Printmaker Jim Horton at the boundedition studio on May 16 with his Chandler & Price letterpress, made in Cleveland in the 1930s.

Its founders call boundedition a “member-based community resource for the preservation, practice and expansion of the book and paper arts.” They call themselves its managing members: bookseller Gene Alloway, book artist Barbara Brown, graphic designer Laura Earle, printmaker Jim Horton, and product designer Tom Veling, a retired Ford Motor Co. engineer.

They were moved to act when Tom and Cindy Hollander announced last summer that Hollander’s School of Book and Paper Arts would close its doors after the spring 2013 session. The school operated on the lower level of the Hollander’s Kerrytown store for more than 10 years.

Brown, a longtime teacher of bookbinding classes at Hollander’s, reached out to fellow teacher Horton as well as Earle, Veling and others who met weekly at the open studio there. Serious discussions began in February, Horton says, when “we decided that what we’d done at Hollander’s was too good to give up.”

Earle, whose family has been involved with Ann Arbor’s Maker Works, was instrumental in finding a home for boundedition inside the member-based workshop at 3765 Plaza Drive. Maker Works’ managers were receptive to letting boundedition rent some space, and Brown says Earle, her husband and her son “pretty much built the office singlehandedly” – including a set of modular work tables that can be arranged according to the requirements of individual classes.

Brown credits Earle’s energy and determination for the speed with which boundedition took shape. “It would have happened,” she said, “but Laura made it happen now instead of later.”

Ann Arbor’s community of book artists and book lovers got a chance to look around at a May 16 curtain raiser. Tom and Cindy Hollander were in attendance; Horton reports that they’ve given boundedition “a thumbs up” and Brown says “Tom has really been very supportive.”

An open house is coming up on Sunday, June 2, from 1-6 p.m. “The whole community is invited to come out to see the space,” Horton says, “to sign up for classes, to let us know if they’re interested in teaching classes.”

“We’re really looking for people with innovative ideas for classes, because we think the Ann Arbor community is very rich in skills that you may not get in a lot of other places,” he says. “We’re tapping into that.”

The managing members themselves bring a range of expertise to the project.

Horton taught art and graphic design for 40 years (he’s retired from Greenhills School) and leads workshops in printmaking and wood engraving. He’ll be teaching his first boundedition class before the month is out: Intro to Letterpress will be offered over two evenings on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Brown teaches bookbinding at the University of Michigan and exhibits her work as a member of the WSG Gallery (full disclosure: my husband is also a WSG member). She and Earle, who has run several graphic design companies, will teach a two-day session June 28-29 on how to create books using laser technology.

Alloway, owner of Motte & Bailey Booksellers and former president of the Kerrytown BookFest board, brings “a sense of history and knowledge of the book” to the boundedition project, Horton says. On June 20, he will present “Collecting Books in the Digital Era.”

“And if we need troubleshooting for anything on the tech end, we have a wiz” in Veling, Horton says.

An invitation to the May 16 curtain raiser for boundedition – the work of designer Laura Earle and printmaker and engraver Jim Horton. The text and image are silkscreened onto a plexiglass cover and the book has a Coptic-style binding, one of the techniques taught by Barbara Brown. (Not visible is the back cover – an image of books, engraved on walnut using Maker Works laser technology.)

He says boundedition will be using the summer to introduce itself to the community, flesh out the website and work out bugs in online registration, and prepare the studio for a full program of classes this fall. Also in the offing are an exhibition area and some retail space to sell finished artworks as well as bookbinding supplies, kits for calligraphers, tools for engravers and supplies for three different forms of printmaking: letterpress, lithographic and intaglio.

The business plan is based on a membership structure, with fees that start at $30 a month for students and $40 for the rest of us. Membership gets you access to the open studio and discounts on classes.

The managing members reached into their own pockets for boundedition’s starter funds, with an initial buy-in and monthly dues. “We’re on a shoestring,” Horton says. “Our goal is to break even. If we make some money, fine; but we’re really not looking at profit making.”

Both tradition and innovation will find a haven at boundedition. Horton says there will be teaching roles at for recent U-M graduates – some of them Brown’s students. But like Maker Works, he says, boundedition “in many ways is an educational model that is a glimpse into the future. Old masters have retired … and are mentoring the younger generation.”

