Gregory McNamee: Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest

Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest – Gregory McNamee – University of New Mexico Press – 256 pages – paperback – 9780826359049 – $24.95 – October 30, 2017 – ebook versions available.

According to the publisher, this book is an “entertaining history [of] the many ethnic and cultural traditions that have contributed to the food of the Southwest.” And while I do agree that the book’s style makes it a relatively compelling and easy book to read, I think its author, Greg McNamee, is trying to do much more than entertain. McNamee uses food and cooking as a lens to understanding culture, yes, but also to pinpointing the issues that face us in America as we try to grapple with climate change, to live reasonably and sustainably on the earth, and to work together with our fellow humans. There is no heavy handedness to his approach, but he never lets us forget the driving themes of his work, and his perspective.

McNamee starts off by going back to the earliest periods when humans arrived in the Americas, and takes us through the beginning of agriculture in Mesoamerica, and the ancient trade networks that evolved to connect peoples of the coasts, plains, and mountains. From there, he takes us through the various areas that comprise the loosely labelled southwestern region of America, up through the present day’s fusion of cultures and foodways from so many different areas that defines this cuisine now.

Covering just about everything edible in human cultures in what we consider to be the southwest region (which he defines a bit more broadly than most), from chili pepper and agave, to modern day cuisines that include Frito pie and other cross cultural inventions, McNamee traces a culinary journey through varieties of space and time, to get us where we are today and significantly, what the southwest and its food and people might look like in our emerging future.

Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones is indeed, a masterful work of accessible anthropology that was recognized as one of the 2017 Southwest Books of the Year. Since I love the southwest and its food, reading this book was a great pleasure for me.

Greg McNamee is a writer, journalist, editor, photographer, and publisher. He is the author or editor of forty books and more than five thousand periodical contributions. He operates Sonora Wordworks, an editorial and publishing service, and is also the publisher of Polytropos Press.

McNamee is a research associate at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, and a lecturer in U of A’s Economics Department of the Eller College of Management. Additionally, he teaches courses and gives talks on writing, publishing, journalism, media and technology, as well as cultural and environmental issues. He lives in southern Arizona. Learn more about him and his work at his website.

It was a pleasure for me to get to speak with Greg, who is a great storyteller and conversationalist, and a I only wish we had been able to speak in person, and for a much longer period of time. And I was very pleased to learn how to pronounce “tiswin” too.

This book feels like sitting down to a dinner with Diana Kennedy and Jim Harrison, tequila in hand and great conversation going long into the night. It’s alive, a love story, a timeless journey. I absolutely loved reading it and will treasure Gregory McNamee’s words for a long time to come.

— Tracey Ryder, cofounder of Edible Communities and coauthor of Edible: A Celebration of Local Foods

Tortillas, Tiswin, and T-Bones sends the reader on a riveting adventure, tracking the origins of Southwestern ingredients and culture to reveal American history through food. McNamee’s prose is deft and authoritative, and this is a highly original, timely book.

—Kate Christensen, author of Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose

 

 

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Gordon Ball reading from ’66 Frames

’66 Frames – Gordon Ball – Coffee House Press – 9781566890823 – paperback – 320 pages – $15.95

Allen Ginsberg, who helped Ball with some of the research for his book, once remarked on Ball’s vantage point:

From city and country communes, underground and avant garde film and photography,
Gordon Ball has been marvelously placed as participant and observer of many
extraordinary art situations.

’66 Frames: A Memoir (Coffee House Press, l999, introduction by Jonas Mekas), is an account of one year in Ball’s life thirty-five years ago, working in avant garde film, immersed in New York’s counterculture. Its readers have responded with enthusiasm, as these comments suggest:

This book made me want to take acid and have sex with lots of people. It also made me want to stay up all night in the company of my genius friends in the mid-sixties in New York’s Lower East Side. It also made me grateful for not being twenty and living in a war-wracked, generation-torn, paranoid world. Gordon Ball writes with compassion and nostalgia about a unique and nearly indescribable epoch.

–Andrei Codrescu

’66 Frames is a beautifully written book which captures the spirit of those times better than any other book I know.

–Filmmaker Stan Brakhage

 

Gordon Ball’s own website includes a gallery of his photographs of Ginsberg and others.

