Judge William C. Whitbeck and Kevin Boyle in Lansing

National Book Award Winner Kevin Boyle is back in Michigan to make two presentations on race at the University of Michigan Dearborn campus Thursday February 16 and Friday February 17.

Last fall Boyle toured Michigan as part of the Great Read program sponsored by the Michigan Humanities Council in what just might be the most successful statewide reading ever. Boyle’s award winning book, “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age.” is a gripping look at the 1925 murder in Detroit of a white man by a black man and the ensuing trial that garnered national attention and helped set the stage for the nascent civil rights movement.

Arc” is the story of Detroit physician Ossian (pronounced ocean) Sweet and his family, who set off a cascade of events when they became some of the first blacks to move into an all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925. The times were tense as the city faced an influx of Southern blacks moving to Detroit as part of the “great migration.” 

When a mob of protesters pelted the Sweet home with stones, someone from inside the home fired shots into the crowd, killing one man and wounding another. Sweet and 10 of his family and friends were arrested on suspicion of murder. Watch a video trailer about the book.

Boyle — who was raised in Detroit, studied at University of Detroit and University of Michigan and teaches at Ohio State University — is more than an historian. He is a great storyteller who can mesmerize you with the nuanced retelling of a trial whose outcome can be easily found on Wikipedia. “Guilty” or “not guilty” becomes secondary. Read more about his visit to Dearborn here.

His most recent book “The Magic Room”, as Zaslow liked to describe it, literally put Fowler Michigan and its Bridal Salon Becker’s Bridal on the map. An article in the Wall Street Journal about the book was illustrated with a map of Michigan with Fowler almost dead center in the mitten.

I last saw Zaslow at the book debut in Fowler Michigan but I had talked to him several times since discussing an appearance at the Kerrytown BookFest. I had interviewed Jeff twice for a couple articles I was working on and had come to enjoy our discussions. Two things from those interviews stand out. Jeff told me his whole experience in writing “The Magic Room” got him excited about walking his three daughters down the aisle.  In an answer to a question about the topics and people he chose to write about he said he would never write about the dark side of an issue or a person.  

“That’s not me.” he said. 

“I want to write about inspirational things.”

He was always upbeat and cheerleader for the people he wrote about. When Shelley Becker’s daughter Alyssa, who he writes about in the book, got engaged at the book release party he sent me an e-mail right away. When we talked he was excited about that little piece coming together. I had recently e-mailed Jeff for his input on an article I am working on about the lost art of letter writing. I figured as an advice columnist he had read tens of thousands of letters and his observations would be spot on. He said he had a couple book signings and after that he would get back to me. I think I know what he would’ve said.

He will be missed by the millions of people who read his books, but mostly we should keep his spouse and his daughters in our thoughts.

If the Rust Belt had a capital city, it would be Detroit, where people have been making cars for more than 100 years. That may sound like a Clint Eastwood Super Bowl half-time ad, but Lolita Hernandez, author of “Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant,” insists, “The factory is the city.”

“The factory is a city of itself and permeates it,” Hernandez says. “You can’t get away.”

Hernandez, who worked more than 30 years in automotive plants (including 21 in Detroit’s Clark Street Cadillac Plant) before retiring, joins four other speakers in discussing race, class and labor at the second installment of Michigan State University’s College of Arts and Letters’ “Community Conversations” series Feb. 22. The first program in the series featured novelist Bonnie Jo Campbell discussing her book, “American Salvage” and Michigan’s crystal meth epidemic.

Ned Watts, MSU Professor of English and associate chairman and organizer of the event, said the program’s goal is to show the importance of working-class writing and to stimulate community discussion.

Michigan literature has deep roots in the worker culture, reaching back to the experiences of iron ore and copper mining workers in the Upper Peninsula and to the factory represented in Harriet Arnow’s “The Dollmaker.”

You can find the industrial heritage of the city in the poetry of United States Poet Laureate Philip Levine and the more modern “Punching Out” by Detroiter Paul Clemens.

