Category Archives: Writing and Writers

Reflections on the writer’s life and the literary scene

06.13.23
by

A Writer’s Week

Dear Readers—The following, though almost comic in its brevity, is a concise snapshot of the thrills, glamour, and enjoyment that are part of an up-and-coming author’s daily life. 

Sunday, June 4

Church as usual in the morning, and daughter Katie expected for dinner in the evening. That should leave me four or five after-lunch hours for literary work and my Mandatory Nap.

I spend two hours revising the blog post for Tuesday, June 6. It’s about Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans, and how that nasty fight of yesteryear echoes down to our day. What if this post draws fire from Hamilton’s or Jefferson’s 21st-century followers? I must get this right, as near bullet-proof as I can make it. Don’t want to get drawn into politics.

Fooboo. Photo by author.

At three o’clock, I took the dog, Fooboo, for a walk. It’s a beautiful day, but quite hazy, due to wildfires in Canada.

Then back to work. I read and digest a new chapter written by a colleague in Tuesdays With Story, one of two writers’ critique groups I belong to. This chapter is a vivid excursion into a dystopian society of the near future. I mark a few passages of tangled syntax or confusing concepts, but it’s a great read. This kind of work is time-consuming, but you’ve got to give feedback so you can get feedback. Otherwise you’re just shouting into a vacuum.

Katie arrives at five, bringing her dog Lucy to dinner with her. Time to put off the literary lion and put on the dad.

Never got my nap. Hmpf.

Monday, June 5

Ian Fleming. Fair use.

A late breakfast, accompanied by all we could stand to watch of a disappointing 2014 biopic on the late Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. Then it’s time to get to work.

This is one of two or three mornings a week I manage to carve out a few hours for writing new material. I bang away at the first draft of my new World War II novel, tentatively titled Brother’s Blood. This seems to me the most brutal and exciting part of writing. A story does not exist yet, except some fuzzy notion in your head. You make it come to life by writing words, sentences, and paragraphs. How does one do that? I don’t know, but one must do it. Two and a half hours later, out of breath, I emerge with another chapter and a half snug in my laptop. 

Time to wash breakfast dishes and clean up the kitchen. Over lunch I read the penultimate chapter of Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, the book that prompted my upcoming blog post. 

Almost forgot to record that somewhere in the middle of the morning’s writing, I took a few minutes to email my fellow writers in Tuesdays With Story, to make sure everybody understands which chapters we’rre reviewing tomorrow night. I’m the group’s gatekeeper for stories to be critiqued, and I host the Tuesday night meetings, which are a hybrid of in-person and Zoom encounters.

Arthur Koestler. Photo by Eric Koch for Anefo, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.

After lunch Fooboo takes me for another walk. His real, official name is Midnight, so I’m walking Midnight at noon. Midnight at Noon. Great title for a book! What would it be about? Alaskans and Norwegians, especially Spitzbergers, are proud of their midnight sun, but this is Midnight at Noon. Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, a political thriller about the Bolshevik experience in Russia. But no. This would be Midnight at Noon. I ought to keep it under wraps lest someone steal my title and write the book before I even know what it’s about.

After walking Fooboo I take my nap. Now it’s three p.m. I’d better look at the blog post again, and then read another story for tomorrow night’s meeting. But revising the blog post takes the whole time. I call it quits for now—can’t miss Jeopardy!

After supper and our nightly Scrabble game, I’m back at the laptop, seeking out royalty-free images to decorate the Hamilton blog post. Then I spend an hour entering the text and images in WordPress, adjusting their positions, highlighting and coloring text, etc. I finish around 9:30. 

Tuesday, June 6

I’m behind on my reading for tonight’s Tuesdays with Story meeting, so most of today will be consumed with reading the work of my fellow writers and registering comments on same. I enjoy this process, even though some of my colleagues write in genres or subject matter I have no interest in. The fact that I am not the author’s intended audience has notthing to do with my responsibility to read the piece and give intelligent feedback. Sometimes it’s a kind of drudgery, but it’s drudgery that might prove useful to a friend who hopes to break into publication. By suppertime, I’ve finished all six items and have printed out my comments so they’ll be close at hand when we begin our discussion.

So the nightly ritual of Jeopardy!, supper, and Scrabble occurs just as scheduled.

At seven, Mike and Jack show up at the door. Ensconced with wine in the sunroom, we three are joined via Zoom by Amber, Amit, Judy, Suzanne, Bob, Kashmira, and Jaime. Two hours fly by as we comment on one another’s work with comments that swing frequently between praising and challenging. Critiquing is an art. To receive critique with an open and discerning mind is a discipline. 

Wednesday, June 7

The morning’s first business: follow up on last night’s meeting. There is a Tuesdays With Story  newsletter, with rotating editorship, that summarizes the feedback each author received. After first updating my own list of future dates and presenters, I send reminders to all who presented material last night to send their concise summary of feedback received to this month’s editor. And I send the editor list of who presented last night and who is on the docket next time. 

This week’s Blood Pressure Challenge is a letter from the Kia car company advising me that I’d better apply for a free steering wheel lock to protect my apparently all-too-stealable 2016 Kia Soul. I navigate their website and fill out their form. The software does not accept it and advises me to call their 800 number instead.

While waiting for Kia to answer the phone, I peruse other websites in my self-assigned quest to determine whether I am a fool for not switching my weekly blog from WordPress to Substack. I learn that there are different forms of WordPress, and I’ve chosen the wrong one. It appears, by the way, that I should also be considering Medium and Ghost. In addition, I learn that actual reasons to choose any one of these platforms over the others exist only in web marketing techspeak—no matter which forum one reads. None of these programs would stay in business if they had to explain themselves in English. We would all figure out that we don’t need any of the things they claim to do. But as it is, we will never know that, because we’ll never find out what it is they claim to do.

After two hours down this rabbit hole, I hang up on Kia and make myself a sandwich. After lunch, I nap and walk the dog. 

Then it’s free reading time. I’ve got a tall stack of books. I order them from the public library and then try to cram them into my head before they’re overdue. Right now I’m on Spencer’s Mountain, by Earl Hamner, Jr. It’s the coming-of-age novel that gave birth to the Waltons TV series. It’s what we now call a young adult novel, a quick read but well worth reading for its distinctive voice, its narrative flow, and the skilful plot management. Even though I’ve seen it all on TV, it still draws tears at all the right places. 

