“Carl Sandburg: American Experience”

In 2019 Redding playwright-actor Max Walter created and performed “Spirit of Carl Sandburg: The People’s Poet in His Own Words.” It’s now been transformed into a selective anthology, with thoughtful commentary, of Sandburg’s work across some “six different fields of writing.”

“Carl Sandburg: American Experience” ($15.95 in paperback from Larado Publishing; also from the author at pprmkr1@gmail.com) presents Sandburg (1878-1967) as one who, “through his poems, songs, and the telling of Abraham Lincoln … helped Americans discover their national identity.”

Perhaps best known for his epic poetic cycle, “The People, Yes,” and the six volume biography of Lincoln, Sandburg also collected folk songs in “The American Songbag” and wrote “Rootabaga Stories” for children (where, in Rootabaga County, it’s “Over and Under country. Nobody gets out of the way of anybody else. They either go over or under”).

In 1950, in a preface to “Complete Poems,” Sandburg wrote that he still aspired to be a writer. “I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.”

Sandburg is plain spoken, especially in his poetry, seeking to walk in the footsteps of Walt Whitman, whom he called “The Poet of Democracy.” As is Sandburg: “One of my theses,” he writes, “hovers around the point that the masses of people have gone wrong in the past and will again in the future—but in the main their direction is right.”

As a Chicago-based reporter he covered the race riots there in 1919 and in 1965 was honored by the NAACP with a Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Sandburg defined poetry as “a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.” 

But the one who told us, sweetly, that “The fog comes/ on little cat feet” is also the one who writes, in a poem discovered in 2013: “Here is a revolver./ It has an amazing language all its own./ It delivers unmistakable ultimatums./ It is the last word./ … And nothing in human philosophy persists more strangely than the old belief that God is always on the side of those who have the most revolvers.”

“Dangle Him Purposely: An Autobiographical Novel”

“I admit I spent three decades practicing law,” Chicoan T.B. O’Neill says on his website (tboneill.com). “Trial work did allow me to fight the old battles of my youth (primarily against authority of any kind), and it provided a treasure trove of material that writers search for tirelessly.”

But he also finds treasure in the story of his early life. His poverty-stricken grade-school years, in the 1950s, with a dysfunctional family always on the move, are narrated in “Timmy: A Boy, An Era, A Family’s Desperate Journey,” part of the “A Mile Beyond” series.

The second in the series, “Dangle Him Purposely: An Autobiographical Novel” ($13.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle), brings Tim into the 1960s and the Vietnam War era as his family settles in Chico. Told in the third person, the story divides sharply in two; hijinks, fistfights, and sexual escapades fill Part I, “Vignettes of Adolescence.” 

Ah, Chico. “By 1959, the year Tim’s family arrived, a smug optimism pervaded the town. A big election filled the airwaves with Camelot approaching, Y.A. Tittle and John Brodie were throwing for the 49ers, and rock and roll rumbled over KPAY and KHSL.”

Part II, “War and Ruminations,” brings Tim to a strange battlefield; though he yearns for direct combat, his work with psyops means befriending local villagers and showing them cartoons and John Wayne movies. In this part the hijinks, fistfights, and sexual escapades are shrouded in Tim’s first-hand experience of the idiocy of the war. Friends die trying to make inconsequential gains. Locals plead with the Americans not to abandon them; Tim knows they will.

“Then came snapshots of recent memory—of the legless ARVN’s belly oozing, of dead American boys laid out like lumber, of ducking from crackling AKs, of . . . emotions at full throttle, colliding like atoms in a particle accelerator. His reaction was swift and uncaring.”

O’Neill cautions readers not to look for a happy ending, though toward Tim’s time of discharge he is reading the classics and mulling some kind of legal career. In elegant, riveting, sometimes graphic prose, O’Neill chronicles how he became himself, the result of all that dangling.

“The Broken Chain: The Ravenwood Hauntings Book 2”

It’s ten days before Halloween. For Tamika Little, 11, her dreams recall a horrific incident at the hands of an abuser. “A long, slimy tongue slithered out of its fang-infested mouth and slid across her face, leaving a trail of saliva in its wake.”

But though Tamika, in an unnamed city somewhere near “California State University,” awakens to a world like our own, it is a world where ghosts are a thing, and where Tamika, her soon-to-be older sister Serena Ravenwood, her boyfriend Luis Chavez (who can see ghosts), and, unexpectedly, the bully Butch Rodgers (who can see human auras) must band together to stop a string of murders.

Prolific Chico writer N.J. Hanson continues the horror, first told in “An Empty Swing,” with “The Broken Chain: The Ravenwood Hauntings Book 2” ($12.95 in paperback from Ink Drop Press; also for Amazon Kindle). As the events hurtle toward October 31, Hanson’s sure hand guides readers into the lives of the main characters and their interconnections.

