All that is solid melts into air…

I know, I have beefed about our new electronic world before but now I have a brass tack excuse. Our Tecky Department has no conception of paper or anything solid it seems. It’s all about task lists and memory cells and the great Fixit Syndrome we have in publishing – Penelope or Sisyphus Syndrome depending on your gender.  To make us more efficient (would that were possible) we have struggled with BaseCamp and now we have Apollo thrust upon us (half the price and better or so I am told). But I protest that I am a man of the Legal Pad and the Piles-On-The-Desk and the Post-it Note (see, I can do technical) and the last minute phone call and the I-am-sure-I-can-find-it-somewhere moment.

My desk is a Mnemonic Device in and of itself. But that is lost on those whose idea of a desk is a platform for a computer. Ok, so only I can use it as others merely see this, my Renaissance Palimpsest, this, my Palace of Secrets, this, my Cabinet of Curiosities, as… as, well, as a Mess and as my Mess at that, indecipherable and unsightly. The cleaner won’t touch it; more’s not quite the pity.

Karl Marx comes to mind as in “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”  Not that the Communist Manifesto has passed across my desk at all recently you understand but the man has a point. On this and some other issues I might add.

It’s not quite as dramatic hereabouts but things are definitely melting into the ether as far as I can see (or not as it were…) and the bit about “man’s relations with his kind” does raise the issue that you can do a lot more with physical objects on a physical desk to jog the fading, superannuated, (is that an Oxford Comma I saw there?), memory cells than you can with a key board and a screen on which you have to remember to raise Apollo before you remember anything else! I need post-it notes all over the laptop to remind me how to remind myself of how to reach the memory threshold and the lists. All of which doesn’t even get me to first base. Hell, I even have trouble with pin-boards.

A small row, sorry, a pile really; a small ever-changing pile of books come and go with attendant subliminal messages about things to Fix and do, quotes to use, definitions, adumbrations of ideas that might, just might, become a book in one of our (at that particular moment, unsuspecting) authors to whom the e-mail might start “Might I suggest…”. Two or three yellow legal pads lie ready to be indiscriminately used for listing, note taking, doodling, calculating, listing again, recalculating. Endless print outs from the computer travel from one side of the desk (as flat sheets) and exit stage left into the recycling bin as I scrunch them up and practice my hoops.

All of which brings me to the question of discipline. All this talk of self-publishing: they have no idea. From this, my Mess issues sufficient direction or indirection, as meaner colleagues have remarked, to get the hundreds of decisions that book publishing entails done and dusted. A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind…and cyberspace is always clean?

 

Words, Words, Words.

I was half way through one of two recent Atlantic Monthly articles by the interesting Jonathan Knee when I realized I wasn’t getting the message. Jeff Jarvis’ blog piece on BuzzMachine had led me there. Jarvis had mentioned Rupert Murdoch and I have always had a problem with that man and everything he represents by way of publishing anti-matter.  If the former is one of the great unsolved problems in Physics then Rupert is certainly the same for publishing but I digress.

All three articles are full of words I understand; words like content and value and some words I think I understand like aggregator (I think I do that on Twitter) and words I don’t like and just about understand like Customer captivity . And then there’s the bombshell:

“In fact, the dirty little secret of the media industry is that content aggregators, not content creators, have long been the overwhelming source of value creation.”

Now I think, a book publisher, I have always been a content creator as opposed to a content aggregator, pace my new role as “Cool Liberal” Tweeter at BHPanimalwatch; (honest! That’s what I have been listed as by at least one kind Tweetheart).  But the problem here is both Knee and Jarvis appear to have rediscovered Distribution and Profits but now call them Aggregation and Value Creation. Yes, their exemple du jour, Netflix is an interesting story but it’s no more a panacea than the good warehousing and pre-Amazon distribution they now criticize. We’ve seen it all before methinks.

There was a time when publishing was publishing and content was indeed king, but then knowing folk like wholesalers and mail-order mavens of one stripe or another told us that value creation lay not in the content of the book but in the ownership and branding of said nebulous material and its professional handling. Qui Bono? We asked. Why the shareholders of course. And the Readers? We asked. Who? What? You mean Customers don’t you – those we can capture?  Well no, not really. We just meant Readers. So here we go again with new in-words like customer captivity, as these interesting folk re-raise the question of how to make good corporate money for the few out of what should be the common enterprise of all.

