How the Story of an Artist, a Painting, Two Presidents and a Contemporary Poet Unexpectedly Intertwines

The Truman Library is putting some significant American documents on display this spring (April 20–May 24) as part of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. Along with such treasures as a broadside marking the Treaty of Paris (1983), which ended the Revolutionary War, the Louisiana Purchase, and numerous consequential Supreme Court decisions, the library is pulling out of storage one of its more unusual holdings—the painter Elaine de Kooning’s portrait of President John F. Kennedy. The president sat for de Kooning over the winter holidays in late 1962 and early 1963 and she spent much of the following year producing numerous sketches and more than 30 canvases. The Library acquired the portrait in 1965 and de Kooning was on hand to present it to Harry Truman himself in a photo op in Independence.

 The portrait doesn’t go on display very often. I had the chance to see it up close a couple of years ago when I was digging into the painting’s history and tripping over a parallel story that I couldn’t resist telling. I wrote a two-part series for KC Studio magazine, which appeared November-December 2024 and January-February 2025.

 I’ve combined the two texts (making some slight edits along the way) into a single piece here.

 

            While gathering material and sifting archival sands for the book project I’m currently immersed in, a digression presented itself, as they often and relentlessly do. If you are more laser-focused and on-task than I am, you might have let the impulse go. But that would be you. I couldn’t help myself. So I pinballed from one thing to another.

            The first thing I was searching for was a poem by William Stafford, the Kansas and Oregon sage, which he wrote following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The second thing, united to the first by a random leap of mind and of digital data-mining, was a portrait of JFK made by the painter Elaine de Kooning. Sixty years ago, in January 1965, she presented the Kennedy portrait to former President Harry S Truman and his Truman Library in Independence.

            Now this bit of local history would most likely have led me to tell the straightforward story of de Kooning’s painting and the happy occurrence of its little-remembered residency in the presidential museum in our midst. (It’s not often on display.) That indeed was the plan. But, again, the underlining thread here is my old and comforting friend serendipity—how chance and coincidence manage to make our lives unpredictable if not ever-intriguing.

            It happened like this. At a late summer poetry reading, in a cozy Kansas City cocktail lounge, I listened to Jenny Molberg begin to describe her current interest in reclaiming the stories of female artists who happened to be overshadowed or ignored because they were married to artists who got all the attention. I wondered what she might have known about Elaine de Kooning. Flash forward a millisecond when she revealed that she knew much about Elaine de Kooning, because Elaine de Kooning was a friend of her family. Elaine de Kooning painted portraits of at least four of Molberg’s family members, including her beloved grandmother. That was merely the beginning.

            Jenny Molberg, Ph.D., is on the English and creative writing faculty at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg. She’s editor of the literary journal Pleiades and author of three books of poetry. (2026 updates, she now teaches at Emerson College in Boston and is editor-in-chief of its literary magazine, Ploughshares.) Most recent of those books is The Court of No Record (Louisiana State University Press), some of which she highlighted in September in the monthly Speakeasy poetry series at Swordfish Tom’s, the basement-level, hipster-magnet home of high-grade cocktails in the Crossroads. Her poetry is brash, bawdy, brutally honest about violence done to women, and has a self-defined bitchiness. It’s full-throated, 21st-century feminist, that is.

            Molberg is also in her second year of a writing residency at the Charlotte Street Foundation. While on sabbatical last spring she read the book Ninth Street Women, by Mary Gabriel, a group portrait of de Kooning and four other painter friends in her New York world. That jump-started her interest. Then, a chance discovery made while talking with a fellow Charlotte Street artist helped her decide that “Elaine was speaking to me.”

De Kooning was an accomplished though often less-regarded member of the circle of artists who defined the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s, including her husband, Willem de Kooning. She carved out a specialty in figure painting and soulful portraits, making memorable canvases of artists and writers such as Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and her husband. Porter once noted how portraiture liberated de Kooning and well served her unique talents as a painter. In 1963, the year she labored over her JFK project, she also painted a heroically scaled group portrait, stretching nearly 14 feet wide. It presented the figures of nine young, otherwise anonymous men—most were revealed to be patients in a drug rehabilitation facility—titled “The Burghers of Amsterdam Avenue.”

The Truman Library’s Kennedy portrait by Elaine de Kooning.

De Kooning met and painted Molberg’s family members beginning in the late 1960s, a few years after the Kennedy work elevated her market for commissioned portraits. A great aunt, Yvonne Collins, was married to a Texas insurance mogul and art collector, who commissioned his wife’s portrait in 1967. Grandmother Sue Deakins, of Tyler, Texas, sat for de Kooning two years later. She was a onetime English teacher who would instill in Molberg her love of reading and literature. Sue Deakins was deeply interested in the arts, and in 1972 she arranged an exhibit of de Kooning’s portraits at the Tyler Museum of Art. There was a memorable gathering at the Deakins home, Molberg tells me, of which stories are told that largely involve the fact that de Kooning had not yet given up drinking. 

            Molberg’s family members still possess many works by de Kooning, including several of the countless charcoal sketches, drawings and preliminary paintings she made in preparing for the final JFK oil portraits. Sue Deakins corresponded with de Kooning for years, until the artist’s death from lung cancer, at almost 71, in 1989. Deakins is alive and well, now 89 in Dallas, having moved there recently from Tyler to be closer to her daughter, Molberg’s mother. Molberg, of course, has the family scrapbooks and de Kooning’s letters to enrich her own work.

            All of that material evidence and intellectual energy have become Molberg’s passion as she works toward a book of personal essays and poems tracing de Kooning’s presence in her own life. Thanks to an Inspiration Grant from Arts KC she was able to travel earlier this year to de Kooning’s former home and studio, still largely preserved by a new owner, in the Long Island, New York, enclave of East Hampton.

            And she was pleasantly surprised—what? another coincidence?—to learn that de Kooning’s memorable portraits of John F. Kennedy include not only the full-length painting that hangs at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and those in the hands of her family, but also the one right here at the Truman Library.

 

Former President Harry Truman with Elaine de Kooning and her JFK portrait, Feb. 11, 1965. (Harry S Truman Librrary)

Part II

            On Feb. 11, 1965, Harry S Truman met the painter Elaine de Kooning for the first time as she presented her new portrait of another American president, John F. Kennedy, to the Truman Library in Independence.

            In the preserved video of the dedication ceremony, there is laughter during a photo opp when Truman is encouraged to move from where he stood on one side of the painting to join de Kooning on the other end.

            In the moment, Truman refrained from commenting on the painting per se, but he thanked de Kooning for the hard work and noted how the portrait would expand the institution’s holdings relating to the history of the U.S. presidency.

