For a children’s book author especially he was outspoken, brash and fearless in his approach to the literary world. “In the Night Kitchen” for example was routinely classed as a banned book for showing a little boy’s penis.

So did the idea for “In the Night Kitchen” just pop into Sendak’s head? Not so much. When Sendak sat down to illustrate and write the book he was very familiar with the work of Michigan comic illustrator Winsor McCay who was born in Spring Lake Michigan and who for more than 20 years illustrated the comic “Little Nemo in Slumberland”.

“Little Nemo” is still one of the best fantasy comic book strips ever and guess what it starts with? A dream sequence with Little Nemo in his bed.

One panel has Little Nemo sitting up in his bed saying “I wish I could have one pleasant dream for a change! Shucks!”

Photo by Tom Wilson-Grand Rapids

McCay was an influence for many cartoonists and early animators including Walt Disney who was inspired by McCay’s 1914 animated short “Gertie the Dinosaur”.

The Spring Lake illustrator worked for numerous newspapers in his career, but he really cut his teeth doing on-the-spot caricatures at a Detroit Dime Museum. His breakthrough illustrations were on the sinking of the Titanic.

When Disneyland was opened McCay’s son was present at the dedication which was Walt’s way of saying thank you. The first design for Frontierland was conceived by McCay. A state of Michigan Historical Marker has been erected at the site of McCay’s childhood home which is located on Exchange St. in Spring Lake.

Sandra Seaton

When East Lansing playwright Sandra Seaton receives the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature´s Mark Twain Award for writing this week, she will join a distinguished group of previous winners, including Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Virginia Hamilton, Ray Bradbury, Jane Hamilton and Jim Harrison.

For Seaton, a planned memorial service at the ceremony for former MSU professor and author David Anderson (who died this last December) is just as important to her as winning the award.

“I remember memorizing and reciting (the work of African-American poet) Paul Lawrence Dunbar as a child,”
Seaton said.

Seaton’s family joined “The Great Migration,” moving from Tennessee to Chicago. As a result, she said, her
playwriting always went back and forth between themes of the South and the North.

“Every time, I’ve seen a play I’ve written, I’ve revised it,” Seaton said. “It’s not a play until it is performed, and the play is part of the process, not the whole.”

She said that the stage, the director’s point of view and the actors’ spoken words often change the interpretation and meaning of the original play: “When I watch a play I’ll hear a line or see a scene that isn’t working, and rewrite it.”

The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature meets at MSU Thursday through Saturday, and the seminars are open to the public; the entry fee is $25 (lunches and dinner are extra). Discussions cover everything from how Sinclair Lewis brought H.G. Wells to Main Street, to explorations of the writing of Theodore Roethke and John D. Voelker and analysis of the coverage of the Detroit riots of 1967.

More information on the conference is available at the society website at www.ssml.org. Seaton will be presented the award at a luncheon on Friday.

Abbott’s emergence from Flint was a storybook tale, especially considering that he was born without a right hand. On a scholarship to the University of Michigan, he collected two Big 10 championships, a solid 26-8 record and won the Sullivan Award for the best college athlete in 1987, the first baseball player to win the award. He then became a member of the triumphant U.S. Olympic Baseball Team, which won an unofficial Gold Medal in the 1988 Olympics (baseball was classified as a demonstration sport that year).

Drafted by the California Angels in 1988, Abbott began what appeared to be a stellar career, even logging a no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians in 1993. Then he lost his fast ball and bounced around several baseball teams. His fall from stardom matched his meteoric rise to fame.

Abbott, who is 44, has gone on to become a professional inspirational speaker — a term he says he abhors — admits the book was a catharsis for him in many ways.

“Parts of it were very hard; especially the professional disappointment,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Newport Beach, Calif. “Writing about playing baseball and then not playing, after the role it played in my life — (that) was the hard part.”

The first time Abbott watched a DVD of the 1993 no-hitter game happened when he and co-writer Tim Brown, a sportswriter for Yahoo! Sports, sat down to go over it play by play. The game is reviewed in detail in the book and it becomes a central focus for moving the story forward. But the real story is about the one played off-field.

