Authors Electric

 Alicia Sammons I worked as an editor for the better part of my too long professional career. Editing can be demanding, but I never thought of it as a particularly glamourous or creative calling. Over the years I climbed my way up from proofreader to senior editorial positions on magazine, major metropolitan newspapers, and editing for independent publisher.  I always felt in awe of writers and aspired to their magic with words, an assessment shared in popular culture. We see a lot of juicy movies about authors like The Hours and Midnight in Paris. On the other hand, editors can't get much respect even from their writers, including a few authors with whom I've worked.  Vladimir Nabokov  sneered at them as ‘pompous avuncular brutes.’  Robert Gottlieb edited books of  Joseph Heller ,  John Le Carré ,  John Cheever , and  Toni Morrison . The legendary Maxwell Perkins  edited and famously mentored Lost Generation icons F. Scott Fitzgerald ...

"I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it," wrote Paul Theroux welcoming us succinctly aboard The Great Railway Bazaa r.    "Trains sing bewitchment," Theroux added at the start of a four-month rail journey from London through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, returning via the Trans-Siberian Railway. His 1975 armchair classic depicts people, history, and cultures, more than trains and never complains about difficult accommodations. "If a train is large and comfortable you don't even need a destination." ...I concur.  I've set a few of my stories on trains, including Onion Station (published in Chicago Quarterly Review and in my anthology, Sometimes Ridiculous ). The tale is told from the perspective of a boy on a 1940s transcontinental train trip stopover with his warring mother and father in Chicago. It's taken from life --  an episode in a forthcoming novella largely set on rocking ra...

I should have anticipated the 21st century's demented clown show in 1999 on the rainy November night that I saw Being John Malkovich at a multiplex theatre in San Francisco. The harbinger wasn't so much Spike Jonze's brilliant, surreal comedy itself, but what happened in the theatre that night. I had dropped off my youngest kid after a daddy weekend that Sunday night and felt too awake to go straight back to my apartment. I diverted to catch the late showing of this well-reviewed, bizarre film, which more than lived up to expectations.   About halfway through, when I had finished off my popcorn, the screen went dark, followed by a canned slideshow advertising snack bar treats. There was little reaction from the two dozen-or-so in the theatre. So I waited. And waited. And waited. I checked my watch (This was before our cell phones became smart.) Twenty minutes! Then thirty! The sparse late night audience settled into soft murmuring. Nothing from management. No apparent activ...

Ask me what I've been doing lately and chances are I'll rattle off bullet points like a Ted Talker. I recognize that the questioner is only making conversation, but I feel compelled to provide you with at least a semblance of substance - without overdoing it I hope. In turn, I may ask: "How about you? Any pancakes on the griddle?" But what if I respond: "Nothing! Nada! Zilch! Bupkis!"? Honest, perhaps, but sounds rude. A brush off. What a curmudgeon, that Tosi guy, a prima donna ! Worse yet, it comes off as feigned humility. Shrug. Gee. Little me? He's so humble, that Tosi guy.  Still worse: Instead of bullet points, I give you a full accounting, a quarterly report on my works-in-progress, launches and lunches, with recipes.  God forbid, you should think that I am really doing nothing. You should find me out as an idler, a time-waster, an Internet triva-addict, a gamer, a social media gabber.  You may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one t...

Zadie Smith: Intimations on culture and COVID COVID-19 has rearranged our metaphors, especially for those of my advanced years, and co-morbidities that require lying low. Hunter-gatherer/adventure-hero idioms have taken a back seat to quieter images of fishing (online) and burrowing, surviving on deliveries from FedEx, Instacart, and Amazon. No longer able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, I am a hermit crab in a conch shell, a trapdoor spider awaiting victuals via Grubhub. I thought about how the pandemic affects me creatively beyond material circumstances while reading Intimations , a powerful collection of six, "shape-shifting," intimate essays about the COVID-related experiences of Zadie Smith . In this slim volume, the British born, NYU literary professor, essayist, and novelist crosses the Atlantic on the high wire of writing with grace and insight about unfolding tragedy whose conclusion remains uncertain. The brilliance with which she succeeds flas...

Colorado Symphony's "Play On" virtual ensemble This changes everything! We repeat this mantra with every crisis, disaster, plague , and war. There's truth in it, despite that our ways may change, but human nature not so much. COVID-19 remains rampant worldwide at this writing, while our cities hunker down to stall its spread and buy time for our doctors and scientists. Squint, and you can see the outlines of changes to come in a post-pandemic world. I'll leave analyses of the cultural, economic and political tectonics to others, and note only the vibrations we're already feeling in our world of writing and publishing. It's early days, but reports indicate a surge in book sales as might be expected what with so many of us sequestered at home with time on our hands. It's difficult to tell if this will be a longterm trend, but demand for books seems to be surging at the moment, particularly for e-books - delivered electronically...

Latinx Chicago poet, author, professor Sánchez It's not easy being an American metropolis, forever hassled, baited and struggling to live up to the sometimes conflicting ideals of opportunity, freedom, enterprise, and cosmopolitanism. Urban dwellers like myself like to dream of their hometown being a center of creative arts, education, science, architecture, and enterprise. On days when the sunlight glistens off the lake and the splendid downtown towers, when festivals and budding trees announce early spring, and when the trains run on time, we glimpse the shining promise of our urban work-in-progress. Just as often we watch it fail miserably. We note its corruption, squalor, and violence on sorrowful, embarrassing display. Then, with little fanfare, we've also watched it rise - with little credit given - stubbornly from all manner of adversity, storm, strife, blunders, chicanery, and disease. In so doing we confound the naysayers who fear and loathe our urban ways as...