Kristin Oakley

After Jeopardy! and a quick dinner of microwaved yakisoba, I’m off to Mystery to Me Bookstore, that magical Madison venue where my friend Kristin Oakley is unveiling her new novel The Devil Particle. It’s the first of a four-book series—a different genre, story line, and approach from her previous novels. But if you liked Carpe Diem, Illinois and God on Mayhem Street, you might like this one, too. Kristin’s launch party brings out lots of good friends—writing guru Christine DeSmet, author Peggy Williams (whose new book will be published next spring!), internet marketing maven Celeste Anton, and Milwaukee publisher Kira Henschel. It’s nice to be together in one room, all unmasked. And I get my copy of The Devil Particle SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR!

Thursday, June 8

The long weekend is already beginning. After two sets of geriatric doubles tennis in the morning, I make my usual Thursday rounds: I pick up the church’s mail at the Struck Street post office, drop it off at the church, and stop at the fish store to pick up half a pound of salmon for tonight’s dinner and a pint of seafood gumbo for lunch. 

After the gumbo (After the Gumbo—another great book title!), I’m off to Winnequah school in my Literary Lion persona. Attentive Readers may recall that I read my middle-grade manuscript, Izzy Strikes Gold!, aloud to grandson Tristan’s fifth-grade class last winter. Today they get their yearbooks—yes, fifth-graders get yearbooks now—and spend time milling around in the corridor signing one other’s yearbooks. The teacher, Matt Fielder, has invited me back to see the kids and sign their yearbooks. More than fifty years have passed since I last signed a yearbook. It’s very nice to be asked.

Arriving at home, I face an infrequent chore. We take Fooboo out, drench him with water from the hose, soap him up, rinse him down, towel him off, and turn him loose. He does not like it one bit, except for  running around the backyard shaking off water and rolling in the grass. Since he’s still too wet to be re-admitted to the house, I spend quality time with him in the yard, so he won’t be lonesome. 

I lounge in my zero-gravity chair and start on my next library book. (I finished Spencer’s Mountain.) The new book is Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons. I saw the movie with Paul Scofield and Robert Shaw when it came out in the Sixties. I caught the last scenes of it recently on TV and was struck by the dialog between Sir Thomas More and his accusers. So I got the book to read it and perhaps get a few clues how a great playwright does it.

After an hour, the dog’s ready to go in, and Jeopardy! is coming up.

Friday, June 9

The day begins on the East Side of Madison. I join a couple of friends, Norm and Karl, for breakfast at a local cholesterol shop. Our geezers’ triumvirate meets three or four times a year to grouse about how life is getting to be strange. 

I rush from breakfast to Winnequah school, where Tristan graduates from fifth grade at 9:30—yes, fifth-graders have graduations now. A good time is had by all. 

By the time I get home, it’s noon. Besides lunch, I have an email saying that the June issue of Well Read magazine has dropped, featuring my short story, “Beast of the Moment.” I take a few minutes to announce it on social media, complete with a link so people can read it. I’m proud of this, the first short story I’ve published in a long time. Short stories are about as hard to write as novels. Just shorter.

I spend the first part of the afternoon dashing off an issue of my irregularly published e-newsletter, The Haphazard Times, to let my loyallest fans know about “Beast of the Moment.” I take the opportunity to mention that a special price of twelve dollars a copy is temporarily in force on my novel, Price of Passage.

I accomplish a bit of yard work and house cleanup Then Katie, Elsie, and Tristan descend on us, along with my sister, Cynda, and her husband, Steve. We spend the afternoon and early evening celebrating the kids’ graduations from their respective school grades—fifth and eighth—and my approaching 78th birthday. We can’t celebrate together on my birthday, because Joelle and I will be in Budapest, ready to start our adventure cruising down the Danube. 

That’s all for now.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

06.06.23
by

Hamilton vs. Republicans

Alexander Hamilton. Portrait by John Trumbull, 1804. Public Domain.

Alexander Hamilton has got me thinking about Republicans.

Hamilton may have been a republican, but he was not a Republican. 

Hamilton was the disease Republicans vowed to cure.

I’ve been reading Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow’s scholarly biography. It’s the book that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to create the musical show Hamilton.

Out of respect for your time, Fair Reader—and to put my own subsequent remarks in context—I shall boil down Chernow’s quarter of a million words to a few paragraphs, immediately below.

Summary of Chernow’s Book 

Hamilton was a meteor that flashed across American skies in the late 1700s and very early 1800s. The glare of his arc obscured a lot of other guys desperately trying to get noticed. 

President George Washington in 1795. Portrait by Gilbert Stuart. Public Domain.

A poor immigrant from the West Indies, Hamilton became George Washington’s right-hand man during the Revolutionary War, and the postwar confusion, and the early Constitutional period. When Washington was elected president, he chose Hamilton as secretary of the treasury. Besides consolidating and funding the existing Revolutionary War debts, starting a national bank, and putting America’s currency and credit on a sound basis, Hamilton organized nearly everything else about the infant government. He pushed all his many projects, from the Coast Guard to the Whiskey Tax, on to ultimate success.

In his pushiness, he made an enemy of Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s Secretary of State. Besides the fact that Hamilton leaned toward the British, from whom we had just separated, while Jefferson favored revolutionary France, the two men held opposing images of the future United States. 

Hamilton advocated a strong central government to protect U.S. commercial interests, foster trade, and preside over an expanding industrial economy. He also abhorred slavery and wished to see it abolished. Jefferson idealized the independent farmer spread across the landscape—including those independent farmeers of the South who owned battalions of slaves to help with their independent farming. He distrusted cities, financiers, and a centralized government.

The Founding Fathers abhorred political parties; but factions immediately arose in the new American republic, based on contrasting worldviews and economic interests—and you had to call them something. Hamilton and his teammates were called Federalists. The name came from the Federalist Papers, a series of essays Hamilton had written, or caused to be written, promoting adoption of the U. S. Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson as president, 1801. Portrait by Rembrandt Peale. Public Domain.

Jefferson and his friends, including fellow Virginians James Madison and James Monroe, accused Hamilton of trying to sell America back to the British. They suggested that Federalists wanted to replace our elected president with a monarchy—despite the fact that Federalist-in-chief George Washington would never condone such a thing. The Jefferson crowd were called anti-Federalists, or more lastingly, Republicans—simply meaning they favored a republic, not the monarchy they feared the Federalists would impose.

Federalists vs. Republicans: It was the birth of the American two-party system. Things went downhill from there.

Chernow of course adds numerous details, which I have spared you. But that is the gist of it.

The Upshot

Hamilton came to a tragic end, which need not detain us here. 

But what of that two-party system? What happened to it? Why is it that, 225 years later, we do not still have Federalists and Republicans? 

Hold on a moment, Gracious Reader: Are you sure we don’t?

Around 1800, when France’s woes were an American spectator sport, U.S. fans of the French Revolution organized themselves as “Democratic Clubs.” These clubs aligned with Jefferson’s Republicans, at least on foreign policy. So the Republicans started calling themselves Democratic Republicans and, later on, just Democrats. 

