Lit!Pop!Bang! is a Baltimore podcast that explores all things, well, lit, pop . . . and bang.

They chat about literature they’re reading, they banter about the latest in pop culture, and if you’re wondering what the “bang!” is in reference to, it’s that little something extra that gives listeners some insight into the personality of the host and guests, like asking what literary figure from the past they would most like to have dinner with.

The Baltimore podcast is hosted by writers and educators Anthony Moll and CeCe and produced by Mason Jar Press. It launched in December 2017 and has brought together area authors, poets, and other creatives for light conversations that sometimes integrate heavier topics and current issues. Without a designated studio, they’ve hosted Lit!Pop!Bang! at a number of unorthodox locations.

“We were once in an office closet,” CeCe says. “We’ve been everywhere from people’s bathrooms to—.” She cuts herself off and laughs. “I’m kidding. We have not recorded in a bathroom. But we’re very DIY.”

The upside of not having a studio is that it allows them to be very fluid.

Their second on-location podcast will be recorded live next weekend at the Baltimore Book Festival, where they’ll bring Maren Wright-Kerr, the Baltimore Youth Poet Laureate, and widely known poet, writer, and teacher Ailish Hopper to the CityLit Stage at 1 p.m. Sept. 30 to talk specifically about race in writing, publishing, and pop culture. The broader topic is about identity. They’ll ask things like who gets published? And why? And who are the gatekeepers?

“We want to have the conversations that can be hard to have,” Moll says. “We want to be our usual selves, too—from being very serious but also irreverent. We’re just putting on audio the conversations we’re already having.”

“We try to find out what’s ticking underneath the facade,” CeCe adds.

They also hope to include some audience participation in the form of a Q&A session, if time allows.

“The call-and-response is real, and it’s risky in that anything can happen,” says CityLit Project director Carla Du Pree, who organized a packed lineup over all three days of the CityLit Stage. “We applaud Lit!Pop!Bang! for standing up to this challenge and bringing it. I love it when people aren’t afraid to venture into new spaces.”

The Baltimore Book Festival, in its 23rd year, runs from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sept. 28-30 at the Inner Harbor Promenade and is free and open to the public.

Moll, who holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts, is a longtime Book Fest goer, but this will be his first year presenting. CeCe has lived in Baltimore for about three years, and this is her third year being part of the festival. She’ll also be reading her own poetry.

“Baltimore Book Festival is a place where everybody can come—all ages, all races, all gender identities—and you can really find whatever it is you’re into,” CeCe says. “I’ve been to book fests across the country, and this is one of the best.”

Brooks

Doug Wilson (St. Martin’s Press)

This thoroughly researched biography of one of Baltimore’s most beloved sports figures features a chorus of voices testifying to the fact that Brooks Robinson was the best fielding third baseman in history and one of the nicest guys to ever put on a uniform. As such, it isn’t the most compelling read, but it does occasionally inspire interest that, unfortunately, goes unsatisfied, because Robinson’s voice is largely absent. He chose not to cooperate with Wilson.

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Gilbert Byron: A Life Worth Examining

Jacques T. Baker Jr. (The Talbot County Library Foundation)

This homespun biography of Gilbert Byron, a Thoreau-like writer from the Eastern Shore (and author of the 1957 classic The Lord’s Oysters), includes enough fascinatingly archaic info to make it a satisfying paean to our fading native customs. It also makes abundantly clear that Byron, who passed away in 1991, had the Chesapeake in his blood, thanks to his seafaring father and a philosophizing grandfather, who lived on a “little ark” anchored on the Chester River.

When Alice McDermott suggests meeting for lunch at the Irish Inn at
Glen Echo, it seems like an obvious choice. Critics often tag her as an
Irish-American, or Irish-Catholic, writer, and the proposed setting
conjures images of Guinness on tap, shamrock decorations, fish and
chips, and a steady stream of stock phrases like “luck of the Irish” and
“Irish eyes are smiling.” But it turns out that the Inn, like McDermott
and her work, defies stereotyping. Its humble exterior—painted yellow
with a dark-shingled roof—is unremarkable. Inside, it exudes carefully
cultivated taste, with white linen covering the tables and framed oil
paintings lining the walls. It is, indeed, a leprechaun-free zone. The
menu lists black-tiger-prawn spring roll and smoked-salmon carpaccio
alongside more traditional fare such as shepherd’s pie.

McDermott,
who lives in nearby Bethesda, appears to be a regular, greeting the
hostess and server with a familiarity that trumps formality. After
glancing at the menu, she orders a beet salad and iced tea. A
youthful-looking 60 years old, she smiles easily, often, and for good
reason—she has, for decades, been acclaimed as a top-tier literary
talent.

McDermott’s latest novel, Someone, was recently
nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. (The
winner will be announced March 13.) She’s already won a National Book
Award for 1998’s Charming Billy and earned three Pulitzer Prize
nominations. McDermott’s crisp, purposeful prose has been praised by
many publications, including The New York Times, which lauded her for “writing with wisdom and grace and refusing to sentimentalize her characters.”

Peers
like Anne Tyler feel similarly. “I am a huge admirer of Alice
McDermott’s work,” says Tyler, who cites Someone as a particular
favorite. “It was beautifully written and very touching, with its
unpredictable landings on different, random times in one woman’s
life.”

