“Out Of The Darkness: The Mystery Of Aaron Rodgers”

“It was a sunny afternoon in Malibu in February 2024,” sports biographer Ian O’Connor writes, visiting Aaron Rodgers who was “working on his tan while I fact-checked anecdotes and claims from the 250 interviews I conducted for this unauthorized book.”

The book is “Out Of The Darkness: The Mystery Of Aaron Rodgers” ($29.99 in hardcover from Mariner Books; also for Amazon Kindle). The “long-shot kid from upstate Chico” might not “lead the Jets to their first Super Bowl appearance since they won it all in January 1969”; yet, as the new season beckons, one never knows.

“Rodgers,” O’Connor writes, is “the most compelling and polarizing figure in professional football, hands down… I wrote this book to explain why.”

What follows is an account of Rodgers’ life, beginning with Pines Elementary in Magalia and concluding with his move to the New York Jets and his season-ending injury early in the first regular game of the season. O’Connor takes the reader inside Rodgers’ most crucial games, at Pleasant Valley, Butte College, Cal, the Green Bay Packers, and the Jets.

But the book captures Aaron’s personal odyssey as well against the backdrop of strained family relationships (O’Connor flew to Chico to take Rodgers’ parents, Ed and Darla, to that fateful Jets game), the sometimes prickly relationships with teammates, friends, and coaches, and the ever-present question of what is next after a Super Bowl ring (with the Packers in 2011) and MVP awards attesting his status as one of the greatest QBs in history.

Butte College is especially formative. Smart as a whip, Rodgers finds a mentor in coach Craig Rigsbee. It is 2002; Aaron is 18. Rigs overrules his staff and makes Rodgers “the guy.” O’Connor writes that “it was a decision that set up the most important season of football that Aaron Rodgers would play—ever—and leave Rigsbee as the man most responsible for changing the trajectory of his career.”

Despite his “self-generated controversies,” O’Connor notes, friends “talked often about Rodgers’ generosity, his outsized heart, and the money he had donated in the wake of the great wildfire and the great pandemic.” 

This, too, is Aaron Rodgers, Chico’s son.

“Dancing On The Ceiling”; “Dancing In A Minefield”; “Dancing In A Storm”

Chico novelist, poet, and former foster child Hope Hill finds in her free verse a kind of liberation. In three books of poetry, texts are centered on each page but without titles or periods and flow as if they were ribbons dancing in the wind. 

Each book, independently published, is $5.00 in paperback (also for Amazon Kindle). “Dancing On The Ceiling” is a meditation on suffering. “Every adult says/ The nightmares in daylight/ Will never go away/ But you have to get over it/ The truth is, you can’t/ Cause the nightmares/ I have in daylight/ Are one hundred percent real/ Not monsters under my bed/ But people attacking me/ Bad memory after bad memory/ Flooding my mind/ Searing my brain” the poet writes.

“Dancing In A Minefield” is explicit about poetry as therapy. “Can you explain/ Why I must pour out these words/ Or risk losing my sense of self?” And: “I could no more cease writing/ Than I could unmake myself”—and yet there are moments that nearly do unmake the poet:

“I’m dancing in a minefield/ Twirling amidst the explosions/ Wondering when I’ll shatter/ And fall apart once more” but then: “As I write I find the truth/ For I have answers I must find/ And they are hidden in my mind” amidst trauma, fear, shame. “Being mentally ill/ And disabled as a result/ Of said mental illness/ Means that PTSD/ Affects every aspect of my life” the poet says.

“Dancing In A Storm,” the third volume, is “about survival”: “I’m writing this/ For future me/ I want to remember/ That I fought/ To stay alive/ It wasn’t always easy/ But it was always worth it/ And when the storm clouds lift/ As they always do/ I’ll remember/ That the sky/ Was crying for me” writes the poet.