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Steve Steinberg: Urban Shocker: Silent Hero of Baseball’s Golden Age

Urban Shocker: Silent Hero of Baseball’s Golden Age – Steve Steinberg – University of Nebraska Press – Hardcover – 9780803295995 – 352 pages – $32.95 – ebook versions available at lower prices – April 1, 2017

Even avid baseball fans may be forgiven for not knowing much about Urban Shocker, one of the best pitchers of major league baseball’s early modern era. It is no surprise that Shocker is not as famous as he could and should be. Shocker’s best years were spent in St. Louis, playing for the perennially mediocre Browns. And his time as a Yankee teammate of Babe Ruth was tragically cut short by ill health. Furthermore, he was a star player at a time when baseball was much more of a local sport – no television to memorialize his achievements – his face and skill as a pitcher is virtually invisible to us, now almost 100 years since his glory years.

Steve Steinberg is a talented baseball historian and writer. His work in uncovering the story of this undeservedly ignored pitcher is admirable. Baseball history can be a rich vein to mine, but it requires talented and dedicated individuals to do the incredibly time consuming work of research, and then to transform those details into a compelling narrative arc. Steinberg succeeds in both respects, and with this fine book, he brings Urban Shocker to life for contemporary readers.

Even if you are not a diehard baseball fan, Shocker’s life reveals a great deal about baseball and its players as part of the culture and daily life of America in the immediate post World War I (Roaring Twenties) era. Baseball players lived much more difficult lives than their modern descendants, it seems. And of course, the business of baseball was very different then – players were tied to their teams for life, and had very little control over their own destinies. While they were paid well compared to the average worker of the day, in relative terms, their paychecks were not usually life changing and most players had to work other jobs during the off seasons.

Little is known of Shocker’s early life, and he did not make it to the big leagues until he was in his early twenties. Like many players of the day, his path to success was not an easy one. And once he reached the majors, playing for the Yankees before their great success years, he was quickly traded away to the St. Louis Browns in 1918. It was not until 1925, after four straight seasons with at least twenty wins for the lowly Browns that Urban was finally traded back to the Yankees. He finally had the opportunity to play in  the World Series with the 1926 Yankees.

In the almost mythological 1927 season, often considered to be among best in baseball history, Shocker pitched brilliantly to compile 18 wins against only 6 losses, this at a time when his skills were clearly in decline. Shocker was suffering from a then incurable heart disease that would kill him less than a year later. He kept his illness to himself, and managed to excel as a pitcher using his years of experience to substitute for physical dominance before he finally had to quit the game altogether, surprising the baseball world at the time.

Steinberg has given us a deftly written, detailed and sensitive portrait of a complicated man, whose brilliant baseball career was cut all too short. I enjoyed reading this compelling biography immensely – it brought me back to a period of baseball history I have long been interested in – and I had a great time speaking with author Steinberg about this book and his work in baseball history.

Steve Steinberg is known as a baseball historian of the early 20th century. He was fortunate to have sold a family business, allowing him to explore a new career as a baseball writer. He focuses his work on portraying long-forgotten players, bringing them to the attention of contemporary baseball fans and readers. He is the author or co-author of several books and many articles, including with Lyle Spatz, 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York. Steve’s web site is a wealth of baseball history. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Colleen.

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Bill Schubart: Lila and Theron (A Novel)

Lila and Theron (A Novel) – Bill Schubart – Charles Michael Publishing – Hardcover — 9781682613566 – 192 pages- $19.95 – ebook versions available at lower prices – June 6, 2017

This small book is short and sweet in a very good way. Through well written fiction, the book documents and celebrates an imagined place and people in time, that have only recently disappeared from the American landscape. It’s difficult for most of us moderns to imagine life without all the technological conveniences we have come to take for granted today. It was not that many years ago that the isolated mountain communities of northern Vermont were still home to small farmers, whose daily lives were closer in rhythm to the nineteenth century than to even the twentieth, much less the technologically advanced twenty first century of today. Some of these hardy folk still farmed with horses into the 1960s, and many small-scale daily and truck farming operations managed by dint of endless toil, to support the families on the land they had worked for generations.

To most of us, these lives will be as foreign as science fiction. Harsh circumstances often make people harsh, but Schubart’s characters find a way to access their humanity despite all the struggles of life which which they must cope. It’s a joy to get to know these characters and to share the stories of their lives. Schubart, now in his seventies, bridges this time frame. He grew up in northern Vermont, and while his life experience was vastly different from the farm people he writes about here, these are people he knew and loved during the his youth, and it benefits us all that he has brought them to life in this lovely novel.

