Cover of "Ghost Writers"

“The Sin-Eater: A Breviary,” Thomas Lynch’s latest collection of poems from Paraclete Press, presents this world and the next according to Argyle, an insurance policy incarnate for unabsolved offenses and, Lynch writes, “the mouthpiece for my mixed religious feelings.”

“Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them,” part of the Made in Michigan Writers Series from Wayne State University Press, serves up a dozen ghost stories – some fiction, some true in their own way – from some of the state’s finest writers, many of them from the Ann Arbor area. Laura Kasischke (“Space, In Chains” and “The Raising”) and Keith Taylor, whose next poetry collection, “Marginalia for a Natural History,” comes out next month, are the editors as well as contributors.

Taylor, who teaches English at the University of Michigan, and “Ghost Writers” contributor Elizabeth Kostova (“The Historian,” “The Swan Thieves”) will read from the collection at Zingerman’s Roadhouse on Wednesday, Oct. 26, at the sixth annual Vampires’ Ball, a benefit for Food Gatherers. (Hunger. In Washtenaw County. In America. Sin? Horror story? This theme is definitely hanging together here.)

Scary Stories

The standout in “Ghost Writers” is “Not Even Lions and Tigers,” Steve Amick’s wryly funny tale of enforcer Harry Bennett driven mad by the “haints” of strikers and organizers he bloodied in the service of Henry Ford (though, he’d insist to his disappointed ma, “he was in his office for most of it”). As he exhibited so well in his novel “Nothing But a Smile,” Amick is just great at nailing place and period with the energizing element of utterly authentic speech. His Bennett flings off sentences studded with gems like “whorebath,” “hoohaw” and “cooked up the wheeze” (translation: authored the joke). Plus, we get some local history: Harry Bennett, born on Ann Arbor’s Wall Street; stepson of an early member of UM’s engineering faculty; a frustrated artist who raised Wyandotte chickens on his Geddesburg estate. Now you know.

With “Ghost Anecdote,” Kasischke again gives us a story of a bad-ish girl, a dead mom and suburban vice and again leaves us marveling at her lethal skill with the lightning-bolt detail (and, again, imagining she would have been a blast to cut class with in high school). Nicholas Delbanco’s “Pier Road” offers a meditation on what vanishes from a place and what remains: “What are we haunted by, and why?”

Anne-Marie Oomen’s “Bitchathane” introduces us to “spider ghosts,” via the red-haired narrator’s Aunt Toots and in the Upper Peninsula, where women in steel-toed boots do construction work alongside their husbands, have their hearts broken and, sometimes, pieced back together in a tight package of revenge. And this captivating story introduces me to Oomen’s wonderful voice, and will lead me to check out her latest collection of essays, “An American Map” (from Wayne State University Press, 2010).

Scary stuff aside, it’s fun just to do some Michigan sightseeing in the pages of “Ghost Writers.” Greenfield Village. Harbor Springs. At the Detroit Institute of Arts, the up-north high school teacher in Taylor’s “The Man at the Edge” encounters Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry panels – they “all looked as if they pictured disembodied organs of the female reproductive system.” And it’s the place – Michigan – as much as the theme of haunting, of a present given deeper meaning by an undead past – that makes this collection worth the read.

Cover of "The Sin-Eater"

“The ghosts in Michigan, perhaps like ghosts everywhere, seem to stay close to home,” the editors observe in the preface. And to this Taylor’s daughter, Faith, gets off a good one: “‘Well, good for the ghosts! At least they still call it home.’”

The Sacred and Profane

The next generation adds a special dimension as well to “The Sin-Eater.” To accompany “a couple dozen poems, a couple dozen lines each,” are a couple dozen truly fine photographs taken in Ireland by Michael Lynch, the poet’s son. (Another son, Sean, contributes a watercolor.)

Both Milford, Michigan, and Moveen in County Clare are home to Lynch, in whose magnificent “Walking Papers” Argyle made his first appearance. As with “Ghost Writers,” place and the dicey transition to an afterlife are central themes in “The Sin-Eater.” It is medieval (in sensibility if not in time) Ireland, where for a loaf of bread, a bowl of beer and six pence Argyle will squat beside a laid-out corpse, “eating sins and giving souls their blessed rest.” Like any working stiff, there are gigs he prefers more than others:

Maybe steady work with nuns whose vices

were rumored to go down like tapioca.

But no, those clever ladies lived forever

and for all their charities would starve the man

who counted for his feed on their transgressions.

No, most of Argyle’s work comes from rank-and-file sinners, whose resentful mourners may suspect a racket but will cover all the bases nevertheless. And he catches it from both sides. In “Argyle in Carrigaholt,” the “grinning” sin-eater gets chewed out by a prelate “famous for / the loud abhorrence that he preached against / adherence to the ancient superstitions.” But Argyle harbors his own contempt for those “who do a brisk trade in indulgences / and tithes and votive lamps and requiems.”

Cruelty toward the defenseless turns his stomach, and more than once he finds himself in profound solidarity with wronged innocents who succumb to the deadly sin of despair and are denied “requiem or rosary.” This refusal of official mercy is at the heart of two of the collection’s most powerful poems: “Argyle’s Ejaculations” and “He Posits Certain Mysteries.”

The father’s words and the sons’ images create a haunting whole. “The Sin-Eater” is a beautiful work of art.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor and can be scary when she sets her mind to it. Her columns are published periodically in The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

What will it take for another bookseller to open shop in the Borders/Shaman Drum neighborhood at State and Liberty, and operate a browseable place with content deep and wide? We’re talking about a books-and-mortar store a stone’s throw from the University of Michigan campus. A spot where you arrange to meet up with your husband after the two of you go your separate ways for an hour. Where you hang out until the movie starts at the Michigan Theater. Where you actually buy a book now and then – sometimes a title other than the one that got you in the real, live door.