And yes, we have seen it all before and, as all three articles indicate, to little profit; so why the repetition? Still, as an intellectual exercise, the articles are worth reading. You could also go do the daily crossword; or, dare I suggest, buy a Bunker Hill book and read it?

Well, you didn’t expect me to miss that opportunity did you?

 

 

Moments of Perplexity

Life is a puzzlement and like the King, I could sing (if I had the looks and voice of Yul Brynner!)

There are times I almost think
I am not sure of what I absolutely know.
Very often find confusion
In conclusion I concluded long ago
In my head are many facts
that, as a student, I have studied to procure,
In my head are many facts..
Of which I wish I was more certain I was sure!

You guessed it.  I have been doing contracts while it rains again like we need some born again Noah on hand.  I used to have a simple clause that allowed agreement on “Electronic Rights in any and every form now known or hereafter developed”. You would think that would cover it wouldn’t you? It seems we need to give names to countless widgets as well as the open ender; widgets like Tablets for example.  I am more familiar with the Roman wax tablet and the Mycenaean brick (for lack of a better description) than I am capable of being with all the tablet variations being served up today but we struggle on with the lists: “ iPods, Blackberries, Palm Pilots, Smartphones, Pocket PCs, and other similar or competitive devices now existing or hereafter developed and hand-held computers, mobile telephones, personal data assistants and any other devices that provide computing and information storage and/or retrieval capabilities and are able to display images, graphics and text,, whether now existing or hereinafter acquired or developed, including, without limitation, all iPod, Blackberry, Palm, Apple’s Tablet, Google devices and mobile tablets”. There you go… I can see the Future!

Tranparent Book Greg Mably

Greg Mably

As for the whole concept of the electronic book which is and isn’t, exists and doesn’t, in that inimitable now-you-see-now-you-don’t fashion I feel like the character in Greg Mably’s poster.  Our Teck Chief is up on a visit and when not dazzling us with wizardry likes to sit on the porch with her Kindle which is stuffed with a thousand novels. The one she’s reading must be 5 inches thick in the original mass market codex version but, like the other thousand or so on her “device”,  it looks exactly the same as all the others which you can only see one or two pages at a time. Films make her anxious as she does not like suspense. E-books give me the same feeling. I don’t trust the next page to be there. Silly I know, but then Life is, as we have said, a puzzlement!

 

 

Fixit Time

Fixit time, like the rain doesn’t seem to go away.  Ellen Sousa’s magnum opus The Green Garden is about to go to the printer but we are waiting on William Cullina for his promised introduction and, talking of the Fixit of all Fixits he is busy fixing the last trimmings for a new garden at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden. He must know what Fixit means! The amount of activity on their website is amazing. http://www.mainegardens.org I’ll stick to publishing.

Meantime Bert Dodson has delivered everything for his fall book Helping Santa: My First Adventure with Grandma. His attention to detail and composition is fabulous and the story is a delight. We always give him too little time but he is now in recovery before starting (is there no peace for the wicked?) on his next children’s title with the great and award-winning author Lynda Booth-Sweeny about Daniel Chester French; he of the Lincoln Memorial statue of Abraham Lincoln the Great Man himself.

Voices In The Hills by Nessa Flax

Nessa Flax

Nessa Flax dropped by a day or so ago. Nothing to fix it seems but a long natter about possible books to come and the nature of memoir and autobiography and whether they are the same. I’m with Gore Vidal in that autobiography as history is more a question of worldly context and period, and memoir is also history but in a personal context. I’d add that both are often a competition between vanity and self indulgence! The worst of the first come from mendacious politicians like Tony Blair and George Bush and the worst of the second come from all those ghastly and vacuous twenty-something personalities whose horizons never seem to extend beyond their navels.

The Best? Call me eccentric but I think one can be objective about the worst but for the best it is a matter of taste and timing. My random list would include Valentine Chirol’s Fifty Year’s in a Changing World (if you’ve a taste for good journalism and Imperial British arrogance), John Osborne’s A Better Class of Person (the best writing by far despite the theatrical spite) and, if you like academic thinkers as I do, perhaps R.G.Collingwood’s An Autobiography, Richard Cobb’s People and Places and George Steiner’s Errata. All a bit obscure I’ll grant but I’d also happily take The Education of Henry Adams or Grant’s Memoirs to the beach too.

