William Hazelgrove to Discuss The Pitcher at CD Book Club May 31

No sport is more uniquely American than baseball. After all it is called our national pastime. William

Hazelgrove’s recent novel, The Pitcher, relates a marvelous story of the fulfillment of the American dream amidst the balls, bats and bases found on the baseball diamond. I was somewhat hesitant, I must admit, to begin reading another “baseball as a metaphor for life” novel, but somehow The Pitcher grabbed my interest immediately and held my steadfast attention until the end.

William Hazelgrove

Hazelgrove writes a truly “feel good” story about Ricky Hernandez, a Latino teenage boy transplanted

from Chicago to Florida. His single mother, Maria, is working hard to make ends meet after divorcing from an abusive husband, who still lurks terrifyingly in the background. Maria knows that Ricky has natural talent to be a successful pitcher, yet he needs intensive coaching to assure he hone his raw hurling skills.

And who better to learn the craft of pitching from than Jack Langford, the former World Series pitching hero who just happens to live on the same block as Ricky and Maria?  We see how the reclusive and alcoholic Jack, who had been knocked down in the game of life through personal loss, picks himself up from the mat as he is transformed into a caring and loving human being by his evolving relationships with Ricky and Maria.

Although some might question that there is a little too much predictability in the story line, The Pitcher makes for a wonderful read with a true storybook ending where you feel the goose bumps and shed a few tears of joy.

    
Note: William Hazelgrove is the featured author at the Cliff Dwellers Book Club on Saturday, May 31 where he will discuss The Pitcher. The discussion begins at 11:00 a.m. All are welcome. The Cliff Dwellers is located at 200 S. Michigan, across the street from the Art Institute. If you plan on staying for lunch afterward, please call 312.922.8080 to make a reservation.

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Richard Reeder is the author of Chicago Sketches. He teaches literature courses in the Oakton College Emeritus Program.  He created the Chicago Jewish Authors Literary Series. Richard is a reviewer for the Noir Journal blog. He has his own literary blog www.aliteraryreeder.wordpress.com, and serves on the board of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

Guild Literary Complex at 25

The balloons gave it away: this was a party. A feel-good celebration. Heartfelt congratulations for a milestone. Pats on the back.

When you see balloons, you look for the open bar. The chicken. The DJ. The cake.

Where there are balloons, cake cannot be far away.

And there was booze, there was chicken, and there was cake--but for that, as always, you had to wait.

The Guild Literary Complex started 25 years ago, when the iconic bookstore expanded into a space it called “The Annex,” wild with fresh ideas, intent on preserving and spreading love for books and all things literary. The bookstore didn’t survive, but the nonprofit offshoot is alive and well, and many of its contributors, from the foundation to the ceiling, showed up for the party last Thursday night, May 15, at the Biograph Theater.

The Guild has had only five directors in its history, starting with Michael Warr and continuing on through the current head John Rich. Each of the five, in turn, took the microphone to share stories of their tenure and in so doing provide a chronological history of the organization. All were articulate, funny, humble, a reflection of the kind of organization this is, has been.

After Michael Warr, to whom the majority of the Guild Complex’s identity was attached, there was Julie Parson-Nesbitt, who had to prove the organization was more than its founder and face. Then Ellen Placey Wadey, one of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s illustrious board members and a major behind-the-scenes force in our thriving literary community. Then Kimberly Dixon-Mays.

You heard about the genesis, those meetings in the annex with David Hernandez where, you got the feeling, spit flew and arms waved. You heard about the struggles—11th-hour cash infusions to keep the doors open. You heard about the memorable events, like Steve Earle and Tony Fizpatrick and Michael Ondaatje taking the stage together.

And you also heard the names of 25 Chicago artists whom the Guild Complex revealed as their stars of the future.

“We knew we wanted to mark our birthday with a way to look forward, and focused our attention on making the list of 25 Writers to Watch,” said John, who as current director spoke last.

Writers familiar and not waved their hands in acknowledgement, inspired no doubt to be part of the illustrious list. Writers like Bill Hillmann and Megan Stielstra, both tireless champions of pet literary movements (Windy City Story Slam and 2nd Story) who’ve recently published well-received books. Writers like Kathleen Rooney and Nnedi Okorafor, who have been racking up literary praise for a long time now. Writers like Eric May and Gwendolyn Mitchell, veteran authors and laborers for some of our finest cultural institutions. Writers like Kristina Colon and Jacob Saenz, relative newcomers already finding a lot of fans. As is the hallmark of the Guild Literary Complex, the diversity was remarkable: young and old, male and female, black and white, Latino and Arab.

The Guild Literary Complex is not an incredibly well-funded concern, a reality we know all too intimately here at the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. Money is important—you need at least some of it to even get by. But without much of that, you need help—volunteers, interns, low-paid contract workers. Accomplished Chicagoans willing to accept a share of the load.