Meanwhile the Federalist party shot itself in the political foot too many times and went out of business, to be replaced by a party called the Whigs. Named after a similar party in the United Kingdom, the Whigs were not quite Federalists, but they had a lot in common with them. They wanted a strong central government that would foster infrastructure—roads, canals, railroads—to grow the domestic economy. They also favored a national bank and protective tariffs. 

Sound a lot like Hamilton, don’t they, these Whigs?

The Democrats—and remember, Democrats were Republicans—espoused Jeffersonian ideals. They aimed to protect farmers, including the slaveholding farmers of the South. They rejected urbanism, industry, and finance. They opposed a strong central government. 

Senator Stephen A. Douglas. Original photo by Julian Vannerson, with Photoshop work by Kosobay. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, for example, wanted each state to make its own choice on slavery. This idea, which he called Popular Sovereignty, would have allowed Northern states to salve their consciences by prohibiting the immoral institution while simultaneously the Southern states could go on exploiting African American slaves. Douglas thought it was the ideal solution.

As the slavery question came to dominate politics, the Whig party—which was not all of one mind on slavery—withered away. A new party was born to take its place. Founding delegates meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin, thought “Republican” would be a good name. The Democrats having discarded the label long before, it was up for grabs. So old Whigs like Willam H. Seward and Abraham Lincoln became Republicans. 

By 1860, the two-party system comprised Republicans, who now occupied the niche the Federalists had carved in the 1790s; and Democrats, who formerly had called themselves Republicans, back when they stood against the Federalists.

All clear so far? 

Maybe not? Perhaps a review is in order. 

Hamilton led the Federalists, who wanted a strong government fostering industry, trade, and commerce. Jefferson led the Republicans, who wanted a weak central government, states’ rights, and a system tilted in favor of dispersed farmers.

Through a process of evolution, the party that carried on Hamilton’s outlook called itself “Republican” in the mid-nineteenth century, as the Jeffersonian Republicans decades earlier had changed their label to “Democrats.”

Switch-a-Roonie

When the Civil War came along, it was a war between the Republicans and the Democrats. That’s an oversimplification, but conceptually it is true.

The Republicans won the Civil War and the Democrats lost the Civil War.

Then the Republicans, assuming the slavery question had been settled, went on to other preoccupations: high finance and large-scale industry—typical Hamiltonian concerns.

The Democrats, after losing the Civil War, hoped to restore their party’s good name in the North while restoring society to its antebellum status in the South. 

Now, Kind Reader, it is beyond Your New Favorite Writer’s competence to sketch how the two-party system evolved from a quasi-Hamiltonian versus a quasi-Jeffersonian party a century ago to a Big Government party and a Small Government Party today.

I am only here to suggest that today’s Democrats seem to espouse postures of which Hamilton, the Federalist, might approve. And today’s Republicans seem to espouse postures that Jefferson, the Republican, might endorse.

Would it be folly to suggest that today’s Democrats are a continuation of Hamilton’s Federalists, and that today’s Republicans now carry on the tradition of Jefferson’s Republicans? 

Perhaps it is folly. Yet there is something in it.

So What?

Reading Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, I especially enjoyed one statement by the author: “If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.”

Hamilton set the pattern of the federal government as an active partner in setting the United States up to be a great nation—commercially, politically, and on the world stage. Because of Hamilton we have a federal government that is not afraid to step into the lives of its citizens and assume a directive role.

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others were wary of such confident assertiveness by the Executive Branch. They strove to establish primacy of the Congress over the Executive. With almost 250 years of perspective, we can say they largely failed in that mission. Congress today is more an appendage of the presidency than the other way around.

Largely for this reason, today’s Republicans wage a twilight struggle against federal overreach, highlighting many cases where people’s lives have suffered unreasonable intrusion by the federal government. They are opposing a well-entrenched foe—the Democrats, moved by a vision of the good things government has accomplished, and all the good things it might yet accomplish, if only the Republicans would let it.

The chief lesson of our common past is that the passions of today did not spring full-blown from our own brilliant imaginations. They are the echoes of similar passions begun centuries ago and modulated along the rocky pathways of the intervening years. 

Lord help us all if we fail to grasp the implications of this fact.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

05.23.23
by

All the Time There Is

On a nice day in May, as I lay in my zero gravity chair in the backyard, looking up, examining cloud patterns etched in a blue dome, its bottoms fringed round with the yellow-green of spring trees—it occurred to me that however much time this reverie took, I could spare.

Growing older, I become more patient. With each passing year—each step closer to the chasm that ends this life and drops us into the next—I am less concerned about running out of time.

When young I was often impatient.  

Now, my impatience is all used up.

In the midst of the storm and strife, the middle years of life, there are things to accomplish that seem time-bound. We must prove ourselves in some minor skill before we can move up the ladder. We must pile up enough gold to send our kids to college by the time they are ready to go. We need to stretch and to strive, to scrimp and to save, to squirrel away assets against the future.

All that is behind me. Now, everything worth doing seems to want all my attention. It is less vital to finish than to engage. 

Kipling sketched a remarkable image of the afterlife—only I suppose it applies to my here and now:

When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.
And those that were good shall be happy: they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comet’s hair.
They shall find real saints to draw from—Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all!
And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;
And no one will work for the money, and no one will work for the fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!

We who have lived beyond the hustle and urgency of mid-life know a secret we could tell to those still trapped in that gosh-awful hurly-burly. But it’s no good; they would not listen. 

Or rather, they would not hear. Even gifted with the best intentions and the strongest focus, they could not hear. You don’t have ears for that secret until it becomes your own. 

It is the whisper of Eternity. It says: Go. Do. Enjoy. Be. You have all the time there is.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

05.16.23
by

Fonix

A news story stunned my ears last week, courtesy of Wisconsin Public Radio.

“A bipartisan bill is expected to be released this month that would change the way most public schools in Wisconsin teach reading,” reported Corinne Hess. 

“. . . Instead of being taught reading through pictures, word cues and memorization, children would be taught using a phonics-based method that focuses on learning to sound out letters and phrases.

“According to [the Department of Public Instruction], only about 20 percent of school districts are using a phonics-based approach to literacy education. Other reading curriculums that don’t include phonics have been shown to be less effective for students.”

Whoa. Stop the presses!

Bipartisan? Could peace be at hand in the Great Reading War?

Phonics

When I was a kid in 1951—yes, 72 years ago—our teachers taught us phonics. They leaked the remarkable secret that each letter represents one or more sounds in the spoken English language. (I mean American English, Dear Reader. I hold no brief for British, ANZAC, or South African speakers who utter tortured diphthongs where we would use vowels.)

