiana, and Thunder Bay, Ontario. He drove hi-jacked furs and booze from New York to Chicago and chauffeured the bosses to their meetings in Chicago and New York. He hunted down those who had broken the code of honor, returning them to Milwaukee to face a harsh kind of justice. Peter was always small for his age, but quick, and he lived more in his first eighteen years than most of us live in a lifetime. Peter's Story is the story of those years.

For many years, Peter - who still lives in the Milwaukee area - operated Baywood Tailors in Shorewood and Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, establishing a reputation as a fine tailor and employing some hundreds of people in custom sewing and alterations. He closed his store and retired for health reasons in 1999.

Peter's Story is Peter's first publication and my first collaboration of this sort. I met Peter in November, 2003, when I was teaching a workshop in "Writing Memoir" at the Northshore Library in Glendale, Wisconsin. He was one of fifteen or sixteen students, but stood out immediately. He had come into the room with the friend who'd driven him to the library and he took his place at the table. When I looked over at him, it was as if a nimbus enveloped him; he seemed almost as if he were an angel. He sat at the table and smiled. I don't usually see halos around people, so I was intrigued. I walked over and introduced myself. "And who are you?" I asked him.

"I'm Peter," he said.

Peter was attending my seminar on writing memoir because he wanted to tell his life story, and he was struggling with how to do it. He thought perhaps the seminar would help him see his way clear. I ended up co-authoring Peter's Story with him because Peter was having health problems - his eyesight was failing him; his hearing was poor; his heart liked to play tricks. At the very beginning of our relationship, I had hoped Peter could write his own story and put the bits of memory into chronological order on his own. He tried, but wasn't very successful at it. Because he was nearly blind, writing was difficult for him, and the pages were nearly impossible for me to read. And because he is essentially an oral story-teller and not a writer, the narratives were cramped and crooked and didn't have the flair of his telling, nor the color of his inflection. Peter is Italian and, you might say, he talks with his hands.

Eventually (and reluctantly) I realized that if Peter's Story was going to be told as it deserved to be, Peter needed more than my advice. And while I really didn't need another project at that point, his was a story worth telling. So I interviewed him at length about his life. I recorded some twenty-five ninety-minute tapes. When I wasn't available, Peter's friend, Anne Buckley, recorded another ten tapes of his remembering.

Peter's memories came as little stories, scenes or vignettes. It was clear that this was not going to be autobiography with a straight-ahead push. There would be starts and stops and overlaps. My task was to transcribe Peter's remembering so that it would be both engaging and accurate. I wanted to retain the sound of Peter's voice in the telling, yet I had to make the prose readable on the page.

So I worked with Peter. Peter's Story remains Peter's story, his memory of his life in those days. Yet I massaged the oral narratives so that they'd work on the page; I arranged and re-arranged the discrete elements trying to create a coherent whole, an arc of greater meaning. I was the one to insist that, as interesting as his life has been, Peter's Story would begin with his first memory and would end by his eighteenth birthday.

Peter had terrific recall of his childhood, yet because so much went on in such a short time during his early years and because there was overlap in his telling, I have not been able to fashion here an exact chronological version of Peter's life. I have stayed with the chronology to the extent that I have been able, but I know these events aren't placed with total accuracy. I doubt that anyone could do that, and I'm not sure, in telling Peter's story, that we'd want to. Yet this version is as accurate as it is humanly possible to make it and, where the actual chronology may vary, I think this doesn't distort the truth of Peter's life. This is not fictionalized memoir, but a telling as true as we can make it.

You may wonder why I did not worry that Peter was just making this stuff up. I did consider that, early on. Yet there has been such an internal consistency in his telling that I am convinced this is indeed Peter's story, to the best that he can remember it. He may not have been aware of it (or maybe he was), but I laid little traps for him. I would say, "You remember when you told me about such and such; tell me more about that." And he would recount the incident, and it was the same story, and he might give me additional details I didn't have. I might ask him a question I already knew the answer to, and he gave me the same answer several months later. Sometimes in telling an entirely different incident, he'd make passing reference to another event and frame it the same way and highlight the same details as I had already heard. If I have been conned, I have been conned by a master. I am convinced that, to the extent it is humanly possible, this is Peter's life as he remembers it.

Of course Peter is the hero of the book: it is his life. Yet, too, there is enough detail here to contribute to a social history of the Third Ward, I think.

The Idea of the Local is a collection of essays that continues my exploration of place and places, of people in place and of ghosts on the landscape. Whether it is my home I'm writing about, or the broader middlewestern vista, whether it is the island of Cozumel or the wild waters of Canada, I try to pay patient attention to where I am and where we are, believing that however much we might shape a place we are also shaped by it. These essays are intended to examine some of the ways our places make us who we are. Some of the pieces have appeared in literary magazines such as New Stone Circle and North Dakota Quarterly; some have been posted here at The Middlewesterner. In both cases, again and again, I have meditated on the meaning of place for us, on our relation to our various habitations, trying to understand how a community or a landscape gets its claws into us. Writing the essays has helped me come to some understanding, yes, and I hope that reading the essays will help the reader in similar fashion.

I am awfully proud of these books: I have worked at them, and cannot not make them better than they are. And that's about where an author has to let go - when you have done everything you know how to do - and send the books out into the world.

So, folks, here they come. You can get your copies of the books from me; make your check payable to Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931. Peter's Story is $16.95. The Idea of the Local is $17.95. If you order before October 1st, I will pay the cost of shipping. If you order after that, add $3.00 for shipping & handling.

You'll be glad you did.

I HAVE BEEN BUSY

I have been busy

these past couple of months. Have I told you that? No - I have been too busy to put up any posts.

What have I been doing, you might ask.

Well, I have completed work on the memoir Peter's Story: Growing Up in Milwaukee's Third Ward during the 1920s & 1930s which I co-authored with Peter Pizzino. The book is at the printer. I expect to see proofs this week.

I have completed work on my collection of essays, The Idea of the Local. I sent it off to the printer a few hours ago.

Peter's Story is Peter Pizzino's memoir of growing up in Milwaukee during the 1920s and 1930s. I wrote it in partnership with Peter; that is, Peter told me his stories during interviews that I recorded to audio tape, and I transcribed the tapes and translated the oral telling of the story of his childhood so that it is suitable for the page; I smoothed the order of events and established the narrative arc, beginning when Peter was two and a half years old, and ending when he was eighteen. It is a powerful story, and I hope it finds its audience. The transcribed version of the interviews ran to some six hundred pages; the book comes in at 240 pages. The official publication is in October. A quality paperback, the book will retail at $16.95.

The Idea of the Local is a collection of my essays about place and people in place and ghosts on the landscape. In sum total, the book shows us how we are shaped by the places we inhabit, and how we shape them. The main part of the essays is divided into three sections. "Riding With the Local Used Cow Dealer" collects some of the profiles I have written about people I've encountered, living and dead, showing their lives or portions of their lives in the places they lived them. Some of the pieces, I hope, point towards a new way of writing local history. The second section of the book, called "Being Here," contains pieces related to Fairwater and our life here, Mary's and mine. The third section, "The Idea of the Local," captures small moments and large ones in places I have visited - across Wisconsin and the middlewest, from Willa Cather's Red Cloud, Nebraska, to Wallace Stegner's Eastend, Saskatchewan, from the island of Cozumel to the wild waters of Canada; the section concludes with the title essay, which admittedly is not so much "idea" as it is illustration of the idea, I suppose. There is a Prologue, which sets the stage for my wandering place to place, and an Epilogue meditation on what my obsession might mean. Official publication, again, is October. The book, a quality paperback, comes to 264 pages total, and will retail for $17.95.

Neither Peter's Story nor The Idea of the Local is a perfect book, I know. One strives for perfection, yes, but at some point must let go, and go on. I've made the books as good as I can, and I think that's all I can ask. When I finally hold a copy of each book in my hand, I will be proud of them, of the work I've done, despite whatever flaws remain. Now it is time to go on towards whatever is next.

*

Part of what kept me busy: the last week of April I taught writing at the Elderhostel in Green Lake with Ellen Kort, Richard Roe, and Alice D'Alessio. What a wonderful experience - both teaming up with those three writers to give our students a challenging experience, and interacting with the students themselves, who came to learn, and to write. Every morning, first on the agenda, we had a students write for ten minutes in class, always on particular themes, on the theory that one is a writer only when he is writing. Without fail, our students would cut open a vein and bleed fresh words onto paper. There wasn't much grumbling from these Elderhostel students; instead, they leaned into each chore - whether the writing in class or the overnight assignment - and constantly surprised us with the wonders they found at the tip of their pens.

I hope to teach at the Elderhostel again, because I got as much from the students as I gave, or more.

*

The first Saturday in May was Run-Down-the-Mountain Time in Colorado. I had signed up to walk the Colorado Marathon in Fort Collins, all 26.2 miles of it, but when the time arrived  I knew I wasn't yet in shape to do an entire marathon. So daughter Jessica, son-in-law Tait, and I agreed to change our registration to the 15-Mile "Mini" Marathon. Jess and Tait ran down the mountain, and finished well ahead of Jessica's target time. Hoorah! Dad, however, found out he was in shape for exactly eleven miles. That is, I handled the first eleven miles at a pretty clever pace, then hit my personal wall; during the last four miles, while I wasn't actually on my hands and knees crawling towards the finish line, I might as well have been. It was terrific to see Jess and Tait and my wife Mary along the sidelines a few hundred yards from the finish, and to have Jessica accompany me step for step for part of that remaining distance.

Out of several hundred people who started, I think I was the last to finish the mini-marathon. But I finished!

*

I was in West Point, Nebraska, in late May for my Vagabond project, and had a lovely supper with my friends there, Gwen and Dick Lindberg. I also had breakfast with Charles Sass, who had returned to West Point for his 50th class reunion. I interviewed him about West Point and his years in the community and he gave me some insightful responses to my usual questions. I also interviewed Father Francis Lordemann, who is associate pastor at St. Mary's Church in West Point. I heard someone call him "The Homilator," as his are the sermons of choice. Father Lordemann wrote his dissertation on the "rural church," and kindly loaned me a copy of it for my perusal. Perhaps I'll quote from it here at some point with his permission? He, too, offered very insightful responses to my usual questions.

While I was in West Point, I made time to visit the John Neihardt Center in neighboring Bancroft, Nebraska. Neihardt, you may know, was the author of Black Elk Speaks, which was written in the 1930s and neglected until the 1960s. Neihardt is also the author of an idiosyncratic favorite of mine, The River and I, about a canoe trip he made as a young man down the length of much of the Missouri River. I got to meet the Executive Director of the Neihardt Center, Nancy Gillis, and to talk with her about Neihardt and about her work for the Center. Because I feel some kinship with Neihardt (mostly, I suppose, it is the kinship of those who are neglected writers), I left copies of several of my books for the Center's library.

It was a good visit to the Neihardt Center, and a good visit to West Point. I was reminded how much I like being on the Vagabond Trail, and how soon I need to get back at it.

Now that I have Peter's Story and The Idea of the Local at press, perhaps I can turn my attention to other matters?

Yes.

WISCONSIN LITERARY BASH IS SATURDAY AT GEORGE W. MEAD WILDLIFE AREA

The third annual Wisconsin Literary Bash,

billed as "a non-urban book festival," is being held on Earth Day weekend, Saturday, April 21, as part of the central Wisconsin Prairie Chicken Festival at the George W. Mead Wildlife Area, S2148 County Highway S, Milladore, Wisconsin. Because the book festival is sponsored by the Wisconsin Center for the Book, on whose board of directors I serve, I volunteered to help with set-up and tear-down, and to do whatever was needed during the event. Later I was asked to read at the Bash as well.

Here's the line-up of book festival events:

• 10:00-11:00 a.m. - Wisconsin Public Radio's Glen Moberg, along with Patrick Thomas Reusch and Mary "Casey" Martin, will read from the works of the late Gaylord Nelson, FrancesHamerstrom, Aldo Leopold, Hazel Grange, and Helen Corneli.
• 11:00a.m.-1:00 p.m. Poetry by Judith Strasser, Chuck Stebelton, Laura Sims, Jacqueline Lalley, Robin Chapman, Lucy Rose Jones, Earle Garber, and Cathy Conger.
• 1:00-1:30 p.m. - Tom Montag
• 1:30-2:00 p.m. - Joe Reiderer
• 2:00-3:00 p.m. - Panel: Publishing tips
• 3:00-3:30 p.m. - Mary Bergin
• 3:30-4:00 p.m. - Justin Isherwood

There will also be books on display (and for sale) at the festival, from Big Bluestem Press, Free Verse/Marsh River Editions, Home Brew Press, Itchy Cat Press, University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin Historical Society Press, and Woodland Pattern Book Center.

Wisconsin Center for the Book (WCB) is affiliated with the Library of Congress and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. WCB's mission is to promote the culture of the book by celebrating books and book arts; encouraging the joy of reading and writing; and honoring our Wisconsin literary heritage.

There's more information about the Prairie Chicken Festival at here and here.

See you there!

PRESENTATION ON WHAT I DO TO THE ROTARY CLUB IN RIPON

I spoke to the Rotary Club in Ripon

at lunch-time yesterday, at the request of a former colleague of mine, Diane Shady, the manager of human resources at Ripon Community Printers where I worked for a quarter century. A few months ago, Mary and I had seen Diane and her husband Kim in the grocery store, as happens in these small communities. Diane asked: "What are you doing these days?" I told her, and she thought that a talk about my projects might make an interesting presentation; a few weeks later she invited me to speak to the Rotary.

What did I tell them?

I told them that I have written since I was in grade school, and since high school I have defined myself "a poet." That is, whatever else I have to do, I am a poet; it was the poet who worked for twenty-five years at Ripon Printers, for instance.

