The classics

I can trace certain aspects of my personality and my preferences directly back to elements of my childhood. For instance, my sense of humor, my idea of comedic timing, my appreciation for smart-alecky absurdity all come from a healthy diet of Looney Tune cartoons when I was a kid. Seriously, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, and Yosemite Sam have more to do with how I tell a joke or what I think is funny than most people I've known. "The Rabbit of Seville" and "What's Opera, Doc?" are as important to me in their way as Willa Cather's My Antonia and W.B. Yeats' early love poems.




Similarly, books my mom read to us when we were kids, books I found on my own at school or in the library have a lot to do with the kinds of stories I like, the sorts of images I'm drawn to, and the way I tell stories and read to my own children now.

I was a Weekly Reader junkie and my mom allowed me to buy ridiculous numbers of books in grade school so I have a lot of memories to choose from. However, there is a core of books that I remember more than others and, as an adult, I've begun tracking them down and buying them so I can read them to my kids.

A couple are books that my Grandma Brown had at her house and were always sort of the special treat at bedtime when we went there to visit. The Giant Jam Sandwich and Something Queer Is Going On both made big impressions on me. TGJS because of its' perfect, sing-song rhyme and terrific, stylized images and SQIGO because the cleverness of the prose and pictures and the fact that it in no way talked down to its readers. (Both Maryn and Avery love the loud, dramatic reading of "You STOLE Jill's dog!")



One of my most important books was Andrew Henry's Meadow by Doris Burn. Andrew Henry is a boy who is constantly building things and, unfortunately, getting in his family's way by doing so. He builds an eagle's cage in the living room while his dad is trying to read the paper, he hooks up a homemade merry-go-round to his sisters' sewing machine when they want to work on it, etc.

So eventually, he decides to strike out on his own. He packs up a bag of tools and supplies and heads off into the deep woods. When he eventually comes to a meadow, he decides to settle and he builds himself a house out of stone and logs. The element I remember best is that he included a landing pad for the meadow dragonflies.

Anyway, other kids from the town (Stubbsville, I think) find their way to the meadow because they have weird things they like that their parents don't want around. One girl loves birds but her dad is a farmer who wants to scare them away from his crops. Another boy has a whole drawer full of dandelion parachutes that his mother wants him to throw away. They all convene in the meadow and Andrew Henry builds them each their own individualized house. (Bird girl gets a tree house with feeders and baths and a mount for her binoculars, dandelion boy gets a tower from which to launch his collection, etc.) Eventually, there are nine little houses in the meadow with the shining brook.

Soon, the townspeople notice the kids are missing and begin to search. Andrew Henry's dog, Sam, who watched AH leave, leads the town through the deep woods and the children are found. It's a happy reunion and, once Andrew moves back home, his parents give him a corner in the basement to use as his building area. Kid appreciates family more, family appreciates kid more, everyone is happy.

Describing it now, it seems like there are more serious themes at work but when I was a kid, I just really liked the ingenious pictures of the houses Andrew constructs. I also liked that, according to the author's note in the back, Doris Burn lived on an island and did all her work in a little cabin that was heated by a wood-burning stove. That seems exotic and very artistic to me back then. (Still does.)

The potentially sad note to this is that, in my search for the image below, I discovered that there are plans to make a movie out of AHM and, worst of all, the screenplay was written by Zach Braff of Scrubs and Garden State fame. I hate Zach Braff the way I hate foot fungus and kids with trust funds. The man-boy is unctuous and awful and to think that he is going to have a hand in the shaping of the movie version of this very important book makes my skin crawl. Please Braff, please, excuse yourself from this project and go pull your overly self-satisfied act somewhere else. I would rather a movie of this book never get made than be made by you.


One other book that stands large in my childhood is Miss Nelson Is Missing by Harry Allard and James Marshall. A class of disobedient, disrespectful students get a rude awakening when their teacher, the sweet, lovely, patient Miss Nelson, mysteriously disappears and is replaced by the evil, angry, exacting Miss. Viola Swamp. The pre-M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end was a thrill every time. I'm not sure about my younger brothers but I know that Jason, my mom, and I all remember Miss Viola Swamp vividly.

Consequently, you can imagine my joy when Suzanne and I came across this shirt in one of our favorite Ann Arbor stores, The Peaceable Kingdom:



Awesome.

I likes me some tactility. . .

I once asked Scott Samuelson, my friend and mentor, what it was that he liked about making his own books by hand. We were sitting in his kitchen eating pizza and he was showing me the latest in his desert book series. It had a hand-sewn leather bag, clay tablets with words letterpressed into them, feathers, bones -- it was a tactile feast and I loved every bit of it. And so, in my state of being in love with this weird amalgamation of materials, I asked him, "Why this? What is it about bookarts that's so compelling to you (and me)?" He had two answers: #1 -- Bookarts is everything. It's the writing, the designing, the production, the art, the craft, the font, the paper, the images, the words. That kind of total control and from-the-ground-up creation is really satisfying. #2 -- It's tactile. There's something special about the texture of paper, the feeling of letters pressed into a surface, the sensation of signatures snugging up when you pull the thread tight.

