Another Fall Week That Was

The last full week in October (we’ll have a partial week leading up to and ending with Halloween) was noteworthy in many ways. Here in Leelanau County – in my part of it, anyway – we had our first hard frost overnight Tuesday-Wednesday and woke to a transformed world. But after that, temperatures did not stay in the 20s, but began to rise, and by Saturday we were well launched into a beautiful Indian summer, with plenty of fall color left for residents and visitors.

Bookstores make for odd bedfellows

Writer and radio host Aaron Stander interviewed two authors who have graced the premises of Dog Ears Books, Benjamin Busch and Lynne Rae Perkins. Both writers gave outstanding interviews, and I was proud to speak and write of them in the possessive. Lynne Rae quoted me on the air, which was an extra kick, and Ben had some very important things to say about Iraq. (Follow that "two authors" link to hear both radio interviews. For an unedited version of Ben's thoughts, see the October 2014 issue of Harper's Magazine.) Meanwhile, at the bookstore, Ice Caves of Leelanau and Nuts to You continued to be bestsellers, and I got the first of Ken Scott’s 2015 Leelanau calendar, something those of us here in the county all anticipate eagerly each year.

On Friday, three members of my family and a friend who’s become part of the family arrived for a weekend visit. In honor of my mother’s and my son’s birthdays earlier in the month (even though my son does not eat sweets, including cake), I gathered up my courage and made the fresh tomato cake from Jayne Robinson’s wonderful book, The Cake Chronicles. My rendition is not the most photographic in the world, but I assure you, Jayne, it tasted great! One person in particular requested a very large piece and then said of the spatula, “You’re not going to throw that in with the dirty dishes, are you? Hand it over!” My sister commented on the fact that we could actually taste the fresh tomatoes – and I must say to anyone who doubts this makes for a good-tasting cake, that it is a delicious cake, very rich with brown sugar, dates and raisins, and of course the cream cheese frosting.

One layer

Frosting

Frosted 2-layer cake

Piece of cake

Left after first night 

My son and I got out early Saturday morning with Sarah on one of the season’s most spectacular days. Really, I’d say Saturday was downright perfect, with balmy temperature and bright sunshine and plenty of fall color all around. That afternoon my mother and sister took a color tour of their own, and we all had a rendez-vous at the farm later on.

Sunday was my day to play with family: breakfast together at the farm, long walk with Sarah and my sister, color tour and visit to Dennos Museum with mother, sister, and son, sandwiches and pie at Shine Cafe at Horizon Books (and complete tour of bookstore, naturally) before another rendez-vous, six strong, to attend the a focus group premiere showing of our friend George Colburn's documentary, "Navajo Code Talkers: In Their Own Words," at downtown Traverse City's State Theatre.

My family wound up our wonderful, event-filled day with a delicious Italian meal around the corner from bookstore and theatre. Cannoli for Monday morning's breakfast? Sybaritic!

On a serious note, I will have another post soon on one of the major topics of conversation, reading, and viewing over the weekend: What do we mean by "warrior"?

Where Is Benjamin Busch These Days?

It's been three years since Ben appeared on my radar. First came discovery. Then eager anticipation. Finally, reality. For the sake of accuracy, perhaps I should note that Ben preceded his book, when I invited him up before it was even finished to have a conversation in the bookstore with essayist Anne-Marie Oomen in front of a fascinated public. That was when he still had his ponytail. But I digress. 

It's hard to keep track of such an active, creative person as Benjamin Busch. If he isn't making a movie or taking it around to film festivals or exhibiting photographs, he's on a book tour, so I guess my subject heading today was kind of misleading, because I don't know exactly where he is this month. I do know that Dust to Dust was named one of the Top 5 memoirs of 2012 by Library Journal, has been named a Michigan Notable Book for 2013, and received the 2013 GLCA Award for Nonfiction. If you have yet to make the acquaintance of this very memorable, beautifully written memoir, please visit Dog Ears Books and let me introduce you soon. You won’t be sorry.

Take a close look at that Michigan Notable Book list, and you'll also see Michigan authors,  Jeff Vande Zande and  Laurie Sommers, visiting authors at Dog Ears Books now receiving state-wide recognition. Northport is almost at the end of the road, but we don't take a literary back seat. 