I told them that I had already written several books before I retired from RCP in 2002, some of which weren't published until after I retired.

I told them that I was fortunate to be able to retire at age 55 in order to taking up writing full-time. That my wife Mary keeps us in groceries and health insurance, and I write.

*

I told them that I have two big books coming out this fall, Peter's Story and The Idea of the Local.

I came to Peter's Story, I told them, after teaching a class in writing memoir at the Northshore Public Library in Glendale in November 2003. There I met the Peter of Peter's Story, Peter Pizzino, one of the students in the class who came to it hoping to learn how to tell his life story. Peter and I connected, and I tried to help him begin writing his memoir.

Yet as much as I tried to help Peter, the more I saw that he needed me to co-write it with him: he had health problems and was losing his eye-sight and when he wrote you couldn't read what he had written.

So I interviewed Peter. I recorded twenty-five ninety-minute tapes, and his friend Anne recorded ten more. I transcribed those tapes and fashioned a narrative of Peter's life from age two and a half to eighteen. Peter was born in 1923 and grew up in the Italian community in Milwaukee's Third Ward during the 1920s and 1930s. His mother abandoned the family when Peter was three and a half years old, and the children were put in an orphanage.

Peter's father got custody of the children when Peter was about seven years old. Peter turned into "a little Third Ward hoodlum," and took to stealing chickens and potatoes to feed families in the neighborhood. Eventually the local padrones noticed Peter's talents, and sent him into "underground" training in Milwaukee and Chicago. He started working for the padrones: collecting envelopes; hauling moonshine from southwest of Thunder Bay, Ontario, and from Lafayette, Indiana; hi-jacking furs and liquor in New York for disposal in Milwaukee or Chicago; driving the padrones to their meetings in Chicago and New York; and eventually tracking down and bringing back those who had crossed or had dishonored the bosses. "You live by the sword, you die by the sword" was the rule.

By the time he was almost 18, Peter decided that working for the padrones wasn't the life he wanted to live, and he asked to be let out of the outfit. (But, hey, you can buy the book to find out what happened....)

*

I told the Rotary Club about The Idea of the Local, my forthcoming collection of essays about place and people in relation to place. The book is divided into three parts:

Part One, called "Riding With the Local Used Cow Dealer," is about people. I profile seven different historic or contemporary people: Elsa Rhein, a storekeeper in Manchester, for instance; a woman who ran a tavern in small town Wisconsin during the 1950s; the rendering truck driver who is the "used cow dealer;" and others.

Part Two is called "Being Here," and is about our lives in Fairwater: about the old-fashioned Christmas program we put on every year; about the annual Valentine brunch; about walking in the country south of town, and so on. This section concludes: "In that moment, I wondered how anyone could wish to live some place else."

Part Three is "The Idea of the Local." It could be called: "Being There." I talk about having breakfast in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and supper in Winneconne, Wisconsin; about pursuing my "Trifecta" of foods in Cozumel and eating campfire walleye in Quetico; about helping some folks refurbish the house my grade school buddy grew up in, my friend who died in Vietnam; about walking with the spirit of Wallace Stegner in Eastend, Saskatchewan and circling Iceland with my wife. And much more.

And, yes, in the final essay I do ponder "The Idea of the Local."

*

I told the Rotary that these forthcoming books have slowed my real life work, which is Vagabond In the Middle, a long-term undertaking to understand what makes us middlewestern. Vagabond takes me into one town in each of the twelve states that are wholly or partly middlewestern. So far I have interviewed more than 170 people, asking three questions: (1) Why are you here? (2) What did the community used to have; what does it have now; and what do you expect to have in 15 or 20 years? And (3) can you give me three or four adjectives which describe the people of the community, and tell me stories which illustrate those characteristics? I have toured factories, attended talent shows, and watched high school girls' basketball play-offs. I have ridden with a Kansas wheat farmer harvesting his fields until 10 p.m.; have accompanied a small town police chief making rounds in the evening; have watched the volunteer projectionist run the movie at a non-profit, ghost-inhabited theater, and when the film broke, they called the cops and the officer on duty came and repaired the situation. I have recorded nearly a quarter-million words of journal entry, and I have all those interviews on tape.

And some day, I told the Ripon Rotary Club, if I live long enough, all this Vagabond material will be a book, too.

*

Afterwards, I answered questions until all of them had to get back to work and I had to get back to whatever it is that I do.

Which is what?

This, I guess.

PARKVIEW MIDDLE SCHOOL IN GREEN BAY KNOWS HOW TO DO IT RIGHT

Parkview Middle School

in Green Bay really does know how to do it right!

You may remember that I was invited to be part of the "Poetry Cafe" that Parkview was putting together for their sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students. Those students gathered last night in the media center at the school, which stands in the shadow of Lombardi Field in Green Bay, and I was part of it.

I was one of four poets making presentations to the students. The others, Anjie Greene-Martin, Liz Hammond, and Dale Ritterbusch, often work together as part of a group called The Wasteland Poets, the name being, I think, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the mistaken notion that outside the centers of Milwaukee and Madison, poetry in Wisconsin is pretty much a wasteland. These poets want to say, perhaps, "Just a damn minute - we're here, and we're poets." The true wasteland, sometimes, is trying to get attention for poetry in the hinterlands.

Getting attention for poetry at Parkview in Green Bay was no problem last night at the Poetry Cafe. It was a great mobbing throng of students who arrived, well more than the thirty students they expected, I think, plus some parents, teachers, and even the school principal.

The folks at Parkview are doing it right - they must be, to get that many students that interested in poetry. The care and joy they put into the Poetry Cafe made it clear to me that here No Child is Left Behind. The Poetry Cafe ran from 6:00-8:00 p.m., and here they were, still giving to the students.

The event was held in a media center made up to resemble a coffeehouse of the Folk Era, complete with a bead curtain to walk through as you entered, and several lava lamps to light the doings.

There were cold drinks available, and tasty treats. LOTS of everything. Someone cares.

And there was the ceremonial beret. Each of us put on a beret and was transported. Into the realm of poetry.

The evening started with one of the teachers playing guitar and singing a song, and students of hers held up prints illustrating key parts of the song, with the song's heroine somehow integrated into the scene of every print - melding into a tree perhaps. Poetry does that sometimes, helps us to see one thing in terms of something else.

Then the four of us invited poets talked about being a poet and about writing poetry and we read from our work. And we each offered the students a "poetic challenge."

I asked them to write a Parkview Honka, the form I developed especially for this occasion, and which I've been practicing in public here and here and here, and elsewhere. The rules of the honka are fairly simple:

(1) Two stanzas, the first of three lines, the second of two lines.

(2) Exactly six syllables per line.

(3) In the first stanza, you describe what is "out there," out in the world, not within yourself. This is physical description of what you can see, hear, touch, taste. It is not about yourself nor your feelings.

(4) The second stanzas gets more personal and contains your insight, opinion, conclusion, or realization of something greater. This can come from "within."

(5) Somewhere between the first stanza and the second stanza, the moment of magic that makes the poem happen has to occur: the poem has to leap or open or in some way connect us to the juice of the universe.

(6) On this basic framework, you may play with alliteration or caesura or rhyme/slant rhyme, etc.

Anjie Greene-Martin had read a "list poem" and challenged the students to develop a similar poem. Liz Hammond had read "What I Learned in Kansas" and asked the students to write a "What I Learned in..." poem. And Dale Ritterbusch read a poem called "Disobedience" and suggested the students write a poem about the most stupid rule they'd ever had to follow.

Then it was time for the students to put their heads down and work on their own poems. Learning, I believe, can be a noisy proposition, and there was some learning going on, some enthusiasm being unleashed. We four invited poets went from table to table, answering questions, making suggestions, offering encouragement. From time to time the students paused to check the numbers on the tickets they'd received upon registration. Some twenty or twenty-five books were being offered as door prizes. So this boy or that girl would shout a cheer when he won, or she did, and then it was heads down, back to the writing.

The noise of learning. The roar of the enthusiasm. I think the best thing we can do for student writers is foster enthusiasm for writing, to nurture in them the desire to do it even when no one is looking. We were seeing enthusiasm last night.

The final portion of the evening was the "open mic" when the students read their poems for us. Sad poems and silly poems. Rhymed poems and free verse. Poems about the seasons and poems about their very selves. A great rush of young poets lined up for the microphone, all of them wanting to share their words, some of them offering more than one poem. Finally, it was, "Okay, we're running out of time now. If you have already read a poem, please sit down. If you haven't read your poem yet, come do it now." The last poet of the evening was one of the teachers, who read two of his own poems - one was a Parkview honka which he'd just written for us; and the other was a poem he'd written during classtime while his students were working on their own writing.

And then it was over. The Folk Era coffeehouse evaporated. This moment of poetry was behind us. It was time for us to go on to whatever was next. We picked up plates and napkins and glasses from the tables. The students tidied up. We stepped through the bead curtain back into the workaday world.

Yet we took with us into that world something that hadn't existed before. Some moment of magic. That is the magic of poetry.

The folks at Parkview Middle School in Green Bay know how to do it.

YES, I WAS GONE AND THEN I'VE BEEN BUSY

It has been a busy

month.

You may remember that on Saturday, March 17, I was heading to Green Bay to speak at the Letters About Literature awards program and to assist with presentation of the awards. Letters About Literature is sponsored by the Wisconsin Center for the Book and is intended to encourage young people to read and be inspired by literature and to write to the author who has somehow changed their view of the world or themselves. Three students in each of three age-groups received awards in Green Bay, so a total of nine students were feted, out of 905 students who participated in this past year's program. As part of the ceremony, each of the students present read his or her entry aloud at the ceremony. I read the entries of the winners who could not attend. The most amazing surprise? I went to the awards ceremony thinking the program was primarily about "writing." In actual fact, it seems to be about the life-changing experiences the students had as they encountered specific works of literature. As one after another of the students read their letters, it was clear that the author each was writing to had touched the youngster in some essential way. These students will never be the same. Reading their letters at the ceremony, each was professing that change to the world. It was wonderful to see, and to hear.

I may not have told you that on Sunday, March 18, I was to head west for a few weeks. And I did head west that day, arriving in Valentine, Nebraska, on Sunday night. On Monday morning, while it was still dark, I walked out of Valentine on a walking trail south into the Nebraska Sandhills. In the dark, the stars were like cherry blossoms above me. Nearly four miles out I crossed the Niobrara River on a walking bridge high above the water. A bit farther on, I turned and headed back, and off to my right dawn started to break, as lovely a morning as I think I have seen.

Back at the hotel, I packed my bag and prepared to head off. I stopped for breakfast in Valentine before leaving, long enough to hear an old fellow in one of the booths complain about the terrible mess that President Bush has made of things. And this wasn't some flaming Democratic partisan: "I didn't vote for Clinton, and I'm not voting for his wife." Yet he asked the fellow he was having breakfast with: "What do you think of that young fellow, Barack Obama?" It sounded like there was hope in his voice.

I headed south-southwest out of Valentine on Highway 97, Sandhills off to my left, Sandhills to my right, Sandhills dead ahead. I turned west on Highway 2, and made my way to Gering, Nebraska, where I spent parts of a couple days with a former high school classmate I hadn't seen in more than 42 years. His business was in its busiest season, so while he was hard at it, I stood for a while on top of Scott's Bluff and visited the museum at the Scott's Bluff National Monument and the North Platte Valley Museum, which houses the Paul & Helen Henderson Oregon Trail Collection, the most comprehensive collection ever compiled on America’s Western overland trails.

What is it like to see a former classmate after 42 years? It's like walking across the street to have coffee with a friend. Yes, it's true we hadn't seen each other in an awful long time, and it's true we aren't as youthful and lithe as we might once have been; yet at the same time some abiding and essential connection remains, as if one of us had stepped out for just a bit, then stepped back in. Of course, in the meantime, he has two grown sons who run the Denver branch of his business, and I have two grown daughters. How does that happen? Weren't we just kids playing intramural football at Trinity Prep in Sioux City, Iowa?

On Wednesday morning, March 21, I headed to Fort Collins for a week-long visit with our daughter Jessica and her husband Tait. In the midst of it, Tait headed to Arizona with his father, for his first triathalon of the season. Tait finished 26th out of 600. That's pretty dang impressive, young man. Jessica and I had some good father/daughter bonding time, and I tell you, she takes really good care of her pappy. I always come home spoiled.

I did start heading for home on Wednesday, March 28, taking the long way back. I stopped for lunch in Yuma, Colorado, and as I left the little cafe after finishing my meal, I told the folks gathered for their coffee klatch that they ought to charge for the entertainment. The owner of the restaurant, when she brought me my food, had confided that "it might sound like there's going to be blood, but they're pretty harmless."

I spent Wednesday night in Smith Center, my Vagabond In the Middle town in Kansas, staying at Bruce and Bobbi Miles' Ingleboro Mansion bed and breakfast. In the morning Bruce and I went down to the Second Cup Cafe for a daily meeting of the As the Bladder Fills Club. I sat next to Ivan Burgress of Echo Echo fame, and when I went to pay up for another year's subscription to the Echo, Ivan said I'd given him enough for a lifetime subscription. "My lifetime, not yours, Tom."

Ivan also quoted me in the following week's Echo. I had asked the fellows if they knew what we up in Wisconsin call their Kansas country roads. "No," they said. "Fields," I said. If you've ever driven their country roads, you know what I mean. They just bulldoze a certain flatness into the soil and call it a road. During a wet spring, it's like driving in a mudhole sometimes.

After breakfast, I headed east for Junction City, Kansas, to meet up with another former high school classmate. And to interview Merrill Werts for my Vagabond project. Merrill now lives in Junction City but grew up in Smith County, Kansas, and we spent nearly three hours talking about his home and family and life. What a wonderful man.

