New Search

If you are not happy with the results below please do another search

8 search results for: M.G. Turner

1

Ruth Gruber: Friend, Mentor, Surrogate Grandmother by M.G. Turner

/0 Comments/in
[caption id="attachment_17658" align="alignleft" width="192"] Ruth Gruber April 2007[/caption]

A few months ago, while undergoing an ultrasound for something disconcerting I’d found on my body—which mercifully turned out to be, officially, nothing—I was suddenly hit by a wave of gratitude for an old friend: author and photojournalist Ruth Gruber, who despite our wide age gap was one of my closest confidants, and even at times a surrogate grandmother.

The reason for my gratitude was simple: in 1944, as a newly appointed general by the Roosevelt Administration she personally escorted 972 refugees to America; many, though not all, were Jewish. Among these refugees was a man named Alex Margulis who, as chronicled in Ruth’s 1983 book Haven, would go on to invent the CT Scan, MRI, and other examples of medical imaging technology which have saved an unfathomable and beautifully absurd number of lives. As I was having my procedure I couldn’t help but think of Ruth, and all she meant to me, and to the multitude of people who knew her. After passing away in 2016, at the age of 105—nerd that I am, I admit it’s titillating to use the actual numerals for her age, as in the Chicago Manual of Style only numbers under 100 are spelled out—she left behind a legion of admirers, followers, and yes, even fans. I consider myself as belonging to the latter category, but at the start my connection to her was a personal one. Yet beyond personal and professional appreciation lies my aforementioned feeling, gratitude: especially as the technician utilized that life-saving device and informed me with a wink that, because the doctor did not want to see any more, I was “good.”

***

I don’t recall the first time Ruth and I met, but it had to have been around my seventh or eighth year—as in 2004, when I was still very young I subjected her to an interview, filmed by my mother on a camcorder, one steamy day in August, while I was on summer vacation. I still have the video, rendered into digital form but no less evocative of that early VHS period: amid wavy lines there I am, in almost knee-high white socks, sitting lackadaisically in a stuffed armchair, rattling off a list of question I had memorized, forgotten, then memorized again; while Ruth herself, looking dignified and very well at just ninety-three, listened and nodded and tried with honesty and precision to answer my questions—the questions of an eight year old who was very much wowed by her, and kept repeating after her every statement “That’s a great answer!” in an effort to impress a woman who could not have been kinder-hearted or more willing to engage with a young person.

It is important to stress the reason for my early acquaintanceship with her which soon blossomed into a friendship: my father was her editor—and according to a quip she made on more than one occasion at dinner parties and events to the chagrin of some present, he was her favorite editor. This favoritism was likely rooted in her appreciation of his no-nonsense editing style, and his direct, fearless approach to publishing. It matched her own brand of journalism, which was in the words of one of her mentors Edward Steichen to “Take pictures with her heart.” Not only did she take pictures with her heart, she wrote with it too! As any of her readers know there is a declarative majesty to her prose that is only outmatched by her subject matter; she had so much to say and a great deal of life experience to back it up—whether becoming the youngest Ph.D. in the world, doing so in Germany in the mid-thirties and seeing the tail end of the Weimar Republic give way to Nazi Germany; or having tea with Virginia Woolf in London—the very subject of her thesis—and being struck by the author’s corrosive nonchalance, and low-grade anti-semitism, while still managing to hold a nuanced view of her; or when in 1944 she, as mentioned, escorted by ship nearly a thousand refugees who were escaping persecution in Europe, and fighting for them to be accepted by the virulently anti-immigrant State Department, despite President Roosevelt being considered a friend to the Jews.

This is to say, she had something unique—content. Like other, more famous writers and journalists of the time—Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Gellhorn come to mind—after literally living her stories, she put her experiences into words that could be understood by everyone. But her egalitarian style permeated not just her written work but the way she spoke about her career—this held even while speaking about it to me on that sultry day in 2004 when my mom and I stopped by to see her to conduct and impromptu interview. There would be many days and evenings like this, when we would look at each other, and one of us would ask: “Do you want to go see Ruth?” and the answer was always, invariably, the same.

***

Ruth had been living in the Eldorado—a quintessentially regal Central Park West apartment building—for several decades when I first became acquainted with her. Just going over there was a grand experience for me; at the time I had not yet glimpsed New York’s magisterial splendor; the lobby looked like an art deco palace. But visiting Ruth was the start of something more than architectural or stylistic appreciation. I can easily recall these visits as the first time I considered an importance beyond the aesthetic; or rather, that the aesthetic and the moral and meaningful could coalesce into something highly impactful: the notion that one’s life could be an adventure.

[caption id="attachment_17660" align="alignleft" width="202"] Ruth Gruber embarking on the voyage to bring nearly 1000 refugees to America in 1944. They sailed from Naples, Italy, crossing the Atlantic protected by a convoy of US warships. The story is told in her book, “Haven,'” and the 2000 CBS miniseries of the same name, with Natasha Richardson cast as Ruth.[/caption]

It was this adventurous spirit that Ruth embodied, as well as a presentation of self that prized dignity and demeanor. Whenever we saw her—it didn’t matter if we had come on three consecutive Sundays—she got dressed up; always with her light gold hair perfectly coiffed; her jewelry always tasteful; her greetings broad and demonstrably delighted, as if she wanted us to know, really know, how glad she was that we had stopped by. And we stopped by many times, whether to simply have tea and talk, or to take her out to Central Park, or even have dinner with her.
It was on these nights that my conception of an intellectual community was formed—namely that such a thing could exist, and that I could be a part of it. This feeling carried over into my schooling; in college I had the unique experience of going with my archives class to visit the New York Public Library to see Virginia Woolf’s diaries, which my friend had been mentioned in, however unkindly by the sadly disturbed writer, whom Ruth saw as a woman trapped by her own mind. Though Woolf used an anti-semitic slur in her journal to describe Ruth, she did not hold a grudge beyond feelings of sadness and disappointment.