Mine will be slim to a point of honor and entitled “Moving Rapidly On…”

 

Publishers have two seasons not four

Spring and autumn, Spring List and Fall List, Publishers have two seasons not four.  Summer and winter are, in a way, seasonal interludes between the other two.  Yes books are published every month but the vast majority fall into these two periods.  As the Psalmist wrote “He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting”.  Not on publishing though, not just yet.

It was in the late eighties that some corporate wonder with an MBA attached told me not only that   publishing was a “sunset industry” but that publishers were really “Brands for Products”. He even showed me a new fangled thing that was already called PowerPoint to explain whatever bit of what he said he thought I didn’t understand.  I told him PowerPoint wouldn’t win any graphic design awards and, as to his dusky comment, reminded him that we lived in a Copernican world and what goes around, including the earth about the sun, comes around. The man was really a newspaper executive and in the music business too so I feel entitled these days to a little schadenfreude on both counts.  The man didn’t reckon on us publishers discovering the ipad and the e-book.

And so we head into the future not just with an e-book plan but now an App strategy. Makes you feel young really when you launch into things you know nothing about. As always it’s who you know and not what you know and we now have an e-person and an App-person who are both clearly slated to give us and our authors a run for our money.

Talking about running for money we are having an interesting if friendly contractual and semantic tussle with an author and a lawyer in California. The issue is what is Dramatization and what isn’t. Apps apparently (no pun intended) have muddied the water. Not in my view but there you go. To me what is Theatrical and Broadcastable comes under Dramatization and what is not (ebooks and Apps) can be comfortably stabled in the electronic publishing rights clause.  Everything falls into one or the other. We’ll see.

Today seems to be the day for contract queries. Here’s another from closer to home from a co-publishing partner who is worried about competing with their own book. Don’t, is the simple answer if it will undermine sales in the first one without any significant benefit to the second. The matter is alas complicated by the fact we are not publishing the second book. Often books can compete and increase each other’s sales but that does need planning.

I quoted my favorite contract line to another author who has promised to dine out on the quote: Viz: An old mentor of mine, and a lawyer no less, insisted that punctuation ought to be eschewed in contracts as it was often the lazy person’s way of avoiding issues or the hard work of making sound syntactical sense in a clause. He would also append those lovely, now long neglected, initials E & OE to the bottom of his covering letters – Errors and Omissions Excepted.  The acronym could cover a multitude of sins from hangovers to spelling.

Dragons and Lightning

By Olga Peters

Published: June 1, 2011 - The Commons

BRATTLEBORO—Follow your dream. If you don’t, there are consequences, “especially if they’re dictated by the gods,” said author Willem Lange.

Lange will read from his new work, A Dream of Dragons, illustrated by Vermont artist and Caldecott medalist Mary Azarian on Thursday, June 9 at Everyone’s Books on Elliot Street.

Lange’s commentaries are heard regularly on Vermont Public Radio and he writes a column for the Rutland Herald. He has also authored eight books. including Favor Johnson: A Christmas Story.

The reading had originally been scheduled for The Book Cellar, which as been closed since the Brooks House fire on April 17.

A Dream of Dragons marks Lange’s first poetry book. It is a story of love, exploration, and the doom awaiting those who ignore their destiny.

“It was one of those to-die-for stories,” said Lange of the genesis of his eighth book, which was written in a canvas-walled tent 56 years ago,

Dragons grew out of a story the then-20-year-old Lange heard while working in a New York quarry in the summer of 1955.

Lange, who lives in East Montpelier, heard main character Martin’s story from Martin’s wife, Lottie.

Lottie told Lange how her young husband had been struck by lightning.

“Well, how do you let that go?” asked the writer.

He wrote Martin’s saga down and promptly stashed it in a drawer for over 50 years.

The “about 50-percent factual” story weaves the facts of Martin’s life with Norse mythology and Lange’s own “blurring of the characters’ lives.”

One of Lange’s favorite Norse gods, the one-eyed Odin, makes an appearance as an old beggar at the door of a Norwegian farm. The Norse fates, the Norns, which rule the destiny of gods and humans, hold tight the threads of the characters’ lives.

The epic poem Dragons, written in blank verse, begins in 1894 in Norway with Martin’s father, Olav Eriksson.

Olav dreamed of a life beyond the family farm.