Thelma dies at nineteen giving birth to a son, Theron. When the son first meets his father, he learns his mother’s death is his fault and can only muster the question, “How did she die?”

Looking away, the father mutters, “She died givin’ birth ta you. An’ I lost all her help and comforts.”

“I have long considered Bill Schubart to be the wisest columnist in America. That same wisdom, deep life experience, and empathy come shining through on every page of his new novel, Lila and Theron. Full of joy, sadness, humor, and insight, Lila and Theron is a clear-eyed celebration of our almost boundless capacity, despite all our human frailties, to love both one another and the place we call home. Over the years, I have known many true and good country people like Lila and Theron, whom I have been proud and honored to call my friends. This is a beautiful book.” – Howard Frank Mosher, author of Marie Blythe and Walking to Gatlinburg.

Bill Schubart has lived with his family in Vermont since 1947. He writes about Vermont in fiction, humor and opinion pieces, is the author of several books, is a regular commentator on Vermont Public Radio, and active in Vermont community and political life. Learn more about him and his work at his website.

It was a true pleasure for me to share a conversation about Vermont and its people, small-scale farming, and the art of fiction with my old friend, Bill Schubart.

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Christopher Benfey: Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay

Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival – Christopher Benfey – Penguin – paperback – 9780143122852 – 304 pages – $16.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices – February 26, 2013

I found this lovely and compelling book by complete happenstance while visiting North Carolina earlier this year. The redoubtable Regulator Bookshop in Durham had a copy out on its “local interest” shelf, and the cover grabbed my attention immediately.

Not knowing anything about author Benfey, I was surprised and pleased to learn about his background through this complex and rewarding memoir. It’s a book that combines so many different areas of his interest – and mine – built around a complex interweaving of his family’s story and his desire to learn about and understand the people in his life story.

Benfey was raised in Richmond, Indiana, where his father was a chemistry professor at Earlham College. His father’s side of the family were German Jews who escaped Hitler, including aunt and uncle Josef and Anni Albers, who were both central figures at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina (and central also to modern arts and crafts in 20th century America). North Carolina is a nexus, as Benfey’s mother grew up in the longstanding folk pottery region of the state as well.

So Benfey’s story starts as a family history, but moves assuredly through art, geography, cultural history and his own personal journey of discovery as a writer and thinker; as the title itself suggests, “names the three paths, each mapping the experience of relatives or ancestors of mine trying — by art, by travel, or by sheer survival — to find a foothold in the American South.”

There are many well-told stories here, and North Carolina is at the core of it all. Even if you have never explored the cultural and geographical riches of that state, this book will capture your imagination and bring you there. Benfey builds his story much as a brick layer does, carefully assembling the pattern from materials at hand to create a fully formed story all the while.

This is a book I am happy to recommend to almost any reader.

Chris Benfey is a professor at My. Holyoke College, where he is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English. He was educated at the Putney School, Earlham College, Guilford College, and Harvard (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature). Benfey is also a journalist, having served as the art critic for Slate, and also is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic, among many others. Chris is a renowned Emily Dickinson scholar, and author of four highly regarded books about the American Gilded Age. His edition of essays on the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff appeared as War and the Iliad in 2005.

Benfey’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares.

This book is among my favorites and I hope you enjoy the conversation I had with the interesting and well-spoken Christopher Benfey as much as I did.

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Thomas McNamee: The Inner Life of Cats

The Inner Life of Cats: The Science and Secrets of Our Mysterious Feline Companions – Thomas McNamee – Hachette Books – Hardcover – 9780316262873 – 288 pages – $27.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices – March 28, 2017

What a fun read! Thomas McNamee’s story begins with the story of finding his own cat, Augusta, and that story becomes the framework for a comprehensive understanding of how cats develop both physiologically and psychologically, and of course how their owners do as well.

McNamee recounts the evolution of cats and much more as he tells the story of his own cat’s adventures. He talks to all kinds of experts, animals behaviorists, activists and researchers to help his readers understand these strange and different animals who have lived with and among humans for so long. His book is well grounded in every way.