[caption id="attachment_17661" align="alignright" width="219"] Ruth Gruber photo “The Embrace”[/caption]

While I stood with my class looking at Woolf’s pages—most of which were written in a flourishing lavender hand—I knew that among them were those referring to my friend.

Despite Woolf’s callousness, I cherish these kinds of synchronicities. Growing up in New York brings one into the vicinity of great people, particularly if your parents happen to know some of them. These same great people can in their own way sum up entire eras, especially if the person in question is a centenarian. Ruth was born under President Taft and died in November of 2016 while Barack Obama was mercifully still President—though about to leave office to make way for the degraded eventuality that was to come. In one final act of goodness, to add to her litany of mensch-like deeds, the recently turned 105-year-old was taken by her daughter to the polls and cast her last vote for Hillary Clinton. It is unclear whether in the coming hours Ruth was cognizant of the election results, or fully grasped their implication, but it didn’t matter, for she had raised her voice one more time. This was something she’d grown accustomed to, whether from her efforts to counter the anti-semitism and isolationism of the United States government; or in 1944 reporting for the NY Post on the fate of refugees on the ship Exodus; or her early contributions to the newly-named field of Feminism in the 1930s.

***

[caption id="attachment_17662" align="alignleft" width="300"] Ruth Gruber is showing me a hinged, painted case my mother, artist Kyle Gallup, made. Inset in the case is a collage Kyle also made comprised of photos Ruth took documenting the refugees on the Exodus ship. It became part of the cover art for Ruth’s book—”Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation”—which my father published with Ruth in 1999.[/caption]

Despite her far-reaching influence, my dearest recollections of Ruth remain rooted in more personal soil. She was simply an older woman whom I cared for, and who at times felt like a surrogate grandmother to me. Given that my biological grandparents lived far away and I did not see them often, Ruth became a special friend, who was not relation nor teacher, but a figure whose influence was hard to define or put into a single box. It was in fact so unique, that, due to my own immature faculties at the time, I was unable to fully comprehend how lucky we were to know her and be close to her.

Yet where nomenclature fails, one recollection appears to sum up this relationship. And it was that, in my third grade year, she took it upon herself to attend Grandparents Day on my behalf. While most children had their family relations with them, Ruth was at my side, explaining who she was to the awed faces of the class. I remember my mother thanking her, and Ruth saying it was her pleasure—in her parlance everything was almost always “her pleasure”—and walking her back to her Central Park West apartment building where I knew we would soon have another one of our special get-togethers. Sometimes the canvas of memory is confused, disjointed, opaque; but not my memories of Ruth. There is a single beam of clear light which is cast upon all my imagistic renderings of her, and it starkly illuminates the privilege of having sat in her company, of hearing her stories that always seemed to conclude thematically with the victories of dignity over oppression, of passion over indifference—I took these tales to heart without deciding to, for there was something so indelible about her influence. Among her many gifts was the ability to make you feel that life could be made better by the simple act of putting pen to paper, or pressing the camera shutter. Sometimes the simplest actions have the greatest impact; sometimes saving one life can save many others.

Ruth’s influence transcends an easily measurable calculus; many close to her said if she had been a man she would have won the Noble Peace Prize, but Ruth herself did not think in those terms. She simply did the work she was passionate about, and believed to be right, and encouraged others to do the same. For a long life well-lived what more can anyone ask?

M.G. Turner

October 1, 2022

2

“On Browsing in Bookstores, a Pastime” by M. G. Turner

/0 Comments/in , , , , , ,

There is something uniquely magical about walking inside a bookstore, preparing to browse: you cross the threshold and suddenly you have been transported, quite literally, to a world of books. As the atmosphere settles, you notice there is a quiet here that reigns supreme, a quiet comparable perhaps only to that of a library; a pregnant hush fills the air and instills a state of calm that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere. Especially in New York City where the aggressive frenzy of life never ceases, the bookstore—and its ill-treated cousin, the library—can be an oasis, a place of refuge, a second home that can be utilized when other options of play or fun or drink have been depleted or appear uninviting.

When times are tough the world of books calls to us, and if we’re lucky we heed that call—the call of what we must do and not what we ought to. There is no greater pleasure than going to a bookstore with an objective in mind, say to purchase some work or other by Balzac and leaving inexplicably with a Faulkner. Bookstores divert our expectations. The shelves in many of New York’s finest are crammed high to the ceiling with both old and new tomes that at first speak to us in voices we may only hear subliminally. Thus visuals are our calling card, our way in. Often it is the seductive glint of a spine or the flicker of a cover that catches our eye, and as we pull the book off the shelf, and stare at it, a love affair begins. The eye tries to comprehend what the soul sees clearer. We know there is some future here for us, our paths will diverge together, we will save that spark and let it grow—that is, if we are lucky and decide not to put whatever work we have found back on the shelf where it will be consigned to wait a while longer for the coming of its true owner.