The poet’s task is not to escape the past, but to integrate it with one’s very self. “I’m autistic/ And changing that/ Would mean I wouldn’t/ Recognize myself/ I don’t know who I’d be/ Without it”—Hill’s writing takes the reader on a harrowing yet celebratory journey as the poet is “writing myself sane.”

“Ember”

Early on in Chicoan Douglas Keister’s new novella (his forty-seventh book), a beautiful, 37-year-old woman asks her coffeeshop companion a question: “So, Jeremiah Quincy Jensen the Third, how did you become interested in cemeteries?”

Jerry, as he likes to be called, is a taphophile, “a cemetery lover,” giving lectures on cemetery symbolism and publishing books on it as well. As the 54-year-old academic shares a bit of his story, it’s clear for both of them something else is going on. 

“They were seeking common ground not so much to find a shared interest,” Keister writes, “but to find a way to explore the palpable chemical connection they both had felt the second they met. Love at first sight seemed trite and hackneyed, but that’s exactly what it was.”

The woman, with her “vibrant red hair,” is named “Ember” ($10.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). “The word ‘ember,’” she explains, “means a small spark or flame, a symbol of a fire that burns deep within. It can also signify the fading remains of a past emotion.”

Jerry understands; while Ember Owens is good at “finding and losing boyfriends,” Jerry lost the love of his life some two decades earlier. Amber (so like Ember) had married Jerry after her first marriage--to moneyed charmer Jason Lewis who turned “jealous, possessive and violent,”--disintegrated. Jerry and Amber were celebrating Amber’s thirty-third birthday when Jason intervened. Amber did not survive.

As the relationship between Jerry and Ember deepens, with the sex extraordinary and fiery, both suspect their own motives. Jerry wonders whether showing Ember his late wife’s grave at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York makes Ember a kind of substitute. Ember wonders if this is just another encounter, destined to fizzle, never enabling her to come to terms with her rape as a teenager and giving up the resulting child in a closed adoption.

Their love will be tested as a sinister plot comes to fruition while they are visiting Sleepy Hollow. Jerry, ever the professor, explains some of the symbols on the gravestones that signify membership in secret societies. And then their lives change forever.

It’s a romantic thriller with, ahem, a great plot.

“The Adventures Of Wild Willy: True Stories From 1940-1980”

Born in 1933 in Los Angeles, writer-artist Wilma Rae Forester moved to Chico with her family around 1940 and “finally settled in the barren wastelands of the eastern part of town called Pleasant Valley. Ours was one of only two houses on Cactus Ave. … It was great horse country and easy to access Bidwell Park.”

She and her young chums certainly did horse around back in those days, and Forester recounts some of those memories (with real names and only just a tad exaggeration here and there) in “The Adventures Of Wild Willy: True Stories From 1940-1980” ($25.49 in paperback from ReadersMagnet LLC, readersmagnet.com; also for Amazon Kindle).

“I married very young and had two sons and later a daughter…. The R.G. Rolls family moved to Forest Ranch in 1964. I married Jacques Gubbels in 1997 and we still live in Forest Ranch. I have trophies and ribbons from riding and painting” but her Christian faith sustains her along with her “children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.” 

In 1945 it took months but the family nursed a downed bird they called “Goose Gander” back to health with masking tape and a cardboard box. Then, hearing another flock overhead, the bird flew up to join them, slowly rising and circling the barn as if to say thanks. But there was a surprise: “We finally found his picture in our ‘Book of Knowledge,’ and Goose Gander was not a goose. He was really a Trumpeter Swan.”

Years later, housewife Wilma and friend Marge, both riding motorcycles, found an old logging road above Forest Ranch and made their way down the mountain to Butte Creek. And needing to get home by entering into a “no trespassing” area owned by “a cranky retired sheriff who lived all by himself” near the creek they found him “holding a rifle and packing a pistol on his hip.” Did I mention two big dogs? It took real smarts to get away.

The book is filled with Forester’s paintings and youthful shenanigans, but most especially is an homage to her home: “I love Forest Ranch.” Her memories, now in this time of challenge, are especially poignant.