The No. 1 Borders bookstore at Liberty & Maynard in Ann Arbor.

Keith Taylor, the poet, UM creative writing teacher and veteran local bookseller, says “it will take idealism, a lot of 80-hour work weeks, a willingness to be constantly present.”

Check, check and check. This is Ann Arbor, after all.

And then there’s Taylor’s fourth condition: “A landlord willing to rent space for less than the going rate.”

“Rents in central Ann Arbor right now will not allow for an independent bookstore, or an independent anything,” he says, “until the business owner owns the building the store is in.”

Karl Pohrt concurs – and the owner of the former Shaman Drum Bookshop, but not the building that housed it, should know: “It’s essential to own the building. If they don’t, they’ll be vulnerable.”

“Rent,” replies Nicola Rooney flatly when the proprietor of Nicola’s Books is asked why she won’t consider a move from Westgate Shopping Center to the State Street area.

We knew that, really. This is downtown Ann Arbor, after all. The market apparently won’t bear an independent bookstore in that neighborhood – Shaman Drum, which was located on South State just around the corner from Borders, closed in 2009 after nearly 30 years in business. Its former storefront is now a burger joint.

So the real question is this: If the market won’t bear a full-blown downtown bookstore, how will the community respond?

The Business of Bookstores: Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Pohrt warns, with a laugh, that opening a bookstore is like setting up shop “on the boulevard of broken dreams.” More seriously, and out of respect for his “brother and sister booksellers,” he says that “people need to know how hard this is and what’s at stake.”

Taylor says Petoskey now easily outclasses Ann Arbor as a book-buyer’s town. He has his doubts about whether even a non-traditional bookstore – a co-op, for example – could work. “I’m not sure that the book culture now is such that can support that.” (As an aside, it’s worth noting that Taylor had his doubts decades ago, too. He was working at the original Borders store when Tom Borders announced his grand expansion plans to staff. Taylor didn’t respond favorably, prompting Borders to say: “Keith! Why so negative?” It took a while, but now it’s pretty clear why.)

Taylor estimates that rent at $10,000 a month would require $2,000 a day in retail sales – “and you have to sell an awful lot of books to get to $2,000.”

The distinctive storefront of the former Shaman Drum Bookshop at 313 S. State, now a burger joint.

Especially now that Borders et al succeeded so well in institutionalizing the discount. The profit margin for the book business is 40% to 50%, Pohrt says, which to a bookstore means “2% to 3% after rent, utilities and wages.” So even with publishers starting to factor the discount into list prices, who can survive on selling books alone? Not Nicola’s, though the store never confuses the clearly segregated gifts, cards, pens and chocolates with its main event.

Do we really need to ask how many of us buy online just because we can – maybe not all the time, but often enough? Not to mention the lowest of the low: the “browsers.” Pohrt remembers them well – people who’d head out his door with nothing but an ISBN.

“If you have a bricks-and-mortar store, somebody can always undersell you,” he says. “So why should people buy books from you instead of the Internet?”

The Survivors

Our surviving indies in Ann Arbor have done so by finding more affordable space, serving niches and cultivating loyalty: Aunt Agatha’s on Fourth Street for mystery fans, Common Language at Braun Court for the LGBT community. (Owners Keith Orr and Martin Contreras, who own the neighboring \aut\ BAR, held their second annual Last Bookstore Standing fundraiser on Aug. 25.)

The book selection at beautiful Crazy Wisdom on Main Street, while more varied than you’d think, largely reflects the store’s focus on the spiritual experience. Nearby Falling Water (a little fiction, a little poetry, a little wit amid a lot of gentle self-help) is where you can happen on a lovely book for yourself while buying a lovely gift for somebody else.

Dawn Treader is an adventure; Motte & Bailey is a treasure – but used inventory, while invaluable, is another creature entirely.

But whatever their attributes, none of these sellers are – or aspire to be – what Shaman Drum was before the textbook market collapsed, or what Borders managed to remain for at least a little while until Paperchase, chocolate-covered sunflower seeds, and the long limp toward liquidation.

The storefront of Aunt Agatha's Mystery Bookstore on Fourth Avenue.

In Ann Arbor, according to Pohrt, more books were sold per capita in the 1960s than anywhere else in the country. When my husband and I moved here in 1990, it was immediately clear to me that two things mattered most to Ann Arbor: food and books. Ann Arbor is where Borders was born.

Yes, yes – but that was then and this is now. Locally owned Nicola’s Books is left standing; Barnes and Noble, the national chain that’s a relative newcomer to town, is wobbling. Ann Arbor is a plugged-in, uploaded, wired and wifi-ed, downloaded, World Wide Webosphered, test-marketed-for-a-no-newspaper place. We’re victims of our own success, says Taylor, who reminds us that UM faculty sat in front of glowing screens while Shaman Drum was shuttered. Rooney is fully mindful of all those students out there whose podlets are their link to whatever life of the mind they’ve of a mind to search out.

Is this what the community wants – is it enough?

Another Model: The Community-Based Collaborative

As Shaman Drum was reaching its crisis point in 2008-09, Pohrt says, “I woke up one morning and I didn’t know how to fix it.” The nonprofit approach wasn’t tried in time, he says.

But now Pohrt has another idea. “Start with a group of people,” he says. A representative from city government. Someone from the Downtown Development Authority. A person from UM who’s committed to book culture. “A good lawyer, a good real estate person, a good numbers person,” Pohrt says. “And somebody who knows the book business – and there are a number of these in Ann Arbor.”

And a millionaire?

One of those would be useful, too, Pohrt says, “but you also need people to buy into the idea. And this is a test for the community.”

Common Language Bookstore in Braun Court.