            De Kooning said she was honored to have her work in the vicinity of Thomas Hart Benton’s recent-vintage library mural, “Independence and the Opening of the West,” which she called “his masterpiece.” And she expressed hope that Truman would “get used to my portrait,” recognizing its expressionistic freedoms and jaunty colors as a departure from traditionally heroic, realistic renderings of important people.

            She went on to describe her painstaking process over many months to capture the radiant essence and dignity of the late president as a man ready to spring into action.

            The Truman Library’s painting—and all of de Kooning’s other JFK paintings and sketches she made at the time—began as a commission suggested in 1962 by a New York art dealer, Robert Graham. Graham was visiting the library that fall with Benton when the discussion began with its administrators. Graham had a school-boy connection with President Kennedy, which helped move things along.

            If Graham expected push-back from either Kennedy or Harry Truman on his promotion of de Kooning as the portrait artist, it never materialized, according to the gallerist’s correspondence in both the Archives of American Art and the Truman Library.

            And as Cathy Curtis, author of a recent biography of de Kooning, writes, “In a practical sense, her reputation for rapidly completing a portrait made her the ideal artist to paint a famously restless head of state.”

            At the time, when the subject was brought up at the White House, the president was too busy to sit for an artist, though an opportunity arose during the Christmas holidays while the Kennedy family would be at the winter White House in Palm Beach, Fla.

            De Kooning spent a reported 20 hours over nearly two weeks jumping from her sketchpad, where she put charcoal to work, to her easels, where she began oil paintings. Her sessions with the president were often informal but also took place when he was conducting business. During one meeting, a conference on Medicare, she sketched him while standing on a ladder. After the live sessions, she spent most of 1963 working on nothing else but her multiple canvases—“thirty-six canvases going at once,” she’d say.

            In the spring of 2024, Jenny Molberg, a Kansas City poet and teacher on a year-long sabbatical from the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, stood in the high-ceilinged, naturally lighted studio space in East Hampton, Long Island, where de Kooning eventually settled. Molberg has been following a trail that begins in the 1960s, when de Kooning painted portraits of Molberg’s grandfather and uncle, a great-aunt, and her beloved grandmother, who remained a friend of the artist for many years. De Kooning once gave a JFK sketch to her uncle as a memento, and it remains a cherished family possession.

            Molberg has been working on poems and essays springing from her exploration into de Kooning’s life and work, planning eventually to produce a book.

            “I've been really interested in what Elaine says about men as her subjects,” Molberg tells me, “especially in light of the fact that portrait painting may have seemed ‘domestic’ to her male contemporaries in the Abstract Expressionist movement (it was her way of making money when she lived beyond her means, which was...always). I think she thought a lot about the gender dynamics of a woman painter making portraits of men, when for so long men were the sole possessors of the muse/the nude female body/the sexualized body in art. Elaine once said, ‘Men always painted the opposite sex, and I wanted to paint men as objects.’”

            One day last fall, Mark Adams, the Truman museum curator, and John Miller, its registrar, brought de Kooning’s JFK portrait out of temperature-controlled storage and placed it on a chair in a conference room. I sat across from it to see what I could see, to see what doesn’t come across in photographs or reproductions as I’d been encountering them in books and elsewhere.

            I’d hoped to share the viewing with Jenny Molberg but our timelines didn’t mesh—my travels and deadlines, her travels and back surgery—and I knew she would have another opportunity during her own project’s trajectory.

            As I sat there with the painting, I thought about that horrible day, the one that for those of us alive at the time, can’t be forgotten—Nov. 22, 1963. I was 10 years old, sitting in the fifth-grade classroom in the Longfellow School, Sanford, Maine, where a black and white television was soon rolled in on a cart.

            I thought about Camelot, the promise of the “New Frontier,” the mythic aura of the Kennedy presidency with which de Kooning’s modern sensibilities aimed to connect on canvas. I thought, sorry to say, about the despicable caricature of a human being who has disrupted American life for a decade now in a narcissistic search to fill presidential shoes that have and will never fit him.

            My eyes searched the painting up and down—it’s about four feet wide and nearly five and a half feet tall—to finally focus on the four-ring binder where Kennedy’s hands seemed to rest in mid-executive action.

            I thought about the brilliance of de Kooning’s strategy to incorporate streaks of bright white, remnants of the Florida sun, which splashed through the patio where JFK sat and squirmed as she sketched and painted in early January 1963.

            The white space offers breathing room in the painting, as if the light from above were telling us something about her subject, as if she were inviting viewers to fill those open areas with their own memories, visions, thoughts, and feelings about the fallen president and their own lives. Others may see in it a sense of incompletion that rightfully accompanies a life cut short

            The writer Thurston Clarke, speaking a decade ago about his book, JFK’s Last Hundred Days, found a different conclusion in de Kooning’s experience. “I don't think you can ever get as far as you want to with Kennedy because he was secretive and so complicated, and he compartmentalized so much,” he told an audience at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston. “In fact, if you look at the beginning of the book — I open with Elaine de Kooning, who was essentially driven crazy by trying to capture his essence into a single portrait for the Truman Library and ended up doing nothing but painting Kennedy for a whole year, doing 30 oil paintings, covering the walls of her studio with drawings and sketches and everything of Kennedy. So you can never get to the final thing.”

            We can certainly argue with Clarke’s phrase that de Kooning was “doing nothing.” The evidence in front of me, in the Truman Library conference room, happens to argue otherwise.

            In the end, the vectors of memory are unpredictable as they zing through that infinite universe between our ears. Artists and writers might be especially attuned to grasp those signals as they pass.

 

            Anxiety over de Kooning’s portrait project increased after Kennedy’s death. De Kooning felt a new obligation to get it just right, but was somewhat paralyzed to continue, according to some accounts. Within days of the assassination Truman Library officials were hoping her portrait could be in their hands to go on public display as soon as possible. Yet it would be another year before Robert Graham and President Kennedy’s inner circle agreed on which of de Kooning’s paintings they preferred to go to the Truman Library. Another one would soon be acquired by Jacqueline Kennedy, and other versions eventually landed at the Kennedy Library in Boston, development plans for which were already under way, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

            De Kooning recounted her experience making the portrait in her introductory remarks in Independence.

            “When I first laid eyes on President Kennedy, December 28, 1962, at ten o'clock in the morning, I arrived carrying the world's image of him. The one thing wrong with that image was that it missed the great color. The image was black, white and grey, and it missed the hoping great scale, the tremendous physical presence of the man. So for one split second I did not recognize him. He was bigger and more radiant than any reproduction had indicated.”

            She also summed up her idea as it evolved: “The colors were chosen, not to convey a realistic sense of a gray flannel suit worn by a man with a tan—but rather to attempt to communicate the brightness and high color of the man as I saw him. Also, I wanted to capture his quality of readiness, as though he was about to spring from his chair. And to get the frown and the smile at once—the sharp, appraising glance.”