But if we hold in our hands the book we are meant to read, then we are giving ourselves over to something unconscious and in some ways very powerful. What we are giving ourselves over to is Fate. For reading books, and at the outset, buying books, is very much like making friends. The object itself transcends the lucid boundaries of paper and ink; it is so much more, and because of that the weight of a decision rests heavily on our shoulders. Do you buy another Nabokov? No, you’ve already read four of him. Another Tolstoy? You haven’t even finished Anna Karenina. A new edition of Ulysses? You have two already, dog-eared and disgruntled and waiting to be finished. You walk on aimlessly, through the aisles, dodging people taking on a similar pursuit: beautiful girls in faded jean jackets and sunglasses on their foreheads, old men stooping over dangerously to get a look at some old and beaten Melville, and the others like yourself trying to work themselves up into a state of rapt determination, studying the walls, trying to discern the titles of famous works, squinting as if at the hieroglyphics of Luxor.

The weight of a book in hand is equivalent to the weight of gold. You measure it, test it, consider whether you can withstand the flurry of its pages, the emotional impact of its premise. Stories are contained within stories, characters within characters, subtlety gives way to novelty, novelty to extremity, enjoyment to a cessation of pain. For that is what all the browsers, including yourself are looking for: a place to stop and sit awhile, to direct thought consciously toward a more righteous purpose, feeding the imagination a meal it cannot make on its own.

The shelves are calling to you. You know not to make a mistake. Occasionally you do make one and you are back at the register the next day making the same hurried, nervous claim: “I bought this for my friend but it turns out he already had it.” Several Hemingways have found their way back to this bardo. Tolstoy’s What is Art? was too polemical for your taste. A copy of the Master and Margherita whose translation you utterly hated was happily parted with. Silently, the cashier, gives you store credit and with this slip, handed over with a subdued frown—half-judgement, half-dismay—you are now able to go back to the walls, back to the drawing board as it were, to feast your eyes over the multitude of possibilities, the bold, broad scope of world literature staring you so determinedly in the face.

And finally you find what you’re looking for. And that pain does cease. Until of course you finish the book at a remarkable clip and opt to do it all again. The energy to read recycles, reincarnates, reinvigorates, and you hope never to give up the journey; even after you have lined up your finished books like the proud trophies they are, there is always a little more room, another book case to fill, another story to sink into. Finished Mann’s Buddenbrooks, well there’s always The Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus. You’ve read those two Flauberts but there’s more Proust to dig into, a seemingly endless supply of it. Turgenev always wins over the other, more popular Russians, but there is not much of him along the walls, save the obvious in Fathers and Sons. You’d read more Dostoyevsky if you didn’t hate his guts and think he was an anti-semite and in many ways a difficult and stifling writer. You need to read more women, it’s a fault of the whole system, the whole structure, but for your part you do love Woolf, Chopin, Cather, Stein; Wharton is an undeniable great but her meanness never ceases and it’s not clear she even likes her characters.

But no matter who you choose—or rather who chooses you—the point is never to give up on books or decline what they have to offer. The point is to never cease searching for some little taste of paradise that we had previously lacked, to find the good in the bad, the large in the small, the mediocre in the great. You can see in three dimension and you can read in four. To live other lives is to live your own more fully. You can’t believe it sometimes, the depth, the brevity, the longevity, the incalculable gifts given to us by people who worked sitting down. It is connection that we are looking for when we pace like ghosts up the hallways of some magnificent temple of literature, filled to bursting with every voice; male, female, Black, white, and all varieties of humanity. Nothing can touch us, and by the same token, everything can. For we want it to. We will it to. For if Fate has deemed it, we go home happy—and if we’re lucky, stay that way.

M.G. Turner

3

David Lynch: Archaeologist of the American Unconscious by M. G. Turner

/0 Comments/in

I became fascinated by David Lynch roughly eight years ago, during a difficult and crucial period of my life. I was lucky though, for while I was garnering an appreciation for the artist I now consider the leading archaeologist of the American unconscious, I also acquired the practice of Transcendental Meditation, of which David Lynch is among the world’s foremost proponents.

It came to me almost magically. I had been thinking about adopting a meditation practice, and had dabbled in several forms, until a good friend—whose family happened to be acquainted with Lynch himself—learned the practice and I subsequently joined the party. This experience in meditation was followed by an appreciation of the filmmaker-turned-meditation-advocate: I watched all his movies.

First I saw “Blue Velvet” which represented for me the ending of my childhood and the beginning of what came next. Then I went back to his earlier work, the beautifully absurd “Eraserhead” and the quintessentially humanist “The Elephant Man” which may in posterity’s light be seen as his greatest achievement. Later, “Mulholland Drive” revealed the depravity of an alternate, or perhaps not so alternate, Los Angeles while nodding humbly at Hitchcock and other suspense icons; he has also cited Edward Hopper as an influence. “The Straight Story” is a surprise in and of itself, and adds a touching element to Lynch’s oeuvre and doing much of what the title implies without sacrificing his innate artistic vision. “Twin Peaks” changed the calculus of what American television can accomplish and fashioned a bizarre and complex world that pulsed with reality and intricacy.

It has taken me a few years to really grasp what Lynch’s output means for the larger culture. Not to mention his meditation foundation which these days seems to be his main mission and is doing important work. Its positive impact is well-established and the results it’s achieving in the areas of PTSD and relief of trauma among vulnerable populations deserves the Nobel Peace Prize—if only that institution were more forward thinking, and more open to alternative modalities. However, I want to focus on his artistic output and its importance to contemporary culture. The truth is, America has never felt like more of a Lynchian hellscape. On the surface, as in “Blue Velvet,” there is wealth and beauty, green lawns and bright sunshine—but below the surface, if one simply peers down, there is corruption, degradation, and a deep moral failing at the root of our materialism.

