“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.”

"After/Ashes: A Camp Fire Anthology"

As the editors write in a new anthology of prose, poetry, and images--a creative response to the Camp Fire--it took seventeen days to completely contain it. During that time a group of Butte College students and instructors, themselves deeply affected by the fire, began assembling "stories and visual art featuring both immediacy and recollection; stories that signal not just the end, but a new beginning."

The result is "After/Ashes: A Camp Fire Anthology," a paperback with full-color photographs produced by WordSpring Press. It's available at the Butte College bookstore on main campus and at the Chico Center, and in downtown Chico at Naked Lounge, Kona's, Upper Crust, and The Bookstore. For updates, visit buttewordspring.org/anthology; price may vary with location. (The Butte College WordSpring Creative Writing Conference is Saturday, April 27.)

Edited by John LaPine, with assistance from Claire Grant, Tim Hayes, Grace Armstrong, Lia Deromedi, and WordSpring advisor Molly Emmons, the book begins with "My First Fire," an account of her escape from Magalia by Anne Sheridan. Their house survived, but "devastation still surrounds us. … I see people trying to fix what was broken and reclaim what was theirs. They are coming out stronger in the end." 

There is sorrow in the midst, a realization, writes Molly Fisk in "Particulate Matter," of what one is breathing in. "How many miles of electrical wire and PVC pipe swirling into the once-blue sky: how many linoleum acres? Not to mention the valley oaks, the ponderosas, all the wild/ hearts and all the tame, their bark and leaves and hooves and hair and bones…."

A section of photographs by retired English instructor Neal Snidow (the cover is a closeup of "Chevy Side Panel"), and others as well, captures the strange landscape created in California's deadliest conflagration. 

And now? Tim Hayes imagines "A Conversation" between the scorched field and the emerging grass. "You stand in the place of a/ late companion,/ how dare you appear so suddenly?"; to which the grass replies: "perhaps I am that same companion,/ I grew from the fragments that/ were left behind./ carnage is necessary for/ creation./ wounds are made for healing./ comfort is the enemy of change."

"Diverse Minds: North State Journal 2017"

According to its website, the Iverson Wellness and Recovery Center in Chico "is a group of men and women challenged by a variety of mental health, alcohol and drug issues." Iverson is a program of Northern Valley Catholic Social Service, supported by the Mental Health Services Act and Butte County Department of Behavioral Health.

Outreach Coordinator and Peer Assistant Andrea Wagner, with a degree in journalism from Chico State University, facilitates a writing group and a yearly compilation of work.

That project has expanded to encompass sixteen Northern California counties. "Diverse Minds: North State Journal 2017" ($7.10 in paperback from CreateSpace; also for Amazon Kindle), edited by Wagner, presents readers with the work of over fifty writers and artists who are living lives "of wellness and recovery."

"Life can be challenging for people on the autistic spectrum," writes Paloma Blanca. "I often have to script my conversations. So don't treat me worse because I can come off as awkward." Jonathan Roy Martin cultivates gratitude: "I'm grateful for good people/ In my community/ I'm also grateful for/ Those who heard my plea."

The book includes "frank discussions of suicide, domestic violence, and substance use." Donna C. writes that "my writing is a step to my recovery. … Slowly I'm learning that life can be lived without violence and abuse. It's hard for me to live this way. For me, I've come to expect being hit."

Drawings and photographs, fanciful, serene, or stark, add resonance. Autobiographies at the end open up the meaning of the contributions. A section presents work by Shelby Wright, submitted by her mother after "Shelby completed suicide in 2011." "And although I am fighting with all my heart and soul," Shelby wrote, "my road is still long and hard." Her legacy of hope mixes with the sadness.

The road can be hopeful, but it is not safe. Kadjain Troi: "When you come to a fork in the road, remember, the paved road is an easy way home, but the other path will get you there with a story to tell."

Submissions are being accepted for the 2018 Journal at nvcss.org/diverseminds. Publication and an art show are scheduled for November.

"First Blush: North State Writers 2017 Anthology"

North State Writers (northstatewriters.com), a chartered member of the California Writers Club, has published "First Blush: North State Writers 2017 Anthology" ($13.95 in paperback from CreateSpace; also for Amazon Kindle). Twenty writers contributed thirty-eight short pieces and poems, with the cover by master illustrator Steve Ferchaud.

The book begins with T.B. O'Neill's "The Court Martial of Darren Sweet," an unsettling tale of the Vietnam War. "Now, understand," the narrator says, "I'm completely out of my comfort zone here." Part of the delight of the anthology is watching writers stretch, exploring new themes or coming at familiar ones from different directions. Cathy Chase offers a Hmong narrator in "The Flight To The Mekong River"; Joan Goodreau characterizes her son's diagnosis of autism as a tornado in "The Eye Of The Storm"; in "The Parade," William Douglas writes, "Late Sunday night, Billy and Allen stole an elephant."

In "Stroke Of A Pen" N.J. Hanson types a twisted tale of horror, and Mary Jensen offers a vehicular confession; Thatcher C. Nalley explores mental illness in "Pray Tell," and Steven J. Thompson poetizes in "White Or Red, Darling?" Michael Richards writes of home, and Vietnam.