My former classmate in Junction City is Marion Abbick of the famed brown oxfords. His friends call him Doc. Doc and his wife Marcia were wonderful hosts. I stayed with them Thursday night through Sunday morning and had a terrific time. I got to meet Doc's friend Cuz, and to see the farm where Cuz grew up. We talked briefly with the fellow who now owns that farm, then as we were leaving, Cuz caught a whiff along the driveway, and was transported: "That smell! I haven't smelled it in forty years."

Later that day, Doc and Marcia and I visited the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene and stopped at the Russell Stover chocolate factory where I bought some goodies for Mary.

Doc and Marcia and I each had a pound of shrimp at the Tropics in Milford, Kansas - a tradition in the making. And Doc and I had the hush puppies, which might be the best I've had.

Doc is a musician, and has volunteered me to play bass with him and some other former classmates at our re-union in Sioux City this coming June. So we spent some time in his basement studio, going over some of the songs. Sometimes going over and over some of the songs, for Tom is a slow learner. This gig in Sioux City was supposed to be a few songs played informally for a few friends and classmates in a back room, yet it has transmorgified into something else: turns out we're booked to play the lounge at our hotel on Saturday night, June 9. Seats 85 people. I'll practice the songs in the meantime, in hopes that we don't drive people out of any of those 85 seats.

Sunday morning, April 1, I headed for home, about a 12-hour drive from Junction City. Heard one of the public radio announcers do a spot for one of those corporations which "helps make our programming possible." Except this mellifluous spot was for "Solient Green. Now available in all the colors. Solient Green - It's people." Heh. April Fool's, get it?

If it is April, what is Tom's first order of business? To prepare our tax returns, of course, because it cannot be put off any longer. This usually takes me two or three days of hard concentration, reading and re-reading the instructions, filling and erasing and re-filling the forms. I am a poet, not an accountant, and it shows most awfully at tax time.

So prepare tax returns is what I did on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday of last week, and I finally got the state and federal returns, and their accompanying checks, off in the mail and breathed a sigh of relief.

But not for long. On Friday Mary and I headed to Iowa for Easter with my family. We got together at the VFW post in Alden, Iowa, because my sister's house would not be big enough for all of us - my parents, my brothers and sisters and their spouses, our children, and the grandchildren. We filled the VFW post to near capacity, too, I might add. Home on Saturday night.

You'd think I could relax. But no. April is the busiest month:

• April 12 - Poetry Cafe, Parkview Middle School, Green Bay.
• April 16 - Presentation on my writing projects, Ripon Rotary Club.
• April 21 - Reading of my poetry and prose, Wisconsin Literary Bash at the Prairie Chicken Festival, George Meade Wildlife Area, Milladore, Wisconsin.
• April 22-27 - Ederhostel Writing Class, Green Lake Conference Center.
• April 29 - Reading at Fort Atkinson Public Library.

And I can also report that there has been progress on Peter's Story. The book designer has given me proofs of the Foreword and Chapters 1-7. By the end of the day today, I will have Chapters 8-13 and the Epilogue ready to hand off to the designer.

Then I can start tidying up essays for my forthcoming collection, The Idea of the Local. The book designer needs that manuscript by early next month.

Also in here somewhere I received confirmation that I'll be teaching Creative Nonfiction again in the fall semester at Lakeland College.

So if it seems like I'm a little sparse around these parts, perhaps you can understand why.....

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: WISCONSIN CENTER FOR THE BOOK'S LETTERS ABOUT LITERATURE AWARDS CEREMONY IN GREEN BAY

Tomorrow I will drive to Green Bay

to be present at the awards ceremony honoring Wisconsin's "Letters About Literature" winners, three students in each of three levels from among the 905 Wisconsin students in Grades 4 to 12 who participated in this year's program. "Letters About Literature" encourages young people to read and be inspired by literature and to write to the author who has somehow changed their view of the world or themselves. In Wisconsin, the program is sponsored by the Wisconsin Center for the Book; nationally it is supported by Target Stores and Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

The writers of the nine winning contributions will receive their awards at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow, at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin. The first place winners each get a $100 cash award and a $50 Target gift card. Second place winners take home $50 cash awards. All finalists receive an award certificate. The cash awards and coordination of the competition are underwritten by Wisconsin Center for the Book, an affiliate of Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, based in Madison.

First place winners will move onto nationwide competition, with awards at that level to be presented in Washington, D.C., in late spring.

Wisconsin's winning 2007 "Letters About Literature" are:

Level 1:
1st place - Makayla Imrie, Templeton Middle School, Sussex.
2nd place - Miranda Brown, Templeton Middle School, Sussex.
Honorable mention - Lorien Swanson, Woodside Elementary, Wisconsin Rapids.

Level 2:
1st place - Alex Inman, Onalaska.
2nd place - Alisa Helstead, Parkview Middle School, Green Bay.
Honorable mention - Kate Glenn, Parkview Middle School, Green Bay.

Level 3:
1st place - Danielle Breidung, Waunakee High School, Waunakee.
2nd place - Catrina Van Deraa, Clintonville High School, Clintonville.
Honorable mention - Hillary Rosenheim, Clintonville High School, Clintonville.

I decided to attend this "Letters About Literature" awards ceremony for two reasons. First, to honor these young writers, and all those who participated in the program; their efforts should be celebrated. And, second, because I may be tapped to take over coordination of the program for the Wisconsin Center for the Book's board of directors: I thought I should see what an awards ceremony looks like.

Because I am attending, the current coordinator, Dawn Jeffers, thought perhaps I could also deliver a short inspirational talk at the ceremony, about writing and being a writer. I've prepared some remarks that time out at about seven minutes, which means I should be done talking before anyone starts snoring.

The mission of the Wisconsin Center for the Book (WCB) is to promote the culture of the book by celebrating books and book arts, encouraging the joy of reading and writing, and honoring our Wisconsin literary heritage. For more information about WCB and its programs and events for all ages, visit: www.wisconsinacademy.org/book .

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: PETER'S STORY FOR THE RECORD

For the record

I should say that I went to Milwaukee yesterday, intent on reviewing Chapters 10, 11, and 12 of Peter's Story with Peter. In our previous meetings, we usually handled three chapters, and I expected we'd move at similar pace.

Peter had been to the doctor earlier in the day because his eyesight has suddenly been deteriorating again. That he is 83 years old may be part of the reason. The doctor confirmed that, yes, his eyesight was deteriorating and added that nothing could be done about it. Not a happy bit of news.

Peter and I worked pretty hard, nonetheless. We completed our review of all the remaining pages: Chapters 10-13 and the Epilogue. There is one more bit of information we'll need to add to Chapter 10 when I return to visit Peter in April; otherwise the text is done. That's D-O-N-E, folks!

On Sunday I will be leaving for a two-week trip to see our daughter and son-in-law in Fort Collins, Colorado, and to visit high school classmates in Gering, Nebraska, and Junction City, Kansas. Before I leave, I want to take at least the first six chapters to my book designer, so she can get started preparing the pages for the printer. This pre-supposes that I will be able to take one more swing through those chapters before I leave; I want one more opportunity to get it right before I put the book into production. Damn Virgo perfectionist, I am. Wish me luck.

To celebrate, I will be returning to Milwaukee this evening and will take Peter out to supper. It will be a plain, ordinary meal in a plain, ordinary restaurant. Yet also it will be a terrific moment for us, as we recognize all the hard work that is behind us, and look forward to all the hard work ahead of us, the work of actually getting Peter's Story into the hands of readers. Fortunately, the toughest part is done.

After we have supper, I'll return to Fairwater and get on with the business of finalizing pages for the designer. I will push on. We're looking at perhaps a 260-page book here, so it will be quite a push.

Yet it is time to say Ha-rooh. Say it with me!

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: PERHAPS I MISSPOKE YESTERDAY ABOUT THE WEATHER

Perhaps I misspoke

yesterday when I said the weather would be no excuse for not coming to the Foot of the Lake reading at the Windhover Center for the Arts in Fond du Lac.We got about three inches of the slip-slidey stuff in the later afternoon and evening. As I drove to Fond du Lac for supper with the other poet, Jacob Gamage, and a couple members of the Foot of the Lake Poetry Collective, I started sliding towards the intersection as I braked for the stop sign where Highway K meets Highway 23. There was traffic coming both directions. I steered onto the shoulder a bit, and had the gravel footing there not arrested my forward motion, the choice would have been to dodge onto oncoming traffic or take the ditch. The answer would be obvious: take the ditch. Fortunately, that wasn't necessary.

Jacob drove up from Madison, and he said that Highway 151 wasn't too bad but the streets in Fond du Lac were slippery. I'll vouch for that.

The weather did not deter a healthy audience of poetry admirers, however - and I recognized quite of few of the faces in the crowd: thanks, you guys, for coming. As the reading progressed, we could see out the window that the snow continued to fall. Our trip home was of the 40 m.p.h. variety.

In the Grand Balance of Things, the reading and the audience on one side, the driving conditions on the other, it was all worthwhile. I read a mixture of poetry and prose; and Jacob read a mixture of poetry and prose; and there was a sympathy or resonance back and forth between his work and my work. Jacob is a quiet-spoken and unassuming fellow, not given to grand gesture and flourish, but to telling the little truths of what he sees. Side by side, we made a good program. I appreciated getting to meet Jacob and hearing him read.

Jacob was born in Illinois and raised in Florida and Texas; he has found his way back to the middlewest, and sounds like one of us. He finishes his graduate studies in May at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and what the future holds for him you can't know, except that his talent will be heard.

After we finished our part of the reading, we took a short break - and I even sold some books - and then concluded the evening with an "open mic" session which somehow stayed in keeping with the mood Jacob and I had set.

As my wife put it, "It was a lovely evening."

My thanks to the Foot of the Lake collective for a lovely supper, and thanks to all the faithful poetry-pilgrims who braved that bit of bad weather to hear us.

I can't imagine that any other reading series could bring in any more sympatico an audience, and in such driving conditions, too.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: MY FOOT OF THE LAKE READING TONIGHT AT WINDHOVER IN FDL

Tonight I am one

of the two featured writers for the Foot of the Lake's series at the Windhover Center for the Arts in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Both Jacob Gramage and I write prose as well as poetry, so listeners will hear some writing broken into lines, and some which is not.

The weather is expected to be good this evening, folks, so there's no excuse for not showing up. And this is a poetry reading, not church, so don't sit in the back: come on up to the front.

What can you expect? Here's the release the Collective sent out about the event:

The Foot of the lake poetry Collective is presenting another reading in their 2007 series. The featured readers will be Tom Montag and Jacob Gamage. The event will take place at the Windhover Center for the Arts in Fond du Lac, on Tuesday March 6 at 7 p.m. Refreshment will be available and an open mic will follow the featured readers. Please join in the fun. We are certain that you will enjoy the prose and poetry of these two talented Wisconsin writers.

Tom Montag of Fairwater, is a Wisconsin poet and essayist who has published numerous books of prose and poetry since 1972. He has two books coming out in fall 2007: The Idea of the Local (essays) and Peter's Story (memoir, co-authored with Peter Pizzino). His earlier works include: Curlew: Home (farm memoir, 2001), Kissing Poetry's Sister (essays about writing and being a writer, 2002), The Sweet Bite of Morning (poems, 2003), and The Big Book of Ben Zen (poems, 2004). Middle Ground (1982) serves as his collected earlier poems. Montag, with his wife Mary, edited and published The Wisconsin Poets Calendar: 1982-1984. He blogs as The Middlewesterner at http://middlewesterner.typepad.com .

Jacob Gamage is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently working on his manuscript, "A Private Stratigraphy: Poems and Prose," a combination of poetry and memoir. A Midwesterner at heart, he plans to remain in Madison after receiving his degree.

(You can see the recently updated calendar of all my upcoming events here.)

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: A MISCELLANY

Today I attend my first

meeting of the Board of Directors of the Wisconsin Center for the Book in Madison. As I reported here, I started a three-year term on the board at the beginning of January. This meeting will be my first introduction to the Board's work, and an orientation to ways for me to contribute to the Center's sucess. I'm looking forward to the challenge.

*

I cancelled my trip to Milwaukee yesterday to see Peter for more work on Peter's Story. We had gotten about 16" of snow on the weekend, and it was snowing again yesterday morning. The session with Peter last week might have looked like it didn't accomplish much. For instance, we didn't revise or approve any of the chapters, so I can't consider any more pages D-O-N-E. However, we did review a complete list of the incidents or scenes in the book, and this revealed several short omissions, additions which I have written up and have been weaving into the existing chapters. I didn't want to come to the end of the project and find that we'd left out something important. Last week's session helps ensure we're including everything we need to include, even if doing so doesn't look like the straight push of progress.

*

Yesterday I agreed to co-teach a week-long Elderhostel at the Green Lake Conference Center at the end of April. I'll be one of four writers working together during the week. The other three have had some experience together with this Elderhostel, and my addition will be an expansion of the program. I will be trying to fit into the existing scheme of things while at the same time bringing to the sessions whatever it is that I bring. Which is what? At the least, a great deal of enthusiasm for my obsessions.

*

I opened my e-mail this morning and found an invitation to speak in April to the Rotary Club in Ripon about my various projects. While we were shopping for groceries a few weeks ago, Mary and I had bumped into a woman I used to work with at Ripon Community Printers, and her husband, and when they asked what I'd been doing with myself, I'd given them a thumb-nail version of Peter's Story and the other projects. This morning's e-mail suggests that they think a report about my projects would make an interesting program for a Rotary lunch meeting. Well, it so happens I'm free for lunch that day, so I will be accepting this offer. You know it's darn near impossible for me to pass up an opportunity to talk about my writing.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: WHY BOOKS MATTER

Saturday evening, I went to supper

in Milwaukee, at the home of Anne Kingsbury and Karl Gartung, the heroic caretakers of Woodland Pattern Book Center. Anne and Karl were hosting two writers who would be presenting at the book center on Sunday, Elizabeth Robinson and Eric Lorberer. Their other guests were Chuck Stebelton, Woodland Pattern's Literary Program Manager, and myself, The Middlewesterner. We were served the most wonderful chicken on rice with peanut sauce, a terrific salad, and some lovely green beans. There was champagne; there was beer. For dessert, there was the mother of all cherry pies, with ice cream on top, two scoops for those who wished.