            The day after the presentation in Independence, de Kooning’s painting took center stage in an exhibit for the public at the Kansas City Art Institute’s Charlotte Kemper Gallery. The sunny and striking portrait of Kennedy was accompanied by 38 other sketches and paintings and one abstract bronze sculpture. The exhibit ran for three weeks.

            Jenny Molberg joined me on a brief research visit to the library at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, where we paged through the catalogue of that KCAI exhibit. Here was a full-page reproduction of the Truman painting; here was a photograph of de Kooning beginning a sketch of the president in Palm Beach; here were sketches dated Dec. 28, 1962, the first day of her project and the same date as the one in Molberg’s family.

            Molberg’s reflections on de Kooning certainly embrace the JFK period, but she is traveling far beyond it.

            “I've started thinking about the lyricism in her abstract paintings,” Molberg says, “but maybe more importantly about the narrative aspects of her portraiture. How is she reaching back into the history of portraiture, engaging with the canon (as it were)? How is she flipping gender expectations?”

            Perhaps some of those questions will now come to mind whenever the public has a rare opportunity to view de Kooning’s JFK portrait at the Truman Library.

Postrcript: Jenny Molberg’s next book of poems, The Medium, will cover the ground she describes in this story, with Elaine de Kooning at its core. It is scheduled to be published by the Louisiana State University Press in February 2027.

From the Archives: How Language, Race and History Collide in KC's Culinary History

Local news reports have noted, without much detail, that the plan to open a lounge in the burgeoning riverfront district of Kansas City has gone awry because of its intended name, Sundown Hi-Fi. The name was deemed too controversial for the district’s developers because of the word’s association with the ugly segregationist history of the American south. I thought it might be useful to note that a similar thing occurred in Kansas City more than two decades ago. Of course, my long profile piece about the matter, from 2003, doesn’t exist in The Kansas City Star’s often pitiful online archive, so I’ve retrieved it from newspapers.com.

From the Archives: Remembering Tracy Kidder, a Master of Non-Fiction Narrative

I was saddened to hear today about the death of Tracy Kidder, who succumbed to lung cancer at 80. My entry to his work was the unexpectedly thrilling The Soul of a New Machine(1981), which captured the frenzy of the early days of computer technology, a frenzy that has only accelerated exponentially ever since. Journalists of the day found Kidder’s immersive narratives to be the gold standard of long-form nonfiction, perhaps second only to the likes of John McPhee. I was fairly certain I’d written about him during my days as a book review editor, and, indeed, I found my raw notes file from a phone interview I did with him in 1989. The interview piece ran a few days later alongside my review of Among Schoolchldren from The Kansas City Star, September 3, 1989.

From the Archives: On Pat Metheny's Work as a Musician Telling Stories

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Two things collided in recent days — I’ve started listening to Pat Metheny’s new record, “Side-Eye III,” in advance of his concert in Kansas City on April 4 (at the Kauffman Center). Then the formidable jazz critic Nate Chinen posted on Substack a new interview with Pat and comments on the new record and tour that aligned quite well with my ears. He also posted links to earlier Metheny pieces, which caused me to go back to a major feature I produced about Pat’s Orchestrion project in 2010. It was December 2009 when I traveled to New York to spend a day watching Pat getting the hang of this incredible machine that he had brought into being for a new album and tour. My story ran on Page 1 of the Kansas City Star. Of course, since the Star’s website has been so awful over the years, I managed to find the story still existing on the website of the Ventura County newspaper, which picked it up from the McClatchy wire. Having just read it again after all these years, I thought, hey, this was fun to write and somehow it still reads pretty well as a long-view account of Metheny’s career. Not sure why it came out formatted this way, but I’m not intending to mess with it too much.

Just FYI, I touted the April concert in a blip accompanying my March-April See Hear column for KC Studio Magazine.

By Steve Paul
Mcclatchy Newspapers

NEW YORK — For Pat Metheny, music is nothing without a story. It's a lesson he picked up 40 years ago playing with Kansas City drummer Tommy Ruskin, when the 15-year-old guitarist was beginning his passionate drive to make music a way of a life.

Everything's a story. And everything in Metheny's world seems to be connected.

There's the interconnected path that leads from a childhood memory to the long electric arc of his musical career to the launch last week of the most astounding jazz band he has ever assembled.

Then there's the story of the friend of a friend who got him a deal to spend a few months rehearsing in this vacant Byzantine Catholic church in Brooklyn.

Metheny, with guitar strapped on, stands on his carpeted practice stage strewn with wires and surrounded by drum kits, cymbals, marimba, vibraphone, little percussion pieces, piano, a half-dozen other guitars, and two mysterious wooden cabinets lined with bottles.

And there's not another musician in sight.

Yet, Metheny launches into a new tune and the familiar liquid ring of his Ibanez guitar fills the sanctuary air. Then, as his fingers move up and down the neck, the drumsticks start riding the cymbals and drumheads, which are arrayed on tall racks behind him.

Soon the vibes are playing, the marimba, a bass guitar, a gang of vertical stringed machines called a robot guitar, all controlled by Metheny, all responding to electric signals he's sending out from his Ibanez.

Yes, Metheny, the fluffy-haired musician who has proven that a near-high school dropout can become one of the most creative performers and composers of his time, has now blazed another trail.

He has invented what has to be, at least for the moment, the ultimate one-man band.

Sure, any lounge lizard worth his paycheck can push a few buttons on a keyboard and get the sound of a rhythm section and strings swaying to a languid bossa nova.

But there's never been anything quite like this, and Metheny has never done anything as complicated and as outrageously fun.

With a new record just out and a tour starting in France, you might think that Metheny, the veteran, has already done it all.

"Every single person," he says during a rehearsal break, "including my wife, thought I'd lost my mind. This one takes the cake."

The story of Pat Metheny's "Orchestrion" record and tour begins with a childhood summer memory. Pat, about 8, and his older brother Mike, both trumpeters like their father, discover the wonders of a player piano in their grandfather's basement in Wisconsin. Load in a roll of paper and the mechanical piano plays a tune.

Fast forward a few years and Metheny's playing in the marching band in high school at Lee's Summit, Mo., and in the evenings, when he should be doing homework, he's taking his newfound interest in the guitar to another level. At 14, 15, 16, Metheny talks and plays his way onto bandstands around Kansas City, getting a jazz education from Herman Walder, from Tommy Ruskin, from trumpeter Gary Sivils, from pianist Paul Smith, who hires him for a regular gig at a pizza parlor.

The first time Ruskin hears him, about 1970, Metheny seems a pretty well-formed guitarist, far more mature and accomplished than you'd expect from a 15-year-old.

Ruskin didn't really sit him down and say, "Hey, kid you've got to tell a story," but even then Metheny was musician enough to understand that there was something deep about the way Ruskin played the drums.

