M. G. Turner: “‘False Memories & Eldritch Interludes’ is a spooky delight”

A review by Ewan “M. G.” Turner of a new horror-inflected book:

False Memories & Eldritch Interludes is a spooky delight! Part-memoir, part tall tale, author Joseph Citro takes a novel approach by making himself known to readers in among a series of stories, narratives, and as he calls them, “eldritch” interludes. If that word is familiar it’s because it was popularized by fellow New England writer H.P. Lovecraft, whom Citro acknowledges as a major influence, as he was on so many, acting as a model for all who preserve local history in that most gothic region. Citro’s writing itself is excellent—personal and touching, and as a fellow horror writer/enthusiast myself, it is special to meet him in these ingenious pages. Along the way you feel less like you’re reading a book and more like you’re in the presence of a great storyteller who is weaving narratives that at first seem opposed to each other but surprise you with their profound resonance.

It is also a joy to read stories and then have them commented upon by the omniscient writer’s voice in welcome “Behind the Scenes” sections which provide an excellent dichotomy between fright and fable, and give you an even deeper view into the author—something Lovecraft himself was never able to do, but Citro does remarkably well and without it feeling contrived or too self-referential. Also, I should add that it is very refreshing to read work like this, though I hesitate to describe it as “no-nonsense.” Instead what I mean is that you have the feeling of being given a chance to see the inner workings of a seasoned writer’s mind and with him as a guide we’ll live to tell the tale! (Also, it’s just nice to read something unpretentious in style and yet extremely deep in terms of content, a nearly impossible feat to pull off.)

Favorite pieces in the collection include: “Them Bald-Headed Snays”; “Soul-Keeper”; “Kirby”; and “The Last Fortune Cookie.” “False Memories” is a must-read for all horror enthusiasts and for people who enjoy the work of highly skilled writers who tell stories connected to their local communities and expand upon and ultimately craft their own urban legends. Last, evocative illustrations by Corey Forman round out the package nicely.  It’s available on Amazon.

The Vermonter publication has described Joe Citro as “Vermont’s most recognized authority on ghosts, haunting, and the state’s mysterious past. He’s written many fascinating books on the subject, including his bestselling work, Passing Strange: True Tales of New England Hauntings and Horrors.” Citro really is a New England treasure, as is clear in this 2020 profile in Seven Days magazine.

Elaine Dewar (1948-2025), Stellar Writer and Dear Friend, RIP

I’m sharing with friends and readers of The Great Gray Bridge that a dear friend and talented author, Elaine Dewar, passed away yesterday—age 77, after a brief illness—in Toronto surrounded by her loving family, including her daughters Anna Dewar Gulley and Danielle Dewar Birch. Elaine was a very accomplished journalist and author who specialized in reporting on and writing about challenging subjects, especially cutting-edge science as it intersected with culture, business, and society. I had the privilege of working on four of her seven books. A Jewish funeral was held at a chapel in Toronto today, and I was able to sit in on it via youtube with my wife. We both benefited over the years from Elaine’s kindness and hospitality. I wish we could have been in Toronto to pay a shiva call at the family home.

Beyond our strong professional links, she was a tremendously steadfast friend—having us stay in a comfortable bedroom in her home numerous times when visiting Toronto, always reminding us that it was there for a getaway when needed. She also had my back after 2009, the year that I became an independent editorial provider in the book business, with me no longer holding an in-house publishing position. One manuscript of hers that I edited was Smarts: The Boundary-Busting Story of Intelligence, which I also covered on this blog in 2015. As I wrote then, just editing it had made me smarter (a bit, anyway :-). Her intellectual curiosity was prodigious. While working for Carroll & Graf Publishers, I’d published the US editions of two of her earlier books—Bones: Discovering the First Americans, on the ancient peopling of the Americas, and The Second Tree: Clones, Chimeras and Quests for Immortality, a kind of nonfiction version of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel Oryx and Crake. Those books had been edited and published in Canada, so having the chance to edit Smarts was a treat. The fact Elaine went out of her way to hire me for the well-paying freelance assignment of editing the manuscript, so lengthy that it became a nearly 600-page book, shows her loyalty.