Hernandez, in an interview from her Detroit home, said that factory life and the “sequential bonding nature of industrial work still permeates the city,” even though factories have closed.

“You develop a whole family in the plant,” she said. “Everyone knows who you are; you rename each other and develop your own language. It’s like a secret society.”

She believes that because of the loss of industrial jobs, “we are losing a part of our culture that is significant.”

Hernandez chronicled that culture in her critically acclaimed “Autopsy,” which portrays life and work in an auto plant through 12 interconnected stories. She said writing about work is important because “that’s what people do.”

“Very few people don’t work,” she said. “They are defined by their work.”

Since retiring, Hernandez has been committed to writing about and teaching working-class literature and writing.

“Our stories are not being told,” she said. She tells her students in creative writing at the University of Michgan’s Residential College who believe that “their lives are not literature-worthy” that the issues and lives of the working class are rich with potential. Hernandez also believes that Detroit’s industrial plants helped create a different atmosphere between the races.

“After Jim Crow, everyone was able to work on the line,” she says, “and there was a sense of family and a sense of unity.”

She said she still resents it when she hears the word “diversify”: “It’s almost as if we’ve been kicked to the curb,” she says.

Hernandez, who has also written two books of poetry with working themes, said that when “helicopter journalists” describe the city of Detroit as being empty, the description doesn’t work.

“It feels as full to me as ever. The city doesn’t feel any different to me. There is a sense of community.”

And she believes that there is more attention being paid recently to worker writing and worker art. 

The final Community Conversations program takes place March 22 (time and place are yet to be determined) and features mystery author Joseph Heywood, discussing his books about a Michigan “woods cop.”

But that won’t be the last chance area residents will have to hear about working-class writing. On March 27, “Rivethead” author Ben Hamper speaks at MSU’s Main Library. Hamper, who is originally from Flint, was a columnist for Michael Moore’s Flint Voice newspaper.

Hernandez said that Hamper was genuinely grounded in the plant. “He had been there for a long, long time and it made him a sojourner in that situation,” she says.

An excellent way to keep in touch with programs about worker culture is to subscribe to the e-mail alerts on the weekly Brown Bag programs sponsored by Our Daily Work, Our Daily Lives. The programs are organized by John Beck, associate professor and director of the Labor Education Program. He can be reached at beckj@msu.edu.

Lolita Hernandez

Part of the “Community Conversations” series

Today’s New York Times is a case in point. There he is in what appears to be a disembodied floating head on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Novelist Olen Steinhauer has reviewed Leonard’s newest book “Raylan” about the federal marshall Raylan Givens who is the subject of the TV series “Justified”.

“Justified” based on a character which first appeared in Leonard’s “Pronto” and then later in the short story “Fire in the Hole” has put Leonard in the spotlight once again. Some authors of Leonard’ stature would spit if you suggested that a TV series or movie had energized their work. They would be fools since at the top of the New York Times Fiction lists are books which have been made into movies.

Leonard not only embraces the cinematic fame he takes it one step further by writing an entire book based on the character Givens. The author told an audience at a book signing in Birmingham recently that he was just sitting around on the movie set when he decided he had to do something. The book is a result and if anything it makes the scriptwriters job easier since Leonard has fleshed out his unusual character Federal Marshall Raylan Givens who is slow to talk but quick to act once he has made his mind up. This usually means a quick draw and a quicker death.

Detroit News Writer Susan Whitall also contributed a front-page article for the newspaper’s Friday edition on Michigan’s esteemed and without a doubt most famous novelist. Whitall, who was in the audience for the Birmingham book signing, saw first hand the passion Elmore Leonard fans have for their hero. When Leonard concluded his presentation with his son Peter, who is also a crime novelist, a crowd rushed the table with piles of books to be signed.