Guest Blogger: Tim Finally Answers Gerry's Question

Old Reed City postcard (Sorry I couldn't crop this better)

Today’s guest blogger is Tim Bazzett, who recently appeared as a guest book reviewer for Books in Northport. Gerry Sell of Torch Lake Views left a comment on that post, asking if there was “something in the water” of Reed City that turned out writers. Tim e-mailed me, saying that he would be happy to answer Gerry’s question but had trouble doing it directly on the blog. (Don’t feel bad, Tim—a lot of experienced bloggers have trouble leaving comments sometimes: It’s the fault of the blogging platforms.) When asked, he readily gave me permission to use his e-mail as a guest post, so here once again I give you Tim Bazzett:

Hello, Gerry –

Finally I respond. Nope, probably nothing in the water here--just the usual minerals and impurities. But in case you didn't know it, famous writer/composer George Bennard ("The Old Rugged Cross") spent his last years here. The hymn is something of a city anthem and we now have an ORC Museum as a popular tourist attraction. I remember seeing the Rev. Bennard as a guest on Tennessee Ernie Ford's afternoon TV show back in the ‘50s. Ernie probably sang it better than anyone else.

Jim Harrison's dad, Win, was the county ag agent here back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, so Jim spent his formative years here, til he was about 12 or 13, when his family relocated to Haslett, down by Lansing. At MSU he was part of a trio of writers, the others Tom McGuane and Dan Gerber, who formed the short-lived Sumac Press where many of his early poems were published. And I still remember the excitement I felt when I read Jim's first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir, when I was in grad school at CMU. The first sentence began: "Driving west out of Reed City ..." and went on descriptively for a couple of pages. Not exactly Hemingway-esque as he is so often described. but it was that Reed City reference that hooked me and kept me along for the ride for many books after that. My favorite of all Jim's books is an early one, Farmer, because it is set in and around Paris, just 15 minutes or so south of here -- although I don't think Paris is ever actually mentioned. Jim also had a few fond memories of Reed City in his memoir, Off to the Side, and the area is also represented in some of his poetry, as his uncles had a cabin out near Wells Lake, north of town. It seems I remember a poem about Kilmer Lake, more of a pond, really, near Wells Lake. Drs. Paul and David Kilmer were medical practitioners here for many years - they had an office upstairs over Bonsall's Drugs, and also made house calls. And Dr Paul had a cabin on Wells Lake that is, I believe still in the family.

And, since Harrison, I was the next Reed City writer, but, in comparison, I don't really count -- strictly amateur, regional story-telling stuff. Although I am rather proud of the fact that my second book, Soldier Boy (2005), has sold over a thousand copies and has been read in all fifty states and several foreign countries since its publication. I've had letters and emails from folks, mostly veterans or active-duty military, from all over hell and back about that book. It seems to have struck a common chord with people who've served. Locally, I think it's mostly referred to as "that dirty book." But I take comfort in knowing that they say the same thing about most of Jim Harrison's stuff.

I should also mention New York Times bestselling author of In Harm's Way and Horse Soldiers, Doug Stanton, who was born here, but he grew up and, as you know, still lives in Traverse City. My brothers and I went to school with his folks, Derald and Bonnie. His grandfather on his dad's side helped run the local Shell station and did a little farming on the side (didn't everyone back then?), and his maternal grandfather, Ivan May, was the last agent for the railroad here, before the rails all went away. I think Doug likes to tell people he was born in a library, which is kinda true. The current Reed City Public Library used to be the Reed City Hospital many many years ago.  

And now we have Ben Busch, and his book, Dust to Dust, which is simply outstanding. Ben brought us an advance copy back in September. I was really looking forward to reading it, as I had been privileged to read early drafts of many of the essays included in it over the past year. Ben would just come by with a sheaf of papers and say, "Read this and let me know what you think,” and I did. I thought they were all really good. I think the only advice I ever offered was that some of them were awfully serious in nature, and could maybe use a bit of comic relief, but I don't think Ben really needed even that advice, as his wry, dry sense of humor is very much in evidence now in DtD, although it is, finally, a very serious and mature work. Anyway, I had to wait my turn for the book. My wife snatched it away from me and read it first. And she marveled, and chuckled, and, finally, wept as she finished it. And so did I. It's that kind of book. And if there is any justice, it will sell a million copies. Benjamin Busch may indeed be Reed City's very first real claim to fame in the literary world. Oh, I know Harrison is famous, but he didn't write his books here, in Reed City. Ben did, and could put this town on the map. And I hope that in the process, he will also spark a renewed interest in the work of his late father, Frederick Busch. Because I have been reading Fred's books for over twenty years now and have never quite understood why he was not a nationally, or even internationally famous writer. He was that good. And now so is his son. I expect even greater things from Ben in years to come.

Enough said. Nope, nothing in the water. But read Ben's book. You won't be sorry. Dust to Dust is not simply a "man's book," or a book about war. It's a book for Everyman (and Everywoman), and one to savor and cherish.

All the best from 'literary' Reed City,

Tim Bazzett

Rathole Books

    

Quiet Sneak Preview

Near our house in the shadow of a hill in Sherburne was a pit scaled with fieldstones picked long ago from the old hayfield beyond. It was close enough to supply the rock I needed for building a wall beside our driveway. The slabs on top were gray and bleached, dry lichen clinging to them in oval patches....

