Happy 70th, Donn Fendler

Although it's almost September, summer isn't yet officially over, so I can still mark the 70th anniversary this past July of one of my very favorite real stories: Donn Fendler's Lost on a Mountain in Maine.


Written by journalist Joseph B. Egan, as relayed by Donn in the months after the boy's rescue from a harrowing nine days lost in the woods, Lost on a Mountain in Maine is a familiar title to most children in this state. I first read the book when I was about 10 -- two years younger than Donn when got lost -- and have read it probably a dozen times since. It's a story that still raises the hairs on my arms, and brings a lump to my throat, when I think about it.

Having reached the summit of Katahdin ahead of his Dad and brothers, Donn, anxious about the dark cast to the sky and chilly in his light windbreaker, decides to head back down to find them. But a fog bank obscures his view and he takes a wrong turn. Thus begins a harrowing nearly-two-week journey finding his way out of the woods, relying on his Boy Scout training and indominable faith.

While it might not have the canonical weight of the literary elite, it is no less an example of the classic "hero cycle" than Homer's Odyssey. The likeable, but naive hero sets out on his journey, makes a really bad decision (that we readers see coming before he does), ends up in the underworld (Donn literally falls down an embankment), fights a wild variety of demons (in this case: blood-thirsty mosquitoes, bears, hallucinations), gets help from an otherworldly source (his faith in God, the voice of his mother), and finally ends his journey back home (by way of a remote camp in Stacyville, Maine, miles from where he started). The story is timeless, universal, and moving. If ever there was a hero to root for, it's this skinny kid from Rye, New York.

And root, Mainers--and Americans--did. The missing boy made national headlines as hundreds of searchers--human and canine--tirelessly combed Baxter State Park for him. His own father put in countless hours until an eye wound forced him to stop. Finally, after nine days of fending off wildlife, frigid temperatures, hallucinations, and fear, he emerged.

"Triumph of the human spirit" is a cliche, but it's absolutely accurate in this case. The physical deprivations were one thing, but the sense of loneliness that child must have felt wandering those dark, remote, uncivilized woods makes my heart ache. Even more so now that I have a son of my own.

Donn Fendler -- feted with a grand parade, introduced to FDR, turned into a Maine folk hero -- is now in his 80s. Retired from a military career, he lives in Tennessee most of the year but summers in Newport, Maine, not far from where I grew up. (In fact, I'm proud to say that he went to the same high school I did -- Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield.)

Some years back, I wrote to him to tell him how much I adored his book, and he wrote a lovely letter back. We then exchanged a couple more letters and in each, he was unfailingly generous of spirit and eternally grateful for the opportunities life had given him. Because of that, and knowing how much Maine children still clamor to hear his story, Donn annually visits a number Maine schools to talk about his experience.

I think he knows that, at this point, his experience of wandering alone within the wilds of Katahdin stands as something larger than the facts of those nine days. In other words: There are many ways of being lost, and you can choose to give up -- or have the faith to find yourself again.

Thanks, Donn. We are so lucky to still have you around.

How Not to Write Bad History

In the last couple of months, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what makes for "good history" -- especially when it's local and once it's written down.

As the coordinator of the Maine Community Heritage Project for the Maine Historical Society, I foster collaborations between local historical societies, schools, and libraries so that the resulting team of adults and students can create a town website dedicated to local history. In the process, they digitize up to 200 historical society collection items (historic photos, documents, artifacts), write a 3,000 word narrative, and create online exhibits on topics that tell the unique stories of their town. Add-ons like oral history interviews expand on the main components. The resulting website is housed on MHS's Maine Memory Network, a digital museum that houses nearly 19,000 historic images about the state. (Yeah, it's a cool job.)

While the digitization process is key to the project, and vital for expanding access to these town treasures, the writing part interests me personally the most. Here's when the local color can really shine through. Here's where the often-told stories--and the long-gone-missing stories--can exist side-by-side. Here's how the "institutional knowledge" of town elders and others with specific knowledge of the community will exist far into the future.