I've thought about this a lot, particularly the tactility angle, and it's interesting to me that when it comes to commercial book design, I am drawn to things that have a concretion to them and the illusion of touchability. In short, I likes me some tactility in my book design.

Here are the covers of several books that have that element that I like so much. I don't think these scans will do the real thing justice but then, when do they ever?

Able to take pictures of tall buildings in a single bound

Yes, Virginia, even in Detroit there's morning dew.

This is another photo I took just after Suzanne dropped me off this morning. The picture doesn't do reality justice. The sun and water on all this shaggy, stubborn grass was dazzling. It was like someone had dumped a bucket of diamonds in the yard.


I've been thinking about work and happiness lately, wondering how often those two go together. William Faulkner said, "It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work." (Actually, I think Faulkner himself disproved the "can't drink for eight hours" claim but that's neither here nor there.)

It's rare that I meet someone who really loves what they do for work. Most people I know are on their way to something else -- a different career, a different degree, a promotion, more recognition, retirement, etc. I mean, I know it may not come up in every day conversation necessarily but I don't often hear people express that the thing that occupies the bulk of their waking hours and pays their bills is the best, most correct thing for them to be doing with their lives.

When I was growing up, my dad hated his job. He wouldn't come right out and say so but for most of my childhood, everything about Dad more or less screamed misery. He worked constantly. Many mornings he was gone to the bank before any of us were up for school and invariably he didn't make it home until 6 or sometimes later. He worked on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, during family reunions, etc. And when he was home, it was clear the day's efforts took a lot out of him. He'd get a plate of dinner, head downstairs for the recliner, eat, and fall asleep while watching MASH. Jason and I would sit down there with him and watch TV. We'd be obnoxious and try to get a reaction out of him. Some nights he'd think we were funny and he'd play along, other nights he was too tired and had no patience for two hyperactive, spastic boys.
Looking back as an adult and a parent myself, I see now how weighed down he was, how drained from the stresses of the day. Particularly when he was working for First Security Bank, it seemed work took from my dad.

Interestingly, even people who are doing exactly what they want seem to complain more than they celebrate. I know tenured professors who never wanted anything more than to be exactly that and yet, they focus on ungraded papers, unresponsive students, and administrative bureaucracy. Lucky Tony is the director of therapy at a facility that he partially owns. In his own words, he is "The Man" and yet his days are filled with needy parents, runaway kids, and the constant ebb and flow of money for the facility.

I'm far from being the most ambitious guy in the universe. My professional goals are pretty modest considering the field I'm in. I want to return to teaching at the junior/community college level and live out my life getting good benefits and the yearly increase awarded to people who stick around. I have no interest in even attempting life at a first or second tier school and academic publication interests me about as much as Sudoku (which means not much at all.) I just want to teach and get paid.

But here's the thing: I do teach and I am being paid. Just not as much as I'd like. In a building that's too hot. Teaching students who sometimes come to school hungover or buzzed. With bosses that don't start or end anything on time or plan much of anything more than a day or two in advance if that. In a building surrounded by homeless guys. In a city plagued with violent crime. In a state with one of the worst economies in the country. In a country that's at war. And on and on.

Obviously, I'm exaggerating to make a bit of a point. No job is ideal -- partly because it's work and work, by it's nature, is hard. (That's why it's called "work" and not "prancing freely with ponies made from cotton candy and licorice.") But if I have a job and can live on what I make, what's the difference between me and Bill Gates? He has a 74 million dollar roof over his head and I rent but is he more dry than I am when it rains? He has thousands of employees and I have 30-some odd students -- does he have fewer bad days at work than I do?

I don't know. Enjoying work, like everything else in life, is largely a matter of personal choice. We are agents put here to act rather than to be acted upon and we live life according to the choices we make. I doubt I can choose to take the same, sublime joy in grading barely legible essays on guns in Detroit that I take in snuggling with my daughters or eating warm chocolate chip cookies but I can probably choose to think to myself, "I'm doing something that I like, something I'm trained to to. This is pretty good."

Kinda Pollyanna, I know.