And yet, I have never felt that Lynch was preachy. To the contrary, his view is objective. He is simply presenting reality as he sees it—no matter how bizarre, depraved, or alien. This is where the absolutism of meditation comes in. I use the word “absolutism” to demonstrate the totality of the unified field, the field we reach in Transcendental Meditation, of which Lynch himself is a perennially committed diver. This field feeds the artist’s creativity; in Lynch’s own words it “serves the work and serves the life.” But through Lynch we are also being served a meal of oddities and profundities, which he has dived within to capture and present. For there is something almost incidental about Lynch’s own role in the artistic process. I’m not sure if he would describe it this way, but his language surrounding “catching fish,” which he likens to ideas, seems a unique endeavor in an industry where being a go-getter is praised and people supposedly make their own luck.

The ideas themselves, these fish which he has so patiently waited for and watched swimming under the surface of the mind, and which he has then skillfully fished out—these ideas, in sum, say something vital about our culture. It would be reductive to suggest they say only one thing, but every great artist may only be able to tackle one great idea over the length of a career. In Lynch’s case, with respect to his reluctance to give voice to his reasons and motivations, the question is, how with all we have, with every rolling hill, with every shining sea, with every great thoroughfare to drive down, with every beautiful house that has out front a rich, green lawn, how is it that we are all at base so desperately unhappy? Why do we distrust our neighbors? Why do we hate each other? Yet the corruption Lynch points to is not seen by him as ubiquitous; instead he seems to suggest that these dangerous impulses only control us when we have no conscious knowledge of them. We cannot see them, because most don’t bother to go to the place from which all matter springs; or in other words strive for something deeper.

This brings me back to meditation. It is impossible to look honestly at Lynch’s work without seeing it in the context of a committed meditator, and a man who has faced his personal darkness every day and put it into his art, rather than into the world. There is a moving anecdote in the probing documentary film “David Lynch: The Art Life” in which he describes taking his father down to the basement of his home to show him his “experiments,” which included the carcasses of dead animals, rotting fruit, and similar earthy paraphernalia. Later, as they are climbing back up the stairs Lynch’s fathers says “David, I don’t think you should ever have children.”

Naturally, Lynch is devastated by this. But in his narration he seems more devastated by the fact that his father misunderstood a pursuit he was deeply excited about, rather than his insensitive command to refrain from procreating. He wants to be understood—but for Lynch the type of understanding he traffics in is not of the conscious understanding that can be easily categorized. His movies enter you at a different, more subliminal level than most movies being made today—perhaps ever. It stands to reason that would be the case, given his almost fifty-year meditation practice and the wisdom he has gathered from it, the wisdom he has sought to infuse, perhaps furtively, into the movies we have all enjoyed and embraced.

All this meant a lot to me eight years ago and still does; given the few degrees of separation between us I could very well have met him, though never have. But I don’t have to meet him to appreciate his work, nor feel personally connected. Truly great artists make us feel as if we know them; they consciously lower the barriers of morality and good taste so that we can have an experience that is free of judgment. These days when most of what is being peddled smacks of 16th century morality plays, where good always wins and the bad are always punished, it is refreshing to have someone stepping in to say “Not so fast. The world is much more complicated, and much more nuanced than anything you can reduce into a simple catchphrase.” Maybe a more concise statement is what the character named Donna Hayward says in “Twin Peaks”—“It’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream and the most terrible nightmare all at once.”

If that doesn’t describe America today, I don’t know what does. All I know is I’m glad David Lynch is around to illuminate us. It’s nice to know someone is meditating for our sins. Maybe one day soon the world will join him.

M.G. Turner

4

Ernest Hemingway and the Agony of Inspiration by M. G. Turner

/0 Comments/in , ,

As a writer, I’ve had multiple run-ins with Ernest Hemingway. The first was in the spring of 2021, following the airing of the Ken Burns documentary, and the most recent was last month, after buying a large Hemingway boxed-set, which I wolfed down in two-weeks. The set included The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, which I had previously tried to read all the way through and failed.

This time I did not fail. But perhaps I should have. You see, for the past year I have been completing a novel that has its stylistic roots in what I like to think of as “modern gothic” with what I hope is fluid and frankly beautiful prose. My work tends to come from a much different aesthetic place than those who follow the Hemingway method, i.e., Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and George Saunders; yet to my chagrin I found, as I pressed through the great and tragic author’s oeuvre I was losing my sense of self, my sense of who I am as a writer. There are some writers, and artists in other fields, whose voice and style are so magnetic, so enveloping, that they instill in the reader or viewer the sense of nothing having existed before or after them. Hemingway is a quintessential example of this, and an author whom most aspiring writers need to tangle with at some point. And for me, this past month, my collision with Hemingway came, and I left the ring, as it were, feeling as if I’d been continually punched in the face. This could be due to the quick, jabbing, declarative nature of Hemingway’s prose—it stands to reason that he himself was an avid boxer—and clearly brought this quality into even his most lengthy, involved novels such as A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Some writers—I’d even say most—try a different approach with the reader. Some lull, some soothe, and some entertain. Hemingway does none of the above. Hemingway berates and belittles, but he also rescues and redeems. Which is why, even when I recently felt his voice becoming my own, and my boundaries yielding to his force of will, I did not put his books down, did not shunt my new boxed-set onto a high shelf, did not flee the ring. I stood firm. I withstood. I, and most importantly, my young novel survived.