Pohrt envisions a community-level project resembling the Michigan Center for the Book, an initiative of the state’s Library of Michigan that’s based in Lansing but, Pohrt says, “belongs in Ann Arbor.” On the local level, such a project would nourish and promote the myriad aspects of a local book culture: Book arts, like those fostered by Hollander’s, the Kerrytown shop. Youth literacy efforts led by such operations as the nonprofits 826michigan and the Family Book Club (Pohrt’s on the board of the latter). Writing groups and “rent-a-carrel” opportunities for authors looking for both a quiet place to work and a way to support a community that will support writing.

It would also include a bookstore, of course, but one that is part of a community-wide operation that involves and fosters all the booksellers in the community: booksellers that serve markets for literary fiction and graphic novels, for antiquarian volumes and used paperbacks, and yes – for ebooks and audiobooks and all those other technologies for which people are going to spend money.

Pohrt admits that “there are problems with what I’m proposing” – not the least of which is making sure that nobody among those dogged booksellers we already have is left out of a wider effort. “Maybe each of these pieces already here would have a stake in it,” he says.

In a recent piece for The New York Times Sunday Review, fresh-off-a-book-tour author Ann Patchett (“State of Wonder”) gave a shout-out to indie bookstores around the country – including her “most beloved McLean & Eakin in Petoskey” (score one for Taylor’s street cred). She’s “so convinced that the small, locally owned and operated independent bookstore was a solid business model” that she and a partner are opening Parnassus Books next month in Nashville. One assumes that Patchett herself was able to pony up at least part of the cool million such an enterprise might require, and that she can afford to lose some of it, as Pohrt and Taylor say is almost certainly part of the deal. And more power to her.

But is Ann Arbor so different from Nashville, or Iowa City, or Milwaukee, or Oxford, Miss.? We can’t support a State/Liberty shop dedicated to selling books at the “reasonable profit” Rooney says she manages at Westgate? Will it take a community project dedicated to preserving a culture of readers and reading to keep a first-class, non-niche bookstore in the downtown neighborhood?

Pohrt acknowledges that his is a daunting proposal. “Say it’s impossible. OK, let’s go.”

The Presence of the Shopkeeper

Rooney does it, and of course the keystone is the fact that Westgate rents aren’t what @Burger had to pay (until students went home for the summer, and that Liberty Street restaurant closed). She even takes time off to visit her nonagenarian mum in England – though granted, those winter visits are in November and February, bracketing the feverish Christmas retail season – and had an honest-to-god summer vacation this year.

She does it, she reminds us, because she’s cultivated a fine staff and can trust them to hold down the fort – rather, to keep the fort open to all those savage readers out there.

The storefront of Nicola's Books in the Westgate shopping plaza, at Jackson and Stadium.

Rooney says she’s willing to be there for anybody who “wants a hand-hold” while building a State/Liberty business; she knows how it’s done. In fact, she’d consider an arrangement with a bookseller in it for the long haul who, perhaps, could master the art and science of bookselling under her tutelage and “essentially inherit it from me” when that day comes.

Still, as Taylor reminds us, a big reason for Nicola’s success is the physical presence of Nicola Rooney herself. On a recent Friday afternoon I spent the better part of an hour browsing her shelves for my husband’s birthday presents – I came in for Charles C. Mann’s new “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created” and collected a few discoveries as well.

Thanks to her distinctive British accent – equal parts charm and steel – it was easy to eavesdrop on Rooney’s sales technique. Somebody was looking for a book whose author recently had a reading at the store. “Oh, yes, a lovely man.” Small talk with shoppers about the massive, damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t preparations for Hurricane Irene. “They’re stopping the buses and the subway!” Another wanted the latest mystery in a favorite series. “If you like we can give you a call when it comes in.” Turns out the customer is from Tecumseh and was in town, stopping in the store just in case. “We could send it to you ….”

Rooney is, in all the fine senses of the word, a shopkeeper. She knows her wares and she knows her customers. She’s trained her crew to be shopkeepers, too – various customers have their various staff favorites. And they all spend lots of time on the other side of the counter, tracking down that title that should be “in history or in The Times’” but might be “tucked behind another one.” And because of all that – and, of course, a rent the market will bear – Nicola’s Books turns a respectable profit.

Rooney and two of her staffers spent a good 10 minutes – a long time in a small shop – determined to hunt down one of the three copies of “1493″ that were, the computer indicated, in the store. None were to be found. So she took my info and promised to let me know when the next copy came in (it was expected, and indeed arrived, on Monday).

I was so grateful for the attention. Once again, I was so grateful for the place. We talked for a while about books and bookselling in Ann Arbor. Then she rang up a couple of history paperbacks for me, and I handed her my Amazon.com Visa card.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor – her columns are published periodically in The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

The inner courtyard at the University of Michigan's North Quad. This year's Ann Arbor Book Festival and Writer's Conference, which takes place on June 25, will be held at North Quad, located at State and Huron.

The publishing industry as we knew it is all but gone, as is the bookselling industry. (A visit to the almost ghostly downtown Borders store on a recent Friday night grimly reminded us of this.) The Great Recession all but dried up sponsorship and grant money for the arts in general and the literary arts in particular.

So how did organizers manage to bring back the book festival for another year?

Like most of us, by deciding what expenses weren’t essential, by figuring out how to stretch a buck and by some simple community cooperation.

Check out the schedule and you’ll see that this year’s festival – set for Saturday, June 25 – is being presented essentially in conjunction with the Neutral Zone’s Volume Summer Institute and the Ann Arbor Summer Festival.

Jeff Kass, Neutral Zone’s creative arts director who is heading up the book festival this year, says organizers were faced with “trying to move forward with the book festival under difficult economic circumstances, and we really didn’t have the resources to go it alone anymore.”

Kass apparently saw an opportunity to tap the talent that was coming to town to lead workshops for the Volume institute at Neutral Zone. The annual program “brings in some pretty terrific instructors, writers and performers,” says Kass. Integrating them into the festival happened by moving it from its traditional long weekend in early May to late June.