The worst jobs I've ever had:

1. Washing dishes at Golden Corral in Rexburg, Idaho when I was 15 years old. Wet, covered in half-chewed food and garbage, yelled at by frustrated middle managers, too young to date any of the superhot waitresses who were all seniors and thought of me as a cute, harmless mascot.
2. Cleaning hotel rooms in Jackson Hole, Wyoming when I was 16. Far away from home, had to live in a windowless basement room with exposed pipes in the ceiling and soggy carpet, tedious monkey work, foul co-workers (not you, Tony).
3. All temp work in Boise. Boxed Power Bars for 8 hours at a stretch, moved junk around as a Sears was renovating. Temp work: worst. jobs. ever.
4. AV maintenance for Boise School District. Spent an entire summer cleaning overhead projectors in grade schools all over Boise. 10 hour work days. Diana, the evil boss who took the job far too seriously.

What were your worst jobs ever? Are you happy in your current job?

Tag, I'm it.

Darlene Young included me on her "tag" list -- which apparently is like the childhood game only I get to play it while sitting at my desk in a shirt and tie. So here goes:

Four Places I’d Love to Visit:

1. Mackinac Island, MI. Specifically the Grand Hotel. (Mostly so I can stand on the back porch area and envision Jane Seymour running towards me screetching, "REEE-chard! REEE-chard!" Name that movie, folks.)

2. The Czech Republic, specifically Prague. Suzanne and I visited my mission several years ago and, as cool as that was, Piggly Wiggly's and riverboat casinos don't really compete with one of Europe's most beautiful cities. I think it would be fun to go there with her and eat deep fried cheese slathered with tartar sauce. We'd also have to visit the bone church and drink the magic water at Karlovy Vary

(A street in Karlovy Vary)


(The Ossuary Chapel in Kutna Hora)

3. The Field Museum in Chicago. Partly because it's an awesome museum, partly because it's housed in the only structure left standing from the 1893 World Exposition. (Read Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City and you'll know why that's so cool.)

4. Fallingwater. Because Frank Lloyd Wright rocks and it's only a day's drive away.

Four Things I Covet:

1. Tony's luck.

2. Tom Trusky's artist's book collection.

3. Scott Samuelson's letterpress.

4. People with physical coordination.


4 Goals I Have:

1. To finish my PhD in 5 years or less (total).

2. To take Suzanne and the girls to Disneyland.

3. To write more fiction.

4. To see U2 in concert before they die or break up.


4 Fads I Wish Would Pass:

1. SUVs

2. Singing Bee- style TV shows.

3. Saggy pants.

4. George W. Bush.


4 Delights:

1. The bottom of a DQ ice cream cone.

2. Snuggling with my daughters.

3. Hot soup and warm bread on a rainy day.

4. Making Suzanne laugh.


4 Regrets:
There really isn't any way I could limit it to four. The small stuff I don't really regret. The big stuff I'm not posting on a blog for the universe to read.

4 Things I Wish I Could Do More Often:
1. Go out to see movies at the theater.
2. Take days off from work.
3. Travel.
4. Visit Idaho.

4 Things That I Never Would Have Imagined Would Happen to Me:
1. Be diagnosed with cancer.
2. Work with an almost exclusively black student population.
3. Live in Michigan.
4. ????

4 People I Tag:
1. Suzanne.
2. Tony.
3. Tracy.
4. Mom.
5. Clark. (So I can't count -- so what? I'm an English major.)

Rainy Days And Mondays Always Make Me Happy (when I get to stay home.)

It rained all day yesterday and I don't think the sun even made a cameo appearance. Maryn had a fever that topped out at 101.9 and so she and Avery and I all stayed home. We watched an Electric Company marathon, baked cookies, and ventured out briefly to the library for movies. It was a good day to say inside and so we did for the most part.

The morning started a little rough, however. Personally, I think younger kids need to learn about the fine art of sleeping in. For me, it's not really sleeping in unless you pass 10 a.m. 10:30 is ideal because then you get the pure luxury of sleeping far longer than necessary but you still have most of your day to work with. (Even as a super-indulgent college student, I hated it when I slept until noon. The day was just shot by then.)

However, as I say, my daughters haven't got these finer nuances down just yet. At 9:30 Avery was sitting on top of me, sort of bouncing up and down, saying, "Get up, Dad! Get up and turn on cartoons!" I'm the one peeling her blankets off of her at 6:30 every morning on school days so I guess turnabout is fair play. When it's her turn to get up, she acts like every blanket that gets removed is one more needle shoved directly into her heart. So my guess is she's got some built up hostility and saw a chance to pounce. I tried to get her to back off but a four year old with a will of iron will not be deterred. I dragged my sorry carcass out of bed and we sat down to rot our brains with tv and our teeth with a cannister of cinnamon rolls.

The sign came last night that Maryn was feeling much better. She'd just gotten out of the shower and was supposed to be putting clothes on. Instead, she whipped around, hands up kung-fu style, and started coming toward me. I asked, "What are you, the naked ninja?" She thought that was really funny and she started to karate chop me. I tried to give her a light boot to the bare behind but she darted out of the way, circled me, and swatted me on the butt. You would have thought she had just won the lottery or something. She squealed with happiness and went to tell Avery that her new name is now Naked Ninja. Hopefully, we can get her past this phase before she starts high school.