Leonard has had a predigious career with 45 novels to his credit; 49 if you include some special editions which reprinted story collections. The author is no slouch and with his newest addition to his pedigree he continues to add fans of all ages. It’s impossible to predict what Leonard will write next although he has hinted about another “Raylan”, moving the lawman to another locale.

Poet Theodore Roethke of Saginaw Michigan and Michigan State University and Robert Hayden of Detroit and the University of Michigan are part of  the 10 stamp series of U.S. Poets.  Others are Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, ee Cummings, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. None of the poets are living.  The stamps are expected to be dedicated at a formal release ceremony at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Chicago. Read an article about the postal release here.

Included in the group are an insurance executive, homemakers, academics, a doctor, a World War I ambulance driver. The mix includes a suicide, alcoholics, and a couple of rough divorces.

Roethke is a poet you might have missed the first time around. He was born in Saginaw in 1908 and you can read more about his life in today’s (May 25) Writer’s Almanac by clicking here. Roethke’s family is well known in the Saginaw Valley for their flower business, both wholesale and retail. Read more about Roethke at the Poetry Foundation by clicking here. And read more about the sculpture (at left) recognizing the life and work of Roethke that is at Saginaw Valley University by clicking here. Read more about the Roethke stamp here.

Roethke, who was a Michigan State University Professor, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and his boyhood home has been preserved by the Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation and is available for tours.  The poetic themes of Roethke often included the flowers and plants with which he grew up with. He saw the greenhouse as the metaphor for his life.

Robert Hayden was raised in Detroit’s Blackbottom and was part of the Federal Writers Project. He was the first black of poet laureate of the United States. After graduating from Detroit City College he graduated from the University of Michigan and cited his professor W.H. Auden as pivotal to his career.

That may be the case, but Lansing’s world of poetry is about to get bigger and more accessible, as Lansing becomes the first Michigan city to join the national  Poetry in Motion effort, which displays placards with poetry in buses and subways.

Capital Area Transportation Authority buses traversing mostly along campus routes and down Michigan Avenue will host a moveable feast of poetry, with each bus showcasing interior placards with lines of poetry from 13 poets, including Michigan State University Professors Anita Skeen and Diane Wakoski. The poets also include regionally and nationally recognized poets, such as Octavio Paz, Lucille Clifton and Ezra Pound.

In addition to the poetry, the placards are illustrated with original works of art created by five students from an MSU advertising class.

Poetry in Motion kicks off Thursday with a reception on a CATA bus that is scheduled to depart from MSU’s Snyder-Phillips Hall at 10 a.m. on a trip to downtown Lansing. Stops are planned at Everybody Reads Books and Things, the Capital Area District Library, the Women’s Center of Greater Lansing and the Michigan Humanities Council, which provided a grant of $250 to underwrite the program.

Poetry in Motion was started on the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York in 1992, and has expanded to scores of cities nationwide, including Chicago, Little Rock, Dallas and Denver.

Stephanie Glazier, assistant director MSU Poetry Center

A little over a year ago, Stephanie Glazier, assistant director of the MSU Residential Center for Arts and Humanities Poetry Center, discovered Portland’s Poetry in Motion program during a trip to Oregon. 

“I fell in love with their program,” Glazier said. “It’s a great, simple way to get poetry in the public eye. As a CATA rider myself, I wanted to coordinate a program in the Lansing area.”

Glazier said that the U.S. doesn’t have the same reverence for poetry as other cultures do. “This is one way to put poetry in places you otherwise wouldn’t expect it,” Glazier said. “I felt like Michigan needed a win.”

She said research shows that when you read poetry, “the brain is literally delighted.”

Glazier said the project is a great example of the kind of collaboration that can happen around the arts. “I’m thrilled that CATA was eager to be a part of the program, and a lot of different kinds of talent came together to make it possible.”

CATA CEO/Executive Director Sandy Dragoo agreed to share specially selected excerpts of poems with riders as way of “celebrating and thanking them for the moments of their day that they share with us. We take pride in doing our part to raise Greater Lansing’s cultural awareness in this somewhat unexpected way.”