Bill Zirinsky, owner of Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tearoom, remains a key sponsor of the festival; Kass says Evans Young of the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science & the Arts, and Peter Schork of Ann Arbor State Bank have “stepped up” their own commitments to the event. And, Kass says, foregoing the expense of a festival executive director freed up some funds for conference scholarships (email Kass at a2bookfestival@gmail.com for scholarship info).

The Summer Festival partnership, Kass says, opened up some new venues for the festival and the Volume institute, including the Stern Auditorium at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The festival tent will be pitched on Ingalls Mall for some afternoon discussions and the presentation of this year’s Leader in the Literary Arts (LILA) awards to local storyteller Laura Pershin Raynor and to Ann Arbor’s Family Learning Institute and its executive director, Amy Rolfes.

“These kinds of alliances are the way things are going to have to be,” Kass says, and the “vision for the book festival is going to continue to evolve: What does the community really want as a literary arts festival?”

The heart of the matter, of course, remains the Writer’s Conference and its sessions focusing on the crafting of fiction, poetry, memoir and literature for young adults; Kass says he’s hoping for a “healthy turnout.” Things get started at 8:30 a.m. with the annual Breakfast With the Authors (emceed by Raynor), when festival and conference participants will gather informally at the Image Café in the North Quad building, located at the southeast corner of State and Huron. The conference is organized into three sets of sessions led by 14 writers – among them Kass (a creative writing teacher at Pioneer High and Eastern Michigan University), Lori Tucker-Sullivan and Cynthia Furlong-Reynolds. Margaret Yang returns this year as well. (See the full list on the festival’s website).

Volume institute faculty who are also on board at the Writer’s Conference include poets Roger Bonair-Agard and Kevin Coval. (Coval’s conference session, “Working Class Poetics,” sounds intriguing: “It’s vital to remember the power of art to bring the everyday lives of workers into the forefront of the public’s literary imagination.”) And this year’s wrap-up Author’s Forum will feature Ann Arbor writer Karen Simpson and her first novel, Act of Grace. (On Wednesday, June 15, Simpson will give a reading from the novel at Nicola’s Books, starting at 7 p.m.)

Linda Fitzgerald, whose day job is running her own marketing communications business in Ann Arbor, was sending out feelers early on about the prospect for this year’s festival; she says she might have missed one conference since the festival’s inception 2003.  While noting that there’s “lots of local talent” leading the festival sessions this year, Fitzgerald says she hasn’t settled on the sessions she might check out this time around.

But she has watched the character of the conference evolve along with the “seismic changes in the world of publishing itself” – Fitzgerald herself is now investigating the self-published “e-book route” for her mystery novel, Mantra for Murder. A marketing orientation in the early years – “all knees and elbows” in the quest to snag an agent and find a publisher, she says – has shifted to something that is “more supportive and fun and inspirational.” The focus on nurturing a “community of writers.”

(A friendly aside to the festival folks: Update the website! The Ann Arbor News and Shaman Drum Bookshop are listed as sponsors – both organizations are no longer in business.)

Poetry in the Garden

One Pause Poetry, sponsored by Copper Colored Mountain Arts, will present Laura Kasischke and Keith Taylor reading Poetry in the Garden on Friday, June 17, from 7 to 9 p.m. at 7101 W. Liberty Road in Ann Arbor.

Kasischke’s latest collection of poetry is titled Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon Press), and several of her new poems appeared in the April issue of Poetry magazine. Taylor’s Marginalia for a Natural History will be out from Black Lawrence Press in October.

It’s Still 2011, So We Are Not Late With This

The Library of Michigan announced its list of 2011 Michigan Notable Books – in December 2010. So we’re thinking this means that these books will remain notable for another six months, right?

Well, it just so happens that some of them may remain notable for even longer than that. So there.

This could especially be the case for local favorites who made this (last?) year’s list, including Thomas Lynch’s Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (Norton) and Eden Springs: A Novella by Laura Kasischke (Wayne State University). Another really fine title that made the list is Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams, edited by M.L. Liebler (Coffee House Press). Among this book’s many riches are selections by Lynch and that fine poet of blue-collar work and workers Philip Levine. It made a dandy Christmas present for my brother – and kudos to Nicola’s Books for the featured shelf space.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor and has been known to compile her own notable lists. Her columns are published periodically in The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

Book cover for "The Ugliest House in the World" by Peter Ho Davies.

Two works of fiction by University of Michigan creative writing teacher Peter Ho Davies spent way too much time on my “gotta get to” list. And “The Welsh Girl” (2007) and “The Ugliest House in the World” (1997) were fine company when I finally claimed for them a couple of snowy weeks in February.

“The Ugliest House in the World” (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin) is a collection of deftly composed short stories that are tragic, comic and often a dead-on blend of the two. They take us from colonial southern Africa to anti-colonial Kuala Lumpur, from Wales to – hilariously – Welsh-speaking Patagonia. (“Butch should have known it would come to this when the Kid started shooting ostriches again.”) And while we know things won’t end well for the British in Natal, the officers’ dining-table tales of heroism in the face of Zulu savagery are a ripping good time.

Davies’ tragicomic pitch is perfect in “The Silver Screen.” Meetings of the central committee of the Fourteenth Branch of the Kuala Lumpur Communist Party also serve as life-study sessions for Lee, an aspiring local artist who paints posters to advertise Hollywood films (the operator of the local movie theater is a comrade):

There was an unwritten law that during meetings Lee would be ignored, while the serious business of world communism was conducted. Yet on certain evenings – the night that Lee was sketching his poster of Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, for instance – the communists would argue longer and more passionately, with more sweeping strokes of the hand, their heads held higher and their brows creased deeper.

On the other hand, no one would look up from his food the night that Lee was trying to get a likeness of Sydney Greenstreet. They all held their bowls of rice that much closer to their lips and waved their chopsticks before their faces as they talked.

The branch is eventually ordered into the jungle to join the fight against British occupation, and Lee finds himself with the platoon, documenting the drama with his sketchbook and pencil.