You need energy.

Energy fueled this party, as I’m sure it’s fueled the organization for a quarter century. And inspiration fueled the energy—the idea that what they had done, what they were doing, mattered. A lot of the writers on the 25 List took part in the celebration. So did all the directors. Board members like president Michael Puican, vice-president Reg Gibbons, Bayo Ojikutu and Rosellen Brown were there, names that could very well be part of a list of our great authors, in Chicago or anywhere.

By the time the cake made its way to the Biograph Theater’s second-floor event space, the crowd had thinned. Some of us were still drinking, others dancing, and dusk had settled over Lincoln Ave, dimming the view of the Guild Bookstore’s former location, now a flower shop. Chicago is always in motion, and sometimes I find it hard to remember things as they were. Last week, I was looking out at Millennium Park and couldn’t for the life of me patch together an image of what was there before The Bean.

Peering over a taxicab, I tried to reassemble the Lincoln Ave. of my early 20s, the way it might have been when the Guild Bookstore was thriving and the people at this party were plotting how to ignite a new bomb off the old wick. Three Lagunitas IPAs weren’t helping my memory. I remembered a record store and a consignment shop and maybe a lot more parking, but the different times in that same place blurred together.

But it didn’t matter. Unlike so many dearly departed Chicago institutions, the Guild Bookstore—a left-leaning place where happened all manner of literary advocacy, from fighting for writer grants to trumpeting tiny journals--is not a ghost. It’s the mother and the father and the fat uncle of a baby that’s all grown up but very far from extinction.

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Donald G. Evans is the founder and executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. He is the author of the novel Good Money After Bad and short story collection An Off-White Christmas, as well as the editor of the anthology Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. He is the Chicago editor of the Great Lakes Cultural Review. He serves on the American Writers Museum's Chicago Literary Council and the committee that selects the Harold Washington Literary Award.

donaldgevans@hotmail.com

Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature

They’re writers, critics, editors—mostly they earn their living as college teachers or administrators. Each, or at least it seems that way, has a pet project related to their specialty, the kind of project so narrow in scope that only other scholars will find use of the final product. They’re thoughtful people, kind people, and for many they’re living the life they always imagined for themselves.

A life filled with literature.

The 44nd Annual Meeting for the Study of Midwestern Literature symposium took place in East

Lansing, MI late last week. For the most part, we never left the Kellogg Center, shuffling from one seminar or talk to another.

As part of a  criticism panel, I gave a talk called, “Why They’re Remembered,” focusing on the winners and losers of Chicago’s cannon. I wanted to explore the reasons that some writers continue to be part of our civic identity while others get buried. Nelson Algren versus Willard Motley, for example. Or Carl Sandburg versus Meyer Levin. All of the panelist but myself read from prepared and scrubbed texts. I know that’s the convention at academic conferences like this, but I stubbornly believe that when it’s called a panel discussion then you should, well, discuss. So I talked out loud from some notes I’d cobbled together and included the audience in my hunk. I’ll post the complete essay later.

As you would expect, Chicago weaved its way in and out of the various discussions. During my panel alone, Marilyn Atlas read a paper gushing with praise for Peter Orner’s use of the city in his fiction, and Traci Collins gave a paper called, “Oscar Wilde, and Chicago Book Publishers” that included fascinating information about Francis Fisher Browne’s turn-of-the-century bookstore in the Fine Arts Building. Sandra Seaton orchestrated a staged reading of her adaptation of Cyrus Colter’s Black for Dinner, the third in her trilogy of one-acts based on the Chicago Literary Hall of Famer’s short stories. Phillip Greasly talked about Sandburg’s poetry.

Robert Dunne, 2014 MidAmerica Award Winner

At the luncheon Friday, Robert Dunne received the MidAmerica Award for outstanding criticism. The Sherwood Anderson scholar delivered a self-deprecating acceptance speech in which he referred to the arc of his career and reputation being tied to the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature (or DMW, for those in the know, which included basically everybody there). Quite a number of the attendees had a hand in shaping and building the DMW, which is an incredible reference source soon to be joined by the second volume.

The Chicago content was scattered amongst interesting topics ranging from Willa Cather to Mark Twain, and presenters highlighted small and big Midwestern destinations along the way. The conference, or meeting, as they like to call it, is a useful way for experts on and from different regions to share their knowledge with one another. That’s the way I took it: a chance to learn about places like Detroit while giving away what I know about Chicago.