We ended the evening sitting in something of a circle in the living room. Eric was examining books on Karl's bookshelf, the lovely well-made books and chapbooks Karl has collected over thirty years. When Eric encountered a particularly lovely and well-made and important book, he handed it to Elizabeth, who examined it lovingly and handed it to me, and once I had examined it, I handed it to Chuck.

We talked about poets and poetry, about life and living, and the books we touched were handled with reverence. These were not commodities, but art objects in themselves. The words on the page were not the only significant element of the book. The tooth of the paper attracted our fingers; the combination of paper and ink and color attracted our eyes; even the way a book laid open could draw my attention. The book as book invited us to lounge with the words on the page.

The book is a tool for communicating information, yes; yet it can be an art canvas as well. The medium is the message and it is still a Gutenberg universe in terms of our senses. These books were not only pieces to be read: you wished to hold them in the great embrace of your total perception. Yes, one can have an almost erotic relationship with paper; even the smell of it excites.

Books matter because we are sensual beings and because holding a good book in your hand is a sensual experience. Reading such a book can be as satisfying as the finest massage. O, we were a strange, lovely circle, those of us touching books in Anne and Karl's living room Saturday evening.

In a well-made book, the loveliness of what the author has to say is lifted up by the loveliness of what the maker of the book has created. And, Saturday night, those books were lifting us as well.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL - PETER'S STORY UPDATE: PASS THE BUG-JUICE

Hallelujah! Pass the bug-juice.

We're gonna celebrate.

Yesterday I penned the final pages, the final paragraph, the final word of a complete draft of Peter's Story. It makes quite a pile of manuscript - 262 pages of text, 74,902 words. It has been a long tramp to get to this point.

Yet having a completed draft is a long way from being done, although I now have in hand what is pretty much the final draft of the Foreword and Chapters 1-6, all approved with Peter's blessing. These are in the hands of my never-flagging and ever-vigilant personal editor-proofreader-and-lover, who is still finding things to question. (Sorry, no gossip here, folks - that editor-proofreader-lover is my wife, Mary.  Not only is she a great wife, she is my best reader. She knows my many faults and loves me anyway and is courageous enough to point out my questionable prose.) Yes, we're far from being done. When I write fast, which is how I write, the paragraphs and the sentences can get kind of ugly. I still need to smooth Chapters 9-13 and the Epilogue, and massage them and smooth them again.

Yet now I have a first complete draft to work with.

Say Hallelujah!

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: PETER'S STORY UPDATE - SO CLOSE, SO CLOSE

I am so close

to having a complete draft of Peter's Story. So close that I can taste it.

I finished a draft of Chapter 11 this past Friday. I finished a draft of Chapter 12 on Sunday. On Sunday as well I massaged and finalized the last chapter, which had already been drafted, Chapter 13. Admittedly, I moved some material out of the body of the book in order to finish what I've finished, and it will have to be dealt with in the "Epilogue." That is the work which remains, writing the additional material for the epilogue.

So close. The end is in sight.

*

Yesterday I went to Milwaukee and reviewed Chapters 4, 5, and 6 with Peter. This involves having me read him the draft and he offers corrections and additions as needed, and - in the end - his approval. At this point we have reviewed and approved the Foreword and Chapters 1 through 6.

I'll meet Peter again next Monday with Chapters 7, 8, and 9 in hand.

So close.

*

I have been keeping my nose pretty close to the grinestone these past weeks - that uncomfortable position - and I haven't done much blog-reading and not much in the way of keeping up with my e-mail, I'm afraid. The push is on. The push is really on. Once I have a complete and final manuscript for Peter's Story in hand, I'll turn my attention to my collection of essays, The Idea of the Local, which will be published at the same time as Peter's Story, on the theory that I can do publicity for both books at the same time. The idea being that I might sell those interested in my writing about place on Peter's story, and those interested in Peter's story on my writing about place.

I have never before had two books come out at the same time, so this will be a new experience for me. I trust that I'll survive it.

What d'ya think?

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: MORE HEGELIAN SHUFFLE WITH BILL STOBB

I did download and listen to

Bill Stobb's audio-essay, "Hegelian Shuffle - Part 1 - Thesis," in which he places my remarks in my essay "Who Is Poetry For?" at one end of a continuum of possibilities, making them the "thesis" in his Shuffle. His is a lovely and relaxed weighing of ideas. Bill was sitting on his winter porch in his stocking cap and fingerless gloves, musing about poetry and my position on poetry. I recommend that you give him a listen.

He does think that my farm boy in the essay is a "composite," and I'd like to correct that notion. I was reporting the real experience of a single, real farm boy, myself remembering that moment; albeit then I was holding the experience up as a emblem, so that one might see it as "mythologizing," as Bill does.

Bill's discussion is interrupted twice, serendipitiously. First, by sundogs on the cold, bright day he made his recording. Yet is it pure coincidence he saw those sundogs during a discussion of my recognition of "the sun's loneliness?" I don't think so. Or at least we shouldn't take the coincidence for granted.

On the other end of the continuum, as Bill might see it, is a "post-modern" poetry, an aesthetic which questions the very basis of our knowing, perhaps, or at least it questions the basis of our telling. A "crazy poetry," as Bill puts it to his four-year-old son when the child comes out onto the porch for some attention during the recording session. This was the second interruption. Bill posed for the boy a choice between "crazy poetry" and "poetry about farms," these extremes of the continuum: which does he like?

The wisdom of the four-year-old? "I like nice poetry."

So do I, son, so do I.

In "Part 2 - Antithesis," Bill will examine an aesthetic in marked contrast to mine, the aesthetic of a "crazy poetry" which he appreciates as much as he does my regionalism. And then, I assume, in "Part 3 - Synthesis," he will resolve the tensions between Thesis and Antithesis and will stake out a position of his own.

In an e-mail follow-up, Bill wondered if I might want to record an audio response to his remarks, which I have done, and which he will try to incorporate into his continuing discussion. I appreciate Bill's kindness in his handling of my position, which I assure you could draw bile from one less sweetly disposed. My essay is a polemic; it does stake out a position on one side of the question.

I think that at the horns of this Thesis-Antithesis you will find, on the one horn, poets like myself who believe the stuff of poetry is the world; and, on the other horn, poets who believe the stuff of poetry is language or the poem itself. Between those of us who see poets as shaman-like creatures and those who believe the poet's task is to play poetry as an elaborate self-referential word game.

Admittedly, I simplify, as if you can really force a choice between "crazy poetry" and "poetry about farms."

I did get off one good bon mot in my audio response, I think. Listen for it:

When all is said and done in this post-modernist world, I take some solace in the fact that if a bus hits a post-modern poet, he's just as dead as the rest of us would be.

I closed my audio response by saying: "This is Tom Montag, signing off from my end of the continuum." Bill thinks "My End of the Continuum" would be a great name for a column. Hmmm.

---------------------------
There is a discussion of Bill's "Hegelian Shuffle" taking place here. If you want to access it, you'll have to register at Facebook, which was relatively painless.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: STOBB'S HEGELIAN APPROACH TO MONTAG; MORE PETER'S STORY

When I got home from Milwaukee

last night, I found an e-mail from William Stobb, one of the poets I met on a trip to La Crosse, Wisconsin, last month for my reading at the Pump House Center for the Arts. One of the pieces I read at the Pump House was an excerpt from my essay, "Who Is Poetry For?" Stobb got a copy of my collection of essays, Kissing Poetry's Sister, which contains the complete version, and after reading it, as he says in the e-mail, "I decided to explore my own thoughts about the questions your essay raises." He does so in a podcast at http://www.miporadio.net/WILLIAM_E_STOBB/ under the title "Hegelian Shuffle: Part 1 of 3 Thesis: Tom Montag." I have dial-up internet service, and I've been downloading the podcast for about 45 minutes, about 20% of the file, so I haven't heard what he has to say yet, but I wanted to point my readers in the direction of Stobb's comments. I may follow up with some discussion here after I've heard the piece. We're up to 24% downloaded now. Upp, now it's 26%

*

Yesterday, in the morning, I finished my draft of Chapter 10 of Peter's Story. The end is in sight! I have Chapters 11 and 12 to draft, and I have some massaging to do in Chapter 13, which is mostly completed, then I'll have a complete draft. I can almost taste it.

*

Yesterday, in the afternoon, I went to Milwaukee to see Peter. I read him Chapters 2 and 3 and we revised and approved them. We also re-examined the chronology of the first ten chapters and, with three changes, I'll have the order of events perfected.

*

I left Fairwater early enough yesterday that I could go look at where Peter had lived in Milwaukee's old Third Ward, on the south side of Clybourn between Jefferson and Jackson Streets. On that side of Clybourn, there is freeway overhead, and bare ground beneath. The neighborhood from Peter's life? It's all gone, every last stick of it. What remains is Peter's memory of it. In a very cold brightness I got a look at the raw ground and the pillars holding up the freeway and the freeway itself overhead, and I felt a rush of gratitude and pleasure that I'm able to help Peter to tell his story.

Today, I start drafting Chapter 11, with vigor and renewed enthusiasm.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL CREATIVE NONFICTION AT LAKELAND COLLEGE IN THE FALL?

I got an e-mail yesterday

from Karl Elder at Lakeland College near Sheboygan. "Are you interested in again teaching Creative Nonfiction during our fall semester? I know the students would be pleased...."

"Well, yeah!" I wanted to shout, but actually I responded with something a little more composed, ending with "Let me know more as this develops...." It is a lovely possibility.

Working with young writers is always such a charge for me, like sticking two prongs into the juice of the universe and being jolted with that hugeness. I always have to hope that I'm giving back to the students as much as they give to me in those classes.

I am fortunate in my situation as a Visiting Writer at Lakeland that: (1) this is one class, not a full load; (2) it is a subject I love and am excited about; and (3) it comes without all the obligations that the other faculty members have, so my energy is devoted 100% to the class I'm teaching.

What a lovely prospect for fall....

A WRITER'S JOURNAL MORE OF THE GLOBBING UNIVERSE

Yesterday I wrote

about the universe's tendency to glob like things, you may remember. Well, as if I needed further proof that my theory holds water, before the day was done I received an invitation to participate in a "Poetry Cafe" the evening of April 12 at Parkview Middle School in Green Bay - in the shadow of Lambeau field, for you Packer fans.

There will be 2-4 poets involved, I'm told, and we'll each have a short while to tell the assembled students about ourselves and to read a bit of our work, then we'll gather in smaller groups and talk about the process of making poems, and - more important - the students will actually experience the process by making some poems of their own.

I think for beginning writers, kindling the fire of enthusiasm for writing is more important than actually teaching all the intricacies involved in poetry. If the student develops a passion for writing, a greater understanding will come later, naturally, as it is needed. Starting out, what is necessary is the fire for writing, the passion for it. At least that has been my own experience. I had identified myself as "a poet" long before I ever wrote anything even remotely passable as poetry. Yet I kept at it because I had the fire and - hey - I'm a poet.

By the end of the evening, if all goes as planned, each of those budding poets will have a poem to share during the open mic session which will wrap up the Poetry Cafe.

I think to myself: how fortunate these students are! How I wish I had seen a real live poet up close and personal when I was in middle school. Perhaps I wouldn't have felt like such a geek, an outsider among my own people.

It would have been terrific to hear someone tell me: it's okay, what you do, and here's how you might do it better.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL THIS GLOBBING THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE

Is it peculiar

that, in the same week, I received invitations to participate in Brandon Public Library's Authors Festival on September 14 and 15 and to read at the Foot of the Lake Poetry Collective's reading series at the Windhover Arts Center in Fond du Lac on March 6? I mean, one goes for months and months without such invitations, and then receives two of them only a few days apart.

Confirms my theory about the universe's tendency to glob like things together.

In the case of the Authors Festival in Brandon, I had to tell them I would not be able to participate on Friday, September 14, as I had already committed to reading at the Village Booksmith in Baraboo on that date.

Confirms my theory, again, that the universe tends to glob like things together. When the fellow called with the invitation for the Authors Festival, my reading on September 14 at the Village Booksmith was the only engagement on my 2007 literary calendar beyond those in January. (I read at the Pump House in La Crosse on January 18, you remember, and at the Poetry Marathon at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee this past Saturday.)

My firm policy is "First Come, First Served." That is, I would stand by my commitment to read at the Village Booksmith, even if that meant I could not participate in Brandon's Authors Festival. That's how I want to be treated, so that's how I treat those who are kind enough to invite me to read. It is a slippery slope, I think, if you cancel an appearance at one place in order to read somewhere else that might be more lucrative or better for your career. I grew up in a world where a hand-shake agreement meant something.

Fortunately, it seems that the Brandon Library's Authors Festival can accommodate my prior commitment and will schedule me for September 15th only.

*

I did read at the Poetry Marathon at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee this past Saturday, January 27. Because I was later than usual getting signed up for a reading slot, my accustomed hour (3:00-4:00 p.m.) was filled. I read during the 4:00-5:00 p.m. slot.

Fortunately, things were running about twenty minutes behind schedule when we arrived, so I got to see and hear some of my accustomed co-conspirators; and then during the next hour I was introduced to many writers who were new to me. The work of some of them was terrific. Indeed, I have to say that the two young women who came up from Chicago for the Marathon brought some stunning work with them. The first, reading what she called "a five-minute fiction," left you gasping for air; the other read a poem in five parts which she said was about pornagraphy and society and such, and "if that bothers you, you can leave now," yet it turned out to be a lovely ode to that place where a woman curves back inside herself. Terrific and exciting writers, both of them.