Glazier said the displayed poems she selected were chosen to represent “a large cross-section of diversity in voices, geography and styles of poetry.” Glazier took recommendations from other poets, then secured the necessary permissions to use the work. She said she expects some clamor from poets who want to be included next year.

There’s also hope that the poetry will make riders smile a little; Glazier thinks the lines from Bob Hicok’s “A Primer” might accomplish that task.

Hicok, who grew up in Grand Ledge, wrote the poem (which first appeared in The New Yorker) as a salute to his home state.

“We are a people who by February

want to kill the sky for being so gray

and angry at us. “What did we do?”

is the state motto. There’s a day in May

when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics

is everywhere, and daffodils are asked

by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes

with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.”

Glazier said the poetry is illustrated with a scene of a man proposing to a woman emerging from a daffodil.

She said the bus poetry explores all forms of human emotion, from love to fear and from hope to the wonder of nature.

Each of the poetry placards contains a scannable Quick Response code that leads to the MSU Center for Poetry homepage.

The MSU Poetry Center is celebrating its fifth year, and Glazier said Poetry in Motion “is a great way to let the public know the Poetry Center is here, and we want community feedback. I sense there is a resurgence of poetry in this country.” 

She points to poet Elizabeth Alexander reading in front of millions at President Obama’s inauguration and former Michiganian Philip Levine being named the current Poet Laureate of the United States. Michigan does not have a formal Poet Laureate, although at different times Hillsdale poet Will Carleton, Detroit Free Press poet Edgar Guest and Detroit’s Paradise Valley poet Robert Hayden have held that title.

A selection from Guest’s poetry was recently featured in Chrysler’s ad campaign, “Imported from Detroit.” Hayden was the nation’s first black poet laureate, and Carleton, a late 19th-century phenomenon, was noted for his poem, “Over the Hill to the Poor House.”

On a wintery Michigan day, CATA bus riders might identify with the lines from Diane Wakoski’s poem “Sun”: 

“A bird made out of keys,

flying to unlock the sun, let out the heat.”

The words “Elmore Leonard” were all that were needed. A couple hundred admiring fans jammed a basement meeting room to listen to Elmore Leonard and his son Peter Leonard, both who were releasing new books. Elmore Leonard, of course, was promoting his new book “Raylan” which is receiving additional attention due to the award-winning TV series “Justified” which is based on Leonard’s Raylan Givens character.

In “Justified” Federal Marshall Raylan Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant,  is a fast-draw expert who shoots to kill with no remorse. He is a perfect Leonard character who first appeared in the books “Pronto” and “Riding the Rap”. Leonard later wrote a short story “Fire in the Hole” upon which the TV series is based. “Raylan” sort of takes the character full circle and expect to see more Raylan Givens in future Leonard novels. Also expect to see a barrage of publicity and advertising for the series and book. Just that morning Leonard taped a public radio segment on “Justified” and “Raylan”.

At 85 years old, Elmore is really enjoying his new group of fans, many of them younger and newly introduced to one of the country’s greatest mystery-thriller and western writers. Leonard has now written something like 45 books and many of them have been made into blockbuster movies with major stars like Paul Newman, Steve McQueen,  and George Clooney.

In addition to a clever give and take, question and answer format between father and son, the two Leonard’s signed books for a couple hours with many in line asking for special inscriptions for friends and relatives.

Elmore told some fun stories about his days at Campbell-Ewald where he wrote ad copy for Chevrolet trucks and he would visit working class bars where he would get ideas for ad copy. He said jokingly that he would tell the patron to “say something colloquial.”

Elmore only lasted six years at the ad agency during which time he wrote five Westerns while writing ads.

Elmore Leonard said “Hemingway started me-I thought Heminway was it. He was succinct and all made sense, but I realized he didn’t have a sense of humor.

“I have funny lines, but most of my characters don’t know they are funny.”

