Q&A with Stevan M. Weine

 

 

 

Stevan M. Weine is the author of the new book Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness. Weine's other books include When History is a Nightmare. He is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois College of Medicine.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Best Minds, and how would you describe your relationship with the late poet Allen Ginsberg?

 

A: I have long been fascinated by how people make meaning and art from mental suffering. When I first read “Howl” and “Kaddish” as a teenager, I was immediately taken by Ginsberg, who was fully engaged in this kind of work.

 

I read everything I could and learned a little more about his mother, Naomi, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent many years in psychiatric hospitals. I learned that Ginsberg himself was involuntarily hospitalized for eight months in his early 20s not long after he had visions of God inspired by William Blake.

 

That got me wondering, what did Ginsberg really think of psychiatry and how it approached madness in comparison with literature? So in 1986 I wrote Ginsberg a letter, he answered, we met and started talking. He let me interview him several times, and gave me access to his archives, his psychiatric records, and those of his mother.

 

When I was only 24, he handed me an incredible opportunity to tell a story which to this day has not been fully told. He also became a mentor to me as a young psychiatrist, having me read William James and Antonin Artaud, for example, and then discussing them with me.  

Q: How do you think Ginsberg addressed his mental health issues, both in his life and in his writing?

 

A: When Ginsberg was hospitalized at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in 1949, he had formal psychiatric treatment in the form of psychotherapy. In Best Minds, I discuss this in great detail, based on the progress notes from the medical records and Allen’s recollections.

 

Later when living in San Francisco, he had psychotherapy again which helped him accept being gay and a poet. In his 50s, he again entered into therapy when coping with his partner, Peter Orlovsky’s, drug habit and manic episodes. All of these treatments were helpful to Ginsberg.

 

But let’s not overlook the work Ginsberg did as an artist every day of his life, journaling, corresponding, studying literature, writing poetry, documenting and examining his inner life and daily experiences, those around him, and society at large.

 

I am amazed at the courage, commitment, discipline, and creativity which he brought to his suffering and that of others. As Patti Smith explained to me, he did the work of an artist. 

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Ginsberg and his mother, Naomi?

 

A: Loving but also ambivalent and complicated. As a child and young adult, Allen was her caregiver and protector, but unfortunately, also at times a victim of her delusional behavior. For years he tried his best to save her from her illness and from the hospitals. Some big decisions fell upon him alone when he was still young.

 

Despite all her suffering, Naomi still saw herself as a mother and tried her best to give her love to her sons, even from a locked psychiatric ward.

 

Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: “Best Minds” comes from the first line of “Howl”: “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” As I explain in Chapter 6, this line is written from the perspective of a witness and is laced with ambivalence. Were they or are they the best minds? Did madness make or break them?

 

The rest of the title, “How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness,” is really what this book aims to achieve. Again, how does a young person confronted with horrific suffering and also immersed in literature manage to turn it into remarkable art that impacted many lives.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I work in global mental health, which takes me to Central Asia and other destinations. We build interventions to support people who are suffering from mental health problems in the context of social adversity, and do not have access to mental health resources.

 

I am also finishing some small pieces that didn’t make their way into this book. One piece on Ginsberg and Bob Dylan as witnesses to social injustice. Another on Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg’s friendship around the time of Allen’s visions. Another on what would Ginsberg say we should do to help persons with serious mental illness on the street.

 

The most important one to me is on Naomi Ginsberg, which is focused more on her, and less on Allen. Naomi, like so many others, disappeared into the psychiatric hospital, and was silenced. Fortunately, in her case there is some documentation, which allows us to get to know her and her struggle.  

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I can’t overemphasize how excited I am to share this book with readers. I’ve lived with this project for more than half my life.

 

In that time it has developed in ways that I hope will connect with multiple audiences. Those who know a lot about Ginsberg and those who only heard of “Howl” or “Kaddish.” Those focused on poetry and the Beats, and those interested in trauma, madness, and the history of psychiatry. Allen Ginsberg contained multitudes.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Matthew Guenette

 

 

 

Matthew Guenette is the author of the new poetry collection Doom Scroll. His other poetry collections include Vasectomania. He teaches composition and creative writing at Madison College, and he lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the poems in your new collection?

