Oregon–State of Mystery

Posted on April 9, 2011 by Ed Battistella
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This year Jackson County Reads celebrates mysteries.   On March 26, 2011, the Medford Branch Library of the Jackson County Library Services in Southern Oregon hosted about 70 attendees in a workshop featuring five southern Oregon mystery writers:  Phil Messina, Ken Lewis, Tim Wohlforth, Robert Arellano and Morgan Hunt.   Sponsored by the Jackson County Library System and the Ashland Mystery Readers Group, the free four-hour workshop covered all the how-tos any aspiring crime fiction writer would want to know. 

Phil Messina, Central Point city manager and co-chair of the Southern Oregon Chapter of Willamette Writers kicked things off with “Why We Love Mystery?”  Rogue River Police Chief Ken Lewis followed. Ken Lewis, the author of Little Blue Whales and The Sparrow Blade, explained the ins and outs of police procedurals. It was a police academy short course without the calisthenics.

Pushcart Prize nominee Tim Wohlforth was next. The author of Harry and the forthcoming The Pink Tarantula (featuring his short story characters Crip and Henrietta) explained why short form mystery is important and how to develop an idea into a short story.   

Southern Oregon University professor Robert Arellano was a nominee for this year’s Edgar Award for his fourth book, Havana Lunar, published by the prestigious Akashic Books.  Arellano described how to develop your writing and polishing skills and the delicate balancing act between writing and being a writer.  Morgan Hunt, author of the musically-titled Tess Camillo series (Sticky Fingers, Fool on the Hill and Blinded by the Light) talked about marketing your brand and your crime fiction.

The afternoon session was packed with questions and comments as participants broke into small groups to work with each expert on specific problems and opportunities. Kudos to the writers for sharing both their Saturday and the tricks of their trade.

Jackson County Reads Mysteries! The capstone event is still to come when in mid-April Carola Dunn, author of the Daisy Dalrymple mysteries arrives in Southern Oregon. Dunn will be at the Ashland Branch Library on Thursday April 14, 2011 at 7p, at the Klamath Falls Public Library on Friday April 15, 2011 at noon, and at the Medford Branch Library on Saturday April 16, 2011 at 1p. She’ll squeeze in an interview with Cathy Carrier at the Ashland Springs Hotel for Ashland Mystery rvtv noir on Saturday morning.

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An evening with the Wixons

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Ed Battistella
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At Bloomsbury Books On March 31, a crowd of about 50 poetry fans were treated to a reading by Vince and Patty Wixon.  The couple read from their two recently published books—Vince’s Blue Moon: Poems from Chinese Lines (WordCraft of Oregon, 2010) and Patty’s Airing the Sheets(Finishing Line Press, 2011).  With characteristic Midwestern modesty, they interspersed their poetry with readings from Lawson  Inada, William Stafford, and others who have influenced them.

Vince’s Blue Moon poems use lines from classical Chinese poetry of the Tang and Sung dynasties as points of departure for his own reflections. Vince explained (jokingly) that he uses prompts “because he had a happy childhood and has a happy marriage.”  The title poem, whose prompt is I’d send a letter in a fish if I could depicts the Blue Moon Ballroom of southwest Minnestoa, where Depression-era parents went to swing to Lawrence Welk.

Patty’s work is about the wisdom of small things passed along or lost forever,  from handkerchiefs embroidered with strawberries to an aging parent’s puzzlement at the mahjong tile in her hand.  

And each ended their part of the reading with a love poem.  Vince’s poem celebrated the end of endless home maintenance.  And Patty’s was a meditation on bedsheets.  They were made for each other.

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Interview with Thomas P. Flanagan

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Ed Battistella
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Thomas P. Flanagan was a research chemist with National Starch and Chemical Company in Bridgewater, NJ.  He is the holder of 20 US and 40 international patents for glues and adhesives designed between 1965-1990. Flanagan is the author of Hot-Melt Adhesives, a chapter in The Handbook of Adhesive Bonding (Macmillan, 1973) and was recognized for his scientific achievement at the 1988 meeting of the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI). I interviewed him by phone at his home in Venice, Florida in April 2010.

 EB:  Tell me a bit about how hot melt adhesive changed book publishing.

 TF:  Hot melt glue replaced water based glues and allowed book and magazine printers to increase production–by 100 to 200 percent–and cut costs at the same time.

 EB: How so?