The author has strong opinions about these animals. He is clearly someone who loves cats and wants to improve the way other cat lovers live with and treat their pets. He aims for them to have happier and better relationships with them, and I suspect that reading this book will in fact help make that happen for them.

While I am decidedly not a cat person, Tom McNamee is such a fine writer and storyteller, I found this book impossible to put down. I am guessing true cat loving humans will as well.

McNamee is the author of several successful books, including The Grizzly Bear; Nature First: Keeping Our Wild Places and Wild Creatures Wild; a novel, A Story of Deep Delight; The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone; Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution; The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance; and most recently, The Killing of the Wolf Number Ten.

McNamee also  wrote the PBS documentary Alexander Calder, which won a Peabody Award and an Emmy. In 2016, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on The Inner Life of Cats.

​He was a board member and chairman of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He has also served as a board member of Rare Conservation and the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture. After two decades in New York City, he then lived on a cattle ranch in Montana for eight years. He now lives and writes in San Francisco.

Thomas McNamee’s website is here.

“The Inner Life of Cats is filled with shining prose, moments of sheer cat joy–and intimate, careful scientific observation. Thomas McNamee’s naturalist’s eye, combined with his humor and heart, bring the always wild, yet domesticated cat into delightful, insightful focus.”
―Cat Warren, New York Times bestselling author of What the Dog Knows

Talking with Tom about this book was a true pleasure. Full disclosure: I published his excellent book, The Killing of Wolf Number Ten (a great book – it is the story of the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park).

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Elizabeth Hand: Fire

Fire (Outspoken Authors Series) – Elizabeth Hand – PM Press – paperback – 978-1-629632-34-6 – 128 pages – paperback – $12.98 (ebook version available at $9.99)

Over the years, I had heard of Elizabeth Hand, and knew she was a writer to be reckoned with, but I had never read her science fiction and mystery novels or stories. She was just not on my radar. Now, having read this fantastic short collection of some of her fiction and nonfiction, I have belatedly begun to understand the scope of her work and enjoyed the opportunity to experience her powerful writing.

Fire is a short book that packs a big punch. Maybe it is the ideal introduction to Hand’s work, and maybe that was PM Press’ intention in publishing it. The title story was written especially for this book. It is a powerful post-apocalyptic short story set in a world – our own – approaching global conflagration.

In a useful essay, “The Woman Men Couldn’t See,” Hand examines the work and life of Alice Sheldon, who wrote some stunning science fiction novels under the pseudonym “James Tiptree, Jr.” in order to conceal identity from both readers and her bosses at the CIA. In another nonfiction contribution called “Beyond Belief,” Hand talks about how she went from being a troubled teenager to a serious writer. Other pieces include some of her short fiction, a bibliography of her writing, and PM’s own interview with the author (which I tried to not replicate in my own conversation with Elizabeth).

After seeing Patti Smith perform, Hand became involved in the nascent punk scenes in DC and New York. She worked at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Hand is the author of a number of novels and three collections of stories and her work has been recognized by the Nebula, World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Tiptree, and International Horror Guild Awards. Her novels have been chosen as notable books by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. Hand is a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and lives with her family on the coast of Maine.

Talking to Elizabeth Hand was great fun for me. She is as good a conversationalist as she is a writer, and has alot to say that I think listeners will find interesting.  I hope this interview with Elizabeth Hand will be a useful and meaningful contribution to our literary landscape. Now that I have become familiar with her work I intend to add Elizabeth Hand’s fiction to my ever expanding list of “must-read” books. Thanks to PM Press for introducing me to this wonderful writer’s work.

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Tilar J. Mazzeo: Irena’s Children: A True Story of Courage

Irena’s Children: A True Story of Courage – 9781476778501 – Gallery Books – Hardcover – $26 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

Author Tilar Mazzeo is a terrific storyteller, who took on the task to tell the world about an inspiring, heroic and terrifying story with this book, the true story of one woman who, with a network of associates, saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis during World War II. The main subject of the book is Irena Sendler, who was a young social worker in Warsaw, living in a socially and politically progressive milieu, when the Germans began World War II by invading Poland.