There is little to relieve the poignant sorrow in some of the stories. In “Union,” striking Welsh quarrymen struggle to hold their families together and to hold out against the English mine owners who employ starvation and Cornishmen as strikebreakers. In the title story and “I Don’t Know, What Do You Think?” Davies is stealthy in sliding a revelation in here, slipping the tissue off another there, until he’s laid the full, sad state of affairs before you.

He exhibits an unsentimental compassion for human frailty, and there are recurring allusions to what ordinary people risk when they choose to claim simple pleasures. And his narratives are marked by quick bursts of horror – a new lamb is untangled from fence wire, but not before it has lost an eye to a patient crow; a machete-wielding rebel commander gives a fearful villager a swift lesson in the paramount importance of the present moment; a dragoon sergeant crushes a defiant Welshman’s fists with a rifle butt: “The sound of breaking bone could be heard all the way down High Street.”

Book cover for "The Welsh Girl," by Peter Ho Davies.

The centrality and illusoriness of ethnic identity is the unifying theme of Davies’ work (little accident – he was born in Britain to a Welsh father and Chinese mother) and at the heart of “The Welsh Girl.” Outside a village in the hills of North Wales, unwelcome English soldiers have finished a camp that is to house German prisoners seized after D-Day. Many of the villagers are indifferent or feign to be – the English are the real enemy – but the foreigners behind the fence are irresistible to the boys in the village.

Jim, a child evacuee from the Blitz, at first calls them “nasties.” One prisoner in particular – Karsten, whose “smattering” of English gives him the power to choose whether his unit will surrender or burn – fascinates Esther, the Welsh girl of the title and the literal embodiment of cultural ambiguity. A parallel story – that of a German refugee whose language skills are of use in the British interrogation of the captive Rudolf Hess – adds another layer of profound complexity to Davies’ novel, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

“The Welsh Girl” is a remarkable meditation on nationalism as both the impetus to destructive power and a bunker for the powerless. When is a sense of place a curse instead of a comfort? What kind of powers do captives hold? What happens to innocents caught on the fence?

Davies, who is on the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at UM, says he is at work on a novel and a new collection of stories, “but they’re a couple of years away as yet.” In the meantime, delve into Davies’ backlist. And after you finish “The Welsh Girl,” check out “Deleted Scenes” in the Odds, Ends & Outtakes section of Davies’ website. Yes, there’s more.

The Steads at Nicola’s Books

Ann Arbor’s Erin Stead, who won the 2010 Caldecott Award for her illustrations in “A Sick Day for Amos McGee,” will visit Nicola’s Books with her husband, Philip, the book’s author, at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 8. The store is located in the Westgate Shopping Center, at the corner of Jackson and Maple. And check out a very charming profile of the couple in February’s Ann Arbor Observer.

You know – that place where everyone knows where everyone else lives and everybody knows everybody else’s business and, no matter how insipid or irrelevant, has an idiotic opinion on it all, one generally borne of grinding frustration, depthless boredom and a general, yawning poverty of the spirit …

A photo of Frances and Joseph Gies, from their book "Life in a Medieval Village."

No. I do not need to get on Facebook.

But maybe somebody out there who is plugged into this dynamic global engine of online communal solidarity-ishness can take a break from investigating what your fifth-grade gym teacher had for breakfast and help us out here.

The mystery opens a few days after Christmas, when my husband and brother-in-law drop me at the Borders in Peoria, Ill., on the way to relive their childhood at a matinee screening of “Tron: Legacy.” Browsing the history section, I come across a paperback edition of “Life in a Medieval Village,” by Frances and Joseph Gies, and settle into an armchair.

And there I learn, from the back cover, that the Gieses “live on a lake near Ann Arbor, Michigan.” And there’s this dear photo of an elderly pair who appear to be Grandma and Grandpa circa 1948, but they’re also two scholars who’ve spent their lives together researching and writing almost two dozen books about life in the Middle Ages. How cool is that?

Thus intrigued, this MA in history delves into meaty research the very day we get home after the holidays. And what do I learn from Wikipedia? That Mr. Gies, University of Michigan class of 1939, passed away on April 6, 2006, and, with Frances, “collaborated on a number of books” that “are respected amongst historians and archeologists.”

So the opportunity has passed to talk to this gentleman about the prodigious work of a lifetime. But all is not lost. So it is on to the Ann Arbor District Library to collect two armloads of the Gieses’ books in hardback, including “Life in a Medieval Village”:

The modern village is place where its inhabitants live, but not necessarily or even probably where they work. The medieval village, in contrast, was the primary community to which its people belonged for all life’s purposes. There they lived, there they labored, there they socialized, loved, married, brewed and drank ale, sinned, went to church, paid fines, had children in and out of wedlock, borrowed and lent money, tools, and grain, quarreled and fought, and got sick and died.

Tack on “paid dearly to eat sandwiches at Zingerman’s and waste many a fine fall afternoon at Michigan Stadium” and that pretty much sums up Ann Arbor in 2011, no?

Of course not. People come and go so quickly here – as did the Gieses, a progression of book flaps informs us. In 1974, when “Life in a Medieval Castle” was published, they lived in the Chicago suburb of Barrington. When “Women in the Middle Ages” came out in 1978, they had moved in Oakton, Va. The parents of three and grandparents of three more were living on that lake near Ann Arbor when HarperPerennial brought out the paperback edition of “Life in a Medieval Village” in 1991. “Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel” followed in 1994; “A Medieval Family” was published in 1998. Local obituary records show that Mr. Gies was in his 90s when he died in Maine in April 2006.

Then, as always when you’re sleepless at 3 a.m., inspiration seizes you: The go-to guy here has to be über-townie Geoff Larcom, formerly of The Ann Arbor News and now a media guy for Eastern Michigan University. My erstwhile colleague, who is on a first-name basis with every single person in the world born after the Spanish-American War who ever lived in Ann Arbor, can tell me all about the Gieses.