It was not poetry that I read for my part of this year's Marathon, but prose passages which maybe could pass for poetry, taken from my memoir, Curlew: Home, passages about: the smell of St. Mary's Grade School in Mallard, Iowa; the poetry of scooping corn; night plowing; and this, from a "Meditation at the Old Home Place:"

You see mile after mile after mile of empty field, the ground worked for another season. There is a time to sow and a time to reap. A time to laugh and a time to cry. A time for the wind to blow, a time for incredible silence. A time for building up small farms, a time for tearing them down. For everything there is a season and a purpose under these shifting Iowa skies.

I must say, my prose of that farm world I grew up in sounded awfully grounded compared to the work of some few of the other writers who read during the same hour, self-important poets who haven't yet realized, perhaps, that poetry, true poetry, is about something bigger than they are. Perhaps they will come to that recognition, but they haven't as yet. Neither wall-to-wall surrealistic imagery nor L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E G=A=M=E=S will get you into heaven, I'm afraid.

And, I ask you, if poetry doesn't take you to heaven, what does it do?

*

I have been continuing to hammer mightily upon Peter's Story, the memoir of a Milwaukee childhood during the 1920s and 1930s that I am co-authoring with Peter Pizzino. That which I pulled apart again - the first eight chapters - is now pretty much put back together. And I have sketched out the contents for each of the chapters still needing to be written, Chapters 9, 10, 11, and 12. Chapter 13, the final chapter, is pretty much drafted, as is the short epilogue.

Sometimes I think the writing of Peter's Story might be a little bit like the Wreck of the Old 97: "He was goin' down the grade doin' 90 miles an hour...." I hope I don't get "scalded to death by the steam."

I'll take Chapters 2 and 3 to Peter and will review them with him one week from today.

That's progress.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL WHAT'CHA GONNA DO?

Oh, the mind of a poet!

It is not pretty in there - a rusted mower up against sun-baked adobe, what's with that? The flat sear of snow against green trees? You don't know what you'll find. Certainly there'll be wind, blowing hard.

My wife says we don't look at the world differently, we inhabit different worlds! I admit to having a tenuous hold on this one, for sure.

I was reminded again this morning how tenuous. You see, I leave notes to myself on the container of instant coffee I approach twice each morning for a cup of start-me-up. Yesterday the note said: "Lunch with Deba." So I wouldn't forget. It works. I make myself a cuppa coffee first thing in the morning, and am reminded of the day's agenda.

If you have visited our house you will have seen my notes to myself on the kitchen cupboard, right at eye level above the sink. I do dishes every afternoon and am reminded of what is upcoming. This makes quite a mess of the cupboard doors, but it keeps me on track, most of the time.

Part of the problem, especially lately, is that I spend so much time wrapped up in my own sentences that I have difficulty remembering other obligations, that I have this doctor's appointment, that lunch date, or a Poetry Marathon in Milwaukee on Saturday. Sometimes I have to put a note to myself in the box I use to take mail to the post office, so I remember to pick up milk or stop at the village clerk's office. Sometimes I move a note from the cupboard door to the kitchen door, so when I leave the house I'll remember why.

I think I live as if I'm in a blizzard and need to follow a rope from house to barn and back again.

It'd be funny if it wasn't so funny.

It's not pretty in there, a poet's mind. Dry weeds shaking in a stiff breeze. The glint of broken glass.

Yet it's the mind I've got. What'cha gonna do?

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: SEEING PETER

I met with Peter on Monday

and spent the time working on Peter's Story with him. The first (and best) part of the visit was sharing a black and white mock-up of the cover with him, a photo of him as a boy on the front cover, his Confirmation photo along the edge of the back cover. I read him the text of the proposed back cover.

Then we got down to business. I reviewed various passages and incidents from the book with him, to establish a clearer chronology in my mind. These passages and incidents are in Chapters 1-8, which I have considered D-O-N-E. Well, they're not done: I will have to do some pulling apart and re-massaging to better represent the actual order of events in Peter's life. The chronology is not going to be totally accurate, because of the nature of the telling, but I need to get closer to the actual than is currently the case. One wishes for perfection, but must settle for the best that is humanly possible.

I also had questions for Peter about specific details I was unsure of - one or two questions in each of the completed chapters. We clarified those issues, and I can make the necessary alterations.

I finished the visit by reading Peter the Foreword, which he hadn't heard before, and Chapter 1, which I previously reviewed with him in an early draft. Peter's eyesight is failing, so it is necessary to read the pages to him, rather than expect him to read them himself. This is also an opportunity for any last minute additions and/or corrections to the text.

We worked together for three hours, this 83-year-old man and I, the 59-year-old young-un. It was three hours of concentrated effort. I was exhausted by the time we finished. I can only imagine that Peter must have been tired, too.

Then we scheduled our next meeting for two weeks distant, when we'll review and finalize Chapters 2-3.

A hug good-bye. Well, a couple of hugs good-bye then, and then I was headed home in Wisconsin's gathered darkness.

Peter's Story - Coming Soon to a Theater Near You.

Well, we can dream, can't we?

TO THE PUMP HOUSE AND BACK

It was a lovely trip

on Thursday to La Crosse, for my reading at the Pump House Regional Arts Center. I was ensconed in my hotel room before a bit of snow made the streets slippery; and supper was just around the corner, not even half a block.

We met at Buzzard Billy's - poets David Krump and William Stobb and I - and I tried the jambalaya (which was terrific) with a side order of hush puppies. Bill bought my supper: Thank you, Bill.

The Pump House Regional Arts Center was only a stone's throw away. David showed me around the old building briefly before my reading. It was indeed the city's old pump house, and it was rescued from demolition some decades ago when other great matriarchs in town - the Court House and City Hall, I believe - were being reduced to rubble. It is a great enveloping space, and some of the doors and stairs and railings had been salvaged from those other buildings, to gain new life at the Pump House, such that one of the front doors of the place said "Mens" and the door to the little auditorium where I read said "Jury Room."

It was a small but attentive audience. I read for a little more than half an hour, poetry and prose, something from all my voices, some from Curlew: Home and Kissing Poetry's Sister and Sweet Bite of Morning, and - for the first time - some from the run of short poems I put up daily at The Middlewesterner throughout 2006, a manuscript I call "A Mouthful of Wind." I ended with a version of my little essay, "Breakfast in Red Cloud, Nebraska," which can be found here in its journal form.

It was, as I say, a small but attentive audience. As with Guernseys and Jerseys in the dairy business, in an audience for poetry you look for Quality rather than Quantity, and this group Qualified.

After a short break, the audience became the show, with many of them reading their own work for the open mic portion of the evening. There is something very democratic at open mic readings, the community choosing to listen to all its members who wish to speak. I know that is sometimes painful, yet it is also a way for new poets to develop their chops, and for more established poets to report on their progress.

Afterwards we did indeed manage to find a few beers and a quiet place to talk, to the extent that I didn't get back to my hotel room until 1:00 a.m. - well past my usual bedtime, as you can imagine. And yet it was an enjoyable interlude late into the night. I seldom have the opportunity to exchange late night harrumpfication with interesting poets over a few beers, so I took advantage of it. Being that it was only a very short walk back to my room, I got to bed about the same time I would have if I'd chosen to drive home to Fairwater after my reading.

(That, folks, is just the kind of argument a poet will use when he wants to have a few beers with his fellows.)

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that, while what I have told you here is the truth, it is not the full truth, because it leaves out a report of David Krump's exchange with the waitress at Buzzard Billy's as he tried to get his leftover hush puppies boxed up to take home. The conversation went south on him at amazing speed. But it was David's experience, so I'll let him release it to the world. I'll just tell you that it was like watching a car wreck.

I had a lovely trip; I was so well treated; and I think I gave a good reading.

Thanks, David. Thanks, Bill.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: PROGRESS ON PETER'S STORY & A READING IN LA CROSSE

When you're a child

sledding on a bright winter's day, it always seems so far to the top of the hill. You trudge your way up, and trudge. Then you seat yourself for exhiliration.

Writing Peter's Story has been a little bit like that. The hours and hours of interview, the even longer seige of transcribing the interviews. All that is behind me now. I have been to the top of the hill, and now I'm speeding down the slope.

Since returning from Cozumel, I have drafted another chapter and a short "epilogue," for a current total of nine chapters, a foreword, and an epilogue. There are perhaps four more chapters between here and "The End."

I called Peter yesterday and set a meeting for Monday when we'll work out some questions of chronology and I'll start reading the completed portions to him for his review and approval. Peter's eyesight is bad enough that he cannot read them for himself.

Even if the four remaining chapters each take a week to draft, we are a month from completion. Even if I review only one chapter a week with Peter, we are three months or so from having a final manuscript.

Say it with me: Hallelujah!

*

In addition, last night I put together the passages I want to send to the magazine in Milwaukee which is interested in excerpting Peter's Story to coincide with publication next fall. A word count revealed that I had 2000 words too many in this initial compilation, so I have started to revise, paring it down to the length I'm allowed. I'll work some more on that today.

*

Today I also have to put together my reading for tomorrow in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Those of you who follow my calendar already know that I'll be reading at the Pump House Regional Arts Center at 7:00 p.m. tomorrow, January 18. I'll be meeting a couple of La Crosse poets beforehand for supper at Buzzard Billy's. I'm looking forward to some jambalaya and hush puppies from my favorite Cajun/Creole restaurant in Wisconsin.

Now - the question today is: "What shall I read tomorrow?" By nightfall, I'll know.

I'll stay over in La Crosse after the reading, rather than face a three-hour drive home after my usual bed-time. Staying over might allow me to step out after the reading and see if there is any beer in La Crosse. I might even have one.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: THIRTEEN FOR THE NEW YEAR

Not New Year's Resolutions,

but a look ahead:

1. Team Montag has completed its 2,000 miles of walking for 2006, and I intend to walk my thousand miles again in 2007. That my daughter, Jessica, completed her portion of the challenge has been heroic, as she was sidelined by major surgery this fall. I'm sure she will be  running a thousand miles in 2007, and bicycling more than that. We may conference and post our plans later this month.

2. Jessica and I, and Jess's husband Tait, will participate in the Colorado Marathon in Fort Collins in May. Jess and Tait will run it, and I will walk (though I will have to walk fast enough to finish in six hours, as they'll be closing the course - Highway 14 through the Poudre Valley - right behind me). And I will participate in the Fox Cities Marathon in September for the third time; it is possible that Jessica could run it this year.

3. I will complete the manuscript for Peter's Story, which will be published as an MWPH Book; and I will have it to the printer in June, with the official "publication date" set for October.

4. I will perfect my collection of essays about place and places and people in place, The Idea of the Local, and will have it ready, too, for the printer in June, with official publication in October. This is another MWPH Book.

5. I will expend some considerable energy promoting Peter's Story and The Idea of the Local, with as many talks, readings, and book signings as I am able to arrange. I am hoping the two books will attract audience for each other. I may do a "book tour" once we have the books in hand, but in my experience book tours are brutal - at least the way I've done them. Yet I have found that the single best way to sell books is face-to-face with readers at readings.

6. We will be scuba diving in Cozumel January 3-10, 2007. Yes, I know - that starts the day after tomorrow! We'll be packed and ready by the time the plane leaves. We will. We really will....

7. We will canoe again in Canada early in August. I hope it will again be at Little Caribou Lake near Armstrong, Ontario, and that we'll have the same three women from Thunder Bay sharing their pickerel with us.

8. I would like to think that I'll start sending out my poems and essays to the literary magazines again, though I have to confess that the imprimatur of publication in the journals means less and less to me. More and more, I feel that my mission is writing, not getting what I write published in the magazines. We'll see how far I go in overcoming my reluctance.

9. I want to begin exploring which passages in my "Morning Drive Journal" might make a book, and what kind of book it would make. I am frequently astonished by passages from that journal as I load them to The Middlewesterner: "I wrote that?" I say to myself. I wonder if a selection of such passages could be stitched together into something meaningful and useful for readers other than myself.

10. Yes, folks, I know. I have got to get back on the Vagabond trail. Once I have Peter's Story safely tucked away in final manuscript and I am confident that I have crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's in The Idea of the Local, I'll fire up the Vagabond-mobile and hit the road. I really do like visiting my focus communities; and I fear that some of them have forgotten who I am because it has been so long since they've seen me. I'll get back to it soon. Soon. I promise. West Point, Nebraska, here I come! Gwen, I mean it. Watch out, Redfield, South Dakota! And, Ivan, save me a chair with the As the Bladder Fills Club in Smith Center, Kansas! Here I come!

11. I come onto the board of the Wisconsin Center for the Book as of today, and I want to serve that organization well during my three year term, and to promote "the book," an artifact which in its many and various manifestations has enriched my life immensely, both as a reader and as a writer. It is time to give something back.

12. I would like to do more readings and especially seminars in the coming year, which means I'll have to do more to promote myself. I recognize that I have a lot of experience as a writer that I can share with budding authors, yet promoting myself as a speaker and teacher is very difficult for the Iowa farm boy. It is something I'm going to have to get over, for I have learned writing by writing, and how I did that would be useful knowledge for others who want to write. And I'd like to share it.

13. Oh, yeah, and I resolve to stop biting off more than I can chew....

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: CURLEW: HOME A READER RESPONDS

Exactly what a writer

wants to hear first thing in the morning.

I rose yesterday at 4:00 a.m. to get at my day's work; I filled the firebox on our ol' computer and powered up; I connected with our internet provider and got the e-mails. In tumbled a message from one Sharon Higgs, a name I didn't recognize. The subject line was Curlew: Home.