***

I work with fiction writers almost every day, as an editor and a literary representative. Most of the time I think half of my job is to help each writer tangle with the demons embedded in their prose, thorny eruptions that can spring up at any moment. In even more poetic terms, I see myself as a Horatio, Hamlet’s loyal friend, who stands fast as the ghost of his father the fallen confronts the young prince and forces him to wrestle with his conscience. On the page we come face to face with ourselves, and when we read books we come face to face with other people. Naturally every writer, when working in the most effective capacity, will bring themselves to the page, so it stands to reason that when one reads Hemingway they not only read him, they face him, and sometimes even face off with him.

If you’ll allow one more boxing metaphor, when we pick up, say, A Farewell to Arms, we are contending with an experience that Hemingway has transmuted to the page in terms as stark as he could muster. He dares you to withstand him and what he experienced. You feel like you are slogging through the mud, feel like you are tangling through the trenches, and when Henry’s dear love Catherine Barkley dies in childbirth he makes you go through it with him, mourning her to the last page as he denies us even a smidgen of satisfaction. “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Henry does not cry. He does not scream. He simply stumbles on, injured and broken, just as we, having made it to page 332 stumble on.

I know all this sounds like I don’t like Hemingway very much. Quite the contrary—I love him. But it is precisely this love, this agony of inspiration, that writers must learn how to handle. When I was younger it was easy to read a page or two of A Moveable Feast and think, okay this is how it’s done, and immediately run to the computer or a notebook and put down a litany of irredeemably declarative sentences. Now that I am a bit older, this doesn’t happen as readily, and I am able, perhaps because of my sense of self—fragile though it continues to be—to manage it, and am able to cross the tightrope of influence and homage.

As Rainer Maria Rilke posited in Letters to a Young Poet an artist must work with whatever is only theirs, and no one else’s. This sounds easy enough, and yet it is probably one of the hardest things a writer can do, and maybe the biggest accomplishment next to putting a period on the final sentence of a great work. How does one withstand, to use a word I’ve deployed already too often, the gravitational pull of someone so monumentally important to our culture and still have faith and confidence in what they’re offering a reader? I know I used the second person when posing that question, but I am talking about myself as much as others. How was I supposed to let my own novel live when Hemingway had seemingly dashed apart my style with a few choice sentences? The word “confident” kept flooding back to my mind, because the way he comes across on the page is as someone who is so utterly convinced of his literary excellence and aesthetic brilliance that anything less—or more importantly, different—is exactly that, less.

But I am here to say: this is false. Though his confidence, even certainty in his style, made him the great writer we know him as, it does not mean other possible fictive valences are worthless, or worth less than his own. When analyzed further, how could it possibly be the only way? A signature of life is its diversity and essential uniqueness. Human beings are varied, not only in terms of race and creed, but also in personality, and yes, style. One writer cannot define the entirety of the canon, no matter how hard they try, or people try for them.

***

But again, I love Hemingway. And I also love what I am working on—you must. This may sound conceited, or foolhardy, but I think loving the pages on your desk is essential to those pages finding an audience and living. I believe a literary figure like Hemingway must be seen in the context of his times, for today, due to his lack of preamble and exposition, he might not have made it out of the pages of minor publications. But in the same way, do we judge Wilt Chamberlain, the only professional basketball player ever to score 100 points in a single game, by the standards of excellence in the current NBA? We do not.

This is all to say that ideas about the greatest writer or the greatest style are inconclusive. I firmly believe anyone, regardless of ultimate success, when they put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard—are trying to put down the greatest sentence ever. No one enters this field with dreams of mediocrity. We slip into the ring bravely, and work with what we have, with what is most accessible; eventually, if we are lucky, we eschew all influence and find that now vague concept: our voice, that which comes solely from ourselves. We may have influences. We may have shadings in our work that relate or are in conversation with those who came before, but at heart our best work is apt to come when we are in touch with our innermost quality of command, our innermost narrative, our personal dreams. Hemingway had his dreams. And we have ours. But I suspect we will continue to box with him, and writers of all styles, backgrounds, and understandings, until this experiment ends—and let’s hope it never will.


 

 

 

 

M.G. Turner
June 2022

5

About Philip Turner–Professional Background

Finding a Foothold in New York City This page of personal recollections of my path into publishing picks up where Philip Turner–Personal History ended, a web page complimentary to this one, about my years running Undercover Books with my family in Cleveland; from age sixteen attending two experimental educational institutions, the School on Magnolia, for […]

6

About Philip Turner Book Productions, Ewan Turner, and Philip Turner

Philip Turner Book Productions is an editorial consultancy joined to a literary agency. Our company is comprised of my son Ewan Turner, Executive Editor, who came on-board in 2020, and me, Philip Turner, a publishing veteran with more than four decades of experience in all parts of the book business. Ewan is heading up New […]

7

In Conversation w/Canadian Author Ken McGoogan at The Explorer’s Club in NYC

/0 Comments/in , , ,

In the early 2000s, when I was an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers, I had the good fortune to acquire the US publishing rights to a book first published in Canada, Fatal Passage: The Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Who Time Forgot and Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean, what would prove to be only the first two books on polar exploration by Ken McGoogan, who has continued to immerse himself in the subject over the past twenty years, now having published a total of six Arctic books. A key development in that immersion has been his role as a resource historian for many sailings with Adventure Canada, a travel company that takes visitors on voyages to Canada’s northern reaches and in to the Arctic itself.