As revenue-starved schools continue to drop the arts, skilled trades and other hands-on crafts from the curriculum, it’s increasingly up to the practitioners to pass along their skills – and an appreciation of their value – to students of all ages and stages. The managing members of boundedition are stepping up.

Tillinghast In Town

Poet and travel writer Richard Tillinghast will be reading from his latest book, “An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering,” at Nicola’s Books on Wednesday, May 29, at 7 p.m. Tillinghast is a former University of Michigan professor who now lives in Hawaii; he returns to Michigan each year to visit friends and family and lead poetry workshops at the Bear River Writers’ Conference (this year, May 30-June 3). His 1995 collection of poems, “The Stonecutter’s Hand,” is a personal favorite.

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.

I have been cobbling together a living since July 2009, when New York-based Advance Publications shut down Ann Arbor’s daily newspaper. It was a trauma, pure and simple, for me and for many of my colleagues. After almost 20 years at The News and 30 years as a newspaperwoman, my “career” was dead and the newspaper industry eventually would be, too – at least as we knew it. Some really bleak months followed for all of us.

A crowd showed up for Literati’s first event on Friday evening, April 5. The new downtown bookstore is located at Washington and Fourth Avenue.

One of the ways I pay the mortgage now is with earnings from my freelance editing business. One of my clients was the Michigan Theater, which in 2011 hired me to edit a history of the theater. The manuscript’s author, Henry Aldridge, recently retired from the faculty of Eastern Michigan University; in the 1970s he rallied the community to rescue the Michigan from the wrecking ball and for decades has been one of the theater’s organists.

Over a number of months Henry and I would meet at Biggby Coffee on East Liberty Street and, chapter by chapter, shape his story of how a movie palace built for silent films in the 1920s weathered dramatic shifts in the film industry and the damage done to downtown America by postwar suburban sprawl, to ultimately stand firm as an Ann Arbor cultural landmark. It is an inspiring tale.

After one of our sessions we stood together outside Biggby and glumly beheld the dead sidewalk in front of the newly vacated Borders flagship store – a community institution that the community could not save. The ironies did not escape us.

The loss was especially personal for Henry; the bankruptcy had thrown a young friend of his out of a job she adored. Shannon Alden was a 14-year veteran of Borders with a passion for children’s literature. Henry was prodding her to find another way to use her gifts for connecting with people and sharing her delight in books. He urged me to contact her if only to offer some moral support; both of us had taken a hard blow to our sense of purpose because of a revolution in the economics of reading. Newspapers, bookstores – the Internet was killing them both.

So it is not a little ironic that months of blogging and Facebooking kept us up to date on the city’s much-anticipated new downtown bookstore before Literati officially opened its doors at 124 E. Washington St. on Easter Sunday.

From Blog to Bricks-and-Mortar

Literati Bookstore has come into being thanks to a huge commitment from Hilary Lowe and Michael Gustafson, partners in life and business. It was exciting to see good things start to happen in the space formerly occupied by Rick Snyder’s local campaign headquarters (cue the speculation about karma). I popped in a few times this winter – one day to discover the shelves had gone up, another to observe a woman with a paint roller risking her life atop a ladder placed just so on the stairs leading to the lower level. I met Lowe and Gustafson in the flesh on an afternoon in mid-March. It was a landmark day, too – the scanning of books had commenced!

From a short distance, I spied a stack of copies of “King Leopold’s Ghost” by Adam Hochschild, a really good book about some really awful history. It was then that I got that oh-my-god-it’s-really-happening jolt – an admittedly weird response to the rape of the Belgian Congo. Lowe talked about the 100-some job applications they’d received, with Borders and Shaman Drum alumni heavily represented. She was gratified to have had such a deep pool of available talent from which to choose a staff of a half-dozen or so “book ninjas.” And she (accurately) forecast an end-of-month soft opening.

Out of town for Easter, I paid my first visit to Literati the following Wednesday. The sun shone, but a sharp wind bit at my cheeks and bare hands that April morning as I made my way up Washington Street. I knew what I was looking for: “The Yellow Birds” by Kevin Powers and “Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories” by Ron Rash. What I found as well was a beautiful space, with quirky vintage tables, chalk-on-blackboard signs and lots of natural light through windows that open on both Washington Street and Fourth Avenue.