Later, she undertook tenacious investigative reporting to chronicle a hidden history that combined business and culture. This story, of a secret corporate consolidation in the Canadian book publishing industry mingled with improper obeisance to the interests of a particular multinational publisher, became her book The Handover: How Bigwigs and Bureaucrats Transferred Canada’s Best Publisher and the Best Part of Our Literary Heritage to a Foreign Multinational (Biblioasis, 2017), which was nominated for the Governor’s General in Nonfiction. She asked me to read early chapters of that book, which I did happily, and with great interest. Prior to her death, Elaine completed a final book, which will be published next year, Growing up Oblivious: Residential Schools, Segregated Indian Hospitals, and the Use of Indigenous People as Slaves of Race Science, another Canadian exposé, which Biblioasis describes thus: “An investigative journalist reckons with the cost of settler privilege in this gripping exposé of racism and unethical science.” Speaking during the funeral today, her daughter Danielle described the forthcoming book as a memoir of sorts, one of which Elaine had never written.

There have already been other tributes to Elaine, along with this one chronicling important and interesting parts of Elaine’s life and work I didn’t know about. One is by her lifelong friend, Marci Macdonald, and is available on the website of Benjamin’s Funeral Home, which also hosted the video of the service today. Significantly, her current editor, Dan Wells of Bibliosasis, writes movingly on his site The Bibliophile of editing Growing up Oblivious in person with Elaine in her last days. He also has a valuable perspective on the writing and editing of “researched nonfiction,” which I realize now can correctly be said to have been Elaine’s true metiér.

I will always think fondly of Elaine, and her husband Stephen Dewar (d. 2019), seated at the breakfast table in their cozy kitchen, CBC Radio program Metro Morning on the dial, newspapers open, when I came down for a morning meal, and they each greeted us with humor and charm.

 

Powerful Endorsements for “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life” by Todd Goddard

September 15, 2025 update:

Along with all the terrific endorsements the author and publisher have received for Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by our agency client Todd Goddard (shown below), we now also have an enthusiastic Publishers Weekly review (“A perceptive account of a prolific and celebrated artist.”), which was quickly shared by the proprietor of the popular Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook**, where it’s generating more enthusiasm and pre-orders ahead of the book’s launch on November 4.
—-

As announced previously on this website, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by our agency client Todd Goddard, the first biography of the notable American author, will be published on November 4, 2025, in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook by Blackstone Publishing. The book has garnered powerful endorsements so far, from writers Gretel Ehrlich, Rebecca Solnit, Colum McCann, Carl Hiassen, John Matteson, William Souder, and Jim Fergus, as shown below.

If you’re interested in pre-ordering the book, here are links for doing so:

Bookshop.org (Bookshop is an online bookseller whose sales support  independent bookstores), 2) Barnes & Noble, 3) Books-A-Million, and 4) Amazon.

Advance Praise for Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by Todd Goddard

Devouring Time is a massive achievement, a deep plunge into the life of Jim Harrison whose 40 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry line our shelves. Atavistic, inspired, despairing, gluttonous, turbo-charged, and broken-hearted, the gut strings of what drove Harrison are plucked, page by page until his high-wire obsessions, his “beggar’s banquets” of eating, drinking, traveling, and writing finally recede. What lasts are the words.”—Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces and Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Jim Harrison was a mustang that never got corralled, or at least broke out of all the paddocks he found himself in, and Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight. I was more than glad to go on the journey that was Harrison’s life in Devouring Time’s narrative, and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and all.”—Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

“Jim Harrison is and always will be one of my great heroes. He emerges from Todd Goddard’s splendid Devouring Time in vivid technicolor, and indeed shadow, as if he could walk off the page at any moment, sounding out his American yawp. Gracefully rendered and impeccably researched, Goddard intimately charts the free-flowing river that was Harrison’s life, its headwaters and tributaries, the glistening shallows and eddies, and the dark charging currents that carved channels through the literary landscape. His timeless poetry and fiction, singular joie de vivre, boundless appetites and intellect, as well as his unerring commitment to wisdom and wildness, resound on every page. One of our most cherished writers, Jim Harrison has landed in the hands of a worthy biographer. An absolute pleasure to read, Devouring Time resonates with me still.”—Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon

“My friend Jim Harrison always seemed a fiercely untameable subject for a biographer, but I think Devouring Time will stand as a complete and moving portrait. Jim was one of those rare writers whose private life was as adventurous as their works, but only a dogged journalist could have tracked down all the tales. Todd Goddard tells the whole story in a way that Jim would have admired – raw and revealing, yet with a sensitive eye for both the pain and the talent that made Jim one of modern America’s most intriguing poets and novelists.”—Carl Hiaasen, author of Bad Monkey and Fever Beach