Abbott writes that his success in baseball was of such importance that it “brought upon me a distorted view of winning and losing. It wasn’t until I struggled that I came to understand its destructiveness.”

The book is not just about a one-handed player making it to the big leagues and defying all odds. Abbott, in sometimes very emotional details, discusses his childhood and makes sure everyone knows who helped get him to the big leagues. “I benefitted greatly by the people who pulled me into the game,” he said.

That list includes his coaches, especially his Little League and high school coaches at Flint Central High School. The book is a refreshing look at the role his parents played in his maturation as a baseball player and as a person.

“I wasn’t a kid who wanted to stick out,” Abbott said. But stick out he did, even though he developed the habit of hiding his hand in a front pocket (something he couldn’t do in a baseball uniform). He writes about some painful times, such as his first day in kindergarten when a classmate was repulsed by a hook prosthesis that Abbott quickly gave up.

He admits that even today strangers ask about the hand. Last year, while vacationing in northern Michigan and wading in Lake Michigan he recalls a woman yelling out to him, “What happened to your hand? War?” “It doesn’t bother me, but sometimes you can’t articulate the way you feel,” he said, “and (the feeling) never goes away.”

He also writes tenderly about another feeling that never goes away: his admiration for his parents. While writing the book he discovers a back story involving his parents, Mike and Kathy, who were high school sweethearts. His father was looking forward to a possible college football scholarship when Kathy, a college freshman, became pregnant.
Kathy was asked to leave her family home. She and Mike decided to get married, but had difficulty finding a Catholic priest to perform the ceremony. Finally, they were married two weeks after Jim was born.

The book then becomes their story. “I didn’t know a lot about their story until the book was written,” Abbott said. “There was a lot of family history I wouldn’t have known about and it only enhanced my admiration for them.”

Abbott’s parents’ uncertain start didn’t hold them back. Both Mike and Kathy finished college and went on to successful careers.

The book doesn’t preach, but it is easy to pull from it some life lessons, including how to deal with bullying, being different and facing reality. “The thing about a disability is, it’s for- ever,” Abbot writes. “And forever might not end but it has to begin somewhere.” “It’s important to know about the things that make you feel bad,” he said. “It doesn’t make it easier, but it takes some of the power away from what can make you feel bad. I want people to read the book and to know they can write their own story, not bound by the circumstances you are born into or find yourself in.”

Abbott has written one of the more engaging sports memoirs in a genre that is overrun by whining “me-me” books. It’s not often that an athlete looks to Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses” for inspiration: “Those that have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”

Jim Abbott, The author of “Imperfect: An Improbable Life” will appear 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 2 Schuler Books & Music 1982 Grand River Ave Okemos Free www.schulerbooks.com (517) 349-8840.

Three recent National Book Award honorees found the prize created an almost oxymoronic situation for them: They couldn’t write.

Jesmym Ward, Jaimy Gordon and Bonnie Jo Campbell all discovered that their brush with writing fame left them overscheduled, living out of suitcases and a little gun shy about living up to the expectations created by the coveted award.

Ward, who won the National Book Award in 2011 for “Salvage the
Bones,” and Gordon, the 2010 award winner for “Lord of Misrule,” will join 2009 finalist Campbell (“American Salvage”) for a conversation about winning, writing and life after the award at the 2012 Night for Notables award ceremony Saturday at the Library of Michigan.

Given their commitments it’s almost incredible to see three National Book Award honorees on the same program, said Carolyn Sparks, executive director of the Library of Michigan Foundation, which hosts the event.

Besides the obvious, the three writers have much in common. All were considered underdogs in the award competition. Gordon and Campbell’s books were published by small presses, and Ward was a virtually unknown author.

All have Michigan ties. Ward graduated from the University of Michigan; Campbell lives in Portage, and Gordon is a professor of English at Western Michigan University.

None of the authors had any inkling they would be in consideration for the award before the announcement of the finalists. Gordon didn’t prepare any comments for the award ceremony, Campbell had to borrow a dress, and Ward says she still can’t believe it.

“It was such an impressive list,” she said. “It still isn’t real to me. It has made my life very busy.”