On a dark roadway leading out of town, a Buick LaCrosse stops and Trisha Silverton, 18, tries to get away from the unnamed abuse from her three “friends,” Joey, Tony, and Samantha, but it’s too late. When Tony bashes her head repeatedly against the pavement, killing her, haughty Sam takes her opal necklace and purse to make it look like a robbery, and they all speed off.

But Trisha’s ghost is not pleased; the necklace is imbued with murderous energy to exact revenge, no matter who stands in its way. Tamika’s mother is taken over by the necklace to wreak the executions, and psychic Morgana tells the teenagers they must find the ghost behind the killings after four murders in three days.

“The pendant's fluorescent green, white, and blue opal stone glistened in the moonlight that fell through the window. The chain started to move. At first, it was just a small twitch, a few links of the chain, then it began to crawl. The necklace crept along the floor, slithering like a snake under the door and down the hall.” 

A string of murders, and murders by a string. Beware the jewelry box.

“Haunted San Jose”

Elizabeth Kile, Chico State grad, longtime San Jose resident, and lover of ghost stories, fields a passel of them in “Haunted San Jose” ($21.99 in paperback from The History Press; also for Amazon Kindle.)

“I am a believer in ghosts,” she writes, “but I also consider myself a skeptic, looking for rational explanations and relying on common sense. But there are things that can’t be simply explained away, and a couple of experiences have convinced me that there is something beyond our realm of normal understanding—the very definition of paranormal.”

Yet, she admits, “part of the pleasure of sharing ghost stories is in the telling, not necessarily in the believing. If a story is compelling and frightening enough, does it matter if it’s true? Probably not. We can continue to scare ourselves with stories we know are implausible, but out of respect for those who came before us, we should also acknowledge the historical record.”

That’s precisely what she does in telling the tales of local landmarks, including the “Winchester Mystery House,”  whose “stairs to nowhere” have a decidedly non-ghostly explanation. 

But there are schools, like Del Mar High, where “legend has it that … a boy was murdered by his best friend. Witnesses who have been on school grounds in the middle of the night say that if you listen carefully, at 3:15 a.m., the time the murder was supposed to have occurred, you can hear a boy screaming for help, his cries echoing across what are now the athletic fields.”

Readers will find stories about haunted hotels (like the Sainte Claire, with the sound of high heels clicking on—the carpeted floor), parks (like Alum Rock Park, haunted by cannibals), roads (where spectral figures visit drivers on Hicks Road), and private homes (like one where “a teenage girl with blonde hair” walks through closed doors; Kile suggests this is a “residual haunting … a spirit performing actions she carried out when she was alive”).

Kile debunks many of the stories as urban legends once she investigates the historical accounts (and there’s an extensive bibliography) but makes room for spiritual energies to manifest themselves in odd ways, all in creepy good fun.

“Religion And Public Health During The Time Of COVID-19”

“Our most basic contention,” write editors Joel Zimbelman and Andrew Flescher in a new collection of scholarly essays, “is that the pain of the pandemic in its first three years … was exacerbated by the disconnect between the public health, national political, and broad media discourse on the one hand, and the rich reflections and insights of various religious communities that span the globe, on the other.”

Zimbelman, from the Chico State Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities, and Flescher, a former Chico State colleague now Core Faculty in the Public Health Program at State University of New York at Stony Brook, have brought together ten essays (and their own introduction) all dealing with the role religious traditions played in the worldwide response to Covid.

“Religion And Public Health During The Time Of COVID-19” ($73.58 in hardcover from MDPI Books) is also available as a free open access PDF at mdpi.com/books/book/7780. Other Chico State contributors include Donald Heinz (“COVID-19 and Religion”), Daniel Veidlinger (co-author of “Exploring the Benefits of Yoga for Mental and Physical Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic”), both of the Comparative Religion Department, and Aaron Quinn, Department of Journalism and Public Relations (“The Arbitrariness of Faith-Based Medical Exemptions”).

The essays concern the humbling proposition of balancing religious freedom and individual liberty with public policy directives. Veidlinger asks whether the benefits of yoga outweigh risks of practicing in a tight-knit congregate setting, and Heinz, surveying the conservative evangelical resistance to mask mandates, wonders about the government’s “ability to bind the Christian conscience.”

“I was not immediately prepared,” he writes, “to interrogate these conservative oppositions to government further until I reflected on the unending calls for resistance and non-conformity in my own Christian leftism.”

Finally, Ellen Zhang, from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Macau, in China, focuses on “COVID-19, State Intervention, and Confucian Paternalism.” The Confucian ideal is not government treating adults as children, but government earning the trust of people. That can allow vaccine mandates since people live in relation to one another and questions of harm transcend the individual.

Those interested in public health policy should grapple with these essays.