McDermott appreciates the acclaim but doesn’t make too
much of it, likely the result of a middle-class upbringing and its
accompanying don’t-get-too-big-for-your-britches ethos. She often seems
more interested in talking about the successes of others, notably her
students.

What’s less known about McDermott is that she’s forged a
stellar reputation as an educator. She has, since 1996, taught in the
Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University, where she conducts
graduate and undergraduate fiction workshops. “It’s energizing,” she
says. “I enjoy looking at that first draft and thinking, ‘What have we
got here? What’s on the page that we can make use of?’ I occasionally
feel like I’m more invested in the stories than they are, but it’s
always fun because they’re so talented.”

One of those talented
students, 2003 grad Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a fellow nominee for
the National Book Critics Circle Award this year. She came to the U.S.
from Nigeria at the age of 19, determined to become a serious writer. In
2008, she won a MacArthur “genius” grant. Another former student,
Matthew Thomas, graduated from Hopkins and took a job teaching English
at a Jesuit high school in New York. For 10 years, he didn’t publish
anything, but worked steadily on his first book, which he recently sold
to Simon & Schuster for $1 million.

Listening to McDermott
talk about them, it’s apparent she isn’t bragging or basking in some
reflected glow. She certainly isn’t competitive, and their awards and
advances, though nice, don’t really impress her. On a deeper level, she
understands the enormity of how far they’ve come and the sheer
improbability of their journey.

She relates to that.

McDermott
grew up in Elmont, a Long Island suburb, where she went to Catholic
school and read constantly. She had two older brothers. Her mother did
secretarial work and kept house; her father was a sales rep for Con
Edison. He worked a desk job his entire life, valued the health care and
pension it gave him, and expected his children to have similar
aspirations. As a result, McDermott’s notion of going to college as an
English major and becoming a writer was greeted with eye-rolling doubt.

“It
wasn’t just that I thought it was an impossibility,” she recalls. “I
was told it was an impossibility. My parents said it was silly, or, even
worse, dangerous.”

But after realizing how serious their daughter
was, her folks softened a bit, figuring she could teach or become a
secretary in a publishing house. “But you’ll have to get your shorthand
and typing skills up,” they advised her.

McDermott graduated with
an English degree from the State University of New York at Oswego, where
an instructor once took her aside to say, “I have bad news for you.
You’re a writer, and you’ll never shake it.”

After a short stint
working as (no kidding) a secretary at a publishing house, she went back
to school and got her master’s in writing at the University of New
Hampshire in 1978. That same year, she sold her first short story to Ms.
magazine, an event that proved to be a professional and personal
turning point.

McDermott was out celebrating the story’s
publication with friends in New York when she met her future husband at
the Mad Hatter, a singles bar on the Upper East Side. David Armstrong
had just moved to the city from Ohio to get a Ph.D. in neuroscience at
Cornell University. When asked if they started out as friends, McDermott
interjects, “This was the Seventies. You didn’t write letters.”

So it was immediate, love at first sight? “Oh, yeah,” says McDermott, with a nod and laugh that drives home the point.

Two years later—after publishing more stories in Mademoiselle, Redbook, and Seventeen—McDermott sold her first novel, A Bigamist’s Daughter,
to Houghton Mifflin for $12,500. The modest advance “felt like a
million dollars,” she says, but even more significantly, it fed her
belief that “this crazy idea I had of being a writer could become a
reality that was recognizable to the rest of the world.”

Still, her parents cautioned—her chosen line of work didn’t come with benefits.

McDermott
and Armstrong married in 1979, and his career researching Alzheimer’s
disease has pretty much determined where the family—they have three
children, two boys and a girl—has lived. It’s taken them to San Diego,
Pittsburgh, and, ultimately, the D.C. suburbs, after Armstrong landed at
the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

While living in
Pittsburgh in 1996, McDermott was approached by John Irwin— who chaired
the Writing Seminars at that time—about coming to Hopkins for a writing
residency. By that time, she’d written three books, been a finalist for
the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, and done some college
teaching. “I heard her read at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference [in
Tennessee] and knew she’d be a perfect fit,” recalls Irwin. “Her writing
was humane and deeply felt. She was a consummate stylist.”

McDermott
accepted the invitation, “because it was Hopkins,” she says. “It was
the house that Barth built,” referring to longtime faculty member, John
Barth, who built up the program and retired before she arrived.

She
commuted from Pittsburgh for a year and enjoyed working with
serious-minded colleagues like Stephen Dixon, who says that McDermott
was, indeed, a perfect fit. “She created a fair, relaxed, and warm
atmosphere in the classroom,” says Dixon. “In addition to that, she was
incisive and very smart.”

After the residency was over,
McDermott was invited to stay. Around the same time, her husband got the
NIH job, they made the move to Bethesda, and she became a regular
presence at the university, though her exposure to Baltimore was limited
to reading Anne Tyler books, which, she notes, made her “very receptive
to the city.” She was named the Richard A. Macksey Professor for
Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities, which is an endowed chair, in
1999, the year after winning the National Book Award.

Since then,
she has been Hopkins’ marquee writer, following predecessors such as
Barth, Robert Stone, and Mark Strand. “As a highly visible writer, she
attracts students to the fiction department,” says Irwin. “And she’s
very hands-on once they get here, a truly great teacher.”