Or not. All Geoff can do is helpfully point out a typo in my e-mail and otherwise show off. As far as he knows,

The only Gies (not Giesn) were the late Tom and Thelma Gies. He was a prominent business prof for U-M. Died about 20 years ago, and Thelma recently. Lovely couple, but likely not related to Frances and Joseph. Tom and Thelma’s son, Chris, has a son named TJ that [sic] works for The Pistons.

When he finds out what TJ had for breakfast on Thursday, Geoff will no doubt fill me in. (In that same e-mail, Geoff told me he was wearing a “grey shirt with black-themed tie” – I did inquire – but here’s a word to the media relations folks at EMU: Don’t be fooled. In a newsroom bulging with competition, Geoffy was the sartorial eyesore. The mere memory of that taxi-yellow shirt with the red golf tie can still bring on the dry heaves.)

If Geoff can’t help, maybe the rest of the world can. So now I’m scattering this on the cyberwaters: Whither Frances Gies?

The Latest Fuss over Huck Finn

The instantly notorious “Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition” officially hits the bookstores on Tuesday. This is the version “edited” by Auburn University’s Alan Gribben to banish the word “nigger” and replace it with the word “slave.” Gribben says his intent is to secure the novel’s place on school reading lists. Much airtime and print space was given over to outrage. But how many of us merely rolled our eyes when we heard the news?

However well-intentioned, this latest attempt to “cope” with the racially offensive language that makes Twain’s great novel a routine target for censors on school boards is a silly one. But it will take its place in the continuing and decidedly un-silly debate over how to teach “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Here’s my take: The “S” word describes an abomination that many Americans honestly view as a mere bygone. The history of slavery in the United States is quite a bit more. The “N” word is an abomination that many Americans would prefer be gone from the language. It won’t – and it shouldn’t be gone from Twain’s imperfect masterpiece. And to “cleanse” the novel of it is as dishonest and ultimately pointless as taking to the House floor to recite a Constitution cleansed of the Founders’ tally of one slave as three-fifths of a person.

But in a New York Times op-ed piece (“Send Huck Finn to College,” Jan. 16, 2011), short-story writer Lorrie Moore introduces something new to this old fight. Speaking from what she calls “a mother’s perspective,” Moore argues that “‘Huckleberry Finn’ is not an appropriate introduction to serious literature” and that it fails as a tool for encouraging young people – including “the young black American male of today” – to read great literature. So, Moore suggests, why not wait to teach it at the university level, “where the students have more experience with racial attitudes and literature”?

While she doesn’t fully address the controversy – if “Huckleberry Finn” isn’t part of the curriculum, it should still be on the shelves in whatever middle and high school libraries still exist these days – Moore makes important points.

I’m not speaking from a mother’s perspective or a teacher’s perspective. I’m speaking from the perspective of another reader who deeply admires this great novel – complete with its ending, which reduces drama to farce. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” ends with boys’ play – Tom Sawyer appears on the scene and persuades Huck to make an “adventure” out of rescuing the again-captive Jim – perhaps because to end it with Huck and Jim triumphing on their own would have been farce in another form.

Huck Finn first appears in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” – which, Twain wrote, “is not a boy’s book at all. … It is only written for adults.” With “Huckleberry Finn,” these two books about boys have been twinned and maybe shouldn’t be. I gave copies of both to my nephew for his ninth birthday last summer. While I hoped he’d be able to enjoy Tom now, I assumed Huck would sit on his shelf, hopefully for “later.” While “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is a story for children and for adults, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is not a “boy’s book.”

Local Poets Get National Play

Thomas Lynch of Milford, Mich. – a small town north of Ann Arbor – introduces Argyle the sin-eater in four poems that appear in the February issue of Poetry magazine. All that’s to admire about Lynch’s work is on display as he takes us to Ireland and explores to the pace of a beating heart his themes of death, faith, love and – here in “He Posits Certain Mysteries” – mercy, after a suicide:

… Argyle refused their shilling coin

and helped them build a box and dig a grave.

“Your boy’s no profligate or prodigal,”

he said, “only a wounded pilgrim like us all ….”

Lynch’s “The Sin-eater: A Breviary,” upcoming from Paraclete Press, has us looking forward to autumn. [Editor's note: Lynch's latest collection of poetry, "Walking Papers," was reviewed in the October 2010 Book Fare column.]

“Still Life,” a jewel by the University of Michigan’s Linda Gregerson, was set in an impressive two-page facing spread in the Nov. 29 issue of The New Yorker. And in December, Poetry featured “The Selvage” by Gregerson and a pair of poems by Charles Baxter, whose novel “The Feast of Love” secures him as a permanent local in my book, even if he did decamp for Minnesota. Baxter’s weavings of music and memory are shot with metallic threads of pain in both “Please Marry Me” and “Some Instances.” December was “The Q&A Issue,” and the brief discussions with the poets that follow each work are a real treat.

Local Readings

Deborah Rodriguez, author of the 2007 memoir and book club favorite “Kabul Beauty School,” reads from new novel “A Cup of Friendship” on Saturday, Jan. 29, at 3 p.m. at Nicola’s Books.

University of Michigan’s Nicholas Delbanco reads from “Lastingness: The Art of Old Age,” at the downtown Borders on East Liberty at 7 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 31, and at Nicola’s Books at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 8. You might have heard Delbanco talking about late-life creativity on NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Jan. 21 (or read Brooke Allen’s tetchy take on the book and its writer in the Jan. 23 New York Times Book Review). While some artists run out of gas as they run out of years, Delbanco observes, others develop a sharper focus and a deeper intensity in the liberation found in work as its own purpose. Good news for the really, really late bloomers among us.