"I received your book yesterday," Sharon wrote me. "I have only had an opportunity to read a few pages. I am amazed, as your story is laying out my feelings."

Sharon had been born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, had moved to Illinois, and then to southern California (at age 14). She and her husband now live in the Pacific Northwest.

"For years I have had this yearning," she said. "I thought it was for seasons, which was part of it, but there was more and I just couldn't put my finger on it. I thought maybe I simply had a restless heart."

"It is beautiful here," she added, "and yet the yearning has become stronger and I'm being pushed, but I don't know where."

"I discovered your blog," she wrote, "and then I ordered your book, and now I am reading my feelings, only they are yours."

"I just want to say thank you for writing it all down," she said. "I am truly enjoying your story and it feels so good to know that these feelings are real and they have meaning and other people feel them too."

Well. How can you not push everything farther back on the To Do list and immediately respond to such a missive?

I did immediately respond, thanking Sharon for her good words. "You can't imagine how much such a response means to an author," I wrote. "We labor pretty much alone, in silence, and wonder if anyone hears us. Thank you for saying that you have heard me."

Sharon responded with a follow-up e-mail, which I received this morning.

"As for Curlew: Home, it is wonderful," she wrote. This is an unsolicited testimonial, folks, the best kind. "I am only about 100 pages into it, but I am enjoying it so much. You capture the time, the traditions, the lay of the land."

"My husband and I spent some time in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1990," she wrote later on in the e-mail. "I had not been back to Wisconsin since leaving there for Illinois when I was 7. My parents, especially my mother, always said how terrible it was, dreary and cold and bland. When we drove into the state, I was stunned. I found it to be beautiful. It was probably March and the trees were still bare. The rolling hills and the farmland, I loved it all. I could not imagine what my mother was talking about."

Sharon noticed several things about us while she lived here, "things I understood from my deepest self."

One - "The work ethic tends to be huge. There was always fear of losing a job, lay-offs, plant closings, when I was a child.... I picked that up early in life and it stayed with me.... I saw it there in 1990. An insurance man who came to my house worked two jobs though he didn't have to.... He said his daughter did the same."

Two - "Then there is this popcorn thing.... When we lived in Madison, it was common to see men wearing three-piece suits walking along at lunch time with a bag of popcorn.... Fresh popcorn. It was different than any I've ever had, better. I have never been able to duplicate it."

Three - "Then, in one of your journal entries from 1998 - September, I believe - you speak of the seriousness of the people as they are going to work. It's so true. Life seems so serious there, if you don't pay attention to every moment you could lose your grasp of it." She has the same feeling in her own life.

"In any event," Sharon wraps up, "I want you to know how much I appreciate your writing of this book."

Sharon, I want you to know how much I appreciate your e-mails. As I've told you, writing is a pretty lonely profession, and whenever I get to engage a reader responding to me directly about my work, that is a terrific day. It happens, but not as often, perhaps, as one would like.

-----------------------------------
Folks, Curlew: Home is about this far from going out of print. Get yours now. Copies are still available at amazon.com here, or you can order it directly from me, as I have the publisher's remaining copies: $15.95 + $2 s&h = $17.95. Make check payable to: Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931. There is more information about the book here. If you want the author to sign your copy, let me know: I think I could talk him into it.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL THIS EDITING BUSINESS

My stint as co-editor

(with Kasturi Mattern of Not Native Fruit) of the "First Time" issue of the on-line literary adventure, qarrtsiluni, comes to an end at the end of the week. Earlier I had co-edited the "Finding Home" theme with Lorianne DiSabato of Hoarded Ordinaries.

Why does a writer volunteer to serve as an editor? Perhaps there are as many reasons as there are writers, but these are three that compel me:

(1) Serving as an editor is an opportunity for me to "give back" to the literary community. As a writer, I depend on others to be interested in my work and to make an effort on my behalf to get it out into the world. Occasionally volunteering to serve as an editor gives me the chance to return the favor; I get to work on behalf of the work of other writers for a while.

(2) I am always astounded by how much I learn about my own writing as I edit the work of others. I begin to see clearly that all the faults I may find in another's work are actually faults in my own work as well, and seeing them in another writer makes it easier for me to spot them in my own writing. So you might say that being an editor makes me a better writer.

(3) Like the writer, the editor has an opportunity to create a thing of beauty. Structure and proportion and balance are issues for the editor as well as for the writer, though perhaps on a somewhat different scale - across a whole run of selections, instead of within a single piece. The good editor learns to appreciate a broader range of kinds of writing, which leads to a bit of wisdom in itself, I suppose. Certainly I wouldn't want to publish a whole issue which contained only work like my own. Literature is larger than that. I like gathering some of that largeness. This means I have to lay down my preconceptions about what a poem or an essay or a story is, and be instructed by the piece of writing that comes before me. Admittedly, there are places I just won't go, yet also there is good writing which breaks my rules for good writing, and it is good for me to see that, and in some fashion - as editor - to be responsible for it. The house of literature has many rooms, you might say, and as an editor you may wander in them, to learn that something may be good without necessarily resembling your own goodness.

Certainly, I always need to remind myself that I am a writer. There were some years that I gave myself to editing at the expense of my own writing, and I am not going to do that again. Yet the challenge of editing is an interesting spice, at least for this writer.

In addition, perhaps there is another reason for editing, when you are working with a co-editor: an old grumble-bear like me learns a little bit about playing well with others. Decisions become not a matter of what "I think," but of what "we think." That's a good lesson for someone as set in his ways as I tend to be.

I might add that both Kasturi and Lorianne were terrific co-editors during our respective efforts; it was, in both cases, I might say, joyful work. Both of them helped to make the experience particularly rewarding for me - so thanks, Kasturi and Lorianne.

Yet now the "First Time" issue comes to a close and it is time for me to get back to the writer's role on a full-time basis. Though, I suppose, eight months or a year from now I'll hear myself volunteering to take another stint as an editor....

A WRITER'S JOURNAL AN EDITOR CALLS

"Is Tom Montag there?"

said the voice on the other end of the line.

"This is he," said I.

He identified himself as the editor of a magazine I had just written to. "Are you Tom Montag, the poet?" he wondered.

"Yes, I am."

"Your package caught me at a slow time," he said. I had mailed him some chapters of  the Peter's Story memoir I am co-authoring, and a letter proposing that he excerpt the story for publication in his magazine, to coincide with the book's release next October. "I read a couple of the chapters. I think you've got something that we'd be interested in."

He couldn't, of course, use the book chapters as they stand. He would want something full of the city's atmosphere, with a strong lead, which moved fast, and not more than 5,000 words at the absolute maximum.

I suggested some possible directions the article might take; he said he'd be willing to work with me; I set a date when he could expect to receive a draft of what I was proposing; he gave me his e-mail address. We said good-bye. That was the end of the conversation.

Then I was standing alone in the house. "Yu-haaa!" I yelled. The cats didn't quite know what to make of my outburst.

"Yu-haaa!" I said again.

THE WRITER'S JOURNAL: PLAIN SPEECH OF ACTION

The plain speech

of the farm folks I grew up among is the language of action, not of reflection. Those farmers rose early to get at it early, not to talk about getting at it. Once they were at the task, certainly there was little need for discussion. "How many ways do you think there are to pitch manure?" they might have asked, if you stood there chattering about it. "Son, did you come to talk about it, or were you going to clean the chicken house?"

A WRITER'S JOURNAL: THIS ATTENTIVENESS

This attentiveness

is almost a disease. It is a permanent, continuing condition. You cannot turn your attention on and off like a light bulb. I am a seeing-understanding-recording beast, and cannot help myself.

Yet it is tiring. Sometimes I want to say enough. Sometimes I want to say, "Let someone else do it."

This need to write is a curse as well as a blessing. A curse, in that I can never enjoy ordinary events the way ordinary people enjoy them. I am always processing, always weighing, always shaping. It is a gift, of course, this drive to record our fleeting world before it is lost. It is a gift and a curse.

I wonder whether there is some halfway place I could stand, where I could give my attention when I choose, and not give it when I choose not to. Then I remember: oh, yes, this is obsession we're talking about. You don't turn obsession on and off.

At dinner with my friend Chris Halla last week, I was struck by his offhand remark about my passion for recording every detail. That's how he put it - every detail. He was speaking in reference to the size of my forthcoming collection of essays, The Idea of the Local. I assured him the new book doesn't collect all the pieces which have accumulated here; I have reserved a considerable number for another, later collection to be called Personal Papers. But his point is well-taken: every detail.

I tell myself, in the lighter moments, that I write for those aliens who will arrive on our dead planet a thousand years from now and find my bucket of words, that they could see and understand who we were, those of us who dallied here, in this place, at this time. That's a long perspective to take, I know; and one can't be certain with what understanding those green-eyed aliens will come to us, so I want to give them everything they might need.

I know, I know - with my complaining I sound a little bit like the boy who got the dog he wanted for Christmas, that now he'd have to take care of it. Well, yeah. One should be held accountable for the gifts he has.

Yet sometimes I really want to say, "Not now. Later. Give me a little peace."

But that's not how it works.

Merry Christmas.

PETER'S STORY: A MILESTONE

On Tuesday I typed the last

word of the last page of the more than 450 pages of transcription of interview I conducted with Peter in order to co-author his memoir with him. Did you hear what I said? The last word of the last page of the transcriptions!

I still have an hour of tape to listen to, and possibly to transcribe; Peter recorded these before he knew me, as he was trying to figure out how to tell his story. I think it's unlikely that this hour of material contains any stories I haven't already heard versions of; yet there may be some little details I'll want to cherry-pick and use to add just the right touch to a passage I have already roughed out, or will be putting together soon.

I now have three chapters of the book in a relative state of "final" draft - Chapters 1, 2, & 4. You may notice that Chapter 3 was skipped over. Chapter 4 is self-contained and belongs where I've put it, and it was easy to finish. Chapter 3 is a little more problematic, and I continue to massage it or, to use the blacksmith analogy, to hammer it into shape. Where the iron resists is where beauty shows itself.

Am I making progress on the book? Yes. Am I making enough progress? I don't know. At the end of January and the beginning of February I want to start reviewing the final draft with Peter, to get his final and definitive approval of the shape of each passage, to correct any details I might have gotten wrong, and to straighten any sentences I might have gotten crooked.

It is a two-fold challenge: to convert Peter's oral telling of the stories into prose that also reads well on the page; and to lay out in clear and proper fashion all the bits and pieces of Peter's life from the time he was two and a half years old until he was eighteen. Some of what we have to tell happened simultaneous with other incidents we are relating, so the constant questions before me are: which to tell first, which to tell next; which to highlight, which to reduce or leave out; which is scene, which is summary.

You find yourself finally juggling all the pieces of a chapter in your mind at once, and your wife calls you to supper. Then after you eat you come back and try to get them all in the air again. What you want is for the pieces to fall onto the page 1, 2 3,  in proper order, everything in the proper place for maximum impact and appropriate to the greater arc of the telling. Sometimes this means you just sit and look at what you've got. You sit and look. And you trust that - however slowly - the glacier is moving. That's where I am right now with Chapter 3, sitting here trying to discern where the glacier is going. Then I'll take my cue from that, and Chapter 3 will be under control.

In the meantime, a mile marker. You can rejoice with me, if you would, that the last word of the last page of those transcriptions of the interviews have been typed. Hooray!

THANKS, BROTHER

I had dinner with my poet friend, Chris Halla,

on Tuesday; I hadn't seen him in perhaps two years. We used to get together several times a year, but both of us got busy and our meals together and the subsequent conversations over beer fell off the radar. Well, we reconnected on Tuesday.

We met at A Taste of Thai in Appleton, which establishment the keen-eyed among you already recognize as the place my daughter and I have dined before walking both of the two most recent Fox Cities Marathons. Chris and I sat at the bar, to start, and the bartender offered us menus. He opined that I probably didn't need to see a menu as I already knew what I was going to have. Which was? Pad Thai. I enjoy a lot of other Thai dishes, but I always kick myself afterwards if I don't order Pad Thai. I think I must have been Thai in a previous existence, or - based on how much I like the food - several previous existences.

It was a shame to let our contact slip, a shame on me. Chris is the fellow who - in the mid-1990s - pulled me out of the morass of a decade-long writer's funk. I had not written any substantial prose for ten years or more, and only a few poems. Only the most charitable could still call me a writer in those years I wasn't writing. Chris offered a hand to pull me out; he allowed me to get some purchase, to find a way to the dry ground, to begin again. He endured, in the beginning of my return to writing, daily missives from me, great packages of letters and journal entries and pieces of prose. He remained interested and encouraging and helpful. I don't know what he was getting out of it, but I was getting what I needed to re-establish my writing. I owe him a lot.

So I have to let him go poking me in the ribs about always ordering Pad Thai, don't you think?

It would be a terrible loss to let such a friendship lapse, and we have vowed to meet again in a month or two, to continue the conversation. I don't know what he gets from his visit with me, but I get a lot of encouragement from him.

Looking back, I have to say that, without him, I would still be mired in The Great Silence.

So I owe you big time. Thanks, brother.

PATTERN OF PATTERN-MAKING

When we write, we have to

understand what we see. Part of the reason that things line up for us and make sense is because we are seeing them. That is, I have already established the pattern of pattern-making that works for me. I see and record what I have prepared myself to see and understand. It is almost as if I could see a random anything and could make my sense of it.

So how did I establish the pattern I use to make sense of what I see? How did I come to this way of understanding?

MY APPOINTMENT TO THE BOARD OF THE WISCONSIN CENTER FOR THE BOOK

It is an an unexpected honor.

Rather out of the blue some weeks ago, James Gollata, a board member of the Wisconsin Center for the Book, phoned me to see if I might be interested in serving on the organization's Board of Directors. By way of introducing himself, he casually said something like "I've read your collection of essays, Kissing Poetry's Sister, and it's the best book I have read in recent memory."