Refuse Collection!!

I post this photo of us at a recent Primary activity at the Detroit temple for several reasons:
#1 - To show off what a good looking family I have. Suzanne is, of course, this beautiful, sophisticated woman and is, strangely enough, still married to me. The girls got their long, elegant necks and cloud-like skin from her. They got their giant pumpkin heads from me.
#2 - To show a more accurate, current photo of myself. My profile photo makes me look all shaggy and boho but in reality, I look much more like a 21st century Mormon than a 19th century Mormon these days.
#3 - To prove that I really do have a wife and that she's not made up and/or never seen like Vera from Cheers or Stan from Will and Grace. (It has been implied by some that Suzanne doesn't exist.)


I took this yesterday on the walk to Suzanne's building and I love it. Is it just a fancy way for the new casino to label its garbage dock or is it a manifesto-like statement encouraging us to defy the herd-ism of modern life? I know that it's definitely one but I definitely prefer the other.


Weird connection: Kosciusko is actually the name of a small town in Mississippi and was an area in my mission. (It's pronounced koz-ee-ES-ko.) I went on splits there once and it's very much what you'd expect from a rural town in that part of the country - an old fashioned town square with a statue of a Civil War soldier in the center, little brick-front businesses lining the streets, one area of nice, upscale houses, other areas of abject poverty. You expect Atticus Finch to walk up and ask if you need directions to the courthouse or something.

Anyway, the town's real claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of none other than Oprah Winfrey (or Opfrey as I choose to call her.) Everyone I talked to when I was there claimed to know her, said they "ran" together in high school or whatever. I believe them like I believe Napoleon Dynamite is "pretty good with a bo staff."

When I was there, I heard that the town was named after a Polish general but I never knew who he was or why a Mississippi town would be named after him.

Anyway, you can imagine my surprise at moving to Detroit, a place about as far removed from that green, genteel town square as you can get and finding a statue of good ol Tadeusz Kosciuszko, big as life, right on Michigan Avenue. Weird, right? (Atticus Finch might get mugged here for being a white lawyer. Then again, people here might admire what a good shot he is.)

Well, as it turns out, it's a lot less random to have Tadeusz here than in Mississippi. Detroit is full of people with Polish heritage. The community of Hamtramack which is just to the north and east of downtown is very Polish. (In fact, it's where the very terrible Claire Danes movie Polish Wedding was filmed.) And Kosciuszko, a figure from America's Revolutionary War, is a real cultural hero for Poles apparently. So having a giant statue of him here is equivalent to that blindingly white sculpture of Joseph Smith in the lobby of the JSM building in Salt Lake. Joseph never got anywhere near Utah but people there revere him, hence the statue. Same with Tadeusz here in Detroit. (Although he may have made it to Detroit at some point. I don't know.)

So what about Mississippi? Well, according to the Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce website, the town used to be called Red Bud Springs but "The county seat, Kosciusko, was named by the area's state representative, William Dodd. His grandfather, a Revolutionary War veteran, had greatly admired the Polish patriot, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, whose love of freedom led him to help the colonies during America's struggle for independence."

So essentially, it would be like my brother Jason founding his own town and naming it "Neil Peart" or my friend Tony founding his own community and calling it "Prince." Maryn would probably call her town "Polly Pocket-ville" and I, naturally, would call my settlement, "Mark Brown."

Just kidding. I'd name it "Iron Man."

If you got to name a town but had to name it after a person you admire, what would it be called?



I include this photo just because I think it's kinda cool. Guerilla art in Motor City.

Cool

Last week, we read "Are Black People Cooler Than White People?" an essay by Donnell Alexander. It begins,

"I'm cool like this:
I read fashion magazines like they're warning labels telling me what not to do.
When I was a kid, Arthur Fonzarelli seemed like a garden-variety dork.
I got my own speed limit.
I maintain like an ice cube in the remote part of the freezer.
Cooler than a polar bear's toenails.
Cooler than the other side of the pillow.
Cool like me."

The title of the essay is more of an attention-getter than anything else and he even calls the question "dumb" at one point. But his thesis is essentially that the idea of cool is inherently black. "Cool," he writes, "was born when the first plantation nigga figured out how to make animal innards -- massa's garbage, hog maws and chitlins -- taste good enough to eat. . . Cool is all about trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents. It's about living on the cusp, on the periphery, diving for scraps. Essential to cool is being outside looking in."

Later, he writes, "(Blacks) have been treated by the country's majority as, at best, subhuman, and, at worst, an abomination. So in the days when they were still literally on the plantation, they devised a coping strategy called cool, an elusive mellowing strategy designed to master time and space. Cool, the basic reason blacks remain in the American cultural mix, is an industry of style that everyone in the world can use. It's finding the essential soul while being essentially lost."