A: This book was drafted during the pandemic, so a couple of years, though the bulk of poems were probably written during those first six months when everyone was staying home if they were able to, when everyone was masked, an end nowhere in sight.

 

This time was intense in our household; our kids were both grade-schoolers going to "school" via computer. It made me terribly anxious. I felt keenly, every day, that my kids were missing out on something vital, like friends, like playing games...I was so sad for them.

 

Q: The writer Sarah Freligh said of the collection, “One feels the eternal push-pull between generations, from the life his father begat him to his own worries as a father and the siren call from his Gen X self.” What do you think of that description?

A: I'm amazed when something I've written connects with anyone. It feels like a kind of miracle. I'm so thankful for and honored by Sarah's take on Doom Scroll; I think it's spot-on.

 

I hope my last three books (Doom Scroll, Vasectomania, American Busboy) have charted this journey of a Gen Xer into parenthood/responsibility, which includes a growing sense of how little time any of us actually have. I hope, too, that these books consistently choose the comic over the tragic as a way of seeing...

 

Q: How was the book's title (also the title of one of the poems) chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: The original title had been Indexer, but [poet and University of Akron professor of English] Mary Biddinger challenged that, and of course I'm glad she did. Working with Akron means I'm working with an incredible group of artists. I trust Mary's vision always, her editorial insight is amazing.

 

For her, the calculus was probably obvious: given all the doom scrolling in the book, wouldn't  Doom Scroll seem like a smarter alternative, less abstract, but with a still palpable ambiguity, Doom Scroll as both a proper noun and verb, as a kind of action? That's how the title came about, by listening to Mary! 

Q: How did you decide on the order in which the poems would appear in the collection?

A: All credit goes to Sandra Simonds. She's been an invaluable voice for my last few books, suggesting an order for each one that shadows the poems with a kind of arc.

 

Doom Scroll begins with a dream poem for instance, and ends (I hope) in a realistically hopeful place. In between the first and last poem, a kind of oscillating pattern exists where poems spike up and down from each other in terms of mood and action. I want the book to feel fast, coherent, to turn from poem to poem and end somewhere far from where it started. Hopefully the order creates that.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I have 100+ pages of new material I'm eager to start thinking about in terms of theme/structure. I've been writing about family, of course, but also thinking about a "we" that finds themselves always in the middle of something, with no beginning (other than birth) or end (other than death) in sight. It's more fun than it sounds! 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

March 29

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
March 29, 1936: Judith Guest born.

Q&A with Farah Jasmine Griffin

 

 

 

Farah Jasmine Griffin is the author of the new essay collection In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays. Her other books include Read Until You Understand. She is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University. She lives in New York.

 

Q: What inspired you to compile this new essay collection?

 

A: Some of the books that have been most important to me over the years have been collections of essays, so I always dreamed of compiling my own. But it was a dream...that one day I would be like the writers I most admired, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, June Jordan and others.

 

Then I had colleagues, friends and former students who kept encouraging me to do so. They knew that I'd written and published a number of shorter pieces, many of which they'd been using in their own teaching and writing, and they convinced me that it would be valuable to have them under one cover.

 

I was grateful when Norton agreed to publish them if I was willing to add a few new essays to the collection. So I guess we could say In Search of a Beautiful Freedom is a dream come true. 

 

Q: You write, "I have always felt most at home in the essay form." Why do you think that's the case?

 

A: I'm not sure why I immediately felt most at home in the essay form, but as a young writer trying to find my way it seemed to welcome me.

 

I tried to be a journalist; I wrote for The Harvard Crimson very briefly. I interned at The Nation. I did some freelance writing for the Philadelphia Tribune and other newspapers. I always felt anxious about being a reporter and never satisfied with the quickness of the story format.

 

I wasn't a very good poet, though I wrote "poetry" since I was a girl; and I tried my hand at writing short stories, which I enjoyed but never published.

 

But I always wrote good essays and as I trained to become an academic -- we learn how to write articles, academic essays -- I learned how to shape ideas and arguments in 30 pages or so and that worked for me.

 

But I think I learned most from reading essayists and I took great pleasure in reading and writing them. And collections of essays felt like great musical albums to me. They were whole works but each essay was like a single statement.