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Donald G. Evans is the founder and executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. He is the author of the novel Good Money After Bad and short story collection An Off-White Christmas, as well as the editor of the anthology Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. He is the Chicago editor of the Great Lakes Cultural Review. He serves on the American Writers Museum's Chicago Literary Council and the committee that selects the Harold Washington Literary Award.

donaldgevans@hotmail.com

CQR Celebrates Chicago Issue

The temperature dropped suddenly, the wind kicked up, and menacing clouds spit rain on my used-to-be favorite summer straw hat. An impatient BMW nearly took me out at a pedestrian crosswalk. But once the elevator delivered me to the 22nd floor at Adams and Michigan, the demise of our first truly springlike day seemed trivial. There was food, red wine for a price, and a view that included a serene sailboat set against the dropping sun. And writers. Writers almost exclusively. Even the fine artists and graphic designers and lawyers and IT wizards at least dabbled in prose or poetry, maybe were working on a play. Everybody was there to celebrate and support the Chicago Quarterly Review, which late last year, its 20th, put out an all-Chicago issue.

The majority of us there, myself included, had a hand in the making of the journal. I contributed a short

Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Fuller reads to a full house. 

short story, recruited a few very good Chicago writer friends (Don DeGrazia, Christine Sneed, Joe Meno) to contribute, and orchestrated a youth writing contest that resulted in the publication of three pieces. The work I did was not insignificant, unless you compared my effort to others in attendance. Like Syed Afzal Haider, who founded the journal and has dedicated vast amounts of time to it, the slush piling up at a faster rate every year. Or Lisa Mackenzie, Syed's talented sidekick, who helped organize the event remotely and then flew in to serve as master of ceremonies. Or John Blades, the fiction editor. Art Fox, a contributing editor. I don't know all the particulars about whose been doing what for how long, except to say that a lot of them were at the Cliff Dwellers last night.

About 15 people read, all relatively short bits. Sometimes these readings can be deadly: a long cast of authors wrestling for control of the spotlight, the most resilient refusing to succumb despite mounting opposition in the form of sighs, yawns and stampedes to the bathroom. But this wasn't like that. Individually, the work was good, sometimes very good, and collectively the samples represented the essence of the journal. There was fiction and non-fiction, poetry and longer prose, humor and dead serious. It didn't seem too long at all.

But what I liked best was there was enough time set aside for a party, or at least a party of sorts. Time to meet the other writers, catch up with friends, investigate ways to mutually assist one another with this or that. Time to drink one or two or three glasses of wine.

Time to enjoy the view, which seemed immune to whatever storm was brewing below.

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Donald G. Evans is the founder and executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. He is the author of the novel Good Money After Bad and short story collection An Off-White Christmas, as well as the editor of the anthology Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. He is the Chicago editor of the Great Lakes Cultural Review. He serves on the American Writers Museum's Chicago Literary Council and the committee that selects the Harold Washington Literary Award.

donaldgevans@hotmail.com

World Renown Library Administrator's Remarkable Stories

The labels on the Big Little Books said, “Tommy Staley’s Library,” and were loaned out to the Tulsa, OK neighborhood boys on a rotating basis. The future Harry Ransom Center director was nine when he started this little lending library to give access to friends eager to get their hands on his latest Dick Tracy, Tarzan, Andy Panda, Blondie, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and Gene Autry stories.

“It was fun,” says Dr. Staley, at age 78 enjoying his recent retirement after 25 years at the helm of the Ransom Center. “I was always engaged in literature, used to hang out in bookstores.”

Dr. Thomas Staley

Dr. Staley served as the force behind the growth of perhaps the world’s greatest literary manuscripts collection. Under Dr. Staley’s stewardship, the Ransom Center raised one hundred million dollars and added to its collection holdings related to important writers like John Fowles, T.C. Boyle, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, James Salter, Tim O’Brien, Russell Banks, Andres Dubus, Jayne Anne Phillips, Tom Stoppard and David Hare. The Ransom Center has what Dr. Staley calls “a horde of material.”

Ten thousand people annually—scholars, historians, writers and readers of all stripes—make use of the materials, and their subsequent work, such as dissertations and book-length biographies, adds ever-new dimensions to our understanding of important authors.

“We place great value on various drafts,” Dr. Staley says. “They tell the story of how a writer creates and builds. The various drafts form a tracery of how a writer finishes a book.”

Dr. Staley will speak about his career this Friday, May 9 at a Caxton Club luncheon at Chicago’s Union League Club (65 W. Jackson Blvd.) Lunch will be at 11:30 a.m. with Remarkable Stories: Furthering the Collection to follow an hour later.

Dr. Staley will tell stories that lend insight into the sometimes exciting ways in which he acquired prized collections, including authors with strong Chicago connections like David Mamet.

For Dr. Staley, his passion for literature started at an extremely youthful age, and his Big Little Books lending library was an early indication that he would combine this interest in literature with an interest in sharing.

“I was always in the business of collecting,” Dr. Staley says. “I think I knew something about it, how to predict winners.”

Early on,  private collector John Benet Shaw advised Dr. Staley on his burgeoning interest, giving him, for example, a list of London’s best restaurants, where relationships with book dealers and writers could be cultivated.