“She was
very human, kind, and honest,” says former student Adichie. “She had a
quiet class and grace and wore her immense talent very lightly. She was
also very sharp as a reader—she got things and saw things. I paid
attention to the comments she wrote on my stories.” (McDermott, for her
part, takes no credit for Adichie’s success, saying she was “almost
fully formed when she came to us.”)

Matthew Thomas was similarly
impressed. “Alice taught us that every story should be not just one
story, but two stories, or more than two if possible,” he recalls.
“There should always be a parallel story, she urged. With that in mind, I
will say that there is the story Alice’s work tells, and then there is
the parallel story of the remarkable person Alice is in the world.

“She
is one of those transformative teachers one is lucky to meet even once
in a lifetime, a great writer, an American treasure, a gift to readers
everywhere. Nearly above all else, what I remember about Alice is her
wonderful laugh, which suggested that everything was right in the world,
or could be with a little mutual effort.”

McDermott has long
maintained that writing fiction helps her make sense of the world, so
it’s remarkable that making sense of others’ fiction holds such appeal
for her. “It’s just a matter of getting down and dirty in their prose
with them,” she explains. “We’re all there trying to make the story,
novel, or chapter as good as it can be. It’s a constant struggle to get
it down, get it clear, and understand that your intentions are the same,
whether you’re an undergraduate writing a short story or a writer with
seven published novels. The continually reassuring thing is that we’re
all novices when we start a new work.”

That point gives her pause. She takes a sip of tea and adds: “There’s so much you don’t know until you start writing.”

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Read author Matthew Thomas’s tribute to Alice McDermott. >>

How did you initially learn about Elizabeth (Betsy)?

I
had just finished appearing in a documentary on Dolley Madison, who, as
you know, was a friend of Betsy’s. I was talking to one of the
producers of the show and mentioned that I hadn’t really found a topic
that appealed to me for a new book project. His face lit up; I have the
perfect topic for you, he said: Betsy Bonaparte! He had done a little
research on her for the show and thought she was fascinating. He was, of
course, corre­ct. As soon as I began to look at her letters I knew I
had to write her biography.

What were your first impressions of her, and how did they change as you researched her life?

At
first, I thought of her as a femme fatale. Then I thought of her as a
woman scorned and believed I was going to write her story as a tragic
love story. But, I soon learned that Betsy was so much more than either
of these stereotypes. She was a complex, brilliant woman and one who
dared to create an independent life for herself in an era when few
American women could even imagine this. The costs of breaking the mold
of domesticity were high but she refused to conform to the gender
demands of her day. I came to admire her greatly for this. At the same
time, I realized that she should not be romanticized or idealized; she
was stubborn, she was elitist, and she was profoundly unable to accept
that her son, and his sons, did not share her obsession with being a
Bonaparte. Most of all, I was fascinated by her contradictions: she
despised American culture and American values yet she embodied them in
many ways. In the end, it was her complexity that stayed with me and
that I tried to convey in the book.

Elizabeth was an
incredibly independent woman for that time. Over the course of the book,
we learn a great deal about her father and her strained relationship
with him. But did she have a female role model, in or out of the family?
If so, it didn’t seem to be her mother.

In a sad way,
Betsy’s mother was her negative role model. Betsy loved her deeply, but
was repelled by how submissive her mother was, how passive she was in
the face of mistreatment by an unfaithful and selfish man—and Betsy
wholeheartedly rejected this feminine role. But Betsy did not have a
positive female role model; in fact, she had very few female friends.
Men—powerful men, brilliant men, successful men—these were her real
reference group and often they men who did great damage to her like her
father and Napoleon.

Of all her acquaintances/family
in the U.S. and Europe (from Dolley Madison and Vice President Elbridge
Gerry to the Bonapartes), what relationship of hers did you find the
most fascinating (in that you wish you could have written more about
it)?

Oh, definitely her relationship with
Gorchakoff. I think she truly loved him (and he loved her). She let her
emotional guard down with him. He was her match in terms of looks,
brains, and wit. But there were so few sources available– only one
exchange of letters and a few comments by friends and acquaintances—and
so I could not develop their story fully.

I don’t think
I’ve ever heard someone so dismissive of her hometown. At one point, I
gave up counting the number of negative comments about Baltimore. Did
Betsy ever say anything positive about the city?

Although
Betsy talked so negatively about Baltimore, she was really rejecting
American society, culture, and gender ideology in general not just her
hometown. Remember, despite her attacks on the city, she always returned
to it and she spent her last years in Baltimore even though she could
have settled anywhere—NYC or Washington, for example. In the end, it was
“home.” I suspect that, if she and her father had ever been able to
reconcile, her hostility to Baltimore would have diminished. But the
truth was, she was meant for the glittering salons of Paris and the
sophisticated gatherings of the Russian aristocrats in Geneva. As a
female, was too large a personality for America.

With that in mind, what were your feelings about Baltimore after you visited?

I
grew up in the South—in Mobile, Alabama—and, although I have lived most
of my life in NYC, I still appreciate the appeal of a southern town.
Baltimore radiates the same pride in its past as my hometown and it
clearly has a respect for old buildings and their history. Obviously
this matters to someone who has spent decades as an historian. I spent
most of my time in the lovely neighborhood of the Maryland Historical
Society but I did venture down to the water to sample the crab cakes.
How could I resist?