The UM English Department’s Zell Visiting Writers Series brings National Book Award finalists Mary Gaitskill and Carl Phillips to town next month. Gaitskill, a novelist and UM grad, reads on Thursday, Feb. 10; poet Phillips appears a week later, on Feb. 17. UM grads Suzanne Hancock, a poet, and fiction writer Valerie Laken (“Dream House”) will also read, on Thursday, Feb. 24. The Zell events start at 5:10 p.m. at the UM Museum of Art’s Helmut Stern Auditorium.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor and sort of enjoys being tetchy, from time to time. Her reviews for The Ann Arbor Chronicle appear on the last Saturday of each month.

Inscription from the author's grandmother on the book

Real books, made of paper and ink. From real stores, made of bricks and mortar: Nicola’s Books. Common Language. Crazy Wisdom. Falling Water. There are real treasures at Dawn Treader, Motte & Bailey, West Side Book Shop and the other used bookstores in our area. Yes, yes, Amazon is easy and “cheaper.” But at the local Barnes and Noble or Borders stores, you might find a neighbor behind the sales desk, or in the aisles.

Among the great bargains to be found at used bookstores are the deals you get when you reach for an interesting title and discover an inscription on the flyleaf. Two stories in one!

Dawn Treader Book Shop is great for this kind of hunt – especially its children’s section, which has a wonderful collection of old books hidden here and there amid the piles of multicolored, ‘80s-era paperback dross. Age adds charm and mystery to many of the inscriptions, which are more often than not written in fountain pen with the elegant sweep of fine and intent penmanship.

And people had great names back in the day: To Alver & Daffield, Christmas 1928, Grandma J. – “Don Sturdy In the Tombs of Gold,” by Victor Appleton. Or Petter from Willet, Christmas 1930. – “The Last Dragon,” by Dan Totheroh.

Inscriptions for adults are often more pointed:

To my beloved – just for dreamin’ – Lee, 1942. – “Vagabond House,” by Don Blanding

To Frank, the man with the medieval mind. Charles, May 1992, Ann Arbor – “The Making of the Middle Ages,” by R.W. Southern

Christmas ’78: To make you a better “pitcher-taker!” Richard & Anna – “On Photography,” by Susan Sontag

On the upper left of the flyleaf of a Grosset & Dunlap edition of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” To John + Sara Wolferd. From Aunt Anne Herron, Christmas 1945 is penned with a flourish in violet ink. There’s more at the bottom right corner of the page: For happy hours. And still more, this time in ballpoint, smack-dab in the center in a rounded hand: Passed down to Chantel.

*** *** *** ***

Some inscriptions aren’t as interesting as the books they’re in: “From Avery to Neil. 1916.” – “The Boy Allies at Liege,” by Clair W. Hayes, copyright 1915.

Maybe in 1915, or at least in America in 1915, the Great War could still be marketed as a glorious adventure – “the greatest war in all history,” as Hayes ends the book. He produced a series that saw “The Boy Allies” (18-year-old Hal Paine and his chum Chester Crawford) “In the Trenches,” “With the Cossacks” and “On the Firing Line; or Twelve Days’ Battle on the Marne.” You don’t need a hundred years’ hindsight (four years were more than enough) to cringe at the very idea of stories like these. Hey, why not “The Bobbsey Twins at Passchendaele?” (“This mud is jolly!” chuckled Freddie with a playful shake of his matted yellow curls. “Look there!” cried dark-eyed Bert. “Let’s join that fellow in the swimming hole! He’s waving us over!”)

Presumably Neil was too young to join up even by 1917, and saw his combat in the pages of this very strange book. Did his age keep him out of combat in the “greater” war that followed? Did he ever feel disappointment at “missing out”? At what age did he fully appreciate his double stroke of luck?

*** *** *** ***

Inscriptions from my grandmother started early in my life: Happy Birthday From Grams, With Love 1961 – “Custard the Dragon,” by Ogden Nash, and Love From Grams, Christmas 1961 – “Custard the Dragon and the Wicked Knight,” by Ogden Nash.

Did she want us to call her “Grams?” We called her Grandma Sylvia. She raised three kids by herself during the Depression and didn’t have much money later, either, but she never let Christmas or the birthdays of her seven grandchildren pass without a gift. Sometimes she’d send a check. (Money!) We’d carefully endorse it over to our banker – Dad – and he’d hand out the cash.

Last summer I discovered one of Grandma Sylvia’s checks in my father’s desk – a check for three dollars. I think of the pleasure my decently pensioned mother has taken in showering her two grandchildren with Christmas gifts. And how, in the spring of 1961, Grandma Sylvia bought a pair of “Custard the Dragon” books, wrapped up one for the third birthday of her then-only granddaughter, and put the other away until December.

*** *** *** ***

Sometimes an inscription doubles as a literary review. My Everyman’s Library edition of Thoreau’s “Walden” is inscribed by my oldest friend. We met in seventh grade when we thought we had little in common, and have spent 40 years discovering to our joy – and, sometimes, sorrow – how much we share. Her simple inscription, a farewell as I left home for college, reads “Domenica – from Lisa, August 1976.” It makes me laugh because I remember her assessment of Thoreau and of me, deep in my Transcendentalist period the summer before senior year: “What are you, crazy? Thoreau was a lazy-ass loser. He needed to shut up and get a job.”

*** *** *** ***

“May 1981 – To Ann – our first grandchild – We hope you will enjoy these poems as much as we have – Your Benton grandparents.”

This note appears in a copy Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses” that I found in the children’s section at Dawn Treader. I have copy of my own – it was a wedding shower gift. It is inscribed on the page where the poem “At the Seaside” appears:

“Always remember

And never forget:

Don’t be afraid

To get your feet wet.

You can put your shoes in my clothes dryer anytime.

Love, Cathy”

My cousin Cathy taught me how to read. My primer was a copy of “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” Cathy was also my first best friend, and among the many reasons I adored her was because she, my much older cousin (five years!) had chosen me as her companion; we grew up around the block from each other.