We learned that “a” can be pronounced long, as in “bake”; short, as in “flag”; soft, as in “father”; and so forth. We learned that “c” is sometimes hard, as in “cat,” and sometimes soft, as in “recess.” Interestingly, “bicycle” has a soft c and a hard c, both in one word. “Y,” also interestingly, can sound like a long “i,” as in “tyke,” or as a long “e,” as in “candy,” or as a short “i,” as in “bicycle.” But sometimes it has a special motive force of its own, as in “Yankee.” 

We were taught that phonics rules had exceptions—quite a few of them, actually. For example, sometimes the sound normally represented by the letter f is actually spelled with the two letters “ph,” as in “telephone.” Sometimes the two-letter combination “ch” is pronounced like a hard c or a k, as in “chorus,” not with the soft “ch” sound of “chair.” And so forth, and so on. 

Oh, so many exceptions. Yet, even with all these exceptions, the whole thing hung together and made a kind of sense. 

Light bulb. Photo by MEHEDI HASAN ( KΛΛSH ) on Unsplash.

When you met an unfamiliar word you could “sound it out,” and nine times out of ten it turned out to be a word you already knew. You could produce a string of sounds from a word’s letters, and you would suddenly recognize the word. 

Hallelujah! A light bulb went on in your head. 

Sometimes you had to try three or four runs at it, using alternate pronunciations, but eventually you could figure it out. 

The opportunity to sound out the words you didn’t know made reading a joy. You could move forward at a decent speed. A great bonus was that when you figured out a word, all its snags and bumps stayed with you. So when you discovered that “diaphragm” spelled dy-uh-fram, not dy-uh-fraggum, you remembered that silent g ever afterward.

It was never a perfect system, but it worked pretty well for those of us who were thoroughly drilled in phonics in the first two or three grades of school.

So what could possibly go wrong? 

Politics, that’s what.

Poor Johnny

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published a book called Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It. Flesch’s thesis was that a new method of reading instruction—the so-called “whole word” or “look-say” method—was robbing a generation of youngsters of the power of reading. Instead of learning to associate letters with sounds and thereby sound out the words they were reading, young people were expected to simply recognize words one by one, from their general shape. This made reading into an insurmountable guessing game, according to Flesch—akin to the challenge faced by young Chinese who need to learn thousands of separate characters.

Horace Mann. Public Domain.

The whole word method was not actually new—education guru Horace Mann embraced it in the 1840s—but it had gradually supplanted phonics instruction in American public schools in the first half of the twentieth century.

When Flesch launched his withering critique in 1955, it met stiff resistance from a liberal educational establishment that had largely adopted the whole word method and rejected phonics. This debate soon went the way of all debates in our fractured society: The politicians made it their own. Reading became just another battlefront in our great cultural war. If you were conservative you favored phonics; if you were liberal, you pooh-poohed phonics and favored the whole word approach (also called the whole language approach).

That frozen paradigm has persisted through six or seven decades. If you were for phonics, you might want to put the 19th-century McGuffey readers back in the classroom; you might also be suspicious of fluoride in the water supply and aspire to Make America Great Again. On the other hand, if you favored the whole language approach, you were probably a card-carrying member of the teachers’ union and wanted to put Critical Race Theory in the classrooms. 

A Freshening Wind

Now, there seems to be a shift in the wind. For the first time in my long memory, it seems both sides have tired of treating reading as a political football and are seeking to coalesce on “evidence-based” or “scientific” methods of reading instruction. And scientific evidence has accumulated in favor of phonics to the point where it cannot be ignored. 

Tony Evers. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

But here’s what’s really new: The Republican assemblyman drafting new legislation on the matter is working with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to draft a plan teachers can embrace. Liberal Democratic governor Tony Evers, himself a veteran educator, sounds willing to endorse a bipartisan phonics plan.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if educational practices, for once, were not held hostage to partisan ideologies? One would like to think it can happen.

A Personal View

I was taught phonics. My wife, also a product of the 1950s, learned to read by the whole word method. I am a good speller and know a lot about the way words are put together. My wife is not a confident speller and is deaf to many verbal nuances. 

On the other hand, there are probably people who became excellent spellers and wordsmiths without ever being exposed to phonics. And there are probably people who learned phonics but did not learn to read very well. No theory can fully capture the natural differences in people’s aptitudes and learning styles. 

As a traditionalist, I look askance at laws that would dictate teaching methods statewide. What ever happened to local school boards?, I wonder. Should not they, rather than the legislature or the DPI, control the curriculum and pedagogy in their own schools? 

In an era when powerful forces militate for broad uniformity of policy in all arenas, there is something to be said for the idea of local variation—or at least, for the possibility of local variation. It’s hard to imagine that Milwaukee and Black River Falls have the same set of problems and need identical solutions.

Even with that caveat, if current trends bring about a re-emphasis on phonics, that’s probably a good thing—especially if we can bury the hatchet on our longstanding war over how children learn to read.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer 

05.02.23
by

Create a Discussion Guide for Your Book

Note: The guest post which follows, by my friend Joy E. Held, is a timely discussion of why authors should create discussion guides for their books, why it is important, and how to approach it. Happy reading!

As an author and educator, I believe in the value of reflection as a way to better comprehension. I like finding discussion questions at the back of books, but when it came to create one for my own books, I couldn’t find anything. I discovered many examples, but no specific guidance on building one. I put on my teacher hat and built a template that any author can use.

When the COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult to gather in person and talk about books, readers, authors, and publishers quickly pivoted to virtual meetings. Zoom, Facebook, Vimeo, Kaltura, Google Meet, Skype, Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Teams, and others filled the void offering free or reasonably priced options for keeping the conversations about books moving forward. 

At the time, I was serving in a volunteer role as the vice president of programming for a nonprofit writer’s group with a writing craft book club. I was stunned at how easy it was to get popular authors to agree to meet with a group of writers via Zoom on a weeknight to talk about their books. The practice is still in place today because authors and publishers discovered how easy and valuable it is to connect with readers virtually to extend the discussion about a book. It’s a great way to make published books accessible to more readers when in-person and virtual options are combined to accommodate everyone regardless of location. 

Why Not Discussion Guides?

This was also the moment I started looking for reading group discussion guides to support our conversations when an author wasn’t available to meet with us. I discovered that guides were out there, but not in the numbers I expected. That’s when my experience as a college English professor reminded me that I had written dozens of reading guides to accompany the literature I taught in my courses. Why didn’t more authors include study guides with their books?