Do you watch the Oscars?

My wife and I usually watch it. Unless I’m out of town. I usually hit the hay before it’s over.

It’s really, really long.

It runs into my bedtime. I hate it that they backload the important awards until the end, but I guess they have to.

Do you think the Oscars are relevant?

That’s
a great question. Relevant to what? Relevant to the art of filmmaking
as it’s understood globally? Not very. In terms of a popularity contest
in Hollywood? Very relevant. You can sort of assess the trends Hollywood
thinks are cool and the actors and directors that are considered hot
and deserving by tracking it over the years. For example, Martin
Scorsese never won for years and years, and then he finally got it for The Departed because they figured he was due; he’d been denied all those times.

And Steven Spielberg didn’t win for years, and then he won for Saving Private Ryan.

Hollywood
is devoted to making money, right? That’s what it’s all about. They
have always tried to balance that with creating a product that is not
simply commercial, they hope, and this is an event where Hollywood gets
to say, ‘Look, we’re doing serious art here!’

Well, in their endeavor to make some entertainment of substance, how do you think they did in 2013?

There
were several quite well made and even stirring and moving films. I
thought it was one of their better years, recently. Although, I have to
say, the last three or four years, I didn’t really watch all the movies
that were nominated. It’s an irony: When you teach film, you don’t have
time to go to the movies. You watch the same movies over and over again
for your class or you watch them at home or in your class, so I seldom
get out. But! Because of this interview, I’ve been seeing a lot of
movies in the last few weeks.

Which movies stand out for you this past year?

Well, I loved American Hustle.
I liked the storytelling style David O. Russell has there. And I
remember the ABSCAM scandal vaguely. And it brought back memories seeing
those ’70s fashions. I thought Christian Bale’s performance was one of
those kind of a stealth performances. He didn’t look great, but he
completely lost himself in the role. I never thought, ‘Oh, here’s a
Hollywood actor doing this.’ I thought it was really strong.

And, yeah, 12 Years a Slave
is devastating. You leave the film speechless. Although, there are
stereotype characters in all of them, like Michael Fassbender: He’s the
evil slave-owner; that’s all he is. And there’s a foil there for him
with the Benedict Cumberbatch character, the ‘nice’ slave owner. So,
there’s some kind of schematic storytelling in that one, but Chiwetel
Ejiofor, his performance is magnificent. All of the nuance he shows in
his face? To me that’s the best actor. I think he’s going to win.

Do you? Because it seems like all the pre-Oscar awards have gone to Matthew McConaughey.

Yeah,
that’s a Hollywood thing there. He’s played these stud roles or in
B-romantic comedies, and he’s stretching. In the last year, he’s really
stretching. He made a movie called Mud, Jeff Nichols’s second film, a real interesting performance there. And he lost all that weight [for Dallas Buyers Club]
and he’s playing against type, so Hollywood may reward that. I think
that Chiwetel Ejiofor deserves best actor, [but] the Academy seems to
favor actors who gain or lose weight for roles. In that light, Matthew
McConaughey and Jared Leto look like favorites for best actor and
supporting actor.

It seems like the best actor race, in
particular, was very strong this year. There were a lot of people who
got left out, in particular Robert Redford.

And how about Tom Hanks?!

Right, and Tom Hanks! Those are two really big names to leave out. What does that say about this year’s crop of leading men?

Well,
I think Tom Hanks got left out because Bruce Dern got nominated. Dern
is one of those—he’s 77 years old—he came in that wave of great ’70s
character actors; he often stole films in supporting roles. He’s kind of
dropped off the map in the last 10 or 15 years, and this is kind of a
comeback. And Alexander Payne, the director of Nebraska, is
well regarded in Hollywood, so [Dern] had to be nominated. So there was
no room for Tom Hanks. I don’t know what happened with Redford. Maybe
Dern edged out Redford, actually, because they’ve got the two older guys
there. They can only get one grandpa.

What about the ladies this year? There’s Amy Adams in American Hustle, Sandra Bullock in Gravity, Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine, Meryl Streep in August: Osage County, and Judi Dench in Philomena.

Cate Blanchett won for The Aviator
years ago. She was doing an impersonation of Katharine Hepburn. I
didn’t particularly like that. People can watch five Katharine Hepburn
movies, and you can do that. And Sandra Bullock is kind of a one-woman
show there. I mean, Clooney, he’s in the picture for the first half,
maybe. And she has a lot of talking to herself going on there. I think
there’s a good chance she’ll win because everyone was so impressed by
all the hardship she had to endure during the shoot. And she had to act
with no foil. A lot of times Hollywood rewards that. I really liked Amy
Adams’s performance. The movie is great because you don’t know who is
scamming whom here. Was she really still in love with [Christian Bale’s]
character? Was she really falling for Bradley Cooper’s character? You
weren’t really sure. And maybe she wasn’t really sure either. So she was
going to play both ends against the middle and go with the winner, I
think. And so that kind of deceptive look that she had in her eye, the
things that passed across her face, I thought it was really impressive.
Now, Cate Blanchett, I’m sorry, but I thought her performance was very
mannered in Blue Jasmine. The voice and everything. I don’t
think the movie is very good, and she suffered from a poor script there.
Talk about stereotype characters there, wow. We’ve got the noble
blue-collar guy, the nasty Bernie Madoff character that Alec Baldwin
played. If Alec Baldwin fell asleep and woke up, he could play that
character. It didn’t involve any direction for him.

