University of Nebraska Press

Off the Shelf: We Are Here by Ellen Cassedy

Read the begining of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust by Ellen Cassedy:

"A soft summer rain was falling as a white-haired woman made her way to the microphone. “Tayere talmidim!” she began. “Dear students!” Through the pattering of drops on my umbrella, I leaned forward to catch her words. The old woman’s name was Bluma, a flowery name that matched her flowered dress. She was a member of the all-but-vanished Jewish community in Vilnius, Lithuania, the city once known as the Jerusalem of the North. “How fortunate I am,” she said in a quavering voice. “I have lived long enough to see people coming back to Vilnius to study Yiddish.”

Hiking into the Yosemite wilderness

Below is a guest blog post from Mark Liebenow, author of Mountains of Light.

In his new book, Liebenow takes us deep into the heart of Yosemite National Park, introducing us to its grand and subtle marvels—and to the observations, reflections, and insights its scenery evokes. Here, he discusses how he comes to his findings in nature.

When I go into nature, whether it’s for a day or a week, I carry a pocket notebook and record my thoughts and observations.  At the evening campfire I transfer them to a larger journal, adding in the details before I forget them and pondering the questions raised.  Sometimes the meaning of what I experienced isn’t clear until much later. When I arrive home, I research what I noticed and learn more about Yosemite’s history, geology, and biology.
 
I tend to be a focused writer, which is not always a good thing, but it can be overcome.  I write what I see in front of me.  Perhaps this is because I have a brief time on a hike to jot something down if I want to make it back to camp before dark.  Any extra time is used to explore another interesting area along the trail.
 
I wanted each chapter in the book to stand on its own, so I looked for an image in each that kept showing up at important times and developed the connections.  In one chapter it was the river; in another it was the rock climbers.  A friend told me that she intended to read my book straight through but couldn’t because there was so much going on.  I told her I was pleased.  
 
People come to Yosemite because there is something here that affects them, something that changes their lives.  I think that what is affecting us is also what drew the early pioneers here in the mid 1800s, and what convinced the native tribes to make this valley their home for thousands of years.  My search was to find what this was.
 
I chose to hike alone, which isn’t the smart way to go, but it did allow me to focus on nature, watching and listening to its many voices.  I didn’t want to chat with a partner on the trail and miss what was going on in the forest and mountains around me.
 
Wallace Stegner said that people need the wilderness, if only to come to the edge of it and look.  What I do in my book is hike into the wilderness to see what is there.  When I stand on the top of Clouds Rest at 10,000 feet and look at the wilderness around me, I am profoundly moved.  Nothing else affects me this way.  Nothing else inspires me like the wilderness.  Nothing else gives me such hope.

Friday round up

Yesterday, author Kate Buford commented in The Readex Blog about the research value of historical newspapers.

Buford said, “I sure wish the ever-expanding resource of digitized historical newspaper archives had been available in its present form to draw on in 2002 when I started the research for Native American Son.”

Native American Son is the first comprehensive biography of the legendary Jim Thorpe, arguably the greatest all-around athlete in U.S. history.

Read more of Buford’s comments here. She’ll have more in the upcoming issue of The Readex Report.

Also featured yesterday was James Crews’ poem “Looking Back” from his poetry collection The Book of What Stays. 

Read the poem at Poetry Daily.

And Chris Lamb, author of Conspiracy of Silence, wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times about Jackie Robinson titled “Jackie Robinson – crossing the line.”

Read about Robinson’s journey to breaking the color barrier here.

Mountains of praise

Earlier this week, Mountains of Light was given a rave review by Blog Critics.

In the book, author R. Mark Liebenow takes a journey deep into the heart of Yosemite National Park, introducing us to its grand and subtle marvels—and to the observations, reflections, and insights its scenery evokes.

Blog Critics said, “I repeat, Mountains of Light is a stunning book. I keep wanting to call it a ‘future’ classic. It deserves to stand with the great books of the iconic authors of this genre—Muir, Aldo Leopold, Sig Olson, Terry and Renny Russell. This is a book that cries out for wide availability. It is a book to be read and re-read.”

Read the full review here.

UNP author unplugged

Earlier this week on the Dzanc Books blog, The Collagist, author Matthew Gavin Frank answered interview questions in the form of excerpts.
 