All three writers candidly admit that before being honored their writing careers were on the ropes. Ward considered taking up nursing, Campbell thought about replacing writing with teaching, and Gordon was losing hope.

In a recent essay, Gordon, who wrote about a down and out race track in “Lord of Misrule,” compared her writing career to a race horse at the end of its career that makes one last unexpected run for glory.

“I always wanted to publish ‘Lord of Misrule’ … with a major press. I wanted more people to read at least one of my books. I wanted it to be difficult for anyone in the business to dismiss me.”

Gordon, who said she was published for 35 years by “good small presses,” was treated as an unknown writer when she became a finalist. “Vulgar as this is, I wanted one book with my name on it in airport bookstores, with the front cover turned out to passersby.”

The writers will also discuss a common aspect of their writing: Each has a strong, young female protagonist — all lost girls — who overcomes her flaws, looking out for herself and others.

Moderator Campbell hopes to thoroughly investigate that idea. “Our characters seem to defy expectations,” she said,  “and I want us to talk about why that is.”

The Michigan Notable Book Award is celebrating its 20th year and has its roots in the state’s Michigan Week celebration. Each year, a committee (including this writer) reviews hundreds of books written by Michigan authors, or books about Michigan.

Bruce Kopytek, whose book on the history of a department store (“Jacobson’s, I Miss It So”) and its closing was selected as a Notable Book, said, “My book is in good company, but as a first-time author I was caught off-guard. The honor certainly goes to the subject matter.”

Several first-time authors were selected as award winners, including Scott Sparling, for his edgy, noirish crime novel “Wire to Wire,” and Ellen Airgood’s “South of Superior,” about a charming Upper Peninsula diner and its denizens.

Other award winners helped resurrect the lives of important Michiganians who otherwise may have been lost to time, such as Detroit News Susan Whitall’s biography of Detroit soul and blues singer Little Willie John “Fever: The Fast Life and Mysterious Death of Little Willie John”). Former Washington Post writer Sara Fitzgerald’s “Elly Peterson: ‘Mother’ of the Moderates,” illuminated a Michigan activist who was one of the first major female political leaders in the country.

Next week, the award-winners start touring the state, making appearances at 50 local libraries. The Night for Notables is sponsored by Cooley Law School, Meijer, Lansing City Pulse, the Michigan Center for the Book and the Michigan Humanities Council. Night for Notables is 5:30 p.m. Saturday, April 28 at the Library of Michigan in downtown Lansing, 702 W. Kalamazoo St. $35, (517) 373-1300. michigan.gov/notablebooks. Read the entire list.

2012 Michigan Notable Books:

“Elly Peterson: ‘Mother’ of the Moderates,” by Sara Fitzgerald (University of Michigan Press)

“Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan,” by Craig Fox (Michigan State University Press)

“Fever: Little Willie John, A Fast Life, Mysterious Death and the Birth of Soul,” by Susan Whitall (Titan Books)

“Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them, Contemporary Michigan Literature,” edited by Keith Taylor and Laura Kasischke (Wayne State University Press)

“Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One,” by Mark Kurlansky (Yale University Press)

“Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life,” by Michael Moore (Grand Central Publishing)

“In Stitches: A Memoir,“ by Anthony Youn, M.D. (Gallery Books)

“Jacobson’s, I Miss It So!: The Story Of A Michigan Fashion Institute,” by Bruce Allen Kopytek (History Press)

“Magic Trash: A Story of Tyree Guyton and His Art,” by J.H. Shapiro and illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton (Charlesbridge)

“Michigan and the Civil War: A Great and Bloody Sacrifice,” by Jack Dempsey (The History Press)

“Misery Bay,” by Steve Hamilton (Minotaur Books)

“Miss Martin Is a Martian,” by Colleen Murray Fisher and illustrated by Jared Chapman (Mackinac Island Press)

“Motor City Shakedown,” by D. E. Johnson (Minotaur Books)

“A Nation’s Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis,” by Matt De La Pena and illustrated by Kadir Nelson (Dial Books for Young Readers)

“Once Upon a Car: The Fall and Resurrection of America’s Big Three Automakers — GM, Ford, and Chrysler,” by Bill Vlasic (William Morrow)