No. Probably not.

But
you shouldn’t punish the actors because of the movie. I think Woody
[Allen] makes too many movies, and he doesn’t think it through. My vote
would be for Amy Adams, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Sandra Bullock
got it. I don’t think Meryl’s going to win this year. And Judi Dench?
She’s won before, so probably not.

Do you think the
recently resurfaced child molestation accusations against Woody Allen
will hurt Cate Blanchett’s Oscar chances? She’s widely considered the
favorite in the Best Actress race—or at least, she was.

Interesting
question. I doubt the allegations will hurt Blanchett, though. She’s
likely to be seen, even by those who believe the allegations, as an
innocent victim. My guess is that, if anything, voters bend over
backward to be fair to her.

One of the things people were
excited about was the potential for the 2013 nominees to be the most
diverse group in Oscar history. That didn’t quite come to fruition but
there are more people of color represented than there used to be. What
are your thoughts on Oscar diversity this year and in general?

I
think the Academy Awards still suffer from tokenism. They consider if
they have one African-American or, you know, somebody from some unusual
place, then they’re covered. But I would congratulate them on Barkhed
Abdi’s nomination. That was from left field, completely. He hasn’t acted
before. He’s a funny-looking fella. He doesn’t have a Hollywood look,
that’s for sure. That was a very strong performance in a movie where he
was the villain and he had to add some shading to that. But you know,
Hollywood is filled with good lefties so they do their best, but until
there are more complicated roles for—not just African Americans but
also, say, people with disabilities and so forth—they’re still going to
continue to suffer from tokenism.

You’ve got Lupita Nyong’o for
best actress in a supporting role and one African-American in Supporting
Actor and one Anglo-African for a Leading Actor and that’s par for the
course for the last several years, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s about what they usually manage.

But
you could argue too—and this is what Spike Lee always says—it’s really
difficult for an African-American director to get films financed unless
they’re thrillers or unless they’re genre pictures, and they’re not
going to get nominated unless they follow Hollywood: Go there and shake a
lot of hands, get a lot of press. I don’t know if he’s right or not.
Spike’s kind of a provocateur so . . .

Speaking of shaking
hands and kissing babies, the behind-the-scenes campaigning seems so
prominent now—or maybe it’s just that the public is more aware of it
now. Thoughts?

I think we know more. If you read about
the history of Hollywood, it always went on, but it was a different
industry then. You had agents doing so much more of the work, and it was
not known by the public. For example, all of the gay actors—they were
open secrets in Hollywood. Everyone knew, but the general public didn’t
have a clue. So, those kinds of things wouldn’t happen now. So I think
it’s just more out in the open. They lobbied for their awards. They
lobbied for their roles, and so forth. It is more blatant now, and I
think probably a little more energetic, but I think probably it’s just
that the general public knows more about it now. There’s no such thing
as privacy these days, and that applies there also.

Your recent book, Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream deals
with the American Dream, and while none of the best picture nominees
are classic noirs, many of them do deal with the American Dream in
various ways. What are your thoughts on that as a theme that unites
these disparate pictures?

The Wolf of Wall Street is about the perversion of the American Dream. Blue Jasmine,
again, you’ve got the perversion of the idea that you rise by your
bootstraps, and you make a lot of money, and you do an honorable
business, and you rise and become wealthy. But, in that one, Alec
Baldwin’s character rips people off, and then you have the contrast
between the upper-class lady played by Cate Blanchett who doesn’t know
how to do anything and her sister, Sally Hawkins, very blue-collar. So
you can see the class theme very strongly in that.

You could argue that American Hustle,
these guys want to get something for nothing. They’re operators,
they’re entrepreneurs. That’s very noirish, actually. The idea that we
don’t know who is really faking and who is not and that someone will get
in over his head completely, like Bradley Cooper’s character who thinks
he’s in charge but actually isn’t, those are all noirish. In Nebraska,
you know, [the character] Woody wants to go get his million dollars.
The dream of getting rich. The backstory is he’s had a disappointed
life. Something happened to him in Korea, and he’s never been the same
since. This is a chance to redeem himself and leave something for his
adult children, so that certainly applies there. And again, 12 Years a Slave
is about how what we think of as the American Dream covers up a history
of slavery and violence and exploitation. So, I think it still applies.

It
seems like there’s still plenty of material to be mined from the
disparity between the idea of the American Dream and the reality of the
American Dream.

Yeah, I try to argue in the book that
these people are all buying into this ideology and they find out that’s
it’s either vacant or they made one mistake and that was it.

It’s unforgiving.

That’s right.

Any other snubs or omissions?

Many people were expecting the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis to get many more nominations than it did. It kind of got shut out there.

How do you account for that?

