Praeterita

Last weekend, my wife Patricia Ann McNair and I taught a one-day journal and sketchbook class at the Interlochen College of Creative Arts . The ICCA runs classes for adults in a purpose-built space on the campus of the internationally renowned Interlochen Center for the Arts. The photo above shows one of the participants in the act of making a 10-second drawing, the first activity of the day.

Teacher and writer John Schultz has died at the age of 84. He had a long association with Columbia College Chicago, where he helped found a fiction writing program that used a unique pedagogy: the Story Workshop method, which he began using in the classroom starting in the 1960s. John probably taught thousands of students over the course of a long career, and he was mentor and friend to many who went on to become teachers themselves. Most of the people who knew him, including my wife Patricia Ann McNair, spoke about him with reverence and immense gratitude for how he taught them to become writers. Compared to her, and her colleagues at Columbia College Chicago, and his innumerable former students, I only had a passing acquaintance with John. Yet my first meetings with him came around the time that I first met Patty, during my first visits to Chicago, and for that reason this has claimed a special home in my memory. I remember a party that Patty held at her apartment at the end ...

I am in California with Patty for four days, accompanying her to a reading a book signing in Marin County, just over the Golden Gate bridge from San Francisco. Apart from the fact that I keep calling it 'Frisco, which Patty finds very annoying, I think she's glad that I am here. Actually, I know she's glad. We had a great time last night in Sausalito, at Studio 333 and its Why There Are Words reading series. There were six readers, all of them very accomplished writers. But I think Patty sold the most books at the end. Tapas at a nice restaurant/bar beforehand. Strolling outside in the night afterwards, the indigo shapes of the darkened mountains visible darkly against a sky of visible stars.  Today, we drove the short distance to Mill Valley, one of those older northern California communities of brick and wood buildings organized around a square -- like Sonoma, most famously. It has a loose, informal feel, which on closer inspection you realise can only be sustaine...

There is lots of interesting news about my wife Patty's book. Her short story collection, " The Temple of Air ," was published nearly a year ago, and since then it has been a finalist in one big literary award (The Society of Midland Authors' fiction award) and the winner of another (University of Illinois' Devil's Kitchen Readers' Award). It's about to go into it's third printing, and the latest edition has a blurb on the front by no less a personage than Audrey Niffenegger, author of " The Time Traveler's Wife ": Yesterday, Patty posted an interview  on her blog with Caroline Leavitt, the author of  " Pictures of You ," which was a huge NYT best-seller recently. But then Ms. Leavitt also published an interview with Patty on her blog, too. That's quite a coup. It's also a really good, in-depth interview, and is worth taking the time to read and find out a lot about the background to the book, Patty's w...

Saturday we were in Petoskey, way up in the north of Michigan, for a book signing at a fine bookshop called McLean and Eakin. Then on Sunday, it was back to Interlochen, where Patty introduced one of the winners of the chapbook competition held by the Michigan Writers group. Here is a collage of the two events:

I'm on the road with my wife at the moment, doing some events related to her book, The Temple of Air . Yesterday we were at a reading at Brilliant Books, in Traverse City, Michigan. Today we we are heading to the book fair in Petoskey, which also inaugurates the annual celebration of all things Hemingway. And tomorrow, we come back to the campus of Interlochen, where Patty is presenting the first prize to the winner of the Michigan Writers' chapbook competition, for which Patty was one of the judges this year. "The Temple of Air" has just gone into its third printing, hot on the heels of its winning a pretty significant literary prize last week. Here is a collage of photographs from Brilliant Books last night.

I've always wanted to go to St. Louis, but in the ten years I've lived in Chicago, just 300 miles up the road, I never went there until yesterday. Patty had to go to read at Left Bank Books, in the west end/Forest Park area of the city. She and her fellow Elephant Rock Books author, Stacy Bierlein, were doing a joint reading as part of their promotions for their books, "The Temple of Air" (Patty) and "A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends" (Stacy), both of which were published by ERB in the last eight months. Left Bank Books is at the corner of a street in a neighbourhood that looks astonishingly like parts of Vienna, or Prague, or the un-bombed bits of Berlin: Not surprising given the massive German influx into the area in the late 1800s. Home of Budweiser, Anheuser-Busch, and all that. I understand that this area has been through several up and down cycles, and is currently enjoying one of its upswings, with cafes, bars, restaurants, boutiques,...

Text derived from writer Patricia Ann McNair's daily prompt series , #4, We were never sure what happened: We were never sure what happened . Because when I picked up the phone, she was still babbling in a high pitched hysterical voice so that I couldn’t make out the words, only her name. I handed the phone over to my mother and said, “It’s Linda.” My mother listened, saying “Oh God, oh God” into the mouthpiece of the big yellow phone, from which I could hear Linda’s voice, tinny and distorted now, still wailing in long sustained notes. My mother went next door, to where Linda lived, and didn’t return until hours later. Ashen-faced, she told me what she knew.  Linda had finally locked her violent husband out of the house, telling him that he was out for good this time.  Her husband, a soldier who had just completed his third tour in war-torn Northern Ireland, had bellowed through the door that he would get her back somehow.  The next morning, their teenage so...

Cheeky, but I can't help it. As part of Columbia College Chicago's 2011 Story Week Festival, I will be taking part in a panel discussion with Audrey Niffenegger and four other artists/performers, to discuss the subject of "Story in the Arts." The event will start at 4:00 PM on Thursday, March 17th, at the Film Row Cinema in the Loop, 1104 S. Wabash, Chicago. Here is a linky to the schedule of events: http://www.colum.edu/specialevents/story_week/Schedule.php And a linky to the bios of the presenters: http://www.colum.edu/specialevents/story_week/Panelists,_Performers,_and_Performers.php The events are free and open to the public, so if you're in downtown Chicago on Thursday, I hope you'll drop by. Each panellist will give a short presentation about or reading from their work, after which there will be a discussion, chaired by writer Patricia Ann McNair .   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Patty and I held our latest Salon yesterday. 25 people - writers, artists, musicians, friends - came along to read from their fiction and non-fiction, play guitar and sing, and show pieces of art. A description of Gertrude and Leo Stein's salon in early twentieth century Paris: "On a typical Saturday evening, 60 years ago, one would have found Gertrude Stein at her post in the atelier, garbed in brown corduroy, sitting in a high-backed Renaissance chair, her legs dangling, next to the big cast-iron stove that heated the chilly room. A few feet away, one could hear Leo expounding to a group of visitors, his views on modern art. Among the crowd of Hungarian painters, French intellectuals, English aristocrats and German students, one might pick out the figures of Picasso and his mistress, Fernande Olivier (Picasso looking like an intense young bootblack; Fernande, almond-eyed and attractive). The man with the reddish beard and spectacles, looking like a German professor, wo...