Pete Leonard remembers the time he stopped in to visit his father who was in sandals, jeans and a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt and realized he also needed to get out of advertising. Very shortly after his first novel was released.

Elmore Leonard for sure hasn’t looked back on his decision to leave advertising saying “sixty years and it’s worked out.”

It sure has, and some scenes and storylines from his new book Raylan will begin to show up in episodes of “Justified” according to Leonard’s researcher and assistant Greg Sutter. During the signing, Sutter and Detroit News  writer Susan Whitall were having a good time reliving their days at Creem magazine, the Detroit based rock magazine.

Now there’s an idea which Elmore Leonard should work into one of his novels. The rock scene in Detroit during the 60s and 70s is without parallel and there’s still people around to talk about it

Peter Leonard’s new book, “Voices of the Dead”, ties Nazis and vigilante justice into a nice package and creates a character, Harry Levin. whom I’m wagering we will be seeing again.

He has been doing that for more than 40 years.

Daniels’ work has been compared to Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor and Tobias Wolff, but those aren’t totally fair comparisons since Daniels’ voice is truly one of the Midwest Rust Belt and the workers who keep it running, sometimes in work that is pure drudgery.

For the last 30 years, Daniels has been teaching creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a job he calls a “good gig.” But his roots are still in his hometown of Detroit.

Daniels said he has always been attracted by what he calls Detroit’s “straight forward quality; there’s no bullshit.”

His writing is intertwined with work and the influence it has on a person’s life beyond the job. In fact, his first “real” poem, which he wrote in high school, was about his job at a party store.  “Growing up in a Party Store” is like a first love to Daniels, one he talks about with deep affection. 

Daniels said he turned to writing when his classmates in middle school started teasing him about his then speech impediment. Writing was a perfect outlet for an introspective personality. His history teacher would become his first mentor after recognizing that Daniels was writing poetry in his papers.

“When I wrote the poem about a party store it was kind of a revelation,” Daniels says. “Work is who you are, and it drives your personal life.”

Daniels was also deeply influenced by working in auto plants during summers to pay for his college tuition at Alma College.

One of his favorite and recurring figures, Digger, is an amalgam of people he met during those days on the line.

He also admits that some of the writing is autobiographical: “All writers reveal some of themselves through what they write.”

He said “writers are shameless” in the way they borrow from things they hear or observe. “I hear someone say something, and I’ve got to write it down.”

Daniels has pretty much kept the 3 x 5 index card business alive over the years by writing down what he hears. He even keeps cards at his bedside, in case he wakes up during the night with an idea.

“Not that I can always read it in the morning,” he admits. A recent card has “brouhaha” scrawled on it. “I’ll use it someway.”

Daniels is quick to list his writing influences, including Stuart Dybek, Tobias Wolff, Canadian writer Tom Wayman (whose writing also examines work), Detroit native Philip Levine, the nation’s current poet laureate, and Jim Harrison, Michigan’s emotional poet laureate.

Daniels still has his copy of Harrison’s book of poetry “Letters to Yesenin” nearby him at work.

Another significant influence in Daniels’ writing life was James Baldwin. As a graduate student at Bowling Green University, Daniels took a class from Baldwin, which is something not many writers around today can say.

“He had a big effect on me,” Daniels recalls. “It was right after the last summer I worked in the plant. Baldwin challenged the class. He didn’t teach in the traditional sense, but he challenged us to be a little more honest and get beneath the surface.

“He would tell us, ‘I’m the son of a slave and you’re the son of a slave owner.’”

Daniels admits he may have gotten a little defensive about his writing during that time. “But as I got a little more distance from the class, I understood.”

In 1993, he wrote “Time, Temperature,” a poem about the 1967 Detroit riots as what he calls a “late paper for his class”: Daniels dedicated the poem to Baldwin.

One of Daniels’ goals is to get people to “encounter literature in places where they normally wouldn’t expect it.” And one of his own poems — about the Detroit Tigers, of course — appeared in a baseball collector’s magazine.