I
think it’s a hard movie to like. The main character, Llewyn, is kind of
a jerk. And, speaking of the American Dream, it doesn’t have the right
story arc. He doesn’t succeed by hard work and then become famous. He
just kind of goes in a circle. There was a guy at the theater with me,
and it was very funny. He got up at the end, and he’s getting past me in
the narrow aisle there, and he stopped. His face was like three inches
from my face and he was like, ‘What was that story about anyway?’ I
think a lot of people got to the end and went, ‘Huh?’ So I think it got
shut out because of that. But I have to say that Oscar Isaac was
riveting. A really wonderful performance even though the character is
not very likable. You wanted to look at him, and that’s what a good
actor does.

Well, he’ll probably get rewarded with more work, which is, in many ways, better than winning an Oscar.

Oh
I think so, too. The idea is that once you get an Oscar your career is
made but there are a lot of people who win an Oscar, and then they don’t
get work for three years.

Again, it’s not the American Dream that people think it is.

Yeah.
People say, ‘Oh, he’s going to cost too much now,’ so they won’t hire
him, or ‘He’s too associated with this particular role.’ It can be a
double-edged sword.

Tales from the Holy Land

Rafael Alvarez (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing)

If
Baltimore is the Holy Land, Alvarez is its Pope of pulp. These 19 short
stories exude hardboiled fortitude and an aversion to pretension of all
types. Populated with anti-heroes and set mostly between Fells Point
and Highlandtown, they pull the vigorous specificity of Mencken’s Happy
Days through The Wire (a show he helped write) with so many details
intact that they feel utterly real. But Alvarez’s fiction also traffics
in the mysteries of human kindness and cruelty, and his soulful
rendering of characters such as Basilio Ballousa, Pio Talle, and Gibby
Lukowski makes these stories true. His people are from the streets, but
they believe in something bigger——be it a familial bond, Catholic
mysticism, or the music of Johnny Winter——and that’s what ultimately
makes these tales transcendent.

---

Unruly Catholic Women Writers

Edited by Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke & Ana Kothe (Excelsior Editions)

Put
together by DelRosso, an English professor at Notre Dame of Maryland
University, and two co-editors, this literary anthology seems especially
timely with Pope Francis shaking up things at the Vatican. It
spotlights writers who are, indeed, unruly. But they’re also thoughtful,
witty, and sensitive, and their irreverence is part of a two-sided coin
in the air. Here, their personal essays, monologues, short stories,
plays, and poems are grouped in three sections: “The Joyful Mysteries,”
“The Sorrowful Mysteries,” and “The Glorious Mysteries.” Mystery, not
dogma, infuses the pieces, as these women grapple with the inspiration
and indignation Catholicism has produced. Many of them continue
contemplating the silences and empty spaces that religion fills for many
people.

---

Gentlemen of the Harbor

Captain Bill Eggert (self-published)

The
opening story in Rafael Alvarez’s Tales from the Holy Land involves a
teenager losing his virginity aboard a tugboat. Eggert’s tugboat history
includes nothing as racy as that——though, coincidentally, its cover and
the Alvarez cover are nearly identical——as its captains and crews
generally live up to the book’s title. Superbly illustrated with
photographs by famed Sun photographer Hans Marx and others, it depicts a
way of life that is hidden in plain view. Tugboats have been a common
sight around the harbor for generations, but most people aren’t privy to
the culture arising from these decks and docks. Eggert remedies that
with a pithy mix of maritime history and local legend, augmented by old
newspaper stories and even an occasional poem.

A few pages into her new poetry collection, Guinevere in Baltimore,
Shelley Puhak drops her first local reference: “O say, can you
see?—from 95 North, the swath of city from stadium to incinerator
smokestack.” That poem, “Lancelot, En Route, Stopping Off at Fort
McHenry,” not only unmistakably establishes the Baltimore setting, but
also introduces the third-wheel member of the troubled love triangle at
the core of her book, a modern-day take on the venerable Arthurian
legend.

Winner of the eighth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, Guinevere in Baltimore
unspools as a linked series, with King Arthur recast as the cuckolded
CEO of an overseas shipping corporation; Queen Guinevere as his
adulterous, ennui-ridden wife; and self-doubting Sir Lancelot as the
firm’s top salesman, Arthur’s best buddy, and Guinevere’s lover. Puhak
deftly nestles the trio into a landscape of Baltimore landmarks (Bromo
Seltzer Arts Tower, The Walters Art Musuem, Fells Point wharf) and
history (Great Fire of 1904).

“I was inspired by the
medieval troubadours’ use of love stories to explore political and
economic themes,” explains Puhak, a professor of English at Notre Dame
of Maryland University. “I was also looking for a legend that contained
within it the seeds of its own destruction.”

Via her
three principals, she conveys that tragedy both personally and
professionally, characterizing the poems’ overarching theme as “an
examination of selling out, of settling. It’s also an exploration of how
the metaphors we use change the arguments we have.”

Puhak
lives in Catonsville with her husband and their 6-year-old son. Her
poems evince an intimate knowledge of Baltimore, its streets, buildings,
and sensibility. “Baltimore offered me concrete evidence for how ideas
and biases are etched onto landscapes,” she says. “I’m drawn to how
layered it is: asphalt over cobblestone, bike lane over old streetcar
rails.”