The answer is probably because developing a study guide is not an intuitive process for most people. Authors may know their subjects inside and out, but designing a set of stimulating questions for readers may not seem like an easy process. Because it isn’t. However, there are reader’s guides available from many publishers as their marketing and promotions departments know the value of providing thought-provoking questions for readers to consider after they have read a book. The priceless value is the fact that a discussion guide extends the amount of time and interaction a reader has with a book. Also, a decent discussion guide helps educators assign deeper study of a book and expands the understanding of the message or theme of a story.

One way to engage readers beyond the last page of your book is to provide a set of discussion questions. Educators, book clubs, librarians, and curious readers appreciate the extra information because a book discussion guide takes them behind the scenes, so to speak. How do you go about developing this tool?

Online Course

Enter the educator (me) with a template to help authors create a discussion guide for their books. Once an author understands learning styles, teaching methods, and how a reader typically engages with text, the process can be replicated for as many books as they write. I created an online course to teach writers how to create a discussion guide for their books.

I’m excited to share this practice with authors, editors, publishers, educators, librarians, book clubs, readers, students, and anyone who wants to encourage deeper engagement with a book. The broad topics of the course include:

  1. learn the value of book discussion guides to many different consumers of media
  2. understand research practices that support your knowledge and abilities to create discussion guides
  3. receive tools and a step-by-step plan
  4. have the option to share your guides with me/other students. 

The course is divided up into these SECTIONS:

  1. What is a book discussion guide?
  2. Typical contents of a book discussion guide.
  3. Discussion categories and how to create questions from your book.
  4. How and why a book discussion guide will help you and your readers.
  5. Downloads of worksheets, progress journals, infographics, checklists, a resource list, a sample fiction book discussion guide, and a basic book discussion guide template.
  1. What is a book discussion guide?
  2. Typical contents of a book discussion guide.
  3. Discussion categories and how to create questions from your book.
  4. How and why a book discussion guide will help you and your readers.
  5. Downloads of worksheets, progress journals, infographics, checklists, a resource list, a sample fiction book discussion guide, and a basic book discussion guide template.

Writing a book is generally about connecting with other people. Authors typically have an intention in mind when writing a book be it fiction or nonfiction. Call it a message, theme, or purpose, writing and publishing a book is one way to reach more people with your story. 

You may or may not have a finished or published book at this point. It doesn’t matter because this formula can be put into action at any stage of a book’s life. It can boost interest in a new book and lengthen the shelf life of an older title because of the way a good book discussion guide adds dimension and interest to a publication. Once you have the process in hand, anyone can go from “how do I extend the life and interest in this book?” to increasing sales and expanding engagement almost indefinitely. What do I mean by “expanding engagement?” 

Expanding Engagement

Expanding engagement with a book means ways to keep a book “top of mind” for a reader. There is social media, of course, but a good book discussion guide has the potential to do so much more than posts or even paid online advertising. It works the same for any genre and any writing style because once a reader finishes the last page of your book, you want them to keep thinking about the content, wondering about you, the author, and having ways to delve deeper into the book’s meaning, purpose, construction, and more.

“Create a Discussion Guide for Your Book” course provides a step-by-step action plan about the why, how, when, and what of developing a knockout discussion guide to accompany your books. Even poetry! Every published work has a history, a construction period, and more that readers are eager to learn about. The course contains printable worksheets, checklists, text lessons, videos, and progress journals that will give you the tools to design, create, analyze, and share a discussion guide based on your book. Once you have the formula, it is repeatable for every book you publish.

The course retails for $197.00, but readers of this blog have access to the sale price for a limited time. To get started, click this link and start immediately. 

Only $97.00 for a limited time.

All good things,

Joy

Copyright 2023 Joy E. Held

04.25.23
by

Same Old Soapbox

Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood, A Retrospect

At age seventy, I abandoned myself to the literary craving and became a full-time writer.

That was in January 2016. 

During an apprenticeship marked by small successes, the possibility of “doing a blog” was often brought to my attention.

The notion was preposterous. It would suck up all my time, leaving me none for serious writing. Besides, how could I ever think up enough new content? 

Every fiber of me railed against it, but in April 2019 I started this blog. In the process, I conferred on myself the title: “Your New Favorite Writer.” Well, if I didn’t do it, who would?

That was over four years ago. I have posted about a thousand words almost every week since then. It does take a lot of time, about a day a week. But on the other days I have still gotten some serious writing done. 

Besides, I have made an interesting discovery:  The blog itself is serious writing. 

“Be that as it may, O New Favorite Writer—how do you balance such unequal tasks as posting a blog and writing the Great American Novel?” 

The answer, Dear Reader, is that it’s all of a piece. (And thank you for asking.)

It’s All One Thing

Sherman

When I say “all of a piece,” I mean the writing life cannot be forced into small, separate pigeonholes—or narrow silos, if you prefer a farm metaphor. It is not that you must move your book forward at the expense of your blog. It is not that you must spend all your time writing, to the exclusion of reading what others have written. It is not that you must devote yourself only to the art of narrative and pay no attention to sales, trade, and the soil of commerce. 

No, Gentle Reader. You must do it all at once. 

General Sherman said, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Your New Favorite Writer says: “Writing is a mess, and you cannot parse it.”

Lionhood

Lion. Photo by Kevin Pluck, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

About the time I started this blog, it dawned on me that to be a serious writer you must become a Literary Lion, and you dare not put that off until your first Nobel Prize. If you are to have any chance at all, you have to jump into the Literary Lion business right away. 

Armed with this stunning insight, I posted a series titled “Six Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood.” The six steps are:

  • 1. Cut the line. Skip straight to literary lionhood.
  • 2. Write.
  • 3. Get feedback.
  • 4. Associate.
  • 5. Submit.
  • 6. (Develop Your) Platform.

When I wrote six pieces, one a week for six weeks, about these six steps, I continually warned readers that “simple” does not mean “easy.” Each step is simple. But you have to do them all together, continuously. If they were easy, everybody would be Stephen King.

Some time later, I was compelled to revisit my six simple steps several times to enlarge or clarify, based on my new experiences. But in the main, the six steps have held up well.

Proof of the Pudding

It seems to be a law of language that common sayings and nostrums get simplified over time. One example has to do with proof and pudding. People today commonly say, “The proof is in the pudding.” That’s an interesting saying, but in isolation, rather mystifying. Why should proof be in pudding? Why conceal evidence in pudding?

Listen, Fair Reader: Your New Favorite Writer is old enough to remember when the saying was used in its original form: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Ah! Clarity. If you want to know how good the pudding is, eat it. The eating will tell you what you want to know. 

I offer my journey as proof of the pudding of achieving Literary Lionhood in Six Simple Steps. 