Literati co-owner Hilary Lowe.

Right off the bat I snagged a copy of “The Ancient Murrelet” fresh out of the box – Lowe was unpacking copies of poet Keith Taylor’s new chapbook in advance of his reading at the end of the week. I browsed the fiction, poetry and periodicals filling two long walls on the street level. Downstairs is dim and cozy – that morning a quartet of readers sat around a table, their heads bent … over books, not iPhones! At least a half-dozen customers were checking out the long wall of biography, history and political science and small sections for art, travel, health, gardening, photography and more. Lowe credits Peter Roumanis, an owner of the new Vellum restaurant on Main Street, for guidance in curating the exceptional cookbook selection.

Back upstairs, I resumed my search for “The Yellow Birds” – the author’s name had momentarily fled my head. I glanced around for some help and there, shelving books in the nook devoted to kid lit, was none other than Shannon Alden, one of the select Literati book ninjas! Up until that moment we were merely warm acquaintances; now we threw our arms around each other.

She located “The Yellow Birds.” The Rash collection was on the shelf, right where it belonged. “I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats” – on display near the register – was the perfect housewarming gift for Elvis, my stepdaughter’s kitty, from my own cats Lily and Clementina. Lowe identifies herself as a “crazy cat lady” but you’d know it anyway from a casual look at her shelves. (“Crafting With Cat Hair”? Thursday’s my birthday, friends.)

Shannon handled my purchases. “Of course, you’re going to be a frequent buyer,” she said, signing me up. Another customer was leaving with a big bag of books and some parting advice: “Stay open late during SummerFest; unbelievable crowds.” Then she eyed Shannon: “I remember you!” Another Borders alum, it turned out.

So there we were, in our new downtown bookstore: Shannon back to selling books and me back to buying them. After nearly four years of pinching pennies, I was in the position to spend $77.26 that morning, and another fifty bucks the night of Taylor’s reading. If you don’t think that’s a big deal, then lucky, lucky you. Now get your fortunate self down to Literati today and match it. And then do it next month, and the month after that.

$$$$$$$

I guess it’s not surprising that this last selection in Taylor’s new book of poems resonated:

In the Hard Months

Oh, I wish I could believe
in February that the blood root
will really bloom – for its short moment,
until its petals will be knocked
off by a cold rain – in March,
or that the cone flowers will turn
to seed in September so the finches
can pick them apart in one last
frenzy of summer, or that the poem
will come again, confident
and supple in its moment on the page.

Lowe and Gustafson report that they got lots of generous advice from local book lovers and booksellers, including Taylor – “one of the very first people we met with when we first told some people we were planning on opening a bookstore downtown,” they blogged. “Since then, he’s been incredibly supportive.”

But back in the summer of 2011, he wasn’t optimistic about the future of bookselling in Ann Arbor. Talking in the wake of Borders’ demise, Taylor said he wasn’t sure the local “book culture” was robust enough to support a new independent bookstore and fill the void left by the closures of Borders and of Shaman Drum, in 2009.

Poet Keith Taylor signs copies of his new chapbook, “The Ancient Murrelet,” at his April 5 reading at Literati Bookstore.

What would it take to make a go of it? For starters, he said, “idealism, a lot of 80-hour work weeks, a willingness to be constantly present.” Obviously, Lowe and Gustafson bring all that in abundance. But Literati’s owners are doubtlessly bringing a lot of debt, which brings us to the big issue: They’ve got to make the rent. Even if Faramarz Farahanchi might be the “landlord willing to rent space for less than the going rate” – for Taylor, that’s the bottom line – Literati has to sell a lot of books, every day.

Seasons change by themselves, provided we stay out of the way. Other welcome arrivals need help. Taylor’s poems have their moment on the page because he has a gift – and because he holds up his end of the bargain and takes to pen and paper with some regularity. The Michigan Theater still stands because Henry Aldridge and others like him knew its glorious worth and worked hard and smart to save it. I’ve got money to buy books again not only because of an indecent amount of luck, but because, most days, I show up at my desk.

