On Friday night, your correspondent went to the opening night of Detritus, a new bookstore at 71 Orange Street supported through the city of New Haven’s Project Storefronts program and curated by Alexis Zanghi of The Dirty Pond. Detritus aims to be a bookstore that reflects both the local literary scene and the eclectic taste of its curator; it also aims to be a place where literary events of many, many kinds can occur, making the bookstore as much a performance space as a bookstore, a place where New Haven’s writers and readers can go to not only read each other, but see each other, hear each other, meet each other. And if the energy of its first evening is any indication, it will succeed. For the opening was crowded, the wine flowing, people standing around the sidewalk outside laughing and smoking cigarettes, as if it were a club (hooray!). And inside, your correspondent, who is not a talkative man by nature, could not stop talking to people—writers, readers, critics. Zanghi declared that the opening would last from 6 pm to 8 pm and had to shoo people out the door. We should make sure she has to keep doing that, for Detritus appears both to be filling a niche that New Haven needs and offering a different, and highly intriguing, model of what a bookstore can be.

Dino Buzzati once began a story: “A strange thing has just happened to me – an extraordinary thing – I haven’t decided whether or not to tell my editor.” That’s a chilling but accurate glimpse into the soul of the freelance writer. For the better part of the last twenty years, whenever anything strange or extraordinary has happened to me, I’ve immediately wondered whether to tell it to Alison True, the editor of the Chicago Reader. I got lost on the way to the airport – a perfect little anecdote for the Reader. I contracted a rare eye disease – during the treatment, I was taking notes for the eventual feature story in the Reader. A man sitting next to me on the subway dropped dead of a heart attack – and I began musing, “Write this up for Alison, collect a couple of hundred bucks … hey, this is turning out to be a pretty good day.”

The Reader is one of the most successful and longest-lived alt-weeklies in America. Alison started there in 1984, just out of college – her first job was in the mail room – and she was named editor in 1995. She’s spent her entire career staying out of the limelight. If you Google her – or anyway if you did up until a couple of weeks ago – the only hits are in generic articles called things like “Fifty Women in Chicago Publishing.” No controversial interviews, no grand pronouncements on the future of journalism. Her byline has rarely appeared in the Reader itself; in most issues, the only place her name turns up is on the masthead. But the paper has been, week after week, a continual demonstration of her skill and taste as an editor. Many people who’ve worked there over the years have thought of it as Alison’s high-pressure boot camp in old-school journalism.

Mostly the Reader has specialized in local affairs – which given that the locality is Chicago has meant a certain preoccupation with the corrupt and the bizarrely violent, the sorts of hot-button issues that the local mainstream papers are too complacent to touch (there were two decades of stories about police torturing confessions from suspects – the ringleader was recently convicted in a federal court). But Alison has also encouraged writers to wander and experiment. I spent many years, with Alison’s encouragement, pushing at the boundaries of long-form journalism. 30,000 words about American memories of World War 2. 35,000 words about my father-in-law, a Russian émigré who grew up in China. 45,000 words about the history of my family house in small-town Illinois. Each time I’d tell Alison that I’d finally come up with an idea for a story she’d never be able to use. “Try it anyway,” she’d say. “I love a challenge.”

Alison has also put her pervasive but unobtrusive stamp on the Reader’s internal culture. Its original crew of editors practiced a management style I’d call “hippie machismo.” They weren’t a touchy-feely crowd, those guys (and they were all guys). I told one of them that I’d been writing for the Reader for years and still had no idea whether they even liked my work, because they’d never said a word to me about it. “We publish you,” he answered. “That ought to be praise enough.” Alison changed all that. She’s regularly complimented people on good work (the first time she did it with me, I thought she was being sarcastic). The Reader’s copy editors became unfailingly nice, even when they were persecuting your first draft with mosquito-swarms of nitpicks. Alison got to be an adept at the dark art of coaxing writers into revisions. One time when I was dawdling over a story, she called me near midnight and said she couldn’t go home until I turned in the revised copy. I parried by suggesting that we both get some sleep and I’d send it to her first thing in the morning. She sighed. “That’s okay, I understand,” she said. “You get some sleep. I’ll just stay here and catch up on my paperwork.”