“Once Upon a River,” by Bonnie Jo Campbell (Norton)

“Songs of Unreason,” by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon Press)

“South of Superior,” by Ellen Airgood (Riverhead Books)

“Vintage Views Along the West Michigan Pike: From Sand Trails to US-31,” by M. Christine Byron and Thomas R. Wilson (Arbutus Press)

“Wire to Wire,” by Scott Sparling (Tin House Books)

The Lansing Senators

Peter Morris who has authored several books on the history of baseball and has been named “Baseball Historian of the Year” will present “Is Baseball Passé or the National Pastime” at a meeting of the Historical Society of Greater Lansing, 7 p.m., Thursday April 19 at the downtown branch of the Capital Area District Library.

Morris who lives in Haslett Michigan is the author of “A Game of Inches”, “Catcher”, “Level Playing Fields” and “Baseball Fever”. Most recently he authored an e-book “Don’t Kill the Umpire” about violence in baseball.  He will make the case that baseball is still the national pastime and it permeates American culture like no other sport.

“Baseball culture is imbedded in everything from our language (“level playing field”, “fair and square” and “not coming out of left field”) to political showcases (every president since William Howard Taft has thrown out a first pitch.)”  Morris who spends time each year in Cooperstown, New York at the Baseball Hall of Fame researching topics said “Baseball has taken on the mantel of the national pastime and the American character.”

The event is sponsored by the Historical Society of Greater Lansing and is funded in part by Michigan Humanities Council, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I had this premonition that the Pulitzer committee would not choose a book in the fiction category this year. Here’s why. This past weekend I bought a very interesting book at a Library sale in Muskegon. The book, “The Last Rivet” chronicled the dedication of Rockefeller Center in 1940.

The book was donated to the library by Nicholas Murray Butler, a name I didn’t recognize so I googled it. It turned out that Butler was the president of Columbia University at the time and there he was in a photo in the book sitting alongside Rockefeller. It also mentioned that he was on the Pulitzer board which oversees the selection of a book in the fiction category. Reports claimed that he had basically black balled the selection of Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Interestingly, Butler was also a supporter of Germany prior to World War II.

Could something like that happen today? Not as likely, but there will be some speculation. Books considered this year included “Pale King” by David Foster Wallace, ”Swamplandia” and “Tiger’s Wife” which also got cut from the National Book Award winners list.

On the up side “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention”, a book with some significant Michigan connections especially Lansing and Detroit won the non-fiction category. Of course, the author Manning Marable died prior to the publication of the book. Read a Mittenlit.com review here.

Benjamin Busch

The Sunday April 15 New York Times Book Review takes an in-depth look at the recently published memoir of Reed City Michigan author Benjamin Busch. His memoir “Dust to Dust” is quite different. First, it does not follow the normal conventions of memoirs in that it is not chronological. It jumps around and you have to be careful when you lay the book down to remember ‘where you are’ in his life when you come back to it.

In that way, the book is a little like Benjamin whose life has been a series of both unconventional and conventional undertakings. It’s easy to read something larger than life into the fort building he describes as young boy or to find Hamlet lurking in a couple skulls he uncovers as the reviewer does. The New York Times reviewer leads us into this Hamlet-laden review with more than 200 words before ever mentioning the book or the author.

One sentence (actually a part of a sentence) reads: “His skeptical, sometimes prolix, often vertiginous speculations on transience bespeak the preoccupations of an age in which a fashion for melancholic introspection…”

Whoah, doggies. The reviewer lost me there for a minute

Maybe I missed something. Certainly it is a heady book. Afterall, not many of us think of life in terms of the elements (water metal, soil, bone, blood, ash) but that’s not such a huge leap. Shakespeare did it all the time.

Busch’s thoughts on war and warfare are often conflicted even though above all he still is a “Marine.”

Karl Marlantes, Marine veteran of Vietnam and author of “Matterhorn”, one of the most monumental books on the Vietnam War, and “What It is Like to Go to War” has similar things to say about young men and war. As a fellow Marine, Marlantes provided a blurb for “Dust to Dust”.

