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The fangirl in me has been reading Wil Weaton's blog for years, enjoying his conversations about everything from Star Trek to D&D. What has really kept my attention though is his entries about family and writing and how he has navigated the world since child actor status of a near iconic nature. (If you're a regular on Star Trek you get the icon tag I think, whether you want it or not.) (It also doesn't hurt if you starred in one of the greatest coming-of-age movies of all time.) (And when that is based on one of the greatest coming-of-age stories of all time it makes you even cooler.)

But I digress.

I am sure a lot of people think Wheaton is just another former child star and write him off as such without taking any time to actually see what he is doing now. For those of us who follow his work this is crazy talk however as although Wheaton still acts (and does a great job) it is his writing that has really taken off. His latest essay collection, The Happiest Days of Our Lives recently came out from Subterranean and iIt's classic Wheaton - funny, nostalgic, ironic and if you are of a certain age (late 30s/early 40s) a dead on sentimental look back at certain times and places from your own childhood. But, more than all of that, Happiest Days is also yet another example of what I think Wheaton does just about better than anybody these days and that's write about what it's like to be father.

Wheaton has two stepsons who live him with him and his wife and they figure prominently in his essays. Sometimes they are used as a foil for his own geekiness - responding in mock horror to his musical taste or nostalgia for gaming, SF, etc. But mostly there are really sweet moments such as the book's brief opening piece when he asks Ryan the formula for the circumference of a circle and in the exchange that follows reveals he "has been riding this planet for almost twenty billion miles." Ryan thinks it's pretty cool and it is, although the conversation between the two is even better: casual, a little to the geek left of ordinary, and comfortable. It's Wheaton being who he is with this kid and Ryan being cool with that. From those first two pages I realized this book is not about being an actor but about being a father and in small ways or large all the pages that followed just reaffirmed that first assessment.

There are essays here about saying goodbye to the Star Trek TNG set, a funny memory of what it is like as a kid to choose between saving your allowance or buying a much longed for action figure (at Kmart no less) and a look at Star Trek conventions from a perspective most of will never know. But there are also numerous asides about music shared between the generations and playing frisbee with the boys and the first time he plays D&D with Ryan (which prompts all sorts of memories about his own storied past with the game) and driving with Nolan on the freeway for the first time. These are small idea essays mostly - meaning they are narrowly focused on one man's experiences. But by reaching beyond his fame and into aspects of his life that are so easy to relate to (something he does daily on his blog), Wheaton largely removes his fame from the narrative (which is odd as clearly he does write about Star Trek). Every time he mentioned Nolan or Ryan it made me smile - I recognized those parental feelings and I appreciated how he was sharing them. By the time I finished reading Wheaton had cemented himself in my mind as a wr

....then yeah, I want to read it.

Notes From No Man's Land is an essay collection author Eula Biss that won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. (That is another clue that the book is a must read.) Here's what Alexie had to say in his blurb:

I fought with this book. I shouted, Amen! I cursed at it for being so wildly wrong and right. It's so smart, combative, surprising and sometimes shocking that it kept me twisting and turning in my seat like I was on some kind of sociopolitical roller coaster ride. Eula Biss writes with equal parts beauty and terror. I loved it.

I bought this one for myself because of Alexie's blurb and also because of excerpts I had read about her first essay, on telephone poles and the history of lynching in America. I used to heavily teach lynching to my students at Ft Wainwright, just because it shows so much about who we were - not only the fact that lynchings occurred, but that so many people celebrated them and that the largest mass lynching in the US was actually of Italians in New Orleans in 1891. The topic has a lot of punch and I found it was always excellent for finding common ground among all students (no one supports lynching). So I wanted to see what Biss could bring to this aspect of American history and man, was I ever impressed.

In "Time and Distance Overcome" she writes about the history of the telephone, the development of telephone poles (and how some people opposed them to the point of destruction) and how, by default, they became used for lynchings. She writes about riots, about lynching postcards, about a big story (lynchings) and a small one (telephone poles). She includes amazing things like this:

In Pittsburgh, Kansas, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole, cut down, burned, shot and stone with bricks. "At first the negro was defiant," the New York Times reported, "but just before he was hanged he begged hard for his life."

In the final paragraphs she mentions her grandfather who was a lineman whose back was broken when a pole fell. And just like that she gives you personal insight as to why the poles have always captivated her ("My Dad could raise a pole by himself," her father would say) and yet how she can not see them the same way now. It's a startling beginning and the book just takes off from there.