"He liked my solos," Ruskin says. "He calls them, 'telling a story.' I try to tell a story rhythmically when I play rather just playing for speed or technique. I'm still working at that."

Yet, Ruskin adds, "If he learned something from me, it was by osmosis."

Metheny, a self-described "mercy graduate" of Lee's Summit High School, soon catches the ear of a music school dean who recruits him to attend the University of Miami. One week into the program, Metheny befriends another young and brilliant musician, the bassist Jaco Pastorius. Metheny also comes to the embarrassing conclusion that he doesn't belong in college.

He goes to the dean, says he feels inadequate and certainly not up to the intellectual demands. The dean, as Metheny's story goes, notes how students had swarmed to the school's new electric-guitar major and asks him if, instead of staying on as a student, he'd like to teach. "Can I keep my dorm room?" Metheny asks.

From there, vibraphonist Gary Burton, whom Metheny impressed at the Wichita Jazz Festival in 1973, gets 19-year-old Metheny onto the faculty of the Berklee School of Music in Boston, the real launch pad for Metheny's rocketing career.

He teaches three terms in 1974-75 and by 1976, Metheny makes his recording debut as a leader for the ECM label, releasing the first of dozens of LPs and discs. (His most recent big project, "The Way Up," was a nonstop 68-minute orchestral-type composition that, in concert, he played straight through, leading a seven-piece version of the Pat Metheny Group.)

As a musician, he's not an acoustic purist. His records blast with electronic anthems as much as they explore avant-garde corners and soothing melodic tune-making. As early as 1978, he makes a solo record, "New Chautauqua," by sandwiching tracks of himself playing different guitars in the studio, and by the next year he's dabbling with electronic instruments including a digital synthesizer connected to his guitars called a Synclavier (SIN-clah-veer).

"Technology has been part and parcel of what I do every day," he says.

But those things are just tools, he'd say, as he did in a 1985 interview with Downbeat magazine: "I always try to emphasize that if you don't have anything to say musically, it doesn't matter if you've got a state-of-the-art Synclavier or a crummy old spinet piano. You still have to come up with the goods."

The memory of his grandfather's player piano rolled around in Metheny's mind over the years, and his own research led him to the Orchestrion, a generation of mechanical players on steroids that dates to the late 19th and early 20th century.

"With Orchestrion, the player piano expands out to other instruments," Metheny says.

In short, it was an entertainment machine that allowed a performer to emulate a band, though, with today's ear, a band that would sound rather crudely simplistic and oompah-heavy.

Because those instruments operated on foot-pumping pneumatics, the possibilities of nuance and dynamic range were limited.

As Metheny's idea takes hold, he seeks the advice and partnership of instrument makers and experimentalists across the nation. A few years ago, someone gave him the breakthrough idea of using solenoids, or electrical switches, to control a variety of instruments.

"I wanted to play a guitar with my feet," he says, "and that opened the door for me — solenoids."

By 2008, Metheny thinks he had learned enough to proceed. The instrument makers began building an array of devices for him, eventually deploying a total of 400 solenoids to transfer Metheny's directions to the mallets, drumsticks and picks that play along.

And those ranks of bottles in elegant wooden cabinets? They are tuned, much like a pipe organ, and respond to puffs of air, also on his command.

Concert listeners used to DJ-spun sound environments and computer controlled music will note here that Metheny uses no sampling, no looping, no-prerecorded sounds, not even a computer keyboard on stage. All of the music on the new album, and in the concerts to come, are real time and made essentially by acoustical instruments.

"It's something that's hard to explain. It's not samples. It's a big living, breathing thing."

Some of the instruments, scheduled to arrive a year ago, show up two months late. That gives him barely six months to learn to play them. "I had to do a week of math just to get it all to groove," he says. In the meantime he's writing music for a September recording session, and he's still in search of the story of the music, really trying to focus on what he's trying to do and say.

In the end, the story becomes a kind of autobiography of a musician. The whole thing the robo-guitars, the bells, the lightly brushed cymbals adds up to a portrait of the musical mind of Pat Metheny.

"Every sound there is made by me," he says, "and is fundamental to the way I hear things."

By December, the day of this demonstration, the recording is done and now the task is memorizing the music to play in concert and continuing to master the instruments, to understand their capabilities and what they can and can't do as he stands on stage alone and plays his guitar.

"Honestly, I didn't know what was going to happen," he says. "It took me to new and different places."

The record, "Orchestrion," is fully composed and controlled, with textures and tempos in five compositions that sound like no one but Metheny.

In concert, his challenge is that of a jazz musician: to create improvisations on those pieces on the spot.

And something else he has never done before:

"This," he says, "is the first time I've ever toured solo."

Metheny did not set out to find an alternative to paying a band. After this, he'll continue with his group projects and trio recordings and every other aspect of his musical journey.

A little before 7 p.m., Metheny's phone lights up. It's his wife, Latifa. He'll be home soon, he says, to visit with the kids — the couple had their third child in May — and, he tells her, he'll get takeout dinner on the way.

His routine: drop the older kids at school, arrive in the Brooklyn church at 9, home for dinner, then back working with his production crew and rehearsing till late.

Making new music, balancing family life: That's material for a whole other story.

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Reposting from FB:

At The Kansas City Symphony on Friday night I had the distinct pleasure of hearing Leila Josefowicz play the extraordinary Violin Concerto No. 2 by the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. She and it rank right up there as one of the most ferocious instrumental performances I've ever witnessed. Given the composer's Polish identity, I am only wondering if the piece, from 1933, can be heard as a response not only to personal ill health (Szymanowski died four years later and this was his last major work) but to the ugliness then rising in Europe. (Just a thought; more study needed.)

This morning, I'm watching Josefowicz, via YouTube, play a John Adams violin concerto, which rivals Szymanowski's ferocity. In any case, you have two more opportunities to see her with the very fine KC band, and its pinpoint leader Matthias Pintscher— tonight (Saturday) and Sunday afternoon (she'll certainly ignite some pre-Super Bowl fireworks).

Earlier this season, Josefowicz played the Szymanowski concerto with the NY Philharmonic. Maybe a recording will eventually make its way to the YT screen. I can't say I've followed Josefowicz's career from apparent child prodigy to MacArthur "genius grant" and beyond, but I will certainly pay more attention now. Also on the KC Symphony program is Ravel's lovely "Mother Goose" suite and the epic Symphony No. 5 by Prokofiev.

Astoundingly, when I mentioned to a restaurant manager that we were heading to the Symphony last night, he knew that the Prokofiev was on the program and said he'd read the composer's autobiography when he was young. After 300 pages, he told me, Prokofiev was still only 17. Go figure. What's not to like about a night on the town?