Frank is the author of upcoming book, Pot Farm, which details the strange, sublime, and sometimes dangerous goings-on at Weckman Farm, a place with hidden politics and social hierarchies, populated by recovering drug addicts, alternative healers, pseudo-hippie kids, and medical marijuana users looking to give back.
 
Click here for insight into what Frank thinks about writing and why he does it in the interview titled “There is a Glossary of Terms for the Lives We are Leading Together.”

Off the Shelf: Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite by R. Mark Liebenow

Read the beginning of Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite by R. Mark Liebenow:

"In the middle of the night something pushes on my toes. Half asleep, I think a nocturnal squirrel is rooting around at the bottom of my tent. There is scuffling and the animal bumps hard against the hollows of my feet. That’s no squirrel. It’s larger, perhaps a raccoon. Then I hear a low guttural snort and National Geographic images rush into my head-grizzlies mauling their helpless prey, wolves tearing elk apart with their long savage teeth.

With my heart pounding, I lie as still as a mummy.

When I hear the creature shuffle away, I risk sitting up, making as little noise as possible, and peek out the tent’s opening. I detect a sour musky scent but the darkness is so thick that at first I don’t see anything. Then the animal moves into the slight moonlight hovering between trees a dozen feet away and I’m able to make out a back that is big, black, and shaggy.

Bears unsettle me when they are this close. They are strong enough to rip the doors off cars when hungry, can flatten a tent in one leap, and have claws that can shred the bark of trees. My shelter’s thin nylon skin wouldn’t stop a chipmunk determined to get in. It’s January and this bear is supposed to be hibernating, not roaming around.

Pulling my head back in, I zip up the tent and force myself to lie down. I listen to the sounds of the wilderness for a long time, hear the twitching of branches and the rustling of dry leaves. I do not sleep well."

Mark Liebenow has won the Chautauqua Nonfiction Prize, among other awards. His work has been published in such journals as the Colorado Review, the Spoon River Poetry Review, and the Clackamas Literary Review.

 

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Moutnains of Light, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Mountains-of-Light,674967.aspx.

Runner, writer, reader

Rachel Toor, author of Personal Record: A Love Affair with Running (2008), didn’t start out as a runner. In fact, she considered herself a bookish egghead who ran only to catch a bus. But since she ran her first race more than 20 years ago, she's finished dozens of marathons, qualified numerous times for Boston, and run many ultra-marathons and other endurance races, too.

Toor is now sponsored by Athleta. For the next year, she'll blog for the clothing company about running, 2012 resolutions and above all, enjoying the ups and downs of life.

Read her first blog post here titled "Imposter Syndrome."

Off the Shelf: Descanso for My Father by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Read the beginning of the Prologue from Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher:

"I watch my son as thunderclouds gather outside my Denver home. He stomps his wide little feet on the hardwood floor, clamoring for a tube of eucalyptus lotion he cannot reach and cannot have. He balls his dimpled fists into hammers, tugs at the reddish wisps of hair curling around his head like flames. He is twenty-three months old, the same age I was when my father died. I look at him now and try to imagine the impressions he is forming from this time, the feelings he is filing away to retrieve later and hold to the light.

Mood shifting, he gallops away, squealing with delight into the kitchen following a bouncing red ball. And I wonder: if I died at this moment, would he remember me?

Nine years old. Rumbling down a two-lane highway on the way home from a Jemez Mountain stream, cutoffs damp, comics wrinkled, sun slanting through the side window of my mother’s ’67 Comet. I’m trying to sleep but I’m kept awake by the jolt of potholes and the rootbeer breath of my little sister, who snores on the backseat beside me. Hills the color of red chile powder slide by on the horizon, lulling me into a dream. I open my eyes to another bump and it is there—a “t” on the mesa, a cross etched black against the white August sky.

“Someone died there,” my mother says, glancing in the rearview. “Struck by lightning, probably. That’s what they did in the olden days. Put up crosses. Little piles of stones.”

I sit upright. “Someone’s buried there?”

“Oh, no,” she says, laughing. “They’re memorials. Shrines. It’s a Spanish tradition.”

She lifts a hand from the wheel and crosses herself.

Our car rounds a corner and the wooden marker fades into the granite and scrub. I close my eyes but the image remains, the person who died without warning, the spirit wandering the roadside like a hitchhiker, watching cars pass, waiting for someone to notice. I see a man, always a man."