Biss gets personal by explaining her family's mixed race history and yet this is not a memoir but rather an occasional consideration of her experience. She writes about teaching but then uses that entry to discuss the mashup of attitudes (both preconceived and otherwise) in inner city schools. She writes about the Caucasian woman who gave birth to twins via invitro and one was African American (and not hers) and the outcome of that court case (and what it said about mothering) and about writing for the San Diego Voice and Viewpoint, an African American community newspaper.

I was especially impressed though with a historical essay about Buxton, Iowa. In "Back to Buxton", Biss writes about Buxton, "the Negro Athens of the Northwest" and her own experiences living in Iowa City, an often out of control college town. The security and peace found in Buxton, is absent from Biss's life and drives her to study not only its history but that of other towns who live on in the university's archives. For historians this is pure candy all by itself but when viewed throu

NPR has an excerpt up of Notes From No Man's Land by Eula Biss. What's really interesting is that she writes eloquently about the history of telephone poles and then, slowly, builds to their use in lynchings. Here's a bit:

Lynching, the first scholar of the subject determined, is an American invention. Lynching from bridges, from arches, from trees standing alone in fields, from trees in front of the county courthouse, from trees used as public billboards, from trees barely able to support the weight of a man, from telephone poles, from streetlamps, and from poles erected solely for that purpose. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, black men were lynched for crimes real and imagined, for whistles, for rumors, for "disputing with a white man," for "unpopularity," for "asking a white woman in marriage," for "peeping in a window."

The children's game of telephone depends on the fact that a message passed quietly from one ear to another to another will get distorted at some point along the line.

Notes was already on my radar as a must read and now I am doing my level best to hold off until the summer before I buy a copy. This is exactly the sort of history that so impresses me - the way ordinary things are juxtaposed with drama in a way that is wholly unexpected. Sarah Vowell often does this with humor, It seems that Bliss does it with great empathy. Can't wait.

This collection is just another reminder of why I follow the releases of Graywolf Press so closely. Last year I raved (more than once) about Terese Svoboda's Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, a combination of military history, family memoir and meditation on research methods that blew me away. It's one of the more quietly intense and "searching" titles I've read in ages. Svoboda asks questions that no one else has asked and the reader becomes just as consumed with finding answers as she did. I loved it.

I recently finished another Graywolf title, The Next Rodeo by William Kittredge's about growing up in eastern Oregon and his own changing views of the west. This one started slow for me and honestly I wasn't sure that I would like it. But Kittredge is so unsparing of his own feelings - so determined to admit how his view of the land was wrong and how the way the people he loved damaged it because they thought they could - they thought they were doing the right thing to tame it - he just pulled me in. It's odd because he's not a big apologist; he's not asking for forgiveness and he's certainly not throwing his rancher father or grandfather under the bus in the name of political correctness. But he does say that the long held myths of the west have so corrupted our vision of it that we destroy it because we believe the stories even in the face of an overwhelmingly damaged reality. I found myself turning down the corners of one page after another (bad habit) and thinking, remember this - remember this - remember this.

He made me think of Florida and Alaska; of so many people who cling to what they know are lies just so they don't have to face the truth. The Everglades will survive, the river will survive, the beaches will survive, the wolves and the polar bears and the Porcupine Caribou herd and on and on and on. They will all be there tomorrow because they were there yesterday. If we say if often enough then it will come true, right?

There were orange groves in my hometown when I was growing up and whales offshore and beaches as far as the eye could see. They were all there once; if I close my eyes I can see them still. As long as I keep my eyes closed, they are there forever.

Graywolf Press you break my heart with your books, but man how much I love you.

In the wake of her award winning book The Year of Magical Thinking, I realized that I had never read anything by Joan Didion. This is odd because the essay is one of my particularly favorite forms of writing and she is well known for her essays. A few months ago I finally got around to ordering a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and then it sat downstairs as I dealt with other books I could not resist. A few days ago I picked it up and I have been slowly reading (savoring) it ever since.

This lady really can write.

The only reason anyone would be fascinated by these essays is the writing. A murder in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" - is it so different from anything else we read about in the news today? Not really, not much, and yet the language draws you in; makes it so much more relevant. "Of course she came from somewhere else," writes Didion, "came off the prairie in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio, for this is a Southern California story." And just like that the reader understands something about this woman, this killer. We have seen a glimpse of something that Didion was able to show us and that makes us keep reading.

I wanted to know what else Didion understood.

It's such a joy to read a smart writer, and even more so when she isn't afraid to be smart. Didion reminds me of Jenny Diski that way - they both have a wry way of looking at the world and no concerns about telling it like it is. Joan Baez "was a personality before she was entirely a person, and like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be." Echoes of our own celebrity culture today, of Britney, Lindsey, and all the others. Of course Joan Baez never wandered around without her underwear on but still - "a personality before she was entirely a person" is pitch perfect and makes you wonder, in retrospect, how much of the myth was really Joan Baez and how much was what everyone else decided was Joan Baez.