Coming of age in the 60s, I knew many boys (we were hardly men) who trotted off to Southeast Asia spurred on by the ballad the “Green Beret” or who ran the other way chanting “Hell no I won’t go”. I was among the “hell no” group and my youthful battles seemed to have no impact on my decision nor did Thomas Moore or any Shakespearean play.

And when the reviewer sees deep meaning in fort building or hatchet slashing (Benjamin takes a hatchet to a small tree) it was something boys did and still do. If you have an ax cut a tree down. I wonder how the reviewer would’ve described my own boyhood indisecretions of rolling cattails in fresh road tar and then tossing them at cars while hiding in the ditches. I still wonder why we didn’t light them up first.

This book is a very different kind of memoir and certainly one to which you can’t apply normalcy in its style. As an example, he tells us very little about his family or his friends, if he had any.

All in all, I think you should wait to read the review until after you read the book. It will only confuse you -the review that is. Some New York Times Reviews skew toward trying to show how smart the reviewer is without ever considering the book itself. This one in particular is too smart by far.

If you get a chance, go see Busch read and discuss his book. He’s not only a lot of fun, but he offers you the opportunity to dig deeper into yourself. Right now he’s a writer, actor, artist and photographer, but you get the feeling he’s still defining himself and waiting for the right role and a bigger stage to take him to stardom or more importantly a satisfying life.

More of us should think in terms of our own life experiences the way Benjamin Busch does. Buy it. Read it.

Library activities include everything from suspension of certain fines, free videos (http://www.baycountylibrary.org/) to special programming such as former Poet Laureate Billy Collins at the Ypsilanti District Library.

You can also find additional programs at a site maintained by the Library of Michigan.

I remember when my mother first took me to the Bay City Library and I was able to take books home with me. I had my own library card and did I wear it out. As I grew older I was able to read anything I wanted and I mean anything. My Library card was lost in a tragic canoe tipover but I still have the Library Club pin I received for reading something like 50 books during the summer.

The Lansing Rally of Writers has been in it for the long haul. For 25 years, the rally has promoted writing and writers in Lansing.

This year’s program features noted crime and western writer Loren D. Estleman who, in a career spanning more than 45 years, has written 60 novels and hundreds of short stories.

Estleman’s fingers can never be far from an old-school typewriter.

A typewriter?

“I’m not giving up on the typewriter,” Estleman, 59, said, in an interview from his
home in rural Whitmore Lake — but then everything is rural in Whitmore Lake, which suits Estleman just fine.

“I’ve never been online and I’m never going online,” Estleman said.

Only recently has Estleman acquiesced to publishers’ demands of creating electronic files of his work, leaving that chore up to his spouse and fellow mystery writer Deborah Morgan.

Estleman still prefers using his 1967 Olympia and his 1923 Underwood to bang out his novels, including his more than 30 books featuring Detroit private eye Amos Walker. Walker, who would be just as home in the 1930s Detroit as he is in his novels’ contemporary setting, is a tough-talking, no-nonsense gumshoe who is quick with his fists and quicker with the quip.

Estleman said his morning keynote address at the Rally of Writers would stress that“writing well is the best revenge for young writers.”

He says writing well offers the best chance to get published and the best chance to make yourself critic-proof.

Estleman, whose career began when he submitted his first short story to a magazine when he was 15, is not a fan of self-publishing.

“It should be the last resort for writers. It’s so easy to self-publish that too many young writers don’t go the regular route,” he said.

And he sees a downside to that.

“You are never going to learn the craft unless you face editors,” he said.

Estleman said he has belonged to a writers’ group for 30 years. It meets every two weeks. He said a writers’ group helps make you aware of your audience and “what rings untrue.”

“Every writer after awhile becomes too familiar with what they are doing,” he said. He said writers’ groups make you aware of that and help you to avoid that common mistake.

Estleman said his advice to young or first-time writers is to “have faith in yourself.” He also believes that every reader needs feedback during the writing process: “Establish someone close to you whose opinion you trust.”

The author is a stickler for detail: It still bothers him that in one of his Walker books he placed the iconic giant Uniroyal tire from the 1964 World’s Fair on the wrong side of I-94 in Allen Park.