For we honkies, there is room in his idea of cool for us too:

"Some white people are cool in their own varied ways. I married a white girl who was cooler than she ever knew. And you can't tell me Jim Jarmusch and Ron Athey and Delbert McClinton ain't smooth.

"There's a gang of cool white folks, all of whom exist that was because they've found their essential selves amid the abundant and ultimately numbing media replications of the coolness vibe and the richness of real life."

So the way I interpret this is, cool is being able to maintain your composure and perspective even when the world is ganged up against you, even (especially) when you are on the outside of what is going on in the mainstream. Interestingly, it's actually a very similar idea to that old poem by Rudyard Kipling, "If." You know, "If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you. . . etc."

I like this because it inverts the high school concept of cool that places the most popular, richest, best looking types at the top of the pyramid and instead gives precedence to those who are doing their own thing, "finding their essential selves" as it were. Being an outsider is integral to cool. (This is comforting to those of us who were never at the top of that traditional pyramid in life.)

The other thing that strikes me about this definition is that, according to it, shouldn't Mormons be, like, super cool? Theological, social, sexual, geographical outsiders taking a salt-caked desert wasteland and building a flourishing city? Doesn't that qualify as making a dollar out of fifteen cents? Isn't "being in the world but not of the world" the same as finding your essential self amid the numbing onslaught of contemporary life?

Morning in Detroit

I snapped this earlier today, just after Suzanne dropped me off. It was about 7:40 a.m. and this view is looking east (obviously) down Michigan Avenue into the heart of downtown. At the risk of sounding Robert Duvall-ish, I love Detroit in the morning.

Our route in the morning brings us east on 96 for most of the 20 minute drive, banks south briefly, and then turns east again. Just as the road makes the big curve east, the city skyline comes into view. On clear mornings, the buildings look like a shimmering mirage and everything seems good. Morning light just has a way of making things look better. The streets don't seem as filled with trash, the chipped, grime-caked sides of the old buildings gleam, and steam rising from manhole covers is beautiful rather than gross. The day is still good, y'know? No students have freaked out, no co-workers have quit or been fired, and I still have my lunch to eat. As much as I have never, ever been an early-rising type of person, I do enjoy the view in the morning.

On another note, Suzanne, the girls, and I drove up to Port Huron last Saturday for a we-know-summer-is-ending-so-we'd-better-have-fun- while-we-can trip. Between Ricks College and her mission, Suzanne worked at a girls camp called Camp Stapleton. This was back when kids from the inner city were being bussed an hour north to spend two and three weeks at a time doing crafts, playing in the lake, and probably missing home like crazy.

Anyway, I'd always known she'd worked in the Port Huron area -- but what I didn't know until this weekend is that her old workplace is right next door to the camp where my work takes students for retreats a couple times a year. It's so weird that the world is so small. A place where Suzanne worked over a decade ago is right next door to where I take my students now. It seems like our relationship has always been fraught with odd coincidences like that. Like the fact that her older brother was one of my MTC instructors. Or the fact that she ran into my ex-girlfriend at a random, two-week telemarketing job she took in Provo one summer -- and ran into her just as said ex was writing me a letter. There are about half a dozen other little moments of weirdness I could list but I won't. That's a whole other post. My treatise on fate and the idea of "meant to be" will have to wait for another day.

The point is, we went to her old camp, looked around, played at the beach, and generally had a really good time.

Maryn and Avery looking (as they would call it) "fashion" on the tree stump.

The waters of Lake Huron.

Three More

This is the title page of OYL 2, a short story entitled Cause. Its unofficial and much more entertaining title given by my friend Stephen Carter is Mormon Snake Volcano! I have a lot of affection for this particular book because it's the first short story I've started and finished since I was 14 or something. It's definitely lacking in some serious ways but just finishing it was pretty nice.

As the unofficial title suggests, the story involves snakes so the cover stock is a bumpy, handmade paper that looks like scales. I knew I was on the right track when Avery, my four year old, saw it and asked, "Did you kill a snake to make that book?"

The letter "A" singled out on the title page was meant to echo Hawthorne's scarlet letter.


David West and Jim Irons were colleagues of mine back at the College of Southern Idaho and fellow poets. We decided to collaborate on a book just for a kick and ended up having a good time with it. Actually, the reading and publication party were fun -- the actual production process was like being waterboarded by Karl Rove himself. Fortunately, as ever, my mother came to the resucue and helped me put them together. The book is an accordion-fold (a.k.a concertina) with three individual chapbooks sewn into the valleys. The label you see is actually a removable paper band.