Here’s on of those YT vids, with Leila J in John Adams’ concerto:

https://youtu.be/hveOSiuQE6M?si=aNY9XGv7CytJG7bX

From the Archives: Remembering the Literary Mastery of Daniel Woodrell (1953-2025)

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By Steve Paul

This week we received the devastating news that Daniel Woodrell, the Missouri-based author of a superb series of novels produced over the last forty years, had died of pancreatic cancer. He was a mere 72. I regret even more that last March, when we were traveling to a conference in Alabama I failed to make an advance connection with him and I missed an opportunity to get together while passing through West Plains, MO. His reply to me at the time, included this: “I finally started reading Connell seriously and geez he's got it all.” I know we had crossed paths when I was working on my biography of Evan S. Connell, and I’m glad he got the urge to read more of Connell’s work.

I knew I’d written about Connell a few times over the years, and I was heartened to unearth some of those pieces. He would have come on my radar circa 1987 when, as book review editor at the KC Star, I assigned his civil war novel to another fine writer with a western bent, the late Lenore Carroll. My first interview with him occurred about five years later, in 1992.

I was pretty sure I’d reviewed the fabulous Winter’s Bone but I’d forgot that I paired that with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. So that one turned out to be an interesting read and memory jolt. I’m not prone to quoting myself, but 20 years later I felt somewhat good about this piece: “Woodrell lives in the hills and absorbs their currents. He captures the acts and language of the disenfranchised, the downtordden, the mischievous. his characters tend to be aggressively anti-social or behavioral screw-ups, ‘scornful of town law and town ways, clinging to their own.’”

Two years after the novel came out, I used Winter’s Bone in a class I was teaching at Knox College, and I was surprised when the students turned out to be less enthusiastic about it than I was. Probably a combination of their rich-kid privilege and my lousy teaching. No big deal. But I also loved the movie version, wowed by its faithfulness to Woodrell’s story and the absolutely stunning presence of Jennifer Lawrence in the starring role as Ree Dolly.

I was also happy to be reminded that I heaped praise on Daniel’s later novel, The Maid’s Version, a remarkable example of his ability to mine and transform real, historic events from his native state’s hidden corners.

When I was putting together the short-story collection Kansas City Noir something like 14 years ago, i was eager to include Daniel. My recollection is his entry came very late in the process, but he was such a meticulous writer and his story, Come Murder Me Next, Babe, was so eerily fine (based on another true-crime tale), I didn’t care. If you’re looking for an entry point into Daniel’s work, you could start there and quickly move on to Winter’s Bone.

Each of the reproductions below come from the pages of The Kansas City Star — from 1987, 1992, 2006, 2013.

Recent Wanderings: Columns, Articles, Reviews

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Sometimes I lose track, but my inner editor tells me I ought to do a better job of compiling some of my recent writings. So here I’ll post links to works published in various place—my KC Studio columns, Substack eruptions, etc.

Art and History at UMKC: A couple of days last summer, I dropped in to view the work of two Spanish art conservators who were touching up and preserving a major, but little-known art work on the walls of a UMKC building. I’ve written about these murals before; they’re the work of a Spanish artist with connections to both Ernest Hemingway and to the current director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Like so:

https://kcstudio.org/a-rare-and-powerful-artwork-puts-on-a-new-face-at-umkc/

Conservators at work on “Don Quixote in the Modern World”

Two Dudes and Bob Dylan: After a summer encounter with Robyn Hitchcock, I read his recent memoir about the year 1967, which we happened to share as a notable period in our respective teen-aged musical awakenings. My review (of sorts), originally posted on substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-177798282

From the Archives: A Pynchon Double-Header Prompts a Review Revisit

I’ll concede that I am usually slow on the uptake. We’re on the verge of having a new Thomas Pynchon novel, Shadow Ticket, hitting the market any day now. I haven’t yet read it, and hope to get to it soon. And I haven’t yet seen the new movie, “One Battle After Another,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, which you might now is an adaptation of Pynchon’s Vineland, which was published in 1990. Hey, 1990, that rang a bell, and sure enough, while I was still book review editor of The Kansas City Star, I reviewed Vineland, and, damn, if the review doesn’t still feel a bit fresh and not to embarrasingly out of date.

RIP Lenny Zeskind, Author and Investigator, and Revisiting My 2009 Profile

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The Kansas City Star’s Judy Thomas wrote this week about the death of Leonard Zeskind, a Kansas Citian committed to researching and uncovering the many tendrils of white nationalism in the U.S. His landmark book on the project was one of hundreds recently purged from the library at the U.S. Naval Academy by the reckless administration, Judy reported. In 2009, I wrote about the book upon its release, and reading about it again, in this fraught moment of authoritarian and right-wing fervor, speaks to its utter timeliness and timelessness. In visits with Zeskind at his office at the time, a labyrinthine lair lined with file cabinets, he displayed both a sly sense of humor and utter seriousness about his work. In one moment, he beseeched me to aim a bottle of lubricant into his eyes. That was a first in my newspaper career. The story below first appeared on page 1 of The Kansas City Star on May 18, 2009.

From the Archives: That Time Gillian Flynn Tried to Kill Me

With Gillian Flynn, the Gone Girl goddess, coming back to her hometown soon, why not flash back to the feature profile I put together in 2012. At the time, Flynn’s writing career and personal life had begun to soar. She graciously allowed me to visit with her in her Chicago home and to follow along as she appeared at a bookstore reading. That’s when it got really interesting—though I left this little detail out of my magazine piece. (Why oh why? It shoulda been the lede, maybe?) I was a passenger in Flynn’s car as we returned to her place from the suburban bookstore. At one busy intersection, she made a left turn…INTO THE WRONG, ONCOMING LANE, if I recall correctly. It didn’t take long to correct the driving error, but still. We joked about how maybe she was having the impulse to bump off this nosy writer. Whatever. Maybe she tells the story differently. Maybe she doesn’t even remember it. Although we shared a stage once in an event for the Mid-Continent Library, we’ve had little to no contact ever since. It certainly has been fun to follow her projects over the years, and nice to hear that she’s struggling to work on another novel. In any case, I’m sharing here the magazine pages of that story, published just about a dozen years ago, Nov. 12, 2012, in The Kansas City Star Magazine (remember when?). Some of the photographs are mine; I was happy to line us up with my friend Emily Railsback, who had recently resettled in Chicago, to shoot the cover portrait.

Travel Journal: Turkey (Türkiye), an 'Ever-Evolving Mirage'

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After a long week’s journey to Istanbul and the Cappadocia region, I’ve been sorting photographs and diving into my notebooks to pull together some mostly coherent impressions. What I’m posting here still seems raw and incomplete, but I hope it captures some of the essence. I’ll also be posting selected pictures at this site’s photography page, Available Light and Shadow.