I knew she was bluffing. But I capitulated anyway – because I also knew (and she knew I knew) that she was eight and a half months pregnant.

Alison cajoled, and nagged, and bribed, and badgered; she put up with all kinds of tantrums (my wife says she once passed by my study and heard me yelling into the phone, “I am speechless with rage!”); I ultimately wrote around a quarter of a million words for her – and I wasn’t even one of the Reader’s most prolific contributors. Some of it is among the best writing I ever expect to do. But the highest compliment I can pay to Alison as an editor is that I think the Reader got better after I stopped writing for it.

The Reader was a comfortably profitable business for three decades, and then almost overnight began hemorrhaging money (the advent of Craig’s List wiped out its gigantic weekly section of classified ads). Since then, there’s been wave after wave of budget cuts, staff firings and layoffs, and the inexorable shrinking of editorial space down to almost nothing. My long-form stories were among the first casualties. There were no hard feelings (I’ve gone on to an even longer form known as “books”) and Alison has still tried to get in a couple of little pieces of mine into the paper every year or so. But meanwhile, with a ghost-town office and a skeleton staff, she’s rallied and been printing some of the finest journalism in the Reader’s history. The Reader has been running stories about Chicago’s hidden world of financial chicanery that in a just world would have earned a Pulitzer. But then, if there really was any justice, people would be talking about Alison’s run at the Reader as the alt-weekly equivalent of William Shawn’s glory days at The New Yorker.

In the last few weeks, as the news spread that Alison was suddenly gone from the Reader, I’ve been getting emails from some of the old crew asking me how she’s doing and what the real story of her departure is. I love gossip as much as anybody, but the answers are disappointing. She’s not bad, considering; and there isn’t much of a real story. The Reader’s newest owners have a new business plan (it involves “pushing at” the firewall between editorial and advertising) and Alison doesn’t fit in. Nothing personal. There’s just for a lot of us around town the soundless gut-punch awareness of her absence. It’s a strange, even extraordinary feeling. I keep thinking I should write it up for her. It’ll take me a while to get used to the idea that I can’t.

Lee Sandlin is the author of Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, to be published in October by Pantheon.

Did you see New Haven Review on the front page of the Sunday edition of the New Haven Register? The occasion was our induction into the Community Media Lab (http://www.nhregister.com/bloghaven/). Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t checked out the CML, then you should because right now it’s becoming the best way to see who’s blogging in the greater New Haven area.

Note that CML’s list of bloggers don’t just write about topics related to New Haven and its environs. Chris Bartlett writes about small business issues (http://chris.followcb.com); Ralph Purificato covers mixed martial arts (http://www.ctmmanews.com); Westville resident Tagan Engel offers foodie advice (http://taganskitchen.blogspot.com); and on and on.

The idea is simple: the Register is using its clout to turn bloggers into news and generate web traffic for its own site—win-win for bloggers and the Register—or so we hope.

We’re happy now to be part of this family of local bloggers and for that reason alone, we hope you’ll share in the pleasure we’ve taken in becoming part of that family.

Two upcoming conferences in the Nutmeg State drew our attention recently.

The first is the Unicorn Writer’s Conference in Stratford, Connecticut. If you don’t know writing, you should. It’s a bit of a writing Mecca, and the Unicorn Writer’s Conference, now in its second season, takes full advantage of that fact.

The conference is organized by Jan Kardys, a literary agent with a long, long career in publishing.  The conference is a fascinating peek into the ins and outs of getting on board the writing train, with workshops on everything from Writing Character-Based Fiction to Down & Dirty Self-Promotion, an art as old as Walt Whitman’s ebullient and anonymous review of his own poetry.