But, of course, no one will care about any of this if the presentation of it is poor--if the history, as written, is just plain bad.

I've spent a lot of time writing a lot of different things--English Lit papers, personal essays, magazine articles, publicity copy, short stories, poems, memoir, you name it. Until this job, however, it had been quite a few years since I gave much thought to the particularities of history writing.

Writing history, a non-fiction genre, differs from other kinds of writing in significant ways. Unlike fiction, it adheres closely to known facts (and occasionally well-founded inferences) and generally argues a point based on those facts. Unlike other kinds of non-fiction, however, good history writing seeks to tell a compelling story, usually peopled by complex individuals set against richly-described backdrops of time and place.

In other words, if you think an apt model for "history writing" is what was presented in your high school Social Studies text book, think again. That stuff, most people who care about history would agree, would bore the paint off walls.

So how does one go about writing good--evocative, provocative--history, especially at the local level? Perhaps the best way to think about it is in the reverse--what does bad history writing look like?

This is exactly the tack taken by H. P. R. Finberg in his and V. H. T. Skipp's 1967 book _Local History, Objective and Pursuit_ in a chapter entitled, "How Not to Write Local History." I came across it in the midst of writing a manual for the MCHP--a fun, if gargantuan, task--and laughed out loud as I read it. The chapter begins:

"Anyone who wishes to avoid writing local history will find it perfectly easy to do so: he has only to switch on the radio or television; or he can just go to sleep. For present purposes, however, let us assume that somebody, somewhere… is determined at all costs to write the history of a local community… I shall try to show him how to reach the standard of performance that is expected of him: in other words, how to achieve the monumental flatness, tedium, and lack of acceptance which has been the hallmark of local history as too commonly practiced." (p. 192)

This charming, tongue-in-cheek introduction leads to ten “rules” of how to succeed at the practice of writing flat, tedious text that no one really cares to read. In fact, it cleverly highlights the very opposite—everything you need to do to write local history well.

In the interest of sharing Finberg's wit and insight with a larger audience, here are those ten rules (in quotations), followed by my own commentary.

1. "Assume an equal enthusiasm in the reader." Not everyone will approach the writing with the author's single-minded focus. Imagine the reader as someone bored with or skeptical about your history—how will you convince him or her otherwise?

2. "The element of comparison is lacking." Don’t assume your local community is the most important place that ever existed. While it is unique, it should be put into the context of its region, the state, and even the country’s history. Readers will be turned off by the lack of awareness of how your community exists in relation to other places.

3. "Treat the history as a heaven-sent opportunity for airing [personal irritations]." Whoever is doing the actual writing must keep personal opinion out of the text. History should be written as fairly and unemotionally as possible.

4. "A feeling for romance… can do wonders in putting the reader off." Avoid sentimental anecdotes, flowery writing, and tangents or trivial details not directly related to the subjects at hand.

5. "Foreshorten historical perspective." Badly written history sometimes treats time periods unevenly. Make sure you write about your town’s historical eras in a balanced way. Don’t cover 200 years in one paragraph, and spend the rest of the essay on the last decade. While some periods will be more pertinent than others, investigate each as deeply as possible and give them all the weight they deserve.

6. "Don’t provide a map." When you’re writing about a place, support the text with visual images. Highlight it with historic maps if at all possible. (Or any other visual “guides” that might help the reader imagine the place about which you are writing.)

7. "Assume that the reader is on par with yourself." This rule, which echoes back to the first in the list, refers to the one's diction. If you're writing for the general public--or anyone, in fact--avoid erudite, academic, or technical wording. Write in descriptive, but plain and straightforward language.

8. "Exclude all that matters." This is the complement to Rule #4. While you don’t want to include every trivial detail that you uncovered in your research, you should, in fact, make certain you haven’t left salient points out. What vital information must people know about your local history? Make sure you tell them.

9. "References… [don’t] give any" – Or, says Finberg, if you do, make them erroneous or unhelpful. Simply put: Cite your research and make sure it is all—to the letter—correct!