All content is (c) Steve Paul, 2024.

6 October 2024, Istanbul

We spent an extended week in Turkey, bookended by a long day of travel to get there and two long days of travel coming home.

I hadn’t really focused on how enormous a city Istanbul had become. Current estimates of 20 million people are common, though we heard numbers even higher. The population may have swelled in the aftermath of two earthquakes that ravaged several central cities of the country in 2023. The subsequent migration and infrastructure damage has led to a painful economic crisis marked by rampaging inflation, though it was hard to see how that was playing out in daily life of the city from our limited, tourist perspectives. What we saw was a bustling, crowded place, with pockets of modest or impoverished dwellings punctuated with new construction, renovation, and what felt like tourism-driven abundance.

Blue Mosque

Our hotel, the Ottoman-inspired Armada, was in the Sultanahmet district, just a 10-minute walk from some of the most historic and popular sites, including the Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque, and the Basilica Cistern. It was another 10 minutes on foot to the Grand Bazaar. Because we arrived in the late afternoon, our opening itinerary included a rooftop reception and dinner. After some intermittent raindrops, the evening unfolded nicely, and we dined on a typically fabulous spread of small plates (meze) and sweets. Overlooking the terrace was the Blue Mosque, which was bathed in white and violet lights.

Because we were a group of musicians and music aficionados, we were treated to a mini-concert by a quartet of Turkish musicians, which helped set an important tone and thread of our visit.

Our welcoming band.

7 October, Istanbul

I know it’s impossible for a traveler to parachute into a country and even try to get a handle on its character. Perhaps because our friends who arranged the journey had much experience and many connections, our days here were filled with congeniality, not too many travel hassles, and many pleasant surprises. And perfect weather, too.

One guiding thought I had in mind wherever we went in Turkey was the writer Orhan Pamuk’s description of his country and his native Istanbul as an “ever-evolving mirage.”

A few random street scenes here:

***

View from the Bosphorus.

Getting to know Istanbul almost has to begin with the Bosphorus. It’s the physical and metaphorical axis that defines this vast city’s place in the world. It separates East from West, Europe from Asia. It’s part of the nexus of commerce and trade that has connected (and divided) so many cultures over the centuries. Our group had a choice opportunity to experience the Bosphorus on a private boat tour, complete with food and wine and glorious late afternoon breezes. We had views of historic palaces, of the famed Galata Bridge, of so much of the vibrant waterfront even despite the presence of rather monstrous-scale cruise ships—two more in addition to the Queen Victoria.

Cruising on the water as the sun was setting and the moon rising was a visual and visceral high point of our journey.

8 October, Istanbul

Our travel priorities always include what we can find in the visual arts, and we were quite taken with Istanbul’s relatively new Museum of Modern Art. The privately funded non-profit institution is a decade old, but it reopened just last year (2023) in a crisp and bright new building by the architect Renzo Piano.

A featured exhibit while we were there was by Olafur Eliasson, whose work I’ve long admired. He’s a sculptor of light and color, of metal and wood, of glass and optical illusions. I’d like to go in-depth about the exhibit, but will save some of that for later. Eliasson’s major concerns over environmental decay and climate change result in works that are both in your face and subtly melancholic. 

Olafur Eliasson

Elsewhere in the museum we walked through the permanent exhibit of artists we were wholly unfamiliar with. But we were struck by the presence of significant forays into abstract expressionism, particularly by one or more female artists.

I’ve got very mixed feelings about AI developments in the cultural and creative world. But it’s hard to deny the entertaining visual appeal of the work being made by Rafik Anadol, a Turkish-American artist with a global practice. Like many people, I first encountered his super-sized, liquid-like wall extravaganza at the Museum of Modern Art, which transformed meta-data of the museum’s entire collection into a mesmerizing psychedelic experience. We happened to catch another Anadol production this summer, a special room-sized immersion at the Antoni Gaudí Casa Battlö in Barcelona. Now comes his pulsating immersion room at the Istanbul Modern, a piece that reflects and honors the Bosphorus. Blue and white tones cascade through the room like hyper-inflated waves. Mirrored floor and ceiling surfaces expand the effect all round you.

Walking out of one gallery and into a hallway I couldn’t help but notice a strange sight outside a wall of windows. It was a section of the Queen Victoria cruise ship, docked right there on the Bosphorus, within spitting distance of the museum. The geometric array of the giant craft’s cabins and rails made for an instant snapshot, a grand artistic gesture as if the slice of reality were hanging hugely on the museum walls (below).           

***

Ezgi Karakus joins the musical enthusiasm at our group dinner.

An evening of fun, frivolity and fabulous food unfolded at the Hos Seda Balik Restaurant. After mounds of meze, a whole fish, and tastes of red Turkish wine, the long table erupted in music. And some spontaneous dancing.

9 October 2024, Istanbul

In preparation for the Turkey journey I poked around online to scout jazz clubs in Istanbul in hopes of finding a destination for one of our group’s unscheduled nights. Lo and behold, Istanbul’s Akbank Jazz Festival would be well under way offering numerous opportunities coinciding with our days there. Among the options was a concert featuring the American bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, whose funk-infused music I hadn’t heard for some years (decades). I was intrigued by the possibility of hearing him in the context of Turkish fusion, as he was appearing with a band led by the percussionst Burhan Öçal. I didn’t know of Öçal, but I came away bowled over and eager to hear more from him.

Turns out this concert was something of a reunion of sorts, given that Tacuma had recorded an album with Öçal a quarter-century ago (“Groove alla Turka,” 1998). The show even began with a big-screen projection of some documentary footage of that recording session. And it also was presented as a memorial tribute to another Turkish jazz hero, Mehmet Ulug, who died in 2013 and is remembered at this festival every year.

Guest rapper Gazapizm

The scene: Babylon, a large, standing-only concert space within what seems like an extremely vibrant arts center and cultural complex. In planning for the evening out, I couldn’t figure out from Google Maps where our group of eight jazzers could eat nearby beforehand, so we opted for a fine spot (details on this elsewhere) near our hotel and then cabbed over to find Babylon. When we got there, we discovered that an open-air plaza outside the joint was filled with festive restaurants and people, so that was a lesson learned. (Next time in Istanbul!)

The upshot was a high-energy concert, with eight or more players on stage, including horns, keyboards, violin, various percussion. The opening tune was “Nihavend Longa,” which dates back to “Groove Alla Turka.” (I found it on Tidal, though it’s likely available on other streaming services.) As an opener it highlighted an attractive blend of eastern and western jazz sounds. My experience might be somewhat limited, but this and other tunes on the set-list connected me with a memory of discovering the Lebanese-Parisian jazz fusion of Toufic Farroukh on a trip to Europe in 2002 (see Farroukh’s terrific album “Drab-Zeen”).