The shoes? We were under a standing order from our mothers not to play near The Creek – rarely more than The Trickle back then, but still. So early one morning Cathy and I walked across the neighborhood park to play near The Creek. And, inevitably, I fell in. The Trickle barely covered my 6-year-old ankles, but still. Cathy was a quick thinker (another reason I adored her). Squish-squash-squish, I followed her back to her house, where my aunt and uncle miraculously slept through the clunkity-bang of my red PF Flyers taking a spin in their dryer.

Cathy died more than a decade ago. The Creek is much deeper now. And every time I visit my mother in the house I grew up in, I take a walk across the neighborhood park. If I ever fall in, I guess I’m on my own.

*** *** *** ***

For my nephew’s 9th birthday, I gave him copies of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (and many thanks to the clerk at Nicola’s who led me right to the editions designed for young readers). I kept my inscriptions simple: To Frankie, Happy Birthday 2010, Love, Aunt Domenica. Maybe he’ll read Tom Sawyer sooner and Huck later. Like the Benton grandparents, I so hope he will enjoy them as much as I have.

A title on my list this Christmas is Patti Smith’s “Just Kids.” The rock musician’s memoir of the boho New York years spent with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe won this year’s National Book Award for nonfiction. In her acceptance speech earlier this month, she said: “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book – there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

Make a note of that.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor is a voracious reader who lives in Ann Arbor and has been known to write on many things, including books.

Cover of Thomas Lynch's "Walking Papers"

Lucky me. Lucky us.

Lynch is a writer who chooses to call things by their proper names. Death is death. An ass is an ass. Love is bliss, except when it is something else entirely.

And when he puts his intelligence and honesty and lurking wit to observations of human-scale profundities, he finds solace in even the harshest truths.

“Oh Say Grim Death” muses on the most inexplicable of blows: A child is killed. We learn of it – he died in a fire, on a Thursday morning – from what is cut into a 18th-century headstone, and follow the search in that New Hampshire town as certain as it would be anywhere, for a reason to have “faith / In God’s vast purposes. As if the boy / Long buried here was killed to show how God / Makes all things work together toward some good.”

Just as certain is this:

… Grim death destroys us all

by mighty nature’s witless, random laws

Whereby old churchmen, children, everything –

All true believers, all who disbelieve,

Come to their ashen ends and life goes on.

There are simpler observations in “Walking Papers,” and observations of simpler things.

Maybe “Euclid,” for example, was just another working stiff. The Greek geometer’s insight – that “distance / from a center point can be both increased / endlessly and endlessly split” – could just as easily have occurred to Murray the GM parts trucker in one of those moments of mental space when he was waiting to clear customs at Niagara Falls.

At “Monaghan’s Fish Market,” there are cases of fish “filleted and laid out like the swarm of souls / on the Sistine Chapel ceiling Michelangelo / painted for the pope. . . .”

And from the operator of Milford’s Lynch and Sons Funeral Directors comes a certain view of Pavarotti’s funeral – and we learn that nobody can silence a gasbag quite like an undertaker.

A first encounter with “Corpses Do Not Fret Their Coffin Boards” gives the impression of a more loving spin on the admonition to count your blessings. Return to it, and you recognize that “unholy dread” (“the weight of too much liberty” that too many of us know), the one that sends us to hunting up the metronome: to counting, to collecting, to keeping score. Lynch finds his peace in the velvet-gloved strictures of the sonnet. (At least until he hits 52.)

Other than an occasional burst of bitter laughter, there is (of course) no comfort in Lynch’s scorching assessment of the sorry crew that cooked up the Iraq War. He lets loose his raw revulsion at the recklessness and mendacity of “Dear Mr. President,” “Dear Mr. Vice President,” “Dear Madam Secretary” and “Dear Messrs. Attorneys General” in the middle section of these poems from 1999-2009 – years, as we all remember, when stuff happened. Lynch gives stuff its rightful name here, and he serves up other names as well and pins them on donkeys.

The horror and waste – and the blowback – play out in the stable and the barnyard: A cow “with a pink udder / and its own agenda” tries to mount another cow, crushes it and leaves it to make “an awful noise” for days until a man who knows how to handle these things comes out in a truck and puts “a kill shot / between its eyes,” hoists it skyward and hauls it off. While it’s not cruelty we are witness to, it is still a ghastly scene – but being that it’s dumb animals that are involved we don’t torment ourselves trying to make sense of it. Not so when beasts with the power of reason get an itch, by god, to conceive something out of nothing.

When the smoke clears and the ash settles, Lynch is back at the theme of mortality. But these aren’t crimes; these are the breaks. From the title poem, written for fellow poet Michael Heffernan:

————————————Listen –

something’s going to get you in the end.

The numbers are fairly convincing on this,

hovering, as they do, around a hundred

percent. We die. . . .

-

So, go on out and count some syllables,

lay some lines down one after another,

check the pulses, make the meters tick,

make up whatever noise you have to make

to make some sense of the day that’s in it.

And always, always, he chooses and pairs such beautiful words, and breathes with them. From “Calling”:

It was a language I learned to speak,

Lovely and Latin, a sort of second tongue –

My parents’ and people’s, the nuns’ and priests’ –

That rose in the air like incense and song

Ghostly and Gregorian, like memories:

First gushing, then going, but never gone.

In “The Life of Fiction,” Lynch reminds us that “the sea and the weather keep coming and going.” Through senseless wars and “good” ones, after the deaths of innocents and of minor sinners with great gifts, “the sea and the weather keep coming and going.” Is that a harsh or comforting truth, salt in the wound or salvation? Does it matter?

This is what Thomas Lynch knows: “We carry on and pay the going rate / because we keep as articles of faith / there might be something for us in the mail.”

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor. Her book reviews for The Ann Arbor Chronicle appear on the last Saturday of each month.