 TF: The hot melt glue solidifies right away, so publishers could make more books faster. With water-based glues you had to wait for the glue to dry.  It also allowed what’s called perfect binding—where the signatures are guillotined and glued rather than sewn.  Sewing signatures was very time consuming. Before long hot melt glue was used for paperbacks, hardbacks, and magazines—not all, but lots of them.

 EB: When did printers start using hot melt adhesive?

 TF: It started in about 1955 or so, with the Readers Digest. That had been a stapled magazine but by using glue, the publisher could print is faster and cut back on the size of the magazine to save on paper costs. TV Guide was a big early adopter and they had about seven processing plants around the country for different television markets.  Playboy was also a customer and when they sent copies of their magazine for glue testing I kept them in the cabinet so no one would be offended.  But one day they all disappeared from the lab.

 EB: Were lots of companies making hot melt adhesive?

 TF: National Starch was the leader.  But others followed. Manufacturers were interested in having more than one supplier.

 EB: Were there any big problems in the switch from water-based glue to hot melt?

 TF: One big complication was that some bookbinders stopped drying the ink during the printing process.  They put the books right into the binding machine. But the problem was that after about three month the ink solvent bled into the glue and ruined the backbone of the book.  The bindings would crack and fall apart.

 Some publishers were suing us for defective glue, so I researched the problem and ran some test runs. The test proved that the run of books with the ink fully dried were fine and the run of books with the ink still wet cracked.  So the lawsuit was dropped.

 EB: How was the hot melt glue applied to a binding?

 TF: The glue was in a heated tray and applied by rollers that went over the cut edges of the pages.  Usually the first rolling would set the places in places and a second rolling would reinforce the binding and apply glue to hold the cover.

 EB: I’ve got a paperback book here that has a little hinge on the cover. What’s that for?

TF: The hinge is a matter of supporting the cover–hard cover books typically have a gutter and hinge. On paperbacks often the cover would be folded over and hinged to let the glue attach the first and last pages as well.

 EB: What the difference between a perfect binding and a burst binding?

 TF: With a perfect binding the pages are cut and glues.  With a burst binding the signatures were scored so that glue could penetrate the individual signatures.  Burst binding came later as a means to preserve as much of the look of traditional hardbound books as possible.  And it made for a much nicer book.  Some bookbinders also used headbands to make glued books look better.

 EB: I see that you have almost two dozen patents.  How did the patent process work?

 TF: I have 20 US patents, patents for everything from paperback glue to disposable diapers.

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Why Literary Ashland?

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Ed Battistella
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Why establish a blog on the literary life of southern Oregon?  For a while I’ve been marveling at some of the literary talent that lives in the area and that passes   through.  And as I’ve attended talks and readings, or in some cases interviewed writers, there has always been something that stuck with me that seemed worth writing down and remembering.  So one of the purposes of Literary Ashland is to collect and share those take-aways.

Here are some examples, in no particular order.  Visiting in April of 2010, Christopher Rice talked about the importance of characters and relationships to fiction and the way that he always tries to find out what he has in common with a character.  He also mentioned that places are sometimes characters—he grew up after all in New Orleans—so I guess it’s also crucial to find out what you have in common with a place you write about. 

Tobias Wolff also visited in April of 2010 and talked about, among other things, the significance of small moments in life as providing insight into one’s own moral sense. (So we think about our lives paths in terms of Frost’s road not taken.)

In May of 2010, I interviewed Tim Maleeny, a New York ad executive who has written several very funny mysteries (Jump, Stealing the Dragon, Beating the Babushka, Greasing the Piñata).  His advice was to develop an ensemble of characters, explore relationships among characters, turn stock devices on their heads, put characters out of place, and use short chapters that alternate humor and action.

In August of 2010, Maryann Mason interviewed the legendary Aaron Elkins, author of the Gideon Oliver “bone detective” novels.  Elkins said that he thought that the mysteries cannot literary fiction because they have to hide too much from the reader. It’s a nice point.  I guess if someone wants to try to write a literary mystery they’d need to both hide and reveal.  He also pointed out that when Gideon Oliver ovels were made into an ABC televsion series (in 1989!), the writers changed the character from a physical anthropologist to a cultural anthropologist. They didn’t think anyone would be interested in forensics.

Visiting in February of 2011, Mark Salzman pointed out that you are not the author of your life story; you are the audience.  That takes a lot of pressure off. Salzman also quoted his wife, filmmaker Jessica Yu, on the difference between documentary and narrative: in the first you organize material that is already there; in the second you generate material.

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