Matthew Thomas studied with Alice McDermott when he was a Writing
Seminars student at Johns Hopkins University. When asked about
McDermott for our March profile, he sent the following essay about her
as an instructor, writer, and mentor. It beautifully amplifies the
importance of McDermott’s contributions in the classroom and beyond.
Thomas’s debut novel, We Are Not Ourselves, will be published by Simon
and Schuster in September.

---

Alice McDermott’s indisputable
brilliance as a writer is a matter of historical record. Her brilliance
as a human being, however—her magnanimity, decency, and extraordinary
humility—deserves its own separate accounting.

When I studied
under Alice in the Writing Seminars at the turn of the century, she was
only a couple of years removed from the triumphant publication of Charming Billy.
Nobody would have begrudged Alice feeling her oats a little, had she
been inclined to do so, because few American writers could claim so
august a resume as hers.What was remarkable from the
beginning of my acquaintance with Alice was how thoroughly humble she
was, what a common touch she had, what a model she was for carrying
oneself with grace. (It’s a testament to Alice’s humility that I
hesitate to go on at length here, because I’m certain it will mortify
her to read an account of her remarkable qualities, but in the interest
of inspiring readers with the idea that someone like Alice exists in the
world, I will continue, and court her ire.) She was generous with her
time and enthusiasm, and endlessly supportive of the writers in her
charge. She also gave freely of her extraordinary insights into craft.
Alice made the insoluble problems of composition seem solvable with
enough effort, which was something of a miracle, and a generous gift for
a master craftsman to give to an apprentice.

The lessons Alice
taught us were extraordinarily useful and specific. She told us she
wrote by hand, on legal pads, and some of us, freed from the burden of
editing as we wrote, found a new fluency by following her example. I
never forgot her lesson in the proper placement of dialogue tags, which
she boiled down to the pithy, “After the first natural pause.” I could
have felt around in the dark for years without seeing that bit of truth
on my own as lucidly as she’d put it. A minute of her time cleared away
every error in that category forever, and it strikes me now that a good
portion of her pedagogical philosophy involves demystifying the writing
process in order to allow room for the deeper mystery of creation,
namely how a work gets imbued with individuality, personality, soul.

Alice
taught us never to populate a story with disembodied heads, brains in a
jar. Fiction, she argued, must evoke a world outside the limited
confines of an individual character’s consciousness. To Alice, a writer
was responsible for giving readers clues about the world a story’s
characters inhabit. Verisimilitude didn’t have to be achieved in the
first draft, if one wasn’t gifted at instantly rendering the
three-dimensional world. It was possible to write a scene and then
circle back and layer in details that provided a visceral sense of
reality. This is best accomplished, perhaps only accomplished, she
taught, by availing oneself of senses other than those two most overused
by beginning writers, sight and sound. Only when we write with all the
senses are our characters allowed to come fully to life.

A
startling amount of the practical writing advice she gave us stays with
me to this day. I’ll never forget when she said, “You can’t say of a
character, ‘He lifted five rabbits out of a hat, one at a time.’ You
can’t see someone pick up five rabbits, one at a time. You see one rabbit, then another, then another.”

It
mattered, too, how many times the rabbit came out of the hat. Alice was
adamant that details had to be chosen for a reason. Every detail had to
be significant for it to remain in a given story. “If you have a story
where the character is an aspiring architect,” she once said, “and he
builds models of cathedrals at home out of paper, and he has a cat, then
the cat must crush the model, or else his being an architect is
inessential, does not advance the plot. Don’t pick something at random.
He must be an architect for a reason, not just to add a layer of
brushstrokes to the character.”

Moments in time rigorously
observed mattered to her. She insisted that we avoid resorting to
invocations of habitual actions, like “He would often go to the store.”
To Alice, it blurred a scene to talk about what “always” happened. What
someone did in a specific moment was inevitably far more compelling.

One
of the most useful things Alice ever taught us ostensibly flies in the
face of one of the central tenets of much creative writing instruction.
She took the “show, don’t tell” maxim and turned it on its head. Don’t
be afraid of exposition, she urged; exposition is always ready at hand
as a tool to be used, and a narrator must be allowed to advance the
plot, explicate a situation, develop a character. At the same time, she
insisted, exposition can’t be workaday or obligatory. The writer’s
paramount task, at all times, is to create a continuous fictive dream.
When the work is done right, she suggested, the reader forgets that
there’s an author. It’s not that she taught us not to “show” things;
there is no writer alive more gifted than Alice at constructing scenes,
choosing resonant details, and allowing a dialogic exchange, even a
silent room, to come alive based on the people and objects in it.
Rather, she gave us permission, even urged us, to lean on exposition to
do a good deal of interesting work. What this insistence of hers
actually had the effect of doing was enabling us to write more
compelling scenes. That was true, in part, because if one holds the note
of exposition longer, when one delves into a particular scene it will
be a crucial one. One directive I’ll never forget: Withhold dialogue
until a character absolutely has to speak. That will make everything he
or she says relevant and necessary. Relevance and necessity were the
bellweathers for Alice. Invoking the famous last line of Frank
O’Connor’s great story, “Guests of the Nation,” she taught that a good
short story captures the moment after which nothing will ever be the
same. If everything has happened a certain way for a hundred days in a
row, she urged, a story is when things change on the hundred and first
day.