 

Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the book says, in part, "Pieces on Black women writers contemplate such famous figures as Zora Neale Hurston—whose controversial opposition to Brown v. Board of Education receives a subtle appraisal—as well as such lesser-known literary lights as Ellen Watkins Harper, who published novels about Reconstruction as early as 1869." How did you choose the essays to include in the collection?

 

A: Choosing the essays to include in the collection was the most difficult part. Early on I had a wonderful research assistant, now a published poet, Alexis Jackson, who tracked down all of my essays, including the most obscure, printed them out and put them in a big binder. There were about three or four times as many as appear in this volume.

 

I read through them and got rid of any that I thought didn't hold up, or that were repetitive, and then I shared those with my wonderful editor Amy Cherry. We read them together and came up with groupings or categories of essays that seemed to fit thematically or to be about music, literature, politics or urgent social issues, black feminism, etc.

 

We ended up jettisoning whole categories - for instance the visual arts are no longer there, only one essay survives. We also needed to keep it at a reasonable length so there were some essays that were cut, simply because I had to make the hard choice of having a book that wasn't too large!

 

I guess there will be enough for a second volume at some point, especially if I keep writing, as I plan to do. 

 

Q: You note that the book's title refers to Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens. How was your title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: I wanted to pay homage to a book that really made me want to write essays. I came to that book, as did many young women of my generation, already wanting to be a writer, but Walker's book showed me how to be an essayist, showed me how to think critically about books and history and gender in ways that mattered to me.

 

And it gave us a mission and purpose and name: Black Feminist/Womanist. It named our aesthetic and political project, with which we would grapple for decades. It just opened so many doors, and I wanted to honor that.

 

Recently, after the book was already in production, one of my graduate students was doing research in the Alice Walker archives at Emory University and she found a letter that I'd written to Walker when I was a college student about how important In Search of Our Mother's Gardens was to me. I didn't recall writing and sending it but it just underscored that, yes, that book had been life changing for me.

 

She also found a letter, written around the same time, by another young aspiring writer, who has since become a friend and an acclaimed poet, essayist and memorist, Elizabeth Alexander.

 

Also, I see this critical, creative enterprise as one of constant searching, seeking and being in the process of discovery. The essay for me is a process of discovery -- it's thinking it through on the page. So I wanted to honor Alice Walker for giving me and my generation of writers/critics/scholars/thinkers/artists that sense of possibility. We owe her so much, especially that collection.

 

And the second part -- a beautiful Freedom -- searching for Freedom is a human impulse, the impulse of all living things to be free. And for the descendants of enslaved people in the Americas, that desire, that struggle for freedom marks our political and cultural and spiritual traditions, and I see my work as part of that.

 

Not just a Freedom TO, but a Freedom FROM: from want, from fear, from hunger, from danger.

 

Also, my sense of freedom is informed by a Black American Freedom Struggle that understands with Freedom comes Responsibility (was it Eleanor Roosevelt who said that?). To paraphrase Toni Morrison, The function of freedom is to free someone else. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have a few projects I am working on. I am working on a book about some elements of Toni Morrison's thought which reveal her to be not only a great novelist but a thinker of major importance whose ideas had a deeply prophetic dimension as they challenged us to become a more just world.

 

And I am also working on a book about Black women's friendships. It's too early to talk about right now, but it will be a series of stories about friendships between historic and more contemporary figures.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: That I still think reading can make us better human beings. That I think a society that bans books will tolerate other forms of Fascism and that I support the frontline librarians and teachers who are fighting the good fight against this every day.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Farah Jasmine Griffin.

Q&A with Leonard S. Marcus

 

Photo by Sonya Sones

 

 

Leonard S. Marcus is the author of the new book Pictured Worlds: Masterpieces of Children's Book Art by 101 Essential Illustrators from Around the World, and the new middle grade book Mr. Lincoln Sits for his Portrait.: The Story of a Photograph That Became an American Icon. He has written more than 25 books, and is also a curator. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Pictured Worlds?

 

A: As a history major in college, I wrote my senior honors thesis about early American children's books.