Tacuma introduced one tune with a plea for peace, kindness, and love, which was met with great applause. Called “Rahima,” it’s a gentle ballad named for Tacuma’s wife.

Toward the end of the set, the band was joined by a highly popular rapper named Gazapizm, who added an unexpected layer of vocalism to the proceedings. Another singer, whose name escaped me, joined to whip up more emotional vibes, helped close the concert.

 We were deep in the crowd (not conducive to decent photos or video), and I was struck by the overwhelming youth of the audience. Not sure that we’d see quite so many young folks at a similar jazz concert in the U.S. Carol, my partner, not exactly a jazz fan, said she really enjoyed the show.

While back-filling for details, I found this link to an NPR show from not long ago featuring Tacuma, which is worth a listen (see link below photo).

Burhan Öçal, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and a guest singer whose name I didn’t catch. At Babylon.

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/27/1131879487/bassist-jamaaladeen-tacuma-reflects-on-his-journey-down-a-dirt-road-in-n-carolin

A Food Interlude

To discover the joys of Turkish cuisine is to recognize its close relationship to Greek and Middle Eastern foods. We enjoyed ubiquitous variations on hummus, baba ghanoush and tzatziki. Red pepper concoctions appeared on almost every buffet and table. At our luxurious hotel, I was turned onto the attraction of salad for breakfast, encouraged by our Turkish travel mate, Ezgi Karakus, to try the rocket lettuce, or mild, large-leaf arugula, sprinkled with lemon juice and oil. I experimented with using the leaves to wrap various cheeses.

Lamb shank at Mozaik, Görome, Cappadocia.

Best meal—so good we had it twice—was a lamb shank at Mozaik, a restaurant in Görome, Cappadocia. Moist, tender, falling off the bone; we learned from an insider that a chef’s secret was putting dates in the oven as the shank roasted, which added a subtle sweetness. Another high point was the series of delicious small plates, along with bottomless wines, that accompanied our private boat tour along the Bosphorus channel. The wooden boat belongs to the Armada Hotel, where we stayed just a stone’s throw from the water. I knew virtually nothing about Turkish wines, but sampled several throughout our stay and learned that wine production somewhere in or around Cappadocia could be as ancient as that in the Republic of Georgia and Shiraz, Iran. Another liquid attraction in Turkey is the ever present Raki, which is essentially a version of what we know from France as pastis, or Ricard—the delicious (if you like such flavors) anise aperitif.

Not long ago, the New York Times helpfully ran a feature story about the rise of female restaurateurs and chefs in Istanbul, which I happened to carry with me on the journey. Turns out that one of those restaurants, Giritli, was just around the corner from our hotel. Its outdoor patio was attractive and comfortable, and prix fixe menu was absolutely first rate. Our jazz-going crew started out there one night. The meze assortment was a filling starter plate, but I couldn’t resist the grilled fish as a main dish (sea bass, I think it was). And once again, the wine, a Bordeaux-style blend, was perfectly fine. I didn’t get around to peeking in the kitchen or trying to greet the chef; but our table service was super friendly and first-rate.

October 10-11, Görome and Uçhisar, Cappadocia

Cameras blazing at the post-ceremony tourist show at Saruhan

After a short flight from Istanbul to the Kayseri airport, one of our first experiences in the Cappadocia region involved a journey into history and mysticism. Pretty sure I can honestly say I’d never witnessed a Whirling Dervish ceremony, but here it was, twirling before our eyes inside a 13th-century caravanserai. I’m not exactly sure what links the spiritual event to the place, an ancient stop called Saruhan on the so-called Silk Road. But it’s now a tourist attraction. Visitors are invited into an interior arena and cameras are prohibited as initial silence turns into music and a quartet of men doff their black robes, step onto the stage and begin moving, clad in white tunic and skirt, in symbolic steps and spins. I was struck by a brochure’s note that the tall fez atop their heads represented the “ego’s tomb,” a point emphasized when you understand that the ceremony leads the participants into “an ascent through love, in which the dervish deserts his ego, finds the truth and arrives at ‘The Perfect.’” (I borrowed the idea for what might well become a line in a future poem: The extended fez is known as ego’s tomb,/ which, after all, is what a successful poem could be.) At the end, the dervish ceremony succumbs to the demands of tourism by tacking on a brief coda suitable for camera phones and offering a gift shop with dervish and local souvenirs.      

***

It’s somewhat fascinating how the Cappadocia region has developed only in the last 40 years or so, as I understand it, into a compelling and mega-popular tourist region. Its geological marvels and rockadelic landscape are a big part of it, of course. In 1985, the Görome National Park and surrounding area received protection as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its historical cave dwellings, religious refuges, and nearly incomparable depth of the human experience. Then, as a tourist economy began to develop—not easily within a culture known for sharing rather than profiteering— someone had the brilliant idea to sell the landscape experience via hot-air balloons. As one local insider put it to me one night, most people anymore come to Cappadocia for the balloons and don’t even know about the ancient churches or the history. The balloons—as many as 150 at a time, each carrying four to a dozen or more passenger—float above the spires and valleys each morning at dawn. Travelers are lured to view the penile towers and “fairy chimneys” in Love Valley and similarly marketed sites.

Today, tour buses navigate the narrow roads in the hills and towns. If you take a sunset Jeep tour of the valleys you will soon be in the midst of a bizarre conglomeration of tourists on horseback and tourists on ATVs all jockeying for selfies among the rocks.

I had a feeling that we could pass on the balloon ride, especially after learning that we could avoid the early-morning call and relax with coffee on a hotel terrace with fabulous views of the balloons. Coffee wasn’t available yet, but my camera phone was fully charged.

***

Don’t get me wrong. I know I was a willing participant in a tourist parade through Turkey, a place I had never encountered. But over the years I’ve developed an abiding sense of tourist guilt that glides to the surface from time to time as crowds amass around me. (We were in Barcelona this summer just days after anti-tourist protests erupted along La Rambla, within steps of where we’d soon be staying. Tourism is striking a difficult balance with local politics and economic and environmental priorities in many places. And don’t let’s get started on what local havoc Airbnb has caused.)

A Melmuk design.

What we witnessed and took part in on this trip was a rather conventional skim of prominent attractions, accented with beautifully curated events and gatherings that spoke to the musical and cultural-exchange roots of this journey. In addition, our planners’ special connections in Turkey led us to special experiences, even when we were engaged in what I recognized was a heightened form of performance retailing. By that, of course, I mean we had insider-tours, complete with demonstrations and personal attention, of a famed ceramics studio, a high-end jewelry studio, and a highly regarded carpet shop. (See my video below of the famed ceramicist and entrepreneur Galip Körükçü making a pot at Chez Galip.) Yes, we spent money in all of them.