This conference runs from 8:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. at the Oronoque Country Club, 385 Oronoque Lane, Stratford, CT 06614 (203-375-4293, Fax: 203-375-1443).  You can register here.  The cost is $165.

The list of presenters is long and impressive.  It includes Gene Wilder as a keynoter and presentations by author Jodee Blanco, filmmaker Anthony Artis, Hearst Books publisher Jacqueline Deval, literary agent Gina Maccoby.  It is an ideal venue to meet those in the business and schmooze, one hopes, your way to new deals and success.

Now on to our next event: did you know that there is a Connecticut Chapter of the Romance Writers Association (CTRWA)?  Who knew we had so many writers in the genre? 

But the CTRWA does more than just handle romance writing.  To find out what that more is, you’d need to check out its Connecticut Fiction Fest, which will be held on April 24 at the Four Points Sheraton in Meriden, Connecticut. Registration is a relatively modest at $95 ($75 for CTRWA members) for a program that will run from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. 

The focus of this conference seems to be on “pitching.”  Since literary agents will be in attendance, it’s an opportunity both to learn the trade and, hopefully, make a connection.  Workshops here include “Length Really Does Matter: Tips for a One-Page Pitch/Synopsis” and “How to Sell Your Book Fast,” with presenters including fantasy romance novelist Jessica Anderson to Emily Beth Rappaport of Berkly Books. 

So if the itch you need to scratch is a book looking for a publisher, this might be the conference for you.

Followers of this site will have no doubt come across the occasional wonderful article we have had from New Haven journalist and writer Robert McGuire. Every so often Robert heads off with his wife to Vietnam, their sojourn to which he chronicle at www.weaselcoffeelovers.com.

We like Robert, and his blog postings on Vietnam are thoughtful disquisitions on the daily life in this region of far East Asia where so much American treasure and blood was consumed. To that end, we think it more than worthwhile for our readers to take the trip over there and see, from the perspective of a New Haven writer, this remarkable region of the world.

The Publisher
New Haven Review

This posting is a courtesy notice for local writers.

In brief, a new grant for writers has been established by the Greater Hartford Arts Council, and though Hartford is not New Haven and never shall the twain be mistaken for one another, greater New Haven area writers can apply.

Entitled the 2010 Solo Writers Fellowship (as opposed to the 2010 Dynamic Duo Writers or 2010 Kingston Trio Writers Fellowship?), the Solo Writers Fellowship provides a limited number of awards to writers of various genres who live or work in Connecticut.

Four fellowships of $2,375 each will be awarded based on a panel’s review of writer’s application, work samples and professional work history. The purpose of this grant program is to reinforce the importance and value of writers within our community by supporting activities related to the artistic process, such as, but not limited to, rental fees, travel costs and/or living expenses while creating new work. We envision this grant program to support several weeks’ worth of living and working in a temporary space that fosters imagination, focus and creativity.

Applications are due March 1, 2010. For more information, including Guidelines and Application forms, please click: http://www.letsgoarts.org/writersfellowship.

This grant is made possible through the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, and administered by the Greater Hartford Arts Council.

For more information, contact:
Greater Hartford Arts Council
45 Pratt Street
P.O. Box 231436
Hartford, CT 06123-1436
860-525-8629
 info@LetsGoArts.org

Katharine Weber, True Confections, Shaye Areheart Books, 274 pp, $22

Katharine Weber’s True Confections takes the form of an affidavit by Alice Ziplinsky, née Tatnall, aka Arson Girl, a New Haven resident who has become the de facto head of Zip’s Candies, through a series of events — both mishaps and good fortune — that make for a sprawling, juicy tale in a relatively small compass.