These relationships are vital, and Dr. Staley has friends, colleagues and acquaintances all over the world. Tom’s friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick, author of Sleepless Nights, in part led to her donation of ex-husband Robert Lowell’s archives, a deal that included UT-Austin’s purchase of her own. Dr. Staley’s friendships with Stoppard and Fowles were factors in their choosing the Ransom Center. And on and on.

Dr. Staley founded the James Joyce Quarterly in 1963 at the University of Tulsa, and served as its editor for 26 years, at which point he started the Joyce Studies Annual at the University of Texas-Austin. He has written or edited 15 books and edits a literary modernism series at the University of Texas Press. He also started, in 1990, a fellowship program at UT-Austin that supports the research of visiting scholars. He led the 1993 $14.5 million renovation of the Ransom Center that encompasses, amidst its 40,000 square-foot space, galleries, an auditorium and a reading room.

Make no mistake: Dr. Staley’s acquisitions at UT-Austin were large. In 2005, for example, Norman Mailer’s archives, weighing 20,000 pounds, were delivered in a tractor-trailer.

“There’s a more complex and wider picture when you talk about an institutional collection,” says Dr. Staley. “You cannot indulge yourself as much as a private collector. Frequently, there’s a question, ‘Can this particular archive add a dimension to the collection?’ "

The Union League Club is an ideal setting for the Caxton Club luncheon. The American Writers Museum

The Union League Club

plans to build the first national writers’ museum here in a few years, and of course our mission at the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame is to preserve and promote our great heritage.

“We have a number of your writers we value enormously,” Dr. Staley says. “Chicago always has writers who feel the nation. Chicago has that character, that rare quality--Boston almost has it, but not quite—that is very American, but particularly Chicago.”

The Ransom Center’s collection includes archives of CLHOF inductees Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes, as well as nominees James Jones and Edgar Lee Masters.

Reservations are required for the event, though the $30 admission fee can be made that morning by check or cash at the Union League Club. To RSVP, email: caxtonclub@newberry.org. For questions, call 630.638.7438 or 773.208.7155.

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Donald G. Evans is the founder and executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. He is the author of the novel Good Money After Bad and short story collection An Off-White Christmas, as well as the editor of the anthology Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. He is the Chicago editor of the Great Lakes Cultural Review. He serves on the American Writers Museum's Chicago Literary Council and the committee that selects the Harold Washington Literary Award.

donaldgevans@hotmail.com

Write in Hemingway's Attic

Up in the attic of a Victorian home on Oak Park Avenue is a safari writing retreat. Animal skins cover the floors and the walls are lined with photographs and maps, promising travels and thrills far away from the suburban life that surrounds the house. A leather desk and comfortable chair offer places to contemplate adventures both literary and real.

This is the office occupied by the Hemingway Foundation's Writer in Residence, a yearlong position

available for writers who need space to work and are interested in being inspired by Hemingway's legacy. Young Ernest lived in the house -- and played in the attic -- as a young child, his love of storytelling ignited by his grandfather and other family members telling tales around the fire.

The attic office was once a maid's room, but in 2012 the Thomasville furniture company transformed it to become the anchor of the Foundation's Writer in Residence program. The company offers an officially sanctioned Ernest Hemingway line of desks, chairs and other home furnishings, and offered these up to make the office -- which was dusty and in disrepair -- suitable for creating the next great work of American literature.

Thomasville's Oakbrook design teams studied the space and came up with two plans for the office and the Hemingway Foundation board chose the safari theme. Though the Hemingway Birthplace home is decorated in the Victorian style of the time when the family occupied it, the attic is a dreamscape: the sort of life Ernest imagined when he was a boy.

Other local companies pitched in to help renovate the attic. Clyde Russell re-plastered the room's walls and built benches to enclose previously exposed ductwork, and Hometown Handyman repaired broken floorboards and windows. Vincent Filak restored furniture found during the cleanout of the attic, including a child's rocking chair once owned by Marcelline Hemingway, Ernest's older sister.

Once the restoration was done, the Hemingway Foundation board put out a call to writers to apply to

Susan Hahn, first Writer-in-Residence

use the space. Though only office space -- not living space -- was offered, applications came from as far away as Hawaii and Germany. A committee of Foundation board members chose a writer closer to home: poet and novelist Susan Hahn, who would complete her second novel in the attic.

“It was a great honor and a great privilege to be the inaugural Writer-In-Residence at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Birthplace Home in Oak Park,” Hahn wrote in a message to the Foundation. “Being present in the Hemingway writing room--even when I wasn't actually able to be there--makes me feel that there truly might be ‘magic’ in those walls.”

The Foundation is accepting applications for the 2013-2014 residency through June 1. To apply, download the application here: http://bit.ly/1mt0Py1

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Allison Sansone is the Executive Director at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.