 

Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French visitor to the US during the 1830s, had observed that American children were more free-spirited than their European counterparts, and I wondered if the American Revolution had brought with it a different attitude toward childhood, and if that change might be glimpsed in whatever children's books were published in those days.

 

A few years later, I became a children's book reviewer, and although most of the books I wrote about originated in the US or England, I developed a special interest in the few books that came from elsewhere--the work for instance of the Japanese creator of wordless picture books, Mitsumasa Anno.

 

Then a chance came to go to the Bologna Children's Book Fair, where publishers from around the world gather annually to buy and sell foreign rights, and my eyes were opened wide to the extraordinary number and variety of children's books that never make it to the US.

 

Ever since then, I have tried to have a global perspective in my work, and to understand why some books "travel" well across cultures and others do not, and what that tells us about cultural compatibilities and differences and about publishing as a business.

 

Q: How do you think children's book illustrations changed over the years, and what do you see looking ahead?

 

A: There have been a great many changes. Before color printing became available in the mid-19th century, many children's books had only black-and-white line art, although sometimes you could pay extra for a hand-colored copy, or color the pictures at home yourself.

 

Printing technology has been responsible for a number of changes. For a long time "full color" was so expensive that only older, seasoned artists could be trusted with it. Robert McCloskey wanted to illustrate Make Way for Ducklings, his second book, in full color but his editor said No!

 

Then in the 1980s, color became very affordable--and the mantra changed to "the more color the better" as picture books needed to vie for attention on the shelves of the cavernous new big-box chain stores.

In recent years, digital art-making has seemed to favor a flat, colorful, retro, and highly graphic style of illustration. Digital technology has also made it much easier for an artist living in, say, Argentina, to illustrate a picture book for a publisher based in Brooklyn.

 

The subject matter of picture books has also changed again and again. In Victorian England, the best illustrators were literally inventing the modern picture during the 1860s and 1870s--and trying all sorts of experiments. Nearly all of Randolph Caldecott's "toy books," for example, were about the comic misadventures of grownups.

 

These days, under the influence of developmental psychology, most picture books feature stories about children (or animal stand-ins) who more or less mirror the assumed reader's age.

 

Another Victorian illustrator, Walter Crane, packed many of his scenes with stylish home furnishings, presumably in the knowledge that it was the parents who buy the books.

 

During the 1940s and 1950s, artists influenced by early childhood education theories like Leonard Weisgard and Clement Hurd made illustrations that were semi-abstract in order to leave more to the young child's imagination.

 

After Maurice Sendak, it became acceptable to depict children throwing tantrums and characters like Sendak's Wild Things who represent the scary figments of a child's imagination.

 

As for the future, it's clear that e-picture books did not satisfy readers and that the traditional picture book will continue to flourish, sometimes becoming a little more like an artist's book with appeal for older readers as well as the core 3-to-7 demographic.

 

The graphic novel and picture book will continue to cross-fertilize. More and more of the world's most talented visual artists will discover the picture book as an artform worth trying.

 

Q: You also have another new book out, Mr. Lincoln Sits for His Portrait. Why did you choose to focus on this famous picture of Abraham Lincoln with his son Tad, and how would you describe the dynamic between the two?

 

A: The photo of Lincoln and Tad was taken along with several other Lincoln portraits at Mathew Brady's Washington studio on Feb. 9, 1864. It is probably the most intimate of all photographs of the 16th president.

 

In it, Lincoln is seen seated with a big book perched on one knee and appears to be reading to his 10-year-old son, who stands close beside him. The photo combines in one image Lincoln the great man with Lincoln the father and Lincoln the man of letters. He was after all a spectacular writer and eloquent orator and hilarious storyteller--and serious reader of Shakespeare.

 

I guessed that the photo might have a backstory worth exploring, and as I began my research I soon realized how interested Lincoln was in all the new technologies of his day: photography for its power to define his public image and help him connect with people; the telegraph as a means of quickly getting his speeches out to the nation (newspapers often printed an important speech in full) and of communicating with his generals in the field; and the railroad as one of the keys to binding the divided nation.

 

I came to think of Lincoln as a kind of artist who made brilliant use of each of these industrial age wonders to further his goals.

 

Q: The Kirkus review of the book calls it a "provocative study of Abraham Lincoln as a masterly media manipulator." What do you think of that description?