I have been on the loose in the literary world for slightly longer than seven years. During that time, besides establishing and tending this blog (“One of the best writer’s blogs on the planet,” according to Laurie Scheer), I have:

  • Had a dog story published by Fetch! magazine.
  • Had three short stories published by The Saturday Evening Post.
  • Had my debut historical novel, Price of Passage, published by DX Varos Publishing, under a traditional, royalty-and-advance author’s contract. 
  • Completed a middle grade novel, Izzy Strikes Gold!, currently seeking representation and publication.
  • Begun a World War II historical.

But that’s not all. Besides these obvious milestones, I have been busy associating. I have attended six or seven writing conferences. I am a member of the Wisconsin Writers Association, the Chicago Writers Association, and the Authors Guild. I am de facto leader of two small but important writers’ mutual critique groups in my home town.

Selling books at Literatus in Watertown.

The moment you sign a book contract you become a salesman. So I am learning about that. I visit bookstores and ask them to stock my book. I do author events from time to time—signing and selling fests, where the books are purchased one by one after actual conversations with readers. I am scheduled as the featured speaker at a couple of events in the near future. And, with the help of publicist Valerie Biel I am learning how to sell books through Facebook advertising. 

I have become a fixture at my local public library, regularly reserving and carrying home more books than I have time to read. Stacks of books—all kinds of books—litter every horizontal surface of my home. I read as much of this conveyor-belt feast as I can manage.

And a lot of great books are being published by folks who have become personal friends of mine—Nick Chiarkas, author of the excellent, heart-filled New York gang novels Weepers and Nunzio’s Way; Gregory Lee Renz, whose debut firehouse novel Beneath the Flames delighted critics and book buyers alike; Christine DeSmet, author of the Fudge Shop Mysteries series; Kristin A. Oakley, author of Carpe Diem Illinois, God on Mayhem Street, and the forthcoming The Devil Particle—and many others. 

Me, Me, Me

This is all about me. Does it sound like boasting? 

So be it. But my purpose, Gracious Reader, is to show how all these activities lean in on one another. A writer’s life comprises all of them, and more. If it’s just one thing—or two, or three—it will not sustain itself. It will not endure.

And what is success? Like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder. If literary success is measured in dollars, I am, to date, a miserable failure. But if personal satisfaction may be considered, the past seven years have made me a wealthy man. 

The proof of my pudding is in living the dream. You can quote me on that.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.18.23
by

Shooting the Curl of AI

A Writer’s Nightmare

Suddenly, it’s upon us. 

We stand unprepared, all thumbs and fumbles, wondering what to do. Like always.

It’s AI, artificial intelligence, and it’s coming to get you. Elon Musk said recently that artificial intelligence “has the potential of civilizational destruction.” Never mind that he might have had selfish reasons for saying that. You’ve got to consider the possibility that he told the truth.

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash.

We’ve known for decades that someday machines would learn to think. I once read a futuristic short story in Playboy magazine, back in the days when we all read Playboy for the articles (nod, nod, wink, wink). In this story, a worldwide group of computers had been connected with one another. Their pooled intellect gave birth to an über entity which took over the world, cutting biological humans out of the picture. 

I don’t remember the story’s title, or who wrote it, but it appeared in the 1960s. 

So we can’t say we didn’t see this coming. 

But now, it’s here, arriving on our doorstep last week, in a COVID-style sneak attack. Remember March 12, 2020, when they canceled March Madness?

It now seems the second full week of April 2023 will be remembered as When AI Became a Serious Matter.

Playing Around

People—not scientists necessarily, but the kind of dreamy folks I hang out with, i.e., writers and philosophers—now report playing around with something called ChatGPT. In their playing around, they have discovered that ChatGPT can write prose that seems remotely like something a human being might have written. 

Enrico Fermi in 1943. U.S. Government photo, public domain.

Let me assure you, Dear Reader, I am not among those who have played with ChatGPT. I would not have been among those playing with nuclear fission in 1942, either. 

The first nuclear reactor, in the West Stands section of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. Drawing by Melvin A. Miller of the Argonne National Laboratory, public domain.

But I gather, from what those others are saying: The problem is not that one cannot detect the output is computer-generated. Rather, it is that for the first time one can imagine that in the future—for example, later this afternoon—ChatGPT or a similar program will get good enough that one can no longer tell the difference.

Never mind the potential end of world civilization; AI could impact writers. 

This is serious.

Colloquium

I took part in a recent colloquium of concerned authors. Scores, maybe hundreds, of authors attended. Many of these authors, unlike Your New Favorite Writer, earn all or part of their income by writing. 

I started out puzzled but eventually caught the drift. Or, rather, drifts. 

  • 1. AI programs will soon start writing better than we can . . . or almost as well as we can . . . and we’ll all go broke. Publishers will no longer need human authors. They’ll just push a button on a machine and get a book, ready for release. No royalties will be owed to any humans. The AI machines, we assume, will accept their wages in electricity and silicon.
  • 2. Since AI is already quite useful at discharging the kinds of tediosities with which we writers are burdened, some of us hunger to use AI programs or bots—or whatever they are—in our own writing practice. Not for writing, you understand. Oh no, never!! Rather, we would use them as slave labor for menial tasks—up to and perhaps including the elaboration of trial texts which the writer may then modify. Thus we would reserve the higher functions of authorship for us who so richly deserve royalty checks. This would be, I suppose, something like the way research professors use graduate students. In this sense, AI is merely a tool, like a dictionary or thesaurus, clearly beneath the mystical heights of creative writing.

But you’ve already seen, have you not?—It’s so hard to get ahead of you, Astute Reader—how in some vague way this second concern is already at odds with the first?

  • 3. So, to reconcile the first and second concerns, some participants declared we authors ought to embrace AI to whatever extent is warranted, so long as the publishers are required to attribute each published work to a specific human author—one who gets paid. 

It would take at least an act of Congress to make this happen. But a squadron of intellectual property lawyers is already cranking up its engines to bombard publishing contracts and book copyright pages with model provisions—“guardrails,” they call them—protecting authors’ rights to control the use of their product, and importantly, to get paid. 

This drafting of guardrail language, all by itself, strikes me as a Herculean task. But it may be necessary work, because as you know, what people can do, they will do. 

There is no holding back this tide of AI. It’s a giant wave, and we shall either find a way to shoot the curl or be crushed in the collapsing pipeline.

  • 4. Beside the three areas of concern already mentioned, there is another. It seems existing AI platforms already incorporate the output of human authors as a training aid. The chatbots are learning to write better because their creators feed them sample text from published books that are the copyrighted property of authors—without acknowledgment or compensation, as far as I can tell. 

It may be possible, through legal action by authors’ groups, to prohibit the use of authors’ works as training materials for AI bots, or even to claw back some form of payment for the unauthorized uses that have already occurred. 

