State of the Re-Union with Al Letson

 Al Letson

Some of you might remember the interview I did with Al Leston about three years ago. Here’s the latest news about Mr. Letson. Because I’ve been tied up with getting my novel published, I’m going to take the easy way out in this blog entry and simply quote from the program I received at the recent event held in celebration of Al’s NPR radio program: 

Winner of the Public Radio Talent Quest, State of the Re:Union is a new public radio show that aims to show listeners how we are more alike than we are different and the many ways our differences are celebrated. Multi-faceted artist, Al Letson, employs his talents to discover how a particular city, town or area creates a community. From Washington DC to Jena, Louisiana, State of the Re:Union will travel our great country one significant spot at a time to capture the stories, the challenges and the culture that not only make it unique, but work together like chords to compose our rich commonwealth.

 Transcending a glorified travel guide, State of the Re:Union finds the resonating fragments that create the cornerstone of every community. Hear from the artists, activists, politicians, teachers, preachers and every day people that are making a difference arranged with the music, sounds and styles born of the area in focus. 

 Sure, things fall apart–our job is to put them back together.

Back: Bob Shipp, Front: Fletcher Shipp, Oksun Burks

 

Above:  Carol Wagnon, Marian Murray, Kathleen King

  WJCT proudly presents the State of the Re:Union Hometown Premiere event on June 19, 2009 at WJCT Studios in Jacksonville, Florida. This special multimedia version will present the recent episode, “Jacksonville: Bold New City of the South?” and discuss the show live with featured guests from the show.  

Clarence & Benita Fears

 

Mark Ectlund, Alan Justiss

Donovan King, Nick Clancy

 

 

Maud Newton Soars

Narrative Magazine has an excerpt from Maud Newton’s novel and it is top notch! A combination of light-hearted snark and Poe-like dark, which is exactly what most real childhoods consist of.

 When I say Poe, I’m thinking of The Black Cat. When the protagonist killed the cat, I simultaneously cringed and identified with him. Not that I ever killed a cat, but I know that feeling remorse after doing something in anger. I think most kids do.

 That one morbid thought aside, this is primarily a humorous and heartfelt hoot of a tale. I was cracking up over the daughter’s reactions to her mother’s weirdness. Again, just like real life.

 The name of the excerpt is When the Flock Changed. Check it out: 

My mother was a preacher until the cops shut her down. Well, okay, she kept at it halfheartedly in our living room for a while, but the fire had wiped out not just her warehouse church and the halfway house she ran out of it, but her passion, her commitment, and maybe even, deep down, her belief. All those years of serving the Lord, of taking to the streets to let the homeless and addicted and just plain lonely know what a friend they had in Jesus, and now she had no proper house of worship, no sea of folding chairs or repository of sermons on tape. She was practically a layperson. Worse, her flock knew it and was slipping away.

The church ladies saw the blaze as a sign of God’s disfavor. Mom had created a makeshift dorm in the sanctuary, a commercial space, and one of the guys had fallen asleep with a joint still burning. Maybe she shouldn’t have spent so much time ministering to the riffraff when there were perfectly normal people’s problems to attend to. Our Heavenly Father wouldn’t have let the church burn down if she’d been in tune with Him and His Word. So the flock was saying.

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Maud Rounds Up Some Good Quotes

Maud Newton has posted her sixth installment of Literary Quips, Observations, and Warnings. For example, author Jean Rhys assures us, “I think and think for a sentence, and every sentence I think for is wrong, I know it. Then, all at once, the illuminating sentence comes to me. Everything clicks into place.” 

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…Wadsworth Camp Update…

Here is a cropped section of an image I found in an excellent ebook called World’s Finest Beach by Donald J. Mabry. At this time, I can’t say for sure that “C.W” stands for “Charles Wadsworth” but . . . how could it not?

The Charles Wadsworth Camp Mystery: Part II

The crux of the mystery: Is Charles Wadsworth Camp’s minimal internet presence due to lack of interest in his work, or is the lack of interest due to his minimal internet presence? Click here for the recap.

I hold in my hand the official death certificate of Charles Wadsworth Camp. The trade/profession section contains the one word I can only hope will appear someday on mine: Writer.

According to this document, a Dr. E. C. Swift attended the ailing author from Octber 29th until his death at 1:40 PM on October 31st, 1936. This differs from what I found online at sites like IMDb, which always list his last day as October 30. Could it be that he or a member of his family wanted to avoid any mention of Halloween?

The cause of death is blocked out, but only because I’m not a member of the family, and we know that Camp died from pneumonia at age 57. The most common story is that Camp’s lungs were already weakened by mustard gas during WWI, leaving him especially vulnerable to respiratory disease. But the April 14, 2004 issue of the New Yorker features a profile of Camp’s daughter, author Madeleine L’Engle, in which a member of Camp’s family tells Cynthia Zarin, “(Camp) used to smoke Rameses cigarettes… he used to drink a lot…Uncle Charles was not ailing in his life. He was a big, handsome man in a white linen suit smoking cigarettes on the porch and drinking whiskey. He was a favorite of my mother’s, and she was a talker, and she never mentioned anything about him being gassed in the war.”