He laments the decline of newspapers in the United States. He calls the situation “the new Dark Ages.” “Who will keep the public record?” he asks.

Estleman always has several books in the pipeline, and one that he is very excited about is a fictional look at real-life gangster Al Capone. “Capone is very current in our culture,” he said, “and the 800-page manuscript is the longest I ever submitted.”

The rally takes place April 14 at the Conference Center of the Lansing Community College West Campus.

A free Rally Warm-Up, titled “After Red Tails: Struggles on the Home Front,” starts at 7 p.m. April 13 at the Schuler Books & Music Eastwood Towne Center location. Authors Lawrence P. Scott and Geoff Blair will discuss the World War II Tuskegee Airmen. Scott co-authored the book “Double V: The Civil Rights Struggle of the Tuskegee Airmen,” and Blair is the grandson of one of the Tuskegee aviators.

The 2012 Rally of Writers features 16 break-out sessions with authors, playwrights and poets.

Mardi Link, who has two books focusing on Michigan history and a forthcoming memoir, will will conduct a luncheon workshop on essay
writing titled “Three Books, the Hard Way.”

Okemos author Lev Raphael will conduct a workshop on Estleman’s nemesis, the e-book. Local poets Dennis Hinrichsen and Anita Skeen will conduct workshops on various aspect of poetry.

Other writers scheduled for the event include Andrea King Collier (multimedia storytelling), Mark Crilley (young adult graphic novels), George Dila (scenes in fiction), Michael Dwyer (travel writing), Carol Finke (magic realism), Meagan Francis (parenting), Dennis Hinrichsen (poetry), Steven Piziks (“Nuts & Bolts: Paradox of Cliches”) and Rob Roznowski (playwriting).

A Rally of Writers

Saturday, April 14

Registration begins at 8:30 a.m.

Conference Center, Lansing Community College West Campus in
Delta Township

5708 Cornerstone Dr., Lansing

$70 advance registration; $50 students with valid student ID

$80 registration at the door; $60 students with valid
student ID

$15 lunch (lunch purchase required for Mardi Link’s
presentation)

Rally Warm-Up: “After Red Tails: Struggles on the Home
Front”

Free

7 p.m. Friday, April 13

Schuler Books & Music, 2820 Towne Center Blvd., Lansing

(517) 372-4294

www.arallyofwriters.com

In the Matter of Two Men

One does such work as one will not,
And well each knows the right;
Though the white storm howls, or the sun is hot,
The black must serve the white.
And it’s, oh, for the white man’s softening flesh,
While the black man’s muscles grow!
Well I know which grows the mightier,
I know; full well I know.
The white man seeks the soft, fat place,
And he moves and he works by rule.
Ingenious grows the humbler race
In Oppression’s prodding school.
And it’s, oh, for a white man gone to seed,
While the Negro struggles so!
And I know which race develops most,
I know; yes, well I know.

The white man rides in a palace car,
And the Negro rides “Jim Crow.”
To damn the other with bolt and bar,
One creepeth so low; so low!
And it’s, oh, for a master’s nose in the mire,
While the humbled hearts o’erflow!
Well I know whose soul grows big at this,
And whose grows small; I know!

The white man leases out his land,
And the Negro tills the same.
One works; one loafs and takes command;
But I know who wins the game!
And it’s, oh, for the white man’s shrinking soil,
As the black’s rich acres grow!
Well I know how the signs point out at last,
I know; ah, well I know!

The white man votes for his color’s sake,
While the black, for his is barred;
(Though “ignorance” is the charge they make),
But the black man studies hard.
And it’s, oh, for the white man’s sad neglect,
For the power of his light let go!
So, I know which man must win at last,
I know! Ah, Friend, I know!

by James D. Carrothers (1869-1917) who was born in Cass County Michigan, the son of slaves. He was an eloquent poet often writing about the fate of the Negro in the United States. His poetry would’ve been as germaine in the 1960s as it was at the turn of the century. “In the Matter of Two Men” is a historical entry in the Poem/a/Day project sponsored by LansingOnlineNews.com during National Poetry Month.