 

A: The word "manipulator" might to taken to imply devious intent, and I don't agree with that reading of Lincoln's fascination with images.

 

In deliberately presenting himself in photos as a person of strength and determination, he was in fact countering the malicious critics who misrepresented him as an uneducated country bumpkin and even (as one critic actually said) as a baboon. He was taking on the Eastern establishment and beating them at their own game.

 

Soon after Lincoln was assassinated, the image of him and Tad was published as a wood engraving on the cover of the widely read news magazine Harper's Weekly. From then onward, it has continued to shape our collective memory of Lincoln as a great man who was also a down-to-earth and deeply human one.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am currently curating three exhibitions, all of which will open in November 2023. "Kid in a Candy Store: The Picture Book Art of Seymour Chwast" will be at the Eric Carle Museum (Amherst, Mass.). "Between Worlds: The Art and Design of Leo Lionni," which I'm co-curating with Steven Heller, will originate at the Norman Rockwell Museum (Stockbridge, Mass.).

 

And "Building Stories," an exhibition about the idea of home in children's literature, will open in November at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., for a 10-year-long run in partnership with the DC Public Library.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Maybe two things: 1. Now that the pandemic is waning, I am looking forward to being back out on the road to give school and library and other public programs about my work. And 2. I have found another photo to write about...

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Josh Weiss

 

 

 

Josh Weiss is the author of the new novel Sunset Empire, a sequel to his novel Beat the Devils. Both books feature his detective protagonist Morris Baker, who lives in an alternate version of 1950s America. Weiss lives in Philadelphia.

 

Q: Did you know before you wrote your first Morris Baker novel that you'd be writing a second one?

 

A: A second book was part of the deal from the very start (all of the brokerage credit goes to my amazing agent, Scott Miller of Trident Media Group). With that said, I wasn’t sure if my sophomore novel would be another adventure with Morris or something completely different.

 

I originally saw Beat the Devils as a bit of a one-off because some of my favorite alternate history novels — Fatherland, Wake Up and Dream, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union — are all standalone stories. But the more I talked it over with Scott and the publisher, the more I began to get excited about the prospect of revisiting this world.

 

Like most good ideas, the general plot line for Sunset Empire came to me in the shower about a month prior to the pandemic lockdown. Interestingly, I wrote the epilogue right away — it was that clear in my mind. The rest of the sequel followed a little over a year later.

 

Q: How do you think Morris has changed — or remained the same — from the first book to the second?

 

A: It’s a good question. I definitely wanted there to be some growth between books, but it soon became clear that if Baker was able to completely process all of his deep-cut trauma, he’d lose all the qualities that made him such a compelling character. 

 

By the end of Beat the Devils, he’s reached a state of self-acceptance, realizing that there is a way to move forward in life without all the guilt and rage that’s been swirling inside him since he was liberated from a concentration camp in 1945.

 

When we get to the events of Sunset Empire, which take place a year and a half after the first book, Baker has relapsed. Now doubly haunted by his experiences during the Holocaust and the loss of Sophia, he’s once again drinking too much and isolating himself from those around him. This leads to major friction with his girlfriend, Shira, and the congregants of his synagogue.

 

The story of how he thwarted an evil Nazi cabal in the first book has been spread far and wide by journalist turned revolutionary Edward R. Murrow. Baker has gained this almost mythological status as a Jewish champion among his contemporaries, but doesn’t quite know how to live up to it. With this sequel, I wanted to explore themes of identity and probe the dilemma of who Baker thinks he should be versus the person he really is.

Q: What inspired the plot of Sunset Empire?

 

A: Without giving too much away, Sunset Empire offered me a chance to dip my toes into the waters of horror (you’ll know when my adoration for Stephen King and John Carpenter is showing) as well as the politically-charged, paranoia-tinged spy thrillers of the Cold War that inspired me to create the MBU (Morris Baker Universe) in the first place. The Manchurian Candidate, Goldfinger, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, and Marathon Man come to mind.

 

I also found myself wanting to reflect the COVID-19 pandemic — and the xenophobic vitriol that sprung from it — given the fact that this book was written in the middle of the global health crisis.