It’s yet another messy area for the lawyers to sort out. But I take it as a mere corollary of two more basic questions: 

1. Who’s going to do the writing, people or machines? And,

2. Who’s going to reap the benefits, authors or publishers? 

Pardon my chutzpah, Gracious Reader, but I suspect we’re still missing the Big Picture. 

Story

It’s all about the power of narrative. I once heard a lecturer say that when it’s time for bed, kids ask for stories. They don’t say, “Mommy, please read me the telephone book” or, “Daddy, I want to hear a grocery list.” They say, “Read me a story” or even, “Tell me a story.”

Authors are storytellers. Even technical writers owe their jobs to the particular skill of stating scientific or technical facts in a way that allows readers to understand those facts as a sequence of events including a chain of causation. In other words, they tell stories, no less than novelists or playwrights do. What’s true for technical writers is even more obviously true for freelance journalists and for the authors of narrative nonfiction books. 

So, if we storytellers are afraid that publishers will gain access to computer programs that allow them to cut us out of the profits, ought not the publishers worry that they, likewise, will be cut out of the profits?

If AI can write as well as human writers, will there not come a day (perhaps next Tuesday) when you can pull a cell phone from your pocket and command: “Tell me a story.” And the phone will make up a story on the spot and either speak it or type it to you. Maybe it will even assemble a complex dramatic video for your entertainment. 

And—get this, Dear Reader— the product will be first-rate. It won’t be merely grammatical. It will be tense and compelling. Maybe not hilarious—humor is notoriously difficult, and it may exceed the capability of machines to learn. But they’ll be able to assemble great suspense and action films. They’ll do it all by themselves. You can order up an original story at the touch of a thumb.

Originality

Oscar Wilde in 1888. Photo by Napoleon Sarony, 1821-1896. Public Domain.

Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said, upon viewing a flawless forgery of an art masterpiece, “It has all the virtues of the original, except originality.” The same may be said of these future machine-generated stories. Readers, however, will still gobble them up.

BUT SO WHAT?  What difference does all this make? 

If we can get stories concocted instantly by our phones, what impact will that have on literature?  Surely it will mean authors and publishers as we know them will no longer exist—at least, not in any traditional framework.

Yet story will survive. 

If we look to our phones for stories, that’s only because story is a basic requirement of the human race. You might even say the capacity for story is what makes us human. 

One can easily imagine machines telling stories. 

One cannot imagine machines needing stories told.

Only humans need that. And those who hear stories can also invent other stories. In fact, some of us can’t help ourselves. 

So story will survive. Humanity will go on. There will still be human storytellers.

I’ll still be here, writing the old-fashioned way, regardless what the machines may be doing. Whether I’ll be paid is another question; but then, I’m not being paid now. 

It’s not about the money. It’s about the story.

Keep reading. Keep writing.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.14.23
by

A Postscript

Perhaps you recall reading about my old band teacher, Emerson Ebert, in a post on Tuesday, March 28.

Emerson Ebert, a recent photo.

I learned, to my delight, that Mister Ebert is alive and going strong at age 98. So I printed a copy of the blog post and mailed it to him, with a cover letter expressing, first, how startled I would be if he remembered me after more than sixty-five years; and, second, how much I was hoping he would not be offended by my writing about him.

A few days later, I received this wonderful note from Mister Ebert, written in a firm hand: 

Dear Larry,

What a surprise when I received the letter from Larry Sommers.

Believe it or not I do remember Johnny Stevens, Jack Spencer and Larry Sommers.

You certainly described the Streator music program in detail.

This was a real walk thru the past for me.

At any rate you can’t imagine how rewarding your letter was to me. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Emerson W. Ebert

98 years

He was not displeased. In fact, he was pleased.

Encouraged, I put through a phone call to a number I had which I thought might be his. I left a message, and when he called me back I was delighted to speak with a man I knew back in the Fifties, when he was a grown man and I was a kid.

We had a nice, long chat. It included pleasantries, memories, and updates. Finally, we rung off.

Two things come out of this, Dear Reader:

1. When you reach the far end of life, you often appreciate more those people you took for granted, or were not particularly close to, in the early days. Such is the case with Mister Ebert, who really struggled heroically in the parlous exercise of teaching us music.

2. The rewards of authorship are not limited to money or fame—neither of which is guaranteed, anyway. There are moments when something you have written kindles a new friendship or reaffirms an old one. These rewards are just as sweet as the other kind.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.04.23
by

Woman River

Last fall, I attended the Wisconsin Writers Association’s annual conference, which was held in Superior. 

Doug Lewandowski, a Duluth writer, introduced himself and told me about his book—a collection of related short stories about people and events in a small Minnesota town called Woman River. He was rather low-key and matter-of-fact about the book. He gave me a copy, free of charge. I promised I would take it home and read it.

Time went by. 

You have no idea, Dear Reader, how many books I feel compelled to read—not only for my own enjoyment, but also in pursuit of my literary career. Woman River went to the bottom of my pile. Finally last week—about six months after Doug gave me the book—it reached the top of my pile.

POW! Take that, O smug, self-satisfied one-book wonder who brashly claims to be “Your New Favorite Writer”! 

I was, as the Brits would say, gobsmacked.

Let me belatedly assure you Gentle Reader: Doug Lewandowski is the real McCoy. Woman River is a great book. I wish I could write like that.

So I’m passing this recommendation along to all my friends. Get hold of a copy of Doug Lewandowski’s Woman River and read it. You won’t be disappointed.

Here’s the review I posted on Goodreads.com a day or two after finishing the book:

The town of Woman River is filled with flawed people. They mostly smoke Luckies and drink Hamm’s beer—but it’s 1959, so that’s pretty normal. None of them sought to be flawed, but all of them want love. And—in a small but difficult miracle arranged by author Doug Lewandowski—we the reader get to see their love bulging from every wound and pressure point. 

The book is a great affirmation of life with all its worries. One comes away feeling this is what writing is for. 

Woman River is a novella built of short stories, each related to all the others as the varied residents are bound to one another by ties of affection, loyalty, and eternity. 

A young farmer recoiling from a failed marriage pits his stern father against his lifegiving lover. The innkeeping couple face a dread illness with stoic devotion. The local pariah and the capable police chief share an affliction of combat stress. The town’s ethos revolves around its church, which comforts and challenges in equal measure. The priest clings to his precepts while falling under the spell of his gracious housekeeper, who must choose her own destiny. 

The text could use a bit of proofreading, but the narrative is sure, deep, and compelling. As Midwest regional literature, this book might be compared to Nickolas Butler’s Shotgun Lovesongs, Michael Perry’s Pop. 485, or the works of the late David Rhodes. But I almost feel it’s the book Steinbeck would have written, rather than Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row, had he grown up in Minnesota, not California.