Jim Harrison, Paris, 1971. Credit: Dan Gerber

“Jim Harrison lived a big life, and he has long deserved a gargantuan biography, both in size and spirit. And this is what Todd Goddard has given us. All by itself, the meticulously rendered story of how Harrison’s prose masterpiece Legends of the Fall came into being would be ample reward for the curious reader. But Goddard has given us immeasurably more. Impeccably researched, sensitively written, Devouring Time gives us a man — one who experienced the very depths of pain but found there the building blocks of enduring art. Cruelly battered by adversity, Harrison nevertheless infused his world with transcendent song. Read in conjunction with his own work, Devouring Time completes his testament.”—John Matteson, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father

“A feast of a biography that does full justice to a writer whose vast appetites…for books, food, sex, success, and a life in the wild…fueled a prodigious and prolific talent. Sweeping yet judicious, written with grace and restraint, Devouring Time deftly captures a life that veered between exhilaration and despair, impoverishment and acclaim. A keen-eyed and sensitive interpreter of Harrison’s writing, especially his poetry, Todd Goddard also grapples with his subject’s manifold excesses and insecurities. Harrison’s long marriage to his wife Linda, to whom he was serially unfaithful but never faithless, anchored his tempestuous personality. Their often-challenged devotion to each other is the beating heart of this moving portrayal of an artist who craved domesticity but could never live entirely within its boundaries. An exquisite, indelible book.”—William Souder, author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“Let me just say upfront that any other writers who are working on, and/or planning to write a biography about the life and times of poet/novelist Jim Harrison, I would suggest that you hang up your pens and pencils, fold up your laptops, and turn your literary attentions elsewhere. Todd Goddard here delivers the most definitive possible such work, a book brilliantly constructed, comprehensive and artfully written.

I was a close friend of Jim Harrison’s for thirty-seven years (among, of course, many others) right up until the evening of his death. I thought in that time (as many of us did) that I had heard virtually all of Jim’s stories, some more than once, for he was a consummate storyteller, frequently with alternate versions of his tales, and never too shy to talk about himself.

Herein are the rich details of the life and career of one of America’s sometimes overlooked literary geniuses, a man devoted to his art, who pushed his talents, and body, to the limit, from the rarefied world of poetry, to fiction and novels, to screenplays on the other end of the spectrum. Along the way, the reader will learn a great deal about the complicated and sometimes cutthroat literary and film businesses, as well as meet a vast array of friends, family members and colleagues who peopled Jim’s world.

There are no punches pulled here; like so many creative geniuses, Jim Harrison had his dark side, fueled by alcoholism of which he himself was more than well aware. This is a big book, and not just in size, that tells the story of an extraordinary character unlike any other, a man so totally out of the ordinary, that those of us who knew him personally, forgive him all his excesses, remember his humor and generosity, and will miss his presence on earth until the day we die.”—Jim Fergus, author of One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

**

Excitedly Anticipating Publication of “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life” by Todd Goddard

May 27 2025 update:

For fans of Jim Harrison eager to have their copy of Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life as soon as possible upon publication November 4, 2025, please click through to the websites of major book retailers below, using the pre-order/buy buttons provided:

1) Bookshop.org/for pre-ordering Devouring Time (Bookshop is an online bookseller whose sales support many independent bookstores)  2) Barnes & Noble/for pre-ordering Devouring Time   3) Books-A-Million/for pre-ordering Devouring Time  4) Amazon

—–
May 22, 2025
As reported on this website in April 2020, for our author client Todd Goddard, Philip Turner Book Productions sold Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life to Blackstone Publishing. Due to the pandemic, a number of key archives were inaccessible for 2-3 years but the author persevered and his book, the first biography of the protean American writer—beloved to readers for his poetry, many novellas, full-length novels, and essays that covered the gamut from food to fishing to foreign locales—will be published in hardcover, ebook, and as an audiobook on November 4, 2025. You can see the cover image from the advanced reading copy (ARC) that is being distributed to bookstores, book critics, and literary journalists, and the back cover copy.

Things are setting up very well for the book, with this enthusiastic blurb already received from the author and activist Rebecca Solnit, who writes that,

“Jim Harrison was a mustang that never got corralled, or at least broke out of all the paddocks he found himself in, and Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight. I was more than glad to go on the journey that was Harrison’s life in Devouring Time’s narrative, and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and all”— Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

The biography of Jim Harrison (1937-2016) unfolds across a number of key places, from the lakes and forests of Michigan, his home state, to the Florida Keys, to Greenwich Village, to Durango, Mexico, as well as Montana, Hollywood, Arizona, and Provence, France. In the archives, Todd Goddard found a rich record of correspondence, including many letters with Raymond Carver, Francis Ford Coppola, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Allen Ginsberg, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Norman Mailer, Gary Snyder, David Foster Wallace, Terry Tempest Williams, and Tom McGuane. Goddard is an associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University, has taught Harrison’s fiction and poetry, and presented research on Harrison’s works for the Jim Harrison Society at the American Literature Association’s annual conference.