I ran into Jill Peek, editor and publisher of “The Ancient Murrelet,” in the big crowd for Taylor’s reading on April 5. She observed that Lowe and Gustafson have not only taken a huge financial gamble, but they’re devoting some of the most crucial years of their professional lives to the experiment. A few days later we continued the conversation. “I hope I wasn’t too preachy with my remarks about risk,” she wrote in an email, “but I often feel that in this town, those with UM or institutional affiliations do not necessarily see that what’s new and lively often requires risk-taking. That’s my observation from growing up in what became Silicon Valley.”

Precious time and lots of money – the owners of Literati Bookstore are investing both and we have an obligation to do more than sing their praises for it. They are not going to succeed just because we’re deliriously happy that they are finally here – that Ann Arbor once again has a place downtown where we can go to readings and hold book club meetings and browse while we’re waiting for a table to open or the movie at the Michigan to start. That’s all great, but unless lots of people spend money there, often, it will not survive.

Being an engaged and beloved member of the community is simply not enough.

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.

Ann Pearlman, in a photo taken earlier this month at Great Lakes Chocolate & Coffee on Jackson Road, where she chatted with columnist Domenica Trevor about her work: “I’m just doing things that are fun.”

Which, coming from the Jewish author of a memoir entitled “Infidelity,” makes considerable sense.

The fictional cookie club is hosted by narrator Marnie, whose day begins with preparations for a dozen friends who will be arriving at her Ann Arbor home that evening with food, wine and a story to accompany the ritual exchange of imaginatively presented cookies – with frequent dance breaks. But she’s also anticipating important news that evening from her older daughter and her husband in San Diego and, in a month, a grandchild from her 18-year-old, whose boyfriend is “a black ex-convict and aspiring rap star.”

Pearlman belongs to a real Christmas cookie club here in Ann Arbor, and reading her bestseller had me fantasizing about how lovely it would be put something like that together with friends whose company I treasure all year round and don’t see as often as I’d like. But then I thought again about the generally sluggish crowd I hang with and how the kinder ones would simply laugh at me. Righto. What say we just meet for pink drinks in January, hmm?

Such a lame crew, I suspect, would mystify Pearlman. Among her commitments: She’s a writer (seven published books). She’s an artist. She’s an adventuresome cook (her latest effort extends to homemade liqueurs). By her own account, the boundary between her family and her friendships is often indistinct.  She has maintained a psychotherapy practice in Ann Arbor even as her writing career became firmly established. And the day we spoke, this mother of three and grandmother of four was looking forward to dancing the night away at the Necto’s Townie Party, despite a lingering cough from a bout of illness that put her off the cookies at this year’s meeting of the club.

‘Sacredizing’ Time

Is she “driven”? Such a harsh word; such a joyless concept. Pearlman calls herself “hyperactive,” but that implies frenzy – movement without purpose. Pearlman gets things done.

Pearlman’s father, she says, “didn’t get to finish his story.” He was in his 40s when he died at home of a heart attack. She was 19; she witnessed it.

“For six months afterward,” she says, “I was wandering around, saying ‘Life is meaningless. Life is meaningless.’ I drove my mother crazy.”

She was obsessed, she said, with the unanswerable question: “How could this amazing, vital man drop dead?”

But then came an epiphany. If life could, indeed, be cut short at any moment, the only way to function meaningfully with the knowledge was to spend “every single day” doing what she loved – “and enough with the bullshit.”

It’s not grim, she says: “I’m just doing things that are fun.”

But the creative life is also a serious business. “I ‘sacredize’ time” to write, she says. “Do the most important thing of your day the first thing of the day.” On her blog, Pearlman shares her routine: “The sun wakes me. I grab espresso coffee and sit before my computer.” She writes until noon, at least five days a week. Such discipline, such commitment, brings joy.

Her published books are mileposts of a sort for her personal and professional lives. The first ones were related to her therapy practice: “Getting Free: Women and Psychotherapy” in 1982 and “Keep the Home Fires Burning: How to Have an Affair With Your Spouse,” in 1985. Then came “Infidelity,” a brave account of the pain that marital betrayal inflicted on her grandmother, her mother and – after 30 years of marriage – on Pearlman herself. Thirty-eight publishers rejected the memoir before a fledgling literary house, MacAdam/Cage, published it in 2000.

Her next project was “Inside the Crips,” written with gang member Colton Simpson and published in 2005. The ambitious and acclaimed account of “life inside L.A.’s most notorious gang” also drew Pearlman deep into a subsequent, headline-making drama when Simpson was charged with acting as the getaway driver in the robbery of an $800 earring from a California department store. In what she has described as a devastating experience, Pearlman was subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify at Simpson’s trial; he is serving a life sentence thanks to the Golden State’s insane “three strikes” law.