Poland, of course, was quickly defeated by the larger and more modern German army. The conquered country’s resources, human and otherwise, were turned toward the use of the German war effort, with hundreds of thousands of Poles used as slave laborers as their country was occupied by a brutal military regime. And the Germans then began their concerted efforts to destroy the large Jewish population of that country. While many Poles opposed the Nazis, with partisans fighting them from the outset of the war, some Poles were active collaborators with the Fascists, and many more simply did their best to survive under impossible conditions.

Some Poles risked everything to rescue Jews from the near total eradication of that community that the Germans sought.

Irena Sendler and a close circle of her friends and work associates undertook what we now can recognize as an heroic effort to save some of the children of the Warsaw ghetto. For almost four years, they took immense risks and dangers upon themselves and their families, to rescue innocents from the horrors they could see were happening all around them.

While everything in this book reads like a terrifying, fast-paced novel, Mazzeo has pieced together a completely true story of unimaginable heroism by many “regular” citizens of Poland. Irena Sendler, together with the help of a network of local people and the Jewish resistance, was able to save upwards of 2,500 Jewish children from likely death in the brutal concentration camps to which most Polish Jews were sent. Irena herself went back and forth into the Jewish ghetto, sneaking children out in a myriad of ways, and then found refuge for the children with local Polish families, convents, churches and farmers.

It was an incredible effort. Irena Sendler knew the terrible risks – she was at one point brutally tortured by the Gestapo – but also knew she could not fail to act.

It is incredible that she and so many of her cohorts survived the war. But then, of course, she and Poland had to survive the takeover of her country by the Soviets, and that meant that the story of her wartime heroism could not be told until long after the war had ended. Mazzeo’s effort here to celebrate and tell this amazing story is extraordinary, and much appreciated. Irena Sendler and her network of heroes serves as inspiration and constant reminder that we “regular citizens” must be prepared to face moral choices at any time, sometimes with dire consequences. So many good people were killed in this terrible war.

It is impossible to read this book and not wonder how any of us would have responded then. And of course we must each ask our selves honestly, how will we respond when our time to act is upon us?

I really enjoyed reading this book. It brought up powerful emotions and important questions. Mazzeo is both a fine writer and a terrific researcher, and in this book displays both those talents in full flower. We had a really interesting conversation about this book. There is so much in it I did not want to discuss in detail, so readers will be able to have the full experience of the book for themselves, but we had much to talk about nonetheless.

Tilar Mazzeo is the Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine. She is the author of numerous works of narrative nonfiction, including the New York Times bestselling The Widow Clicquot.

There’s a wonderful portrait of Sendler, written while she was still alive here and a website devoted to her life and story called Life in a Jar.

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Clara Bingham: Witness to the Revolution

Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul
9780812993189 – Random House – Hardcover – $30 – (ebook versions available at lower prices)

There have been many books written about the politics and culture of the sixties, but I don’t think there has ever been a book quite like this one.

Clara Bingham is a journalist who grew up just a bit too young to join in the festivities of what is now known as “The Sixties.” That term is actually a misnomer, as most of us know, since the decade of turbulence and strife really started in the mid-sixties and ended, more or less, with the close of the Vietnam War in 1975. However it is measured, and measuring time periods in history is never easy or altogether clear, that time was full of energy, social discord, cultural change, political engagement, joy and tragedy.

Ms. Bingham had relatives and family members who were old enough to participate actively in the youth culture explosion of that time, and we are lucky that their experiences inspired her interest in this historically significant era. She took upon herself a seriously daunting task, to try to understand what happened in the culture through the words of some of its key participants. It’s an altogether brilliant, inspiring effort.

She has chosen to focus on a single year to create a lens through which to see America in the throes of cultural upheaval. The book covers the period from August 1969 to August 1970, during which there were nine thousand protests and eighty-four acts of arson or bombings across the country. It was an incredible year, one that included so many key events of the time, both at home and abroad, including the rise of the Weather Underground, the invasion of Cambodia, Woodstock, May Day in New Haven, and the massacre at Kent State – and so much more.

As an active member of the counter culture myself in those halcyon years, this book brought back many memories, and reminded me of some of the things I’d forgotten about, as well as some of the people who were so important to us in those years. There’s so much in this book, there are some events and people I had not even thought about for almost 45 years. The first-hand accounts included in this book are important and powerful. These reminiscences can help us understand an era that is so much with us still – both culturally and politically. This book can help us understand why America is still in the throes of cultural and political upheaval, and is so culturally divided. While there were many failures in the sixties, and many terrible things done in the name of good intentions and beliefs, we are awash in the cultural forces unleashed then. The baby boomers who created the youth culture of the sixties are aging out of the population now, but the effects of that time continue to reverberate today.