He has also stretched his limits in unfamiliar territory. On a sabbatical in Italy he said he took the contrarian approach: Since everybody would expect him to write about anything but Italy, he wrote about Italy and is now working on a collection of poetry about the Middle East. His poems also have covered the lives of painters and musicians.

One of the most challenging writing assignments Daniels has taken on is script writing. He likes how it stretches his capabilities as a writer.

“I like the collaborative process (of scriptwriting),” he says. “I don’t feel so proprietary in my writing.”

While at Michigan State University for the Michigan Writers Series, Daniels will bring a little bit of short story writing and script writing to the table. He’ll read from his new collection of smart¸ sometimes snarky short stories, “Trigger Man: More Tales from the Motor City,” and will show his short film “Mr. Pleasant,” an adaptation of one of his books of short fiction.

For Daniels, films exposed a whole new side of creativity. He points to being able to work on “Mr. Pleasant” with director John Rice, who got his start as a filmmaker by working with George Romero on the cult classic “Dawn of the Dead.”

However, Daniels didn’t stray far from his focus on work in “Mr. Pleasant”: The storyline follows a working-class kid from Detroit who hopes to leave that environment behind him when he goes to college.

“We all have our own Detroits,” he says, “and we each experience place in a different way.”

Poe Cottage Dearborn Inn, Michigan

There’s hardly a day goes by that I don’t stumble across (or are gently pushed in that direction) a Michigan author or a book about Michigan. Take yesterday, for example, I learned that the writer of the hit television series “Breaking Bad” attended Interlochen Academy as a teen. The writer, Vince Gilligan, is one of featured authors at the National Writers Series in Traverse City this Winter. And all this time I  thought he just dated Bonnie Jo Campbell. Those who have read Campbell’s “American Salvage” will see this connection. This morning, an article on Edgar Allen Poe in the Wall Street Journal triggered one of my favorite Michigan literary connections at the Dearborn Inn. It’s one of my dreams to spend a sleepless night there in the Poe Cottage. To my delight, I just finished reading the Scribners’ 1932 Award Winning short story, “The Big Short Trip”  by Lansing author and might I add Communist spy, John Herrmann. It made me suspicious that an University of Michigan playwright Arthur Miller might have stumbled across it at one time and based his 1949 play, “Death of Salesman” on this short story. And just for clarity it’s not likely that Arthur Miller was a spy. He was a sympathizer to use the term of the day.

So when Lousie Cooley, director of the Evening College at MSU Alumni Association, finally talked me into making a presentation on Michigan Literary History as part of the Evening College’s offerings I said yes. I’ve given the presentation twice before, once to a gathering of writers and once to a Bay View library club, so it wasn’t like it is a big deal, but I’ve been refining it so it can be used as sort of an informal tour book for literary geeks. Here’s what the promotional material says about the program:

Join Bill Castanier, literary journalist and founder of the Michigan authors’ literary blog for a book lover’s tour of Michigan. Discover details and little-known facts about more than 100 Michigan authors, poets and playwrights. Did you know that one Michigan author was not only a member of Hemingway’s “Lost Generation” but was also a Communist spy? And that Carl Sandburg called Michigan home until some goats made him move! During this classroom “tour,” you will travel from Niles to Calumet and back exploring authors who lived in Michigan, vacationed in Michigan or when visiting Michigan took home memories that lasted a lifetime. You will learn what triggered authors such as Mark Twain and Flannery O’Connor to write scathing letters back home about their visits to Michigan and which author first wrote about Michigan mosquitoes! And last but not least you will discover the Michigan author who started out in a log cabin and what prompted another author to build a castle for himself.

If you can, join me Tuesday, April 17, 6:30–9 p.m. at 102 Kellogg Center, 1 session, the session is  $45. If nothing else you’ll go home with an interesting an unusual reading list.

Register here.