We have some ARCs available, so let me know, if you or someone you know—a bookseller say, or a reviewer—wants one because of the sort of books they read, carry, and write about, including Harrison’s own poetry, essays, and novellas, the latter being a form he excelled at beyond any fiction writer of his era. 

This week, Harrison’s classic 1989 poetry collection, The Theory and Practice of Rivers, has been reissued in a new edition from his longtime poetry publisher, Copper Canyon Press. In advance of that, Todd Goddard, Rebecca Solnit, and Jamie Harrison, one of Jim’s daughters, took part in an online discussion of the book with Copper Canyon publisher Joseph Bednarik. In addition, Copper Canyon printed a sweet little broadside for The Theory and Practice of Rivers, which I was delighted to receive in the mail, as shown in the photo gallery below. The republication of The Theory and Practice of Rivers is timely in that it happens to coincide with the publication this week of Is a River Alive?  by another of my favorite writers on nature and landscape, Robert Macfarlane. Taken together the two books are sure to bring renewed attention to our riverine world.

And if you’re looking to join an online community of folks who treasure Jim Harrison’s work, I suggest you can join the Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook, where I appreciate that this post is being widely shared.

All in all, it’s shaping up to be a banner year for the indomitable Jim Harrison!

Sold: “First Great Sorrow: My Years with Senator Robert Kennedy,” a memoir by Donna Chaffee

As literary agent, I’m very pleased to have sold First Great Sorrow: My Years with Senator Robert Kennedy, a memoir by Donna Chaffee, to Usher Morgan of Library Tales, a new publisher for me.

One of the reasons I’m optimistic for Ms Chaffee’s book, and the publicity it’s likely to attract, is that I sense a backlash brewing to RFK Jr.’s controversial tenure in the Trump administration. The same day we announced Donna’s book in Publishersmarketplace, it was also announced that Kerry Kennedy, sister of RFK Jr., is going to publish Ethel: Faith, Hope, Family, and an Extraordinary American Life, a biography of her mother Ethel Skakel Kennedy, written with Maryanne Vollers, with the Harper One imprint; by coincidence, as editor I earlier published a book with Kerry Kennedy, Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders  Who Are Changing the World (Crown Publishing, 2000) which shows her commitment to social justice and human rights. I think there will be a good synergy between the new books by the two women, Donna and Kerry.

I am reminded that during the 2024 campaign for the presidency, many Kennedy family members expressed opposition to, and unease with RFK Jr holding high office. With him now installed in the federal government, I believe the Kennedys will continue providing counterweights to the shameful example being set by their dangerous sibling and close relative, especially in contrast to his father.

As to Donna Chaffee’s book itself, it is a rare personal account of the charismatic Senator whose life was abbreviated so tragically.. The memoir covers the years Chaffee knew and worked with RFK, from the time he became a member of the Senate in January 1965, through his run for the Democratic nomination in 1968, and his murder that June. Over the decades she retained a lot of material from that time, including photographs, and has remained a member of the close-knit community of Kennedy family friends and associates. Her book will be published on June 6, 2026, 58th anniversary of the assassination.

Following the Senator’s death, Chaffee received a degree in Political Science from UC Berkeley and embarked upon a career in public service, working for more than 20 years as a financial manager for the County of Los Angeles. Since her retirement, she has become actively involved in cheetah conservation in Africa and traveled the world, visiting more than seventy countries.

 

Sold: “John McGraw: The Tumultuous Life and Times of Baseball’s ‘Little Napoleon'” by Daniel R. Levitt

Very excited to have sold a great new baseball book to Rob Taylor at University of Nebraska Press, one of the very best editors and publishers of sports books. John McGraw: The Tumultuous Life and Times of Baseball’s ‘Little Napoleon’ by Daniel R. Levitt. It will be the first full biography of the New York Giants’ legendary player-manager in two decades, apart from a 2018 book that focused mostly on McGraw’s many ejections from games. As described in my announcement of the deal, his “acumen as a field general was unparalleled, with innovations in play that enlivened the dead-ball era….[But with] gambling and on-field fisticuffs common….McGraw, a diminutive second basemen was usually among the brawlers; on the base paths, belligerence reigned as just one or at most two umpires enforced the rules, and McGraw and opponents often tangled in mutual brazen aggression.” With a tip of the ball cap to publishing pal David Wilk, who referred the author to me. For publication in 2027. #baseball #biography #NewYorkCity #DeadBallEra