“Olav the Dreamer” fancied he could hear voices beyond the horizon. Finally, he heeded the dragon’s call and sailed a small fisherman-built ship from Norway to Canada.

Olav’s fate soured when he ignored the dragon’s song to marry Marie in the French-Canadian village Lac St. Pierre.

Martin survived his father’s deadly mistake. A French-Canadian family took him in, renaming him Martin Gariepy.

At age 10, Martin saw something in the sky that “shimmered.” He stole a boat and navigated south beyond his boundaries.

The dragon’s song led a teenaged Martin to a dilapidated New York farm.

Lottie, 20 years his senior and then-wife to a drunken farmer, took Martin in. Martin grew into a man who could carry four bags of grain (400 pounds) twice around the village green.

Lottie and Martin eventually recognized love over their morning oatmeal.

Martin settled. The Norns sent lightning to settle the score.

A challenge to readers

“Everything is working its way to ultimate doom,” said Lange of the Viking sense of tragedy that infuses Dragons.

Lange said his favorite verse of the story is when Olav steers his boat toward the horizon and setting sun. Lange said that moment when a person commits to striking out is “exciting.”

Lange was nursing a broken heart emptied by the love he thought would last the rest of his life the summer he heard Martin’s story. He wrote the poem at their campsite on a homemade desk.

(His buddy wasn’t satisfied with a “simple campsite,” said Lange.)

Lange jokes that his wife, Ida, is holding out for the Dream of Dragons movie. He also says that Ida teases him by saying that early in their romance, she fell in love with Dragons before she fell in love with him. The couple married in 1959.

Ida has urged Lange for years to publish Dragons, he said.

Lange said he finally pulled the saga from the file cabinet because “it was time.”

Poetry, he said, has “always been there one way or another.”

Lange said he remembers writing “la, la, la” poetry as early as 1939 on prescription pads in the back of his grandfather’s pharmacy.

“Lange is a storyteller par excellence,” said Ib Bellew, publisher at Bunker Hill Publishing, an independent publishing house in New Hampshire that specializes in books on the arts, photography, science, and history, as well as children’s titles.

Bellew said Lange’s skill as a storyteller and local following contributed to Bunker Hill’s decision to step outside its normal subjects and publish an epic poem.

The challenge with publishing poetry is readers’ openness to reading it, said Bellew.

Also, Bellew said, Lange is not widely known as a poet.

Bunker Hill has sold about half of its 1,500-copy first printing , Bellew said.

Dragons marks Lange and Azarian’s first book collaboration. Azarian, of Plainfield, said she illustrated some of Lange’s columns for a newspaper in 1982.

“They were fun,” she said.

Azarian, who said her illustration of Odin as the old beggar is her favorite, creates her illustrations using woodcut prints. Her alphabet images graced the walls of many Vermont K-3 grade classrooms. She has also illustrated more than 50 books, including Snowflake Bentley, written by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, which won the the Caldecott Award for the best illustrated picture book of 1999.

Azarian said Dragons struck her as “such a compelling story” that it was hard for her to cut down the number of illustrations she wanted to make to the final six that appear in the book.

Living by impulse

Azarian and Lange shared their own responses to the times in their life where fate showed its hand.

Azarian said she has found it’s best for her not to force big life decisions.

“I slide my way through,” she said.

“I tend to be impetuous,” said Lange. “The longer you wait, the colder the water will be.”

In 1959, he said, he “impetuously” jumped out of a dirty work site to chase a passing woman. The woman was Ida.

Lange thinks following that impulse worked out well.

Salad Days

Brief digital discomfiture with designers and editors under pressure can make one nostalgic for the days of Wraps and Inserts, for those salad days when paste-ups were cumbersome piles of paper hiding that long extinct being The Paste-up Artist, Grant Enlargers occupied the corner spaces, and designers worked at tables rather than screens.  An unholy amount of sweat and skill is going in to ensuring The Green Garden gets to press on time but the mind boggles at the thought of pulling this off twenty or so years ago!

Romeo

Romeo

Romeo: The Story of an Alaskan Wolf has sold out.  We are reprinting for the fall. The book got the most remarkable and generous endorsement from the great and wonderful Farley Mowat. After a paragraph of fulsome praise for the book he ends with a salute to our author “I envy John Hyde as I have never envied another human being.” You can’t get much kinder than that. Thank you again Farley!