Fatal Passage chronicled the mystery of the ships HMS Terror and Erebus, which under the command of Royal Navy captain John Franklin, set off with more than 125 officers and crew on board in search of the Northwest Passage, but then disappeared never to be heard from again, at least not among Euro-centric people. Many search parties sought to learn the fate of Franklin and his men, including one helmed by John Rae, from Orkney in northern Scotland. He was the first European-based explorer to value highly the local knowledge of Inuit guides, hunters, and interpreters, who led him to eyewitnesses who’d seen hungry white seamen trekking across their lands in dire straits. They reported to Rae their understanding that to them these desperate men had engaged in cannibalism, feeding on the dead to try and save themselves. Rae’s discovery, though vetted by him with careful cross-questioning of the native witnesses, earned him a vituperative rebuke once back in England from Franklin’s wife, Jane Lady Franklin, who even enlisted Charles Dickens to editorialize against Rae. Fatal Passage effectively rehabilitated the reputation of John Rae, more than a century after it had been trashed by poobahs in Victorian England.

When it was published in the US, in 2002, the book won a Christopher Award, given to authors who produce works that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” McGoogan traveled from his home in Toronto to New York for the ceremony, and we began to get better acquainted as author and publisher, and as friends. Later, I made a road trip with my wife and son to Toronto and we enjoyed a dinner at Ken’s home with him and his artist wife Sheena. Another guest that night was Ken’s literary agent Beverley Slopen, from whom I’d acquired the rights to Ken’s books, and from whom I would later acquire rights to books by other Canadian authors, such as the mystery master Howard Engel, creator of the Benny Cooperman detective series.

Last December, Ken got in touch with me to extend an invitation. His latest book, Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery, was published in Canada last fall, and he explained to me it would be coming out in the US in the Spring of 2024. He would be coming down to New York to make a presentation on March 22 at the NY Public Library, in connection with a new exhibit, “The Awe of the Arctic” in the historic main library from March 15-July 13. A day prior to that, Ken said, he would be giving a talk at another public venue. He asked, in so many words, “Would you be interested in reading the new book, preparing some questions, and interviewing me at the first event?” After learning a few more details, including the fact there would be an honorarium to cover my preparation and for serving as his interlocutor, I readily accepted the exciting invitation.

In January, I was even more excited to learn from Ken that the venue for our joint event would be The Explorer’s Club, a venerable institution on the east side of Manhattan established in 1904. On Honourary Canadian, the sister website to this one, I put up a post promoting our talk, chronicling my longtime association with Canada and Canadian authors, and drafted what I dubbed my Canadian-adjacent bio, touching on my longtime immersion in #CANLit and in reading and publishing tales of polar exploration.

From Ken’s publisher—Douglas & McIntyre of Madeira Park, British Columbia, Canada—I received a copy of Searching for Franklin, and dove right into it. Rather than immediately noting possible questions for Ken while reading the book, I instead read it with a pencil in hand, scratching out asterisks in the margins next to passages that intrigued me, which I anticipated going back to once I’d finished the whole book, to mine them for the most resonant themes and to form the most stimulating questions I could think of for our discussion.

I found the book quite engrossing, and appreciated that it was written in multiple, contrasting styles of narrative nonfiction, though it’s all done without becoming jarring or off-putting. While most of is written in past tense, the norm for this sort of book prose, there are occasional passages in present tense, as when Ken and his fellow adventurers were actually touring the Arctic on an Adventure Canada cruise, and when they disembarked from the ship to traverse the ground where Franklin, his officers and crew, and their Inuit hunters, interpreters, and guides had trekked almost two centuries ago. Ken also presents some fascinating counter-factual possibilities that contrast with the known historical record, as he offers his best theory about what led to the tragic demise of Franklin and his two ships and the entire crew. Note with no spoiler: this new theory of his, appearing for the first time in Searching for Franklin is supported by medical reporting and highly informed speculation.

Last Thursday, the night of our discussion finally arrived. I was glad to be joined by my wife, artist Kyle Gallup, and my adult son Ewan Turner, who operates Philip Turner Book Productions with me; he is a creative writer publishing under the pen name M.G. Turner. After a friendly reception in the historic rooms of The Explorer’s Club, Ken McGoogan pulled on the rope that sounds the Club’s bell, calling the meeting to order, and an audience of what looked to be about seventy-five people took seats in the main hall. Following an introduction by Cedar Swan, the CEO of Adventure Canada, Ken gave a talk outlining his long association with the Franklin saga, going all the way back to the writing of Fatal Passage. Using slides, he described how Margaret Atwood had introduced him to Swan’s father Matthew, the founder of Adventure Canada; the many voyages he’s made with them over the past twenty years; how Franklin’s candidacy to lead the search for the Northwest Passage had been championed to the Royal Navy by Lady Franklin, even though his earlier expeditions had produced less than stellar results; John Rae’s discovery of Franklin’s fate; and the medical and dietary travails that he now believes led to the demise of so many of Franklin’s men. When he finished his presentation, it was time for our discussion.

