Book Fair Revolution!

Well, that's what I was planning to write about...

Greetings from the chilly southlands.

This past weekend, I was on the farm for days watching icy weather roll through, hunkered down, not caring if the roads were passable or not. I waited with candles for the electricity to go out so I might return to a more natural cycle of light and air exposure, but alas, electric light reigned.

I’m grateful that the storm wasn’t as bad here as predicted and am thinking of those less fortunate. On the farm, ice accumulated on every surface before a warmer, fuller front came and washed it away. Because folks weren’t sure if all the rain would freeze, I got Monday off. It was a gorgeous, cold, sunny, windy day. One perfect for a winter walk. I spent the morning at my desk, then broke out into the blissful hardwoods for the afternoon.

While I rode out the storm on the farm, I had intended to write about a literary adventure I had taken the previous weekend. I was invited by the Baldwin County Arts Alliance to Milledgeville, Georgia, to take part in a local author event they called the “Grown Up Book Fair.” I’m still not sure how they found me (maybe thanks to this newsletter?—I meant to ask but forgot). The only book I’ve published is a little collection of poems back in 2019. I hardly think of myself as an author.

Either way, I had a wonderful time at the event. The organizers and other authors were kind, smart, eccentric people, and Milledgeville is a pleasant place in winter—a pretty, funky little college town in the middle of the state, on the Oconee River. The college is a small liberal arts school, and from what I can gather, it attracts quality teachers. They’re known for their creative writing program, and for a medium-sized rural town, Milledgeville seems to have a substantial bookish culture.

I found this out years ago when I attended a reading at the college to see one of my favorite writers speak. The writer I was there to see had a poet open for her, an Iranian-American woman whose wild and whimsical words—let’s just say—shaped the night. Things happened that defy Newtonian physics, and I went away from there bewildered. I went straight home and recorded my account of the night as a story. I never tried to get it published anywhere because, honestly, I was afraid people wouldn’t believe it was true.

When I got invited to the book fair, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to share that story with some Milledgeville folks. I spent the week prior making little hand-pressed copies with red cardstock covers. I gave some dang good sales pitches and sold those suckers for $7 a piece. I also brought a stack of my poetry books and some used books from my home library, which I am (I guess) trying to diminish. I put the used ones on a little bookshelf beside my table and sold nearly half of them for $3 a treasure. A fine deal if you ask me. Mostly, I didn’t care about the money. I bought beer with it later. It was a pleasure talking with people, especially about books.

The title of my hand-pressed story is named after a Flannery O’ Connor quote. If you’re from outside of Georgia and you’ve heard of Milledgeville before, it is likely for one of two reasons. Milledgeville was once home to the world’s largest mental institution. It was called Central State Hospital, and at its height, it housed over 12,000 patients. Anytime I was acting up as a kid, folks in my family would say, “If you don’t straighten up, we’ll send you to Milledgeville.”

Perhaps more famous than Central State is the fact that Milledgeville was home to one of the most celebrated southern writers ever. Flannery O’Connor weaved her grotesque and direly funny tragedies from a typewriter that sat beneath a Catholic altar in her family farmhouse north of town. I won’t go too deep into my love of Flannery since I have written about that in other posts. Suffice to say, if you like dark, twisted short stories about human depravity and salvation, you should give Flan a try. She’s an acquired taste, so no promises. But for my money, there’s no one sharper and funnier. Anytime I’m in Milledgeville, because of her, I feel as if I am on a literary pilgrimage. “When in Rome,” Flannery wrote, “do as you done in Milledgeville.”

Natalie came down from Atlanta to join me at the book fair that Saturday. We rented a little treehouse cabin on the outskirts of town and extended our pilgrimage. I had planned for this piece I’m writing now to be about the fine time we had there—a kind of jovial travel blog about how you don’t have to go far to have fun if you’re in the right company. I was going to write in detail about how we visited Flannery’s grave in the cold, dark rain, and smoked a cigarette as we rearranged the pens that adoring fans had seemingly dumped on her gravestone. I was going to write about our adventures downtown. The dark coffee house. The grungy pool room. The singer in a mechanic's shirt who had delivered disappointing Tom Petty choruses. You’ve got to put more ass into it, man! The guitar player who had carried the band.

We people watched, drank local beers, and laughed all night. This was going to be a fun little write up, I swear. Last Sunday morning, we awoke to snow falling outside the cabin windows in large, glorious chunks through the hardwoods as the fireplace crackled indoors. The snow didn’t stick around for long as the sun emerged and lit up a brilliant day. We went for a hike by the river and made a raging fire that night, braving the cold with wine and poetry.

I was planning to write in detail about the book fair—about the people I met there, and how that brief glimpse of connection inspired me for days. I had the whole weekend to write.

Then the weekend came.

I’m typically good at dissociating when it comes to the news cycle. It’s not that I don’t feel the world being torn apart—I do—and from time to time, I allow myself to feel it deeply. But I think breaking away from the news regularly is a responsible act of self-care in the digital age, just as limiting social media time is a necessity for mental well-being. Humans, in my estimation, are creatures meant to deal mainly with what’s in front of them. I like to tell myself that, anyway.

Maybe that’s selfish or whatever, but I’m not apolitical. While I try to remain open, with limited certainties, I have strong feelings about almost any political or social issue.