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is a New Letters Literary Award winner, four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and finalist for the Bakeless Literary Prize, National Magazine Award, and PEN Center USA contest. He is also the editor of Shadowbox magazine.

Off the Shelf: Such a Life by Lee Martin

Read the beginning of "Colander" from Such a Life by Lee Martin:

"One summer morning the telephone rang in my grandmother’s house, and, because she was busy washing dishes at the sink, I ran to answer it. She kept the new dial phone on a library table by her bedroom window, a bedroom off the kitchen in the modest frame house where I’d spent the night. It was 1962, and I was seven years old. Progress had come to our sleepy, backwoods part of southern Illinois in the form of telephones you dialed instead of cranked and seven-digit numbers instead of a series of long rings and shorts. My grandmother had all this before my parents did in our farmhouse just two miles east on the County Line Road.

My grandmother’s phone was on a party line, and I loved to sneak into the bedroom when she was occupied with her soap opera—she was faithful to As the World Turns—and pick up the receiver and eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. “Well, I swan,” I heard a woman say one day, and I thought how marvelous it sounded when she said it, her voice nearly breathless with disbelief. “I swan.” More splendid than it sounded when my grandmother said it. More wonderful because it came to me over that phone line, a voice without a body, just the pure sound of it.

When the phone rang on that summer morning and I answered it, a woman’s voice on the other end of the line said to me, “Lee,tell Grandma to bring her calendar.”

It was my Aunt Anna, my mother’s sister, and I said all right, I would. I’d tell Grandma that instant. A calendar, I may very well have thought to myself. I swan.

I ran into the kitchen, and I tugged on my grandmother’s apron. “Aunt Anna’s on the phone,” I said, “and she wants you to bring your calendar. Hurry. Quick.”

Grandma whisked a calendar from the nail where it hung next to the crank phone she no longer used. She hurried into the bedroom, where I’d left the receiver lying on the library table. She picked up the receiver and held it to her ear. She said, “Anna, I’ve got the calendar. What’s wrong?”

But there was no answer on the other end of the line, and my grandmother looked at me with suspicion in her narrowed eyes, her bunched-up brow. She laid the receiver into its cradle. How I loved that sleek, black phone with its dial that whirred along so merrily when I put a finger into one of its notches and spun it.

“Lee,” my grandmother said, “it’s not nice to story.”

She thought I was fibbing, but I wasn’t. Aunt Anna was on the phone. She said, “Tell Grandma to bring her calendar.” Now suddenly she wasn’t there. Just silence, and I said to my grandmother, “Just ask her when she comes to get us.”

Aunt Anna was coming in her car, and she and I and my grandmother were going to my parents’ farmhouse, where my mother was canning tomato juice.

“Not me,” Aunt Anna said when she arrived and my grandmother asked her whether she’d called. Once again, I was suspect.

“Little boys who tell stories grow long noses,” my grandmother said, and I kept quiet, not knowing what to say in my defense."

Lee Martin is a professor of English and teaches creative writing at Ohio State University. He is the author of the novels The Bright Forever, finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and most recently, Break the Skin, as well as two other memoirs, Turning Bones and From Our House, both available from the University of Nebraska Press.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Such a Life, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Such-a-Life,674935.aspx.

An adventurer's delight

In a remote kingdom hidden in the Himalayas, there is a trail said to be the toughest trek in the world—24 days, 216 miles, 11 mountain passes, and enough ghost stories to scare an exorcist.

Beneth Blossom Rain: Discovering Bhutan on the Toughest Trek in the World is Kevin Grange’s account of his journey across the country of Bhutan by taking on this infamous trail, the Snowman Trek.

Seattle University Magazine’s Maura Beth Pagano called it “a treat for any adventurer.” She also said that “not only does the author let readers catch a glimpse into his time on the toughest trek in the world, he inspires them to set out on their own fearless explorations.”

Grange recently created a soundtrack for his memoir on the blog, Largehearted Boy. The blog’s Book Notes series lets authors create a playlist for their book and explain why each song contributes to their story. Grange said, “To write without music is the literary equivalent of trying to paddle a boat onshore.”

Click here to read his playlist.

Be sure to also look out for an audiobook coming out later this month from Audiobook.com.