Below is Thousand Springs, my first major post-MFA writing project. During my thesis defense, one of my committee members asked, "So what's next for you?" I said, "A book of nature-love poems called 'Thousand Springs.'" I knew the question was coming because every MFA at BSU got asked that so I wanted to have something specific in mind. Suzanne, the girls, and I had just been on a trip to the Thousand Springs area in southern Idaho and were in love with it. I came up with this half-baked idea to write a series of poems about the place and that was the basis for my not-very-sincere answer at my defense. Later, once I got a real job and had some time to think about it, I decided to make good on my sort of silly promise. The poems aren't actually about Thousand Springs but that is the title poem and there's a lot of water/rain/snow imagery.

A Few Designs

These are a few of the designs I'm happiest (least unhappy) with.

The official logo.


This is the first of a planned series that tanked after three issues. Originally, I wanted to create a new book for every month of my first year here (one for every month of my "one year lease.") I made them in editions of 10, kept one or two for myself, and sent the extras to friends and family. It was a great plan but one that was hatched before school started and before I had a job. Both school and a job started for me in late August/early September and that's pretty much when the OYL project went the way of dodos and laser disks.

This first one was a week-by-week journal of my first month in Michigan. The end papers (which aren't visible in this picture) are made from free maps I got from an Avis rent-a-car place. One side is a street map of metro Detroit and the other side is a state map.

This was the third and unfortunately final OYL book. I wrote 52 short poems (the longest was 6 lines), printed them on blank playing cards, and then housed them in this handmade box. Looking at it now, I see all sorts of flaws that need correcting but I'm still happy with the idea.

This was a pre-OYL project called Travel Safe. I made a two-week expeditionary trip to Michigan in spring of 06 and kept a travel journal. The cover is one of the first linoleum block prints I attempted.

Dream Job

Last year I came across Chip Kidd's Book One at the Twin Falls Public Library. English major that I am, I'm always looking for books with pictures in them and his book is almost nothing but. Kidd, I found out, is the rock star of book design and Book One is a retrospective of the various publications he's designed over the last twenty years.

He's designed hundreds of books that, when you see them, you say, "He did that one too?!" As I flipped through his doorstop-hefty book, I found book after book that I'd seen in the store and picked up based solely on the way it looked. Yes, as Napoleon would say, the guy's got skills.

Later, my very generous mother bought me my own copy and since then I've spent many hours examining each cover, staring at the fonts, the images, how the spine was laid out, etc. Sometime during one of those pore-fests, a thought crystalized in my little, blonde head: being a book designer is my dream job.

A lot of my activities have danced around the edges of that job. I was an art major in college for a little while before switching to English, I've always been fascinated with image-making and image reproduction (I used to go to my dad's bank on Saturday afternoons to photocopy my favorite frames out of comics and art books from the library), I've been making my own books of one kind or another since junior high (beginning with unfortunate attempts at my own comics -- Tony even came up with a theme song for one of them), and I've actually stayed away from reading certain books simply because they were ugly. (Many people have told me to read Chaim Potok's stuff and I even have a copy of The Chosen but I can't even bring myself to pick it up because it's so dated and unattractive it looks like somebody bought it at Leif Garrett's yard sale.)

There's also the fact that, as an MFA student, I could barely wait to get five or six poems together before declaring them A Manuscript in order to justify turning them into a book. I spent as much time on font and image selection and placement as I did writing the poems themselves. A well-written individual poem was always nice but a book of them bound together with a cover and front matter and a colophon and alla that booky goodness was just deeply satisfying.

As it is, I teach English. I like what I do and I think I'm pretty good at it. I don't have the inclination or nature to throw over all my training and experience, abandon everything and go back to school to be a book designer. (It would be a bad idea on so many levels -- one of those levels being that Suzanne would beat me with a sack of oranges.) But the older I get, the more aware I become of things that actually make me happy. Doing my own little, amateur designs for myself and friends makes me happy. It doesn't have to be a career choice or a life altering passion. I just like it. I'd like to get better at it, of course, and get more tools with which to do it but it's okay if my "dream job" stays more or less just that, y'know?

Going along with that somewhat, it occurs to me, more and more, I'm done with seeing movies or reading books that I "should" read. I'm becoming more content with my weirdness and the quirky things that give me satisfaction. I don't feel the need to apologize or even explain my interest in Mormon film or the fact that I have a line of action figures lining a shelf in my office. I don't feel bad for liking to sew up chapbooks while watching episodes of the BBC's Two Thousand Acres of Sky. For various reasons, I grew up feeling that a lot of the things that interested me and were important were strange, lame, unacceptable, second-rate, and/or generally uncool. Happily, the older I get, the more genuinely content I become with the deck of weirdness I've been dealt in life.

Anyway, my original point brings me to a question: what is your dream job? If you could do something professionally that would just make you leap for joy to get out of bed in the morning so you could get to work at it, what would it be?