Weber’s fifth novel is Alice’s first person account, offered for legal reasons, of her employment at Zip’s Candies, of her marriage to Howard “Howdy” Ziplinsky, and of her involvement in the family business, and, like the candies Little Sammies, Tigermelts, and Mumbo Jumbos that are the legacy of founder Eli Czaplinsky, Alice’s narrative creates textures that tantalize, tastes that surprise, and a memorable “mouthfeel.” Alice is intelligent, humorous, informative, but also slightly askew, perhaps even actionably unreliable.

Along the way, Weber furnishes engagingly deft sketches of New Haven and environs — she has a feel for the city in its town and gown dichotomy, and provides glimpses of the city that used to be through evocation of the fortunes of the fictional, but highly realistic, Zip’s Candies.  In the tale of a little, local company that must compete with the big name, real companies — like Hershey and Mars — Weber finds an apt figure for the fortunes of small businesses and small cities in the 21st century.  We often find ourselves in a detailed subculture — the world of candy manufacture and marketing — that Weber, in the voice of Alice for whom every aspect of the business fascinates and who has “perfect pitch for the candy business,” delivers with great gusto.

Weber also provides a lot of fun by, as it were, peeking through Alice’s narrative with material that the narrator seems not too comfortable with, or perhaps may even be distorting for her own purposes.  What is the true story of the fire, blamed on Alice, that burned down a schoolmate’s home in 1975?  What exactly were the problems with her marriage to Howdy and why did he run off to Madagascar?  And what of the alleged intrigues against Alice by her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law Irene?  How sympathetic do we find Alice, the gentile in the Jewish family business, who becomes, by her own insistence, the one most concerned with the family legacy and her fond, deceased father-in-law’s wishes?

Loyalty is the key.  The successful candy bar is supported by a consumer belief that he or she is honoring family traditions, so that loyalty is all bound up with nostalgia for childhood experiences either actual or longed-for.  Ideally, too, the consumer has a sense of entitlement to self-indulgence driven by an ambivalence toward guilty pleasure.  I mention all these things because my knowledge and experience in the candy manufacturing business in general, and with Zip’s Candies in particular, should be above question, but they have been questioned …

The questions Weber raises through Alice aren’t all simply personal either.  Should we, today, consider a candy line founded on characters in Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo racist?  Is Alice painfully naive when she doesn’t think of the ramifications of packaging two chocolate Sammies on either side of a white chocolate Susie?  Or is it the world — Weber gives a quick glimpse of the blogosphere and its ability to create urban legend at will — that has gone askew?

The book is at its best when Alice is delineating, with story-within-story spirals, her relations with the Ziplinskys — particularly revealing are her dealings with Sam, her father-in-law, and the way she brings her and Howdy’s children into the business.  The story of Eli’s brother Julius and the Nazi plan to ship Jews to Madagascar is fascinating but somewhat intrusive into the narrative, as Julius is a character who is never “real” to Alice, since she never meets him, and the story, ostensibly told to explain why the Ziplinskys have holdings in Madagascar where their cacao and other ingredients come from, seems material that could have been worked into a gripping novel in its own right, but which seems a bit outside the range of Alice’s voice, despite her admission that she is largely inventing what she can’t reconcile with those few facts she knows.

It’s largely the voice and direct experience of Alice that are the winning ingredients here, for she is the one who makes of her immersion in the candy business the basis for all there is to know about life, a way to take charge of the past, the family, the business, and, ultimately, the future.  As Weber’s inscription from Anne Sexton would have it: “Even crazy, I’m as nice / as a chocolate bar.”

Katharine Weber will be appearing at Mitchell Public Library in Westville at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 13th, and at RJ Julia Booksellers, in Madison, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, January 21st.

Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, who is currently the James Weldon Johnson Fellow at the Beinecke, is reading at that august repository of valuable manuscripts, 121 Wall St., this Wednesday, Nov. 18th, at 4 p.m.  Read my discussion of her book Native Guard here.

Local poet Don Barkin, author of That Dark Lake, will be reading his poems on Friday, Nov. 20th, 7 p.m. at the Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave.  The event is co-sponsored by the Kehler Liddell Gallery and the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance.  Check out my article on Don’s book in this Thursday’s Advocate, or online.