There is so much of importance to be found in this book. I was really pleased to have a chance to speak to Clara about Witness to the Revolution. It’s an incredible effort and I hope it will help spur further conversations about the Sixties and what we can learn from that incredible era.

If you want to listen to Clara reading from the book, there’s a short segment over in Author’s Voices.

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Chris Offutt: My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

9781501112461 – Atria Books – 272 pages – Hardcover – $26.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Chris Offutt’s father, Andrew Offutt, left behind an unusual legacy – a massive quantity of pornography he wrote over a long swatch of his life. Besides being at one time a respected insurance agent, and subsequently a successful but still minor science fiction writer, Andrew Offutt spent years writing pornography, and made himself the “king of twentieth-century smut.”

During the 1970s, after Grove Press and other publishers had helped break down the barriers to legal publishing of pornographic and erotic literature, the floodgates of erotic writing opened up to meet a formerly unreachable demand. Several specialized, but relatively small commercial publishers created a mini-industry to satisfy an emerging market for written pornography and erotica of all kinds. During the height of the popularity of these books, some writers were able to make reasonable livings by turning out massive quantities of what was essentially pornographic pulp fiction.

Andrew Offutt was one of these writers, but unlike so many other high volume writers,  he was singular in his commitment to good writing and real plot lines, among other features of traditional fiction. As one might imagine, Andrew Offutt was an unusual man, and a strange and awkward parent keeping secrets about his work and the toll it took on his psyche.

Chris Offutt therefore grew up in a highly unusual world. His mother was the typist for all his father’s books. The family lived in the Kentucky hills, where most kids grew up hunting and fishing, and learning the pleasures of traditional country woodcraft.

Andrew Offutt was more than a little eccentric, and was a fiery and unpredictable father. When he closed the door to his home office, he demanded silence and to be left alone to concentrate on his writing, terrifying and controlling his family. And Offutt took the entire family with him when he went off to science fiction conventions, where he was a sought after figure, playing the role of the exotic sci fi novelist. In the seventies, Chris’ parents were evidently active swingers at these conventions.

During this time, Andrew Offutt wrote an incredible number of books – in total, more than four hundred novels, including pirate porn, ghost porn, zombie porn, and secret agent porn.

In 2013, after his father died, Chris Offutt returned to help his mother move out of his childhood home. In order to make sense of his father and his own childhood, Chris took on the herculean task of reading and organizing his father’s manuscripts and the vast trove of memorabilia, journals, and letters that accompanied them. It was only through the lens of his father’s writing that he was finally able to bring some closure to his understanding of this difficult and sometimes brilliant man. And at the same time he was able to gain a better understanding of himself as a person, father and of course, his own life as a writer.

This book is a remarkable literary and personal effort of psychic and literary exploration, truly one of the best memoirs I have read. Perhaps because my own father was similarly a writer who made his living through his work with words, this book meant a lot to me.

It was a great pleasure to have the opportunity to speak with Chris Offutt about his courageous and beautifully written memoir, and his own creative work as a writer.

Chris Offutt was born in 1958 in Lexington, Kentucky and grew up in the small town of Haldeman in the same state. He went to Morehead State University, and then to the University of Iowa, where he earned an MFA from the famed Iowa Writers Workshop. His first short story collection was Kentucky Straight, published in 1992. Along with fiction and memoirs, Chris has also written comics and journalism for several magazines and newspapers. In recent years, he has written for television as well (Weeds and True Blood).

Chris has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He received a Whiting Award in Fiction and Nonfiction.

“Chris Offutt owns one of the finest, surest prose styles around, ready and able to convey the hardest truth without flinching. Now Offutt enters the darkest and most mysterious of places—the cave of a monstrous enigma named Andrew J. Offutt—armed with nothing but his own restless curiosity. Spoiler alert: He makes it out alive, walking into the daylight to bring us a deeper, funnier, more tender and more heartbroken truth—and his masterpiece.” —Michael Chabon

I’m as impressed as Michael Chabon is with this fine book.

And Offutt knows how to give a great interview too.

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