I began, asking such questions as these (with appendices from my research in parentheses):

  • Why did the idea of the Northwest Passage become so central to British myth-making about itself, and later to Canada’s own self-image? (In a discussion a day earlier when we met for a convivial dinner and to discuss the following night’s program, I referred Ken to such evidence of the rousing example from pop culture of Stan Rogers’ song “Northwest Passage,” a veritable Canadian national anthem, sung lustily by the barrel-chested musician (1949-83) on his debut album in 1981. So as to not lengthen the duration of our discussion unduly, I refrained from mentioning it then, but do so now for the sake of sharing more of my research.)
  • How was it that young boys went to sea so young, including Franklin himself, at age twelve? (In another example from cultural history cited in camera to Ken, but not at the Club is the haunting folk song “The Captain’s Apprentice,” collected in 1905 by my favorite English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose lyrics tell the sad tale of a boy treated roughly.)
  • Can you contrast the leadership styles of John Rae and Franklin, with Rae seeming to show special regard for the well-being of his fellow expeditioneers, more so than Franklin?
  • It’s amazing to me, as you write, that ships had libraries—1700 volumes on Franklin’s ship, which would have taken up a lot of room on board. Aboard ship, where living and sleeping quarters were notoriously tight, how did they accommodate so many books? (And, was there such a thing as a ship librarian? That would be the job for me.)
  • You write that Charles Dickens at least allowed John Rae to publish a rebuttal to Lady Franklin’s accusations about him, but I wonder: Why did Dickens believe Lady Franklin’s slanders about Rae, at all?
  • Can you explain why when Erebus and Terror were found in 2014 and 2016, they were forty miles apart in the Arctic Ocean?
  • The caloric demand for portagers and voyageurs while doing all the enormously strenuous work on the trail must have been very high for them—while they carried 80-pound packs, in contrast to the sailors who carried a fourth of that weight—yet they often didn’t get the food they needed. How did they manage?

The discussion between the two of us transitioned into questions from members of the audience, with me calling on seven or eight people to stand and ask their questions, which were good ones. I enjoyed this part of the program very much, taking me back to my days when I moderated the community meeting of my college, Franconia College. After about an hour and twenty minutes, we concluded what had been a very enjoyable and stimulating program. The Explorer’s Club has posted it on their youtube page, so if of interest, you may view it via the link below.

I will conclude this post by making one more observation that I didn’t take the time to say last Thursday night. As my author Ruth Gruber (1911-2016)—about whom I’ve written often on this website—who I’ve observed with her spot reporting during and after WWII, and in such books as Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation, became, in my opinion, the most prominent chronicler of DPs (displaced persons) following the war, Ken McGoogan has over the course of his six books on the Arctic become our foremost chronicler of the explorers who sailed across the Atlantic seeking navigable waterways spanning northern seas that would take them all the way to “Cathay”—a Pierre Berton for the twenty-first century. I’m glad I’ve been in a position to carry on a dialogue with Ken these past many years.

https://www.youtube.com/live/450ZwrJor5U?si=QOE_hO59YB89Z2Xf

And here is a gallery of photos from the whole night, from the reception through Ken’s talk, and then from our discussion. All photos taken by Kyle Gallup.

[gallery link="file" ids="18452,18453,18454,18455,18456,18457,18458,18459,18460,18461,18462,18463,18464,18465,18466,18467"]

 

 

 

8

Looking Back on 2022, Another Good Year in Editing and Agenting

/0 Comments/in , , ,

Yesterday I began totaling up the volume of business for Philip Turner Book Productions in 2022, to prepare to send agency clients full accounting of monies we received from publishers for them in 2022, and to write an annual year-end blog post. I’m pleased to note the figures confirm how it felt while we working at it—2022 was a very productive year for the company I founded in 2009, which I began operating with my adult son Ewan three years ago.

It’s fun and rewarding to have such a knowledgeable colleague and partner whose instincts and judgment I trust completely. When the year began he was our Managing Editor, and then mid-year I promoted him to Executive Editor and Literary Agent, which was announced in the Publishing Trends newsletter in July. The dual role is emblematic of our makeup as a joint editorial services consultancy and literary agency. He’s heading our New Stories division, devoted to cultivating new work in fiction, narrative nonfiction, and memoir.

Looking back on the year that ends this week, I see that

• On the editorial side, we edited manuscripts and book proposals from 15 different authors;
• On the agency side, we made seven new deals with book publishers and audiobook publishers for titles that will be published in 2023 and beyond;
• With a backlist of author clients and their books that have now been published and selling for a decade or more, we also paid out advances and royalties from various publishers to seventeen different authors and rights holders.

Some of our sales in 2022:

• PUBLIC/PRIVATE: My Years with Joe Papp at the Public Theater by Gail Merrifield Papp to Applause Theater and Cinema Books; audiobook rights sold to Audible who is working with the author to recruit an A-list actor to provide the narration. Told in an entertaining way, the book blends an affecting memoir of the author’s life and work alongside the founder of the Public Theater, Joe Papp, with a behind-the-scenes portrait of the influential theater’s dazzling history. News of the book deal appeared first in Publishers Weekly’s Deals column. The book will be published in October 2023.

• MOLYVOS: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis by educator and humanitarian John Webb, sold to Potomac Books, for publication in 2023. Webb’s book tells the little-known story of the intrepid Greek villagers, who in the early months of 2015-16 bootstrapped an effective humanitarian response to aid the tens of thousands of Syrians, Afghans, Ethiopians who’d launched themselves in flimsy vessels across the Mediterranean and the Adriatic seeking safety and succor in Europe, before well-known NGOs were on the ground, months before those vaunted organizations mounted no response at all, while people of Molyvos did heroic work.