Well, you can ask me to do damn near anything, Jim, if you keep talking like that.

He was approaching me to see if I was interested in serving on the board. On the one hand, there are about four board meetings a year that one would be expected to attend. On the other hand, most of the board members are up to their elbows in the Center's projects, or they're in even deeper, because apparently there is no end to the contribution one might make to the group's efforts. Indeed, I understand the out-going president of the Wisconsin Center for the Book, Mary Casey Martin, has tallied more than 1600 hours of volunteer time in the past year on behalf of the organization.

Some of Mary Casey Martin's time was devoted to talking to me on the phone this past Friday night, to welcome me to the organization's Board of Directors, to inform me of the first board meeting I am to attend in February, in Madison, at the University Club, and to let me know something of what to expect.

The Wisconsin Center for the Book "was created to celebrate the culture of the book," as they say, and by extension it seems devoted to contemporary writers and serious writing. Established in 1986, it is affiliated with the Library of Congress and  the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. Over the years, the Center has created and/or supported a variety of programs and festivals meant to draw attention to the book, serious literature, and contemporary writers.

My appointment to the board is for a three-year term, from January 2007 through December 2009; I understand that there is often an opportunity for re-appointment, if one wishes to continue serving. It is too early for me to tell how, exactly, I might be useful to the organization; yet by the end of my first board meeting in February, I'm sure I'll come away with a bit of To-Do list in hand. Already I see in the paperwork I've received that I'm tentatively slated to serve on the Web/PR committee (for I had mentioned to Mary Casey Martin in an off-hand way on Friday that perhaps the organization could expand beyond its web page to blogging about its activities). I'm sure there'll be all sorts of possibilities for helping, more potential work than one might have time for.

How much of an honor is this? I'll tell you this: I slept only about two hours on Friday night; the rest of the night I lay abed thinking about what this might all mean, what was involved, and how I could help. I couldn't get my heart to stop pounding and I had to keep swallowing it. I feel immensely honored that I've been asked to serve; and I admit that I feel considerable weight on my shoulders to do good service in service of the book. I also feel an immense wu-hoo of exhiliration. I look forward to the possibilities.

You can bet, folks, that I'll keep you informed about my experiences serving on the board of the Wisconsin Center for the Book, in this moment when I have the opportunity to give something back to "the book," which has given to me.

SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE

The greatest part of life

is not about difference but about sameness. Days are more alike than they are different; people are; so are places. Yet we understand difference: differences, we feel, are most telling, revealing. Still, it is in sameness that we can start to see pattern. The pattern in sameness allows us to see structure. What we see in difference allows us to see process.

That's the notion, anyway. Is it true?

LEARNING TO SEE

We may think we are born

being able to "see," yet I find we don't come naturally to the kind of observation good writers achieve. We can teach ourselves to see, however; we can practice seeing, until it becomes second nature.

I recommend that the beginning writer frame a view or vista as if putting it within a picture frame. Indeed, it is good practice to take a photograph and write of what is in it. The book I have used with students is Bound for Glory, late Depression-era (1939-1943) photographs in color published by Harry N. Abrams, with an introduction by Paul Hendrickson; these photos have the advantage of being some distance from our immediate experience and holding some unfamiliarity for us. They are strange enough, you might say, that we can view them with new eyes, without preconceptions, which is a good place to begin.

I ask students to examine one of those photographs, to describe what they see, to tell me what is happening in the photo. There is movement, in such an examination, from content to meaning, from the specific details seen to what the configuration of these details might mean.

The details of the photograph which stand out for the student writer become the bones of the description. Meaning becomes the flesh on those bones, and needs to fit the facts of what has been seen. One cannot be making stuff up out of nothing. The particular selection of details implies a motion in the photo, a narrative of some sort, a configuration which leads to understanding.

With practice, a writer can move from describing photographs to framing a live and moving vista in a similar way, looking at the view as if through a picture frame - what is in the view, what is the motion of that configuration, what does it mean?

The careful writer is never ashamed of his enthusiasms nor of his ignorance. Indeed, ignorance mixed with humility is a great virtue for writers.

So the beginning writer can start to ask, in a variety of contexts, what is important in this scene, how is it arranged or configured, what motion does the arrangement suggest, and what does it all mean. Understanding what it means is really the middle part of the operation: between seeing what we see and recording what it means, we have to make selections about which details are important, how they might fit together, and how that configuration might suggest some greater notion.

Admittedly, in actual practice, the process of selection which leads to understanding starts at the very first moment of seeing, and continues through the last moment of recording our observations; yet we need to underline "understanding" as a distinct part of the writer's task, so that we might begin to appreciate how we arrive at that point where we know what we have seen.

This, obviously, is a discussion I haven't finished. I think I have been circling and trying to come to terms with this aspect of writing for all my years as a writer, and I'll have to continue examining it.

THE THREE PARTS

There are three parts

to writing nonfiction prose of the kind I write, I think. There is, first, paying attention; one must see and see deeply, beyond the surface. Lastly, one must record what he has seen, and what it means. Both of these tasks are difficult and tiring, yet not so difficult and tiring as the step between them: coming to understand what has been seen, and what it means. We can teach ourselves to pay attention, I believe, and we can teach ouselves to record what we have seen. Yet how do we learn to understand? Understanding is not a skill, but is the product of a skill or set of skills. Which skill or skills, and how are they employed?

I see I must give some attention to understanding understanding, and must record what I find.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL - 12-1-06 THIS NOT FITTING

This past Tuesday I wrote about my visit with the book discussion group at the Ripon Public Library; I mentioned that one question from the group focused on my sense of alienation as a youngster, growing up a poet among farmers. Some of those commenting on the piece picked up that thread, and I realized that perhaps I could tease the notion a bit further. And I'd like to invite my readers to express their own sense of how it is in their own lives, with this alienation and not fitting. Let's start talking about it.

Likely each of us,

man, woman, and child, Democrat and Republican, artist and artisan, poet and farmer, likely each of us feels alone in the world at some time, feels alienated from his fellows. Yet some of us are truly different from our fellows, and our sense of "not fitting" is more than the common angst.

I grew up to find myself a poet among farmers. When all their cows are white with black spots and yours is not, you wonder why. You do not think to question why their cows are black and white; rather, you ask yourself why yours is roan, and what does that mean. We accept the predominant as a given and question ourselves.

I didn't feel excluded by those I grew up among, and indeed whenever I've returned I have been welcomed warmly. Rather, my sense of isolation was something I imposed on myself. My fellows did not separate me from them; I felt the difference, and separated myself from them.

We know we are different, those of us who are not like the rest; and we feel the difference acutely. We try to understand what it means to be different. And why me, Lord, we asked ourselves. And how am I going to live left-handed in a right-handed world, so to say.

The answers I've found for myself don't explain anything. What is, is. I am who I am . Trying to find someone to blame for my difference, for my being a poet among farmers, is a little bit like trying to find someone to blame for the sky being blue.

And truly the issue is not so much that I am different; rather, I ask myself, what am I making of my difference. I am a poet, and I am making poetry of it. Others make art. Still others dance or do stand-up comedy. Things of beauty come not of placidity, but out of tension, out of the pressure of difference. If I were like my fellows, I would not be a poet, it's that simple.

It was not only while I was growing up that I was different, for even here, even now, I feel like an outsider. There are few among the people in Fairwater who read the kinds of books I like to read, for instance, and only a few who would be writers. Few of them seem to see the world around them as a series of codes to be broken and understood. Perhaps they already understand; perhaps they already read the code; or perhaps they take no notice of it. Yet for those of us who are different, every little thing of the world is a mystery to be investigated. That we feel compelled to investigate is part of what makes us different.

Only occasionally do I get melancholy about not fitting. For the most part, I am happy to pursue my track. Poetry is what I have been put here for. I can accept that. Yet occasionally I realized that, being a poet, there are a lot of things I cannot do. I cannot believe without questioning; I cannot accept the party line; I cannot live the quiet life. Instead, I am condemned to raise hell and ask questionis and to see things that no one else sees and to endure they're wondering "What's with him?"

Everyone needs to belong. That's why we have clubs and organizations and secret societies. What club does the outsider join? By our nature, we are not joiners. Yet we do find each other, those of us who don't fit, and we do weave alliances and bonds of affection and we share the commonality of our outsider status.

Is it enough? Well, it has to be. What other choices do we have? We cannot leap outside our skins; we cannot change our spots. We are who we are. Most of us accept that; for those who don't, the suicide rate is likely higher than the norm. Rather than choosing to honor their difference, some choose silence.

Fortunately I am still among those who have chosen to honor the difference; and I intend to continue in that choice. Not fitting is the way I fit myself.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL - 11-30-06 PETER'S STORY

Peter and I went to the lawyer

on Tuesday and finalized our agreement regarding "Peter's Story." For a couple of years we have been working on the basis of a handshake. Peter is now, I believe, 83 years old, and we needed to get our agreement in writing, for the future is always uncertain.

"Peter's Story" is a memoir of Peter's life in Milwaukee's Italian community in the old 3rd Ward during the 1920s and 1930s. I am co-authoring the story with Peter. We met in November, 2003, when I was teaching a workshop in "Writing Memoir" at the Northshore Library in Glendale, Wisconsin. Peter was one of fifteen or sixteen students, but he stood out immediately. He came into the room with the friend who'd driven him to the library, and he took a place at the table. I looked over at him. It was as if a nimbus enveloped him; he seemed almost as if he were an angel. He sat at the table and smiled. I don't usually see halos around people, so I was intrigued. I walked over and introduced myself. "And who are you?" I asked him. "I'm Peter," he said.

Peter was attending my seminar on "Writing Memoir" because he wanted to tell his own life story, and was struggling with how to do it. He thought perhaps the seminar would help him see his way clear. Peter had grown up in Milwaukee's old 3rd Ward, and he'd lived through Prohibition and the Depression in that community. His mother abandoned the family when Peter was three and a half years old, placing the children in an orphanage, and it was a couple of years before Peter's father got custody and raised the family. His father was a hard man and life with him was a hard life. The subtext of "Peter's Story" might be a child's search for his mother's love and his father's approval - a search that is bound to end in disappointment: if you have to look for it, it's not there.

Peter was a hellion as a youngster, leader of his own gang of 3rd Ward hoods who'd steal chickens from Commission Row and distribute them to needy families in the community. At age ten or eleven, he'd run away and live in hobo camps for weeks or months at a time.

Peter's fearlessness and natural leadership did not go unnoticed. Soon he was "adopted" by a group of pardones in the old 3rd Ward, who at one point told Peter's father in no uncertain terms to stop beating the boy: "He's our son now."

The padrones had errands for Peter to do, and when he wasn't collecting the envelopes, he was working in this butcher shop making sausages, or in that import store sweeping up, or in one of the Italian restaurants learning how to cook.

Soon enough the padrones sent Peter "underground" in Milwaukee, for training in how to protect himself, how to watch others, how to disappear, how to stay underwater for twelve minutes without needing to take a breath. Later he took underground training in Chicago, too. He was introduced to Al Capone simply as "the kid."

Peter lived more life in his first eighteen years than most of us live in a lifetime. He hauled moonshine from southwest of Thunder Bay, Ontario, and Lafayette, Indiana, at an age when he needed to sit on a pile of cushions to see over the steering wheel. He becamed a "wheeler," driving the local padrones to meetings in Chicago, New York, Kansas City. He became a "hunter" and went after men who had betrayed the padrones, brought them back to face rough justice.

Before he was 18 years old, Peter decided that the life he was living was not the life he wanted to live; he wanted to strike out on his own, make his own way, create his own business. Eventually he married (and divorced and re-married and divorced); and, as he had wanted to as a child, he opened his own tailorshop, employing some hundreds of people in sewing and alterations. Those years beyond age 18 are outside the scope of "Peter's Story," which focuses on those first hard years in the old 3rd Ward.

I am co-authoring "Peter's Story" because Peter has had health problems - his eyesight is failing him; his hearing is poor; his heart likes to play tricks. In the beginning of our relationship, I was expecting that Peter would write his own story, and I counseled him to keep writing out the bits of memory and to hang them in chronological order from a clothes-line stretched across his spare bedroom. And he did. Peter wrote and wrote and put the pages on the line with clothes pins, and wrote some more. Because he was nearly blind, the pages were difficult or impossible for me to read. Because he is an oral story-teller and not a writer, the narratives were cramped and crooked and didn't have the flair of his telling, the color of his inflection. Peter is Italian, and you might say he talks with his hands.

Eventually (and reluctanctly), I realized that if "Peter's Story" was going to be done as it deserved, Peter needed more than my advice. And while I really didn't need another project, his is a story worth telling. So I began interviewing him about his life, and recorded twenty-three ninety-minute tapes. When I wasn't available, Peter's friend recorded another ten tapes of his remembering.

"Peter's Story" is Peter's story, his memory of his life in those days, but I have been massaging the oral narratives so they work on the page; and I have been arranging and re-arranging the discrete stories so they make a coherent whole, an arc of greater meaning. I have been the one to insist that, as interesting as his life has been, "Peter's Story" will begin with his first memory - of running up the stairs at that black house on Clybourn Street shouting "I come from another world" - and will end when he leaves the organization before his eighteenth birthday, leaves with the blessing of the padrones. Peter always remained an "honored guest" in their presence.

So my work, at first, was interviewing Peter to get the stories. Then the task became transcribing the interviews. I wrote them out longhand, almost 450 pages of notebook. I am four tapes from finishing the transcribing. Yes! I have completed a raw draft of the first eight chapters, yet keep finding additional materials that need to be tucked in here and there, so some of those chapters will be twice as long as they should be, and will have to be re-crafted.