Pearlman turned then to fiction – “I thought I could say more” – with “The Christmas Cookie Club” (followed a year later by “The Christmas Cookie Cookbook” with fellow “cookie bitch” Marybeth Bayer of Ann Arbor). Her latest, “A Gift for My Sister” (the paperback will be out in February) follows the stories of Marnie’s daughters, Sky and Tara.

A Tale of Two Sisters

Sky, the older one, is cautious and conventional, a law school graduate who married her childhood sweetheart and is raising a daughter. Tara, a gifted musician with sharp edges forged early by her father’s abandonment, has a rising rap career and an intense but uncertain relationship with the father of her young son.

Pearlman says she had a great time writing “Gift.” It gave her a chance to explore the lives of sisters (she has one brother) and, she says, the two distinct sides of her own personality.

“There have never been times when I haven’t made something,” she says. So why would a restlessly creative soul (like Tara) go after psychotherapist’s credentials instead of an MFA?

“I’m Sky!” she replies. “Sky needed to have a job!” And it helped, she says, that even strangers always seemed to find it easy to open up to her: “I was 14 years old, on a bus, and a woman sitting next to me started to tell me all about an affair she was having.” But she offers a deceptively simple purpose for what she does: “People need someone to witness their lives.”

Pearlman is finishing another novel involving characters from “The Christmas Cookie Club” – no dates for publication yet. And she’s also compiling a book of family recipes for her extended clan – a project for which her new tablet is perfect: “I can do it anywhere!”

And of course, she’s reading: “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell, “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins, “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach get enthusiastic mentions; Julian Barnes’ latest novel, “The Sense of an Ending,” gets raves.

Lately, she’s been tackling Lucretius. In comparing several editions, she says, the divergence of the translations was so disconcerting that she thought, “I’m going to read it in Latin and I can translate it myself.”

Righto.

She says she reconsidered. So let’s presume that Pearlman has chosen a satisfying translation and settled in, maybe with a plate of pecan butter balls and a pink drink. Sometimes pleasure is the greatest good.

The Best Christmas Present Ever?

Plans appear to be in the works for a new downtown bookstore. Huron High grad and former Simon & Schuster sales rep Hilary Lowe and her fiance, video producer Michael Gustafson, pulled up stakes in Brooklyn over the summer and moved to Ann Arbor; they’re looking for a spot to set up shop as Literati. Watch this space for an update.

And Happy New Year.

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.

Cover of "When Your Song Breaks the Silence."

She left behind a novel. And her parents, Stan and Judith Jacobs of Ann Arbor, have published it, in ebook form, as a memorial to her.

“When Your Song Breaks the Silence” is an elegantly imagined life of Austrian composer Franz Schubert, distinguished by an articulate sensitivity and meticulous research. The completed novel’s existence was a surprise to her parents – its subject was not.

When her daughter was 11 years old, Judith Jacobs writes on the website she created for the book, “she wrote a story about the composer as a young child trying myopically – Natalie was also very near-sighted – to interact with his family and surroundings.” A graduate of Community High School, Natalie majored in English literature at the University of Michigan and was still working with the Schubert theme in the mid-1990s; when Stan and Judith traveled to Vienna in 1995 they made a point to visit the house where he died (in 1828, at age 31).

“A lilac bush was in full bloom in front of the building,” Jacobs says. They took a photograph.

A Body of Work Discovered

Natalie continued to write after embracing the more practical art of midwifery, for which she was finishing training in Portland, Oregon, when she died of viral myocarditis – an inflammation of the heart muscle – brought on by a case of flu.

After the Jacobses went to Portland to settle their daughter’s affairs, they gave Natalie’s computer to a friend of hers, who discovered on its hard drive a collection of Natalie’s writings. Among them was the novel.