Finally, the 10th rule of bad local history writing, which Finberg says is “the most important matter of all”:

10. "Never use one word where you can possibly use four." Remember the rule about plain and straightforward language? Mark Twain famously encouraged writers to choose one simple word over multiple complex ones. No matter how many words you plan to write, be efficient.

What this all boils down to is: Students of good history think and look broadly, leaving no stone unturned in their effort tell a thorough, fact-based, and compelling story. Then they write the hell out of it. Because when history is told like the great human drama that it is, we readily embrace it, understand our place in it, and have a better idea of where next to go, knowing a little bit better where it is that we've been.

The Worst Books (Sometimes) Make for the Best Discussion

Okay, to clarify: I don't mean "worst" in a quality way. Poorly conceived and poorly written books are just pointless to read, much less talk about. Nor do I mean books written so obscurely that the common (i.e. not scholarly) reader gives up after a few pages.

What I mean by "worst" in this case, then, are books that incite ire in the reader, but which nevertheless keep them turning the pages. The kind of books that get thrown across the room when the last sentence has been read.

Think about it: What's the last really wonderful book you read? You know, the one you have nothing but good feelings for. The one that ended neat and tidy, with every loose thread either tied up or clipped off. What do you have to say about it?

"Oh, it was great. I loved everything about it." End of story.

Sure, you could go on about how the characters moved you, how cleverly the plot arced its way on to the end, how humanity is better for this book having been written. Far be it from me to deny you the warm glow; I've enjoyed many contented sighs myself. But try having a dynamic discussion with a group of 8 or 10 when everyone feels exactly that same way. Boring! Often, once you get past the initial oohs-and-aahs and the laundry list of everyone's favorite parts, the talk fizzles. What more is there to say?

Contrast that, if you will, with a first-person narration by a real humdinger of a character--a villain or megalomaniac or someone just off her rocker. Or a story that tackles a controversial subject in an all-too-honest, no-holds-barred way. Or a book that contains a devastating tragedy for which you found yourself wholly unprepared. Or a writing style that takes everything you learned in Freshman Comp and turns it on its head (but somehow keeps you reading).

That's the stuff that really upsets people--literally throws them off balance. It fills them with such intensity of feeling that the words explode out of them the moment they enter the book group room.

"I hated this book! It really frustrated me! The main character drove me nuts! I can't believe it ended the way it did!"

Excellent, say I, let's talk about why. And, by golly, there is never any shortage of answers to this question. People will talk forever about something that angers or saddens them. It's not unlike gossip. When's the last time you heard a piece of gossip that made you sigh contentedly? By definition, gossip is juicy--acidic, tart, zesty. Without its salacious tang, no one would pass it along; it would die with the first listener. In much the same way, if a book fails to quicken the reader's pulse or make him question his own assumptions about the world, then what point is there to talking to anyone else about it?

There is, however, such a thing as too much, and too similar, intensity. The passionate reactions of the group members must not be so inflamed as to blind them to rational conversation, and the willingness to hear different perspectives. And it helps if readers react differently to different things in the book. If no one can get past the dissatisfying ending or the grating narrative voice, then the discussion will begin to sound like a skipping CD. Result: annoyance.

All that said, human response to literature is highly subjective. (And that's why I'm not naming titles here.) The role of the group's facilitator, or whomever chooses the book, is a tightrope walk. She must find a book that engages a diverse group of readers without making them complacent or totally turned off. So, what to look for? Here's a quick and dirty list:

* Complex situations. If not necessarily controversial subjects, then at least situations with no easy answers.
* Stories driven primarily by richly-drawn characters, not plot. Every good writer knows that plot is simply a by-product of character--their thoughts and desires make everything happen. What they think and do must be entirely believable according to their personality and motivations--even if it's tragic or horrendous.
* Descriptive writing that, in no uncertain terms, avoids cliche. Nothing makes a book truly "bad" like dull or laughable imagery. Original, compelling images make a piece of writing pulse and glow.
* And if the writing breaks traditional rules, the new style and structure must have its own consistency. It must teach the reader how to read it, so that she doesn't abandon the text but feels like the effort is worth her time.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to choose a dynamic book for discussion. But if nothing else, these four suggestions won't let you down. If someone walks into your discussion ready to hurl the book across the room, ask him to hold off until the end of the evening. Meanwhile, make sure the discussion touches on the above points, thereby proving the book worth the time and effort after all. In which case, instead of throwing the book, your irritable participant might instead tell you something along these lines on his way out the door:

"Well, I still don't love it, but the discussion sure made me appreciate it a lot more."