Only in Detroit

So we do with what we have, right? You look around and use the resources that are available to you. Rexburg, Idaho, because it is on the edge of massive lava flows, uses crushed up lava rock rather than salt on the streets in the winter to give cars traction. In southern Mississippi cheap driveways aren't lined with gravel but instead with crushed up seashells. A preponderance of coconuts in Hawaii led to the unfortunate creation of poi. In Utah, they are currently developing cars that powered almost entirely by food storage and self-satisfaction.

Here in Detroit, we also use what we have. Just about every day of the week, I drive past the federal building on downtown on my way to Suzanne's work. Because it's the federal building, there are giant concrete planters surrounding the place to discourage any Timothy McVeigh-style attacks. The planters are filled with nicely kept petunias that always seemed exceptionally vibrant because of the deep black mulch surrounding them. In the back of my head, I often wondered how the mulch stayed so dark and so uniform looking.

In the last couple of weeks, I started walking the mile between my building and Suzanne's and it was on one of those strolls that I finally discovered the answer:

Yeah, that's right -- shredded tires. Certain pieces even still have bits of words (like the psi indication and stuff like that) evident on them. For whatever reason, I'm fascinated with this little quirk of D-town landscaping.

Teaching tool/sleep aid

This is the aforementioned Hulk hand. It was given to me by my boss when I mentioned that I like comic books. It's a big glove, essentially, and when you punch things with it, it makes crashing, crunching, smashing sounds and ends with "Hulk smash!" or Hulky growling. Students like to play with it sometimes and I, ironically enough, have used it to wake students up from time to time.

Workplace/Museum

This is where I work. It was built in 1932 and has all sorts of really cool, old-school architectural touches that simply aren't employed any more. There are two hand-carved faces of knights flanking the first floor entry to the stairwell and stained glass windows in an small, unused chapel in the back. Certain spots in the floor have cool Pewabic ceramic tiles inlaid and we've got a classic,, cast-iron fire escape out back. There's even a back office attached to my classroom that actually overlooks the main sanctuary of the adjacent church. (It's got a great view of the giant stained glass windows that face east. Very cool in the morning.)

I'm a big fan of these older touches. However, I am a huge fan of a few, more modern architectural elements -- like air conditioning. Yep, you guessed it, this beautiful, historic building has got jack squat in the way of AC.

Consequently, I'm sitting here at 2:29 on a Wednesday afternoon feeling like I've been wringing out sponges with my armpits all day. It's sticky, hot, and generally uncomfortable. My students can barely keep their eyes open and, for once, it's not because of my teaching. It's because when you're on the second floor of a 75 year old building with no cool air anywhere (and you have to listen to me teach about writing essays), the only defense is unconsciousness. Rather than deal with the fact that this building should be leveled to the ground or turned into the official Museum of How Crappy Things Were Before Air Conditioning, we take refuge in sleep.

(I say "we" but I've yet to find a really comfortable way of sleeping here. The floor is too hard and I'm too tall or something for any of the chairs to really work. I recently experimented with using a foam rubber Incredible Hulk hand as a pillow for my head. That's actually been my most successful nap-taking strategy so far.)

(While I'm speaking parenthetically, I should mention that, while my students sometimes sleep during class, I do not. I wait until lunch or break time to make my brief, usually unsuccessful attempts at slumber. I work. I promise.)

A few Detroit pictures by photog extraordinaire, Tony Mosier

The great Detroit train station in all its ruined glory. This building is about half a mile from where I work. When the weather is nice, I sometimes walk over there on my lunch break.


A view of downtown from the Compuware building. That's Comerica Park, home of the Tigers, in the upper right hand and Ford Field, home of the ultra-lame Lions, just beyond it.


Greektown. Home to neither Tigers nor Lions but rather men with thick eyebrows named Stavros.

All these photos were taken last winter when Tony, my best friend of 18 years, came out for a visit. He also took some great pictures of my daughters that I'll post another day.

Norse Penny?

So where does the name of the blog come from? Well, despite your best guess, it is not my tribute to a former Nordic girlfriend. I never dated a Viking named Penny. (I did date an Idaho girl named Penny but that was a long time ago and she eventually had her name legally changed to Lauren anyway so it's a moot point.)

Anyway, the Norse penny I'm referring to is also known as the Maine penny. In 1957, archeologists excavating a former Native American settlement near Brooklin, Maine unexpectedly found a small, silver Viking coin among all the Indian artifacts. The coin, they figured, was probably minted between 1065 and 1080 A.D. and long predated the village they were excavating. These days, more level-headed scientists and researchers have simply decided that the penny being in Maine is the result of an extensive trading network that stretched far to the north. But back then, there was all this excitement and speculation that it meant that Vikings had actually settled parts of what is now the continental U.S. and that the Native Americans might have founded their village on the ruins of a Norse town. That idea persisted for years until it was eventually discredited.