Alice possesses that rare quality that is the hallmark of any
highly evolved person: she acts the same with everyone she meets. She
is serious, but never solemn. She radiates peace, and a kind of
serenity, but never at the expense of a good chuckle, the way one
pictures Buddha laughing generously at human foibles and frailty. The
enormous insights into life that she has acquired over a career spent
getting to know her characters as intimately as she knows them, and
greeting them with as much love as she does, allows Alice to project an
air of perpetual calm and ease that one suspects covers an even deeper
level of calm and ease beneath it. (For someone who is so personally
calm, she writes about violent turmoil with startling facility. Dip into
the beginning pages of That Night, where men are crashing heavy metal chains into each other, to see what an extraordinary imagination she has.)

If
all of that is not a tall enough order, Alice taught us that every
story should be not just one story, but two stories, or more than two if
possible. There should always be a parallel story, she urged. With that
in mind, I will say that there is the story Alice’s work tells, and
then there is the parallel story of the remarkable person Alice is in
the world. Having said all I’ve said about Alice as one of those
transformative teachers one is lucky to meet even once in a lifetime, a
great writer, an American treasure, a gift to readers everywhere, let me
say that nearly above all else what I remember about Alice is her
wonderful laugh, which suggested that everything was right in the world,
or could be with a little mutual effort. She made us want to be better
people for her.

Besides the fact that it’s your hometown, what makes Baltimore so appealing as a setting for fiction?

The
question that is asked a thousand times of artists mining the plentiful
but seemingly worthless ore of Baltimore (it’s not gold, it’s iron and
slag and we try to spin into something that glitters, if only when the
sun hits it just right.) For me it’s the age of the place—as old as just
about anything in the area that eventually became the United States—and
its also the romance of sailing ships and the sea and the true polyglot
of people and their faiths. No matter what they put up in this town, it
was built upon something that makes for a better story: Burke’s beneath
the chicken fat of a Royal Farm at Light and Lombard; orthodox
synagogues and the bones of organ grinder monkeys beneath the new
restaurants of little italy, heavy metals deep in the soil beneath
Harbor East. I make sure I find someone who still remembers and launch
them onto the canvas of my fiction, which is really one very long
story—a mural—being written one panel at a time.

You’ve
also lived in Los Angeles, a city that attracts lots of aspiring
writers, actors, musicians, etc. As a devoted Baltimore, what was it
like living there?

I tried, but I never really liked it. I
arrived too late in life (mid 40s) Tried to enjoy Dodger Stadium but it
only reminded me of where I wasn’t (Camden Yards); became good friends
with a guy from Pigtown, John Elliott IV, who photographed red carpet
events and when we were at PINK’S (the famous LA hot dog joint) we
talked about the old Polack Johnny’s on the Block … went to Mass at
the futuristic LA Cathedral (shot part of my rosary documentary there)
but wished I was at St. Leo’s on Exeter Street.

How has your work as a journalist informed your short stories?

The
two cannot be separated. Baltimore is the great subject of my work – I
still recall trying to figure out at about the age of 20 two seemingly
crucial aspects of becoming a fiction writer: whether to create a truly
fictional world (re-naming everything, inventing new streets, etc.) or
choosing some exotic locale (or a series of them for my stories) and the
real answer for why I chose Baltimore (one of my better decisions) was
it just made a very difficult craft much easier.

The
characters in your stories come from the streets, but they tend to
believe in something bigger (be it Catholicism or the music of Johnny
Winter). Do such things offer more than solace from reality?

O’Malley
took a lot of shit for the BELIEVE campaign. It was one of his ideas I
supported. I believe that mysticism and faith can change things,
particularly in a charming city like Baltimore where the average
person—and in Baltimore it’s a pretty tough ‘average’—is just trying to
survive. We all need something bigger than ourselves— whether it’s the
Ravens or Transubstantiation—whether we believe it or not.

Music
plays a major role in some of these stories. What is it about the music
of Johnny Winter, Frank Zappa, and Dion that resonates with you?

Of
all people, Mr. Lewis—you, who once wore Ike Turner’s pajamas—you know
this is a question that must be discussed over a long evening of good
food and drink only to declare that we didn’t even scratch the surface. I
was 6 years old in 1964. On February 8—my namesake grandfather’s 60th
birthday—I was one kind of kid. After Sunday, February 9 (when The
Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show), I was another.

Gibby
Lukowski loses his virginity on a tugboat, and his family worked the
waterfront for generations. Wasn’t your dad a tugboat captain?

My
father was a chief engineer for the Baker-Whiteley towing at the City
Pier on Thames Street from 1957 until the company—then known as
McAllister—replaced the seafarer’s union workers with scabs. I have a
long chapter in The Wire: Truth Be Told about the great baltimore tugboat strike of 1966.

What are your favorite “Baltimore” books?

I don’t really read Baltimore books. My favorite Baltimore movie is Barry’s Avalon. I was re-watching it in 1995 when my former father in law—Ralph Rudacille, father of Deborah, author of Roots of Steel—was
struggling to beat cancer. Somehow the combo of a Baltimore that was
gone (Avalon) and this proud former steelworker from Dundalk fighting
for his life unexpectedly brought me to tears. Mr. Rudacille—as Pop
Pop—makes a cameo in the story “Nine Innings in Baltimore.”