12 October, Görome

Many thanks go to our inspiring tour organizers and guides from Ensemble Iberica. We were ably led by Erin McGrane, Jeff Freling, Beau Bledsoe, and Ezgi Karakus. A culminating experience was a concert by Beau and Ezgi (with a cameo by Jeff) in one of those historic caves, a onetime proto-Christian or Byzantine church now in its modern guise as an event space. The candle-lighted setting was gorgeous, exceeded only by the music, which washed over our group like a prayer. Despite the lighting, I captured some video, including this one of a composition by Ezgi inspired by her hometown of Izmir. Of course, another fine feast followed at our new favorite restaurant, Mozaik in Görome.

13 October, Uçhisar

© Steve Paul, 2024

I awoke before dawn today and found a perch on a terrace of our cave hotel. It felt like the first opportunity to sit and write anything of substance based on our days of hectic travel. I also felt a strong pull toward the morning view of Mount Erciyes, the dominant inactive volcano of the region. Sunrise was approaching. Clouds and the dark shapes of land created a planar canvas of subtle colors. It felt like I was living inside a work of art in the moment and over the next 45 minutes or so I captured the slow evolution of images. Again, I could think of Orhan Pamuk’s “ever-evolving mirage.” Later I offered an online post, “Ten Sunrise Views of Mount Erciyes.” Instagram, of course, reduced the images to its standard square format. Here are four of the originals in their horizontal glory. I want to live with these for a while and think about whether they’re worth exhibiting.

© Copyright Steve Paul, 2024

© Copyright Steve Paul, 2024

© Copyright Steve Paul, 2024

14 October, Istanbul

Istanbul—This was an unplanned overnight back in the big city, caused by a delayed flight from the Nevsehir airport in Cappadocia. We missed our connecting flight to Chicago. My travel savviness failed and real information was hard to come by if we had any hope of booking alternative flights out of Istanbul. What the hell; all we could do was go with flow. That included taking a free hotel night with dinner from Turkish Air. I reported on this to FB: 

It's a wide weird world. Early today (Monday) our flight out of Cappadocia, Turkey, was delayed two hours, causing us (and others in our group) to miss our connecting flight from Istanbul to Chicago. After Turkish Air rebooked us for a flight early Tuesday, and after more than a few minutes of waiting, we got shuttled all the way into the city for a comp hotel, where checkout will be 3 a.m. (it's now about 9 p.m.) to get shuttled back to the airport for a 6:30 a.m. flight. Dinner buffet at the hotel wasn't bad at all, and then we caught sight of the bedecked and beglittered contestants of the Mrs. Woman of the Universe competition. The Universe! They were happy to be photographed as they strolled to the buffet and back. I did no reporting whatsoever, so can't say which Mrs. Woman won. (Later I learned the honor went to Mrs. Belarus.) Still, for every setback in life, and all the lost hours that we'll never get back, there seems to be an upside.

From the Archives: Reading and Interviewing Margaret Atwood, 1993-2022

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By STEVE PAUL

With Margaret Atwood coming to Kansas City soon for a library talk (Sept. 24), I thought I’d dredge up a couple of related old pieces. I had the opportunity to meet and interview Atwood in 1993 at the annual American Booksellers Association confab (now Book Expo) in Miami. Her novel The Robber Bride was coming out that fall and her publisher had sent me an early copy of the book—so-called advance review copies were not yet ready, so they sent me a dupe of the typed manuscript. I’ll concede that my reading of Atwood was rather conventional if not underwhelming from today’s perspective. Then again, the interview with her remains enlightening.

In talking about the essential status of mythology in contemporary story-telling, one of the driving forces of her writing, she illustrated:

“One of the founding stories of U.S. culture is the biblical quotation ‘by their fruits they shall know them.’ It was originally intended spiritually—you know good people by how they behave. But it was interpreted by the Puritans to mean you can tell good people by how rich they are, which is with us today. It underlies so much literature in this culture—the idea of sin and redemption.”

Find reproductions of the two pieces, published Nov. 14, 1993 in the Kansas City Star, in three images below.

In more recent years, I had the pleasure of encountering Atwood at the Key West Literary Seminar. She spoke again about myth and fable. In my memory she talked about the movie “Aquaman” as a product of myth. The movie had just recently come out and she suggested that she watched it so we wouldn’t have to. (I still haven’t gotten around to it.) One morning in Key West, we ended up at a Duval Street CVS at the same time, where I met her husband, the writer Graeme Gibson. He would die just months later, as I recall.

Atwood happens to make a cameo appearance in my biography-in-progress of William Stafford. This goes back a ways to Atwood’s years as an emerging poet and fiction writer (her first novel was published in 1969). Shortly after being named Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress for 1970-71, what we now call the U.S. Poet Laureate, Stafford put Atwood’s name on a short list of writers he would like to host during his tenure. He wanted to make sure women were represented on what was very much a male-dominated field. Sure enough, one of the first reading programs Stafford hosted in the fall of 1970 brought together Atwood and Galway Kinnell.

In 2022 I wrote to Atwood to see what she might recall of the event and/or Stafford. She kindly replied, hand-writing her response on my original letter and sending it back to me:

“I was 30! A very minor figure! …I love Wm Stafford’s poetry in book form—but he was a big cheese and I was a very small cheeselet.”

And here’s a blog bonus: An audio recording of the reading can be found at the Library of Congress website. Find it here and enjoy:

https://www.loc.gov/item/95770388/


From the Archives: Stanley Crawford's 'Mayordomo'

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I was saddened to learn of the recent deaths of two important New Mexico writers, N. Scott Momaday and Stanley Crawford. I never had the chance to meet Momaday though I certainly knew of his legacy as a voice of Native American culture. I did intersect with Crawford years ago and wrote about one of his New Mexico books. I’d only recently begun traveling to the Southwest and getting a handle on the interwoven cultures of the “Land of Enchantment.” Crawford’s Mayordomo was an enlightening guide to the complications of village life. This first appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1988.

From the Archives: Calvin Trillin Three Ways

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One of Kansas City’s favorite literary native sons is coming back to town on a book tour soon. He’s touting a new collection of some of his classic magazine journalism, including landmark reporting on the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s. It was some years later when Trillin’s “American Journal” reports began catching my eye in The New Yorker, and then a decade or so more when I began writing about Trillin during my days as Book Review Editor of The Kansas City Star.

I’ve dug deep into the files to unearth one of those book related stories, which included an interview in Trillin’s Greenwich Village pad.

Twice in the 2000s I managed to accompany Trillin on food tours of his beloved lower Manhattan, which turned me on to some of the more interesting corners of the village and Chinatown.

For now, I’m posting jpeg clippings. Hope that works for all.

Now, a food tour, 2005. My syndicated piece published in the Honolulu newspaper.

Seven years later, 2012, mostly new places, but some old favorites.