Gail Stone has a racing tale featuring a 1970 split bumper orange Super Sport Camaro; her mother, Carol J. Gray, remembers "The Glass Roof" and her Rose Marie Reid bathing suit; Andrea Lavoy Wagner, in the poem "Fists," observes "Violence creates victims/ but it also creates conquerors." Linda Sue Forrister has an "October Epiphany," Margie Yee Webb writes of "Cat Mulan," N.L. Brumbaugh explores the King Tut Exhibit; and Eric Miller tells us "Wife Trumps Husband At Christmas" (if you want a new weed-eater, read this first).

Cara Gubbins writes of manatees in "The Release," Dan Irving offers a non-fiction biography of Yukon explorer James Foster Scott; Kathleen T. Hiatt tells the tale of a horrible car accident in "Sibling Rivalry"; Ken Young provides the first chapter of the second book in his "King's Frog Hunter" high fantasy trilogy.

"In the gloom of the Dudoon Bog," Young writes, "a lone rider weaved carefully between stagnant ponds, searching for a safe trail." In this anthology, the trails are rarely safe.

A literary taste of Chico and beyond

Dan O'Brien bills himself as a "Northern California independent author and literary consultant," and his Amalgam Publishing (thedanobrienproject.blogspot.com) is a small press that has begun publishing a series of regional anthologies of fiction, poetry and nonfiction.

The first offering is "The Northern California Perspective" ($12.95 in paperback from Amalgam; also in Amazon Kindle format), available locally at Lyon Books in Chico. Intended as a quarterly literary journal, the debut issue contains a good amount of reprinted material with some new pieces as well. The goal, O'Brien wrote in an email, is to focus on original submissions for future issues.

Deeply affecting short stories from Chico State University creative writing and American literature professor Rob Davidson bookend the journal's other pieces, with an additional story in the middle, all from Davidson's "The Farther Shore" collection. "What You Don't Know" begins simply enough: "Beau's house was one of my first sales in Chico, a crucial early commission that gave this new realtor ground to stand on." That ground begins to slip away soon enough, and perhaps that's one of the subtle themes pervading many of the pieces by the 19 authors represented. Something lost in the small towns of Northern California, and maybe something to be found, as in Butte College writing instructor Joe Abbott's contribution, "Burl Cutters (Spring 1979)."

"Disrobing Chico" is an excerpt from Timothy O'Neill's memoir of a Chico long past, and a boyhood long outgrown. "If you kept your sight low so as not to see the hills of the Sierras rising golden to the east of town, glanced left where the brick Presbyterian Church bell tower closed the horizon ... , and if you then quickly turned to the right where Broadway curled before the band of huge chestnut ... then you would think you were in some eastern college town--maybe Williams or Princeton."

Poetry abounds, too. Lara Gularte writes of "Living Above Paradise": "I have come to live here,/ neighbor with skunk, bear,/ mountains with discerning faces. ..." In "The Great Free State of Northern California," by Alec Binyon, the poet writes: "We are children of the West,/ sons of restless madness and daughters of/ destitute dreamers,/ born from the survivors of faithful mountain crossings. ..." Much to be savored here.

Editors of Sierra Nevada anthology to make Chico appearance

In 1912 John Muir wrote that "the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light . . . it still seems above all others the Range of Light."

Now, the light shed on Muir's beloved mountains by the work of some 75 writers has been collected in "The Illuminated Landscape: A Sierra Nevada Anthology" ($19.95 in paperback from Heyday Books, www.heydaybooks.com), edited by Gary Noy and Rick Heide. Co-published by Sierra College Press and Santa Clara University, the book features voices as different as Mark Twain and Gary Snyder. It is essential reading.

The two editors will talk about and read from their anthology at Lyon Books in Chico on Tuesday, August 31 at 7:00 p.m.

Noy is the director of the Center for Sierra Nevada Studies at Sierra College in Rocklin and is in the midst of team-teaching "The Sierra Nevada," an interdisciplinary course. Heide has a journalism background and won a 2003 American Book Award for an anthology of Latino literature.

The editors structure their book historically, from "the golden misty dawn" (1840 and before) to the "quiet-colored end of evening" (1991 to the present). Genres range from the "Old Gambler's Song" of the Maidu to an excerpt from Tom Knudson's "The Sierra in Peril" series for the Sacramento Bee, which won a Pulitzer Prize.

Jack London is here, carefully introduced, as is Henry David Thoreau (who, though never visiting the Sierra Nevada, was a critic of the California Gold Rush: "a touchstone which has betrayed the rottenness, the baseness, of mankind").

Several pieces were specially commissioned. Nevada City author Jordan Fisher Smith tells what happened when he arrested a woman high on drugs in the American River Canyon. Poet Maria Melendez recounts her first camping trip in the Sierra Nevada. Biologist Joe Medeiros writes of "The Power of Trees," and asks a series of haunting questions that end the book: "Will our grandchildren be able to hike along a high ridge in the Sierra and lean against an old juniper? Feel its energy?"

Readers will appreciate the many perspectives--and the illumination they bring.