From the opening chapter:

He is making what he hears into structures that he can understand: the sound of his mother’s voice, the tread of his father’s feet; the intricate melodies of words. Sounds beat down on him relentlessly, sometimes terrifying, sometimes soothing, but always present, even in the quietest room. He imagines he can hear the sounds that the grass in the courtyard makes as it grows. …

He comes to realize that sound is a language that he must learn in the same way that he must learn to read. These patterns mean something, they have secrets inside them. He is starting to understand. And meanwhile the patterns are everywhere: in the sounds of the priest giving Mass, in the sounds of his brother Ignaz practicing the piano, in the sounds of his mother’s murmured words of comfort after he wakes from a nightmare.

Shhh, Vögelein. Geh’ zu ruhe. Go to sleep, love.

I can’t.

It was clear to her, Judith Jacobs says, that the novel “had real possibilities.” A friend suggested she show it to Andrea Beauchamp, assistant director of the Hopwood Awards Program at UM. Beauchamp passed the manuscript along to writer and UM colleague Eileen Pollack (whose most recent book is the novel “Breaking and Entering”). First, though, she took the liberty of reading the manuscript herself; Beauchamp, Jacobs says, told her she “loved it, and cried at the end.”

“When Andrea and Judith first contacted me, I was reluctant to read the manuscript,” Pollack recalled in an e-mail. “I knew that Natalie was young when she died and that she had written the book on her own. In most such cases, the results are amateurish. If that turned out to be the case, how would I convey such a judgment to her parents without adding to their grief? On the other hand, as a parent, I could imagine what it would be like to be left with a child’s manuscript and want the work to reach a larger audience, to live on …. So you can understand how happy I was to discover that the novel was the work of a truly gifted writer.”

Pollack, says Jacobs, “really gave us confidence that we might be able to do something” with Natalie’s manuscript.

A Chapter Is Published

Her first step was to submit a chapter of the novel to about 30 literary magazines. Titled “An die Freude” (“To Joy”), it is Natalie’s retelling of the premiere of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 from the point of view of Schubert, who was in the audience in Vienna that May night in 1824. With Beethoven in view on stage, seated to one side of the orchestra, he absorbs the symphony’s opening measures:

Or had it begun? What was going on? There was just a pianissimo murmur of strings, open fifths, and Franz thought for a moment that there had been some sort of mistake and the orchestra was tuning again …. But then he realized what was happening. It was the primal moment, the chaos before creation, as the other instruments added descending cascades of open fifths, the simplest chords. Franz thought of God moving on the face of the waters, in darkness and silence. And then the music grew, expanded, exploded into a huge statement of the first theme that made him jump in his seat. Behold, the creation of the world!

From then on, he knew he was in the presence of something very wonderful, very new, altogether new. For in no other symphony had music remade the world. And the music around him rose and rose, blossoming into a million fantastic shapes, while he watched and listened, trying to understand even while the music transformed him into a vessel filled with sound, shaking with it …. He was drunk with it, and as it sang through his veins, he forgot it all: his failing body, his failing art, all gone, lost in this vast and wonderful ocean of sound.

He wished he could take it and pull it into himself, make the brilliance a part of himself. The idea of making something as wonderful as this was beyond his comprehension. How did the man do it? How could he possibly be holding this inside him? He looked so insignificant down there, hunched over his score, unaware of the glory all around him.

This is why he’s deaf, Franz thought. He’s been listening to God too much. The thought was absurd and would have made him smile had he not been grinning with elation already.

Many journals “ask for short stories or novel excerpts that can stand alone,” Jacobs found, “and this chapter filled the bill. … I was thinking in terms of finding an agent and a publisher and wanted to establish a track record to show that the work was publishable. There was also the wish to see something of hers in print in a decent magazine, of course, and publishing a chapter of the book might also bode well for publishing the whole thing.”

The Battered Suitcase, a print journal, accepted “An die Freude” by Natalie Jacobs and it appeared in the December 2010 issue. Now, Jacobs says, “people can read it online for all time. It’s too bad she wasn’t there to enjoy it.”

An Alternative: ePublishing

Meanwhile, Pollack had shown the manuscript to her literary agent. When she responded to Jacobs with “a lovely letter saying she liked it a great deal … but didn’t see what the market would be for it,” Jacobs began looking into alternatives.

She did some research into electronic publishing and found that it “looked very respectable.” But, “I had no idea how I would do it,” she says. And “in my online search for help in self-publishing, I learned that there seem to be as many books on the topic as there are actual self-published books.” “The Indie Author Guide: Self-Publishing Strategies Anyone Can Use,” by April L. Hamilton, would eventually become their “bible” for the project; Jacobs calls it “a very sensible, well-written guide – no hype.”