Writing Rules

When I taught in community college, I encountered many students--of all ages--who struggled with writing. Most vexing to them were the basics--things like punctuation, sentence structure, grammar, and spelling. They had no problem coming up with salient topics and rich content, but putting their thoughts down cohesively, cleanly, and concisely was another matter altogether.

I couldn't blame them entirely. The rote way writing basics are often taught, it's a wonder anyone learns to differentiate a comma from a semi-colon or how to avoid a run-on sentence. Even I, an English major from way back, have no memories of actually learning grammar rules (perhaps I've blocked them out) and would be hard pressed today to give you a dictionary definition for a past participle. When I write, however, the basics are always there under the surface, undergirding my words. No writerly type I know would claim that catching a split infinitive is the exciting part of their job. That's just nuts and bolts. But if you want to move people, you've got to have the mechanisms in place.

So that's what I would try to explain to the students who shot me pained looks at seeing purple marks all over their papers (I refused to use a red pen). "Why does this stuff matter so much?" they might say, and I would look them in the eye and reply something on the order of: "Because you and your ideas matter so much."

Once they understood the lovely little irony that adhering to generic rules actually allowed their very unique and individual ideas to come through more clearly--that this whole process was, in fact, not about turning them into grammar automotons but, rather, about celebrating the depths of their minds and souls--my job got a little easier. Going over the mistakes one by one was almost beside the point. After all, they weren't going to stop writing fragment sentences or "its" instead of "it's" overnight. But maybe, just maybe, they were going to try a little harder next time--knowing someone cared enough to want to understand them.

Books in the Workplace

Last Thursday night I spent two hours facilitating a discussion about a memoir and two short stories with nurses, physicians, administrators, and other staff at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. The subject: Mental illness. The experience: Invigorating and inspiring. No, the subject and the experience are not mutually exclusive.

This was the fourth discussion in a six-part series I'm facilitating for the Maine Humanities Council. The program is called Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Healthcare and it's more than a decade old. It was started in Maine in the 1990s and has since been exported to more than 20 states. When I worked for the Vermont Humanities Council, I directed the program there, overseeing it in 13 hospitals and facilitating discussions in two of them. I feel privileged to have continued my involvement with the program in Maine. I've been with the Lewiston group since last year (it's a January-June series, one discussion a month).

"Lit & Med" acknowledges the art of healthcare as being on equal footing with the skill. In short, the program's goals are to improve communication and understanding among colleagues in the hospital setting and ultimately, to improve patient care. The program is intentionally diverse--anyone who works in the hospital is invited--to allow for cross-departmental exchange and to get past the imposed hierarchies that exist in every hospital. Reading lists are custom-designed for each participating hospital each year and the readings on them must be story-based. Hospital staff read all the time--medical texts, manuals, patient records, protocols, etc. What they don't ever have a chance to do is discuss the challenges of their job through narrative. Why is this important? Stories--whether novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, memoir, personal essay--offer insight into human nature that a more analytical piece of writing cannot. They also offer the safety of talking about intense issues through the eyes of a character.