Camp’s residence is listed as “Red Gables” at Jacksonville Beach, Florida. It says that he had lived in this area for three years before his death, which means he probably did not write any of his mystery books here, but he was also a critic and an editor, so it’s possible that he did some work in Jacksonville. I’m still looking into that, as well as trying to find out where and what exactly Red Gables is. The only Red Gables I’ve heard of is in England, but Jacksonville is always naming things after famous landmarks in other big cities.

Part III coming soon!

Infinity’s Name is a Cosmic Number

The uninitiated might not expect a blog called Bookslut, with a feature called The Indie Heartthrob Interview Series, to feature such books as Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (W.W. Norton & Company) by Arthur L. Miller  and  Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity (Belknap Press), by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor.

  Several of my short stories, as well as my upcoming novel, Tamper, explore the intersection between science and spirituality, and the two books mentioned above will be the next two books I read.

In it for the Long Haul

Jeff VanderMeer says,

“Understand the relationship between PR efforts and sales, PR and your reputation. The simple fact is, your PR efforts can greatly enhance your reputation without having as large an effect on your sales. Good PR is as much about setting you up for future opportunities and making sure you stay in the public eye as it is about readers making purchases. Studies show that readers may need to hear or read about a book as many as seven times before deciding to purchase it. Thus, a strong PR effort will influence sales over time, but the primary impact is to position you in other ways.”

 Read more…

Next Stop: Silverfish City

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This Is Good Stuff

Jeff VanderMeer on writing and rewriting a novel.

Is Charles Wadsworth Camp’s minimal internet presence due to lack of interest in his work, or is the lack of interest due to his minimal internet presence?

 “No one,” the doctor answered, “can say what psychic force is capable of doing. Some scientists have started to explore, but it is still uncharted country.” - from The Abandoned Room, By Wadsworth Camp

Why is there almost no biographical information about Charles Wadsworth Camp on the internet? Almost all references to Mr. Camp appear in the numerous biographies of his famous daughter, Madeleine L’Engle. But Camp was also a writer. There are movies based on his work. His books are available for purchase in both used and new editions. The ebook versions range from free to 96¢, and some of his novels are freely accessable online.

Camp’s The Abandoned Room (Public Domain) is a little gem of a murder mystery with supernatural overtones. The story is briskly paced, for the most part, with a sustained  atmosphere of spookiness.  The denouement is no less satisfying than many of the Sherlock Holmes adventures. The story is certainly more linear than the webwork novels of Harry Stephen Keeler. I highly recommended The Abandoned Room to fans and scholars of the old-dark-house thriller mystery genre.

Charles Wadsworth Camp, also known as simply Wadsworth Camp, was born on October 18, 1878 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and died on October 30, 1936 in Jacksonville, Florida. This intrigues me because I live in Jacksonville, and it is my intention to find out exactly where Mr. Camp lived and if he wrote any of his novels or articles while residing here.

I sent an email to the Madeleine L’Engle website. After all, L’Engle’s parents were Wadsworth Camp and Madeleine Hall Barnett, and, although L’Engle passed away in 2007, maybe the mangers of her web site can fill me in. Maybe they are even planning a big Wadsworth Camp publicity campaign, even as I write this, which will make my research moot. Maybe my email will inspire them to initiate a big publicity campaign. See, that’s one of the problems with research. It’s like when scientists try to observe the position of a sub-atomic particle, the very act of observing the particle changes it’s position. 

The reply from L’Engle’s web site came back the next day, “Bill, we are not aware of any resources online about Mr. Camp. Sorry. Thanks for your interest.”

Continuing my web search, I found some vital information in a New Yorker profile of Madeleine L’Engle, written by Cynthia Zarin, which gives us the spectacle of an alligator climbing up the steps of L’Engle’s Florida home before she moves to New York and lives in an apartment below Leonard Bernstein.

“Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in 1918 in New York City, the only child of Madeleine Hall Barnett, of Jacksonville, Florida, and Charles Wadsworth Camp, a Princeton man and First World War veteran, whose family had a big country place in New Jersey, called Crosswicks. In Jacksonville society, the Barnett family was legendary: Madeleine’s grandfather, Bion Barnett, the chairman of the board of Jacksonville’s Barnett Bank, had run off with a woman to the South of France, leaving behind a note on the mantel.” – from Cynthia Zarin’s profile of Madeleine L’Engle in The New Yorker.

Zarin goes on to say:“Madeleine…found Florida stultifying and surreal” (don’t we all; she should have been here during the hanging chad debacle - Bill). “One afternoon, she watched an alligator pick its way up the porch steps.” (She should have been here during the hanging chad debacle – Bill)

 

Next: A visit to The Jacksonville Historical Society

To be continued.