It was around that time that Stan Jacobs, an emeritus professor of atmospheric and oceanic science in the UM College of Engineering, was able to join more fully in the project. He’d read “An die Freude,” Judith says, “but that was really all.” It was three years before her husband could bring himself to read the entire novel: “It just made him too sad.”

Natalie Jacobs, whose novel "When Your Song Breaks the Silence" was published posthumously. (Photo courtesy of Stan and Judith Jacobs.)

Judith and Stan brought their individual strengths to editing Natalie’s manuscript. Judith was the copy editor; Stan did the fact checking. “It was astounding how much research she did,” Judith says. They checked several Schubert biographies – “it all tracked.” (And, as Pollack notes, “the portrait of Schubert and his contemporaries [is] utterly convincing without seeming too heavily researched.”)

Meanwhile, Stan Jacobs was formatting the manuscript for epublication.

“Judy wrote the description of the book required by the publisher and an afterword describing how it came into our possession,” Stan wrote in an email detailing the process. “She also wrote the front matter – the cover, the title page, the dedication page, and the copyright statement. I was responsible for casting the table of contents in the proper ebook form and for editing the manuscript to conform with ebook conventions.”

Sounding like the scientist he is, Stan advised that “provided that you read the publishers’ guidelines carefully, the process is straightforward.”

He prepared two versions of the manuscript for uploading, one for Amazon Kindle and one for Barnes & Noble’s Nook and other ebook readers. Then (after he “obsessively reread it another time to check for typos”), he used Calibre, the open-source ebook application, “to convert the file into the two most popular ebook formats, Mobi and EPub. I then checked the formatting using an Amazon Kindle and an iPod Touch for the Mobi and EPub versions, respectively.” After final checks of the book’s appearance and epublishing features, they sent it off to Amazon for Kindle and to Smashwords, the distributor for Nook and other ebook readers.

Even an ebook requires a cover. Judith Jacobs is an artist who makes digital fine-art prints. But she is not, she insists, “a graphic designer. So I tried to do something simple.” She researched cover designs at Barnes & Noble, collecting images of appealing book jackets. And she had an image of her own to work with: the photo taken in Vienna in 1995. “It looks the way the book sounds,” she says of the cover she created for her daughter’s book. “It suits both the style and the 19th-century subject matter.”

Natalie had not given her novel a name. “I felt very presumptuous, choosing a title for her book,” Judith Jacobs says, “but I thought Schubert would be OK.”

“When Your Song Breaks the Silence” is taken from the last stanza of “Der Einsame” (“The Hermit”), a poem by Karl Lappe put to music by Franz Schubert:

 Chirp on and on, dear cricket,

in my narrow and small hermitage.

I tolerate you gladly: you do not disturb me

when your song breaks the silence,

for then I am no longer so entirely alone.

The novel is available for Amazon Kindle. The Smashwords edition is now on the lists at Barnes and Noble Nook Store, Apple iTunes Store, Kobo, and soon to come at Sony.

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.

Cover of the Winter 2012 edition of Third Wednesday, a literary journal edited by Laurence Thomas of Ypsilanti.

As it turns out, all you need to know about this well-kept secret can be found in its pages.

Thomas – who is a poet, as well as an essayist and a writer of fiction – was born in Ypsilanti 85 years ago. A Hopwood Award winner for essay and poetry at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s, he had a teaching career that took him as far as Uganda, Saudi Arabia and Costa Rica before he returned to his hometown, where he lives today. Third Wednesday was an outgrowth of a monthly poetry group and of his friendship with the late Dearborn Heights attorney and magistrate Michael J. Barney, who was also a published poet and founder of Gravity Presses (lest we all float away) Inc.

Barney, “a regular attendant” of the group, Thomas says, had begun publishing through Gravity Presses a local literary magazine called Now Here Nowhere. Only a handful of issues came out of the project before Barney became ill (he died of cancer in 2006). Third Wednesday picked up where Now Here Nowhere left off, Thomas says, and is in great part an homage to Barney’s memory.

