Desperately Seeking Salem

If you walk through the entrance to Mission Mill Museum, veer past the information, steer clear of the gift shops, and wind your way to the northwestern most end of the facility, you will find Max Marbles, probably the most interesting person I have interviewed in Salem thus far.

My story on Max, called The Fixer, appears in the current issue of Salem Monthly.

Now, if you’ve been following the monthly since Editor Eric Howold took over in February, and since I started writing for them in March, then you might have noticed that I have been tearing up the WORD section, a back-of-the-book column about all things literary and bookish in Salem. So far I’ve covered:

Local romance writers on Obama

Reading therapy dogs

And I’m not done yet. A profile of Max Marbles — one of the nations’ premier bookbinders and local all-around intellectual nut and cool guy — is my latest attempt to discover if Salem has not, as I had feared when I moved here, a scrapbooking culture, but an actual book culture. Max is the local go-to-guy for salvaging those most precious books in our collections.

So far so good.

I have a couple of books I wouldn’t mind taking down to Max. There’s my baby book, which my mom left in the basement as it flooded, there’s my German university transcript that my husband spilled red wine all over (in Germany you have to keep track of these flimsy pieces of paper called “Scheins” in a more flimsy book, there is no central registrar…), there’s that copy of Spy Magazine: The Funny Years, which my friend Jason’s daughters scribbled all over.

But none of these books, have really earned their wings, as Marbles says, as a venerable object of time.

Maybe someday I’ll take him my munched on copy of Dr. Suess’s Yurtle the Turtle. I liked that book so much as a child, I used to eat it.

If you can get past the Kevin Costner image on the front of most copies of  The Postman floating around in second-hand bookshops these days, it isn’t difficult to get swept away in David Brin’s images of a post-apocalyptic Willamette River Valley, in which men and women struggle to survive in a new world chaos where rogue factions  and peaceful communities fight to have their ideas for the future live on.

The Willamette River Valley has long seemed to me like an excellent place to wait out the post-apocalypse. My husband and I actually considered this fact before moving here. We had a map of the United States spread out before us and contemplated the possible cataclysmic events that could shape our future by attaching ourselves to the wrong geography.

Both being from agriculturally-based regions – Lancaster County, PA for me and Ames, IA for him — setting ourselves up in a food-producing region was paramount. And if you read this blog, you might wonder if I’ve already begun storing my calories away, squirrel-like, for just such a ground-shaking event.

Something about the ruggedness of Oregon’s landscape and the imagination and ingenuity of its best citizens strikes me as rich soil for planting post-apocalyptic narratives. Also, I’d feel well-inclined to band together with a group of people whose biggest laugh during Pixar’s Up came when the fat little Asian wilderness scout couldn’t pitch his tent (I’ve confirmed this, having seen Up twice).

But back to The Postman, which has all the hallmarks of great post-apocalyptic lit: the world after great tragedy, torn apart by competing ideologies for the future; a lone hero with a grip on reality, but who never loses his sense of hope; a culture that has moved backwards each year as generations lose access to education, rogue bandits whose survivalist motivations bring out the true evils in man; and limited pockets of technology that are never as helpful as humans might wish.

But the real subject of The Postman is the stories and lies we tell ourselves to get through the day.

Near the beginning, hero Gordon Krantz, a travelling storyteller and one-man theater troup — stumbles onto a dead postman and dons his uniform for warmth. But in this world, where men can’t expect to be allowed peacefully to enter new communities, the uniform serves a bigger purpose. He soon concocts a tale that he is an actual postal officer from the Restored United States of America — a lie that establishes himself as a trusted figure, bolsters the hopes of everyone he encounters, and sends the main events of the book spinning into disaster.

I’m not a huge fan of older science fiction, and some of The Postman grated on me. Specifically, Brin has this habit of writing through the perspective of the hero but also explaining what he is thinking through annoying italicized phrases that add little insight to the narrative. Brin does this a lot when Gordon encounters women, leaving me to believe that the hero responds to females like a nerdy 7th grade science-fair champion.

Also, I wouldn’t recommend getting too attached to anybody but Gordon, for the obvious reasons.

What Brin does best is create characters that move beyond type, and which act in a way that seems entirely plausible in this imagined world, which is based so much on the places we know.

If you’ve spent a lot of time in this valley, you’ll recognize some of the settings — in Eugene, Corvallis, Roseberg, Cottage Grove. Sadly, Salem — which I imagine sometimes as the setting for its own doomsday novel — only figures into one page of the book:

“Dena had pestered [Gordon] to bring along her own list of presents. Needles and thread, base-neutral soap, samples of that new line of semicotton underwear they had started weaving again up in Salem, just before the invasion.” – p. 219

But that line alone sent my mind wandering to underground underwear-weaving subcultures, perhaps founded by the little old ladies who weave outside of Max Marbles Book Bindery at the Mission Mill Museum, perhaps putting their “flags” on the Oregon Pioneer in a sign of hope…

Next on my journey through Post-Apocalyptic Oregon is William Stirling’s Dies the Fire, first in a series of newer novels also taking place in the Willamette River Valley. Anyone know of any more to add to my list?

So I’ve got this little piece on writer Robin Hemley‘s new project Do-Over: In which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarrassments, which is running on a website I started writing for during my time in Iowa City.

All of you literary types will know that Iowa City is the nation’s capital city of literature, even receiving a UNESCO distinction recently to attest to that fact. Yes, it is home to the first-ever Writer’s Workshop, the place where an aspiring group of English teachers first tested the fallacy that good writing cannot be taught. But it is also home to the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, of which Mr. Hemley is the director.

I am continually amazed by writers who can lead full-time writing and reading lives while also teaching at a university and directing entire writing programs. Robin Hemley added another feather to that hat trick when he decided to do-over some of the most embarrassing scenes of his life by reliving them as a 48-year-old man (he is now 50).

You know the do-over: there is something sublimely childish about the very idea of it.  It is the quintessential playground phrase, the line that gets shouted when the ball falls on the line in four square.  It is a phrase ripped from the context of a board game, when the dice fall off the board and you’re just not happy with the outcome.

With a generation of baby boomers having its death grip on youth and a president known to have demanded do-overs as a child having just left office, the do-over is a well-timed cultural force.

And if you keep your ears open for it, you will also find that there are adults in your life claiming do-overs every day of the week.

All of this means that Robin Hemley, a writer who has not languished in obscurity (he is well-known among nonfiction prose writers), but who isn’t exactly a household name, is poised to become exactly that.

He’s a funny writer, but more than that, he’s a thoughtful writer who isn’t afraid to make himself look like a fool to see what insights foolishness might inspire.

Because of the nature of the newspaper business – as of this posting, the author doesn’t have any reading tour stops out here – it is unlikely that many newspapers in the Pacific Northwest will run reviews or profiles of Do-Over and its writer. So consider yourself informed.

We can’t all spend our lives reliving our childhood, but I am happy to know there is someone out there who has tried to do just that.

A stripper, a wife-beater and an Islamic fundamentalist walk into a bar a few days before 9/11. You can read my review of Andre Dubus III’s latest novel here.