Author: Michael

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Everybody Is A Spy Now

The scene is a trope in many spy novels and movies. The undercover agent moves through a foreign city, she is nervous. She looks at each passerby, is that man an opposing agent? Is the old woman by the vegetable stand really selling potatoes or is she a watcher? That man with the newspaper, is he on the lookout for her? The couple with the dog, innocent pedestrians or counter-intelligence operatives?

Going for a walk in the age of COVID-19 feels a lot like that. Every person on the street is a potential carrier. That old man without a mask, what is wrong with him? That woman sneezing, are those allergies or is she symptomatic? That guy with the water bottle, is that a dry cough or did a swallow go down the wrong pipe.

This is my city, but it is foreign all the same.

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A Usable Past

Angelus Novus —Paul Klee. Labelled “The Angel of History” by Walter Benjamin

In her book Future Histories, Lizzie O’Shea credits Van Wyck Brooks with coining the term usable past. Brooks wrote, “The present is a void and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value.”

O’Shea goes on to point out that, for young people in particular, the past can feel like a dead weight, there to hold us back from creating our future. But she warns us not to ignore the past. If we do, it survives “…as a default genealogy, a mere reflection of the status quo, fixed and irrelevant.”

That term default genealogy struck me as much as the concept of a usable past.

Default means our choice is already filled in for us. That’s why the vast majority of documents generated on MS Word all look alike, Calibri font, 1 inch margins, single spaced. Default also means failure to fulfill an obligation or a debt. By choosing the default history, we are defaulting on our obligation to create and harness a usable past.

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Literary Ashland with Alma Rosa Alvarez and Michelle St. Romain Wilson

Our April 2020 guests were Alma Rosa Alvarez and Michelle St. Romain Wilson. They just published a collaborative book of poetry entitled Promised Fruit. Alma Rosa is a professor of English at Southern Oregon University. Alma Rosa received her PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara. At SOU, she teaches U.S. Literature with a specialty in U.S. Ethnic Literature. She loves the way literature guides students through new experiences. Her research interest is in the formation of the Chicanx canon.

Michelle St. Romain Wilson has taught creative writing to children and teens through the Oregon Writing Project at Southern Oregon University (SOU) and the Academy program at SOU. She has a BA in English from Loyola University, New Orleans and an MA in English and Creative Writing from California State University, Sacramento. She is the wellness program manager at La Clinica, an organization which offers affordable, quality health care services to underserved communities in Southern Oregon.

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Literary Ashland with Rebel Heart Books

Our March guests were Eileen Bobek and Marcella Bell of Rebel Heart Books in Jacksonville, Oregon. Since 2017, Rebel Heart Books has been an important presence in Jacksonville. As they state on the bookstore’s website: “Independent bookstores are not just physical spaces to house books. They anchor communities. They house real people and ideas, stories of love and hope, pain and loss, failure and redemption and any emotion and circumstance that can be imagined or experienced. Their fuel is a belief in the written word. They take care of people.” In this interview, they tell us how the bookstore grew from an idea to reality, how they choose books and the role an independent bookstore plays in a small community.

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Literary Ashland with Ed Battistella and Michael Niemann

The February 2020 edition of Literary Ashland was a little different from our usual routine. Given the uncertainty about the station’s new location, we didn’t invite any guest. Since both Ed and I have new books coming out this year, we decided to spend the half hour talking about them.

For those of you who may not know this, Ed Battistella teaches Linguistics at Southern Oregon University. He is the author, most recently, of Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology. His new book, also published by Oxford University Press, is entitled Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President, Washington to Trump.

My next Vermeulen thriller, Percentages of Guilt, will see the light of day sometime this year. The current shutdowns due to SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID19, the disease it causes, has thrown a wrench into the schedule. We’ll see how that develops. In any case, give it a listen, you’ll learn something about each of our books.