Last Tuesday I made Peter a promise that we will have a final draft of "Peter's Story" by his birthday in May, and that my publishing house, MWPH Books, will put a finished volume in his hands by mid-August.

That's the plan, then. In February and March and April, Peter and I will be reviewing the final draft line by line. Is this what we want to say? Is this how we want to say it? No doubt Peter will be making us spaghetti and sauce and meatballs and Italian sausages as I read him the pages and we work our way towards the end of the project. We'll finish a day's work and sit down to dinner. I'll go home and make the appropriate revisions. A week later, I'll return with another chapter, and we'll hone some more pages to their final perfection.

Eventually "Peter's Story" will be told, and I'll be proud to have been part of the telling. And it will be a good story. All the more compelling because it is a true story, as true and accurate as Peter and I can make it.

In the meantime, if I seem a little scarce hereabouts, or a little scattered, you'll know what I'm doing - working and re-working Peter's story to make it the best telling we can.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL - 11-28-06

It was just the sort of visit

writers dream of. I met for two hours last night with Ripon's book discussion group at the Ripon Public Library. Their book for discussion this month: Curlew: Home, my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm. The fellow who had extended the invitation to me some months ago, my dentist, brought an Iowa map, so we could locate Curlew and Mallard, West Bend and Emmetsburg. Yet it was much more than finding Curlew on the map that they wanted to talk about.

As often happens, Curlew: Home triggered memories and stories in the readers, and so some of what we talked about was their own experiences, or their parents' or grandparents'. As is always the case, we had to talk about the proper way to kill a chicken for butchering: every family has its own protocol.

These readers immediately understood why I didn't name my parents in the chapter "Her Most Perfect Day Ever."

"Your parents represent many others," one person said.

"This is a story that belongs to many people," said another.

Yes, exactly. In calling my parents "the young farmer" and "the farmer's wife," I was trying to suggest that my memoir is about more than one Iowa farm family during the 1950s and early 1960s; that it is the story of other families who have no one to tell the story; and over the years many readers have said to me "This could be my story."

One of the readers, a professor of art at Ripon College, I believe, focused a question on my sense of alienation growing up as a poet in rural Iowa, where the young farm kid found no role model for being a poet. It was a sense of alienation, I suppose, that is common among artists who never quite fit with their peers, who never feel fully comfortable with their circumstances. I was somewhat surprised by my response: that I felt as if I didn't "fit," but that it was my fault, not the fault of those around me; that I was the weird one, while the farm families around me were good and gracious folks.

What I didn't say last night, but realized this morning: I still don't "fit;" I still feel different from those around me. Though I have to admit that blogging affords me a wonderful sense of community these days, a kinship with like-minded souls, comrades in the cause of seeing the world as it is and recording it accurately, men and women from across the United States and Canada, in London and South Korea and elsewhere. I do not feel quite so alone.

"Would you read some passages from Curlew: Home?" the discussion group wanted to know. Well, of course, I would. That is what I am born to. And then, bless them, they wanted me to read a couple of my "farmer" poems from the book I call my "collected early poems," Middle Ground, so I read two of those.

Excerpt from the "Prologue:"

... to be dying still
is to be alive.

Excerpt from "Cleaning the Barn:"

There is philosophy to be made of cow manure....

"When do you guys quit?" I had asked early on.

"When we feel like it," I was told.

We started at 7:00 p.m. They finally quit at 9:00 p.m., the library dark and already locked up. A full two hours of the kind of attention, as I say, that writers dream of.

"Thanks!" I tried to tell them as we stepped out into heavy rain, "I am blessed by such attention."

A WRITER'S JOURNAL - 11-22-06 WRITER'S DISTANCE

We are not born naturally able

to stand back from our own writing and judge it effectively. We think what we've written says what we want it to say because we already understand what we want to say.

Our words don't always carry our meaning, however.

The best writers learn how to re-approach what they have written with new eyes. One way or another, they become able to see that a certain word is too slangy for the piece, or that it makes suggestion of plenty when plenty is not what is meant. Sometimes a half of paragraph wants desperately to be cut out: it may be lovely writing, but it belongs in another essay, not in this one.

How does a writer gain the needed distance from his or her own work?

First, I think, you need to read a LOT of other people's writing, and to weigh its effectiveness and clarity as you read. You have to read a lot simply to have a high standard of comparison for your own prose (or poetry). And if you have the opportunity to edit other writers' work, do so: every problem you find in their writing you will also find in your own.

Second, a good editor is the writer's best friend - not someone who wants to publish your work, necessarily, but someone who wants to make the writing better on its own terms. Someone who will tell you the truth. Who will ask "Why do you say 'I had a memory of..." instead of  'I remembered...'?" A good editor is able to see your writing for what it is, rather than as you see it, with the tinted glasses of your own knowing.

We may have a problem accepting critiques of our writing because in this culture we have not been brought up to accept useful criticism; rather we have been prepared to reject it, to push back. Our cult of individuality is in some ways poisonous. Yet, because questioning by someone who desires to help improve the writing can be so beneficial, we need to learn to listen to the editor's comments and to weigh their worth. If we really want to improve our writing, a clear-eyed reading by a trusted editor is invaluable. We should find such an editor and listen with both ears. To have such a friend for your writing is to be truly blessed.

A word of caution: not everyone who says he wants to help wants to help. Sometimes editors have their own agendas, and it may not be in your best interest or in the best interest of your writing to follow the advice of such an editor. The issue is trust. Find an editor who is trust-worthy, and develop trust.

Yes, I am saying - on the one hand - listen to a trusted editor; and - on the other hand - watch out.

To edit your own work effectively, it is necessary for you to see it from a distance. I mean this in two ways.

First, you should stand back from the writing far enough that you come to the words fresh and they mean what they mean, not what you think they mean. Perhaps you have to put the essay away in a drawer for three weeks before coming back to it with new eyes.

Second, you should never confuse the worth of your writing with your own self-worth. New writers especially tend to bleed profusely when their work is marked up - because they are one with it. "Whosoever cuts on my work cuts on me" explains this weakness. The good writer, the professional, never confuses what he has written with who he is. Commercial writers must learn this early, if they are to survive, but even literary writers such as myself must be able to stand apart from the writing.

It always helps to know who you are in any piece of writing. I mean that when the writer starts putting ink to paper, he is putting up a mask, he is putting on a persona. This is just as true for nonfiction as it is for any of the more creative forms. If you know who is speaking for you in a particular instance - what kind of voice am I trying to convey here? - then you can edit the writing until that voice rings clearly. Sometimes in my writing, I am the Iowa farm boy, or the Iowa farm boy looking back. Sometimes I am the old German grumble-bear I am. When I smooth my work, I am trying to let one or the other of these, or some other such voice, speak clearly. "That's not the way I sound," I know, so I have to revise the sentence or the passage until it sounds like me.

So if you are going to edit your own work you have to know what you sound like. And if you want to know what you sound like, you cannot stand on stage speaking; you have to sit down in the audience listening. A good way to hear how you sound is to read your writing aloud, and listen to what you hear. This gets you close to the sounds in your writing; it allows you more easily to discern whether what you're saying makes sense; and it quickly reveals your bad habits and unacceptable quirks. If you are going to change, you have to admit there's a problem, and reading aloud allows you to hear the problems.

If you want to get distance from your writing, write a lot. In the 1970s, I wrote an estimated half million words of profile and interview and little essay for the Fox River Patriot, a region-wide monthly paper for central Wisconsin. I was writing for ordinary folks, so my prose had to be clear and make sense; I was writing about ordinary folks, so I had to tell their stories accurately, both as to the facts and in terms of tone; I was learning my trade in full public view and might hear about it if I slipped up; and I got practice, practice, practice. When you write that much, you find that you can kill your little darlings - this word, this metaphor, this sentence, this paragraph, even a whole profile if necessary. The more you write, the less tightly you hold onto what you've written.

Perhaps, most of all, you have to be uncompromising as you strive for excellence. Good enough is not good enough. Excellence has no mercy. Push every sentence to make it better. And push it again.

TO BE SENTIMENTAL OR NOT TO BE

My mother-in-law,

some years before her death, read my memoir about growing up on an Iowa farm, Curlew: Home, and pronounced it "not the least bit sentimental." That was high praise from a former chair of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. And it set me to wondering why my book was not sentimental, when many other such remembrances get sticky with the syrup.

Lately I have been doing some editing which brings me into contact with the personal narratives of other writers, some of which go towards sentimentality and some that do not. And again I am led to consider: what's the difference? And, if a sentimental telling has good bones, how can it be saved?

The difference is this: the author of the nonsentimental memoir reports her experience as truly and accurately as possible and lets it speak for itself; the author of the sentimental piece tries to tell us not about the experience but about how to feel about the experience. It's a question of focus. In the first case, the author reports the experience as truly as is humanly possible, and leaves it to us to establish what it means and how we feel about it. In the second case, the author is not so much interested in the experience, but in shaping our response to the experience, manipulating us with cheap effects.

Sadness and loss don't have to be sentimental. And, if a story that tends towards sentimentality has good bones, it can be saved from itself. It can be revised to lay out the facts of the experience; the instructions about how we should feel can be excised. Yet the authors of sentimental writing often resist such editing - because the story is so personal and its meaning would be lost for them if anything were removed. Such writers stand too close to what they are telling. If one is going to tell a story clearly and truly and without sentimentalizing it, he has to pull back and see it for what it is. "Art" in writing requires perspective and sharpness. Perspective requires that the writer knows where he stands in relation to the experience and in relation to the reader. Sharpness demands that any fuzzy cheap sweetness be fully excluded.

Sentimentality in writing is a way for the writer to manipulate the reader so she will feel what the writer wants her to feel, and nothing else.

Now I would be lying if I said that the good writer, the unsentimental writer, was not trying to manipulate the reader. That's our business, and that's the magic of writing - getting readers to feel what we want them to feel. It's a lot harder work than sentimentality, this setting up all the elements in the art of it , laying out the story in such a fashion, so the reader gets what we want him to get. Yet the good writer makes a compact with that reader: I won't push you around if you come with me. The sentimental writer is like a bossy older brother, pushing and shoving and telling us how to feel.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL - 11-17-06 MY "APPRECIATIONS"

I call my commentary on books

"appreciations" and not "reviews." Why?

I find the term "appreciation" allows me to engage a book on my own terms, and on the book's terms, rather than in terms of the needs of any perceived audience. Rather than responding to the book for any other reader, I am coming to understand the book for myself. I don't owe anybody else anything; my obligations are to the book and to myself.

By calling the commentary an "appreciation," I can engage the book on a personal level, rather than trying to locate it in the grand scheme of literature; I become one reader writing about what he has read, rather than some professional feigning to understand this book in the greater context of all books. I can freely acknowledge how much I don't know, even as I point to aspects of the book which delight me.

I make no commitments to the bookselling industry, nor to the book-buying public. My commitment is to understanding the book on its own terms within my own limited frame of reference.

I can display my prejudices in a way that a "book reviewer" cannot. I can speak about myself in relationship to the book, and about the book in relationship to me, always in the context of my predilections as a writer and a reader and a pilgrim on this old mudball we call Earth.

By calling my commentary an "appreciation," yes, I am saying that I don't owe anyone anything, except for my promise to be honest with myself about the book. Unlike the "review," my "appreciation" is not trying to "sell" the book; I am trying to understand it. The book I am reacting to doesn't have to be newly published; it can be several years old or out-of-print. I don't need to observe any limits as to word count; I don't have to further any program or literary philosophy. My "appreciation" doesn't have to fit anyone or anywhere.

I don't have to hide my ignorance. Indeed, my ignorance becomes part of my response to the book.

As I do not solicit books to review, I do not have to respond to any book that doesn't move me in some essential way. No publisher can put its hooks into me; no author can make claims on me. I give deference to myself. I am free to surprise myself with my response. I owe no one, and no one owes me.

I do not have to comment on bad books. I don't have to write about writing that doesn't engage me. I am free to see the book as it is, as I am. I am free not to respond to a book, if I wish.

I suppose that book reviewing is a necessary evil; yet I don't have to involve myself in that system. I am carrying nobody's water but my own.

By calling my book commentary an "appreciation," I am able to disagree with myself if I wish, to contradict myself when I must, to look at things from the other end of the telescope sometimes, or to overturn the microscope.

There is a great sense of freedom, then, in doing "appreciations" instead of book reviews; yet I am also constrained to tell my personal truth to the best of my ability, for the "appreciation" becomes a measure of myself as well as of the book to which I'm responding. I am always putting my reputation on the line, in addition to the book's reputation.

The "appreciation" is always about the book and about me in relation to the book.

As I say, I am not selling anything. Yet the reader who chances upon an "appreciation" I have written may thereby come away with his own appreciation of the book. That would be a lovely consequence, but it is not required, I think, for my appreciation to be successful.

A WRITER'S JOURNAL - 11-16-06

Last night I received

an e-mail from a fellow who explained that he had just finished reading my memoir, Curlew: Home "and can't even begin to tell you how much I enjoyed it."

I haven't read anything so beautifully written, so heartwarming, and so evocative of growing up on a farm as your book of essays and journey back.

How does one respond? I said, "Oh my. This is the kind of letter an author dreams about receiving. Thank you."

It is uncommon enough for me to hear such praise from readers that it always takes my breath away. A writer must be humbled by such heart-felt words. And I am.

My correspondent last night said he was going to press family and friends to get a copy of Curlew: Home, "knowing that they'll find it just as spellbinding and rich as I did." This reminded me - again - that we are down to our last few boxes of the Midday Moon Books edition, and it is time to push forward into the memoir's next incarnation. I hope to have good news to report in that regard in upcoming months.

As for the fellow's good words last night, I can only say again: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate hearing it. It helps confirm that I achieved what all good memoir must: that my particulars speak on a larger stage than just the farmstead I grew up on; that my story is indeed our story.

Thank you, George.