I don’t know what it was specifically about seeing the videos of Alex Pretti’s death that sent me into such a dark whirlpool of inescapable dread. Maybe it was the fact that it appeared that he was trying to intervene between an agent and a woman that the agent had violently pushed to the ground. (I don’t claim to know what happened before the incident, and I don’t think it matters much.) Maybe it was a few moments later when I found out he was an ICU nurse at a VA hospital. Maybe it was when I saw pictures of him. I hate to admit that my despair could be associated with the fact that he was a white man close to my age, someone like me. I hope this isn’t why I felt so strongly, but I can’t be totally sure. Maybe it was simply watching him get dragged down and beaten by masked men before one of them disarmed him, and then ten solid seconds later, another unloaded a clip into his back.

I got sad as hell.

I made the mistake of turning to social media, which was nothing but a barrage of posts and videos about the killing, most of them biased, supportive of my anger. I was taken completely. When I heard Trump and his cronies condemning Pretti as a domestic terrorist, I got livid. Only minutes after the shooting, they had declared him a leftist lunatic? Why not come out and say, this is a tragedy; we’re going to start an investigation? Right away, Pretti was the aggressor and the shooter was the victim. Even though I had watched the killing from multiple angles, they told me I didn’t see what I thought I had seen.

Then I did something I haven’t done in a long time and took my concerns to the hell realm called facebook. I tried to remain reasonable and made a post with two points, one, that Jesus was an immigrant who taught us to love everyone, even our enemies, and two, that I recall being a kid in the 90s when most conservative folks would not have imagined defending a federal agent murdering a citizen in the streets, regardless of the circumstance. I did a pretty good job staying out of the debate that ensued on my post’s thread that evening but spent the rest of the weekend totally wrapped up in the drama of it, checking my notifications regularly (they are turned off on my phone), battling people, sometimes old friends, sometimes strangers who seemed like they’d make ideal ICE recruits.

The situation turned even darker for me when, responding to my online statements, a couple of relatives texted me to tell me why I was wrong. They came armed with tactical Fox News talking points. After long strings of texts of me explaining that the people of Minneapolis were defending their neighborhoods from an invasion of ill-trained, belligerent masked thugs, and after I shared a story with one of them about a family with six kids being tear-gassed in their car, nearly killing the kids before neighbors came to their rescue, I was taken aback when the final conclusion of one of my relatives, who shall not be named, was, “Well, I guess since I’m not there and seeing this happen, I just can’t relate.” Can’t relate to the fact that endangering children isn’t okay? I guess this was war. At the end of the conversation, they told me they were worried about my blood pressure.

How anyone could defend any agent of the government pushing people down in the street who looked like they were from the local Episcopalian church baffled and infuriated me. Then I heard conservatives online talking about how Pretti was armed and, even though he never unholstered his firearm, how no one should bring a firearm to a protest area. This blew my mind completely. The Second Amendment people were suddenly arguing for gun control. The world had gone upside-down. People’s values went only as far as their party said they could.

The point of this piece isn’t to make a political or moral argument, even if there is one to be made. Each day over the weekend, I got up telling myself that I wouldn’t get pulled back into the drama. I had time off with my daughter. I had things to do, a travel blog to write. It was cold outdoors but beautiful. I love exploring the woods in winter. Both days, I mindlessly picked up my phone and was transported immediately back into the anger zone. I texted my dad so many articles that it would not have been humanly possible for him to read them all. I had read them all like a starved beast devouring prey.

Even though I was in the drama for days, I was able to recognize that, in a sense, I was wasting the precious time off that I had. That’s not to say that anger over this situation isn’t valid. I think anger and intentional action are necessary right now. I’d like to believe that the ideas I shared on facebook opened someone’s eyes, but that isn’t the feeling I get. I could be wrong, but it seems like most folks are pretty much entrenched in their perceptions. Or in the perceptions fed to them.

In other essays, I’ve written about ways to resist this dominator culture that we all face. In the same way that every food we put into our bodies either helps heal or does harm to us, every action either diminishes or bolsters systems that we perceive as being much greater than us. I suppose that sharing your voice online equates to pushing back too, but you have to ask yourself about costs and benefits. Does spending time arguing online cost precious moments with loved ones, moments of bliss or reflection, sanity, art? What is the chance that you will persuade them through comment boxes? One of the best ways I can imagine punishing government or corporations in a system dominated by money is with your dollar, withholding it intentionally from who you don’t want having it. This goes back to my last post. No Money Days come in hand. I believe there is a nation-wide economic boycott happening tomorrow! Plan accordingly. Here is a list of ICE’s corporate sponsors. I have been meaning to cancel my Amazon Prime account for years. I just did it with the motivation provided by this list.

When I finally came out of the well I had been drowning in, feeling proud of Minnesotans for their peaceful demonstrations in the face of tyranny (realizing that not all respond in peaceful ways) and as it seemed like even prominent Republicans (and the NRA?!) were denouncing the response of federal officials, I felt guilt for not having gone through with my book fair piece. Of course book fairs matter. This day and age, anything associated with reading is revolutionary. As technological society speeds up how we experience the flow of information, and as the number of adults reading for pleasure in the United States has plummeted in recent years, reading is perfect way to fight back. A classic dystopian work would be appropriate at the moment. And for community? A community of readers might well double as a group of subverters. As the good residents of Minneapolis are showing us, communities and neighborhoods are worth fighting for.