What any of this has to do with me is this: I heard about the Maine penny years ago and loved the idea, loved the hint of something ancient and mysterious resting just below the surface of the obvious. I loved the idea that I could be staring at something common and ordinary and simultaneously looking at something momentous. Will Peterson's poems from his book Luctare Pro Passione did the same thing for me -- he made Pocatello, Idaho (a much reviled and under -appreciated place) exciting and (dare I use the cheesy term?) magical. He imagined the area's ancient history when it was all under Lake Bonneville and whales swam above the city's red foothills. There was one poem in the book about a hiking trail above the city littered with lucky horseshoes. It was like a Western Shangri-la or something. I feel as though I'm not doing the poems or the idea an justice but suffice it to say, I love thinking that there is something magic or mysterious surrounding us in our daily, common existence.

Later, when I was in grad school and publishing my own chapbooks of poetry for friends, I wanted to come up with a name for my ultra-small press that meant something to me, that wasn't just some corny play on the word "press" (you know, like the Bench Press, Hard Press, Permanent Press, etc.), and that reflected my sensibilities when it came to poetry. I flirted briefly with Red Planet Press because I designed a killer logo (I thought) and because my name, Mark, originates with Mars, the Roman god of war. But then that idea went away and Norse Penny Press came around.

I think the first book I published under that name was Inamorata, a collection of poems about former girlfriends that still haunted me at me at the time. When I produced ten or twelve handmade copies of my Master's thesis, The Book of Saint Anthony, it had the little, scanned and altered image of a Norse penny on the back cover. I felt so official. Since then I've produced another three or four books under the imprint and I'm looking forward to doing more at some point (like when I start writing poetry again, whenever that will be.)

So the blog name comes from the press name which comes from a tiny chip of metal found in America 50 years ago that turns out to be a coin struck in ancient country over 900 years ago. Make sense?

Blogging

I wonder how many of these things begin with something like, "I can't believe I'm starting my own blog." I suppose it's not very original but it is how I feel right now. It's hard for me to articulate exactly why I'm doing this. Several people have heard my anti-blogging rants -- how they're for navel-gazing narcissists, how they're self-indulgent, how I don't understand that people would want to make public their useless, quotidian observations and verbal diarrhea.

I guess now I either take myself a little less seriously or I just want to board the narcissistic, self-indulgent diarrhea train along with everyone else. Either way, I can't believe I'm starting my own blog.

One major factor in shifting my attitude about this weirdly democratic, pubic/personal journal practice has been Darlene Young's writing at www.apersonnamedeunice.blogspot.com. Darlene is a long-distance friend of mine that I met through the Association of Mormon Letters and her work is well-written, charming, self-deprecating, sometimes funny, sometimes thought provoking. Rather than being self-conscious about the act of writing, she just writes and does it well. Every morning when I come into work, I check my regulars: cnn.com, slate.com, popmatters.com, and her site. I'm always excited when I see that it's been updated and there's some new piece of writing about her family, a new e-mail survey she's filled out, or a new picture of somewhere she's been or someone she knows. I don't know Darlene that well. We've only met face to face once and it was a couple of years ago but I see what she does and I admire it and want to emulate it. As Jon Lovitz/Harvey Fierstein used to say on SNL, "Is that so wrong?"

So here I am on a steamy Detroit afternoon on the second floor of the parish house at St. Edward's Episcopal Church ot the corner of Trumbull and Michigan, kitty corner from the giant, rotting husk that is Tiger Stadium. It was foggy and overcast all morning long but now the sun has broken through and the temperature has already surpassed the projected high of 80 degrees by a few notches. Off in the distance, as I usually can, I hear sirens. Sometimes they're far off, sometimes they go blaring by my open window like the entire world is coming to an end. It's gotten to the point where I don't bat an eye when they pass by. When I first started here a year ago, I'd go to the window, crane my neck around, and look to see if somebody had been shot or stabbed or run over in the road. Now I pause long enough for the noise to pass and then I go back to teaching.

I find a perverse sense of pride in working and going to school in downtown Detroit. It is so utterly removed from my experience as a white, Mormon kid growing up in small, rural Rexburg, Idaho that I am occasionally astounded by my life. It's not glamorous by any stretch to live and work here but, for me, a kid whose hometown didn't have a building over three stories tall, to walk down Michigan Avenue to the Compuware building (where Suzanne works) on a humid afternoon is a thrill. It's exciting and interesting to me to be in such a radically different place.

So Detroit is going to be the setting of this little blog. I live in Livonia which, ironically enough, is one of the whitest suburbs its size in the nation but I spend almost all of my waking hours here. (Plus, this is where I have the computer access.) So Detroit it is.