* * *

...I saw daffodils deep in the forest and headed for them. They were an early breed, small and subdued, but they betrayed settlement, yards, and home. Someone had planted them and doomed them to a perennial life, immortal in the place that had been surrendered by the short lives of people. They continued to multiply and bloom for over a hundred years, expanding into misshapen patches....

* * *

The soldier arrives home to discover that the war he has returned from has already been forgotten, and because he has survived as a witness to it, neither he nor his country are innocent. Both try to dream again, the soldier by remembering himself before the war, and the country by forgetting the soldier it sent away.

– Benjamin Busch, Dust to Dust: A Memoir
 

Trees, Wood, Paper, Words, Books, and Memory

My father experienced the world through language. It was an intellectual relationship to the physical universe. He tried to create language to express and enclose anxieties—to connect the stress of human interaction and survival to nature through art. It was the only method that he believed in. He could write with authenticity about experiences he hadn’t had, could breathe the life into people he hadn’t been. He found a way to live outside of books—but not without some degree of astonishment that the things described in them often actually existed. I was different. I gained comprehension of my environment by throwing myself against it. Digging, cutting, climbing, stacking. What my father built with words, I built with pieces of the earth, stones and wood. He wrote most of loss and failure because he feared mistakes and departures so much. Tragedy was inevitable to him, whereas I believed that the inevitable could be fought. I thought that with enough defiance, mortality could be made at least improbable.

That is the fourth paragraph of the essay “Growth Rings,” by Benjamin Busch, published in a special issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review in Fall 2009. It was January 2010 when I happened upon the journal, my eye caught by the cover. The special issue was titled “Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age,” and the cover photograph was the front of Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a big GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE in the front window. Essays in the special issue ranged from pedantic to witty, each one interesting to me in its way. But Busch’s essay stopped time in its tracks.

Here was the setup: His father and mother had both died, within a year of each other, his father first. The son goes back to their house and finally, reluctantly, enters his father’s workroom. There is a writing tablet on the desk, holding only blank sheets and the impression of a single word, written on a sheet that had been torn off and discarded. What was that final word his father had written? There is also on the desk an old leatherbound edition of Paradise Lost.

The father had lived an interior, verbal life, while the son’s youth was an outdoor, physical existence—building stone walls, exploring the woods—but later the younger Busch came to see similarities. Finding the right stone in a dry-laid wall is like finding the right word for a hole in a poem. Shelves of books, like the growth rings of a tree, provide an ordering of time. In the Namibian Desert, he felt he was “in a place before language or what remained after language had failed.” He writes of this place (remember that a desert is also treeless), “The flood had come and gone, and no one wrote it down.”

Trees, wood, paper, words, books, and memory formed the theme of the “Growth Rings” essay. I should mention here that not only was his father a writer—his mother was a librarian. Now, here is another paragraph from the essay:

You can read a book now without turning pages, without saving a place on a shelf for it afterwards. Electronic books are available, and bookstores are closing. What is lost is the book as an object. A book is an artifact of both writing and of reading. It is a physical representative of time like the trees it is made from. The writer will die, the reader will die, and the mice will come for the papers they left in boxes. We will all be covered with a blank white sheet. But there will be a shelf somewhere where the book will survive. Someone will walk into the empty room, blow the gathered dust from it, sit, and begin reading in the light of a window. The book will change what they see outside. Then the reader will consider the placement of the book [on the shelf] and the book will remain, again, where it is placed.

In the essay, Busch goes on to say that he found words not from a childhood of reading but by “turning over rocks.” What’s important is that find them he did. “A book, even in its death, has matter,” he writes. Then, “Even a burned book leaves ash.”

I have not received an advance reading copy of Ben’s memoir, Dust to Dust, which he will be reading from and signing at my bookstore next week on Friday afternoon (March 23, 4-6 p.m.), and I would usually be apprehensive about having a book signing if I hadn’t yet read the book. Not with Ben. I have believed in his book for over two years, long before it found a publisher. His work, as the 2009 essay shows, combines experience in the natural world with a craftsman’s approach to language. He is also a Marine (two tours in Iraq), an actor (three seasons on “The Wire”), a filmmaker (wrote, directed, and produced the independent film “Bright”), a photographer, a husband and father and a Michigan writer.

Much more I don’t want to say because I know that his book will say what needs to be said, but it isn’t every day that we have Benjamin Busch in Northport. Don't miss him! That's Friday, March 23, 4-6 p.m. at Dog Ears Books, 106 Waukazoo Street.

Here’s part of a review of Dust to Dust: A Memoir that I read only this morning (March 16):

“There is not one bad sentence in this book. Translucent prose carries each section, and the chapters line up in a beautiful array, much like the soldiers or stones Busch describes so well. I cannot wait to see what he writes next.” – Therese Nielsen, Library Journal Reviews