A Dream of Dragons

A Dream of Dragons

And speaking of fulsome praise and Northsome folk Willem Lange and Mary Azarian will be talking about their book A Dream of Dragons: A Saga in Verse this Thursday June 9th and Sunday June 12th at Everyone’s Books in Brattleboro http://www.everyonesbks.com/ and the Village Square bookshop in Bellows Falls http://www.villagesquarebooks.com/event/willem-lange-mary-azarian-dream-dragons respectively. We are getting to the end of a marathon of appearances but nothing has dulled the joy of watching these two transport their audience with their art and poetry. Your publisher will be there too to make sure!

Now where was I – oh yes we have a dose the hoary old saw called Commas and Capitalization. I’m sworn to secrecy but we have had our fingers rapped by better Grammarians than I Gunga Din! So long as they don’t start in on my colons I’ll be ok. I know Googling is the first and last refuge of the desperate but on this occasion Commas and Capitalization got me 577,000 results in 0.08 seconds, Comma 226,000,000 results in 0.20 seconds and Capitalization 13,800,000 results in 0.09 seconds.

I’m ready.

 

Grace Won Over Green

The Green Garden

The Green Garden and its cover: Grace won over Green. It is going to be a classic look. I liked the original but perhaps more for the conceit than the result so all’s well, author’s happy, one less moving part to worry about. Here it is:

Belle

The color proofs for Belle: The amazing Astonishing Magical Journey of an Artfully Painted Lady. They are everything we wanted and have been packed off to the author before going back to the printer with a few minor comments. The printer in Hong Kong is getting restless and wants to know how many to print. Scary stuff – overstocks and too many returns loom through the haze of enthusiasm and optimism. Ordering paper has also become an issue what with all the Japanese paper mills disrupted by the crisis over there. Have to tell them this week. The calculator is getting hot. Here is where the adventure starts (in the book I mean).

Sometimes the moving parts move about of their own accord. Next year we are publishing a monumental (in more ways than one) study of English Armor in the 15th century: The Armour of the English Knight (note the English as opposed to American spelling, noblesse oblige!). Author now wants the book split into two volumes and to publish volume two first. Makes absolute sense if you know what I mean. There’s more to this than meets the eye.

“Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,

Our bending author hath pursued the story…”

As the Bard opined, but we digress. We will return to this in time!

At the risk of extending the moving part metaphor to breaking point my desk and computer screen can look like a mechanic’s bench as I try and resist taking a monkey wrench to an awkward contract or over-inking a sales blurb in red marginal screams.  I work in piles of paper old style. It is the season for Fixits as we move into full gear for the fall list.

As in the wall list above the bench:

Intro to our web catalogue not strong enough: Fixit

Contract for our amazing The Very Scary Monster has scary clause: Fixit

Sales need sales material yesterday: Fixit

Two more bookshops want events with Henry Homeyer for his Organic Gardening (not just) in the North East: Fixit. Can’t: Henry’s boondoggling down the Grand Canyon for some Travel Magazine. Alright for some…(note to self: remind him to Tweet next time)

Rep’s Tipsheet for one of the fall titles has gone missing: redo from scratch argggh!

You get the picture…

 

A Thousand Moving Parts

Publishing has a thousand moving parts and far more than the day moveable type was invented (1040 AD by Bi Sheng in China) which makes it difficult at times to keep one’s eye on the Big Picture. We are publishing a marvelous children’s book about two butterflies and their adventures in The National Gallery in DC and things are coming together. They have an education department second to none and they like our book. That’s a big detail. A small detail would be my regret at not mentioning the author’s previous job at the National Portrait Gallery in the jacket flap copy. I hope the NPG book buyer will overlook the fact and indulge us.  Mr. Wyeth, our rep in DC, will no doubt berate us though. It would have made a good talking point for him.

A Green Garden

A Green Garden

The author of our forthcoming The Green Garden has e-mailed a mild protest about the type on the cover, doesn’t like it and nor do her friends.  Small details on covers tangle us up. Is type chosen for image, for sales, for beauty, for composition or at random? It’s a typeface designed to indicate our author’s impeccable green credentials and note the recyclable, eco-friendly feel we thought we had created. Watch this space.