When I read this kind of writing it always makes me want to be more honest; to stop playing at story and thinking too much and just write. I try to drum into my head the importance of truth in writing - it seems obvious, even in fiction, but you can't ignore that little voice that wonders what the reader wants; irregardless of what you have to say. Is this character sympathetic enough, this moment intense enough, this conversation sincere enough? Is it what they want to read?

Didion did not worry about such things of course. Her thoughts on Bethlehem from an interview at the Guardian a couple of years ago:

I ask if it felt like career-making stuff as she wrote it. "No. I was paying the rent. It wasn't until Henry Robbins, who was my editor at Farrar Straus, wanted to bring out a collection of pieces ... I thought it was a terrible idea because I thought they would all be repetitive." But she did put them together, "and it was sort of well received. But I still have no sense, no sense of ... they literally were pieces that were taken against a deadline, against a need for money."

Don't think about it too much maybe - not about the audience anyway. Think about the writing but not about the rest. Let the rest just happen because the writing is the most important thing. "We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and screamed, forget who we were."

I still remember and that's why I need to write it now. For me, and maybe only for me, I need to write while I still remember.

(Post title from "on Keeping a Notebook" by Didion. Picture from Alexis Anne MacKenzie; see post at Endicott Studio to learn more about this amazing artist. The picture, to me, was Didion creating a world.)

I am deep into reading Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys and I have to say that much of this touching and funny anthology is ringing as remarkably true for me. I am planning to include it as a "Cool Read" for my column this Spring and I think it really is an excellent choice for teens. Many of the essays recall friendships in high school or college that will particularly appeal to young adult readers and if they are in similar situations as the writers then this book will certainly seem to be a god send.

I requested an ARC of this one solely based on the inclusion of two of my favorite YA authors: Cecil Castellucci and Bennett Madison. Most of the contributors write for adult readers, but it was Cecil and Bennett who were the big attractions for me (and also David Levithan). Cecil's piece is, well, a heartbreaker. Anyone who has been there, whether in Paris or Florida (like me) will know what she was thinking and feeling and you just hate that it has to happen so often - that we all have to get our hearts broken on such a regular basis.

Now I have an idea as to why she is so very good at writing her books with their endearing characters and poignant plots. (Oh how I wish I had gone to college with you Cecil - I am sure it would have made it all so much more wonderful!!!)

As for Bennett's essay, well it is full of the sort of searching for self and embrace of all that is unique and free and wonderful in the world that I would expect the creator of Lulu Dark to know and feel. I suspect though, for all of his casual attitude and refusal to get too close, that Bennett's heart was broken a time or two when he was young as well - even if he broke it himself, it sure seems like a few lonely tears were dropped on occasion.

It's all in the growing up, you know.

What I really loved about these two essays most of all though was the peek inside of the lives of people who are sort of friends - friends in this odd way that the internet and lit blogosphere can give you friends you have not met or talked to or really honestly know.

And yet, still, somehow they are friends. (And I know this - I know how much I would have to talk to them about from the very first moment we say hello.)

Ed had a piece earlier this week in response to Michael Goodman's announcement that he would be sharply reducing his blogging at the Grumpy Old Bookman. The question of why to blog or is blogging a distraction is not new, but I have figured out why I do this. No one in my family is a writer, none of my friends are and other than grad school I have never really been around writers. I have already written why I chose to review books, but starting Chasing Ray was more of an attempt to connect with a portion of the literary world. Simply put, I blog so I can meet people and learn things that make me a better writer. I blog so I can learn from Cecil and Bennett, from Gwenda and Jenny D. and from the lovely Justine (who has so kindly been emailing me with advice on my YA book). I blog so I can meet someone like Gavin and then exchange opinons on Ray Bradbury's latest as if we were sitting outside a Parisian cafe in the 1920s; as if talking books was the best, right way to spend part of each day.

Because you know, I think that is so very true.

I blog because it helps me to know better authors like Cherie and Margo, whose worked I have reviewed and loved, and reviewers like Leila, Jen, Susan and Kelly who all have discussed a book at one time or another that I have subsequently read and enjoyed. And also there is all that I learn from Ed and Mark, Johanna and Jessa on other writers, publishers and the larger literary universe.

The lit blogosphere might seem to be a small world, I know, but it's a world that I have never been allowed to enter before - that I was always urged away from because there were other things more important than reading and writing. (These are things you do after school, after work, after "the real world".)

I blog because at long last I have found my people and really, what better reason do you need than that?