Both events are free and open to the public

And on Thursday night, Nov. 19th, The Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., is holding a fundraiser.  In this unique event, audience members will be hit up for suggestions, and the Yale School of Drama folks (students, faculty, staff) will have 60 minutes to bring the audience desiderata together in 15-20 minute pieces, to then be performed for the audience who will judge the best piece, according to announced criteria.  So if you’ve ever wanted to be in on a creative team, as well as a critical voice in awarding merit, here’s your chance.  It’s also a chance to support this very worthwhile theatrical endeavor.  Tickets are $20.  Doors open at 6 p.m. for seating and bar service.  6:30-7 p.m. is the time of the teams and planning; 7-8 p.m., dinner service is on; 8 p.m., the show begins.  Contact: 203.432.1566, or online at www.yalecabaret.org.

Some months ago, I wrote a little thing for the New Haven Review about my love for Shirley Jackson’s book Life Among the Savages. I’ve just gone back and looked at the date on the piece (which can be found here on the website) and my word, it was almost a year ago I wrote that tribute. Goodness. I’ve lost track of time in precisely the same way that Shirley Jackson lost track of her blankets.

Well, in a recent Wall Street Journal, John J. Miller wrote an article about Jackson which will get a lot more attention than anything I’d ever write about Shirley Jackson, and I wanted to thank him for writing the piece because from it I learned some really good news. The Library of America is going to publish a collection of Shirley Jackson’s work. Though I see no mention of the book on the Library of America website or on Amazon.com, the book is apparently scheduled for a June 2010 release. I for one am looking forward to it.

We all have a lot of questions about what happened to Annie Le, the Yale graduate student who went missing a few days before her wedding and whose body was found stuffed in the ceiling of a Yale laboratory. Now that her killer has been apprehended and will be brought to trial, one question that lingers for media pundits is, why did her story garner so much press? What was it about her story that called for it to be splashed across The New York Times, Google News and Bloomberg, not to mention all the tabloids?

One can only conjecture.

Was it that she was a Yalie? On Thursday, 9/17, Slate columnist, Jack Shafer, noted:

“If you plan to be murdered and expect decent press coverage, please have the good sense to be a Harvard or Yale student or professor. America’s top dailies and the cable networks will rush to the scene of the crime and sniff the vicinity for clues to your demise. They’ll scrape your personal history and publish enough information to serve as a foundation for a made-for-TV movie about you.”

Apparently the media elite comes from either Harvard or Yale, so almost any news emanating from these places is considered newsworthy. Furthermore, a violent crime at a place as seemingly powerful and invulnerable as Yale, the institution associated with George and George W., Bill, Hilary and the last 3 Supreme Court justices, is a sensation.

Was it that she was a bride-to-be? Annie went missing only days before her wedding, and her body was discovered on the day that she was to be married. As if to highlight the tragedy of a young woman snuffed out at the height of her promise, many stories focused on Annie’s upcoming nuptials. We know that Annie embroidered her own veil and gushed about marrying her “best friend” in her Facebook pages. The New York Times even went so far as to interview Ms. Kiley, Annie’s hairdresser, who was quoted in the paper as saying: “I was going to be part of a beautiful day, which is the most important day of a girl’s life other than the day she gives birth.”
Has anybody heard this much attention being paid to a guy getting married before?

Was it because she was, pick one, young, female, pretty, Asian? Pretty young faces, as we know, sell newspapers. And what a novelty it was to see an Asian face on a tabloid cover. Asian immigrants are generally taught to work hard and fly under the radar. When Raymond Clark III emerged as Annie’s killer, it was as if two sides of the socio-economic and racial spectrum that makes up America’s workplace was laid bare.

We may never know the motives behind Raymond Clark’s killing of Annie Le, but it makes sensational news.