 

Q: What did you see as the right balance between history and alternative history as you wrote these books?

 

A: For me, it’s all about having some semblance of a historical backbone without getting too caught up in the minutiae. After all, this is a work of fiction taking place in a reality vastly different from our own. Poetic license, baby!

 

Nevertheless, I like to be accurate to the period in terms of its technology and culture (think film and music) to give the reader a certain baseline of what really did exist before presenting them with an absolutely wild deviation from the timeline.

 

And even then, those out-there deviations often contain small nuggets of truth. In this parallel universe, for example, the United States has moved away from fossil fuels in favor of the more sustainable energy provided by nuclear fission.

 

Why? Because President McCarthy saw an opportunity to become filthy stinkin’ rich if he used the power of his office to monopolize the industry. As such, the Ford Nucleon (an actual late ‘50s concept for a nuclear-powered vehicle) became a reality, even though a car that runs on atomic fuel is still a pipe dream today. I really loved the dissonance of such an awful administration doing something environmentally noble for all the wrong reasons.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m currently in the process of pitching my third novel. Whether it will be another chapter in the Morris Baker saga or something different remains to be seen.

 

I have a premise in mind for a trilogy topper if that’s what the people want (I recently had a fun idea about how to tie it back into the events of the first book), but would be equally delighted to explore any of the concepts laid out in my 50-page document of book ideas that continues to grow with each passing year. Whatever does come next, though, I’m fairly certain it’ll be another period piece of some kind.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: If you want to see more of my writing, check out my pop culture bylines at SYFY WIRE and Forbes Entertainment!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Barry Wittenstein

 

 

Barry Wittenstein is the author of the new children's picture book The Day the River Caught Fire: How the Cuyahoga River Exploded and Ignited the Earth Day Movement. It focuses on the fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland in 1969. Wittenstein's other books include Oscar's American Dream. He lives in New York City.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Day the River Caught Fire?

 

A: I remember hearing Randy Newman’s song “Burn On” in 1972. I could not believe a river had caught fire. I quickly learned it was not satire, as many of Newman’s songs are. Fast forward 50 years, and I wanted to write a narrative nonfiction picture book about climate change and pollution. I remembered the song.

 

Q: What do you think Jessie Hartland’s illustrations add to the book?

 

A: Jessie’s illustrations are fabulous. They elevate the story into an entirely new stratosphere. Kids will find it easy to “get into the story” because her art feels familiar and inviting. Jessie’s images perfectly complement an otherwise deadly-serious tale.

 

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book says, in part, “But despite ending the main narrative with an optimistic observation that the river is clean enough today for fish to survive in it, [Wittenstein] closes with an author’s note that offers a strong reminder that pollution and climate change remain deadly challenges…” What do you think of that description, and what do you hope kids take away from the book?

 

A: I’m glad Kirkus noted that. Yes, it would have been easy to write a bland author’s note. "Dirty river becomes clean river. The end." I hope my note rallies the troops. It’s a call to action. It’s a warning that while the Cuyahoga is clean, so much more still needs to be done worldwide.

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: When I began my research, I was ignorant of the entire subject. It was just a germ of an idea.

 

I spoke to David Stradling, urban and environmental history professor at the University of Cincinnati. I read his book, Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland. David was an invaluable resource.

 

Much of my research took place online—videos and documentaries on YouTube. I signed up for a subscription to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to read their coverage as it happened in 1969.

 

Part of the fun of writing nonfiction books is learning about the subject and finding kid-friendly facts.

 

I did not understand the timeline of the Cuyahoga and its impact on Earth Day. I had no clue that Cleveland’s Mayor Stokes was instrumental in helping push the subject into the headlines.

 

I didn’t understand that because the 1969 fire was extinguished almost as soon as it began, and no photographers could get there in time to take pictures, whatever photos do exist are from previous Cuyahoga river fires.

 

And I certainly had no clue that other rivers around the nation had also burst into flames.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Nancy Paulson just signed a narrative nonfiction picture book biography for a 2025 release. A musical, theatrical production of my 2020 book, Oscar’s American Dream, is being produced by the Orlando Repertory Company in Florida. I’m keeping my agent, Mona Kanin, busy with new material on various nonfiction topics. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Barry Wittenstein.