To the Summit of Mt Everest or Bust, Fueled by Xenon Gas

In the present era of international mountaineering in the Himalayas, which began in the early decades of the twentieth century, seasonal weather patterns mean that May has long been climbing season on the great peaks, including Mt Everest. The devastating events in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, when eight climbers died on Everest, occurred in May 1996. Here’s a fascinating article on a summit attempt that is taking place right now, in May 2025. Four British soldiers-turned-mountaineers are attempting to summit Everest, and raising money for charity through their effort. That part’s okay, or normal enough, if you discount the reality that far too many people now try to climb Everest every year, with veritable traffic jams happening on the most popular routes and chokepoints, like the South Col, and lots of refuse is left on the mountains that then must get carted down at some point. The article started to become strange for me when I read that the quartet is going to try to do it in only seven days, while most teams take a month or even more. Most expeditions have their team members acclimatize to the oxygen-depleted atmosphere, because altitude sickness above 6000 meters (or around 19,700 feet) is common, and what can be a death zone is above 7900 meters (around 26,200 feet). It is hoped that the more time climbers spend adjusting to this altitude, they will be better able to handle all the rigors, keeping in mind that the summit of Everest itself is higher still, at 8,849 meters (29,356 feet). This often means that for the climactic stretch of the ascent, climbers can be very ill and struggling with multiple debilities, including mental confusion and bad decision-making, which can lead to fatal mis-steps and mistakes.

However, to achieve their lightning-quick ascent the four British climbers are experimenting with unproven medical stratagems to acclimatize their bodies in advance of ever even traveling to the Himalayas last Friday. Back home they’ve been sleeping in oxygen-deprived tents (dubbed “hypoxic tents,” as they tried to create conditions that mimicked those they’ll encounter this week on the mountain. They report nights of terrible sleep the past several months, and express some uncertainty as to whether the tents have helped, though they’ve stuck with using them for months. Even more bizarre, though, are inhalations of xenon gas they’ve been administering to themselves the past few months, in hopes of boosting their red blood cells; they’ll also use xenon gas again once they’re in situ.

Unsurprisingly, the expedition has attracted criticism in the mountaineering and the medical world from people who believe what they’re doing is not only unproven, it’s and potentially dangerous. The team members claim they’ll have a lighter environmental footprint, and it’s no more dangerous than any other summit attempt. In addition, though mountaineering—unlike competitive sports such as cycling and tennis, which have governing bodies that monitor athletes’ blood and urine, and try to hold them to account if they use banned substances—has no official body to sanction the British climbers, or even to rule on whether what they’re doing is ethical or justified. To them, apparently, it’s an acceptable risk, and they won’t be stopped from making this attempt though it may prove foolhardy.

wapo.st/4358woo

Remembering Solly Ganor, and “Light One Candle”

In 1995, when I was editor-in-chief for Kodansha America, the US division of the then largest Japanese publisher, Kodansha Ltd., I edited a powerful Holocaust memoir whose author is mentioned in a moving Washington Post article out this weekend headlined, “How a little-known Japanese American battalion freed Jews from a Nazi death march,” linked to here. The book was titled, Light One Candle: A Survivor’s Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem, by Solly Ganor (1928-2020). It recounts how in early May 1945, a little more than eighty years go, the author’s life was saved at Dachau by Clarence Matsumara, also mentioned herein—a US service member who was part of  the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, made up mostly of Japanese Americans, many who had relatives then interned by the American government.

Earlier in Solly’s life, at age eleven in Kaunas, Lithuania, he happened to meet and befriend the Japanese consul, Chiune Sugihara, who boldly, and without permission from his own government, was signing hundreds of transit visas for Jews and other Lithuanians desperate to flee Nazi-occupied countries. Solly and his family could have tried to leave, but did not. Later, the local Jewish population was corralled into a ghetto, which Solly frequently dared to escape from, entering the larger part of the city for food, and other necessities of life, among them books. Later, he was impressed into forced labor by the Nazis, harsh servitude he somehow had survived until the day he was found by Clarence and his unit, emaciated but alive. When Clarence appeared over him, as he gazed on the face and features of a person of Japanese heritage, he thought of Sugihara, and knew he was looking at someone who would help him.

The Post article links to an oral history that Solly provided to the Holocaust Museum in 1997, and I’m also linking to it here. With the 80th anniversary of V-E Day celebrated in the Allied countries just last week, and even marked with proper solemnity in Germany, I was inspired to read the Post article about the Japanese unit that fought the Axis in Europe, and remember working with Solly on his moving memoir, which covers the same period.