The big picture is tangled up too in all the small details of e-book publishing that we are about to dive into. Our two Vermont authors are about to get the treatment so watch out for Henry Homeyer’s Organic Gardening: published whole and in part (Print $17.50 Whole e-book $9.95 and $1.00 each for 12 monthly bits). We thought of publishing Willem Lange’s Dream of Dragons verse by verse at a dime a stanza but opted to push out the whole lot at $10.95. Big picture? I think e-books are essentially unshelvable and therefore will never replace the serendipity that our minds demand from books. Small detail? Folks are nuts about e-books by and large (in both senses of the word) so here we go!

from the Back Room at Bunker Hill

Ib Bellew to speak at IPNE Conference

Ib Bellew has been asked to speak at The New England Publishing Conference on March 25 – 26, 2011 hosted by IPNE.

Ib will be talking about “On the Cutting Edge: Trends in Book Publishing”. Here is a bit from his planned talk.

“We are all publishers now.  What to do?  The Gatekeepers have fled and the doors are wide open: infinite access. Or so the purveyors of Ipads and Kindles tell us. Even self-publishing is passé.

How to keep up?  There are so many forms of publishing and that has always been so, from the town crier to the mass paperback by way of the museum catalogue and the pamphlet to name a few grains of sand on the beach.

Now we have the internet and printing presses that can, or soon will, produce single copies almost for the same price as a standard multiple run, design software that can enable an average farmyard chicken to design his own coop and perimeter, and the Internet or a street gossip system that would be the envy of any superannuated Italian Village Elder– those real pros I used to watch on the square in Bologna every spring along with the pigeons and the publishers attending the Book Fair.

Publish and be damned. Both are now as easy as pie.  But what’s wrong with this picture? Why is it that we are throwing all sorts of babies out of every conceivable shape of window with this Bathwater that is not entirely of our making?

First let’s look at the Bath Water: What is making it murky?”

Hear Ib’s wisdom on March 25th from 11am to 12:25pm. To find out how to order your ticket click here.

An interview with Willem Lange, author of A Dream of Dragons

Ib Bellew: Of the poets you admire — Frost and Service, Tennyson and Lear, and Kipling for that matter — who inspired you most to put pen to paper and with which poems or ideas?

Willem Lange: It’s so long ago now, it’s hard to say.  My mother was a lover of poetry and gave me several collections of chestnuts – one of which, Best-Loved Poems of the American People, I cherish today, though it’s disintegrating – full of variously amusing, provocative, and inspiring poems.  Many I would now consider bathetic, though as an adolescent I was inspired by them.  Some still grab me, like The Arab’s Farewell to his Horse.  The same summer I wrote Dream, I also wrote The Petrifaction of David Noreau, a goofy imitation of Robert Service, internal rhyme and all.  I came later to Frost, and only slowly recognized his sensibility as mine, though turbocharged and beyond me as a writer.  I love Frost most of all for his ability to focus on little details – the ice falling from birches onto the frozen crust below; the bereaved mother looking out an upstairs window at her husband digging a grave for their dead child – and making us stop to see and feel them.

Ib Bellew: The importance of the little detail is important to Charles Simic too.  He once wrote that “This is where the poets come in. In place of the historian’s broad sweep, the poet gives us a kind of reverse history of what, in the great scheme of things, are often regarded as ‘unimportant’ events, the image of a dead cat, say, lying in the rubble of a bombed city, rather than the rationale for that air campaign.”  I think Dream of Dragons plays on that theme throughout and uses a small boy and a boat to bring in all the emotion of immigration, of arriving, of being American in a way, or am  I inflating your sail a little too much?

Willem Lange: Mm, yes, I think you are.  Though the best storyteller I’ve ever known, an old Adirondack guide [named Bill], had (I see in retrospect) that gift of using the tiny detail – the smell of a hand lotion, the lash of a branch across a cheek – that was absolutely captivating.  He always began with things you knew well, or wanted to believe you did, and then took you along with him on the story.  His description of a big, mangy old bear sow rooting in his can dump one night; his frightened assistant, Frank, holding the five-cell flashlight over Bill’s shoulder so he could see to shoot; and the light (and Frank) disappearing as soon as Bill shot, while the bear growled and ran in circles through the cans looking for what had hit her.  He told me the story almost 60 years ago, but it obviously made an impression.  There were many others.

Ib Bellew: Name some poems you loved as a youth.

Willem Lange: Ulysses, Journey to Ithaca, Charge of the Light Brigade, Ballad of the Northern Lights, Bill the Bomber, Gunga Din…I am moved by the thoughts and actions of men in desperate straits.  Cyrano “My panache!”