From his home office, Thomas corrals the input of associate editors both local and far-flung (one of them lives in Tajikistan!) who review submissions of poetry, fiction and visual art to produce a quarterly collection. Third Wednesday casts a wider net than did its predecessor and draws submissions – “two or three a day,” Thomas says – from around the country as well as Michigan. The current issue – Winter 2012 – publishes poets from Ann Arbor to Sofia, Bulgaria.

Third Wednesday pays its contributors with a copy of the issue and a token honorarium: $3 to $5. Design editor Paul Kingston “insisted on paying a stipend,” Thomas says, “and he’s proved to be right. (Contributors) feel like professional writers when they receive the money. And some of them tear up the check – that helps us out.”

The journal sponsors an annual poetry contest; poet Philip Dacey judged this year’s entries, which are published in the current issue. The three winners – Chris Lord, Adella Blain and Phillip Sterling – all hail from Ann Arbor. Each issue of Third Wednesday includes a featured poet – sometimes well known (David Chorlton was featured in Fall 2011) but usually, Thomas says, “chosen from our contributors who show skills and ideas we want to promote.”

What do the editors look for? “It’s based on our studies of poetry, keeping up with what’s current,” Thomas says, “and looking for that tingle when we receive work that seems new, vibrant and beautiful.”

“We like publishing well-known names,” he says, “but our greater interest is in finding exciting work by those not yet established or with local reputations but not yet known nationwide.”

Along those lines is work from InsideOut Literary Arts Project, which also appears in every issue. The Wayne State University project places professional writers (many of them with roots in UM’s creative writing program) in Detroit public schools, where they lead workshops for students. Here, from Third Wednesday’s Fall 2011 issue, is a particularly fine example by an anonymous participant in a workshop for teen writers held at the Ruth Ellis Center in Highland Park:

What it’s like to be a black gay man

(for those of you who aren’t)

It’s holding your tongue when you want to sing

It’s straightening your wrist

deepening your voice

It’s asking a man a question

xxxxxxwhile asking a different question

It’s a signal it’s a stop light

It’s a hustle, one drink too many

a puff of smoke

It is opening your mouth

xxxxxxand a purse falling out

It’s a street corner

xxxxxxIt’s a fix. It’s a prayer

to be held to be driven

xxxxxxto be rode

It’s finally an open door

xxxxxxWelcoming you in

xxxxxxWelcoming you out

You can get more information about Third Wednesday online, including submission guidelines. You won’t find the journal’s current work on the site, however. The most recent issue can be found in good, old-fashioned paper and ink: subscriptions are $30 a year and copies are sold at Nicola’s Books in the Westgate shopping center and WSG Gallery on Main Street (full disclosure: my husband is a member of the gallery).

Cover of "Sold Everywhere But Borders" by Rebecca Van Der Jagt.

Upcoming Events

Rebecca Van Der Jagt had been on the job at the Borders bookstore in Ramsey, N.J., for one month when the word came down from corporate in July 2011: Liquidation. In “Sold Everywhere But Borders,” Van Der Jagt has written an employee’s account of the grim last days of a beloved bookstore. She’ll be in town to sign copies at Biggby’s Coffee on Liberty Street at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 21; an emotional gathering of the Borders diaspora is a pretty sure bet.

Author Christopher Paul Curtis will be at Nicola’s Books at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, April 26. His latest book for children, “The Mighty Miss Malone,” is based on a character his readers met in “Bud, Not Buddy,” Curtis’ widely acclaimed 2004 novel set in Depression-era Michigan. “Bud, Not Buddy” won the Coretta Scott King Award and a second Newbery Medal for Curtis; the first was for his 2000 debut novel, “The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963.”

The 35th annual Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair is Sunday, May 20, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Michigan Union ballroom. A visit is well worth the $5 admission, which benefits UM’s William L. Clements Library.

Honors for Kasischke, Hoffman

Two works featured in this column have gone on to wider recognition in recent (and not so recent) months. In March, Laura Kasischke’s “Space, in Chains” was awarded the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Kasischke, a novelist and poet who lives in Chelsea, is a professor at UM’s MFA program in creative writing.

And back in November, Andrew J. Hoffman and his memoir “Builder’s Apprentice,” published by Huron River Press, were honored with a Connecticut Book Award. Hoffman is the Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at UM’s Ross School of Business and the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor lives in Ann Arbor and can generally be found reading on third Wednesdays. 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.

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.

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.

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.