Take our discussion of Mindy Lewis's Life Inside -- a memoir of her institutionalization in a mental hospital as an adolescent. A stridently rebellious teenager in the '60s, Lewis took drugs and fought viciously with her single-parent mother. At her wits' end, Lewis' mother took the advice of a psychiatrist and signed her daughter over to the state to handle. The state committed her and diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Upshot: she wasn't, and she spent years undoing the damage wrought by the system. As you can imagine, it's a heart-wrenching and enraging read. But the you-are-there perspective of the author allows the Lit & Med participants to get inside the heart and mind of a patient (who shouldn't have been) and understand her experience in a way that a textbook discussion cannot. One participant, who vividly recalled his own experience years ago as a resident with mental patients, found the book "re-opened an old wound." But this time, he wasn't alone in dealing with it. The exchange shared among the group members offered solace for and insight into the lives of both patients and providers. The culminating question--much debated, left unanswered: How far have we really come from those days?

We went on to discuss two equally complex short stories by Adam Haslett from his collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. "Notes to My Biographer" and "The Good Doctor" tackle mental illness through the eyes of a (genuine) schizophrenic and a doctor sent to treat an anxiety- and trauma-ridden woman, respectively. Haslett clearly earned his MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. These are carefully-woven, sharply-detailed, character-driven pieces. They are not, however, beach reads. Responding in an interview to claims of his work being "depressing," Haslett rightly differentiates between something that is depressing, which is the absence of all feeling, and deep sadness or tragedy, which promotes an intensity of feeling. I did not hear anyone on Thursday night say these stories were "depressing." On the other hand, the word "sad" liberally peppered the lively and engaged conversation. The group felt the weight of the characters' anguish as if the characters had been sitting there telling their stories in person. And while they came to no easy conclusions about when to use medication and when not, or what, really, is a "good doctor," they knew the conclusion was hardly the point. "He leaves off the answers," said one physician about Haslett's writing. "That's good because there aren't any."

When I said above I feel privileged to participate in this group, I mean it. I'm being let in to the deepest, most intimate places of healthcare--where providers examine their very personal reasons for doing what they do, as well as their professed shortcomings and frustrations. Don't get me wrong--there's plenty of joy and gratitude that gets expressed, too. These men and women exemplify the "care" in healthcare. They appreciate the stories--the lived experience--of patients and they want constantly to learn and understand more about them, and about themselves. If I fell sick, I wouldn't for a second hesistate to put myself in their hands. The biggest reason why is that their hands are simply a highly-skilled extension of their gifted hearts.

The Paradox of Writing

A wise high school English teacher once told our class: “Don’t ever let me ever hear you say that these days were the best time in your life.” What he meant momentarily startled me—a senior very much enjoying high school and in particular, English classes—but I quickly realized the truth in his statement. If you stop growing—improving upon yourself, seeking out new adventure and information—at any point in life, you are done for. Those forty-year-olds, gazing forlornly back at their high school “glory days” (which, Bruce Springsteen tells us, will surely “pass you by”) and comparing how far they haven’t come (or how far they’ve regressed) don’t strike us still as the big man on campus or the cover girl—they strike us objects of pity.

So, too, with writing. No matter how brilliant a piece of your writing may be in the moment, or the immediate afterglow, of creation, you should find somewhere in it cause for this reaction upon pulling it out twenty years later: sheer embarrassment. From the student essay to the Pulitzer-winning novel, the writing should never look “perfect” to the writer once some time has passed. To someone else, maybe. But not him or her. Why? Because a working writer, like anyone practicing a craft or a skill, should constantly improve. Sure, you may look at an old research paper, poem, article, or newsletter you wrote and think, Gee, overall this was pretty good stuff! But if you are still writing, and ever conscious of making your writing the best it can be, you will by necessity come across a section or a sentence that draws the blood to your face and makes you think, I can’t believe I wrote that! That’s a good thing. Embrace your embarrassment. It means you’ve grown and flourished as a writer—that you are better today than you were twenty, ten, even two years ago. And, assuming that you continue to write (and, as a foundation for that, continue to learn) throughout life, you can be assured that you will be better next year than you are right now.