Ib Bellew: Were you ever enamored of Bob Dylan or talking of bathos of country western singing? Were you an odd man out, still liking Tennyson and Kipling rather than T.S. Eliot and Auden?

Willem Lange: Bob Dylan, no; I was busy raising kids and teaching when he was coming up, and couldn’t play the chords he used, anyway.  Country and folk music, yes; I loved it – but more the old-timey stuff, like Jimmy Rodgers, Hank Snow (who named his son Jimmy Rodgers Snow), Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Burl Ives. Yes, I was kind of odd man out, anyway, because I read poetry at all.  None of my friends would have known Eliot from Marshall Petain (or cared).  We were all about camping, tramping, climbing, folk and square dancing, and whitewater canoeing.

Ib Bellew:  Back to Tennyson and company: In Dream, I think you combine many of these poets’ different strengths: evocation of the natural world, epic allusion, the pace of ballad, moral and ethical issues.  What else do you share with them?

Willem Lange: Dream, I think, builds on what you mention, but adds the old Scandinavian sense of doom that awaits even well-favored men who turn aside from, and put aside, the dreams that motivated them as young men.

Ib Bellew: You describe in your preface how the subject arose but can you expand on how you conceived the poem before you actually went off into the woods and wrote it down?

Willem Lange: I have no idea why or how it started.  I was only two months into recovery from the traumatic end of a relationship I had considered lifelong, so my nerves were a little on edge.  When I heard Marty’s story, I just grabbed it – just as I did, decades later, Favor Johnson’s.  I didn’t have to go off into the woods.  We were already in the woods, living in a big wall tent near the quarry.  The tent was very homelike inside, with, among other conveniences, a desk and chair and my typewriter.

Ib Bellew: Had you written any poetry before?

Willem Lange: Yes, I’d been writing various terrible verses since about the age of four.  Occasionally one found its way into an anthology.  I’ve written very little overt poetry since then, but try instead to expand my prose into a metaphoric haze that I hope will produce the same subjective reaction.

Ib Bellew: Do you find it easier to bring out that “subjective reaction” in prose now rather than verse?

Willem Lange: Yep.  Verse is a lot more work, and I find that it’s no longer natural for me.  It also implies a serious, sober sensibility that I don’t possess; almost every thought or insight I have seems to have an ironic counterpoint.  Dream is an exception, and it frightens me to say, “Here it is.”

Ib Bellew: When did you first come across the Icelandic sagas?

Willem Lange: Sagas…I don’t remember.  But Dream did impel me to learn more about what I was trying to do.  Some years ago I audited a freshman seminar at Dartmouth (Professor Gaylord) that was really helpful in understanding the sagas – Norse, Icelandic, and Teutonic.

Ib Bellew: You learned to sail in pulling boats, I think, and have stuck to coastal sailing so far.  Judging from passages in Dream of Dragons, you hanker after a real deep water sail?  Did you fancy The Old Man and the Sea?

Willem Lange: None, thank you. I favor a slow time, coasts and harbors and people, like Cavafy:

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.

I did like Old Man and the Sea a lot, though.  It’s almost poetry, but verges on being mannered: Hemingway writing like Hemingway. But that’s about as close to deep water sailing as I want to get.

Ib Bellew: Tell me a little about your actual experience of Scandinavia. Did you go and see a Viking ship in the museum in Oslo?

Willem Lange: I have no ancestors in Scandinavia, except as the Norse imprinted a lot of northern Europe.  My folks were Reformed Christian peaceniks from northern Germany who came here to avoid the Franco-Prussian War.  But yes, I have been to Norway, as the leader of a tour group.  Among other things, we did visit the Viking Museum and its fantastic ships, as well as Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki.  I would go again in a heartbeat, but this time I’d ferry down to the Shetlands and Orkneys, across to the Faeroes, and on to Iceland, which I also found fascinating.

Ib Bellew: What was your longest epic voyage?

Willem Lange: In a pulling boat, from Hurricane island down East to Machias, Cape Wash, and Grand Manan.  In canoes down over a dozen Arctic rivers, the longest over 200 miles to salt water.  There were a few epics in there now and then.

Ib Bellew: Thank you for letting us publish your epic. As you say, “Here it is”. I am sure your readers will love it as much as we do.