You should read Woman River. Don’t miss out on great writing.

#

I mean it. Read Woman River. You’ll be glad you did.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage 

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois 

FREE FOUR-CHAPTER PREVIEW!

(History is not what you thought.)

03.14.23
by

Jack’s Big Show

Jack Benny, 1964 publicity shot. Public Domain.

The new thing called television was run by the same networks that ran the old thing called radio. 

Popular radio programs, from The Lone Ranger to Art Linkletter’s House Party, were carried over to TV and brought their loyal audiences with them. 

A great radio show was The Jack Benny Program, a weekly half-hour of hilarity and running gags that ruled the air from from 1932 to 1955. Benny, like many others, made the jump from radio to TV, appearing on CBS television from 1950 to 1964 and on NBC for one year after that. For five years, he and his ensemble pulled off the frenetic trick of appearing regularly in both media.

An Overnight Success

Benny Kubelsky with violin, early 1900s. Public Domain.

He was Benjamin Kubelsky, a violin player from Waukegan, Illinois. After achieving great mediocrity in school and business, the dreamy 18-year-old took his fiddle to the vaudeville stage in 1912. 

Audiences yawned. 

Famed violinist Jan Kubelik hinted at legal action because of the similarity of names. Kubelsky, adding jokes to his routine, changed his billing to “Ben K. Benny: Fiddle Funology.” 

Ben Bernie, a well-known “patter-and-fiddle” star, was not amused. The new kid’s name was too similar.

Kubelsky—having meanwhile served in the U.S. Navy for World War I—adopted the name Jack, common parlance for a sailor (“Jack Tar”). 

After two decades of scratching out a living, first as a vaudevillian, then as a movie novice at MGM, Jack Benny auditioned for NBC Radio and became an overnight success.

Show Within a Show

Jack Benny, newly-minted radio star, in a 1933 NBC publicity shot. Public Domain.

For NBC, Benny—billed as “the star of stage, screen, and radio”—exercised his dramatic skills by portraying a radio comic named Jack Benny. 

This fellow Benny lived a sedate bachelor life in Beverly Hills. He employed the gravel-voiced Rochester, a butler-valet-chauffeur played by black actor Eddie Anderson. Benny’s girlfriend Mary Livingstone (in real life his wife, Sadie Marks) dropped by often, as did people from the cast of his radio show: bandleader Phil Harris, boyish tenor Dennis Day, the closely harmonious Sportsmen Quartet, and rotund announcer Don Wilson.

Mary Livingstone, 1940 publicity photo. Public Domain.

Add a rotating cast of quirky character actors including multi-voiced Mel Blanc, supercilious Frank Nelson (with his famous baritone “Ye-e-e-s-s-s?”), and race track tout Sheldon Leonard (“Psst! Hey, Bud!”), and you had the basic ingredients. 

Dennis Day. ABC publicity photo, 1960. Public Domain.

A show’s plot would focus on some minor incident in the life of stage-screen-radio star Jack Benny. One week he, Mary, and Dennis would go to the race track to play the ponies. Another week Rochester would drive him to the train station for a trip to Palm Springs. Another week, Benny went Christmas shopping or stewed about an impending meeting with his show’s sponsors. Odd things happened to Benny in these commonplace situations, with disparaging commentary by the screwball characters in his cast. 

A comedian playing a comedian in a show about nothing. Are you listening, Jerry Seinfeld?

Pay No Attention to That Man at Center Stage

With kooks on every hand, Jack Benny himself seemed like the normal person in the show. But not exactly . . .

Each episode revolved around Benny. He was center stage. The shady characters, uppity store clerks, band members in a constant state of carousal, wry Mexican villagers, and most of all Benny’s long-suffering household intimates—Mary, Don, Dennis and especially Rochester—all served to call attention to Benny’s eccentricities.

He was vain and vainglorious. Blue-eyed and never ageing beyond 39, he admitted freely to being a violin virtuoso and a comic genius, with leading-man looks thrown in. 

He was indecisive, sometimes making a store clerk wrap, unwrap, and rewrap a purchased gift half a dozen times so that he could change the sentiments expressed on the card inside.

Most of all, he was cheap as only the rich can be. He had fabulous wealth, which he kept in an impregnable basement vault, while pathologically resisting any effort to part him with a dime. This miser image was displayed in every show and developed in almost every joke, until no American could have been unaware that Benny was a skinflint. 

His stinginess was the tacit explanation for his car, a 1908 Maxwell roadster, always on the verge of death. When Rochester, as chauffeur, would suggest Jack acquire a new car, he always insisted on coaxing a few more miles out of the Maxwell. The car’s throes of anguish in its brave attempts to start were given voice by the great Mel Blanc.

Jack Benny and Eddie Anderson as Rochester from the television version of The Jack Benny Show, with Jack’s 1908 Maxwell—one of the rare times an actual car was shown. CBS Television, 1951. Public Domain.

When Benny encountered a hoodlum demanding cash, the studio audience and every fan at home could see the punchline coming.

Jack was a master of the long pause. Comics to this day rave about Benny’s comic timing.

Fred Allen 1940 publicity photo. Public Domain.

Audiences, who may not have understood such subtleties, roared.

To boost ratings, Benny and rival comic Fred Allen concocted a feud, which played out on both shows over a period of almost twenty years, until Allen’s sudden death at 61 in 1956. A typical exchange:

Allen: Jack, you couldn’t ad lib a belch after a plate of Hungarian goulash.

Benny: You wouldn’t say that if my writers were here.

But Benny’s writers were there, every Sunday night. And when he moved from radio to television, “audiences learned that his verbal talent was matched by his controlled repertory of dead-pan facial expressions and gesture” (Wikipedia).

A Smooth Transition

Except for that discovery, the transition was seamless. Of all shows that went from radio to TV, Benny’s had the least noticeable format change. The Jack Benny Program on television was exactly what we radio listeners had always seen in our mind’s eye.

Benny trouped on for another fifteen years on television and continued making stage and TV appearances until shortly before his death in 1974. 

Audiences gradually learned that Jack’s on-air persona was a carefully constructed myth. In person he was warm and generous. And his devotion to music was real, even if his musical talent was less than stellar.

He donated a Stradivarius violin purchased in 1957 to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. At the time of the gift, Benny said, “If it isn’t a $30,000 Strad, I’m out $120.”

If you’re interested in a more complete account of the Jack Benny Program, try  https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Jack_Benny_Program.

Next week: Something completely different. Tune in.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

FREE FOUR-CHAPTER PREVIEW!

(History is not what you thought.)