• In the popular POT THIEF mystery series—whose author J. Michael Orenduff we’ve been representing since 2010—we placed his tenth title, THE POT THIEF WHO STUDIED CALVIN, to be published by Open Road Media in coming months. Orenduff will also be publishing a nonfiction book with Open Road in coming months, details to come.

• We arranged for the writing of a history of a regional American theater by a prominent arts critic whom I represent, and engaged the participation of a theater benefactor in the project, details to come.

Books we had sold in earlier years, set to be published in 2023:

• THE NEEDLE AND THE LENS, on the interplay between music and storytelling in movies, by Nate Patrin, author of Bring that Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, University of Minnesota Press, May 2020; Nate’s second book will also be published by UMP.

• CINEMA OF SWORDS: A Popular Guide to Movies & TV Shows About Knights, Pirates, and Vikings (Plus Samurai and Musketeers) by Lawrence Ellsworth, translator of four Alexandre Dumas novels we’ve sold to Pegasus Books; we sold Lawrence’s new book to Applause Theater and Cinema Books.

• THE ULTIMATE PROTEST: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World by Ray E. Boomhower (author of Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam, University of New Mexico Press, 2022); Ray’s new book on Malcolm Browne will also be published by UNMP.

• THE KREMLIN’S NOOSE: Vladimir Putin’s Blood Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia by Amy Knight, author of Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (St Martin’s Press, 2017). We sold Knight’s new book to Northern Illinois University Press distributed by Cornell University Press. Amy’s new book is a dual portrait that documents the rise of Putin and the mogul Boris Berezovsky, who helped make Putin ruler, then feuded with him till his death in London, which like so many Kremlin critics, occurred under unexplained circumstances.

Books we had sold in earlier years, published in 2022:

[av_one_half first av_uid='av-2gxgfuj']THE BARRENS: A Novel of Love & Death in the Canadian Arctic by Kurt Johnson and Ellie Johnson (Arcade Publishing, May 2022), sold under our New Stories rubric. Chosen by the Women’s National Book Association for their annual Great Group Reads program, attesting to its suitability as a novel for book clubs. “Two young college women embark on a canoe trip down the Thelon River in Canada’s Barren Lands when a tragic accident turns a wilderness adventure into a battle for survival in this debut novel…A poignant and engaging thriller with a formidable lead character.”—Kirkus[/av_one_half][av_one_half av_uid='av-29t36rf']ROOSEVELT SWEEPS NATION: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal by David Pietrusza (Diversion Books, August 2022; Blackstone Audio). “Historian Pietrusza creates a brisk, spirited narrative, abundantly populated and bursting with anecdotes, revealing the president’s trials and turmoil as he faced reelection….Prodigiously researched and exuberantly told.”—Kirkus, starred review[/av_one_half]

[av_one_third first av_uid='av-1tubbcr'] HEROES ARE HUMAN: Lessons in Resiliency, Courage and Wisdom from the COVID Front Lines by Bob Delaney with Dave Scheiber (City Point Press, September 2022; audiobook, Tantor Media). “Offers insights into life on the front lines during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic…An eye-opening work about health care workers’ sacrifices and burdens.”—Kirkus[/av_one_third][av_one_third av_uid='av-195qm7v']LURKING UNDER THE SURFACE: Horror, Religion, and the Questions that Haunt Us by Brandon Grafius (Broadleaf Books, October 2022; audiobook, Tantor Media). “Grafius teaches us how to welcome horror as a constant companion in a world plagued by real evil.”—Sojourners[/av_one_third][av_one_third av_uid='av-rrcgnv']LAST CIRCLE OF LOVE, a novel by Lorna Landvik (Lake Union, Amazon Publishing, December 2022; audiobook narrated by the author, Brilliance). “This warm and funny book is vintage Landvik, with an ensemble cast of salt-of-the-earth women with names like Marlys and Charlene who tiptoe into the world of lust and examine what, as they say, turns them on. None of it is really erotica, of course, but more practical things like gallantry, compliments, understanding and forgiveness.”—Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star-Tribune[/av_one_third]

After 2023, we eagerly anticipate publication of DEVOURING TIME: Jim Harrison, a Life by Todd Goddard, the first biography of the acclaimed master of the novella, gourmand, ardent friend, hunter and fisher, which will be published by Blackstone Publishing.

Major thanks to all the authors who entrusted us with editing and representing their work in the past year. We really appreciate it.

Also doing our own creative work in 2022:

Under Ewan’s pen name, M.G. Turner, he published essays on this website about Ernest Hemingway; photojournalist Ruth Gruber; and special effects film pioneer Ray Harryhausen, and continued developing his fiction, with a completed short story collection and novel which we’ll be circulating in 2023. He also assisted children’s book scholar Michael Patrick  Hearn in lectures for the Grolier Club.

I published a review/essay on a formidable nonfiction trilogy about Canadian indie rock n’ roll by Michael Barclay and other authors, highlighted by Barclay’s book, HEARTS ON FIRE: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music, 2000-2005 (ECW Press, 2022), and a review/essay on Robert Gottlieb’s enjoyable publishing memoir, AVID READER. I also contributed an essay, “The Education of a Bookselling Editor,” to AMONG FRIENDS: An Illustrated Oral History of 20th Century Publishing and Bookselling, to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2023.

We’re each looking forward to a great year in 2023. As always, please get in touch if you or someone you know is seeking guidance about publishing. Ewan can be reached at ewanmturner [@] gmail [.] com, while my contact info is philipsturner [@] gmail [.] com. Our company email is ptbookproductions [@] gmail [.] com.