Admittedly, this is tough for us perfectionists. I’ve wound myself in knots countless times, trying to the get the phrasing of one sentence letter-perfect before daring to move onto to the next. (I’m not much for the messy first draft, or “mind dump” as it’s often called.) Later, that sentence might be the one thing I wish I had changed. That’s the paradox of writing… or any profession, or life itself: Work toward perfection all the while rejecting the achievement of it. Somehow, I managed to tell this to student writers (as my teachers told me, as countless famous writers have told eager novices) with a straight face. “Don’t worry about perfection now,” I’d say, “because that will be irrelevant the next time you look at this piece. Your definition of perfection will have changed. Just worry about doing your current best.” Whether it helped depended on how much they cared about being a decent writer—and how dichotomous their minds were.

Because, if you can’t make peace with the paradox… well, I’ll let The Boss tell you what happens: “Time slips away / And leaves you with nothing mister but / Boring stories of glory days.”

Reading--and Discussing--for Pleasure

Reading good fiction and "story-based" non-fiction (memoir, personal essay, histories, even some science writing), is one of my favorite things to do in life and most of it--probably 90%--never gets formally discussed with anyone. It enriches my mind, enlarges my heart, stimulates my intellect, teaches me something new about life and humanity, and--not by any means least--entertains me. But the 10% I read and then set out to discuss with others often transforms all these qualities into something richer, more divine, and deeply comforting. Read alone and you connect minds with one other virtual person--the author. Read and discuss with a group, and you feel part of something larger than yourself.

I, like many others, have been disturbed by the reports in recent years about the sharp drop-off in reading for pleasure, especially among the more literary forms of reading (as opposed to the newspaper, web sites, "how to" books, etc.). The NEA published one of the more talked-about studies in 2004, noting that the greatest drop was seen in young people. They estimated a drop in 20 million readers from 1982 to 2002. I agree with NEA's then-chairman Dana Gioia's assessment of that as a "crisis."

However, while I don't doubt the research behind the results, and I don't have a lot of hope there's been a significant upswing in the past five years, it is indeed hard to go very far today without bumping into a book group, and increasingly, a community-wide "one book" read. Sure, many of these groups preach to the choir of traditional pleasure readers: women "of a certain age," well-educated folks, people who used to do 100% of their reading alone and ached to carve out at least 10% for sharing with others. But before you worry too much about elitism and exclusivity: There are men who join book groups, as well as those without a college education, teens, and even folks who previously "didn't have time for reading." I know, because I've met them. (More on where in another post.)

A little credit for today's gargantuan book group phenomena and its ever-widening circle goes to the smallest state in the union: Vermont. More specifically, you can thank the Rutland Free Library and my former employer, Vermont Humanities Council, for bringing forth the contemporary book discussion group before anyone had heard of an "Oprah author"--or, for that matter, Oprah herself. (Lest you think I'm denigrating Ms. Winfrey, I'm not. I think she deserves a big shout-out for introducing literary reading to a mass audience. She alone must have decreased the percentage of non-literary readers in all those studies by at least a point or two.)

Quick overview: In 1978, then-Rutland Free Library director Pat Bates got a grant from the Humanities Council to start up a "Women in Literature" book group; it was a wild success; more groups followed; they spread around the state. Shortly thereafter, the Council and made "Reading and Discussion" its own program. (Years later, I would have the great pleasure of overseeing R&D and creating many themes for its growing catalog.) Then, in 1982, VHC got special funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and, in partnership with the American Library Association, gleefully exported its proven model to multiple other states. Suddenly, thousands of people--tens of thousands of people--were engaging in non-academic, community-based discussions about books they had read purely for fun.

Okay, so I admit that today's book group/community read trend is larger than one state and one humanities council. But I can't help but think that some of what was created in that verdant Green Mountain soil by a few creative and intrepid folks nourished the bounty of book groups out there today. Since those early days, we have come to understand that it's about the book, of course, but it's also bigger than that: It's about what E.M. Forster meant when he wrote the epigraph to his novel Howard's End: "Only connect." Go out there and talk to your neighbors. Share a story with them and get their perspective. Think about where they are coming from, not just yourself. Then you'll know why one longtime Vermont reading-and-discussion participant once told VHC, "These groups get me through the winter."